I played Paperboy 2 for the SNES when I was a kid. I was playing it again through totally legal means and thought about how excellently, this game tempts you with things to whip newspapers at.
Look at that, a baby and a suckling pig. If you hit that pig it goes running off and might kill you. That’s a death worth having by my estimations. You save the pig and he gets revenge on you. It’s actually good if you hit the baby because it stops flying down the street out of control. There are like half a dozen you have to avoid. Is there someone at the top of the street just whipping her sextuplets down the street.
Then you have this old folks having a precious moment. Just asking for you to hit them with a newspaper so that they kick their legs up. What’s one subscriber out of ten for that street when you get to do that? You can get them to sign up through word of mouth if you aren’t a shit to the other subscribers.
Then there’s this dude. Just one little hit to that jack… and boom. He dies. No one would know. This game might be turning me into a psychopath.
To be fair to the paperboy/girl you have to deal with this bullshit.
Look at a man just whipping tires into the open street. I would be on the other side of his house catching those tires to resell them.
Then there’s this bullshit of gargoyles that are constantly shooting fireballs. What is this neighborhood? But then again, maybe that house makes sense when we have…
Active hauntings!
And a fortress that’s opening fire I guess on the people across the street. What did the local zoning board have to say about the moat? And the cannons?
I couldn’t find a screenshot of it but there’s also a convenience store that’s getting robbed every day and the only one there to stop it is the paperboy/girl.
The fact of the matter is that this town should have a great deal of news regarding these weird neighborhoods. But I guess news is so slow in this town that the local hiring and firing of paperboys/girls makes front page news.
Anyway, to get to the point. This game fucking rules.
I want you to know that this isn’t a paid advertisement. I’m not getting any money for this. I just stumbled across this randomly. It’s the trailer for Showa American Story and I’m so intrigued that I felt I had to make a post about this.
So, there’s a lot going on and yet, I have no idea what is happening. Definitely, America has been bought by America. Got it. There are zombies. Sure. A man commits seppuku in front of Mount Rushmore. Getting weirder. There are a bunch of fat men that Voltron into a fat men megazord. Uh… There’s a man who says that he’s a cowboy and samurai. Kind of par for the course. There are zombies using their organs as weapons. That makes sense, they’ve been doing that since the Left 4 Dead franchise.
The visuals look beautiful, which shouldn’t be anything new. We have the graphical ability to make great looking games easily now. What really looks good is that everything is imaginative. They show these large landscape shots where it looks like everything has been lived in and civilized in a certain manner. That they put thought into this. I can really appreciate that.
Whatever the nitty gritty of the story is, it’s going to be insane. This feels like a Hideo Kajima game or a SUDA51. They have their own logic and they’re applying it to this nonsense and it’s going to break your hear and make you question your sanity.
The thing is that this reminds me of every time I’ve seen a trailer for some weird movie that I know is going to shake me to my core. Something like Blue Velvet or the Lighthouse. It just looks like this game is ready to grab me Peter Pan style and take me on a life changing journey. So, yeah, I guess for the trailer hook, line and sinker.
When it comes out, I’m going to play it and I’ll report back. I just wanted you all to know about this if it flew below your radar.
Another game genre that I’ve been enjoying are simulator games. Two in particular lately, fast food simulator and supermarket simulator. I can say that the first one is a highly accurate version of what it’s like working in a McDonald’s as I did for my first job. The only thing is that I’m not horrendously shy and scared of people.
The work in both games is just as monotonous. You perform the same actions day in and day out. You can throw on a podcast and just cruise. There’s no story to pay attention to.
So, why do I love these games?
Yahtzee the very swear-y video game reviewer has called these dad games and one of his points is that it lets you envision your life if you had taken a different path. As someone who has played these games it also allows you to pretend that these are viable career paths. I put together one bag of food for someone coming through my drive through and it had four items an somehow cost fifty-six dollars.
I’m not a dad and never will be but I’m dad age. Sometimes I imagine pulling a dude from American Beauty and going back to work at McDonald’s when things in my life were simple. But I don’t think that’s why I actually like these games. McDonald’s made my clothing stink no matter how many times my mom washed them. One of my prize Kurt Cobain t-shirts was forever cursed with the smell because I put my work shirt on it overnight.
The real reason that I think that I like it is that I have another hobby that some people might consider boring: knitting. For a lot of people, it might seem so boring to sit still and slowly knit stitch by stitch. But there’s something that I love about the click of the needles and the slow creation of a scarf or washcloth(I’m not that good. I need to work on getting better).
It’s the same thing with these games. Watching as my level goes up in either one and expanding on the things I can make in my fast food restaurant or watching my supermarket slowly expand. It’s the satisfaction of a job well done. Even though it’s just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.
When I knit, the world falls away, my mind clears and I can just focus on that. It’s the same thing with these simulator games. I don’t care if people think they’re a waste of time or boring, for me those moments of peace are what make it all worth it.
I’m including the Yahtzee video if you want to hear more about dad games:
This is going to be a post where I complain about something that I’m very lucky to have, which is a consistent DND group. I know for a lot of people, it’s something they can only wish for.
We’ve been playing together for about nine years, maybe more. People have come and gone but we’ve been pretty consistent for the most part. Considering how long I’ve been playing this game, you could say I have a particular fondness for it. So, when the money was right, I picked up Baldur’s Gate 3 because it was just more DND. I should have loved it.
I started playing it and got through the introduction off of the mind flayer’s ship and started assembling my party. It’s fun and a well made game. The story seems like it’s going to be engrossing. I’ve heard how much people love these characters.
But I found myself after two hours in, starting to get tired of it. I wasn’t disliking playing it but I just couldn’t get myself over the hill on it. I went back to playing Skyrim and modding the hell out of that when it hit me.
It wasn’t what DND is to me.
DND is a collaborative storytelling tool that everyone gets to get a hand on. And the hands that add to my stew are not expert but they know how to make that stew tasty as hell.
I won’t name names but I have one that I call Big Moves because throughout our current campaign, she has consistently made moves that have made me have to upend everything I’ve done. I showed them this portal that would take them to a different world where they could do things. She thought that no one should have that much power and blew it the hell up. The person creating the portal is now an enemy.
Did it annoy and shock me at the time? Of course, but it opens up new opportunities for me.
Then we have our resident murderhobo who I rolled a random encounter and they immediately robbed him. They took the salted beef and onions he had. Mostly out of spite for not having better things. She has blown up her fellow adventurers on multiple occasions.
Then we have the guy who I’ve turned into John Hammond and his ex into Ian Malcolm as they argue about the ethics of cloning and DNA manipulation. He has a suit made of flowers that acts like Iron Man armor.
Then we have the Luxodon dominatrix/inventor who has recently decided to multiclass into bard and use the language of dance to showcase their bardic abilities. Her mom is Dolly Parton from the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Why? Don’t worry about it. She has flying sex toys that she uses to attack people.
We have the Haregon ninja assassin who tried to swim into a shark’s mouth and got chomped in half when he rolled a nat 1 on his dexterity check. He got better.
Finally, we have a tabaxi cleric that tries desperately to get them to act civilly. It hasn’t worked.
I gave them this airship:
So, cool.
They named it the Good Ship Lollipop.
For me, I think the problem with Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it reflects a future that I don’t want. One where I’m playing DND without these people. When I play it, I just miss my friends.
For those that don’t know, Oddjob was a character in Goldeneye the video game that no one wanted their opponents to play because you would constantly shoot over him.
They’ve recently announced though that Sabrina Carpenter is coming to Fortnite and wow we sure have come a long way from the polygonal nightmares above.
So considering, she’s five feet flat, I think it’s time for her to get a smaller hitbox and be harder to hit. Her whole thing is being smol.
I won’t be playing because I didn’t get on the ground floor of Fortnite and the whole thing feels so confusing to me.
Over the weekend, I bought and played Balatro. For those that don’t know, Balatro is a rogue-lite where you play different poker hands to gain chips and get a total in a set number of moves. Different jokers can be combined to increase your chips and help you win.
A rogue-lite for those who further don’t know, is a game where you don’t get to keep your progress after you die or fail in your task. Usually, your run can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on the luck of the draw.
Balatro
It is addictive to say the least. I put in 11 hours before I knew what had happened. It got me thinking though that maybe the original puzzle games are rogue-lites in and of themselves. Games like Dr. Mario, Tetris Attack, Bust A Move and regular old Tetris. You have a run and you have to rely on skill and luck to see how far you’re going to go.
There is a delicate balance between those two that you have to maintain. Playing Balatro made me retroactively not like another rogue-lite, Slay the Spire, which has you climbing a tower while playing various cards to fight monsters.
Slay the Spire
I put way more hours into Slay the Spire over the years than I did Balatro. And yet, I never beat it. Maybe I was playing it wrong but I just didn’t even get close except for a handful of times. When I did though my character was so out of his depth and was easily defeated. I think that’s the point and it could definitely be a skill issue but I still think Balatro has it beat on ease of use. When I lost in Balatro, I would think that I had definitely made some errors here and there. When I lost in Slay the Spire I would feel like the game had decided it had enough of my shit and slammed me to the ground for my hubris.
It could just be me but I do feel like Slay the Spire could be a bit more forgiving. But then maybe that’s the whole point much the increasingly difficult Soulsborne games. I’m terrible at those as well.
Okay, so maybe it is me. But the fact of the matter, is that I keep coming back to games like Dr. Mario, Bust a Move and Tetris because they give me the feeling that I’m somewhat in control. Maybe I won’t get the pill, bubble or tetrad that I’m looking for but I’ll at least feel like I’ve accomplished something.
The worst thing that anything can do is make you feel like you’ve wasted your time. Whether it be a movie, book, TV show or video game. Do I feel like I’ve wasted my time playing Slay the Spire? No, I don’t. I never wasn’t having fun with the game. I just, I don’t think I’m going to pick it up anytime soon.
Admittedly, Balatro lost its attraction when I won the run. Hunh, maybe that’s why Slay the Spire is so hard. So that I’ll keep coming at it like Don Quixote at his windmill.
This might be a controversial topic as video game movies are largely loathed and have only recently gotten good. Looking at you, Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, thanks for holding up the side. I don’t think those movies were a fluke but we saw how bad it could have been with the ugly sonic from the first trailers.
AHHHHH!
The reason I say it’s a tossup is because there is so much history behind Sonic and the expectations are going to be so high. But there’s the kicker. There are a lot of different video games that you could turn into movies with their much less well known plotlines and hell they aren’t even known that well in the video game world. Let’s look at the five that I think would really work.
Blast Corps
Speed was an enormous hit. A bus that can’t slow down and if it does, it’s not going to just kill the people on it but people around them. That’s a hell of a pitch and idea.
What if you changed it that it’s a nuclear missile truck that can kill thousands, millions of people if it crashes into something in the wrong place. Enter the Blast Corps, a group of pilots and drivers that have access to a bunch of vehicles such as robots, giant dump trucks, bulldozers and cars. They need to destroy everything in the truck’s path to make sure that it doesn’t detonate.
That concept also rules. It’s high octane, ready to go for a blockbuster disaster movie. Roland Emmerich would salivate over the idea of making this movie. Also, you could make so many toys if you make it PG. Kids would love a big playset with collapsible buildings.
The tone could be kind of silly(because it’s a silly concept) and you could just have so much fun with it. You could make some of the most wild and out there characters. Just let the actors go broad and get nuts.
You could start off with them using those construction vehicles and “they’re like, we’re not going to be able to break through in time” and all of a sudden the mech comes busting through is like. “Kept you waiting, hunh?”
Get on this one, Hollywood.
Also before I move on, in the past, I’ve heard so many people give Roland Emmerich flack for making big dumb popcorn movies. Okay, the man has a skill for making good looking popcorn movies.
Look at that, that could be a painting. The main has a niche and has mastered it.
Wild Guns
A forgotten SNES game that deserves some love because it’s so much fun. It’s a western where Annie has hired Clint to help her get revenge for her father’s murder. The two of them head out and start gunning down anything in their path.
“Frank, you charismatically handsome devil, that’s been done to death!”
It has. BUT HAS IT BEEN DONE WITH GIANT ROBOTS?
Fuck yeah
There are dinosaur skeletons. There are high tech trains. There’s a giant robot crab. It is insane. Once more you can do so much with this.
You could write such good banter between Annie, who Clint thinks is this like simple rich southern belle until she grabs her guns and proves herself to him. Meanwhile, he becomes much more understanding.
Just imagine the action scenes. The two of them running around a town as robots open fire on them. The fire dying down as they gun down the robots. And with robots, you can make it PG as well, once again bringing in the kids. That’s why the foot soldiers in Ninja Turtles should always be robots cos you can go nuts on them without worry.
Also in the remake they added two more characters.
Doris that cool lady in green and Bullet that little gunslinging dog on a Green Goblin glider. This is made to be a hit.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Another game with a paper thin plot and a great title. Two teens, Julia and Zeke, find themselves protecting their idiot neighbors from an onslaught of a variety of monsters. They’re oblivious and keep cheerleading and barbecuing in the midst of this apocalypse.
There are zombies, you nerds! Leave the burgers
They use weapons like squirt guns, soda cans, weed whackers and bazookas to fight off zombies, blobs, evil plant monsters, killer dolls, mummies, vampires and sea monsters. You can have so much fun with all of that.
In the game you have to collect your neighbors before you can move on. Boom, a scientist invented a teleporter and it allows them to tap their neighbors and send them off. It would have a Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle vibe.
If you kept it moving with the run and gun vibe from the game it would kill as an action comedy. Sean of the Dead proved that you can do it already.
It Takes Two
What’s this? A modern game!? This would be great to be a more adult oriented video game movie. In it, two parents who are on the verge of divorce are magically turned into their daughter’s dolls. They are trying their best to get her to notice them so that they can get turned back into humans. But eventually another character named Hakim forces them to overcome obstacles to fix things between them and show how they’ve been neglecting their daughter.
This would be a fun family film that turns into a tearjerker towards the end. It would be like Up or Inside Out. Heartbreaking and wonderful. It could lead to so many great discussions.
I saw Inside Out with some parents and they openly wept. It was the discovery that they realized that they couldn’t make their children happy all the time. This builds on that with allowing them to check in with one another to make sure that they’re doing the best for each other and their kids.
Plus, you can add so much humor to it. A nice light in the darkness.
Bubble Bobble
Bubble Bobble is about two dragons that shoot bubbles that encase robots and other monsters before turning them into food. They are ready and waiting to become mascots and big as the minions. Look at how cute he is.
Just give them cute personalities and you are ready to go. Make a land of the dragons that they have to protect and them using their bubbles to fight back.
You would need to do a little more worldbuilding on this one though. The levels for Bubble Bobble weren’t exactly detailed.
Think of it as a blank canvas
Hell, you could do a crossover movie with the Yoshis! That would be super cute.
Summary
So those are my choices for the next video game movies. There are so many games out there that I might have to do this again and still never reach the bottom of the barrel. But who cares. This was fun.
So, you’re an adventurer that’s setting out from your most likely recently burned down village. Maybe you got exiled. Who knows. You’re going to encounter monsters on the road. What they’re going to be varies from game to game but for the most part you’re going to easily be able to strike them down.
Despite this, they serve an important role. They’re there to show you how to fight and how the mechanics work. They’re the unsung heroes of the RPG world. So, I want to take some time to highlight some of my favorites.
The Rabite from Secret of Mana
WHY DO I HAVE TO FIGHT THESE THINGS? They’re not going to be the only cute thing that I have to kill on this list but they’re extra cute the way they hop around. They will do a little tackle on you but who can blame them? They just want to be your friend. Still, I done smacked them down. They usually left behind candy. Just great little friends.
2. Rattatas and Pidgeys- Pokemon Red/Blue/Green and FireRed/LeafGreen
It’s luck of the draw, depending on which one of these that you get when you first leave Pallet Town. But both of them are wonderful to run into, because unlike a lot of the other monsters on this list, these are waiting to be your friends. Usually, my first Pidgey becomes my main form of transportation as I fly across the map. Meanwhile, Rattata became a Raticate and his hyper fang carried me through a good portion of the game.
They were also the first two Pokemon I ever caught in my entire Pokemon career. And you never forget your first.
3. Slimes From Breath of Fire
A normal ass slime that has no features. He’s just kind of there to get hit and disappear. Later in the game you encounter gold slimes who give you plentiful amounts of experience and money. No bells and whistles to it. So, why would I even put this on the list? To showcase the next entry.
4. Slime From Dragon Quest
I have killed a lot of these little guys and I hate it every time. Look at that face! He’s just here to be a little guy. It just has so much personality. It makes sense that this little guy became the face of the franchise. So cute. Love you, slime! Thank you for all your hard work.
Now the question is, whose cuter? This slime or the rabite? I can’t choose. You can’t make me!
(It was then that the author ran from his room and into the middle distance to start a new life)
5. Spiteful Crow from Earthbound
Look at this dude. So, cool. Those shades and that bow tie make this little guy stand out. They attack by pecking at your eyes, which to be fair is a spiteful move. However they also throw you a cookie when you return them to normal. That can make a big difference when you have lower HP levels. Maybe they’re not that spiteful, just a little bit spiteful.
6. Lying Hablerie from Persona 4 and Persona 4 Golden
There’s not enough space on this blog to point out how weird the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games are. But Frank, you might say, there’s infinite amounts of space on the internet.
Exactly.
These things fly up and lick your handsome chad face. Still Izanagi dispatches them easily.
I had to explain Pokemon to my coworker the other day. She told me that her son liked the cards but had no idea what they were beyond that. Having to explain it to someone else, made me have to consider what did I like about it in the first place.
I think the games themselves offer a fantasy that any child would love. First, you get to leave home on an exciting adventure! You’re going to travel from town to town, seeing the sights. Encountering new people and doing new things. That was what the anime was, a road movie as much as an advertisement for the games.
Secondly, kids love pets. But what’s the problem with pets? You can only have one or two. Well, Pokemon offers you the dream of having several hundred pets all at the same time. And there are so many kinds of pets. Forget your normal dog and cat. You can have a sentient pile of garbage as your pet!
Who rescued who?
Then comes the joy of just collecting things. Kids collect trading cards and bottle caps and all kinds of things. Now they have cute animals on them. And of course, the aforementioned sentient bag of trash.
There’s over a thousand of them at this point. Your kid is going to be able to find at least one that they love above all others. For me, it was the Pokemon, Lapras.
A lovely blue and looking to surf through the water
I loved dinosaurs as a kid but found real plesiosaurs to be terrifying. I think they were the ones that gave me my initial hydromegathalassaphobia, the fear of large things in the water. Most things prehistoric things made me scared of the ocean.
AHHHH!
Lapras was a nice alternative. You could ride on its back. It was gentle and kind. But the problem was that they were so few in the game. They were hunted to near extinction. But then through conservation methods, they became plentiful again.
I thought that no one could shake my love for Lapras. But then one of the new games introduced a new challenger. The one and only, little pig: Lechonk.
Look at this absolute unit.
Gotta love a little pig that’s so round. While my love for Lapras will never be shaken or replaced, this little guy comes a close second.
But this is kind of the point, isn’t it? I’m sure that someone even loves the garbage bag. With that many, every person has to have a favorite and every pokemon is someone’s favorite.
It’s always been a weird thing for me to have such affection for these silly little games. But the fact of the matter is that they have influenced me throughout my life. Part of my love of adventure and wanting to see new places comes from these games. There’s always been a lifelong want to walk across America and it definitely came from watching Ash, Misty and Brock walking something like several thousand miles.
Lord of the Rings offers the same thrill of adventure. Leaving home and doing something great and I think that Pokemon elicits the same feelings. Except instead of having the fate of the world and a big eye staring at you, you get a nice little friend.
Going off of what I wrote last week when I said that I constantly try and experience new things, there are several games that I play every year. They’re like my comfort food. Games that I’ve loved forever. Most of them are JRPGs and old school in general. Sometimes it just feels nice to think that you can go home again. Here are the four games that I play every year.
Shovel Knight- What if your knight didn’t have a sword but instead a shovel? What if the damsel in distress was the equal to the hero? What if a company made one of the best old school platformers that ever was. Those are the questions that this game asks. The game is about the titular Shovel Knight trying to save his partner, Shield Knight from someone named the Sorceress and her villainess group of knights called the Order of No Quarter. The gameplay is reminiscent of Duck Tales with you slashing and pogoing with your shovel. Shovel Knight is funny, well made, colorful, has great music and is all around a masterpiece. It is such a joy to play. It takes about four hours to beat but those four hours are joyful. You can feel the love in every moment of this game. The team that made these are experts at fun and have done their homework five times over.
2. Final Fantasy X- I have bought this game on every new system that it becomes available on. I played this game religiously when I was younger and had it on my PS2. I never wanted to be that far away from it. The game is such a departure from the other Final Fantasy iterations. You play as Tidus who arrives in a tropical paradise that is stuck in a continual cycle of death because of a giant Kaiju-size monster known as Sin. He becomes a guardian of a woman named Yuna who is learning how to summon creatures known as aeons, once she completes her journey of learning how to summon all of them, she will face Sin. And that’s about all I can say without spoiling. The game is bright and colorful much like Shovel Knight, has a wonderful battle system that makes gameplay fun and addictive. It has it’s moments that are less than stellar, see the Tidus laugh moment below but the journey is one that I go on every year just to remember how good it is.
3. Bioshock- Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? That’s the question that Andrew Ryan asks you as you unwillingly enter the city of Rapture. You play as Jack a man that is just having the worst day. He gets into a plane crash and swimming to safety, he finds a lighthouse. He goes inside and takes a bathysphere down to this city. He finds a fallen utopia, the aforementioned Rapture, that was based on the concept that there were no restraints on scientists, inventors and artists. They found a substance called ADAM that allowed them to change their DNA. This allowed them to throw fireballs and lightning and do all kinds of other things. But the substance had two downsides, it took genetically altered little girls known as little sisters to harvest it and it was highly addictive creating violent monsters called splicers. You have to learn how to survive in this world and then escape from it. You need ADAM to live and you need to decide if your survival is worth murder of children or if you’re willing to make the game harder by letting them liven when you take the ADAM from them. It’s a first person shooter and probably the darkest game on this list in terms of visuals and subject matter. It’s another masterpiece that doesn’t take too long to play. Or maybe I’ve just gotten that good at it.
4. Chrono Trigger- Another JRPG of the old school SNES variety. You play as Crono and after a festival experiment goes wrong and sends you back in time, you find that you have to stop a disaster that is going to take place and destroy the world. You collect people from the various time periods that you visit to help you and include, a chivalrous man sized frog knight, a polite robot, a sorcerer that looks like Vegeta and a cave woman. Then you have your two bros from the present, a princess in hiding and your female inventor friend. The game despite its age jam packs so much into it. There are over thirteen endings in the game depending on when you fight the final boss who becomes available about a quarter way through the game and even sooner if you know how to get there. The game was as far as I know the first game to issue a new game plus mode where you were able to restart the game with all your weapons, experience and abilities from your last beaten save. That meant that you could start just romping all the first area enemies with your ultimate abilities the minute you hit the street. This game continues my love of color, great stories and music. Starting to see a theme emerge.
Franklin Cota, an author and podcaster 