The New Yorker and The Observer’s Simon Parkin joins the panel to cover a new angle in game genres, the legacy of Segata Sanshiro, and aesthetic crevices. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Tim Rogers, Brandon Sheffield, and Simon Parkin. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
I’d be curious how long after release Brandon played Final Fantasy XV, because initially after launch, your first run through those creepy cave dungeons throttled movement to a crawl to make it feel more like a horror game with scripted jump scares. The party would just carefully tip-toe around and Prompto would be like “guys I’m so scared what was that noise”. I think initially the crevice would have just been for visual variety so you weren’t just sitting there bored watching your dudes walk at a snail’s pace for fear of the same enemy mobs you’ve regularly been tearing to pieces out in the field. I think enough people must have complained because on subsequent playthoughs I noticed you can move at regular speed in those dungeons now, which is why all the party chatter in the dungeons ends prematurely because movement between scripted events is no longer synced to the length of the script, lol
I hope this means we’ll hear some insert credit people on My Perfect Console. I’d love for Jaffe to have a platform to gush about Nier for as long as he likes.
Simon’s My Perfect Console podcast is great. Highly recommended.
Here’s an answer for reading the New Yorker for the cartoons BUT I think it would also fit a hypothetical question of “what’s the NOT reading the articles in Playboy of video games?”:
Playing gacha phone games where you wish every part of the game (battles, exploration etc) was automated or skippable (e.g. some games have a quick battle where it doesn’t load into the battle, it skips straight to the reward) so that you can just concentrate on the acquisition of new gacha and feeding items into your characters to get them levelled up.
I have found myself wanting this feature in gacha games and realised what this says about how I’m spending my time and the TSA agents of my mind detained that thought in another room.
Edit: Aesthetic Crevice is a good Xbox gamertag that is randomly generated by the console when you sign up
if that BUT is trivial, then it’s a ripoff, if it’s significant than some game is actually a genre.
what’s trivial and what’s significant changes over time.
i think tim is right though, genres are pretty fake. but then, i guess at some level everyone kinda knows that taxonomy is always just a way of organizing ideas… but then also people can forget that even if they know it. people often mistake a map for a territory.
also, i think simon is right that genshin impact was recieved as such a ripoff because it’s made in china. we’re in a re-run of the cold war, and china is the new ussr.
it’s wild how things like that have such sway over public opinion.
There are multiple podcasts called “No Bones About It”, and they seem to mostly be about orthopedics. Which I guess loops back around to Tim’s TikTok Doctor.
Regarding Simon being quiet, guests can often be a little nervous or shy when out of their normal format. I actually cut quite a few instances of Jaffe prompting Simon for input (without cutting the resulting input itself, naturally) so please don’t hold it against anybody in particular that he hangs back a little at points in this episode. I’m sure if/when we get him back on, he’ll be more familiar with the format and willing to jump in.
The most widely held bad take may be one that even most of us believe, which challenges our own ability to point it out. For instance, to what @pasquinelli summarizes Tim as saying, maybe we put too much stock in conventional genres. What the heck is a “puzzle game”? What if we thought of Tetris as a high-speed dexterity game alongside Pacman? What if we put Bejeweled 2 alongside Civilization 6 for its turn-based if this, then that sequencing? What if we erased not just the J from JRPG but the JRP for dialogue box? What if most gamers suddenly thought of genre as pluriform, manifold overlappings of features rather than mutually exclusive categorizations for market segmentation? What if Sonic belonged to 100 genres?
Dreamcast 2: Unbox Your Next / Switch to Your Dream. I got nothing for Playstation: “Play Not Your Dad’s Stationery” is set to an audience of few.
