Butterfly Soup is not for me, and I love it so, so much

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Matt Rickart | 10.13.2017

Soup

Before getting into Butterfly Soup - one of my favorite gaming and narrative experiences this year - I want to loosely define a few phrases:

Slice-of-life Slice-of-life, as an idiom, is sort of quaintly useless. Life is broad, and the slices can be generous. Ironically, in gaming, we use the term “vertical slice” to delineate the most exciting parts of a video game.

YA Yesterday on the Chicago L I saw a 50-something-year-old woman with a giant Hunger Games mocking jay tattoo on her neck. She probably wasn’t Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins. I know that for industry/genre enthusiasts YA is a useful term, but it’s also a dumb one.

Visual novel Visual novels are popular in Japan, but not living in Japan I haven’t spent much time with them. I did play the grossly overwritten 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It didn’t exactly leave me wanting more.

In visual novels, the player/reader reads text (mostly dialogue), looks at character portraits and makes occasional choices. Some visual novels include slightly more gamified systems, like inventories or stats, but generally they’re even less dynamic than choose-your-own-adventure books.

Okay, now Butterfly Soup:


Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is a Step Sideways

Matt Rickart | 09.26.2017

Uncharted

There is a time and a place for Uncharted video games; it’s somewhere between 2001 and 2010. Americans needed escapism, heroic gunfights, and they could be forgiven for seeing exotic locales as playgrounds. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007) was an exercise in Indiana Jones fan fiction and photo-realism. The follow-up, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009) is generally regarded as the pinnacle of the series. A rare sophomore effort that outstrips the first project without over-reaching. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (2011) was a lot like Among Thieves but somehow dumb, boring, and poorly titled.

Then, from the same studio, came The Last of Us (2013), an astounding video game. Serious, clever, grounded, powerful - a game that probably made Naughty Dog finally feel weird about being called Naughty Dog. The Last of Us was Uncharted with a tight camera, an appropriate feeling of wonder brought on by the contrast of desperation, and guns that felt like guns.


Threes is, subjectively, the greatest game of all time

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Matt Rickart | 09.14.2017

THREES

When my parents bought me a fat grey Game Boy in 1991, it came with Tetris (1984). I played a lot of Tetris then, and I’ve played a lot since. Tetris may be the platonic ideal of “video game,” insofar as something so absurdly subjective can be said at all. Safer at least, would be to say...


Prey Is An Immersive Sim, I'm Told

Matt Rickart | 09.06.2017

Prey

Part One: The first hour of Prey

The week before Prey (2017) came out, I played a free downloadable Playstation 4 demo of the game with Zero Stars co-host and EIC, Bob. The demo takes you through the first hour and a half or so of the game. It’s a very good demo. I’m sure the developers at Arkane know that their game’s opening is strong - probably to a fault.

(And in fact, Prey itself is a good game, just to get that out there.)


Pyre Is On Fire

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Matt Rickart | 08.23.2017

Firewardens!

Supergiant Games, a video game development company, was founded in 2009. In 2011, Supergiant put out its first game, Bastion, an isometric action-RPG. In 2014, Supergiant published it’s second game, Transistor, an isometric strategy-action-RPG. Starting in September of 2015, Supergiant (probably) played a lot of NBA 2K16’s MyCareer mode, as directed by renowned filmmaker Spike Lee.

At this time, Supergiant thought to itself, “We are not Spike Lee. But we could do better than this.”

And they did. They made Pyre.


Anatomy is a meta haunted house in my hard drive

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Matt Rickart | 08.09.2017

Anatomy

My 2013 MacBook Air can’t run much, but it can run Anatomy. If I had to choose one game for my Mac to run, it might be Anatomy. Anatomy contains so much in so little.


Breath of the Wild is Great Zelda

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Matt Rickart | 08.02.2017

childhood

The first Zelda game I ever purchased was The Adventure of Link. It was 1992 and I found a $20 bill on the asphalt of a consignment store parking lot. I was six, and my mom let me keep it. It was the first $20 bill I’d ever held. The gold NES cart, no box, was sitting in a wicker basket near the register of the consignment shop. I had no idea what Zelda was, but Nintendo was Nintendo. I bought it. I think it was $5.


Overwatch Is Candy-Coated Candy

Matt Rickart | 07.21.2017

MEME

I’m Level 18 or something in Overwatch. I’ve opened a bunch of loot cases. They’re fun; the Christmas poppers of the video game world. I wish the DualShock rumbled when the rewards popped out. In fact, that’s my one legitimate criticism of Overwatch. It’s stupid that the controller doesn’t rumble when the rewards pop out.


Firewatch Is Everyday Friction

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Matt Rickart | 07.13.2017

But for a pond, to put out these fires.

I like the term walking simulators. I think it’s funny. You know what game simulates physical walking really well? Firewatch. Firewatch pulls the tricks from The Last Of Us that make Joel feel like a two-ton bag of rocks, especially when he falls. The walking simulation in Firewatch is strong. Which is good, because it’s one of the only physically frictive systems in the game.


Final Fantasy Is Playing A Role

Matt Rickart | 07.06.2017

A walking simulator

Jesus wept, Final Fantasy XV is a weird mess. I have never encountered something so polished and incompetent. Final Fantasy XV is the anti-Marvel movie and the anti-David Lynch film. It is a beautiful Frankenstein bride. There is nothing lazy about Final Fantasy XV and yet it’s never really interesting except in its failures.