From the Angelique Luminarise website, as always - namely, here. Possibly the last short story, as we've gone through all the Guardians, unless they're doing another tale with everyone together or with the side characters to wrap things up.
It's time once again to step into the mind of Apple engineer Don Norman. The book that put him on the literary map, The Design of Everyday Things, argued that form should be function and function only; the book I recently read, 2003's Everyday Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, argues that - hey, did you know? - design can also aim to satisfy other needs, such as pure aesthetics or the consumer's desire to make a statement about themselves. That's the initial premise, anyway; later on, Norman rides a side tangent about how anthropomorphism can make machines more likable into an exploration of how AI must be furnished with emotions to improve their learning routines and, eventually, an argument on how we should and will embrace our eventual functional replacement by superior robot & AI. "Learn 2 code" for the 2000s. (I wish Norman had spent that time exploring why some products spark certain emotional reactions and going deeper on the promise of his book's subtitle. He's clearly capable of more extensive dissertations, but his treatment of his subjects in the two books of his I've read remains surface-level. There's no point in pulling in an Apple engineer for glossy overviews any Atlantic reporter can handle.)
Anyhow, Norman's wanderings once again bring him to the world of games, as he talks about the challenge of designing for disparate audiences:
Though Norman wouldn't know it, the experiment he proposes regarding promoting a gaming console as a "learning and educational tool for people of all ages" inevitably brings to mind the CD-I, which would have been released...in 1991, wow. (Norman's ideas for console marketing seem very much taken from the early CD-ROM period - his dreams of putting consoles in heavy-duty environments with fire and sparks and hot oily liquids and other things very much not suited to the long-term survival of delicate CPUs and mobos echo the dogged insistence of ad campaigns from the era in putting PCs in the kitchen, to emphasize how user-friendly PCs were now and how much they could add to your everyday life.) There are a number of obstacles to Norman's proposal of which he wouldn't be aware given his lack of familiarity with the market: the greater returns demanded by the increased cost of creating for more advanced platforms, which an edutainment title might not support; the relatively short window during which a given console is supported vs. the slow process of conceiving and designing an educational title (particularly for the smaller studios typically willing to produce edutainment, which typically aren't as experienced or well-oiled as more commercially-minded firms) and it gaining wide acceptance among educational institutions, plus the long length of time hardware tends to stay in an educational environment; the barrier controller operations present to some folks (Norman actually touches in this in a paragraph I cut); the fact that PCs are both better-suited to this work and more "acceptable" as a professional tool. I do agree, though, that leveraging the learning process inherent to games to teach actual marketable skills has been underutilized to this day, despite the usage of gamification in stuff like Duolingo - the only game that's enjoyed widespread commercial success and actually teaches a skill is Rocksmith.
Norman finds more success with his second major suggestion, that consoles be aesthetically tailored to a variety of audiences. This started with handhelds first, reaching as far back as the Play It Loud days of the Game Boy Color, but probably started taking off in earnest with the DS and the release of a baby pink gaming machine in the U.S. (A bit of a "the Frogurt is also cursed" development: we got a gaming machine in a color that in previous eras would be considered untouchably delicate and traditionally "feminine," but in a period where genderizing products had gotten so out of hand that an entire book was written about how kids started thinking anything that wasn't pink couldn't be for girls.) Designer handhelds are now big business in every market. While console designs have matured a bit since 2003, they still remain largely untailored...but customization has snuck in by way of controllers - the part of the system with which you spend the most time physically interacting, as opposed to the box that sits below the TV.
A bonus puzzle: in other discussion, Norman mentions that "[i]n The Medium of the Video Game, Mark Wolf identifies forty-two different categories" of video game:
What is "Utility"?
Image of Simon's asymmetrical shoulder armor not mine, obviously, as I was playing on my PSP.
I'm glad I finished it, and that's not something I would have said a couple stages back. It's still the least of the tellings of Simon's (first) quest outside of further obscurities like Haunted Castle and Vampire Killer, but the final stages do finally pack some of the Castlevania small touches and humor that tell of care - ridiculous full-body plate knights that come screeching onscreen like they're late for class on Saved by the Bell; a Frankenstein fight that you're actually supposed to skip entirely by fleeing to a nearby staircase and jumping over him when he dumbly passes beneath you; mandragora that burst from vials in background bookcases and waddle around all proud of themselves for escaping. Following on the mirror gallery and doll tower, I liked the macabre & surrealistic gallery of paintings lining the hallway leading to Death and the uniqueness of making the first part of the final stage an armory. Despite the hugely unbalanced difficulty, the title does feature a few smart gameplay decisions: some enemy setups designed around the deft usage of subweapons (this is probably the pocketwatch's star outing), and some smart combinations of enemies and environmental obstacles...but there are so many places where they just packed in one too many of those obstacles to be reasonable. There are also a couple inexcusable jumps in the final approach to Dracula's keep that are quite literally pixel-perfect, one foot hanging off and all, which represent the game's meanest, cheapest trick - and the issue that aesthetically, Chronicles is considerably less impressive than a launch game on a system from the previous generation. It's the most brutal stage-based Castlevania I've played, though that's greatly through cheapness and therefore not a compliment.
Ranking the "walk right until Dracula is dead" installments in order of descending difficulty, I'd have to go:
- Chronicles (Original Mode)
- IV
- III (toughest of the well-designed games; hard as nails but fair and extremely smart)
- the original
- Bloodlines
- Rondo
I should point out for fairness's sake that I haven't beaten the first Castlevania (just got to the last stage) and that I beat Rondo with Maria (the correct and actually fun way). Despite this, I'm pretty assured of those rankings. I know the placement of IV is unpopular, but the game has a lot of bullshit that's popularly overlooked because too many influential people played it in their childhoods and therefore have the bullshit muscle-memoried away. If I had to put Belmont's Revenge on the list (I got stuck at the Stage 2 boss in the first Castlevania Adventure and found nothing compelling me to go further), it'd probably go above Rondo - the game's a cakewalk until Drac's castle, but the ridiculous Dracula fight takes more time than the rest of the game combined, and that's with a walkthrough. The platform limitations make the Adventure games so different, though, that I don't think ranking them against the rest of the pack is relevant.
Curse of the Moon would be below everything. Curse 2 is a bad game that doesn't deserve to be in the company of the rest and needs to go sit in the corner and think about what it's done.
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