Paper Mario is where Nintendo shows off its stellar writing

Since it’s bound to come up, I just have to say it: I loved Sticker Star. It was a weird, intentionally obscure mishmash of genres and ideas that felt thoroughly Nintendo, and I hate that its legacy is so negative. I mean, I get it. It’s almost confrontationally different. But the things that are supposedly flaws—the lack of experience points, attacks being a limited resource, the linearity—are the things I love about it. The battles are “pointless” in the same sense that enemies in Super Mario Bros. are pointless. They are obstacles you have to overcome to get to the goal. Instead of stomping on their head, you fight them in turn-based RPG style.

I’ve loved all the Paper Mario games. They’re ambitious and intentionally subvert RPG conventions. I’d love another entry like The Thousand Year Door, but I’d love something new even more, so I’m excited for Color Splash.

Rise And Shine, Mr. Freeman

Also this week, Sam Barsanti shared an essay by Marc Laidlaw, the writer of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, that he had penned just after the first game’s completion. It got commenters reminiscing about Half-Life’s innovations. As The Krampusmeister points out, the biggest of those is how it never pulled the player out of Gordon Freeman’s perspective or broke up the action with distinct level endings—the structure its predecessors had established:

The real thing that was revolutionary, which people usually gloss over, is that the story wasn’t just told in first-person but in unbroken, seamless first-person. Apart from moments when Gordon Freeman is knocked out or otherwise incapacitated, there are no scene breaks, cuts to black, or interludes. Other FPS games were basically a collection of individual levels, usually with a button or a switch at the end that took you to the next level (see: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D), whereas HL1 (and many modern games) feel like one big unending level. Each zone connects to each other as seamlessly as technology would allow at the time, so from the moment you ride the tram into work (and even that tram sequence was revolutionary) to the final moments of the game, you’re with Gordon every step of the way.

Alex Hammyton remembers being bowled over by something a little less heady:

What stuck out to me was the way blood splattered. I know, it’s immature, but it might have been the first time I played a game where every firefight felt unique, with guys attacking at different angles, blood splattering all over the place and grenades going off. When the bullets stopped flying it did look like a battle took place. We take that for granted now, I guess.

Jumping ahead, SaviourMachine searched for what they loved most about Half-Life 2:

For years I have been thinking about what exactly makes Half-Life 2 so special to me and what prompts me to replay it once every four years. Is it the sound? Is it the pervasive sense of isolation, because this is one of the few games which stresses the impossible burden which the character must take? (I remember the way the water drips off the walls in the sewers, and this sound still fills me with unaccountable dread.) Is it because of the intuitive way the levels are structured, so that even when you are navigating City 17’s outskirts, you still have a clear sense of where you are and where you should go? To my mind, less than a dozen shooters in the history of video games achieved that kind of spatial coherence. Because the space feels so real, so uninterrupted, the passage of time feels real as well. This is one of the few games where you feel the urgency of the situation, and where your actions seem to instigate events beyond those that you directly observe. Half-Life 2 succeeds at conveying the tricky sense of being at once the catalyst of seismic changes in the surrounding world and an organic part of them.

That does it for this week, Gameologerinos. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you all next week!