When I saw calls to make the internet fun again with more casual personal websites I wanted to take part with something on the free web host Neocities, but I wasn’t sure at first what to make it about. Eventually I settled on doing one about my favorite Aztec deity, Tezcatlipoca, because I was getting my hands on bits of info that wasn’t easily searchable online. And putting my notes and observations in one place helps with my hobbyist research in general.

The name I chose was Digital Tlachieloni. A tlachieloni is a symbol associated with Tezcatlipoca referred to as ‘the instrument to see.’ It is also one of those things you won’t find too much discussion of on the English internet.

Making a basic website with HTML on Neocities is easy since HTML is fairly simple and human readable. But I wanted to go a bit further than basic. Inspired by I-land (which I have written about before) I thought about how to make the website more fun to navigate and break from the standard nav bar mold. I arrived at making a map for it that would treat it like a physical location, where clicking on different icons would take you to different pages. The version of it below does not have that feature.

I decided to frame the website as a temple, since sources I could find on Aztec temples said their design varied I made it a pyramid design with each floor having two symbols linking to pages of some relevance to each other. I counted the grounds around the temple as a ‘floor,’ but made the roof the exception with just one symbol.

As usual when it comes to my artistic needs, I pulled up Inkscape to make some vector art. There ended up being what felt like too much empty space around the top of the pyramid when I was done, so I added Ursa Major and the moon, two celestial bodies associated with Tezcatlipoca, as decoration. When drawing the moon I used the Digital Florentine Codex to pull up Aztec depictions of the moon for reference.

Making the symbols in the image link to different pages was more simple than I expected it to be, as there was already an online tool for setting this sort of thing up complete with a visual editor.

Having a visual map does come with the restriction that if I want to add a new page, I need to redraw the map. So I thought carefully and asked around about what sort of information people would be looking for on a mythology website. Thus far I haven’t needed to redraw the map yet, but I have needed to expand definitions.

For another touch I gave each page a bit of text at the start to describe the page like an actual part of the temple, and reused the character of Obsidian Cross from some of my other writing as a tour guide. This wasn’t what I had in mind for his first serious appearance, but it fits him since he is an aspect of Tezcatlipoca

For the actual contents of the website this isn’t meant to be a proper academic source, it has some of my own analysis but for the most part this is a tertiary source like Wikipedia. If nothing else the library page, which contains links to my sources, should be of some use to people.

Writing the contents of each page is more difficult than you’d think due to the complexity and nuance of information I was working with. My early attempts at the website struggled under the weight of all the information until the map idea forced me to work out how exactly to break things down so I was no longer listing every single aspect of Tezcatlipoca on the same page.

The website is not done, and will likely remain a continual work in progress since true learning never ends. There’s plenty of information I still need to put up there, including things I don’t know yet. Right now the writing on the website is also a bit too simple for my taste, it’s hard to restate complex information in your own words while trying not to start a game of telephone.

Still with all of the things I want and have to do it’s better to get something out there than keep it as a mere unacted upon idea for years, and I’m pleased with the work I put into making it a more distinctive experience.

This is about two separate stories many readers will not know, so allow me a moment to introduce them.

The Hero Twin narrative of Maya mythology can be read in the Popol Vuh (a free translation with very informative footnotes can be found here), focusing on a pair of twins who are themselves the son of a twin and a woman from the underworld Xibalba. It covers their birth, childhood, and battle against the lords of Xibalba.

Although the Hero Twins are eventually killed by the lords of Xibalba, they are reborn as fish people and then performers who are invited to perform for the lords of Xibalba, which is when the Hero Twins catch them by surprise and overthrow them.

Maya royalty claimed descent from the Hero Twins, and though there is a general lack of surviving written Maya sources, artwork indicates that the mythical narrative was well known.

Sayblood’s Children is a web serial published by S.E Reid to her newsletter Talebones, which fits into a wider and loose series of stories connected by their shared setting, the fictional Ferris Island in Washington State. Currently it requires a paid subscription to be read, but the author has been working on publishing her back catalog for individual purchase.

Prior knowledge of other stories about Ferris Island crucially shapes a reader’s engagement with Sayblood’s Children. One faction that appears across many stories are the Brackers, a reclusive group who live on an adjacent island connected by a bridge and are shown in several stories to have the power to take monstrous wolf like forms.

Sayblood’s Children, set shortly after the colonization of Ferris Island in contrast to the modern or near modern setting of most other stories, features a character named Othniel Brack living on an island near Ferris Island. As a long time reader of the Ferris Island stories it thus became immediately apparent this would be the origin story of the Brackers.

Although in this case, origin myth is a more fitting phrase. While the Ferris Island stories are defined by the presence of the supernatural, it is always lurking outside the bounds of civilization and what people say in public. Sayblood’s Children has the supernatural out in the open with the titular character coming from the underground world of Sumble, the same name as its god, dealing more openly and directly with the fantastic.

And the sense of this as a piece of mythology for a secretive group is enhanced by the way the story draws on the narrative of the Hero Twins. This connection can be observed from the title alone. The name of the mother of the Hero Twins, Xquic, is often translated to English in ways that incorporate the word blood, Lady Blood, Blood Maiden, and Blood Moon are all ways English translations have referred to her. And Sayblood includes that key name element of blood.

Xibalba is located beneath the ground, with some caves being identified as entrances to it. As such Sumble being located underground and the home of an Xquic analogue marks it as a counterpart. This is amplified by the name of Sayblood’s father, One Prince, which follows a similar pattern to how some of the lords of Xibalba are named, like One Blood, the father of Xquic.

Both One Blood and One Prince play similar roles in their stories. One Prince has Sayblood’s lover from the surface, Shrike, killed and his corpse put in a tree. Similarly Hunahpu and his brother’s heads were placed on a tree after the lords of Xibalba killed them. And both Xquic and Sayblood are forced to leave their homes for the world above while pregnant due to the threat of their father killing them.

While both heroines seek out the home of their children’s father, only Xquic reaches it. Sayblood on the other hand ends up on an island in the U.S rather than Shrike’s home of Ireland, marking the point where her story truly diverges from its inspiration. Xquic was put through a test to earn her place with Hunahpu’s mother, but Othniel gives Sayblood shelter freely. None of the Orchard Island characters have clear parallels in the Hero Twin narrative because it represents the moment where Sayblood breaks from it.

Xquic’s initial struggles to be accepted by Hunahpu’s mother and his other children do have a parallel in Sayblood’s story however. Sayblood can sense Orchard Island itself rejecting her as a foreign presence, most clear in an apple tree by Othniel’s home. She eventually is able to reach an understanding with it, setting up her future descendant’s apple trade.

The test Xquic had to pass to be accepted by Hunahpu’s mother was an agricultural one, bringing in a full net of maize despite the field only having a single ear, accomplished with help of the personifications of days and animals. Sayblood reaching an understanding with the apple tree by Othniel’s home thus provides some measure of connection. And while maize is deeply important to the Maya, apples end up being the main trade of Sayblood’s descendants.

The climax of Sayblood’s Children is more distinct than it is similar to its mythical inspiration, but bears some key points of overlap. Much like the hero twins briefly becoming fish people after the lords of Xibalba kill them, Sayblood’s twin daughters end up taking brief animal transformations in the climax to escape from One Prince.

There is also another aspect to the climax with mythical parallels, which is the rejection of the gods of the underworld as gods. When confronting One Prince for the final time, Sayblood denounces Sumble as no god, claiming she has met a true god “…of trees and spring and apples and Christmas.” In the Popol Vuh when describing the defeat of the Lords of Xibalba their own divinity is similarly rejected, with the Allen J. Christensen translation translating one line as “Surely they [the lords of Xibalba] were not true gods.”

Even with this direct of a comparison I do feel a little hesitant around a character rooted in Maya mythology rejecting their past culture for Christianity, but I did see another angle to it. Some Maya in the colonial period connected the figures in the Hero Twin narrative with Christian figures, including Xquic with the Virgin Mary, since both are virgins who give birth to child(ren) who die and then triumph over death. So Sayblood’s interest in what she hears of Christmas reflects the already observed points of comparison with her mythical basis.

While I’ve dedicated much of this to the similarities between the stories, what I enjoy most about their relationship is the key point of difference. Sayblood is a central character in her story while Xquic effectively vanishes from the narrative after giving birth, not acknowledged even once when her sons are in Xibalba. Xquic always stood out to me as a figure ripe for expanding on, as has become popular to do with female mythological figures, so I enjoyed the ways Sayblood’s Children asks the question of what it would be like if Xquic was the main character.

Even with all the connections, Sayblood’s Children is not a full on retelling or adaptation of the Hero Twin myth. It’s an original story drawing on mythical parallels to enhance its own sense of mythology, which is what makes the relationship between them so interesting to me.

And so we’re at the final post of the year. I feel this was a mostly stable year, some standouts but not to the extent of what last year had. Which is good because I’d rather keep things stable than chase constant growth for growth’s sake, there wasn’t any piece that was supposed to be an A Marriage of Body and Soul type hit (by the standards of this small publication) in the first place.

Being able to keep things mostly steady between a move where my family got screwed over by bureaucracy and starting grad school is an accomplishment in itself. Especially since next year is when Battles Beneath the Stars will come to a close after years of serialization, so it will be impossible for things not to change majorly next year.

I talk too much about Battles Beneath the Stars being nearly over since long projects require quite a lot of advance planning even when you’re doing the actual writing in the moment. Part of my thinking needs to go beyond the next year to keep things running.

I did experiment a little this year by publishing my first poem, which I’m glad I got in. I’m working to be better at just trying new things, which really kicked in this month because it’s an actual desire of mine rather than a new year’s resolution. I actually feel hesitant to openly try new things in January because new year’s resolutions make it look inauthentic, but that doesn’t apply to just doing things privately.

My most popular posts this year seem to be the two posts about adapting the written word into video games, which is a very fitting subject for this newsletter. It was fun to write about so I’m glad other people had fun reading it.

Next year will bring about its own challenges personally and professionally, some of which are already visible on the horizon. But I don’t think those challenges will be quite as bad as what I’ve already had to deal with this year, a year I’m happy to put in the past.

Have a happy new year. You’ll hear from me again in 2026.

Previously I wrote about the general idea of adapting the written word into video games. And I have the sort of mind where I can’t approach that subject and not come up with multiple hypothetical examples. So as a follow up I’d like to make my arguments for a few ideas that came to mind while writing it.

Beowulf - Action-adventure game

Beowulf is a fairly short narrative, which makes it easier to adapt in some ways. Rather than invent a bunch of random minor monsters for Beowulf to fight, the answer is to borrow from Shadow of the Colossus, a game where each fight is important. You don’t need to add filler to fit into this format, even if three fights is far less than what Shadow of the Colossus has, some things are just meant to be short.

Shadow of the Colossus also has a contemplative mood to it, something that would be fitting for a Beowulf adaptation, so it serves as a good model in that regard as well. The way the dragon is mourned by the narration has comparisons with how the player is made to feel regret for killing the colossi.

The actual combat itself would be different, Beowulf does not climb any of his opponents. But the overall experience and structure would benefit from drawing on Shadow of the Colossus.

Also we as a society should not allow that CGI abomination and its tie in game to be the most prominent modern Beowulf adaptation. Though the lack of a good adaptation also applies to the next thing I’m talking about.

Dracula - Visual Novel

While adapting a novel into a visual novel feels like a prospect that’s a little too simple, it also doesn’t appear to have been done that much. I’m disappointed there aren’t more visual novel adaptations of public domain works, if nothing else they represent a good opportunity for artists to draw the characters and environments. Not to mention they can explore different narrative possibilities without sacrificing the original narrative, you can play with the source material more.

Although you could just put the entire original text in and put text boxes around dialogue, I think that misses what makes visual novels really work. Prose meant to stand on its own is different from prose accompanying art and music, which also achieves a different effect. You can’t use one as a complete substitute for the other.

I decided to pick Dracula as my specific example because in a work of horror like Dracula the format of having to make choices, one of which will lead to an unfortunate dead end and force you to pick again, can work well for showing just how narrowly the protagonists survived many situations. It amplifies the suspense when you know there’s a genuine chance picking wrong makes you see someone meet with a terrible fate, even if reading the original makes which one is the wrong choice obvious.

I’d also go all in with this and after reaching the true ending in line with the novel, allow players to go back and make a new choice where Seward doesn’t miss a certain message, branching off into a new version of events like a work of fanfiction. But the ending of this would be clearly marked as the ‘false’ ending, a mere bonus after the main course, which is why it’d require seeing the true ending of the novel first.

Aeneid - Musou/Warriors

This is the least by the letter faithful of the ideas presented here, the Aeneid has some notable scenes of war, but plenty of it does not involve combat. Though it’s not a ‘Divine Comedy action game’ level mismatch. I came to think of some ideas for how to execute this specific concept (since it needs justification) that I need to get out there in some form, so here we are.

What prompted me to start thinking along these lines is that the Aeneid does have some battles at the scale with which the genre works, like being the epic that actually shows the climax of the Trojan War.

With Musou games like Koei’s many Warriors games you control a powerful character who cuts through hordes of enemies easily, but the real difficulty comes from trying to control an entire battlefield with just one (or in some games a few) characters, it’s about the wider picture. While the Aeneid follows Aeneas’s journey, it is also about the greater picture of Roman history up to what was Vergil’s present.

The early part of this would of course include the flashback to the Trojan War, where during the sack of Troy you would get a flood of objectives that are impossible to complete like ‘save Priam.’ And at the end of the game the map for the final battle around Laurentum would be a blatant reuse of the Troy map, just with the player in a different starting position.

Some battles would need to be invented to structure a whole adaptation around this style of gameplay, but I believe I have decent ideas about how to do so. There would be several battles early on against Carthage’s enemies, enough for the player to feel attached to Dido as an ally and playable character before the gods demand Aeneas abandon her.

And in the underworld Aeneas’s vision of the future would place him in the Roman civil war, on the side of Augustus of course, making the way time is blended together in that section much more literal.

This is a more loose adaptation than my other ideas, but I do believe that the emotional effects aimed for would ultimately justify the deviations for the sake of gameplay. In general the increased focus on warfare and Aeneas’s inability to escape it would be angled as its own statement on what the history of Rome means, which itself has a basis in what the Aeneid was saying, just made more extreme.

Incidentally there is in fact a Warriors game based on the Trojan War that has Aeneas as a playable character, which I like because the Aeneid is often overlooked these days. We need more things drawing on the Aeneid so people stop neglecting it, but based on what happened to Beowulf I think it’s best if Hollywood specifically continues to forget it exists.

And that’s what I’ll share for now. With how much difficulty I’m having executing one video game idea I know the odds aren’t great that I’ll be able to carry out every idea that comes to mind, so writing about them here still lets me share them in some way. That’s the entire point of my webserial Battles Beneath the Stars.

If you’ve had any hypothetical video game adaptation ideas of your own I’d appreciate hearing about them in the comments or elsewhere.

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There aren’t many adaptations of books or epic poems into video games. Most cases that could be considered as such are filtered through a movie adaptation, part of a marketing campaign rather than its own artistic work, or an original work set in the world of a book series.

What prompted me to ponder this was the announcement of an action game based on the Divine Comedy, which is in fact only the second time there has been a big budget Divine Comedy action game. Which feels like an inherent mismatch of genres for obvious reasons. Setting aside that Dante doesn’t even fight demons in Inferno, who exactly would you fight in the Purgatorio and Paradiso sections of these games?

From there came the question of what kind of video game the Divine Comedy should be adapted as then, because wrong answers are easy to find (Divine Comedy Kart), correct answers not as much. Which led me to the question of how to adapt the written word in general into a video game.

Every artistic form and genre has some structure and constraints that narratives need to be built around. With video game genres these are more specific than what other mediums have. Even a visual novel must work with its assets. Naturally it is difficult to take something from a less structured medium and put it into one that is more strict.

At points like this I find it helpful to dig into specific examples even when discussing broad theory, so let’s step away from the Divine Comedy specifically and explore some other cases.

One game I enjoyed playing growing up was the Hobbit video game by Sierra Entertainment for the Gamecube (not to be confused with a much earlier text adventure adaptation). Recently I replayed it while rereading the Hobbit, and in the process have come to a deeper appreciation of the uniquely book aspects of the Hobbit, like the humor of the narration, and a keener awareness of how poorly the game does as an adaptation despite my enjoyment of it.

While there are many ways in which the game is faithful to the book, to an extent where it’s clear that was a priority, at times it is fitting a square peg into a round hole, with much of the events in gameplay having little overlap with actual events in the book. The Riddles in the Dark level for example is all about fighting goblins and navigating minecarts to reach where Gollum is, the actual riddle game and everything between then and entering Mirkwood is a sequence of cutscenes.

And much of the depth of the book’s narrative is lost, the humor as well. There’s little attention paid to Bilbo’s growth as a person in the game, his doubts are entirely absent. Rereading the book also made me realize Gandalf is actually a rather fun character with plenty of humor around him, replaying the game he was barely a character.

The fundamental error of the Sierra Hobbit video game is that it took inspiration from Legend of Zelda and tried to make Bilbo into Link, despite those characters being cast from different molds. Link is the classic strong hero that Bilbo was deliberately written to not be, Gandalf says outright that Bilbo isn’t a hero. Link is Beowulf, Bilbo is the unnamed slave in Beowulf who wakes up the dragon. I can’t think of a truly Bilbo like figure in Legend of Zelda.

A good adaptation can’t just shove an already existing story into another game’s framework and leave everything that doesn’t fit for cutscenes. An obvious problem with adapting something into an action game, one of the most popular genres, is that there needs to be enemies, a lot of minor plot insignificant (individually) enemies. But those aren’t present in many books, or where all of the narrative focus is.

The Iliad has impressive plot driving scenes of battle so you’d think it would work as an action game, but the closing moment of catharsis is the conversation between Priam and Achilles. What sets the story into motion is the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, the internal politics of the Greek army. Placing all of that into cutscenes between action game moments feels misguided. The game should be at its most involved in the moments that truly drive the plot.

Combat oriented games may be some of the most popular, but they’re not all there is, even if for a while those and sports were all big publishers bothered with. Adventure games, puzzle games (not counting the vs puzzle subgenre), dating sims, and visual novels all have a long history within the medium. And we’re seeing more games experiment with different forms of interaction, like Disco Elysium shaking up the usual CRPG gameplay by essentially removing combat.

When I talked about my thoughts on this with my brother, he proposed that Disco Elysium is what a Divine Comedy video game adaptation should be modeled on, because the Divine Comedy is all about walking around and talking to people. I have not played it myself, but even I know about the ‘skills arguing with each other’ aspect of the game, which seems to me a potential way to explore the lines between Dante the character vs Dante the author.

Which brings me to the other big question of video game adaptations, the level of interactivity with the plot. An adaptation should try to leverage the strengths of the medium, and while many great games have linear rigid plots, others offer a good range of flexibility. Is it off the table for a video game adaptation to explore that part of the medium? To for example let the player decide how Dante interacts with some of the people he meets and run counter to the original text?

Think of tragedies for example. A key part of most tragedies is how preventable they are, and enabling players to explore the idea of how easily it could be prevented through different endings could heighten that. But it would require a willingness to commit to framing the original tragic ending as the true ending and better outcomes as alternatives, while currently in video games those with a true ending often make it an overly perfect outcome. But perhaps adapting a tragedy is exactly what’s needed to push that envelope.

One potential approach comes from Star Fox Command, where after completing a playthrough of the game you are given a ‘key of destiny’ that lets you make different choices and explore the many other paths through the story. I could see that working well for adaptations into certain genres like visual novels, make players experience the faithful adaptation route before letting them see the what ifs.

Part of why I keep jumping between different examples is because this is a broad topic, and also because I think that is part of finding the answer for individual book or epic into video game adaptations. To pick out games with elements that could work well for adapting it, pluck them out, and thoughtfully combine them.

I believe this is an endeavor worth doing on account of its difficulty alone, for how it’d push the medium of video games. And there’s a whole separate argument to make regarding why I’ve chosen classics as my examples for adaptation. I’m not expecting or pretending to answer the questions here just by writing and thinking, all theory and no praxis, but I do hope to get others thinking about it like I have, and perhaps act on them.

Rushing things often leaves them far from perfect. Yet if there is never any pressure it’s rare that whatever is being worked on will actually be completed. That is why we have deadlines.

Having started my writing with fanfiction, I’ve seen what happens with no deadlines. The average multichapter work of fanfiction never makes it past chapter one, because we’re talking about hobbyist writing with no imposed deadlines. I had many fanfiction ideas back in the day that barely made it on to the page let alone a second chapter.

This is why I think National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) became so popular before controversies killed the organization running it. It wasn’t actually about the 50,000 words, it was about needing to finish by the end of the month and having a community of other people striving for the same goal. At least that’s how it was to me.

Part of the benefit of starting this newsletter was the creation of deadlines for myself, because I had observed that I worked better with the pressure. Having an audience that expects the schedule to be kept makes it easier to keep a schedule, and thus helps me continue writing.

By the time the NaNoWriMo organization was truly in its death throes, I realized I no longer needed it, because thanks to this newsletter I’m consistently writing. I did use it to try to write something outside my normal posting schedule, but with a normal posting schedule I get plenty of writing accomplished year round. They were no longer needed for me to write a novel.

I didn’t do much non-fiction writing before making this newsletter. But I let myself fall for the advice of doing non-fiction writing to attract people to the fiction, and I did want to express more of my thoughts in writing. My feelings on this approach now are mixed, but I like some of the writing these deadlines have created, without them I doubt they would have been written.

The reason I’m writing this is because there’s something else I want to write for this section of the newsletter, but I know it needs more time to be done well, more time than would put it anyway near the deadline. Meanwhile this piece gains something meta from being written due to deadline pressure.

My fiction on this newsletter is another angle to consider deadlines from.

At first chapters for my still ongoing web serial Battles Beneath the Stars were released when they were ready, but I realized writing would work better. It has taken so long to complete even with deadlines I don’t want to imagine how much longer it would take if I hadn’t implemented a posting schedule.

There are some parts that I think would have benefited from a looser schedule where I could have taken more time, which is why I plan to make a collected version with revisions (some more major than others). And I knew going in that the web serial format lends itself to rougher less polished writing.

For web serials I’ve seen weekly and even daily tossed around as the suggested posting frequency. Yet for my own I do every other week, and while I do wonder sometimes if I should move up to a more conventional pace, a schedule that I can keep is better than one with a risk of making me frequently miss deadlines. That’s the real ideal posting frequency if you ask me, one that can be reliably maintained, and not everyone has the ability to do new chapters every week.

The amount of chapters is also a factor. Battles Beneath the Stars has continued on for the length of time that multiple full serials I’ve read have begun and ended. But twelve chapters is a different workload from what will end up totalling around eighty four chapters give or take, which contain multiple complete narratives.

And because of the start and stop nature of Battles Beneath the Stars it isn’t as easy to prepare chapters in advance, opening the order of character stories to polls means I don’t know what order they’ll be in myself. And I haven’t always had the luxury of writing ahead of schedule even within the current story.

My next web serial will be much easier to plan ahead for, and I intend to wait until there’s already a decent backlog of chapters ready for publication to start, which should make a weekly chapter posting deadline more managable. In a way, the deadlines are the most important thing to plan, as they shape the pace of the writing.

Sometimes deadlines do prove more of an obstacle than a help however. I delayed one short story I wanted to post because I realized something was wrong, it didn’t feel right, there was something that needed more time to assess and fix. Not everything needs to be rushed out to meet a deadline.

One of my many frustrations with current gaming culture is the ‘just patch it’ mentality, where people consider the state a game is in on release just some minor detail to forget about, even when that state is a blatant example of false advertising to the point of stores needing to cover up parts of the box or greedy microtransactions so aggressive they got senators discussing regulating the video game industry. And it all comes down to deadlines that were improperly placed.

Quality matters. I believe in making something first and making it good later, but the part where you ask money for it should be after making it good, not before. That’s why so many web serial authors I’ve read wait until the collected and revised edition of their serial to charge money for it, even on platforms built around subscriptions. Paying for writing made on a weekly deadline isn’t the most appealing deal.

In a way, managing deadlines is the skill that defines all creative work, since it’s what gets things done and shapes how the work is made. Like how this piece is shaped by the fact that I’m still writing it with around ten minutes left before my self imposed (by professionalism and pride) deadline. Is this a pearl or just nonsense?

Boston Blue Beat Beach Episode (generally shortened to just Beach Episode) is an annual fighting game event, part of the bimonthly Boston Blue Beat series. It’s not on the scale of the truly large events like EVO, which sees people travel in from around the world. Beach Episode is more of a regional event, which is what I prefer and why it’s the largest fighting game event I’ve attended.

I don’t compete in any of the current popular titles in the fighting game community, but what draws me in to events like this are the side games, the smaller scale tournaments for games that don’t have as many players. A friend was going to run one of those side game brackets for Merfight, but was unable to make it and asked me to step in. So that’s just what I did, and I figured I’d compete in other games while I was there.

Saturday

I immediately spotted some familiar faces from my local scene before I had even picked up my badge. Once I had gotten my badge, I went to the combined casuals and side tournament room, filled with tables that had four monitors each.

Soul Calibur players had already begun to gather together at one table, even before the arrival of the actual tournament organizer. So I went and took out my PS4, which I had been asked to bring by the tournament organizer and was surprisingly not that difficult to carry around in a backpack, and set it up. Getting a chance to play some casual matches before the bracket reinforced that I wasn’t going to win with how rusty I was.

My first match was up against the tournament organizer. I managed to score a perfect on them in one round, but lost the game and the match as a whole. There was also a moment during reversal edge, a mechanic that slows down time and forces players to play what is essentially rock paper scissors, that I looked at my opponent’s controller to see what they picked and counter it. They noticed I did that and said something along the lines of “yeah that’s what you have to do.”

The next match was much rougher, a player using Astaroth put a solid end to my tournament run. Even with the crushing defeat it reminded me that Soul Calibur is fun and that I should create more chances to play it with people.

Once the bracket progressed far enough for some consoles to be dedicated for casual play, I hopped on with someone for more games. After a few matches I even switched from my usual Kilik to figuring out how to play as 2B, a guest fighter from Nier: Automata, which led to a more relaxed feeling since I was learning something new instead of trying to regain atrophied skills.

I do not follow competitive games outside of what’s immediately around me, with the big majors like EVO or Combo Breaker I just watch the highlights and new game announcements at most. So it wasn’t until I went to watch grand finals that I learned one of the players, Incendiate, was the three time EVO champion for Soul Calibur VI.

Watching grand finals live turned out to be a good choice. It was Ivy vs 2B (who were framed as rivals by marketing material and do have genuine narrative contrasts I could get into) on Master Swordsmans’s Cave, a stage with no walls and thus full of potential for a round to be decided by ringout.

Both players unleashed some vicious offenses against each other, with quite a few rounds ending in one of them falling into the water. Eventually Incendiate switched from Ivy to Geralt, another guest character from the Witcher series, to close out the grand finals. It did not escape anyone’s notice that the final match was between two guest fighters.

With Evo coming up, which tends to be a big time for fighting game announcements, I wonder if a new Soul Calibur will be announced. Even a vague teaser would renew interest in playing the already out games, and a new game would have main stage status. But for the most part I’m content to keep competing in VI and earlier entries, my hope for a Soul Calibur VII is more for the story. Please let Lizard Man regain his roster slot and also his sanity.

In the gap between Soul Calibur and my next tournament I was on a hunt for things to do, which led to me encountering Scramble Heart City, another game having a side bracket the next day. There were open consoles with it running and an information sheet, so I sat down and tried it out.

Scramble Heart City is a tag team fighter where you assemble a team of three characters. It was still early in development, many sprites for characters were still in a sketch phase, and not all at the same level of development. But they all played well, and the character design shone through even in this rough state.

The available roster was small, but it was possible to add a character to your team multiple times. With the simple Smash Bros style inputs it didn’t take long to start figuring out what made my characters cool, like a character named Book being able to glide in an arc on his big book or have it hit the opponent on the other side of the screen.

If scheduling had worked out I would have signed up for the bracket, but it was set for Sunday right between the two brackets I had already signed up for. So I looked up the game and found that it isn’t publicly playable yet, but is going to be a free game playable in browser, like the developer’s previous title Tough Love Arena. I’m looking forward to when I can play it again.

Afterwards I went to the tabletop area to try out a game called Bullet, there was a raffle to win a copy of it. As usual with board games it took me a bit to grasp precisely what the rules were, but by the end I had corrected a misunderstanding that I had when I started.

In essence it’s an adaptation of the VS Puzzle genre of video game. Each player has their own board with multiple columns they are forced to place bullet tokens onto as decided by the token’s color and the number on it. If five bullets make it to the bottom you lose, and to get rid of them you need to rearrange them into certain patterns dictated by cards you draw, with cleared bullets getting sent to other players next round. All players act at once in a round, which has a timer to make things more intense.

Following my defeat in Bullet there was still plenty of time to spare before my next event, which I used to meet up with an online friend in person for the first time. Naturally we used this opportunity for video games, specifically practicing for the upcoming Blazblue Cross Tag Battle tournament tomorrow. I had hyped up our showdown in the game on the discord we’re both part of, and I lost rather soundly.

We were quickly joined by someone else who wanted to play, who was solidly better than the both of us. They said they weren’t competing in the tournament due to it having such a small entrant size, but it still left us intimidated for how much better the other people actually competing would be.

Eventually it was finally time to compete in the one main stage tournament I signed up for, Sailor Moon S. I had gotten into the game precisely due to there being such a strong local scene for it, I saw people playing at the weekly event I go to and joined them. At Last year’s Beach Episode I had done surprisingly well, but I hadn’t been able to practice as much compared to then, so a worse performance didn’t seem unlikely.

Unlike the small side game tournaments, the main stage events are broken up into smaller brackets called pools due to the large number of entrants, with whoever makes it far enough getting called back later to compete in the top eight section of the bracket. Getting into top eight was well beyond my reach, but I aimed to do decently within my pool.

My one tournament victory came from beating a player going by Andross, who was playing the game for the first time at the tournament. I made Star Fox jokes before and after playing him, but have to respect the guts to try a game for the first time at a stacked regional bracket. Especially one with a reputation for how unfair and brutal it can be.

I decided to stay around to watch other people play, like the friend I credit with getting me into the game. After a close match he was able to make it into top eight, which earned him a lot of congratulations. While I debated watching the top 8, which would happen in an hour and a half, live at the venue, I chose to go home and watch it online on account of being tired. I needed to rest up for the next day when I would be in charge of running a tournament.

Sunday

I arrived early for my first tournament of the day once again, Blazblue Cross Tag Battle. And like Soul Calibur since we were all in one place before the bracket we started playing. I had my Steam Deck with me so I set it up to play some casual matches before the tournament, and it ended up being used for the tournament since it was already there, which helped things run faster.

Blazblue Cross Tag Battle is such an explosive game that tournament sets are run as first to three wins instead of the usual first to two, and still tend to go faster then other games. As fun as the game is I never was able to grasp the more advanced mechanics, so quite a few times it felt like my opponents were two steps ahead. Despite this I did win a match, giving me an overall score of 1-2.

Meanwhile my online friend had a much more fruitful run, he was just one match away from making it into the top three of the bracket. I also ended up taking recordings of his matches on my phone, except for the one that happened while I was also playing.

Amusingly there was a high percentage of Aigis players, including my friend. One person had to fight three Aigis teams in a row. Keep in mind this is a game with 53 characters and Aigis isn’t even the best of them all.

On that note, I liked that I could recognize players by their team after seeing them play once, even the Aigis players all gave her different partners. I don’t think there were any full on team repeats. Character variety is nice and makes team games especially fun to play with, you get to mix and match.

Then came the Merfight bracket. My first time running a tournament at an event like this.

Unfortunately the equipment did not play nice with us. The monitor I went with turned out to have some problems, and the second console took a lot of fiddling with settings to run the game satisfactorily. One player ended up dropping out after the game froze on him. Things went better after switching my steam deck to another monitor, which I should have done sooner.

I do not think this was my best showing as a tournament organizer, even if it was all technical issues I can see now how my response could have been better. Hopefully next time I won’t have this many tech issues in the first place, and more entrants.

On the other hand as someone also playing in it, I won the tournament. The grand finals were an intense showdown with someone I helped introduce to the game. I can still think back to specific adaptations I made to their playstyle. It also helped take my mind off of the stress I had just dealt with. After my past attempts to get a biweekly Merfight tournament going flopped, it was nice to be able to play in person.

With that intensity out of the way I spent the rest of my time at Beach Episode playing games, including trying the fighting game themed card game Exceed and playing some more rounds with my friend. Then I returned home to recover from all the fun I had.

This weekend reinforced to me that I do genuinely wish to improve at playing fighting games. At the same time even just in the realm of video games, I want to keep playing different games instead of hard focusing on just one. There’s likely some way I can strike a balance, since I have no intent of making this a career.

I don’t want to be the best on any sort of grand scale, what I want is to be a solid contender in my local scene, to consistently make it deep into brackets even if not top three or eight. Granted I am at that level locally in Merfight, but that’s due to a small player pool that can’t even be called a small pond, my objective there is to create more competition.

Next year I’ll certainly be in attendance once again, likely still mostly doing side games. And maybe with less rust and more practice.

Once again I attended the gaming convention PAX East this year, and due to my one month hiatus I am only writing it about now over a month later. A delay like this is good, it has given me more time to reflect and think. And I don’t want to be too current and trendy. Anyway, onto the convention itself.

Something about the main show floor of PAX lacked the appeal that even last year had, it felt around the same size, there were interesting things to discover, but it also felt reduced. There was a much smaller selection of big or even medium names in the industry.

There was one especially notable absence, Nintendo. I thought for sure they would have a presence there to show off the Switch 2 and the new games. One of my fondest memories of PAX is playing Pikmin 3 there before the Wii U came out. So it was a surprise that their only presence was through Pokémon, the current state of which I am deepy bitter about and had no desire to visit the booth for.

I try not to get into the ‘armchair stakeholder’ mindset many get into these days, but it’s difficult to miss the many headlines about layoffs and closures in the gaming industry. The reduced state of the PAX show floor is simply a consequence of the overall state of things. With money growing tighter it makes sense that convention appearances would be one of the first things dropped.

It was still fun to simply wander around the expo floor, and there were games I enjoyed playing. One nice find was Cappy and Tappy, a platformer where in addition to your character you control a crane that drops Tetris blocks to serve as platforms. There is a co-op mode where one player platforms and the other drops blocks. Many will likely be a touch malicious with their block placement in co-op.

There was a booth showing off games from local developers, which I enjoyed seeing. And I have an indirect connection to one of those games, as the character designer for Ghost Jam is actually the artist who previously worked with me on a game jam project. It’s a rhythm game where you play as someone in the afterlife giving the deceased music therapy, instead of pressing every note you actually pick which notes you play to determine the mood of the song and thus how your patient responds.

Some games that I played at PAX I’ve been able to play since leaving the convention, like Cells to Singularity, an idle/clicker game where you build out a simulation of the universe, gaining currency and using it on upgrades to get more currency faster. I got a chance to play an update that hadn’t been released yet, and ended up downloading the current version to play on my phone during lines. Still waiting for the version I played at the show floor.

Another that I’ve since played at home was Desktop Survivors 98, a Vampire Survivors type game themed around the old Microsoft Windows experience. As part of that theme they were selling physical CD copies of the game that also included a download code for all the people with no disc drive and a trading card. I purchased a copy, put in the code and waited for the Steam release a little later due to not having a disc drive, and have had a lot of fun with it. It’s the first game of its genre I’ve played and makes me want to try others.

At conventions a good strategy for getting noticed is having a booth that looks distinctive, which is what drew me to Goblin Driving with its large truck booth. This is not a racing game, it is more comparable to an ‘only up’ type game, where you drive to reach the end and try not to fall off, and the controls do not feel like they are entirely in your favor. So the showfloor demo was a challenge, where making it to the game’s first check point awarded a set of goblin ears. And many did not make it.

My own first attempt was an immediate failure, even with a slow speed I ended up going right off the edge of the road due to poor handling. It was so bad I was given a second attempt, where I played even more cautiously and did make it to the checkpoint. Made for a good moment overall, going from instant failure in front of everyone to winning goblin ears I didn’t really want (I was in it for the sense of pride and accomplishment only).

There were also physical tabletop games at PAX, including trading card games, so I was able to play a demo game for Magic The Gathering which handed out sets of thirty card decks to take back. I would have liked to do more trading card game events, but time and the extra charge kept that off.

One memorable booth was Indiepocalypse, which sold USB Drives packaged in old cassette tape cases that have indie games pre-loaded onto them. That is a genius idea, I am taking many notes from this example when thinking about how to distribute my own works.

I’ll wrap up this section with not a game, but a controller. The Swish from is a controller that has two mouse trckingpads on the bottom at each side, four computer keys on the left, and two rows of four buttons each on the right. It’s a mixture of different control types, a presenter used a phrase like ‘a fighting game controller for other games’ when describing it. I’m not sure I’ll feel a need to seek it out for myself, but it dod work just fine when I tested it out.

Also in contrast to the show floor, I felt the panels were much more interesting this year. Normally only a few interest me, here I had quite a few I wanted to go to. A common theme of the panels that interested me was learning about ways to interact with games, be it different styles for running tabletop games or speedrunning.

The speedrunning panel actually got me into a mood to try some casual speedruns, or other kinds of challenge runs since those were covered as well. It emphaized that speedrunning is actually flexible, you can simply not do the crazy glitches, and you can just focus on personal best time or doing a race against a friend. So many have likely done some form of speedrunning without realizing it.

Since then I’ve speedrun the Merfight arcade mode and developed a one turn clear strategy for a level in Code Name S.T.E.A.M. Because nobody else is doing most of these I also get the world record on them by default, but there’s fun to be had in beating my own time, and then I move on to another thing without spending months grinding the same game each day to shave off a few seconds.

There was also a panel on Disney games where winning a trivia challenge earned me a booster pack for the Disney trading card game, which I do not play. But looking at the card art was neat, and I have been eying the game as a whole (pre-built decks only).

Another highlight off the show floor was the arcade room, which is exactly what it sounds like, a room filled with arcade machines, which have all been set to not require quarters. I enjoyed having the chance to play a few races of Mario Kart Arcade GP 2, there’s something about the arcade racing game set up of a chair, wheel, and pedals that just feels great.

Much of the arcade room was taken up by different fighting games. Getting a chance to play Street Fighter III Third Strike on an actual arcade machine after having played through other methods was an odd experience. I did not know how to position my fingers on the arcade cabinet with the signature six button layout, but fortunately Chun-Li only needs to press two buttons in most cases. This has reinforced my preference for gamepads for fighting games.

Other notable machines for me were Virtual-On and the arcade Final Fantasy Theathrythm. Virtual-On is a mech fighting game with a twin stick controller set up, a friend and I played a set in it and couldn’t fully figure out the controls, but it was another case where merely sitting in the arcade cab was part of the fun. Meanwhile the Final Fantasy Theatrhythm arcade game was in Japanese, so it took much struggling to actually get into a song, but was fun once I did.

Another new or at least relatively new addition was a cozy gaming room. This was a dimly lit room with some very nice beanbag chairs and ‘cozy games’ lining the walls. It was nice to just sit back for a little after walking all over the place, very pleasant. Though I will criticize the inclusion of Pikmin 2 among the games. Just because Pikmin is cute does not make it cozy, it’s all about stressful time management and your Pikmin will die a lot on the average playthrough.

As always with PAX, part of the fun was simply being there with friends. Sometimes you need a big event like this to see people or get a good chunk of time with them. Wandering the show floor is more fun with other people, especially when you swap advice on which things are worth checking out.

Even with the show floor having less to show, there was still plenty to do that made me wish I had more time and feel I made the right choice in coming. Naturally I’d want it to return to the heights of past years, but sometimes things need to shrink instead of grow. Let’s hope that the gaming industry returns to a state where PAX can go back to having all of the big names and a full show floor.

Like a good number of people in my generation with my sort of interests, I used to browse the website TVtropes excessively. For those unaware this is a website that catalogues tropes, meaning common repeated elements of stories, things as basic as having a main character. So people make pages for their favorite media and detail every element of it, and you can browse pages for tropes to find examples of it.

Naturally it’s easy to spend hours on TVtropes clicking on the thousands of links each page has to offer. And of course this would sometimes lead to pages for works I had no personal experience with. But I’d still read the whole page, spoilers included, and get a good idea of the work. Which is a bizarre way to experience something. But, reading TVtropes is easier and faster than reading a novel or playing a whole video game, you can get all the information on it with low investment.

You don’t need TVtropes to have this kind of relationship with something. Youtube plot summaries and reviews can fill this role just as well, or reddit posts. There are plenty of sources for someone who has never experienced a piece of media to cite when talking about it.

There’s a certain thought experiment that goes as follows:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on...What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”

My answer is yes, she learns what it feels like to see the color of a ripe tomato, she forms opinions on which colors she likes to see, that is all information she only gains through experience of the color itself. Of course this isn’t getting into the whole philosophical discussion around the idea of qualia, but the relevance to the actual subject of this post should be clear.

If you experience a work of fiction solely through social media posts, plot summaries, TVtropes pages, or even fanfiction, you are Mary in her black and white room. You may have all the academic information about it, but you lack the sensation that comes from actually experiencing it. Complete knowledge of a novel can only be gained by reading it, a movie by watching it, and so on.

Except things don’t evolve in a way completely unsuited for their environment, without quickly going extinct at least. Much of the dreaded Discourse around works of fiction in our times is rarely about the actual work and sometimes it is only a pretext at best. Sometimes being only a conversation piece is the intent of the work, or at least the intent of the marketing team.

This means a plot summary or TVtropes page genuinely covers everything needed for the big Discourse, because again, the actual work is only a pretense. What good is knowing what it means to see red when debating in a world with no red?

There’s also the self referential nature of fandom, where at a certain level fandom becomes about itself rather than what it’s supposedly about. So once an established series or franchise goes on long enough, new entries start to matter to people more in terms of how they fit the fandom narratives rather than their actual qualities, especially if releases happen frequently. And the actual qualities of the original are ignored in favor of what fans project onto it.

On the other side of this, members of a fandom need to be aware of the new releases, and if someone is unable to get the work itself they may feel a need to seek out second hand sources to stay relevant with the current conversation. When someone’s main social scene is a Star Wars community they will have some level of exposure to any new Star Wars release of notoriety, willing or not.

There is little space in those environments for discussion of media that involve their actual qualities. Having a real conversation about something requires staying at the small scale and away from the large beasts known as Fandom and Discourse at the top of the food chain. Which is a much less exhausting and more vibrant existence.

The problem isn’t the plot summaries or websites like TVtropes, they’re not the black and white room, they’re the books inside it. Rather the flaw is in the culture, where things move so fast or become so self referential that there is no time for proper discussion, where waiting to gather your thoughts puts you at risk of them being deemed irrelevant by the time you speak. We need to slow down and let ourselves out of the loop.

Let’s leave our black and white rooms and look at colors for ourselves instead of listening to podcasts about them.

Video games may be a fundamentally digital medium, but their physical elements are also vital. One of the most important yet generally unspoken factors in how game is designed is the controller it uses. A controller defines the way players interact with the game. That’s why the Wii and its Wiimote was such a revolution, it set up the console as a fundamentally unique design space compared to the alternatives.

While games for the same system usually need to be built around the same controller, arcade games had more freedom in what controller to use. Many think of an arcade controller as a stick and some buttons, but consider all the racing games where the controls feature a wheel and two pedals. Then there is the dance pad controls of Dance Dance Revolution, and the circular touchscreen of the maimai rhythm games. Arcade cabinets have plenty of space to go off the beaten path controller wise.

You still see the occasional console game shipping with its own special controller that the game is designed for. Steel Battalion is known largely because of its massive controller that makes it feel like you’re in the cockpit of one of the game’s mechs, and Ring Fit Adventure has the Ring Con for its exercise oriented gameplay.

But, what happens to these games when you take away the controller they were designed for? Odds are greater than not that if you’ve played any sort of retro game, it was on a controller different from what it was intended for. Super Mario Bros was not designed with a control stick in mind, how many do you think have played it with one at least once? For most games being played on unintended controllers doesn’t lead to any noticeable problems, Super Mario Bros is perfectly playable on non-NES controllers.

Not all games make the transition from one controller to another as smoothly. The classic Street Fighter controls since the second game hit arcades has been a joystick and six buttons. All modern video game controllers have four face buttons, meaning that in console releases the shoulder and/or trigger buttons have to fill the role of two arcade buttons that were originally right next to the rest in a row.

It feels unnatural for the right bumper to have as much importance as the square button on a Playstation 4 controller, bumpers and triggers are generally where the less frequent actions go, not one of the central actions of the game, except for shooters where this is inverted. Yet it all still works with little issue.

Street Fighter 6 introduced a new ‘modern’ control scheme to the series clearly made with both standard controllers and those new to the series in mind. These controls are so simplified using it denies you access to all of a character’s moves, because going from six to four attack buttons makes it difficult to keep everything. But that loss of options is why I have no interest in using the modern controls, especially since the character I prefer to play as, JP, loses entire special moves if played with modern controls. It feels like I’m playing a gutted version of the game.

The general problem of going from arcade cabinet controls to console controllers is also why many dedicated fighting game players use controllers called fightsticks that are designed to imitate the arcade set up of a flat button layout and joystick. A whole culture has developed around making and customizing these controllers, to the point that the arcade version of Street Fighter 6, Street Fighter 6 Type Arcade, has a USB port to plug in your own controller.

Yet some of these specialist controllers have gone in the other direction, straying from arcade roots by removing the stick and replacing them with buttons, so instead of moving a stick forward, you press a button set to that direction. These controllers have sparked a bit of controversy, especially for old games that were not programmed to handle the sorts of inputs that become possible by replacing the control stick with buttons, such as holding back and forward at the same time, leading to unintended results.

There’s also the standard of fighting games requiring multiple simultaneous button inputs for actions, like grabs. Except in any modern fighting game console release, players are given the option to map these to a single button, and are often already assigned to buttons in the default control schemes.

Virtua Fighter uses three buttons, guard, punch, and kick, but each combination of these is used as well, including pressing all three. I found pressing three face buttons simultaneously on my PS4 controller rather awkward, so I went to the control settings where I had the option to map the ‘guard+punch+kick’ input to a single button, and then did the same for the combination of punch and kick because my fiddling with the controls placed my punch and kick buttons on opposite ends of the controller’s face. All of this was allowed by the game.

I’m sure on a proper arcade cabinet or a fightstick controller the simultaneous button presses would be more natural, but the former is not how people play at most events and the latter is a big commitment in price, getting used to it, and even carrying around for some. Ironically, most fightstick controllers have eight buttons to maintain compatibility with console games, making them just as capable of going into the menu and setting a macro button.

Yet if we’re talking about how the game was designed, the actions set to simultaneous button inputs were set that way for a reason, whether that be the restrictions of arcade design or a matter of game balance, and those reasons are not mutually exclusive. But the question of purity with mapping these inputs to a single button feels a little pointless if you’re already using a controller the controls weren’t designed around. At the same time, can you truly call Virtua Fighter 5 a three button game when the game settings let you play it with up to seven buttons?

It’s difficult to think of any other genre so tethered to a specific controller that is at the same time only optional even at the highest levels of competitive play. While a fighting game, Smash Bros players have a different culture from the broader fighting game community. But in its attachment to a specific kind of controller considered outdated everywhere else, the Gamecube controller, it’s similar.

The fact that a Switch game was designed to support the controllers for a console several generations removed from it is quite strange. You can use the Gamecube controllers for other Switch games, but only Super Smash Bros Ultimate is explicitly designed to support it. The Gamecube controller has secured itself as the definitive Smash Bros controller, which is impressive considering the first Smash Bros was designed for a different controller, the N64 controller.

Nintendo hasn’t designed a game around the N64 controller since they stopped making N64 games. It’s also one of their more strange controllers with its three handles, which was intended to allow for different ways of holding it, but most defaulted to holding the right and center handles. Except for Sin and Punishment, which was made in response to observing that nobody was using the left and center handle set up of the controller.

This willingness to embrace the potential of the N64 controller makes Sin and Punishment notably a touch difficult when emulated, as the controller settings that work for other N64 games will not fit for it. When I played the game’s Virtual Console release for the Wii U, I first had to adjust the controller settings away from the layout intended for the likes of Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, while on a proper N64 controller I would have simply changed how I held the controller.

Speaking of the Wii U, the Wii U Gamepad deserves mention in any discussion of unique Nintendo controllers. The second screen it offered was one of the distinguishing features of the system, and many of its games have now been ported to the Switch. For some they play just as well, but in others I feel the loss of a core feature.

Pikmin 3 Deluxe for the Switch may have new features and content, but the core gameplay loop feels stilted without being able to just press the Gamepad screen and direct one of the other captains where I needed them. Playing Splatoon 2 made me miss the smooth ease of using the minimap on the Gamepad screen in the first one.

Then there’s Nintendo Land, the highlight of quite a few family gatherings. Not only did it make use of the Gamepad screen to give players different information, such as making the ghost in Luigi’s Ghost Mansion only visible on the gamepad used by the ghost player, it also continued to use the Wiimote’s features for the other players. It’s no surprise that game hasn’t been ported, no other system can do what it requires.

For most of this post I’ve been making an implicit assumption that faithfulness is something people value in terms of controller choice. In fact there are those who find fun in playing games with controllers that they obviously were not meant for, taking controllers meant for just one or two games and seeing what else they can be used for, or even making their own controller set ups.

The list of games that have been beaten with the DK Bongos is larger than the list of games designed for the DK Bongos, since I doubt Dark Souls or Elden Ring were created with them in mind. I myself played through all of Super Mario 3D World on a Gamecube controller, since I got it around the same time as an unofficial Gamecube controller adaptor in preparation for Super Smash Bros for Wii U, this was well before the official adaptor was announced.

Why go out of your way to play with a weird obviously unintended controller? Because you can. There’s an official Dance Dance Revolution dance pad for the PS2, you may as well use it for other PS2 games if you have it. It also adds an element of challenge depending on the controller, forcing you to play the game in a whole new way. If you’re looking for a way to spice up another playthrough of a game, the thing to change may be what’s in your hands.

Video games are more than just the software. With no controller you can’t play the game, and what good is a game that can’t be played? Any discussion of video game preservation needs to go beyond just the games and include the controllers, Wii Sports is not the same if you remove the Wiimotes. The story of video games is the story of their controllers.

Now I’d like to turn this over to you in the comments. What is your favorite video game controller? Do you have any particular stories around video game controllers, like using an unusual one or going out of your way to use the intended one?

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Pazuzu’s function in Ancient Mesopotamian religion was as a protective figure, both warding off evil’s approach and exorcising it. As the king of the evil wind (lilû) demons he is called upon to protect human from his subjects, the most infamous being Lamashtu, a demoness who preys on mothers and young children. So the role that made Pazuzu famous to modern audiences is essentially the exact opposite of what Pazuzu represented in the culture that made him.

While there is evidence that Pazuzu’s power had to be carefully directed, mainly the presence of other figures known to restrain evil on the back of Pazuzu amulets (in other words the side facing the wearer) there are no definitive examples of him actually harming humans I can find. Even ultimately benevolent figures can have malicious acts attributed to them, its a little thing known as nuance, but Pazuzu’s status as an active threat to humans appears entirely hypothetical (or debatable)1, something to prevent rather than something that happened.

Despite his function being about protecting the home, the mythology gives him the opposing element of being someone who belongs in the wilderness as a wind demon. He is only a guest, even if a welcome and long term one. He belongs in the mountains and wilds.

The appearance of Pazuzu is notably consistent in physical representations, combining many distinct animal features. He has a canine head, four wings, a scaled body, talons, the tail of a scorpion, and many other mixed animal body parts (like the snake head on his penis). This makes him easy to recognize when he appears. Often he’s depicted by just his head, like in amulets.

There are two main components that seem to have gone into creating Pazuzu’s appearance and role. Depictions of Humbaba’s head have similar powers to depictions of Pazuzu’s head, while the rest of Pazuzu’s body seems to borrow from depictions of the West Wind, a minor figure that Pazuzu quickly surpassed in fame. Some online sources claim Humbaba is Pazuzu’s brother but this appears to be misinformation as no texts, ancient or academic, ever allude to such a direct connection between them.

In the grand scheme of things Pazuzu is a fairly minor (though popular even in his own time) figure in Ancient Near Eastern cultures, but he also has an element of mystery. Scholars have traced his origins to the Iron Age, but find that he simply appeared out of nowhere at some day, there is no definitive answer to how he came about.

Pazuzu has only one stated family member in our sources, his father Hanpu, of whom we know nothing else. One interpretation of the name Hanpu is that since it means the limping one it could be a reference to the West Wind, whom Pazuzu is partially based on. Others have suggested that both the names Hanpu and Pazuzu derive from the names of historical kings as a potential explanation for their origin.

Coming back to the modern day and depictions there, it feels like a total mischaracterization to cast Pazuzu as a complete villain. For all his potential to be dangerous, he was trusted to protect children and characterized “...as a scary but in essence well meaning traveler.” (Wiggermann, “Reallexikon” 373)

Not only is what we know about Pazuzu compelling, it’s also open ended enough to inherently offer flexibility in how writers portray him. Even academics have different views on how dangerous he was to humans. As another example, some have portrayed Pazuzu and Lamashtu as having previously been in a romantic relationship, which has no basis in the mythology yet also doesn’t violate any of their core traits, and they can just as easily be portrayed as more straightforward enemies.

Hanpu also represents another area where Pazuzu is open to the inventions of a modern creative, since little is stated about him in known sources beyond being Pazuzu’s father, including the specifics of their father-son relationship.

As a king it would also not be difficult to imagine Pazuzu with the sort of royal court divine and human kings of his era had, even if no such thing is mentioned in sources. Or the apparent lack of mentions of a royal court for him could be interpreted as the absence of one. And that absence could be expanded on as a source of characterization for a particular author’s version of him.

Despite the genre being responsible for ruining his reputation, Pazuzu can work in horror as he naturally is. Just make the actual monster one of his subjects while he’s the guardian people run from because he looks like a monster. There’s horror to be had with incorrectly identifying the danger.

The duality of being a fearsome wanderer of the wilds and domestic guardian calls to mind the classic Wild West hero, who arrives as a stranger and departs having saved the day. Pazuzu would fit neatly into a ‘monster of the week’ type serial as a cool monster fighting wanderer.

And its easy to cast Pazuzu as a romantic figure, the combination of fearsome appearance, danger, and protective role carry the sort of appeal that makes Beauty and the Beast so enduring. Paranormal romance may no longer be the hot new trend but it is still around.

Also since Pazuzu amulets and the like were mass produced, we would simply be going full circle if we started making Pazuzu plushies that restock your pepsi and beat the shit out of the monsters under your bed. Making him cute might weaken his effect, but it could be balanced out by giving him a gun. If I ever do merchandise for this newsletter I’d certainly consider that for one of the items.

While I’ve focused on the potential for sympathetic and heroic portrayals due to my own preference, antagonistic Pazuzu portrayals can in fact be done well. In the video game Devil Survivor Pazuzu plays a somewhat antagonistic role, where he will end up killing a potential ally of the player if the player does not manipulate events to instead direct Pazuzu and his summoner to save a different character and potential ally. It works because it understands the nuance of his danger.

I think it’s amazing that we’re able to keep telling stories about ancient characters like Pazuzu, but it loses something when they’re written in ways that have little in common with ancient depictions. So I hope I’ve shown that you can faithfully depict Pazuzu while still putting your own spin on things.

Sources

“A Tale of Two Lands and Two Thousand Years: The Origins of Pazuzu.” Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic (2018): 272–291. Web.

Heeßel, Nils P. “Evil against Evil. The Demon Pazuzu.” in: L. Verderame (ed.), Demoni mesopotamici, Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 77/2, Rome 2011, 357-368 (2011): 357–368. Print.

Wiggermann, Frans A. M. (2005), "Pazuzu", Reallexikon der Assyriologie

Wiggermann, Frans (2007-01-01). "The Four Winds and the Origins of Pazuzu". Academia.edu.

Wiggermann, Frans. “The Mesopotamian Pandemonium.” SMSR 77/2 (2011): n. pag. Print.

After what felt like years of furious spinning from the rumor mills, Nintendo has announced its next console, the Switch 2. The reveal itself was surprisingly barebones, essentially just showing off how the console looks and a bit of gameplay footage and showing a date for further information. But I think about Nintendo a lot, so even this has my mind spinning.

The reason I like Nintendo hardware is because it’s unique, it pushes the boundaries, it does things other systems can’t until people start copying it. So a straight upgrade to the Switch doesn’t excite me. But what does excite me is a new generation of Nintendo games, since new hardware means Nintendo will bring out its heavy hitters once more.

According to the leaks, which appear to be confirmed now, the Switch 2 does have at least one notable new feature. The new joy-cons will reportedly be able to work like a mouse when placed down. On one hand it’s not terribly exciting as an innovative new feature, just mimicking what PCs have had for ages. On the other hand, Nintendo’s main development teams being able to design for mouse controls does excite me, I like what they do when let loose on new controller set ups.

Since this is based off unofficial information it’s hard to get too deep into it. I’ve been annoyed by incessant talk of the Switch 2 so I haven’t followed the leaks, but after seeing people talk about the mouse mode following the reveal, I did take a moment to review the evidence, which shows that the new joy-cons contain the same technology used for mice and are packed like mice. Considering this is Nintendo, I’m not entirely ruling out possible oddball uses of that technology beyond a simple cursor. It all depends on that next wave of info.

So it’s time to step into an area that feels a little easier to speculate on, the games. Starting with the game shown off in the reveal video, a brand new Mario Kart, the first proper new entry in the series since Mario Kart 8 released in 2014. With a gap that long the series has come to an odd place, since this new title will be following up a free to play phone game and an expanded port.

My hope is that after the massive amount of courses Mario Kart 8 ended up with, this game will do something different to stand out. There are already some changes people have observed in the brief glimpses of footage we’ve gotten, which would appear to be in line with that.

First, the number of racers has doubled from twelve to twenty four. This means races will become far more chaotic. There was a glimpse of an odd hovering orange item in a side path on the new course as well, looking like something a racer could pick up. This is most likely tied to some new mechanic. The prior Mario Karts have generally made their new selling point focused on kart selection or course design, like custom karts or antigravity, so something tied to a new form of power up would be novel.

Moving to the realm of things that I think would be neat, I hope the concept of reverse tracks from the phone game is brought in. Playing a course in reverse feels different in a way that simply mirroring it doesn’t. It can also help the selection of courses feel a bit bigger if each has two versions.

Mario spin-off rosters are also a subject I have oddly strong opinions on purely because of how poorly they’ve been done. There was an entire row on the character select screen on the original version of Mario Kart 8 dedicated to baby versions of the cast, and they weren’t even the only repeats. I’m hoping we can move past the period of aggressively bland Mario spin-off rosters and return to something that actually draws on the long history of fun and weird characters in Mario games.

Unfortunately people already spotted all of the baby characters in the Mario Kart footage. So based on trends I’m preparing myself mentally to endure the debut of Lime Luigi and Baby Pauline. I don’t care that much about who specifically gets added, I just want actual distinct characters instead of an alternate version of someone who is already playable.

Also while Link is my go to character in Mario Kart 8, I don’t like having crossover characters in. There’s already a video game series for Nintendo characters competing with each other, let Mario Kart be about Mario.

On that note, there are also the other series that Nintendo keeps on a release schedule of once per system. I love Smash Bros, it’s my favorite video game series, I think about it constantly, and I live in fear of the inevitable next Smash Bros. I am a veteran of the flame wars around character speculation for the series, I can’t endure this again. So when it happens I’m retreating from all Smash related fandom spaces.

Animal Crossing is far less intense for me, even if the fandom did get notoriously crazy around the release of New Horizons. Which also means I don’t have that many hopes or expectations for the next one beyond that it will happen at some point. I hope the equipment durability goes away, that was annoying and didn’t add much.

Then there’s the Mario Sports, which so far have stuck to each sport only getting one showing per system. They’re a safe bet for filling out the selection of games for the console. Now that I think about it, it has been a little bit since the last Mario sports game. Maybe one is being readied for the Switch 2, though I wouldn’t put money on it being in the first batch of releases.

A new Pokémon is also inevitable but I don’t want to acknowledge the current state of Pokémon, to me it ended on the 3DS with Ultra Sun/Moon. Splatoon also doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon, so I expect that to continue into the next console generation.

Legend of Zelda is another one where I don’t even need to say that it’s getting a new game for the Switch 2 at some point. I think like Smash and Mario Kart it’s in somewhat of an interesting place after Breath of the Wild reinvented 3D Zelda and then Echoes of Wisdom took that philosophy to the 2D games.

Tears of the Kingdom was a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, so naturally it had the same massive scope and expanded on it, partially because it could reuse the same world. What about the next 3D Zelda game to have its own version of Hyrule? The non-linear design is likely here to stay, for better and worse, but I wonder if the next Zelda will have quite that large of a world after people reported feeling worn out by Tears of the Kingdom.

As for what’s less guaranteed and purely a matter of speculation, I’ve seen some be hopeful that after F-Zero 99 we may see a brand new full fledged F-Zero. I don’t quite see it that way. To me, the Switch 2 reveal marks the point F-Zero and the other Nintendo racers missed their best chance to come back.

On the Switch the lack of a truly new Mario Kart felt like an opening for Nintendo’s dormant non Mario Kart racers to potentially return. But now is a terrible time for the likes of F-Zero, Wave Race, or 1080 to make their return, because Mario Kart is back. And now that we have a precedent of Mario Kart games with DLC, I don’t think we’re seeing anything of any other racers until all the DLC for the new Mario Kart is wrapped up. Why release a Nintendo racing game when the Nintendo racing game is still in the limelight?

The mouse mode also has every fan of a DS or 3DS game that used the stylus in a way similar to a mouse hopeful that this means their championed game will return. I’m also hopeful for quite a few of those titles, and it would make sense to use established titles to show off new controls, like the New Play Control rereleases for the Wii. But I don’t think it’s the slam dunk guarantee people (including me) want it to be.

In terms of titles that debuted on the Switch, I think ARMS stands a decent chance of becoming a minor member of Nintendo’s once per system contingent. Despite what oddly dedicated haters try to say, ARMS did well for the small pond of brand new fighting games.

Ring Fit Adventure was a massive hit for the Switch, but I’m not sure if Nintendo will go for a sequel when it requires its own accessory (meaning a sequel would need versions with and without it) and had being an exercise game released during the pandemic to back it up, which can’t be ethically replicated. LABO felt like a fun one off, and I hope the new system showcase is something better than 1-2 Switch.

With that I feel I’ve come to the end of what I can say with some confidence about the incoming Switch 2 era of Nintendo with the minimal information we have. I’m not terribly sold on the Switch 2 itself as a piece of hardware, but I have some faith the system itself may win me over once there’s more than morsels of info about it.

For fiction this may be recency bias, but I feel A Marriage of Body and Soul was the highlight of the year overall. What I thought was going to be a quick cleaning up of an old shelved story took on a new life. It was also an experiment in building hype for my writing, which turned out successfully since I got to see a lot of other people excited by and for it.

Also a friend of mine, LostParnassus, made some art after reading the story, which I want to share here. You should check out his mythology art and video games on his tumblr and itch.io.

For non-fiction the standout piece of the year was undeniably My Uncle’s Garden, in part due to how different it is from my other nonfiction. I prefer to keep some amount of distance online, so it’s rare for me to get so personal in a public post. Which is why I’m a little hesitant to bring it up once more. I feel I can’t really call it my own favorite because I enjoyed nothing about its writing or circumstances around it, but it’s certainly my strongest piece of non-fiction.

Plans for the future.

Non-fiction will likely continue as usual. Though looking back on the archives shows that it’s been a while since I posted about mythology, not counting the one about art for a mythology based game. So I want to write about mythology more consistently next year.

With just five stories left for Battles Beneath the Stars we’re nearing the endgame. So I’ve been thinking about what happens when it finally concludes, which I don’t expect to happen neat year unless I speed up publication, but it’s good to think ahead. I want to do a collected and refined version at some point, clean up the inconsistencies that happened across years of serialization and make each narrative stronger. But I don’t yet know when you can expect it relative to the end of serialization.

After that, I want to continue with serialization by starting a new serial. There are multiple competitors for the role of next serial, but if I can’t squeeze them in between chapters of Battles Beneath the Stars, finally publishing the unpublished short story the Lunans in Battles Beneath the Stars come from will take priority.

Of the competitors for future serials, the dominant one right now is the Saga of Hyperion, which is another unpublished work with characters who appear in Battles Beneath the Stars. It is written in a style that mimics the Nordic Sagas, which I feel is a style that also works well for serials. Between the momentum from Battles Beneath the Stars and the fact that I already have a full draft to build on it feels like a natural next move. But there’s still room for things to shift around.

One idea I already have to play around with for The Saga of Hyperion is a TV like pacing of seasons, since what I have in the draft before I thought of writing serials already lends itself to such a format. I’m seeing that for longer haul projects having built in breaks is good.

Also on the subject of future serials, I’m considering starting separate mailing lists for them when they happen. I feel there’s enough sections in this newsletter as is and that a second long form serial will make things too cluttered, even when its a story in the same world as Battles Beneath the Stars.

Regardless I want to continue writing and have more stories to tell. That’s all for now. Have a lovely Christmas Eve.

What Manner of Man is a novel that is open about its inspiration from Dracula, beginning with a quotation from it (and another from the Bible) that provides the title. The intertextual relationship between the two is a nuanced one, far more creative and indirect than a mere retelling, which is why I want to take this time to explore it.

Rather than the entirety of Dracula, What Manner of Man draws specifically on the first part of the story for its own structure, Jonathan’s time at Castle Dracula. In essence it asks what if that section was expanded to be the whole story, focusing on the elements of homoeroticism between Jonathan and Dracula that both characters discard and forget after the first act for their own reasons.

Right away there is an immediate difference in how the stories approach their epistolary format. Dracula is a text that exists within its own narrative, but this is not revealed until late in the story, and the characters never publish it. What Manner of Man opens with a preface about how the documents composing the story were found and suppressed from public knowledge until the author was able to transcribe and publish them. 

Where Dracula started with a clerk’s assistant traveling by train to easten Europe to meet his aristocratic client Dracula, What Manner of Man begins the story proper with the priest Victor Ardelian traveling by boat to the strange island of Swallow’s Rest in order to perform an exorcism at the request of the mysterious Lord Vane. Both spend time with the locals before meeting their respective hosts in ancient crumbling residences, Castle Dracula and Whithern Hall respectively.

The differing scopes of the narratives can be seen in how even the more distinctive locals Jonathan meets are left unnamed, while Father Ardelian’s temporary hosts are characters in their own right, Danny and Sylvia. Jonathan is quickly concerned by the concern the locals all show him, while Father Ardelian’s willful blindness and denial can be seen in how it becomes obvious to readers that Danny and Sylvia are lesbians in a relationship while he remains oblivious to the reason they share a bed.

Despite many accusations of cluelessness, Jonathan Harker was incredibly observant on his journey to Castle Dracula. The only reason it feels obvious to readers that Dracula’s coachman is just Dracula in disguise is because Jonathan presented all his evidence for thinking that, but didn’t make the claim explicitly lest he be deemed a madman. Jonathan is an unreliable narrator in that he is highly concerned with how he comes off to others, he doesn’t want to look crazy, so he doesn’t assert any conclusion about Dracula until it is definitively proven. Which is why after the first act he only truly recovers when others read his account and believe him. 

Father Ardelian is quickly shown to be unreliable as a narrator in his own way, as the contrast between his letters to his sister Vera and private journal say much. He attempts to project confidence to Vera, while in his journal entries he goes into detail on his doubts, even then still clearly attempting to repress his own emotions and desires. Father Ardelian is a man who almost always lies about himself, especially to himself.

Deception is also a key part of how What Manner of Man makes its borrowed elements from Dracula feel fresh. At first it seems Danny and Sylvia are happy to let Father Ardelian go to see Lord Vane after an error with schedules, in contrast to how the people Jonathan meets do everything they can to stop him from seeing Dracula. Then as the story reaches its climax it turns out Father Ardelian’s arrival on the isle ahead of schedule had been orchestrated by Sylvia so she could gather information on him and try to deduce Lord Vane’s plan. The opening chapters are even more similar to Dracula than they appear on a first reading.

This also comes into play with how What Manner of Man approaches an iconic scene from Dracula’s first part, where Dracula sees a cut on Jonathan and tries to attack him, but is repelled by the crucifix Jonathan was given on his way to the castle. Notably Jonathan finds the crucifix idolatorous, it is not truly a symbol of his own faith, yet it still has power.

 As a work highly critical of Christianity (to put it lightly) such iconography fails Father Ardelian when he tries to use it against Lord Vane, despite his complete confidence in their effectiveness. However, Father Ardelian does have the experience of being saved by a religious icon he doesn’t believe in. The source of his ocassional power over Lord Vane, which mystifies both, is revealed to be the ring he wears, an ancient religious symbol of Swallow’s Rest that had been taken from the isle long ago, found by Father Ardelian as a child in the ruins of a Mithraeum.

While the crucifix is a gift Jonathan receives from a stranger that quickly and clearly is proven effective, the ring is something Father Ardelian brings with him as a symbol of his past, and thus is deeply tied to his character. For that reason the true nature of the ring and its history with Father Ardelian, and role in the history of Swallow’s Rest, is hidden until after everything has fallen apart and Father Ardelian stops lying to himself.

This withholding and delaying of information is a key part of how What Manner of Man builds on Dracula’s first part, since to expand an opening act into a full story requires a much slower pace. There are no London and chase segments of the story to take the narrative away from Whithern Hall or to set up. 

There is one notable scene in What Manner of Man where its counterpart within Dracula is immediately evident on a first reading, the ritual scene in What Manner of Man, which corresponds to Jonathan’s encounter with the three vampire women.

Both are sexual scenes where the vampires prey on the human protagonist, who experiences a mix of fear and pleasure and later tries to deny that the scene even happened. A key difference is that in Dracula it is the vampire women who try to assault Jonathan rather than Dracula, while Lord Vane assaults Father Ardelian himself.

These scenes also bring the protagonist closer to the main vampire in highly different ways. Jonathan is horrified that he must cling to Dracula for protection from even worse monsters, it’s a deeper connection in purely negative ways. Lord Vane intended to kill Father Ardelian in that moment, but couldn’t bring himself to, setting his decay that drives the final act of the plot in motion, because he too can love.

To move on from comparing specific plot elements, I will now shift to listing what I believe are some of the equivalencies between the casts of Dracula and What Manner of Man. But I don’t think the idea that Father Ardelian and Lord Vane are the counterparts of Jonathan and Dracula needs any further explanation.

Vera = Mina: This one is both the most obvious and interesting, because Vera is based on Mina as presented in part one Dracula of: Mina as the distant figure Jonathan write to, not Mina the composer of the narrative whose assault by Dracula fuels the final act of the narrative. What Vera takes is being a distant recipient of letters who has a history with the main narrator. 

Vera’s own name, meaning truth, also relates to how Father Ardelian eventually addresses an unsent letter to her coming to terms with himself, which has parallels in Mina reading and sharing Jonathan’s account of Castle Dracula, which is vital for Jonathan regaining confidence that what he experienced was not the delusion of a madman. 

Lord Vane = Mina: Not only is Lord Vane the clear Dracula stand in, but the final act of What Manner of Man revolves around the threat of Lord Vane’s further degeneration into a monster to his own sanity and self, similar to how the final act of Dracula is driven by the threat of Mina becoming a vampire. And like Jonathan with Mina, Father Ardelian is all too willing to sacrifice himself for Lord Vane when it would solve nothing. As the main love interest it only makes sense Lord Vane would take from Mina as well.

Sylvia = the normal coachman: Sylvia is the one who manipulates the time of Father Ardelian’s arrival, similar to how Jonathan’s coachman attempted to make Jonathan miss his meeting with Dracula.

Sylvia = Abraham van Helsing: In addition to the above, Sylvia is also the character who knows the most about the nature of main vampire, yet initially withholds her knowledge due to trust issues, and after becomes one of the main organizers of action against the vampire. This is similar to Helsing’s role in Dracula.

Danny = Quincy: This one is much looser, but both are the more blunt and straightforward members of the anti vampire group in each story And both are responsible for a decisive blow in the final battle with dramatic consequences, the difference being that Danny’s is less lethal.

Notably, several key Dracula characters such as Lucy or Renfield lack a clear counterpart in What Manner of Man, owing to how different the narrative ends up being. A conversation is only interesting when between two different parties, for all that it draws on Dracula, What Manner of Man is a text that can be appreciated and even analyzed without once bringing up Dracula.

In writing this I led myself to several revelations about the relationship about Dracula and What Manner of Man. For example I didn’t think about comparing Lord Vane to Mina until I was in the process of writing the character comparison section, so I don’t believe this is a definitive or exhaustive look at the matter.

But I hope this inspires others to give their own perspective on the dynamic between these two vampire stories, or to think about how they may go about writing works that have a similar relationship to another text, something beyond devout worship or imitation.

Perhaps one of the highest praises I can give What Manner of Man is that the author mentioning plans for a novel with a similar relationship to Frankenstein makes me excited to reread Frankenstein and prepare to analyze this upcoming novel in relation to it.

However, one thing I dislike about many games designed like this is how attached they are to the specifics of their inspiration, where they feel more like a clone than a successor. Which can often leave me thinking ‘you know what, I’ll just play the original instead since this game wishes it was that so badly.’

So in addition to saying what I’d want to mimic about the inspiration games, I’m also going to try and list off ideas for how to make a successor actually distinct from the original. Because I want to see something new built off of these games rather than an empty appeal to my nostalgia, I want to go somewhere new, if I wanted to return I’d replay the originals.

Sonic Riders

While Sonic is obviously going strong, the Riders subseries of hoverboard racing games has been seemingly dead for a while now, with its last appearance on the Kinect for the Xbox 360. Never a good sign when the last entry of anything is an exclusive for a failed peripheral.

Like many other Sonic games, Sonic Riders has a lot of style it hits you with from the start with its opening move. Putting the characters on hoverboards and rocket skates over more typical vehicles immediately gave it a cool factor over other racers. The overall aesthetic is something that I would want to keep, since it’s a large part of the appeal, it does in fact need to feature hoverboards or options of equal coolness.

Gameplay wise, the main things I’d want to keep are the different character types with their own distinct routes they can take in a course, as well as a focus on mechanical execution for shortcuts. One possible way to actively build on Riders as a base could be to compress the different options, make the different character types be what they race on, like choosing between a hoverboard or rocket skates user.

To distinguish it from Sonic Riders, I’d avoid having any sort of stand in for the air meter mechanic (one of the game’s distinguishing features), and play up a focus on combat by letting you outright KO rival racers. I’d also have the tracks change over the course of a race, leaning on another Sega racer for reference.

These feel like radical enough changes that’d they be out of place in a new Sonic Riders, which is exactly the point. But fighting your rivals at low health as the track undergoes a radical transformation with the start of the final lap is its own form of cool not dependent on memories of a PS2 game.

Overlord

Overlord was a short lived series of video games for the Xbox 360 and PS3, with a few spin-offs for other systems. It’s difficult to describe neatly in terms of genre, almost a sort of pseudo RTS action adventure, where you play as an evil Overlord who goes out to conquer, mainly by commanding your Minions to fight and solve puzzles using their different abilities as you push through each level.

There are some similarities to Pikmin, both are about controlling little creatures of differing colors and increasing their numbers to serve your ends. But Overlord has no day system and a completely different approach to level design. I feel like they are in the same yet to be clearly codified genre (alongside Little King’s Story and a few others) since even its brightest star isn’t the most prominent. And sadly I do not expect a new Overlord anytime soon if ever.

With plenty of other games I can go ‘well these other racing games are great even if they don’t give the same kind of hit as Sonic Riders.’ I can’t do that for Overlord. And it being so distinctive means there is still plenty of ways and directions for the concept to grow because they were working in a sparsely populated genre.

The main things I’d need for a game to sate my desire for a new Overlord is the same general approach to exploring the world, and a horde of little creatures to command with different abilities. And the fun of being at least a little evil is part of the appeal, a villainous protagonist is a broad enough concept to not be too deferential to the specifics of Overlord I feel.

This might be one of my least practical to make video game ideas in a head full of unpractical video game ideas, but I have a pitch to make it super marketable and build on the inspiration, vague dating sim elements.

Both mainline Overlord games offered a choice of wife or favorite wife that had minor gameplay ramifications. I’d go further and give this spiritual successor a player character you can choose the gender of and a range of different options for consorts that you can romance, with associated upgrades you can get without romance. An added focus on relationships would broaden the appeal and fit what’s already there.

Also, Pikmin 4’s introduction of a tower defense mode had me realize something similar would have fit Overlord, so this successor would pick up the slack and distinguish itself in the process. Sequences where you need to defend a location from an opposing army would fit the vibe of being an evil overlord even if you can’t have that title for legal and SEO reasons.

It makes me sad whenever I think about how Overlord could have evolved alongside Pikmin, but at least one of them is keeping on.

Chronicle of the Sword (Soul Calibur III)

This is a little different since I’m referring to a side mode specifically rather than the full game. Yet it fits into the category of distinct gameplay experience that I feel hasn’t been given a chance to grow and evolve through sequels or imitation, since it was just a single one-off side mode.

For Soul Calibur III the developers asked “what if our fighting game was also an RTS” and went to work with a side mode that had its own story and characters separate from the main Soul Calibur world. In it you direct your units along paths to fight the enemy and take their bases while protecting your own, with the taking of bases and other key moments settled in classic Soul Calibur matches.

And I’d think it’d be interesting to see what would it be like if this mix of RTS and fighter was designed as the main attraction rather than a reframing of the core gameplay. Since in the time since Soul Calibur III I at least have not become aware of any full games built around similar gameplay to Chronicle of the Sword.

Some other games mix fighting game elements with strategy, like Project X Zone, but they don’t do full on fighting game matches. I know of an upcoming indie game, Kronian Titans, that is a fighting game with its own strategy based story mode, but I believe it’s set to be turn based and again is just one mode among others that lack strategy elements.

As a fighting game Soul Calibur generally aims for balance when putting different characters against each other, match ups are polarized but still winnable. But in a full on RTS/Fighter fusion you wouldn’t need that kind of balance for individual character fights, the balance is instead about the armies as a whole. It’s a whole different lens for designing fighting game movesets compares to the likes of Soul Calibur.

There’s also room to bring the two halves closer. For example, what if you could do actions on the tactics side that resulted in different stage hazards on the fighter side, like setting fire to a location or bringing out artillery. Or perhaps borrow the assist mechanics from tag fighters to incentivize keeping units together.

However, I take back what I said about my Overlord idea, mixing two notoriously niche and hard to develop genres probably beats it out in lack of practicality and difficulty to make. But I’d be down to support any kickstarters from people brave and experienced enough to do it.

Honorable Mention: Code Name S.T.E.A.M

I wanted to put Code Name S.T.E.A.M (a game I’ve written about before) on the list, but genuinely couldn’t think of a way a spiritual successor could keep the core feel and still be its own thing.

My only ideas of what I’d change are sequel tier adjustments rather than ‘new thing built on its foundation’ tier, like map previews before selecting your squad and less tedious unlocks. But it fits into the category of ‘game that leaves me wanting a follow up that will likely never happen.’

Honorable Mention: Subspace Emissary (Super Smash Bros Brawl)

Subspace Emissary is one of my favorite game modes in Smash of all time and I’d love to see games based on it specifically with its blend of classic Smash gameplay and platformer levels.

Then I remembered the existence of a recently released indie game called Decline’s Drops, that seems to be exactly that. I feel there’s likely still plenty of room to explore in the notion of a full game based on Subspace Emissary specifically, but it’s great to see at least one game doing just that. I hope ‘platform brawler’ can become its own subsubgenre and escape Smash’s shadow the way platform fighters themselves still struggle to.

That’s all for now, thank you for reading.

To cover my visual art needs I’ve been using Inkscape, a vector graphics program, because I can just make shapes and then adjust them. It’s what I’ve used to design the logo of this publication. Drawing people is a whole other task however, some of the most infamously hard to draw things are involved in drawing someone, like hands.

But one game gave me an idea for a work around where even I could draw characters for a video game, Joy Mech Fight, a Japan only release for the NES. It’s a fighting game that got around the technical limitations of the NES by rendering each body part as its own sprite, making each character a robot with floating disconnected limbs. And I have lots of ideas for fighting games specifically.

In my case having floating disconnected limbs is simply easier to do something with even at my skill level, I don’t have to learn anatomy and the robots don’t need to have human like hands. And with Inkscape I can animate different sprites by simply moving each part individually.

My first go at this idea was quite a while ago, and ran right into the brick wall of the in development fighting game engine I was using getting an update that broke all of my code in a way that suggested fixes and conversions did nothing to mend. But recently I felt inspired to try again. So I tossed out the old project and started again with something new.

I decided on a small and simple roster this time around, just six characters, half of what is considered bare minimum these days. And that each character would be a robot based on a mythological figure from a different mythology. This pairs with my interest in mythology, and for an inherently abstracted approach like this having known iconography to draw on is useful.

With mythology based works I think a good test is if you can tell who’s who from a glance, or if things start to click into place once you know who it is, so I decided to share this image without the names to let people guess.

Now I want to go over each one and how I approached their design, which doubles as the reveal of their identity.

Tezcatlipoca

Obviously Tezcatlipoca is going to be in my mythology project. He was initially designed for the first go around and was an obvious transplant to kick this new try off. I based his depiction here on a specific piece of art that showed him holding two flint knives.

His design is basically covered in Tezcatlipoca symbols, the yellow balls on the feet are bells, the center piece and eyes are obsidian mirrors, the mouth is modeled after a smoke glyph (which also represents speech), he has the classic black band across the face, and over his head like a crown is the ezpitzal, one of his symbols.

I had the concern that the central mirror might come off as another eye with the other two serving as eyes, but while Tezcatlipoca has always been depicted with a normal amount of eyes, he has such a strong association with seeing that the mirror coming off as a third eye does fit.

For colors I obviously needed black in there, and I think the red paired well. It’s been a while since I made this particular design, but I believe the more yellowish colors were done because in a lot of art of the Aztec deities the skin looks a bit yellow to me. The green comes from including the ezpitzal, which I also applied to the hands to spread out the color more.

While my other designs try to mostly stick to a single type of shape, he has a varied mix because of his many faceted natured, with points, rounded edges, and flat edges. Gameplay wise I envision him as an all rounder, able to do a bit of everything.

Odin

This is one of the designs I’m most pleased with. My concept going in was Odin as the classic wizard outfit moving on its own, I struggled with the question of how to do the face before deciding to make it the hat. He comes across as a little cowboy like, which made me think that wizards and cowboys are actually a little similar as wandering strangers with iconic headgear who come to town and kick off the plot.

The wizard robe may come off as dress like, but I decided that’s okay because I think Odin would wear a dress. I wanted to bring in his animal connections, so I based the feet on the feet of ravens. And the spear next to him is of course supposed to be his version of Gungnir. I’ve been going back and forth over how to size it, whether it’s too thin or too wide.

I also made a point of having him be the only fighter without a clear mouth, helps give off a mysterious aloof aura. Color wise I wanted colors that had death connotations to match with Odin as a death god, which both black and white work for. I recalled descriptions of Odin with a blue cloak, and red as a contrast fit in its own way as a color of bloodshed.

As a fighter my intent is to make Odin the long range fighter, one who doesn’t need any projectiles when he has a spear. I even put the spear behind him to try and indicate he prefers staying back and keeping a distance.

Ghatotkacha

Ghatotkacha’s name can be translated as ‘pot head’ so I knew I wanted the head to literally be a pot. Then I found a source saying it was referring to a specific style of pot used as an instrument (ghatam), which generally has a cushion under it, so I went for that specifically. His weapon is an Indian mace, called a gada.

In general I struggled to find consistent Ghatotkacha iconography, so I had to go broader. The wheels for feet reference how central chariot combat is to the Mahabharata, though Ghatotkacha himself doesn’t appear to fight on chariot. The idea here is that he’s his own chariot basically.

The central body part is actually a rather morbid nod to how he died, shot with the the Vasavi Shakti, referred to as either an arrow or dart. And you could say Karna hit bullseye with it. Because it looks like an archery target or dartboard, right?

When looking for depictions of Ghatotkacha I saw there was a tree shrine to him, so combining that with the pot head it made sense to try and give him more earthy and wood like colors. The gold color is because a lot of art of him I saw included gold. I’m disappointed I didn’t have anyway to reference his shadow play depictions since I like those puppets, but that feels more suited to a whole other design.

Also trying to give Ghatotkacha a little smirk became a massive headache. But I needed to show that he knows full well he’s strong enough to win. I know it can do a lot to characterize him at a glance.

There are brief little glimpses of a moveset in my mind, something fast that involves his mastery of illusions, like creating copies of himself as part of his special moves.

Heracles

Heracles offered few surprises in the process of designing him, the surprise was how much it went to plan. I knew going in I wanted a big blocky design with Ancient Greek style thunderbolt symbols (as opposed to the modern zigzagging line style) for his Zeus connection. And a big club as his weapon that’d help him take up more space.

I briefly considered trying to put some Chronos adjacent symbols like an hourglass on the chest as a nod to the Orphic equation of them, but that felt like too much to get at a glance. The chest feels a little empty to me, but I’ve seen plenty of Heracles art with a bare chest. Also not keen on the vibe his face gives off. I was trying to go for a focused stoic expression with the plain flat mouth.

Naturally I want Heracles as the big grappler of the roster, someone all about slow yet powerful attacks. I’m picturing his normal grab as him lifting up the opponent and squeezing them, the move he killed Antaeus with, and other grabs involving catching airborne enemies or throwing them to the other end of the screen.

Pazuzu

Pazuzu is the one example in this of me reusing a part from one character for another, and it’s not hard to see that his feet are Odin’s with a slight tweak. He has talons in his depictions, and I already had someone with talons, it made sense.

In general there was a mix of knowing what I wanted to do and struggling with ideas or execution. I knew I couldn’t pull off wings like a traditional depiction, so I thought about a bird shaped jet pack, but that also felt tricky. Then I had the idea of giving him a small wind turbine to represent his wind association and putting thrusters on his feet, which would help distinguish them from Odin.

For the head I tried to make it dog like, though making a mouth that could work like a canine mouth was too much. But it’s why the eye and the mouth that annoyingly looks like a moustache are positioned that way, like a side view of a dog. His eyes are describing as bulging so I tried to make it look almost too big for the face. The top of the head is a reference to the handles on most depictions since many were made to be carried.

The scorpion tail is something I’m proud of, because with how I set it up I can manipulate it to move in different ways by moving each component part. It’s the most articulated body part in this project.

As for the sickle sword, I was looking into potential weapons and saw the sickle sword mentioned as a symbol of kingship, and Pazuzu is a king of demons. Then I got the idea of trying to make the blade look like a snake, realized it’d be a sexual innuendo given how snakes are used in Pazuzu’s depictions, then did it anyway.

I wasn’t sure what to do for the central body piece, but the depictions of Pazuzu seemed kind of slim, and I thought it could contrast Heracles’s big strongman core.

For colors I wanted red, with the brightest parts being the ones that are dangerous, like the stinger or blade of the sword. Then I wanted something to break up all reds, so I flipped the color wheel to the opposite end.

My aim with Pazuzu is to make him a more technical character, someone who can poison enemies and hover in the air. He’ll likely be one of the last to be implemented due to the added complexity.

Tsuno Daishi

Almost everything about this design is a happy accident.

Going in I was at a loss of ideas because his depictions are all fairly consistent with each other, which can be hard to play with. So I tried simply to mimic his long wavy limbs, then in trying to position them noticed how well they fit together, like he was praying while seated and hovering. As a Buddhist abbot turned demon king I thought this was rather fitting, so I embraced it.

The head was a more straightforward act of mimicry, even the oddly goofy happy expression doesn’t feel too dissimilar to what I was using as a model.

For colors I wanted colors connected to the Japanese imperial court, due to his connections with it and being associated with earthly luxury. Thankfully a quick search just happened to pull up a wikipedia article with hexcodes of colors reserved for members of the imperial court. Incidentally wikipedia barely touches on what makes Tsuno Daishi interesting on the page about his human historical self, if nobody else fixes that I might have to between everything else I’m doing.

Gameplay wise there isn’t much of a strong vision for him yet, aside from the idea of him having a special move that heals himself and dispels effects like poison, as a reference to how he’s prayed to for protection from illness to this day.

I don’t think these designs are entirely finalized, there are still tweaks that can be made that I’ve thought of while making this post. And I need to make a decision on if there should be little orb hands for every character holding their weapon or if it’s okay that for some the hands would only appear when doing a grab.

Despite everything I’m proud of these overall. And I’m looking forward to the next steps of this project, where I’ll program the movesets of each character and sprite out the attacks. And hopefully succeed in laying the groundwork for releasing a game once the engine I’m working with becomes capable of such.

Even if none of that turns out, making these characters was a fun little creative endeavor on its own.

Optional Response Prompts: Which of the six do you like most or would want to play? What mythologies would you want to see represented in any expansions to the roster?

My uncle’s garden felt like a sacred space in the sacrilegious hustle and bustle of New York City, an oasis of quiet in a desert of noise. He had a fountain with koi fish in it, I got to feed them and always enjoyed watching them eat. On my penultimate visit to him there, I saw one that was noticeably smaller. It was an infant koi fish, or whatever the correct term is.

I use the word garden, but it was more a museum. There was a child buddha on an elephant. A stone lantern with a depression in it. A replica terracotta soldier. Others I’m failing to recall in sufficient detail to describe. It was beautiful. There were things to admire right there in his backyard, not far away in a museum that creates envy of the ancient world where even plates could be worth admiring. He had them in the present.

The inside of his home was not as pleasant. It was crowded with things, well more than a museum exhibit’s worth. He was a hoarder, and he saved a lot of things that seemed more burdensome than anything else, unpleasant to look at, but he also had things you’d want to keep. He was both a role model and cautionary tale.

Writing this brings back a foul smell, the one it took on due to the state of his health. I don’t feel like saying what it was, but I know what it was and that makes me want it out. Why is that fucking smell such a clear memory instead of something worth remembering!

There was one sculpture in his house in particular that I got to hear the story of multiple times. It’s carved from the wood of a specific tree, it looks like people linked together, forming a sort of spire. There was something special about the tree or carving process.

It was from a trip overseas to an African country, as a teacher on a school trip. He saw the sculpture, tried to buy it yet it was too much, so he left. Then the school trip came back by the area so he saw it again, and the price had lowered so he could get it. But it was so large he had to have it specially shipped, it had to be carried on a cart through the airport, getting it into the taxi in New York City required a lot of effort. What’s going to happen to it now?

My uncle had many stories. Some of them may have not been true, even excluding the ones that were clearly him having fun telling tales. Phone calls with him were always long. He’d often repeat stories, but they were still fun to hear. He made sure I knew something important, the answer to any question: It Depends.

Books were important to my uncle. If someone left books out by the street he always had to inspect and take them. He liked sending people books too, and he didn’t settle for mere paperbacks, they were nice looking special editions. Giving books was his love language.

I haven’t read them all, he had a way of rambling about something and deciding that meant I was interested in it myself. But it was because of him I read the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Winnie the Pooh, the latter of which he considered an important fantasy book. I both understand and yet feel I don’t fully grasp the ending of The House on Pooh Corner, the sign of a thoughtful ending.

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw.

"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I—if I'm not quite——" he stopped and tried again—"Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"

"Understand what?"

"Oh, nothing." He laughed and jumped to his feet. "Come on!"

"Where?" said Pooh.

"Anywhere," said Christopher Robin.

I shared some of my own writing with my uncle. He’d always come back with strange versions of it in his head that felt like another story, which I think was part of the fun for him. My relatives think it gave him something to rotate in his head since he didn’t have papers to grade as a teacher after retiring.

I always say it’d be nice to have other people build off my own work, and that’s what he did. He didn’t settle for just saying he liked it, that wasn’t his style, he met my story with one of his own. I wanted to share more of my writing with him.

My uncle didn’t eat, he dined. The local restaurants all knew him. We always ate well with him, and for hours when we dined at restaurants. My family doesn’t eat to live, we live to eat, and he exemplified that. Will the waiters he knew as a regular mourn him too? Do they know what happened?

My final goodbye to him was this: that I admired how beautiful his garden was and wanted to create a beautiful space like he had. My fear is that I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing my childhood home, but wherever I live, I want to make it beautiful. That’s what I learned from him, that what’s I want to pass down from him.

Is there any other wisdom of his I have to share? It Depends.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince was either the first demo I played or the first one that stuck with me, memory is fuzzy like that. You take the role of a man who will inherit the 45 room manor of his great uncle if he’s able to find the 46th room. Because this isn’t an ordinary manor, the layout changes everyday.

How the game works is that you walk around in a first person perspective, and each time you open a door, you have a set of three potential rooms it can open to. Each room you enter detracts from a count of steps, if it runs out you’re done for the day. The demo gives you a four day time limit and removes items to limit your progress, it’s unclear to me if the full game will have a (much longer) time limit.

Some special rooms cost gems to make, and as you get further in the manor doors will start requiring keys. If you get to a locked door without a key or a dead end you’ll have to backtrack to find another path, which will drain your steps. Though for me I never ran out of steps, because it’s fully possible to end up with all dead ends and locked doors barring your progress for the day, in fact it happened to me every day.

Despite there being no apparent danger, for me at least there was an odd sense of fear that was hard to shake. The manor is devoid of people because you’re supposed to be doing the challenge alone, and some important rooms are darkly lit. I wouldn’t call it horror, but it was unnerving.

I’m not sure if I got as far as I could in the demo’s four days, even with a second playthrough, but I got a feel for the story and how it progresses. Documents found in certain rooms give context for the state of the family that left me wanting to find more, and I encountered a safe I couldn’t figure out the combination to. This is a game about acquiring knowledge, so you’re not truly back to square one each day. You have to experiment with placing new rooms to get anywhere instead of the same reliable set.

For more direct and mechanical progress you can also unlock areas in the manor grounds that give you bonuses, which need to be walked to each day to take effect, draining your step resource. Encountering this made me feel a lot less frustrated with the game and its inescapable dead ends.

This game was quite the paradox in that I feel like it’s not for me in several ways, yet I’m still drawn to it. All the other games listed here are ones I was pointed to, but Blue Prince was my own discovery and it was quite the find.

The Crush House

The Crush House is another game that got me to play it multiple times, mainly due to it crashing on me (for reference I played on a Steam Deck). Described as a ‘thirst person shooter’ you are the producer and sole cameraman of the titular reality TV show. You pick four people to star on the show, and then follow them around, filming their drama and making sure to please the demands of audience, displayed as a feed of comments on the side of the screen.

A season of the show starts on Monday and ends on Friday, but if you fail to meet the network expectations for a day of filming you will be canceled immediately. This adds a lot of tension to the game as you only decide what to film, not what happens. If people want something heartwarming but the characters you’re filming start fighting all you can do is film something else. With four people and a decent sized house it can be hard to keep track of all of their locations to know who is most exploitable at the moment.

Whether it’s fighting or romance, the cast will get into something dramatic quickly, and go from one to the other fast. And they’ll vary between playthroughs, though you will notice some recurring themes and conversations. Also as a quick note, there do not appear to be any restrictions on who can romance who, which is good for the gameplay in letting the randomness do its work, but doesn’t feel fully in sync with the game being explicitly set in 1999.

In addition to the reality tv stars, the generic demographics you have to please can feel like characters in their own right at times. Plumbers are obsessed with water features and want them in every shot, while Butt Fans really want you to zoom in on butts. Compared to them the Voyeurs feel normal.

Between days of filming you can walk around the house at night. This is when you can use money earned from ads that play while on commercial break to buy more props, which I never got enough money for. Cast members may sometimes stand around at night, if you break the rules and talk to them they’ll have a favor to ask of you, a sidequest to film something specific. I wasn’t able to get far enough to see the consequences of completing a favor.

Promotional material also advertises that there are dark secrets to uncover, presumably on the nights between filming. Hopefully the full release is more stable, I’d like to make it through a full season and see how my early theories about the dark secrets turn out.

Bloomtale

Bloomtale: A Different Story is a turn based RPG that feels a lot like Persona 5, just in a small American town in the 60s. You play as a girl who was sent with her little brother to stay with her grandfather over the summer after her parent’s divorce, and ends up having to fight demons alongside her friends, with her soul on the line if she can’t beat them before summer’s end.

Individually the things that make Bloomtale feel like Persona 5 just sound generic traits nobody can monopolize, but together they add up. To start with the most blatant, relationships with other characters are tracked with a gameplay mechanic called ‘confidants.’ If you knock down every enemy in a fight, text appears saying ‘hold up’ and you can either unleash a powerful attack to hit all enemies or recruit one as a spirit to use in battle.

Then there’s the fact you use summoned spirits reflecting a character’s personality for their magic, the magical otherworld showing insight into a character’s state of mind, the calendar system, the animal companion who takes a more humanoid form in the magical otherworld and explains how it works, vocal random encounter themes, the protagonist speaking with a seated figure in a special dream space that they form a contract with, so many beats are taken from Persona, 5 specifically, that it can start to feel like a remix. This isn’t even a complete list.

Despite all of that the game does also have things to set itself apart. Gameplay wise things are distinguished by each character having a set guardian they always have access to, and a second free slot for demons recruited from random encounters. This adds some flexibility to party building while still letting each character have their own identity. However, it felt like attacks would miss more often than they’d hit, which got frustrating.

The protagonist also isn’t a mute vessel, she talks outside of player choices and there’s more room for her to act in different ways. I didn’t do it, but you can have her spend the money for an errand on candy for her little brother instead, or lie about the price in order to keep the change. This left me curious to find out how the game could change in different playthroughs.

It’s not the most original game, and the script could do with polishing, but the demo felt promising regardless.

Demonschool

Demonschool is a game with DS style graphics about attending school while being a demon slayer. The protagonist and her friends are assigned a different cursed item to investigate each week, which leads up to a big boss battle.

The progression of days is mostly linear, only plot important events will progress the time of day, so you don’t need to manage your time. Maybe that will change later on, but for now it mainly means that you need to do sidequests when they become available and shouldn’t just save them for later. There’s no danger of hitting your deadline and getting a game over for it.

Combat is where the game truly shines. Battle takes place on a sizable grid where your win condition is to eliminate a set number of enemies and have a character reach the other side of the board. Attacking an enemy will knock them back, you can hit them into other enemies to spread damage around, or into an ally to execute a combo attack.

Each action a character takes requires an increasing amount of energy, of which you have a set amount each turn. So having each party member do something lets you do more, three characters taking one action takes the same resources as a character acting for the third time that turn.

You’re not locked into any action until you press the button to end your turn, and you’ll see the results of your turn as you set them up, so you’re encouraged to take your time to fiddle with different approaches. And there’s a scoring system to reward winning in the minimum amount of turns. It’s a system that lets you coast if you want, but rewards mastery.

While the game has a literal ‘monster of the week’ format, it’s also up front about the overarching conspiracies and such that the overall narrative will focus on. I felt that a few party members were a bit one note even in the special scenes for increasing your relationship with them, but this was only a small slice of the story.

Something is clearly up with the island the game is set on, and the demo concludes with things escalating even further. I want to see what happens next and how combat will open up with the teased addition of even more party members.

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Dungeons of Hinterberg is an action RPG that places you as a monster slayer on vacation, specifically vacation for going into dungeons and slaying. In the demo I got to explore a snow covered area where I got the ability to conjure a hoverboard to move around and grind rails on, which made basic movement fun.

The dungeon in the demo was a Super Mario Galaxy like environment, with small planetoids in a strange magical space you could walk all around. Combat felt fairly simple but I did get taken out once, some tougher enemies had attacks that were difficult to dodge.

After completing the dungeon it was back to town, where I had a long list of potential characters I could spend time with. Each offered different potential benefits, and the game drops a clear hint that you shouldn’t expect to be able to get all of them on one playthrough.

The demo closed with a hint of the overarching plot, with the protagonist receiving a vague warning of dark secrets around town. I enjoyed the game and will look into the full release, but the demo was so short and sweet, covering just one day, that I don’t have much to say here.

And that’s all that I’ll talk about here. There were other games that caught my eye, but I wanted to keep this to a set group. While the big budget games have been going through some headline making roughness, the upcoming indie games have a lot of clear promise.

The most important part of a crossover is its scope, by which I mean what exactly is being crossed over. Capcom vs Marvel for example has it right in the title, you’re going to see characters from Capcom and Marvel duke it out, while you shouldn’t expect Spider-Man to be showing up in Capcom vs SNK.

Obvious you’d expect Spider-Man and Wolverine in a Marvel vs Capcom game, with Ryu and at least one Mega Man protagonist on team Capcom. But to me where these crossovers get interesting is their limits. Marvel and Capcom both have a massive roster of characters, so once you get the obvious inclusions done with, there’s a lot of space to include more minor characters.

Those lesser known characters help add an element of surprise and spice to the game. You know to expect and what to expect from popular characters. But did you expect to see that weird NES peripheral nobody seems to remember fondly in Smash Bros or know immediately to watch out for his spin attack that stops projectiles in their tracks?

For me a large part of the appeal of a crossover is getting to encounter those characters I may not already know. I barely knew most of the fighters in Super Smash Bros Melee or Brawl when I first played them, and I loved them off their appearance in Smash alone. How can you not find Mr Game & Watch’s 2d style charming? Meta Knight and Pit were such memorable parts of Brawl’s reveal trailer to me precisely because that was my introduction to them.

Unexpected oddball picks can also lead to rather inventive design. In an interview this is what Ryota Niitsuma, director for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, had to say regarding a certain member of the game’s cast.

Shuma-Gorath. Why's he reappearing?

So, Shuma-Gorath...he looks interesting, he's all tentacles. It was more our creative curiosity. We wanted to see what he'd be like in a 3D model. Marvel...weren't so keen [laughs]. It was the only character that we pushed Marvel on, that is of Marvel's characters. I'm not foreseeing a Shuma-Gorath movie any time soon, but I'm sure he'll be loved once he's included.

-Full interview this is from can be found here

[With a line up consisting mainly of costumed humans, Shuma-Gorath immediately stands out on the Marvel side of the roster for his appearances in Marvel vs Capcom.]

When crossover games have an incredibly broad scope, their rosters have a risk of being less creative as there’s even more ultra popular characters they have to fit in, where the deep cut picks make way for absurd combination of popular characters, which by definition means the roster lacks a certain cohesion to it.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate has my least favorite selection of new fighters in the series for that reason. I’m always deeply annoyed at statements that Smash has ‘evolved beyond’ being about Nintendo, because being about Nintendo is what makes it interesting in the first place, what makes it Smash Bros. Ultimate lost part of the series identity with the focus on popular headline making fighters over exploring different Nintendo games.

You do not get the likes of Captain Falcon, Mr Game & Watch, Ice Climbers, Pit, R.O.B, Little Mac, or the Duck Hunt Dog in a crossover about video games in general. All of those characters contribute to Smash as a series celebrating the full scope of Nintendo’s library, even the weird and forgotten. You lose that when it becomes about mashing random popular video game characters together on account of them being popular with no other connective tissue.

For a non video game example of this, take the short ‘Once Upon a Studio,’ made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Disney. It features characters from every part of the studio’s history, not just the big hits with Disneyland attractions. Dan Abraham, one of the directors, dropped this quote in an interview about it.

…to this day, you'll see Stitch, and you'll see Ariel, and you'll see the Beast and that, but there's somebody out there that loves Johnny Appleseed. And there's somebody that loves Gurgi and Chicken Little, and they don't get to see those guys very much. So we wanted everybody to see their pals because that's what this was. It's a family reunion that hopefully you want to go to.

-Full interview can be found here.

This is what big crossovers are about to me. It’s about both your favorite character and somebody else’s favorite, the familiar and unfamiliar. You lose that if you’re scrambling to include every last thing that’s decently popular, which can easily happen if you lose sight of your scope and go from being about one company to an entire creative medium.

And for an example of a crossover that started off with too broad of a scope, we have Multiversus, where the theme is ‘anything owned by Warner Brothers.’ When you have the sort of range where Lord of the Rings is on the list of currently untapped sources of characters, you know the net was cast a little too far.

Yet even with its broad scope Multiversus has shown some inventiveness in its roster. When the open beta launched it featured a character made specifically for the game, Reindog. And alongside pre-release announcements of big name characters like the Joker, they also slipped in a Banana Guard from Adventure Time.

While there are plenty of characters I’d like to see in Multiversus (I wrote a post that featured my pitch for how Frodo Baggins could play), what I want most are characters from some forgotten movie or cartoon I never heard of before, characters people haven’t seen in a long time.

Of course when you have a chance to gather genre defining characters together, it makes sense to take that chance. I just hope that Multiversus is able to continue to create spaces for the weird selections in between the iconic characters.

Thankfully there are examples of crossovers purposefully using popular characters to allow for less popular ones to appear. Disney Villainous for example is a board game (which I’ve previously written about) where you play as different Disney villains competing to fulfill their objective first, with plenty of expansions adding more villains to the game.

What I like about the design of the Villainous expansions is how characters are spaced out. The usual format is to have at least one of the expected popular villains and one villain who is less popular but still has their fans. So the Despicable Plots expansion features Gaston on the box to draw people in, with Lady Tremaine and the Horned King paired with him. Meanwhile Scar headlining the Evil Comes Prepared expansion allows Yzma and Ratigan to debut alongside him.

Thanks to this Disney Villainous has a good line up of characters. You have your usual suspects for any Disney villain gathering, and then there’s Prince John and the Queen of Hearts. If you’re sick of Maleficent hogging the spotlight in Disney villain gatherings you can just not play as her and run Madam Mim vs The Evil Queen from Sleeping Beauty.

Beyond the matter of popularity, there’s also what the characters represent for the overall theme of the crossover. What eras of Disney does the Disney crossover take from the most, how many characters whose film rights weren’t owned by Disney when the game was made are on Marvel’s half of the roster in a Marvel vs Capcom game?

Again, Smash Bros does this well in my opinion. The Duck Hunt dog isn’t just representing Duck Hunt, he’s representing the NES Zapper accessory and other games that used it. The Wii Fit Trainer and Miis serve as symbols for the various casual games that Nintendo came out with for the Wii as a whole. They’re representatives of two very different moments in time for Nintendo appearing side by side.

It is that element that can make crossovers special as a celebration, when focused on something with a long and varied history. For example a Star Wars fighting game would have an especially interesting roster if it was about the entire franchise, by which I mean all movies, tv shows, games, books, and so on are on the table, even Legends.

If I was picking the roster for such a game, then after getting the obvious main trilogy characters I’d have at least one of Kyle Katarn or Mara Jade since they are some of the more popular decanonized Legends characters. There would also be at least one representative of the High Republic books and the Jedi Survivor games. Ahsoka and Mando/The Mandalorian/Din are also shoo-ins for a Star Wars roster not limited to movies, and Cassian Andor would represent a rather distinct branch of Star Wars.

For something like Star Wars where fans tend to have their own corners for the most part on account of the large amount of Star Wars material there is, something like that could serve as a nice family gathering of the distinct parts. That’s just one hypothetical example, but it illustrates the point.

While I’ve mainly discussed fighting games here, the same applies to all sorts of crossover games. A crossover should go beyond the surface level, it should take its time to map out the full scope of what can be included and where it can do something distinctive and unique with what it includes. Crossovers are a space where even the neglected and forgotten can have their moment in the sun, and that’s why I love them.

Optional response prompts: What are some of your favorite crossover games? What’s a crossover you’d like to see? Any niche characters you hope to see in a game like Smash or Multiversus?

In the case of Tezcatlipoca this is especially ironic, as despite popular culture designating Quetzalcoatl as the ‘Aztec Jesus’ figure while demonizing Tezcatlipoca, it is Tezcatlipoca who developed an intimate relationship with Jesus and other Christian figures after the conquest.

As an important clarification, I am no scholar myself, merely someone with an interest in Tezcatlipoca who has read the academic sources I could acquire. But I seek to relay and synthesize the knowledge I have gathered to the extent of my current ability, so that it can be spread further.

Establishing the connection

In order to demonstrate the most clear cut case of a link between Jesus and Tezcatlipoca, I must first introduce one of Tezcatlipoca’s many names and aspects. Telpochtli is among the many names given as a title for Tezcatlipoca, one linked to its own cult and statues, yet still Tezcatlipoca.

Telpochtli is sometimes translated as the Young Man, because he is a figure defined by his lasting young age, essentially Tezcatlipoca as a child. And it is through this aspect that Tezcatlipoca has the most direct link to Jesus, to the point of becoming difficult to distinguish.

“The association between Telpochtli and Christian figures is still present today among certain indigenous groups, such as in the Sierra de Zongolica, where Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1985, 168) emphasizes “the intimate relationship that still exists between Telpochtli and Jesus Christ in the religious thoughts of the converted Nahuas.” Thus the most extreme care should be exercised before we assimilate the figures of young men present in the sources with that of Telpochtli, the “Young Man,” as he was seen by the ancient Nahuas.”

-Olivier, Guilhem. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” Translated by Michel Besson, University Press of Colorado, 2008, p. 26

Additionally we have sources showing at least one Christian missionary declared Telpochtli a caricature of ‘the true god.’ So we have even direct enemies of Aztec culture confirming this association through how threatened they felt by it.

This connection was not limited to Jesus however. Terms of address that were used for Tezcatlipoca became terms of address for the Christian god after the conquest. Saints such as John the Evangelist also had a syncretic relationship with Telpochtli (with virginity cited as the connecting factor for John the Evangelist specifically).

Now that I’ve established that one of the definitive scholarly sources on Tezcatlipoca shows this relationship, I want to offer mostly original analysis on points of similarity between Tezcatlipoca and Jesus. To show that there would be overlap even without such explicit proof that they became near indistinguishable.

Toxcatl Interpretations

A key component of the Aztec religion were ixiptla, impersonators or embodiments of deities. These people would be sacrificed to the same deity they acted as, to themselves. Colonial sources drew parallels between this practice and the crucifixion. Though this practice and associated comparisons were not unique to worship of Tezcatlipoca.

However, Cecila Klein, in her article Gender Ambiguity and the Toxcatl Sacrifice draws comparisons between the representation of Tezcatlipoca’s ixiptla before his sacrifice at the feast of Toxcatl and Jesus during the crucifixion. Her conclusion is that both were depicted androgynously to show “the youth had become much more than just a man. (p. 155)”

Meanwhile Guilhem Olivier has posited in Mockeries and Metamorphoses the interpretation that Toxcatl signified a temporary break in communication with the gods.

As he ascended the pyramid to be sacrificed, Tezcatlipoca’s ixiptla stepped on and broke a flute with each step. Music is the means of communication with the gods, brought to the people by Tezcatlipoca. The death of Tezcatlipoca‘s ixiptla paired with the shattering of flutes breaks the connection he established through the gift of music, and the appointment of a new ixiptla reestablishes it.

While Olivier does not draw the comparison himself, I argue that this interpretation creates another point of similarity between Tezcatlipoca and Jesus. The time between the death and resurrection of Jesus could similarly be considered a temporary break or disruption in connection between mortal and divine, restored when Jesus rises on the third day.

A forgiving deity

One trait of Tezcatlipoca that may have made him particularly compatible with Christian figures is a link to forgiveness.

There was a ritual where once in a person’s lifetime, they could confess wrong doings to Tezcatlipoca and seek forgiveness. For all the obvious differences in the ritual’s actual procedure, there are some clear connections to draw with Christian rituals like Baptism and Confession. Take for example this passage in the Florentine Codex, part of the speech given to the one who has confessed wrong doings as part of the ritual.

And as to this: now thou hast given it, thou hast manifested it to the lord of the near, of the nigh. Thou hast consulted, thou hast revealed it to the bather of people, the washer of people. Perhaps it is not in jest, perhaps this is no little thing, for thou hast descended where the blue waters, the yellow waters, the deep green waters rest, where the lord of the near, of the nigh, washeth one, batheth one.

-Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy", fol. 25r, (Anderson & Dibble 1953–1982) nahuatl translation Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/6/folio/25r?spTexts=&nhTexts= Accessed 20 December 2023

The lord of the near and nigh is yet another title for Tezcatlipoca of course. However, as the Florentine Codex is a post conquest source it should be taken with a grain of salt when its contents seem especially similar or compatible with Christian values or traditions.

Even if this account prioritized creating similarities to baptism over veracity, that still doesn’t mean it was invented wholecloth. In fact Tezcatlipoca has other attested links to forgiveness and penance, which lends credence to this baptism like instance of it.

For all people

Jesus and Tezcatlipoca care for the same set of people, everyone, from the highest to the lowest of the low. What drew me to Tezcatlipoca in the first place was that he had both royal associations and was a protector of slaves. He was patron of the school for commoners as well. On all levels of society, he was present with specific functions for that class.

For children in particular, we have this example of a saying concerning Tezcatlipoca’s relationship with children.

““The children, the youths, the maidens are the real friends, the really beloved of the lord of the near, of the nigh. They live with him; they rejoice with him; he maketh friends of them.””

-Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” Guilhem Olivier trans Michel Besson p.27 footnote 51

Compare this to a certain fairly well known verse from the Bible.

“But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:14)

-The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769; King James Bible Online, 2024. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-19-14/

Final Notes

Having detailed several aspects of Tezcatlipoca here, I have one question. Where is this Tezcatlipoca today when we talk about mythology? Even in works of fiction praised for supposed focus on Aztec mythology, all I see are colonialist caricatures of him. A Tezcatlipoca who despises or is apathetic towards humanity and craves violence for its own sake is clearly no Tezcatlipoca, yet ‘supervillain’ appears to be the only role modern writers care to give such a nuanced figure.

And the fact that Quetzalcoatl is the one people paint as a Jesus figure is equally damning of modern attitudes, as this attitude depends on a myth that couldn’t be a more obvious post conquest invention if it tried.

The image of the virtuous white anti human sacrifice Quetzalcoatl and his malevolent archenemy Tezcatlipoca is the colonized version of Aztec mythology, and that is what dominates the typical depiction of it today, despite not holding up to any examination of the sources for Pre Columbian religion and mythology.

Tezcatlipoca will be depicted well, in a way that recognizes why he gained such an intimate relationship with Jesus, when people learn to actually engage with and respect Aztec culture.

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Sources Cited

Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy", fol. 25r, (Anderson & Dibble 1953–1982) nahuatl translation Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/6/folio/25r?spTexts=&nhTexts= Accessed 20 December 2023

Having the entire Florentine Codex in a free digital format with multiple translations is a great help for research.

The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769; King James Bible Online, 2024. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org.

Most of my quotes and sources concerned Tezcatlipoca, as Jesus is a figure who needs no introduction, but for their attitudes on children I felt properly quoting the verse concerning Jesus’s attitude, even though most know it to some degree, would help illustrate the point.

Klein, Cecila. “Gender Ambiguity and the Toxcatl Sacrifice.” In Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity, edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, University Press of Colorado, 2015, pp 135-161

All of the articles in Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity are insightful, but it was only Cecila Klein’s that had direct relevance to the focus of this article. While initially not fond of her chapter due to some claims not discussed here that I felt rushed ahead of themselves, rereading it for this post gave me newfound appreciation of it.

Olivier, Guilhem. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” Translated by Michel Besson, University Press of Colorado, 2008

This was by far my main source due to its extensive focus on the subject matter and being what first made me aware of the associations between Tezcatlipoca and Jesus. Many of my quotations came from early in the book due to that being where Jesus is discussed as a point of comparison. I advise anyone who wants to know more about Tezcatlipoca to read this.