Ever onward, ever onward. I know how much you all cherish these entries.

• DROD: The City Beneath (2007): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [54 hrs]

Picking up from last time, after playing hundreds of hours of DROD: I proceeded to play even more DROD.

Third full game in the series, and the last one that I’d already played; everything from this point on will be brand new to me. My first playthrough of this one was only 4 years ago, but damned if that helped at all. Some of the hardest stuff, toward the end, seemed vaguely familiar when I got there, but a substantial portion of this felt like I was seeing it for the first time. That’s not a reflection of how interesting it is — this is in fact the kookiest and most eventful of the games thus far. It’s mostly just an indication of the degraded state of my memory-formation in 2014. Pretty sure things have improved on that front since.

Story-emphasis gets even more extreme in this one. On my previous pass I found that off-putting, but this time I was into it. Bring on the folk-art weirdness, I say! For whatever reason, I’m eating it up. Meanwhile the puzzle elements branch out in all kinds of wacky directions. This is a game that experiments and expands on its own design right before your eyes. There’s something thrilling about that.

Also, after a decade of defiantly unschooled and unpolished music by the game’s designer — which, I grant, was fairly engaging in a gawky “outsider” sort of way — this one suddenly has a soundtrack by an actual established synth musician. And it’s pretty good! (It better be, if you’re gonna spend 54 hours with it.)

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• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 8. Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom (2008): Roger Barnett [8 hrs]

I promise: this is the last one for now. A few interesting rooms here but overall I found this set of puzzles tended toward the irritating. Ah well. You better believe there’s more DROD to come but I think it’s time to mix it up again.

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• Fish Fillets 2 (a.k.a The X Fillets II) (2007): ALTAR Interactive (Brno, Czech Republic) [50 hrs so far…]

Yes, I know how it looks. But contrary to all appearances, this is absolutely terrific. If you can set aside the chirping nonsense of the trappings — and you can — this is as good and as hard (hard! HARD!) as puzzle games come. The original Fish Fillets was a drag, whereas this isn’t at all: it’s smooth and responsive and has a generous undo and save system. Furthermore the puzzle mechanics in this one have been revised to be much more intuitive: yes of course the fish should be able to carry items downward as well as upward!

It gave me that childlike eager feeling I sometimes get, where not only am I enjoying myself but I become convinced against all reason that everyone I know would enjoy this too. It’s never true, of course — in fact often the things that inspire that kind of enthusiasm are the ones most idiosyncratic to me — but it’s a special expansive kind of enthusiasm, where even the non-ego parts of my psyche get folded in. This is a game not only for “I” but for “the Other”! Too bad Fish Fillets 2 isn’t available for Mac or else I’d give YOU a copy, gentle reader, whether you wanted it or not. (If you have a PC, please note that this is just $5 on Steam, and goes on sale for $0.99 regularly. Please note!)

The brilliance, as with DROD, is that the puzzle construction is always in interlocking conceptual layers: the big-picture plan (“I think the idea is to move the first piece across the screen and then use it to lift the second piece?”) is constrained by the move-by-move sliding-puzzle logistics (“Dammit, in what order do I have to make the moves so that I can squeeze both the fish past that jut in the wall? Is it even possible?”), and vice versa. The process of solving is always an intricate dance between attending to short- and long-term goals.

The puzzles are hard (HARD!) enough that all the X-Files fish nonsense feels perfectly welcome (though I’ll grant that the way the dialogue repeats after an undo is a bit exasperating). All the non-puzzle elements of the production feel like illustrations on paper plates at a 6-year-old’s birthday party, but that’s really fine with me. I generally had a good time at those parties. And yes, after tens of hours of brainwashing, I did actually start to chuckle at some of the supremely supremely nerdy joking. It’s all in good fun, people! Come on!

I’m writing it up even though I didn’t finish, yet, because — did I mention it’s hard? About 40 hours into this thing the difficulty started to be, as they say, prohibitive, and progress became very very slow indeed. But I’m not a quitter. Just a slower. I’ve slowed so significantly that I’m logging it. But I assure you: the work will continue.

Hey! I just now put it together that Fish Fillets is designed by Vlaada Chvátil, the same game designer as instant-classic tabletop game Codenames, as seen at your local Barnes & Noble! NOW do you believe me? This is the real thing! Woo-hoo, Fish Fillets 2!

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Meanwhile I do want to keep chipping away at the backlog. Still working through the Humble WB Games Bundle from 11/5/13.

• Scribblenauts Unlimited (2012): 5th Cell (Bellevue, WA) [played for 2 hours]

Curiosity about this game’s celebrated “type absolutely anything and it will appear onscreen!” mechanic was the main reason I bought this bundle in the first place. The system is simultaneously impressive and not that impressive. Everything’s rendered in the same simplistic, blocky, hinged-puppet style, and modifiers are implemented in the simplest and most obvious way. Wanna see “big fat angry teal koala”? Sure, it can do that. Just don’t expect it to be as funny to look at as it was to come up with. Despite all the adjectives it still just looks basically like “koala” which, come to think of it, looks basically like “bear.”

That said, there are certainly several minutes of genuine entertainment to be had in ordering it to generate a bunch of stupid surreal things and then watching them interact. “Stinky mean cantaloupe” vs. “hairy baby mapmaker”! Go! (In case you were curious: the cantaloupe attacked the baby mapmaker, who then defeated it almost immediately by throwing a map at it.)

As for the game, it’s more or less Richard Scarry’s Busytown, with plenty of glockenspiel cheer to go around. Contrary to the silly casting in the trailer above, this is designed for actual kids much more than for kids-at-heart (= weird uncles)… but I do have to wonder if even actual kids would find this rewarding for very long. Once you get past the pure sandbox amusement, the gameplay basically consists of a series of characters making requests like “I need something to help me put these dinosaur bones together!” and you type “glue” and then drag the glue to the woman who asked for it, and then the pile of bones puff-of-smoke into a complete skeleton, and the screen fills up with “hooray you did it” graphics. I guess maybe if I had typed “giant sticky boogers” it might also have worked, but it’s not like it awards creativity points. Glue will do fine.

Fun is where you find it, I guess. Sounds good. I made a hairy baby mapmaker and had the corresponding amount of fun. I heartily approve of the spirit of this game and have no need to actually play it.

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• Batman: Arkham City (2011 / “Game of the Year Edition” 2012): Rocksteady Studios (London, UK) [25+ hrs]

Batman’s post-Burton franchise affectations — of being “brooding” and “dramatic” and, quote, “dark,” end quote — are pretty hard for me to take, if only because I actually do like things that are brooding and dramatic and dark, and Batman, as far as I can tell, is actually just a ballet about a bunch of different Mardi Gras costumes getting into fights. All the weeping choruses singing double-talk Dies Iraes, the obsessive Pietà posing — get a grip, guys! Open your eyes and look at what’s really going on here: the little guys are bopping each other!

The storyline is just a catalogue of 15 different villains, strung together into a fetch-quest daisy chain, and the gameplay mostly consists of being trained to do tricks on cue, and then being fed the cues. (Whenever you see a concrete wall: use your explosive to explode it. Got that? Hey look, it’s a concrete wall! Hey look there’s another one!) The characters are all kinda gross and/or porny, and as I’ve already said I can’t really get into the vibe. So why did I thoroughly enjoy this game for 25 hours? Sheer production polish. This product is luxurious in every respect: it looks and sounds and responds like a million bucks. That’s what “triple A” games are supposed to offer: confident, seamless immersion in a sensory thrill. Taste, and indeed substance, is really beside the point. Games are the new Hollywood; this is a mountain of sparkly tinsel. I’m totally a sucker for tinsel. Isn’t everybody?

I think snobbery usually arises from people trying to fight off their own seduction by nonsense. I on the other hand enjoy allowing myself to be thoroughly seduced by all sorts of nonsense. If it can figure out how. This figured out how. Yes, I know, having no standards is risky — but listen: life is risky.

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The rest of the Humble WB Games Bundle is going to be skipped!

• Mortal Kombat Kollection is no longer supported by Steam and anyway it’s just old arcade games, which I can play other ways.

• Guardians of Middle-Earth is fundamentally a multiplayer game, in a genre I don’t care at all about, and Steam reviews pretty much all say it’s terrible. Three strikes.

The bundle also came with some kind of starter kit for Lord of the Rings Online but that’s not actually a game that I now own, it’s just a promotional enticement to enter an already free-to-play “massively multiplayer” game. Not happening.

So that finally brings me to the end of my purchases of… let’s see… November 2013!

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December 12, 2013: GOG, knowing that at the end of the year they’ll be losing their license to sell the original Fallout games, offers them for free to kick off their winter sale (and possibly to piss off the rights-holders?) I can’t resist clicking on buttons that say Free, so now I have them.

These are famous and beloved games, but they’re now essentially antiques and are furthermore not what I would usually consider to be my kind of game. So let’s see how much patience I have for them.

• Fallout (1997): Interplay Productions (Los Angeles, CA) [played for 2.5 hrs]

Results are in: Not enough patience. I can tell this is a nice, thoughtful RPG. But I have some kind of inborn RPG block, and this isn’t gonna be the game that breaks it.

I spent most of my time punching rats, then waiting for them to ploddingly “take their turn,” so that I could punch them again. A guy said he’d help me for money, but I had no money, and couldn’t find any way to get some. I died several times by stupidly wandering into situations I wasn’t prepared for. There were too many menus and stats, and everything required two more mouse-clicks than I instinctively wanted it to. I just couldn’t get in the zone. I never can with RPGs. That’s all there is.

Very very gradually earning new slivers of the statistical pie in the face of a random number generator is not fun to me. It never will be. Seems to me that RPGs are ALL ABOUT that.

This means I’m gonna skip

• Fallout 2 (1998): Black Isle Studios (Irvine, CA)
• Fallout Tactics (2001): Micro Forté (Canberra, Australia)

Okay.

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12/18/03 I purchase “Humble Bundle: PC and Android 8.” This ends up being 8 games (for $5). One of them (Little Inferno) I already own and have addressed somewhere above. The other 7 are next up on the backlog.

• Gemini Rue (2011): Joshua Nuernberger (Los Angeles, CA) / Wadjet Eye Games (Brooklyn, NY) [6 hrs]

All graphic adventure games are born fighting an uphill battle against terminal awkwardness. I can’t help but root for them… for the first half hour. The other five-and-a-half hours of Gemini Rue I spent making editorial corrections, mentally. The title gives a clue to the sort of writing on offer: Gemini is the name of a sci-fi location in the game, and then, yes, that’s just the plain old word “rue,” as in “rue the day.” As in “He doesn’t need to live a life of rue anymore,” which (spoiler!) is the final line of dialogue. Or as in the designer’s own words: ‘…since the game was pretty melancholy, I looked up a sad thesaurus and came up with the word, “Rue.” ‘

The protagonist’s name is “Azriel Odin.”

Sound and graphics are… okay, and some of the Philip K. Dick-ripoff story ideas had promise. The genre is a promising one for this form (and overall I found this more successful than Beneath a Steel Sky; the necessary actions may have been uninspired but at least they made sense). So, sure, the game has its points — I don’t need to look up a sad thesaurus to review it — but it is inescapably student work, living somewhere above “fan” but below “professional.” Of course, a lot of well-staffed graphic adventures also tend to find themselves stuck in that zone, which is why they all need so much rooting for. Root root root! If they don’t win it’s a shame. Hey Wadjet Eye, if you ever want someone to rewrite absolutely every single line of your dialogue, just let me know. Sample work: final line above should have been “Whoever he is… he’s free.” Get in touch if you want the other thousand.

Unless the voice acting is supremely good — which it never is — these constrained pixelly games feel far better without it. Much more enveloping, much more ominous. That hush is a threat and an enticement, just like the faces that are too lo-res to be seen. And yet I never have the guts to just outright mute the voices when they’re provided — it would feel uncouth, like refusing a birthday cake that someone has taken the time to bake for me. On which they’ve written “Happy birth! Day.” because they only got one take and don’t have any clue what the context is. Thanks guys, it’s! Delicious.

A break from the bundle backlog! After typing up the previous entry in this log I realized I maybe should play some games that I actually like, for a change. Done.

• The Talos Principle (2014): Croteam (Zagreb, Croatia) [28 hrs]

Purchased 12/28/17 in the Steam Winter Sale for $7.99 (down from $39.99!).

Excellent. Gently surreal uninhabited idylls filled with lock-and-key puzzles, a.k.a. Myst, but this is surely the cleverest narrative justification the genre has ever received. The particular aesthetics of these idylls were rewarding for me; I was pleasantly reminded of my recent visit to Pompeii, which I think is exactly what the designers had in mind. I was also affected by the level that seemed to be a take on Böcklin’s Toteninsel; the chance to go “inside” an evocative piece of art is one of the greatest gifts of computer games. All in all, a bunch of tasty make-believe places to spend some time.

Furthermore the actual puzzles are good too, basically revolving around the principle of locking/unlocking at a distance by line-of-sight. This is a simple and solid mechanic, and despite being intuitive and obvious, was genuinely new to me. Quibble is that there’s some redundancy, a sense of filler, over the course of this fairly long-for-a-puzzle-game game. Second quibble: of the two voice performances, one — the female voice you hear in the trailer — isn’t very good, and unfortunately it has a lot to say. Otherwise strongly recommended!

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• The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna (2015): Croteam (Zagreb, Croatia) [12 hrs]

DLC (“DownLoadable Content“! We’ve been through this before!) for the preceding. I bought it on 12/30, after enjoying the main game for only two days, because it already seemed clear I was going to want it and I didn’t want to miss the sale price: $3.74.

This is the good kind of DLC, where the new stuff actually feels more polished than the original game, because the designers’ understanding of their own creation has grown more confident and mature. This set of puzzles is more varied, less redundant, and overall harder than those in the main game. In fact the set of optional extra challenge puzzles at the very very end are legitimately tough nuts. Which I was glad for. Even the writing was stimulating! There was a distinct sense of “let’s not just phone this in by grinding out more of the same, let’s come up with a new subject of interest and take it seriously.” Admirable all around.

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• DROD: King Dugan’s Dungeon (1996–2005): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [35 hrs]

“D.R.O.D.” = “Deadly Rooms of Death.” An old friend. Played the original in 1998, then checked out the revamped edition in 2008 or so. I guess once every 10 years seems to be the rhythm because look what time it is. I recently learned that the version on Steam had some new “challenges” incorporated into it, involving doing old puzzles in newly constrained ways, and I’m a big enough fan that that’s an enticement. I had bought the first three games in this series from GOG on 6/14/14, bundled on sale for a total of $2.49 — good deal! — but those copies didn’t include the challenges, so on 1/1/18 I repurchased them on Steam, on sale for: $2.49 again. Sometimes it’s disturbing how cheap games are.

This is possibly my favorite game of all time? The ultimate computer game? The greatest puzzle game ever made? I’m not sure if any of those things is entirely true, but some kind of superlative certainly applies here. Not sure I can fully explain the grip it holds on me, but essentially: it’s like an infinite toybox. Each puzzle-room is a new surprise pulled out from its depths, and there are thousands upon thousands of rooms out there. This is a construction kit that can generate genuinely interesting and substantial puzzles, seemingly without limit. It’s a thing of beauty. And there’s something of the platonic ideal of videogaming, to me, in the way it’s simultaneously continuous action AND turn-based strategy — in its world, these are identical. Just as it’s simultaneously pure logic puzzle AND fantasy dungeon adventure — again, it makes these identical. It’s like the nexus of all gaming.

The game’s aesthetic quirks and shortcomings are to me endearing. Or maybe that’s even too condescending: they’re genuinely engaging in their own right. Suave and polished is not the only way worth being! DROD is profoundly unselfconscious in the greatest nerd tradition. It feels like something purer and more unembarrassed than “the industry” will ever know, and reminds me of the bygone computer culture of my youth, when the homeliest of homemade games sat shoulder-to-shoulder with intricate commercial products. Listening to voice-over done by programmers, and following along a storyline like something your friend would write in their notebook in 6th grade — at some level, though I do occasionally roll my eyes, these things make me feel that I’m somewhere healthy, somewhere worth being.

As for this first game in the series: yeah, it’s a little unbalanced, with weird difficulty spikes and several tedious stretches. And the “challenges” turned out to be a mixed bag at best. But overall it holds up and I was happy to be back.

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• DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold (2005): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [52 hrs]

[There’s no dedicated trailer for just this one — the trailer above includes scenes from both of these first two games in the series.]

Played through way back in 2005, but was eager to take a second pass as part of this “let’s just play all of DROD in chronological order, dammit” kick.

Second game in the series brings new polish, new variety, and a significant increase in the amount of storytelling, which in this case means doofiness. When I first played this years ago I was a little turned off by that; compared to the relatively plotless first game, it felt like a regrettable downturn toward terminal dorkitude. But this time around, I really felt the opposite: that it was a welcome, cozy dumbness. It drew me in.

Again I was was eager to check out the “challenges,” a few of which turned out to be pretty cruel and tedious, maybe to the detriment of my overall enjoyment, which luckily is robust enough to take a few hits, no problem.

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• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 1. The Choice (2005): Neil Frederick [2 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 2. Perfection (2005): Larry Murk [17 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 3. Halph Has a Bad Day (2006): Eytan Zweig [6 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 4. Beethro and the Secret Society (2006): Jacob Grinfeld [11 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 5. Beethro’s Teacher (2006): Henri Kareinen [33 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 6. Master Locks (2007): Larry Murk [8 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 7. Smitemastery 101 (2007): Jacob Grinfeld [4 hrs]

[No trailers for any of these things because they were made by and for superfans, who don’t need to be advertised to.]

Yes! That’s right! It’s more DROD! The plan is thus to go through all the official content in order of release. That means between the second and third games, all of these things.

I bought the complete “Smitemaster’s Selections” DLC bundle (12 in total) at the same time I bought the preceding games, 1/1/18, for $3.72. I splurged, what can I say.

So what are they. Well, another reason why DROD is the best computer game of all time — the most computer-game-y computer game of all time — is because the built-in level editor can be used by players to create, as suggested above, genuinely rewarding and original content. The things that make the games so great are exactly the things that a “modding” culture can take fullest advantage of. So the line between “official” content and “fan-made” content is, though clearly marked, deliberately faint. These “selections” are fan-made levelsets that were chosen for deluxe treatment by the developers — adding story and voice acting, more thorough testing, etc. etc. — and thus were elevated to being a more or less commercial product.

As you might expect from fan-made content, these are generally more compact, quirkier, and on average far, far harder than the main games. For those reasons they’re also sometimes the most stimulating. I wasn’t sure what to expect — I had never played any of these before — but for the most part I had a really good time. No. 5 of these is the hardest DROD content I’ve encountered anywhere, by a long shot, and also maybe the best. And generally I liked having personality brought to the fore. When you’re wrestling with a puzzle, you’re wrestling with a particular person. Here that became palpable.

Much much more DROD to come, rest assured.

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[No trailer available for such an old game. Here’s some gameplay from the tutorial area to give a sense.]

• Fish Fillets (1998): ALTAR Interactive (Brno, Czech Republic) [played for maybe 6 hours?]

I almost forgot, I played one other game on and off during this period, one that I’d tried a few times before but never gotten into. This was my most committed attempt yet and probably will be my last. It’s sort of a Sokoban/sliding puzzle with two player characters, gravity, and a lot of movement restrictions, some of which are extremely counter-intuitive. It’s a brutally unforgiving bastard of a puzzle game from the outset, and then even if you do manage to master the full ruleset, the puzzles ascend to really crazy levels of intricacy (here’s the solution to a late-game puzzle, just to give an idea). And wow, talk about folk art. The two fish do comedy routines in Czech while you’re playing (really!), and the puzzles involve moving deliberately goofy stuff around to deliberately goofy music. Like, say, a big toilet. Get it?

The reason I stopped wasn’t the actual puzzles, though there is certainly an element of infuriation there — it’s the extremely antiquated program itself, which is intensely clunky and slow to respond, and has no undo system, pretty much unforgivable when wrestling with problems of this depth, at least at my current levels of patience. Turns out there’s a much better implemented sequel from 2007, in which all my issues were addressed. Watch this spot.

These days, the original Fish Fillets is available free for every imaginable system, by the way. Have at it, I guess. Or don’t.

This has been accruing. Might as well dump it out now. There’s nothing very good here, but since when has that ever stopped the log? It keeps on rolling.

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Okay, so, last two games of Humble Indie Bundle 9, purchased 9/23/13.

• Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken (2011): Ratloop Asia (Singapore) [4 hrs]

This was the commercial upscaling of an in-browser Flash game. A browser is like an itsy-bitsy proscenium, a little Punch and Judy stage with red curtains at the side. The format brings different expectations; not everything can scale. The Punch And Judy Movie remains to be made for good reason. The essence of Punch and Judy is that they’re a miniature vulgar version of real, full-scale drama. So by definition they can’t be real full-scale drama. This felt a little like The Punch And Judy Movie.

The packaging weighed more than the game. Not to say there weren’t a few actual gameplay ideas here, but none of them remotely justified the dimensions of the production. This wanted to be in a browser, or on a phone. Or the back of a cereal box.

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• A Virus Named TOM (2012): Misfits Attic (San Francisco, CA) [played for 4 hrs]

Simple stuff, overworked and overproduced. A modest little indie game invested with too many hopes. Basically it’s just the pipe rotation/networking puzzle that I first encountered as “Series of Tubes” by Wei-Hwa Huang in 2006 or so (I don’t know if there’s an earlier precursor), combined with the Pac-Man maze/evade mechanics of so many early 80s arcade games. That’s it. They add some minor novelties to try to keep it varied as you progress. But who asked for variety, anyway? At heart this isn’t really a puzzle game, notwithstanding that the designers opted to build some puzzles with it. It’s basically just an arcade game; it probably ought to have had randomly generated playfields and continuous play. It’s okay for such things to be monotonous; that’s the draw, in fact. Say I, anyway. Of course, I only played the single-player content — there’s some cooperative and head-to-head stuff in there too, and maybe that sits better. I promise never to find out.

As for the package, the strenuously professional attempt to keep things lively and generate charm is self-defeating, and misjudged. Maybe if the music were in fact charming, and not ha-ha hardcore as-if, the whole experience would be reframed. Oh well. At least it’s short. Though I abandoned before the end because the last few levels were pointlessly, punishingly hard.

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10/21/13: Humble Weekly Sale: Hothead Games. Pay what you want for these three games. I pay $1 because I’m faintly curious about the first game below. Faint to the tune of $1.

• DeathSpank (2010): Hothead Games (Vancouver, BC) [13 hrs]

Bought it because it was by Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame and seemed to have some adventure elements. At heart it’s actually exactly the sort of thing I usually whine about: a pure tedium of armor and weapons and potions and combos and currency and shops and configuration; phony inflationary “leveling-up” instead of substantive progression; a plot consisting entirely of fetch quests and padding. I wrote off Torchlight and Bastion as a waste of my time. Yet this I played to fullest completion. Why? 1) I happened to be in the mood to embrace the meditation of an empty task-chain. 2) When it comes to emptiness, packaging is everything, and where Torchlight‘s package was genuine refried D&D, and Bastion‘s was preening emo junk, DeathSpank is a cheerfully stupid pop-up book. This I can use. I picked up thousands and thousands of little coins that went ding simply because that’s what one does in a pop-up book, and it seemed like a pleasant place to hang out for a couple days.

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• DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue (2010): Hothead Games (Vancouver, BC) [played for 1.5 hrs]

Only a few months later in 2010, this “oh oops here’s the rest of DeathSpank” game was released. Seems like they were developing content for a single game and at some point realized it was too much, too long, too bloated, and then instead of cutting back they bulked it up further so that they could split it into two separate products. That’s all well and good for them, but what about me, the player? I started in cheerily enough but after an hour had to have a reckoning: am I really going to spend another 13 hours hanging out clicking on things that go ding in this same pop-up book? What if there were THREE iterations of this game? What if there were SIX? Would I really play them all? If they’re just going to make more and more of it, at some point it’s on me to say it’s been enough. Okay, then: I say it’s been enough. This second one might be marginally more interesting in some superficial ways but screw it. I already had this experience. It’s cute! I’m not complaining. But I’m ready to move on. If, say, in fifty years, when I’m in my late 80s, I have a profound nostalgic desire to return to DeathSpank, what a treat I’ll have in store! A whole brand new game! But for now, I’ve got plenty of other inane non-places to be.

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• Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One (2008): Hothead Games (Vancouver, BC) [played for 1.5 hrs]

Penny Arcade is a longstanding webcomic about two unpleasant nerds who play videogames, constructed as a charisma fantasy in which there’s something wry and snappy and authoritative about being unpleasant nerds who play videogames. It’s self-congratulation very thinly veiled as self-deprecation and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Nonetheless I thought maybe I could get through one episode of their game. But the game is an RPG, so, as I said above, the packaging is going to be the entire value. And the packaging here is smarmy overwritten trope-clusterbomb gobbledygook, i.e. “geek culture.” Strictly for people who think “Chthulhu plushie” is always and ever intrinsically hilarious no matter the ubiquity. That’s not me so I’m out. Also the design is full of 2008 clumsiness, with way too much clicking necessary to get from one non-event to the next.

Like I said, I only put in a dollar for this bundle because of DeathSpank. This just hitched a ride and I never wanted it in the first place. But I gave it its 90 minute due.

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11/5/13: The Humble WB Games Bundle. I “beat the average” by spending $5 for six games, one of which I already have; a week later three more games are added, making a total of eight new games. I purchased this solely for Batman: Arkham City and Scribblenauts. From my point of view the other six games are completely incidental. But here we go!

Here we go, sort of. See, the thing is…

• F.E.A.R. (2005): Monolith (Kirkland, WA) [played for 2 hrs]

Okay, well, I can see that this is a class act, really I can, but it’s basically a machine purely for making the player tense, and I don’t need that at the moment. In fact perhaps it’s enlightened to say that I don’t ever need it. I passed on Dead Space for the same reason. Of the two, if I had to pick a horror movie to be stuck in, I’d pick this one, which as you can see from the trailer is basically The Ring done as an “evil lab” story. Not my favorite but I’ll take it over outer space fleshmonsters any day. But isn’t a lovely thing about life that one doesn’t have to pick a horror movie to be stuck in?

Really, it’s mostly a gunfight game, with a horror wrapper. But gunfights make me just as tense, if not tenser, as the vengeful spirits of little dead psychic girls, so that’s no relief. I played two hours, killed a whole bunch of guys, got jump-scared a whole bunch of times, and decided I get the drill. It seems like a pretty good drill but I think I’d rather stay away from drills.

There are some expansion games that came with it. I won’t be playing those.

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Which brings us to:

• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009): Monolith (Kirkland, WA)
• F.E.A.R. 3 (2011): Day 1 Studios (Chicago, IL + Hunt Valley, MD)

Right, so, the sequels were in the bundle too and naturally I’m not going to play them either. For the time being. And I expect the time being to continue being for a good long while.

Next!

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• The Lord of the Rings: War in the North (2011): Snowblind (Kirkland, WA) [played for 2 hrs]

A big-budget mediocrity, one among thousands. Games like this are the reason you can’t just go out and buy every game that looks like it might be good. Because chances are it’s not that great. The brand tie-in is done well enough, and I’ll admit that the scenery looks pretty nice, but ultimately it’s all just tinsel. The actual playable area is usually a big rectangle, in which you just stand and fight hordes of bad guys. It’s a glum slog. The writing, the design, the gameplay — everything about this is professional, expensive, and worthless. Games are the new Hollywood, baby!

I put in two hours trying to see some variety but the game insisted on denying it to me. I quit when I noted that I had gotten to level one, part 19, and saw that it was just going to be another fight against the same bunch of bad guys I’d been fighting for the past 18 parts. What a drag. There’s so much better out there and my time deserves it. Shame about all those nice castles and mountains and things that they built. If only there’d been something to do in them.

Not a lot of game-playing these past few months. But a few things.

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (2001, for Game Boy Advance): Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe (Kobe, Japan) [played for about 6 hrs?]

(I can’t find any original ads. Maybe there were none. Here’s a trailer from a 2014 Wii U rerelease.)

This turned up in the Raspberry Pi dragnet. All those GBA games were looking pretty tasty so I told myself I’d pick one, imagine I had a GBA back in the day and it had been one of the few games I owned, and play it to completion with that kind of dedication. After about 6 hours the make-believe wore off and I realized I should stop.

As I’ve said, I’m not a fan of games where little numbers fly off the characters like sparks. Hey designers: I want to be to processing either symbolically or aesthetically, not both at once. But in this instance I swallowed it, because the big picture strongly appealed to me at the moment: to be questing through subterranea, trying to acquire and master, acquire and master. I disparage RPGs for conflating inflation with progress — is the “level 2017” USD really all that awesome? — but there’s something undeniably reassuring about any game where your only possible trajectory is upward. Found a new power, a new ability, a new card for your deck? You never have to do without it again; it’s not going anywhere. Eventually you’ll have the full set and be the monarch of all you survey. Personal aspiration modeled on baseball card collecting. A fantasy to soothe the real-world angst of losing things, slipping backward. Here the only possible struggle is forward, forward for hours toward the distant exit. And as you work your way toward the light you have all that wonderful tunnel waiting for you, a haunted house to be savored. In this context struggle is indistinguishable from ease.

I enjoyed the jump-whip-jump-run flow state, but the stingy checkpoints seemed to insist on cautious and strategic play. At every death: aw, c’mon, guys, that’s my flow state you’re messing with! I’ll cheerfully follow your twisting thread of tasks, and if you leave me be, you’re welcome to spool it out forever. But if you insist on interrupting me again and again, I’m gonna come out and say it: this thread is too long.

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New release that I bought on launch day ($19.99) because I wanted to be able to relate to the reviews:

• Thimbleweed Park (2017): Terrible Toybox (Seattle, WA) [11 hrs]

I mostly give this a thumbs-up. Atmosphere and loving care, sure, but above all: the sense that this really is a product of the same people and the same sensibilities that generated Maniac Mansion 30 years ago. A rare sense of authentic cultural continuity. “Nostalgia” gets sold a lot but this is the real thing: it lives! The only other example I can think of is Cliff Johnson’s 25-years-later sequel to The Fool’s Errand — the production of which seems to have killed the man’s spirit.

Two major problems:

1. Fake-o pixels that get manhandled. Different sizes of “pixel” show up on the same screen, “pixels” get rotated diagonally, “pixels” shake and warp in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with the grid. This is such a profound aesthetic error that it’s hard for me to understand how these designers could blithely get it so deadly wrong. But they do.

Need it be said? “Pixel art” is only meaningful to the eye insofar as it is a rigorous constraint. Otherwise you’re just using a lot of little squares. Why? God knows. “I’m officially obsessed with little squares! They’re kind of amazing. OMG little squares hahahaha ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ lol .”

2. The game is run through with wocka wocka meta-commentary on adventure games, game development, etc. etc. In the old days that sort of thing was an occasional puckish indulgence from the coding side of the curtain. Fine. Here it’s given free rein and a major role in the story: a bit much. Then at the end of the game the meta actually takes over outright, which is far more than a bit much. Monkey Island 2 ended by yanking back the curtain and thumbing its nose at the audience, but that worked because the whole thing had been a paper-thin genre goof all along. (Compare Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Whereas Thimbleweed Park is a very weird amalagam of stuff, not just a straight parody, and the trajectory of its plot isn’t at all obvious. To punch holes in the screen (so to speak) instead of paying off in full feels like a failure of imagination rather than the daredevil leap it seems to want to be.

That said, these were an enjoyable 11 hours. I resorted to googling for hints three times. One was worthwhile, one was a wash, and one of them I regret.

I didn’t Kickstart Thimbleweed Park — I’m not going to Kickstart any game until a game has Kickstarted me — but I followed along with its development blog. Two years ago, when they crowdsourced the names of the books in the “Occult Book Store,” I totally submitted some that are now in the game (alongside about 6000 others). They’re dumb. But they’re not nearly as dumb as the other 6000.

Backers above the $50 level got their names in the in-game phone book (again, thousands of entries) and were given the option of recording an audio voicemail message, of which there are 1848 in the finished game. I listened to quite a few (including one from Mad Men‘s Rich Sommer, known videogame enthusiast). Hearing the actual voices and senses of humor (and German accents) of the people whose money made the game possible is a rich and rewarding bonus feature to stick in a game. It’s of course an ocean of meaningless monotony but there’s some real depth there too. Hey, just like: the internet!

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Okay, now back to the backlog. More from “Humble Indie Bundle 9,” purchased 9/23/13. Four games left.

• FTL: Faster Than Light (2012): Subset Games (Seattle, WA) [played for about 7 hrs?]

Not my cup of tea but I drank about 7 hours worth of tea anyway. People love this game and, you know, I get it. I just don’t get it as me. I was pretending to be another person for a while.

The dream is: hey, when Captain Picard says “divert all power to forward shields,” could that be a game? Yes, it could. But what goes on in it? Space battles, naturally, where you do your best to divert all power etc. Beyond that it’s basically just a board game, shuffling Chance Cards at you. It tells about as much of a story as Monopoly. I was able to play it with my board game mind, with occasional interludes for my video game mind. It goes in the long line of board/realtime hybrids extending back to “Archon.” Of course it’s also a direct descendant of the hallowed old “Star Trek” BASIC game circa 1971.

I had heard a lot of indie hyperventilation about this dinky-looking game for the past several years, and accordingly brought some cynicism with me. I’m very pleased to find that this is what engendered all that nerdy enthusiasm: an unpretentious, extremely old-fashioned thing through and through.

People go on and on about the brilliance of “roguelike” games when they’re really just talking about the way card and board games have always been. Thoroughly shuffle the deck and away you go.

Yes, there’s a kind of freedom and perhaps dignity in such games that Mario et al. lack. There’s a certain sense of independence, of maturity, in randomness. A rigid adventure game gives a man a fish; a deck of cards teaches a man to fish. (By saying “go fish.”)

But actually I’m skeptical of equating independence with maturity. Dependence has its own dignity and meaning. A rigid adventure game dares to say something directly to the player; it’s sociable. There are great human joys and depths in the experience of giving a man a fish. You can cook it for him, for one thing: add spices, add a side dish, make it particular. Being connected isn’t inferior to being disconnected. They each have their place. I like video games because they’re connections, because I like encountering the human in cultural works. If I’m going to play a true Game, a system game, a tokens and shuffling game, why would I play it on a computer? A real deck of cards is always a superior tactile experience, a superior social experience. I spent some of my FTL hours fantasizing loosely about a hypothetical tabletop version. It seemed to invite it.

No, I never beat the boss. Yes, I was playing on Easy mode. I made it to the final phase of the boss battle once, but then it got me.

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• FEZ (2012): Polytron Corporation (Montréal, QC) [13 hrs]

This lived well up to expectations. A mood piece smack-dab in the middle of “video game culture” — pixels as ontological fixation + wistful synth sunsets — and yet it didn’t annoy me in the least. This is the fully committed game all other hipster indie games want to be. Credit the excellent soundtrack, but also the concept and design. Mario World as Flatland is an inspired link-up, and while you’re gently jumping and climbing your way through the game, the environments are taking the premise more seriously than you may at first notice. When the finale goes the full Kubrick it feels earned and appropriate; it’s genuinely spectacular.

One of those games where the unfurling of the content corresponds to methodical exploitation of the various potentials of the “core mechanic,” as they say. That kind of structure is satisfying not just because it keeps the level of interest up — something new is always happening — but because it feels formally unified and whole. For these 6 hours (or 13 if you stick around like I did) you are doing many things because you are doing one thing, and that one thing is synonymous with the game. This was what gave such force to Stephen’s Sausage Roll (and The Witness) last year. I think this structure is probably the platonic ideal for video games: an exhaustive guided tour of a single idea.

Navigation is the weak spot here. Having to re-traverse completed areas over and over becomes increasingly irritating as things drag on. (I assumed some kind of warp power would be granted to the player late in the game, but it wasn’t to be.) For me this had the unfortunate consequence of making me reluctant to leave an area with any unexplored secrets — because it would be such a pain to get back — and thus more inclined to look things up online. Which turned out to be a terrible mistake, because the game was designed with some lovely puzzles in its second half that I had spoiled for me while still in its first half. I imagine that a few tweaks could have clarified to the player that some areas simply weren’t meant to be solvable until — not just “later,” but “much later.” The idea of “not until much later” is its own thing in game dramaturgy; if it had been signaled to me more explicitly I would have recognized it, and been spared the spoilage.

Only two games played this month. My head was elsewhere.

Continuing with “Humble Indie Bundle 9,” purchased 9/23/13. Six games remain.

• Mark of the Ninja (2012): Klei Entertainment (Vancouver, BC) [13 hrs]

As I’ve said before, game genres are defined in dumb ways. Here we have an example of the “stealth” genre, which basically means any game where you hide a lot. Could be a 2D game, could be a 3D game, could be based on puzzles, could be based on story, could be based on fighting, doesn’t matter. It’s one of those “genres” defined by its attitudinal emphasis, like “horror” — which nonetheless get listed in uneasy parallel alongside genres like “1st-person shooter” and “graphic adventure.” (Could there be a “stealth 1st-person shooter”? Sure; there are plenty. Mix and match.)

I actually wish there were more attitudinal genres in circulation — like “anger” games, and “power fantasy” games. If Steam tagged such things I would be grateful for the guidance. They do sometimes indicate “exploration” games, which is my cup of tea. I would also seek out “fantasy of clarity and order” games. I guess that’s most games.

Anyway, according to the Steam tag system, Mark of the Ninja is a Stealth • Platformer • Ninja • Indie • 2D • Action • Singleplayer • Side Scroller • Adventure. It seems like “Stealth” (or, I guess, “Ninja”) was the conscious intention, and the rest of that stuff is just what fell into place reflexively. Basically, an animated ninja hangs from ceilings, hides behind things, and quietly impales people when they walk by — or doesn’t: your call. (I didn’t like seeing people get impaled so I tried to keep it to a minimum.)

The basic mechanical ideas are compelling — throw darts to break light fixtures and darken rooms so that you can move around unseen; make noises to distract patrolling guards, then get behind them and duck under floor gratings before they turn around, etc. etc. — but the level design is pretty monotonous. Most of the pleasures that the system has to offer have been used up by the fourth or fifth level. Then there are eight more levels.

“Give me experiences, not systems!” I shout yet again. A system is always a means to an end. Seems like these designers worked hard on the means and then just threw an end together. I suspect that pressure to make the game long enough to sell for $14.99 was also a factor in making it feel so drawn out. (Even at 10-20 hours it’s still considered a “short” game.) As a latecomer who only spent about $0.70, I personally would have been much happier with a dense, satisfying 4-hour version. Plenty of time to see all the goodies and do each trick a couple times.

Also, this is a game by the same people who made Shank, and it has some of the same hollow-shell ComicCon feel to it; the commitment to being kickass grotesquely outpaces the commitment to the characters and the story. These are artists fundamentally driven by a compulsion to be derivative. This too is a greater sin over 13 hours than it would have been over 4.

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• Eets Munchies (2014): Klei Entertainment (Vancouver, BC) [played for 1 hr]

This is exactly what it looks like: yet another cutesy-poo iteration on the old Incredible Machine and Lemmings ideas from 25 years ago, with fake Django Reinhardt to hammer home the point that this is a classy joint and a good time is being had by all.

It comes from the same studio as the last game; I imagine they threw it into the bundle as a way of advertising it… FOR YOU SEE this is actually an iPad game, and the bundle only included a computer version. If I really liked it and wanted it on my iPad where it belongs, I’d have to buy it like anyone else. Sure, you can play it on a computer — my one hour is proof of that — but it’s like eating bread with a spoon. I already addressed all this when I got Splot in an earlier Humble Bundle, which was the same thing.

At the time of purchase this was just a “beta” but within a year the full game had been released. It’s also a remake of a game from 2006; presumably these guys saw the success of Cut the Rope in 2010 and thought, “hey, we made that game already! But ours wasn’t as big a success, I guess because it wasn’t as slick-looking. Okay, let’s do it again but slick-looking.” But of course you can’t retroactively be the ones to strike gold. Cut the Rope is still the big winner, not this thing.

Cut the Rope is also more elegant and satisfying in every way. The puzzles I solved in this, the first 50 or so, weren’t that hot. If this looks like fun to you, check out competing best-seller Cut the Rope!

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Okay, I started to feel bad about neglecting the queue so here I am pushing onward.

It’s been a while so a quick refresher. Previously on Game Log:

When last we saw our spreadsheet, I was making my way through the 10 games purchased as the “Humble Origin Bundle” on August 27, 2013, an assortment of “triple-A” games from Electronic Arts that aren’t quite my usual fare. So far I’ve given at least an hour each to Dead Space (dismember horrors), Burnout Paradise (crash cars), Crysis 2 (DOMINATE WITH YOUR POWER), and Mirror’s Edge (be so so fierce).

Next up is Dead Space 3 … but I’m just declaring this one a no-go without even starting it. Having almost immediately found the original Dead Space too unrewardingly yucky to continue, I think it’s safe to say that this entire series isn’t for me. I don’t need to subject myself to any more of it just to prove that. (Yeah, even though they say Dead Space 3 is significantly less scary than its predecessors. I don’t care.) I’m comfortable resigning myself to getting my $4.95 worth out of the other 9 games.

(In related news: email me if you want a code for redeeming a copy of Dead Space 3! Still good! Never used!)

Five to go.

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• Medal of Honor (2010): Danger Close Games (Los Angeles, CA) / EA DICE (Stockholm, Sweden) [played for 1 hr]

I had to stop after an hour because I think this game may be evil. Evil in the sense of being by and for a mindset that is responsible for some of the real troubles of the real world. I was worried this might be hard to explain but conveniently it’s all on show in the trailer above.

Is “macho” really evil? I don’t know; maybe that’s too strong a claim. I can hear how extreme it sounds to say that.

But if “evil” is going to refer to anything, shouldn’t it be this? Flipping the switch. The wolf pack. The unknown elite.

It was after this cut scene that I quit. I couldn’t stomach the game’s unbelievable self-satisfaction about having recognized that an Afghan would have feelings. Writer: “Hey, an Afghan saying some emotional stuff, about how he’s, like, a human being or whatever, would be a really awesome opportunity to contrast the kickass hotheaded take-no-shit side of American masculinity with the mature, compassionate, also-take-no-shit side of American masculinity. I’ll have him babbling, and a wise American will cut him off in an awesomely manly fatherly voice and say ‘I understand. Where are the enemy?'”

The idea that an Afghan might resent being cut off, might feel outraged at being threatened and then patronized by heavily-armed self-satisfied foreigners, is beyond the game’s ability to imagine. It’s too busy looking in the mirror and flexing, and being proud of its refusal to take shit. No more shit. Take no shit. We don’t take shit. One thing you can say for sure about the most elite operators in the world: they don’t take shit.

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

This is a real psychology and, yes, I think it is out there doing evil on this earth. It arises from the taking of shit, and it results in the dishing out of shit.

(The use of echoey middle eastern drones to signify “sober worldliness,” the suppressed and muffled fear and sadness of the proudly battle-hardened, is starting to be a red flag for me. When you hear that keening in a movie these days it’s almost always a sign that some emotional poison has gotten into the water.)

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• Battlefield 3 (2011): EA DICE (Stockholm, Sweden) [9 hrs]

Yes, I know, this would seem to be exactly the same game. Yet this one I played to the end. Its attitude was markedly less toxic. Naturally, it too dabbles in absurd and unhealthy ideas of masculinity — that goes with the territory — but this time those absurdities felt less directly related to moral rot in the real world. Battlefield 3 certainly glorifies the sights and sounds of war and the act of killing, but it doesn’t dwell on how powerful and manly it all makes you. It offers you a fantasy military-fetish experience that, in good faith, it simply assumes you will enjoy. There’s none of that air of narcissistic bullying about it.

It certainly has some tasteless elements stuck in there, but to me they felt naive rather than calculating. It’s the difference between a teenager who says offensive stuff because he’s enthusiastic and oblivious, and a teenager who knowingly says offensive stuff because he wants to prove that he’s too hot for you to handle.

Battlefield 3 is fundamentally an online multiplayer game, with a single-player story game tacked on. Reviewers generally loved the former and dismissed the latter as a sloppy mess, best ignored. But I of course only played the latter. The graphics and overall sense of environmental immersion were terrific, among the very best I’ve ever seen. The rest was indeed sort of a sloppy mess. But I was too entranced by the production values to stop before it was over.

Fun fact: while I was in the middle of playing this game, C-list tabloid mainstay and DSM-5 spokesmodel Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, in what has been described as an “actual event.” On the first day afterward I thought I might not be able to continue with this game because its combination of blinkered idiocy and indiscriminate American military force would ring too relevant for comfort.

But on the second day after I realized, “if I stop shooting at CGI terrorists, the Trumps win,” so I played the rest in one go. It was exactly as fun as the pre-election portion of the game. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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• The Sims 3 (2009): The Sims Studio [= Electronic Arts] (Redwood City, CA) [played for 2 hrs]
+ “Late Night” expansion (2010) + “High End Loft Stuff” pack (2010) + “Date Night” clothing set (2012)

This is an enormously popular game into which many people pour hundreds of hours. I did two hours and I’ve decided to move on.

I built a guy. I tried to make him be me, but after many minutes of carefully tilting his nostrils and rotating his chin and scaling his eye socket depth etc. etc. etc. I had only managed to build something vaguely like a waxwork Jake Gyllenhaal. The game then suggested to me that he was a “loner” and “artistic” and that his life goal was to be a film composer. (Believe it or not, those were randomly generated, but of course I accepted them, on the fortune cookie principle.) I called him “Fred Zank” and moved him into a house. After a tutorial showed me how to control the camera — extremely awkward! — and order Fred around, I was encouraged to tend to his needs, get him a job, and generally guide him toward a life well lived.

Left to his own devices, Fred just wanted to sit in his house and read a fantasy novel. A newspaper was delivered, and I had Fred read it. It informed us about some kind of sporting event going on, so I sent Fred into the city to try to attend. I guess technically he did, but I was disappointed to find that the interior of the stadium wasn’t actually depicted on screen so it didn’t feel like a rewarding outing. Upon exiting the stadium, Fred indicated that he was thirsty and hungry, so I directed him to a nearby establishment with a martini icon, but the bouncer repeatedly refused to let him in, so I sent him to another one. That bouncer refused to let him in too. These humiliating experiences seemed to agitate Fred somewhat, and by this point it was getting quite late and Fred was apparently weary from lack of sustenance.

In desperation, I found a dive bar on the map and sent Fred there. When he arrived I had him order food and drink from the bartender. Perhaps he would have done it on his own, and my order somehow doubled up the amount of food and drink; in any case, he seemed to go on eating and drinking for a long time. A woman sat down at the bar next to Fred and I was going to have him try chatting her up when he suddenly indicated that he had urgent need for a toilet. I trundled the camera around looking for the bar restroom, and, finding it, directed Fred to use the toilet there, but unfortunately at that moment I saw that Fred had spontaneously added a new task to his queue, called “pee self.” He then stood up rather confusedly from the barstool and peed on the floor, obviously disgusting the 7 or 8 people who stood nearby, whose thought bubbles all filled up with pictures of Fred.

This incident made him fairly unhappy, and he began to emanate a cloud of stink. Furthermore it was now the wee hours of the morning. I sent Fred home to sleep it off in his bed, which he did, not waking until mid-afternoon. I had him take a shower, and then look for a job in the paper, which he immediately found: he could apparently enter the music industry as a professional “fan.” Having accepted the job, the next morning I had him make himself breakfast to prepare for his first day at work. The only thing he knew how to make was “waffles.” I watched him combine ingredients into a bowl, stir the batter, and then pour it into some kind of pan — I guess a waffle mold? — that he put in the oven. After a few minutes of baking, the oven burst into flame. Fred, standing nearby, began to panic, uselessly. The fire spread to the wall and the floor. The fire alarm went off and soon a fireman had arrived to spray the oven — and Fred — with foam.

Soon a mysterious car arrived outside to drive Fred to work. It drove Fred to a high-rise office building. Again, the interior wasn’t shown, so I don’t know exactly what Fred was doing as a professional music fan, but he was there at work for several hours, and left with about $125 of pay.

At this point I stopped.

I found all of this amusing, sure, but also sad. There was something disheartening about the loneliness and futility of this sprawling world-system, full of catalogues upon catalogues of options, and something oppressive about Fred’s overwhelming vacuity. Even his most outrageous humiliations were weightless, arbitrary, inconsequential.

It was like the opposite of storytelling: the game offers events that would seem to have obvious dramatic meaning, and then drains them of that meaning. In this game people ostensibly die, are born, fall in love, betray one another, achieve their dreams, lose it all, blah blah blah, but it all has exactly the same texture of utter emptiness. That’s supposed to be the fun of it, I suppose, but to me it means there’s nothing worth staying for.

The Sims 3 might purport to be like playing with dolls, but when kids play with dolls, their emotions are the life of the dolls and the life of the dolls is all emotion. There are no rules other than self-expression. Whereas these computer dolls are all rules, only rules, and they do their feeling by themselves. They have animations for acting sad and happy and scared and eager so that you don’t have need or occasion to imbue them with anything of your own. A doll is a totem; The Sims are just sea monkeys. And if I’m going to raise sea monkeys I want them simple. I don’t want “infinite possibilities.”

Just last month, Stardew Valley managed to draw me into playing a “life simulator” because, unlike the usual fare, it was fundamentally sentimental about everything. The changing of the seasons; the sprouting of a new radish; showing daily affection for your cows: the game’s aesthetics are very specifically selling the idea that any of these things might wet your eyes a bit with existential poignancy. And I’ll buy that; I have use for it. (Yes, sometimes I criticize attempts at that sort of thing as kitsch, or insincere, but I criticize because it’s something I care about, something I need.) The Sims 3 is the opposite: a mechanized simulacrum of life deliberately emancipated from all sentimentality. It invites us to enjoy the forms of shopping and coupling and advancing and earning without the burden of those things having any substance. It is the names and shapes of things without their pesky meanings. That attitude in itself has a meaning, for me, in relation to life, and it means depression. This is what life looks like when you are looking through the wrong eyes.

So that’s enough of that.

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• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 — Uprising (2009): EA Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA) [played for .5 hrs]

How to parse the title: first you’ve got Command & Conquer (1995), and then you’ve got a prequel, Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996), which begins its own line of descent, its grandchild being Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008). And then a few months later, the present game, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 — Uprising, which is a “stand-alone expansion” to Red Alert 3. This all means that my sense of being late to the party is four layers deep. Plus if you watch the trailer you’ll probably understand why I’m not sure whether I was invited to this party at all. Kinda seems like a party for a different crowd.

I like the concept of Real-Time Strategy but my brain doesn’t naturally take to it. I started the tutorial, but trying to get in the headspace gave me such a strong sense of swimming upstream against my own desires that after half an hour I decided it needed to be heeded, so I’m going to skip this game. My superficial impression is that if I were even remotely inclined to play an RTS right now, this would be a pretty good one. But I’m just not.

Thought: I am far more willing to push through tedious rulesets when learning board games because a) the entire responsibility for enacting the game is on the player so it feels natural that I should have to shoulder more information than when a computer is running the show, and b) the point of a multiplayer game is not so much to contend with the rules as it is to contend with other people through the medium of the rules, which holds greater emotional promise and so is worth a greater investment. It’s true that I am a lifelong lover of puzzles and single-player games, but the ones I like generally have fairly simple and immediately intuitive rules. To me, essential to the pleasure of experiencing a thing alone is that you encounter it as it appears, rather than as it explains itself. The appearance is the explanation.

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Sidebar:

I love the ideal represented by the modern practice of incorporating the tutorial right into the game proper: namely that learning is entirely the teacher’s project, not the student’s, and so at its best it will be indistinguishable from ordinary doing. The only necessity is that the on-ramp begin all the way on the ground — after that, as long as the road is well-constructed, from the traveler’s perspective it’s all just road. Ramps are not “prerequisites” to level ground; all travel is continuously contoured.

For puzzle games this ideal is absolutely achievable; this year The Witness and Stephen’s Sausage Roll were both built entirely around the principle of learning. But with intricate game-systems like RTSes and board games, it’s much more difficult to create a tutorial that resembles play, because the rules are not inherently cumulative. The intricacies usually exist because they’re necessary for structural balance. Starting out with only one or two rules in place is like playing a completely different game, one that the designers rarely want to spend time exploring and making worthwhile in its own right. Nonetheless I continue to fantasize about such things.

I would love board games to come with an interactive learning ritual, something like a Seder.

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• Populous (1989): Bullfrog (Guildford, UK) [played for a few minutes]

This last game in the “Humble Origin Bundle” seems to have been tossed in as a kind of historical bonus item. Populous is a tremendously influential classic from nearly 30 years ago. It’s probably not my cup of tea, but I was still looking forward to giving it a shot, after all these years of hearing about it. Unfortunately, the version in this bundle displays with the wrong colors and the wrong proportions. More importantly, it does not come with the manual. If any game has ever needed a manual, it’s this one — the gameplay is highly idiosyncratic and the controls are a set of buttons marked only with obscure glyphs. Could I find the manual online somehow, and also try to figure out how to improve the emulation? Yes. But I could very easily have found a pirated copy of this game somewhere, too. This trek through my backlog is about giving a chance to all the games I’ve already acquired. This acquisition turns out to be missing some parts. Moving on.

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Here ends the “Humble Origin Bundle,” which in retrospect was kind of a bust. I bought it for Mirror’s Edge and out of curiosity about Dead Space and The Sims 3, but none of those really panned out the way I hoped. 25 hours of “meh” for $4.95 I rate as not great. It’s cheap enough per hour, but there are, after all, infinite hours of “meh” to be had for free in the real world.

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September 20, 2013: GOG adds two new free games to their roster and I reflexively add them to my library. As with prior free games on GOG, these are both games that had already been declared “freeware” by their copyright owners and can be downloaded elsewhere, but I’m still counting them here because they were, on that day, the objects of my acquisitive compulsion. About which I feel slightly ashamed. All this blogging is, I guess, my way of proving to myself that this compulsion isn’t completely empty and neurotic after all; I eventually do get something real out of these things I acquire. (Some of them, anyway.)

Better, I know, would be to accept and embrace any past compulsion, rather than try to vindicate it with a new present compulsion. Yes. But there’s a second aspect to all this game playing, which is that I like games, am comforted by them, and happen to have this bottomless bag of gifts for myself, just standing by. It seems like a genuinely worthwhile thing to be doing at a time when I am seeking peace of mind, to be pulling stuff from that bag.

• Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995): Interactive Binary Illusions [= John Passfield, Steve Stamatiadis, & Tony Ball] (Brisbane, Australia) [5.5 hrs]

(No trailer available, so this is the whole game. Skip around; you’ll get the gist pretty quickly.)

This of course I can handle. One of the most competent and committed of the fan-made LucasArts imitations, at least from the era before “Adventure Game Studio” came out and every geek in Europe could make his own Monkey Island knockoff. These Australian guys completely built their own wannabe LucasArts game from the ground up, and then managed to sell it commercially. Albeit not in very large numbers.

The game is in every possible way an imitation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992) — plus a couple of elements from The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) — but the designers deserve credit for making their imitation non-slavish. It is entirely derivative but it’s not autistic mimicry, as so many fan games tend to be. It’s a real, original game that just happens to get all its ideas from other, more famous games.

Flight of the Amazon Queen is clearly a passion project, very ambitious for the people making it, and that means its has that special energy that amateurs bring. Like those kids who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark. These guys have done something similar and it’s compelling in a similar spirit.

On the merits, the actual story and puzzles aren’t really interesting or that much fun. There’s an unconscionable amount of slow, slow backtracking, always unskippable. But the graphics are mostly quite good, and I can coast a long way on just the implications of those pixelated DeluxePaint shadows.

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• Stargunner (1996): David Pevreal, Craig Allsop, James Podesta, & Leo Plaw (Brisbane, Australia) / Apogee Software (Garland, TX) [played 2 hrs]

The other freeware game added to GOG on the same day happens by complete coincidence also to have come from Brisbane, Australia. (I just searched to see what’s the most famous game ever to have come out of Brisbane. The answer is: Fruit Ninja. Who knew? Or cared? Video games are a truly international culture, far moreso than movies or music.)

This is a distinctly ugly horizontal shoot-em-up from toward the end of the “shareware” era of scrappy half-independent games. It plays fair and has generally a good feel to it, but there’s not enough personality here to entice me to put in the time. If this were the only game I owned, I’d probably grow to love it. But I own many, many games.

It’s also very hard and it doesn’t try to ease you in. Right from the beginning of level 1, even set to “easy” difficulty, it’s hard. I’d be more interested in learning how to meet that challenge if only the aesthetics were motivating me to care. As it is, I felt a little like it was someone slamming the door on me every time I knocked. Hey, man, I’m just here as a courtesy, trying to be polite! I’m not, like, obsessed with you. If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m just going to go to the next house. It’s no skin off my back.

Especially since it was free.

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September 23, 2013: After twelve days of considering whether buying “Humble Indie Bundle 9” for $5 is really a good idea, I finally take the plunge. This officially nets me ten games, but three of them (Bastion, LIMBO, and Brütal Legend) are already in my collection from prior bundles, so really I get seven games out of it. Of these, I have until now played only one (and not for very long, so I’ll be returning to it here).

• Trine 2: Complete Story (2011–13): Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland) [17 hrs]

Remember Trine? (It’s okay. I know you don’t. This is just for me.) Well, here it is again, with “2” mostly referring to the production values. Lavish to look at and bask in, in a tasteless, immoderate, Thomas Kinkade kind of way. Also bland and uninvolving in a Thomas Kinkade kind of way. It’s a tad more satisfying than the original — at least as far as I can remember it — but ultimately it’s just more of the same game. I didn’t mind being transported to lush Fantasy Nowheresville for a while; I got something out of it. But that’s hardly a recommendation. I’ve been to plenty of Fantasy Nowheresvilles with much more to offer. We all have.

This release is called “Complete Story” because it also contains a substantial new set of levels that were released a year after the main game. The extra material is markedly better than the rest: less padded, more varied in play and in visuals — which are, to my eye, much more attractive than in the core game. This is the way it often goes: the extra bits of DLC are developed after the pressure of getting the game finished has been lifted, and after the team has developed a comfort with their materials, and so they end up being more confident and compelling precisely because they’re inessential. Then again, sometimes it goes the other way: the extra bits are nobody’s top priority and nobody wants to waste good ideas on them, so they come out timid and shoddy. It kind of depends on the prevailing spirit of the studio. I feel like the superiority of the DLC over the main game actually reflects well on the company culture at Frozenbyte.

There’s a Trine 3 out there but I don’t own it and hopefully I’ll be able to keep it that way.

More from this bundle next month. You can’t wait.

Only two games played this month, and neither came from the back of the queue. Forgive me.

• Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (1990, for Sega Master System): Sega (Tokyo, Japan) [3 hrs]

(I can’t find an ad for this game so instead I offer this video of a full playthrough. Please approximate a trailer by skipping around randomly.)

This is a minor platformer, intermittently charming, fairly typical of its era. The production is tight and professional throughout. The difficulty is mostly well balanced. The tinny music on the Sega Master System is unfortunate.

The Disney license is only used superficially — i.e. it doesn’t inform the mechanics or structure of the game — but what’s there is fairly respectful: the level themes allude to classic Silly Symphonies like Flowers and Trees, Thru the Mirror, Clock Cleaners, etc. More than you can say for most Mickey Mousery.

I originally said a whole lot more here, but on second thought I feel like that gave a false impression of what this game was like and how much it meant to me. Your current impression is more accurate.

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The following game was bought on 10/11/16 as the “early unlock” for the “Humble Monthly Bundle: November 2016,” for $12. This is a monthly scheme wherein the customer is shown one pig and then encouraged to buy a pokeful. (That is, my $12 got me this game immediately upon purchase, plus a bunch of other unknown games only to be unveiled on November 4.)

• Stardew Valley (2016): ConcernedApe (= Eric Barone) (Seattle, WA) [played for 35 hrs]

Yeah, that’s right, 35 hours. And that’s not to any sort of ending. In fact according to the calendar in the game it’s probably only about halfway.

I bought and played this because over months of hearing about it, its promise of quiet coziness began to call out to me mysteriously.

Everything about Stardew Valley is what I generally reject about games: RPG systems upon systems surrounding a completely empty core of skill-free clicking. The worst. And yet somehow the huge popularity of this game’s sentimental vision of life as a heartwarming routine resonated with me. The idea of corralling my OCD into an open-ended fantasy of day-to-day serenity seemed potentially nourishing. Maybe I’d learn something about what OCD is actually good for. Instead of the itchy discontent of 100%ism, I thought I ought finally to sample the gentle infinity of +1ism. Accepting that there is no ending, just a direction to move in, might mean being able to take more pleasure in the moment.

I raised lots of crops, bought some cows and chickens, caught a lot of fish. I got to the bottom of the mines, restored a couple rooms in the community center, won contests at the annual festivals. I had four or five moderate friendships going. I added a kitchen to the farmhouse. I started making cheese, wine, mayonnaise, preserves. My dog’s name is Bug.

I think I learned something by playing this game. Or maybe my playing this game was the proof that I had already learned something. In fact I think both are true, because it’s not a thing to learn just once; it’s a thing that I must continuously learn and relearn until I am rebuilt by it.

Did I have a good time playing Stardew Valley? Yes, I think so, but part of my learning is changing how I identify which times are the good ones. I’m not sure the game is “fun,” but who ever said “fun” was the only kind of fun? The game is transporting, yet not really transporting to anywhere. It’s a world in quotes in quotes in quotes and then in quotes again, and all those quotes are a cushion of peace.

After gladly putting in those 35 hours, I seem to have stopped. Might I return? Sure. Might I not? Sure. One of the great joys of “no ending” is that it doesn’t matter whether you play.

Another game suddenly cuts into the queue:

• Shadow of Destiny (2001, for PlayStation 2): Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan) [4 hrs]

I had never heard of this game until the moment I happened across a clip of it on Youtube, and I immediately felt the urge to play it because I got the strong impression that it might be bonkers.

Friends, it is BONKERS.

Part of the bonkers is in the localization from the Japanese, as is common, but just as much of the bonkers is in the original localization from the land of dream.

The apparent premise of the game is that a plane passing over Uncanny Valley accidentally drops a copy of “Back to the Future,” and the confused denizens there, who have never seen a human movie before, become obsessed with it and begin performing their own interpretations of the story. As is the way in Uncanny Valley, their voices, bodies, and thoughts are not actually linked internally but only through an interdimensional game of Telephone.

Of course that’s all a joke. In fact my fascination lies exactly in the fact that this is not an artifact from another world or a primitive society: it’s a video game from a large corporation, sold internationally. All the more to marvel at. Human culture is a vast fungal mass and this is one of its infinite fractal tendrils, and that’s all. I’m just noting that from my personal Mandelbrot perch, this particular tendril is, weirdly, both nearer and farther than it appears. Fractals can be that way.

I think that’s a deeper way of understanding the “uncanny valley.” The near side of the valley isn’t “realism,” per se, it’s just whatever way your personal culture has trained you to see the world. “Realism” — yes, even “photorealism” — is always a convention; the question is whether it’s your convention. This game neither belongs to my culture nor doesn’t belong; it’s too foreign to be familiar and too familiar to be foreign. It’s both and neither. It is, in a word, bonkers.

“Uncanny” and “comical” are two sides of the same bonkers. I laughed a lot while playing. Which is to say while watching — about 95% of the game is non-interactive puppet show. I’m fine with that, at least when the show is so distinctive.

I can’t find any other people online reacting that way to this game — to the contrary, it seems to be a sort of cult classic, very highly regarded by those who know it, but not widely known. Well, that’s fine. My amusement was my own and it was real.

When I was done, I thought I’d watch a little with the original Japanese audio, to see if it somehow made things feel more dignified or sensible. Turns out there is no original Japanese audio; the original Japanese version has the same English voices, just with Japanese subtitles. These are their real and only voices. So that particular thread of the absurdity isn’t really an issue of localization; it’s just another example of the longstanding Japanese compulsion to make like a Westerner, very charismatic, it’s the big time, ready to rock and roll!

I should also note that the voices are hopelessly American but the game seems to take place in Germany and the characters all have Germanic names. I think from the Japanese point of view, Germans might be second only to Americans in terms of the cachet of being compellingly non-Japanese. And perhaps somewhat interchangeable in that role. The protagonist’s name is “Eike Kusch,” which he pronounces as “Ike Kush” (rhymes with “mush”).

Only a few days later and this has already become one of those “did I make up this memory? did I dream it?” experiences, like a weird TV special I might have seen once 30 years ago and never had corroborated by another person. Some things seem destined to be felt that way; this game really hits that nail right on the head. It’s like they deliberately designed it to be one of those. This game is not corroborated. It’s just you and it, alone together, and it drills deep down into its own weird outlook and doesn’t look back. I was about to type “I can’t ask for more than that”… but of course I can ask for more. What I mean is: that, by itself, is worth a lot.

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• Ico (2001, for PlayStation 2): Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) [8.5 hrs]

In the course of investigating my options for playing Shadow of Destiny, I learned that the laptop I’m using is capable of faithfully emulating the PlayStation 2. This came as a surprise. I had thought that the PS2 (launched 2000, superseded 2006, discontinued 2013) was too recent and sophisticated a system for emulation to be an option. Having learned otherwise I suddenly got excited about finally experiencing a few much-talked-about “PS2 exclusive” games from 15 years ago that I had never gotten a chance to play. So I dove in with this one.

Ico is first and foremost a mood piece. The mood-building extends into every aspect of the design and is handled with great care. The game successfully casts a gentle spell of supernatural poignancy, and I’m not inclined to ask any more of it than that. Video games simply aren’t good enough yet — not 15 years ago, and not now — for a game with this degree of taste and sensibility not to be celebrated on that basis alone. Just the animation of the boy tugging the girl by the arm already contains more human insight than most other games in their entirety.

The gameplay itself is a bit rigid and limited, which is fine with me; somewhat repetitive and tedious, which I can bear; and quite obtuse about checkpoints and deaths, which I must admit I found truly annoying. At least an hour and a half of my play time was spent on redoing whole scenes I’d already completed just because the checkpoints were so damn few and far between. In this respect it reminded me of Heart of Darkness (as logged in August), and got to me to thinking about all the other ways it resembled Heart of Darkness. Both games use the mechanics of the platform adventure as means to an end, where the end is a distinctive cinematic ambition, and both games succeed despite themselves, because their bold pursuit of that ambition is compelling in itself. The player gets a taste of the dream and starts rooting for it.

I’ve always been drawn more toward eccentric games that pursue their aesthetic visions down rabbit-holes than I am toward games with robust rules and systems but nothing to show me. I’m much more excited about the fact that a video game can offer me what animation offers me than I am about the fact that it can offer me what a deck of cards offers me.

This is undoubtedly because I still have hardly any real-life experience of video games as social. I simply haven’t had those sorts of friends.

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Back to the list for one game.

• Mirror’s Edge (2008): EA DICE (Stockholm, Sweden) [played for 3.5 hrs]

This is an admirable game that is also an infuriating game. Admirable, infuriating, admirable, infuriating, back and forth like that for three and a half hours, until I’d had as much as I could take and had to stop. Maybe I’ll return someday, but why, when there are so many worlds left to conquer?

Admirable because it’s an original concept done with care. Infuriating because the punishment to reward ratio is much much higher than it needs to be, to no end. At least “to no end” for someone like me, who’s just here as a tourist. I guess if I was in it for the self-esteem I’d feel it differently. But isn’t it a good thing that I don’t want these games to offer me self-esteem? I just want them to offer me entertainment. Falling yet again, because I still missed the jump, because I still haven’t mastered the unforgiving controls after 3 hours, is not entertaining enough. It’s close, but not quite enough.

Parkour appeals to a certain psychology that isn’t mine. I don’t go around feeling so humiliated by lacking “mastery over my environment” that I fantasize about being able to vault over it all. Our hero, Faith, is a “real badass” who “doesn’t take shit.” It’s a different hero complex from the monster truck military version that pushed me out of Crysis 2, but it’s still a hero complex. This one is more for people who fantasize about being as lithe and emotionally untouchable as a puma. I don’t personally identify with apex predators.

I’m really sick of badasses, and hearing people envied for being badasses. BADASS. BADASS. BADASS. Public service message: there’s no such thing as a “badass,” so you should be very suspicious of any you encounter.

My personal hero fantasies more have to do with e.g. discovering a secret will in an old trunk. Luckily there are plenty of games that target me.

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And back off the list again.

• カエルの為に鐘は鳴る [Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru] (1992, for Game Boy): Nintendo / Intelligent Systems (Kyoto, Japan) [6 hrs?]

Browsing lists of Game Boy games to see what should go in my little retro box, I came across mention of a game with the title For Frog the Bell Tolls.

Repeat:

For Frog the Bell Tolls.

I of course had to try it out. I wanted to meet it and thank it for introducing this splendidly surreal sequence of words into my life.

The Japanese title is indeed exactly the title of the Hemingway novel with the words “for whom” replaced by “for the frog.” Since this is not actually a Dadaist game, I am going to assume that in Japanese this substitution reads as silly but more or less smooth, and that therefore “For Frog the Bell Tolls,” though literal, is a less than ideal translation. The game was never released outside of Japan, but one of its developers recently referred to it in an English-language blog post as “The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which preserves the reference and the silliness but irons out the Gertrude Stein. So we should probably take that as the best version of an English title.

The version I played was translated by fans in 2011 as “For the Frog the Bell Tolls,” with a sensible but somewhat disappointing “the.”

It’s okay: the purity of “For Frog the Bell Tolls” will live on in my heart.

What the title means: you play as a prince who gets turned into a frog, a spell which can be lifted by the sound of the ancient magic bell. See?

I started For the Frog the Bell Tolls purely for the novelty, but then I stuck with it to the end because it turned out to be an engaging and amusing game, and quite a well-made one. It wasn’t until after I had begun playing that I really registered that this was in fact an A-1 top-team production from Nintendo themselves, and basically the highest-profile Game Boy game not to be released in the West. I guess someone must have thought that the extremely goofy tone of the thing wouldn’t travel well — Japanese comedy often doesn’t. But assuming the translation I played was really as faithful as I’m led to believe it was, I think they were wrong about that. The sugary-sweet land-of-make-believe goofiness was accessible and perfectly palatable even for a Japanoskept like me.

It was in fact the game’s strongest suit; it kept me in a good mood even as ungenerous choices in the game’s design wasted my time. There’s not really any meat to the game; it’s just a matter of doing the obvious thing in a succession of cutesy scenarios — and yet there are quite a few “one-hit” deaths that cruelly set you way too far back, resulting in many tens of minutes spent grinding back through tasks and territory whose interest has already been exhausted. Irritating.

Otherwise, a real charmer. Nice music, too: a relatively tasteful, thematically cohesive score. By the end, the “bell” leitmotif heard in nearly every cue actually manages to feel like it’s accrued some kind of emotional meaning. Which is a lot more than can be said for most video game music, and is especially high praise for something composed entirely for the greeting-card tinky-tink instruments of the Game Boy. “Relatively” is a key word here, of course.

The project of working chronologically through my amassed game purchases was interrupted this month by the sudden acquisition of a Raspberry Pi for playing “retro” games. But what games to put on it? I started working from this list of “best games.” I didn’t get very far with it (surprise!) but I did end up playing some of the games along the way.

The games I played for more than a few minutes:

• WarioWare, Inc. (2003, for Game Boy Advance): Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) [played 1.5 hrs]

I feel reasonably well-informed about what the Nintendo corporation has wrought over the years, but I haven’t actually played very many of their games. Here for example are a few famous ones that I had never touched before.

WarioWare, Inc. is a daring experiment in tone and tempo; it translates the signature style of Japanese TV — the barrage of hyperactive wackiness, wocka wocka wocka! — into gameplay. Hundreds of rudimentary challenges (steer around the obstacle; jump at the right moment; etc.) are thrown on the screen in succession, for about 3 seconds apiece. There’s not enough time to make a conscious assessment of what’s required or how it’s to be controlled, so your reflexes just kick in and take a stab at it. Thrillingly, they are often correct, thanks to all kinds of subtle design choices that were secretly communicating directly with your intuition.

This game comes up a lot as a point of reference in design discussions, and now I understand why; it’s like game design broken down to the molecular level. It also caters to the mindset of game designers, by being framed as a clown show wherein Wario decides to strike it rich by producing video games. Meta. Furthermore, many of the minigames are smirking allusions to classic games of 20 years earlier: grist being pulverized right before your eyes by the postmodern mill. I found the game inspiring — as an example of unabashed weirdness, a remarkably bold production for a major corporation like Nintendo — yet also dispiriting in its plunge toward the era of slurried “retro” chaos. Prescient! But dispiriting.

The ad embedded above (actually several ads in a row) is from Japan because this game doesn’t seem to have gotten a US TV commercial.

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• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (1995, for Super Nintendo Entertainment System): Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) [played 5 or 6 hrs?]

In the case of Yoshi’s Island, the ad embedded above is from Japan because it is attractive and sensibly put together and represents the game, whereas the revolting American TV spot is a piece of senseless filth that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the depraved and cynical mind of some cretinous cigar-chomping ad executive who obviously lacks a human soul.

The generosity of the designers is apparent in every level of Yoshi’s Island; they want the player to be delighted anew as often as possible. No design idea outlives its welcome; something unpredictable is always around the corner. Nintendo’s Mario games were such monster hits because they were every kid’s fantasy of how a toy should be: a horn of plenty. And in this one there’s a splendid breadth and balance to the offering: you can just focus on driving forward to the end, or you can slow way down and look for all the hidden truffles, and either way you’ll feel like you’re playing exactly the way it was meant to be played. The sequence of beats works at either tempo.

Despite my affection for platforming games like this, I am very bad at them. I fall and fall and fall while trying to execute basic jumps. The need to bring the character to a stop by “braking” gives me the subconscious sensation of constantly having overshot my mark (even when I haven’t), which erodes my confidence. Even after many hours of play I was still losing life after life in dumb ways.

But improvement is always a possibility if you let it be. Maybe after many more hours of play — in an unjudgmental frame of mind — my instincts would start to sharpen after all.

In any case, my self-frustration mostly stayed at a manageable level, in part because Yoshi’s Island has an innovative system for giving the player an incentive to avoid errors while reducing the amount of disruption caused by actually “dying.” Every time Yoshi takes a hit, he drops infant Mario, and then has to scramble to pick him up again before a timer runs out. In other words, making an error means you have to do busywork; once you do it, you’re basically back to where you were. Like the hint system in Machinarium, which cordoned off the spoilers behind a blockade of deliberate tedium, this seems to me a fine solution to the perpetual problem of creating in-game disincentives that don’t interrupt the flow of play. And as with Machinarium, I’m not aware of any other game having taken up the idea. It’s still there, for anyone who wants it.

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• EarthBound (1994, for Super Nintendo Entertainment System): Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) [played 1 hr]

The EarthBound ad embedded above is the American version because, despite being terrible, it at least shows the game. In Japan (where the game is known as “Mother 2”), the ad campaign didn’t give any hint of what the game was like. Nonetheless, and I say this in all seriousness, this may be the best commercial I’ve ever seen.

The game is an RPG in the post-E.T. “suburban kids save the day when the adults are clueless” genre that was central to the movie business in the 80s and 90s but was surprisingly underrepresented in video games. I’m not really a player of RPGs but I gather that when this game was released stateside it was absolutely unprecedented in this respect. I also gather that further down the line — I only played through the introductory scenes and some of the first area — it becomes more and more quirky and sentimental in unexpected ways. I was mostly playing to get a taste of a much ballyhooed cult favorite, for my literacy. And sure, I could immediately see the charm. Which, I suppose, is not unrelated to the charm of that commercial; I bet the designer wrote the ad campaign too.

Perhaps someday I’ll return for the rest. Then again, as I said, I’ve never really gotten into RPGs, and the reason is mostly that stat-on-stat subtraction-offs are, to me, an intolerably drab and tedious mechanic on which to base a game, especially a 50-hour epic. And unfortunately this game seems like it’s pretty committed to constant stat battles as a way of life. So perhaps not.

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• Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (1993, for PC Engine): Konami (Tokyo, Japan) [played 1 hr?]

This is viciously hard. In a Mario game, the abilities you’re given and the demands placed upon you tend to line up; you’re good at jumping, so jump up here. In Castlevania games (at least the older ones) it’s the opposite; the enemies move and attack in ways that are designed around your character’s shortcomings. You’re bad at attacking anything that’s not directly in front of you, so this enemy’s going to swoop above and below you. You’re not very fast, so this enemy’s going to be fast. In gaming I want to always be frustrated with myself, not with the damn character and his stupid slow jumping, so this kind of thing breaks the magic of immersion. On the other hand, the game is what it is and is known to be winnable as such; the true objective is to become so versatile with the abilities you do have that you can apply them to any situation. If a vampire hunter had wheels he’d be a bicycle. Well, this guy has no wheels.

The real “hard” in a “hard” game is “hard to find a reason to keep at it, since it is after all just a game, and there are after all thousands and thousands of games out there.” This is unfortunate, because the experience of sticking with “hard” until it cracks open, weeks or months later, is ultimately a wonderful and valuable one — because it builds up one’s core confidence that there is no “hard,” just “slow,” and that everything is achievable in time. But that experience has to arise organically from one’s real motivations in the real world, and right now my sense of entitlement to gratification from entertainment has a shorter fuse than “weeks or months.”

But who knows. Maybe I’ll return to Castlevania for another whipping sooner than I think. In a “Rondo,” the same refrain comes back again and again.

The video trailer above is just a clumsy fan-assembled thing. The game was released only in Japan and no commercial has been uploaded to Youtube that I can find.

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• Heart of Darkness (1998, for PlayStation): Amazing Studio (Paris, France) [7 hrs?]

This one I played to completion. Eric Chahi’s previous game, the classic Another World (1991), had been one of my favorites as a teenager, but by the time his next game came out I was in college and less tuned in, so I managed not to have known about it at all until now.

As is frequently the case with games incorporating elaborate traditional animation, much of the gameplay is location-specific and heavily dependent on trial and error. But beyond that, even the more fully-realized systems — for shooting and jumping — are here applied to extraordinarily punishing scenarios. The most infuriating of them (the one at the end of the game) I had to attempt maybe 40 times before executing it successfully. Or more. Nonetheless the crazy, impossible ambition of this game to be a full-fledged Spielberg/Henson/Disney rollercoaster, and the truly excellent in-game animation, cast some kind of spell over me. Somehow it managed to be a gratifying experience despite its cruelties (and infelicities).

Heart of Darkness was purportedly the first game to record a soundtrack with full orchestra (though, because of its many years in development, not the first game to be released with one) and from the first moments I was taken aback by its quality. It’s by Bruce Broughton, a legitimate major Hollywood composer, and his genuine sure-footed mastery of the 80s/90s fantasy-adventure idiom immediately marks this game as something special. I’m not aware of any other game that sounds remotely like this, which means I’m not sure there’s a game that feels remotely like this.

This game goes on the shelf of bold and intriguing one-offs, alongside The Last Express.

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• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991, for Super Nintendo Entertainment System): Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) [played for 10 hrs?]

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is right up near the top of most “best games ever” lists.

I get it. It’s maximally delectable, a living kingdom of marzipan, and it’s cleverly constructed to draw the player spiralling ever inward. First you have to save the princess, which takes about five minutes. Hooray! — but uh-oh, now you have to save the kingdom, which takes a few hours. Hooray! — but uh-oh, now you have to save the dimension (more or less), which is going to take you a long, long time. The gameplay itself is clean and strong — most of it carried over from the original NES Legend of Zelda — but the real brilliance here is in the way the game subliminally ramps up the player’s ambition, starting as a reassuringly linear taskmaster (“go here and get this, now go there and do that, now go here…”) but giving ample opportunity to notice other stuff along the way, until very gradually that other stuff begins to be mandatory. It’s a bit like a foreign language course; the only thing that’s ever directly asked of you is to repeat what you hear, but beneath that surface a broader fluency is bit by bit called into play. Many games since have tried to replicate this progression — it’s pretty much de rigueur these days for games to start out as their own tutorials — but there’s something particularly disarming and confident about this one.

After about 10 hours, well into the fluent free-roam portion of the game, I found myself hitting the point of exhaustion. I get it; I got it.

The trailer above is, as you can see, from the recent Wii U re-release. I find two original 1992 US TV spots with no game footage: the fancy one and the less fancy one. Meanwhile the Japanese commercial gets at things in its own way. Chances seem good that this will be the 2020 Olympic Opening Ceremony.

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Back to my present-day list, but not yet back to the chronological grind.

• Tomb Raider (2013): Crystal Dynamics (Redwood City, CA) [24 hrs]

Tomb Raider was offered on March 29 of this year by GameChanger, a video-games-for-hospitalized-kids charity, for a $1 donation. I proposed it to a friend as a game we could both play and then discuss, but he had some other stuff he wanted to get through first. Then this month he gave the signal, so we played it.

Top flight triple-A polish is its own reward. Setting aside gameplay, I was quite happy to be prancing around in beautiful island scenery — jungles, caverns, cliffs, and of course abandoned buildings up the wazoo, all of it heavy with that special sense of preternatural dimensionality that makes 3D game worlds so mesmerizing.

I just wish it had been in service of a game that emphasized exploration and traversal more than combat, since that’s what these lush environments are crying out for. But this Tomb Raider hardly raided any tombs; mostly she just “headshot”ted and “stealth kill”ed and “collect”ed and “upgrade”d her way through a paramilitary world, to earn niblets of animated story. Maybe I’m an idiot but I was actually kind of curious where the plot might go; turned out “going” wasn’t really its intention. Lara Croft is shipwrecked on a cursed island full of bad guys so she kills the bad guys and lifts the curse. SPOILER ALERT!

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• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014): The Astronauts (Warsaw, Poland) [5 hrs]

I bought this on June 9 of this year when it was a special for $4.99 during the GOG Summer Sale, because I had had my eye on it for a while and because thanks one of the many gimmicks of the sale, buying any game would also unlock a free one that I also wanted. I played it now because, as you’ll see below, my next-on-the-list game was not entirely to my taste and I wanted to counterprogram with something short that I felt sure I’d enjoy.

I did enjoy this, very much. As a luxurious environmental immersion this manages to put Tomb Raider and its ilk to shame. For sense-of-place photorealist atmosphere this game is second to none; it has a lot in common with Dear Esther (and, in places, with Amnesia) — but in addition to having even more impeccable graphics, Ethan Carter has far better and more restrained writing than those games. In this place, I cared almost as much about what was going on as I did about what it was like to be there. That’s meant as high praise. (Albeit handicapped for a medium that still struggles mightily to have any real literary value. The script of Ethan Carter is no masterpiece; it’s just competent, and god bless it for that.)

I’ve seen people online complaining that the geography of the game is too big for what it contains, but I feel like the emphasis on long, slow, quiet strolls through the woods is what affords the work its occasional feeling of having transcended mere gamehood. Transcended into where? Into a new, dimly lit formal territory, still being explored. The opening screen announces that this is a “narrative experience,” which seems about right, although I feel like even “narrative” is unnecessarily leading. Is Pirates of the Carribbean a narrative experience, or just an experience? I came away with that feeling that the best games can provide: that I’d just been somewhere else for a while, somewhere as real as my own dreams.

There’s actually a really good detective gameplay idea tucked in here — tag locations within a crime scene in chronological sequence to demonstrate that you’ve deduced the events that took place there — but it’s used so sparingly that it feels like its potential has hardly been tapped.

The ambient sound and music had a strong effect on me, evoking moody 70s horror movies, which by association instilled me with a spirit of trust in the experience and its intentions.

So: do I take issue with the single brutal, BRUTAL jump-scare in the middle of an otherwise melancholic and dreamy game? Hell yes. Would the game be better without it? Hm. I don’t know. Strictly speaking it may have been gratuitous, but I can’t deny that it contributed to my emotional experience, by retroactively radiating its threat to all the hovering eeriness in the rest of the game. But do I resent it nonetheless? Hell yes! How dare you! I got goosebumps all over my body and had to sit still for a minute while I came down. They got me good.

They’re gonna get you good too. I’m not offering any spoilers to help out. You’ll be okay. Fine, here’s the one thing I’ll say: it’s not in the first couple hours of play. I promise.

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Okay, and with that I return to my list. Still working my way through the “Humble Origin Bundle,” purchased 8/27/13.

• Crysis 2: Maximum Edition (2011–12): Crytek (Frankfurt, Germany) / Crytek UK (Nottingham, England) [played for 5 hrs]

Crysis 2 is the videogame equivalent of the Marvel movies that have taken over Hollywood. It’s glossy and impressive, it’s eager to please, it’s beyond soulless, it’s sort of fun. The storytelling stays firmly within the bounds of the testosteronal zeitgeist so that your brain doesn’t need to process it at all: aliens and a plague and paramilitary troops have all ravaged Manhattan, evoking 9/11 — and in other news, the pope is Catholic. Just in case you weren’t getting the message, they got the actual Hans Zimmer (“Han’s room”) to write the theme. We clear now?

The game — not just the action but the plot itself — is all about your cyber-suit of dominating power, specifically all the power it gives you with which to dominate. After you dominate enough guys with your power you can earn more power for your suit, thereby increasing your power to dominate. And you’d better dominate them with your power, if you don’t want them to steal your power suit from you, because naturally they want it, for its power to dominate. Which must never fall into the wrong hands.

After I had duly dominated my way through five levels with increasing power but decreasing patience, I realized that my ability to briefly turn invisible, combined with the ease with which I recovered from damage, meant I could probably run straight through a level without actually shooting anyone, and sure enough this proved to be true. This left me with a choice to make: should I zip through the game unsportsmanlike just to get to see the snazzy locations and special effects, and watch the story play out? Or should I take my temptation to do this as an indication that I shouldn’t be playing this game at all, and dump it?

I dumped it. It wasn’t for me.

7/10/13: “Humble Weekly Sale: Two Tribes”: 3 games for $3. I bought for EDGE, which I played for a couple hours shortly thereafter. The other two I had not played until now.

• EDGE (2008–11): Mobigame (Paris, France) / Two Tribes (Amersfoort, Netherlands) [9 hrs]
• Toki Tori (2001/2008–10): Two Tribes (Amersfoort, Netherlands) [20 hrs]

EDGE is a genial “op-art cosmos” headspace, the sort of thing that was particularly prevalent in games in the 80s (EDGE bills itself as “retro”) but, like all true psychedelia, is actually timeless. The point of this kind of space is just to be in it, so it’s fitting that this is as much a ride as a game. For me it’s one of the primary colors of fantasy: wandering around the playground of the geometric infinite, watching inscrutable cubic doodads doing their thing. EDGE isn’t uniformly rewarding, but it delivers that fantasy with great care and polish, so I’m content. I treasure my inner Marble Madness and am grateful to have it serviced. (I approve of the music, too.)

Toki Tori is an archetypal “puzzle platformer.” Despite how it may appear, it gets genuinely very difficult. It’s a remake of a design from the old days of tight resource constraints, and it retains some of the invigorating leanness of that era. The player understands that all the cutesy-poo is just a front for something essentially stern and unbending. In fact the trickiness comes off as all the more diabolical, dressed up in sheep’s clothing as it is. This genre tends toward pointless padding, but Toki Tori is admirably unrepetitive. Many of the solutions have that desirable quality of “hiding in plain sight.” What separates Toki Tori from a truly first-rate puzzle game like Stephen’s Sausage Roll is principally that the layouts have not always been sufficiently streamlined, which means that in the most complex puzzles there are a lot of pointless false paths. I ended up peeking at the first steps of online solutions many times, just as a way of reducing the number of variables.

• RUSH (2010): Two Tribes (Amersfoort, Netherlands)

RUSH combines all the elements of the above two games — cosmic cubes and a batch of pure puzzles — but it’s not as satisfying as either of them. Puzzle games are like spas: the whole point is to put you in a certain state of mind, so all the little superficial stuff matters. RUSH bugged me in seemingly unimportant ways, and yet what else is there? The system for testing solutions doesn’t have the VCR-style controls I intuitively wanted; it isn’t as easy to deal with the 3D structures as it ought to be; the sparkly commotion in the background is off-putting; the music is lame; it takes too long to watch the solutions play out; et cetera. Too bad, because the puzzles themselves are fine. Well, maybe.

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8/27/13: “Humble Origin Bundle”: 10 games for $4.95. Big-budget mainstream ones, too. I had not played any of them until now.

• Dead Space (2008): EA Redwood Shores (Redwood City, CA) [played for 1 hr]
• Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box (2008–09): Criterion Games (Guildford, Surrey, UK) [played for 3.5 hrs]

Dead Space is, like so many other games, Alien. As I’ve said before, I only sort of understand this phenomenon. Why does it have to be Alien again and again? Why this claustrophobia above all others? In this instance, the horrible-monsters-haunting-the-creaky-derelict-industrial-spaceship happen to be gooey stretchy incoherent mutations, in the style of The Thing, which I personally find a little too truly repellent to enjoy as “horror.” Nonetheless I still wanted to try Dead Space. It’s regarded as “big-budget popcorn action done right,” and I’m attracted to the idea of just about anything being done right. As soon as it started I could immediately tell this was going to be some grade-A blockbuster junk food. But having played the whole first level and had abominations of flesh BLAAAGH!!! jump out of the darkness at me repeatedly (and having then gunned them into gross heaps of spurting goreflesh), I recognized that what I was experiencing was not really any form of pleasure — pride, maybe (“look at me, coping with this!”), but not pleasure — so I stopped. As usual in these situations I kind of wish there were a way to explore the world and play out the story, just without all the BLAAAGH. But there ain’t.

Burnout Paradise is a dreamlike driving game in which a full-scale realistic city contains no humans, only cars, and all wanton destruction is magically set right once it’s out of sight, so crash and smash what you will. I’ve never gravitated to driving games but to my surprise this one charmed me. Perhaps I’ll even return to it from time to time. I’ve always liked the spaces in games above all and this game seems to concur; there are nominally races and stuff to do, if you choose, but at heart it’s just a free-range playground. Everything about the experience is subordinated to the expansive, meticulously imagined fake American city itself, which rolls by with splendid geographic fullness. Jumping your car off cliffs to try to smash through billboards and land on bridges turns out to feel like a natural way of reveling in the landscape. Yee-haw!