Rachel’s away this week, but the postcards must continue regardless! Open your letterbox, here comes another one!
I guess AAA are giving us our food pre-chewed now, huh
My memory is hazy, but if I recall correctly, around the release of Super Mario Galaxy 2 in 2010, there was a brief period of discourse about the game’s difficulty. If players died repeatedly, they would be given a special item that made them invulnerable for the rest of the level. This was becoming a bit of a trend at the time; Nintendo was clearly concerned that the enormous casual audience they had gained via Wii Sports wouldn’t have the skills or the patience to try out their more traditional franchises, and were adding these features to ensure a smoother ride. The hardcore were, predictably, upset.
15 years later, it’s funny to think that this was ever a concern. The casual audience moved away from dedicated video game systems fairly quickly, and Nintendo have since approached difficulty in ways that feel largely beneficial to everyone. Besides, it turns out that it wasn’t Nintendo we should have been worried about in the first place. It was Sony.
Once known for its inventive and daring first-party releases that pushed and challenged players, Sony has since abandoned this approach, opting instead to sand down the edges of its homegrown titles until they are perfectly spherical. Long gone are the days of finely crafted gourmet plates and lavish buffets of snackable junk food. Instead, here is a trough of chewed-up slop, rendered in full 4K at 30fps. Bone apple teeth.
As you may have guessed, I’ve been playing Ghost of Yōtei, the sequel to 2020’s Tsushima, developed by Sucker Punch. Right up top, I think it’s worth saying that I am having a very nice time with it so far. It’s easily the best-looking game I’ve ever played (Sucker Punch are the best in the biz when it comes to environmental design, lighting, and weather effects), and its core narrative thread is much sharper compared to its predecessor. I’m 12 hours in, and I can see myself devoting another 20 over the next few weeks.
But man, if this game doesn’t largely play itself. The Ghost games (is this what we’re calling them?) may pride themselves on keeping the screen free of UI clutter, but it makes no difference when they’ve also removed all barriers between goal and solution. Setting a waypoint on your map sees the wind blow with a comical clarity towards your destination. White flowers boost your horse’s run speed (lol). The route is usually a straight line, with no environmental obstacles to note, save a log to jump over or a small cliff to “climb” (hold the left stick up for a few moments). Similarly, upgrades are acquired by fast travelling to an inn or pressing X on a menu to have vendors come to you, no matter where you are in the world. It’s smooth! It’s seamless! It’s boring!
I had the same issue with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 a few years ago, to the extent that I dropped it after around 10 hours, frustrated by how little it asked of me. Yōtei’s combat has enough texture to keep me coming back, but the same problems remain. I can only assume that with players spending less and budgets ballooning to obscene levels, Sony’s only hope is to make their games as digestible as possible to keep folks engaged to the very end.
I think it would be easy to point to the likes of Elden Ring selling over 30 million copies as proof that players actually value ideas that go against the grain, but I’m honestly not sure if that’s true. A recent study supports the idea that most people don’t buy new games, which makes you sort of understand why Sony is pushing for this kind of design. It’s bad for the industry, and it’s bad for the art, but until that AAA bubble finally explodes, I guess this is what we’re left with: Enormous, lavish troughs of beautifully rendered slop. Lucky us.
Liam
Recommendation: hot sauce girl dinner recipe that just might salvage the day
Not to go into the messy details too much, but I’m having kind of a shit week, Indieventure fam. The sort of week where you really need to stop and take a moment to appreciate the little joys in life, and also where you might say “fuck it” and tax your recently-35-year-old digestive system to its newly-minted middle-aged limits in mildly self-destructive protest.
Luckily, these are not mutually exclusive for me, because I love hot sauce. Which is why this week my snack of choice has been Quorn Cheesy Nacho Nuggs dipped alternatingly into Sauce Shop Buffalo Sauce and The Garlic Farm Vampire Botherer Fang Melting Sauce (the latter a delightful souvenir of my trip to the Isle of Wight this summer).
There are numerous benefits to partaking of this simple recipe, one of which is an Onion Cellar-style inability for the people around you to tell if your face is red and puffy from anger and sadness, or simply from all the hot sauce. Also it’s distractingly tasty, to the point where I genuinely turned to FOTP Mick mid-agonised rant about the horrors of life to comment that, as far as I’m concerned, jalapeño garlic sauce was put on this earth expressly so that it could one day meet nacho veggie nuggets… so clearly no matter how glum things seem right now, there’s still capacity in me for some spontaneous delight.
As for the wider issues (which I really don’t want to go into but suffice to say: family, work, family again) please send good vibes, I guess — and possibly also Gaviscon, because while I’m not suffering for my passion right now per se, I’m definitely feeling it the next day.
Rebecca
Ace Attorney beanposting is, without exaggeration, the best thing I’ve ever seen on the internet
I keep meaning to mention this on the podcast, but I’m not sure I ever actually have. Do you guys know that as of last Christmas, I’ve started collecting Ace Attorney Capcoroms, the tiny tsum-tsum inspired sushi plushes that Capcom make of characters from their most iconic series? At the time of writing my collection has swelled from the initial three FOTP Santa brought for me to 15 and still growing, which represents the majority of what’s available but leaves me with a few more worlds to happily contemplate conquering.
I’m not usually a completionist when it comes to merch collections – yes, I’m slightly problematically hooked on Nendoroids right now as well, but even then I tend to be very selective, since anime collectables in particular quickly get ludicrously pricey and I normally only fork out for plushies and figurines of characters I particularly love. But Capcoroms are small, stackable, and only cost a relatively sensible low-double-digit amount each. Basically, once I’ve locked in all the ones I really want, I might actually get the three or four more required to complete the set – assuming Capcom don’t announce even more, which they currently do about once a month; I’m blatantly not the only one who’s fallen for these charming lil squishies.
This whole obsession began with the realisation that it’s impossible for me to look at these silly little beans without a big goofy smile on my face – and that’s with my own sensible tendency to just stack them all in a big pyramid (or occasionally make them smoosh their silly flat faces together for a kiss). Lurking on social media as I am wont to do, though, I see that other people are doing amazing work creating little tableaux with their Ace Attorney Capcoroms, and I just want to show you all my favourites because they’re so good.
You can ease into the trend by admiring this creative but still fairly hinged cat tree-esque shelf display, and this adorable scene showing the cast of Great Ace Attorney throwing a tea party for the spin-off’s recent 10th birthday. Then, when you’re ready to get a tiny bit weirder, I recommend checking out a beautifully composed showcase of Athena and Simon’s trip to Eurodisney. And because I don’t want to ruin the joke from this point on, please just take a look at this one, this one, and this one in approximately that order to maximise the slow slide into surrealism (and be sure to read all the comments because the kayfabe is reliably gold – this right here is why I can’t quite bring myself to quit Reddit altogether).
Finally, I’ll leave you with an Ace Attorney merch shitpost that isn’t Capcorom related but is the most cursed thing I’ve ever seen, because it’s so horrifyingly brilliant I can’t look away. That’s how you know it’s art.
Top row: Sholmes
Second row: Phoenix & Edgeworth (PW Trilogy)
Third row: Kazuma, Ryunosuke, and the Masked Apprentice
Fourth row: Klavier, Apollo, Athena, and Simon
Fifth row: Gina, Iris W., Susato, Phoenix & Edgeworth (AJ Trilogy)
Not pictured: Godot (cuz Rachel so kindly bought him in Japan 🥹 and still has custody of him until I see her next month); Franziska and Kay (cuz I can’t find them 😭); Van Zieks (cuz I don’t like him 😈); Maya, Nahyuta, and Rayfa (cuz I don’t really care about them 🥱)
Rebecca
A Rachel update
Rachel has been travelling around South Korea and Japan these last few weeks. We’ve largely not heard from her (a positive thing, considering she’s on her holidays) except for a single image she shared on her first day away:
I have so many questions. Is this a version that was specifically created for planes? Does it have any exclusive content? Can you play multiplayer with other passengers?
I’m unsure if this is a universal experience, but I tend to have a stronger emotional reaction to media when I’m on a long-haul flight. Maybe it’s the air pressure, maybe it’s because I’m constantly on edge that the plane is about to explode in a way that planes don’t. Either way, I hope that Rachel played Peggle at 42,000 feet and had a religious awakening to the church of Bjorn.
Liam
But what about you, dear reader? Scribble your entries in the comments section below.
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