Why Baldur's Gate Is Still a Delight to Play

Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Baldur's Gate. I've attempted to play through it numerous times over the years since its release in 1998, but for some reason, I always bounced off around Beregost. I think it was seeing all the houses in the town and being intimidated at how long it would take to explore through them all. It’s a good thing I never saw the city of Baldur’s Gate right?

All these years later, with the release of the Enhanced Edition and some CRPG experience behind me, it was finally time to tackle this genre classic. Spoiler alert, but I loved it. I considered playing through the sequel immediately, making a video on the whole series. After a viewer poll and some consideration however, I decided to cover the base game plus the Siege of Dragonspear expansion in this video, and save Baldur’s Gate 2 for the future.

This critique is a series of anecdotes and observations about my time playing the Enhanced Edition, released in 2012. The first section is about levelling up, and how small changes to numbers affect success and failure. The second section is about my chosen class and companions, and the third section is about the game's plot and how it relates to pacing and progression. It's also where I discuss the reason why I found Baldur's Gate so enjoyable to play all these years later. After I wrap up, I’ll let you know the games for the next critique poll, and share some ideas that didn’t make their way into the main video. Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe and give the video a like if you enjoy what I have to say. This discussion contains minor spoilers for Baldur’s Gate and Siege of Dragonspear, so viewer discretion is advised. Now, let's talk about levelling up.

The Importance of a Few Numbers

I think RPG fans take levelling up for granted. In many games, the levels hit quickly, exciting the player with that dopamine rush of their power increasing. Maybe it's more health and better stats, or maybe it's a point to spend in an upgrade tree, but while levelling up is always exciting, there's a paradox that the more levels a game throws at a player, the less important each level itself feels.

That's why playing Baldur's Gate over the last couple of months was such a revelation. Levels in this game are scarce, and because of this, each new level carries with it a sense of accomplishment, alongside a shift in the balance of power between the party and their enemies. I'll give two examples of what I mean. A few hours into the game you need to assault a bandit camp. My party was level 2 at this point. Despite many reloads and trying out different strategies, the guards patrolling the outskirts of their camp were destroying me. This series of defeats led to the decision that it was best to go elsewhere and complete side quests in order to reach level 3 before I tried again. I explored new areas, found a dungeon in a ruined bridge, and by the time I had cleared it, my party was level 3, and had better gear. I went back to the camp, and decided to use a conservative strategy to pull single enemies towards my group, clearing the camp one grunt at a time, but this caution was no longer necessary. With the increase of one level, my party was getting hit a lot less, and their weapons were inflicting large amounts of damage on everyone foolish enough to stand in their way.

The second example is an encounter that happened hours later in the base game, but didn't pay off until the Siege of Dragonspear expansion. There's a cave I walked by with a terrifying bloodstain leading into it. Armed with the spirit of adventure, and the ability to quicksave, I decided to see what lay beyond the cavern's entrance. It was a wyvern nest. I had been able to take out some smaller Wyverns in a random encounter, but this was a horde of them, and there were big ones in there. I had no chance. I reloaded, and moved on. Fast forward 20 or so hours, and I'm exploring a wilderness zone in Siege of Dragonspear. I walk into the fog of war and the game reveals wyverns. I freaked. Here were a few of the creatures that had caused me such trouble all those hours ago. What I didn’t consider was that even though it was hours ago, it was many levels ago as well. My party killed the Wyverns so easily, it was almost unbelievable. I had been so scared of running into what I felt were high level creatures, that I had forgotten my party were now high level creatures themselves. I didn't even have to bust out any spells or strategies.

The reason I bring up spells and strategies is a few years ago I made a critique video on Pillars of Eternity. I talked about how it was easy to get into a familiar rhythm of how to approach combat encounters. Each party member had a role, and I knew what abilities would get the job done. A problem occurred when I would come across encounters where using that familiar strategy no longer produced results. These encounters forced me to scour the spell descriptions of my magic users, and the ability descriptions of my other members until I found something I hadn't been using that would result in success. When it worked, I would add these new skills and spells into my rotation until I hit the next roadblock. Rinse and repeat.

In Baldur's Gate, this rotation of skills and spells used in the majority of combat encounters, is replaced by relying on the AI scripts. I think this is feasible because I played the game on its easy difficulty setting. A couple years back I made a video on Persona 4 Golden, about how playing on the ‘very easy’ difficulty made the game more fun due to the ease of combat, and the increased money and experience. Since that video, while I still prefer to play games on an easier difficulty, I no longer prefer the easiest. I like moving down one notch from normal instead of moving all the way. The reason is that while easy difficulties put the games' numbers in the player's favour, it still utilises most of the games' systems, which a story mode might get rid of for greater ease of play. For example, in Baldur's Gate, story mode does not allow the player to be permanently killed in battle. Playing on easy, there were combat encounters like my bandit camp escapade that were threatening or insurmountable. Encounters that I even, gasp, had to reload.

The reason I play on easy is it lessens the difficulty of the majority of combat. One way it accomplishes this is that the AI scripts are more useful than they would be otherwise. With the numbers in a player’s favour, the majority of random encounters can be handled by every member of the party using melee or ranged attacks. AI stops me having to reassign a target every time a foe dies, instead of party members just standing around after a kill scratching their rears. Even if I have the spellcaster scripts on and my magic users start using buffs and attack spells without my input (which I think is a strong argument to turn the AI off), since there's little penalty for resting, you can get those spells back once the fight is over. The main danger is that once an enemy is spotted, with the AI on, your frontline fighters will rush towards them, sometimes springing traps in the process, but any strategy you have that hinges on positioning benefits from controlling the party yourself. So while I preferred to leave the AI on for the majority of the game, I did turn it off or toggle it in tough encounters.

And though playing on easy massages the game in my favour and makes relying on the AI a reliable strategy, numbers still dictate the flow of battle. To bring it back to the Wyvern fights and the importance of levelling up, the reason the AI scripts are so useful, is because the stats that determine hits and avoiding damage, THACO and Armour Class, turn most fights into a binary affair. Are you a high enough level, or is your gear strong enough for this encounter? If so, you’ll rarely be taking damage and you’ll frequently be hitting the enemy. The rest is up to the dice rolls to determine how many combat rounds the encounter is going to take. If you're too low level like I was at that bandit camp, or have bad gear, then the inverse will happen. The enemies will be taking chunks out of your health and avoiding all your damage. At this point it's time to reload and either work out a strategy to make up for the fact your stats aren't high enough, or it's time to travel elsewhere to level up.

This is how the majority of combat works in Baldur's Gate, and if that was all there was to it, it would get tedious, even with the AI scripts automating the process. What keeps combat exciting up until the final boss, are status effects and magic users. Any spellcaster in a group of enemies should be your primary focus. Even when your party has low THACO and Armour Class numbers (because these stats are better the lower they are), the wrong magic can spell disaster. Anything affecting morale or autonomy is the worst. Web to hold you in place, fear to make you flee, and all manner of spells to charm or confuse a party member so they wander off, or even worse, start attacking an ally. With how quickly a fight can go tits up when afflicted by these effects, I'll take a disease or poison side effect anyday. At least those are easily treated.

Speaking of status effects, let’s talk about Basilisks. Baldur's Gate is a low level AD&D campaign, meaning the player isn’t going to be fighting dragons, or horrors from another plane of existence. When I fought the final boss, my characters were levels 6-7, but the toughest fight I had in the whole game was a few hours earlier underneath Candlekeep. To exit the Candlekeep Catacombs, you must fight your way past two Greater Basilisks. Their main attack is a petrification gaze. If you fail a saving roll, you're a statue. The character is dead. Game over. And these Greater Basilisk bastards shoot this gaze at you relentlessly. There are simple ways to negate petrification, such as the level 1 spell, ‘Protection from Petrification’, but I somehow never came across it. I had one potion of mirrored eyes and a couple fire and lightning wands. After many many many quickloads, I managed to best the wretched beasts and was able to leave the catacombs intact.

So for as many combat encounters that felt easy to breeze through with the AI, there were those like the basilisks where I only succeeded thanks to strategy, taking advantage of the spells and potions I had available, and a solid heaping of luck. The final encounter with Sarevok is another example. He’s ridiculously strong, and has allies that are just as big a pain in the ass. A beneficial tactic I only learned late in the game is that you don't have to see an enemy on-screen to shoot area of effect spells like fireball. What a great way to bring Sarevok past all the traps of the room you fight him in. Combined with the right special arrows, a couple monster summons, and some clever use of attack spells, buffs, debuffs, and drinking potions at the right time, I was victorious. With all the reloads it took, I breathed a sigh of relief as I enjoyed the ending cutscene.

It's memorable that I beat the final boss through the skin of my teeth, but what I took away from that encounter was that despite reaching the credits, I knew little about how to level up and equip a party optimally in Baldur’s Gate. There was a feeling that if I wasn't playing on easy, I wouldn't have had a chance. It made me want to know more about what the best gear is, where to find it, and who the best companions are. About halfway through my playthrough I was thinking of other classes I'd love to try, and what weapon proficiencies, skills and spells would result in an unstoppable force. In my opinion, that’s one of the marks of a great RPG. When it's done I say to myself "Ok, I know a little more about how the game works. Now I want to play through it again, and break it with how powerful I can become". With that in mind, let's talk about my character and party choices, and where I think I may have gone wrong.

Attachment Through Utility

Last year I had a hankering to play through Baldur's Gate. I knew that with how long it takes me to make videos, and seeing the games covered are chosen by the viewer poll at the end of each critique, it'd take a while to get around to it. In preparation I read some of the Forgotten Realms novels, the most engaging of which was the Dark Elf Trilogy by RA Salvatore. Reading the story of Drizzt Do’Urden locked in the idea of what I wanted to play in Baldur's Gate. Since I couldn't play as a Drow, I'd choose an Elf, and it just so happens that an Elf is a great race to play the Ranger class.

I should have chosen an Archer cause I hardly used any of the Ranger's abilities. It was also annoying to have my main character in the backlines of party composition. Sure he was invaluable raining down arrowed death from afar, but I still wanted him to be out front. Luckily I found other companions to fill out my party while Imoen and myself took potshots with our bows, but I kept thinking about playing a melee class so I could fulfil that frontline fantasy, leading the party and conversing with all the quest givers. Sure the dialogue choices are the same no matter who is talking (not counting for the party leader’s charisma stat), but this is a "role playing" game, and not having my own character initiate conversation was ruining the illusion.

It didn't take long to lock in the party I would use for not only the rest of Baldur's Gate, but Siege of Dragonspear as well. The sole exception was Imoen not being available in the expansion, so the game gives you Safana, who I referred to as "We have Imoen at home". It turns out by happenstance, the party I ended up with is the canonical party, the one that the player starts Baldur's Gate 2 with. I had two couples along with Imoen and myself. Khalid, Jaheira, Minsc, and Dynaheir.

I feel I need to talk a little about Minsc. A friend of mine kept quoting his lines to me over Discord as I was playing through the game, and I had no idea what he was referring to. See, when I played this game for an impressions video years ago, one of the first things I did was turn off the voices. I found I could read the scrolling text faster than it was spoken, and I found the constant lines when characters are selected, moved, or in battle, annoying. With the voices silenced, I could read at my own pace, and when the characters were talking, I had my own concept of what they sounded like. This is why the wacky lines of Minsc talking about his space hamster Boo didn't resonate with me. I sometimes saw his text appear in the box at the bottom of the screen, but none of it made any impression on me. Siege of Dragonspear handled this better because text boxes often appear above character's heads on the game screen, and the companions converse amongst themselves a lot more in the expansion, but any attachment to these 5 characters I had in Baldur's Gate was solely due to their utility.

Dynaheir and Jaheira were my magic users, with Dyna leaning more on wands than spells. Jaheira buffed and healed the party, and often I would use Flame Blade or Shillelagh to boost her combat skills. Khalid was my tank, Minsc my damage dealer (who needed the most healing out of everyone in the group), while Imoen and Davv my Elven Ranger pelted the enemies with arrows, with Dyna aiding this barrage with her sling once I cast enough spells. And I would be remiss to discount Imoen's utility at recognising traps, disarming them, and unlocking chests with her thief skills.

Reading some online guides afterwards, I learned that most of my party members are far from the best choice for their roles as tank, healer, damage dealer, or spellcaster. There are 25 possible companions. I ran into a chunk of them during my travels, but never wanted to replace the members I’d already learned how to use. Initially I kept my party around for narrative reasons. Khalid and Jaheira were asked to look after me if anything happened to Gorion. Imoen is my character's childhood friend, and well, something about Minsc had me bring him along, and after I helped him rescue Dynaheir, they seemed a good pair that I should keep around. As I wasn't hearing them talk throughout the game, this initial reasoning gave way to the aforementioned utility, and by the time the expansion rolled around, I wanted them in my party because they were familiar. Jaheira joins the party late in Siege of Dragonspear, Khalid even later, and it was a joyous reunion to welcome both of them back. The initial narrative reasoning was enough, and then an entire game of exploring, questing, and overcoming adversity with these characters endeared me to them. My feelings about Baldur’s Gate’s narrative follow a similar arc.

Baldur’s Gate’s Narrative Gets Out of its Own Way

For most of my time with Baldur's Gate, I didn’t care about the narrative. Gorion being killed after fleeing from Candlekeep is a intriguing setup, but the question of why you're being pursued is then put on the backburner until the final act. Sure you keep encountering bounty hunters and mercenaries trying to cash in on your corpse, but without a reason, it turns into just another thing the player has to deal with. It feels a lot like the plot thread of the iron shortage. First you're travelling to Nashkel to investigate why the iron in their mines is tainted, before following a bread crumb trail of conspiracy through bandit camps, forests, and secret mines, all the way to the city of Baldur's Gate. While it was this conspiracy plotline that lead me through all these locations, systematically dismantling the leadership of the shadowy organisation responsible, the reason this plotline feels as sparse as the bounty hunters that show up from time to time, is that the Iron shortage has little to do with my character. I’m going through the motions of pulling on this thread because finding the next person in charge to interrogate and kill before being pointed in a new direction is where the meat of the game takes place.

It feels like the iron shortage conspiracy is used as an excuse to guide the player to new locations, new dungeons, and all manner of sidequests. It's remarkable how many folks are just hanging out in open areas with fun diversions to take part in. I last played D&D in my college days (which is quite a while ago), but I imagine in a lot of play sessions, there are fun characters the dungeon master sprinkles along the game path to lead the party off on tangents to gain experience, loot, and most of all, a good time as they're working their way towards the larger purpose of the campaign. These in-between moments when I found myself a dungeon, a new area to explore, or some people to help, were when I was having the most fun.

Now I've already talked about how important levels and gear can be to surviving combat. Each increase in numbers (even a single digit) can drastically change how easy or difficult an encounter is, and it's the fact that experience trickles in over time, and gear upgrades are a rarity that adds a further excitement to the act of adventuring. A dungeon has enough traps, enemies, and chests to guarantee that a party is going to leave it stronger than when they entered. Successfully completing quests offers the highest experience gains, and as a new player, I was able to indulge in the act of exploration that I find the most enjoyable, that I didn't know what would be around the next corner.

For example, on the way to the Cloakwood mines, I had to work my way through Cloakwood itself. It's a forest with traps just out in the open. When I first triggered a web trap and was beset upon by spiders, I thought the guy who had just given me a quest to save his brother had set me up. I didn't come to the conclusion that there were traps until it happened again further in the area. The concept of traps being in an outdoor space was so foreign to me, that I couldn't believe such a thing was happening. It made me paranoid for the rest of the entire playthrough, wondering what would be the next innocuous area that would cause a headache because I wasn't scouting ahead with my thief.

But once I keyed into the rhythms of exploring an area, winning battles, finding treasure, clearing quests and levelling up, I saw Baldur's Gate in its best light. Candlekeep is the bookend of this style of play. You leave it after the tutorial, and this freeform adventuring (following the iron shortage conspiracy from location to location) continues all the way to Baldur's Gate itself. The city is full of sidequests, too many districts, and the most confusing sewer system I've come across in a game. After returning to Candlekeep and escaping the catacombs below, your party are wanted as fugitives, so the sewer is the best way to get around… if you can work out how all the screens and ladders in and out of it connect. It never made sense to me. This is probably when my class changed from Ranger to Fallen Ranger. I started killing the guards when they were set upon me. I didn't think too much of it, until after one fight I noticed the majority of my party had left me. I'd never even considered the reputation mechanic until this moment. I guess that's what I get for travelling with do-gooders, says the guy who can't ever bring himself to attempt evil playthroughs of any RPG.

After returning to Candlekeep however, the plotlines of the iron shortage conspiracy, and why your character is being hunted merge (the same figure, Sarevok being responsible for both). What follows is a mostly linear affair of returning to Baldur's Gate, spoiling Sarevok’s plans to rule over the city, chasing him into the Undercity, and emerging victorious. After the hours spent without significant revelation, this final section after returning to Candlekeep feels like Baldur’s Gate is speedrunning its ending. The plot has always been time-sensitive, but the pace of the adventuring has been anything but. One aspect I think adds to this sense of taking one's time when out in the world, is that sidequests are removed from your journal upon entering a new chapter. It makes it so the player doesn't want to tackle whatever their next task is, shifting the priority from the main plot to everything else the game has to offer.

What's ironic about this push and pull between the immediacy of the plot and the leisurely approach to adventuring taking precedence, is that I wasn't thorough at all in my completion of sidequests, or exploring the Sword Coast. I didn't engage with most of the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, and if I didn't know how to finish a side-quest thanks to the vague hints in my journal, I left it alone. Now in Siege of Dragonspear, I started to alt-tab, to look up how to complete side quests in the Baldur's Gate wiki. I think I decided to do so because of Dragonspear’s focus on narrative over the freeform adventuring of the original title. In Baldur's Gate, there was always enough sidequests and places to explore that I felt I didn’t need to be a completionist. I was charting my own path through these lands, and the game was accommodating. In Siege of Dragonspear, it felt like I needed to tackle everything I came across, because there wouldn't be many other options or opportunities for adventure.

Conclusion

So why did Siege of Dragonspear leave me feeling cold while playing Baldur's Gate excited me? Part of it is that Baldur's Gate has a satisfying ending, while Dragonspear ends on a cliffhanger meant to lead into Baldur's Gate 2. And of course there's the 18 years between the base game and this new piece of DLC, explaining the difference in design philosophy between the two. I give Dragonspear credit for having entertaining and complex dungeons that were a joy to play through. The Lich dungeon early on was a highlight. I loved how dangerous the lower levels were, and how I had to use some brain power to not only work my way through, but to defeat the Lich at the end once and for all. In contrast, most of the dungeons of Baldur's Gate that I played through were mines, or mazes full of trap-heavy corridors. But while the dungeons in the base game are lacking compared to Dragonspear, Baldur's Gate is full of outdoor areas to explore that are populated with characters, sidequests, loot, and interesting encounters. It champions player-driven adventure in a vast explorable world. Dragonspear has such areas, but they're constricted, and they're all on the game's narrative path. Baldur's Gate gives the player the freedom to explore at their leisure, Dragonspear whisks the player along its narrative, only allowing small diversions. I hope I've made an adequate case in this video, that the small diversions are the entire point. The secret sauce. This spirit of adventure, of allowing a player the illusion of charting their own path and having their own experience, is why Baldur's Gate is so special, and is still a delight to play all these years later. Thanks for watching.

Playing Super Mario World in 2024

Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Super Mario World. This is in three connected parts. Part 1 is about my history with the game, being able to play it when it launched in North America. Part 2 is how different it is playing the game all these years later mostly due to the controls, and Part 3 is about the game’s difficulty before we wrap up. As always that is followed by the announcement of the next viewer poll, some additional ideas I had when writing about the game, and talking about the benefits of becoming a patron. Feel free to jump around, watch one part at a time, or the whole thing at once. I hope you enjoy my look back at this platforming classic.

Part 1: My History with Super Mario World

They say you can never go back.

I was lucky enough to get a Super Nintendo close to its US launch date of August 23rd, 1991. Earlier my family had moved from Woodinville Washington to the Gold Coast of Australia. My Dad grew up on the Gold Coast and wanted to move back. Things didn't go well as it wasn’t too long before my Mum took me and my sister back to the US for a time, until my parents worked out their differences and we moved back to Australia permenently.

Shortly after moving back to the US, I was given a Super Nintendo as a present. It came with the adapters, 2 controllers, and Super Mario World. That game was everything to me. I don't have many memories of my childhood, but I do remember hooking the Super Nintendo up to the TV in a friends' basement (as this was before my Mum found us our own place). It was magical. The only downside was having to start the game with 2-players. I was a child going through some turmoil. I wanted this new Mario all to myself man!

I have many fond memories of my time with the Super Nintendo, but playing Super Mario World is the strongest. I can't recall how long it took, but I found every damn secret exit in the game. I don’t know how much was due to the amount of time I played it, how much was swapping knowledge on the school playground, and how much was due to reading issues of Nintendo Power. My Mum made friends with a guy who worked at Nintendo and he would gift me issues of the magazine when him and my Mum would meet up, or maybe I had a subscription. As I said, my childhood memories are fuzzy.

Over the years I'd devote time here and there to Super Mario World. I'd start a new game and play a few worlds, and years later I'd test it out in emulators, but this is the first time I have dedicated myself to finishing the game and uncovering its secrets since I was 9 or 10 years old.

They say you can never go back.

This is true on a couple of levels. The first is I’m no longer a child living in Washington state in the early 90s. I’m now in my early 40s living on the other side of the world. It's said that "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man". This is the simple change. Watch a movie or read a book you enjoyed in childhood, and if it still holds up (which often isn't the case), you will get something completely different from it. The childlike wonder of Dinosaur island, of riding Yoshi, of battling the Koopa Kids, and uncovering the games' multitude of secrets hits different now.

It’s not that the game isn’t still enjoyable. I think it's excellent, and we'll discuss why in more detail later, but it's a different beast. I no longer have months to play a game to distract me from the fact that I don't have my Dad around and my Mum is likely struggling (which looking back probably did hit harder as an adoptee). I didn't have years of playing, thinking about, and making videos about video games under my belt. I was a dumb kid who loved Mario and now I'm a dumb adult who's making a video about that love.

So let's move onto the other level of not being able to go back, the hardware. I no longer have a Super Nintendo console or a CRT television. What I do have is a Super Nintendo emulator running on a laptop through a 27" 1080p monitor, with a shader on it to emulate how the game might have looked back when I first played it. I’m also not playing with a Super Nintendo controller. I’m using an Xbox Series X controller, and even though it has a dpad, 4 face buttons and two bumpers, it is not the same layout or the same feeling, and it is this discrepency in the controls and thus the game feel of playing Super Mario World, that I want to start with.

Part 2: It's Not the Same Game

The way Mario controlled back in his first outing on the NES was with 2 buttons laid out horizontally. The A button jumped, and the B button performed the double duty of acceleration and shooting fireballs. In Mario 2 and 3, new abilities were mapped to the B button, but the essence of Mario's core movement was through this 2-button horizontal setup.

The SNES controller has 4 face buttons; 2 sets of the NES layout stacked on top of each other, however Super Mario World does not use the same layout as the NES games. Jump is instead mapped to B, and accelerate and other abilities such as shooting fireballs (and so much more) is mapped right above it to the Y button, but also to the X button as well. This is important because of what the A button is used for.

The A button is for the new spin jump. Mario can break blocks, pulverise enemies, and there’s a satisfying sound effect to go along with it. Coming from the NES Mario games, of course players are going to assume Mario generally controls the same way, and as a kid, once I saw that cool spin jump with all its utility, why would I ever want to use the regular jump again? It was boring by comparison. And hey, even if it is weird that the alternate button is now above the jump button instead of right next to it, because the X and Y buttons do the same thing, I could choose to accelerate, swing the cape, and make Yoshi eat with the same positioning of my hand. Well… Yoshi complicates matters. If you press spin jump, Mario gets off the back of the dinosaur, so I had to move to the B and Y buttons if I wanted to use Yoshi, but flying solo? It was spin jump all the way baby! That was until I got to Morton's Castle.

In Morton's Castle I learned what those of you already familiar with how Super Mario World controls have been thinking ever since I started my story; that the spin jump just doesn't have the same height to it. There's a climb in the second section of the castle, where platforms are shifting to the left and right, opening up and closing paths for Mario to ascend ever higher until the boss door. I would always keep dying on this one part that I thought impossible to reach, until I was playing with a friend and I think they admonished me for not using the regular jump. That level taught me that the regular jump had its utility, even if it wasn't as cool.

In this playthrough I used the spin jump rarely. It doesn't feel cool to me anymore, and while I still like the sound, I can't handle it going off constantly. It's just like pressing the Y button to make the cape spin. Useful movement to keep Mario safe, but that sound effect in perpetuity? Ugh. It reminds me of when an old college roommate played Ocarina of Time, and rolled everywhere as Young Link. It drove me up the wall.

Now auditory processing issues aside, I wanted to bring up the spin jump story not only as a funny anecdote for what Child Dave thought was cool, but how I might not have been the only one. In thinking about the spin jump, it made me realise that Takeshi Tezuka and his team changed the familiar button layout of the old games to give prominence to this new Mario ability. I wonder if they expected its new utility and cool factor to cause younger players to rely on it I mean the Mario games are made primarily for children. The focus on Dinosaurs and the vibrant colour palette in Super Mario World speak to that, but I've also been thinking that maybe the reason I've not been using the spin jump in this playthrough is because of how the face buttons are arranged on the Xbox controller, and how different it is to holding a Super Nintendo controller in my hand.

I've often thought about how different games feel when playing them on an emulator, as we don't have access to the original controllers by default. I've come across this hurdle in my Atari and NES Project videos, and it's also something that occurs when playing PC ports of console games before Xinput was popularised. A game is tested and fine-tuned with a primary controller and control layout as it’s designed. Sure my Xbox controller has a d-pad, 4 face buttons and 2 bumpers, but they're not in the same part of the controller. They're not the same size, they don't feel the same to press, and the SNES controller didn't have a right analogue stick in the way of the face buttons, or triggers to deal with. It also didn't help that I forgot to assign the diagonals to the d-pad in the emulator, and then it was a while until I realised that I had mixed up two of the directions. Whoops.

The reason I bring up triggers is that it was around the Forest of Illusion that I became frustrated with some of the challenges the game was throwing at me. It didn't help that I found 1ups to be useless since after a reset, the game defaults Mario to 5 lives and no power-ups. It was here when I started using save states in the emulator, and to make things easier, I binded them to the left and right triggers of the Xbox controller. Sometimes during a rough jump, I would accidentally hit the right trigger, loading the last save state and nullifying my progress. Whoops.

I was thinking about my Disco Elysium critique; how I brought up the reasons I was save scumming before dice rolls, and if using save states in an emulator could be seen as a similar transgression. I think it's helping that I'm playing Turbo Overkill as I'm writing this. It's a modern FPS emulating one from the 90s. Until checkpointing became more ubiquitous, I would hit F5 to quicksave my game every minute or two in an FPS, mostly after a tough firefight. There were times when this got me into trouble, but generally having control over your own save can be a godsend. It's just a grey area with Mario because such a benefit was not in the original game.

Which returns me to the Xbox controller and emulation. You can't go back again. My controller feels different, the hardware I'm using is different, I'm at a different point in my life, and I am able to save and load the game whenever I damn well please. Playing Super Mario World in 2024 is *different*, and while I have the memories of playing the game as my 10 year old self, they are clashing with this current playthrough. So finally, let's talk about Super Mario World itself.

Part 3: Is Super Mario World Too Easy?

How did you find out about Top Secret Area?

When I entered the first Ghost House, I was worried I wouldn't remember the secret exit, but no joke, the instant that first room loaded and I saw the sea of spectres swimming above, I knew exactly what I needed to do, take a running jump and fly up the side. I just can't remember how I originally found out about it. It could have been by accident. Once the cape is introduced, there's a desire to fly above the ground of every stage if the game lets you. It's not far fetched to believe I flew up, saw the door or the room above and the rest is history, but it's also plausible that either a friend told me or I found out about it reading Nintendo Power. It's an early enough secret for any old game magazine to spoil. It's just trickier to think that I did it on my own because while any normal level with a secret exit flashes red on the map, the Ghost Houses don't. I guess it's fair to assume they all have secret exits being Ghost Houses, but aside from the first entry to Star Road, I mostly found the main exit of these places and moved onto the next stage.

The reason I bring up Top Secret Area is how powerful a secret it is. Anytime I had trouble getting through a stage, one of my first solutions was to go back to Top Secret Area, load up on Fire Flowers, Capes, and Yoshi, return to the offending level, and see if that could help get me through. The capes' slow glide and ability to swirl away most opposition combined with the extra hit Yoshi allows can render most platforming or enemy challenges obsolete. There's also a chance, that a couple extra hits will allow Little Mario to make it to the end of the level.

The only issue was that after uncovering Donut Secret 1, I made a decision (a quite boneheaded one I might add), that I would play through the main levels until I got to Bowser's Castle before going back and uncovering all the secrets. This meant that every time I wanted to top up my resources at Top Secret Area, I had to trek through every area of Dinosaur Island there and back. If I had uncovered Star Road as I went, it would have been much less of a headache. At least I uncovered most of the Switch Palaces as I went through the game.

Different opinions on the Switch Palaces are discussions about Super Mario World’s difficulty. Despite fans using the assets of Super Mario World to create some of the most fiendish Mario levels in existence through Kaizo romhacks, there's a consensus that Super Mario World is an easy game, and the Switch Palaces adding blocks over pits, and walls that Mario can run up make an easy game even easier. That the player can't turn them off when on is a further sticking point.

I'm now going to talk about the difficulty of Super Mario World and the Switch Palaces in turn. As Mario games go, I don’t think Super Mario World is difficult. There were moments of difficulty certainly. Getting the secret exit on Cheese Bridge and then swimming through Soda Lake is a tough challenge. Finding the right exits in Forest of Illusion, or the crushing maze in Valley of Bowser 2 stick out in my mind, and then there's the special levels once you get through Star Road.

The special levels are worth talking about because I think Star Road and its special levels are the seed of the Kaizo romhack spirit. There's a mix of trying out fun things with the level mechanics (such as the spinjump romp in Star World 1 or that Star World 3 is a single screen puzzle), alongside seeing how far the difficulty can be pushed. Let me complain about a couple challeges I found particularly nasty.

Let's start by just repeating what I wrote in my notes about the level named Tubular. And I quote, "Navigating Balloon Mario around obstacles, while finding new balloon power-ups to keep flight for an extended period of time? Fuck off." The level named Awesome has a lot of dodging punted shells while on ice, and then later on Bullet Bills start firing. Yikes. It's fun if you grab the star, but the game doesn't have many opportunites to get used to the ice physics, which is one reason it can feel like such a brutal challenge. Mondo strikes me as a failed experiment. The water raises and lowers, with enemies that require Mario to have a full range of movement. Without power-ups and Yoshi, I think this one would be near impossible, and that leaves us with Outrageous. It sure is! This is more about a tightly packed grouping of hazerdous enemies and using momeuntum (or a well timed bouncing off an enemy) to make it over the giant pipes. I enjoyed the other special stages for what they were trying to do, although I used the cape to bypass most of the final special stage called Gnarly. When the coins spelled out "You are a super player", I said in response, "Yes I am".

Now back to the Switch Palaces. Whenever I played a new 2-player game of Super Mario World with a friend, I would always go to Yoshi's Island 2 first, hoping that they'd play Yoshi's Island 1, and I could giddily collect some 1ups in the coin bonanza that is the Yellow Switch Palace. Am I the only one that would spin jump onto the switch to freeze Mario in an odd frame of his animation? Anyway, after the Yellow Switch Palace, the other 3 are kind of a disappointment. There's only 1 extra life to collect, and solving the puzzle of how to get it is that much trickier. I also forgot about the Red Switch Palace until I was on my secret exits run late in the game. It really feels like a player should be hitting the switches as they make their way through Dinosaur Island, even though they’re only mandatory for some of the secret levels.

And there's no question the switches make the game easier. They're a way to make jumps trivial or to signpost secret areas. I can sympathise with not wanting the added help, and yet like I said in the last paragraph, turning them on feels like a necessity for clearing the game. Personally I welcomed their addition. When I saw yellow, green, or blue blocks it made me feel my progression through Dinosaur Island, and I'll never balk at any extra assistance. In Super Mario Wonder I kept the extra blocks badge on until I was collecting all the seeds I missed post-Bowser, but yes, at least in that game the choice is up to the player.

Conclusion

Super Mario World is not my favourite 2D Mario game (that would be its sequel Yoshi's Island), but its up there. Part of it is the reason I outlined in the first section; right place, right time, right age. Coming back to it all these years later reminds me of just what a solid entry in the Mario series it is. Not only in launching a more advanced piece of hardware in the Super Nintendo, but taking the experimentation seen in Super Mario Bros 3, stream-lining it, and changing the games' focus from strict platforming aptitude, to exploration of secret exits and the changing of the world map due to the player's actions. Oh how I loved when Bowser's cragged-face rose out of the water after completing the Ghost Ship, and out of all the amusing vignettes that play after Mario defeats a Koopa Kid, my favourite is Ludwig's castle, when it lands on a hill in the distance, and the poor thing dons a bandage that it sports for the rest of the game.

I could go on about little details and memories from my time with Super Mario World (and maybe in the epilogue I'll go through some more of them), but despite issues with the controls, (particularly the lack of programmed leeway for jumping off and landing on precarious platforms, and the exactness needed to throw a shell upwards to hit a block), the game was a lot of fun. The reason I didn't go into these examples earlier is that through tricks like facing backwards to halt momentum, or relying on the cape's float ability, a lot of these issues can be overcome, and I honestly didn't know if any struggles I had in regard to how the game felt to play were due to my choice of controller or not.

This is not the same Super Mario World I played back in 1991. How can it be? I'm not the same person I was 33 years ago, and I'm not using the same controller or the same hardware. They say you can never go back, but that doesn't mean that you can't find a new appreciation and enjoyment for an old favourite here in the present. Given enough years, you might even experience that joy more than once in a lifetime. I still think Super Mario World is a great game here in 2024. I wonder what I'll think of it in 2057. Thanks for watching.

Delight, Self-Destruction, and Dice Rolls: My Journey Through Disco Elysium

It feels like I could play Disco Elysium 10 times and still not see everything the game has to offer. That’s likely untrue, but the important thing is it feels that way. After my first playthrough, I restarted the game a couple times, going through the first couple of hours, and the variation of dialogue even in the beginning, when Harry is talking to his Ancient Reptillian Brain and Limbic System is extraordinary. Now this all could be an illusion, the game’s first few hours being strong and full of choice, only to whittle away that choice the nearer to the end a player gets, but a) I don’t think that’s the case, and b) if it is, they kept the illusion of the magic trick going until the final conversation Harry has with his “special task force”. That final conversation plays as a summary of the player’s actions through their time in Martinaise, but it doesn’t get everything right. For instance, I drank one beer and smoked one cigarette to cross those quests off my ledger, but I did it after hours, when Kim had gone to bed and I was all alone in my hotel room, yet during that confrontation, Kim says that I was drinking and smoking the whole time, and Harry’s partner Jean Viquemere says he smells the booze on Harry’s breath. So it’s not perfect, but let me say right now that my example is nitpicky, and is no way indicative of my awe towards Disco Elysium as one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Disco Elysium as a CRPG

It’s easy to see what games inspired Disco Elysium’s creation. The closest point of comparison is Planescape: Torment, a game I finally played in its entirety a couple years back. I’m quite happy with the critique I made. You should check it out. The reason for this comparison is that both of these Computer Role Playing Games or CRPGs have us playing an amnesiac, with the player being able to influence this blank slate of a character through our actions and dialogue choices. Dialogue is the focus here, because while the CRPG is based on Dungeons & Dragons, and like a lot of videogames, simulates combat as its main mode of conflict, Planescape: Torment downplayed the importance of combat, and 20 years later, Disco Elysium removes it almost entirely.

I say almost, because Disco Elysium contains action scenes. There’s an entire row of the skill tree dedicated to physical attributes, and another to motorics (or how good Harry’s reflexes are). In the early game, they’re used for small things - busting down doors, jumping off rooftop ledges, or smacking obnoxious children in the face - but soon enough you can whirling spin kick a racist, climb a rickity ladder with your eyes closed, and the climax of the game plays out like a multi-man turn based RPG boss battle, with characters living or dying depending on how good your preperation, choices, and the rolls of the dice are. We’ll get back to those dice rolls soon.

Speaking of RPG boss battles, it’s been pointed out by others that some of the conversations in Disco Elysium feel like boss battles. The military tribunal I mentioned as the climax of the game is this in its most explicit form, but when I think of talking to some of the most powerful people in Martinaise - Joyce Messier, Titus Hardee, and of course Evrart Sinclair, getting what you want out of them without having your health or morale depleted or integrity compromised, can be as intense as choosing what strategies to employ to get through a tough fight in any other RPG. When to attack, when to defend, what weaknesses to exploit to open them for massive damage, the parallels are here. To further the analogy, Cuno, Measurehead, even Garte, can feel like mini-bosses. They don’t have as much power, but they’re impeding your progress and need just as much finesse to overcome. Finally there’s the random encounters and NPCs, which are kind of interchangeable, cause sadly I think I’ve stretched this analogy past breaking point. I just wanted to say that despite not having explicit combat, Disco Elysium still feels like a CRPG in many ways.

Skills and Thoughts

Another CRPG point of comparison are the skills and thoughts Harry has at his disposal. Just like how placing skill points in other RPGs makes aspects of the game easier, giving the player more options, the same can be said for Disco Elysium’s skill tree. The difference is that all these skills are parts of Harry’s psyche. With enough points they start speaking to him, making suggestions for what choice the player should make next, and what would yield the best result. However, these skills are not always right. They will argue amongst themselves, even admitting to mistakes. There’s a great example late in the game where the Suggestion skill makes a suggestion, and if you follow it, it apologizes to Harry, saying he should never listen to it again. Usually they’re not that self reflective. They are a part of Harry after all. As you’re walking around the world, skills will chime in with thoughts, and every dice roll in the game is linked to a particular skill, but again, we’ll get to dice rolls later. Oh we’ll get to dice rolls later.

So what of thoughts? Through conversation, either with his own psyche or others, Harry can uncover thoughts. If a player has the brain space (and it takes a skill point to clear out more), Harry can internalise the thought, suffering a penalty until the internalisation is complete. Internalised thoughts come with rewards, usually an increase in the cap of certain skills, points in the skills themselves, or something extra. For example two of the most powerful skills I discovered in my two playthroughs are Jamais Vu, and Actual Art Degree. Jamais Vu gives the player 1 experience every time they examine a thought bubble, and Actual Art Degree heals morale and grants 10 experience every time the Conceptualisation skill chimes in during a conversation. With enough points in Conceptualization, this happens often, and that extra experience builds up over the game. The Harry in my second playthrough with Actual Art Degree had the whole skill tree at 4 or better by the end of the game with points to spare. Thoughts are powerful, and Disco Elysium contains so many that I doubt you could uncover them all. Comparing Disco Elysium’s systems to other RPGs once again, the Thought Cabinet reminds me of a job system, where you can spend time learning a skill that can be equipped no matter the change in job. Of course Harry only has one job. He’s a cop, but the game gives us some leeway as to what kind of cop Harry can be.

Copotype & Kim Kitsuragi

Not that the kind of cop Harry can be ultimately matters. Same with the 4 political ideologies Harry can champion. I mean yes they add a lot of flavour to the game, but it’s like selecting dialogue options in Kentucky Route Zero. The game is mostly going to play out with the same beats each time. The choices add seasoning, allowing the player to express themselves as they nudge the character in a specific direction. They can’t change the character or the story, but there is agency here, and even if there wasn’t, I’d argue for the importance of giving the player a sense of ownership over who the character they’re controlling is. It’s just at the end of the day, Harry is a broken shell of a police officer who drank themselves into total oblivion and awoke with severe brain damage. Policing style and political affiliation doesn’t seem as important.

But it does matter, just for a different reason, and that’s the conscience that the game saddles you with, named Kim Kitsuragi. Kim will turn a blind eye to most things in the game, committing crimes, drinking and drug use on duty, and even racist sentiment – but he will chide Harry when all these eccentricities get in the way of solving the case. I don’t know how far Kim’s tolerance stretches as I couldn’t bring myself to lean towards racist or fascist thought in either of my playthroughs, but I have seen others talk about some of the ways the player can hurt Kim. It sounds awful, and if you fail the roll to warn him during the tribunal, he gets sent to hospital, and you spend the rest of the game with Cuno as Harry’s partner and conscience. Yikes.

What I’m getting at is even if the player doesn’t care about what kind of person Harry is, they might care about what kind of person Kim thinks Harry is. I know I did. Hearing Kim defend us to Viquemere at the end of the game felt great, as well as the ability to suggest he joins Precinct 41. I loved the aces high the two shared when Harry shoots down the corpse. I loved uncovering Kim’s interests and getting him to break out of his shell, and I loved the culmination of this unofficial quest being a dance-off between Harry and Kim in the church. I want to be on another case with these two. They’re such an effective buddy cop duo.

Which is a good way to get into how funny Disco Elysium can be. Most buddy cop movies are comedies, balancing the horror of a murder or a grand conspiracy with the goofy antics of at least one police officer, or the tension of putting two strong personalities together. Harry’s self-destruction is played for laughs, and it washes up on the rocks of Kim’s stoicism, but what makes Disco Elysium so great is the game isn’t just comedic or political satire. It’s sad, sometimes downright depressing, but there are moments of joy, terror, and absolute wonder. Heck, I’d argue that solving the murder isn’t even the most interesting part of the game, it’s uncovering the world of Elysium itself, and I think the ending sequence exemplifies this… so I’m going to discuss it. Skip to the next chapter if you don’t want the ending spoiled.

Discussing The Ending

After the tribunal, which kills a varying level of union members and mercenaries depending on your actions and successful dice rolls, there’s still no suspect for the murder. In both of my games, I did not arrest Klassje, so she left a present for Harry in her room showing where the shot that killed the hanged mercenary came from. An island past the end of the coast. We take a boat there and find The Deserter, a cast off of the revolution. He’s lived there ever since, sneaking around Martinaise, watching everyone, stocking up on supplies, and every now and then, using his rifle.

The old man is full of spite, hatred, and jealousy. He killed the merc, mid-coitus with Klassje. Disco Elysium has plenty of foul mouthed, ill-tempered, dangerous people in it, but one thing that unites them all is if you dig a little, there’s a sympathy to how they ended up this way. Well maybe not the Sinclair brothers, but most people. The Deserter is no exception. He ran away from his duty during the Revolution, he saw how his side was massacred by world powers, taking over Revachol and not making anything better for the people. Over a lifetime of hiding and surviving, it’s understandable that such shame, guilt, anger, and bitterness would fester. Even more so when you discover the reason for his erratic behaviour and why he’s got holes in his memory. As Harry and Kim are about to make the arrest, the Insulindain Phasmid appears.

Lena and Morrell are cryptozoologists. They’re searching for the Insulindian Phasmid a creature that may or may not exist. Through conversation with Lena, you can learn about many other phasmids (including the Col Do Ma Ma Daqua, which leads to a thought worth internalising). By helping the cryptozoologists with their phasmid traps and coming into contact with the phasmid’s pheromone, you can use Harry’s Inland Empire skill to speak to the creature.

What follows is one of the most fascinating conversations in a game brimming with fascinating conversations. There are many great lines and revelations. I hope you’ll indulge me as I play my favourites. We’ll start with the Phasmid’s pity for humanity.

“Of course it is nothing compared to the horror that is you – with all of creation reflected in your forebrain, in terrible fidelity, a fire mirror. Eternal, never-ending damnation.”

The Phasmid mentions how humanity brought the pale with them as no creature remembers it before humans showed up, and how we’ll likely destroy everything. What is the pale? I’ll discuss it soon.

“There is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants, that you are going to destroy us all”.

“You are a violent and irrepresible miracle. The vaccum of the cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing – just by accident”.

“Instead of air, you exale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.”

As a capstone to this weird and wonderful game, I found the entire dialogue between Harry and the Phasmid moving. Kim manages to snap a photo of the phasmid. We now have proof of this wondrous creature. A creature who corrupted The Deserter with its camouflage pheremones over decades, turning him into the mess of a broken old man that now sits before you. How beautiful yet terrifying.

This ending counterbalances the worst of this world with the most wondrous of this world, two extremes that have affected each other. Harry has encountered both, and upon returning to the mainland, is snapped back to the middle by his real partner and the remnants of his task force. It’s time to evaluate Harry as a police officer, how well he solved the case, and if he’s not too far gone to keep employed at the precinct.

I’m going to make a leap here. I think the tonal spectrum of this ending exemplifies most of the characters in Disco Elysium. Everyone is trying to do their job, to deal with reality in their own way (and many are succumbing to the pressure, and self-medicating just like Harry). From this perseverance of continual survival, everyone is broiling with both the absolute worst of everything around them and the wonder (and sadly terror) of what might be. There is little room for joy in this world, and I think that’s why Harry’s unorthodox policing (which is made even stranger thanks to his brain damage) is often so funny. It cracks the veneer. It offshoots the melancholy and now and then, as with the church and the dance club, there’s even a small ray of hope. I think that’s why the Phasmid is such an important discovery. Not just for the wisdom it imparts to Harry, but with photographic evidence of this new species, it creates a sense of wonder in what else the world has to offer, especially when this reality everyone is dealing with is so existentially terrifying. Yes, it’s now time to talk about The Pale.

The Pale, Disco, & Anodic Dance Music

The world of Disco Elysium is less a globe, and more a corona. A series of isolas, island continents separated by what is known as The Pale. The Pale is entropic. It eats away at reality. Those like The PaleDriver who have had long exposure from repeated travel through it are untethered to reality, their psyches degrading… and that’s not even the worst part of it. The pale is growing. It’s a fact that all the governments of the world try to downplay, how unreality is spreading, seeping into the world, and whether it be 20 years, 200 years, or 2000, there will be a time in humanity’s future when the pale takes over. Isn’t this a cheery backdrop in which to set a game. No wonder everyone is self-medicating.

But let’s return to hope, and the dance club. Through a late game sidequest, if you choose to help the Anodic Dance Music kids set up their club (and possible drug lab) in the church, you can use their advanced sound equipment to amplify the pillar of silence that Soona the programmer is studying. It almost tears down the building. It is a hole in reality. Baby pale. It is theorised that the early settlers on the isola built the churches to encase and stop the expansion of these pillars. So what does that say about Revachol when most of these ancient churches have been torn down. At least this church still stands, and hey, maybe the kids and their dance music can help contain unreality.

Especially if the Phasmid is right. If the pale is a manifestation of humanity’s dark impulses, its desire for self-destruction, then celebration might have an opposing effect, even if that celebration involves indulging in humanity’s more primitive urges. Like most of Disco Elysium, the pale can be held up as a mirror to Harry himself, the darkness growing, festering, eating away at everything that is left. Despite how destructive the drinking and drug use has been, there is an odd counterbalance in our main character. It’s in the title of the game itself. the Disco might be what’s holding Harry back from the edge.

Early on in my first playthrough, before I had a sense of what this world was, the talk of Disco confused me. The year the game takes place in is ‘51, and I said to myself, “But Disco is from the 70s.” I know right? Thinking that Revachol had some connection to our own world and history. Through talks with Joyce Messier and others, I learned that the Disco era ended a while back, but Harry still holds on tight to it. In the way he dresses, the way he talks to people, and the expression permanently fused onto his face. His boasts of being a superstar cop feel like the influence of the Disco holdover. Once we learn that Harry’s behavior (destructive and otherwise) is influenced by a woman leaving him years ago, it’s not too far fetched to assume that Disco also relates to his glory days as a police officer, when him and his lady were still together. Ironic that while holding onto the pain of the breakup is what almost destroys Harry, holding onto the care-free attitudes of Disco could be what saves him. By helping the kids build their new genre of Anodic Dance Music, the good parts of Harry can pass on the spirit of what kept him going to future generations.

Why The Dice Rolls Are a Problem

And since I’ve brought up hope a couple times, that’s a nice segway into the part of the game I really wanted to talk about, the dice rolls. In my impressions video many moons ago, I talked about how much I loved the dice rolls, because even failure was amusing. Not only in terms of animation or what Harry says, but despite failing a roll, there’s usually a way to travel down the dialogue tree to get what Harry wants, with only a detriment to health or morale as payment. The variation and surprise of these failures, especially in the games’ first day teach the player that failure is not the end all and be all, can be funny, and will often lead to an interesting outcome. Ah, if only this were true.

In a vacuum it is, but the problem is these failures can stack up. There was a moment where the dice rolls failing throughout Martinaise had me stuck. Once a white check fails, often the only way to try again is to level up and put a point in the corresponding skill. But it’s a dice roll. It’s all too possible to get the boost you need to put the dice roll in your favour, and still fail it, wasting the skill point you just spent. I had hit enough failure in day two before the water lock was opened up, that I had run out of places to explore, and ways to earn experience to try a dice roll that might fail all over again. This is when I started save scumming.

Now the conversation about save scumming has come up again because of Baldur’s Gate 3, but for those of you unaware, some people have a problem with a player saving the game before a dice roll, and reloading their game until the roll goes their way. Never mind that no one should care about how another person plays a single player game, the fact that the term itself has the word ‘scum’ in it should tell you all you need to know about how the practice is looked upon by the wider community. And you know what? I don’t actually like save scumming. It’s not because I think it’s against the spirit of play, fairness, or some other bullshit, but it’s because loading a game and retrying a roll interrupts the flow of the game. Especially when you fail multiple times in a row. It lays bare just how infuriating and unfair basing forward progress on a roll of the dice can be.

And sadly these dice rolls are baked into Disco Elysium. I’ve already talked about conversations being like combat, and how skills and thoughts have corolaries in other RPGs. What makes it all feel fresh here is how it’s recontexualised. How it still leans on the same systems but with a new presentation, a new perspective. What makes Disco Elysium clever is the complete removal of combat while still keeping the game engaging on a systemic level through the strength of its writing. This removal and recontextualisation of other RPG systems makes the dice rolls feel archaic to me. A vestigal leftover from the genre’s past. Yes randomness makes skill checks feel exciting, especially when a player rolls a double six or ekes out a success roll on a slim chance. The corresponding sound effect and green tint help sell this, but like all games based on chance, the dopamine high is fleeting, and it’s only there to make it ok for those times the system doesn’t work in your favour. I don’t know about you, but the good feeling I get from succeeding on a difficult skill check does not make up for the bad feeling I get from failing on an easy one. Save scumming doesn’t solve this issue, but it sure as hell makes it less frustrating.

Conclusion

The problem is without the skill checks, there’s no point to the skills, the thoughts, and all the other trappings of the RPG within Disco Elysium. The chaotic nature of the dice rolls is an integral part of what the game is. Often while playing I thought about a hard cap on skill checks like in Fallout: New Vegas, but that would go against the game’s desire to have the player enjoy failure while the game continues onwards, which I think is the way forward design-wise. Yes the dice failures often have a punishment associated with them (and perhaps that’s the part that needs to be removed), but to be able to roll (heh) with the punches and change approaches because the obvious way forward didn’t work out, holds merit. This is the spirit of what Disco Elysium offered, I just think it fumbled its execution. That it’s still one of the best games I’ve ever played regardless speaks volumes. One of my ideas about what makes a great game is that its strengths overshadow its weaknesses, and the quantity and quality of the writing in Disco Elysium definitely overshadows my criticisms. It just doesn’t invalidate them. While it seems unlikely that we’ll get a worthy sequel (if we get one at all), I hope games inspired by Disco Elysium consider the use of dice rolls, and how to make failure more interesting and palatable. Let’s further deconstruct the RPG while keeping the writing and design at a high standard. That’s not asking for too much is it? I mean making a good game isn’t that difficult right? Right? Thanks for watching.

Epilogue

Well that took a little longer than I thought it would. I finished Disco Elysium back in November but I decided I wanted to play it through a second time before writing the script, and then I put playing it that second time to the side to finish the NES and 2023 videos, but it’s finally done and I’m proud with how it turned out. This is my first critique using Davinci Resolve. I’ve used Vegas for the past 8 years, and I’m still getting used to all the little quirks that come with learning a new piece of software. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the video, both on its presentation and the ideas within. I have an even greater appreciation of Disco Elysium after making this, which is always the outcome I want with such a video. If you’d like more perspectives on the game, in the description there’s a reading list of all the articles and video essays that I found worth a read or a watch during my research.

So let’s talk about what the next video is going to be. As usual, it’s up to you to vote on it. Those who remember the poll at the end of the Vampire Survivors video recall that the games that weren’t picked were Red Dead Redemption, and Tunic. The third game was chosen by my lovely Patrons and is… drumroll… Super Mario World. One of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo. Yeah, the poll was all SNES games and Mario won. That means the choices for the next critique are Red Dead Redemption, Tunic, or Super Mario World. There’s a link to the poll pinned in the comment section, and I’ll be leaving the poll up for a week from when this video is published. Happy voting, and I look forward to seeing what wins.

Now it’s deleted ideas time. For the last couple critiques I’ve used this space to talk about ideas I had while writing the script that didn’t make their way into the final work for whatever reason. For Disco Elysium, I have two. The first is an addition to the section where I was comparing Disco Elysium to other RPGs. I wanted to mention how enjoyable it was triggering detective mode and having all these little nooks to explore with loot in them. Finding treasure is always a highlight of RPGs for me, and having an analogue in Martinaise added a fun sense of progression as I was exploring the world. I just felt I had already made my point about Disco Elysium as a CRPG, and talking about the loot would have dragged the script down.

The second idea was about the action scenes themselves. This was an idea I talked about in the Post Game Clarity Best of 2023 podcast. How despite this being an RPG with no combat, the few action scenes the game did have made me think of how much games treat combat as a crutch. Even in other CRPGs, it feels like you’re fighting every few minutes. Like the writing and exploration wouldn’t be enough to keep a player interested. There’s a video in my reading list of Disco Elysium lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz talking about his idea for the expansion of the games’ action scenes in the sequel. How you could break a sequence like a car crash into a series of millisecond decisions like the fight with Measurehead or when things go south in the Tribunal. It got me thinking about how even in action movies, there’s downtime to develop the characters and to move the plot forward, and it’s like games don’t trust themselves to do that. I think Disco Elysium proved that action scenes like the Tribunal are more impactful due to their infrequency and how the game built up the stakes of that particular moment. Really it makes me think of this as a new direction for the medium. That games could be so much more, and it’s Disco Elysium that showed me this possibility.

So why isn’t this in the critique? Well it never came up when I was writing and I didn’t want to shoehorn such an idea into what I had, plus I knew I could talk about it here.

And since we’re coming to the end, it’s time to say that if you enjoyed this video and want to support more like it, why not become a member of my Patreon? For as little as $1 a month you get written monthly updates, and voting on which games I cover next. The $3 tier gets early access to the videos, and there’s a higher tier if you’d like me to shout you out at the end of this video. I also have a Ko-fi page, but if you can’t afford either, please consider giving the video a like, leaving a comment, and sharing it with your friends.

Until next time, I hope you’re all well, are enjoying your gaming, and are having a wonderful day.

Why Is Vampire Survivors Still So Fun?

How did a game as simple as Vampire Survivors take the world by storm? It's a twin stick shooter without the shooting. Yes your character is attacking the onslaught of enemies marching towards you, but you have no direct control over their attacks. You can only move and choose what weapon or item to acquire or upgrade next. Its simplistic pixelated visuals and horror themed motif don't exactly scream "I must play this", and sure the music is great, but every indie game has great music these days. The price is affordable at around $5, and that's what made me give the game a chance when my friend Andrew recommended it to me back in early 2022. A couple weeks later, I was hooked, gifting the game to everyone on my friends list.

So what's the appeal? It's how difficult it is to survive 30 minutes. The hordes increase in size and ferocity as the seconds tick away. Through playing the game and hitting specific milestones, new weapons, characters, and stages are unlocked, as well as earning enough gold to buy upgrades in the power-up shop. Eventually through enough knowledge, and the act of attrition, survival is guaranteed, but what keeps a player going until they reach that point, or beyond?

Let's briefly sidestep to the question of beyond because that was a legitimate concern in approaching this game for a critique. When I first played Vampire Survivors in Early Access, it felt like a simple arcade game. How long can you last, and how much damage can you rack up? Nothing but survival to strive for. Since then the game has undergone a slew of updates, and one of those updates added a final boss and a credits screen. There we go, a definitive end point. A goal for the critique. Now we can return to the question of what keeps a player engaged enough to survive for 30 minutes, let alone take things all the way to the end.

That's the question this video will be trying to answer. I'll begin by narrating the journey from my first attempt at the game, to the first time I survived 30 minutes. After that I'll talk about the steps I needed to take to reach the final boss, with some thoughts on time, my favourite weapons, and the progression of player power sprinkled in, leading to a discussion of why I kept playing after I stopped recording footage, wondering if the compulsion to complete the games' list of unlocks was all that kept me going.

If you haven't played Vampire Survivors and worry about spoilers, I will be showing footage, and discussing characters, bosses, levels, and weapons from later on in the game. Finally, a word of caution. If you have photosensitivity issues, a lot of my footage contains flashing lights and effects, so please be careful. With all that out of the way, it’s time to tell you a story about my journey through this little indie game you may have heard of called Vampire Survivors.

Trying to Survive

My first goal was to survive for 30 minutes. This took close to 6 hours of play. When the game starts, the weapon and character selection is miniscule, and most importantly, you don't know what you're doing. For a game where the only gameplay is moving the character through the level and making decisions on upgrade screens, those first few games seem unfairly complex. Like the player is missing out on crucial information, or that the heart of the game is earning enough money to power up through the shop. I think that's partially true, but it's a loop that reinforces itself. The better you do in game, choosing the right weapons for your character and the stage you play, the further you'll get, the more weapons, characters, and stages you'll unlock, and the more upgrades you'll be able to purchase in the shop, which will lead to longer games, better decisions, and continuing this process.

When I talked about a sense of progression in this version of the game that wasn't there when I played back in early access, I'm mainly talking about the relics. I unlocked the library after three attempts of the Mad Garden. Upon selecting it, I noticed there was a relic listed, and upon entering the stage, there was a green arrow enticing me to follow it. I ignored the swarming hordes, following the siren song of this green arrow. Eventually I found it, and it was a book of weapon evolution recipes. This blew open the game for me. Back in early access, I had heard about weapon evolutions when trying to work out how to get better at the game. If you level up a weapon to its maximum, and have the right item in your inventory, opening a chest dropped by a boss monster will trigger a weapon evolution. It felt that these were the trick to surviving 30 minutes, and now the game was giving me access to these important evolutionary secrets.

Of course it's still easier to look up what items you need for a weapon evolution online. When I first got the grimoire it revealed a few evolutions, but it was still up to me to experiment. I didn't mind this as it was fun filling my inventory with 6 items that I hadn't worked out an evolution for, and seeing if anything happened when I got to max level with a weapon. As the game went on, I started using the wikis for weapon evolutions to make sure I wasn't making an error and wasting a run. This wasn't until I started surviving the whole 30 minutes though, so I'm getting ahead of myself.

I unlocked level 3, the dairy, and the relics here were a bestiary and a map on the pause screen. This added another level of understanding, as I could see that each stage had items just hanging out in the game world. I wondered if this was a hint towards which weapons were best for each stage based off the items needed for weapon evolutions. I also noticed the giant question mark, but when I first made my way over, it was surrounded by enemies that were too high level for me. I figured I needed at least one or two weapon evolutions to make my way there, but the question I had was when, so let’s talk about the importance of time.

In the Mad Garden, every 5 minutes, a ring of flowers will encircle the player, trapping them in an arena with some higher level creatures and a Mantis boss. I think it's best to think of the difficulty of a Vampire Survivors level in terms of time. Once I made it to minute 15, I found making it to minute 20 wasn't too difficult, but after minute 20, if I wasn’t set up to take things to the end of the game, I would get swarmed. This led to a theory that minute 15 is the best time to start making my way towards the question mark (and perhaps the relics, as future relics weren't as easy to beeline at the start of a run). Weapon evolutions unlock at level 10, so by 15 I felt I should at least have one evolution if not a couple. Basically the earlier I selected what weapons and items I wanted, and which evolutions to work towards, surviving to 30 minutes would be all but guaranteed.

And eventually I got there, I survived my first 30 minutes, and then in the same session I did it again. Hold your applause please. Similar to how there's a point in any level when it seems like a win will be guaranteed, once the player works out how to survive the time limit, they can easily do it again. Part of my initial success was playing a new character, part of it was the amount of unlocked weapons and items I now had at my disposal, part of it was all the upgrades I'd purchased at the power-up shop, and part of it was the confidence I'd gained working out how the game worked. On the run I first survived, I had 5 weapon evolutions. It would take a while before I was able to activate all 6, because that requires some additional knowledge in regards to planning at the start of a run, but thanks to all these factors, I had survived, and I could do it more than once. So now, the question forming in my head was… "what now?"

When Does it End?

Yes in the intro I talked about how there’s a final boss, but I didn’t know that at the time. I wondered if I was done with Vampire Survivors. Was my only goal to survive 30 minutes? Was I now supposed to do it with every character on every level, slowly making my way through the remaining unlocks until there were no new secrets to uncover? Yes… and no. I looked it up online, and the internet told me that once a player collects all the relics, a special stage will unlock, leading to a credits screen. There’s my goal. I would reach that credits screen. I mean, that's how most games work right? The game is finished once you reach the credits. What I didn't understand was how many steps there would be between this moment and finally finishing the game. 14 more hours of gameplay, and more than once I thought "well surely that was the end right?", only to be wrong. This happened at least 3 times.

Step one: obtain all the relics. I could survive 30 minutes, and I had a better understanding of how to build my character during a run, not to mention having more characters to select from. Some of them having powerful special abilities, such as Pugnala gaining 1% might with each level. Might is basically damage output, so you can see how having that rise with each new trip to the level up screen can be of assistance. During this time I got to play with new weapons thanks to characters like Pugnala, Poppea, and Giovanna. Unlocking these weapons for use on the level up screen made future runs a lot easier, and by this point I had evolved most of the weapons available, gaining a greater idea of which weapons synergised well, and which I just liked.

Ok. Dave's top 5 Vampire Survivors weapons. #5 Celestial Dusting. I like the idea of farting flowers of death. #4, Phiera Der Tuphello and Eight the Sparrow. Like their evolution, I can't have one of these pistols on my list without the other, and what can I say? I just like being a whirling dervish of bullets. #3, the Pentagram. Originally I thought this was an evil weapon, but when I finally got over myself and unlocked its evolution, I realised its greatness. Gem explosion baby! #2, King Bible. Alongside the garlic, this is an early favourite of most players, as it keeps enemies at bay. I'll usually save a weapon slot for it in most runs, unless I want to shake things up. And #1, Song of Mana. Even more of a barrier, and a must when playing the Library stage. Once it's always on, you're a vertical do not enter sign. Of course, there’s not really a weapon I dislike (not even Carréllo or La Romba), as they all have utility either in their normal or evolved forms, and besides, I don’t start every run looking for my top 5. The decisions are based on the character I’ve chosen, their starting weapon, the stage I’m playing, and what weapons show up on the level up screen. It helps keep each run at least a little fresh once I learned how to properly build my character.

Speaking of the right build, as I was making my way towards relic acquisition, I started to form ideas about the right way to play the game. How it might be best to only collect 3-4 weapons initially, supplement them with thier evolution items sure, but then make room for the items I feel greatly assist any run, like the duplicator or the empty tome. There's a bonus stage called Moongolow that has every item just sitting there, easily accessible. I made a mistake in one run of collecting everything. I wasn't able to level up my weapons because the level up screen was taken up by all the items in my inventory. That's why I like to keep my inital selection low. Not only does it allow me to level up what I already have, but it gives me more chances for the weapons and items I want to appear, as the more I unlock, the greater the selection the game's randomizer has to pull from, muddying my level up plans by not having that weapon or item I want ever show up. Thank goodness for the reroll, am I right?

The Long Winding Endgame Road

After collecting all the relics, it was onto Step 2, which is… uncovering more relics. A secret ending to the Moongolow stage leads to an angelic corridor, leading to yet another relic. This relic opened up a boss in the Cappella Magna stage where you defeat all the reapers, and then they Captain Planet into a super reaper. Beating this boss gave me, you guessed it, another relic! Limit breaks, the ability to level up weapons past their max level, which is an amazing addition if you just want to let loose and show off your power in endless mode. Speaking of endless mode, the two final relics are in yet another secret stage that beating the super reaper opened up, Eudaimonia. This was the level that the internet told me lead to the credits screen, and it did… I just had to play a game in both inverse and endless mode before the final boss showed itself.

But before the final boss, I want to talk about the reaper. The whole game this jackass has swooped in at the end of the time limit, ruining my fun. In the Cappella Magna stage you take out all the different coloured reapers, and wail on them when they team up. I thought the super reaper would be the end of it, but no, once you defeat it, a white reaper takes over slaughtering duty. It’s one of the appeals of endless mode, no reaper to contend with, the stage just resets with harder versions of the same swarms. It’d be great to finally have dominion over death, and that relic I found in the angelic corridor allowed me just this opportunity. It unlocks the silver and gold bracelet, and the left and right metaglio signs.

These are the evolution items for the Laurel and the Clock Lancet, the weapons that I ignored even more than the pentagram for most of my play. The trick with the bracelets and signs is that both need to be levelled to max before the evolution takes place, and each has 9 levels. To top it off, one half of these items buffs you, and the other half buffs the enemies. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to contend with a power-up that powers up the enemies, as the evolution item for Song of Mana is the Curse-o-matic, and levels of curse are able to be purchased in the power-up shop. I ignored this for the longest time, because why would I want to make the game harder for myself?

Because increased enemy quantity means more enemies to kill, which means more experience, allowing quicker level ups. It allows weapons to gain the power they need even earlier, and once I realised that, I rationalised that since I already knew how to survive the game, this increase in enemy speed and health wasn’t going to hurt, and it didn’t. Sure it makes the start of each run more precarious depending on the character, but ultimately it’s a way for the player to gain more power, and this is why the evolution of the Clock Lancet and Laurel was left till the end of the game, it gives you the power to kill the reaper.

Thanks to the Infinite Corridor and the Crimson Shroud evolutions, the reaper went down, but that white bastard reared its ugly head again. The white reaper showed up in the fight against the final boss as well. The first time it appeared and killed me, I was shocked, but as I had the power to revive, I was able to continue…as long as it didn’t appear again. And it appeared again. This time however, I gained a helping hand heh heh heh. At certain milestones through the game these disembodied hands have been applauding me, cheering me on. The final boss is called The Director, but based on the power of the hands, overwriting the power of the white reaper, and then showering me with riches once the boss fight is done, I’d say these hands are the true director of the game. The one who’s wanted me to succeed this whole time, and thanks to their help, I reached the credits screen. I beat Vampire Survivors.

Why Am I Still Playing?

But I haven't stopped playing Vampire Survivors…and I'm wondering why. The game kind of got stale around halfway through my playtime. 30 minutes can be a long time to see a bunch of flashing effects and numbers popping off everywhere. I don't have photosensitivity issues and even I felt tired in my eyes and brain after each successful run. I was thankful for the level ups and treasure chest drops because they were always an audio/visual reprieve. Regardless of the overstimulation, the game itself is less exciting once "solved". I worked out how to survive around hour 6, and while there were many more hours of enjoyable experimentation with stages, weapons, characters, evolutions, and secrets, the gameplay itself became the most boring part. And the more I played, the better I got at making the right decisions to keep the enemies off me minute after minute, making the core gameplay even duller.

But I'm still playing. And despite what I just said, the game is still exciting. Why? Well I think there are two answers. The first is the randomizer I mentioned earlier. It's become known that the creator of Vampire Survivors Luca Galante worked as a developer for a gambling company. With the chests full of random unlocks, the gems to collect, and the joyous cacophany that accompanies each new increase in power, the influence is noticable. However, it's these random elements that keep each run exciting even when the challenge is gone. Each treasure chest will give one upgrade, but there is a small chance for it to give 3, and an even smaller chance to give 5. Each of these is accompanied by more bombast, and that's not even the most explosive and exciting random element. That honour goes to the red gems.

Red gems give more exp than turquoise or blue gems, and sometimes when I collect a red gem, I will recieve what I can only describe as a level explosion. Level after level after level after level. I swear I’ve had 10 in a row. Before writing this paragraph I wanted to understand how it worked, to see if like the chests, there was a small chance to hit a jackpot. It turns out that's not really the case. The following information is from the internet so may not be correct, but I'm going to mention it anyway. To prevent slowdown or crashing there's a limit of 400 gems allowed in the game at a time. Once that limit is hit, a red gem will appear, and all future gems will pool in this red gem, so depending what minute of the game the player is in, and when they collect the red gem, the xp they recieve can fluctuate wildly. Not as random as the chests, but boy does it feel that way when you strike it big.

And while these moments are full of excitement, and there’s still joy in watching my selection of weapons obliterate all who cross my path, the base game no longer holds the same pull. I mean I got more than my money's worth so I'm not sad about it, but yet I'm still playing. The treadmill of unlocks is exciting because new characters and weapons add much needed variety to the gameplay, but since I’ve beaten the game, unlocks are all it has left, and in the middle of finishing this script, I finally completed the unlock list, and the secrets to boot! All that’s left is to purchase the 2 pieces of DLC, opening up a new series of locks to un. I think I’ll purchase it once this video’s out.

Now the pull of the unlocks is strange because I’ve never had much interest in achievements. A list of arbitrary tasks to complete once a game is done holds no sway over me, because I always have dozens of new games to move onto. Achievements have always felt like busy work. That’s what’s baffles me about Vampire Survivors. Even when the core loop of powering up in the shop is done, even after the game is over, I still found myself wanting to complete the list, and I did. Now a lot of the unlocks did feel like busy work, but despite saying that the gameplay wore out its welcome once I knew what I was doing, I think I’m still drawn to the joy and bombast of playing a round of Vampire Survivors. At this late stage, the enemy swarms surround me thick as carpet, and there’s still fun in selecting what weapons and items I want to try and wipe them all out with, especially using some of the late game characters like Red Death or Queen Sigma.

Conclusion

To put it another way, I still like making the numbers go up, and I still succumb to the thrill of a chest or red gem jackpot. When I started writing this script, I was planning on discussing when Vampire Survivors shifted from enjoyable gameplay into a treadmill of unlocks, but now that I reflect on my time playing the game, and that I’m still continuing to play it, I can see that the gameplay itself is still enjoyable. The reason I think I convinced myself it wasn’t is in order to complete all the unlocks, I was using game modes like hurry and endless to make my way through the list as quickly as possible. No longer engaging in said gameplay. Also, I bought into the idea that because the core gameplay is so simplistic, the shine had to wear off eventually. I think that the reason there are so many unlocks and additions, is because developer Luca Gallante realises that you can only push such a simple concept so far… but think how far the concept has been pushed! Even in its early stages, Vampire Survivors captured everyone’s imagination, and it’s still attracting new fans. It feels like the unlocks were the only way to make the game bigger, as adding more base mechanics, a story, or a straight-forward campaign would have ruined its simplicity, its mystery, and thus its charm. And I’ve come to the realisation that I wouldn’t be interested in completing these unlocks if it didn’t add something worthwhile to these same base mechanics that I still enjoy interacting with. It could have done with more vampires though. Thanks for watching.