Making Games in ZZT

For the first time since 2017, I made a little game in ZZT! It's part of the upcoming 2024 Vextro anthology release, so I'll be publishing it in December as always. I was honestly surprised by how much of a delight ZZT was to work with; thanks to advances in tooling and my own knowledge of the scene, I had a better time with it than I did the first go around. I wanted to share a little primer on it in case other folks want to try it out.

Here are the main assets, in my mind, of using ZZT as a dev tool in 2024. 

• Simple top-down "walk around and interact with things to make text boxes pop up" language is cozy, familiar, and endlessly flexible. I'll be comparing ZZT a lot with Bitsy and RPGMaker since I think the three engines offer a similar language with interesting differences in their approach.
• The built-in object programming language is shockingly flexible, giving you much more power over your game logic and world than Bitsy (while still not as much as RPGMaker event scripting, which I'd argue isn't entirely a negative). 
• ASCII art style is attractive without forcing you to make custom assets, and without having the "stock" look you get from using more detailed default assets.
• Light-weight and extremely easy to deploy: thanks to asie's open source Zeta emulator, ZZT runs on all major desktop environments, AND in browser (albeit not on phones like Bitsy or Puzzlescript). All in under a megabyte for each version! And thanks to asie's Reconstruction of ZZT, the core engine is open source as well!

All in all, ZZT has a legitimate niche if you can get a handle on its quirks. It's completely FOSS now and it has a microscopic footprint. It runs in the browser but doesn't require a browser. It's a great tool for making top-down walking sim story games (a genre I really like) that also has the flexibility to incorporate action game setpieces, dungeon crawls, and puzzles. That opens up a ton of possibilities for interesting storytelling.

When I made Atop the Witch's Tower, I did everything in DOSBox with the default ZZT editor. For non-standard colors, this meant importing hex-edited boards into my game and manually copying tiles from them. The ZZT editor also had the nasty habit of wiping object code when I had too many objects on the board at once. Most of the magic of ZZT's language was still present in the original level editor — but it was undeniably a pain in the ass. 

This time I used KevEdit, a tool originally made in the early 2000's to streamline ZZT dev. KevEdit's great! The biggest hurdle for most folks I suspect is that it's keyboard-only, but I enjoyed painting boards with the arrow keys. Beyond that it adds a ton of conveniences that weren't present in the original editor: easily building palettes of non-standard colors, removing boards, the random fill tool, importing and exporting object code for editing in a text editor, and a ton of other niceties. I was intimidated by all the options it offers up front, but I followed along with Dr. Dos's guide on the Museum of ZZT and got a handle on the essentials pretty quick.

I talked about how ZZT's object scripting is powerful, but there's one very interesting, irritating wrinkle to it. You can't take direct control of the player object, the way you can in RPGMaker. You can't move them, and you can't teleport them to a new board programmatically. There are ways around this: the big one is putting the actual player object in a corner and having them "pilot" a fake player object that actually interacts with the game (and CAN be controlled by object code). You can also spawn boulders on top of the player to move them, or something?? Basically the alternatives are weird and annoying, they add extra friction to both dev and to play. (There are tons of great games that make use of these approaches, I'm just relaying my own experiences here.)

Every time I've engaged with ZZT, I bump up against this limitation and grind my teeth. But I vibe with it more when I think of it as a creative challenge. ZZT wants me to make the player an active participant in the story. When I can't pause input and take control of the player, I have to completely rethink how I approach "cutscenes". I think both Atop the Witch's Tower and my new ZZT's story scenes would've been less impactful if ZZT let me take control of the player avatar, because I would've instinctively gone for lazier, less interesting solutions.

Those are my immediate thoughts after slamming out a short game in ZZT for the first time in ages. I'd like to spend more time making games in the tool, as well as more time playing other people's ZZTs. I love the original Town of ZZT and rabbitboots's Faux Amis (pictured below). I'd also like to play more of the classics Dr. Dos has celebrated over the years. I think other dev friends should give it a look — if you enjoy working in high-level tools with cool limitations, tools like Bitsy, RPGMaker, or Puzzlescript, I think you'll find something to connect with with ZZT.

Lockirby2's RPG Challenge Runs

Lockirby2 is one of my favorite youtubers I've kept up with over the last few years. I first found the channel through their excellent and instructive walkthrough of the original Kaizo Mario World. But the real fun has been keeping up with the Final Fantasy challenge run videos. I got a lot of joy from watching and reading along with the two most recent series, the FF6 0 EXP Solo Rotating Character Challenge and the FF7 Strahl Community Challenge, as they came out.

Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII are pretty gentle games for the most part. But they have a ton of hidden depth that I never picked up on playing the games casually. These challenge runs and their strict rulesets highlight their innumerable mechanical subtleties. Did you know Atma is vulnerable to Slow? Did you know JENOVA Life has a 1/N chance of using Aqualung every fourth turn, and N starts at 5 and gets lower as her HP decreases? Did you know, did you know, did you know—

I love these games. Getting to learn all these weird details and seeing the creative ways Lockirby2 exploits them is delightful. The videos push me hard to think critically about RPG systems; sraëka's games and criticism are the only works I can think of that make me feel similarly. 

I absolutely had to write a post after seeing them bring that same level of attention to detail to Facets (after I tactfully and humbly pointed them at it during a convo on discord). I really can't overstate how gratifying it was to watch the playthrough and read the commentary. It's a level of intense formal close reading I've never experienced for any of my games before. It feels incredible to get that kind of scrutiny specifically from someone I already really respected for their RPG design thoughts.

I want to make more turn-based games with hard, chunky boss fights someday. I want to make them enjoyable for casual play, but reward deeper engagement from knowledgeable players as well. Thoughtful criticism like this is gonna help me get there.

Game Reviews: Live A Live and Romancing SaGa

Live A Live (1994, SNES)

Played the fan-translated Super Famicom version, natch.

Live A Live is as good as it gets. Square at the top of their game making an anthology of experimental micro-rpgs. Every one of them's a banger. If it was just the seven chapters on their own, it'd still be essential playing, but then the last two chapters tie everything together pristinely. It's just a perfect little package, as good as any other masterpiece Square put out at the time.

Every other rpgmaker dev I know has been obsessed with this game for years; I can't believe how long it took me to get around to it. There's stuff I've seen in my friends' games or done in my own games I thought was really original and clever. Then I discover Live A Live did the same things in 1994.

I'm not discouraged — I think it rules that artists have always been doing weird cool storytelling with the format. Instead of working in a vacuum, we're part of an ongoing dialogue that's been going on for 3+ decades. To me, that's much more cool and exciting. If you're interested in getting into the heads of people that made amazing games like LAL, I can't recommend this interview with director Takashi Tokita and other key staff members enough.

If you spend a lot of time thinking hard about how rpgs work, if you're a dev or an enthusiast player, you owe it to yourself to play Live A Live.

Romancing SaGa (1992, SNES)

The structure of this game is so nifty. It's almost like a magic trick, where I don't want to spoil it. But the gist of it is that the game's story progression isn't locked to any specific questline. The world moves forward over time, with quests becoming available and also locking out without you necessarily triggering any specific flags. Essentially everything is optional — the path you carve through the game to get strong enough to beat Saruin is entirely your own.

The downside of this approach is like, if the only thing you need to do to win is get strong to beat one boss... it kind of makes the whole game into one big thirty hour grind! You'd have to be playing it in a really boring way for that to really be true, but most of the quests are variations on "spend an hour fighting 100 random battles in one of the mostly interchangeable dungeons." "The whole game is grinding for one hard boss" is reductive, but not that reductive.

In a sense, it's the purest distillation of the appeal of post-GameBoy SaGa, to the point of being hard to digest. To me, these games are about the joy of fighting a whole mess of enemies and getting a constant drip-feed of incremental stat and skill upgrades after nearly every battle. The open world structure makes that more interesting, but I think that aspect feels more special to SaGa fans than it actually is because of cultural myopia. There are tons of open-ended PC western RPGs from this era like the Ultimas, Might & Magic, Wasteland/Fallout, etc. "You can go anywhere!" is only unique to SaGa if you've mostly played Final Fantasy-style roller coaster games.

But nobody does the character progression dopamine drip-feed like SaGa. It's not just the little stat ups after every fight — the systems and setpiece bosses are complex enough that the progression always feels substantive and rewarding. Grinding only feels good when there's a challenge that makes the grind feel worth it, and SaGa final bosses are terrifying monoliths. I barely scraped by Saruin at the end of this game; I've played through a lot of RPGs, and nothing hits like a SaGa climax.

I did finally get tired of the grind about twenty hours in, switch from hardware to emulator, and speed through the last ten hours with a fast-forward button. There's just ultimately not a lot to it. It feels "pure" to me because it's so empty, and if you're not already onboard with SaGa, I would recommend almost any of the other games over this one.

But I adore these games. I think SaGa's core appeal is more lizard-brained than we're often willing to admit, but what's wrong with that? Number go up feel good. I've had a stressful few months, and I had a lot of fun coming home and vegging out in front of the SNES and button-mashing through another dungeon's worth of battles. Romancing SaGa re-energized my love for the series, and I'm very excited to play one of the many new releases fans are feasting on. SaGa never dies! SaGa lives on!

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Metroid Prime 2 and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004, GameCube)

“Wait for it to start doing its spin attack. Switch to Morph Ball. Boost Ball into it while it's spinning to stun it. While it's stunned, roll between its legs, and lay a bomb on its flashing weak point. When the body is destroyed, the head flies off and starts attacking. The head will have a light or dark shield; switch to the opposite colored beam to dispel it. Then you can use a Super Missile to destroy the head.”

This is me describing how to kill a Normal Non-Miniboss Enemy in one of the late game areas of Metroid Prime 2. I swear to god every fucking enemy is like this. God forbid you design an FPS enemy where the optimal strategy is “shoot it until it dies”; it always has to be some five step process to make then enemy vulnerable, then you have a half second window to shoot them (from just the right angle, of course) and finally deal Real Actual Damage.

Of course, even with all that, many enemies take three or four Super Missiles to kill. So now every encounter takes a full minute to finish, and often they’ll put three or four of these fuckers in the same room. So of course I run past every single enemy I can, because combat is a miserable ordeal with no reward, and I’ve already been through this room seven times anyway, god fucking dammit.

Don't you dare use anything besides Super Missiles or maybe the occasional charged light/dark/annihilator beam. I can't think of an FPS with a more pathetic default gun. There's almost never a good reason to use any of the non-charged shots against enemies. I counted the number of regular beam shots an extremely piddily enemy took later on — 26 hits! What's even the point of having a beam at that point? Where are the popcorn enemies? Why is everything a painfully involved miniboss? Why do the beam combos cost so many resources when I never found a single practical use case for any of them?!

While I don’t think the combat works at all for the regular enemies, I think there’s a perverse rom hack joy to the bosses. They have all the same problems and jank as the enemies, but multiplied several times over. Every major boss is a 10+ minute encounter, and because the timing to dodge enemy attacks is much stricter here than in Prime 1, they often come down to the wire. The thing is, once you’ve beaten a boss, it’s over. And you’re generally rewarded with a cool power-up! The regular enemies are miserable because the game expects you fight them over and over for no reason. The bosses don’t have that problem.

All my most memorable moments in Prime 2 were barely scraping by at the end of the painfully long boss fights. I beat the Spider Guardian on my first try with 10 total energy to spare. If I'd taken a single additional hit, I would've died and had to start the whole grueling trial over again. The release I felt nailing each of those super-strict bomb jumps and defeating the boss was orgasmic.

The finale is epic. The Ing Emperor’s second phase is the scariest fight in the game outside maybe the Boost Guardian, and after barely scraping by that fight you still have another timed boss fight to deal with, one that’s exceptionally confusing and opaque in its execution even by this game's standards. All without any checkpoints of course. No notes, pristine conclusion.

The best thing you can say about Metroid Prime 2 is that it’s a weird, obnoxiously strict, rom hack-y sequel to Metroid Prime 1. Prime 1 was polished, streamlined, and generally pretty easy. It’s a good game that definitely called for a sequel that’s annoying in the ways Prime 2 is annoying.

Prime 2 is far too long, and the story is contrived videogame bullshit in contrast to Prime 1’s gracefully unfolding mystery. Calling it an FPS feels unfair because it invites comparisons to games where the combat is actually fun. But it has some good tunes, and in spite of (and sometimes because of) its myriad failings, it still takes you on a journey that feels substantial. There’s a catharsis to reaching its hard-won conclusion.

I definitely don’t think Retro is the best to ever do it, and I’m in no rush to revisit Prime 3. But they make games that feel like real adventures, and that’s something I’ll always appreciate.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky (2009, DS)

Cleared the main game, special episodes, and post-game story.

This was my first Mystery Dungeon game, and it honestly kicked my ass early on. I finished the Groudon fight having exhausted every resource I’d been stockpiling, and I banged my head against the Bidoof’s Wish special episode endboss for over an hour.

After a while though, I figured out what moves worked really well, what items to stockpile for bosses (reviver, totter, and x-eye seeds), and played more tactically. My goals stopped being “get through the dungeon and beat the boss” and started being “try to win without using any reviver seeds.” Nothing gave me real trouble after the first ten hours. This is ultimately still “Baby’s First Mystery Dungeon,” which was great for me, because I’m still very inexperienced with roguelikes, and I was in the mood for a light and breezy number-go-up game.

That said, the Zero Island South dungeon is very intimidating. It’s a 99-floor dungeon that starts you at level 1, with no items, money, or teammates. It basically turns the game into a real capital R Rogue-type dungeon crawl. If I hadn’t been playing for 40 hours already, I’d probably throw myself into learning it. But after a few attempts, I’ve decided I need a break. I suspect for MD veterans, the post-game super-dungeons are the main appeal here, and the rest of the game is essentially an extended tutorial. I hope to get there someday!

Ultimately, the story and presentation were the main draw for me. It’s not hard to explain why the story is as good as it is. It’s just written like a real JRPG or VN. The story is free to do what it needs to do, instead of being incestuously beholden to series tradition like the mainline Pokémon games. It functions like a good YA novel, so the big moments can have a huge emotional impact. (The amazing soundtrack, perfectly deployed and directed, also helps.)  

It’s not just the big moments though. All the incidental character writing too worked great for me too. The game is just cute. I love all the characters, I love living in this tiny adorable world.

The main game lands great, but it doesn’t feel quite complete on its own. I think Special Episode 5 is absolutely required for the story to land the way it needs to. The main game and the last special episode are two halves of one climax, and without either one the story doesn’t feel quite finished. After having played both, I was deeply satisfied. I cried my eyes out through both finales, of course.

The special episodes are only in the Explorers of Sky version of the game, so I strongly recommend playing this version, and not Explorers of Time or Darkness. They’re maybe the most story-essential post-release content I’ve ever seen, even more than Dana’s solo dungeon in Ys VIII, and I’m a little aghast they weren’t in the original game.

The post-game story doesn’t land as well, unfortunately. I think I would’ve ultimately been just as satisfied if I’d stopped after the main game and Ep. 5. There are enough good moments for it not feel like a waste of time, but ultimately introducing three entirely new characters for the eleventh hour climax was a bad call. I just don’t care about them the way I do the established cast, and their story resolves too quickly to have any real impact. That their story comes after slogging through that awful Unown dungeon added insult to injury.

I wanted to voice that criticism, but I still can't overstate how much the main story and special eps resonated with me. I honestly feel a stronger connection to Sky than I can really put into words or justify. There’s a certain spirit to the simple, lovely story and gorgeous presentation that’s hard to pin down, something that makes me feel warm in my heart. I think that essence is why it still has such devoted fans over a decade later.

Sky was a fantastic introduction to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and Mystery Dungeon in general. I’m excited to play Shiren and other roguelike-adjacent retro games, and for the first time in ten years I’m excited about Pokémon. I can’t wait to play the other PMD games.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: SeaBed and Anthology of the Killer

SeaBed (2017, PC) (Itch.io, Steam)

In terms of the intensity and depth of the emotional response it engendered in me, SeaBed compares neatly with The House in Fata Morgana. It takes a completely different, much quieter and subtler path to get there, obviously. Fata Morgana gets there with the most hard hitting melodrama possible. SeaBed gets there through countless quiet moments, all working in concert to slowly weave a spell over you without you even realizing.

As a text game dev, I deeply appreciate the presentation. The whole story is told through VA-less NVL-mode walls of text, borrowed royalty-free music, as few VN presentation tricks as humanly possible, and a combo of blurred photo and cheap blender backgrounds. The only major points of aesthetic interest are the beautiful character illustrations by hide38 (who also wrote the script).

And the story still hits like a truck. When you make your characters and their longings feel this real in the reader's heart, you don't need voice acting or a bunch of expensive one-off assets. SeaBed does exactly what it needs to with the presentation to support the writing, then gets out of the way and lets the story speak for itself. I think that's really admirable, and speaks to a confidence that a lot of devs would benefit from.

If all this sounds back-handed, it shouldn't. Some of the most well-loved VNs in history are doujin games like Higurashi or Tsukihime, which used similar aesthetic shortcuts. I cherish many VNs with super-loved-on presentation. But my favorites will always be the ones that make me believe in their stories, and you get there first and foremost with strong writing.

SeaBed is as affecting a story as any visual novel I've read. I don't have much to say beyond that that wouldn't spoil the shape of the story (hence why I spent three paragraphs soapboxing about VN direction). If you're up for the slowest of slow burns, and you appreciate VNs with grown-up theming that don't talk down to you, give this one a read. 

Anthology of the Killer (2020-2024, PC) (Itch.io)

Extremely extremely delightful. I've been savoring these over the last few months, and I finally ran through the epic finale last night. I've been playing thecatamites's games for over a decade, so it's really awesome to see so much of his style synthesized into such a dense hilarious vision.

It's cathartic because I've actually often struggled to connect with his games. thecatamites's work is focused more than anything on strong texture, loved-on spaces, and funny lyrical writing. That's all great — but I like games with strong emotional arcs, stories that take me on dramatically pointed and specific journeys. thecatamites's games (and his criticism for that matter) don't generally seem interested in drama at all. Anything resembling a dramatic moment in his games tends to feel playful and ironically detached. In many respects our critical lenses are almost exact opposites.

I had a really negative reaction to Magic Wand when it came out for this reason; I kept expecting it to have some kind of real rpg story, and it just doesn't. Space Funeral has a neat little meta theme at the end that really resonated with me, but it's more of a cute final note than a big climax. The games of his I've enjoyed the most with are the short comic ones like Murder Dog IV, where I can focus on enjoying the texture and jokes, and they're over before I can build any lofty narrative expectations in my head.

Anthology of the Killer meets me half-way. The grand joke of these games is that thecatamites is as good as literally anyone on itch at making Eerie Haunting Dream spaces in 3D, at setting up scares, at panicky chase sequences. He speaks the language of "Unity horror game" extremely fluently — which makes it VERY funny when BB cracks a perfectly timed hilarious joke that sucks all the tension out of the scene. (Drool of the Killer's ending sticks out to me as a particularly great moment.)

The writing is SO funny, constantly, and pairing that sense of humor with the great horror language never stops being delightful. It's also possible he was always this funny, and I was just finally disarmed and willing to fully accept his sense of humor because he fit it into a game with the most perfect cast of blorbos imaginable (I cherish ZZ).

I haven't played all of thecatamites' ouevre, in part because I've sometimes come out of his games frustrated. I feel bad about never getting around to 50 Short Games or 10 Beautiful Postcards in particular; I really want to play those. Part of me wants to end this on something like "Anthology of the Killer is thecatamites at the height of his powers," but that doesn't feel quite right. It's more like, I'm thankful that he channeled his myriad artistic strengths into a package I could personally connect to, even as someone that doesn't share all his values as a creator and player. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Trails to Azure and Carrion

The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (2011/2013, PC)

Cleared on Hard, finished all side-quests. Finished it a while ago, but it's still stuck in my craw, so I feel like writing a review. I'm not going to spoil anything directly, but I'm definitely giving impressions of the whole game, so if you're particularly sensitive to spoilers maybe dip now.

This was obviously lovely in a lot of ways, but I think this is where I get off the Trails train for a while. Trails has never been big on stakes, but the lack of lethality to anything in Zero and Azure is just devastating. There's no weight to this anymore. The big scary villains aren't scary because I know no one's ever going to die.

It's especially weird because Zero gets most of its resonance from paying off an extremely dark character thread set up in 3rd. You'd think they'd realize it's good to have some edge every now and then in a massive fantasy epic. But if there was any edge left in Zero then it's completely gone in Azure; this is one of the most bloodless stories ostensibly about revolution I've ever seen. The new emphasis on light dating sim mechanics means we also don't get a strong core romance like in Sky. I didn't get to see any of the meager sparks between Elie and Lloyd pay off because I didn't buy her enough stuffed animals to put in her room, whoops.

It's a shame because the character writing is as lovely as ever. I finally upped the difficulty to Hard for this one and I should've done it sooner, it feels amazing and the bosses are super-chunky and fun to unravel. The music and art and setting texture are as gorgeous as always. But at this point Trails is a romance where nobody fucks and a war epic where nobody dies. I've lost my patience for that for the moment. 

Carrion (2020, PC) (Steam)

Carrion does One Thing and does it really really well. I was worried at first it would get tedious as the game went on, but it introduces just enough little movement and puzzle mechanics to keep things fresh. I really appreciate the game's restraint; less confident games would have three times as many upgrades, ten times as many optional collectibles. But Carrion only does exactly what it needs to communicate its story. It knows it doesn't need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you interested.

It was clearly play-tested to hell and back too. It takes a ton of work to make a game that feels this smooth and frictionless without also feeling patronizing. It reminded me of Valve games at their best honestly. The choice to not have an in-game map was inspired, and I'm sure it created a lot of extra work making sure players can stay on track without one, but it fit the tone perfectly.

I appreciate the inclusion of the containment units since it gave me an excuse to run around the game world at the end, see how things fit together. It took maybe an hour to find them all, which felt like exactly the right amount of time I wanted to be backtracking before going back and watching the perfect ending play out. The extra puzzle rooms were fun too, and I appreciate that none of the setpieces ever got hard enough that I got frustrated with the innate imprecision of the movement.

Making a commercial-scale game that's this quietly Rock Solid is a huge accomplishment. There isn't a single thing about it I'd want to add or take out. I can't remember the last game of this scope I could say that about. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean: First Departure R

Tales of Phantasia (1995/1998, PSX)

Loved this to bits — it's solid and excellent, in a subtle way. I have some thoughts!

This isn't Final Fantasy VII — dungeons are numerous, mazey, long, and chock-full of random encounters. Multiple times the main story pauses until you go to two or three dungeons (in any order) to get the required plot tokens. This is bad if you see rpg dungeons as an unpleasant obstacle in the way of progressing the rpg story. But I loved the combat system, and I was in the mood for a classic, dungeon-y, meat-and-potatoes jrpg, so I had a really fun time.

Small cast sizes are good! There are only six playable characters, and they all get plenty of time to shine throughout the story. I semi-recently played FF9 and Xenogears for the first time; both those games have much bigger casts, and both drop the ball with many of their characters. There are no Ricos or Freyas here, characters with a couple good scenes early on that have nothing to do otherwise. The skits, added in the PSX remake, obviously go a long way in helping me further connect with the characters. Their ending resolutions, and the extended pre-final dungeon scene in Early, cemented them in my heart as an all-time favorite rpg cast. (The excellent, playful writing in the Phantasian Productions patch also definitely helped.)

The main villain is introduced in the first seconds of the game, and he stays the main villain for the entire story. There's no bait-and-switch, no big twist. There are two main act break setpieces, one about three hours in and one about twenty hours in, that each further establish the villain and develop your relationship with him. When I got to the finale and the full arc of his story was revealed to me, I was really moved. A big part of that is that they didn't pull a new villain out of their ass for the final boss — this is Dhaos's story from start to finish as much as it is Cress and co.'s, and that's a rare feat for an RPG story.

The only other Tales game I've played is Vesperia, and it frustrated me because of its extremely long, sloppy story full of dropped threads and its very easy fighting. Phantasia was the perfect antidote — it's more tightly focused, and the dramatic fights kicked my ass. I have a lot of friends that adore Tales; I'm really happy I found the right game to invite me into the series.

Star Ocean: First Departure R (1996/2019, Switch)

I had measured but fairly high hopes going into this one. I'd just played Tales of Phantasia and absolutely adored it, and this game shares a lot of the same core creative team. It's actually a great meta-story — after chafing under Namco's direction during Tales of Phantasia's development, the creatives left Wolfteam to form their own studio, Tri-Ace. So, Star Ocean was Tri-Ace's first game after its founders escaped from under the thumb of big daddy Namco. It's a great narrative about creatives thumbing their nose at big publishers and making the games -they- want to make.

So it's a shame Star Ocean sucks ass!!! I haven't played an rpg this devoid of charm and joy since Suikoden. It's easy to focus on the nakedly incompetent parts. A popular target is how the game essentially begins with a ninety minute cutscene dropping gallons of lore and exposition about its big sci-fi multi-planetary universe, only to drop you on a single generic fantasy planet for 90% of the game. I'd also mention how the last three hours come out of nowhere and feel totally weak and unearned, and how we only meet each of the two main antagonists minutes before they're killed and exit the story. But there's so little here to latch onto that I don't think fixing the glaring unforced errors would help much, honestly. At least the big mistakes are funny.

I can't speak much to how the remake compares with the original. My partner and I compared scenes from the intro cutscenes with the remake, and the original seemed a little better directed. The remake will smash cut between scenes or music tracks in ways that feel amateurish and ridiculous, and the original at least seems to avoid that. The original's aesthetics feel a little nicer to me too. But I like the fighting in the remake (apparently borrowed from Star Ocean 2) a lot more, so it's all kind of a wash.

Ultimately the foundation here is so rotted through that I don't think it can matter much which version you play. Maybe the SNES version has stronger texture, but I don't think there's any iteration of Star Ocean that compares with the straightforward competence and resonance of Tales of Phantasia. Maybe some creatives benefit from a producer looking over their shoulder after all.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Writers' Club, NaNoWriMo, General Updates

I want to share a cool thing I’ve been doing for the past year or so.

About once a month, I get together with my partner and a few like-minded friends. We’ve met in the park and at each other’s homes. We bring snacks (fruit, cheese, and cured meats are always a safe bet) and drinks (tea, seltzer water). We chat for a while and catch up.

Then, we go to this site and generate ten random words. Any similar site will do fine. We all look over the list, and pick two words that jointly make for an inspiring theme. We set an hour timer, and we all hunker down on our laptops or phones and write a short story based (often loosely) on that theme.

When we’re done (we usually extend the timer 5-10 minutes so everyone can wrap up), we take turns reading our stories aloud to everyone. They’re usually between 800 and 1500 words. Everyone is very sweet and affirming to each other’s stories. This definitely isn't a hardcore writers’ workshop where we’re criticizing each other’s off-the-cuff pieces; it’s a purely nice, positive thing.

I’ve really enjoyed this process. I don’t love all the stories I’ve come up with, but I always have fun writing and sharing them. It’s nice to do something creative without worrying about whether the end product will be worth making a whole itch page, posting it on social media.

I’ve really liked a few of the stories. I’ve thought about making a little PDF collection and posting them on itch. But then I started overthinking things. How many stories should I include? Are any of them really worth sharing?

I decided to table the collection idea for now. I’ll just keep writing little stories, enjoying the process, and maybe sharing the ones I really like in smaller circles.

I want to keep working like this, both socially and on my own. It’s helping me grow as a writer. When I improvise and slam out small stories based on ideas I just came up with, it’s easier to see my creative patterns. I see the parts of my prose voice I’m proud of, and I see what story structures and clichés I reach for more than I should.

This isn’t the only way I’ve been experimenting as a writer. At the behest of my partner, I attempted NaNoWriMo last November. (She’s won eight times, incredibly.) We successfully roped in a bunch of friends and family. Everyone had a blast. I successfully won — I wrote 55,000 words and completed a first draft!

I haven’t returned to that draft yet, although I want to once I’m done with a few other mega-projects. Right now, I’m finishing up a large interactive fiction story. I’ve had the seed of it in a google doc for a couple of years now. Over the last three or four months, I’ve gone from barely anything drafted, to a complete, mostly edited 43,000 word twine.

Between flash fiction, my twine, and the NaNoWriMo, I’ve slammed out over 100,000 words of fiction in the last year. I’ve never written at this pace in my life before. I’m not planning to post any of it here (the flash fiction is very casual and loose, and the long-form works *cough* don't really fit the Far Away Times brand). But I’m confident the learning and growing I’m doing with these projects will only make my future stories stronger.

My itch and my blog are going to be a little quiet this year. I made a huge amount of progress early in the year on my big RPGMaker explore-y game. I stalled out because mega-projects are exhausting. But the map is fully built out and polished — I "just" need to do the NPC dialogue, a couple of cutscenes, and the interior locations. I want to get it in playtesters’ hands in the winter, then release it early next year.

I’m still making a Vextro jam entry, so the itch won’t be completely dead in 2024. My hope is that I’ll finish my current mega-projects, then channel more of this flash fiction/writers’ club energy into my game dev. Some of the game designers I most admire have shared over a hundred games over the years. They’re good at giving themselves permission to sketch out small ideas and not overthink them to death. As a result, they’re able to put out a ton of cool, creatively vibrant works.

Next year, I’d like to make more complete games in one or two sittings. I think the way to get better at a creative discipline is to work at it consistently over a long time, to start and finish many, many projects. Learning to work in a looser, sketchier mode sometimes would be good for me.

It’s funny that it’s translating into so little publicly shareable work, but this has maybe been the most creatively productive year of my life. I’m even writing videogame criticism again, over on Backloggd! Even with something as low stakes as games crit, it helps to find a space where you can casually make things without worrying about whether the end result is “good enough.” I intend to repost some of my favorite reviews on here over the next few weeks.

After Journey's End, Volume 1

 

Melos Han-Tani of Analgesic Productions just released the first volume of After Journey's End, a new game design journal! I submitted a piece, along with a bunch of other cool creators! Toby, Sylvie, and Dari are all writers and gamedevs I was already a fan of, so getting to write alongside them makes me happy. And the other creators' thoughts are really interesting too; I want to check out their work down the line.

The pieces are a cool look into the practical day-to-day practical minutia of making games, in bite-sized essay format. It's a nice alternate flavor from the usual two hour armchair criticism video essays you get on youtube. I'm excited for more volumes to be released in the future!

8/20/24 update: Volume 2 is out now! Give it a look, there are a ton of great pieces!

Cresting the First Peak: My Kaizo Mario Journey

I've been interested in the world of Kaizo Mario ROM hacks for years, ever since seeing Invictus get run at GDQ. Modern Kaizo hacks like Invictus are astoundingly gorgeous and inventive. As someone that loves hard action games, I didn't want to only enjoy these games second-hand through a stream — I wanted to play them myself. After eating up every other available GDQ run of Kaizo hacks a few years ago, I spent a couple weeks trying to learn the original Kaizo Mario World, and came to a maybe obvious conclusion.

Kaizo hacks are hard!

I spent probably fifteen hours on Kaizo 1. I got pretty good at it, with the help of a good online guide. If I dropped a save state at the start of the levels and on checkpoints, I could make it through all of them at least once. 

But the idea of doing a complete run was terrifying, mostly because it meant doing the goddam dolphin level in one continue along with the preceding switch palace. The game saves after every level except switch palaces, and as luck would have it my least consistent level was right after one. You can easily farm for lives in the water level later on, but just getting past that dolphin level was an insurmountable hurdle to me. So I put the game, and the genre, down for a couple years.

Kaizo hacks are very hard. But in the intervening years our technologies have advanced. We don't have to try penetrating the world of Kaizo with the oldest, crustiest, hardest hacks anymore. (I say this with love and adoration for Kaizo 1 — it really is a cool thing, and I want to return to it someday.)

A few months ago, I saw some footage of Memory Lane on YouTube. I fell in love immediately. It looked like the Kaizo Mario World I knew and loved, but with fast, infinite retries, cute custom music, and a new emphasis on quick, graceful movement reminiscent of Ultra Star (everyone's favorite Kaizo 1 level). I loaded it up on my RetroPie and proceeded to bang my head against the first level of seven for about a week. I never beat the level (although I got quite close).

Kaizo hacks are hard!

Shortly after my second failure, I searched for "Kaizo Beginner Hacks" on YouTube. You get a lot of results now, most of them posted in the last few years. I watched a handful of them, but my favorites were OreosArePoop's and BarbarousKing's. Oreo's video provides a long, exhaustive on-ramp of beginner Kaizo hacks, giving me a ton of cool-looking games to pick from. Barb showcases some gorgeous non-Kaizo "standard" hacks, action games that are tricky and exciting, but without the knowledge checks that make Kaizo feel impenetrable.

I started with Of Jumps and Platforms by Darolac. It's a seven level hack focused on fast action. The difficulty on SMWCentral is "Standard: Hard". I cleared it in a little over an hour, and from the first level I was head over heels for it.

It's just a gorgeous, delightful game. I don't actually like Super Mario World — I think it's long and boring, and the levels lack any of the momentum that made Mario 3's setpieces so delightful. But Of Jumps and Platforms takes the engine and enemies from Mario World, adds a few classy custom touches, and turns it into a tense, propulsive action game. I could easily see playing it over and over.

I needed more, obviously. I loaded up slurdgery next, one of the hacks cited as inspiration for Of Jumps and Platforms. The difficulty on SMWCentral is "Standard: Very Hard", and that "very" is doing a lot of work. slurdgery is longer, slower, and much harder than Of Jumps and Platforms, and I wasn't as immediately entranced with its style. But the fourth level, centered around avoiding poisonous versions of not just mushrooms but also fire flowers and capes, wowed me with its creativity. And the final level is legitimately epic. Just when I thought it was finally over, it hit me with an insane auto-run section that knocked me on my ass in the best way.

Outside of one other game I'm talking about in this post, slurdgery is the hardest hack I played for this binge. It took me around five or six hours, and despite lacking the Kaizo tag on SMWCentral, it still presumes a lot of knowledge of Mario World's engine. If I hadn't already known about regrabs (releasing and then holding the jump button to make wide, short jumps) I would've had a rough time in the finale. It's also one of my favorites — it's an epic journey in just nine levels, and its best moments hit me in a really good way.

Mario's Mystery Meat by Eminus is somewhere between a meme hack and a creepypasta hack. It reminds me of MyHouse.wad, which I also didn't enjoy much. It's mostly about the jokes and spectacle, but it gets hard right at the end, in pretty obnoxious ways. I got through the Will Smith tower okay (it's a solid bit of level design), but the maze afterward was just insufferable to me, and I had to resort to save state practice to make it through. The very hard multi-stage end-boss could've been fun as the climax to a meatier hack, but I was pretty sick of the game at this point, and again resorted to save state practice before getting through it legit. 

This was the only game I finished that I needed to practice with saves, simply out of a lack of patience. The aesthetics are obviously impressive, but I'm engaging with these hacks because I'm looking for tight, exciting action and clean dramatic arcs to the play. All the other games I'm talking about deliver on those fronts. If I was in a different headspace, or if I was more familiar with Vinesauce memes, I could see it hitting a lot better.

I played the next two hacks concurrently. One is a Kaizo tutorial hack, focused on exhaustively running through the weird little nuances and knowledge checks of Mario World's physics that Kaizo hacks rely on. And one is a "real" Kaizo hack. I like this way of handling it — the tutorial hacks are really useful and worth playing through, but they feel a little like homework. Cutting them with an actual game is a good way to keep the fun and momentum going.

Let's talk about the tutorial hack first. There are several big ones, but I went with 2Kaizo2Learn by BlueRibbonHighLife. I liked that the world map was totally open — if you get stuck on one level, you can take a break and play some other levels instead. There are tons of levels, but they're mostly very short. The game gives you clear instructions on some trick or bit of technical movement, then the whole level is executing that one trick. Every eight levels or so there's a "test" that strings together several tricks into a proper mini-Kaizo level. 

2Kaizo2Learn is great. I got briefly stuck on a few of the later levels, but I'd just look at BlueRibbon's commentated playthrough, and that was enough to figure it out. The final test is positioned as a "victory lap", and that's what it feels like. When I finished this, I felt a lot better prepared to jump into real Kaizo hacks.

Love Yourself by Chondontore absolutely rules — it's still my favorite hack I've played so far. It's a fairly gentle beginner's Kaizo hack. There are no shell jumps, no weird Yoshi or cape tricks. It's still hard (it is Kaizo), but I saw it listed on multiple videos as an excellent entry point, and I agree. The levels are all delightful and the music curation is fantastic. My favorite thing about SMW hacks versus the original game is the focus on tightly designed, exciting levels that propel you forward through the game, and Love Yourself is fantastic at that.

But what really blew me away with Love Yourself was the storytelling. The climactic castle levels are a blast. There's a level themed around "breaking into" the fortress, Mega Man 1 Wily 1-style. The double-length climactic castle level itself is excellent. But the real star here is the final epilogue level, after the climax. It's a gorgeous bit of storytelling unlike anything I've experienced in a Mario game before. I don't want to elaborate and spoil it — if you're going to play any game on this list, I think it should be this one. I've seen four friends play through it after I first went nuts about it online, and all of them had a great time.

My next hack was Cute Kaizo World by slopcore, and I breezed through it in a warm haze. I was planning to tackle a few more very early beginner hacks after this one, but when I cleared it so easily I decided I was ready to push forward. I don't have much to say about Cute Kaizo World; the levels are well-constructed, and the overall game has a nice, comforting mood, like a warm hug. It has a few shell jumps, some secret exit trickery, and the last level pushed me harder than anything in Love Yourself, making it an excellent ever-so-slightly-harder chaser to the other intro hacks.

Love Yourself and Cute Kaizo World are very new hacks; both were released in 2022. Quickie World and Quickie World 2 by Valdio came out in 2018 and 2019 respectively, and until recently they were the go-to "getting into Kaizo" beginner hacks. This makes sense to me — they're definitely doable in a reasonable amount of time for new players, but Quickie World 1 in particular is much harder than the beginner hacks I've mentioned so far. 

I started tracking how long each level was taking me with Quickie World 1. More than half of the levels took me over twenty minutes, which isn't true of any of the hacks I've played since. One level, the climactic Sawfring Castle, took me over two hours. None of the other Kaizo levels I've played have even approached that. "Over two hours" isn't that long for "real" Kaizo hacks; if I want to beat Invictus someday I'll need the patience to tackle levels of that difficulty. But for where I'm at in my journey, it was a hugely demanding challenge.

It was also extremely satisfying. Quickie World 1 is still the hardest hack I've played so far, and I got a great high out of finishing it. It feels a little clumsier and more awkward than hacks like Love Yourself, but to me that just added to the charm. It's a lovely game, and one of my favorites of the bunch.

 

Quickie World 2 went down a lot smoother, and I think it's more soundly constructed in terms of level design and presentation. But it's a little like Cute Kaizo World; it's so smooth to play that none of it stuck out in my mind as super-memorable. I know I liked Field of Dreams, Sawfring Ruins and the final level. I'm looking through a playthrough now a month later, and a lot of levels jump out as "oh I really liked that one!" It's definitely a good time, but I still lightly prefer the first game.

Scary Bosses and Nice Sprites was the next game by Darolac, creator of Of Jumps and Platforms, the hack that kicked this whole journey off. It's definitely a big step up in difficulty from their last game. Pacing-wise this one reminds me a lot of slurdgery, a stated influence of Darolac's. Each level has a cute gimmick, and is usually divided into bite-sized challenges. The levels here seemed to take me a while, but that's a bit misleading — the levels are much longer than normal Kaizo levels, and they have several checkpoints instead of just one. So even though they took a while, they never felt overwhelming.

The bosses here are an obvious highlight. They're very kinetic and delightful to unpack, and certainly more exciting than any mainline Mario boss I can think of. The last boss in particular is really excellent. The super-segmented style of level design here and in slurdgery isn't necessarily my favorite though; I think I prefer levels that flow more. But a lot of Kaizo levels are built around flowing motion, so I'm glad to play a few games based around chunky game design-y gimmicks instead.

My last hack for now was Orcus by Jordan. In direct contrast to Scary Bosses, Orcus's level design is stripped down and minimal. There's a strong focus on technical movement and regrabs over all else. It feels really nice to me — it's right up on the edge of being too minimal for my tastes, but I think it works well. The framing device of the castle and the ominous threat of "Orcus" is extremely strong. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't do anything with the Orcus conceit, and the actual climax is extremely brief and weak. This is one of the better hacks I've played here in terms of level design and construction, but as a story it was by far the most disappointing.

That's a bit of a sad note to leave off on, but I definitely intend to keep playing Kaizo hacks. I've been entranced by this world for years, and it feels amazing to finally carve my way into it. Orcus was the last beginner-level hack I had lined up — next up, I'm jumping into intermediate-level hacks. My end-goal is to play Invictus, which supposedly exists on the upper end of the intermediate, so I have several lined up to help ease me into the world of genuinely hard Kaizo hacks. 

I also hope that this new interest extends into similar kinds of platformers, not just Mario World ROM hacks. I've told friends "I don't like masocore" many times over the years, that I don't like platformers with infinite lives about repeatedly trying the same very hard thirty second checkpoint over and over. My instinctive preference is for arcade-style action games, where the end-goal is to string together a complete 20-40 minute run of the whole game without hitting a game over. But these hacks have helped re-open my eyes to the appeal of masocore-type game structures. 

There's no right or wrong way to make a platformer. You can make arcade-style platformers with hard game overs. You can make games with frequent, infinite checkpoints and extremely demanding self-contained challenges. And you can make easy games, where the arc of the game's story plays out in the music, in the mood, in playful bespoke interactions you have within the game world. 

It's all about drama to me — I like to finish action games feeling that I've gone on some kind of substantive journey, and there's a million ways to reach that. I want to be more open about embracing alternative kinds of action game structures moving forward. Roguelites still look boring and crappy to me though, sorry.