On Rain & Expectations

Session I

When I was in middle school, we would have orchestra field trips once a year to go to Cedar Point, an amusement park that was four or five hours away. We’d get up early in the morning, get on a chartered bus, and ride all morning, playing games on pencil and paper, watching movies piped through the bus to tiny TVs. Upon arriving, we’d be essentially let loose within the theme park, a thing that sounds kind of crazy now when I think about it. We’d spend all day in the park doing whatever we wanted, forming into small groups with only the promise to meet back up at the bus at the end of the day.

At the time I wasn’t a big fan of roller coasters, so one year I roped one of my friends into going to the back of the park, where there existed a ride that was essentially an endless loop of manufactured white water rapids. You’d sit in a big metal disc with high-back chairs lining the outside facing inward and ride down this course, the disc spinning as you went based on the movement of the water. Waterfalls lined the ride and depending on how the disc was oriented you might end up completely soaked or relatively dry. Seeking out the patterns in the ride, we’d try to predict where to sit and figure out how early on in the course of the ride we could predict which seats would get which waterfalls. We’d get off the ride and walk up the sidewalk a bit, then immediately down a long winding path that led back to the entrance to the ride. The ride itself appealed to us but also the idea of being able to say that we had ridden this ride 8, 10, 12 times that day alone seemed like a thing, like our dedication to this one ride was somehow worthwhile, whether it was because it made us weird or special or better, I don’t know.

At one point in the early evening, heavy clouds rolled in and it started to rain. People started running around the park, ducking under canopies immediately outside serving windows for food stands or taking cover in the arcade near the front of the park. My friend and I, already thoroughly soaked, walked happily through the rain, confident that there was nothing it could do to us that we hadn’t already done to ourselves.

Sword & Sworcery EP left an intense first impression on me. The rain storms in the game felt real and put me in the world to a degree that I didn’t realize was happening at first. Then I met a looming shade that pursued me, displeased with my presence in a mountaintop template. My heart was pounding. I tried to run away for as long as I could because the way the music came in, the horrifying cry that he made(?) as he came into existence, the way he pursued me without seeming to really be in a hurry, to know that he would get to me inevitably— it frightened me. In a real way, a way that made me think maybe I DO have a soul and maybe this evil dude could take it away from me. Shook by the experience, I stopped at the next sign of safety, took off my headphones, and put down the iPad. It was late at night, and my neighbors were arguing loudly. I worried what was going to happen next. This was an adventure game where sometimes maybe it rains and sometimes scary things happen and it was pretty cool.

Session II

I took a trip to North Dakota after my sophomore year of high school. Together with the youth group I belonged to I rode over the course of two days in one of two 15-passenger vans to a Native American reservation, where we spent the week sleeping on the hard floor of a school gymnasium and working all day to fix up the homes of some of the people in that community who couldn’t fix up their homes themselves. The home I worked on was owned by a man named Robert, a retired alcoholic who lived in the middle of a huge open plain surrounded by sky the likes of which I haven’t really seen since that week. With a group of mostly strangers, I tore the siding off of a house, re-insulated it, and put up new siding while some of the adults and older high schoolers in the group re-shingled the entire roof. It was an intense week full of a lot of hard work.

On our last day before going home, the sky turned dark and began pouring rain. There was no warning, no summer rain shower with bright, reflective sprinkles of water to preface it. It just began, and the beautiful open plain turned almost immediately into a huge mud pit littered with our tools and belongings. We rushed to get backpacks full of valuables off the lawn and into the trucks and vans we had come in, but the decision was made fairly quickly that we couldn’t leave our work half-finished; that we had to continue and have the siding on the house or the weather could damage the house in real ways. We got back to cutting pieces of siding the lengths we needed to cover the house, trying as hard as we could to get them cut before the circular saw itself got flooded, unable to spin at the speed it needed to cut the siding as it tried to swim through the water caught in its casing. We worked through the afternoon, measuring, propping up, and nailing on siding, using power tools like the nail gun and wondering if we shouldn’t be using power tools like the nail gun, all while the mud on the ground surrounding the house got deeper and the beautiful brand new siding got smeared with dirt because there was no chance of it not getting everywhere. But we kept working, because the whole thing was ridiculous, and what else could we do?

Occasionally while playing Sword & Sworcery I would hit a boundary of belief, a moment where I would say “no, they didn’t make this to do that.” And I would try it, and it would do exactly what I hoped it was to do. Sword & Sworcery, in some ways, is a game of “what if we brought this back?” but also “what if we did what you always wanted that to do?” It trades heavily on your memories of games past, using the graphical style and the point-and-click adventure game interface to tie itself to something specific and set your expectations, but it does that not just to fulfill those expectations, but to occasionally break them, exceed them, and remind you that you are living in a world where more things are possible. You will go into a trance and literally move mountains just by dragging them with your finger. Why not? These secrets, these extreme moments that could take you to a room full of rupees or a set of warp pipes or even into corrupted memory, a place the programmers created by accident and left in for fun— these methods are now the basis of the game.

Sometimes, though, I’d put the Sycthian into a trance and I’d see an object and I’d stop breathing. “I know what I have to do.” I’d try it, and it wouldn’t work. Let down, I’d try a more mundane solution and that wouldn’t work either. I’d try a few more solutions, but at some point I’d realize that I’m just tapping the screen, hoping for a reaction. These moments are one of the places the game falls apart. The other big problem was discovering that the mechanics that seemed so perfect, so expressive and ideal for the moment in which I was first given them, were just introductions to three or four core mechanics that I would be reusing throughout the game. I felt a bit cheated the second time I was chased by a calmly walking spectre of death— the very one I had struck down earlier. I guess it’s scary that nothing I can do will kill him, but it certainly did scare him off for a while, and oh, what’s this, we’re going to fight in portrait mode and he’s just going to telegraph his moves the exact same way as he did last time? Oh. Okay. I guess I was dumb to be afraid that first time. I guess I was wrong about this game. I liked the facade, but underneath that I was deeply dissatisfied with what they have to offer. This was an adventure game where sometimes maybe it rains and one time a scary thing happened and sometimes it makes you play a weak version of Punch-Out and it was pretty disappointing.

Session III

Last summer, a month after moving back to Connecticut, I went to New York City with my wife for a concert in the East Village. It was our first time going to a concert in Manhattan after I had moved away from the area for a year and a half to live nearer to her, spending my weeks working in downtown Chicago and living in the suburbs and my weekends living with her in Indianapolis. When we left the venue, it was sprinkling a little bit, but by the time we had walked a block east toward the nearest subway stop on Bleecker and Lafayette, it began raining, the kind of rain I hadn’t been caught outside in since my trip to North Dakota. The streets and sidewalks flooded quickly and we hurried to reach our subway stop, only to find the entrance taped up with a sign instructing us to go to the next stop north of that. We followed Lafayette up to Astor Place, a larger subway stop with a covered entrance, only to find a crowd of people huddled under the entrance and another taped up stairwell instructing us that this subway stop was also out of service.

At this point I was tired and soaked and didn’t want to be responsible for what would happen next. I knew the next station on that line was at Union Square, 6-8 blocks north of there. I knew it was likely that there was another line we could take somewhere east or west of us, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the trains to be sure. I didn’t want to be in the rain, and I didn’t want to be the one who said that we had to walk up to 14th Street. I was angry and I was sad and we still ended up having to walk through the rain, all the way up to Union Square, only to sit on an hour-long train ride back from Grand Central to Connecticut soaked through more than either of us could remember being.

I had two thoughts, one right after the other, during the last time I picked up Sword & Sworcery. I had played for ~45 minutes and had just finished “Session 2”, the longest of the three and the real meat of the game mechanics-wise. My first thought was that I was really unhappy with the game, that I felt betrayed by its outward appearance, by the things people had said about it and the first impression it had made and the promises that I had made to myself about what the game would achieve and what I would be able to say about it that I hadn’t been able to say about any game yet.

My second thought came after the Archetype reminded me of my goal, my protagonist’s fate and what I assume will be the penultimate moment of the game (the final moment being the repercussions of those actions and the examination of whether or not my fate is important to the rest of the game’s world). I thought about what he had said and I realized that I don’t want to see that fate come to be. Here’s this game that I am unhappy with, that I want to hate, that I want to put down for failing ME, the player, the consumer, the audience; but if it tells me that the Scythian must be a martyr and I can’t bring myself to watch that happen, what does that mean? Why can I carry out my “goal” in other games with similarly tragic endings knowing what it implies and watch the result and feel like there’s any meaning within that, but despite an urge to put the disappointment and the mechanics of Sword & Sworcery behind me, it physically pains me to think of taking the Scythian to the top of Mingi Taw? Maybe it’s an adventure game where sometimes it rains and sometimes it makes me play a weak version of Punch-Out and other times it makes me feel dread and other times it makes me feel wonderful.

Yeah, that’s it.

—Casey

Eat Poop You Cat

While we were at PAX East this past March, I had the pleasure of introducing the whole Warp Skip extended family to a game called Eat Poop You Cat (it goes by many names, but this is how it was introduced to me in 2007). It’s a great game to play with a group of 5 or more, and all it requires is one sheet of paper and a pen or pencil for every person who wants to play. Here are the rules:

1. Everyone writes a sentence at the top of their sheet of paper, then passes it to the person next to them— make sure everyone passes in the same direction, but you can go the opposite direction next game to mix things up.
2. When you receive a sheet of paper, read the sentence, then draw a small picture illustrating what you read. Fold the paper to obscure the sentence you read, but leave your picture visible. Pass the paper to the next person.
3. When you receive the next sheet of paper, look at the picture and write a sentence that describes what you see. Fold the paper again to hide the picture and leave only the sentence that you just wrote. Pass again.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until the paper has made it all the way around the circle. You do not take a turn on the sheet of paper that you wrote the original sentence on, so you will play a number of turns equal to the number of people you have playing.

That’s it! There are successes to be found in pretty much any round of EPYC. You can celebrate your coherence if a sentence actually makes it relatively intact through your entire group of friends, or you can get angry at your friend for not recognizing a flawless drawing of Keyboard Cat when they see one.

Sometimes, though, magical things happen when you play this game. Magical, frightening things. At the Warp Skip meetup at PAX East 2011, this is what happened when Adam’s turn to draw came up:

This picture still haunts my nightmares.

—Casey

Weekend of Kirby: Kirby’s Adventure (and others)

I spent somewhere around 10-12 hours this weekend playing Kirby games. Before Saturday, the only one of the traditional sidescrolling Kirby games I had played was Kirby’s Adventure for the NES. Over the course of Saturday I played both of the Game Boy entries, the first two Kirby’s Dream Lands, and today I played all of Kirby’s Adventure along with a sampling of Kirby’s Dream Land 3 and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. After all of that platforming, I think Kirby’s Adventure still stands out as my favorite.

It’s definitely not a perfect game. You can tell it’s struggling against the NES hardware on a pretty regular basis, as any time the game has to show more than ~5 sprites on the screen at the same time the whole game slows considerably. It also doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense: the stages, as in most Kirby sidescrollers, lack any kind of creative focus, instead opting to just throw together a random smattering of trees, clouds, and Roman architecture, sometimes putting stars in the background. But it controls as solidly as the Game Boy games and has a huge variety of powerups to play with. Getting one of the rarer abilities like UFO, Throw, or Body Slam is an exciting moment, whereas in the later games like Dream Land 3 and The Amazing Mirror the powerups tend to feel pretty homogenous— you just pick up whatever you can get and run with it, and abilities from pretty early on in the game like Bomb can feel overpowered.

The best part of Kirby’s Adventure is the final boss and the part leading up to it (spoilers ahead on a 19-year-old NES game): after beating King Dedede, the final boss from Kirby’s Dream Land 1 and your ever-present adversary throughout the game, you go to restore the Star Rod that he had apparently stolen(?) to its rightful place on a fountain or something. Along the way, a beaten King Dedede begs Kirby not to do it, but his pleas are ignored. When Kirby places the Rod on the fountain, an evil Nightmare is freed from the fountain (apparently King Dedede stole and broke the Star Rod to imprison this jerk) and it flies into space. King Dedede inhales Kirby and the Star Rod and spits him into space to chase after the Nightmare. The real final boss fight begins at this point, a two-stage affair with the first being a horizontally-scrolling shmup reminiscent of the blimp boss from Kirby’s Dream Land 1 and the second half being a tough boss battle against the villainous Nightmare, who now looks kind of like a cross between Count Chocula and something actually intimidating.

At this point the only Kirby game I haven’t played a few hours of is Kirby’s Epic Yarn, but I have to admit that at this point I’m a little tired— not of Kirby, but of staring at the TV screen all weekend. I think Epic Yarn, which is supposedly quite good, will have to wait while I go read a book for a little while or something.

—Casey

Weekend of Kirby: Various Spinoffs

In my quest to play as many Kirby games as possible, I managed to run through varying amounts of a lot of the non-platforming Kirby games today. The pictures below that are obviously not taken with a cell phone camera are form the excellent vgmuseum.com.

Kirby’s Dream Course

Kirby’s Dream Course is a strange isometric miniature golf game where you have to attack enemies in order to create an exit point, then exit through a “hole”. Like in golf or whatever. The best part of Dream Course is that it has a two-player competitive mode, which usually devolves into knocking each other off the course as frequently as possible.

Kirby’s Block Ball

A fascinating Arkanoid clone— I played through 10 levels of this game today, reaching the “bad” ending after a couple hours and enjoying every minute of it. Reaching the “good” ending would require getting the high score on every level: not something I have time to do right now. Block Ball is a really great use of the Kirby universe and the variety of enemies and bosses once again (and this is a common thread in Kirby games) makes what could be a mediocre game charming. My biggest problem with this game is that some levels are built entirely around using a particular powerup, which if you manage to lose you have no way of getting back without losing all your lives and starting over. I really liked this game and am glad I finally played it.

Kirby’s Star Stackers

A drop-blocks-in-a-well puzzle game with a mechanic I haven’t seen repeated anywhere else (which is surprising for Nintendo), Star Stackers has you sandwiching stars and other powerups between blocks with different animals on them, chaining together combos and such. It’s a really fun mechanic that I’d like to see revived some day, and beyond the charming animations it also has weird/hilarious menus and presentation.

Kirby’s Pinball Land

I’m generally down on video game versions of pinball. It seemed a novelty when I was a kid— being able to do crazy things that a real pinball machine could never do— but looking back they seem kind of boring. Kirby’s Pinball Land is no real exception; the execution is solid but nothing really drew me to keep playing.

Kirby’s Avalanche

Kirby’s Avalanche is a Puyo Puyo game— a good one, although not as exceptional as Kirby frequently manages to take generic ideas and turn them exciting. It has the exact same narrative presentation and screen layout as any number of Nintendo-branded puzzle games— Dr. Mario 64, the Panel de Pon reskins like Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League, and Wario’s Woods. I didn’t spend much time with this one, because I have more interesting games to play.

Kirby Canvas Curse

Kirby Canvas Curse, when it came out, was hailed as one of the shining examples of the early Nintendo DS catalog that figured out how to make good use of the stylus mechanic. For me, this game suffers from Sonic Syndrome: a feeling that you’re constantly missing out on important pieces of the game by constantly moving at a fast pace from left to right. It’s still fun, and still impressive as a demonstration of how touch screen controls can really change the way you play a game, but it didn’t draw me in like Dream Course or Block Ball did.

With that, I think I’ve played at least a little bit of all of the non-platforming Kirby games! From here on out it’s all platformers.

—Casey