bluelander | Entries tagged with games

In lieu of a journal update today, I put some work into my Game Badges page. I've got the layout looking good on desktop and mobile, I put up an info page, and I've created the first 6 game pages. There's still some details I need to fill in, but the important stuff is there.

I know it's silly, but I've been wanting a longer-term project I can work on from the office, and this is scratching that itch. I'll post some short diary updates if anything happens, but for now I'm happy with most of my writing energy going to this. Thanks for understanding 🙏

In somewhat higher spirits after a much-needed break. Last week was also the monthly housing inspection, which is always a nerve-wracking experience. That on top of the yearly recertification and all the stuff I had to do during the week made me look forward to a weekend of rest.

My spouse and I briefly considered early voting and going to a local Halloween event on Saturday, but between her illness and my exhaustion, we stayed indoors all weekend. I managed to make about 15 levels for Slime & Goo 2, which is a pretty good clip. I won't finish by Halloween, though. I had thought about making it vaguely halloween-themed, since it's about collecting mushrooms in a spooky forest at night, but there's no way I'll be done in time for an Oct. 31 release. If only I had thought about it sooner. Ah well.

I have, however, come up with some interesting new mechanics and written a couple paragraphs of story and dialogue, which is more than any of my other published games. I hesitant to mix my interests too much, because it's easy to overdo text in a game. I don't want to fall into the trap that a lot of independent games do where large amounts of text are used in lieu of interesting interactions or dynamic storytelling. I think I'm striking the right balance so far, and I have more ideas for levels that feature interesting mechanical storytelling even in puzzlescript's very limited toolset.

One positive limitation of the platform is that you can only fit a couple hundred characters on screen per message. It's helpful in preventing me from overdoing it. I've decided 3 of those messages in a row is the maximum I'm willing to accept per story moment before it gets back to puzzle-solving. If I keep it to one of those sequences every few levels, hopefully that'll be a satisfying pace.

Game Badges

I haven't been nearly as active on RetroAchievments.org lately, other than continuing to plug away at Mario's Picross on my phone. I had a brief intense phase of 100%ing games, but I think I'm running out of games where I care to do that. It comes from having a different philosophy than most of the people designing achievements: I think 100%ing a game should involve doing everything in the game. For some games, that means there aren't going to be a lot of achievements, and that should be fine. Coming up with a bunch of arbitrary achievements just to pad out the number is counter to the spirit of the game.

For an example everyone can understand, take Super Mario Brothers. It's a pretty linear game, but there are things the designers included to add some spice and mystery. Here's my idea of a perfect achievement set for SMB:

Finish the game
Find a warp zone
Finish the game without warping
Find a pipe to a secret coin room
Find a secret 1-up in an invisible block
Get 6 fireworks at the end of a level
Get 5000 points from a goal pole
Defeat King Koopa with fireballs
Defeat King Koopa by getting the axe
Finish the second quest

That's pretty much everything the designers put in the game. Sure, there are multiple secret pipes and hidden 1-ups, but there's no way the designers expected the players to find all of them. You'd have to finish the game at least twice to 100% this set, and it's not an easy game! It's only 10 achievements, but this would be a fun, challenging, complete experience.

The rA set had more than 10 achievements, though. It has 77. It includes tasks like this:

Finish the game without losing a life
Complete world X without harming enemies or being fire Mario (x8)
Using shells, defeat every kind of enemy that can be hurt by a shell
Hit a buzzy beetle from below while it's in the air (???)

It's just a bunch of nonsense. There's also achievements for defeating every King Koopa with fireballs, for finding all the coins on every level without dying, shit nobody actually finds fun. It's the quintessential retro video game, it has nearly 50,000 players on rA, and less than 2% of them have 100%ed it. That's a bad achievement set.

What's more, if you want a gold badge, you have to get every achievement without using save states, so there are several achievements where if you fuck up once, you have to restart the entire game.

The save state thing is turning into a big problem, because the rules don't differentiate between saving your state to cheese difficult segments, and saving your state to come back to the game later. So in games without battery backup, which is most of them, I have to leave the emulator running all the time to keep my progress, which is preventing me from playing other games. Also, I'm finding myself only playing games on my PC or (God help me) my phone. I have a hacked 3DS and I'm not using it, because I can't get retro achievements on it. I feel like I may be missing the forest for the trees.

I recently stumbled on gamedad.club, a charming little shrine to the device the author has neologized as the Game Dad: cheap generic emulation handhelds. From Game Dad as Time Condenser:

The Game Dad creates Game Time.

It takes the games that you used to have to commit an hour to, and it overlays them with instant save states, meaning at any time you can pull a console out of your pocket, play for a minute or two or three, then instantly save and put it right back in the pocket again.

The Game Dad collects the wispy mists of useless time that would have otherwise been lost to doomscrolling, and it condenses them into Game Time. It gives you time to play the games that you meant to play twenty years ago but didn't have the time for. This time is chewy and satisfying. It scratches your restless brain and fills up your empty stimulation tank.

When the tank's full, when you've had enough Game Time, you turn the Game Dad off and your hands are still, your mind is quiet, and you don't feel the tug of your anxiety rectangle. The time that comes after Game Time is quiet time. You don't want to switch to a different app, your device is back in your pocket. Instead, you might chat with someone else whose car is also up on the lift at the mechanic, or just watch the clouds and have an idea.

I thought this is a lovely sentiment, I agree 100% and I realized how silly it is that I've been emulating games on my phone, when I've got a device with a perfectly good D-pad. Well, the new 3DSXL¹ actually has a slightly-too-small D-pad and it hurts my thumb if I play intense action games for too long, but whatever, it's still leaps and bounds above playing anything on my fucking phone.

Anyway, I started thinking about what I like about retro achievements, and how I can incorporate them into my life in a healthier way. I realized there are two main draws:

I like seeing a neat grid of gold badges
I like when a set is thoughtfully designed, and makes me appreciate the game more.

That second bullet point is far and away the exception rather than the rule, but for example, Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite game, and the achievement set actually made me appreciate it more. On first glance, a lot of the achievements appear daunting, along the same lines as SMB1; however, it all clicked for me when I remembered that after finishing the game, you can start over with an inventory full of P-wings.

I never played the game like this as a kid, because it takes long enough to finish, the game doesn't have saves or passwords, and I was never allowed to leave the NES on for that long. Also, I never had a reason to play the game a second time after finishing it. Being able to fly through most of the game was novel, but it wasn't really that interesting.

Except the achievements give you plenty of reasons to go back through the game with P-wings. It turns it into a proper second quest. 100%ing Mario 3 was the most fun I've had with retro achievements, my other experiences on the site have been trying to chase that feeling, but very few of the sets are that thoughtfully designed.

Well, I don't actually need an emulator to programmatically prove that I did all the things. I can just do it on my own, for fun. And I can ignore the not-fun parts.

What about the satisfying grid of gold badges? Heck, I can do that myself. And so I created: Game Badges.

It's very much just in the prototype phase, and it doesn't have a mobile-friendly layout yet, but this is what I want to start doing instead of retro achievements. Every badge will be a link to a page with information about the game, what self-imposed challenges I've completed, a link to a video of me playing the game (if one exists) and maybe a mini-review. There will also be a section for non-gold badges, for games I haven't yet completed to my own satisfaction. So it'll kind of serve as my personal backloggery, too.

This will be a slow long-term project, but it'll open me up to playing more games in more situations than I was allowing myself. My 3DS is in my backpack and it's loaded up with all the games I've been playing recently.

Uh, but I can't really play anything at work. I can get away with using my phone, but sitting at my desk with a Game Dad will definitely draw unwelcome attention. But that's okay. I can use this time for reading and writing.

1. The 3DS isn't definitionally a Game Dad, but a hacked one can serve the same function. Maybe it's a Game Uncle?

Spent a little time yesterday tweaking the journal style. Switched to a different theme and modified it a bit. The theme I used before was fun, I liked the spinny icons, but the justified sans serif text was driving me crazy, especially on mobile. I chose a dark theme with serif text, which is how I have the ebook reader on my phone set up. A livejournal-derived CMS is interesting, because I'm not only defining how my page looks, I'm defining how the page where I read everyone else's journals looks, too. So I'm extra incentivized to make it as comfortably readable as possible.

The layout is a bit broken on desktop at the moment, the left column is overlapping some of the navigation links. I'll have to look at it when I get home. I'm amazed that none of the DW themes have a basic layout with all the content centered in the middle of the screen. That's one thing I miss from bearblog. I liked the simplicity of the front page being a list of entries, and each entry being a simple page of text with navigation links at the top. None of the DW layouts take mine length into account. I use a 21:9 monitor at home, so it's especially bad there. Even with the 3-column layout, the center column with all the content is like 150 characters long when the window's maximized. Now that modern CSS lets you define element width in terms of number of characters, there's no excuse not to have your lines fall in the 45-70ch sweet spot of readability.

So I centered the content column and made it 60ch wide, and had to nudge some of the elements around manually, and it's not quite right but it's getting there. Mobile is about perfect, and that's where I do most of my reading anyway. And I figure others read either in their own style which they're comfortable with or in a feed reader. But if you're reading on the website on a computer, consider this space

under construction

Keyboard Blues

Hey, let me know if this is a thing: a keyboard that can be used either as a USB or Bluetooth device. I'd like to get a new keyboard for work anyway, since the one they gave me is an awful chiclet-style keyboard, basically a laptop keyboard sandwiched in a cheap plastic rectangle. I have no idea why this product exists. I have plenty of space on my desk for a real keyboard.

If they make keyboards that can be used as USB/Bluetooth devices, I could plug it into my work computer and pair it to my phone, so I could type on my phone but still appear to be working. Ideally it would have a physical toggle switch so I could switch modes seamlessly, but that's probably asking a lot. Even being able to press some Fn-FX combo to switch would be okay.

What wouldn't work is if the keyboard is always in USB mode if it's plugged in, and can only be used wirelessly if the cable is unplugged. I suspect that this is how every BT/USB combo keyboard works, and none of them tell you that's how it works because it's just How It's Done™. But if you know of a keyboard that works the way I'm describing please let me know. It doesn't even need to be mechanical, a good rubber dome keyboard would be preferable to what I'm using now. But if it has some nice cherry browns, I wouldn't complain.

When I search for "multi device keyboard" I'm finding a few that might sort of do what I want, but (a.) they're all chiclet keyboards, and (b.) it's unclear whether "a computer via USB" is one of the devices they actually support. They mainly seem to be for switching between multiple Bluetooth devices. USB is only mentioned in the context of charging.

Now, you would hope that plugging it into your computer's USB port turns it into a wired keyboard. It'd be nice if we could assume that's how it works. But my spouse recently bought a wireless mouse that doesn't do anything without the dongle. If you plug it in, all it does is charge. If you want to use the mouse while charging, it requires two USB ports. One for the mouse and one for the dongle. What a crazy, mixed-up, topsy-turvy world we find ourselves living in.

No Joy Stick

Speaking of input peripherals, I think I need to find a wired gamepad for my computer. I've been wanting to play games that aren't RPGs or puzzle games, and I think the delay introduced by wireless controllers is making me have a much worse time.

My two options right now are an 8bitdo M30 bluetooth and a Wii U Pro controller with a Magic-NS dongle. They're both fine, but I feel like both controllers add just enough imperceptible input delay to compromise any game that requires quick reflexes. I was playing Kirby's Pinball Land for the gameboy, and I did okay, but I haven't yet finished a single level. I feel like I should've, given the time I put into it. I just lose control of the ball too much.

I don't think it's me, because I've also played a bit of 3D Space Cadet Pinball on a keyboard, and I was much better at it. I felt myself improving on subsequent runs. I felt able to put the ball where I needed more often. I accomplished goals and got some decent scores.

I also don't think it's the game, because it doesn't seem that hard! Kirby games usually aren't. It's very generous with the gutter-blocking power-ups and even if your ball drains all the way to the bottom, you can save yourself from losing a ball with a little timing microgame. But I'm missing the timing on it most of the time, and I'm struggling to keep Kirby on one screen long enough to complete an objective and move on to the next screen. I think I'd feel more in control with a wired gamepad.

I suppose I could use my keyboard for KPL to test my hypothesis. Maybe I'm just inexplicably bad at it. But if I do improve on a keyboard, I want to look into a wired controller for action games that require it. Like Battle of Olympus for the NES. I've really been enjoying it, it's like Zelda II if it were improved in every way, but I'm struggling with the combat more than I feel I should.

I don't know what the good USB gamepads are nowadays. They do sell a wired version of the M30, but it's $35! Also the buttons on my M30 tend to get sticky way too easily and require frequent cleaning. Their SNES controller clone has smaller buttons that might hold up better. It's $27, but it has two analog sticks I don't need.

I could also get two generic SNES controller clones for $10. I don't really need two, but I guess I'd have a backup if one breaks? I have a feeling they're pretty fragile. But if the D-pad feels good, it might be the most comfortable controller for me. And for that price it might be worth it even if they wear out in a year.

controllers

Actually those D-pads look a little too big. This one looks more accurate and is also more highly rated, but it's two for $17:

controllers

Ratings don't necessarily mean anything on Amazon, though. The reviews that look legit seem mixed. I dunno. If you have a wired gamepad you can recommend, let me know. Even if it's more expensive, if it's been serving you well for years it might be worth it. I'll try KPL with a keyboard the next chance I get and report back.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Venetian Snares - I'm Sorry I Failed You

My body has felt like it's trying to fight something off for the last week. I don't think I'm actually sick, and my symptoms are very vague—just kind of general body aches and an overall icky feeling. You know the icky feeling? I got that. I think I'm somewhat prone to psychosomatic sympathy¹—if I'm around someone who's sick a lot I start feeling like I'm a little sick too. My spouse doesn't have covid and my symptoms don't line up with it, so I'm not worried on that front. Just a little temporary unpleasantness, and nothing compared to what my spouse has gone through.

Gonna be another short one today. I actually have a bit of a backlog again, because I've been spending a little too much time writing (and using my phone generally) and not enough time working. Now that my condition is treated, and my brain is able to focus on things, it wants to focus on all the things. It's ok, I'll get caught up. I'll simply focus on focusing. Balance in all things. Whenever I feel the urge to do something with my hands, like the 8 seconds every few in minutes in which I need I have to scan a document, I'll go for the bubble bracelet instead.

bubble bracelet

Bubble Bracelet!

It's one of many thoughtful or cute trinkets my spouse put in my Easter basket this year (my spouse made me an Easter basket! 🤯) but this has by far been the most useful. It works just like any other silicone bubble-pop fidget toy, but the fact that it's a bracelet means I always have it with me. I put it on my right wrist when I leave for work in the morning (my watch goes on the left) and any time I need something to do with my hands, I pull it off and get a-poppin. A lot of people probably have something similar on their keychain, but the shape and size of the bracelet make it more interesting to fidget with than something that would fit in my pocket. To me, anyway. I can rotate it with one hand and pop with the other. I can count the bubbles before I get back to the beginning (there are 10), etc. A dollar-twenty-five very well spent.

Worms Armageddon 1999 PC league

I'm loathe to recycle social media posts on my journal. The level of my aversion probably isn't rational, but in the twilight years of Livejournal, a bunch of my friends set up bots that would make a post once every 24 hours that just contains all their tweets from that day, and it made me very sad. All those abandoned zombie accounts reposting tweets at other zombie accounts made me feel, and this might be overly dramatic, some kind of existential dread.

But I want to spread the Worms word, so:

It's so weird that they ported Worms Armageddon 1999 to the newest consoles. That's the Worms game people should play, but the PC version still works fine and will run on a baked potato, it controls best with keyboard and mouse, it's extremely moddable and there's a plethora of extant player-generated maps and other content. People just stopped playing it. Online W:A was some of the best fun I've ever had with a multiplayer game. Anyone else wanna get back into #WormsArmageddon PC?

Having an action physics-y sandbox game where players take turns made it a perfect hangout game. You can open the chat window and talk to your friends while you're watching the other players take their turns. You really don't want to try to chat on an Xbox controller. All you can type are words like AX, BAY, YAB, BART, ARBY, etc. Gets old after awhile

Two people expressed potential interest, but they're both in wildly different time zones from me, so I made an aspirational ~~collaborative document~~ (edit: peerpad doesn't work, awesome. Re-made the document on rentry.co) to maybe help people come together and play Worms. If you think you may be one of these people, see the link for more information.

Why?

If you don't know what Worms Armageddon is, I probably won't convince you to spend 15 bucks on it. It's sort of a niche genre. If you've ever played an artillery game, it's basically one of those except your tanks are worms that can move around. How much they move is dependent on the game mode you're playing. They can always scooch around a bit left and right, but their mobility is limited and they can't fall very far without getting hurt. Mobility items such as the ninja rope, parachute, jetpack and teleport give you a much wider range of movement. These items can turn it into a completely different game; the ninja rope especially has exceptionally good physics, and if you get good at using it, you can fly around the maps with acrobatic fervor. Many of the most popular modes from the early aughts we're mostly or entirely about rope movement; you can look up rope race videos on youtube for a sense of what that looks like. It might not seem like the most exciting thing if you haven't played, but there's a very high skill ceiling and getting good (or even okay) is a lot of fun.

I got okay at it. I was never much into the pro rope stuff. My favorite mode was called a "shopper". You start with no weapons, and every turn a crate will appear. You have to use your rope to get to the crate and launch an attack before time runs out. The skill level required depends on the map, but this is generally considered a more casual mode because of the luck involved. A crate has a chance of containing any weapon. Weaker ones like mines and bazookas are most common, but you always have a chance of getting one of the more powerful/chaotic weapons like a holy hand grenade, or potential team-ruining banana bomb. To me, the shopper is the perfect mix of luck and skill. You can't feel too bad about losing if you play well, because you can only use what you're given; but if you're not at least somewhat competent at roping and using the weapons effectively, you're probably not going to get far.

If the rope action isn't for you, there are a bunch of other more traditional modes. My favorite "normal" mode was the T17. It's similar to a shopper, but you start with a few basic weapons and mobility tools, including a limited number of ninja ropes. This one is more about using your resources strategically, but is more interesting than a straightforward artillery duel.

The customizability is the game's killer feature. This is the only game I've played that can either be eSports or Mario Party or somewhere in between depending on how you set it up. That's how we should rate the sweatiness of competitive games, in my opinion: where does it fall on the esports-Mario Party spectrum? Me, I like a good balance, but definitely closer to the MP end. I like to have fun and goof off, but I don't want complete chaos. I want some amount of structure to both motivate me and to put boundaries on the activity. I've never been someone who can just drop into a Minecraft² server with a bunch of people (or by myself, for that matter) and have fun just noodling around for hours. Worms Armageddon is a structured, time-bound social activity that requires neither too much or too little skill, is extremely customizable and doesn't require you to talk to other people with your physical animal voice. If these sound like qualities you value in a game, maybe give Worms a try.

I feel like I've written some version of this post at least three times over the years, but Team 17 porting the game to new consoles is a bizarre and unexpected development that prompted me to think about it again. I've mostly made peace with the idea that I don't like the same kinds of multiplayer games as other people, but events like this make me think "...what if?"

1. Beastie Boys voice psychosomatic sympathetic, sympathetic psychosomatic

2. This is the problem with the Mario Party-Esports spectrum, I don't know where Minecraft would fall. People take it more seriously than anyone should take MP, but it's so unstructured it barely feels like a game to me. It's left the spectrum entirely and is off in a field somewhere, doing its own thing. (There are like a billion people in this field. I recognize that I'm the weird one)

Current Mood: different

My spouse has been very ill, so most of my weekend was spent taking care of her. She was sick enough to go to the ER last night, just in case it was anything serious. I'm glad she went, because it could've turned into something serious, but they sent her home with medicine and she's doing a bit better, well enough that I could come to work today. 😌

Not that I wanted to come to work, but I'm still not permanent enough to get benefits like sick time or vacation time.

My puzzle game playing has got me brainstorming a sequel to Slime and Goo. I've thought of a setup that would enable to make more sokoban-style puzzles with the S&G mechanics. It would be called Slime and Goo 2: Quest for the Cure in Phantasia Phorest. The story is: the Radiant Cake was a phony! Dr. Fondant must have already gotten to it, and replaced it with a cursed facsimile. All the critters of the Black Forest who partook have succumbed to a debilitation sleeping sickness. Luckily, Slime and Goo were full, so they avoided the effects. Now they must venture into Phantasia Phorest and collect 100 Insomnient Shrooms so the witch can make enough waking potion for everyone.

Mechanically, it would be similar to the previous game except that instead of just needing to reach the cake (exit) on each level, you have to collect all the mushrooms to move on. Instead of showing you what level you're on, the counter would show total numbers of mushrooms collected. That way you can get an idea of how far into the game you are, percentage-wise.

The sokoban element comes from magic logs that you must push into patches of moonlight peeking through the forest canopy to grow mushrooms. The win condition for each level would be: no logs or mushrooms remaining on screen.

That's my only idea for new mechanics so far, but it would open me up to making more traditional sokoban puzzles with the S&G twists. I may also copy over the one-way passage mechanic from The Quest For One, that could be a pretty simple way to add some puzzle variety. I'd probably eschew the bonus coin idea this time around; I liked it, but it was a difficult constraint to work around, and S&G wasn't as fleshed out as it could've been. My goal for the sequel will mostly be more puzzles, so it's more of a level pack than something that'll redefine the game.

I'm debating whether I want to include more story. Puzzlescript does allow you to display short messages, and having some charming writing could make the game more interesting to more people. Having two protagonists automatically gives me plenty of opportunities for little bits of funny dialogue, and a Phantasma Phorest is a good setting for interactions with other fantasy character archetypes, like The Owl of Wisdom and Orestes the misunderstood rat.

I do kind of enjoy that the first S&G is a textless experience, so it can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of language. I think it's more elegant as a game, but it does limit me creatively. Maybe I can expand on the zine idea, instead of just 2 pages from the Indiepocalypse zine, I could make a full booklet with some expanded lore. Of course no one would read it if it requires an additional download, and the whole idea was to have interesting stuff in the game to make it more compelling. I dunno. Maybe I'm being unnecessarily purist about it. People seem to like bitsy games, so if I include some bitsy-like exploration and storytelling, maybe that'll make it interesting for a greater number of people. And since it'll have essentially the same mechanics as the previous game, some storytelling would help set it apart. Okay, it's settled: Slime & Goo 2 will have in-game lore. Thanks for letting me brainstorm at you.

Of course this is all academic, because puzzlescript is not a development environment I can make use of on a phone, and it's still unclear when I'll have the time and brainpower to work on personal projects when I'm at home. I can make a page in my notes app to jot down story and dialogue ideas to be transferred to the game later, but I can't work on actual level designs. Maybe I can get some graph paper and pencils and start sketching them out like it's the 80s. Just kidding, that would probably draw more unwelcome attention than using my phone, and I can't work like that anyway. I need the live playtesting ability. I downloaded a tiled graphics editor on my phone just to see, and yeah, I can't do anything with it.

I'm trying to think of more creative outlets I can tap into while I'm at work. I wish I had more ideas for downpour games. Truth is, I've never been all that interested in straight-up choose-your-own-adventure games. The few actual CYOA books I interacted with as a kid bored me, I didn't see the appeal. There's not enough to do in them and your choices don't really matter. It takes 10 minutes to go through the book and see every possible branch. There's no way to predict which choices will lead to good outcomes, there's no way to feel like you "solved" the adventure. The only real strategy for getting the best ending on your first go is picking the most counter-intuitive action at every branch, because they probably punish the obvious good choices to make it more interesting. I heard tale of solo gamebooks that were more like RPGs where you have a character, you're moving around an actual map, and there are systems with die rolls, but I never saw any outside of the tiny solo example dungeon in one of the original red box D&D manuals. I would've loved to play more games like that, but I never encountered any.

Twine is cool because it has systems for tracking variables and generating random numbers, and that's all you really need to turn a CYOA into a proper adventure game or RPG. I haven't finished any of the games I started making along these lines, but I'd like to. But twine also isn't workable on a phone.

Downpour has one game mechanic that isn't possible in a physical CYOA book: the ability to make a choice lead to a random passage. You can use this to implement a crude "die roll": if you want a choice to have a ¼ chance of leading to outcome A and a ¾ chance of outcome B, you can make a link to a random pool of 4 passages consisting of ABBB. But there are no variables, so there's no way to make it have a long-term effect on the narrative unless you create two completely separate paths that branch out from from that point.

For example, if the player clicks a treasure chest and there's a ¼ chance of finding a magical shield that will protect them should they try to confront the dragon, there's no way to check to see if the player has the shield when they get there. You'd have to create two completely divergent story paths from that point, and obviously if you have more than one or two of these kinds of choices, your narrative will quickly unspool into unmanageable fractal spaghetti. So nifty as it is, downpour is really only useful for little joke games, and that's mostly not the kind of game I want to make. Not that I think it would be easy to make a tool that allows people to make these types of games on their phone, and it's very good for what it is, that's just why I lost interest after a couple small projects.

I realize I'm asking a lot from a bad computer with the world's worst input device, obviously I'd be using a real computer if I could, but if I want to reclaim a little sliver of agency in this hell society, it's phone or nothing. Might as well make the most of it

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Contra Hard Corps - Jurassic Dope

I forgot to mention on Tuesday, but my therapist wasn't available that day and scheduled me for Friday this week. It wasn't as rough as usual, I mostly talked about how much better everything is now that my ADHD is being effectively treated. I talked about being proud of my consistency with this journal over the last couple weeks, and how it's not just that I feel like I'm able to write, but I'm able to have thoughts that worth writing down, and how scary it is to think this might go away if insurance decides to fuck with my meds again. I compared my situation to Flowers for Algernon and was a little sad that my therapist was unfamiliar with it. It's not a perfect comparison (or a perfect book) but I think anyone who's had a mental illness effectively treated can relate to it on some level.

We're scheduled for Tuesdays for the rest of this month, which is good for my brain. Now that my ADHD is better and I'm out of pure survival mode, we're probably going to start talking about my trauma more, so Tuesdays are going to be rough again for the next little bit. But it's a good, necessary kind of hard, and I'm glad I'm in good enough mental shape to start working on it again.

Even if therapy wasn't that hard, today's entry will probably be on the shorter side due to having my morning routine thrown off. More of a diary kind of update.

lies and grind

Speaking of morning routines, I just watched this video about how social media stars lie to their audience, and I'm quite amused at how grindset tiktok influencers fake their morning routines. There's one guy where the whole point of the video is that he's in the "5 AM club", a supposed elite cadre of the ultra-productive who wake up at 05h00 to start their day with a battery of self-improvement tasks, and she explains based on his location, the time of year and position of the sun, he had to have recorded the video hours later than he claims. Like, enduring these morning routines is his whole shtick, and he couldn't even do it once to make a convincing video. His whole life is a lie. lol

I don't watch this kind of content, so I don't really need the debunking, but it does make me feel better seeing the extent to which these supposedly super put-together, hyper-productive people have to fake their lives. Also, my life may not be perfect, but at least I don't have to set up my phone to start recording me, get back in bed, and pretend to wake up for millions of people. I could be doing a lot worse.

I've watched a couple of Hannah Alonzo's "influencer" videos and they're pretty entertaining, although in some cases I worry I'm just engaging in the thing itself. Exposing how influencers do dumb shit on purpose to make me mad does in fact make me mad, and if I didn't watch the exposé, I wouldn't be exposed to it at all. It's probably fine in small doses though, idk

When I was a kid, I watched a TV special called Buy Me That that exposed how TV and print advertising lie to make their products look better, it was a pretty influential piece of edutainment. It set the wheels in motion for my anti-consumerist (and eventually anti-capitalist) attitudes, Influencer Insanity feels like a modern extension of that. I hope it gets seen by the people who need to see it.

workday cake

It was someone's birthday in my office today, which is always potentially exciting, but all they had was cake. I was hoping there would be food. One of my co-workers brought me a slice of cake, which was very kind, but it's just been sitting on my desk cuz I came in late and haven't had lunch yet. Sweets aren't my preferred junk food, I'm more salty/fried/savory-inclined. I mean I'll eat it eventually, but probably won't get much out of it.

I live in walking distance of my office, which is very nice, but food options in this part of town are dire. There's one pizza place down the street, and I've been here for 3 years now, so I'm thoroughly sick of it. There is a little employee cafeteria, and the food isn't stellar, but it is cheap, so I take advantage of it when I can. But (1) it's cash-only, (2) it's only open til 13h00 and sometimes I forget to eat before they close, and (3) it's very often closed due to staffing shortages. So it's not something I can depend on.

In contrast, we have a little vending area with drinks and snacks that's fully self-service. You grab items you want out of the cooler or baskets, scan them on the little tablet that's bolted to the wall, and insert your credit card. It's nice and convenient, but it's all overpriced junk food. That's why cake is so disappointing, I can go downstairs and get a 100% sugar snack cake any time, and a sheet cake from Kroger or whatever is basically the same thing. Sometimes people bring in donuts to share, and I hate to seem ungrateful, but that's also the same thing. It's supposed to be a special treat, but real food is a much scarcer and more special treat, to me.

cake update

I have eaten the cake. It tasted like sugar and chemicals.

two burly plumbers

I haven't seen the Super Mario Bros. movie, and don't intend to. But I have now listened to the official 45 minute promotional storybook cassette. "Theater of the mind", I like to call it. It's pretty good. The narrator is doing a reasonable facsimile of the 90s movie trailer guy voice. I wasn't bored. It passes the bechdel test. It sets up and pays off an important lesson about never leaving your tools behind. I wouldn't say I laughed at any of the jokes, because I didn't, but there were times the writing surprised me, and being surprised is similar to laughing. This is letterboxd, right? 2⭐/5. At least it was only 45m long

happy friday

That'll do it for this week. Thanks everyone for reading, I feel like I'm getting back into a groove. What movie do you want to experience in the form of a 45m storybook cassete? Comment down below, and submit any questions for Monday Q&A. If you enjoy my work and would like to support independent writing on the world wide web, I've got a ko-fi and a Patreon if you're so inclined. You can also help by sharing a post you enjoy with a friend or on your social media platform of choice. See you on the seventh!

Current Mood: ready for the weekend
Current Music: Disco Biscuits - Kitchen Mitts

Kemco's Crazy Castle

I went on a bit of a puzzle game spree over the weekend, mostly action puzzle games. I was in the mood for a relaxing NES game I haven't played before, so I loaded up The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a game and franchise I was unaware of until Jeff Gerstmann ranked it in episode 9 (currently #104/374, a pretty decent showing. Well above the Spondylus Line.) It's a very basic movement game, sort of Lode Runner-esque but no digging. All you do is move around levels, going through doors, up and down stairs and through pipes trying to collect all the carrots in each level. There's a boxing glove you can pick up to defeat an enemy (usable once), objects scattered around some levels you can kick into enemies, and a potion that makes you invincible for about 5 seconds, and that's it as far as player mechanics. Most of the game is positioning, moving around trying not to be in the path of enemies, and figuring out how to exploit the enemy AI. The enemies do follow a script to try to get close to you but there's a bit of randomness baked in, so it can be tricky. If you pay close attention to the enemies, you learn how some of the enemies behave, so you'll be like "okay, the dark brown Sylvester goes up pipes but never down then, so I have to make sure I get the carrots at the top of the level quickly" or "Wile E. Coyote never goes through doors, so I have to save my boxing glove to deal with him." Little things, but it was enough to keep me entertained through all 60 levels. The later levels suffer from the same problem the NES port of Lode Runner has: the full level isn't on screen, so avoiding the enemies you can't see yet is often a matter of luck. But the game gives you an extra life after every level you complete and there's a password system, so it's forgiving enough to get through.

Lode Runner

I also tried the NES port of Lode Runner again. I wish they figured out a way to compensate for the offscreen enemy problem, because I really like how it looks and sounds. I made it through a dozen levels or so, but once you hit the levels with a lot of undiggable floors, it just gets too frustrating. I run right to get away from the enemies, clear out all the gold, head back left, whoops there's an enemy waiting on every viable path, I can't dig to get away from them, yay I'm dead. It's sad, but I gotta write this version off.

I tried to play proper Lode Runner, but I couldn't get the disk to work with the Apple II core (heh) in Bizhawk. I could've used a different emulator, but eh.

Kemco's normal castle

I tried the sequel to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a Gameboy game known as Mickey Mouse IV in Japan, The Real Ghostbusters in North America, and Garfield Labyrinth in Europe (this series has the weirdest mess of licenses I've ever seen.) It's a totally different type of game than TBBCS: you can jump, you have a life meter, you collect differently-shaped keys to open doors, and you have a digging button for solving Lode Runner-esque block puzzles. You don't trap enemies in holes, you just occasionally need to figure out how to dig down in a way that won't cause you to become trapped; but because you can just jump out of the hole if you're about to become trapped, it makes it feel more like chores than a fun puzzle to solve. The time it takes for the blocks to respawn is interminable, and you have a time limit for completing each level. I'm not into time limits, in any game really, but especially one where I'm solving puzzles. There's no worse feeling than figuring out what you need to do, but being unable to execute the plan and get to the exit quickly enough before time runs out. Solving a puzzle and then losing anyway makes me want to not play anymore. So I bailed on this one pretty quickly. Honestly, it's hard to even call this one a puzzle game, it's more of a bad platformer. It's on the original Gameboy, so it looks and controls like shit. I mean, it's not awful; if it were 1993, I was 8 years old and stuck on a long car ride, I would've been happy to have it, but I'm not going to play it when I have other options.

Moblin Sokoban

I played a little bit of Moblin Sokoban. That's not its name, but it's a recreation of the original sokoban from 1982, first released in Japan on the Fujitsu FM-7 computer, using the Moblin sprite and other graphics from The Legend of Zelda. I loaded it up because I wanted a game I could play with one hand while I eat, because I'm kind of bored of watching videos recently (note to self: books are a thing. Read a book, you ADHDingus)

It didn't really work, because neither eating nor using the arrow keys is something that's easy to do with my left hand, but I played a dozen or so levels after I finished eating anyway. It's a good version of the game, very basic but snappy movement, and it looks good, but I wish it didn't provide metrics for how many moves it takes to solve each level. I went on a little rant about this on fedi, which I'll place behind a cut to spare anyone who's already seen it

( mini rant )

I was being a little harsh, I don't dislike Moblin Sokoban because it provides these metrics, I can make myself ignore them, I just would prefer they weren't there.

Anyway, it has 90 levels, which are overall much larger and trickier than modern sokoban games, so it'll give me a good bit of entertainment.

Chip's Challenge

Finally, I brought it all around full circle with the intersection of sokoban and action puzzle games: Chip's Challenge. This is a pretty legendary game most people know from its inclusion in various Microsoft Entertainment packs in the mid-90s, but it originally came out on the Atari Lynx in 1989. I never thought I'd play a Lynx game, but I checked to see if that version has retro achievements, and it does, so that's the version I'm playing. The achievements are reasonable: there's one for finishing all 8 tutorial levels on your first try, which I did in about 5 minutes after my first loop; There's an achievement for viewing an easter egg accessible from the main menu, a psychedelic mandelbrot fractal generator; the rest of the achievements are just for playing the game.

Which is good, but there are 150 levels and this game is fucking hard. I've played a little bit of the Windows version, but I apparently didn't get far past the tutorial, because I'm in the 20s and these levels are already kicking my ass. It has the dreaded time limit, and the number of times I've run out of time after solving the puzzle is >1, but unlike Garfbusters, the design of this game is interesting enough that I want to keep going. I may end up forgetting about the gold achievements and cheating to give myself infinite time, but if that's what it takes, I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. But if the levels get so hard that I'm not having fun even with infinite time, I'm not gonna push it.

I'm particularly interested in a set of mechanics in one level that bears a strong resemblance to the puzzle in Slime Resgoo Towlr and went on to play a part in the sequel, Quest For The Radiant Cake. There's a button you can step on that will cause a block to appear. When you push the block into water, it becomes a platform you can stand on. You repeat this process to build a bridge across the water, but where and how to build the bridge requires a little bit of lateral thinking. I'm pretty sure I never got that far in the game before, so I don't think I was consciously ripping it off, and it feels nice to have independently had the same idea.

Another level has a similar setup, except the blocks are scattered all over the place and the map is HUGE. At least huge relative to the 9 tile x 9 tile view of the world afforded by the Lynx's miserable 160x102 screen. I spent some time wandering around the map wondering where I should even start, when a light bulb went off. "You know," I thought, "I bet one of these blocks has the flippers underneath it." There are four power-ups that allow you to move freely on the four types of rough terrain: the shield for fire, skates for ice, the magnet for moving walkways and flippers for water. With the flippers, I could walk straight to the exit like the water wasn't there at all. I moved just about every rock on the map, and I was right. That felt good, like I got one over on the level, like I found the one weird trick puzzle designers don't want you to know about. That's what I want out of a puzzle game.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Mario's Picross on my phone when I have a spare minute. I made it to the star puzzles, which are a lot more difficult than the mushroom puzzles, so progress is slower but still satisfying. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Chip's Challenge when I have some time at home. I'll report back if I get frustrated and call it quits or if all the logic practice makes my brain spontaneously evolve into some kind of omniscient superintelligence with ESP. I figure it's 50/50.

Markdown update

Quick follow-up to something from the previous post: claudeb let me know that dreamwidth does, in fact, support markdown! There's no indication of this on the page where you write you entry, it looks more or less identical to the livejournal interface from 20 years ago, but if you bing "dreamwidth markdown", you'll find a 5 year old FAQ entry that explains that yes, dreamwidth does have full markdown support, you just have to start the entry with a special bangtag (!markdown). This whole entry has been written with markdown, so when I'm ready to copy it from my notes app into the post box and click "preview", I'll let you know how it works out:

Hey, it works perfectly! Thanks again claudeb

Current Mood: focused
Current Music: Strawberry Girls - Bird Technology Pt. 1

We're about ten months into the year of the journal and so far it's off to a rocky start. I wanted to post at least once a week, and my track record has been less than stellar.

The main factor I attribute this to is an absolute glut of work at my job. When I did my 100 consecutive days of blog posting last year, it was a time when it was possible to get caught up on work and have the tiniest sliver of downtime in which to goof off, and writing on my phone was a good use of that time. I can't use my work computer for anything fun, because everything I do on it is monitored and recorded. Sitting at my desk using my phone is acceptable, because we live in a reality where everyone does it, and no one wants to be the one to not do it to enforce the rule. As long as I'm getting my work done, and not flagrantly using my phone all day, I'm in the clear.

At the time, reading and writing were the only things I really wanted to do on my phone. I don't use any big social media platforms, and my fediverse timeline is tightly curated, so doomscrolling is thankfully a habit I was able to break. It doesn't take me long to catch up with the posts I missed while I was asleep, and then I'm done with the fediverse for awhile. That gives me a lot of time for creative activities.

Unfortunately, I realized that I could download retroarch and be getting retro achievements on my phone. So now that it's been a time of year that we're somewhat caught up, I've been spending time I might've otherwise have used writing playing Mario's Picross. Which I've learned is one of the best games on the gameboy. It came out in 1995, it should have been to the gameboy pocket what tetris was to the original gameboy. Everyone and their grandma should've been playing Mario's Picross, your local news should've been running stories about picross fever taking over the country, Andrew Lloyd Webber should've covered the picross theme under the pseudonym Dr. Chip.

The good news is, there's a very limited subset of games I can tolerate playing on a phone. It's pretty much just picross and digital board games. Even RPGs aren't playable for long stretches, because I have to slide my thumb around a virtual D-pad to navigate the world, which feels extremely bad. Digital board games are the best, because they only require occasional screen taps. Picross obviously isn't as good as playing on an actual Gameboy or something with a controller, but it's tolerable; and also, I've tried to play native android picross games, and I find the emulated gameboy game easier to control. On android, the boxes in the 15x15 puzzles are too small to consistently fill the way I intend. Moving a cursor with a virtual D-pad sucks, but it's better than the alternative.

I already got all the achievements in Monopoly for the megadrive (which I actually owned as a kid) and Life+Payday+Yahtzee for the GBA, so once I'm done with Mario's Picross I'll probably be done with phone achievements. I might check out Mario's Super Picross on the super famicom, but if it just ends up being the same puzzles on a different platform I don't think it'll hold my interest. (I might be in trouble if anyone makes achievements for the Itadaki Street fan translations.)

Picross is good for playing in small chunks, 10 or so minutes at a time (which is good because that's usually the amount of time I have) but I want to start jotting thoughts in my notes app, because that's how I managed to keep my 100 day streak. I would have sporadic thoughts throughout the morning, the time of day my brain is working, and just keep a log running throughout the day. Then when I get home, I have enough brain left to do some light editing, formatting, title-thinking-of, and posting.

I moved the notes app back to my home screen. I use a custom home screen app called oLauncher, which limits the number of apps on the home screen to a maximum of 8. It's a text list rather than a grid of icons. If I need another app, I swipe up and can either select from a list, or start typing the name of the app. This is so my attention is drawn mostly to the things that are important and I want to do. I *can* use other apps, there's just a little more friction to prevent me from over-apping. My top 8 currently is: (no particular order)

An audiobook player
An ebook reader
An instant messenger
A fediverse client
A music player
The notes app
The bus pass app
Weather

I can also access clock settings by tapping the time, and bring up the calendar by tapping the date. I think that encompasses most of what I actually want to do on a phone. I don't have a web browser on my home screen because using the web on a phone is kind of a drag.

The app I replaced to make room for notes is newpipe, which is super useful, but I typically download the audio from YouTube videos in batches when I'm home and listen to them in the audiobook player when I'm at work, so it's fine behind the swipe-gate.

Anyway, now that notes is front and center, hopefully I'll remember to use it more. I have ADHD and tend to forget activities I enjoy are a thing.

Like writing in this journal! Hello! I'm back and this time I'm hopefully going to remember that writing is a thing I enjoy. Please look forward to more loosely-connected bursts of cognition loosely edited together into whatever this is

Current Mood: confident
Current Music: Freelance Hairdresser - A Diff'rent Stroke of Genie-us

For awhile I was forced to use Linux as my home OS, since every windows-capable computer I owned had some sort of problem. Eventually tax refund season came around and I had an extra $20 to gamble on a third-party replacement power supply for my Thinkpad x250, and that brought it back to life. So I'm back on good ol' windows 7 for as long as it's still viable. I expect eventually I'll have to go with linux permanently, which will be a bummer.

During my linux year, I used retroarch to play games, which is an awful program made by shitty people, but it seemed like the most viable option for an easy all-in-one emulation solution on linux. As long as I was forced to use retroarch, I signed up for an account with retroachievements.org, a site where people create fan-made unofficial "achievements" for old video games.

I'm lukewarm on the concept of achievements on the whole. I think when done well, they have the potential to add more value to a good game. I often go back and play games in unconventional ways, particularly RPGs, and having a system in place to track these unconventional play styles isn't inherently a bad thing. It's quite an old concept—Microsoft was the first to use the term "achievement" when the Xbox 360 came out, but as far as I know, the first game to track these kinds of meta-challenges was Nethack, whenever they introduced the conduct system.¹

Of course the idea of adding self-imposed challenges to a game is probably as old as games themselves, and developers factoring in these challenges when they design games is older than Nethack (Shigeru Miyamoto suggested Super Mario Bros. players who mastered the game could try playing without collecting a single coin.)

But when Microsoft systematized this idea on a platform level, and made them mandatory, that was a mistake. Suddenly, developers who hadn't given a lot of thought to optional challenges, or who were designing a game that's just not well-suited to them, had to come up with some bullshit.

The easiest solution, and in my opinion the most sensible one, is progression-based achievements. Achievements that unlock for completing a level, defeating a boss, seeing an important story cutscene, anything that's a part of simply progressing through the game. If you're required to come up with 20 achievements to publish your game, and design them such that anyone who completes the game gets all 20 achievements, that is totally ok. It can be useful to have a metric by which to judge how much time is left in a game, or players can just ignore them.

Unfortunately, the need to come up with bullshit achievements has created a few dark patterns that have carried over into the fan-made retro achievements. Here is a non-exhaustive list with examples:

Mind-numbing tedium

In Earthbound, the last character you recruit to your party is an eastern monk prince who can't use most of the modern western equipment in the game. However, there is one weapon he can use: the Sword of Kings, a fun reference to Dragon Quest 3 for the true RPG-heads. It can only be obtained as a random drop from one enemy in one location late in the game. It has a 1 in 128 chance of dropping. It was clearly designed as a fun easter egg to surprise and delight the small handful of players who get lucky enough to roll it, because it's not even very good. It's the only weapon in the game the character can use, and it's barely better than fighting bare-handed. Do the retro achievements expect you to walk back and forth fighting random battles for potentially hours to obtain this pointless item? You bet they do!

Playing badly on purpose

I love Fatal Labyrinth for the Megadrive. I loved it as a kid and I possibly love it even more now. It was my first roguelike, before I had ever heard of Rogue or understood what it meant for a game to be like it. I'm an expert at the game, and looking for new challenges and conducts. One of the retro achievements is called "I Think I'm Lost", and the "challenge" is to "explore 50 floors in a single playthrough". The labyrinth only has 30 floors, so the only way to get this achievement is to fall into a pit 20 times, something I've never done, not even when I was a kid and knew nothing about the game. It would be impossible to play this badly accidentally, and it's extremely not fun to do it on purpose. The best way I can think to get this achievement would be to repeatedly fall through the first pit you encounter. For example, if I find a pit on level 4, I would have to fall through it, replay level 3, and get back to the level 4 pit; then repeat this 20 times. Then finish the game. Surprise! It's secretly another "mind-numbing tedium" achievement!

"This game is cool, but remember this other game?"

Shadowrun for the Megadrive is one of my favorite action RPGs. I've replayed it a dozen times over the years, because there are many different ways you can approach it and each of the approaches is interesting in its own way. But one way you can't approach it is as a stealth game. One of the major game modes involves raiding corporate offices, including a couple mandatory missions, and with one exception (more on that later) any approach you take with these missions is going to involve constantly triggering alarms and gunning down guards. There are mechanics that make you think they would've liked to have included some sort of stealth system. There are security cameras you can sort of avoid, or shut down if you're able to hack into their computer system. You can get a silencer for your gun, which prevents an alarm from triggering when you shoot—but there are no stealth kills, every guard is going to take at least 2 shots to deal with, and guards always appear in groups of at least 2, so in practice the alarm is going to trigger when they immediately shoot back at you anyway. You can see the skeleton of something that might've been a stealth system, and maybe they just ran out of time to implement it.

Still, the set for Shadowrun has achievements like:

Solid Snake
Complete any Shadowrun in the Renraku Office without raising an alert or using invisibility

and

Kept You Waiting, Huh?
Get into the Fuchi building, get the Cyber-Heart and get out without raising an alert or using invisibility

So, it's interesting that they add that "no invisibility" qualifier, because the invisibility spell is the one actual mechanic with which you can engage with the game stealthily. Here's what happens if you enter a building and you're not invisible: a guard is standing there. A guard asks to see your ID. You either present the fake ID you can have made for a lot of money, or try to talk your way out. If the guard sees through the fake ID or doesn't buy your story, he attacks. Achievement failed. Reload the game and try again. The fake ID can certainly increase your odds of encountering a guard without triggering an alert, but without invisibility, you're proccing random events that may or may not trigger an alert all the time. Even with the 20,000 nuyen fake ID and a level 5 maglock passkey and maximum charisma for smooth-talking the guards, it's still just a series of die rolls; your preparation just helps the odds be slightly less in the corporation's favor. There is no skill involved. It's just loading your game over and over until you happen to win all the die rolls. At the risk of editorializing, one might think of this process as a kind of "mind-numbing tedium".²

Revenge of the nerds

There's a retro achievement for Final Fantasy 7 called Ancient Steps Retraced. The description is:

Beat the Temple of the Ancients in one session using magic materia only and without escaping or restoring MP.

Okay, kind of nonsensical, but it doesn't sound too bad. There are five types of materia: Magic, summon, support, command, and miscellaneous. I guess you have to use nothing but materia that lets you cast spells, right? No special commands or summoning?

Well, no, what there isn't sufficient space to explain is that you have to complete the dungeon using nothing but magic materia. No items equipped, no attacking, no using potions, just magic.

In fact, there's a whole laundry list of secret rules you have to follow that you can only know about if you read the description posted by the author in the forum for the achievement. Here's the full list of requirements:

( Ancient Steps Retraced )

What we have here is a nerd finally getting to exert dominance over those he perceives as his lessers. Everyone's going to fail on their first go, because they're going to interpret the challenge in good faith, as if it were written by a normal person trying to add value to an old game they love. Only when they get through the dungeon and have not unlocked the achievement will they maybe check the forum to see what's up, and discover that they've been pranked, and they're going to have to lick some nerd's boots if they want to complete the achievement set and get that shiny gold emblem on their profiles. An emphatic no thank you!

All that said, I recently learned that Bizhawk added retro achievement support, so I logged in and I've been messing around with achievements again. My profile name is dukeofthebump if you want to follow my progress. I'm mostly using it as kind of a video game diary, tracking how much of which games I've played, and which ones I've finished... but if the achievement set for a game I like is fun and doable, I'm not opposed to getting some of those shiny gold emblems. Because they're gold... and shiny 🦝

---

1. I've tried to figure out when conducts were added to the game but I haven't had much luck. The old versions page only goes back to 3.2.3, which doesn't have much information about it. The guidebook for version 3.3.0 talks about conducts, so they were formally in the game at least by 1999. I assumed that conducts were an informal player-imposed challenge until the developers decided to formally acknowledge them, but I can't figure out when this would've happened. It's possible they were in there in some form as early as 1985.

2. And besides, if Solid Snake had access to literal magic that made him literally invisible, don't you think he would've used it? Special Operations are all about getting the job done by any means necessary with whatever tools are available. I don't think Solid Snake would approve.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Go Find - Ice Cold Ice

Content warning for a double-fictional double suicide (a fictional movie that only exists in the fictional world of my dream)

I dreamt that I was watching a movie called "Sandra and Maria Die".¹ It was one of those low-budget straight-to-streaming service indie movies that didn't have a lot of buzz, but I watched it because it sounded interesting. The titular characters die about 30 minutes into the movie, and the rest of the film is filling in details about the events that led to their deaths, and the other characters dealing with the aftermath.

I found it really well-done and affecting, and as is my wont with new media I take a strong liking to, I re-watched the movie two more times shortly after the first time. But on the second re-watch, something was different. Sandra and Maria didn't die. The movie is exactly the same up until the titular scene of the movie, but then things start happening differently.

The event that leads to their deaths is a phone call. The women are sisters, roughly college-age, and hosting a get-together at their home. When they're getting ready, they both receive phone calls, the details of which aren't audible to the audience, but it's heavily implied that they did something together about which they were being blackmailed, and the terms of the blackmailer lead to their taking their own lives.

On the third viewing of the movie, however, the call never comes. They get ready for the get-together and have a great time with their friends. At one point, one of the sisters tries to call one of their friends to see why they're running late, and the cell phone network is too jammed for their call to go through.

It's revealed that the network was jammed because some sort of 9/11-esque catastrophe had occurred. In the hazy way details often reveal themselves in dreams, I'm uncertain whether the event was similar to 9/11 or actually was 9/11. If the story was taking place in 2001, that would explain why the characters were primarily communicating with telephone calls. The main version of the film, in which Sandra and Maria die, takes place in a universe where 9/11 (or whatever) was prevented; in the alternate version, the catastrophe happens, indirectly saving the lives of the titular characters but leading to a host of other dramatic tensions. It wasn't like, a Final Destination situation where the characters were supposed to die and now the timelime is messed up (that would be unacceptably grim in a serious story about trauma and abuse); it was just: here's how things would have happened if one of the great coin flips of the universe came up tails instead of heads.

It would be impossible for me to reconstruct the details from the dream into a coherent narrative, much less two, but I'm fascinated by the idea of a story that sometimes, quietly, gives the observer an alternate universe version of events. This sort of thing would be pretty easy to do in text, at least on the technical side: write a short story on a webpage with a tiny bit of javascript that performs an invisible die roll when the page loads. Give it 75% odds that it'll load the Universe A version of the story, and 25% odds of Universe B. The first page's worth of text would be identical, so even someone refreshing the page over and over wouldn't see a difference unless they happened to be scrolled far enough down for the difference to be apparent. If someone has scripts disabled, it would default to Universe A. Nobody would even know that there was anything unusual about the story unless they re-read it enough times to have rolled both versions, or if the story became popular enough that people talked about it. Or if someone looked at the source code, but how often do people look at the source code of random short stories they find on the web?

The web could be full of stories, read by small handfuls of people, which are sometimes imperceptibly different, and I find that idea exciting. What a cool medium!

1. Almost certainly inspired by the webcomic Anders Loves Maria, which I'm looking up for the first time in awhile and am excited to learn is back online! Hooray! (edit: well, partially back online. It appears the author started reposting the strips in real time in the middle of last year, then abruptly stopped a couple months in. How frustrating 😔)

Current Mood: lucid
Current Music: The Beths - Knees Deep

Youtube

Now that I'm more active on youtube again, I have to resist the self-destructive compulsion to constantly check my analytics page. Like many algorithmic validation machines, it's a lot like a slot machine for feeling bad about myself. Every time I "pull to refresh" is another pull of the lever. I stare at the view graph, hoping a few bars will pop up. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do, and I feel a glimmer of hope. 5 views in 5 minutes? That must mean youtube is showing my video to people! I refresh again, hoping for more. Sometimes they keep coming, and I keep pulling, but I'm inevitably let down. No likes, no subscriptions, no comments, no indication that any of those people watched more than 30 seconds or whatever the minimum amount of time is to count as a view.

And my brain knows that this is fine. The videos I make appeal to a narrow niche of people. The odds of a small handful of views containing people who fall into that niche are very low. But the part of me that desires validation can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong, that my videos are bad and I'm wasting my time and I should give up.

This isn't true! I'm having fun with my friend, of course it's not a waste of time. But the social media content machine is designed to make us feel worthless and unimportant, so we get addicted to trying to do better, so the subset of the population most vulnerable to that addiction do more and more harmful and outrageous things to please the algorithm and get ever more validation while churning out content that makes the corporation as much ad revenue as they can generate. Shit's fucked.

I've mostly managed to eliminate this sort of algorithmic bullying from my life. I stopped using twitter years ago. I moved to the fediverse, which isn't perfect but is much healthier, and has tools that help me use it in a less stressful way. I don't post on facebook and mostly use it to look at what my spouse posts and communicate with her. I intentionally use a journal platform where I have no idea how many people are reading my posts. I don't want to know! But if I want to play TV presenter on the internet, and have any hope of the people who want to watch it finding it, youtube and their obsessive analytics are the only games in town. Oh sure, I could find a peertube instance that can accommodate a ~4-500MB weekly upload, or just upload them to archive.org, but that means even the small number of viewers I get now would drop to approximately zero. A rounding error. I'm grateful for my fans that would follow me to whatever platform I posted on, there are a couple of them, but like, I think this new series could potentially appeal to at least a couple thousand people in the world. Not enough to quit my day job, but enough to maybe get a few nice comments on each video and possibly bring in a little extra money each month. I always rejected the idea of making ad revenue from videos, but having a job where I don't make a living wage has made me a lot less precious about it. I'm still going to block ads, and I have no beef with anyone who does, but there's a sizable number of youtube viewers for whom ads are normal and just the way internet TV works—kinda like how watching 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads per episode was how it worked when I was growing up. I can't imagine going back to that.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I started playing Cookie Clicker on my phone.

Cookie clicking

I played Cookie Clicker on the web when it was new. I liked it at first, but I ended up hating it because it turned me into a greasy little optimization goblin who would obsessively micromanage everything for optimum cookie output. I would, like, sell old buildings so I have enough cookies to buy new ones, I'd look up forums and websites where people talked about cookie clicker strategies, leave it running on my computer with an autohotkey script to continuously click while I was AFK, I got up to like the octillions or nonillions or something when I realized that I hated myself and every second I spent looking at clicker. I deleted my save and vowed to never play it or any other idle game again.

Since then, I've chilled out quite a bit, and I realized that Cookie Clicker could be ideal for preventing me from constantly checking my analytics, and other things on the internet, while I'm at work and should probably look like I'm working most of the time. I leave it running in a little stand on my desk, screen brightness turned down pretty low. I have an app that lets me rotate my screen 180 degrees, so I can keep it plugged in, and I set the screen to never turn off when it's on power. I mostly keep the stats tab up, so it doesn't look like I'm looking at a big cookie to anyone who glances over my shoulder. Occasionally, a yellow dot will pop up on the cookie tab to let me know that a golden cookie spawned. I click it, and usually I don't have to do anything but go back to the stats tab; occasionally it's a click frenzy or cookie storm, which requires me to furiously tap my phone for 15-30 seconds, but otherwise I just let it go back to doing its thing. I occasionally take a short break from work to do some building management (always buying, never selling) or buy upgrades and research. It barely takes any time at all, helps me stay on track with my work, and still provides little bursts of excitement when I get a nice golden cookie combo. It's maybe not the healthiest thing, but it's certainly better than refreshing my youtube stats over and over. You see, the number can only go up.

Hundred dollars

I found a hundred dollar bill on the way to work. Weirdly, this isn't the first or even the second time I've found money during my walk; I walk through a relatively middle-class part of my neighborhood, and past houses where people can afford to be careless when digging their keys out of their pocket or purse, and it's not well-lit enough at night that it'd be easily noticeable, especially if someone was hurrying to get in from the snow or rain. But $100 is definitely the most money I've ever found from a single windfall, and I thought it was worth celebrating. My spouse and I are going to treat ourselves to something, but we haven't decided what yet.

Button sticking

The button on my headphones started sticking. I love them: the brand is 3M Worktunes Connect, and they're rated to provide 24 dB of noise protection. They connect via bluetooth, but there's also a 3.5mm headphone jack you can use with just about any cable. I always use them wirelessly though. It's been life-changing. I can't express how much better quality of life I have not having to hear the noises of everyday life that overstimulate me and wear my brain down. The wirelessness is secondary, but also nice: it's quite freeing not needing to be tethered to whatever I'm listening to.

That said, I've never been a fan of the "one button does everything" UI philosophy. There's one button. You hold it for a second to turn them on or off. You double-press it to pair them with a new device. You press the button to pause or resume playback. You double-press it to either skip to the next track or skip ahead a few seconds depending on the app's settings. You triple-press the button to skip backwards, but not every app respects this. Needless to say, in the 3 years I've had this pair, the button's been put through its paces.

It's rubbery, and used to make a nice "click" when pressed, but it's lost its click ever since it started sticking. When the sticking started, the headphones would continuously turn themselves off and back on, because it was like someone was holding in the button. I managed to dig it out with an unbent paperclip, but it's not trustworthy. I no longer feel like I can do single presses with it. I think I can get by with just holding the button in to turn them on... it's already paired with both my devices, so I don't need to activate that function, and they turn off when I plug them in to charge, and I can use the controls on my phone or computer, it's just more of a pain in the ass... so as long as I can hold the button in to turn them on in the morning without breaking it, I shouldn't need to replace them. Crossing my fingers. If I was the cynical type, I'd make a comment about finding $100 and then my $50 headphones immediately breaking, so even when I catch a break I can't catch a break... but I'm trying to stay positive. Even if I need to replace my headphones, I'm able to now where I might not've been before, and an extra $50 on top of that is still way better than nothing. Still, it'd be nice if everything in life didn't have to come with a caveat, you know?

Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags

Sorry if you got a premature notification for this post. I was entering tags, and for the second time, thought that I could press "enter" to accept the tag that was currently auto-filled, since that's how it works on most UIs with this sort of feature. But it turns out the "post" button still has enter key priority, causing me to fire off the entry before it was ready. What, I'm supposed to press the right arrow key? I guess so. Maybe now that I've written about it, it'll stick in my brain.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Mates of State - For The Actor

Well, it's been an eventful (glances at watch) two and a half weeks?! I didn't mean to go that long without a new journal entry, but I guess that's how eventfulness goes sometime.

Ranking the Atari 2600

Recently I was talking about Jeff Gerstmann's "Ranking the NES" series, and expressed interest in potentially doing something like that with the Atari 2600. My friend Mike, who I've collaborated on and off with for years, saw the entry, said that he liked the idea and suggested we could so something like that together. I was initially hesitant, because I didn't know how well it would work as a collaborative project, and was going to decline but suggest we find something else to play and record together instead (which may not have ever happened, you know how life can go.)

But I thought about it, and I realized that a second perspective could be just the shake-up that format needs. One of the best things about Jeff's series is watching him play a game he knows well and can explain in detail, both the game itself and its place in history; one of the other best things is watching him be impressed by a game he knows nothing about (whether it's impressively good or impressively bad.) With two people, we can get the best of both worlds for each game.

The idea is this: every week, each of us selects 3 games to bring to the show. For my games, I study the manual beforehand and try to learn as much as I can about it, and Mike does the same for his 3 games. We each play the games and record our local play session while talking about them over discord, alternating between one of his choices and one of mine. After each game (which we try to play for at least 10 minutes, but we can go over if we need more time) we switch to the shared google sheet showing the list of the best game ever made, and decide where it goes.

I was worried about this part too, since I wasn't sure how much our opinions would diverge, but it turns out that even when we disagree, it's fun to negotiate. We can state our positions, why we think the game deserves to be in Xth place on the list, and either persuade the other person or not. The stakes are so low that neither of us is going to get super heated, and it doesn't take long for us to find a compromise.

I think the format works really well, and I'd have fun with it even if we weren't recording for youtube, but I also think this is maybe the most entertaining thing we've done together and it'd be cool if we maybe got some more viewers. Mike's recording of our first session, by some mysterious blessing of the unknowable algorithm, has gotten 1,700 views, a number which is still slowly climbing up. He got about 10 new subscribers out of it, which puts him at around 90. I was more active on youtube in the mid 2000s than him, so I have 2,300 subscribers from sheer "right place at the right time" syndrome; I was doing "let's play" videos just as that was becoming a thing. It's a meaningless number though, since my videos still get on average about the same number of views as his. Nobody actually looks at their subscriptions page on youtube, they look at the homepage, which doesn't show you new videos from people you're subscribed to unless they're popular. Even "ringing the bell" often doesn't work; my spouse should get notifications, but she wouldn't have known about the new videos if I didn't tell her.

So Mike's recordings of the first two videos have gotten 1.7K and 73 views, mine have gotten 115 and 38. Not bad, considering our most recent videos before that have gotten somewhere between 10 and 30.

Of course, youtube doesn't recommend videos by anyone who isn't already popular except for the occasional weird fluke, so the only real way to get new viewers is to upload "shorts". Mike had the idea first, and he spent a long time cutting our first 2-hour show down to a 1-minute summary, for which he got a respectable 118 views. (note: I wrote this over a number of days, so as of this point the preceding numbers are out of date.)

I've taken a different tactic, uploading a larger quantity of simpler videos related to the main ranking show, which have gotten between 56 and 277 views. Nothing seems to have translated into more exposure for the real videos, but I can't focus on the day-to-day number or I'll go bonkers. Maybe after doing this for a few months, I'll see the overall trend line go up and feel more encouraged.

Not that my motivation ultimately comes from views; it would just be nice. The main thing I get is hanging out with my friend and doing something fun. However, I think these videos are pretty good, some of the most entertaining we've done. I like them, anyway. They're the kind of videos I'd want to watch. And it'd be nice if we could get them in front of the eyeballs of people who feel the same way. I know it's not for everyone, but there's a respectable number of people out there who would like what we do. But the algorithm doesn't care about niche potential, it just tries to put attention on whatever will get the most billions of views. Oh well, I'm still gonna have a good time and there's nothing they can do to stop me. If watching a couple old friends goof around with some even older video games is something you'd be interested in, here's my channel. If not, I get it.

Garbage day

A couple saturdays ago, I spent all day helping a friend of a friend get their apartment cleaned up to avoid getting evicted. I think it succeeded for now, but this person is in a dire psychological state and I'm very worried about them. The less said about this, the better.

Garbage day for my brain

I have a new psychiatrist and therapist. When I first moved from [home town] to [current town], it was at the height of the pandemic and telehealth was becoming more and more of a thing. So I was able to keep the same doctors I've had in [home town], which was nice. However, at some point they told me I'd have to have an in-person appointment for them to continue prescribing my necessary medication, so I had to start looking for someone local. I really should have done this a long time ago; the clinic administration was very disorganized and had messed up my prescription refills on multiple occasions, and I hadn't actually had a therapy appointment in a long time because my therapist there wasn't able to help with my current problems. I'm not upset with her, when I first started therapy she was very good at helping me process the trauma I'd never talked about, come to terms with myself as an adult and become a person I like. I'll always be grateful to her for that, and I guess since she was no longer able to help me, I figured I didn't need therapy anymore.

Obviously I do, and I was sort of in denial about that because I didn't want to go through the arduous process of finding a new therapist and having to explain my whole life history again, what I wasn't getting from my last therapist and what I need. Well, I asked my primary local doctor to help with a referral for a psychiatrist. There was nobody taking new patients, so I got put on an indefinite waiting list, which sucked, because I had to have an in-person appointment with my psychiatrist in [home town] in April or they wouldn't be able to help me anymore. Maybe my primary doctor would've been able to continue prescribing my meds in the interim, I don't know, but I didn't want to have to find out and I hated having a ticking timebomb hanging over my head like a mixed metaphor after a bender.

One day in December, I got a notification from my "health care app" (still a relatively new concept to me) that a psychiatrist in my healthcare system was taking new patients, and since I was on the waiting list I could make an appointment if I tapped "accept" within the next 30 minutes. If I was in the shower or otherwise not available during that 30 minutes, I guess I would've missed my chance and it would've gone to someone else on the waiting list. But I didn't hesitate, and they made me an appointment in January. It was still a month and change out, but at least I knew I'd be okay before the April deadline.

So I went in for an intake with the psychiatrist, and it was... a video appointment. The nurses took my vitals and led me to an exam room, where they brought in a little tablet computer with a zoom window open, and I talked to him like that. As it happens, he works out of [hometown]. Cue laugh track.

I understand why I had to come in though, it was for all the vitals stuff and for me to sign all the forms the government needs for me to keep getting the pills that make my brain work. It just struck me as funny, especially since nobody told me I'd be talking to the doctor on a tablet; so when I was in the waiting room before my appointment, my healthcare app popped up a notification informing me that my video appointment would start soon, and I could go ahead and join the meeting and the doctor would talk to me shortly. I went up and told the person at the reception desk what the app said, and confusedly said "uhh... am I supposed to be here?" They apologized that nobody told me and explained how it would work.

The actual appointment was fine. Medicaid only covers 15 minute appointments for psychiatry, so it was really just going over my meds, making sure I still need them, any side effects, need anything adjust, okay we'll talk again in a couple weeks. Most importantly, I said I wanted to start talking to a therapist again, and he made me an appointment with someone who was physically in that building, the same week as my psych follow-up. So I'd get to talk to him again via telehealth, but I'd have to go in the next day anyway. I didn't care. I was excited to get to talk to someone again. I didn't realize how much I needed it.

There's always that initial trepidation because I'm not sure what the person I'll talk to would be like—I looked her up on the clinic's website and it didn't have much information, other than she had a couple specialties that aren't particularly relevant to my problems, but they're good specialties to have and I felt optimistic we'd be on at least a more similar wavelength than me and my old therapist.

And I was right, she's great! She's closer to my own age and I felt like she understands the world much closer to the way I do than my last therapist, who was a decade or two my senior. Nothing wrong with that, but I was so happy when I told her I'm nonbinary and she didn't ask what that means or seem taken aback. I know this should be the expectation, but my country has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world and I live in the most backwards part of my country, so my expectations are in the gutter.

For therapy, we got an hour-long intake, and I was astonished that I was able to bring up pretty much everything I wanted to talk about and answer all her questions for the intake within the time limit. She's a much more efficient communicator than my last therapist, but not so efficient that I felt like I was being rushed. She was very engaged and seemed genuinely excited to talk to me. It was such a relief.

We scheduled weekly follow-ups, three telehealth and then one in-person. We've had one of the telehealth appointments so far, and it went fine, but it did make it a little bit awkward. I'm thinking of going back to in-person for all our future appointments, because I've since discovered that I'm allowed to stay late at work to make up time for doctor appointments pretty much whenever I want. I like having a low-anxiety reason to go somewhere besides work in the morning, and since our appointments are only 30 minutes now, it'll be nice if we can talk as efficiently as possible.

Books

I played halfway through Omegaland again so I could capture the frames for my "ghost reading a book" icon when I post about books, but I unfortunately haven't read much lately. I tried to take Angela Collier's advice about finally actually reading Lord of the Rings in her video The Scourge of the Shire: I acquired the audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. The thing is, he does have a wonderful voice, and I love listening to him, but reading it as an audiobook only amplifies the problem I had when I tried to read the books: they. Are. So. God. Dang. Slow. I don't care that the books are long, I don't automatically hate long books, but in the long books I like, they tend to be long because a lot of stuff happens in them. LotR seems to be long because every scene is 2-3 times longer than it needs to be. In the audiobook version, I listened as long as the entire length of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring (theatrical cut) before we even got out of the dang birthday party. I dunno. I love The Hobbit (the book and the Rankin-Bass animated version) but maybe the full epic saga just isn't for me.

The other book I've been reading in fits and starts on my phone is a memoir, and it's interesting but I don't know if it's worth talking about because I feel like the majority of it might be complete horseshit. I'll talk about it when I'm done maybe.

I guess that's it for now. I'll try to remember to make bite-sized entries more frequently for ease of consumption.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: V.Snares - A Giant Alien Force More Violent & Sick Than Anything You Can Imagine

Saturday is laundry day around these parts. My apartment complex's laundry room is only open from 8-4, so weekends are the only days I can do it. Laundry day used to be Sunday, but I've learned that Saturday has two advantages: one, if I don't get moving fast enough on Saturday, I at least have a backup option instead of having to wait another week; and two, the odds are much lower that there will be other people doing laundry that day. I guess other folks around here have stuff to do on a Friday night and they like to sleep in on Saturdays. This works for me, because there are only three working washing machines for a couple dozen-odd units (technically four, but one of them only accepts quarters, and there's no change machine [the other three let me pay with an app]) and competing with the neighbors for access is a frustrating, socially exhausting experience.

Laundry yesterday went about as smoothly as it could go. All the snow's gone, so walking down and back carrying a lot of weight wasn't dangerous. I didn't see another person, and although it rained on and off that day, I didn't get rained on. Also, I remembered to bring my 3DS with me for the one activity where it makes the most sense. I have a couple/three hours to kill for washing and drying, and having games is a great way to pass that time.

The potentially confounding factor is that laundry day is when I sometimes get to hang out with Laundry Cat, a cat who comes to visit me in the laundry room. For new readers, or anyone who needs a refresher, here are some of Laundry Cat's greatest hits:

( Cat photos )

If Laundry Cat shows up, obviously she'd take priority over games, but she doesn't come around quite as often in the winter, and I didn't see her yesterday. I hope she found somewhere warmer to be.

So once laundry was going, I pulled out my 3DS, which luckily I had remembered to turn off last time I used it so it still had some battery left. It's technically not a 3DS, it's a 2DSXL, which is fine because I wouldn't use the stereoscopic 3D function anyway. It's a lovely device with the exception of the power button, a rubbery little nub on the bottom of the machine that feels like an afterthought. You have to hold the button in to power it off, and every time I do I have to press so hard that I'm sure it's going to break. There's no way to shut it down in software, even though there's a software step in the shutdown process! Once I hold the button in long enough, a thing pops up on the screen that I have to tap to properly turn it off. It's like they don't want me to turn the thing off. So as a result, I usually just close it and hope I remember to plug it in when I get home, which I usually don't, so the battery's usually dead when I think to use it again, so now you're probably getting an idea why I don't play many 3DS games.

Anyway, I fired up New Super Mario Bros. 2, which if you don't remember was the one with a big coin-collecting gimmick. There's a 7-digit counter showing the total number of coins you've collected across all levels, which shows at all times on the level select screen and whenever you pause the game. I still haven't gotten far enough to learn what the point of it is. All of the level progress so far has been gated by how many of the big coins you collect, three in each level, just like traditional NSMB. There are some fun new coin toys, like a brick helmet Mario can wear that continuously spits out coins as you move around until you get hit or a certain amount of time passes. But, it just feels terrible to play. The D-pad on the 3DS is smaller than I'd like, and it just doesn't feel precise enough for the types of movement NSMB2 requires, and I'm certainly not playing a side-scrolling platformer with an analog pad. I think they want me to use the circle pad, because it was one of the big new 3DS features, and no, I'm not going to, you can't make me.

So after a couple frustrating levels, I started a game of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. You may remember a few years ago Koji Igarashi, the Castlevania guy, did a kickstarter to fund the development of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which was Symphony of the Night with the serial numbers filed off. It's actually quite a good game, I liked it a lot more than I remember liking Symphony of the Night when I tried playing that many years ago. I did at one point get hopelessly stuck, just like I did in SOTN, but this time I liked the game enough to swallow my pride and look up what I was missing. It ended up being one of the better exploration platformers (or "metroidvanias", if you must) I've played in recent memory.

Curse of the Moon is a companion game that I think started as a kickstarter stretch goal. It's a more straightforward level-based action platformer done in a retro "NES plus" style; the resolution and color palette resemble the NES Castlevania graphics, but it's widescreen and features animation and effects that wouldn't have been possible on the original hardware. This is my favorite way to do an "8-bit"-style game in the present day, and Inti Creates (a developer most known for their work on handheld Megaman games, I think) nailed it.

I had started a game before, but despite enjoying parts of it, I had bounced off. You're given the option when you start a new game of playing on "veteran" or "casual" mode. "Veteran" is described: "A style for those looking for a retro style challenge." "Casual" says "An easy-going style. Lives are unlimited, and taking damage does not knock back the player. There is no penalty for selecting this style."

The first time I played, I chose veteran, and I'm not really sure why. I don't need games to be super hard to enjoy them, but I had played Castlevania 3 as a kid, so I figured I should choose the mode that most closely resembles it. I figured the developers designed the game with that mode in mind, so that would probably be the most fun way to play. Well, since I've tried a few games featured on ranking the NES, I've learned something about myself: the main thing that makes me not want to play those games is the fact that taking damage knocks you back, often into a bottomless pit. That's the #1 reason I stop playing those games. There are games that I like everything about except for the fact that taking damage knocks you back. The limited lives aren't a big deal to me; I don't mind a little bit of trial and error, or repeating difficult parts until I master them. But the main features I want in a platformer are jumping and exploration. I don't mind action elements like shooting and sword-stabbing, they can add a lot to a platformer, but if the action fucks with the platforming, that's when I start getting annoyed.

Well, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is much better on casual mode. I'm now having a great time, not just a good one. There's no reason to play on veteran unless you like pointless frustration. I made it to level 4 and when I got home I left it in sleep mode and plugged it into the charger somewhere out of the way, and it'll be ready for me to pick right back up the next time I do laundry. Unless a certain cat requires my attention, of course.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Earthside - Watching the Earth Sink

There are lots of youtube channels I get excited about when I see they release a new video, but the only thing I consider "appointment viewing" is Jeff Gerstmann's Ranking the NES series. I don't consume nearly as much video game content as I used to, and Jeff's the only ex-Giant Bomb host I kept watching after that whole thing imploded, but his solo old game videos were my favorite thing on GB after Mario Party Party, and I'm really glad Patreon is allowing him to continue doing what he does. Every Friday for the last 6 months, Jeff's been playing and ranking game for the NES, licensed and unlicensed, with the goal of eventually ranking every game released in the US. As of today he's ranked 178 games, an average of 7-8 per episode. He streams them live on Twitch then uploads the video to youtube. He streams while I'm at work, so I don't get to watch live, but I wouldn't have 3 uninterrupted hours to watch anyway. It's always the video I look forward to watching when I get home from work.

He doesn't play every game to completion, but he plays enough to get a feel for them, at which point he ranks them on a list. It always feels like he gives every game a fair shake, and he tries to be as true to his own taste and intuition as possible. He's been let down by games he remembered loving as a kid, and pleasantly surprised by games that are legendarily bad. For example, Spelunker, a game famous for being shitty, made it all the to #110. So far. It's sure to go down as he ranks more games, but he found something to appreciate in it. It sucks, but I like it.

I'm not really watching to see if he agrees with my opinions though, I'm watching because he plays everything thoughtfully and has something interesting to say about each game. I'm also discovering a lot of games I missed. The NES was my first game machine, and I had a shoebox full of games at one point (until the power supply died and my parents sold all my games 😢) but I came nowhere close to seeing the full library; even now, 30 years later, there are games I've never seen before, there are games Jeff has never seen before, and it's always exciting when he uncovers a good one. You can see the full ranking list at 8bitnintendo.science (maintained by a fan) if you're just curious about the rankings.

My favorite NES game is The Guardian Legend (I named myself after a character from it.) He hasn't played that one yet, but he has played Gun-Nac, an incredible shmup made by the same developers that I was previously completely unaware of. I knew the name, and I assumed it was a shmup, but I had no idea it was so good. Jeff was coming to it as a sequel to Zanac, a game he loved as a kid, so we both appreciated it from different angles. I don't know if he'll end up liking TGL; the action-adventure segments might not be his thing, and that'll be fine. I'm sure he'll appreciate the craft that went into it, even if it doesn't rank that highly.

I've been thinking of stealing the idea and doing a ranking of Atari 2600 games. I never had an Atari as a kid, and when I played at the homes of friends and family, it was always just the handful of big hits, so I don't have much nostalgia for it, but it might be interesting to watch someone look at them with fresh eyes. I have a full 2600 rom set (which isn't hard, it's only 20MB; everyone should have one!) and I poke at it occasionally, and I've found some hidden gems. One favorite Pressure Cooker, an activision game that set the template for high-pressure cooking games like Diner Dash and Overcooked, and I still think it's a lot of fun today. Another one I like is Cosmic Commuter (also by activision. They made a lot of great games in the early 80s. Not so much today) where you pick up passengers in a space bus. There need to be more games about mass transit.

Would they rank higher than Pitfall! and Yars' Revenge? Probably not, I'd have to do the science to be sure, but if not they wouldn't be far behind. Most people probably think of the 2600 as having a couple good games and mountains of trash—E.T. was turned into a literal mountain of trash—but I think the library deserves a closer look. (In an emulator, with a real controller. Let's not be silly.)

I got back into LPs for a little while last year but kind of petered out. I was in the middle of Magic Knight Rayearth for the Saturn, which is a cute game with great music, but unfortunately I found playing it a lot duller than I remembered. Maybe I can dip my toes back in by ranking some 2600 games. They could be a lot shorter than the NES ranking videos, and shorter than the kind of stuff I usually play. Maybe I could find time for like, an hour a week. Shrug

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Misha - This Is How It Must Begin

I've seen some revisionism about the original 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games. Some people have been claiming that not only do the games not hold up, but in fact they were never good; anyone who believed so as a kid was just bamboozled by marketing nonsense about blast processing and doing what Nintendon't. I'd like to set the record straight.

I can't defend any post-Megadrive Sonic game (except Sonic Mania, which owns) but there are three good 16-bit Sonic games and one that's okay, and I won't idly sit by and let people talk mess about pre-1995 Sonic.

The most common complaint I see is that it sucks when you lose momentum. You're running along, going fast as you gotta do, when suddenly you don't roll into a ball fast enough and get hit by an enemy. You're knocked back, your rings go flying everywhere, and suddenly you're at a standstill. If there's even a small incline ahead of you, you have to tediously trudge or jump your way forward until you get to a spot where you can get up to speed again.

I agree, this is frustrating, and it was a problem for sure—in Sonic the Hedgehog 1. They realized this was a problem and immediately fixed it in the next game in the series by adding the spin-dash. No matter where you are, you can press down on the D-pad and the jump button to instantly get back up to full speed. The three great Sonic games all had the spindash: Sonic 2, Sonic CD, and Sonic & Knuckles.¹ Yes, you lose momentum sometimes in Sonic 1, and it's not fun, but the levels are designed to make it as painless as possible. You usually have room to back up a bit to get back up to speed, and sometimes it gives you a spring to help you along. But Sonic 1 has some other rough edges, and I can see why people wouldn't be into it. That's why I just consider the game okay.

The other complaint I see a lot is that the marketing lied to us, the Sonic games aren't actually that fast, they're just as slow as any other platformer, and if you try to go fast you'll just hit obstacle after obstacle, until you run out of rings and die.

And, yes: the marketing lied to us. Sonic the Hedgehog is, for the most part, a traditional platformer. That's why it takes time for Sonic to build up momentum. The marketing implied that you'd just be blasting along at full speed all the time, and listen to me: you don't want that game. You know what that game is? Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS. I'm not saying that game is bad, it's just not for me. It's for people who want that nonstop speedrun-oriented action. And judging by the mixed reception Sonic Rush and its sequel got, that's not most people. (although I am a big fan of the incredible soundtrack, by Hideki Naganuma of Jet Set Radio fame)

16-bit Sonic is a sidescrolling platformer, like Mario. Not as good as Mario, no one's going to argue that, but still pretty good. The levels are huge and contain a lot of secrets. That's why they give you a 10 minute time limit: sure, with enough practice you can get pretty good at the levels and speed through them in seconds, but for the casual player, they're much better if you play them like you'd play Mario. Take your time. Look around. There are portions of levels designed for you to go fast, usually somewhat on rails, and the sense of speed you get during these sections is fun, but you shouldn't let them dictate how you approach the rest of the game. Slow down! Enjoy the sights and sounds! The games are beautiful and the music owns. You do not, at the end of the day, got to go fast. If that's still not your cup of tea, that's fine, but they're good games.

1. Omission of Sonic 3 intentional. ↩

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Hideki Naganuma - Ethno Circus