How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Lady Who Is Actually The Bomb

I appreciate how King’s interpretation of our ‘glory days’ has my wife out of the house, and us on the couch. Could this be the beginnings of a budding bromance? Or at least a bromantic comedy?


I’m only surprised that Mountain Dew isn’t involved, somehow, as if our palates had regressed to some stunted teenage state. Once upon a time, ten thousand cups of coffee ago, it was DRINK of CHOICE, if never exactly the CHOICEST DRINK. Parents of the world! You don’t need to bat an eye when your boys start showing interest in girls. But when they start to show an interest in single malt Glenfiddich, then it might be time for The Talk.

First on the block has been Braid, a task that was in turns exhilarating, tedious, rewarding and oppressively inert. I find it curious that a game advertised as one that “treats your time and attention as precious” would have a secret item that you have to literally sit still and do nothing for an hour and a half to acquire. Waiting for the glacially slow cloud to whisk us from one side of the map to another, King and I employed our newly reclaimed precious time to the fullest, him scrambling madly to develop a vaccine for the Swine Flu, and I conference calling Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas to see if we couldn’t “get this silly little squabble out of our systems.”

Guys. Come on. Knock it off.

With global pandemic halted and peace in the middle-east secured, we returned to our game to see how our precious time had been invested. We were surprised to discover that our precious Xbox had frozen.

So we got to do it again.

Due to my nature, I am often labeled as a “completionist” when it comes to videogames, a term with which I’m not sure I’m satisfied. I tend to read books all the way through to the back cover, if for the simple reason that that’s where the end is. But it never lends itself to conversations like this:

“Hey, how’d you like that Nabakov you borrowed from me?”
“Man, it was awesome. I hundred percented it.”
“Oh, yeah? Does that unlock anything?”
“Well, it lets you re-read it, but with foreknowledge of the crushing banality of modern life that will ultimately lead to the protagonist's destruction, undone by their own unfettered wants and desires."

Also you get to dress this guy up as a clown.

I am not greedy, and do not ask for a lot out of the endings of games. Years ago I would toil for hours, if only to be presented with some warbling 8-bit ditty or pixelized animation. Perhaps this may be understood as the faintest echo of Pavlov's operant conditioning: Ring a bell, then give me a high-five. Whatever the case, it made finally collecting the eight stars in Braid worthy as a task in itself, even if the process let me feeling a little cold.

Perhaps it's that the reward of the true ending, is, essentially, a bald assertion of the very thing that all the story had been hinting towards from the get-go. How could there have been any doubt about things at this point? It all seemed to be struggling to settle for all time that classic zen koan: "When is a princess not a princess?"*

I will swallow my constant urge to spoil things, and instead couch things in ridiculously transparent entrendre instead. I mean, I know that Tim and the princess had an explosive relationship, but he just hasn’t been the same since she split. All he wanted was a nuclear family, but things began to mushroom out of control. He wanders around Manhattan projecting his failed hopes on the city, a Fat Man rejected for a Little Boy. Even after their fallout, she could always make him glow.




Oh princess. You were The Bomb.


- Rook

* When she's a METAPHOR!**

** Metaphor? I hardly touched 'hor!

Braid for Windows!

This is imperative! Braid is now available on Windows and can be downloaded online through Greenhouse and Steam for 15 dollars of the American persuasion. Buy it, buy it now!




Seriously, this game is important.

-King

I Have 99 Problems But Navigating Procedurally-Generated Two-Dimensional Space Ain't One

Spelunky bitches. Spelunky.

This game has me addicted and I blame Rook. He introduced it to me during the Murder Mystery/Birthday party he and his wife hosted recently and I've barely stopped playing it since.

It's sort of a combination of Mario and a Roguelike which makes for a good time. Each time you step into the dungeon the map is randomly generated and fully destructible. The objective is to work your way from the top of the room to an exit at the bottom 16 times. Every 4 rooms the setting changes from cave, to underground jungle, to ice cavern, to evil temple and any given room can have a number of 'feels' like an undead infestation, or complete darkness. You must navigate these rooms initially with naught but a whip, 4 hearts, 4 bombs, 4 ropes, and 3 flares.

Hearts are your life just as in the days of yore however with the danger of the dungeon and your small supply they are all too frequently not enough. Luckily you can save Damsels. Bringing a damsel to the rooms exit grants you a single heart. Granted just getting the ladies often loses you a heart or two from traps or critters, but what's a spelunker to do?

My only regret is that I have but four hearts to give.

As for the equipment additional supplies can be found through the dungeon in crates, on mini-bosses, or in shops. The shops randomly have additional bombs and ropes, or other equipment such as parachutes, guns, jetpacks and teleporters which you can purchase with the gold and gems you collect or make an attempt to steal the goods out form under the shopkeepers nose, though beware his shotgun. Killing a shopkeeper causes you to be wanted for the rest of your run, and many runs you will have.

Right now my score reads 456 plays, 455 deaths and 1 win. And I'm actually good at the game. Rarely do I die because the game is too hard or too cheap, in fact the game is rather simple and easy in it's design. More often it's because I don't take my time or I do something stupid like jumping down a hole before taking a look to see what's down there, and landing on some spikes.

Help Wanted: Tomb Raider
Pays approx. 1 million dollars an hour, make your own schedule
Self-resurrection experience a plus.

But that's the idea of the game, to die until you don't. There's a few reasons this works, first off, because the game creates each room randomly every time you enter it so every restart is new. You never have to play the same level twice. Secondly failures are generally just as entertaining as successes if not more so and finally, because each time you die you get better at the game.

That's my favourite part too, Learning little things piece by piece that make each subsequent run easier or more informed “Oh, I can hit things with the backswing from my whip? Spiders just got easier to kill.” “There's always a jetpack if I bomb behind the Alien ship? Easy mode!” “Oh, I guess the Countdown Ghost is invincible and kills me in one hit...well then.”

Ghosts have been oppressing video game heroes for far too long.

Since the beginning of my gaming history I've been drawn to the idea that I can get better at a game, not just through the conventions of the game, such as leveling up or finding better equipment, or even from gaining increased skill at controlling the game through dexterity and a better understanding of the control scheme. What really floats my boat is beating a game through mind powers. In the original Mario I eventually became able to beat the first level with my eyes closed because I simply knew where and when to jump. We all know the knowledge of where magic flutes and other warps are can expediate and ease the completion of a game and this sort of thing is becoming more and more prevalent.

It seems some designers aren't trying to immerse you in the game like so many of the current generations game developers do. They're simply saying “This is a game, see what you can do with it.” and while I appreciate being fully immersed it's also fun to just play a game sometimes.

Until next time, keep hitting things with a whip.

-King

Indie Games and The Raiders of The Lost Art

I’m a hardcore gamer. I’ve tea-bagged Covenant Elite, Saw Manny and Meche all the way to the Ninth Underworld on the Double N, Caught 252 Pokemon on the Red, completed FF7 at level 28 without Materia and beaten Super Mario Bros 3 in 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Wait…what? Oh I know it can be beaten in less than 15 minutes, but why would I want to? Mario 3 is fun times and a speed run cuts out half of an extraordinary game. See I like playing video games, and I play them a lot, new ones and old, but eventually you run out of old. Or at least that was the case. These days some new games are…old? I’m talking Independent games here.

Remember this? Probably not since you skipped it with a flute you goomba.

Now granted not all indie games are of ‘the old-school’, the very excellent Mount and Blade comes to mind immediately, but most indie games seep old school charm from every pixilated pore and a select few do it better than their predecessors. Yes I’m looking at you Cave Story. The most incredible thing is that usually these are one or two man operations. I can barely draw a stick man and coding? I don’t want to talk about it. Most of these guys are doing the whole thing solo.

Bobble-headed robots are way sexier than chicks in robot suits

So where do they come from? How can we find them? Well it can be tough to track them down and you really have to keep your finger on the pulse to find these gems. Personally I read TIGsource and The Indiegames Blog daily. Sometimes though, when the stars align and the portents are auspicious, independent developers get a break. Introversion, the previously mentioned Cave Story by Pixel (Now being ported to the Wii!) Braid by Jonathon Blow and 2D Boy's World of Goo come to mind immediately.

Oh, you’ve heard of those last two? That’s probably because Microsoft and Nintendo put on some rubber boots and jumped into the ocean recently. The industry is finally recognizing that their target demographic grew up with games just like these and we, brace yourself, remember them fondly. So they’ve been putting in an effort to dish out some great Indy games though Xbox Live and WiiWare. This is good! Sort of!

Don’t worry true believers, I’m not going to give all the cred for mainstream indie games to the mega corps, things like Steam and Penny Arcade’s Greenhouse have been doing their part, not to mention organizations like the IGDA So try a couple of these, they’re usually free and the ones that aren’t are worth it. At the very least you’ll be supporting diversity in the market. But I guess WW2 Shooters are good too.

Until next time, may you be a bad enough dude to rescue the president.

-King