acrosstherooftops

Posted by Marie Le Conte

https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/on-video-games-and-huh-bodily-fluids

Hello!

Hi! "Give me more love or more disdain / The torrid or the frozen zone / Bring equal ease unto my pain / The temperate affords me none / Either extreme of love or hate / Is sweeter than a calm estate". These are the first few lines from Mediocrity In Love Rejected by Thomas Carew which - yes, that's right - I just typed from memory. It's definitely missing some punctuation but you know, life is short. Also I got all the right words in the right order and I think that's what matters.

I've been thinking about that poem a lot recently, sadly not for any especially highbrow reasons, but specifically because I've been playing the new(ish) Prince of Persia on my Switch. I've been in a bit of a rut recently, gaming-wise, as you just can't replace the highs of Balatro that easily, and have kept spending money on games then feeling entirely unable to get into them.

PoP wouldn't usually be my jam but it was recommended to me by several people, so I bought it, and then I gave up on it, and here I am. Why did I give up on it? Thanks for asking! It's all about the poem. The new Prince of Persia is pretty fun, overall, but it's ruined by its save points. There just aren't enough of them. Well, or there are too many, depending on how you look at it. Again, that's why I kept thinking about Carew's verses.

The game is a metroidvania, meaning it encourages exploration, but it just won't allow you to save your progress anywhere near often enough. What this means in practice is that discovering a new bit of the world becomes needlessly stressful straight away, as all you can think about is "now where the hell is my save point, please don't let me die here then have to start again allllll the way back there".

It is, of course, possible that there are some freaks out there who enjoy this constant, low-level panic, but I am not one of them. I know this for a fact because it's why I gave up on Death's Door before I gave up on Prince of Persia. It's also why I pushed through while playing Hollow Knight, as it ultimately is a great game, but I wasn't really enjoying myself while doing so. The search for the little benches were, in my opinion, the worst thing about Hollow Knight.

This, then, is the one-woman campaign I have decided to launch. Dear video game companies: please either put more save points in your games or just put none at all, and start making roguelikes instead. Enough with this terrible middle–ground! Not having enough save points around means getting bored too quickly. More often than not, it involves having to fight the same stupid hallway enemies again, and again, and again, as they will always respawn near that one bit you will just keep ending up at.

Now maybe you will argue that that's the point, and players need to learn how to fight the various enemies by facing them whenever they die. To you I would say: boo. To you I would say: hiss. If I were one of those players, I would simply get good while playing the game. I would not need to respawn in the same distant spot every time. Well, or I would go for the exact opposite.

I love a roguelike video game with my life, because doing the same thing over and over again feels like someone reaching inside my skull and gently patting my brain. I love dying and having to start again at the very beginning. I love that it gives me a precisely defined Unit Of Game for me to play each time. The rules are clear! I enjoy it when I'm told exactly what to do!

What I can't abide is this dreadful grey area, this neither-here-nor–there. Either let me save whenever I want, and/or automatically save my progress very often, or don't save my progress at all. Give me more love or more disdain! Or, at the very least, make it very clear in the game's description that you will only let me save every ten to fifteen minutes, because it's a free world and you can make the games you want to make, but I should also be free to not buy them. Thank you. Farewell.

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https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/on-video-games-and-huh-bodily-fluids

Posted by Marie Le Conte

https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/european-dips-the-budapest-stag-report

Hi!

Hello! I really hope you enjoyed last week's piece on Hungary! I had such a good time writing it. I was so pleased when I saw people's nice comments about it. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Europe and meeting more people soon.

In the meantime - as I believe I explained when I first had the idea for this change in direction, going abroad for a few days to write a feature takes a fair bit more work than "having ideas while sitting on my couch or perhaps somewhere in my neighbourhood".

As a result, I said I'd start sending only three emails a month, instead of four, though with one of them being noticeably chunkier than the others, meaning that you wouldn't lose any words in the process.

This may well end up being what I do from next month on but, as it happens, I did have an idea for a fun little sketch to write as an aside from my main Budapest piece, and I have attached it below, as a nice bonus.

Hope you like it, and see you next week for a regular column!

A little sketch

Guilt doesn't often manifest itself physically, which is a relief. In Budapest, however, you can have a tough time trying to keep the consequences of your own actions at bay. I'd booked myself a cheap Airbnb around a week in advance, because the trip had been planned at the last minute and I'm not a millionaire. I knew I probably ought to have shelled out and got a hotel room instead, but I just couldn't be bothered feeling that virtuous.

I arrived on Wednesday evening and walked into the building of the studio I rented, walked up to the second floor, started looking for my door, and saw some words written in sharpie on one of the shared windows. I took a picture of them and planned to run them through Google Translate once lying on my bed, but could tell I probably wouldn't enjoy what I'd find.

Next to those few Hungarian words, which, it turns out, meant "SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT", was another message, helpfully written down in English. It read: "GO HOME". I tried, for the rest of the trip, to convince myself I wasn't the problem. I'm only one person! I've become so achingly polite that people struggle to believe I'm French! I'm here for work! Surely, I wasn't the villain.

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https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/european-dips-the-budapest-stag-report