“Pets do what Nintendon’t”
Before we get into this week’s full content, I want to add a little addendum to last week’s monster of a blog, “Train Derailments and Chemical Spills.” See, I’ve been thinking about that post for a couple days since it launched, and I wasn’t really happy with how it ended, especially as more comes out about the East Palestine stuff and the federal EPA takes over. I think I figured out why, and that’s because I didn’t actually make the point I was trying to make. Or at the very least, I only ever hinted at the edges and danced around the deeper meaning of things and what I wanted you all to get out of it. And believe me, if I want you to hear something on this blog, you’re gonna hear it loud and fucking clear.
Here’s the big takeaway about the whole trainwreck that I want to get across; if people get upset about this spill, then why not get upset about everything else? What’s the difference that makes this eligible for a media circus but something like Line 3, which has infinitely more damage potential, doesn’t? Why are these same people not up in arms about ongoing, large-scale problems (deforestation, microplastics, tar sands, groundwater loss, not to mention, uh, burning fossil fuels, etc.) that are constant and produce effects a million times more potent than one singular spill? Maybe it’s a matter of how humans aren’t made to grasp scale. Maybe it’s a side effect of doom-scrolling and the news media cycle. Maybe it’s a matter of concrete, easily-digestible TikTok videos of dead fish. I’m not even truly mad about the media circus aspect; I think the attention is, ultimately, a good thing, because it means that changes might get made, new safety regulations might be put in place, the administration can’t sweep it under the rug (as they, admittedly, have certainly done in the past), and people will get the justice they deserve (assuming conspiracies don’t spiral it out of control first).
I think the reason I’m so keen to kind-of-sort-of downplay this (although the number of fish seems to have climbed from 3,500 to 35,000, and the fact that the federal EPA is getting involved seems to signal the spill got farther than they thought before containment) isn’t that it doesn’t matter. This does matter, in a very real, tangible way. But the reasons it matters have more to do with the public perception that surrounds it as opposed to the likely outcomes, even in a worst-case scenario situation. That’s what bothers me. You’re mad about a drop in the bucket? How about getting mad about the bucket? About the faucet that’s been leaking drops for over two centuries? East Palestine is not some “end-game scenario,” it’s not a fluke, and it does not signal larger change, as much as I would like it to. It is just one more crime on a list of an incalculable number of crimes committed in the name of progress. This time, it happened in Ohio to a bunch of rural white people. Sometimes it happens in Flint, Michigan. Next time? Who knows. But the day-to-day crimes happening all over the rest of the world? We’ll save it for later.
Well, this is the curse and benefit of writing these posts in a single take; they’re easy to churn out every week, at variable lengths depending on what I’m feeling, but they don’t get edited or revised and sometimes I just get so exhausted that I leave things out. But now I’ve had some time away and I can say what I really want to say. In an ideal world, this would be a part of a weekly revision process, so I wouldn’t have to add this addendum a week later. But I don’t have that time and I’m not getting paid to do this, so, uh, suck an egg, I guess? I don’t know who, or what egg, and I don’t intend to stick around to find out. On to new content!
This week I want to explore something that’s existentially terrified me just as often as it’s made me laugh absolutely a worthy way to spend your time. Let’s talk about two video games that I’ve been playing recently because I ran out of time to talk about the other things I was planning on talking about. Just like old times, huh?
First up, on one far end of the gaming spectrum, is Super Auto Pets! This is a game on both mobile devices and PC (I play the Steam version because mobile games frighten me), and it is a textbook definition of a game you play to waste time between things. It’s short to pick up, easy to learn, matches are quick, you can jump in and out as much as you want, and it’s a blast to play. It’s like it was designed to be played at the end of a long work day as you’re switching down work-brain to start up human-brain, or in between matches of more in-depth multiplayer games, or while waiting for that last load of laundry to finish. Literally anyone can learn to play this game with a little patience. No quick reflexes required. Controls are literally click and drag, and you don’t even need to drag if you don’t want to. And yet, despite all of this, it has hooked me (and Cheyenne) completely.
Super Auto Pets is, on its surface, a cute cartoon game about cute cartoon animals beating the ever-loving shit out of each other by gently tapping each other near the middle of the screen. It describes itself as a “chill auto battler,” and I, never having played any other auto battler, must assume that the “intense auto battler” genre sees you spinning plates on sticks and humming the Star-Spangled Banner backward while building your army. Because “chill” is a deceptive word here. This game is chill, yes. There are no time limits. You don’t need to make laser-fast decisions. You click on animals and put them in your team. But it is surprisingly deep, despite all of that, and can get impressively tense. So tense that I’ve found myself holding my breath to see how a battle plays out and cursing at a smug-ass salamander because that motherfucker had one health left and I was one trophy away from winning, damn it.
The actual gameplay loop of the game is simple, straightforward, and almost like playing cards more than it is auto battling, whatever the hell that means. Your goal is to build a team of five animals that can beat other people’s teams of five animals. Your goal is to win ten turns, and every turn, you get ten coins to buy animals to build out the best team you can. This might mean buying something simple, like a pig, which has high attack and low health (editor’s note; real pigs are not this easy to take down). Or you might buy a rooster, which spawns baby chicks when it dies. Those baby chicks might as well be wielding grenade launchers, though, that shit is powerful. You can also add food to your pets, like meat that makes animals hit harder or vegetables that give them extra health every turn. Then, after you’ve worked on building your team, these pets fight another team automatically (oooooooohhhhh, that’s what auto battler means) at the end of every turn, and you either win, lose, or draw, depending on who has animals left standing. It’s kind of a zero-sum game, really, and speaks to the ways that capitalism pits us against each other in a never-ending display of bloodshed where the only prize to the winner is a fancier hat. When you think about it that way, it makes sense. Except here, we are turtles and ostriches. What I wouldn’t give to be an ostrich.
To draw a further comparison to cards, think of something like Texas Hold ‘Em, especially playing against just the house, where you’re trying to build the best hand with limited resources while betting that your opponents won’t have as good of a hand. Of course in this scenario, there are about twenty suits and the face cards each have a special power like throwing rocks at the dealer or stealing from the pot and shitting on the carpet. The game comes with the variety and depth of strategy necessary to make long-term battles exciting and tense, while also being short enough in time and commitment to be easy to say “just one more game.” This is especially true because the pets that you (and, therefore, your opponent) have access to increase in power and ability as the game goes on. If you fail early, you want to keep on trying to get to the higher rounds. Because by the time you hit turn twelve or thirteen, you’re biting your nails and hoping that your pineapple-powered woodpecker can do enough damage to scrape your team by before someone gets in a level 3 hippo. I really, really don’t like those hippos, but I do like gambling, so this scratches a really convenient mixed-metaphor itch.
The best part about it is that it’s free! And also free of those manipulative psychological tactics that certain other games use to pry exorbitant amounts of money from your sad, unmoisturized hands. Sure, you can spend five or ten extra bucks in Semi-Automatic Pets to unlock some new pets, but you buy like fifty of them at a time, and if you pay once, you’ve got them forever. And there’s a weekly pet rotation you get to try out new pets and strategies every week, even if you haven’t paid for them. I really, really like this game as a quick way to relax or zone out for like ten minutes. Give it a try! Cheyenne did, and now she can’t stop playing it, so I think that’s a good thing!
On the opposite end of the gaming spectrum of things I’ve been playing this week, we have Metroid Prime Remastered, something that came totally out of the blue and showed a surprising level of both nonchalance and dedication that I consider uncharacteristic of modern Nintendo. I’ve written about Metroid a couple of times before, mostly by using words like “Metroidvania” or “The Prometheus of the Series” that might as well be complete gibberish to the primary audience of my parents, grandparents, and Cheyenne’s dad’s friend Matt. But I will try to avoid that this time, even though I want to try and emphasize something that is true of both 2021’s (how has it been that long it feels like yesterday) Metroid Dread and this year’s Metroid Prime Remastered. The circumstances surrounding the release of these games is not usual for modern Nintendo. Showing care to a franchise that was long considered dead? Surprise announcements for games that will release in the same year (or in Prime’s case, on the very same day?)? Making a remastered game that looks like they actually remastered it, and then turning around and selling it for only $40 instead of the usual $60? Metroid has been living large lately, in all the right ways. The same can’t be said for most of the rest of Nintendo’s recent track record. Looking at you, Skyward Sword.
Metroid Prime Remastered is a remake of the seminal 2002 GameCube game, which marked our favorite basketball-shoulder-suited spacefaring hero Samus “My name’s not Metroid” Aran’s first time in 3D. And boy, what a remake it is. I’ve never played the original since I was *checks calendar* four when it first came out and *cries* ten when it came out as part of a trilogy pack on the Wii. But it’s been on my list to get around to *cough* legally purchasing and definitely not emulating *cough* for a while now, because several YouTubers and games journalists I respect consider it one of their all-time favorite games. And having now played and (almost) beaten the remastered version, I can absolutely see why.
Like all* Metroid games, Metroid Patrón sees you exploring a strange alien planet, starting from scared and powerless in the last wilds of an uncharted world, but slowly building up power and confidence as you shoot-and-puzzle your way through unlocking new doors, finding new weapons and powers, and becoming familiar with the layout of the world and the secrets it holds. Metroid games, and Metroidvania games in general, all tend to excel in feelings of exploration, of building up your power, and in Metroid’s case especially, of isolation. Metroid Prime is very, very good at all of this. Except, ironically, maybe the last one.
I really, really like Metroid Prime. I’ve been playing it off and on since it came out, when I bought it almost instantly. It does not disappoint. It is beautiful, challenging, fun, and exciting, and I can absolutely respect why people consider it one of their favorite games. There’s something so cathartic about unraveling a huge hazy world and becoming so familiar with it that places that once intimidated you become a breeze by the end. It’s an excellent example of making the metroidvania formula work in 3D, a kind of game of which there are criminally few. And yet, something about it doesn’t quite click with me. Not in like a “I don’t like this” or “this aged poorly” kind of way, because frankly, the game has aged like fine wine. Very little about it (with the notable exception of the Chozo artifacts, but even that feels minor) feels dated, or like antiquarian game design. Sure, maybe it’s a little linear, but it’s also… kind of not? Sure, maybe there’s a difficulty spike in the last quarter that sure caught me off-guard, but it wasn’t too bad. I think it’s less about what the game does wrong, and more about what everything else in the twenty years since has done right.
People talk about how isolating and atmospheric Metrone Prone makes them feel. Sure, I get it. Alone on an alien planet with nothing but hostile life-forms. It’s a hell of a lot more atmospheric than Metroid Dread, that’s for sure, but I think that, at the same time, the remastering process has smoothed over some of what made the original game so atmospheric? Again, I haven’t played the original, so I can’t say for sure, but even looking at that graphics comparison up above, the remastered version has brighter colors, lighter hues to the sky, clearer dimensions. There’s something distinctly off-putting about grimy, dark, chunky games that are, deliberately or not, sometimes hard to distinguish. I find Twilight Princess very atmospheric despite having the color palette of a moldy sock. There’s a reason why every horror game today wants to emulate the PS1 graphics of Silent Hill. They’re inherently spooky. And maybe the remastering de-spookies Metroid Prime? I mean, that’s what happened with Majora’s Mask 3D, after all. But perhaps I’m just unfairly comparing it to everything that’s come since then.
See, when this game first came out in 2002, it blew people away, and for good reason. The game’s still got its chops today, even I can see that. But people were comparing this to stuff like, what, Grand Theft Auto? Resident Evil? The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind? All incredible games, all still regularly referenced by modern games today. But there was nothing else like Metroid Prime at the time, or before then, really. I mean, you’ve got the N64 greats, the Marios, the Legend of Zeldas, and Castlevania and Silent Hill on the PS1, and you’ve got Halo on the Xbox marrying sci-fi storytelling and first-person shooting a year before Metroid Prime releases. But Metroid Prime must have stood in a class of its own; it was something else. Something different. Something that took 3D puzzles from something like Tomb Raider and stuck it in the Quake engine. That’s cool. That’s really cool. And it clearly works. I mean, my favorite part of the game is the morph ball puzzles, easily the most unique aspect of the game. This game works.
But in the twenty years since then, the games that I grew up with (weird as it is to say), you’ve got the pressure-washed perfect platforming of Mario Galaxy, you’ve got the crunch, tactical shooting of Halo Reach Halo 3, you’ve got the unmatched 3D puzzles of Portal 1 and 2 (and Skyward Sword, but I have a complicated relationship with that game), you’ve got the emotional resonance of new forms of storytelling with walking sims like Dear Esther and Gone Home (and I will die on that hill), you’ve got the sci-fi grittiness of BioShock and Half-Life 2, the infinite possibility of something like Minecraft, the 2D metroidvanias of Hollow Knight and Steamworld Dig carrying the torch when Nintendo didn’t, and towering above everything else, standing on the shoulders of giants to become the shoulders of giants, you have Dark Souls. What might be one of the single greatest video games of all time (maybe the single greatest Metroidvania to boot), or at least spawned what I consider to be the perfect video game, Bloodborne. I love Bloodborne so much. I cannot explain it to you properly, and if I did, you’d have me committed. If the N64 and the GameCube saw the beginning of gaming’s creative expansion, the 2000’s and 2010’s exploded the possibility of what games could be. And nostalgia is a powerful tool; those games got to me first. Metroid Prime didn’t.
I’m not even trying to say that Dark Souls or Portal or Bioshock are better games that Metroid Prime. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. It’s inconsequential to the fact that I played those games first. And going to Metroid Prime feels like, somehow, stepping in a time capsule. Not a bad thing, but just… a thing. Maybe I can summarize this by saying that (barring anything huge in the last 10% of the game), Metroid Prime did little that was unexpected. Having played both the larger world of games to come after it, and several other Metroid games surrounding it (both released before and after), I’m surprised to find that Metroid Prime doesn’t surprise me more. It hits a lot of the beats I’ve come to expect from games; fire world, ice world, desert world, green world. Get more missiles, get more health. Beat badder, bigger enemies. Ridley is there. Ancient alien race locked away a great evil. Collect these twelve doodads, open the door, beat the boss, save the world. Honestly, the parts that made the game unique compared to other things in the genre are the beam combos (which I didn’t use), the visors (which hurt my eyes to use), and the morph ball puzzles (which were underused and they should make a whole game out of just that). Everything else feels predictable because, well, so much today is now based on tropes that were established when this game came out.
And maybe this says more about the industry as a whole than it does about Metroid Prime itself. Despite everyone’s constant (legitimate) gripes with the gaming industry, this is a good time to be alive for people who enjoy games. I love that Metroid Prime is back in full, beautiful color. But it doesn’t mean to me what it means to everyone else, I guess. But I digress, and this has turned into a much more in-depth analysis than my bed time was prepared for. Suffice it to say, I really, really like Metroid Prime. I respect it a lot. It is far superior to Metroid Dread in almost every way (except for the EMMI sequences. I like those a lot). And Metroid Dread is still great! I have enjoyed my time with Metroid Prime, and I’m glad I now get to play it while I wait for Metroid Prime 4 to come out in [REDACTED]. Ah, well. Riding high in April, delayed and restarted in May. That’s Nintendo.
Okay, that’s all the time I’ve got; I’ve got to get back to playing Metroid Prime Remastered on my Nintendo Switch. There’s no thread linking these games together, besides that they are good and I’ve been playing them and you should play them and you should especially play them instead of playing the stupid wizard TERF game. Rip in pepperonis my childhood, you will not be resurrected.
So that’s how I’ve been filling my video game time! Beating up animals and, uh, beating up alien animals, I guess? What games have you been playing, Cheyenne’s dad’s friend Matt? Specifically you. I’m asking you right now. Cheyenne better have an answer for me. I know you read this.
