INT: THE DINING HALL OF CASTLE GRUYERE, CHEESE MOUNTAIN
The lights were bright and cheery in the famed dining hall of Castle Gruyere, the mood festive, a veritable menagerie of the finest dorks, dudes, dudettes, cryptid horrors, stacked raccoons wearing a big skin suit, and the entire contents of a clown car, including rather inexplicably the car itself vaping nonstop and pounding down Coca Cola all in attendance for what would certainly be yet another magnificent feast. Rising from the odoriferous and yet strangely enticing wheel of cheese that served as a throne in this carousel of idiocy he called a castle rose the King of Cheese Mountain himself, in a fine mood and holding a giant turkey leg. He did not care that he was a cliche as he began the toast.
"My friends! On this day of days, I have invited you to dine here with me in my magnificent halls in a celebration of the things that unite us, the things we cherish, the things that make life worth living. So gaze upon the delicacies before you, and raise your glasses. Drink now for...Castlevania!"
"For Castlevania!" came the rallying call, beverages draining and being refilled at breakneck pace, the gothic dish still steaming waiting to be devoured.
"Drink now for...Super Mario Brothers 3!"
"For Super Mario Brothers 3!" came again the reply, a masterpiece sitting regally amidst its peers for all to see.
The chef brought forth the main dish to the King, gloriously cliched under it's giant metal dome, waiting to be revealed to ravenous eyes desperate for the dopamine it would surely provide. With only the greatest of pomp and circumstance the King stood and took the lid in his trembling hand thinking excitedly to himself "This will surely knock them straight out of their seats and directly into vassalhood!"
"And finally, drink now, dear friends for...Final Fantasy VII!" he cried as the critically acclaimed, utterly seminal all time classic was revealed with a flourish.
Silence. Suffocating silence and then a small, bored voice as the sentient clown car asked "...eh, that's actually kind of...overrated, isn't it, there, chief? I mean...the minigames, ya know? They get stuck in your teeth for weeks!"
"Yeah!" piped up the skinsuit raccoons. "And how about some unique feeling characters and a decent translation, eh?"
"And it looks uglier than the interior of the strangely sentient automobile after fajita night!" added one of the 50 odd drunken circus clowns with gusto.
Sighing dejectedly, the King sat down rubbing his temples as the nitpicking and complaints continued. "All right. All right! I hear you, just...can you at least TRY to eat it? You think a meal like this comes cheap? You'll eat it and like it!"
"And who's gonna make me? You?" the Queen piped up from the chair one step to the right. The King sighed and slouched into his throne in defeat. "Not you too! Let's just finish this first course like civilized idiots, alright? Everybody? Can we do that?"
The hall was filled with a mixture of contended and disgusted grumbling and munching as his cheesy majesty tucked in, mumbling to himself "Damn you, hindsight!"
END SCENE
Folks, there are a few facts about living in THE FUTURE that we are all increasingly being forced to accept as we age, whether we want to do so or not. One, is that you really ought to try vegetables again with your big kid taste buds because you need some vitamins you pasty, exhausted lump. You must accept that having heroes is equivalent to break dancing on a dance floor made of machetes, and no matter how fly you are and how Hammer your Hammer pants, you will eventually get cut. And the worst fact of all: a lot of the media you loved the most is a lot like your average meat loaf. Flavorful? Usually. Of a consistent texture and quality? Usually. Edible without some kind of tomato sauce or ketchup on top? No. Absolutely not. In the case of media, the ketchup is made up of nostalgia, of roses colored glasses, of fading memories distorted by time and an aging brain, of pure pig headed stubbornness raging for the kids to get off your damn lawn, but by god they can't because YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE A LAWN.NO ONE is immune from this. Not you. Not me. Not even the sentient clown car and the 50 bozos inside it. And to prove that I am a fair and impartial curmudgeon, of the five titles I intend to go over, three of them are personal favorites of mine, and only two are titles lauded by the public at large. Because another part of living in THE FUTURE is learning that you don't get to have it both ways and maybe, sometimes, taking the piss out of yourself can be cathartic. Possibly hilarious. Depends on the state of your electric meatball on the day, really. Put your bib on and grab your Pepto, because once you get under the ketchup? The meat loaf is a disaster.
FINAL FANTASY VII
I need to rip this band-aid off straight away and come out swinging against the game that means the most to me. The game I've played more than any other. The game that literally gave me strength in dark times as a lad to continue going so I could still play it. And I'm going to further not waste time covering the good points of the game, the background, the things you've all heard in every generic PC Gamer etc. article you every saw and every clickbaity Youtube video with nothing new to add but a different set of talking heads. You watch that opening intro, the camera zooms in, Opening: Bombing Mission pounds into your ears and you are getting PUMPED and then a sad little low res blocky dude hops off a train from straight out of his purgatory in the digital nightmares the tortured ghost of Alan Turing suffers every night and you take a moment. Savor it. Swish it around in your mouth a bit. And it tastes a bit off, doesn't it?It really is a very noticeable problem at this point in our lives. Unless you are playing the PC port and have stuffed the half-dead corpse of this game with enough HD uprendering mods to bring it back Lich-like to a semblance of shambling vibrant life, everything is just low res, low poly, and on modern displays completely fug ugly. The source files do not exist anymore, nor much of the source code. The up-rendering mods only came about via use of AI. No matter what you do, it only pulls into stark relief the common knowledge we all must accept that Playstation graphics with some notable exceptions just did not hold up. This is far from the worst example of that, but its just kinda ugly to look at overall now and was only slightly less so then in hindsight. Hindsight is a word we're going to hear a lot here. It is the only thing that can scrub away the stain left behind by Nostalgia Brand Tomato Ketchup and must be used plentifully.
Okay. Problematic, but kind of petty really. Graphics are always the first thing to give out, in fairness, but Nostalgia Brand Ketchup is made with fairness and by god the pantry here at Castle Gruyere is EMPTY. The petty must flow like wine, but that said, I don't even really need it to cut to the heart of what really now, and even if I was too blinded by the newness of it all and the emotional connection to it what really then was the problem. Final Fantasy VII is an unbalanced, mini-game infested, half-experimental broken down mess of a game by a company new to the world of 3D, with a solid core and some great ideas all held together with string and hope and ultimately shallower than a puddle of piss. The thing you're gonna hear lauded again and again is the Materia system. Slap some Materia in a weapon or armor, gain some AP, level it up to get more spells, combine them in various ways for new strategies. Sounds cool right? Revolutionary even. Except...not really. As the Barenaked Ladies said: it's all been done before.
Now, as the overused meme goes because I enjoy weaponizing cliches and infantile humor for my own amusement: management wants you to tell us the difference between these two pictures. I'm management. No, you don't get a raise. And you also don't get a desk. And you have to sit on an exercise ball, because Squaresoft hates you and enjoys the taste of your tears. In picture one we have Final Fantasy 6, and the
Okay, neato, good beans and all that, but what about the other picture and what about FF7, you say? Exhibit number two is right below us for your perusal. What do we have? Cloud, equipping himself with items that allow him to gain AP and get spells. If you're thinking they're literally the same thing really, you are absolutely correct. There is a bit of a difference - FF7 lets you equip multiple at once instead of just one, you can form them into combinations, there's more you can do with it, albeit with some limitations on how you can combine things. For instance if you wanted to have fire resistance in an armor but also be able to cast fire on multiple targets, you require TWO fire Materia, one for Elemental, and the other for All. Imagine needing one Ifrit for single target fire and the other for multi target fire and you're in the neighborhood. The complexity adds a bit of clunkiness and in the end, to efficiently defeat the super bosses there are only a handful of setups that are really valid. A lovely enough puddle, but shallow nonetheless as it is still a puddle. I also have an ongoing theory that people love this system because it makes a lot of pleasant dingy sounds and you are getting to fiddle around with shiny rocks, which is neither here nor there.
And that's what it comes down to really, with both of these games because why not call out FF6 as a petty door prize for coming to the barbecue? It is fitting since the earliest test demos for FF7 used 3D models of FF6's cast. Every character feels the same in the end. The stat differences are fairly trivial in terms of raw numbers output. They can all do everything equally well where the magic system is concerned and all that sets them apart are their unique abilities, Limit Breaks in FF7 and stuff like Tools, Sketch, Morph, etc in FF6. And in both, not all are equal: if you're not using Cloud, Tifa, and either Barrett or Cid at the end, you're doing it wrong. If you use Cyan, Umaro, Gogo, or Mog a lot, you're doing it wrong. They just cannot measure up. At least in FF6 you get to keep the most overpowered characters - Aerith in FF7 has a limit break that literally makes the party ENTIRELY INVINCIBLE and gives a full HP and MP heal. Which you can use in one dungeon and then she's a shish kebab and not good for anything but fish food, bullshit rumors in old gaming magazines and making 14 year olds cry.
So, the graphics are iffy, the balance is questionable but that's not really the biggest issue. It is STILL FUN to play. Leveling up, fighting, earning AP, side quests. Brisk. Enjoyable. Time flies by, until you hit a stupid mini game and the game crashes to a damn halt. And we're gonna count them all. Sweep all the plates off of the table and just lay them out there. All of them. Even the minor ones. You will suffer as I have suffered.
- Hitting three buttons in sync with Tifa and Barret in Reactor Numero 5.
- Smashing idiots with barrels atop the rafters in the Sector 5 Church.
- Doing squats to put together your hot chick cosplay in Wall Market.
- Extremely janky grabbing of swinging ropes while climbing the GOLDEN SHINY WIRE OF HOPE
- Sneaking by the guards in the Shinra Building.
- Guessing the password with the mayor of Midgar for a key card in the Shinra Building.
- Motorcycle chase to protect a truck and somehow managing to keep your balance swinging that big assed sword with one hand.
- Really bad RTS to protect a condor on top of a reactor at Fort Condor.
- Giving a child CPR in Junon.
- Using that child's dolphin friend to jump to the city above.
- Practically unwinnable parade marching sequence.
- Simon Says with President Rufus.
- Annoying one-time only quick time event action in the Corel mountains.
So, next at the amusement park Shinra built on top of the corpses of burned citizens and the scorched husks of their homes you have:
- Nearly impossible roller coaster rail shooter where you get a useless yet unique item if you manage 5000 points, you completionist you, but you can't so you cheat and use a turbo controller. And then years later you get angry when you learn you can just buy everything you missed in Junon on Disc 3, and need to take a damn walk.
- Literally unwinnable fighting game.
- That same damn motorcycle game.
- Janky basketball game.
- Thumb breakingly hard arm wrestling game.
- Tedious, slow, ultimately simple yet oddly aggravating mini game where you feed a moogle his own nuts for a minor one time reward.
- An actually semi fun battle arena where you can earn points to trade for FABULOUS PRIZES and can completely cheese with a Ribbon and the utterly broken Enemy Skill Materia.
- Turning the dials of a safe and getting your ass kicked directly afterwards. The Dance Commander gave out the order, and here's where the FUN was the whole time!
- Dodge boulders.
- SLOOOOOOWWWLLLYY advance the arms of a clock to cross it like a platform multiple times and have to go all the way back through the boulder room if you screw up. Oh and if you don't screw up? You miss some treasure forever. Have fun knowing that without a guide there, sport.
- An entirely farcical Scooby Doo door chase with a black mage puppet piloted by soul juice.
- Horrible snow boarding mini game, also available now at the amusement park!
- Rapidly tapping buttons to prevent hypothermia.
- Awkwardly pumping levers to stop a runaway train with a time limit, complete with badly translated directions and if you fail SCREW YOU no ultimate Materia for you, nerd!
- Guessing a 4 letter password with a time limit and extremely vague hints given by an idiot and if you fail SCREW YOU no ultimate Materia for you, nerd!
- Mandatory stupid RTS Fort Condor battle, and if you fail SCREW YOU no ultimate Materia for you and also NO PHOENIX SUMMON, nerd!
- Dimly lit submarine chase with horrible pop-in that you can win if you know to just hammer the shoot button immediately and ignore all the instructions - also now available at the BLOODY AMUSEMENT PARK.
- Becoming a Licensed Chocobo Inbreeder for game breaking summon Materia that takes so long to cast you can literally make yourself a sammich.
- Racing your now hideously deformed mutant land chickens for fun and profit, then saying meh to effort and using the shoulder button glitch for easy wins because this is all getting a bit silly at this point.
- Frustrating use of frogs and bugs as platform triggers in a side dungeon with middling yet one of a kind treasure.
- Weeping and gnashing of teeth (optional side quest for you in REAL LIFE that somehow feels like you have no choice)
Ehhhhhh. No, Tifa, I don't think I will. Someone else can do it. I wanna play a different game now.
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG...2 (Wait. What?)
I know, I know! Not the usual suspect when talking about the issues with an older Sonic game, is it? This one is stone cold classic back to front, an improvement on the original in every possible category. It's the first one I played. It led to Sonic dominating my 8-10 year old time frame right next to the Power Rangers. I love it. But let me make something very clear: it is because I love it that I need to scrape off the Nostalgia Brand Ketchup and expose the meat for what it actually is. The problems with the first game have been covered ad nauseum by every source imaginable: pacing issues, length issues, doo dah, doo dah. Second verse, same as the first.But what about Sonic the Hedgehog 2? Why are we not talking about all the ways Tails makes the game just a little more irritating? Why are we not talking about how crappy the special stages are? Why are we not talking about how Tails takes the crappy special stages and turns them into shitty special stages? How about some of the stages ranging from "kinda meh" to "I dread ever coming here again", which also ties into different pacing issues than Sonic 1, but pacing issues nonetheless? Gather round the learning tree with the rest of the dinner guests, and I'll break me off a stick and beat some knowledge into your dome expeditiously.
The first problem is, as stated, the fact they felt the need to give you an adorable little AI partner named Tails, or "Miles Prower" because at all times in America we are ready to enter the PUNDEROME. Two dorks enter, one dork leaves. Tails' little two tailed tuckus will shadow your every move - he jumps when you jump. He attacks who you attack. He can't figure out how to climb out of the water and drowns. He can't jump two feet onto a ledge and gets crushed. He hits Robotnik at JUST the wrong moment to screw up your timing and knock you into that damn pink goop in the boss fight in Chemical Plant Zone and you toss the controller and it smashes a snow globe. Yes, it happened, and yes, I got in trouble for it. And it's HIS FAULT.
And the aggravation that is Tails is only compounded by the aggravation that is this game's special stages. The original? Colorfully drawn pixel graphics, kinda disorienting as it spins around, but ultimately benign. The sequel rolls around and what do we get? A tube. A poorly rendered, horribly dithered, stupid freakin' tube you get to run along, grab rings, and try to avoid bombs. Oh, but you can't see anything coming over the stupid hills and if you miss any of the rings you can't see coming you won't have enough. Don't get enough rings before the checkpoint? Eat me, nerd, back you go to the stage with zero rings! Better luck next time! I would have better luck. But this keeps happening!
So you better just play with Sonic alone and punt that little orange bastard off to get the goddamn plane ready to fly later on in the game and be done with it! As to those later stages, there are some problems. A lot of stages in Sonic 1 had some pacing issues largely due to being very puzzley, very winding, very slow. The fact every stage had three acts also just made it feel tedious by the time that third act rolled around every time. For a game where the speed was so hyped there also wasn't a lot of speed. Sonic 2, at least to begin with, has a bit of the opposite problem.
Emerald Hill? Fast pace, flies by, still a bit to explore. But perfectly sized. Excellently paced. Idiotically easy boss fight notwithstanding, absolutely choice. Chemical Plant? Fast, well designed, alternate paths, the tension of escaping the pink death water, especially in that one climbing section. You know the one. A boss who is still easy but you WILL still fall into the gunk and die until you get the hang of it...good stuff. GREAT stuff even. What's next? You're pumped now. You're ready. The screen loads and welcome to...
Aquatic Ruin Zone. Utterly fantastic music. Iconic enough to get a remix in Sonic Mania. And somehow, simultaneously, both too long AND too short. Your first go round you are basically guaranteed to fall below into the water, where it suddenly becomes Caffiene Free Diet Labyrinth Zone. Jumping slowly, air bubble scrambles, scary drowning music, the works. You can get out fairly quick, but still, you'll likely drown at least once at first and fall into water again later. A classic beginner's trap if ever there was one. But it's also too short at the same time! If you manage to stay up top you can blast through Aquatic Ruin in under a minute. Not even long enough to enjoy the music. It goes by in a damn flash and except for Grounder ambushing you from the wall and the occasionally tricky stone pillar Robotnik fight, nothing is a threat except the water.
And this is a kinda pattern this game follows: great, meh, great, meh, great, FUCK, great. Let me lay it out.
- Emerald Hill, Green Hill Zone vibes with better music, breezy but brisk.
- Chemical Plant, action packed, banging soundtrack, paced just right.
- Aquatic Ruin, see above. Nuff said here.
- Casino Night Zone, amazing, iconic, I WILL beat the dead horse of just how stellar the OST in Sonic 2 is, you'll spend ages here just screwing with the slot machines, a tricky boss that makes you think. High point of the first half of the game.
- Hill Top Zone, long, kinda slow, kinda just there. You don't hate it. You don't love it. This is the weakest point on the OST. It's a zone. You play it.
- Mystic Cave is what Labyrinth Zone wished it could be, puzzley, slower paced, but also exciting, diverse and dynamic with a fantastic boss fight.
- Oil Ocean is much the same as Mystic Cave, faster paced but excellent gimmicks and real creativity put into it.
See that? Right there? This is your life now. And you're too far in to just quit. Crusher pistons? Check. Enemies that block the platform you need to jump on and ambush you on stupid screw platforms you cannot jump off while you're making them rise so you lose all your rings, or enemies that shoot projectiles from off screen? Check check. Spear platforms, lava, is a chickenshit candy-ass maze, inexplicably has 3 ACTS INSTEAD OF TWO LIKE THE REST OF THE DAMN GAME? Guess what, chuckles? CHECK! The entire flow of the game comes to a crashing halt right here. Over long, over complex, over difficult, and a boss that is also annoying as hell. This is the worst level in not only this game but maybe ANY classic Sonic game. I loathe it with the fury of 1000 Ifrits burning Locke's ding dong and no amount of Naked Ice Ladies will soothe my wrath. GAH! Right. Levels.
- Sky Chase Zone is next, a chill autoscroller with a chill soundtrack to calm you after all that, unless the programming kinda skitzes out LIKE IT DOES WITH ANYTHING TAILS IS INVOLVED WITH and the little shit doesn't move the plan back where it needs to be and so you die! Even more!
- Wing Fortress has difficult platforming but is memorable, well designed, and feels thematically appropriate for the story the game is trying to tell, and the cutscene at the end leads perfectly into
- Death Egg Zone. Two tricky, well designed, tough bosses. No rings. Git gud and get the ending. But you won't get the real ending because no way in hell did you get all the Chaos Emeralds in the special stages. So. Screw this. Maybe another game will hit the spot?
INT: THE DINING HALL OF CASTLE GRUYERE, CHEESE MOUNTAIN
The King of Cheese Mountain sat in his glorious hall after the first course, gazing with irritation at the discontented rebels about him not satisfied with the bevy of classic dishes he had laid before them. The clowns were painting dicks on the tapestries with the gravy, the skinsuited raccoons were still neck deep in a plate of Contra, and the Queen was in the corner with the sentient clown car smoking like a chimney. Banging a spoon on his goblet fiercely he called "Dear friends! This course got off to a rough start, certainly, but the next will be much more to your liking, I can assure you. Settle yourselves. Loosen those belts!"
"More to my liking?" said a clown covered in bruises from a recent trip to the learning tree. "Pretty dang low bar to clear there isn't it, chief?" followed by much irritating HONK HONK HONKING as the clowns registered their agreement.
"Far more to your liking! I have scoured the globe for only the finest of classic dishes, the tastiest of morsels, the most satisfying draughts to quench your thirst! Bring forth the second course, and let your doubts vanish like smoke in the wind!" The chef brought out the next dish covered in a cloth with absolute certainty in her mind that this course would be the one to dazzle the assembled sultans of stupidity she was tasked with feeding this day, and at a nod from the King, whipped it off with an even more flourishy flourish and a hearty "BEHOLD!"
THE FEAST CONTINUES...SOONISH
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. And I remember suffering a lot in sonic origins story mode when I had to collect the emeralds with Tails 
