Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
We are in a great age of video game art galleries. Shockingly, I’m not talking about the Nintendo Museum—obviously I’m thinking about it, and staring daggers at every bastard lucky enough to enter its halls—but making-of art galleries within games. As we see more and more remakes, remasters, and compilations, we’re seeing them provide examples of the art and assets that went into these games. They can include concept art of characters or environments, early stabs at the final product, unused music tracks, or designs that hint at wildly different plot points or gameplay tenets. Art galleries like the ones in the Castlevania collections or the new Paper Mario games allow us a glimpse, if a slight one, behind the scenes of games that enchanted us years and years ago. The featured image shows the designs behind characters from Chapter 6 of the original Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door; it was unearthed alongside several other pieces for the remake. Often these come in a dedicated collection, but you also have games like Metroid Prime Trilogy or Resident Evil Village that seed these in as rewards. If you gain points in the Resident Evil 4 remake, you could spent them on new gear, or you could spend them on images of monsters and characters. They’re immaterial, but their emotional value is real.
These things are not necessarily examples of pure transparency. They only show just a hint of the process of making these games, most don’t provide translations for the smaller pieces of text, and it’s only what the developers (or in the case of many of these compilations, the people curating the original works) want you to see. The ones that treat them as rewards are also using them to push you into the gameplay, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing and you can invariably find them online. I mean, the header’s picture came from the Mario Wiki, but I could’ve just snapped a picture of it from my own game and uploaded it here in barley any time. But for whatever limitations they make, it’s also exciting to get these behind-the-scenes looks. The Thousand-Year Door‘s cast have lived rent-free in my head for two decades, and it’s not like this provides some shocking glimpse into the life of the Ratooey businessman, the one with a chair fetish whose depressing life makes Goombella want to cry, but I feel I have an idea about how he and the other characters developed. There’s a power in that, which is why I love pouring over this art in releases like these. And a few games do actually provide more detail than just the asset itself, like the commentary in The Great Ace Attorney Collection.
…Maybe I should also just actually commit to that replay of Portal to check out the developers’ commentary. I never actually experienced that. Anyway, what’ve you been playing this week? For me, it’s Dead Space, A Link to the Past, and Balatro, but you know me. Always love to play more things. Even if all of those are replays.