@spacemanspiff00: Thank you. I just wrote these on my own time. I actually did the original drafts a few years ago, but couldn't get them to a state where they felt good enough to post until relatively recently. The sourcing is something I try to do generally when talking about topics outside of video games, or sometimes when referring to some obscurer information within them. I figure if a reader can't confirm that what I'm saying is correct, then the essay doesn't really offer them anything and any argument I make based on those facts is moot.
@bribbins: Thank you. I was unsure whether to include all the references to the in-game sources, but when I was first researching this, there were things that I knew I might have doubted without sources, so I tried to think about what other readers would want.
@gbrading: Thanks. I will be posting something about Bioshock 2 this coming weekend.
@crazycrazydoctor: Thank you. I think when recommending Cosmo's games, you have to know your audience. They have to be up for something a bit avant garde and about exploration over challenge. But for the right person, I think talking about the games' maximalism and surrealism works. There are lots of wonderful little moments to reference like the sandwich machine or the bouncy city in The Norwood Suite.
The manual tells you that Bulbasaur is easy mode and Charmander is hard mode. Pokemon Red & Blue came out in a time where manuals were actually interesting and contained extra information.
I think this is partially correct. You do have to flip ahead to a kind of spoilery section of the manual, and I think that even knowing Charmander is a relatively weaker starter than Bulbasaur, there's still relevant infromation you don't get about those creatures near the start of the game, but the manual certainly helps. I've updated the article to reflect.
While it is ostensibly true that you will have Pikachu or nothing at the start of yellow, you should really have found all three original starters by the time you reach the third or fourth gym. Yellow follows the events of the anime, in which Ash ends up with a team full of Gen 1 starters & Pikachu. This definitely happens in the game. I remember steamrolling the gym leaders for quite a while because of this, and never felt much of a need to capture specific mons to make these fights easier.
@nodima: Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I had the thought around the start of the third chapter on my first playthrough that I could try changing to the French voice-acting, but at the time, it felt fairer to the game to go with the option it presented upfront, especially because I didn't know if the acting or scripting would improve. Then, when writing this essay, it made the most sense to talk about the game in the format that I thought a reader would play it in. Most of the time, though, it just didn't occur to me that I could change the language setting; it's not something I'm ever doing with a European game.
I can see how you could get really into the story if you disconnected from the setting. For me, the story and setting are very closely interlinked, however. The rules of the story are the rules of the setting. The game has big ideas, but I feel like big ideas are a dime-a-dozen in AAA games. What's harder to find are bodies of ideas that are both creative and cohesive. I've not played the second game yet. It was about the time I was finishing Innocence that Requiem came out. I definitely plan to though.
I think this game is a little more anime than the average thing I'm going to play, but I must say I'm impressed with the visual style. It reminds me a lot of Transistor.
@magnetphonics: Thank you. I think the decision not to ease you into running out of rack space is very deliberate. Most puzzle games have you encounter one or two major hitches in a level that challenge your understanding of the mechanics and make you reconfigure your solution. Zachtronics tend to have more per-stage. For better or worse, they don't want to be smoother on your personal development, they want to fit more transformation of your understanding in over the course of the game.
This looks very relaxing; I'll probably check it out. Until you mentioned it in the blog, I was gonna say this sounds a bit like A Short Hike which I also played recently and had a great time with.
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