Music Monday: Summer 2018 Playlist

I’ve been listening to a lot of great music this past summer, and I wanted to do something to highlight it. The end of summer seemed like a good time to commemorate it, and I struggled with ways to cut it down and focus on some select songs or artists, but eventually, I just decided to go with a long, uncut list to get a wider scope. That meant cutting the writing part of this so this didn’t balloon into a novella, but I think the music is strong enough to speak for itself (and maybe there will be more writing on some of it to come).

If you find something you really like, I definitely encourage looking into these artists more. I didn’t want the list to spiral even more out of control, so I had to put some limits in pace, but a lot of these are snippets of really strong albums, or artists who are newer and could do with some new listeners. Take a listen!

 

Celeste Perfectly Unites Story, Theme, and Gameplay

Continuing my ongoing attempt to highlight and analyze amazing indie games (especially those on the Switch), I would like to discuss one of the year’s best titles, Celeste by Extremely OK Games (previously of Towerfall fame*). For anyone curious, I played the Switch version, but it’s available on pretty much any platform you’d want to play it on.

*Which, it was recently announced, is itself coming to the Switch at the end of September, if you haven’t tried it yet and are looking for an excuse; it’s wonderful in its own right!

Celeste is a rare beast, a game that is mechanically tight, incredibly well-designed level-wise, and fun to play while also being an incredibly moving narrative and thematic experience. For those who haven’t heard of it yet, the premise is pretty simple: a girl named Madeline arrives at a remote peak (the titular Celeste Mountain), looking to escape some sort of (initially undefined) personal trauma by climbing it. Along the way, she meets a variety of figures that aid her in her journey, with the entire story rendered in some simple-yet-beautiful pixel art graphics, and with one of my favorite game soundtracks supporting the whole thing.

The game is an incredibly tough platformer, challenging players in a variety of ways while also being one of the more forgiving games of its kind. Save points are frequent in the normal course of a level and carry through between sessions, and on top of that, the game has a variety of options to tweak the challenge in almost any way imaginable so that anyone can feel comfortable playing it, regardless of whether or not you’re the type of person who can beat a classic Mario game in ten minutes. That in and of itself is pretty notable; Game Makers Toolkit has more on these features, which is definitely a worth a watch.

If you’re at all curious about it and want to go in unspoiled of the deeper plot details, I would absolutely recommend trying it! From here on out, I’ll be getting pretty deep into the nitty-gritty of the story.

Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King Is an Interesting Indie Homage to 2D Zelda Games

A big part of my love for the Nintendo Switch is that it’s a platform highly conducive to indie games. Sure, the big titles like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2 are incredibly fun, but they’re only part of the experience. Smaller titles like Battle Chef Brigade or Crypt of the NecroDancer or Celeste (more on this one coming soon) have comprised a large chunk of my playing time as well. I like that Nintendo has begun to do more to showcase these titles, which often wear their inspiration from earlier Nintendo games on their sleeve, and Nintendo’s support has made the Switch all the more attractive for independent studios.*

*This isn’t to say that it’s perfect; in fact, I have a lot of opinions on how they can improve their support for these types of games. But it definitely beats the system that’s in place for indie games on, say, Steam, which appears to be “approve everything, and then release something constantly with no notice”.
One of the big success stories from this set up has been Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King from developer Castle Pixel. The game did well enough on Switch to keep the company open after it got lost in the massive shuffle on Steam. It’s not hard to see why it likely resonated with Nintendo fans, though: the game is a clear love letter to the 2-D Legend of Zelda games and others like them. A Link to the Past, in particular, is a clear influence, which is a big part of what convinced me to pick up the game initially; ALttP was my introduction to the Zelda series, the one I’ve played through the most, and still probably my personal favorite entry.

And Blossom Tales definitely feels like playing it’s inspiration, which took me through a weird roller coaster of emotions while playing the game that I wanted to break down because of how unusual they felt. Castle Pixel has done a great job in making a game that feels cozy and familiar, but bright and new simultaneously. The Kingdom of Blossom is a pleasant place to explore, filled with diverse locales to discover; large enough to feel satisfying, but with a helpful and tastefully-restrained fast travel system that hits the fine balance of making reaching every last corner not feel like a chore, but also not making it feel like you’re just skipping by the entire map. The story is pretty straightforward, but with an added Princess Bride-esque framing device of a grandfather telling his children of the adventures of new knight Lilly, which is both charming and a useful reminder of what to do when you pick the game back up.

Remembering Meteos: A Retrospective

The other day, there were plenty of people on social media who were discussing their “Gamestruck 4”. For those who missed it, the inspiration for the conversation was the day before, when movie streaming service Filmstruck started a hastag asking people for to name the four films that “defined them”. From there, other people began applying the thinking to other mediums, hence “Gamestruck 4”.

With that background out of the way, I decided to think about it some. Video games have been a large part of my life, so which four could be the ones that most “defined” me, whatever that meant? There were a lot of contenders. Super Mario World, as the first video game I played, was a starting point. I’ve probably put more hours into the Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart series than any other games. I’ve written about my love for series like Mario, Pokémon, and Backyard Baseball in the past, all of which had major impacts on my formative years. There are more modern titles that remind me of why I love the medium, like Super Mario Odyssey, A Hat in Time, and Undertale (which I’ve wanted to write about for years, but still have no idea where to even start). Or, I could pick games that are highly representative of genres I like, or which line up with my aesthetic tastes.

There were some interesting titles there, some of which included games that I hadn’t thought about for years. Golden Sun was a big one, an old Game Boy Advanced RPG with a sprawling fantasy epic at its core centered on a group of magic users traveling the world. I spent a lot of time on that one, but of course, I already had a potential RPG representative in Pokémon. Then, there’s games like Tetris and Tetris Attack; I love puzzle games, but especially ones like that.* But what about something that could combine those aspects?

*I have no idea what the official subgenre name is. “Match Three Games” seems like the style, but name that doesn’t really apply to Tetris. Wikipedia suggests “Tile Matching”, which seems the most accurate even if I’ve never heard it used before. Of course, I’m also fond of my mostly-buzzword-yet-technically-not-wrong descriptor, “rougelike puzzle games with permadeath”. 

And that’s when I remembered Meteos.

For those who weren’t fortunate enough to try it, Meteos was a 2005 Nintendo DS puzzle game created by Q Entertainment (and under the design lead of the brilliant Masahiro Sakurai, of Super Smash Bros and Kirby fame) in the same genre as Tetris. But whereas Tetris felt (to young me, at least) like something basic and ancient, even primal, that had always existed in some form or another*, Meteos felt distinctly new.

*And to be fair to young me, Tetris predated me by nearly a decade, so it was pretty close.

A Few Criticisms of Avengers: Infinity War

I’m just going to cut straight to the point: I don’t think necessarily think Avengers: Infinity War is a bad movie. I enjoyed myself watching it in some capacity, which is ultimately what Marvel Studios was going for. But it was a certain type of movie, the kind where, as I’m watching it, I start thinking of all the ways it could have been better. So with that, I figured I’d give the few most significant changes I think would have improved the third Avengers film. As a warning, if you haven’t seen Infinity War yet and you’re concerned about spoiling the movie for yourself, maybe hold off, because I’m going to cover some major plot points.

A Hat in Time and Level Design Philosophies in 3-D Platformers

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my favorite indie games from the past year and I lavished high praise on A Hat in Time by the development team Gears for Breakfast. It’s a throwback to the 3D platformers of the ‘90s and early 2000s that I loved growing up, but like all of the best nostalgic throwbacks, it’s good not just because it references the classics of a past, but because it understands what made those classics work, and consciously decides to do its own thing. Now that I’ve more or less finished the entire game, I feel like I can begin to break down some of the things that the game does especially well.

Every aspect of A Hat in Time is meticulously designed and pitch perfect. The aesthetic side of things are incredibly strong; the game is filled with beautifully-animated, cel-shaded style worlds, each with it’s own hilariously-written and quirky side characters. The entire thing is scored with a triumphant and exciting soundtrack that makes you feel ready to set out on an adventure. Protagonist Hat Girl is given a strong personality with almost no dialogue, and is one of my favorite new main characters in the past decade or so. The controls are tight and so much fun to use, which is critical to a platformer that relies on navigating spaces. Few games make simply moving around a level feel so natural and easy.

And while that all is nice, there’s one specific aspect of the design that I’d like to focus on: the construction of the worlds that serve as your digital playgrounds. A Hat in Time makes some interesting choices in how they went about building these stages that I feel like digging into a little, because I think the variety they provide are part of what keeps the game feel so exciting and new at every turn.

My Favorite Indie Games of 2017

I’ve written a decent amount in 2017 about video games, but mostly about larger titles from bigger companies. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s also not really indicative of a lot of what I played this year, either. And that’s kind of a shame, because a lot of smaller, indie titles rely on good word-of-mouth to get attention. So maybe I’ll write a full article about one or more of these games later, but in the meantime, I wanted to run down a list of the smaller titles that I enjoyed this year. Not all of them came out this year, necessarily, but part of the joy of smaller games is finding something you missed the first time. With that in mind, consider looking into one or more of these if they sound interesting.

Music Monday: Best Music of 2017

Picking my favorite music for a year is a little weird, the more I delve into it. A lot of stuff that I “discovered” this year actually came out last year or earlier. Some of my favorite albums that came out in 2017 include songs that were released in 2016 or even 2015. When you think about it even more, there’s a very good chance that I haven’t even heard my favorite song from 2017 yet. Even if I have, I still might grow a new appreciation for something that I initially brushed off. Drawing up lists like this always involves some degree of arbitrariness.

But I still wanted to do something to mark the end of the year, so I built a list of my favorite songs from this year. I tried to stick to a full rules, though:

1) Songs should be from 2017 when possible. 2016 is okay if I wasn’t aware of the artist until this year, or if the song was released as an early single for a full album that came out in 2017, but try not to go earlier than that.

2) I decided to limit myself to 2 songs from a given artist. If they have two songs on the list, it should either be because the artist had multiple releases this year, or because I really liked the release in question. Generally speaking, I like the larger body of work of every artist here and would recommend listening to more of any of them if you like what I included here, but I didn’t want the list bloating up too much; it’s already nearly 5 hours as is.

Seeing as this list is 80 songs, I’m not going to touch on every single inclusion, but I’ll highlight a few things here and there. With that out of the way, let’s get to it: