the blog of a disabled mother who likes to game, and "get in the pit"
A lot can be said about The 3rd Birthday, but their reuse of previous Parasite Eve songs was (and is) absolutely on point. Some… things can be said about the story and how battles take place, but they absolutely stuck the landing on the music and I know I am far from the first person to point that out.
When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, I was initially excited to play the game.
However, that was short-lived when I found out that a certain part of it caused people to have seizures.
I am epileptic myself, although I retain awareness and consciousness during all of my seizures, and I have no involuntary motor movement. Even though I do not appear to be photosensitive, it wasn’t — and isn’t — a risk that I was (am) willing to take, especially if I had a seizure that… laid me out, so to speak. Even though that was almost immediately patched and friends of mine have told me that that section of the game is a lot “tamer”, I still haven’t played our copy of Cyberpunk 2077. I’m waiting for a lot more information to come out about it, especially that part of the game. My seizures feel like something is shocking my brain, like my brain is an egg thrown onto hot concrete, immediately cooking. If I can avoid them, that would just be awesome.
That also reminds me that I would like to write a post all about my epilepsy since why not?
In Japan, this game is known as Clock Tower: Ghost Head, for clarification.
A lot of people didn’t like this game because of the fact that it is a point-and-click survival horror game, but it was one of my first introductions to the survival horror genre as a child, and I managed to play it all the way through to the A ending (which is the best ending that you can get in the game, meaning that you played it all the way through). The one thing that stood out to me, and made the entire game worth it, was managing to get that far and realizing that you were actually playing the role of the antagonist without becoming aware until the very end. Without ever becoming aware until events at the end of the game forced her to become aware, Alyssa Hale was one of two “cursed babies” born to the Maxwell line, and she and her sibling were initially buried with the intent to kill them and stop the curse until who for all intents and purposes became her father, Allen, digs the children up and realizes that one of them is still alive. He raises Alyssa as his daughter. Alyssa, having the split personality of Mr. Bates — who could have been the soul of the baby who didn’t make it transplanted into her body, or just a side effect of the “Maxwell curse”, even though this is never explained — is the antagonist of the game, and although she is one of very few survivors at the end since her “father figure” shoots her biological father and demands that she escape the building that they are in before it explodes, she still manages to survive in spite of everything that happened.
One of the other redeeming things is the stellar soundtrack, especially what rolls if you get the A ending.
If you’re willing to put up with an old game that has some peculiar… semantics about it, especially the whole point-and-click bit, the fact that it strayed so far from the usual survival horror narrative actually does make it a good game. You just have to be willing to put up with the fact that for today’s graphics, it is an old game.