A little while ago I started writing some things for the SCP Foundation, a fun little wiki with a creepypasta origin that now contains a truly kick-ass community of writers with an aim towards honest, strong criticism that makes the articles as strong as they can be.
Articles on the site revolve around the fictional “Foundation”, an organization dedicated to containing and hiding information about anomalous objects or activities. They’re short pieces of fiction, essentially, using the trappings of clinical documentation to tell some weird, compelling, unique genre tales.
You can find the ones I’ve written so far (three, at present) at my spankin’-new author’s page HERE. For reference, they include:
will be posting a little later this week with some other writing-related news that, as with this publication, is hopelessly out of date. let this serve as a record of things that happened a while ago but, in the grand scheme of the universe, may as well happened ten microseconds ago
it’s truly insane that I’ve had my work appearing across such a variety of spaces, online and print, over the past few months. seeing my name in print in such a beautiful collection, alongside such other talents and distinguished bylines, is an honor beyond comprehension.
thanks to anyone who would have the inclination to read, to enjoy, to support.
i’ve had a couple poems published in the past couple of weeks, which is an incredible wonder and honor and all that good stuff. nice little adrenaline shots of validation, they are
I just pulled my old game boy advance out of cold storage and played metroid fusion, a game I have not seen or played in 15 years or so oh God time is a flat circle
anyway, here are some random assorted thoughts on this little gem:
-it’s so short! my play-through included many, many stupid deaths because I’ve grown bad and lazy at video games, and I still beat it in under 4 hours.
-what’s interesting about the GBA 2D metroid games, in contrast to their three SNES/NES/GB counterparts, is that they have all the mechanics and visual flair of the series but almost none of its soul.
this isn’t really a bad thing — they have a different soul, really, which is that of narratively-driven linear video gaming with gated progress and clear interstitial objectives. exploration is limited to finding extra trinkets and not a fundamental aspect of game play or storytelling.
it’s more notable with Zero Mission, which took a game that was explicitly “you have no idea where you are or what you are doing. begin!” and turned it into a much more straightforward follow-the-objective platformer.
this is sort of the progression zelda was on, too, before BOTW pushed back hard on that trend.
-lord do I not care for the Navigation Room exposition; I’m not even talking about the spell-out-your-objective stuff, it’s the Adam storyline that grates on me. it doesn’t take up too much space, ultimately, but it’s still far more than I needed for something that never meant anything emotionally or narratively
this guy still sucks and I hate him and he’s gross
-switching to clear positives: the visual detail in this game is so awesome; it’s one of the real shining stars of the game boy advance hardware. full of visual storytelling and 16-bit sci-fi atmosphere
-cool little world-building detail: the ice X blobs attack you aggressively when you’re weak to them, and continue doing so for the first few rooms after you get the varia suit, but after a little while they start to realize they’re not hurting you anymore and then they try to run away after that.
-the whole “samus has been infected by X” thing is silly from a narrative standpoint but brilliant for the gameplay. it’s totally unnecessary to explain why/how power ups exist in a game like this, but having those power-ups simultaneously be living things that are your enemy but which you can absorb to heal yourself is a really cool dynamic
it adds a little dynamism to every room how they can re-form into enemies if you don’t absorb them quickly enough. the game even toys with this mechanic later on, though not as much as it probably could have
-so much of this game is just tweaking super metroid, which is both clever and a little disappointing. so many of the enemies are retreads, which is both sensible from the narrative premise and also means most of the climactic battles are hollow echoes of a much more intriguing game
like, the SA-X doing the metroid hatchling self-sacrifice thing is completely inexplicable except as a callback; ridley’s appearance is fun but gratuitous; for a game that starts by blowing up samus’s suit they really do not stray at all from the formula in terms of weaponry.
all that said, it’s a very polished take on the formula, and I still love it. it’s honestly hard to play the SNES game after all the refinement that’s come in its wake.
-the X themselves are a moderately interesting, if fairly tried-and-true, sci-fi villain. sort of a borg-flubber merger.
-it is so bizarre and Japanese-family-friendly that the game’s progressive reward system for beating it quickly, with all the stuff, etc. is to give you pictures of Samus that range from “person wearing a full-body spacesuit” to “mildest cheesecake”, but I guess this is pre-Zero Suit we’re talking about