Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: Beyond Good & Evil

The end of Dark Souls Remastered…for now. What next?

So while I was romping through Dark Souls Remastered NG+, I decided to take a break and try a few games I purchased on gog.com. It was right after e3, and I had been catching up on the stuff I missed. I saw the trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2, and I decided I wanted to try the first game (Beyond Good & Evil) because I’d heard such good things about it. I went to gog to check out how much it was there, and it was on steep sale. I also bought Chuchel because I had seen Ian play some of it, and it was really cute. I joked with Ian that my feeling about BG&E would probably be, “I wished I had played this game twenty years ago (even though it was released fifteen years ago) because while I like the concepts, I can’t deal with the jank.” I also liked that Jade, the protagonist, looks Asian. Hey,  I take my representation where I can find it. One of the reasons I got so into Torchlight as my first hardcore game was because the character I chose looked Asian, and she was fucking badass. By the way, there has been much made about why BG&E failed so spectacularly when it was released, and I really think the fact that the protagonist was female was part of it, but that’s another post for another day.

Anyway, I played about an hour of BG&E, and it was very much as I thought it would be. I really liked the idea, and I adored Jade with her bright green lipstick, but I couldn’t deal with the…not jank because it ran fairly well…but the controls (the camera, man. Oh, the camera) and the aged gameplay. No place to see what the controls were, no way to change the controls (that I could find), imprecise camera controls, etc. In addition, the combat was just bad and the tutorial was horrid. I couldn’t figure out what key I should use to eat the food, and I actually had to look it up on Google. Which, by the way, I couldn’t do while I was playing because I couldn’t Alt+Tab out of the game.

One of the first things I had to do was take pictures of the animals in my immediate area. Seriously, game? This is what you want me to do? The camera controls sucked, and they were very finicky about what constituted a good picture. In addition, they didn’t explain to me that my companion spiky fur polar bear (which is how I thought of him) was wildlife, so I wasted several minutes wandering around trying to find the last animal I needed to take a picture of before moving on. Once I finished that quest, I wandered around to find the next bit, and after several minutes of this, I was done.

I’ve written before how having not grown up gaming makes it difficult for me to go back to old games because I don’t have the nostalgia for them. I played Pitfall as a kid and Ms. Pac-Man as a teen, but that’s pretty much my experience with hardcore gaming in my youth. Wait. I played Time Crisis (the first, I think) in an arcade because I was with my then-boyfriend and bored out of my mind. I was pretty disdainful about vidya games, and he urged me to try one. I resisted for a bit, but then I gave in because we were already there. I put a quarter into the Time Crisis machine, and I was instantly hooked. I kept pumping quarters into the machine, hooked on the response-reward loop. My boyfriend wandered over after some time to ask how I was doing, and I told him to shut up and get me more quarters. I finished the game in one go, and then I didn’t touch another game again for decades.

Those instances notwithstanding, I didn’t play video games, so when all the reboots started happening, I didn’t have the same pull towards them as people who’ve played those games in their childhood probably had. It’s the same with all those retro-looking games–they just don’t have the same appeal to me as they do for people who were gaming back in the 80s. There was a time where everything was crunchy pixel art in a nod to early gaming, and I could not get into it at all. I didn’t get the appeal, and I just accepted it was yet another thing I would never be a part of.

I gave up on BG&E after an hour. While I could see why it was so revered, I couldn’t play it. I’ll wait for BG&E and hope it’s as good if not better than the first one.


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