Re: Undertale
Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2015 2:56 am
I ended up using Joy2Key, which worked fine
sei wrote:Honestly, the sound thing is by far the worst issue for me, but I'm not about to pull my sound card out, because it's also what lets me conveniently switch between headphones and speakers.
sei wrote:Would have been less of an issue if I weren't just starting the game and if an NPC several rooms in weren't where you finally figure out how to fullscreen the game.
Started playing Undertale after hearing my friends rave about it. I'm terrible at this bullet hell dodging stuff.
Plus this game's ugly and the sparing enemies mechanic is arbitrary and dumb (I'm only abut 15 minutes into it, I'm open to the idea that it gets better later on)
Edit: I'm so bad at bullet hell I can't get past the first area so I've given up and gone off to do something else.
Double Edit: Turns out that, by trying to give my character what I thought was the canon name, I'd put it in hard mode. I might enjoy it more when I'm not fighting end game monsters from the start.
Waf: I was just like OH THAT'S THE CANON NAME RIGHT? I'LL DO THAT
Waf: smart move, me
beatbandito wrote:Mongrel and TA's friends are Arin Hansen and Danny Sexbang.
As long as we're mentioning its influences, it's helpful to look at the way Earthbound presents the player with ethical dilemmas without explicitly modeling and codifying morality. Somewhere along the line people started summing up Earthbound as Saturn Valley, probably because Mr. Saturn appeared on a lot of the merchandise, but it wasn't a walk through a village of weird-talking muppets where dancefloor gameshows appear on a cavern floor out of nowhere. It was a real world rather similar to the one we lived in, with moral and ethical consequence that seemed at least marginally analogous to our own.
One of the more interesting parts of Earthbound is when the player enters a compound of run by a religious cult. Because they have gone off the grid, so to speak, there is no ATM available to get money to purchase health restoration items. In a stroke of game design genius, Shigesato Itoi places an unmanned pay-what-you-want food stand in the middle of the village where one can purchase eggs and bananas. This reframes the supposed bad guys as more communal, trusting, and living by a higher moral code than the rest of industrialized society. The player can choose to shoplift, but even that isn't a binary operation: the game offers you a fine-grain five-digit dollar amount to work with, personalizing the misdeed, even though anything below the set price registers as theft. The amount of items that can be purchased or stolen, however, is seemingly infinite. The player is left to wonder if stealing something from a supply which is functionally without scarcity really such a sin? If you do steal, a man will accost you for doing so (and I believe it must be a repeat offense), and you'll get into a fight with him, and all so he can run away, a tiny nugget of commentary on the futility of policing others' desperate decisions with JRPG mechanics (it should be noted this event comes mere hours after Ness beats up a squad of actual police).
But the greatest thing about this whole food stand scenario is that it allows you to purchase eggs, wait for the in-game clock to run, and discover they hatch into chickens who cluck from your inventory. The chickens can then be sold for a $120, a huge profit. This is Earthbound's most most bare commentary on capitalism, the appropriation of public property for personal profit. And, one might ask, if all eggs grow up to be chickens, is eating an egg to restore HP the destruction of a potential chicken life? This game is even a child's introduction to reproductive rights! (What can't it do?!)
Note that the game never comments upon or quantifies the player's decisions. It merely sets up a playset to explore and interpret, the meat of understanding digested within the player's mind, with no gold stars or red F's. It understands that the medium of computation is a means, not an end.
The food stand ends when the cult does, and with it, a feeling of freedom dies, and it's back to familiar drudgery, ATM withdrawal, and department stores, like the popping of a hippie bubble. The game's moral scenarios do not end there, however. It has you stealing someone's presents the night before his birthday so you can survive in the wildnerness. There are parables about homeownership, and ideas about becoming stronger through enduring pain. All of which are present as part of the game's mechanics, and not just text written in a dialog box.
. . .
Now we move on to Undertale, which has Something To Say about morality, and that is that it's very wrong to beat up on a collection of comic relief-spouting pixelmuppets, which the game has the audacity to call Genocide. The game is nearly unfindable on the dynamic range of believability: there is no grounding of characters, setting, or anything that relates to our own life experience to make our moral compass stop spinning in dizzying circles. The tone is consistently "wacky," "silly," "random," "dream-like," et cetera.
The enemies you're fighting aren't even necessarily cast in opposition to you, which would help in grounding and conceptualizing acts of dignity, mercy, and so on. Often the game's lolcats and dogthings won't even be aware of your presence; they will merely be performing actions in a textbox that somehow have a harmful effect that you must dutifully dodge in a highly-abstract spatial simulation of a heart trying not to collide with shapes in a box. This is what Undertale's morality boils down to: a collection of retarded animals shaming you for not dodging videogame JRPG attacks.
Undertale's judgment is cast uniformly upon a single playthrough, hinging on the repetition of one favored mechanic, with the reasonable expectation that the player will always fail to achieve the "Best Ending" on the first go-round. It demands foreknowledge and a prescriptive playstyle which is highly performative and ritualistic and ideologically rigid, which is what you would expect from a person Raised on Tumblr. The subtext is a nauseatingly juvenile: "Listen, I know you didn't know how bad you were, but we all have a chance to improve, okay?" There is an assumption of original sin on the game's part, that it is freeing you from some horrible perpetuation of violence. Gosh, it must be a capital-P Privilege to be unaware of your own misdeeds! It is far older and wiser than you (toby fox was three when earthbound came out btw), and through enough repetition and patience, you too can learn to partake in this completely arbitrary notion of virtue and restraint we have invisibly embedded into the fabric of this game's perceivable consequence. I'm literally offended by it.
And then, as if all this wasn't bad enough, it has to be a Game About Games (the only way for videogames to achieve literary greatness is through metatext), and it has to embed a time travel conceit into its story so that the player can be poignantly and canonically rewarded for their unerring devotion to sparing the lives of cartoon characters and doing their part to wipe out the moral blight upon our society, savescumming.
One of these games can at least be said to enrich one's understanding of real things in the real world, perhaps even before they can fully interact with it; the other developmentally stunts and embeds a pathologies equivalent to raising children with sockpuppets, and then having the sockpuppets beat the children while they beg to have the company of human beings, all while being told, "Dodge! Dodge!" Undertale is the Allegory of the Cave, except the shadows are shadows of caves.