Some things I have been meaning to write about but haven't

So… I have a few posts that I’ve sort of been working on, but they’re involved. I have others that I just haven’t been motivated to actually work on; motivation in general has been difficult lately. And there have been some things I’ve played with or thought about recently, but I just can’t figure out a way to sort of give those things the narrative structure that I hope for when I’m writing here.

2020 & 2021 Media retrospective

At the end of every year, I try to do a bit of a media retrospective of my favorite stuff that came out that year. I neglected to do one last year, what with all the things going on. But, some good art has happened over the last two years. Particularly music, in my opinion, which was originally all I was going to stuff into this post. But, I opted to add video games and movies to the mix.

Experiencing Tetris Effect

In 1984, Alexei Pajitnov wrote Tetris for the Elektronika 60 computer. This was not a home computer by any stretch of the imagination; it was a Soviet interpretation of a DEC LSI-11, itself a shrunk-down version of the PDP-11. It had no display capabilities of its own, and this initial release of Tetris had to be played on a text-mode terminal that communicated with the computer. Pajitnov, working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was tasked with demonstrating the limits and capabilities of the equipment being developed.

You need a Torx T10 driver to disassemble the 8BitDo Arcade Stick

Not too long ago, I decided to get myself an 8BitDo Arcade Stick. If you’ve spent much time here, you might’ve noticed I’m rather into retrogaming. I grew up with joystick-based consoles and arcades, and while I’m happy using a modern gamepad these days, I do often wish I had that arcade feel when I’m emulating an older system. I was also drawn to the tinkering nature of an arcade stick; the actual joysticks and buttons are largely standardized, modular parts.

Artwork of the Channel F (external)

Just a fun little link post. Title link goes to a lengthy and well-illustrated post by Kate Willaert highlighting the design of Fairchild Channel F game cartridges, manuals, and boxes. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately discussing the specific aesthetics of various consoles, and why they gravitated toward those aesthetics. The Channel F is one of those systems that I know all about the history of, but have somehow never actually experienced in person. So, I never really had it in my mind to mull over its aesthetic, but it is a trip. Of course, much like the later VCS, this was a time when video game graphics were… y’know, dots. So box and cartridge art tended to just go buck-wild.

Anyway, the Channel F had a colorful and cohesive aesthetic to its game art, and Willaert does a bang-up job of walking us through it. Apparently this is the third in a series she’s doing, with the Magnavox Odyssey and those games you’d type in from magazines and such being the first and second entries, respectively. Good stuff.


Super Mario Bros. 35

I go on a tangent toward the end of this post about my fear regarding preservation when Switch Online inevitably shutters. However, since posting this, I have learned that SMB35 was planned to be shut down at the end of March 2021. This is absurd, and likely warrants its own post, but it’s worth mentioning that my fears are not only warranted but grossly underestimated.
Super Mario World was likely the first smooth-scrolling platformer that I ever played, albeit briefly at a family friend’s house. Later, PC games like Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit were the first of the genre that I owned and played heavily. It wasn’t until a bit later in life that I got an NES and fell in love with… well, a ton of games for the system, but most relevantly the first and third Super Mario Bros.

Don't turn off the lights

Sigh, so, I feel like every post from the past few months has contained some version of this statement, but… I’ve started writing a number of things lately, and just haven’t had the motivation or whatever to finish them. Some are daunting longer-format pieces that require research and/or illustration, others are smaller filler bits that just don’t ultimately seem worth following through with. I’m handling things pretty well during this pandemic, but… being creative and seeing even the smallest projects through to completion… it’s tough right now.

I bought another four-function calculator

Something I find rather amusing is that despite my owning… a lot of classic HP calculators1, this here blog only has posts about one old Sinclair calculator (which is, at least, a postfix machine) and one modern four-function, single-step Casio calculator (that somehow costs $300). And, as of today… yet another modern Casio calculator. I actually do want to write something about the HPs at some point, but… they’re well-known and well-loved. I’m excited about this Casio because it’s a weird throwback (that, like the S100, I had to import), and because it intersects two of my collector focuses: calculators and retro video games.

The mid-1970s brought mass production of several LCD technologies, which meant that pocket LCD calculators (and even early handheld video game consoles were a readily obtainable thing by the early 1980s. Handheld video games were in their infancy, and seeking inspiration from calculators seemed to be a running theme. Mattel’s Auto Race came to fruition out of a desire to reuse readily-available calculator-sized LED technology in the 1970s; Gunpei Yokoi was supposedly inspired to merge games with watches (in, of course, the Game & Watch series) after watching someone fiddle idly with a calculator. Casio took a pretty direct approach with this, releasing a series of calculators with games built in. Later games had screens with both normal calculator readouts and custom-shaped electrodes to present primitive graphics (like the Game & Watch units, or all those old terrible Tiger handhelds), some of which were rather large for renditions of games like Pachinko. The first, however, was essentially a bog-standard calculator as far as hardware was concerned2: regular 8-digit 7-segment display, regular keypad. I suspect this was largely to test the reception of the format before committing to anything larger; aside from the keypad graphics, the addition of the speaker, and the ROM mask… it looks like everything could’ve been lifted off of the production line for any number of their calculators: the LC-310 and LC-827 have identical layouts.

This was the MG-880, and it was clearly enough of a hit to demonstrate the viability of pocket calculators with dedicated game modes. The game itself is simple. Numbers come in from the right side of the screen in a line. The player is also represented by a number, which they increment by pressing the decimal separator/aim key. When the player presses the plus/fire key, the closest matching digit is destroyed. These enemy numbers come in ever-faster waves, and once they collide with you, it’s game over. Liquid Crystal has more information on the MG-880 here.

So that’s all very interesting (if you’re the same type of nerd I am), but I mentioned I was going to be talking about a modern Casio calculator in this post. About three years ago, Casio decided to essentially rerelease (remaster?) the MG-880 in a modern case; this is the SL-880. I haven’t owned an MG-880 before, so I can’t say that the game is perfectly recreated down to timing and randomization and what-have-you, but based on what I’ve read/seen of the original, it’s as faithful a recreation as one needs. In fact, while the calculator has been upgraded to ten digits, the game remains confined to the MG-880’s classic eight. Other upgrades to the calculator side of things include dual-power, backspace, negation, memory clear, tax rate functions (common on modern Japanese calculators) and square root3. You can also turn off the in-game beeping, which was not possible on the MG-880. The SL-880 is missing one thing from its predecessor, however: the melody mode. In addition to game mode, the speaker allowed for a melody mode where different keys simply mapped to different notes. The only disappointing thing about this omission is how charming it is seeing the solfège printed above the keys.

So was the SL-880 worth importing? Honestly, yes. The calculator itself feels impossibly light and a bit cheap, but it is… a calculator that isn’t the S100 in the year 2020. The game holds up better than I expected. It is, of course, still a game where you furiously mash two keys as numbers appear on a screen, but given the limitations? Casio made a pretty decent calculator game in 1980. More important to me, however, is where it sits in video game history. One might say I should just seek out an original MG-880 for that purpose, and… perhaps I will, some day4. But I think there’s something special about Casio deciding to release a throwback edition of such an interesting moment in video game history. And while the MG-880 was a success, it certainly isn’t as much of a pop culture icon as, say, the NES. This relative obscurity is likely why I find this much more charming than rereleases like the NES Classic Edition. It feels like Casio largely made it not to appeal to collectors, but to commemorate their own history.


On Animal Crossing and native UX

Nintendo (of Australia) has revealed that Animal Crossing: New Horizon will only support one island per console. Different cartridge? Same island. Different user account? Same island. This obviously reads as some money-grabbing garbage (that they’re releasing a special edition Switch alongside the game doesn’t help), but there’s another issue here that I feel will largely go untouched-upon. Using a computer these days is a horrible mess, and to me this is largely due to the use of non-native UI widgets.

The new mobile Tetris is a travesty

A few more technical notes as I’ve unfortunately put more time into N3TWORK’s Tetris: it does use guideline scoring, which I assumed but… the awkward placement of the score made it hard to confirm (and it gives no notification for any moves other than Tetris); leveling is fixed-goal (which makes sense: you lose faster and get to watch another ad!) and tops out at level 15 (EA’s Tetris used variable-goal leveling and didn’t max out); it never reaches nor approaches 20G (I’m pretty sure EA’s Tetris did; if it didn’t, it got far closer).

It’s probably pretty obvious by now that I love Tetris. Enough so that I was able to write a 1200-word post detailing my favorite Tetrises. It is, then, incredibly disheartening that I feel forced to write two posts in one month (back-to-back, even) about modern Tetris implementations that are just absolutely terrible. Unfortunately, this also renders part of the aforementioned list of favorite Tetrises outdated1. Until recently, Electronic Arts (EA) was the developer for Tetris on mobile. As of last year, the ridiculously-named N3TWORK is the exclusive rights-holder to mobile Tetris. Once upon a time, this would simply mean that EA could no longer make or sell a new Tetris game on the respective platform, but it’s 2020 and all technology is hell. So, as of April 21, 2020, EA’s mobile Tetris will simply… stop working. I’m sure EA was forced into some phone-home scheme that would allow such a thing to happen, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the ability for such a thing to happen should be 100% illegal.

Capitalist technohell aside, there’s a new mobile Tetris in town! In my 2019 video game retrospective, I pointed out that “[a]pparently there’s a battle royale Tetris game coming to mobile as well, which is exciting.” This game (Tetris Royale) will, of course, also be made by N3TWORK, and I have to say… I am no longer excited. While EA’s mobile Tetris was essentially a perfect implementation, N3TWORK’s is an unplayable steaming shit. The controls are utterly broken – one’s finger must be lifted in between swiping sideways for lateral movement and swiping down for a hard drop. Bonuses aren’t acknowledged (I’m unsure if they’re scored properly or not at the moment) for T-spins, back-to-backs, or combos – only Tetrises. And visually, the game is a nightmare.

Compare these screenshots (EA on the left, N3TWORK on the right). EA’s app has a bunch of black space at the top and bottom, as it was never updated for X-sized iPhones. N3TWORK’s has been made for modern phones, but it… does nothing useful with that space. In fact, it is objectively worse because the score is floating so far away from the field. One of the big reasons that EA’s made my list of favorite Tetrises is the boxes for the next piece and hold. The backgrounds of these boxes are the same color as the piece, which means that if you know your Guideline colors, even the slightest hint of these out of the corner of your eye tells you the necessary information. N3TWORK’s does not do this. To be fair, this is also something I miss from all of the other implementations I enjoy. However, N3TWORK goes far beyond the normal level of disappointment by making their next and hold pieces nearly invisible to an eye focused on the grid. There is absolutely no reason for them to be so small, it’s just a foolish design decision that makes the game objectively less playable. On top of that, the colors in these boxes are absurdly pale, making color-based recognition difficult as well. It’s worth noting that there are five different skins. Of these, the one in the screenshot is the only one that bothers to color the hold/next boxes at all. It’s absurd. The bizarre pseudo-3D effect and half-baked ‘90s-hacker-film aesthetic are distracting (though fitting for a company called N3TWORK) and ugly, but that’s a personal opinion. You’d be hard-pressed to make an argument about the other aforementioned visual issues not making the game objectively worse to play at a high level.

EA’s Tetris also had excellent stats tracking, both per-game and over time. It would graph out scores over the course of a week or a month. It had some silly additional modes beyond Marathon, but for someone who primarily plays Endless Marathon at a relatively high level, it was the perfect companion. My stats didn’t carry over from my last phone, but I’m glad I cleared over 35,000 lines with EA’s Tetris on my current phone. I will keep an eye on updates to N3TWORK’s Tetris, but a lot would have to change for me to pay for it or even continue to play it for free. It is utterly, devastatingly disappointing.


Tetris Microcard vs. Tetris Micro Arcade

This is going to be an attempt to review two ostensibly similar products, one discontinued that paved the way for the other. Both are pocket-sized Tetris games, officially licensed and generally adherent to the Guideline. They follow the same basic physical format, and comparing them should be pretty straightforward (it is, actually; one is good and the other is bad). I think that properly comparing them, however, requires examining the technical decisions that were made, and for this we need to back up and establish a couple of other things. This is because the first product, the discontinued one from 2017, is based on the Arduboy platform.

Arduboy is a tiny open gaming console that vaguely resembles a Game Boy, based on the Arduino ‘open-source electronics platform’. Arduino kits are typically used to ease the embedded microcontroller portion of hardware products. It’s a dinky 20MHz ATmega processor, with enough flash memory to hold (in the case of Arduboy) one game at a time. Tetris Microcard, released in 2017, took this overall platform, rotated the physical format so it was more like a Game Boy Micro (and in the process, orienting the display portrait, perfect for Tetris) and matched it with a custom port in ROM. Both the Arduboy and Tetris Microcard were manufactured by Seeed Studio, a fabrication shop that also sells a number of premanufactured devices based around these sorts of microcontrollers. I doubt these were manufactured in massive quantities. All of this together led the release price of the Microcard to be a whopping $60.

Onward to the 2019 release of Tetris Micro Arcade. It retains the basic physical format of the Microcard, but is no longer based on the Arduboy platform or manufactured by Seeed Studio. Mass-produced by Super Impulse alongside (currently) five other games in the same format, Micro Arcade sells for a more consumer-friendly $15-20. Some have speculated that these run Arduinos as well, but I suspect this is simply because of the obvious evolutionary path from the Microcard. My suspicion all along has been that these run on a Famicom-on-a-chip. Opening the case up, the processor has (of course) been epoxied over, but it certainly doesn’t look like the format of an Arduino’s ATmega. Regardless, even if it is the same platform, it is a wildly different ROM, and one that fits its role as a cheap, mass-produced device, devoid of love.

That is to say, the Micro Arcade ROM is… bad. Really, really bad. It plays through the background music (“Korobeiniki”) once, and then just… stops. At some point after that, the screen just blanked white on mine, even though the game was still technically playing in the background. There are no lines to delineate between minos in a tetrimino, which always feels like a Programming 101 port to me. There’s no ghost piece. It doesn’t save high scores1 (Microcard has a ten-spot leaderboard). Despite largely adhering to the guideline (pieces are colored correctly, at least, and rotation is SRS2) it feels terribly unofficial.

Which isn’t to say that the Microcard was a perfect port either. Its pieces were not the correct colors, because the screen was monochrome3. It showed one ‘next’ piece compared to Micro Arcade’s three. But aside from the price difference… that’s all Micro Arcade has going for it. The screen blanking may be a glitch on mine, or something that will be patched in a future revision, but I’m not the only one reporting this issue. Even if that wasn’t an issue, and even if the music didn’t randomly cut out, I would still play Microcard over Micro Arcade in a heartbeat. It feels like Tetris to me, vs. a knockoff.

I may put more effort in to figuring out what’s under the hood. Delidding the epoxied ASIC isn’t entirely in my wheelhouse, but I also don’t care about destroying this thing. I may also try to dump the ROM at some point, which could theoretically provide some insight.


2019, a personal video game retrospective

Last year, I did a sort of year in review post which began with an explanation of the difficulty in creating such a post. I don’t tend to consume a lot of media as it comes out, and… 2019 was even worse in that regard. I think my escapism was fairly concentrated this year in two media: video games and comics. Hopefully I’ll do a second post on the latter after sorting out what all actually came out this last year. But for now: VIDEO GAMES.


(Finally) playing Pokémon

Despite growing up firmly in the Pokémon era, I had only played Pokémon Snap, Pokémon: Magikarp Jump, Pokémon Go, and a handful of games on the Pokémon Mini console. That is to say, I have never played a main-series Pokémon game until now, with Shield. I know I’ve been writing about video games a lot lately, and I really should do some maths or something instead. But, I’m an exhausted person in an exhausting world, and video games are giving me a lot of joy. I also know that I’m not particularly qualified to write a review on a game which I have nearly no background with; this isn’t intended to be a review. It’s just been a very interesting experience breaking into a well-known, well-loved franchise 23 years and eight generations late.

To get the end of the story out of the way, I am really enjoying Pokémon Shield, and I intend to go back and play through previous generations of Pokémon games. I can tell that I am nearing the end of Shield, and my sole complain would really be the length of the game. Not in an ‘I paid $60 for this!!!’ sort of way, just… I’m having a good time, I want more. Part of why I’m having a good time is that there’s an obvious formula that works here; the franchise is successful for a reason. The narrative is present but not so deep that it demands undivided attention.The collection element is engaging, and even without the ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ mindset, it means there’s always something new to find. The RPG system itself is interesting to me as well, with every possible move having a cost, that cost system not replenishing over time, and no ability to skip a turn. On the surface it feels like it should be unforgiving, but it works and forces decision-making over just brute-forcing every battle with one well-designed monster.

My appreciation goes beyond the gameplay, however, since Pokémon is such a cultural powerhouse. Simply due to the sort of cultural world I inhabit, Pokémon fan art1 crosses my path a lot. And I’ve always enjoyed it! The little monsters are cute, and folks who want to reinterpret them generally gravitate toward the cutest of the cute. But now it feels personal: I can go out and find this creature, or if I already have, I know how it operates. I realize this is not a novel concept; obviously one will have a greater appreciation for art that they relate to beyond its surface level. But it’s interesting to me how much that appreciation has shifted for me, despite already having absorbed a fair amount of franchise knowledge simply by its cultural saturation.

Part of the reason, I suppose, that I never got into the franchise is because it has always been centered around Nintendo’s mobile consoles. I never owned mobile consoles2 until much later in life – my first was a DS Lite. What I didn’t realize was that this meant that from the beginning of the series, this focus on mobile meant there was a multiplayer aspect. If you truly wanted to ‘catch ‘em all’, you had to link up and trade with a friend who had the other version. A dear friend of mine (who has been very helpful in getting me up to speed on the basics) has Sword, and while we haven’t traded monsters, we have been sharing our finds with one another. It’s cute, and it’s clear that this culture of sharing has been baked in to the series from the beginning. I had no concept of this before; I deeply appreciate it now.

I guess that’s about all I have to say. I firmly believe that Pokémon Shield is a good game. It could be the worst game in the series, for all I know; that wouldn’t really matter. It has been a thing to share with friends, a thing to connect me to a community, and it has me convinced that I should go back and play the older games. To me, that’s good enough.


Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is out, but whatever

Well, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing officially lands in the U.S. today, which means a review is in order. Not of that game, of course, but of Garfield GO – Paws, Inc.’s 2017 response to the similarly-named and certainly better-known creation by The Pokémon Company. Much like Pokémon Go, you play on a map, based on your actual location, tapping things to interact with them. Also like Pokémon Go, you can play in an AR-style mode where the objects you interact with are superimposed on camera footage of the real world around you, or you can disable this to play on static backgrounds. In AR mode, you have to rotate yourself around to find things and aim very carefully, it’s a frustrating experience just for the sake of seeing a Garf floating above your sad desk. I never enjoyed playing Pokémon Go this way either, personally.

Like so many Garf games, Garfield GO feels like a shell of a game with a half-hearted Garf theme slapped on. Even with my limited knowledge of Pokémon lore1, I knew that Pokémon Go made sense: you found cute monsters out in the wild and trapped them in tiny balls. While there’s a battle element to it and all, a core part of the Pokémon Go experience was just finding all of these different creatures and watching them evolve. The Garf imitation, on the other hand… involves you throwing food into Garf’s bowl. One of four types of food (lasagna, pizza, donut, cake); one of one type of Garf.

So if you’re not collecting different bizarro Garfs (which would have been 100% more rad in every way, tbh), what exactly is the point? Well, after you catch feed a Garf, he disappears in a cloud of smoke before appearing next to a treasure chest, fidgeting and pointing at it as though it contains the directions for defusing a bomb that’s strapped to his chest. It does not, of course; it contains coins, hats, comics, and trinkets. Which I guess I have to dive into now.


I am writing about the goose game

I did not intend to write about Untitled Goose Game. It has been written about exhaustively, the core bits of it reviewed and dissected from Kotaku to Entertainment Weekly, from Polygon to Time. The best piece about it, or possibly anything, has already been written. Folks talking about and posting fan art of the game has dramatically brightened up what has been a fairly bleak time in internet discourse. I have nothing to add, because everything has already been said about this game multiple times by myriad people. And yet.

Initially I was a bit frustrated by the game, as its controls are… not great. But even when I was trapped in a weird rotational loop with the farmer, annoyed that it felt like I was playing a hastily-coded shareware title from the late ‘90s, I didn’t want to stop. All was forgiven, I just wanted more goose. I beat the game, which prompts you with a handful of additional tasks. I thought, I’ll do these here and there amid other games. The next day, I wanted more goose, and promptly powered through these tasks. I watched some streamers do these additional tasks despite just having done them, because, more goose. Which, I suppose is why I’m writing this. It’s just another avenue to more goose.

The game is silly and low-stakes, and I feel like saying ‘spoilers ahead’ is kind of ridiculous. But I also think a big part of the game’s charm is figuring things out for yourself, finding weird little details, experiencing the whole thing fresh. So, with that in mind… Spoilers ahead, here are the goosey little details that brought me the most joy:


Solo: Islands of the Heart

Solo: Islands of the Heart is, in the words of the developers, “A contemplative puzzler set on a gorgeous and surreal archipelago” wherein the player “Reflect[s] on love’s place in [their] life with a personal and introspective branching narrative.” This sounds like peak me: I love puzzles, surreal landscapes, love, and introspection! To top it off, the game offers some flexibility regarding gender representation; you’re not automatically forced into a binary heteronormative default. I snatched it up pretty quickly after learning about it (and confirming that it at least attempted to be queer-friendly) and completed a run after a few days of casual pick-up-and-put-down play. While I’m not sure that it was quite what I’d hoped it would be, it made enough of an impression on me that I feel the need to write about it. Be warned, there may be some things that resemble spoilers ahead, but the game is very much dependent upon what you put into it, so I’m not even sure spoiling is… a thing.

The basics…

The basic gist of the game is that you hop around from island to island trying to activate totems. There are two pieces to each; you activate a small one, which shines a light at a large one which you can then talk to. Talking to the large totems asks you a question related to love, after which a new island opens up. There are some other minor puzzles along the way, like helping smitten dogs reach one another or watering gardens; these are all optional and don’t move anything forward in the game. Puzzles involve moving five different types of boxes around, generally so you can move upward to a place you can’t reach, or float via parachute to a far away bit of land. They are, for the most part, pretty simple and somewhat flexible in terms of solving. They can be frustrating in terms of guiding just how high up or far out you need to be to land on that island – suddenly you’re in the water again swimming back to your pile of boxes.

In my experience, there was a considerable disconnect between the ‘do a box puzzle’ and the ‘talk about your love life’ elements. I suspect that part of the idea here is to allow the introspective side of your brain some time to relax by running the lateral thinking bits instead. And, as a whole, I didn’t really mind that disconnect – but it stacked up with other things. I mentioned that it was fairly easy to misjudge just how high or far out you’d need to coax the boxes, lest you plunge into the sea. This happened to me quite a lot, often multiple times on the same puzzle in later stages. Swimming is slow, and faster swimming is achieved by hitting a certain rhythm with the swim button. This decision, too, I can easily justify as an exercise in mindfulness instead of impatiently button-mashing. But these things compound – things start feeling like busy work keeping you at bay while the totems think of something to ask.

Regarding the questions…

The questions the totems ask are not trivial, they run a fairly wide gamut and certainly lend themselves to introspection. Early on, one basically asked if I was polyamorous which… is honestly a very important sort of acknowledgement in a game like this. You’re asked how important things like sex and shared values are; you’re asked if you would abandon your family for a lover. You’re also asked questions that relate more directly to the path you choose at the beginning – that is, are you in love, have you loved and lost, or have you never loved at all. It’s easy, when answering this at the beginning of the game, to fall into the trap of your character being you. And, to be fair, I think that it would be a waste of energy to not align your choices in the game with your personal life and feelings. But, it’s important to keep a bit of distance, as the game will occasionally contradict your answers or dive into things that quite possibly aren’t at all applicable to your situation.

For example, having chosen in earnest the ‘in love once, but not now’ option, I was asked a lot of questions as to why I thought the relationship failed. One was about time, did I think time played a role. After answering ‘no’, the next question basically opened with ‘okay, but time basically had to play into it’, directly contradicting my honest response. This was the first moment where I got annoyed and began to realize I needed to distance myself from the little tiny on-screen version of me that I was shaping. Some of the responses were, to me, absurd to the point of throwing me right out of the game’s depth, such as “You can’t fully hate what you don’t fully love”. But again, the key was to answer honestly while consciously separating myself from my avatar.

About those gender options…

I’d be remiss to not touch on the matter of gender. You can independently choose one of three body styles for your character, and one of three ‘genders’. While the game refers to it as gender and gives you the option of male, female, and non-binary, what it actually means is pronouns. To be clear, I’m glad that they put an effort into making this game inclusive, I’m glad that you can use they/them pronouns. But that’s not gender, and there’s no reason not to call it what it is. Both you and your partner1 get the three options; you can change yours at any time. It’s a root-level option in the pause menu, right with ‘Back to the main menu’ and ‘Settings’. This is absolutely the right way to handle a thing, and should be seen as an example for all developers to follow. Your partner is static upon initial choosing, which… is honestly a little weird, given the player’s flexibility. I would like to see this reconsidered.

In closing…

I’m glad that I played this game. I’d have to be very cautious in recommending it, however: it’s very short, it’s not great as a puzzle game, and the disconnects mentioned (between puzzle and introspection, between player and avatar) are a little tricky to reckon with. I doubt there’s much in the way of replay value – even writing this, I’d like to go through the beginning again to pull some direct quotations but at the same time… I really don’t want to. I might play through a different path if I find myself in love again, but even that feels like a toss-up. Still, there aren’t a lot of games doing this sort of emotional introspective adventure, and I think there’s a lot of value in it. And even though the matter of gender may be a bit flawed, enough of an attempt was made such that the game feels fairly inclusive (or, at least, not intentionally exclusive).


The unsettling meows of a Garf

This post is about the 2007 Nintendo DS game, Garfield’s Nightmare. While it would not be terribly off-brand for me to review a 12 year old video game based on a syndicated comic strip, I don’t really plan to do that. Because honestly, there isn’t much to review. It’s a serviceable platformer with very little in the way of challenge. There are some hidden things can find, some very lightweight box-moving challenges, some enemies to stomp on. It’s a simple game, and, you know… it’s fine.

Gameplay is actually extremely similar to the developer’s earlier GBA games based on the Maya the Bee franchise: Maya the Bee: The Great Adventure and Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold. The developer in question is Shin’en Multimedia, a studio made up of – I shit you not – a bunch of current and former demosceners. This makes more sense when you look at, say, their first GBA game, Iridion 3D which is incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint, or even their recent F-Zero-esque Wii U/Switch title, Fast Racing Neo/Fast RMX. Aside from demos, the Abyss1 group dabbled in games early on with Rise of the Rabbits and Rise of the Rabbits 2 – both, of course, for the Amiga. They developed Rinkapink for the GBC. While it doesn’t appear to have ever been published2, it seems they used bits of it for Ravensburger’s Käpt’n Blaubärs verrückte Schatzsuche. A promotional brochure for Rinkapink seems to be selling their demoscene experience as a company that can avoid “bad programming, flickering graphics, and awful music”, which… makes a lot of sense! You don’t win at demo parties without knowing how to make the most of a given system. Abyss was and is particularly known for its music, at the time largely done by Manfred Linzner, the lead programmer on Iridion 3D, Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold, and, yes, Garfield’s Nightmare. They developed trackers and audio toolchains for the Amiga (AHX) and Gameboy (GHX). They’re still releasing audio demos.

What does any of this really have to do with Garfield’s Nightmare? Likely not much, but it sure is fascinating. If anything I think it explains how technically competent this game is while also being a pretty sub-par Garfield experience. Which brings me to something that I highly doubt was intentional and can only imagine was a byproduct of a team of highly-skilled demosceners having agreed to take on a licensed title about a syndicated comic strip cat: Garfield’s Nightmare is actually fairly nightmarish. Not in a blatantly scary, horrorish way, but rather in its completely disquieting approach to what Garfield’s world is. The basic premise is that Garfield ate too much (shocker) before going to bed, and is now stuck in his own nightmare. But throughout the game, he really doesn’t seem concerned himself. Either he has good enough lucid dream control abilities to will himself into perfect calmness, or else he’s just oddly resigned to being in this nightmare world that he is, of course, ostensibly trying to escape. It doesn’t make any sense, and the disconnect that it presents as perfectly normal is more and more discomforting the more one thinks about it.

This isn’t the only weird disconnect. Aside from spiders (which Garfield does canonically hate)3, none of the enemies are things that bother canon Garfield, or even things that exist in his world as we know it. They seem like entirely generic platformer enemies (for instance, turtle thing with a cannon built into its back) yet they’re in a very specific licensed setting. I’m sure the studio just didn’t want to cough up the handful of dollars to license a sound bite or two of Lorenzo Music’s voice, but Garfield meows when he gets injured in this game. It shouldn’t be unsettling to hear a cat meow, but I assure you it is extremely so to hear what sounds like a sample of a real live cat coming out of Garfield. There’s no lasagna in sight; pizza stands in for health points and donuts are akin to coins. There are hidden doors that lead to brief minigame reprieves in the real world, but this version of the real world is cold and empty, it feels like the Garfield who is in the nightmare has himself fallen asleep and is experiencing a nightmare version of the real world. Even the box-moving puzzles feel planned and placed, which… Obviously they were, by Peter Weiss of Shin’en, but it makes the nightmare feel like an escape room situation that someone has built for the sole purpose of torturing Garfield. On the surface it’s almost certainly just a bunch of half-hearted design decisions, but it adds up and makes for an unnerving, uncanny experience.

So, should you play the game? I don’t know. I mean you can grab one on eBay for like six bucks, and if you let your mind really take in the nightmare world, it’s… weird. It’s fascinating to think about how the developers, active demosceners, got into the DS development program and got shit on for making a Santa Claus demo that they couldn’t link to because of licensing violations months before releasing this oddity. Everything about Garfield’s Nightmare is just weird, and that in itself is worth quite a few donuts to me.


Baba is Turing Complete (external)

Baba is You is a wonderful puzzle game that has been frustrating the heck out of me lately. Its primary conceit is that puzzles are solved by moving textual blocks around to form subject/predicate constructions that rewrite the rules of the puzzle. Matthew Rodriguez has, as explained in the external link above, implemented Rule 1101 in Baba is You, with a video of the automaton in action on his Twitter feed. Matthew Cook famously proved Rule 110 to be Turing complete, which means (given an infinite grid, blah blah) the grammar and mechanics that make for a puzzle in Baba is You also make for a Turing complete system.

Humorously, the first response on the Twitter post is along the lines of ‘can it play DOOM?’ which… Sure! A Turing machine can theoretically do all of the computations that DOOM makes! Ignoring how much processing power and RAM one would need for this (a convenient thing to ignore, but we’re talking hypotheticals here), folks always seem to jump right from Turing machine to something resembling a modern computer. The only thing on the table is computational ability, and at a bare minimum, one still needs a viable I/O interface in order to do anything beyond turning bits into other bits.


The avocado with legs

Avo is the first bit of media from British company Playdeo, whose lofty introduction describes the things they’re creating as ‘television you can touch’. A lot of the general buzz around Avo has described it as augmented reality with prerecorded video, which seems apt. Told over eight short episodes, Avo is a lightweight mystery that befalls the quirky scientist Billie and her sentient ambulatory avocado, Avo. The player controls Avo, walking the stubby-legged fruit around and picking things up while Billie explains the situation and tells you what she needs. At its core, it’s a typical adventure game mechanically – walk around, pick things up, bring them to a place. But it’s all done seamlessly in this fully video-based real setting.

“Seamless” is kind of a strong word, I suppose. While exploring, the video is simply short loops of, say, Billie working at her desk in the background. There are still cutscenes, but because you’re already in the world and bound to preset camera angles, they just kind of… happen in place. So despite there still being two distinct modes, they do blend together in a fairly seamless way. The story is cute and simple, there are fun nerdy jokes scattered throughout (I had a good chuckle at Billie’s large cardboard box labelled ‘Klein bottles with moebius strips inside’), and the core mechanic works well. Avo is enjoyable and potentially worthy of recommendation, albeit with some caveats.

For starters, the game requires you to agree to a privacy policy like… pretty much immediately. I definitely have issues with content (especially paid content) tracking me for marketing purposes, but unfortunately I am used to it. Actually having to accept a privacy policy before entering the game just (and this may be unwarranted) feels more ominous than usual. Perhaps requirements are tighter being based in the UK, but it feels extreme for such an airy game. I was going to play it regardless because I was curious about what Playdeo was doing with the format, but I would encourage folks to actually read through the thing and weigh the pros and cons.

The other weird thing to me is the matter of the beans. Beans are scattered throughout the game. They serve three purposes: they give you an idea of paths you’re supposed to explore, they make Avo move slightly faster for some reason, and they are also the in-game currency to buy the episodes. While I suppose you could simply replay each episode a ton of times and collect enough beans to get the next one, doing so would be wildly impractical. Episodes cost 1,000 beans, and there aren’t hundreds (much less a thousand) of beans scattered throughout any given level. Which makes sense, Playdeo wants you to actually spend money on the game. For this, I do not blame them, and I do not think the game is overpriced (the bean bundle at $6 will get you through the whole thing). I do think that forcing it into this free-to-play framework is just weird. Awkward.

Many negative reviews on the App Store are from folks who don’t want to pay and actually are going the bean-collection route. The alternative that they would prefer is lowering the cost of the episodes. I mentioned that I don’t think the game is overpriced. I do think that the complete undervaluation of mobile apps means that a great number of people will think it’s overpriced. Especially since it’s much more of a story than it is a game. I think these are challenges that Playdeo is going to need to overcome. First, either ditch free-to-play or come up with a far less clumsy approach to it. Second, make the content more of a game and less of a poking-the-television. Avo largely feels like a proof-of-concept. As proof-of-concepts go, however, it is an incredibly charming one. And I would still recommend it as an experience for folks who are comfortable with the data collection.


Tetris 99

I rather enjoy Tetris. Tetris has changed a lot from the pre-Guideline games I grew up with. I’m glad the Guideline exists and has made for a largely consistent experience among recent Tetris titles. But I still haven’t adapted perfectly to, say, a world with T-spins after no such moves existing in my formative Tetris years. Over the years, more and more multiplayer Tetris games have been released as well, the strategies of which are completely antithetical to the way I play solo. To put it lightly, I have never been good at multiplayer Tetris – some of the stronger AIs in Puyo Puyo Tetris’s story mode even frustrate me.

So when Nintendo announced Tetris 99, a battle royale match between (guess how many) players, I was skeptical. Not that I thought the game would be bad1, but I definitely thought I’d be bad at it, which would simply make it… not super fun for me. But, due to there simply being so many players and a large degree of randomness in how much you’ll be targeted for attacks (additional bricks), simply being decent can keep you alive for a considerable portion of the round. I’ve only played a handful of games, maxing out at 9th place (and dropping out nearly immediately at 74th once!), but I’m really enjoying it so far. Something about seeing 49 other players’ teeny tiny Tetris screens on either side of the screen is quite engaging (and honestly a bit humorous).

You can, either manually or according to four rule sets, choose who of those 98 others you are targeting. The mechanisms for this are not made entirely clear – in fact, they aren’t really explained at all, you just kind of have to stumble across them and suss out how they work by name. Likewise, because the rounds are short (and, to an extent, shorter the worse you are at the game) it’s hard to get into a groove, and there isn’t really a mechanism for practicing. If one didn’t already have other Guideline-era Tetris games, and particularly games with a multiplayer experience, I feel like they’d be a bit sunk here. Those minor quibbles are the closest things that I have to real complaints about the game. I’m curious how they’ll monetize it. The mobile Tetris games from EA have additional soundtracks that can be unlocked w/ coins won in-game (or purchased). Perhaps Tetris 99 will end up with a bit of this, or additional skins. Perhaps it’s just an incentive for Switch Online. For now, save for needing a Switch Online account, it is completely free… and it is a blast.


RIP, Wii Shop Channel

A sad loss – Nintendo shuttered the Wii Shop Channel today. This was advertised well ahead of time; hopefully most people who care were able to retrieve and backup everything they wanted to. I haven’t powered my Wii up in quite some time, so likewise… hopefully I don’t have any gaps in my downloads. People are (rightfully) disappointed with Nintendo (I guess this is the first major console download marketplace to disappear?), but I don’t really think it’s sensible to focus our ire on Nintendo specifically – this is the nature of the download beast1.

Assuming one can readily dump downloads, then I suppose from an archive perspective the data can be passed around eternally. Beyond that, however, I fail to believe that any of these markets will outlive the silicon in a cartridge. It would surprise me if they outlived properly-stored optical media. I’m glad that a lot of Switch games are being released in both download and cartridge form – even indie titles via small-batch entities like Limited Run Games. Cartridges are still patched via downloads, and these patches are stored on the device (not the cartridge), so that could become its own issue, but the base game should stay functional for a very, very long time.

Anyway, nothing I’ve said here is particularly groundbreaking. It’s sad that the Wii Shop is no more, but… it was inevitable. One thing that has, fortunately, been archived: that lovely, lovely theme music.


Be gone, 2018

I don’t really consume a lot of current media1, and have accordingly joked that if I made a best-media-I-consumed-in-2018 list, it would just be re-reading Sailor Moon and a bunch of video games from the early 2000s. But, digging a bit deeper, 2018 was one of the rare years that I did consume slightly more current cultural artifacts. So, why the fuck not: let’s list off the best of the best that 2018 had to offer me.

I’m not going into movies, because I watched very few 2018 movies (and in general, I am disappointed by movies). I would have included Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but that was 2017 somehow. Holy heck, this year was a horrifying blur. I did just see The Favourite, which I thought was very good, but it just seems a bit… inappropriate to make any sort of judgment call when I’ve focused so little of my time on film. Also, graphic novels/manga aside, I definitely did not read any 2018 books in 2018, so… there’s that. Okay!


Portal, Commodore 64 style

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy and emotion in video games lately, and this has really given me the itch to play through Portal again. This weekend, I did just that… sort of. Jamie Fuller1 has released a 2D adaptation of the classic for the Commodore 64 (C64), and it is pure joy. It’s quick – 20 levels with brief introductions from GLaDOS, completable in around a half hour. The C64 had a two-button mouse peripheral (the 13512) but it was uncommon enough that even graphical environments like GEOS supported moving the cursor around with a joystick. Very few games had compatibility with the mouse, and here we are in 2018 adding one more – using WAD to move and the mouse to aim/fire is a perfect translation of Portal’s modern PC controls. If you’re not playing on a real C64 with a real 1351, VICE emulates the mouse, and it works great on archive.org’s browser-based implementation as well.


The VCSthetic

The Atari VCS, better known as the 2600, was an important part of my formative years with technology. It remains a system that I enjoy via emulation, and while recently playing through some games for a future set of posts, I started to think about what exactly made so many of the (particularly lesser-quality) games have such a unique aesthetic to them. The first third-party video game company, Activision, was famously started by ex-Atari employees who wanted credit and believed the system was better suited to original titles than hacked-together arcade ports. They were correct on this point, as pretty much any given Activision game looks better than any given Atari game for the VCS. Imagic, too, was made up of ex-Atari employees, and their games were pretty visually impressive as well. Atari had some better titles toward the end of their run, but for the most part their games and those of most third-parties are visually uninspiring. Yet the things that make them uninspiring are all rather unique to the system:


A few of my favorite: Tetrises (Tetrii? Tetrodes?)

I spent a couple of weeks writing this, and of course remembered More Thoughts basically as soon as I uploaded it. For starters, I had somehow completely forgotten about Minna no Soft Series: Tetris Advance for the GBA, which is a somewhat difficult to find Japanese release superior to Tetris Worlds in every imaginable way. Second, I neglected to mention leveling details and have updated the Puyo Puyo Tetris and mobile sections accordingly (as of 10-28).

Tetris, the ‘killer app’ of the Game Boy and proven-timeless time-sink has a pretty bizarre history. Alexey Pajitnov originally wrote it as a proof-of-concept for a Soviet computer that lacked graphics capability. Pajitnov’s coworkers ported the game to the IBM PC, and its availability on consumer hardware meant that unofficial ports popped up across the globe, and licensing deals were struck without Pajitnov’s involvement. Facing some difficult decisions regarding licensing, Pajitnov gave the Soviet Union the rights to the game. Licensing was then handled through a state-sponsored company known as Elorg (the famous Game Boy pack-in deal was during the Elorg era). During this period, brick colors and rules were inconsistent from this Tetris to that Tetris. Some games branded Tetris during this era bore next-to-no resemblance to the game we all know and love.

The Elorg deal was temporary by design, and some years later Pajitnov got the rights back and formed The Tetris Company. The Tetris Company has proven to be an absurdly aggressive intellectual property monster, which is hardly surprising given the game’s licensing history1. The Tetris Company has done one positive thing, though: standardized the rules and the colors of blocks into something known as the Tetris Guideline. This means that any Tetris from the late ‘90s and newer is largely interchangeable2 – and if you can make out the color of the next piece from the corner of your eye, you know what shape it is. The consistency is valuable, and even though years of NES Tetris have left me rather untalented at T-spins, all of my favorite Tetris games are of the modern sort. This also largely means that the distinction really boils down to hardware, but that’s kind of important when some form of the game has been released for pretty much any given system. So on that note, the four I most often reach for are:


Sea Duel

HOW TO PLAY THE GAME:

  1. Slide ON/OFF switch to “ON” position. Listen to a few bars of the song “Anchors Away [sic]” and see a computer graphic of the American flag appear on the screen.

Such begins the instruction booklet for the Microvision game, Sea Duel. A few days back, I wrote about the Microvision, and reviewed the handful of games I had at the time. I figured I’d acquire the handful of remaining games, and in several months or whenever, I’d sum them all up in one more post. But then Sea Duel came in the mail. This game is such a prime example of depth in a limited system, that I feel compelled to discuss it on its own. Putting aside the hilarity of describing listening to a song and looking at a flag as one of the steps you must take to start playing, it highlights one of the immediate standout features of this game – despite having 256 pixels, a piezo buzzer, and ridiculously limited processing power and storage space, the game actually has an intro screen that shows something resembling an American flag and plays something that resembles “Anchors Aweigh”.


256 pixels

I’ve been restoring a Milton Bradley Microvision and am now happily at the point where I have a fully functional unit. Introduced in 1979, it’s known as the first portable game console with interchangeable cartridges. Anyone who has scoured eBay and yard sales for Game Boys knows that the monochrome LCDs of yore were fairly sensitive to heat and even just age. For a system ten years older than the Game Boy (and one that sold far fewer numbers), functional units are fairly hard to come by. But for a while, I’ve been invested in patching one together, and I plan to enjoy it until it, too, gives up the ghost1.


Another World

Is there a word for nostalgia, but bad? Kind of like how you can have a nightmare that is on one hand an objectively terrible experience, but on the other… fascinating, compelling even. When I was quite young, the household computer situation was a bit of a decentralized mess. I guess the Commodore 64 was the family computer, but it was essentially mine to learn 6510 ML and play Jumpman on. My sister had a Macintosh Quadra which I guess was largely for schoolwork, but it had a number of games on it that were positively unbelievable to my 8-bit trained eyes. Among these was the bane of my wee existence, Another World1.

I guess I’m about to give away a few spoilers, but they’re all from the first minute or so of punishment play. Another World begins with a cutscene where we learn that our protagonist is a physics professor named Lester who drives a Ferrari2. At this point, we realize we are dealing with a science fiction title. Lester starts doing some very professorly things on his computer, and then some lightning strikes his ARPANET wires or whatever and suddenly our protagonist is deep underwater! Some kind of sea monster grabs him, and… game over?! The cutscenes are rendered with the same beautifully polygonal rotoscoping as the rest of the game, so it’s entirely possible that you die several times watching this scene before grasping that you’re actually supposed to press buttons now.

This stressful memory came back hard upon recently purchasing a Switch and inexplicably making this year’s port of Another World my first purchase. Well, I guess it is explicable: ‘nostalgia, but bad.’ The frustrations of a game that will let you die if you simply do nothing within the first five seconds had not changed much from my childhood. This is a fundamental part of the experience; Another World is a game that wants you to die. It demands that you die. A lot. It’s a lovely game, and one that I’m sure a lot of folks remember (fondly or otherwise) from their Amigas and Macs, but I couldn’t help but think that this sort of trial-and-error experience really wouldn’t fly today if not for nostalgia3. Though I have to ask myself, how does this differ from, say, Limbo, another game that tricks you into death at every turn?

The next death in Another World is when little polygonal slug-looking things slip a claw into Lester’s leg, collapsing him. You have to kind of squish them just right, and it’s the first of many deadly puzzles that rely more on a very finicky sort of perfection rather than just a clever solution. Slightly further into the game, Lester faces a challenge that neatly sums up the whole problem: perfect positioning and perfect timing are required to dodge two screens worth of oddly-timed falling boulders. These moments are very reminiscent of the frustratingly exacting challenges in Dragon’s Lair, a point of inspiration for designer Éric Chahi4. I think this is where a modern take like Limbo feels less annoying in its murderous tendencies – you rarely die because you didn’t time something out to the nanosecond or position yourself on just the right pixel; you die because something crafty in the evil, evil environment outsmarted you.

This sort of thing seems to be a point of maturity for gaming in general. The aforementioned Jumpman was one of my favorite games back in the day, but it was painstakingly picky down to the pixel. Collision detection has eased up in modern times, and additional system resources give designers a lot more room to make challenges diverse and clever instead of simply difficult-by-any-means-necessary. Another World’s spiritual successor, Flashback5 definitely still had these moments, but by the time its 3D sequel, Fade to Black came out, things were much less picky.

I’m certain I beat both Flashback and Fade to Black, but I don’t think I ever had it in me to get through Another World. I guess this was part of why I jumped right on the Switch port. The game has won many battles, but I do intend to win the war. And the fact of the matter is, that for all my griping, it is still an incredibly enjoyable game. ‘Nostalgia, but bad’ certainly doesn’t mean that the game is bad, it means that the game forced all of my respective memories to be bad. The graphics have a unique quality about them6, and the sparse atmosphere feels very modern. The challenges are often interesting, even when they’re more technical than cerebral. It’s a game that I think is best experienced in short spurts, so as not to be consumed by the seemingly infinite tedium of frustrating deaths. It’s a product of its time, and must be treated as such. And while its demands certainly reveal its age, little else about it feels out of place on a portable console in 2018.


Part Time UFO

Somehow, I missed that HAL Laboratory (creators of the Kirby franchise) had broken into the mobile market earlier this year with the game Part Time UFO1. I tend to be oblivious to even these big mobile releases because I’m just generally not that into the mobile game scene2. Touch controls are limiting at best, and the market is saturated with free-to-play snares. If anybody is going to release a mobile gem, though, HAL is bound to, so I snatched this thing up as soon as I heard about it.

In Part Time UFO, you control a flying saucer (oddly reminiscent of UFO Kirby) with a claw-game-esque grabber attached to it. Every level has a bunch of objects, and a place to put them. Some of the objects are mandatory, others might net you extra points or help you meet a bonus goal. The primary goal is usually straightforward – put all of the important objects on the target, get five objects on the target, get the objects to fit a particular shape on the target, etc. Each stage additionally has three bonus goals. One is usually a timer, and the other two either involve stacking things perfectly, not dropping things, stacking more things than required, etc. The real trick comes from the fact that the target area is small, so you pretty much have to stack things. The physics of swinging something four times your size from a flaccid claw make this stacking less than simple.

The levels are adorably-themed, and the themes tend to influence the overall challenge. For instance, my least favorite are the ‘Lab’ levels, which require you to fit Tetris-like blocks into a precise shape – which feels like a bit much going on all at once. But this adds a nice bit of variety, I think there will be some themes that a given person really looks forward to unlocking more of, and some that are less captivating (though still enjoyable).

Points equate to money, and money can be used to buy new outfits for the UFO. Aside from being cute (and occasionally referential to other HAL properties – Kirby’s parasol comes to mind), these affect the control of the UFO in various ways. Certain challenges benefit more from some outfits than others, but generally it seems like you can pop one on that gives you a boost in control that makes you more comfortable, and just leave it. I made the mistake of buying a speedy outfit first, and became very quickly frustrated with the game.

Make no mistake, the game can be frustrating. But never to the point where it feels insurmountable or stops being fun. Part of it is probably just how charming and sweet the whole thing is. The challenges are goofy (stacking cheerleaders, balancing hamsters on a circus elephant, and of course placing cows onto a truck), and even when successfully completed, the end result is often uproarious. This is one thing I wish they had included – some kind of gallery feature of all your wacky stacks.

I haven’t completed the game yet, so I’m not sure how many levels there are. I definitely think it’s worth $43 – it’s just so joyful, well-polished, and fun – everything I expect from HAL. I do think the default controls – a fake analog stick and button type deal – are awful. That control scheme is bad enough for games in landscape orientation, but even with my tiny hands and Plus-sized phone, I could not figure out how to hold my phone so it would work. Fortunately there’s a one-handed control that’s a little bit awkward, but still streets ahead of the faux stick.


The death of Miitomo

Well, damn. Come May 9, Nintendo is shuttering Miitomo. I don’t know that it was ever terribly popular – it was Nintendo’s earliest venture onto mobile, but it wasn’t really a game. There were some game-like elements, primarily throwing your body into a pachinko machine to win clothes, but ultimately it was a dollhouse. A game of dress-up.

Entertainment, in all forms and across all media, is often a tool for escape. Some wish to lose themselves in a setting, others as a passive bystander in a plot, still others seeing pieces of themselves in fictional characters. A dollhouse experience is largely concentrated on this third aspect – expressing yourself, consequence-free, as this blank canvas of a person. While certainly a valid means of escape for anyone, this seems especially valuable to trans folks and people questioning their gender identity. The answers and comments on in-game questions revealed a staggering number of trans Miitomo users. I don’t really know of another game of dress-up that will serve as a viable replacement to Miitomo, and this is heartbreaking.

The May 9 date will put Miitomo’s lifespan at just over two years. Unfortunately, the app is entirely dependent upon the service, and assets users have acquired will not be retained locally, etc. While it seems plausible that local copies could be downloaded so that users could still fire up the app and change into any number of outfits they had previously purchased1, this will not be the case2. This is not a matter of ‘no more updates’, this is ‘no more app’. And that’s… a fairly short lifespan, even for a niche non-game. This absolute dependence on hosted assets makes me wonder about some of Nintendo’s other mobile forays. When Super Mario Run stops being worth the upkeep, will there be no more updates, or will the game cease to function altogether? Nintendo is in a weird spot where a lot of their casual gaming market has been overtaken by mobile. Obviously they want to get in on that and reclaim some market, but they just haven’t proven that they quite ‘get it’ yet. Or perhaps rendering a game entirely ephemeral is meant to prove to us the value of a cartridge. I… doubt it.

On January 24, Nintendo stopped selling in-game coins and tickets3 for real-world money. Daily bonuses, which used to be a handful of coins or a single ticket, are now 2,000 coins and 5 tickets every day. That’s a lot of in-game purchasing power for the next few months, and I’m glad that Nintendo is saying ‘here, just go nuts and have fun while it lasts’. Better than making this announcement on May 1, and operating as usual (including in-app purchases) until then.

I am truly sad about this; Miitomo has been oddly important to me. There is a lot of sadness and anger in the answers to the public in-game question running until May 9, ‘What was your favorite outfit in Miitomo? Show it off when you answer!’ Users are elaborately staging Miifotos with dead-looking Miis stamped ‘DELETED’, Miis crying on their knees, demonic-looking Miis labeled ‘Nintendo’ standing over innocent-looking Miis labeled ‘Miitomo’ with table knives sticking out of them. Ouch. We have #savemiitomo, #longlivemiitomo, #justice4miitomo (bit extreme, that) hashtags popping up. Suffice it to say, there is a frustrated community. I’ll be the first to admit that it never would have had the prominence of a Super Mario Bros. or Animal Crossing game, but Miitomo has been very meaningful to a lot of people.


As Queen, I keep dying

This post might contain spoilers for the games Reigns and/or Reigns: Her Majesty.

Reigns was a game that really kind of blew my mind when it came out. I guess the idea was to sort of frame a narrative around Tinder-esque interactions, which I didn’t really grasp (Tinder seems like the polar opposite of how I wish to find a mate). To me it was just this story, played over a whole bunch of games (some of which you had to fail), each game potentially affecting future games, and all handled via this incredibly simple decision tree mechanic. For the most part, you have two decisions at any given time (swipe left or right, that’s the Tinder-y bit). It was an oddly engaging game.

Now, in Reigns, you played as a king. So if they were to make a sequel, it would only be fitting that you would play as a queen. This is Reigns: Her Majesty. I don’t really make a habit of reviewing mobile games1 on this blog, but Her Majesty is fucking phenomenal. I don’t know if Leigh Alexander was involved in the first game, but she definitely has a writing credit on this one, and it shows. Reigns was clever, but Her Majesty is ridiculously tight, smart, and progressive.

Part of my draw to the game is likely bias — you play as a woman, a woman who I deeply respect wrote the thing, and the entire game just oozes with femininity and feminism. This has always been a sticking point for me, I will become far more invested in a game where I can play as a woman vs. one where I’m stuck as a man. That’s not necessarily a knock on any given game (or unwarranted praise on any other given game), it’s just my bias. But, trying to look past that bias, this Queen’s world undeniably gives Her Majesty far more depth than its predecessor.

If you never played the first game, it’s worth briefly describing what swiping left or right accomplishes. For any given scenario, swiping either direction may raise or lower one or more of your piety, popular favor, might, or financial2 stats. If any given stat maxes out or reaches zero, you die. This is the same in Her Majesty, but there’s a much bigger struggle (at least, how I’ve played it) with the church. Part of this is that a major aspect of the plot involves astrology and the occult, and diving into that essentially requires you to defy the church. Part of it is that you’re constantly given the opportunity to flirt with all the other women in the game and I mean, how could you not!? Oh, and occasionally the Cardinal asks you to conceal your pendulous melons (or something), which… no, I dress how I want.

And this is why I think the feminine aspect really gives the game depth. Personally, I find it hard to play in a way that defies my feminist sensibilities (and, in fact, a random owl occasionally pops up to tell you how feminist you are or situate you in various fandoms3), but this is often detrimental to my score – you are, after all, ‘just’ the Queen, and in a sense must maintain your place. But beyond my personal hangups, this still adds a great depth to the game. Choices aren’t as clear-cut, and your level of control isn’t always what it seems. Layer the whole astrological woman magic icing on top, and it’s an even more impossibly complex swipe-left-or-right game than Reigns.

This complexity and my desire to be an empowered Queen means that I have been losing very quickly, very often. Which might be grating in a lesser game, but somehow losing Her Majesty usually feels pretty damned virtuous.


Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has been available stateside for about a week now, and it is… strange. This post on ‘Every Game I’ve Finished’ (written by Mathew Kumar) mirrors a lot of my thoughts – I would recommend reading it before reading this. I haven’t really played a lot of Animal Crossing games before, and I tend to avoid free-to-play1 games. The aforementioned post is largely predicated on the fact that Pocket Camp doesn’t fully deliver on either experience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t really know, but something definitely feels odd about the game to me.

Early in his post, Kumar states that ‘[Pocket Camp] makes every single aspect of it an obvious transaction’, which is comically true. My socialist mind has a hard time seeing the game as anything but a vicious parody of capitalism. My rational mind, of course, knows this is not true because the sort of exploitative mundaneness that coats every aspect of the game is the norm in real life.

This becomes even more entertaining when you observe how players set prices in their Markets. For the uninitiated, when your character has a surplus of a thing, they can offer that thing for sale to other players. The default price is its base value, but you can adjust the sale price down a small amount or up a large amount. Eventually you’ll likely just max out your inventory and be forced to put things up for sale in this Market. More eventually, you’ll max out the Market and be forced to just throw stuff away without getting money for it. But in the meantime, people (strangers and friends) will see what you have to offer and be given the opportunity to buy it.

For the most part, if you need an item (I use the term ‘need’ loosely), it is common, and either hopping around or waiting a couple of hours will get you that item. So there should be no reason to charge a 1000% markup on a couple of apples. But (in my experience thus far) that is far more common than to see items being sold for the minimum (or even their nominal value). I don’t know if it’s just players latching on to the predatory nature of free-to-play games or what, and I’m really curious to know if it works. I’ve been listing things in small quantities (akin to what an animal requests) for the minimum price, and while I’ve sold quite a few items, most still go to waste – I can’t imagine anything selling at ridiculous markups.

So far this description of a capitalist hellscape has probably come off as though I feel negatively toward the game, which I really don’t. To return to Kumar, he leaves his post stating that he hasn’t given up on the game yet, but ‘like Miitomo, the first time I miss a day it’s all over.’ This comparison to Miitomo is apt, and a perfect segue into why I’m invested in this minor dystopia.

Miitomo (another Nintendo mobile thing) is really just a game where you… decorate a room and try on clothes. You answer questions and play some pachinko-esque minigames in order to win decorations and clothes, but it’s basically glorified dress-up. It seems like mostly young people playing it, but it’s also just a wonderful outlet for baby trans folks, people questioning gender, and any number of people seeking a little escape. I find Miitomo to be very valuable and underrated, and a lot of the joy Miitomo brings me is echoed by Pocket Camp.

While the underlying concept behind Pocket Camp is that you’re a black market butterfly dealer or whatever, there’s also a major ‘dollhouse’ component to it. You buy and receive cute clothes and change your outfits, which has no bearing on the game. You buy things to decorate your campsite which (effectively2) has no bearing on the game. You can drop 10,000 dollars bells on a purse that does nothing but sit in the dirt looking pretty. I guess it’s hypocritical to praise this meaningless materialism, but it’s a nice escape. A little world to mess around in and make your own.

I don’t know how long I’ll obsessively island-hop the world of Pocket Camp, but I think that (like Miitomo) once the novelty wears off, I’ll still pop in to play around with my little world when it occurs to me to do so. And the whole time, in my mind, it will remain a perfectly barbed satire on capitalism.


Super Mario Run

So, Super Mario Run has been out for half a day or so now, and I’m sure more meaningful opinions than mine are bouncing around all over the internet. It’s just too juicy to not set my own uninspired thoughts in pink internet stone, however. I’ve always been a Nintendo fan. These days I really don’t game much at all. The occasional weird indie, a nostalgic retro re-release here and there, but mostly if I’m gaming on a screen it’s either a roguelike on the computer or a board game adaptation or point-and-click (point-and-tap?) adventure on the phone. The last consoles I’ve owned were the original Wii and DS Lite. All this to say, having a Nintendo side-scroller on my phone is ridiculously exciting. The game is a ton of fun, well worth the cost of entry, and generally feels very much like a Super Mario Bros. game. A few thoughts:


A night of Pokémon Go

Tonight marked my first night spent actively hunting Pokémon; it was, in fact, the first time I’d ever bothered to catch one outside. Finding new critters in new places, seeking out pokéstops with lures attached, comparing notes with a friend… this was all fun but predictable. I guess I just also haven’t been on an evening walk in a while1, because the whole meatspace community aspect of the thing was new, and very unlike what I expected.

Walking through our main town park, which was technically closed since it was after dark, was fascinating. Where there were pokéstops, there were just masses of people huddled together… enough where it seemed rather unlikely to me that all these people actually knew each other… little social gatherings were forming in the middle of the night just out of the desire to catch virtual monsters. And while the basic idea here wasn’t surprising, the sheer scale of the groups, the sheer number of people glued to their phones and alerting others to the presence of a Goldeen really wasn’t something I had anticipated.