Foreword: This is the script for a video I wrote, recorded footage for, and then was unable to find time to edit around Fall 2024. The footage and other assets for this video have been sitting on my hard drive since then while I’m unable to work up the motivation and time to sift through and organize, edit, and finish this video. By my best estimate, this video would’ve been about an hour to an hour and a half long. Instead of letting the dozens of hours I spent working on this go to waste, I’ve decided to release the script for this video for others to read in their own time. I enjoy the writing process, but I cannot stand dealing with editing software and I dislike being in front of a camera, so maybe I should just write actual essays instead of making video essays. Either way, enjoy.

INTRODUCTION

Do you know what this is? It’s a digital photo frame; I have no idea how many people have these or have seen these before. It’s basically just a tiny computer playing a slideshow of whatever pictures are on the SD card that’s in the back of the frame. A relic of an era between the digital and the analog, before we had cloud storage and phones that are better at taking pictures than dedicated cameras. I found this old one while I was cleaning out the basement. After cleaning it up some, turns out it still works fine, and it has photos on it from a time when I couldn’t have been more than ten. While I was growing up, my mom liked to take pictures; she’d bring it with her whenever we did anything remotely interesting as a family. Whenever we took a trip anywhere, she’d have the camera out and ready. I know she treasured those pictures, but I never saw many of them. She always kept them on her phone, or her computer, and she’d spend time looking at them occasionally, showing me one or two. I can still remember seeing her smiling looking at them.

I was born in the era at the very end of the one hour photo print booth. As the digital age took hold it slowly strangled every single one of those storefronts out of existence. Nowadays, developing film is something that’s only done by specialist stores. Some of my friends do it themselves, actually, before getting the film scanned to digital files. Sure, you can still get your photos printed in a number of stores, but something about the analog process still fascinates me.

This little digital photo frame is nostalgic for me, though. The candid photos from here, my mom’s photography, knowing that she was telling my brother to hold still and for me to stop closing my eyes for the tenth time; I can see it all there, just behind the camera. Even the digital sensor struggling to deal with the light of the sun behind us, leaving me darker than I should be while the background is nothing but blown-out white. Something about it brings up a lot of emotions.

I tend to think of my photography as a creative process, rather than a documentary one. I take the occasional photo to remember something, but more often than not I forget to take a selfie, or even pictures of friends. I find myself more fascinated by the artistry, the infinitely different compositions and methods one can use, and how the differences between two peoples’ choices of subjects and framing can say a lot about who they are.

Still, there’s some truth in the saying “take a photo, it’ll last longer.” Our world and ourselves are constantly in flux, and sometimes things move by so fast that the photo one person takes might be the only one of that moment to exist, and the only way to remember.

Cameras are rarely the focus of a video game’s mechanics; it’s just not a subject that seems to grip a lot of people, maybe because cameras don’t lend themselves towards the violent sort of gameplay most video games go for. But I think that in itself makes it interesting to see what games do when they focus on something different as a part of their gameplay loop. I’m going to review and discuss the themes and similarities and differences between two games that seem to have nothing in common with each other, suggested by my friend as a topic for review.

FATAL FRAME

Fatal Frame is a series I had never played before starting work for this video. I had heard the name occasionally, but when I was young I absolutely refused to touch horror games. I didn’t want to be scared, or creeped out; I got nightmares playing games like Spyro the Dragon, the last thing I needed was something that would legitimately scare me. Not to mention the fact that my parents would never have bought me a game intended for more adult audiences at such a young age, nor did any of my friends play it; the closest any of them got was playing Amnesia: the Dark Descent.

And so, for years and years the only ideas I had of Fatal Frame were a brief descriptor of the gameplay and a couple of screenshots I had seen in old gaming magazines. Even while I was setting up to record gameplay for the first time, I felt that little bit of hesitation in the back of my mind; I still hate getting jumpscared. I was expecting jumpscares, railroaded gameplay tracks, terrible inventory management, long, frustrating puzzles and stressfully getting chased by something you have no way of dealing with, all the while wondering why you’re stuck in all of this in the first place.

Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a game released by Tecmo on July 31, 2008. It was not what I expected. Upon booting up the game, you’re met with a quiet, almost peaceful title screen. The only thing staring back at you is the moon, and the game title itself. Eerie ambient noise was met with shrill, out-of-tune piano notes as menu select noises. It feels almost comfortable.

Those of you who are familiar with the franchise may have noticed I skipped over something important: Fatal Frame 4 was never released outside of Japan on the Wii. While a European and American release were scheduled and the localizations for those regions were more or less complete, the plug was pulled by the publishers before the game could get out the door. Normally, this would keep the game off of peoples’ radars, and it certainly did for the majority of the audience, but not for dedicated fans. Fatal Frame had and has a cult following, especially following the PS2 releases, and by 2010 at the latest the game had been fully translated and a game patch created to play the full game in English, albeit with some minor graphical issues. Still, it was an impressive effort. I used this particular fan translation to play the game on my Wii via a patched backup copy, as unfortunately I can’t read Japanese.

CONTROLS

The game starts slow; you control Madoka Tsukimori, a girl trying to find her friend, Misaki Asou, in the middle of an abandoned mental hospital, on the now-desolate island where she grew up. She doesn’t really explain why she came back to the island, not concretely. She says she was pulled there by inexplicable forces after leaving the island 10 years prior, having been found kidnapped alongside Misaki and three other girls, in a cavern underneath the mental hospital she’s now exploring. You start to look around Misaki, waving your flashlight back and forth, fumbling around in the dark.

The Wii has a bad (and rightfully deserved) reputation for games that rely on the Wii’s motion controls as a gimmick. Part of this epidemic stems from the fact that the Wii Remote, even with the Nunchuk attached, simply doesn’t have as many buttons that are comfortable to reach for normal play when compared to a controller for a contemporary console. In an attempt to remedy this, developers used the Wii’s unrefined motion controls as a sort of extra button, or in worst-case scenarios, the majority of the control scheme for an otherwise fine game. Unfortunately, the original Wii Remote is not particularly good at being accurate. Outside of pointing around the screen or the twist of the Wii Remote in your hand, the only reliable input you can read from an original Wii Remote is violent, fast movement. Unfortunately, for most people who play video games, waving your controller around like it’s a cool stick you found in the woods isn’t particularly intuitive, and it certainly isn’t intuitive for people who don’t play video games. This led to a somewhat ridiculous number of video games that have a large animation of a Wii Remote being shaken violently shoved over a portion of the screen as a prompt. Fatal Frame 4 is, unfortunately, one of those games.

However, I think that as a whole, Fatal Frame 4 makes excellent use of the Wii Remote’s aforementioned capabilities of pointing and shaking. Shaking is relegated only to dodging ghosts and escaping their grasp, situations where precise aiming isn’t required anyway. The Wii Remote is pointed up and down to allow for looking in that direction and pointing the flashlight of the character you’re controlling in-game, something that feels intuitive. Additionally, the direction the character is facing is not wholly determined by the Wii Remote’s pointing; the character’s rotation is controlled by the analog stick on the Nunchuk, thankfully allowing for a fairly robust and frankly familiar system of using your left hand for movement and your right for fine pointing and camera control. The only real gripe I have with this control scheme is the twisting of the Wii Remote to dictate looking left and right rather than simply pointing at the screen, but even that’s adjusted to easily enough and works rather well, aside from causing some awkward hand poisitions while trying to get a good look at something occasionally.

As an entertaining note, I actually wasn’t aware of the lock-on button during my first play-through of the game on the Wii. I only noticed it while playing through the remaster of the game on the PC later on. That being said, please use the lock-on button as it makes the game much, much easier and less awkward than using solely the motion controls.

TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS

The game’s controls, while fairly competent, very quickly result in you realizing how extremely slow the game actually is. Your character moves at the speed of a leisurely stroll. There is a run button that brings you up to a brisk walk, however, for when you’re being chased by ghosts. The slow walking speed also makes your actions feel a bit more deliberate, and provides that feeling of powerlessness and dread that horror games love to push onto you. Opening doors takes an eternity, something that calls back to Resident Evil and older horror titles quite prominently. Even picking up items is a long animation, where you have to hold down a button for a full second or so to pick up an item. Of course, all of this extra time spent making your character move gives you time to look around and appreciate the environment. The pixelated, sometimes laggy environment. So what’s going on here?

The Wii inhabits a very strange time period, a transitional time between the era of dying analog and rising digital media. It was a time of compromise between what consumers and executives at companies wanted and what the developers knew the still-limited systems they were working with were capable of. The Wii itself only outputs a meager 480p signal, and that only over the less-common component cables; if you were using composite the Wii would only output 480i, the old interlaced format used for TVs for decades. The world of flatscreen LCD and plasma TVs with widescreen aspect ratios and sizes that dwarfed the then-considered-huge 32” CRT TVs was on the cusp of becoming a reality. They boasted lighter weights and higher resolutions, more detail and contrast than the massive boxes that had dominated living rooms since the middle of the previous century. But the Wii wasn’t interested in those; it had been designed for families to be used on old box TVs that were probably less than 30 inches across, that you sat on the floor to look at or squinted at from halfway across the room. Things didn’t have to look pixel-perfect; you just had to be able to tell what they were.

Fatal Frame 4’s textures are low-resolution, noticably so even on my 27” monitors while playing the game in 480p. You can see the little spots where individual pixels are noticable, but the textures are smoothed over well enough that it’s not a consistent concern. Maybe if I were playing on this tiny CRT I have I wouldn’t have noticed, or cared, due to the low level of detail. However, let’s take this in context: you’re exploring a grimy sanatorium that hasn’t been touched in ages. Windows have been left open for years; mold, decay, and flaking, cracking walls are present everywhere you look. While it may not have been the full intent of the developers, the slightly pixelated, jagged look of many of the textures and much of the art feels extremely appropriate for this setting, and I’d argue even adds to it some.

The Wii was also one of the last generations of consoles to rely almost solely on physical discs as the means of distributing games. This was a time just before everybody had access to consistent, broadband internet; before the era of day one patches and easy hotfixes. Everything that was and may ever be that game needed to exist on a single DVD, usually a single-layer disc that only held 4.7GB of data at most. Part of the reason for Fatal Frame 4’s slow movement and animations, I imagine, is because having to load data off of the disc would cause significant slowdown in-game, or possibly even crashes if the data couldn’t be loaded fast enough. Dropped frames in some areas while looking through opened doors at least partially confirms that hypothesis for me. That being said, the slow, methodical animations add so much to the tension and atmosphere generated in the game. I found myself enjoying just taking in the setting and noticing little details more often than not.

The focus on detail in the game, in fact, is fairly impressive; objects that have no purpose in the game’s progression can be examined, and often have some detailed text associated with them. There are a number of different posters, images, and wall textures that are used repeatedly, but in a way that makes them feel varied enough to feel unique well into the late game. Each room is uniquely arranged and has a purpose within the story, such that it feels like you’re really exploring a building and not simply a collection of randomized rooms. I could tell you what happened in which room after just a quick look around. Lighting plays a massive part in each room as well, with every room being gorgeous in its own macabre way. The downside to all of this detail, however, appears to be part of the reason why the game drops frames in several spots. The Wii was not known as a powerful console, even in its own time, and you can see this game pushing the limits of its processing power. Still, the overall framerate is perfectly acceptable.

The source of the flashlight in-game actually seems to originate from the camera’s position, rather than the player character’s, at least from what I observed; an incredibly missable detail. While it may not seem like a big difference, and something about it certainly doesn’t make much sense intuitively, it actually remedies some issues that could’ve been possible with controlling the character’s flashlight from a third-person, over-the-shoulder viewpoint, such as having the light generate weird shadows from the corner of objects you happen to be too close to. It certainly feels like a very intentional decision, like a lot of the others in the game. There are other examples of this sort of “cheating” to produce the desired effect, as well. Given the game is running on a Wii, I can guarantee the light shafts are a faked effect, though I can’t confirm that. And if you look down at your character’s feet while moving up a staircase, it seems like their feet may not be touching the actual stairs, and just moving up the surface like a ramp.

Still, I don’t think that these details detract from the game at all; if anything, they’re a perfect example of what can be “faked” and still made believable, when the focus isn’t on perfectly simulating real-life.

I think that this game is, ultimately, an impeccable example of what I generally find to be true; the limitations imposed on video game developers by the hardware they’re working on provide challenges that demand creative solutions that not only help shape the games they’re being implemented in, but enhance the ideas that are already there.

GAMEPLAY

The actual gameplay of Fatal Frame 4 is fairly standard for horror games: you spend your time exploring the sanatorium you’re stuck in, as well as the attached hospital. You search the environment for clues as to what happened as tense ambient sound follows you around, broken only by your footsteps and the swinging of doors. There are no pursuers chasing you throughout the whole of the game (with one exception), no timers you need to manage. A small radar indicates proximity and direction to items of interest in a room. Pointing your flashlight at them reveals them as interactable objects, and you slowly lean down and pick each one up. Objects of interest can be text dumps that describe something that happened in the past, consumable items such as film and health items, upgrade items for your Camera, equipment that unlocks new abilities, or items that help you progress. Occasionally, you reach down to grab and item and are instead grabbed by a ghostly hand, which mostly just serves to startle you; there’s no way to tell, to my knowledge, whether an item will be a ghost hand or not, which is one of the few criticisms I really have of the game.

You walk from room to room, finding hints as to what to do next and blocks of text on well-faded paper that detail the events that happened on the island as the game goes on. Just when you may start to feel lost and unsure where to look next, the game often has scripted events occur, usually in the form of NPC phantoms and spirits performing certain actions near you, or running off toward another area of interest. It’s certainly still the game leading you to where it wants you to go, but it feels much less aggressive and more interesting than the waypoint system adopted by many, many games around this time and going into the 2010s. Having the game environment itself show you where to go, rather than having a UI element show you what you’re supposed to do, allows the game more room to tell its story its own way. And the game does just that, occasionally giving the spirits some dialogue alongside their movements to contextualize their relationships to the player characters.

The overall gameplay, despite the tense atmosphere, ends up feeling rather relaxing and fascinating to me. The spaces you explore are desolate and eerie, but also beautiful in their own way. The slowness of the game also adds to this feeling of wanting to appreciate the environment around you, like I mentioned earlier. Beautiful blue moonlight pours through windows, revealing every crack in the plaster walls, the scratches in the timbers and the mildew on the rugs. A quiet space that’s been untouched by people for years, slowly giving way to the march of time while still showing the malice of its nature as a cruel mental hospital as the game goes on.

The game also encourages you to take your time in areas, both with its slow movement speed and with fairly generous items located around each room, which you have to reveal using the flashlight. However, as I’ll mention later, consumables often end up feeling like a waste compared to finding lenses or crystals, the game’s upgrade materials for your camera. Another thing that encourages the methodical approach to uncovering everything in a certain room is the presence of Hozuki dolls: little Japanese dolls that you can find hidden in odd corners of just about every room in the game. Anybody who is familiar with some of the other Fatal Frame games knows about these dolls, but to elaborate a little, the dolls are optional completion objectives which you can photograph. Photographing a certain number of Hozuki dolls unlocks new items for purchase in the shop on subsequent playthroughs of the game, and if you photograph a certain number of them, you receive an upgrade that makes a bell chime when one is near. While the bell can be rather frustrating if you’re having a hard time finding a particular doll, in general it’s extremely useful.

This material reward to check every room as thoroughly as you can pulls the game away from the tense atmosphere occasionally, but on the whole I think it encourages the player to take their time exploring each environment, going through the various text and audio drops located throughout the game, and lends itself to a more appreciative view of the work that goes on to make a game.

Exploration in the game also feels rewarding because of its effective use of space; every player character shares the same map to explore (with the exception of some late-game areas), composed of the hospital and attached sanatorium. This leads to a feeling not dissimmilar to a metroidvania, as you find yourself wandering into the same area from different angles, finding slightly different item placements and new ghosts. It’s refreshing to see a game make good use of its limited space, as I’ve mentioned before, as it’s something I find generally lacking with a lot of higher-budget releases today.

Occasionally, you’re forced to solve a puzzle or perform some other action to find the way forward. These are neither egregiously difficult nor particularly prevalent; there’s maybe four or five different activities that aren’t related to the core gameplay that you have to perform at one point or another, and in all honesty they were rather fun for me, rather than frustrating or obtuse. The puzzles run the gamut from figuring out how to complete a somewhat obscure mathematical sequence, to a sliding box puzzle (which may take a while if you’ve never solved one before), to simply inputting a code or playing a tune using the Wii’s motion controls. There’s nothing here that would stop people who are afraid of using their brain.

Of course, Fatal Frame’s name is derived from the gameplay system, as well. During your wandering through abandoned halls, the game will occasionally throw various angry ghosts at you; previous inhabitants of the island who have passed on for one reason or another, usually not peacefully. They’ll appear some ways away from you and approach slowly, ignoring walls and other obstacles, trying to latch onto you and attack you. Your defense for this is the Camera Obscura, a device designed to take pictures of supernatural entities using specially-developed film. The more detailed the picture is, the more damage is dealt to the ghost; this usually translates to using higher-quality film and waiting until the spirit moves closer to you, and the camera has a chance to lock onto the spirit and charge up. A picture that deals any appreciable damage will stun the ghost, stopping its advance and causing it to vanish and appear elsewhere, starting its advance again. The most effective way to deal damage is to wait for the eponymous Fatal Frame: the moment at which the ghost is directly next to you and starting to attack you. Capturing an image of the ghost at this point stuns it and causes it to recoil, allowing for a second, more powerful shot to be taken in addition to the first.

As you take images of ghosts, the Camera Obscura also builds up spirit power. This is a separate mechanic that allows you to use the special lenses for the Camera Obscura that you can pick up for each character along the way. Each lens can perform different actions, such as performing a more powerful shot, allowing you a longer time between chained shots for more points, or slowing down enemies, among other things.

I should also make a note here that Choshiro doesn’t use the Camera Obscura, but rather uses the Spirit Stone Flashlight; both function similarly, though the flashlight doesn’t require a lock-on to charge up, and has a slightly more aggressive playstyle. Otherwise, it’s very similar to playing with the Camera Obscura.

I don’t think I have anything more to add here talking about the combat systems than anybody else, admittedly; the game uses the tension of waiting for the perfect shot to keep the player on-edge, and make the payoff feel more rewarding.

Street, wildlife, and sports photography can cause a similar feeling, admittedly: you find yourself sitting and waiting often, you know the shot will come but you’re not sure when, or from exactly where. You just have to sit there and wait patiently, stay alert, and hope that you can find the photo you’re looking for.

LANTERNS, POINTS, AND THE SHOP

Another thing worth noting regarding the gameplay is the points system. You get points for taking pictures of any of the hostile ghosts or any of the wandering spirits that show you the way forward. Better pictures of hostile spirits earn more points as you’d expect. Admittedly, the points system took me off-guard at first; for a game that seemed so hellbent on capturing a certain aesthetic and mood, a points system feels like it almost detracts from that feeling of immersion and mood, and pulls the game back towards being more arcade-y.

On top of this, your points are used for more than just determining an arbitrary total score: the game introduces save points as large lanterns located at various locations throughout the game, consistent between characters as a part of the environment. Once you know where a lantern is, it’s easy to go save whenever you feel the need to. The lanterns also, inexplicably, double as shops at which to spend your points. The items you can buy with points are limited: health restoration items and film for your camera, of which higher qualities unlock as the story progresses. At first, the points you will be earning are fairly limited, and you’ll have to ration out what you want to buy from the store, what you think might be necessary, etc. Combined with the items you find by exploring areas extensively, you’ll have enough resources to get by without too much issue. However, by the mid-game you’ll find yourself inundated with points; by the time I had unlocked Type-63 film, I had so many points I bought 100 slides of them, and still had enough left over to do the same with the other character.

Yet again, I found myself questioning why a game that seems so heavily focused on its own aesthetic and theming felt the need to include a shop system that feels completely out of place and arcade-y. The game’s other upgrade systems for the Camera Obscura and Spirit Stone Flashlight rely on items you pick up in the game world, even if they also share that RPG-like upgrade system of requiring an arbitrary amount of items to upgrade things. It feels like a relic of video gaming, something someone felt the need to put into the game simply because “well, it’s a video game.” While I’m spending quite a bit of time discussing the subject here, I should point out that this, didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the game in any significant way. Just something I noted.

That being said, the shop does eventually get other items; after completing the game, an “Extras” menu opens up, allowing the purchasing of new and different camera shot modifiers and costumes and accessories for each of the characters. Completing the game more times and on harder difficulties that unlock as you complete previous ones, as well as completing various other tasks, will unlock more equipment and costumes in the shop, for prices that actually make use of the absurd amount of points you’ll get throughout the course of multiple runs. Funny enough, there’s also an item on the Extras menu that cannot be unlocked due to a glitch, though it doesn’t affect normal gameplay.

PHOTO ALBUMS

The lanterns also serve as points where you can review the photos you’ve taken with your Camera Obscura. The game saves the last 16 photos you’ve taken with the camera to an in-game camera roll; heavily compressed JPEG photos of the images you’ve taken recently are put on display, and can be transferred to photo albums, which are saved in the Wii’s memory for viewing later. This, I think, is another part of the game that caught me off-guard, but in a good way.

I’ve been taking photos for the better part of a year and a half now; I’m a digital photographer, as are most of the people taking photos nowadays. However, I still see some film photographers on YouTube, doing their thing, and I know someone who still does analog photography personally. I had generally avoided the hobby due to the hassle of getting film rolls developed nowadays, especially near me where there’s simply not a lot of places left with the capacity to develop film and I’d have to do it myself. But something recently made me think again as to why someone would want to deal with all of the hassle.

Fairly recently, I’ve started getting photos I’ve taken printed. It’s not some big operation; I mainly just do it for myself, so I have photos to hang up at work or show to friends occasionally. I’ve even started to get some printed out just to give to friends; it’s still pretty wild to me that someone has something I made hanging in a frame in their home. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but just getting to see my work physically in front of me, to know there’s a record of it that can be seen by anybody, and not just flashing lights on a screen, was incredibly satisfying. Even the act of looking at a photo while putting it in the album allowed for a moment of introspection that I hadn’t had while editing the photos or taking them. It brought up memories, both the ones I had while taking the photo and the ones I had intended the photo to invoke.

Saving the game and using the shop also shows you this “Photos” menu, and it’s shown at the end of every chapter. That was enough to remind me to stop and use it on occasion. I never even went back to look through photos I’d already taken, but just the act of knowing you can save these photo albums and look at them later, of taking time to create compilations of photos you’re proud of, heavily reminded me of making the album of photos from that trip. Getting to look back through photos I’d taken of specific ghosts throughout the game and remember their identity helped the game stick with me far more than it otherwise would have.

Rememberance and identity, huh? Let’s come back to that.

AESTHETICS

Fatal Frame’s visual style is immediately visible upon starting up the game. I actually had the video cables from my Wii plugged in wrong when I started playing, and ended up with a game that looked like it was produced to look almost sepia-toned, like many other games of the time period, but even so the game’s visual appeal stuck out to me. Earlier I mentioned how the game manages to really sell the feeling of an abandoned place, a place you’re not supposed to be in.

Cracked walls and worn wood adorn the aging building. Creaking doors, torn curtains fluttering in the breeze through broken glass and shutters blow open by storms long past. The carpet is bunched up, everything looks grungy and dirty, like it hasn’t been cleaned in a decade; something which is enhanced by the slightly chunky low-resolution textures used. Even when you get to go outside, or down into caves, the entire place feels bereft of life, cursed, and still. Even the game’s UI feels dated and aged; cameras several decades old and discolored, carved wood dot the interface. Dust covers everything, and even floats around in the corridors and rooms freely as you move around, stirring up stagnant air.

And yet, that very action of moving around also produces the brilliant beams of moonlight that filter through skylights and windows. Dotted among the ocean of dirty, stale rooms are tiny islands that bring the abandoned into a different light, often literally; I find my eye drawn to the moonbeams illuminating the foyer of the building, bringing a contrast and beauty to the scene that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Time and care went into making this place look like an abandoned place, somewhere people shouldn’t be; but time and care also went into making sure that every little piece of the game is a work of art in itself, the environments and aesthetics included.

While we tend to think of video games as a single piece of art, it’s important to remember that they’re really an amalgam, a combination of their parts, and each of those things is a piece of art unto itself. Someone may take weeks composing music or incorporating sound, agonizing over the layout of a room, how a texture looks, tweaking an animation to get it just right, or even working on the code of the game to make sure everything functions as they feel it should.

Translations themselves are also an art; the effort needed to take words and ideas in one language, which have a specific cultural and connotative as well as a denotative meaning, especially from a culture as insular and generally unfamiliar to western audiences as Japan, and attempt to put that into a form that both maintains the original narrative and is able to evoke similar emotions is difficult and highly subjective. I’m personally of the opinion that it’s very rare for one translation to be objectively “better” than another. Rather, I think that each translation is generally valid in its own right, whether it was officially intended for the media it’s translating or not.

Every one of these things on their own are incredible efforts, influenced both consciously and subconsciously by the artist’s own experiences and preferences; every one of those things on their own are art, whether it’s seen and noticed or not. And all of these disparate pieces and influences combine to create the identity of the games we play.

Identity… there it is again. A few more thoughts, first.

THE REMASTER

The remaster of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was released on March 9th, 2023, after the success of the re-release of its sequel, Maiden of Black Water, in 2021. Resurrecting the more or less forgotten Fatal Frame games after an inglorious death in the late 2000s and early 2010s is an interesting move; while normally I’d complain that this sort of re-releasing of existing, long-dead series is a cynical cash grab by a Japanese company, in this case both of these games were likely to be brand new to a majority of the audience they were now exposed to. Maiden of Black Water had previously only been released on the Wii U, a platform which very few people owned, which you can’t even go to buy the game on legally anymore. Mask of the Lunar Eclipse shared a similar fate, as I mentioned earlier; it received a release on the much better selling Wii, but only in Japan, with no official translation available. While this could very well be a cash grab still, it feels at least a bit more paletteable to me knowing that with its release on PC and all major consoles, so many more people will be able to enjoy these often disregarded games in the series.

But what exactly is a remaster? There’s so many terms that get thrown around when people are rehashing a game or a franchise: re-release, remaster, remake, reboot, rebirth, revival. These things don’t have distinct and separate meanings, either. In the case of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the word is definitely a remaster. This release of Fatal Frame 4 appears to use the source code and assets from the original game, with some updates to things such as the texture size and some added features that “modernize” the game, for lack of a better term.

I should probably preface this section by mentioning that I was playing the Steam PC version of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for this video, on Linux via WINE, and as such my experience with the game may have varied some from what others have played.

New features such as the new “Snap Mode” which feels like it’s been growing in popularity significantly in many genres recently. Snap Mode allows you to pause the game at nearly any point to get screenshots from particular angles, add characters, change poses for characters, add filters, etc. The use of an inexplicable third-person view to make your own scenes and scenarios for screenshots is interesting, and almost invites the character to come play with the game’s characters like they’re dolls. That being said, after already playing through the game once, I didn’t feel a need to sit down and toy with this mode very much, and mainly just made a beeline through the remake.

The new translation for the game appears to largely remain the same as the fan translation patch, albeit with minor differences. In particular, this translation is a lot more clear and straightforward with its wording, which helped clear up a few of the issues I had understanding what the game was trying to say in the fan patch. The most glaring example of this is the change of the name of the condition affecting the patients at the sanatorium from Lunata Sedata to Moonlight Syndrome. While I appreciate the more clear translation notes, I think that having such a cut-and-dry translation takes away from some of the mystique of the game. In a way, the cryptic nature of the fan translation felt like it was an intentional part of the game by the time I was playing the remaster. Maybe that would’ve been different if I had played the remaster first.

That’s not to say I didn’t take a bit of time to notice differences, however. Gameplay-wise, the game feels very similar, although using a standard dual-stick controller on a game I had been playing with motion controls just a few days prior felt strange. I thought that my familiarity may have been betraying me, but the more I played the more I noticed something with the control scheme was slightly off. The third-person camera controls felt fidgety to me, constantly and suddenly shifting by minute angles that made the game feel much less smooth. This was slightly offset by the quicker, more responsive motion the game has, though the abysmally slow walk speed remained the same. I prefer the motion controls simply because they feel smoother, though the new controls are far from bad. That being said, I highly recommend using a controller for this game; using the keyboard controls felt bizarre to me, even after trying it for a bit.

There appear to have been some minor rebalances to the gameplay, as well, particularly when combating ghosts. Ultimately these changes may be due to the game running at a more stable framerate than the original Wii version, though it seems as if film reloading has been made a bit slower than the original to facilitate a bit more of a careful approach to taking photographs. Choshiro’s spirit stone flashlight seems significantly more well-balanced versus a lot of the ghosts in the game, as well.

The in-game shop added a few new items in the remaster; this somewhat alleviates the issue I’d mentioned in the original with there being too many points to spend in a single playthrough, although that issue would have also been fixed by replaying the game and buying some of the new outfits and lenses that are on sale starting in a new game plus playthrough. Overall, though, the mass gathering of points with nothing to do with them seems to remain a persistent issue.

The slow movement speed is, again, to the game’s benefit; the environments are once again gorgeous, this time removed from the limitations of a mid-2000s game console. The remaster takes full advantage of the new lighting technologies and better post-processing effects of the past decade, making good, tasteful use of bloom, reflections, particle effects, and light shafts throughout the game’s environment to help tastefully accentuate what the original was looking to do with its more limited engine and faked approach to things such as light shafts. The UI of the game received slew of new high-resolution elements showing up in force and generally looking great. The game’s full-motion video cutscenes appeared to be completely re-done as well, with some phenomenal results. Due to running the game through WINE, however, I had issues with any full-motion video play, something which forced me to find the cutscene files elsewhere to view them.

The game’s more frequently used models, such as the ones for the main characters, have received complete reworks, with noticeably updated polygon counts and slightly more smooth animations. The textures, on the other hand, are more of a mixed bag; while it’s clear that at least the player character textures have been re-done by hand, it seems as if many of the textures in the game, including common wall and picture textures, were either upscaled poorly or had no work done on them at all. Any work to update textures seemed sporadic at best.

The idea of remastering a game, at least in the modern sense, would typically involve a lot of work on textures. High-quality texture packs are usually the first thing a remaster of a game would tout, at least in the AAA gaming industry where these sorts of remasters tend to show up. Better graphics are the backbone of selling games to investors and consumers alike. There’s a few issues with this, primarily the amount of space textures and high-quality models can occupy in a game. Even as-is, the remaster of this game is nearly triple the size of the original game. So why, with all of the ability of AI upscaling or even simply hiring new artists to work on a game, would a studio choose to intentionally not update textures, or at the very least keep them at a low enough resolution to make it noticeable?

There’s a couple possibilities. The first, and arguably the most cynical, is that the studio wanted to devote the least amount of resources possible to this remaster. This would make sense; get some internal staff to port the new code over, get some of the big assets in the game re-made to show off in a trailer, and ship it for as cheap of a development budget as they could. It’s a common approach and one I wouldn’t put past most development teams, nor would I here. The second possibility, however, is one that’s more interesting to me.

The game’s original director, Makoto Shibata, was credited as a supervisor for the remaster [1]. And in my opinion, I think a lot of the original game’s charm comes from the era it was developed in; the heavily compressed textures of the original game, in particular, stick out to me as a defining characteristic, one I pointed out earlier in making the game feel grungy and abandoned. There’s a chance that this was something that was recognized by the development team and Mr. Shibata, and the textures were intentionally left the way they were to keep some of the game’s original character. Or maybe it was a combination of the two possibilities, a realization that the budget could be trimmed while also helping keep some of the original game’s identity.

In general, I think that the development team succeeded at preserving the original game’s identity. They’ve updated and modernized the title to some extent, making the gameplay smoother and easier to get into while also managing to keep the game true to the original. While I think I still have a preference for the slightly janky motion controls and technical issues of the original game, I think the remaster is absolutely worth playing if you aren’t able to get a copy of the original.

THEMES

Identity, as it turns out, is at the core of Fatal Frame’s narrative, at least in my own interpretation. The nature of the game is one of a detective story; Choshiro is a literal detective looking for the young girls who he’d saved ten years prior to the start of the game, each of whom were drawn back to the island in search for answers as to what happened and who they were prior to being rescued, and for reasons they themselves can’t identify. You spend large chunks of the game listening to recorded dialogue from interviews on tape or reading handwritten notes, trying to piece together what’s happened like the characters you’re playing as.

You also spend a large portion of the game taking pictures.

PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORY

Something that I’ve thought about a lot while playing this game and writing this script is what, exactly, cameras mean in the context of this game. The ability to capture someone’s soul through a camera is a concept I brought up near the beginning of the video, an old myth that likely started with the birth of photography itself. One of the first popular photographers in the United States was a man named William Mumler, who claimed he was able to capture the ghosts of those close to people he photographed on camera [2]. While Mr. Mumler’s spirit photography was ultimately debunked as people he’d previously photographed and were very much still alive, the idea of a photograph being able to capture someone’s very essence isn’t explicitly wrong, in my opinion.

I took a trip to Ireland last year with a friend; I’d mulled on the idea of making a video of the trip, but decided I’d rather focus on spending the time enjoying myself and making memories. It didn’t hit me until I got photo prints back from the trip how important taking photos is, though. Even with so many of my photos being artistic pieces, without me or my friend in them, I could still feel the memories flooding back as I held the proof of the journey in my hands.

My memory recall isn’t very good; while I tend to remember events I’ve linked to certain smells or feelings fairly easily, recalling any particular memory on command is difficult, and while a lot of those moments may have been mundane or uninteresting, they still form a part of who I am today. Looking at some of these photos on the digital frame, I remember some of the circumstances surrounding when these were taken. I see my cousins, who I haven’t talked to in years; the beach we used to go to every summer as children, with horribly blown out exposure as the light bounces off of the water. As someone who’s somewhat forgotten what their childhood was like, it’s cathartic to see that there’s something left of it outside of my own memories, some proof that it did exist.

And to some people, that’s all photos are; a way to remember things. To me, photos can be a lot more than that, though. That blurry photo of bright lights among the darkness is of a dark concert venue while you and your friends were jumping to the beat of your favorite song, screaming at the top of your lungs. That selfie you took where you’re smiling too hard was to help you convince yourself of the facade that you were doing okay after your family member passed. That almost pure-white photo with a pink smudge in the middle depicts the best day at the beach you ever had, except for the fact you forgot to put sunscreen on and got burnt so bad it hurt for a week. Every single photo taken has a story associated with it. A person had to take it, they had to have a reason to take it, even if it doesn’t seem like much of a reason at all. Photography is preserving peoples’ memories, their thoughts and feelings and ideas. It’s the same as writing and oral traditions.

Photography is just like any other art form: a window into peoples’ souls. To see what they value, how they think, who they are. The people in the photo and, to a greater extent, the person behind the photo, bare parts of themselves in the photos they take, just as they do in anything else. In a way, then, I suppose a camera does steal your soul. Just not in the way you think.

In an age which is dominated by digital photos which are gone in a flash, or fake photos created by computer algorithms that are so convincing people believe they’re the real thing, reality has been getting blurrier and blurrier. Losing all the photos on your phone can happen in an instant; the loss of years’ worth of memories, visits to friends that you may never reminisce on again. Faked photos have already caused a stir, with people struggling to tell which ones depicted real experiences and people. I can only imagine what it must be like to realize that you don’t have any physical photos to pass down to your children. Still, I don’t think that should dissuade people from taking photographs. If anything, I think it should encourage people to take more, to keep them safe, to get them printed out and put in a box for later. Let them help create a memory of you and the things you care about for those who’ve never met you.

MASKS AND DEVOTION

It’s in the name, but Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse also makes heavy use of masks in its narrative. The game revolves around the creation of the titular mask, the ramifications of its use and its re-forging. The mask is necessary for the completion of a ritual used by the denizens of Rogetsu Island to guide the dead to the afterlife, and a decent number of other ghosts throughout the game are wearing masks when you face them, to prevent them from infecting others with Moonlight Syndrome. The island’s culture is heavily laden with thoughts about masks, the dead, and the moon, and how they all intertwine.

There’s a certain note in the game from Dr. Aso, Misaki’s ancestor, who created the prototype Camera Obscura. He talks about how the art of mask-making on Rogetsu Island is unique and centuries-old, and proposes a theory on how the masks of Rogetsu Island are capable of transmitting emotions and conveying memories; that people’s emotions and memories can be affected by masks. Then there’s another note, one that seems to be much older; it talks about how the person who wears the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse must allow themselves to become an “Empty Vessel,” something for the dead to flow through on their way to the afterlife.

Masks, in just about any culture, are seen as a way to take up the mantle of something else. It’s a way to pretend to be something else, to hide an identity. The Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, as the game puts it, erases one’s soul; the person who puts on the mask and takes part in the Ritual “becomes nothing, then rises again from nothing.” The Mask of the Lunar Eclipse doesn’t just represent something like the Grim Reaper would in western society. It represents the void of death, oblivion itself. And the feeling it imparts on those who see it is one of dread, of cold nothingness. It’s how I imagine those stricken with Moonlight Syndrome feel, if nothing else. But I’ll get into that in a moment.

The masks on the other dead you see throughout the game, however, are designed to keep the dead from recognizing their former bodies and trying to re-enter them. The idea of using masks to hide or obscure one’s identity seems to run a bit counter to the themes I’d brought up previously with photography. However, I don’t think it is, necessarily.

In the Fallout: New Vegas expansion, Dead Money, the entire plot revolves around a gigantic vault (not that kind) in a forgotten resort in the middle of the desert filled with what is rumored to be an absurd amount of gold. The player character finds themselves teaming up with someone else to find the vault, crack it open, and take all of the gold out with them. The problem is, well, gold is heavy, and you have limited time and resources within the vault. So, despite spending all the effort and time you did getting into the vault, you have two choices: end up trapped inside it forever, or let it go.

The idea isn’t that novel, admittedly, even if it is phenomenally done; it’s effectively the same as to the plot for Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Or the Disney adaptation of the film. Or Treasure Planet, which is basically the same thing [3]. Or the Bulgarian adaptation [4]. But the point still stands: there’s a difference between remembering somebody as they were and trying to turn back the hands of time. You can remember someone fondly, keep photographs of them, talk about them; but you need to remember that things will never be the same as they were. Nature marches inexorably onwards, and the dead can’t come back to life. But we can remember the times we shared with them, and share those times with others through photographs and other physical objects.

MEMORY LOSS AND IDENTITY

As a short warning to people who haven’t played the game before, I’m going to talk about the narrative of the game here. If you’d like to go into a fifteen year old game more or less blind, and I do recommend you do so if you want to play it, please skip to the timestamp on screen.

The game’s plot, as I’ve mentioned, revolves around a hospital and the connected sanatorium, which dedicated much of its research to a disease called Lunata Sedata (in the fan translation; the remaster’s official translation refers to the disease as Moonlight Syndrome). The disease is heavily expounded upon throughout the course of the game, but its main issue is that it affects the mind, removing the memories of the infected as they find themselves questioning who they are.

The game makes an effort to link memories, identity, and mortality via this disease; almost everybody suffering from the disease finds themselves questioning who they are, desperately holding onto the memories they have left. They wander out into the moonlight and reach out to it as if it’s calling to them, even going to the point of causing their own deaths by leaping off of high places or chasing the moon’s reflection in the bottom of pools. The disease slowly takes their sense of self away from them until they become empty husks, barely responsive and scared to look in the mirror, afraid they won’t recognize what they see.

The final stage of the disease, called “blooming,” causes a person’s face to become supernaturally unrecognizable; completely disfigured, distorted, as if the space around their face were shifted somehow. As if they were wearing a mask. This is, ultimately, how the entire island is killed, and why it is abandoned; the overarching antagonist of the game entered this bloomed state and roamed the island, causing anybody who saw her face to be infected with Lunata Sedata. This becomes something that can happen to the majority of the enemies in the game; after taking some amount of damage during an encounter, their face will become distorted, and an eerie sound can be heard playing until they’re defeated.

There’s an idea that comes up a few times throughout the game: when you are gone, how are you remembered? A girl dealing with the disease survived a car crash when the rest of her family didn’t.

“What kept me alive after their deaths is the memory I have of them, and the terrible guilt I feel for still being alive. “This illness is robbing me of even that. “The family that only exists in my memory is being slowly killed off. I can’t stand living while slowly losing the memories of those people who were dearest to me.

“Still the most frightening thing is losing the guilt I feel.”

Something about that particular quote stuck with me. Identity isn’t just something that we are free to define on our own in a vacuum; while we may define ourselves one way, others will ultimately have their own views of us, defined by their own perceptions and predispositions. When we leave this world, our perception of ourselves ceases to matter. What’s left are the repercussions of our actions, and how others perceive us and what we’ve left behind. When nobody remembers us anymore, is that when we truly die?

A real-life analogy to Moonlight Syndrome would be that of Alzheimer’s Disease, which generally affects the elderly and causes erratic behavior and gradual memory loss. There’s a piece of art, put out by someone who refers to themselves as The Caretaker, called Everywhere At The End of Time. It’s music from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, old interwar records, with some manipulations done to the audio. Throughout the six hour run time, the artist tries to simulate the feeling of a loved one going through the stages of elderly dementia, at the end of their life. The gorgeous, if spacey, big-band music, reminiscent of their glory days, shifts to loops of the same small bits of music as rifts form in the memory; things unable to be recalled, distorted as you feel the slow, inevitable descent into a place of confusion, of fear and uncertainty, because no matter how hard you try to escape it, you can’t stop your mind from leaving you, from dying on its own before the body does.

I’ll include a link to it below; it’s available in its entirety on YouTube, and is absolutely worth a skim through, if not a full listen.

I can’t think of many things more terrifying to me than being aware of your own death as it happens slowly. I’m young and haven’t had the time to wrestle with that idea yet, but I can’t imagine it being any easier to deal with in that moment, or any less terrifying. My grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s before her death, and although I was too young to really understand what was happening, by the end she couldn’t even recognize my mother, her own daughter. She was scared, and bitter, and yelled at everything. Looking back, I can at least sympathize, though I hope I never have to empathize.

The horror behind Lunata Sedata, or Moonlight Syndrome, or Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t that it forces a death of the ego by removing our memories of ourselves, although I find that terrifying myself; it’s that it robs us of that ability to remember those who have passed, that were important to us, that we wanted to carry on the memory of ourselves.

This sort of horror is where Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse seems to shine. Rather than focusing on the grotesque, monsters, and the constant threat caused by things chasing you down, Fatal Frame embodies a more… cerebral kind of horror. A beautiful kind of horror. It’s that feeling you get when you’re walking alone at night. It’s that moment where you find the face of someone you used to know on a flyer for their arrest at the bus stop. It’s the dread you feel when you realize that some day, everything you know and love will be pulled back to oblivion, and you have to accept that. But it’s also knowing that everybody else has to accept that as well, that there’s a kind of cameraderie in that. That people are capable of doing good and bad and everything in between, and nobody is going to do exclusively good or bad things in their life.

CONCLUSIONS

I think I’ve gone over Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse long enough. It’s one of those games I was’t sure I’d enjoy initially, but ended up enjoying quite a lot. It was an excellent introduction to the series, and to horror games overall, for someone who really hasn’t played much that could be classified as horror.

Additionally, the game really gave me a lot to think about. Identity, memory, what cameras do, and what really makes a horror game all came up a lot while I was playing. Overall, one of the more enjoyable games I played through this year. I might even make some more videos about the other Fatal Frame games at some point. We’ve got another couple of games to cover, though.

POKEMON SNAP

I was a bit late to the Pokemon party compared to some of the other people in my generation; the first Pokemon game came out just after I was born in the states, but I didn’t get my first Pokemon game until I was eight or so. I had a copy of Pokemon Emerald, and I recall putting over 100 hours into that game, most of which was likely just me sitting around listening to the music, or wandering around and talking to every NPC in a city.

Then, I lost it. I spent hours looking for that cartridge, but I must have dropped it somewhere, or maybe it had been stolen. All the memories attached to those digital creatures over those hours, and the only proof I could offer they even existed was my word. Not too soon after, my parents were kind enough to give me a copy of Pokemon Firered, and I had Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness as well, but that specific cartridge I will very likely never see again.

Once I’d been introduced to what a Pokemon game is actually like, I started to understand the appeal a bit more. The entire game is based around taking these little pixelated creatures and going on an adventure with them. Humans are very good at abstraction and personification; the numbers and images representing each pokemon makes are something our brains can easily picture as real creatures, especially when a child’s imagination is involved, unhindered by years of grounding in the reality of our world. And as with all creatures, Pokemon have to do something when they’re not in combat, don’t they? They don’t just sit around and wait for you to battle them.

Pokemon Snap is another game I never played growing up; I never owned a Nintendo 64, and the friend I knew growing up who did have one didn’t own the game. I’ve been curious about it since I was little, but I never had the reason and means to pick it up until quite recently. It really makes an attempt to flesh out that idea of Pokemon being real creatures, albeit limited by the capabilities of the Nintendo 64, including its abysmally small cartridge storage capacities. As I mentioned earlier, however; limitations breed creativity, and the 90s was the wild west when it came to 3D games and creativity in games in general.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay of Pokemon Snap is incredibly simple: you enter the Zero-One, an all-terrain, amphibious, single-person vehicle that is teleported into various environments around Pokemon Island, a place filled with wild Pokemon. The Zero-One runs on a single track through each environment, similarly to a rail-shooter, and your goal is to take pictures of as many Pokemon as you possibly can, attempting to get the best photos possible. Each environment has set Pokemon that can appear on the route, each of them following the same movements and interacting with other Pokemon the same way each time. You can submit one photo of each Pokemon species you shoot to Professor Oak at the end of the expedition, where he will rate the photos based on a points system.

THE POINTS SYSTEM

The points system is, on the surface at least, fairly easy to grasp and use effectively. Pokemon photos are rated highest if the subject Pokemon is located in the center of the frame, the subject is large enough within the photo to mostly fill the frame, and if it is in a good pose, i.e. not blinking, doesn’t have its back turned, and/or is striking a unique and interesting pose.

This system is perfectly fine for the game, where your purpose is to help Professor Oak document Pokemon on the island for research purposes. It brings to mind photography contests, where photographers’ works are rated based on their technical expertise: is the subject in focus? Is the composition good? Are there any areas of the photo that have blown out highlights or are too dark?

What this system leaves out, however, is something I tend to value a lot in my photography; creative expression. Sometimes, I find myself taking a photo that has something very wrong with it: blurry/smeared subjects, terrible focus, etc. One of my favorite photos I took with my first camera was one I absolutely didn’t intentionally take. It’s a horrible shot from a technical perspective, but something about it really struck me, regardless. The same happens in Pokemon Snap. There were multiple occasions where I took photos I genuinely liked in the game which were rated far worse than “technically correct” shots that I had taken that looked, frankly, boring.

The game automatically puts all of your best-rated photos into the photodex, and sometimes it really feels like it’s discarding your creativity, which is a shame. There is, however, a personal pokemon album in the game as well, which you can put the photos that you like in, much like in Fatal Frame. It ends up giving a very similar feeling to me to that photo album as well, so I won’t elaborate on it much here.

The game starts off with only one course available; as you take pictures and earn points, you unlock several other courses, located in different environments throughout the island and containing different Pokemon. In order to hit points requirements, you may have to go back through an area several times in order to get better photos of certain Pokemon, or photos of different species.

INTERACTION

Once the player achieves certain scores on a given course, they unlock a new ability to play with. The player gains the ability to throw fruit at Pokemon, which they can pick up and eat, or can hit them with to stun them or cause certain actions. There’s also Pester Balls, which allow the player to knock out Pokemon or make them come out of hiding places. Finally, there’s the Poke Flute, which can play one of three melodies, which some Pokemon will react to in various ways such as dancing or waking up. These items are handed to the player throughout the course of the game, encouraging the player to get better scores in courses and new pictures of Pokemon by going back through previous routes to find ways these objects can interact with the Pokemon already present.

Real wildlife photography obviously doesn’t have a chance to re-try the same scenarios, and hitting wild animals with food is frowned upon and generally a bad idea, but you do eventually get a feeling for how certain animals will react to a given situation and how they move as you observe them, making it easier to get more interesting pictures of them. Pokemon Snap also manages to capture that feeling of watching and waiting, of being patient and letting the right moment reveal itself, and hoping you’re able to capture the photo you see.

Pokemon also interact with each other on occasion; in the Volcano level, it’s not uncommmon to see Magmar fighting each other over food, or just because. The game even depicts the Pokedex-correct method of evolving a Slowpoke into a Slowbro; by allowing a Shellder to latch onto its tail. But you have to be the one to initiate the interaction by luring the Slowpoke to the water with a fruit.

Interactions like this go a long way towards making the game feel less like a rail shooter or amusement park ride and more like you’re interacting with real creatures, and admittedly this level of interactivity still feels fairly rare for games even nowadays. Of course, this game had the benefit of having a smaller scope due to limited environments, and could focus on more detail-oriented interactions. Another game that springs to mind is Spyro the Dragon, which released the year before, but even in that game interactions with enemies and between enemies were limited to a few looping animations at best.

The player can also find entirely new, hidden courses via these interactions; several courses have hidden alternate routes located within them that, when revealed, end the current level and unlock a new course for study. For example, the Tunnel level has an Electrode sleeping near the end of it, which the player can hit with a fruit to cause an explosion, clearing away rubble and allowing access to the Volcano level. To even “beat” the game a player has to perform these sorts of interactions and take pictures of them, and has to develop a level of knowledge about each of the courses. Being able to learn about each of the courses and the Pokemon within them becomes a reward in itself, feeling satisfaction in being able to take photos of Pokemon in interesting poses and compositions, and that’s further reinforced when the player is able to unlock more of the game from that knowledge. Overall, it’s a very satisfying feedback loop.

TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS AND AESTHETICS

As was the case for Fatal Frame, Pokemon Snap was a game that was limited severely by the hardware it was on. Namely, the Nintendo 64 has two big limitations: the storage capacity on game cartridges, and its 3D graphical capabilities. 3D limitations were simply a product of the time; 3D consoles and games were relatively new, people didn’t know how to optimize the consoles, and few people really understood how to make 3D games look good yet. That being said, Pokemon Snap does a decent job at depicting Pokemon in their natural habitats.

Showcasing multiple Pokemon on screen at the same time required the use of lower-poly models than would have been used in Pokemon Stadium or the other Pokemon games on the N64, unless the game was to be slowed down to an absolute crawl, and the textures all throughout the game looked muddy and smeared. It’s entirely possible that these would have been far less noticeable on the Nintendo 64’s subpar video output, and even less so on a CRT, although I can’t test that easily. For reference, I’ve been playing the Wii Virtual Console version of the game. And yet, despite all of the technical nitpicks I could point out with the presentation, the game still comes off as charming due to the stylization of the Pokemon and the obvious care that went into modeling, texturing, and animating the whole game. Every Pokemon feels like it could’ve come straight out of the anime, despite the fact most of the models likely use less polygons than random clutter items in modern video games.

The other big limitation, the storage capacity of Nintendo 64 cartridges, was a factor in the graphical fidelity of the game, as well; computer file compression was just coming out of its infancy in these days, and it wasn’t generally something accessible for video game consoles to do in real-time, either. Low poly counts, small textures, sequenced music; even the linear, limited nature of the courses themselves likely helped keep the file size down small enough to fit on the Nintendo 64’s cartridges while allowing the developers to keep the level of detail and interaction they wanted.

The tiny, heavily-compressed images generated by the game for the photo album are a more extreme version of the compressed images saved by Fatal Frame, and occupy that same sort of nostalgia for me. It reminds me of the late 90s and early 2000s, an era of little digital cameras that struggled by with low dynamic range and miniscule file sizes. The sorts of images from those cameras, and from the compression used on the images in Pokemon Snap and Fatal Frame, is extremely nostalgic for the era I grew up in, and is difficult to recreate with modern cameras and tech. I know at least one photographer who uses an old digicam for his photography specifically for the look it provides, though those cameras are getting harder and harder to find as time goes on.

LENGTH

Pokemon Snap is one of the shortest games I’ve ever played, even including indie titles from small dev teams; you can find longplays of the game on YouTube that last less than 2 hours, and I don’t think I spent more than 6 getting to the ending going in completely blind. The story is little more than a fantasy to give the excuse to the player to go take photos of wild Pokemon. Still, the game does actually lean a bit into that idea of researching a mystery, something which the player only gets partial answers to. However, the game’s short length combined with a lack of replayability due to being required to discover majority of the game’s Pokemon interactions in order to proceed creates a game that really doesn’t beg to be replayed.

Let’s compared that to the sequel.

THE SEQUEL

When I first started playing New Pokemon Snap, I was convinced it was a remake of the original, having not looked particularly hard at the marketing material for the game and preferring to go in near-blind for most games I play for the sake of giving a fair review. However, it’s made obvious after a bit of time in the game that this isn’t, in fact, a remake, but a direct sequel, with the original Snap’s protagonist making a return during the course of the story. Though as I was playing, I found myself wondering if this really mattered.

New Pokemon Snap is a game that was made 20 years after the original, on a completely different console, by a completely different dev team, with the exact same premise. While Nintendo may still be the publisher, to me that feels more like a remake than a direct sequel to me. However, like I mentioned previously, the lines between remake, sequel, remaster, reboot, and any other term that may be relevant is so entirely irrelevant and flexible that it defining these terms in a comprehensive way would take longer than the run time of this video, which is saying something. With that out of the way, let me detail the differences here.

GRAPHICS

Starting with the obvious, the graphics for New Pokemon Snap are much better than the original, which isn’t saying much. However, I’d be willing to argue that New Pokemon Snap has generally good graphics, which is very encouraging given how the generation 8 and 9 Pokemon games turned out. I think part of the reason this game turned out looking so good was, again, at least in part due to the nature of the game; games where the player character isn’t allowed to explore a massive open world allow for more detail and focus to be put on what is visible, something which is extremely relevant for the underpowered Nintendo Switch compared to most other gaming hardware available.

I think one of the things that really makes this game’s graphics shine in comparison to its predecessor and even its contemporary mainline Pokemon games is the careful use of dynamic lighting and vibrant colors. This is particularly prevalent in darker areas in the game, where the developers chose to add a number of Pokemon and other wildlife with bioluminescence. The lighting and colors are also shown off heavily with the use of the game’s unique Illumina Pokemon, and the related Crystablooms.

While I can’t confirm this fact, the models for New Pokemon Snap appear to be of the same quality used for the generaton 8 Pokemon games. However, due to the tighter focus of the game world, the Pokemon custom animations for all of the models allow for a far more believable and enjoyable representation of a wild environment full of unique creatures that you get to experience and document.

Overall I think New Pokemon Snap, while retaining a lot of the somewhat sanitized look present in most newer Pokemon games, still looks good, although I can’t shake the feeling that the stylization of the games reminds me too much of the New Super Mario Bros. Series, a series whose extremely flat and uninteresting sense of stylization has caused a lot of criticism and backlash in the years since its end.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay of New Pokemon Snap in comparison to the original is… well, not all that different. The game controls the same, and has largely the same mechanics. The largest shift in gameplay comes from the addition of Illumina Pokemon and Crystablooms, which I mentioned previously. Illumina Pokemon are filled with bioenergy that causes them to glow and causes any pictures containing them to be unrecognizable unless they’re in a specific state. There are only five encounters with them in the game, all in their own unique courses, which function more like timed puzzles you have to solve than the theme-park like courses present in the rest of the game. Crystablooms are filled with the same sort of bioenergy as Illumina Pokemon, and when interacted with via the new Illumina Orbs cause certain Pokemon to react to them, sometimes on a large and frankly gorgeous scale.

Aside from the addition of Illumina Orbs, each course now has multiple research levels and day and night variations of courses, effectively allowing for multiple configurations of Pokemon on the same routes and exponentially increasing replayability. New Pokemon Snap has over 200 Pokemon, compared to the original’s 63, and there are over double the number of courses. The game allows you to document each Pokemon in a number of poses, and on top of that, there are a number of requests that you will receive throughout the course of the game that give you additional ideas for how to capture certain Pokemon.

PHOTO GALLERY

The game’s photo gallery system has also received a revamp; the director of the game said he wanted the game to reflect the way photography has changed in the past 20 years. So why don’t we do that as well?

The original Snap’s photo system was extremely simplistic; you could save up to 64 photos you had taken to an internal memory on the game cartridge, and view them, and that was about it. New Pokemon Snap allows the player to save far more photos, and allows for editing capabilities including re-cropping photos, adding filters, frames, and stickers, and the posting of those photos to the Switch’s native photo gallery and even into an in-game online photo gallery and real-life social media to share them. The developers did a phenomenal job, of capturing the impact the advent of smart phones with cameras, which are effective supercomputers in our pockets, has done to our perception of photography. Fatal Frame’s photo system, likewise, made a rather drastic change to accommodate our new photographic capabilities, allowing people to compose entire scenes with the game’s assets with relative ease.

Twenty years ago, posting photographs on the internet meant sending heavily compressed images in tiny resolutions across early broadband networks. Ten years ago, people were discovering Instagram photographers sharing their photos online and were amazed by the quality of their images, garnering thousands upon thousands of likes and interactions. Now, image resolutions once only dreamed of are not only possible, but extremely common, and can be taken with devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Filters or no filters, just about anybody can pick up a smartphone, make an incredible image, and share it with the world. Everybody has a gorgeous image of some famous monument or natural wonder that they took with their own two hands. Photography has become incredibly accessible to those who want it; the only advantage a camera has over a smartphone is more creative control.

I find it fascinating how both Pokemon Snap and Fatal Frame took the effort to adapt to the times, to allow for so much more creativity given how differently we view the images we take now. That being said, it feels like something is lost; when an art form becomes so accessible, when a photo is no longer a thing in your hands but pixels on a screen that can be gone in an instant, it feels like it’s devalued. This is especially true in the age of social media; someone’s Instagram post matters to them only as much as how many likes it can generate, then it’s on to the next photo. It feels like so few people take time to sit and focus on a photo, meditate on it, appreciate all of its details, and I’m just as guilty of this as anybody else.

THEMES

New Pokemon Snap’s story, as well, is far more fleshed out than the original’s, although it’s still short and simplistic. Pokemon Snap is one of those games that simply doesn’t need a complicated, drawn-out story in order to work well; the few cutscenes that are present mostly serve as a way to tell you that you’ve unlocked some new mechanic or route, save for a few at the very end of the game.

It’d be unfair to say that Pokemon Snap and its sequel bring absolutely nothing to the table when it comes to themes and narrative, but I think it’s important to remember that Pokemon games are, ultimately, made for a young audience. That’s not to say that young audiences shouldn’t be treated to more complex and mature themes and plotlines, but Pokemon is not where you generally look for that sort of deep storytelling, and I found myself struggling to come up with much to say about these games here. However, if I were to pick a specific theme that’s present in both of the games to touch on, it’s to do with the reverence of wildlife, and the importance of documentary and research efforts. I’ll be the first one to admit this does seem to clash with the idea of harassing wild animals by throwing fruit at them repeatedly, though.

Pokemon Snap as a series focuses on the idea of using photographs as a way to study and research new environments. While not necessarily a new idea, cameras do provide a way to freeze a moment in time for later study, as I mentioned when talking about Fatal Frame. You’re encouraged by the game’s mechanics to take photographs that are technically good over more abstract or creative photos; photographs that emphasize the way things are rather than using artistic expressions. You’re always supposed to have the subject Pokemon at the center of the shot, always supposed to capture as much detail as possible.

In the early 1900s, a certain style of photography started to crop up in the western world. The style was called “Pure Photography” or “Straight Photography,” and focused heavily on the technical aspects of photography: most of the photos were uncropped, focused on a rich tonal range, and the photos always kept their subjects in sharp focus, emphasizing as much detail as they could. One of the most famous American photographers, Ansel Adams, was a staunch proponent of the style, showing a distaste for the abstract Pictoralist style which has preceeded it. It lies in a belief that the media of photography allows for the capturing of levels of detail that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult or impossible with other visual representations, and in turn a lot of the photographers involved early-on in the movement were pioneers of realistic photography.

Pokemon Snap’s stricter interpretation of what makes a good photo, arbitrarily bound by the rules of a game, reminds me of Pure Photography in some ways. While any photograph taken in the game can certainly be interesting, the incentive to adhere to what will get you the best score limits your view and what you’re looking for; it gives you expectations as to what a good photograph can and should be, which is something that I try to avoid in my photography and I highly urge others to avoid, as well. Keeping an open mind when out and about photographing is what has led to some of my favorite photos. This also isn’t simply to trash Straight Photography; the movement and style certainly has a place, and I often find myself gleaning inspiration from the photos of those in the movement. I suppose the best way to think about it is as a suggestion or guidelines rather than rigid rules.

But beyond the stricter stylistic choices, photography in Pokemon Snap still falls into a rich history. Documentary photography is a term used to describe photography that’s meant to record and remember places, people, and things. Many of the more famous photographers in the world could rightly be called documentarians; Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives shows the deplorable living conditions in New York City in the late 1800s and helped spur the changes of the Progressive movement in the US, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work documenting all over the world created some of the most recognizable photos ever taken. In each case, these photographers were looking to capture the spirit of a place, a people, and a time. Sound familiar? In a sense, Fatal Frame’s photography is documentary, as well; it’s about capturing and remembering how things were, although in Fatal Frame’s case sometimes the capture is a bit more literally about someone’s soul. In Pokemon Snap’s case, it’s about learning and remembering these Pokemon, ruins, and environments as they were; a sort of documentary photography for nature.

Overall, I think New Pokemon Snap takes the ideas that were present in the original and improves upon them dramatically with its new story and a greater scope. New Pokemon Snap is a very competent sequel, adding breadth and depth of gameplay in order to allow it to breathe and come into its own after the almost demo-like narrow scope of the original all those years ago. It does a phenomenal job at preserving the identity and memory of Pokemon Snap while illuminating it with new ideas and greater detail than the original ever could have.

WRAPPING UP (NOT REALLY)

Of course, that’s not to say you shouldn’t try playing the original Pokemon Snap, either. You should definitely check out all of the games I’ve talked about here, if you have the time. The remaster of Fatal Frame is available on every major console currently on the market as well as PC, New Pokemon Snap is available on the Switch, and the original Pokemon Snap is available on… well, only the Switch accessibly right now, but that’s actually fine as it’s what you’d be playing New Pokemon Snap on, anyway, right? I’m not suggesting anybody go out and buy a Nintendo 64 solely to play Pokemon Snap.

What about the original Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse? Well, if you really want to play it, you can only buy copies for the Wii, and it was Japan-only game, so if you want to be able to read the dialogue you’re going to need to homebrew your Wii, make a backup copy of the game from the disc, and install the English patch, then either play it through an emulator or off of a hard drive connected to the Wii-

Okay, I’m not saying anybody should do that. If you want to go see specific old photos, the famous ones are kept in museums, or you can find them online to look at and appreciate. Why is it so hard to play old video games? Can’t we just take a snapshot of them and save them to play later? And what happens when we can’t play them anymore?

GAME PRESERVATION

Something I neglected to mention when discussing the Fatal Frame remaster earlier was the game manual. The move away from physical video game releases in the past decade or so has resulted in a number of different approaches to giving players the information they need, Most games seem to have gone the route of having more intensive in-game tutorials and diagetic explanations of game mechanics, choosing to forgo the game manual entirely. Others have included the same documentation that would normally be present in a manual in the game itself in the form of a menu. What does Fatal Frame’s remaster do?

If you select the Manual icon in the menu, you’re met with a block of black and white squares that represent a QR Code. That link takes you to Koei Tecmo’s website, where the game manual is hosted in webpage form. When I first saw this, I was genuinely astounded. After a bit of digging around in the website, I found myself frustrated, and disappointed.

When I was growing up, I often heard a specific saying: “Once on the internet, always on the internet.” The idea of digital permanence, that you can’t remove something once it’s put on the internet, was a prevalent one in the 90s and 2000s, but you seldom hear it said anymore. While we tend to think of the internet as a world of permanence, that social media posts and videos will be online forever, it’s simply not the case anymore. The internet has been around for over 30 years now; servers that had been around since its early years have come and gone, or changed drastically in that time period. MySpace used to be a primary way of connecting with other people before Facebook existed. Web hosting site Geocities, once a massive hub of internet activity and user-created webpages, has been shut down entirely, with its webpages no longer accessible at all. Information once widely-known and assumed easily accessible forever is now lost to the overwhelming deluge of new information that washes over the digital shores every day, drowned in the torrent of content that floods search engines with wording and tags optimized to increase views. And in some cases, that information was hosted on servers that are permanently shut down, that were never documented or archived. Dead links are something I’ve found more and more common in recent years, especially when trawling old forum posts for technical help.

Such is, I worry, the fate of Koei Tecmo’s online game manual. The original Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse launched with a game manual, in a physical box, with a physical disc, on the Nintendo Wii. While it was likely only in Japanese, that manual told you the story of the game, the game’s controls; it helped get you in the right mindset to play the game it was packaged with, helped you get excited to play it. That manual is as much a part of the identity of the video game as anything within the game itself. The remaster’s website doesn’t just cover controls and mechanics; it has a section on the relationships between the game’s characters, and gives an overview of the game’s story that is extremely clarifying. It contains art and text that people likely spent months working on. And it’s the only manual we have for the game that’s been fully translated to English, to my knowledge. When this website is gone, and that QR code in the game links to nothing, have we lost a part of the game’s identity?

Digital and internet archival is a relatively new field, and one with a myriad of approaches used to varying effectiveness. But it’s come about due to the increasing prevalence of a serious problem; we’re losing a lot of data from sources that we don’t have saved anywhere else. Specifically relevant to this video, it’s becoming harder and harder to play a lot of older video games. If it’s not become clear by now why I think that’s a problem, it’s because I think video games are art, and like all art, they should be preserved for future appreciation, in as full of a form as possible. Not everything that came with a game is vital to its identity and the experience one gets with it, but it’s becoming harder and harder to play a lot of older games.

So, how exactly can you play the original Pokemon Snap legitimately today?

The Nintendo Switch Online service allows players access to emulation of a selection of Nintendo’s older game library as a bonus to paying for their online connection services. The base service is $20 per year and is limited to NES, Super NES, and Game Boy games, but the Expansion Pak add-on allows for access to Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 games, including Pokemon Snap, for an additional $30 per year. Even if you just wanted to play Pokemon Snap and nothing else here, I’ll be the first one to admit this isn’t a bad deal, assuming you already have access to a Switch; I’ll often pay $50 for a single game I want to play, let alone tens or hundreds. However, we run into a different issue here.

This is a wholly online service; Nintendo has complete control over what games are available in what region, and when. Your access to the game is beholden to the whims of a company which, despite its claims otherwise, is beholden to nothing but the profitability of its endeavors. To put it another way: Nintendo can take away access to those games whenever it wants. To look at a very relevant example: the Wii Shop Channel, which closed down in 2019, had a section of games labeled WiiWare, which was made of games that were only ever released onto the Wii Shop Channel, and nowhere else. When the Wii Shop Channel was shut down, every single one of those games would have been lost forever, were it not for the efforts of archivists to save as many of those games as possible. An even more extreme example is what happened to Discovery films that people had bought access to on PlayStation consoles; not only was this content made unavailable through the online storefront, but the actual media was rendered unplayable and removed from people’s consoles. [7]

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse never got an English release, and was never available on anything but the Nintendo Wii. There’s absolutely no way to get a copy of the original through any digital service, to my knowledge, and there never was.

So why not get a physical copy, if you’re worried about losing access to your games? Physical copies of games aren’t beholden to licensing; the company you bought the game from can’t come take it out of your hands if they decide they don’t want that product out there anymore. This isn’t a bad idea, but there’s one problem with this.

In the past 20 years or so, the secondhand video game market has exploded. For those who are unaware, there is an absolutely massive market out there for used video games from nearly every generation of video game console from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Switch. In particular, the market for games from the 90s and 2000s has become quite expensive in recent years. There’s several reasons for that that are frankly too complex for this video, but to try and keep things simple: more people have gotten into video games than ever before, the internet has made secondhand buying and selling easier than ever, and many of those video games and consoles simply had smaller production runs when they were being made due to demand being lower than it is now. There’s less old consoles to go around and more demand, so price tends to go up.

If you were to try and buy a Nintendo 64 and a copy of Pokemon Snap off of eBay at the time of writing this script, my best estimate is you would be spending about $100, if not more. An imported copy of Fatal Frame and a Wii that can play it would set you back about the same. You could go cheaper, but most of the consoles listed for less than that price are non-functional, listed for parts only, or completely untested and without the cables you would need; in other words, it’s a gamble. You could also take a look at any of the myriad of websites or physical stores that sell old video games secondhand, but from my experience, most of those stores base their pricing off of what’s present on eBay plus a markup, so you’re likely to pay more anyway.

Now, $100 isn’t that expensive in the grand scheme of things. But let’s look at the bigger picture for a moment. The constant march of time ensures that these older electronics and media are in a perpetual state of decay. These old consoles will just stop working one day, and most people don’t have the parts or the know-how to fix them. People like to tout that CDs and DVDs will last forever, but we’ve already reached a point where disc rot is becoming a real concern. As more and more of these games and consoles stop working, the price people ask for them is going to keep growing.

And beyond how much it costs to actually obtain it, what happens when there’s so few copies of a game left that it’s impossible to find one at any price? Does media die when people can’t experience it anymore? If you’re the last person to have a memory of a game, does it die with you? How do you preserve the identity of a game?

PRESERVING IDENTITY

In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art introduced an exhibit that focused on video games for the first time. The collection included a myriad of games from different genres and time periods, including Pong, Tetris, Street Fighter II, Dwarf Fortress, and Minecraft. The MOMA keeps copies of all of these games in its archival servers. In 2013, theyBody Text expanded the exhibit to include more games, including EVE Online.

EVE Online is an MMORPG (Massively Online Multiplayer Roleplaying Game), a massive sandbox representing a whole universe of star systems where thousands of players gather to collaborate, trade, fight, and have complex social interactions with each other. People have put thousands of hours of their lives into these games. How do you capture and preserve memories of such a complex experience? Does saving all of the data needed to play the game count as preserving it? What if you save all of the chat logs, all of the trades, all of the actions players take? Does that save the experience for future players? Should we even try to save that level of detail and experience?

The MOMA’s answer to this question was a video they describe as “a day in the universe”, along with compiled data about the virtual economy from the game’s release in 2003 to 2013. I respect the effort that went into this exhibition, but I remain unconvinced that this is the most appropriate way to depict the lives that have gone on in this game. In this case, however, maybe this is the best we can really do; when EVE Online’s servers shut down permanently, cutting off access to the game as it existed forever, this little window into a virtual world so many people enjoyed may be all that’s left, just like photographs of long-dead relatives.

Longplays are a concept that has existed since the advent of video streaming on the internet. From longplays.org’s website: “A longplay is a play-through of a computer or video game, created with the intent of completing it as fully as possible, mainly for the purposes of nostalgia, preservation, and possibly as a walkthrough.” In lieu of being able to provide a copy of the game for one to play and experience on their own, people will play through their own copy of the game in generally legitimate ways, in order to provide as much information about the game as possible. And given that games are primarily an audio-visual medium, I think this is a great idea for the most part. However, I have an issue with this method of preservation.

Video games are usually presented through audio-visual means, which makes longplays a great idea for documenting things in video games. However, video games are also games. And like all games, they have an element of interaction, some level of control the player can exert over the game world. While it may be fun and nostalgic to watch someone play through a game you played as a child, by removing the interaction piece of the game you’re removing a key part of the experience of playing a game. That’s not to say I think that longplays aren’t useful in their own right; the removal of viewer interaction as a requirement means that people may get to see some parts of a game they had previously struggled with. But the puzzle still remains; how do you keep the identity of the game as intact as possible?

REMAKES, REMASTERS, SEQUELS, AND REBOOTS

It’s hard to avoid talking about remakes, sequels, and the like at least tangentially during a video like this. This whole video concept started out as a review and comparison between two games and their successors. Do I think that Fatal Frame’s remaster and Pokemon Snap’s sequel are good games? Absolutely. Do I think they’re capable of emulating the spirit and identity of the originals? Of course. And it’s wonderful to have these things available on modern consoles, with modern control schemes and modern capabilities. However, there’s some issues, even with this process, in terms of protecting and preserving a game and its identity.

The first issue is one of quality. Not every video game remake, remaster, etc. is going to be an amazing effort. While what someone would say is a “good quality” or a “bad quality” remake can vary a lot from person to person, the moment I mention the Silent Hill HD Collection I know some people are going to cringe instinctively. Producing a bad remake often runs the risk of distorting the view of the original games to people who are using these remakes as their first time through a game; experiencing a remake is always going to be different than experiencing the original for the first time. I have a distinct feeling my sentiments towards the original Pokemon Snap would be very different if I’d played through New Pokemon Snap first, and I’m certain that some people were disappointed when DMC: Devil May Cry wasn’t representative of the rest of the Devil May Cry franchise.

The second issue I see is one of misplaced effort. As a bit of a personal rant, I’m tired of remakes and remasters of games. While having these franchises and games available to new players is exciting and overall a good thing, I do think that we’ve seen a glut of companies, particularly a lot of bigger developers and publishers, eschewing new ideas and additions to franchises for making remakes of their existing games and series. I can’t deny that I’m glad that Resident Evil Remake exists, but seeing time and energy go into things like Warcraft 3 Reforged makes me question why these developers weren’t allowed to pursue something new. Are these constant remakes and remasters worthwhile? In an industry that’s filled with creative people and new ideas, why continue to regurgitate old ones? (I know the answer to this, but that’ll be another video)

As I alluded to while talking about Fatal Frame, video games, just like any other form of art, are always a reflection of the times in which they were made. They’re a reflection of the effort of every single person who worked on them, each of their circumstances subconsciously reflecting in every little thing they work on in that game. While remakes, reboots, and sequels can provide a similar experience, they are also subject to the circumstances in which they were created, and are constantly in a dialogue with the original works in a nature not dissimmilar to an adaptation to another media format. The people working on a reboot of a game are likely fans of the original work, or at least familiar with it, and their own interpretations of the work will often be reflected in the efforts they put into the reboot. Even something as simple as the console the game is running on can have a significant effect on a game’s “feel”, something that was very apparent for me when comparing Fatal Frame 4 and its remaster. If a remaster exists in a constant dialogue with its source material, then even something touted as “faithful” is going to evoke a different set of feelings than its predecessor; Spyro Reignited Trilogy, as faithful as it is to the original, has a number of detractors due to the change in art style and controls from the original trilogy. I’m not arguing whether the inherent nature of being a remaster, remake, reboot, or sequel detracts from the game’s value on its own, but I do believe that a game’s identity is inherently changed when it’s not able to be taken in a vacuum.

When you take a photograph on film, you don’t end up with an actual photo. What you initially get is something called a negative; the exact opposite of where the light is located in the image. It’s a necessary intermediate step in the creation of a photographic print, but it’s also an exact record of the photograph that can be used to make many, many prints. Whenever you want to make more prints of those photos, all you have to do is get the negatives out and make more copies. The prints can be modified however one pleases; you can make some areas of the print darker or brighter and more contrast-y, or you can cut out sections. So why don’t we just have access to ther negatives with video games?

PIRACY AND EMULATION

It’s a struggle to have a genuine talk about video game piracy on a corporate platform like YouTube, but it feels inevitable for it to come up here. I won’t go into details as to the whys here, but I will give a general overview. If you want a more in-depth discussion about the subject, see the video here [6]. Very briefly, however; legality and morality are not the same thing, nor should they be mixed up. I am firmly in the camp that video game piracy is illegal, but not necessarily amoral. I am going to avoid legal discussion for the remainder of this segment because it’d add yet more complexity and length to the scope of this video that I’m not an expert in.

I discussed it briefly previously, but video games are most often viewed as products by their parent companies, something for people to buy and a company to sell for a profit. While this wasn’t and isn’t always the case, it certainly is the norm now. The popularity and profitability of the video games industry over the last 50 years has led to a veritable ocean of new, passionate ideas, but the industry has also attracted people who are solely in it for the money. When people and companies are chasing after profits and shareholder value above all else, especially when talking about media and art, things get left behind. Specifically, video games get left behind.

Video game companies, especially bigger developers and publishers, have no real reason to maintain their video game libraries and keep them accessible to the public unless it’s profitable; it’s simply a fact of the system we live in. They’re not legally required to keep putting out new copies of Gauntlet on NES cartridges, and they’re not required to make new NESes to sell. There was a time when it was deemed unprofitable to do so, so they simply stopped making them. And no matter how much fans may want them to re-make a game or make more copies of a game, the fact of the matter remains that if it’s not seen as potentially profitable, and in many cases they simply can’t do it; the original source code for Final Fantasy VIII has vanished entirely from Square Enix’s company offices, and that tale is, unfortunately, rather common across much of the video game industry [8]. Again, once something is no longer profitable for a company, they stop caring about it.

To that end, video game piracy and emulation is sometimes the only way games can really be preserved. As I mentioned earlier, these games and hardware are going to be gone some day, and there’s no corporation that’s going to save all of them. It comes down to grassroots efforts, the efforts of people who dump their game files to computers, to save these games. In 20 or 30 years, when the last disc laser dies in the last functional Dreamcast, how are we going to play those games? How are people going to get that experience?

I’m not going to pretend I have a solution to this, but I do think that preservation efforts should continue, legally or illegally. Video games can be and often are art, and should be preserved not just for the collectors who keep their games in glass cases or those with the money to buy consoles when they cost over a thousand dollars, but for everybody. When film was first becoming popular, preservation efforts by studios were minimal at best. As a result, hundreds of films that people put their heart into, things that show the soul of a time and place, are gone forever. Entire swathes of films from the early 1900s are completely gone and there’s a likelihood we’ll never get to see them again. Sound familiar?

If you want to avoid that fate happening to your favorite video game, and it’s within your means to do so, find out how to dump the contents of games you own. Keep them on a hard drive; keep a backup somewhere. If you can submit them to somewhere like archive.org or another place willing to help preserve them, do that as well. I’m saving up for a massive home server setup to store all of my games in towards the end of this year.

CONCLUSION

So when it comes down to it, what do Pokemon Snap and Fatal Frame really have in common? It feels like we’ve drifted pretty far from the video’s initial premise, but to me, this sort of conclusion makes perfect sense. Fatal Frame 4 and Pokemon Snap are both games that released at least 2 console generations ago at this point. They both use cameras as a main gameplay mechanic. They were both games that had to work within the limitations of the technology available to them at the time, and they’ve both received some sort of sequel or remaster that tries to bring them to new audiences that otherwise wouldn’t be able to play them, which highlights the fact that these games are getting more difficult to play anyway, and may have been impossible without the hard work of fans trying to preserve them and keep them available to future generations.

Over the past few years, my hobbies have been blending with each other; everything has been slowly tying into everything else, dovetailing in ways I would have never expected or experienced. That’s part of why the scope of this video has spiraled so far out of control; I got the time to sit and talk about two things I really care about: video games and photography. That being said, I don’t think I’d want the scope to be any less than this. I care about these things, I want to make other people aware of these things, and I want to make those people care about them as well.

Life is about sharing the experiences you get to have with others, whether it be right now or 50 years down the road. So go ahead and take those snapshots of your life, of the things you care about; make some backups of them. Store them somewhere safe. Don’t let the things you care about vanish without getting to share it with someone else.