"The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum"

A relatively long post on John Scalzi's Whatever.

"Earthbound, Tough Love, and You"

Watch on YouTube

"Earthbound might be the most personal game from the 16-bit era. It's a game that feel like its aware of you, testing you - you specifically - for the trials ahead."

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(Spoilers ahead.)

Right from the start of the video (and peppered throughout the rest of it, too), I learned a lot more about Shigesato Itoi than I ever knew before. Granted, I didn't really know much about him before now other than that he was the Earthbound guy (that and the whole "he walked into the wrong theater as a child and was traumatized by what he saw, which resulted in Giygas" thing).

And yeah, Phil Sandhop (a guy I knew IRL and who worked on the original Mother English prototype that was later released as Earthbound Beginnings, as I've mentioned several times in the past) agreed that the whole "This game stinks" marketing campaign was pretty silly and kind of counterproductive as far as making people want to buy the game. I mean, I bought it, on the day it was released, but that was because I was told about it in a response to a letter I sent to Nintendo when I was somewhere in the 13-15 years old range, as I've also mentioned before. I didn't even see the dumb ad campaign for it until after I had already finished the game itself.

As for the rest, the video goes into a spoiler-filled essay about how Earthbound increasingly starts to crack the fourth wall until, at the end, it just shatters it completely. For me, to this day, it is still one of the most fascinating endings to a video game that I've ever seen. And, as I know I've said before, while Earthbound may not necessarily be the best game, or even just the best RPG, on the Super Nintendo[1], it was and still is absolutely my favorite. I'd say Earthbound is without a doubt in my top three best most favorite games of all time, along with Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey.

[1] - Chrono Trigger, for one, was probably a "better" game over all, and make no mistake about it, I, Kane Magus, love me some Chrono Trigger... but I still consider Earthbound to be above it on my "favorites of all time" list.

"Night in the Woods' Most Profound Question"

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"Night in the Woods discusses about some heavy topics: the reverberations of history, family legacy, religion, and mental health (to name a few).


"But the biggest, most profound question it asks isn't about any of its grand ideals; it's actually a rather simple one. It's a question that we all ask every day."

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After watching that last one, I went through i am a dot's video list to see if there were any recent ones that I'd missed (there are some that I did already watch, sometime last year, but just didn't make posts about them, for whatever reason), and I saw the above one about Night in the Woods, a game which I finally played through for a second time back in January. This second time, I did all the crimes with Gregg. (And the stuff I was complaining about in that post there were still present the second time through, but it didn't bother me nearly as much this time.) I'd say Night in the Woods is another game that probably fits somewhere into my top 10 favorites of all time. (Which is kind of a thing that I've been thinking about since I played Outer Wilds the other day, i.e. what would my top 10 favs of all time list actually be?)

So, yeah, that's a pretty good video there about Night in the Woods. It does indeed contain "moderate spoilers," though, so if that's something that concerns you, I'd suggest playing the game first. And, more generally, I'd recommend playing the game, just in and of itself.

(EDIT) One very minor quibble with the video... it's not entirely true that nobody ever mentions or brings up Casey, but... yeah... it's mostly true, I guess. (/EDIT)