DISPATCHES MAY
The Wonder of shoe
It is 1991. I am sitting on the floor in my bedroom. I’ve just booted up Super Mario Bros 3 on my little 14-inch CRT TV. I have watched the Fred Savage movie The Wizard and never wanted to play a game more. As the levels pass by, I’m thrilled, excited and blown away. After the weirdness of Super Mario Bros 2, which always felt alien, 3 feels like a return to form. Then I come to my favourite level, 5-3. Those of an older persuasion may remember this one: the Goomba’s Shoe level. I remember jumping into the clockwork green shoe and proceeding to bounce through the whole map with a grin across my face.
After the level is finished, I get excited, hoping to see the shoe on another level. It never comes. It blows my mind that Nintendo has created a whole mechanic for a level that took two minutes to beat. Something that changed the movement, mechanics, and even the look of the lead, only to never be seen again.
Fast-forward to Christmas
2023. I’m laid up with the flu, and I boot up Super Mario Bros Wonder. Slowly, as a combination of analgesics and Nintendo magic soothe my ageing bones, a familiar smile blooms across my face. They’ve made an entire game based on the premise of Goomba’s Shoes! As the levels blur into a kaleidoscope of colour and joy, I laugh croaky laughs, hoot with joy and marvel that a series that has been with me my whole life can still astound and amaze.
Yes, I loved Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved Tears Of The Kingdom. But there is something almost sacrilegious about the idea that Mario, 30-odd years on, can still thrill, amaze and bring me childlike joy. Oh, to be a little Mario in a bouncing shoe! Anand Modha
Yes, Wonder’s rush of delights could s0 easily have felt like idea overkill, but it possesses a strange and irresistible magic that cuts through the thickest layer of cynicism. Anyway, since we can’t exactly offer you a shoe to bounce around in, hopefully an Edge T-shirt will suffice.
Oh, the Humanity
I’m sorry, OK. I tried to love Humanity, I really did. But despite being clever, intelligent, and surprisingly moving at times, my god, it can be really annoying. Anyway, that’s enough of my nihilistic tendencies for now. By strange coincidence, these are actually the exact same feelings I have towards the videogame Humanity,
which I’ve just been playing. While I can definitely appreciate that the game has some serious quality, I’m afraid for me it just keeps boiling down to: ‘Imagine playing 3D Lemmings, but the controls are rubbish’. I’m not sure who felt that Lemmings
would be improved by giving the player a controller instead of a mouse, and that rather than use it to control the Lemmings themselves, it would be better if you could only manoeuvre them indirectly through a thirdperson avatar, but the needless complexity of this setup has unfortunately spoiled my enjoyment of the admittedly brilliant puzzles. If – as Alex Spencer has been eloquently writing in your pages – games are an activity done for pleasure with an agreed-upon set of rules, then this particular rule just feels arbitrary and pointless. Inhabiting a benevolent canine spirit-creature may be important to the game’s central story, but if this leads to a situation where I’ve more or less worked out the solution to a puzzle 20 minutes ago, and I’m still struggling to input it correctly just because I’m having to try to convince a particularly skittish dog to do it for me, then I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Trico got away with it because The Last Guardian
wasn’t a puzzle game, and because of the
“I’m afraid it boils down to: ‘Imagine 3D Lemmings, but the controls are rubbish’”
emotional connection developed between man (well, boy) and beast. In this instance, man is a swarming, faceless, disposable mass – truer to form, you might say, but far less emotionally inspiring. So, having sadly ditched Humanity, I’m now off to explore the rest of the gaming universe, searching for something better. Perhaps it’s finally time to visit the Outer Wilds…
Tom Laverack
If slightly unconventional controls aren’t your bag, Outer Wilds may not be an ideal pick, but do let us know how you get on.
Immortals words
Throughout history, man has sought to converse with the divine, approaching great works of art with almost suicidal intent. Pooling time, effort, money and more often than not the blood and bones of strangers in order to bring us these wonders of the world. Masterworks of entire lifetimes, of whole bloodlines. So why is it that the videogame industry seems to demand one of these for each financial quarter?
With the recent conversation about Immortals Of Aveum underperforming, the buried lede being its eye-watering $125m production budget, I have to wonder why anyone thinks any of these practices were ever sustainable in the first place? Before development costs skyrocketed, before the industry had instilled into us the idea that the Sistine Chapel should be the norm and not a glorious outlier, we had reams and reams of great, interesting games from uniquely creative studios, almost none of which exist in the same state any more.
I won’t lie, every now and then I too enjoy the feeling of being awestruck by something grand and ambitious, but we need to return to the idea of these things being a once-in-a-generation affair. By all accounts, Immortals Of Aveum was decent, but did it really need that production budget? Especially given the news of Die Gute Fabrik ceasing operations due to being unable to secure funding, I find this kind of excess grotesque. We could have had 25 sequels to Saltsea Chronicles for the price of one risky gambit. Time and time again I find myself questioning the reasoning for many a game that has dumped buckets of money, as well as the lives and wellbeing of its creators, for little explanation beyond ‘We need good graphics! People demand to be awestruck!’
The best-selling game of all time is Minecraft. Take from that what you will. Thomas Ife
Frankly, we’d sooner play Saltsea another 25 times than sit through Immortals once more.
Bunker mentality
As someone of a particular vintage who is appalled at the modern-day UI trend that has become accepted as the modern norm – TikTok being a prime example – I know I’m not the only one thinking UI in games has taken a backward step. It’s now deemed acceptable for triple-A (or quadruple-A?) games to have so many gauges, bars and numbers on screen at once that it becomes an incomprehensible pile of screen furniture. I can only take a generalised swoop that we are seeing an absorption of mobile gaming philosophies that have bled into the big releases of today, which I think has led to the gameplay trend of performing an action on screen and watching the numbers go up – activating our collective primordial lizard brains and satisfying our basic human instincts. I shan’t get too bogged down in ‘HUD politics’; I know this trend is here because it sells, and I’ve been guilty of enjoying watching numbers increase in games such as The Division and many a JRPG. These games still have a place in today’s market, but I’m drowning in alphabet soup when confronted with modern-day trends.
It stands out most egregiously today when remakes and remasters are released, showing how game interfaces used to be tackled more creatively, lending themselves more suitably to what the game is trying to evoke. The recent Tomb Raider 1–3 remaster is still effective, even though the graphics aren’t as groundbreaking as they were on its original release; the stripped-back nature of the game, with its minimal HUD, works in confluence with those quiet moments of introspection you get when navigating an ancient temple. (It’s such a mood that I’m surprised A24 hasn’t tried to publish it.)
The other most obvious example is Dead Space, with its diegetic interface, physical gauges, holographic displays and counters, which somehow make the game more immersive. Taking the idea of physicality further, the Metro series adds additional gameplay elements on top of these interfaces, which helps make the game space feel grounded and allows for plenty of tense, memorable experiences. Going even further is Amnesia: The Bunker with its ingenious wind-up flashlight – take this out of the game and the whole thing falls apart. I’m yet to play Pacific Drive, but just the thought of being able to push and play with all those levers, buttons and dials gets me positively salivating. It’s upsetting that games with bigger budgets are more interested in the simple numbers game than physical interactions and having fun with the HUD elements. They should seek opportunities to blend gameplay elements with numbers more innovatively. These gameplay philosophies really highlight the creative chasm that is the difference between indie games and the most prominent game developers.
Nathan Brady-Eastham
As game visuals become more complex, it’s no surprise to see interfaces having to shout louder to make themselves known over the background noise. But it’s also informed by the amount of metrics at play in so many service games nowadays, and you’re right – there is a whiff of the mobile scene about it all. In the beginning, playing games was all about watching a single score tick up, but of course why have just one tally when you can swamp players with 15 of the blighters?