The Patreon Letters - 9th December, 2017

Hello everyone! Em here today for your latest letter. This won't be about the Patreon stuff, I'll instead put that in the weekly update that's free for everyone. I'll be short here, tho: we're not going anywhere unless we absolutely have to, because while Patreon might suck it's the best we've got right now, and Abnormal Mapping wouldn't exist without it and without your support. So thank you for sticking around and helping us and other small sites/creators trying to survive in bad systems. That's it.

I want to talk about some games this week, with no large framework to bind them all together. We're working on the end of the year stuff here at AMHQ, which always puts me in a mood to settle in and play a bunch of small games rapidly. I don't know why this happens, but every year I just clear a bunch of things off of my to-do list, but that does mean I have a lot of small impressions built up over the past few weeks. So please enjoy these capsule thoughts.

TUROK: DINOSAUR HUNTER

I wanted something mindless so I booted up the original Turok and boy did I pick correctly. Turok is a farce of a game, Serious Sam played totally straight, a game where you careen around endless cliff faces and jungle ruins under steady assault of dinosaurs and military men who all rush you because this game is dumb as rocks and thus dumbly rocks. 

I've settled into a groove of enjoying 90s shooters this past year. I love running fast and having a bunch of guns and blasting away endless bad guys while looking for keys. Turok is mostly good at this, though it inexplicably respawns enemies regularly in the level which takes away that very specific feeling of running around a level lost climbing over all the bodies you've left in your wake. I miss that. It's a special feeling and taking it away makes the game much worse off for it. 

Also it has a bunch of first person platforming, but I actually like that a lot? I don't know. Blame hundreds of hours playing minecraft but I'm pretty good at first person jumping now. The elaborate mazes that make up the second half of the game are far worse than any tricky jump. 

SOMA

I started up Soma because the safe mode came out on PC, which doesn't take away the monsters but makes them non-hostile. I prefer playing games like this this way, so I decided to finally install it. I wasn't the biggest Amnesia fan in the world, but I like sci-fi a lot, so y'know, what was there to lose? Anyway if you like good stories and can handle some creepiness at all, please play Soma, I can't recommend it and safe mode enough.

Soma is the kind of sci-fi game that puts most sci-fi games to shame. It's story isn't revolutionary, but the way it unspools it through the fragments of character's lives and your interactions with what's left of the people who survive is fantastic. There's a real humanity to the monotonousness of Soma's setting and characters, a remote hope and a quiet sadness that infects every corner that's even more affecting than the monsters that now stand around and watch you ignore them. 

I played Tacoma recently, too, and I enjoyed that game a lot, but Soma treads some of the same ground and in some ways better and should be considered equally important when we talk about independent narrative games. I'm not here for the hiding survival horror stuff, but now that they've allowed you to literally turn that all off, I can't say enough good things about this nightmare under the sea. 

MAME

I finally got mame running after years of being too intimidated by the command line version and trying to use GUI versions and being scared off by how complicated those seemed to be. I just settled on the command line. The plus is I feel cool every time I use a command line, because I only dimly remember a time when computers were all like this.

Anyway mame seems neat, but it instantly turned into me looking for paddle and trackball PC controllers on the internet and that's a deep dark rabbit hole to fall down. Don't be like me. Play normal games like ... I don't know, Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is good. I feel like the arcade version is harder than the NES one? I've literally never played the original DK before this week, though, it's always been the NES port. This is your Arcade Update(tm).

SONIC LOST WORLD

This is the last Sonic game I'm going to talk about for a long time, I swear. Anyway I finished this game the other day and geez is it endemic of everything Sonic we've talked about in these letters the past few months. It is an attempt to Mario-fy Sonic by slowing the game down and focusing on platforming and Galaxy-esque planetoids. It's a beautiful game that was given a lot more care and budget than, say, Sonic Forces. 

But because it's Sonic Team trying to do Nintendo, no amount of money will be enough compared to what Actual Mario is going to get. And even if it did, you can't buy your way into the level design and inventiveness of a game like Mario Galaxy. And so every time Sonic introduces a new mechanic, you know they're going to use it twice as long as they should and then it'll reappear again two worlds from now because they can't afford not to use everything they make. 

The Mario formula seems really rote, but there's a reason you don't see any outright imitators: it's actually incredibly hard to make even a middling Mario game. Sonic Lost World ends up feeling like someone was asked to make their best take on New Super Mario Bros, and even if you consider it in that cursed company it's not better than the better entries of that. It's really sad to see, because clearly this was the game that got the resources and because they were chasing an impossible dream and were on a system nobody bought, it's doomed Sonic to budget title status. 

Lost World is a strange game, and I don't particularly think it's good (the first half is great, and the second half is too long and rehashes all that joy but harder), but it's now historically a sad stumble that set the world's fastest mammal crashing to earth. Let's hope he gets back up. 

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Anyway, that's it! Sorry there wasn't something more constructed and coherent today. I've been really struggling with real life stuff lately, and all I do is pour my time into games to try to get out of my head. Thanks everyone again for your support.