I put up a new, very short, story over here. Go over and have a read. In fact, go over and read any of the other ones too and let me know what you think.

Best Games - River Raid The first thing you notice about River Raid is how beautiful it looks. Symmetric fields of solid color in perfectly balanced palettes. Everything on screen is clear and crisp. The second thing you notice is how smooth everything moves. The Atari 2600 is well known for its low resolution and chunky movement, but River Raid feels fluidly analog at all times. Next you notice the sound. In a world of digital farts and squawks somehow only the most harmonious tones were selected from the white noise generator built into the Atari 2600. River Raid sounds intense, but never jarring. When you start to play the game, the ramp from simple shooting gallery to incredibly demanding is so smooth you won’t notice that the game is getting harder until you crash 3 times in span of a few seconds. Instantly you restart and try again, becoming incrementally better at the game with each attempt. There is no end to River Raid. No point where the game informs you of your mastery. It grows more difficult until it over taxes either your skills or your stamina. You can’t beat it, you can only improve. It would be easy to suggest that this purity of design and presentation sprung from the limitations of the Atari 2600. Somehow I doubt that. Carol Shaw surpassed most of the perceived limitations of that simple computer in River Raid. She created a smooth, vibrant, aesthetically pleasing game on a system not really known for that sort of thing. The game explains itself while you play with no need for instructions or tutorials. It is abstract while being easily readable. River Raid could only exist as an interactive computer program. The engineering and the art only work when meshed together as one. It is a self contained wonderful thing polished to a high shine. River Raid isn’t a product of limitations. River Raid is proof that we never really saw what the Atari 2600 was capable of, or more to the point, what a brilliant creator could accomplish with those simple tools. 

There is no way that I will ever play all of these games. It will never happen. There was a brief window in the 80’s and maybe the early 90’s that a ‘gamer’ could have at least touched most of the popular titles and genres. I have played a Megaman, and I have played a Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have played Street Fighter, and Doom, and Space Quest. Action, strategy, sports, adventure, role playing, puzzle, narrative, abstract, simulation, educational. All the types, styles, and genres available, I played. There were games that I liked better than others, and game types that had their devoted fans, but there weren’t subcultures. There was no punk rock or Jazz. No surrealist theater or period piece costume dramas. Gamers played games, and most likely they played all of them.

You know how they say “for every movie made there are 100 scripts on the shelf”? Games are the same. I took one of my game ideas off the shelf recently. It had started as a video game riff on everyone's least favorite game mechanic, inventory management, but I have made some significant changes. Most notably, I’ve changed it into a board game. The original intent for this game was for it to be a mobile or tablet, single player game that demanded fast reactions and decisions. Of course that sort of thing is not the strength of board games. Board games are slower, more contemplative, and usually turn based. The best board games are very communication focused. Creating an excuse for people to talk around a table is where board games shine.

I’ve been doing some more work on the story over here . I actually ended up writing some more stuff in part one, or chapter one, or whatever you call parts of stories. I tacked that on, but I haven’t quite caught up with the other stuff I had been writing so that I could figure out how to write this stuff. It’s a wacky non-linear world of writing. The real kicker is, I absolutely know for a fact that I will end up completely rewriting pretty much everything in the first chapter or so to make it flow better with everything else. I think I have made peace with that.

Best Games - Commander Keen If you played games on a pc in the early 90s you had to be happy with slower experiences. Adventure games, puzzle games, strategy games and microsoft flight simulator. To be fair one of those is a pretty intense piece of software, but accurate flight sims aren’t the sort of thing that sells hardware to a lot of people. Not the sort of thing you can build a healthy market on. When you looked at the kind of games coming out on the Genesis and the SNES, the pc just wasn’t that thrilling. There were a lot of reasons to buy PCs, they just didn’t have much to do with games. Computers like the Amiga or the Commodore had a more or less unified set of hardware inside. If you were writing a game you could be sure that anyone that bought it would be able to run it on those machines. PCs came in a lot of flavours and some of them were barely able to manage a complicated spreadsheet. There were a few popular versions of DOS and the fledgling versions of windows would shake themselves apart as soon as any demands were put on them. If you wanted to play games there were a lot of options available, but you might skip the PC for any console. 

I’ve put up the revised beginning of the story I have been working on over here. It took a lot of writing things that happen later on to figure out what should happen here at the start, so when I finally put all of the rest of it back in it will be a large dump of text all at once. As it is, it is still very much a draft and not a cleaned up and edited story, so if you go over there to read it you know what sort of thing you’ll be getting. Turns out writing is hard, and writing something that works and stays consistent over at least dozens of pages takes some work and time. I’ve sort of broken up the story into what would best be described as episodes, so a single finished episode shouldn’t be too long in coming, but the whole thing might take a while. I’ve also done a little looking into what it takes to put a short or long story together into something you can sell on a store like Amazon. I think I will always keep a version of it up here for free, but making it available to buy and download to a reader device of some sort seems like a pretty cool thing that I would like to do. So for the 20 or 30 people who regularly read this (I think the analytics lies when it says anything more than that), you can say you read it first back when it was all broken grammar and spelling errors.

swirl bright vivid light diamond sharp notes refrain once smooth, polished gloss

We watched a movie the other day that wasn’t very good. Like I have said here many times, movies, comics, games, or other works of art that aren’t particularly good don’t bother me that much. It’s not the worst crime in the world to create something that isn’t very good. Personally, I happen to enjoy a lot of stuff that sits right on the axis of mediocre and weird. I have actively sought out poorly produced, cheaply made things that match my particular interests. There is an honesty to presenting something and saying “well this is the best we could do with what we had. I hope you like it” . Those are the sorts of things that look they they were probably fun to make.

I’ve been writing a lot of outline stuff and scattered scenes. This means that I haven’t updated the main story I have been working on for a bit (over here), but it also means that there is a lot still happening on it. Of course, if I posted up the outline that would just give away the whole story, and that doesn’t sound very fun. If I posted up some of the later scenes they might give away the story too, or at the very least not make much sense out of context with any surrounding scenes. Also not very fun.

Best Games - Guwange Okay. First off, there is absolutely no way that I can talk about a game that is part of a splinter off a sub-genre of a genre without wading deep into the weeds. I’m going to toss out some titles and terms without defining them. If you read this hoping to find out what a shmup or STG is, you are in the wrong place. Also shmup is a stupid word and I won’t have it placed idly in my writing without mocking it. You have been warned. If we were to draw a timeline of the vertically scrolling shooter game you would have to reach all the way back to Space Invaders. While not technically a scrolling shooter, due to the lack of scrolling, the core of the experience is there in Space Invaders. Moving and shooting while bullets rain down. You would step forward down that timeline to Galaga and Galaxian, still proto-scrolling shooters. Any sense of vertical movement in those games is superficial. Soon you would reach Xevious and 1942, both 100% vertically scrolling shooters. Maybe not the first, but very early versions of the form. You would snake your way through games like Tokio Scramble Formation and Varth, Turbo Force and Tiger Heli. The Sonic Wings series and Raiden series. All fine examples of a developing genre. There are several branch points where the vertical scrolling shooter split into distinct flavours. The standard vertical shooter, the vertical run and gun shooter, and the bullet hell shooter are some enduring favorites. Some would say that it was Cave Interactive’s DonPachi or follow up DoDonPachi that solidified the branch of bullet hell or bullet curtain shooters, but they created a far more important game a few years later. Guwange was never as popular as many of the other shooters of it’s time since it didn’t see a wide release outside of Japan. Even so, there are a few things that Guwange did that make a game like Ikaruga possible. Before Guwange, the gimmick of throwing an unreasonable barrage of bullets at the player was what defined a bullet hell game. Guwange is less about challenging your dexterity and more about changing how you focus. Broadening your perception and forcing yourself into a flow state is the only real way to play Guwange. The beautiful, muted backdrop of a feudal Japan beset by demonic spirits provides the conceit for the game’s core mechanic. Each of the three player characters can summon a spirit that the player can control to float around the screen attacking enemies. When you tap on the fire button you shoot normally, but when you hold down the fire button the spirit is released and the original character is constrained to slow left and right movement only. The spirit moves very quickly and is immune to bullets. The end result of these two different modes is that the player must pay attention to two different areas of the screen simultaneously. The vulnerable and slow moving main character, and the damage dealing and fast moving spirit. Oh, and one last thing, the spirit can slow enemy bullets to create some breathing room for the main character so you can’t pay attention to only one of them. You will need to play both characters, simultaneously, to succeed. Written down, that sounds like an impossible task. Playing two characters at once on a screen otherwise filled with enemy bullets. Not only can you do it, you quickly find yourself playing through sections of Guwange intuitively. Never really focusing on any single spot on the screen. This is the sort of revelation that makes a developer believe that something like Ikaruga is not only possible, but playable by actual humans with regular human eyes and brains. Guwange is the turning point from one type of somewhat shallow gameplay, to a whole other world of depth and intriguing mechanics. Guwange is one of the best games, and if you can find it, you should play it.

When you are on the team bus, you are family. Not in poetic or fanciful ways. Not in slight or saccharine ways. You are family, real and tangible and messily entangled. You are forced into close proximity with people that you don’t always choose, but with whom you share a common mission. You dress in your best, present your best, while sitting with people who have shared in your failures. You converse with the ease that only siblings know. You laugh and shout and try to carve out some quiet moment of solace for yourself amidst the cacophony. When you disembark, all of you, the team, return to your separate lives. Not in the locker room, not on the field, will you ever be this close. This familial. That experience stays with you.

I’ve written a new post every week for 282 weeks, well 283 weeks now. Most of them hover just under 1000 words or so. There are a couple of haikus in there. Over the past year I added 6 short stories. Almost all of them were typed into either Libre Office or Google docs. That has been good enough until now. I am currently writing another story that is on the longer side. Google docs isn’t really cutting it.

Best Games - Wipeout The swirly, nature inspired, art nouveau in the early 1900s gave way to the more architectural and defined art deco of the 1920s and 30s. The psychedelic designs of the 60s and 70s provided a framework for the more angular, dimensional design of the 80s and 90s. The design of Wipeout fed directly off of the increasingly digital, splashy, design in the early 90s but leapfrogged into the future. The graphic design of this hovercraft racing game from 1995, when most games were still trying to evoke some aspect of grunge rock or gangsta rap culture, laid out a visual language roadmap for the next 20 years.