Free Patreon Letter: May 2017
Puyo Puyo Tetris & Forza Horizon 3
Welcome, everyone, to the new and improved Abnormal Mapping Medium page! We occasionally do writing here but we’ve not really had a good space to publish it since the site relaunch earlier this year, and so here we are. Trying Medium out. Let’s hope it doesn’t get shut down in a couple months.
As part of our patreon, M and I release weekly writing in the form of the Patreon Letters, which are generally loose and informal pieces where we muse on a game, or film, or something we’ve been thinking about that week, that wouldn’t really fit on the podcasts.
In order to give people a taste of what they’re missing out on, we’re going to publish one letter from each month for free on the medium. If you like what you read, you can get exclusive weekly letters — and access to the whole catalog — for just $5/month. We’re two poor, queer friends running a small podcast network so we rely entirely on word of mouth and your support to keep going!
This letter was originally released May 20, 2017.
The honeymoon period has worn off with Puyo Puyo Tetris. There was a good week or so after it came out where I would hang out with friends on a Discord server, and we’d play round after round trading wins on Swap mode. It was all the fun of a fighting game (tense, short matches; a mix of tight execution and setting up combos) but in something I could play with people in America and Australia at the same time. I had a huge blast.
But as Puyo Puyo Tetris is basically a fighting game, the inevitable has happened and in order to stay competitive with each other we’ve got to start, you know, practicing. I’ve practiced a fair bit and I’m getting better, but the enjoyable togetherness of those first few days has definitely been lost. I know this is the complaint that everyone who wants to keep enjoying competitive games on a casual level has, but it still sucks, and PPT falls prey to it pretty quickly. Losing feels horrible, if you’re in any way skilled at Puyo it’s incredibly easy to wipe a new player out with a single combo before they even have a chance to respond.
Last time we played, both me and my friend traded wins about 50/50, and yet we left the session stressed out and grumpy from the mindset shift we’d had to make in order to, as they say, get good. It’s just not something I’m interested in and I wonder if that means every competitive game is going to have a shelf-life for me, or if something will come along that makes getting over this hump feel less like gruelling work to me.
Shifting gears (tip your waitresses) for a second, I’ve played a lot of Forza Horizon 3, which is in a lot of ways incredible, and in other ways a tragic indictment of the way driving games have gone over the last decade or so. The Horizon series is developed by Playground Games, a UK based superteam of sorts, created from the ashes of studios such as Bizarre Creations, Critereon, Psygnosis, and Black Rock. And you can tell, the moment to moment play is a perfect synthesis of Forza’s simulation leanings, and the arcade sensibilities of all these classic British arcade racers. You speed down highways, weaving through oncoming traffic, hitting near-misses and drifts to build up huge skill point combos. I grew up on those games growing up as my main view into racing games, and Horizon feels like home.
But Horizon isn’t Burnout, it isn’t Project Gotham and it isn’t Forza either. It’s this Frankenstein’s Monster of each of them, and is so dedicated to allowing you to pretend it is any one of these games that it ends up with no identity of its own. The game bends to your choices; you drive up to a marker and every race will be filled with opponents driving cars of identical rank and type. If you want to play the entire game driving a Dune Buggy, you can, you will race against Dune Buggies, you will see nothing but Dune Buggies in the open world, you will forget that there ever existed a time where the human race drove in anything more than four wheels and a rollcage.
It’s incredibly frustrating, because this is a game made by a small army of the best racing game developers in the country, and they’re never allowed to take any real authorship. You don’t even have to race the incredibly tailored events they set for you; as the Boss of the Horizon Festival you can edit the Race Blueprints and make everything a 1 lap race with clear skies and no traffic. There’s no need to buy new cars, or upgrade, or tune, because you can’t be an inch behind ahead or behind the exact perfectly focus tested reward curve. It ends up making the actual game feel like a waste, just another open world game with a naked treadmill where you make the numbers bigger and the points don’t matter.
Which is a huge bummer, because I don’t hate Horizon. It’s one of the few left carrying the flag for a style of driving game that I grew up on and hold very dear, but we’ve come a long way from the days where Burnout 3 had a mode made of individually crafted puzzle levels. In a world where so many big games are sacrificing authorship out of loyalty to player choice, and more small games are using procgen because it’s just so much cheaper, it’s always sad to see something so cool fall down to these trends. I understand the economics of these decisions, but I can still lament them from the sidelines. What can I say, I like it when game design.
