-Author Commentary-

I really like this one. The Forever review is one of my favourites, I love that game and enjoyed getting to talk about it and give it the attention it deserves. It's a great game, so it makes me sad that it's doomed to be a permanently unfinished demo that barely anyone even knows exists. I'm pleased with the other reviews in here too, but they're not the main thing here I like. Usually, segments like Yap Trap or Console Chronicle are just small side things, but here, I really think they're the best part, particularly the Console Chronicle. That one was mainly motivated by talking to a certain friend who seemed to have this idea of early 3D games as having "aged poorly" and being "not fun to go back to" - and, would you look at that, they're a Nintendo fan. I've heard this kind of thing a few times, always from Nintendo fans who play the same five or six N64 games and nothing else, so I thought the new Console Chronicle segment type introduced in Issue #7 would be a perfect way to look at that era and make the case that no, "early 3D games" haven't aged poorly, the N64 just didn't have that many good games.

I liked how the Yap Trap about fighting games turned out as well, but there's something there I want to try and elaborate on. I mentioned that I think the often-repeated design mantra of "low skill floor, high skill ceiling" is a lie when it comes to fighting games, but I never quite explained what I meant. The problem there is simple: how do you define "skill floor"? Everyone will have a different answer, but if you look at the complaints of the casual players every modern fighting game tries so desperately to appeal to, it's clear their definition is something along the lines of "I should be able to go online after ten minutes of practice, press random buttons and win like in my Generic Shoot Game". This is absurd. Any fighting game with an adequately low skill floor to appeal to this type of person would necessarily lose a lot of its competitive depth, so while I acknowledge that some fighting games will be more complicated and hard to learn than others, I really don't think appealing to this sort of person is at all worth it, and I can't really see "lowering the skill floor" as an inherently good thing in any capacity.

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