Not Part Of A Large Project Index

While I've ended up mostly focused on deep dives of individual games where I do at least a dozen posts covering a lot of stuff in detail, I do periodically do just a few posts -sometimes just one!- on a topic, and then the nature of the site's design means they become buried and almost unfindable after a few weeks.

So this index is for better tracking these miscellaneous posts, so it's easier for people who care to dig them up, in addition to having introduced a tag just for such posts.

This index itself was first started way after I'd made a fair few such posts, and I've not made a strong effort to preserve their original publication order here.

Four Things Shadow Tactics Hits Out Of The Park. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun isn't the kind of game that fits to my big series of posts approach, but it does several things very well that wouldn't come up organically in the rest of the posts I'm doing on it, so its intro post gets to be a meaty post in its own right!

Hayato. Your introductory character in Shadow Tactics, mostly representative, but with key oddities that can lead to having incorrect expectations regarding later parts of the game. As a character, I like him way more than I thought I would when first playing, but he's absolutely at the bottom of the list -the other characters are just too great.

Yuki. My favorite character in terms of writing, and plenty fun as a game piece.

Aiko. Aiko's mechanics are oppressively powerful, but her writing is unexpectedly good and fitting.

Mugen. Your Samurai-counter, and the character who most surprised me with how much I like their writing.

Takuma. An elder individual getting to be a useful game piece and an interesting character in their own right? In a video game? What a bizarre cryptid to suggest.

Blades of the Shogun Enemy Analysis. Mostly to cover Civilians, honestly.

Japanese Media 'Cheat Sheet'. I suspect this is a lot less useful a resource than it was when I posted it in the ancient misty past of 2017 (And the bit where I cover swearing is rapidly becoming just flat-out wrong as Japanese media increasingly directly uses foreign swears), but I still like it.

Devlearning: Introduction. This was meant to be part of a long series, but I've ended up touching on the topic implicitly with my major projects, making covering it explicitly as its own separate piece feel a bit pointless. Especially since the local evolution of game design, though I find it interesting, is less broadly useful than the principle of 'devs learn as they go'. (A fact I do think seems to go over a lot of player heads, mind) In any event, this starting point used walls in the Command & Conquer games as an example, stopping at Red Alert 2 because I hadn't played Red Alert 3 at the time.

Devlearning: Advance Wars COs. This is a more substantially interesting coverage of the devlearning concept, pulling out the implicit mental model for CO design of Advance Wars 1, noting how it didn't really work as the devs seem to have imagined it would, and pointing out how Advance Wars 2 changes very little of the explicit existing points, but radically overhauls the invisible mental model stuff into something that holds up better. And then natters on a bit about the later games without adding anything because of my obsession with 'completeness'.

Devlearning: DKC Series Secrets. A redux of a post where I went over the progression of secret design in the SNES Donkey Kong Country games. This time, I have more clarity on why I find this an interesting topic worth covering: it's a good lens for talking a bit about platformer design evolution.

Spelunky: Classic vs HD. As far as I'm aware, the most complete list of the differences between Spelunky Classic and Spelunky HD... well, of the differences that aren't about the HD version having new content. This is the redux version specifically, from when I was expecting my old posts to get auto-deleted within a couple of years.

Psychonauts in Review 1. I was going in expecting to really like this game, and was dismayed to find it's borderline-unplayable.

Psychonauts in Review 2: Narrative. Its plot isn't as bad as its gameplay, but yikes.

Brutal Legend: The Campaign. From the developers of Psychonauts, we get... an incomplete, rushed game that has a lot of fundamentally strange decisions that come together to make a depressingly miserable game. Alas.

Brutal Legend: Multiplayer Gameplay. If Tainted Coil was the foundation of all faction design... well, the RTS design of Brutal Legend would still be horribly flawed for so many reasons, but there might've been a decent enough core experience? Maybe?

Brutal Legend: The Aesthetic. Probably the saddest thing about Brutal Legend is that it really does look so cool, so striking, so interesting, in a way fantasy video games rarely even approach, but this incredible aesthetic is attached to this borderline-unplayable game.

Spec Ops: The Line. A game I only checked out because people widely insisted it's a deeper and more nuanced game than your typical shooter-with-plot, and was underwhelmed to find that, uh, no. It's not. Why do people say these things about it?...

Dialogue=/=Plot. In which I discuss the absolutely baffling tendency for people to speak as if the sole arbiter of Plot Content in video games is how much dialogue they have. I compare and contrast Doom, Doom 3, and DOOM 2016 as my examples.

The Bureau: Declassified. I'd honestly like to do a beefier post or series about The Bureau, but for the moment you have just this bit where I talk about it being better than I expected and being a shooter game that clearly prioritized gameplay over story, which I approve of.

Shadow Warrior Classic Redux. An old Doom-clone sort of FPS that's very cringe-y, but... surprisingly solid as far as raw gameplay?

Arelite Core. A JRPG sort of game that's flawed but I found interesting.

Arelite Core: Smithing. An aside talking about how smithing in Arelite Core is kind of a pointless system in execution.

Sniper: Art of Victory. The origin of the Sniper video game series, and a very unique experience. I wish the sequels had stuck closer to its 'sandbox stealth game' sort of approach...

Sniper: Ghost Warrior. Why on Earth would you look at Art of Victory's worst parts and decide the sequel should have even more of those awful parts?

Warhammer 40k: Regicide. I still think this was kind of neat. Unfortunately, it's become even more dead than it was when I first put up this post; a few years later there was a claim they were going to update the game again, but nothing came of it...

Azula: Sympathetic Monster?... A piece about Avatar: The Last Airbender's most compelling antagonist, discussing some of the (many) layers of wonkiness to how Season 3 and secondary material write her completely differently from Season 2.

Difficult Talk: Challenge vs Punishment. One of the things about video game discussion that drives me up the wall is how 'difficulty' tends to be spoken of as a singular metric, with no attempt made to break it down into component parts. This post was an attempt at addressing one of the more universal (and a bit abstract) examples of 'difficulty' being readily divided into distinct sub-elements that are very different from each other.

Difficulty, Yoshi's Island. This actually got posted before the prior, but I suspect reading them in this order is more useful. This post is about how Super Mario World: Yoshi's Island can be extremely demanding of a player's skills because it's extremely forgiving of mistakes: low punishment enabling high challenge.

What you are in the dark: Overlord edition. What would you do if people could tell you were being an awful, terrible person, but you were certain no negative consequences could befall you as a result of your bad behavior being seen?

Overlord 1. Gameplay-wise, Overlord looks like somebody thought Pikmin was awesome but had no understanding of how its design elements fit together. Narratively, it... somehow won awards for its writing? I have no idea why, given how disappointing its writing is. I'd also sort of intended to talk about Overlord 2, but found I didn't really have anything more substantial to say other than 'it's better in some ways, but still overall a disappointing experience'.

Radiant Dawn: Villain Failure. I just don't understand why major, easily-fixed writing problems like this so often make it into the final product in video games.

Chaos Reborn. It's so frustrating how badly the potential gets wasted by the insistence on inserting randomness into core features. This could've been a really good game!

Dawn of Sorrow: Mini-Analysis. The first time I played through Dawn of Sorrow, I thought it was overall an improvement over Aria of Sorrow aside the DS gimmicks it added. When I came back to it years later for a second go, I realized that what I had liked at first blush as 'fixes' to Aria of Sorrow problems actually made the design quite a bit worse!

Order of Ecclesia. Me musing about how part of what's great about Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is that its reworked mana management system does a lot to give everything the opportunity to be worthwhile and fun to use.

Half-Life. The game that put Valve 'on the map', which is a much-beloved classic, and is... strangely bad? It has some good points, but overall I'm pretty confused as to why this is a historic game that looms large in people's memories, rather than forgotten as Yet Another Highly Flawed FPS.

Sonic Adventure 1+2: Paradigm Shift. When your primary villain is hinged on being a pro-technology, anti-environmentalism fellow, what happens once you add in regular humans with modern technology and don't demonize them? Awkwardness, that's what.

Sonic and the Secret Rings. The first Sonic game where Sonic gets to be really fast without the game having to substantially take away player agency to make the high speed non-frustrating. It's sad that it's one of the lesser-known Sonic games.

Kong Family Values. It really is strangely unusual for a video game to have the conflict be personal and social rather than impersonal yet existentially threatening.

Eternal Darkness: The Movie The Game. Eternal Darkness remains, all the way into 2024, the only game I've seen where 'emulates Hollywood movies' is a compliment on competency rather than an extreme indictment.

Eternal Darkness: Spells. I still wonder why it seems to be so normal to think of magic in this game as supplementary rather than as centralizingly powerful.

Shadow of the Eternals: Concerns. Eternal Darkness' devs attempted to get funding to make a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness, and I'm sort of relieved they failed completely, because their attempts to build hype heavily suggested their plans were... not great.

Compassion, 'Rationality'. A rare Vigaroe post not about fiction, criticizing the strange tendency to treat people's approach to compassion as 'irrational' because of unmentioned assumptions of utilitarianism in assessing compassionate behavior.

Horror Game Design: Forewarning. Heads-up! There's a big, dangerous monster up ahead, so it's time for you to be terrified -wait, why are you pulling out your strongest weapon and grinning with eagerness to face your greatest challenge yet?

Ocarina of Time: Master Quest. Ocarina of Time's one Official Romhack, 'made harder' and just... generally a strange entry in the Zelda series. Also, 'made harder' is so misleading I'm willing to characterize it as a weird lie.

Massive. The hugest world! The largest levels! The greatest, most boring slog of your life! Give us 50$ and you too can waste hours of your life on digitally walking through vast amounts of nothing intermittently studded with Actual Content!

Homeworld: Plot. Homeworld was always most notable for being the first attempt at a Truly 3D Space RTS, but I've always found it odd how its plot mostly fits together in a pretty straightforwardly sensible way, but... seems to have not understood itself well enough to complete the throughline.

Missed Opportunities: FFX, Tidus and Yuna. I'd sort of had this idea that I'd do more examples of this type of 'missed opportunity' post, but it's just not ended up happening. In any event, this one is about how Tidus being a confident sportstar guy comfortable in the limelight would be so natural for him to help Yuna with her own stage fright type issues and all, bur a scene touching on this exact notion... doesn't make use of this at all? Bafflingly?

Dungeon Crawl: Mummy Strengths. A now extremely out-of-date summary of advantages Mummies had in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup back when I was pretty heavily into it, before the game's overall development direction shifted increasingly toward 'cut everything I like about the game and only some of the things I hate'.

Ico. Why do people love this game?!?

Min-Analysis: Experience in Might and Magic series. I like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 overall, but it and its predecessors have a really wonky approach to how experience points are decided.

Batman's Funhouse Mirrors: The Joker. I'd imagined I'd cover more of Batman's Rogues Gallery, but ended up only covering the Joker. I do think I make an okay point here, though.

Mary Sue: An Attempt at a Definition. 'Mary Sue' is a predominately fanfic-specific term for attempting to articulate a widely-disliked archetype people have trouble pinning down, because many of the details are honestly malleable. This is my attempt to provide a meaningful definition beyond 'I know it when I see it'.

PRT Power Classifications Analysis: Part 1. I've written a lot in regards to the webnovel Worm over the years, though very little of it on Vigaroe itself. This chunk is me approaching a specific piece of worldbuilding whose idea is sound but the execution is flawed: the in-universe system for classifying superpowers.

PRT Power Classifications Analysis: Part 2. In this second part, I lay out what I'd do to make the system more functional and fitting to the setting.

Super Meat Boy. A game I was curious about for years and went in expecting to like, and was dismayed to find is a poorly-designed mess that's literally physically painful to play for entirely gratuitous reasons.

Hyper Light Drifter. Another game I expected to like going in, and was disappointed to find is a poorly-designed mess. Also surprised to find that it's made by an animator and yet is awful at visual storytelling. It has a neat aesthetic, at least?

Tabris. Kaworu of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion anime is one of the better attempts I've seen at trying to do a realistically sensible 'do you kill one to save many?' hypothetical.

C&C Unit Missions: Devrules. Prior to playing the Red Alert 2 mod Mental Omega, I had foolishly taken it as a given that everyone who has ever played Command & Conquer games more than pretty casually had of course understood the intelligent and sensible design of unit missions in this series. Mental Omega caused me to realize that this is not so by virtue of violating the design rules carelessly, leading to this post.

Checkpointification and Storytelling. I'm really not fond of how shooter games have spent a long time leaning ever harder into checkpoint autosaves, as they're really deleterious design for a lot of reasons.

Coded Rules vs Implicit Rules. One of the things I've thought about a lot over the years is that a game's design is just as much, if not more so, the conventions devs hold themselves to, and how those connect to the explicit mechanics. In this post, I use the Banjo-Kazooie series as an example of this intersection.

Scriptscare. I have a pretty low opinion of games trying to scare the player with non-gameplay scripted moments.

The Cavalry arrives: Awesome? The first of three posts I ended up making about Mother 3, covering how a specific sequence in Mother 3 attempts to recreate the feel of a specific sequence in Earthbound/Mother 2... and fails.

Story Design: Evidence vs Opinions. The second Mother 3 post, covering how its 'lead' character is somebody the story repeatedly has characters tell you is a crybaby and 'gentle', and how this is entirely unsupported by his actual depicted behavior.

Mother 3: Impressionism. Finally, I do an overview of Mother 3 as a story/experience. It's mostly 'I was disappointed and underwhelmed', honestly. There's a handful of bits I like, but overall I'm pretty confused as to why anyone is overwhelmingly positive on this game, let alone literally everyone who isn't me I've seen talk about it at all.

Just a Dream? Link's Awakening is such a great game all-around, but this post is focused on the unusual usage of the 'everything taking place in a dream' conceit, which is something I've seen people dismayed by, which I've always found strange, because the game uses it to good effect and very differently from how these dismayed people seem to think the game us using the concept.

The Darkness II Gameplay Part 1: Generalities. I actually did enjoy this game? But man does it have a lot of weird flaws that really hold it back. 

The Darkness II Gameplay Part 2: Specifics and Conclusion. I really do want to like this game, honestly, but its campaign is so poorly-designed in so many way.

The Darkness II: Story. There's so much done poorly here, and it's honestly even more mystifying than the gameplay problems. Seriously, how did they manage to make the elemental evil bent on humanity's extinction feel like merely a mildly obnoxious boss?!

The Darkness II: Vendettas. The multiplayer-focused side mode to The Darkness II, it's... good? Wait, what do you mean the side mode is way better than the main campaign?? Still got flaws I wish were ironed out (More obvious bugs than the main campaign, for one), but man, if the main campaign was at this level I'd have very much liked it!

The Darkness: The Line Blurs. I experienced the first The Darkness game after its sequel, so I covered it second. It was pretty fascinating. I'm not sure I'd say The Darkness is the better game, but it's certainly the more interesting game, and more of a 'games as art' sort of game. In a positive way, I mean.

Impossible Creatures: Story. An RTS I have kind of fond memories of from my first time playing years ago, which I revisited and was a bit dismayed has really bizarre narrative problems.

Impossible Creatures: Campaign. I was similarly dismayed to discover the campaign missions aren't exactly great as a gameplay experience. No wonder I didn't complete the campaign the first time I had the game...

Impossible Creature: Customization Mechanics. This part I was not dismayed by: I remembered just fine the majority of the wonkiness with the game's customization system, and indeed Impossible Creatures has long been one of my mental go-to examples of how video game stat-customizing systems rarely work out the way the devs clearly imagined they would.

Impossible Creatures: General Gameplay. Impossible Creatures is interesting as a precursor to Dawn of War, introducing a bunch of concepts that Dawn of War returns to but makes more relevant and interesting. As a game on its own merits, it's... heavily flawed.

F.E.A.R 2. I don't actually recall why I started with the second game? It's not like this is the order I first experienced them in... In any event, this is mostly a complainathon of the sort I've come to feel is largely not good. To be fair, it was prompted pretty heavily by a well-known gamebreaking bug that never got fixed...

F.E.A.R. 2 Revisited. The complainathon continued once I saw the rest of the game via a Let's Play. If you want to read it, you can I guess, but neither of these is work I'm, like, proud of.

F.3.A.R. I'm still amazed years later at how good this game is. I should honestly at some point talk a bit more in depth about it; there's a lot of things it does well I didn't cover here at all.

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate. A very strange entry in the F.E.A.R. series, largely disconnected from what the series is about yet still giving the player slow-mo powers and all. I liked bits of it, but the overall whole doesn't fit together very well.

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point. The only entry in this Horror Game Series to remotely approach giving me nightmares! It's also my overall favorite rendition of Alma; I wish all the games ran Alma like Extraction Point does.

F.3.A.R. in the Details. F.3.A.R. is good enough I did end up talking more about it in the first place! In this particular case, I praise the game's good use of environmental storytelling with visual detailwork.

F.E.A.R. Itself. I did at least have a bit of a reason for saving the first game for last... so I can use the other entries as contrast points for explaining how X or Y could have been done in Z or K way to pull things together, that sort of thing. I do still want to see a spiritual successor to this game, something that leverages the basic gameplay framework but with a better understanding of how to fit the narrative/worldbuilding elements together with each other and with said gameplay. This game has tantalizing potential, but it doesn't truly realize it, and the sequels mostly either don't Get It themselves or are off doing very different things. (Very competent different things at times, particularly in F.3.A.R. But still)

Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars Plot. Another game I thought I'd talk about more than I ended up doing, Spellforce 2 is the sequel to the interesting-but-clunky Spellforce 1, and does a lot of streamlining that... takes away a lot of what's truly interesting about Spellforce 1. Though in this post I'm instead covering largely how the narrative of the first Spellforce 2 campaign is a pretty thin set of excuses to justify repeatedly switching factions, plus cover how problematic the switch from Rune Warriors to Shaikan is, both in terms of producing the need for all this narrative work and also because the Shaikan are just broadly not written well.

Spellforce 2: Scale Problems. I don't get why it's so common for video games to set themselves to be about armies and nations and so on, and then actually write themselves like the player team is five buddies running around confronting situations like five people could solve. I especially don't get why game companies getting larger seems to have made this more common. I'd sooner expect the reverse, of big companies struggling to write a small group of people doing small group of people things!

Days of Ruin: Will, Society, and Nihilism. Morality imposed from without, a cage of rules... or morality as an internal compass, a thing to desire in its own right.

Days of Ruin: Brenner, Duty, and Morals. The pull of duty, in conflict with the call of morality.

CO Conversion Part 1: Introduction, Orange Star. A for-fun game design project where I imagine how one might convert the Advance Wars through Dual Strike COs to the Days of Ruin framework, starting with Orange Star. I actually also explain some obscure Advance Wars mechanics in the process.

CO Conversion Part 2: Blue Moon, Green Earth, Yellow Comet. More of the prior project, covering the rest of the 'good guy' nations.

CO Conversion Part 3: Black Hole. The final main part of this project, covering our 'bad guy' COs.

CO Conversion Bonus: Days of Ruin COs. In which I go over the canon Days of Ruin COs, talking some about their design wonkiness and what I'd do to try to improve their design if I was in a position to do such a thing.