You can never go back. (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, May 05, 2022, 18:26 (936 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

Perhaps what I say is a given. This is what you get when you play "phone tag" with any discernible gap in time. But in reading Cody's post, I find myself lamenting this. I wonder if, even if business wise such could never of been, that it would have been better if 343 acted as fateful steward as they have with Halo: The Master Chief Collection. A steward, instead of trying to recreate a king they never could really understand. Because... of the skill that made the original, and all the right mistakes that in all odds can not be reproduced.

343 needed to recreate the king in the same way Mario 64 recreated Mario. Halo was itself a massive industry defining disruption. In some ways, the only way to capture the feeling is to do that again, which means radically rethinking what Halo can be today.

Sonic Mania sits at around 90% on Metacritic, and while that's not necessarily the barometer for quality, it indicates enough reviewers have essentially labeled the game at just below Masterpiece level. I was a huge 2D Sonic fan. And yet, while playing it I felt nothing. Maybe not nothing, maybe ennui? This game was objectively better than the classics it was born from. More colors. More sprites. More effects. Bigger levels. More levels.

But that's not really enough. It's just more. But it's more of the same. It's the same fundamental experience I had in the 90s. I finished it once never getting the chaos emeralds, and haven't touched it since. Nothing about it inspired me because I've been there before.

Halo Infinite fared better, but the end result was pretty similar. And it sucks right? The folks behind each of those games put in tons of love and effort.

They say you're old when your memories outnumber your dreams. Halo Infinite definitely had some dreams. But it had oh so many more memories…