The concept of playing a video game wrong:

People say there's no way to play a video game wrong as long as you enjoy it, but what happens if the opposite happens, you don't enjoy the game because you play it wrong? This is possible. This has happened to me. I have played a game wrong and thus didn't enjoy it because I failed to play it correctly.

Personally I find myself disliking games with universal acclaim and I find myself wondering if I just did it wrong. This has happened several times in my life.

I guess the first example was FF14. I didn't enjoy this game because I tried to (and still try to) play it like world of warcraft. A game that's mostly centered in always progressing something. There is no finish line and you can't stop playing. FF14 is meant to be played in a non-serious way, even at it's highest levels. You take breaks. You don't worry about the destination. I often forget this fact about FF14.

A game I found myself not enjoying at all was a game called Outer Wilds, an open world, open ended, exploration puzzle game. I find myself frustrated by it's imposed time limit and my inability to explore enough and piece enough together to really feel like i'm progressing. I've always had a problem with this majora's mask / Lightning Returns style of game play. The game marks progress through this chart in a space ship but still I feel find myself aimless and it's story pointless to the point that I lack the drive to really want to be curious about the rest of the game. Am I broken? (Yeah.)

Breath of the Wild is another game that comes to mind, a game I know i'm playing wrong. I gave this game about 40 hours of my time. It has very paint-by-numbers open world design. You find antennas, you unlock the map, you do landmarks, rinse repeat forever. This open world design is unfortunately a lie, as there actually is a linear path you're supposed to take, and to not do this, is a lesson in frustration. I played this game wrong and thus suffered heavily for it, to the point I want to write off the entire botw/totk world entirely. This coming from a fan of Zelda since Zelda II, my first zelda game.

I think about award winning sentimental/indie games like Undertale/DeltaRune and Lost in the Woods. These games, based on feedback from friends and loved ones, they say it changed their lives, changed their perspective and outlook of the world. I've completed all three of these and felt... nothing? I disliked the characters. Perhaps this is because I've experienced real hardship, and these made up scenarios just do not resonate with me. I fear maybe, I'm just too old for these types of stories. I like the music. I appreciate how it tries to subvert expectation but ultimately i'm unimpressed. Is there something wrong with me? Did I play them wrong?

I want to be serious about the art of games, but I find it hard to really dive deep or invest into really popular games. I wonder why? What mental or emotional block do I have that keeps me from seeing the beauty in these types of video games? All i can do is keep exploring and maybe one day I'll find the answer.

Video Games, Artistic Intent vs. Customized Visuals vs. Quality of Life.

Recently I swapped my graphics settings in FFXIV to go from using DLAA(DeepLearningAntiAliasing) to TSCMAA(Temporally Stable Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing) and it makes me wonder about things about how games look and how they play.

DLAA uses AI to guess extra frames to anti-alias the game with surprisingly good looking results, at the cost of frame rate/pacing. It also introduces things that are not actually being rendered by the game, AND deletes things that were rendered by the game. This is such a weird catch 22 on this tech. Do I want the game to look good as an illusion, or do I want to see what the game is actually displaying? I've opted for the latter.

The artistic intent from my pov in FFXIV is to also use blur to artistic effect, in order to emphasize impact of magic and objects, however this blur is incredibly overpowering and makes the game difficult to play, because when 4 to 24 players cause the screen to blur, the entire game becomes a blur. Do you keep it on because that's the intended vision or do you turn it off to make the game less cluttered visually to make it easier to play? Many japanese games I play, visual overload is the point of the game, and I think that FFXIV's thinking aligns with this mindset, considering the recent EX Trial Zelenia EX. (Red hazards on a red background with red effects.).

This brings me to classic games and or their ports/re-releases and revisions. I recently played and completed Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster. I made heavy use of the boost function for money and exp, as well as auto-battle function that repeats your last commands and cycles the fights much quicker. The reason I opted for FF1 Pixel Remaster was because of the quality of life options and because they fixed all the bugs from the original version of FF on the NES. The NES version, a quarter of the spells do not work. Stats do not work as intended. There's a lot of old-school walls, such as an exceedingly high exp wall, and many other things that were products of it's time. NES/SNES pixel art was never meant to be displayed on LCD high resolution screen. It was meant to blend through a CRT's scanlines and interlacing, so right off the bat visually FF:PR game is not the same game as the original. Numbers tweaked, spells fixed and QoL. I completed FF1 but did I really complete ff1? I felt like I did and I feel overall it was likely a better experience than the original NES version could ever be I imagine. I thoroughly enjoyed the story as well as puzzling out all the quest objectives and learned why it was called "Final Fantasy". This would have never happened if the NES version was my only option.

When I emulate games, I often have a huge slew of options to modify the game and make it play "better" than the original console release. Unfortunately, these tweaks don't always look good to me. A good example would be Chrono Cross. You have the ability to upscale 3D models, but this does not upscale the 2D pixel assets. So you end up having a weird effect where 3D models are crisp but they look terrible in front of 240i pixel graphics. To me personally this is unacceptable and I tend to run the game at native with bilinear filtering at most. Most "HD Remasters" of games that come out actually have this 3D model + 2D background disparity and it drives me absolutely nuts. In my eyes it looks so bad.

Is fast forwarding a bad thing? Is QoL bad? Is playing a game at 5X speed during grind parts wrong? Is adjusting the exp curve and drop curve ruining the game? I often feel sometimes that is is because it's not the intended mechanical design, but these games were made for kids in an era where you could only afford 1 to 2 games at a time but these days we're absolutely spoiled for choice of games and when it comes to time, we have way less of it.

Recently a lot of games have become easier, because just beating them has sort of fallen off as the main goal. It's 'a goal' but not 'the goal'. An example is the recent-ish release of Sonic the Hedgehog on Sonic Origins compilation. This game removes the lives system entirely and makes it impossible to get a game over. This is good right? This means, even if you're new, you can practice levels over and over until you get good at them, without having to restart the entire game. The point isn't to just beat the game, but learn to beat the levels smoothly and get better and better times as you improve. Mario Wonder comes to mind as well, although this isn't a re-release or remake, this game removed time limits from levels. This is great because you can now go slowly in some levels and explore. You can take your time with obstacles as you learn the game. The goal is to find everything, always has been. But you can also speed through the game as you get better and better and even do time trials. Why does what feels like "artificial difficulty" feel like a mandate to us old school players?

I've been called out many times for my opposition to a quest in Final Fantasy 14 called "Manderville".. it's a short quest line that opens up a store to buy what are called "Relic Weapons" which are meant to be an expansion's ultimate weapon and has very fancy appearances. Manderville was the first time the relic weapons were just given away as something of a participation trophy. You hardly have to go out of your way to get it. Upon release, I *hated* this. However as time as gone by, I've grown less and less annoyed by the free weapons, as this doesn't remove the older weapons from the game. (It did unfortunately take the slot of dev time that would have otherwise gone to something better.) So I'm ok with it now. I still think the weapons suck, but they're not for me and that's fine. I will always encourage players to aim higher and I will help them.

So how do you balance the "Artistic Intent" versus the "Customized Visuals" .. to have the best of both worlds? Does quality of life absolutely invalidate a playthrough of a game when you want to tweak it to be more digestible personally?

it's a onesie kinda night,

lightly seasoned with a little bit of powder

lightly coated in bedtime lotion

accessorized with a pacifier with clip...

Hmm, looking back at the original switch, it was a pretty mediocre system that makes up for it by having physical games and cheap hardware. Without that value, I can't think of a reason to ever upgrade to a switch 2. I can play cheaper games in higher quality elsewhere.

Oddly enough the best games I played on switch were Mario Odyssey, Mario 3D land, New Super Mario Bros U and Mario Wonder. All mario games.

Anything else just felt.. clunky, unpolished and rehashed. (Zelda BOTW/Links adventure/ACNL)

Every pokemon game was good with a crust of jank. It was never unplayable but the rather lacking polish always threw me out of the experience. Legends Arceus was my fav. The others just felt like downgrades from sun/moon.

The game with the most hours is amusingly Mario Kart 8. The DLC and multiplayer aspect that spreads will among skill levels made for the perfect game to play online with friends. hop into discord, hop into races and have fun.

NSO's value was also pretty decent with it's classic games.

Gonna stream a random game from my collection, this game is called "Moonlight"

https://twitch.tv/kisparks

Gonna try something completely different, a game about a fox and a girl named Never Alone Kisima Ingitchuna. We'll see how this goes.

https://twitch.tv/kisparks

ugh 90 degrees, can't *peels off all clothes*

art by RileyKit

Not doing anything with my YT so I figure i'll upload vods from my streams.

I just uploaded Megaman X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAMXENnMi_8