developed by Origin Systems (Austin, TX)

Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (1990)
executive producer: Richard Garriott
produced by Jeff Johannigman
directed by Stephen Beeman
story by Aaron Allston

Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams (1991)
creative director: Richard Garriott
produced by Warren Spector
directed by Jeff George
dialogue by Beth Miller, Raymond Benson, Steve Cantrell, ‘Manda Dee, and Paul Meyer

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More games that I can’t handle.

Yes, it was only a few months ago that I was admitting that I couldn’t handle Ultima IV (1985). But hope springs eternal. And so does obsessive completism. These were on my list, so I had to try them. I had to hope!

Oh right, obsessive completism:

2/13/13: I buy Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (2012) on sale for $4.99. Good enough to finish, but I only bought it because it resembled Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010) and the comparison didn’t flatter it.

2/25/13: It comes to my attention that during the past year, three more free games have appeared in the GOG catalog. I instantly add all three to my account, with no consideration whatever for what they are.

Two are the games I’m about to address. The third is a freeware first-person shooter called Warsow (2005–12), which won’t even get its own entry; I took my obligatory look at it last week and found that it’s an arena game where you battle head-to-head with players on the server. I have given myself an out on multiplayer-only games before and I’m doing it again. Those people scare me.

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Things I was able to relish about these two “Worlds of Ultima” games:

• A world of bitsy candy-like graphics with black borders.

A magazine I bought in 1992 had a screenshot or two from Ultima VII (1992), the subsequent release in this series — something like this or this or this — and despite knowing full well that RPGs were not my cup of tea and that I would never buy the game, I extracted a lot of imaginative pleasure from those couple of printed images.

The idea of a vast world of little marzipan goodies, all fixed in place and made wonderfully incontrovertible by their black outlines, was somehow a dream I had already had; these images just gave it body. The extreme high-angle view, just off to one side from being directly overhead, felt psychologically accurate; it would be from just such a vantage that I would silently look over and in on the soothing mysteries of this world-vision. The roofless buildings, both indoor and outdoor. The surface textures supernaturally prominent yet still restful. I could go on.

The present two games — which are experimental pendants to the main Ultima series — are made with the engine from the preceding game, Ultima VI (1990), which has significantly more primitive, less delicious graphics, but still hints at some of the same satisfactions. The doodads here are too small and harsh to impart that restful textured quality, but the bitsiness brings its own appeal. If you’ve ever taken obscure pleasure in looking at a screen full of Mac or Windows icons, you can find that pleasure here. Here’s a screenshot from Savage Empire, picturing a village feast with a bunch of food in it, which looks a lot like a computer desktop that has been “auto-arranged.” Is it actually food, or is it just doodads? These games let you savor the ambiguity of living in a world of icons.

• A stab at variety.

To this day, RPGs are still almost always about Dungeons & Dragons. There’s no inherent structural or thematic reason why this should be the case — just cultural inertia. These two games are attempts at expanding into other kinds of classic pulp material. The Savage Empire is “Lost World” safari fantasy — a jungle valley of warring tribes, dinosaurs, and lizard people — and Martian Dreams is goofy steampunk, about a 19th-century rocket to Mars, featuring a full roster of random historical figures. (Sigmund Freud, Buffalo Bill, and Rasputin, together at last, on Mars.) Neither of those premises cries out to me, but I’ll gladly take either of them over more of the same old mytho-medievalism.

• An expansive sense of the long haul.

Wherever you’re headed, in this kind of game, it’s still a ways off. You have a lot of chores to do before you can get there. So don’t be in it for the reward. Be in it for the journey. Or not even the journey: the condition.

In checking out Youtube “Let’s Play”s of RPGs, when I inevitably skip forward to the video called e.g. “part 31 of 32,” which is the videogame equivalent of flipping to the end of a mystery to see who done it, invariably the impression I get is that the long-awaited climax is hardly more interesting or consequential than any arbitrary point in the middle. And there’s often a grudging or perfunctory quality to the victory scene at the very end.

A lot of video games over the years have ended with a lame “You did it” message and little else; RPGs, which take many tens of hours to complete, are the worst offenders. It seems almost like a symptom of embarrassment, or fish-out-of-water awkwardness: “Please don’t ask us to claim this was all worthwhile. Please don’t ask us to claim this was anything. It was just the framework for a certain flow state. Can’t we please just get back into the game instead of having to think about it?”

I like the idea of games as flow state above all. I’m attracted to the idea of “quest” being micro-event (when some guy in a hut says please kill the snakes in the basement, so you do, and he gives you gold) and macro-event (when the premise of the game is that you have to reunite the empire, which you probably will in part 32 of 32, fifty hours from now) — but not plain old event, the scale on which I tend to do all my agonizing and overthinking. On that everyday “well, what ought we to do next” scale, these games leave a strange quiet mental space for the player to set up camp. Do your thing; be our guest. In a sense, this is what’s meant by “Role Playing”: the game is not as much about what you’re doing as it is about how you’re being.

And despite never taking to these games, I really like that particular aspect. In theory.

• “Strange quiet mental space” generally.

This is the principal thing that I feel games have lost touch with in the past 20 years or so. That opinion isn’t just nostalgia for my own past, because I feel it even when I dip into games that played no part in my childhood, like these. It’s like the game’s authors and their intentions are audible only as a distant tinkling of cowbells, many miles from where I sit, encountering the game on its own inanimate terms. It’s me alone with it, in my own zone. In more recent games I have a sense of authorial neediness, or micromanagement, in my face almost constantly; the games speak with human voices that make me feel crowded. Whereas this older kind of game is as generously welcoming as only privacy can be.

• Also I won’t deny I get a kick out of any opportunity to hear the old Adlib MIDI sounds, but that is just nostalgia.

Okay, that’s what I liked.

Now a horizontal.

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Actually, how about I do the videos now.

There are no trailers for games this old, which is why I didn’t put these at the top. The following clips are just for illustrative convenience, and to satisfy reader curiosity. Don’t watch them beginning to end unless you really want to. I certainly haven’t.

Here’s the first 15 minutes of The Savage Empire. The intro lasts about 4 minutes, and then the game starts with a lot of dialogue. Start at around 10 minutes in if you just want to get a sense of the gameplay.

And here’s the first 15 minutes of Martian Dreams. The intro to this one is pretty long and wacky. Again, skip forward 10 minutes for a sample of the gameplay.

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Okay, now for the things I was unable to relish about these games.

This part briefer. I take less and less satisfaction these days in elaborating on my discontents. Plus the only form of writing that’s actually natural for me is the bullet points themselves; the rest is a nervous grind, here dispensed with.

• The sense that there is no place to invest myself; no particular “thing to care about.” Any given detail is just a utilitarian cog in the machine, and the machine’s only function is to turn its own cogs.

• The rational-analytical-statistical compulsion. This is what has always blocked me out of RPGs and I still haven’t found a way to embrace it. I want to marvel at experiences, not at systems. Experiences are not systems.

• An emphasis on reading but not on words; i.e. too much bad writing. I readily tolerate tone-deaf dork prose when it only appears in short bursts. But if the focus of a game is going to be on a written story with many screens of text at a time, I can’t put aside the sense of alienation I get from insensitive writing. It feels to me like being trapped with insensitive people. Which I guess is the phobia that continues to define me.

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I played these games for a couple hours apiece, sincerely hoping that a sense of trust would set in, so that I’d be able to enjoy long sojourns in these vast quiet spaces. But it never did. I never stopped feeling like I was playing a game meant for another sort of person.

Some day, I swear, I will play an RPG for real.

developed by 3D Realms (Dallas, TX)
concept by Todd Replogle and Allen H. Blum III
produced by George Broussard and Greg Malone
map design by Allen H. Blum III and Richard Gray

Games from the pre-Youtube era were much less likely to have trailers, but someone seems to have dug up this authentic quasi-trailer from 1996. I’m guessing this was made to be edited into in-store video loops. (If you feel like this is a little too fuzzy and vintage to give a clear impression of the game, here’s the trailer GOG cut together in 2009.)

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CONTINUED THRILLING CHRONICLE OF MY GAME PURCHASES:

6/12/12 — bought L.A. Noire (2011) on $4.99 sale and subsequently played to completion. Review: satisfying, because of the appealing concept and lavish production, despite obvious shortcomings in the gameplay and the plotting.

8/18/12 — bought Alan Wake (2010) on $7.49 sale and subsequently played to completion. Review: unsatisfying, because of obvious shortcomings in the gameplay and the plotting, despite the appealing concept and lavish production.

10/31/12 — bought Bioshock (2007) on $4.99 sale. Haven’t yet played, and still can’t play it for the moment because it requires a 3D graphics card, and of the two computers in my household that fit the bill, one is broken and the other is currently on a tour of the US. Stay tuned.

11/19/12 — bought access to the Double Fine “Amnesia Fortnight 2012” documentary, which did ultimately include 8 game prototypes, several of which I looked at and some of which I didn’t. But I’m not going to write about them here; they’re very much just prototypes, and from an audience perspective are more like interactive supplements to the documentary than vice versa.

11/23/12 — bought Portal 2 (2011) on $4.99 sale. Again, holding off until I have access to a 3D-capable computer.

11/26/12 — bought Ben There, Dan That! (2008) / Time Gentlemen, Please! (2009) on $0.99 sale and quickly played them to completion. This is a pair of dinky, proudly amateurish comedy adventure games that had a reputation for being actually funny. Sure, they were mildly funny, in their nervous British geek way. $0.99.

Also 11/26/12 — bought Puzzle Dimension (2010) on $0.99 sale. About a year later played it to completion with pleasure. I love puzzle games but I’m not a sucker for bad ones; they need to be pretty good to keep my enthusiasm up. This one had a very well-graded difficulty slope and offered an acceptable trance space in which to cogitate. The puzzle designs hit that paradoxical sweet spot of seeming to be cosmic and impersonal yet also witty and communicative. More on this theme someday.

12/13/12 — GOG gives away Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition for free to all comers. I click “okay.” So here we are.

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It turns out that it doesn’t much matter what games are about or what they contain. The medium is the message; the form is the real meaning.

Duke Nukem 3D is a “badass” game for repressed 14-year-olds, with a glut of “ha ha naughty” content like ha ha naked babes and a ha ha porn shop and ha ha toilets where if you press the use key, Duke Nukem will ha ha pee. And yet it hardly matters, because this is one of those games of architecture-as-drama, of traversing imagineered three-dimensional space, and that’s simply too powerful an experience to resist in the name of some flimsy principle like “taste.” Mere taste is no match for the primal power of discovering a secret panel that opens onto a staircase that descends to a flickery underground tunnel that caves in as you run through it toward a narrow opening onto a vast chamber glowing red from below…

First-person shooters are made of such primal stuff, skinned with one or another silly rationale. I said that Half-Life was strong because it “was what it was” — i.e. the skin accorded well with the deeper essence. Duke Nukem 3D, which predates Half-Life by a couple of years and anticipates it in many ways big and small, is just the opposite: the skin has just about nothing to do with what’s going on spiritually. To my surprise, that ends up meaning that I’m able to enjoy it almost as much. To me this was almost exactly the same game experience as it would have been if it were called “Dora the Explorer 3D” and all the bad guys were Koosh balls (with angry eyebrows). Yes, I suppose it’s not totally clear why Dora the Explorer would be destroying the nuclear reactor of a space station… but frankly it wasn’t all that clear why Duke Nukem was either. I guess to stop an alien invasion?

Duke Nukem is ha ha “offensive,” but I just couldn’t find it in me to care one way or the other. There’s a vast difference between being offensive, in the sense of making people feel hurt and alienated, and being “offensive,” in the sense of displaying conventional signifiers of transgression (e.g. a stripper who will flash her tasseled breasts when Duke Nukem throws money at her). Is anyone actually offended by such things, by the things themselves? I think it’s rather that some people feel obscurely menaced by the fact that we live in a world where people such as the authors exist, who are inclined to a posture of willful transgression; i.e. the fact that the stripper is deliberately “offensive” is the only thing that’s actually potentially distressing about it. And I’m not sure “offended” is the right word for that feeling.

In any case I mostly found myself naturally disregarding all that. By contrast, the obsessive emulation of the specific morbidity of Alien once again befuddles me. A lot of fleshy growths and half-mutated humans murmuring “kill me.” I found the sour taste of that kind of stuff harder to block out, since it seemed more sincere, less calculated, than the scatological and pornographic stuff. I feel different degrees of comfort with different hangups; I trust people who are anxious about sex more than I trust people who are anxious about mercy-killing.

I should note that generally I found this game quite scary. Suddenly hearing a “brraaaagh” sound and turning to see that a floating red-eyed demon-alien-head-thing has materialized right behind me has given me quite a few bursts of adrenal shock. The more rudimentary the materials, the higher the stakes when one becomes immersed in them. Taking these doubtful planes and wobbly vertices to be my world means opening myself to almost infinite risk. It’s like when Bob Hoskins goes to Toontown: the less grounded your reality, the more likely that you are about to lose it all at any moment. Physical fantasy is a kind of mortal peril. This is why I was much more acutely on edge playing a romp like Duke Nukem 3D than playing a horror game like Amnesia, which for all its haunted housery nonetheless takes place in a sturdy spatial reality.

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The important thing to be said about this game is: these are good levels. They are unpredictable, balanced, varied, full of goodies and gimmicks, tension, atmosphere, and dramatic reveals. All of which runs deep down into the psyche, into that dreaming part of the mind where all spatial experience goes. The credit “map design” here corresponds to the role of “writer”; in this genre, architecture is the text.

It is an unending source of aesthetic astonishment to me that such intensely meaningful stuff can be dished out so cheaply and unprepossessingly. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space discusses these kinds of imagined spatial experiences with a suitable sense of their profound resonance, but what he doesn’t get across is how immune they are to questions of class, and of quantity. Bachelard’s examples are all from works of relative taste and distinction; he makes it seem like these deep dream-images are somehow allied to the high and the fine and the rare. Not so! All his psycho-philosophical musing holds equally true for tacky 3D games with dime-a-dozen levels cranked out by dudes like these. (That’s a photo of the Duke Nukem 3D team the night before its release.)

On the one hand, I am stirred: we all can dream richly, and pass those dreams one to another; yes, even those dudes in the photo are part of the spiritual life of the human race. I am connected; I am not alone.

On the other hand, I feel a kind of vertigo of overabundance: if even something as overtly benighted as Duke Nukem 3D can put me in touch with my Jungian roots, is anything really better than anything else? If all experience is equally valuable, how am I ever to know where to go and what to do with my time on earth? And if even those dudes in that photo are the sources of such deep stuff, what can I possibly contribute that will matter?

Sure, I have good answers to that vertigo (to wit: “these questions are just an attempt to give rational form the irrational vertigo, which will pass on its own, so they don’t need answering”) but I’m still highly susceptible to it.

developed by Superflat Games [= Jasper Byrne] (Cambridge, UK)
designed and written by Jasper Byrne

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Lone Survivor is precisely what I am acknowledging there to be a zillion of: a miniature production that doesn’t outwardly seem very distinctive, despite actually being a painstaking attempt to put across some subtle emotional thing that is highly particular to its author. Hey, that’s what “art” is, isn’t it.

This is a textbook example of an indie “little pixel guy” game, a boom genre of our time. What lies in the hearts of little pixel guys? Are they doing good or evil? Are they visionary or lost? Will they prosper or are they doomed? Is the world for or against them? The spiritual condition of the little pixel guy is an endless source of interest to a certain mindset.

In this particular case, the little pixel guy is poignantly just getting by, lone surviving in a desolated monster-ridden city which may or may not be all a dream. If it’s a dream, it’s about grief over a dead lover. Which is to say it’s in the “Lost Lenore” category of the emo-pocalypse subgenre, also surprisingly well-populated these days.

Basically, it’s exactly what you see it to be in the trailer above. But despite all the magic creepiness that interactivity can offer — and the game is indeed quite creepy to play — the trailer is ultimately a more effective delivery system for the vibe than the game. My play experience got bogged down in design misjudgments, which I have articulated below at great length and then immediately cut and pasted into my dead letter file so that you don’t have to waste your time reading.

In superbrief: the design is overthunk and overtheorized, with attempts to create “interesting systems” that end up diluting the atmosphere that is the whole point. Atmosphere is not a system. Emotional experience is not “interest.” Imagination is not a collection of hypotheticals.

The game is not unsuccessful at being indie-particular and getting some of its special thing across. It feels mostly quite earnest, which is always good. It’s scary, and it’s peculiar enough that I genuinely wanted to see it through to the end, despite my irritations. But being a four-hour game full of lots of little variables (plus various incentives for repeated replay) doesn’t suit it. I would rather have done this as a streamlined 1-hour experience. Or, like I said, maybe best of all just as a 2-minute trailer. (In that spirit: here’s the slicker “Director’s Cut” trailer, synced to hipster dream-pop.)

It felt like a staple-bound self-published comic book. A high-quality one, well-trimmed and printed on good paper, and skilled, with spirited experimentation. But there’s a certain scale appropriate to such things. 32 pages, or 48. 64 starts to feel like a lot.

Maybe I’m just getting old. (“Maybe I’m just getting old.”) But, you know, four hours! Of little pixel guy hiding from zombies and making coffee in his apartment. That’s a long time.

developed by Supergiant Games (San Jose, CA)
designed by Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin
written by Greg Kasavin

Next rule of 1-m cultural consumption: if I don’t like it, so be it. There’s a lot out there and of course I’m not going to enjoy it all. No need to do a negativity penance in the form of endless second chances.

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Everyone online seems to really loooove this game but I didn’t. Everyone says it’s beautiful and short and sweet, but I was never actually charmed, and I stopped before it was over. “Short” is relative, after all. I played for 6 damn hours. That’s time I could have spent watching 45 Donald Duck cartoons, goddammit!! What’s the big idea? Blkhgh blkhgh blkhgh blkhgh blkhgh!

That’s my best attempt at typographic Duck.

The boldest thing about Bastion is that it has a narrator; a faux-gravelly faux-homespun voice tells the tale of the player’s progress as it’s happening. You heard him in the trailer; he goes like that the whole time while you’re playing. I think it’s intended to give a stronger sense of narrative drive to a game whose actual mechanics aren’t particularly narrative. For a lot of reviewers it seems to have worked. But the effect for me, unfortunately, was just the opposite: the narration came off as transparently aspirational, artificial ‘tude obviously unmerited by the onscreen action. Which just pointed up the awkward phoniness of the story being told, and of the needy pretensions of the game as a whole.

This particular narrator voice is, I feel sure, stolen from The Big Lebowski, which is indicative of the rather limited imaginative literacy at work here generally. If you want to tell a story that beguiles and moves me, you’re going to need to have a deeper bag of tricks to reach into than just the stack of DVDs and comics in your dorm room. This game tells a totally “epic” “tale” but the words “epic” and “tale” are cut and pasted from elsewhere, ransom-note style. Probably from the back of an anime DVD case.

The graphics and sound and music and kinetics are all perfectly polished and attractive. There’s just no glue in the interstices. It felt to me like a portfolio of game design elements rather than a game with a heart. “Heart” was one of the things in the portfolio, underlined heavily. Maybe if there hadn’t been that damn narrator telling me every 20 seconds that this was a hell of a tale, I might have found out what it really was — not actually a story game at all, but with kind of a story loosely off in the background. Like pinball. I can enjoy pinball, but not if someone stands over my shoulder doing a cowboy voice and saying “Ball tries going up the ramp… next thing he knows, he’s slidin’ back down. Well, no one ever said this was gonna be easy.”

I should also acknowledge my personal antipathy toward games with a lot of configurable options. Man, when I’m playing an action game in a fantasy world I so don’t want to have to care about a lot of configurable options. Whereas this game is pretty clearly designed around the player thinking that configurable options are the absolute bee’s knees. Mimesis meekly lays down flat on its face every few minutes so that you can have the pleasure of wrangling yet again with weapon selection and weapon upgrades and player power-ups etc. etc.

In the trailer, you’ll note that the first specific thing named and illustrated about the gameplay proper is “… this distillery, chock full of the finest spirits.” Understand that the “spirits in the distillery” are power-ups that the player can choose before each level; +10 Health and the like. To me it seems obvious that that sort of stuff shouldn’t be the first selling point in the trailer; it’s fundamentally auxiliary. Yet there it is, front and center. And it’s that way in the game too; all the real hoopla is reserved for the occasions when the game reveals awesome new opportunities to configure options! To me it’s more like the waiter who won’t go away. “Would you like some ground pepper on that bite, sir? No? And how about that bite, sir?…”

I just want to bop the little bad guys, which is the actual game of the game. I get the sense that the game is embarrassed to actually be a game about bopping little bad guys. Don’t worry, game, it’s okay. Embrace yourself. It would make this easier on all of us.

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I was not nowhere, playing this game, I was at least partially somewhere. There were sounds and colors and presences, the insinuation of a something. I want to give it credit for that; that’s the main stuff, in games. But when a game is really working, that stuff coalesces into something strong and enveloping, whereas after 6 hours with Bastion there was still only that vague insinuation. Plus an ever-rising sense of tedium and annoyance. And now it’s months later and I’m not going to pick it up back up. I’m going to click “Publish” and move on.

developed by Frictional Games (Helsingborg, Sweden)
designed by Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson
written by Mikael Hedberg
story by Thomas Grip and Mikael Hedberg

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Part of the new “1-m” attitude toward these computer game entries is: less OCD infobox stuff at the top. Director + writer continues to feel solid and sufficient at the top of the Criterion entries, so I figure an equivalent here is studio + designer. And writer where applicable. Done.

I also am finally getting it through my head that most people just aren’t inclined to click inline links, so hey, how about an embedded Youtube video of the game trailer? Much more reader-friendly.

I’ve considered adding trailers to the Criterion entries, too. But there are some snags involved. Unlike game trailers, movie trailers generally aren’t posted and maintained by the official owners, so quality would be variable and I’d be setting myself up for a lot of broken links down the road. Also Youtube isn’t as complete a repository of old movie trailers as you might think. But it might be a good idea anyway. Gonna continue considering it.

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Amnesia is supposed to be a nightmare that haunts you for days, and the general buzz out there says that it is indeed. And it probably would have been, had I not deliberately spoilered it for myself, because I have no interest in having a nightmare that haunts me for days. A one-off nightmare that quickly fades, that I don’t mind. But basically, I’m scared of being too scared, and this game is renownedly scary. So I defanged it by reading carefully about what I was in for. That did the job.

Being scary is the function of Amnesia; other than the carefully calibrated atmosphere, there’s not much going on here. The game is basically a string of “go get the key to unlock the door” scenarios, twist-tied to a completely genre-typical goth-schloth story about otherworldly forces and torture-based alchemy. Basically it’s Dracula with precipitate of Lovecraft, overwritten, which is to say it’s exactly what you assume as soon as you see the haunted castle environs. “Oh, there’s totally going to be a secret laboratory with corpses on whom unspeakable experiments have been done, and long boring pen-and-ink letters to read that make papery noises as you turn the pages.” Well DUH.

The threat, meanwhile, is basically just a moaning, lumbering zombie with a screamo face, who doesn’t have a very sophisticated ability to hunt for you once you’re out of his line of sight.

But you don’t know that for sure until you’ve been playing for a while. And therein lies the brilliance of the game. “Uh oh, I hear a monster coming, I need to hide … oh god, do you think it’ll be able to see me if I crouch over here? I don’t know, dude!! Maybe it will!! Oh shit oh shit oh shit!! … Oh shit it’s still there!!! … Okay I think it went away. I guess it didn’t see me. Oh god that was scary…”

This is the part of game-playing that in any other game would be considered the tutorial phase, where you haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet, haven’t wrapped your head around the rules, figured out just how things behave and what to expect. Amnesia deliberately draws that phase out to last for most of the game. They don’t want you to know what to expect, because that’s not how horror works. Instead they want to keep you in that initial trust-testing frame of mind, where you’re trying to cobble together a sense of how the game reality might work by starting with your own real-world intuitions — always far more nuanced and alive than any game’s actual mimetic system — and then gradually paring them back.

Amnesia says, “Hey, no need to pare back those intuitions. Make yourself at home in a game of your own projection — we won’t interfere.” The haunted house in Amnesia feels like a real, potent haunted house because the game is asserting itself as little as possible, leaving you with all your guesses. “I don’t know, dude, maybe it knows where you are!!! Maybe the walls are, like, watching you!!!”

This is why it was so utterly spoilerable. The actual what-goes-on of what goes on is no big deal. But the process of finding out what goes on, working only from your own Dracular intuitions — plus the creaks and moans and shadows that the game carefully stages — is, I’m sure, intensely nerve-wracking. I still found the game “creepy,” “scary,” “atmospheric,” but I basically sidestepped that essential process of sifting it out, picking it out of a lineup from among the shadows of my own imagination.

So maybe I kind of sidestepped the heart of the game. And, having gotten genuine pleasure out of the Halloweeny vibe and the slow, thoughtful pacing, maybe I kind of regret that. In retrospect. But being open to horror is about trust — and I just don’t. Not strangers, not something I downloaded off the internet. Hell no. How could I? The whole wide uncensored world simply isn’t trustworthy that way.

But now I know, these particular Swedish guys turn out to be basically trustworthy. Despite all the heaping schlockola — let’s just agree, no more games where interdimensional evil manifests as fleshy organic matter sprouting from the walls, okay everyone? — this game was clearly designed with intelligence, theatricality, and genuine affection, and that’s all engaging stuff. These same designers just a week ago released their long-awaited next game, another “classy, atmospheric” horror story, and it’s getting great reviews. Perhaps someday I’ll truly submit myself to that one, put my fear at its mercy the way I didn’t with Amnesia.

I’d rather trust than not; it’s more fun! But I have to baby step my way there.

I guess actually that’s my biggest happy takeaway from this game: 5 years ago when everyone online was talking about how Amnesia was the scariest game ever OMG, I worried that it was some kind of gross-out jump-scare shockfest, and that nobody has any taste at all. But hooray, they do! Relatively.

(Then again, I just watched the trailer for their new game again and it sure looks like there’s fleshy organic matter sprouting from the walls. Come on, guys! I thought we had an agreement.)

developed by Superbrothers and Capybara Games (Toronto, Ontario, CA)
first released March 24, 2011, for iPad, $4.99
[PC version trailer]
[website]
[soundtrack]

Played to 100% completion in 4 hours, 6/23/15–6/24/15.

[complete ~1.5 hour playthrough in 6 segments]

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In the afternoon of Thursday, May 31, 2012, I received an announcement email about “Humble Indie Bundle V,” which contained five games, of which I was already genuinely interested in about four. I immediately purchased it for a full $10, feeling that I had gotten more than my money’s worth from the previous bundles and ought to take the “pay what you think is right” thing seriously. Also, I was employed at the time so didn’t feel quite as frightened as usual about spending money.

The five games, in the order they appeared on the website, were: Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, which I did not touch until just now; LIMBO, which I played and enjoyed soon afterward; Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which I’ve started up once (very nervously) but only played for a few minutes; Psychonauts, which I had already played in its entirety on the PS2 back in 2005, but was happy to purchase in PC form so that I could easily return to it or push it on other people; and Bastion, which I have as yet not played at all.

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This entry has already been written and deleted twice, in full. The game is thoroughly “hipster,” and that’s a subject that can send me off on long, tortured jags. I’m committed to writing these entries in one go and not agonizing, but I really didn’t like what I was putting out there in either of the previous drafts, so here I am yet again.

I think my mistake was launching straight into “analysis” instead of just trying to convey my experience, letting any analysis arise organically as a tool to that end. That might not be an obvious distinction to the reader, but I think it works out to be something the reader benefits from.

My experience of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP was that there was something very tasty and worthwhile here, which I kept trying to bring to the center of my palate, but that there was also the gristle of hipsterism in every bite, preventing the underlying flavor from ever coming into its own. There is a lovely cucumber soup implicit in the fantasy forest twilight ambiance, in the exquisite pixel-art graphics and corresponding dreamy music… and then the soup is given just a little extra hipster zing by the addition of a few lardons, croutons, oyster crackers, jalapeno flakes, pizza bites, chocolate-covered edamame, Corn Pops, and also fuck it how about some dirt, ’cause, you know, “soup,” what’s that all about? #thatmomentwhen

This is not overstated.

Case study: the title. This is a game about a good old mythical quest in a mythical forest, hence “sword and sorcery.” This has been tweaked to “sword and sworcery” in an attempt to lay better claim to the phrase on the game’s own terms, but note that this a deliberately doofy in-quotes pun, one of the staples of hipster argot. (Subtext: “Remember being so simple and innocent as to still make puns? How delicious that was. But make no mistake: we’re sophisticates now, burdened with full censorious awareness of how asinine puns are. Our former innocence is actually an embarrassment. Ha ha we’re making light of it.”)

So far OK, but there’s more. Sword and Sworcery is being presented as though a game is like a rock album. At its core this is a very old idea, going back to Electronic Arts in 1983, but these guys want to be newly fetishistic about it. We know that Sword and Sworcery is an album because it has the “band name,” Superbrothers, shoehorned right into the title. And then the coup de grace: what kind of album is this? Any hipster worth his lardons can tell you that of course it has to be a vinyl EP. And that this, too, needs to be articulated outright in the title to get full credit for it.

Dealing with the string of words Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP exactly encapsulates the player experience in dealing with the game. The various affectations cut against each other and create an anxious little blur of overkill. It’s headache-inducing and erodes the core aesthetic experience.

But here’s where I feel an uneasy ambivalence. The hipster ideology is that this, this itchy, sweet/salty/umami/Trix teary-eyed/tongue-in-cheek overintellectualized/faux-naif fetishistic/sentimental post-postmodern pile-up — which corresponds to their internal psychological pile-up — this is a legitimate aesthetic experience… and I have to admit, they’ve got me there. The artistic answer to “Will it blend?” is always “yes.” The question is really whether the audience wants to stomach it. I can only speak for myself.

I guess my thing with hipsters is that their psyches have been subjected to a sickening Bass-O-Matic process that has utterly intermingled their anxious defense mechanisms with their authentic souls. Then they come to me with these weird slurried hearts and try to interest me in their weird slurried art, and I’m both fascinated and nauseated. I feel like Geena Davis in The Fly listening in horror to disintegrating Jeff Goldblum go on about how spiritual and great it is, what’s happening to him. Um, it doesn’t seem great. #butwhatdoiknow

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This game was designed for iPad and only later ported to PC, but without really reworking the touchpad control scheme, which, with a mouse, doesn’t feel particularly intuitive or sensible. This can’t have helped my impression.

I could go on but I think better I don’t. The bottom line is, there is a lovely forested dreamspace in this game, and I was touched by it, some, when I wasn’t fighting against the many currents of convoluted affectation. The game tells us, laboriously and invasively, that it is based on Jungian archetypes. I’m always up for exploring my inner archetypal imagery; less so for being told that that’s what I’m doing. The cigar-smoking psychiatrist figure who introduces each segment of the game is clumsily identified as “The Archetype” — rather than as, say, “The Jungian” — which seems to me like an (inadvertent?) admission that the hipster mind is a hall of mirrors. The ostensible analytic framework is itself just another projection, one that happens to muck up the dream and diminish its pleasures.

If only games were peelable, I would peel this one and love just the seed. But alas I can’t.

And I can’t heal the artists by loving the art more than I do. This is important to remember. It’s just me here.

This game is a damned shame. Given that, I liked it. But that’s a lot to be given.

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Craig D. Adams (“Superbrothers”) (concept, art, design, writing)
Kris Piotrowski (design, “project leadership”)
Jim Guthrie (music, sound)
Jon Maur (technical programming)
Frankie Leung (gameplay programming)

developed by Robit Studios (New York, NY)
first released November 26, 2011 for Windows, free
~108 MB
[website]
[trailer]
[soundtrack]

Played to completion (including the “good end”) in ~17 hours, 6/16/15–6/19/15.

[Youtube video of a complete narrated ~10 hour “let’s play” in 29 parts: (no playlist; here’s part 1)]
[or: Youtube video of a complete 3-hour “speedrun”]

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Seventh of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue March 22, 2012.

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This game is the reason I joined GOG in the first place. I read this guy’s blog post, which ends by saying “this is a really good game, and I suggest you try it if you haven’t already — it is free, after all.” I played an hour or two, three years ago, and agreed that it was very charming. But then for some reason I didn’t stick with it.

Now I have.

This is one of those games with a toylike dollhouse world that just goes and goes, sprawling until it seems to embrace a little of everything. You come across a haunted castle on an uninhabited island AND a city with a nightclub AND a secret underground robot factory AND a sick mouse who needs go to the mouse doctor AND an ancient booby-trapped temple AND a treehouse village of talking animals, etc. etc. The appeal is much the same as with Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World or a Where’s Waldo illustration — you can focus yourself entirely into this safe, enclosed realm of tininess, and yet still be somewhere spacious and varied. The difference is that here the focusing is enforced by the computer; you never get to stand back and take it all in at one glance. But the experience ends up being the same, just as a hedge maze ends up feeling like the same basic activity as a pen-and-paper maze.

It’s a world designed to be exhausted while continuing to feel inexhaustible. I love it when games can pull that off. The key game from my past that comes to mind is Little Big Adventure (1994), which Treasure Adventure Game resembles in many respects, but lots of other games have created that same feeling. The feeling is the joy of the unfettered imagination.

Just a few entries ago I said that Ultima IV was off-putting to me because it had such a vast map; really I meant it was off-putting for having a map much vaster than its imagination, which is constrained rather artificially — aspirationally — to thy creaky caricature of thy Tolkien model. In Treasure Adventure Game, the worldspace is vast, but peopled by basically anything that came to mind.

Unsurprisingly, the stuff that came to the developer’s mind is all secondhand, but the secondhand toyshop of the childhood-cultural imagination is piled high with diverse stuff, too much for anyone to ever get bored of it. It’s one of those bustling, magical toyshops, like you see in movies — oh hey look, that itself is one of the images in the shop, in the middle of a teetering stack on one of these magical shelves. And these images, when they’re alive, are always melding and reforming, never quite exactly the same. So how “secondhand” can they be, really? They continually molt and burn and are born anew.

This game was created as one guy’s private learn-to-code exercise, which I think is part of what gives its pile-up of imagination such a wonderfully unassuming quality — his focused, ego-bound attention was always occupied with the technical, so the content was born free. 30 years ago when I started playing computer games, most games had some of that quality, the “eh, just call it Zork” attitude — the MIT attitude — which for all its shortcomings nonetheless imparts the potency of the living subconscious to whatever it generates. (That was another chapter concept from my abandoned book on video games.)

Everything in Treasure Adventure Game — a Zork of a title for sure — had a refreshingly authentic naivete. Yes, the game is also a deliberate and overt act of “retro,” and all its simple sunny-day innocence is demonstrably derived from Japanese games of decades past, but behind all that, organizing it, is a real live innocence and openness. It genuinely felt like being inside a game imagined by an eager 10-year-old.

The designer is in fact in his 30s. From what little I could glean online, he seems certainly to be a little dorky and isolated — but who isn’t, these days? I don’t have any grand theory about what makes him tick or why he was able to tap into such a childlike spirit. I don’t need to know; I’m just here to play.

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In many ways it’s very similar to Cave Story, another solo homebrew freeware retro pixel action adventure. But Treasure Adventure Game is, on the one hand, less polished and professional than Cave Story, and on the other hand, more sympathetic to me personally as a big bundle of tropes. TAG is obviously American where Cave Story is obviously Japanese.

For any readers who are still unclear on this point: I am an American. (I’ve dropped many subtle clues over the years, but it was time to come right out and say it.)

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I had a really nice time working my way through Treasure Adventure Game, and felt enthusiasm throughout. I found myself playing in very long and eager sessions, and even sticking around at the end to do the one or two extra errands necessary for the little “100%+” epilogue.

The design is riddled with little infelicities — lots of places where the platforming challenges expose the imperfections of the controls, or places where certain tasks edge into tedium, or where boring backtracking is inevitable, or action sequences feel needlessly finicky, etc. etc. There are, unsurprisingly, many places where the purely amateur spirit praised above turns out to be a liability or a distraction. The game is simply an uneven piece of work. But that overriding sense of genuine good-naturedness never flagged, and I was always able to forgive the rough spots and press on cheerfully toward the next bit of invention.

He did give it away for free, after all!

The music is excellent: right on the money for “innocent retro,” providing just the right degree of mood and shadow to give a real ambiance to the various locales, the haunted pyramids and whatnot, but never giving up — or for that matter overselling — the basic spirit of simple unencumbered play. These are the moods I go to games to find: the moods that exist within an overarching meta-mood of freedom, ease, well-being. The day-night cycle in this game is like a subtle mood sine wave, going on behind the action at all times. This feels healthy to me.

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Part of the reason this game is freeware is that, since it was begun as a coding exercise, the designer wasn’t rigorous about using only resources to which he had the rights. When it was very well received and touted as a top-class freebie (by, for example, GOG), he probably regretted that.

So… for the past few years he’s has been remaking the game for commercial release (as “Treasure Adventure WORLD“) in a high-resolution “modern” style, which seems to me like a terrible error in judgment. Low-resolution graphics and high-resolution graphics have entirely different meanings and bring with them entirely different structural expectations for the underlying order of the game universe. I don’t think the soul or value of this game can possibly survive such a transition intact. The sample videos he’s posted sadden me, because having enjoyed the original, I’m rooting for him and want him to succeed, and my gut tells me that this thing he’s doing is embarrassingly ill-conceived.

But maybe I’m wrong! When I feel embarrassment I usually am.

The designer made six “post-mortem” videos where he plays while talking about making the game. They’re pretty Youtube-y but I made it through. Here’s the playlist.

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Design, coding, graphics: Stephen Orlando
Music: Robert Ellis

Plus various minor acknowledgements for “additional graphics” (I think this means “borrowed graphics”), playtesting, etc. But really it’s a one-man game.

developed by Origin Systems (Austin, TX)
first published September 16, 1985, for Apple II
GOG package ~12MB. Actual game ~1MB.
[Play in browser]

[Played for a little more than an hour, 5/5/15, then read about the game and watched videos on and off for a month…]

[Youtube video of complete 40-hour playthrough (yeah, you heard me) in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4]
[or: HTML “Let’s Play”]

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Sixth of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue September 1, 2011, along with the rest of the Ultima series. This particular game was offered for free no doubt because of a long history of having been treated like freeware, even though it’s technically not. This traces back to the fact that the full game was distributed “for free” on a CD included with the August 1997 issue of PC Games magazine. Seems like the owners thought of it as a one-time promotion and only afterward realized that because of the damn internet, the game would go on being passed around for free, forever. Oops. That’s 1997 for ya.

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Yeah I didn’t play it. This is the oldest and most influential and most “important” game on my list, but I just can’t right now. I can’t.

I’ve never played an RPG to completion, or really at all, and I like the idea of changing that. I’m excited to dig in and really get the measure of one of these things, see what it feels like to go all the way up into the nerdosphere and try to keep breathing deep slow breaths. I also liked the idea of playing this very famous and beloved one. I wanted to go back to 1985 and imagine getting lost in that bare grid and its moveable type world of simple square icons.

But reader I just can’t. Fans of the genre might tell you this is a great place to start, but just as I couldn’t handle it in 1985, it’s still not a place for me to start. Between the gold points and the experience points and the health points and the magic points and the food points and the reagents and the weapons and the runes and the mantras and the fact that the game is controlled with keypresses like “Z for status” which must be read off the reference card until memorized…

But most of all the fact that the game takes place on a giant map of mostly empty wilderness, to which one must constantly refer. This is really what turns me off so hard, and what might be a stumbling block in a lot of RPGs: the whole appeal of computer games, to me, is that they open a door to imaginary space that I as a player enter and experience. Yes, I might well choose to create a map of that space to ease my way — as in a text adventure — but the map does not determine the nature of the space; very much the other way around. In fact often those Infocom maps couldn’t really be drawn literally because they made no topological sense. They were really just sort of mnemonic devices. Whereas here in Ultima, the territory you explore is too vast to be felt out from the individual’s perspective; it just exists to space things out and give an epic extension to the proceedings. Sure, part of the game is discovering towns and stuff that aren’t shown on the official map provided in the box, but that’s not the same as discovering the space itself. You’re not expected to; you’re just expected to keep checking the map and figuring out where you’re headed.

When a map is onscreen, somehow it’s much much better. The screen is the portal; everything beyond that portal is of a piece. Are there maps in the magical space? Well, great, that’ll help me get around.

Actually, when this game first came out and was so beloved, probably players were getting the feel of the territory, genuinely exploring, by just walking around. The problem is just the scale. Did you see that the walkthrough video was 40 hours long? That’s why I couldn’t stomach taking it on. It’s something about scale; my brain can’t process this scale at the moment.

There are lots and lots of interesting things to discuss about this game. It’s all about morality, as conceived by the completely fascinating personage of Richard Garriott, genuinely trying to make the world a better place by schematizing the moral structure implicit to him in Dungeons & Dragons, The Wizard of Oz, and other Americana. And who’s to say this game didn’t make the world a better place? My parallel preoccupations with nerds and philosophy could have a field day here.

But I didn’t play it. Hey, if you wanna read analyses of Ultima IV or ponder the Citizen Kane life of millionaut Richard Allen “Lord British” Garriott de Cayeux, there’s plenty of stuff on the internet. All you have to do is Google. (You know how to Google, don’t you, Steve?)

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Since all I played is the very beginning, I’m going to fulfill my blogbligations by reenacting it here. Don’t worry, this will be fun.

Instead of just opting be a bard or a shepherd or whatever, as one does at the beginning of many RPGs, in Ultima IV, a game about becoming a moral paragon by mastering all virtue, we begin with a test of our natural moral inclinations. The idea of which is great! The execution is a bit eccentric. I think what follows should serve as a fine sampler of the Richard Garriott mindset.

Here are the questions I received, in order. I typed up my thought processes in the moment and copy them here unaltered.

1. Honesty vs. Spirituality.

The problem for me here is in the passive phrase “Thou art asked to vouch…” Asked by whom? What kind of authority structure does my Spiritual Order have, and how integral is it to the spiritual substance of the order? Is it possible to distinguish between adherence to the authority of the Order and adherence to the spiritual creed? The question is basically whether I am willing to “bend the rules” because I believe in the possibility of spiritual growth. But how could I ever be a genuine adherent of the order if I differed with it on such a basic issue of the nature of spirit?

After much deliberation I answered A), reasoning that if I genuinely consider this MY Spiritual order, which seems to be given, then I would consider its criteria for induction spiritually sound. If for some reason (not elucidated here) those criteria include “purity of Spirit,” then yes, I would give completely honest answers about people I knew. I wouldn’t want to be part of an order that I felt had bad rules.

2. Justice vs. Sacrifice

I certainly would not let the man fight alone simply as a way of meting out Justice. However I might use the concept of justice as rationalization for the fearful course of action I would be independently inclined to take. The question of whether I risked my life to aid him would be entirely dependent on my assessment of the risk and not at all on the concept of whether he deserved it. So the question here is whether I answer with reference to the announced virtues (in which case I would choose Sacrifice as more important than Justice) or with reference to the scenario (in which I tend to imagine myself making the more cowardly choice.) Given that the phrasings of the two options are explicit about naming the virtues, I chose B).

3. Valor vs. Honor

This is a tough one for me. The decision would be entirely dependent on other factors. Why am I guarding the tent? Are there things in there, or is it just a matter of form? What kind of counterpressure does this army put on me to prevent me from making my own decisions; i.e., what kind of punishment might I receive for disobeying orders? The question of “honor” is really in the eyes of others, not me. If my commander is obsessed with such things, then potentially my staying my post no matter what does him an emotional service. On the other hand, if the people around me are not interested in honor, then neither am I. So I guess the answer is that I as an individual am more interested in Valor; given how little information I have, that has to be my answer. But the question implies a commander and an army to which I am obligated. My relationship with these abstractions is certainly anxious, and I would be very likely to fixate on pleasing them! But I wouldn’t call that “Honor.” I don’t really believe in “Honor” as a pure virtue. A).

4. Compassion vs. Humility

This scenario is particularly forced and silly. Cheering children by telling stories at the request of one’s captain doesn’t seem to me the least bit “unhumble.” If this is a legitimate way of thinking about “Humility,” then I don’t care for “Humility.” A).

5. Valor vs. Sacrifice

It depends on how much I need the food! Do I risk starving myself? Or am I at no risk and have plenty of food? Is “valor” just a matter of resenting that he “accosted” me? The question does say that he’s hungry, i.e. not just trying to throw his weight around for its own sake. So, all things being equal, how is “Valor” different from hypersensitivity? B).

6. Honesty vs. Compassion

Again, from and to whom am I delivering this purse? The question is about being open to stealing, but there’s no suggestion of from whom I’d be stealing, which seems to me a necessary part of rationalizing stealing. The question strongly implies that I do not have any prior relationship to this beggar, that he/she is simply a stranger I encountered while doing an errand that is meaningful to me and to someone I know. Poverty is going to exist. I see no reason to steal simply because I happened to encounter a poor person on the road, which surely happens all the time. A).

7. Honesty and Sacrifice

Am I a “thee” or a “thou” or what? The question is interesting to me because it doesn’t make clear how my situation, believing I slew the dragon (because I’m told so), differs from my friend’s, believing he slew the dragon. If I take the question at its word, as fact, and consider it incontrovertible that I slew the dragon, I see no reason to sacrifice my achievement to my friend just because he’s lying or deluded or something. However if the idea is that my friend and I each think we slew the dragon with equally good reason, and this is one of those cases where “official historical fact” breaks down (i.e. actually neither of us “slew” it, a rock fell on it. “Well, I started the avalanche!” “Well, the dragon wouldn’t have been under it if it wasn’t for me!”) then I might very well be open to splitting the reward. I’m not greedy about things. But I would never just grant it entirely to someone else no needier than me when I think I earned it; there’s no reason given why I would do that. A).

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If you follow what’s going on in the virtue bracket, you’ll see that this process has attempted to winnow out my primary virtue: apparently it’s Honesty. This resulted in my being born as a mage.

So far I was pretty excited about this game! Then I wandered around the actual game itself for an hour and realized I’m not ready. I’m just not ready. Sorry, everybody!

Feel free to submit your own ethical takes on the questions above.

developed by MicroProse (Hunt Valley, MD)
first published March 1994, for DOS (the fossil record on this is very scanty and I can’t find the price anywhere)
[totally anachronistic re-release trailer with sped-up animation, 2014]
GOG package ~90MB. Actual game ~70MB. Original non-talkie version ~13MB.

Played to completion in 5.5 hours, 5/3/15–5/4/15.

[video: complete 3-hour playthrough in three parts]

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Fifth of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue May 5, 2011. As far as I can tell, this is the first time anywhere that this game was offered for free. So unlike their prior free games, making this one a giveaway might actually have been GOG’s own business decision, though I’m not sure why. A few years later, the same game was re-released by another distributor for $6.99.

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The day I started Dragonsphere, I found myself playing continuously for four hours, which is not usual. Why? Certainly not because it impressed me or won me over in any rational way. Not because it was “good.” Not because I was having “fun” with it. It had something seductive about it that was none of those things, the way that games sometimes do. It had some of that enveloping power, that implacable itself-ness, that draws me along. I was getting something out of it at the furthest reaches of irrationality.

I recently reread an M.R. James ghost story where one of the select details about the apparation — the descriptions are always sparing, for maximum spookiness — is that when it is spotted at a great distance, “there was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.” No more really need be said; we all know what kind of subtle horror he means by “something about its motion.” There are kinds of motion that can seem either too fast or too slow, too smooth or too choppy; somehow the sense of motion is very closely linked to the potential for nausea. Time and rhythm is deep stuff.

In Dragonsphere, all the animations are a little too slow and smooth, have a few too many frames. Time passes a little bit over-deliberately. Furthermore the characters don’t have discernible faces; those pixels have been put to other use. Even the inset portraits that appear in their dialogue boxes aren’t very clear and don’t really have eyes that can be looked into. And the voice-over is so completely talentless — it seems to have been done by the development team and not by real actors — that some hidden meaning, some other principle, seems to be driving it all. For the most part, the game seems to be taking place at not quite a comfortable distance, at not quite a comfortable speed, with not quite a coherent psychological underlayer. All of which is accompanied by the droning spaced-out sounds of the MIDI synthesizer, doing its alien impressions of fairytale fantasy music.

That kind of stuff hooks me like a ghost story. When James says that the ghost’s motion “made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters,” note that he does not say that it made Parkins very undesirous to see it. These are quite different things, especially for the reader. The purpose of the sentence is to instill us with dread that we will eventually have to see this ghost at close quarters — or so we hope, anyway! We relish the anticipation of being forced toward what unsettles us. That which is wrong is magnetic.

At least to me. It’s the same psychology as battered spouse syndrome: when things feel wrong, I feel a tickle of excitement at the possibility of righting them, conquering them, pursuing the evil to its heart and cleansing it. And that, after all, is the storyline of most of these fantasy games, so I know I’m not alone. Everyone’s ears prick up when they see a sorcerer’s forbidding black tower surrounded by lightning clouds: we’re gonna hafta go there, right?

So I guess I played for four hours straight because the effect of all that off-ness is that subliminally it felt like maybe an evil wizard had made this game.

“Evil wizards and the men who love them.”

Isn’t the deepest hook of The Lord of the Rings the fact that it has such ghastly evil in it? The plot is that you must go toward the evil, deeper and deeper into it. I’m not sure the morality in the book can come anywhere near explaining the morality that makes people like the book.

That’s the problem with heroic fantasy: it proposes an unhealthy framework for thinking about its own appeal. That’s why I was so dismissive of fantasy for so long: fantasy had told to me to be! Fantasy stories told me in no uncertain terms to make a heroic beeline toward whatever was most terrifying in the world, and leave childish things — like fantasy — behind. I was wary of fantasy exactly as a result of being so fundamentally an adherent of fantasy. This is a philosophical vicious circle that can only cause harm in the long run.

The other night I read (for the first time) “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which impressed me for recognizing this very thing. It’s a journey, like Frodo’s (or King Dragonsphere’s), of a character who is drawn inevitably toward the heart of all evil by the same nameless subrational forces that make us as readers want him to go there… but unlike most authors of fantasy, Hawthorne knows that the sword is double-edged, and ends up delivering a proper moral: beware of stories like this. Resisting the devil and giving in to the devil are more or less the same thing, and come to the same result: leading a devil-haunted life. Pretty profound, Hawthorne! And I know he’s right, because after reading too many tales of heroic resistance, I accordingly made a haunted life for myself.

But I have been cutting down. Nonetheless I still find myself drawn toward distant ghosts. At least the ones that breathe between the pixels of stilted computer games.

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Beyond the hypnotic stiltsiness, what’s here is middlingly competent enough, with a few standout details on either side of the line. It has one long logic puzzle that I had to take a lot of notes on, which in retrospect could have been handled better, but at the time I was very pleasantly surprised to have such a thing lobbed at me. There’s also a lame gambling mini-game that you have to play over and over. Otherwise, it’s all basically unremarkable “use X with Y”/dialogue-tree stuff. To its credit, you can’t get stuck or die — or rather, there are lots of dead ends but they’re all single-error affairs and after showing you the animated death, the game automatically restores you to the moment before the error. It’s a pretty short game, which is always fine with me. If the character didn’t walk so slowly, I would surely have gotten through it all in a single sitting.

What’s most distinctive about the game design, I think, is the emphasis it places on the story and the writing, which are a couple micro-ticks more prominent, and more coherent, than in most games of this ilk. There’s an actual plot twist, one with some potential meat to it! Most of that potential is unrealized, of course. But under the circumstances of an adventure game, I can make a meal of potential meat. (Which could be the subtitle for this blog.)

The twist — to only half-spoil it — revolves around the game’s unusual conception of a race of “shapeshifters”: unlike any other shapeshifters I’ve ever read about, these shifters actually take on the mindset and nature of the thing they shift into, which means many of them make a shift and then lose their intention to ever revert. When you visit shapeshifter country, it’s covered with trees and rocks that have eyes or ears, shapeshifters who, by becoming trees and rocks, also became content to be trees and rocks, indefinitely. This is a neat and disturbing idea, and the script runs with it a little ways. But then it clouds the issue of what the rules are, and ultimately backs away from the deeper implications. What a waste of a premise that could have been genuinely interesting! But oh well. Whatever. It is what it is. Forget it, Jake: it’s Dragonsphere.

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When I said I was playing Dragonsphere, Beth said, “You should know that in real life, there’s no such thing as a sphere of dragons.” To that I say: maybe.

The titular dragsonsphere in the game is not in fact a sphere of dragons; it’s a sort of crystal ball/palantir thing. Now you know.

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This game was produced by a MicroProse sub-studio that was in the process of being dismantled following a merger, and it seems like its quiet, underadvertised release was a casualty of the moment. I wonder, in fact, whether it was actually finished to the developers’ satisfaction, or just got pushed out the door as-is while they were being laid off.

Doug Kaufman: design, writing
Matt Gruson: producer
Brian Reynolds: technical direction
Paul Lahaise: programming
Michael Bross, Don Barto: music
Mike Gibson: art

Plus eight more artists and animators, two more programmers, etc.

developed by Eclipse Software
Tyrian first published as shareware by Epic MegaGames, September 11, 1995, for DOS, $35.
Tyrian 2000 first published by XSIV Games (Stealth Media Group), November 18, 1999, for DOS, $19.99.
[original site]
GOG package ~24MB. Actual game ~13MB.

Played to completion in 6.5 hours, 4/28/15–4/30/15.

[video: complete 2.5-hour playthrough]

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Fourth of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue December 14, 2010. The game had been declared freeware by its authors on August 17, 2004.

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You’d be shocked at how much text was just here that isn’t here anymore!

I don’t actually have a lot to say about Tyrian.

I do have a lot to say about shareware, the shareware era, my attitude to games at the time and now. But trying to use the obligation to say something about this as an opportunity to instead talk about that is turning out to be one of those hot ideas that doesn’t pay off. It’s tedious to explain myself when there’s no actual vroom behind my thoughts urging me to get them out. These are old thoughts and remain asleep even as I try to yank them into service, so what’s the point? It seems like disrespect to the past self who thought they were interesting to steal his pride and use it with so little feeling. He’ll be back and eager to talk at some point. I leave his thoughts to him.

You know, my head is pretty cloudy and unessayistic a lot of the time, which makes this site sort of burdensome insofar as my ambition is to do some kind of justice to how interesting I think I am. It can’t be done! It cahhhn’t be done. So that’s where a lot of the underinspired heave-ho writing comes in. Even if I do ultimately get some points across, it’s not worth the haul. Some of the time I genuinely have the strength to just toss them across effortlessly, or the acuity to skip them across like clever stones. So why subject myself to hard labor when I’m out of sorts?

Tyrian is a show-off game from an era of showing off. (There, that’s already better than all the grind I deleted.) It’s supposed to be great because it’s so exactly like things you never thought you’d be able to have, but now you do: it’s an arcade game you can play at home!

It does indeed have that going for it. But like so much shareware, it doesn’t know what to do with that, other than pile it on indiscriminately. It’s like the mega-ice-cream-mountain special of vertical shooters. You know, the if-you-can-finish-it-it’s-free-and-you-get-your-photo-on-the-wall-over-the-register. It has all the taste and distinction of those things: 20 scoops and 4 bananas and all 10 sauces and all 12 toppings and an American flag and sparklers and the teenage waitstaff will sing the song when they deliver it.

That kind of narrow excess was typical of shareware days, and gave those games a special quality, of previously unimaginable luxury: we have everything now, finally. From here out, we’re living large! PC games in 1994 were living a nouveau-riche fantasy, diving in their Scrooge McDuck treasure horde of luscious pixels. We waited a long time for this shit, always having to envy those stupid arcade machines. Well, look at me now! Look! Look at me now! (Quoth Tyrian.)

Shareware is sort of an Uncle Moneybags gesture to begin with. Here you go kid: the first part of the game’s on me. Knock yourself out.

Unfortunately for the shareware model, that’s all I ever needed, as a teenager. And it still is. For the most part I just enjoy seeing what things are like. “Wow, look what it’s like!” can be a perfectly complete and fulfilling way of enjoying a game. So why would I ever pony up for Episode Two: More of the Same?

I’m happy to go to the grocery store and just eat what’s on the toothpick. That’ll do me. I’ve had some great free sample experiences. The first five minutes of Tyrian were, and still are, full of decadent charm.

Then for some reason I played for 6 more hours.

(Part of what I drafted and deleted was my admitting that I very well might have played Tyrian to my satisfaction, i.e. played those first five minutes, back in 1995. In fact it seems likely. But I can’t confirm it with a specific memory.)

By halfway through the game, you acquire so much space bullion (or whatever) that you can afford absolutely any weapons you want, which can be combined into an array of guns so overwhelmingly powerful that just holding down fire fills the screen with bullets and obliterates your enemies instantly. For the most part, a little side-to-side motion is all that’s necessary to keep everything under control. It felt more like I was dusting than fighting for my life. Dusting and watching animated explosions. That’s pleasant enough, and certainly a fine way to bask in the decadence of how amazing one’s 486 with VGA is. But so much rolling decadence can be monotonous. Jamestown was short, and the dramatic progression of each level was gleamingly polished. Where this really is The Overkill Sundae Matterhorn Special in every aspect. The levels aren’t drama-less, and there’s definitely plenty of variety over the course of the whole game, but they all feel padded and padded and padded. Yep, more. Yep, more. That’s the selling point.

There is an avalanche of wacky amateur sci-fi text to read in this game, crammed to bursting into the gaps between levels, but man oh man, I just couldn’t. Not another bite, sorry. Fine, so my picture isn’t going above the register. I still played all the way to the end, dammit.

I will give Tyrian this: none of the enemies are Giger-Freudian or otherwise overtly gross. Given the tendencies of this genre, that shows admirable restraint. (I have no problem with a final boss that looks like a big nose.)

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[Tyrian 2000 is just Tyrian (1995) released by a new publisher in 1999 with a few extra levels added on at the end, plus a triumphal picture of a banana.]

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Jason Emery: programming, level design
Alexander Brandon: writing, music, design
Daniel Cook: art, design
Robert Allen: producer

And about seven more.