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Earthbound Battle Background JS is exactly what its name implies: the battle backgrounds from the SNES RPG Earthbound/Mother 2, rendered entirely in client-side JavaScript.

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There is no cost-effective way of polishing most goofy edge cases. In fact, it’s often harder than building the core system. If you’re focused on making a polished, bug-free game, the smart move is to remove them, or make them impossible to reproduce. Bethesda’s games don’t do this. They often do the absolute minimum needed to make these edge cases work, but they keep them in.

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Polish says you probably shouldn’t do a quest with a talking dog, because it’s going to look terrible with the lip sync system. Polish says you shouldn’t do a one-off Rube Goldberg trap using hundreds of physics objects in the game’s “creaky engine.” Polish says you probably shouldn’t put a “flying” spell that will kill the player 20 minutes into the game because it will playtest badly.

I simply don’t think it’s feasible to make a Bethesda game that’s polished in the same way other AAA games are.

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There is a historic awareness that western markets aren’t as exposed to the mass of anime and manga that heavily inform gaming content in Japan, and which comfortably embrace many seijin – or adult – subgenres that often seem weird beyond the domestic market. Indeed, when we appraise games like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball in the west, we tend to do so beyond the context of Japan’s wider otaku culture.

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So Koei Tecmo’s decision not to publish in the west can be read as the continuation of a cultural understanding – that mainstream western audiences see games like DoA Xtreme in a very different way to domestic fans.

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The biggest thing I’ve probably learned in the last year has been self-restraint. There were many, *many* times that without it, I would have become consumed by the hell that was spinning around me, said “fuck it” and given up trying to keep my head down, work hard, and keep the promise I made a year ago – to “continue trying to break down barriers and disrupt the culture that enabled the abuse I’ve endured from the last two weeks from ever happening to anyone ever again”.

I’d like to think I’ve kept that promise.

She has. Founding and running Crash Override Network would have been a hell of an accomplishment during the best of times; that she did it with an internet hate mob breathing down her neck is frankly astonishing. I don’t know anyone who’s even half as committed to improving the culture surrounding video games as Zoe is.

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The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

Great post. I’ve subconsciously noticed this phenomenon in myself for years but have never been able to put it into words.

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