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.
The trailers for Little Kitty, Big City got me cautiously excited. The reason I was cautiously excited was because I didn’t know if anything could happen to the cat. Once the second trailer was just like “Hey, we got you, we know that you just want to watch a fun cat be silly. Nothing can happen to this sweet boy.”
Still haven’t played Stray because I heard things can happen to that cat. It’s hard but the possibility is enough to make sure that I don’t play it. Can’t deal with sad cat stuff. Not at this point in my life.
Anyway, I immediately thought about comparisons to Untitled Goose Game. I enjoyed the hell out of Goose Game mostly because it was enigmatic. You were a goose that seemingly had beautiful handwriting and a vendetta against this one small hamlet. It had mischief to do and it wasn’t going to let anything stop it. This included bullying a small child, bullying a gardener, destroying and stealing whatever it wanted. Why? Well, look at geese, we all know that they look sinister as hell and would do this given half the chance.
Little Kitty on the other hand, has a plot, characters and a clear goal. You are a little cat and you need to get back home to continue your nap. You need to climb back up but you need the strength to do it and you gain that through eating fish. Eat the four fish and began the somewhat challenging climb. Before all that, you’re going to meet a tanuki inventor, a merchant crow hell bent on getting shinies, a duck family and some other helpful older cats. Humans will pet you or if they’re annoyed, pick you up and walk you out of their place of residence or business. To reiterate, no harm can come to the cat.
The game is beautiful, the music is delightful, the characters are fun and the dialogue is witty. The gameplay itself rewards exploration with a bunch of fresh new hats that all look adorable and getting to see your kitty nap in a variety of places. It’s not a long game only taking about two hours to complete and another three if you want to 100% it. However, it’s going to enter my rotation of cool down games where I just want to relax and not think about things like Powerwash Simulator. Just a nice, cozy game to take my mind off of things.
Franklin Cota, an author and podcaster 