AndrewBrown wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2018, 9:51 am
02/01: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [SNES Classic]
04/01: Oxenfree [Switch]
13/01: Axiom Verge: Multiverse Edition [Switch]
14/01: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Switch]
15/01: Super Mario World [SNES Classic]
20/01: BioShock Infinite [360]
23/01: The Fall [PSN]
26/01: Celeste [Switch]
31/01: Super One More Jump [Switch]
05/02: Night in the Woods [Switch]
08/02: Dandara [Switch]
14/02: Dragon Quest Builders [Switch]
20/02: Bayonetta [Switch]
21/02: Puzzle Puppers [Switch]
23/02: Fe [Switch]
24/02: Old Man's Journey [Switch]
Old Man's Journey is not at all what I expected. I thought it would be another narrative game, perhaps in the style of Oxenfree. Instead... it's a puzzle platformer. Players guide the Old Man through the countryside (I believe it's set in France), using a cursor to lower and raise the hills to create new paths for the Old Man to follow. The interface is clean and effective; if a path can be followed between two hills, their intersecting point will be denoted by a small circle. Hills the Old Man are standing on cannot be moved, and occasionally obstacles such as impassable herds of sheep and waterfalls which carry the Old Man to a lower hill must be bypassed. It doesn't try to be anything more than this; the entire game is spent solving platforming puzzles by raising and lowering hills to create new paths.
Old Man's Journey has a lovely painterly style to it—I hesitate to ascribe a specific medium to it, because I'd probably be wrong, but it reminds me of many illustrated children's books Ive read—and simple, evocative animation. These in particular help to sell the story which is told. Periodically through the old man's Journey, he will stop and reminisce about what has brought him to this point in his life. This is captured in a simple vignette, a single image in time with minimal animation to it, before cutting back to the Old Man as he sets off again to his destination. It's a story told in a minimalist style, devoid of dialog, and it made me a little misty when I got to the ending. The ending is a little predictable, and perhaps overly sentimental—I don't think the mistakes the Old Man has made would be forgiven as easily as shown here—but Old Man's Journey tells it well. It's a story about regret and shame, but told in an upbeat way. The nuance and heartbreak of what's happening in these relationships couldn't be portrayed in the way this story is being told.
I appreciate Old Man's Journey for being what it is. It has one idea for a puzzle, and it follows through it. It has a simple story, and it tells that story. There are no desperate notions of making it a "videogame" by hiding tokens in out-of-the-way places. There are no enemies or bosses to fight. It lasts only as long as it needs to—I beat it in an hour and a half—and it ends once it's done everything it wanted to. It's gorgeously animated and has a beautiful soundtrack. I have a lot of respect for Old Man's Journey.
As to the digital discussion:
Give me physical any day. I'll happily wait a few extra months for a physical release of a digitally released game and pay a few extra bucks for it (though I have my limits of how much more I'm willing to pay). I don't trust digital storefronts. They're unreliable; they can go down through human error, or through the actions of certain malicious groups who seek only to irritate and enrage other people. Having said that, I recognize that digital storefronts have created a market far more conducive to certain budgets and design philosophies. The Indie videogame ecosystem couldn't exist without the digital distribution model, and there are too many great games (many of the best of the past few years, as far as I'm concerned) that wouldn't exist without digital distribution. So my compromise is this: Once I download a game, it stays downloaded. I don't delete it. Ever. If a game is too large for it to be practical to be downloaded at all times, then I own it physically, or I don't own it at all. These are exclusively AAA games so it hasn't been a problem yet, as AAA remains easy to get physically.
But we are clearly heading down a road where videogames will only be available digitally. I don't think the physical market will ever fade away entirely—even today, enthusiasts can buy vinyl printings of contemporary music if they know where to look—but it will be an option available only to diehard collectors willing to pay out the nose. I don't know what I'll do when that day comes. Certainly, I don't have the budget to buy physical games printed solely for collectors with lots of disposable incomes. Digital storage options are getting more and more effective by the day thanks to the Singularity. I remember ten years ago thinking it was preposterous that the Wii was trying to make downloadable content viable using SD cards; today I plug MicroSD cards with massive storage capacities into my Switch without a second thought. As storage options get cheaper and cheaper and larger and large, owning games digitally may cease to be an issue for me.
But I still don't like digital storefronts. I think they're a scam. You don't own a game; you own a license to play a game on that service. Once the storefront is gone, or if business changes the availability of the game on that venue, you can't access it anymore. And what happens if the internet is inaccessible, for whatever reason? If you can't afford an internet connection anymore, or if some global catastrophe shuts down the internet for large portions of the populace, if not all of them, then you can't play it if you want to. My friend Leif Johnson spent a long time living in rural Texas, where downloading a PS4 game would take days, if not weeks, on the only internet available to him. This is the main reason why once I download a game, I never delete it. I don't know where I'll be next week, or next year. It may well be that I won't have access to videogames in that unknown future. But if I do, I don't want to have half my collection inaccessible for something as dumb as a broadband internet connection.
The Wii Shop will be closed within a year. Everything on it will disappear. Digital games vanish from the Android and iOS stores daily without explanation. Admittedly, and vocally, I don't like most of these games. But I still recognize them as a valid and valuable form of art. Even games I hate, I don't want to see them vanish altogether. I don't know what the solution to these problems are; they may be none, an entire generation of art and artist's labor enthralled to the whims of capitalism. In time, pirates who are scorned by today's businesses may be seen as saviors of a generation of videogames. I'm learning to live with this trend as well as I can. It has pros and cons. But I see videogames going down a road with consequences too few people seem aware of, or willing to reckon with.
