We had a few kids this year, one of whom was an especially convincing Indiana Jones, but at the end of the night we were left with a couple saddlebags of high-end product: one plump with tangy gummies, the other a medley of fun-size favorites. We were willing to part with more, had there been more larvae; they need sugar in order to molt. But this is not a universally distributed ethos.
Here in the word mines, I chip phonemes from the human corpus. But I also play videogames on occasion:
When I first saw a Queen's Domain demo during a "fest" I was like, hold up. Are these dorks making a King's Field ref? Even referencing it myself indicates that I am a man of a certain age: we imported King's Field from Japan in ninety-four, utilizing the potent Toothpick Trick to play games from the mysterious East. I'm almost certain I mentioned it before, so tickled was I. But it's out! You can buy it, and it's out.
Dark Souls, a game Sony felt was so Japanese they didn't even bother to publish it outside of Japan, has its roots in King's Field. The thing I would compare it the most to hardly even makes sense to mention, that is to say text adventures; we like to dress our text adventures up in a variety of ways now but Emily Short is almost certainly the modern master of a more traditional form. Ultimately, when I say it feels like a text adventure, it's because exploration in a text adventure is something you feel in the hairs of your neck.
I knew a kid about half-way down the hill when I was younger, this would have been out Sumner way, and this was when computers were sorta nasty ugly things that needed to be hidden away. More than forty years ago I was playing Zork in a tiny room off the garage in the dark, and it's simply the case that a 5090 could not produce the kind of visuals that green text drew from my brain. Because our minds are the only GPUs anyone can afford anymore, the only ones we're allowed, I'd been thinking of it anyway.
I only ever played the first King's Field, but when I look at screens of it I think, no, this could not possibly be how it looked. It absolutely did. But in the same way that Turok's fog could, at its best, imply space, these dark corridors and massive beasts suggested checks that the PlayStation's processor could never cash. Here's an example. I'm putting this picture in here primarily for Gabe's use, but you will see it also, just because of how the Internet works:
We used to call him "Big Head Todd," another ancient reference. I feel like I've aged two hundred years or so since the beginning of this post.
So the maximal case is text becoming mental images, but the lo-fi, arguably retro texture swim of a PS1 experiment by FromSoftware leaves so much room for you to fill in those cracks. Queen's Domain operates in this space, somehow more than thirty years later, and it's mean as fuck but I can't stop going back in.
(CW)TB out.
