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| Terranigma was released on the SNES in 1996 |
Remember all those times we LP'd Terranigma? and how we only got like halfway through Chapter 2? The sequel is finally here! This time it's a podcast.
Also good news: this time there's serious video-game-related discussion. One of my personal favorite topics (after melee combat, of course!) is the interplay between narrative and form - i.e. how a game tells its story through gameplay, and how story colors, characterizes, and assists gameplay. As much hemming and hawing as there is about what constitutes a "video game" and when it's just "interactive art", for me the answer is quite simple. A video game should have a meaningful video* component, a meaningful game component, and continuous interplay between the two. A video game that can't do both well is only half a work, and a video game in which they don't work together is just as incomplete. A couple posts on the subject: on Cybernator, ActRaiser 2, and the Genesis Sonic trilogy.
*where "video" generalizes to mean presentation as a whole, i.e. video, audio, and script. It's not perfect but hey we call cinema "movies", "film", or "video", all terms that technically refer to imagery recording.
As usual for the Commune, we start at a core level to try to build things up. No one ever got an A on a paper for writing "Charles Dickens has a good story, and this is how". For Terranigma I thought it would be interesting to look at setting and its interplay with structure (the abstract gameplay manifestation of setting), since Terranigma is mostly an exploration (adventure) game and setting is one of the easier story elements to define and establish.
So sit down, grab a mug of graham crackers, and enjoy the Commune Podcast 26, starring Golem (Greg L.), Adrian, Wariofan63, and Myself. We really gotta work on the mixture of real names with handles though. Link:
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