funfactorpod.com
Reviewing what rocked and what sucked about the classic video game magazines that inspired @tyschalter.com & @aidanis.fun to become professional journalists, authors, and critics.
https://www.funfactorpod.com
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Episode 59, AVERAGE GAMES VIII w/ Aidan (Fun Factor).
@aidanis.fun joins the show from @funfactorpod.com! We answer the evergreen question: What is an average (or below) game you love that doesn't get enough attention?
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but to @mtsw.bsky.social’s point, platforming went from basically the default for all console videogames to defunct in a generation and a half.
and not only was the early 3D landscape littered with terrible platformers, but failed “mascot characters” trying to bottle the mario/sonic lightning
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As it happened even Mario 64 didn't really save the platformer genre, which never regained its dominance. Most of the classic platformer games from that era that people remember today (like Castlevania: SotN) are still traditional 2D platformers. Maybe they should've stuck with Jumping Flash?
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Jumping Flash kinda sucks. But it was an object of intense fascination among game critics in 1995/96 because, pre-Mario 64, no one knew how the platformer genre could possibly translate to full 3D and it seemed to offer a creative path forward. A false start that gaming didn't take.
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I think it's kind of hard if you weren't there to overstate how big the platformer genre was in the 16-bit era. Platformers were *the* dominant type of video game and it was totally unclear to people how that would translate to 3D on the PSX/Saturn/N64.
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Okay so first of all, THANK YOU
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*nods vigorously*
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...so It's something I [again, Ty] have become really sensitive to as I unpack and examine my, like, 30-year-old feelings on the topic.
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...so the "JRPG is a slur" discourse from a couple years ago really caught me by surprise.
However, looking back on some of these old magazines, sometimes the coverage of Japanese games was VERY MUCH otherizing/fetishizing/cringe/racist, even when talking about them positively...
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Oh for sure! It's just something I've come to be sensitive to because from my perspective as a white American teen in the 90s, I just really loved the vibrant, colorful, character- and story-driven JRPGs and wanted all of them over here.
I was out of the gamer culture in the mid-aughts...
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...might well have laid the groundwork for the racist backlash/curdling against them in the mid-to-late aughts.
(DISCLAIMER: these posts are by Ty, the one of us who did NOT write a whole real book about the topic)
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Woo-hoo!! So glad you dug it, Jason!
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😁 Thanks!! Hope you love it!
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We might have some relevant material…
bsky.app/profile/funf...
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Hey, thanks so much! So glad you're digging it (and yes: DOOM was absolutely *foundational* to the industry)
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siiiiiiiiigh
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…notably not mentioned in the interview, and something i didn’t find out for like a decade, is that it’s a breathtakingly racist film about how awesome the ku klux klan is
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Oooooooh.
And as discussed in our latest episode, the VFX house that worked on that movie also collab’d with Capcom in porting RE2 to the N64!