Review: BIT.TRIP RUNNER (Mac)

Prerequisite: check out this video of an individual demonstrating their mastery of the game/toy Bop It.  It's best if you watch the whole thing, but I understand if you become impatient and bail early. BIT.TRIP RUNNER is a video game version of Bop It.  No, it's not an official tie-in, but the mechanics are transferred nearly verbatim.  In RUNNER you control a character who must dodge obstacles as the environment force-scrolls past.  Directional buttons trigger block, kick, slide, and vault actions while the spacebar executes a jump.  These moves are sort-of tied in to the accompanying music score, but mostly you rely on visual discernment to time and select your actions.  Like Bop It, one false move while playing will stop you in your tracks and force you to try again from the beginning.  Also like Bop It, you can beat and master RUNNER, but doing so is like learning to play a song that no one wants to listen to on an instrument that doesn't really exist.

When it came time for me to decide what I wanted to play in my grade school band, I chose percussion.  Drumming seemed more fun than brass or woodwinds, but I was also more confident in my ability to keep a beat over maintaining melody.  My sister took piano lessons, which I was encouraged to take as well, but never did.  We got a programmable electric piano at home eventually, and rather than actually play conventional music, I'd setup the percussion kit that assigned individual drums and cymbals to specific keys and make all sorts of noise.  There was also a neat trick you could do by pressing two low-octave "square lead" keys at the same time, producing some pretty satisfying bass rumbles.  I own a MPC drum machine, though it's been sorely underused.  I adore Rez and was a die-hard DDR player for several years.  In short, though I would not call myself a musician of any kind, I know my way around button/key-based beat making.  On its surface, I should love BIT.TRIP RUNNER.

Unfortunately for me, RUNNER plays how I always feared piano lessons would go: demanding, unforgiving, and with a slavish dedication to someone else's creativity rather than my own. In RUNNER, you can't study notes on a page to prepare, you must react in real time and memorize the level's patterns through failure.  At most, you have a full second to recognize what object is heading your way and tap the appropriate key to evade or deflect.  Each time you screw up, it's like the piano instructor wraps your knuckles with a ruler and points to the first note on the sheet.  If you play a piano piece correctly, you enjoy the satisfaction of hard-earned accomplishment along with the joy of hearing a song that you presumably like.  In RUNNER, you just earn arbitrary points and the music you've produced only occasionally sounds like a song.  There is no level editor or any way of really getting hands-on with the mechanics beyond the prescribed courses.

People have compared RUNNER to mobile games like Canabalt and Temple Run for their similar, forced running perspectives.  Both Canabalt and Temple Run use randomized obstacles and challenge players to get farther than their previous attempt, but as far as I'm aware, neither has endpoints.  RUNNER is broken up into 36 preset levels, and withholds progression until you complete the stage prior.  The big difference between RUNNER and something like Canabalt is how you feel after triggering a fail state.  With Canabalt it feels like the game playfully dares you to try it again.  You know losing is inevitable, but it's fun to try and get farther than last time.  In fact, "losing" isn't really "losing," it's just the end of the round.  Retries in RUNNER are instantaneous.  If you forget to kick a box on cue, the game zips you back to the start of the stage, and after a brief moment you're back on your way again.  I applaud Gaijin Games for making the process so snappy, but subsequent runs feel more like a matter of survival than heartfelt attempts on the part of the player. You're trapped in the gameplay loop until you either win or cry "uncle" and quit.

There are collectable gold bars throughout RUNNER that encourage a more daring style of play, but the game doesn't offer rewards that merit the effort required to snatch them all.  If you do collect every gold bar in a level you can play a bonus Pitfall-styled area, which is neat a couple times, but not 30+.  You only get one try at the bonus levels per completion of a regular stage, which means you may have spent a half hour trying to get a perfect run, only for your "prize" to last a fleeting handful of seconds.  The numerous retries on regular levels pushed me to ignore the gold bars as much as I could, eliminating several tricky maneuvers from my regimen, but also rendering the music more spartan, lacking the distinctive chimes emitted by grabbing the bars.  You could interpret the game as an incisive metaphor for the daily, 9-5 grind perpetuated by an uncompromising capitalist economy, but that's an unearned credit.  Instead, playing BIT.TRIP RUNNER feels like a really difficult motor skills exam – something for the sport stacking set.

I'm being pretty hard on RUNNER, but it does have its merits.  Visually, the game renders Atari 2600 graphics as 3D cubic blocks to grinning, stylistic effect.  If you collect enough point multipliers in a level, an old-school Activision rainbow will tail behind the titular runner as it goes – RUNNER's incentivization at its most effective.  Mechanically, the game is as sharp as it gets.  Though it asks for tight precision, failure is never the result of ambiguous design.  I could knock the effectiveness of RUNNER's musical implementation, but having listened to the soundtrack outside of the game, their track selection is appropriate and catchy.  Lastly, I began this review by comparing RUNNER to Bop It, but I should point out that I actually like Bop It.  It's a party icebreaker game that asks players to focus their attention, likely in a social situation that requires otherwise – a humorous juxtaposition.  As an unfortunate point of contrast, there just isn't much to laugh about in RUNNER.

Still, there are clearly a lot of people who dig what BIT.TRIP RUNNER brings to the table, and far be it from me to say not to like something people seem to enjoy, but the game feels masochistic for nostalgia's sake.  There's no denying its style, but you'd be hard pressed to locate any real substance here.  And if you choose to play BIT.TRIP RUNNER, make no mistake, you will be pressed...hard.

Review: Rayman Origins (Wii)

Let's get the critical evaluation out of the way: Rayman Origins is a fun, smartly-designed 2-D platformer that strikes a balance between the charm and detail of Kirby's Epic Yarn with the trial and error, twitch challenge of Super Meat Boy.  Sounds pretty good, right?  For the most part, it is.  Game reviewers have heaped near-universal praise upon the title using phrases like "wonderfully crafted," "gorgeous," and "controls perfectly."  I agree with all of these, and yet, Rayman Origins still comes off a bit empty.  The only reason I can think of for this disparity was the difficulty I had empathizing with the ragtag group of bohemian shit disturbers that serve as the game's protagonists.  This disconnect effectively eliminated my attachment to the characters' motivations and relegated the game to a product of craft rather than a work of art.

I do fear that this opinion could brand me as some kind of humorless square, but characters who have been created solely for mischief usually rub me the wrong way.  I have always been pretty straight-laced, staying organized and avoiding trouble whenever possible.  In elementary school, I observed conflicts and elicit conversations from a safe distance, honing my "excellent listener" skills overhearing discussions of cigarettes and R-rated movies.  I hated Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because he was the idiot who always dragged the others into avoidable hostile situations.  So, when Rayman Origins opened with the full cast of layabouts harmonizing beatnik music via chewing and snoring noises that essentially annoyed the neighbors into retaliation, I felt less like exacting revenge and more thankful that somebody said something.

At least in Mario games Nintendo fabricates a premise of "rescue" for your quest.  You might not desperately need to save the princess, but you assume Mario probably does, so you oblige.  The "white knight" stereotype isn't what makes the character interesting or believable – on its own the characterization is quite shallow.  It does set a stage for you to quickly get behind the protagonist's motivation though.  This works for morally ambiguous protagonists too, just using different criteria to match the context.  In contrast Rayman and his friends are a bunch of hedonists, apathetic to current affairs except when their collective buzz is at stake.  It's like playing a game where a small party of stoners embark on a quest to find the nearest convenience store and eat day-old taquitos.  Actually, nevermind, I'd totally give that game a shot too.

The fluidity of Rayman Origins' level design and platforming controls largely make up for the shortcomings in plot establishment, but only to the extant that great mechanics can reach on their own. The moment-to-moment satisfaction in Rayman Origins is quite high.  Levels are designed for smooth runs if played precisely.  If the sensation of speed was faster you might think you were playing the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel that never was.  Better yet, you never feel like the characters are out of your control.  If you screw up, there's always something you could have done better.  After all your hard work, finally you reach the end of the level and the camera zooms in to show Rayman thrusting his limbless torso around, mouth agape.  This guy again.  In the scene that follows, one of Rayman's big-nosed pals straddles an incredibly phallic test tube as it fills up with all of the Lums (yellow, glowing collectables) you found in the level.  When other reviewers talk about this game being "unmistakably French," this is what they're actually referring to.

So what am I left with in Rayman Origins but an excellent product of gameplay craft, shouldering an otherwise driveless game.  It's a shame because so many pieces are in place for Rayman Origins to be a certifiable work of art, but it falls short on a holistic level.  The mechanics that are present are rich, but they're not deep.  The game doesn't invite immersion – I got burned out after few levels each time I came back to it.  It's great that Ubisoft recently published a strikingly similar game for mobile devices, since Rayman Origins' structure is better tuned to short gameplay bursts over long-form, sit-down experiences.  If a game/painting/song doesn't ultimately provoke questions or reflection or welcome a more intimate play of engagement, then it's just serving a specifically crafted entertainment experience.  Sometimes that's exactly what I want, but I had higher hopes for Rayman Origins.

We can talk "art v craft" inconclusively for longer than it takes to play Rayman Origins, so let's just consider the established critical baselines as laid out by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.  To state it plainly, Kant divided art objects into "fine art," "agreeable art," and "craft."  A great deal of intricacy goes into these categorical assignments, but the easiest way to distinguish them from one another is by the purpose of the object in question.  Craft objects serve direct practical purposes: cups are vessels for water.  Agreeable art serves to entertain: a well-written joke incites laughter.  Fine art seeks to act as, well, art: a video installation provokes a play with ideas.  Many individuals hold fast against Kant's distinctions between art, craft, and entertainment, but institutions of the art world (museums, galleries, and art schools) still hang on to them as guideposts for taste.

Games, and obviously video games, weren't a part of this discussion in the 18th century, but Rayman Origins was clearly built for entertainment.  That said, entertainment itself could be interpreted as a practical purpose too, thus placing the game into the "craft" category as well.  You could argue that even if I absolutely adored Rayman and his buds, the game would still be "agreeable," not "fine," art.  Who knows whether that would actually be true though?  If art was just a matter of pushing sliders more to the left or right, then the answers to these questions would be obvious.  But I digress.  My point isn't to trudge around in semantic minutiae, but simply to concretize why my time with Rayman Origins left me lukewarm when most signs within and around the game seemed to be pointing in a more prestigious direction.

I want games that match the mechanical challenge they're so clearly capable of with intellectual challenge, or at least stimulation. I'd love to see developers use the gameplay systems from Rayman Origins as building blocks.  The side-scrolling action/platformer can be considered perfected at this point.  That's a milestone achievement, and deserving of serious praise, along with the economical UBIart framework used to create Rayman Origins' visual assets.  But what of it?  I've spent years playing games where I move a character to the right, so here's hoping that the next Rayman game will return the favor and actually move me.

Gold Skulltulla on Medium Difficulty

Hey there.  I wrote a review of Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii, and the folks over at gaming blog Medium Difficulty were kind enough to publish it.  Here it is!  In the review I examine the role that extensive game length has in terms of interactive storytelling.  Hope you like it, and thanks for reading.

Review: Digital: A Love Story (Mac)

It's often taken for granted that people who play a lot of video games know a lot about technology.  I'll attest that there is generally aptitude in these circles beyond that of the non-gamer crowd, but it's not something that comes entirely natural.  Maybe I'm just being defensive because I was always late to the party on so many aspects of new and emerging technological trends in the past 3 decades.  I didn't send an email or use AIM until I started college in 2002.  Same goes for having a cell phone for more than emergency calls.  I would have needed to be unrealistically aware of the personal computer scene at a very early age to feel nostalgic about the interface of the Amie Workbench, an Amiga analogue, and Bulletin Board System (BBS) communications represented in the game, Digital: A Love Story.  Since I wasn't, few of the game's techie in-jokes and references stick.  However, since Digital places you in a sort of 1988 simulation mode, the unfamiliarity lent itself to a more personally authentic experience.

You begin Digital as a someone who's using, for all intents and purposes, the Internet for the first time, but through the very limited lens of the Amie Workbench.  Visually, the game is the computer screen: everything fits the blue/white/orange color scheme, the monitor has heavy scanlines, and the cursor is a big, fat, red arrow.  You receive a message from a friend of your dad that tells you what to do to get on BBSes and chatting with folks.  Where instructions in a game can often remove you from the experience, here everything is presented in proper context and actually reads like messages real people would send.  Because the connection between using a computer to play and the game virtualizing a specific operating system is so direct, very little suspension of disbelief is needed to jump into the narrative.

As the title suggests, Digital is a love story, but it's also a mystery.  You're introduced to the "love interest" character, *Emilia, early on, and when she disappears, it's up to you to figure out what happened.  The narrative convention, which is also the primary game mechanic, is the exchange of BBS posts and private messages.  Everyone you interact with has a unique voice and motivation, creating conversations that reach far beyond typical NPC fare.  You never actually type any messages, instead simply hitting reply and reading contacts' responses.  This string of communication works best when you're in "conversation" with one or two other people and the back and forth is readily apparent.  At other times you'll just callously reply or send PMs to everyone on your list, making sure you're doing everything necessary to trigger the text that will allow you to progress further in the story.  The introduction to *Emilia follows the better of those two paths, and though it's clear that I was just messaging a fictional character as part of an interactive short story, I did develop an attachment to that character; enough of an attachment to drive the mystery plot forward with a degree of urgency.

The writing in Digital is very consistent, believable, and emotionally affecting.   Digital's designer and author, Christine Love, bills herself as a writer first, and it shows.  That's meant as a compliment to her writing skills, not a knock on her game design abilities.  Truly well written games are few and far between, but even fewer are as dependent on quality writing as Digital.  Characters' messages vary in articulation and sophistication, as you'd expect from a bunch of random people on the Internet.  I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's teenager-starring Paranoid Park for how real its characters felt despite, or perhaps because of, the amateur statuses of its actors.  Love is likewise able to find a tone that is reflective of the production process, and somehow more authentic in doing so. 

Digital plops you into the world of BBSes, stranger-in-a-strange-land style.  Yes, there's a missing person mystery to solve, but navigating the uncharted online world is a mysterious voyage in its own right.  Imagine a game that has a clear story objective, but in order to proceed you need to drive a tractor, and before you can drive the it you have to figure out how it works.  Do you need keys to start it?  Where are the keys?  Which lever is for reverse?  Oh wait, does this run on gas?!  BBSes are just as foreign to me as tractors, and I appreciated how Digital didn't assume any prior knowledge.  If there's a tendency nowadays to forget just how open the Internet is, typing in phone numbers in hopes of connecting to a heretofore unseen places is a healthy reminder.  No one even dials numbers to place phone calls anymore, further distancing us from the real technological processes happening in the background.  If you did hand-dial phone numbers, you might mess up and call a random bystander by mistake.  In Digital, instead of hanging up and correcting the error, every number has an unknown on the other end; there's a sense of discovery.

The feeling of openness makes for an ideal learning space, which goes as much for the in-game world as the one outside of it.  Digital teaches you about BBSes and early Internet history through message texts, but in allowing you to actually dial the numbers and direct message other users, you learn by doing.  The mystery/love story paces you through the learning process, heightening the meaning behind your actions.  Later on, the Internet "history lesson" takes some sensationalist turns, but it makes for a great moment of culmination when you finally gain access to the fabled University BBS where they don't just have direct messages, they have email!  A story that's willing to go a little over the top is helpful to make up for the potential dryness of a game centered around an archaic computer interface. The online communications depicted in Digital remain the foundation that our modern Internet is built upon, reminding us of the vast expanses available to users at increasing speeds and densities.  It's up to us to make the stories real.

Digital: A Love Story is available to download for free here.

Review: Limbo (Mac)

The most common understanding of afterlife pit-stop, Limbo, is one that blends in with Purgatory, both associated with wavering, in-between states.  In 2007 the Catholic Church released a document stating their thoughts on the eternal fates of infants who die without being baptized, concurrently addressing the validity of Limbo.  Even though their proclamation did not directly disqualify the existence of Limbo, they didn't take credit for the idea either.  Officially speaking, Limbo is only perpetuated by individuals, not the church, and was (and still is) more recognizable through the lens of pop culture than religious mandate.  While the 2007 document put the malleability of church doctrine into sharp relief, Danish video game developer, Playdead, was already hard at work on their debut title, Limbo: a game centered around the titular mystical locale.

Much the same way that the Catholic Church has decided to allow its members to believe in Limbo if they so choose, Playdead's Limbo (released in 2010) doesn't tell you what to believe about its world.  The developer has left scant details as to what is really happening in the game aside from the premise that a boy (the playable character) is looking for his sister.  The setting begins in a woodland area, transitions into an urbanized setting, and ends in a cavernous factory where gravity itself is in flux.  Does the boy find his sister in the end?  Maybe??  Even that is debatable.  Some narratives encourage participants to fill in the gaps with their mind.  Limbo is more like a figurative painting: you know what you're looking at, but it's up to you to decipher meaning enough to make the piece matter.

Limbo is a side-scrolling puzzle/platformer that has earned its cred by doing a lot with very little.  Visually the world is shown in black and white with characters as silhouettes.  The tone of the game is grim and spooky, furthered by the notion that most everything is hiding in the shadows.  Controls allow you to move left and right, jump, and grab things like ropes and push/pull boxes among other items.  There are enemies, but no weapons, making Limbo more akin to traditional survival horror than even the Resident Evil series has become.  The length of a full Limbo playthrough is also slim, ringing in at about a handful of hours.  The short runtime and abrupt ending come off as anti-climactic, but also as if Playdead is pushing you to open-interpretation rather than slow the show down so they can tie everything in a neat little bow for you.

More interesting than the inessential "story" is the way Limbo creates a mood of tension and dread.  The game begins with your character awaking in the forest, with no direction offered.  Right away there's no impression given that the game is holding your hand; you're on your own, all alone.  Props to the sound designers of Limbo for bringing the stark, colorless world to life with crisp sound effects as you dash through grassy patches, skid down dirt hills, and engage in any number of subtle activities that have been lusciously enriched by their audibility (headphones recommended).  The fact that these noises are often the sorts of things that are drowned out by the rest of life, but can be heard so crisply, makes you feel even more alone than visuals by themselves would be capable of.  So, the mood is set, but the tension springs from the fact that you'll be killed in Limbo early and often.

Death is always right around the bend, and the kills themselves are quite grisly.  The boy can be drowned, beheaded, impaled, or blown to bits, and blood, in silhouette of course, spurts out like the scene from Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights the Crazy 88s.  Checkpoints in Limbo are generous, so after a death you're placed right before the scene where you bit the dust and can take proper precautions so as not to die by the same hand twice.  As an unexpected result, the death mechanic feels like an especially gory take on Looney Tunes.  The animations are so over the top that you can't help but laugh at them after the initial cringe.  Plus, unless you're going for a "perfect run," death is of little consequence, the way Wile E. Coyote is right back to normal after a quick fade out/fade in.

The cartoonish violence serves to make the character seem more boyish in a world of boyish imagination.  Limbo is filled with giant spiders, mind-controlling worms, and other marauding lads right out of Lord of the Flies.  Filmmaker Wes Anderson uses violence in a similar fashion in his movie, to achieve similar weight.  One thing Anderson does to keep his characters grounded in a realm of real-world consequences is for someone to get physically hurt and bleed.  When we see the young scout troop in Moonrise Kingdom fight amongst themselves with arrows and knives, it's silly, but the conflict ends with visible injuries including a dead dog; everyone leaves the battleground bloodied.  Like Limbo, Anderson's worlds play by their own fantastical rules, but are kept relatable with their human suffering and perseverance.  Limbo uses violence to strike a similar balance, but comes from the other end, starting self-serious, but ultimately finding a suitable middleground.

It's unfortunate that so much of Limbo's great mood and tension fades away as you venture further in.  The opening trek through the dim forest is Limbo at its best: ominous with a real sense of danger.  As you progress further into the city, the giant bugs and lost boys appear less frequently until the back half of the game where they don't appear at all.  At this point the game becomes less about survival and more about solving puzzle boxes with increasingly complex physics.  Removed of tension, Limbo also looses its distinct appeal, so much so that when the finale kicks in, it ends the game at a low point.  The final third of the game incorporates switches that can reverse gravity, literalizing the notion of "limbo" as objects in range of the beam suspend between floor and ceiling with careful triggering.  Symbolically, this is an inventive culmination to reach, but the game doesn't bring enough of the full-fledged panache from its opening to make it feel like more than a contemplative, symbolic move.

There was nothing else quite like it upon release, and Limbo's impact on the game industry can be seen in a great number of titles that have co-opted its visual style.  Limbo has become one of the titles that popularly define what an indie game looks and feels like.  Hopefully it's reassuring for Playdead that even though Limbo only takes a brief evening to complete, it's a game that has a positive legacy within the indie games space that will help it stick in players' minds for years to come.

Review: Fotonica (Mac)

Running is not fun.  I remember being forced to run cross-country as a requirement for the basketball team in middle school and hating every minute of it.  I was able to get out of it one year, which was indeed glorious.  Despite this, 12 years later I trained for and raced in the 2010 Chicago half-marathon.  One could look at this act as masochistic (excuses aside, perhaps it was), but in reality I just wasn't very creative with my choice of exercise.  Afterwards I concluded that 13 miles is as far as humans are meant to go and vowed never to attempt to run beyond that distance.  Sure I was getting solid exercise and felt healthy, but the act of running remained as much of a drag as it ever was.

The vast majority of people in the world know how to run, itself being an iteration on one of the early milestones of an individual's existence: the first step.  In contrast, the core physical action needed to play video games is the button push, though the actual sophistication of a full control scheme often requires coordination of multiple button presses with complex timing.  This dynamic is not that far removed from the stepping/running analogy in that it takes behavioral reinforcement and muscle memory to be able to graduate from one action to the other.  The difficulty in achieving this proficiency should take partial credit for the reactionary influx of motion games: attempts at more closely tying core physical actions to those already known and understood by individuals, thus decreasing the learning curve.

On a mechanical level, the game Fotonica brings the systemic understanding of simple body motions into the realm of video games.  If you can press a computer keyboard button, any button, you can play Fotonica.  In the game you control a runner from first-person point of view by holding down a button to run, and releasing it to jump.  The goal is to vault from platform to platform, collecting pink orbs until leaping off a final plank into a glowing void.  Scores are tabulated based on how fast you ran and how many orbs you grabbed.  Fotonica seeks to replace "step" with "button press" in my analogy, but it's not a perfect substitution since the action of running remains at the same complexity as the button press; the relationship between the two is consequential.  A more accurate equation for Fotonica's architecture would be "button press = run."

Santa Ragione, the developers of Fotonica, have put quite a pretty wrapper on their title's minimal core mechanic.  Not to be too reductive, but to say the game looks like a mash-up of Mirror's Edge and Rez simply hits the nail on the head too accurately to ignore.  The world consists of hollow, white wireframe structures floating in black space.  A flurry of abstract shapes zoom past as you progress forth.  As you run, wireframe hands alternatively jut in and out of frame, increasing in frequency along with your running speed.  When landing a jump, green and purple color separation vibrates out from everything to heighten the sensation of impact.  An options menu allows you to turn off the hands, flat-shade everything, and turn your path into a simple tiled line, eliminating distractions and becoming ever more focused on depressing and letting off your button of choice.

Sometimes while playing Fotonica, it felt and looked like I was operating a training simulator for some other game, something more complicated.  This brings back the issue of whether or not the game has made virtual running any more fun than actual running.  The two are difficult to directly compare, but I do know that I enjoyed Metal Gear Solid substantially more than MGS: VR Missions, even if they did let you play as the cyborg ninja in the latter.  Fotonica can feel very treadmill-like, but without the benefits of actual exercise; sort of like I'm working out my MacBook's CPU.  In the game's defense, the sensation of speed exceeds simulation velocities, allowing you to perform actions beyond human capabilities, which does carry a satisfying edge.  The visual style, coupled with the ambient electronic soundtrack creates a cool, other-worldly atmosphere that remains a pleasure to exist in, even if your ability to explore it is quite limited.

When I go for a run outside, I like to listen to music or podcasts as a bit of a distraction, but in Fotonica, I found that I play better when I simplify the visual design as much as possible.  With the complex graphic style turned on, you'll encounter parts of levels where you run through pipes, which are pretty psychedelic to behold, but very difficult to find your bearings within.  Toggling on the "Pure" visual style makes those tubes appear as two layers of platforms, one "in" the pipe, and one "on top."  So, to play Fotonica well is to be closely in tune with the mechanics, and to play it better, you need to eliminate obstacles.  The minimal design approach compliments this zen sensibility.  Become one with the spacebar.

On the subject of PC game controls, I appreciate the idea of a one-button game.  Growing up on video game consoles, not only am I used to holding a controller in my hands for gaming, but have been privy to incremental adjustments to the evolving layouts of peripherals through decades of hardware generations.  Never being much of a PC gamer, the idea of using a mouse and keyboard for action games might as well be the control panel of a jet plane.  It's not immediately apparent to me how to get everything to work, and I haven't put in the practice hours to refine my abilities.  So, I see the prospect of someone saying "forget all that, just use this one button" as having certain surface appeal.

On one hand, Fotonica is a triumph of accessible game design, but on the other, it's a button-pressing exam.  It's a game that upon objective reflection of what I've physically spent my time doing (pressing and releasing a button over and over), leads me to label Fotonica as more of a "in-between" game, than one to sit down and really concentrate on.  This makes sense as so many touchscreen and mobile games offer similarly approachable control schemes, and are ideally played while waiting for something else in our lives to occur.  In these situations, people without games impatiently tap their toes or wrap their fingertips to bide their time, but the game-inclined among us can not only play games to occupy that space, but continue to utilize those same physical actions for something else.  Fotonica never set out to make running fun, but it does a lot to improve what it means to press a button.

Review: Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

We've been told that space is the final frontier, but in the US we're witnessing the retiring of our nation's fleet of space shuttles due to scaled back government funding for manned outer space exploration.  Sure, private enterprises like SpaceX (with tremendous help from NASA) will continue the bold pursuit into the unknown, but the initiative's removal from the national docket leaves it to capture the attention of those who seek it out rather than the hearts of potentially any forward-thinking citizen with an inkling for discovery.  Human outer space exploration certainly inspired its fair share of scientific research and, perhaps in equal measure, the imaginations of thousands of artists, writers, and creative thinkers.  I have a feeling legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto always wanted his Mario character to explore space too.  In 2007's Super Mario Galaxy (SMG), Nintendo did just that, constructing an interplanetary mash-up of the Mushroom Kingdom and the Milky Way that serves as the perfect playground for another Mario adventure.  SMG may not capitalize on the full potential of its unique gravity-defying setting, but its desire to introduce players to a kind of world they've never quite come across is clear from the outset.

Mario games have always had inexplicably floating platforms, but in SMG those platforms usually come with their own gravitational pull, meaning you can run around a spherical "planet" without fear of falling off.  The general feel and aesthetic of this brand of platforming draws less from Hubble telescope images, and more from the likes of a giant mobile come to life.  Think Le Petit Prince multiplied by the moon-rolling credit sequence from Katamari Damacy and you're getting there. The outcome is not that you feel as if you're traversing across vast expanses, but rather that someone dumped out a toy chest in orbit of a small satellite and asked you to make sense of it.  SMG is still a platformer at heart, and to that end it is more about Mario's relationship with various floating objects than it is the zero-gravity environment that exists outside of objects' miniature atmospheres.

Given the space backdrop and the exploratory inclinations of previous polygonal Marios, I was surprised by how narrow SMG's critical path is.  Game structure and mechanics in SMG are not dissimilar from 64 or Sunshine (3D platforming with a hub world containing levels with multiple individual challenges), but a much larger quantity of the levels here push you along one specific route with little-to-no room for deviation.  For some games, this might be less of an issue, but 3D Mario games have a staunch precedent for collectible hunting and expansive levels with hidden nooks, making the lack thereof quite noticeable.

Let's not rag on SMG for tweaking the formula, but instead for the way it misapplies a swath of classic Mario tropes.  Take coins for example.  Coins in previous titles were a valued collectible item, earning you extra lives or potentially stars (symbolizing completion of a task), while also refilling lost health points.  In SMG coins only exist to revitalize health and for tallying a non-rewardable high score on a per-level basis.  A coin can help out in a pinch, but there's nothing to gain by "collecting" them.  Or how about the "lives" system in general?  Extra lives are worthless here since there's barely any reason you'll need more than the handful you begin with, plus the 5 Toad provides you every time you boot up the game.  As a final deflating action, when you quit out of the game, your lives count is returned to the default quantity.  Thus the idea of taking a chance on a risky jump to acquire a green 1-up mushroom always comes off as a poor value proposition.  With no rare grabs to incentivize more skillful platforming I found myself hanging close to the middle of the road, which remains a perfectly engaging ride on its own, but leaves a substantial amount of underused content around the fringes.

SMG's shortcomings with story, camera, and item implementation are even more of a shame considering how impeccable the universe Nintendo has put together presents itself.  There's inspired visual design for bringing the likes of lava, desert, and ice levels into the realm of fluctuating gravity. Shiny textures like brushed metal and floating troughs of water glisten with a tactile aura that will have your synesthesic senses tingling.  The orchestral score dynamically swells and swoons with an emotional range that an actual Mario plotline could only dream of.  I may have had issues with the controls at times, mainly due to unmanipulable camera angles, but the occasions where you bust out motion-specific commands functioned well and added some welcome variety to the standard run/jump activities.  During normal gameplay scenarios, a swift Wiimote whip will trigger a spin attack for Mario, replacing the somewhat clumsy punching ability from the N64 days.  Say what you will about the pervasiveness of waggle motions on the Wii, but this one doesn't require more than a quick wrist flip and the resulting action makes sense with the motion.  It's like pulling the thread out from a top to get it spinning upright.

I doubt SMG is going to inspire the next generation of astronauts since it has far more in common with the world of Power Stars than real ones.  The game takes an amateur-science approach to astrophysics and runs with it before all the data has been collected.  This can lead to inconsistencies (which objects are "planets," and which are just platforms?) but ultimately it serves to set a tone where it's pertinent to pay attention to the action instead of stopping to contemplate why everything around you is happening and how it's possible.  I mean, how is it that Mario gains the skill of breathing in the vacuum of space, but he can't breathe underwater?  It's not important, and there is no answer anyway.  There's an heir to a shelled dinosaur throne commanding a flying pirate ship shooting fireballs at you.  It's a Mario game, so this is what you signed up for.

Review: Journey (PS3)

I used to persistently need the latest video games simply because I was driven to have the new thing.  Now, I'm content to wait months, even years after a game's release to pick it up, knowing I'll pay significantly less for it.  Despite this, I stay up to the minute on the ongoings of the game industry and see a renewed value in playing games upon release that have significant online integration or a collective sociocultural metagame.  The third-person wandering/jumping simulator, Journey, is one of those critical zeitgeist titles that not only has everyone playing, but also musing about.  In what has become a rare case for me, I actually got to spend a decent amount of time with a truly contemporary game; enough to play it through more than once and watch other people play as well.  It's a special game that strengthens and validates my convictions toward games as an artistic medium.

Journey is thatgamecompany's third PS3 game, and also their best.  You play as a robed figure with a glyph-laden scarf which determines how high you can jump based on its length.  The measure of your scarf can be increased by finding hidden glowy things throughout the world.  Other than that, the basic task is to explore the sand-covered landscape, traversing platforms toward a shining mountain top that seems many miles away.  If online, sometimes another human player will join your game and play along, but you don't have to stay together if you don't want to.  There are a few pitfalls and some light puzzle solving, but the bulk of what makes Journey special is what it does with this seemingly bare-bones design.

The easiest parallel between Journey and works from a different creative medium is film.  I can't think of another title that has executed cinematic gameplay to such a loyal extent as Journey.  Given 2011's proclivity towards silent film, the comparisons are all the easier.  Journey contains no dialogue, just chirp tones that can be used for communicating with an anonymous online partner.  Much like Melie's fantastical works, thatgamecompany created a world of constant visual wonderment: a cinematographer's utopia.  You have control over the camera most of the time, but at key moments the game takes over.  This could be to show a particular action sequence from a flattering angle where the sunlight optimally beams through archways making your sandy path glisten, or to frame the mountain top that serves a your destination in a way that makes it seem ever-distant.  The game's duration is on par with a typical full-length feature, making replays feel like rewatching a beloved film out of your home video collection.  You know how the plot goes, but it's exciting when your favorite scenes pop up again.

The multiplayer component of Journey seems like the kind of mechanic that would be at odds with this cinematic flair, but it actually supports it.  Because players' interactions are so limited, there's no way to grief your partner that will ruin their experience.  You could chirp a lot, which would be strange, but there's even a stage in the game where that ability is all but shuttered.  At worst you could attempt to leave the other player in the dust or simply disable the online feature.  At best you make your way through Journey and complete it as a twosome.  There's something to be said for playing Journey solo.  It's a solemn, contemplative experience: quiet and a little sad.  As a pair, there are plenty of scenarios that, ironically, I can best describe as dialogues:

"Wait up."
"OK, I'll stay here."

"Let's do this."
"I'm ready."

"This is crazy!"
"I know!"

"Where did you go?"
"Over here.  Coast is clear."

"Hello?"
"..."

"There's something down there."
"Follow me."

"Oh man, this is it."
"Let's go together."

The way in which I generated theses words in my mind is akin to writing speaking parts for characters in a painting.  Imagine Seurat's Sunday Afternoon where you get to play as the pet monkey.  If only a phoenix made of ribbons would emerge out of the water.  The point is that Journey stirs your imagination, during play, to fill in the gaps it purposefully creates with its minimalist approach.  I haven't played another game that does that.  You build a relationship with the other character making completion of the game's trails more emotionally resonant than the solo experience.

I've noticed a number of critics not just reviewing the game, but recounting their playthrough(s) of Journey, as if there's significant variation in the stories to tell.  I mean, how different could they be from mine?  It's not like Journey has MMO levels of complexity to its online interactions and player agency, yet people are compelled to spin their personal tales.  I only refrained myself because I've seen so many other writers touch on the subject, and people are saying rather similar things.  Surely this is an intended outcome of the game's design, making the player feel like they've taken on some sort of trek, albeit virtual, that had them invested enough in the game world to empathize and identify with the characters.  Are some players just being sentimental or is Journey designed to evoke sentimentality from those willing to participate in the silent melodrama?  For me, it's the latter.

Part of what makes Journey open to these types of responses is that it limits the number of technical hiccups that could possibly break the mood, shifting the focus on the characters literal forward progress.  The action moves with a serene fluidity, allowing you to build momentum and glide along with an exaggerated tangibility that feels just superhuman enough.  My main gripe with thatgamecompany's previous title, Flower, was how much time I spent missing my targets and having to stop and slowly turn around, with only the Sixaxis controls at my disposal.  With Journey, not only are motion controls optional, but when speeds do ramp up you can simply enjoy engaging with the slope instead of having to meet some objective all the while.  The resulting achievement is that moment-to-moment gameplay in Journey maintains a consistency in your character's relationship to the world and keeps players' attentions focused on those interactions.

At the end of Journey, the game tells you the usernames of the actual humans you played with, which is the right amount of metadata to allow into this game, and presented at the right time.  It's as if the game knows you could be about to disconnect with its world, and pulls you in one last time to say, "Yes, you just finished a video game, but something real happened here."  My reaction to this was to press "start" and do it all again.

Review: Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)

So, I was just about to head to the fabric store when I got a message from my friend Zeke; he said he wanted to come over to my place and hangout.  I briefly popped in at the fabric shop and picked up some new patterns before taking the short walk to my apartment.  When I got there, Zeke flew in, paid some compliments to my interior decoration and then pleasantly milled about the space.  I decided this would be a great photo opportunity seeing as I just reupholstered my couch and carefully balanced a trio of pizzas on top of the piano.  I snapped the picture which I suppose I could've kept forever, stored somewhere on the Wii's internal memory.  These Animal Crossing-like circumstances are actually just an aside to the main quest in Kirby's Epic Yarn, but ones that allowed me to literally invest in the game world (with fake in-game currency, mind you).

Kirby's 2010 adventure transports Nintendo's pink cream puff to an enthreaded world of fabric, seams, and buttons.  Instead of inhaling enemies and stealing their abilities, Kirby has a lasso that he can use to unravel his foes.  The lasso is a multifunctional tool that is also used to traverse across the patchwork 2D levels, swinging from buttons, pulling open zippered compartments, and ripping off tabs to reveal hidden items.  The world plays like an exquisitely designed playground.  Individual levels offer a breezy play-space where the largest penalty is having to regather collectible beads strewn around you after getting hit or falling down a hole.  There's something very Montessori about the whole experience.

Accordingly, Epic Yarn has a very kid-friendly visual style that probably makes it appealing to the early childhood set, but shouldn't dissuade adult players from diving in too.  I prefer to think of the game not as "for kids" but rather of a childlike aesthetic akin to a Michel Gondry video.  If the gameplay fell into the overly simplistic and repetitive realm of something like Dora the Explorer where characters pedantically beat mechanics and clues into you until you can recite them backwards and in Spanish, then there wouldn't be anything to vouch for in Epic Yarn on behalf of adults.  Thankfully, this is definitely not the case.  There is challenge in this game, though it is by no means "hard," and most of the trickier parts are optional.  The ease with which Kirby's Epic Yarn opens the world to your availability is one of its greatest assets.

The amount of time I have available for playing games is nowhere near where it used to be, and somehow this "kids" game really understands and accommodates that.  The game's levels are built on a hub system quite similar to Kirby's Adventure (a franchise favorite of mine), allowing you to pop in and run through in short bursts.  The collectibles and medal awards make for impulse retries if you miss something the first time around.  Achieving gold medals and completing side quest challenges are not necessary to progress in the game, but exist for the player seeking to maximize value out of it.  This material is not padding though; individual challenges, issued by tenants of Kirby's apartment building, are clever puzzles that offer something for the player wary of a game without death states.  Tasks like carrying ball-shaped creatures from one end of a level to another within a time limit push you to engage with individual mechanics from the main game in unique scenarios that showcase just how smoothly even the tiniest details have been executed.  The cherry on top is the super friendly UI that lets you hop around the hub world with ease and bring in a 2nd player at the beginning of any level.

Speaking of the co-op player, let's just take a moment to give new character Prince Fluff his due.  My understanding is that this game was originally being developed as a new IP, but creators were made to transform it into a Kirby game.  Nothing against the pink cream puff, but Prince Fluff is really an awesome character design; he's basically a blue, playfully peeved-looking version of Kirby with a sweet crown on his head.  Even though I played through almost all of this game solo, Fluff's existence strongly incentivised me to give co-op a fair shake.  Playing Epic Yarn with another person is probably the ideal way to go since it changes some of Kirby's super powers in interesting ways and means Prince Fluff is always hanging around.

Despite my enthusiasm for this new character, I was surprised by how much Kirby fan service actually resonated with me.  The game makes callbacks to its franchise history effortlessly, peppering recognizable enemies, music, and items throughout (moreso in the final stretch), in a way that co-opts them into Epic Yarn's world rather than relying on nostalgic winks and nods.  Yes there's a cyclops lightning cloud at some point, but it's presented in a matter-of-fact way.  There is a rich world here with some historical backstory probably, but not in a way that's important to enjoying the core gameplay or following the narrative.  This nonchalance made me care about the realm of Dreamland even more since it allowed me to become invested in it through playing instead of being shown outright that I'm supposed to care.

Nintendo has increasingly used Kirby as an outlet to experiment with some out-there, ingenious game mechanics, and Kirby's Epic Yarn is yet another successful turn for the amoebic mascot.  The only disservice of that statement is that it makes the game sound like a bit of an test subject: an interesting concept awaiting implementation in a "full title" somewhere down the line.  Kirby's Epic Yarn is a fully realized vision; the trial and error has been worked out prior.  I have no disclaimers, no excuses, and no reservations about recommending anyone with a Wii play this game.  It's simply one of the most consistently satisfying games of recent memory.

Behold! The Art of Video Games

This past weekend the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) opened The Art of Video Games: a history-spanning account of the life of the medium.  It's a big coming out party for games-as-art champions who get to see the games they love stand in the limelight on a national stage.  The show was put together with great care and respect by guest curator Chris Melissinos, but perhaps the most significant thing about The Art of Video Games is that it exists at all.

The title of the exhibition is so purely descriptive it seems like it should be the subtitle to something written in leetspeak.  I imagine the reasons for such a bland header are multifold.  There's a wide audience of museum goers who know nothing about games and the straightforward title lets them know what they're in for.  It plays it safe, which could be used as a descriptor of the entire show.  It isn't surprising that SAAM would want to avoid controversy, especially in the wake of the hot water their housemate, the National Portrait Gallery, found themselves in with their Hide/Seek exhibition.  Also, the Smithsonian can be a stuffy place, and The Art of Video Games is a sign of goodwill on the part of games advocates who are willing to keep the crazy in the box in exchange for a solid dose of recognition.

3-channel video showing gamers' faces as they play

The exhibition consists of three rooms: a "visual art of games" display, a hands-on arcade space, and an archival console timeline.  Aside from the hilarious video footage of gamers' faces as they play, the initial room seems geared towards showing the visual appeal and traditional craft of game aesthetics.  Concept art and storyboards are installed salon-style, and a 5-channel display shows the graphical leaps in video games hardware over the past few decades.  I imagine the first room gives non-gamers something to latch onto that's a bit more familiar for an art museum.

Moving forward, visitors enter a wide open space with a handful of large projected games to play, each contained within a giant half-cylinder "arcade cabinet."  The whole room is aglow in purple, blue, and black stenciled lights, offering an aesthetic that's very roller rink/lazer tag arena.  During the opening weekend there were lines for the multi-generationally recognizable Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros.  People were playing Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island too, but the nature of those adventure titles made them more suitable for a less crowded setting.  Along with Flower, these are the only playable games in the exhibition.

A giant playable version of the original Pac-Man

The third space, the console timeline, seems like the centerpiece of the show.  In this room, again bathed in purple, vertical structures display video game consoles individually behind glass and pair them with four games each.  The games are divided evenly into Action, Target, Adventure, and Tactics categories, offering a better glance at genre evolutions than necessarily the best or most important games on a particular system.  Each tower has a button per game that plays a video with voiceover describing why the game is of significance and additional contextual details.  Unfortunately, some of the game selections feel like an unnecessary stretch to prove their worth.  The video for TRON: Maze-Atron even admits that the game wasn't very good, yet, here it is.  It may have been a noble effort to democratize the selection process, but it's difficult to see that as a plus given some of the resulting picks; I'm looking at you Worms Armageddon.

It's frustrating to see an exhibition of video games both spread itself too thin and miss essential pieces at the same time, but The Art of Video Games does just that.  Everyone could have their list of impossible-to-satisfy omissions, but I find it hard to stand behind the absence of all fighting games and, by extension, arcades.  On the other end of the spectrum, the broad survey of games is rooted in understanding chronological history more than communicating a clear argument for why we should view games as artworks.  Perhaps "games are art" is the inherent assumption, given the context of the exhibition in an art museum, but I was hoping for a little more intellectual rumination on the subject.

Video game history on display in chronological order

I love video games, but I realize this show is only partially meant for me.  I don't go into an art exhibition expecting to adore every piece, but I do need to find resonance in the core conceits of the artists and curators who bring everything together.  This is a sentiment that The Art of Video Games ultimately achieves.   Melissinos has painted a history of games that may not be a mirror reflection of actual events, but it is a narrative that makes sense, and is actually digestible.  The show is a foot in the door for the medium that will hopefully lead to increasingly daring efforts in the future.

The opening of The Art of Video Games was supplemented by talks and panel discussions as part of Gamefest, covered here previously.

Review: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (WiiVC/SNES)

Should we review old games as artifacts or in the same light as their contemporary brethren?  Even if a new title is released with decidedly retro stylings, does its position upon release matter more than any time in the future?  The relevancy of art often fluctuates based on where a society or individual is in their lifespan at a given point in time.  I wonder how people 10 years from now will view retro-styled games produced in 2010, 2011, or 2012.  Will they be seen as artifacts the same way as games from the 1980s, or has this pixel-art fetishism somehow put things on an even keel?

I've now played every console Legend of Zelda game with the exception of Skyward Sword.  Most recently I took my maiden voyage through the oft lauded SNES entry: A Link to the Past.  It's impossible to view this game in a vacuum where I can unremember collecting the Triforce some 7 times prior.  Yet it's also unrealistic to expect this game to be iteratively better than say, Twilight Princess.  Considering these factors and most of all my general adoration for the Zelda franchise, I was still truly stunned to find myself in an early dungeon of LttP almost totally lacking the desire to continue forward.  Ultimately I did push on, partly due to my self-inflicted charge to finish games that I purchase, but also because I possessed optimism that this version of Hyrule could grow on me.

LttP is the template for almost every Zelda game that has followed it.  I had assumed that these precursory duties belonged to N64 showpiece Ocarina of Time, but now understand that game more for what it did to change how the series' core mechanics were implemented.  The structure of the Zelda game and its modern tropes fall square on LttP's shoulders.  Master Sword?  Check.  Parallel worlds?  Check.  Spin attack?  Check.  Some of these traits are more integral than others, but my point is to illustrate how far-reaching and specific LttP's role as a mold for the franchise was and how difficult it is to play in 2012 as anything other than a piece of history.

In light of Nintendo's recent bend of pedantic in-game instructions for how to use Wii controls, it's refreshing to play a Zelda game that hearkens back to simpler times when you could press "start," enter a cave, pick up a sword and begin an adventure.  A pitfall of this strategy is that it requires a high level of preconceived curiosity and exploratory desire on the part of the player that is more difficult to achieve when the world is somewhat familiar and lacking the visual "awe" factor that usually accompanies these flagship titles at initial release.  Additionally LttP offers a decent amount of player choice, which is always neat to see in older games, but once again this relies heavily on your own initiative since the game merely suggests where to try next, rarely narrowing where you can actually explore.

Put in perspective of the whole Zelda bloodline, LttP feels the most unique in its dungeon layouts.  You know the drill when it comes to the objective list in a given dungeon: fight enemies, locate map and compass, unlock doors, pull switches, discover special item, and defeat the boss.  However, the physical blueprints for these levels use verticality to add a dimension that was not a part of previous 2D Zeldas (I can't speak to DS entries).  This is implemented in individual spaces with ladders and staircases that lead to higher ledges and walkways, but also on a more macro level with the dungeons being multiple stories high.  In a single room this changes the way you approach enemies, perhaps prompting you to remain on higher ground, hurling pots at enemies below instead of jumping down into a sword fight.  Considering the entire dungeon as a puzzle, some rooms are placed directly above others, encouraging you to blow holes in the floor to gain access to depths otherwise unreachable.  This puzzle design sensibility has been carried into the polygonal Zeldas out of necessity to make a compelling three-dimensional experience.  In LttP the verticality feels truly innovative; it's version of Hyrule might not be "round," but it's definitely more than just a flat surface.

I began to approach sitting down to play more LttP similarly to filling out a Sudoku, as it required me to be in the mood for solving that particular brand of puzzle.  I feel a little bad constantly conjuring up references to other Zelda games in this review, but how else can a game like this be evaluated in 2012?  It's a franchise so staunchly rooted in its formula that it would almost be like writing a Madden review that doesn't acknowledge the previous year's game's existence.  Often with Zelda games, style differentiation is enough to warrant giving each entry a try.  Nintendo consistently trots out top-notch art direction no matter how underpowered the hardware they work with may be.  Perhaps Zelda games really are meant to be played exclusively around the time they originally come to market.  This allows enough time between doses to build the demand for a new version, while the visual changes make things appear just different enough to distinguish it from the last one.

On the other hand LttP is still a game worth playing on its own merits, as many of my gripes are personal in nature.  Uncovering the original appearances of so many Zelda standbys was a pleasant surprise.  The overall difficulty was spot on.  There's little more thrilling in an action sequence than besting a powerful foe by the skin of your teeth, which LttP offered more than a couple times.  I wouldn't say the game ever really got its hooks in me, but it came closest with its brainteasingly tricky puzzles.  I faulted LttP's early game for asking the player to bring too much curiosity to the table, but once I began accomplishing the games tasks, their occasionally harrowing nature had me intrigued enough that I was eager to see what else those clever Nintendo developers had up their sleeves.

Completing Twilight Princess granted me with a cautious optimism for the future of my beloved franchise, but A Link to the Past has left me with a sense of acceptance that Zelda is what Zelda is.  What it is is something pretty grand though.  It may be built around a formulaic structure, but it's a system that works.  My only fear is a personal one: that I've exasperated this series' magical hold on me.  Though, since I've laid out that I think these games are optimally played when they're most current, I suppose I should withhold judgment until reporting back post-Skyward Sword.  The fact that I'd even seek to play more Zelda after this must count for something, right?

Review: Not Tetris 2 (Mac)

Tetris has changed, apparently. There are so many versions of the seminal block puzzle title that small variations can make all the difference in selecting which one to play. I have spent my time with Tetris almost exclusively on the NES and Game Boy, and have been surprised at how difficult it is for me to accept how the game controls on other platforms. I gave the recent PSN iteration a spin only to find the change in what the up and down buttons do quite debilitating. I like to think I'm pretty good at Tetris, but faced with the option of reeducating my synapses, I've decided to stick with what I know.

This revelation has left my desires for fresh takes on the Tetris formula to come from games that diverge significantly from the original structure (Tetrisphere, Tetris Attack, etc).  This way I wouldn't have to overwrite any of those twitch instincts I've have developed over the years.  This must be the sort of thing that drives the hardcore fighting game community crazy as their prized title gets tweaked in successive sequels and updates.  I own a copy of Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection which allows you to select 5 versions of Street Fighter II Chun Li's.  To the uninitiated, it's confounding.

In no way did I expect Not Tetris 2 (NT2) to tie into any of these issues, because it appeared to be more of a mildly amusing gag than a real game.  NT2 is visually the Game Boy version of Tetris, monochrome design and all, but with a physics-based play structure.  It's pretty amusing to have pieces capable of 360 degree rotation, bouncing and spinning off one another, and ultimately building an unfixable mess that fills up the entire space.  When I first began playing NT2, it was just that; actually playing well seemed not only impossible, but against the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the game.

But I kept playing it.

The goal shifted from simply figuring our how to play NT2 to how achieve a higher score.  This is something that in the long term, my old Tetris games never truly provided because they're lacking an internal battery to retain leaderboards.  I developed various strategies to best tackle NT2.  Firstly you have to approach block stacking with greater patience and care than classic Tetris because of the delicate rotational balancing required to place pieces in specific crevices.  You can press a piece up against the side wall to get it in a "right angle" position, which is helpful to maximize your early game before things get messy.  If you've got a decent pile built up at the bottom, I found that holding the "down" button as you place new pieces will slam them with extra force that can occasionally trigger a line clear somewhere below (line clears are based on horizontal block density).

I could continue divulging my strategies, but I should note that I reached a point where my feelings toward the game turned about face: I hit a 9999 point cap.  This made me feel conflicted about the whole play experience.  It seemed like maybe I had been playing something that wasn't really meant to be played.  I come from an art background, which has taught me that you shouldn't always believe what an artist says about their own work.  Artists have every right to lie about what a piece means or what their inspiration was.  Heck, maybe the explanation is its own separate piece of performance art!  Was NT2 a game, despite itself?

The amount of time I spent with NT2 dropped dramatically after reaching the cap.  Modern story-driven games add meta-game achievements, side quests, and multiplayer modes to flesh out their worlds, which also keeps us playing them longer.  Old arcade games like Tetris need that high-score mechanic to incentivize replay.  I suppose in this regard that I've "beat" NT2, but that's not something I'd quote in the game's favor, even if it's cool to say about a Tetris game.

Not Tetris 2 is definitely worth experiencing, but as for seriously playing it, that depends on personal discretion, and perhaps a releveling of what to expect from a free, interactive experiment.  Download Not Tetris 2 for free here.