#it felt totally justified there & scared you with its power. Now some random boss will casually deal 200 and I'm like come on what is this

[kaasiand]

I grew up playing some metroidvania Flash games (the Robot Wants series in particular is what I remember most fondly) but had never played any Metroid game up until now, so I started playing the 2D Metroids last week when Zero Mission came out on NSO and I went through them all in release-ish order (ZM as my starting entry, then NES, GB, Super, Fusion, AM2R). I absolutely loved Zero Mission, Super and AM2R (I liked the others a bunch too; imo Fusion's linearity felt justified by the story progressing as you played and also just this raw feeling of constant tension) but then I really did not like the way Samus Returns felt 1-2 hours in (of all things they kept from the GB original it was the fucking screen crunch, and the circle pad just does NOT feel good for this; movement felt wayyy too sluggish in a way that feels typical of 2.5D games to me, and the shooting combat just got completely replaced by the melee counter which I did not like) so I just kinda skipped it and moved on to Dread (which I'm still playing now) and while I enjoy the way Samus's movement feels a lot more (minus the stupid trajectory-locked walljump from Fusion), I don't think I like the game's overall design all that much.

Literally every fucking attack deals 100 damage so you don't get any room for error whatsoever during boss fights, because you can only take like 5 hits before you die; tanking your way through damage always felt like a risk for higher rewards or a way to get something you weren't meant to get earlier on, but now the numbers feel cranked up wayyyyyy too high. You don't get to try and figure out a boss's attack patterns halfway during the fight and learn AS you fight, instead, you have to die a million times when you almost figure something out but failed the execution because every single action requires you to hold three buttons simultaneously and juggle these button combos around constantly. And the game throws a boss at you literally every 10-20 minutes and locks you down one-way paths every single time so the game barely even lets you explore, like, this is literally just a boss rush game at this point and half the bosses don't even reward you with anything. Super and ZM felt like they were actively INVITING me to break the game and go against the game's intentions and even made me wish to replay the games at some point in the future to take things on differently, and I totally understand what made those such genre-defining games. Dread just completely isn't what I was hoping it would be (also where the hell is this game's MUSIC)

[quoth-the-tired-writer]

As he took in the view from the twentieth floor, the lights went out all over the city...

Random first line generator

This is the first bit of writing practice I’m posting here! Yay! I used a random first line generator to do so, linked above. So here we go!  (This was totally made up on the spot, by the way, it isn’t part of a larger story or anything.) 

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     As he took in the view from the twentieth floor, the lights went out all over the city. The man, who was named William but had for the vast majority of his almost 30 years on this planet been called Will, blinked in surprise. His eyes never left the now unrecognizable scene before him, even as the voices of his coworkers sounded through the darkness. Cries of “Oh my god!” and “Is everyone okay?” rang out around him. Those cries and their accompanying worries astonished him. How was darkness surprising? It was and had always been our constant companion. Lurking, quite literally, in the shadows, it was always following us, always ahead of us. It was how we started every morning and ended every night. Darkness was the bookend of our existence. And what did that disembodied voice mean by “Is everyone okay?”? Why wouldn’t they be? For some, darkness represented the solace of terror, a place where bad things lived. For some, this was justified, as dark streets held urban horrors, bad people, bad circumstances. For others less so, but their fear was still understandable. Children cowering below covers and under pillows in their fear of the dark. It didn’t matter that the monsters weren’t real, it still felt like that. But as far as William knew, darkness itself had never harmed anyone. It was a passive companion, unfortunate in its easily exploitable nature, in the fact that our eyes rely on the presence of light to function, and thus, it’s harder to be seen in the dark. In the few moments before the emergency generators powered on, the darkness was total. William relished in it. The view from the twentieth floor of his office building that had become so mundane through its familiarity could now be seen through a new light, or a lack thereof. It sent shock waves of warmth through his heart, a burst of love for his city, for its people. He thought of the families and friends and roommates, and every small community, huddled together now, in the darkness. He thought of the couples and the people already asleep, who would only remember the blackout through the voices and memories of others, and possibly through the slightly sour taste of their milk the following morning. That thought amused him and he chuckled quietly to himself. William looked up at the moon and marveled in the power it held. Unshackled by the light of the city, the moon held much more sway. Its diffused, cool glow bounced off of rooftops and onto his desk. A reflection of the moon itself could be seen on his now black computer screen. Everything he could see, he owed to the moon. But then the generators turned on, closely followed by William and his coworkers’ computers and the ceiling lights above them. William could no longer see the moon in his computer screen and he lamented the end of its power over him. It had been comforting and freeing, to lose the responsibility of light. The moon would never match the brightness of electricity, but in those brief moments, that was okay. It was okay to live in darkness, to have one’s visibility be subject to the whims of outside forces. William had been okay with that. You wouldn’t notice that a lightbulb had gone out if you never turned on the lights. But once you did, it had to be replaced. Things could live in darkness, at the whim of nature, that couldn’t live in light, or at the whim of man. William turned to look at his coworkers and saw how willingly and quickly they returned to work. He stared at his screensaver. He had long felt like a burnt-out lightbulb himself, and thus sympathized with its plight. Such broken things, such useless things, necessitated removal. William was scared that his bosses or managers or supervisors would notice how burnt-out he was and that they would find it necessary to remove him. He sat for a few moments, hoping the generators would give out. He sat for five minutes, but they held. And so William typed in his password and reopened his tabs and, reluctantly, got back to work.