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  • Sleighbells (Cartlidge, 1983)

    Sleighbells (Cartlidge, 1983)

    Developed/Published by: A.G. Cartlidge / Gemini
    Released: 1983
    Completed: 02/12/2024
    Completion: Delivered five presents to Santa.

    Altogether now, in our best Noddy Holder impression: It’s CHRISTMAS! And here at exp. Towers that means we… play through ropey old Christmas games that we’ve dug up because maybe it’ll make us feel festive, although normally it just makes us shake our head in despair, thinking about a situation where anyone received these games and then had to play them because they didn’t have anything else to play.

    So here’s Sleighbells1 for BBC Micro, which I think is the first time that arguably the UK’s most important home computer has shown up here on exp.. As part of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project, it exposed entire generations to computers for the first time (and the BBC Micro was still being used in some schools until the mid/late 90s so it crossed from Boomers all the way to late Millennials). While I think that the most understandable point of comparison for non-Brits might be the Apple II, being a more expensive, sort of schooly “real” computer, I don’t think that really captures the utopian nature of the BBC Micro and the associated project (which you can read all about in NESTA’s excellent “The Legacy of the BBC Micro” white paper): an attempt to create a wide cultural change where the general British public would become truly educated in the tools that were going to change the entire world. To not just watch computers change everything: but take part in it.

    When you think about that–and especially when you read the white paper–you can’t help but become a bit disappointed in the world we live in now. How computers work has become completely unknown to the average person, and our ability to control them has become ever sanded off as we get pushed into walled gardens and proprietary systems, and our governments seem to have absolutely no imagination in trying to actually transform society, at best hoping corporations might help regions “level up” rather than just suck money out, but mostly trying to keep enough blame on immigrants and minorities that struggling people don’t stop and consider a better world might be possible.

    Sorry, this isn’t very Christmassy, is it?

    Now. I’d love to follow this train of thought to explain something that I’ve often wondered about–that the BBC Micro seems to get discussed so much less in retro circles than contemporaries like the ZX Spectrum. Is it possible that utopian promises, long dashed, simply make us too ashamed to remember the venerable Micro? That it reminds us, always, that another United Kingdom was possible?

    Not really. It’s just that the BBC Micro was really expensive, most people only played educational games or used LOGO on it, and commercial games outside of a venerable few were… a bit crap. Even compared to the likes of the Speccy.

    But back to Sleighbells. While it does seem like Santa’s Sleigh Ride is the first Christmas game ever (look, I’m just not going to count Christmas Show and Tell) I keep finding new Christmas games that could easily be the second–it seems like 1983 was a big year for Christmas for some reason.

    Packaged in generic box art and featuring absolutely no sleigh bells, Sleighbells is a multi-screen game that probably has some arcade inspiration but I’d be very hard pushed to work out what it is. Narratively, Jack Frost, who always seems to have a problem with Santa, has stolen all the presents, and so as Santa’s assistant you have to venture into his secret cave and steal them all back. You do this across four screens:

    On the first screen, you have to get to the entrance while avoiding a gang of snowmen who make a beeline towards you. 

    On the second, you just have to run through the cave, avoiding the snowflakes that fall.

    On the third, you… do the same thing again, but there are snowmen popping out of the ground and there’s a bat flying about that will kill you literally the instant the level begins unless you move forward immediately. Fun!

    On the fourth, you’re supposed to catch the presents being pushed off ledges by… spiders(?) and move them to the left of the screen. The presents can squash you and that bloody bat is still there, but there’s absolutely no time pressure or anything so the first time I played this I just stood thinking I was “collecting” presents and wondering when the level was going to time out until I realised I had to move them one by one to the edge of the screen.

    And that’s it, although it loops if you haven’t gone completely doolally with all the excitement.

    This is, of course, rubbish, only remarkable because of how annoyingly difficult it seems at first (the snowmen mob you immediately, and that bat can fuck off) but once you get it it’s just a test of patience really. It does have a very festive title screen with a bleepy rendition of Jingle Bells, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.

    Festive vibes ranking: LOW

    Will I ever play it again? No!

    Final Thought: Something I would be remiss to mention is that the spirit of the BBC Micro does live on in the form of the Raspberry Pi, which does see lots of ordinary people learning how to hack away at a very open computer format, even it is usually just to get a media server running, or a emulation box. It might have been nice, as Ian Livingston pitched, if the device had led to a second Computer Literacy Project as the BBC Nano though.

    1. It’s Sleigh Bells on the title screen, but “Sleighbells” on the box. I guess I’ve decided house style is to say the box is correct. But this probably doesn’t come up much outside of slapdash home computer games. ↩︎
  • Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982)

    Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982)

    Developed/Published by: Parker Brothers
    Released: 7/1982
    Completed: 21/04/2023
    Completion: Got a high score of 1216 on easiest, but also played it in smart bombs/solid walker modes. I could do better!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a 

    As a hardcore follower of everything I’ve been up to, I’m sure you already know I’ve been working my way through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, but what you won’t know, probably, is that when I reached Attack of the Mutant Camels I had a minor crisis: do I go on and play it without the foreknowledge of The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, or do I go back and play that, even though it’s jumping several years on from where I’ve got in the Atari 2600 catalogue? But today is also the last day to pre-order a physical copy of exp. 2601, so writing about another Atari 2600 is almost promotional.

    It gets me started on playing through all the Star Wars games chronologically, too, because it’s, surprisingly, the very first licensed Star Wars game. You’d probably think that would be Star Wars in the arcade (the very first arcade game I ever played, fact fans!) what with it being based on the first movie and everything, but nope, it’s this, released over a year earlier but still two years after The Empire Strikes Back. It’s unclear if the decision to go with The Empire Strikes Back was an attempt to catch the (two year old) zeitgeist or was design led–there’s an interesting contemporary interview with the designer Sam Kjellman and programmer Rex Bradford in the January 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers and Games where Kjellman says “we considered the Death Star scene in the first movie” but there’s not much to make of it either way (there’s a great paper prototype image in the article, though.) And weirdly… Atari’s arcade Star Wars would be released the same month as Return of the Jedi in cinemas!

    The Empire Strikes Back is a post-Defender game–one of the earliest, in fact, to not simply be a direct clone, following really only Choplifter on Apple II (Chopper Command, ironically also helicopter based but a “true” Defender clone predates it on the Atari 2600, though). Using the Battle of Hoth as its setting, the player controls a snowspeeder and is attempting to defend Echo Base from the approaching AT-AT Walkers, with a game over if they manage to make it to the base (which unfortunately isn’t marked in any way other than it is, I guess, just off to the right somewhere.) Unlike the movie, however, where AT-ATs are famously impervious to the snowspeeders attacks, here you are stuck shooting them to death, with each taking 48 shots to die, colour cycling so you know how damaged they are, because you can’t knock them over or anything. In fact, rather hilariously, the manual makes a point of the fact that you can’t shoot their legs, which is probably the one bit of them that would make sense to shoot.

    There are, however, lots of surprising quirks and designerly touches to what would, otherwise, be a fairly straightforward shooter. The game has the usual overblown “32 games” claim that 2600 games basically always did (4 modes in single and two player, with five difficulty levels, basically) but the modes include the ability to make the walkers solid (which actually feels sort of more right, even if it is harder) and to add “smart bombs” which the walkers can fire and which follow you around and you need to shoot to survive (which I can take or leave). Whichever mode you play, walkers occasionally reveal flashing weak points you can shoot to destroy them instantly, which creates this interesting risk-reward as you have to fly around them to try and shoot the weak point in time, putting yourself in danger.

    Most interestingly, however, you can actually repair your snowspeeder by landing it, up to two repairs per life, with your snowspeeder able to take up to five hits. And if you can survive for two minutes without dying, you “use the force” and are invincible for 20 seconds and can then repair your snowspeeder up to two more times. So the game also layers on damage management–you don’t want to be constantly repairing, because you lose precious time and you only get two, so you have to very carefully track how many hits you’ve taken, especially as the walkers get more and more powerful the more you take down. There’s honestly quite a lot going on.

    There is, however, no ending to the assault, as it’s a pure score chase. Released earlier in the 2600’s lifetime it might have been saddled with a time limit (after two minutes and forty-five seconds the rebels escape…) but it’s definitely better this way even if you really don’t get a breather. This fact, however, leads to the rather absurd fact that Video Review magazine enlisted SF author and legendary prick Harlan Ellison to write a review of this despite the fact that he had never played a video game and clearly hated them. Readable in a couple of his essay collections (I borrowed a copy of Sleepless Nights in the Procrustrean Bed from archive.org, which cements how essential its borrowing library is for research) it’s a genuinely rather unhinged screed in which Ellison accidentally implies that he’s had sex with a non-zero number of ten year-olds:

    “No ten-year-old I’ve ever encountered can write Moby Dick, create a Sistine Chapel fresco, or fuck with any degree of expertise.”

    I guess at least he didn’t enjoy it???

    Anyway, he spends most of it whining that you can’t win, referencing the Myth of Sisyphus because, you know, he’s sooo clever. 

    I’m not particularly interested in having an argument with a long-dead self-confessed nonce–in fact I rather enjoy that he was so pleased with his zingers that he wrote a post-script a year later where he crows over the video game crash. And I suspect he forgot all about this by the time he would, hypocritically, declare himself “greatly amused by the prospect of ‘a game that you cannot possibly win’” with Cyberdreams 1995 adaptation of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (according to the Digital Antiquarian in a brilliant article as always.) But I will say that Kjellman and Bradford’s take on The Empire Strikes Back is better than it really has any right to be. The controls are far from perfect, and the game struggles massively with the fact that your snowspeeder’s position on screen often makes it hard to react quickly to walkers or their attacks. You can almost see the Llamasoft inspiration in how much the game makes you feel like you’re an annoying fly, buzzing around a quadruped, as you have to carefully “loop” your snowspeeder around in front of or behind the ship trying to maximise your hits (unless you have to suddenly dash for a weak point.) But there’s something there, and you can strategise–the manual recommends a farming strategy where you weaken the front and back walkers so you can have more time destroy the ones in the middle, and while it’s hardly Geometry Wars or anything, there’s a pleasure in attempting it.

    Enough of a pleasure, actually, that I played this for much longer than I expected. For 1982–the year of Dig Dug and Deadline–The Empire Strikes Back ain’t bad! Lighten up, Harlan!!!

    Will I ever play it again? I could be convinced to. I suspect I’d rather play it again than the next Star Wars game chronologically: Star Wars: Jedi Arena.

    Final Thought: Ellison ends his postscript, joyful at the video game crash:

    “At moments like these, I find my reluctant acceptance of the transient nature of the human race ameliorated. Perhaps the cockroaches won’t take over in my lifetime.

    On the other hand, the spirit of James Watt is still with us.” 

    The heck did he have against James Watt???

  • Hi-Fi Rush (Tango Gameworks, 2023)

    Hi-Fi Rush (Tango Gameworks, 2023)

    Developed/Published by: Tango Gameworks / Bethesda
    Released: 25/01/2023
    Completed: 09/12/2023
    Completion: Finished it!

    I loved this.

    I’m not quite sure why, but saying so feels very exposing. Maybe it’s because before playing Hi-Fi Rush I had no idea what it actually was, and the game’s bright anime-adjacent stylings somewhat had me discounting it out of hand, so I assume the extremely cool people who read this would be doing the same.

    Maybe it’s also just that Hi-Fi Rush is… pretty straightforward? It’s not particularly trying to move the medium forward (although I think it does some clever stuff) it’s just trying to be very, very good at what it’s doing. And what it’s doing, actually, isn’t so much “anime” as “full on Sega blue skies” while being an incredible competent 3D action platformer/brawler with a likable (dare I say loveable) cast of heroic misfits telling a simple but effectively structured narrative with some very savvy music choices.

    The thing is that… succeeding at something that hits that many beats isn’t actually… easy? Something I’m most struck by is actually those characters. By now we’ve all seen the nadir of Marvel-inspired quip-a-thons thanks to the likes of that Forsaken trailer, but even looking at something like, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, where they have something that (at least previously) had worked, it’s remarkable how flat it falls. Here, you have a goofy, act-first-think-later hero, Chai, the cleverer-than-him female leader, Peppermint, the funny robot, CNMN, etc. in a very simple “baddies are doing bad things, let’s get the different things we need to defeat them” story, but it completely pops because there’s been care to keep the story rolling naturally so you flow through it and grow into caring about them. I’m so insanely curmugeonly that I can’t believed to ride that line for me. But they did!

    Now you could say, “ah, but the secret weapon here is that the game uses actual songs that you actually like! That always works!” But it doesn’t work if all the pieces don’t fit together. There’s no better example than one of the game’s latter levels that uses The Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die. It plays at a moment where narratively all hell is breaking loose. It feels like you’re in a climax of an action movie, not just because the music is playing, but because the story has taken you there. That the level design is clever enough to cool down, let the music pull back a little, and then kick it back in for a climax? Absolute chef kiss.

    (It only really gets better from there, too. Ending strong is rarely something I think video games aspire to, but Hi Fi Rush is sensibly around the 10 hour mark and the last three levels or so rip. Did the appearance of The Joy Formidable on the soundtrack literally make me emotional? Yes. Yes it did.)

    Now interestingly, I haven’t actually played any other Tango Gameworks titles so I don’t really know if I should have expected rock-solid play, but either way I was surprised by how well it does. What makes Hi Fi Rush genius, I think, is that it takes a type of game I am incapable of not button-mashing through and adds a rhythm action component that doesn’t expect but rather, uh… politely asks you to hit your combos on rhythm. And it works!

    I can criticise it, somewhat, however They quickly add quite a lot of subtleties to the combat and don’t tutoralise them heavily enough–I didn’t understand how to use Chai’s “partner combos” until well over half-way through the game, and I don’t know if I ever got comfortable with parries because standing around waiting for enemies to attack seemed the antithesis of everything else I was doing. There end up being a lot of buttons and you have to internalise the order of your partners and switching between them rapidly in situations where there are like 3 different kinds of enemies at once meaning at times combat is just a total stramash. But even then, there’s always the beat to follow. It’s very clever.

    Anyway. I loved this. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve played in years. Your mileage may vary!

    Will I ever play it again? When it finished I wanted to play it more. That literally never happens. I sort of hope there’s a sequel, but the story of this is so pleasantly complete that I’m not sure if there should be one.

    Final Thought: I may also be a bit of a sucker for this game because you’re always accompanied by a black cat. Inspired by the game director’s!

  • Merry Christmas From Melbourne House (Melbourne House, 1984)

    Merry Christmas From Melbourne House (Melbourne House, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Melbourne House
    System: Commodore 64
    Released: 1984
    Completed: 11/12/2023
    Completion: Beat it with a score of 100 out of 100.

    It’s 1984 and the Christmas cash-in market is finally mature, with five whole games released for home computers (at the very least.) Alphabetically first in my list (because Icon Software chose to go with “Xmas” on their merry release) Merry Christmas From Melbourne House is a slight cheat because it’s really just a tiny tech demo/bit of marketing, but it was sold, costing 95p (the price of tape duplication and postage?) for readers of Commodore User (it was actually in the December issue and the deadline was December 17th to get your money to them, which makes me wonder how many people played this long after things stopped being festive.)

    It is though, honestly, what I was kind of expecting from A Christmas Adventure. It’s a short, very easy little adventure game that… passes about half an hour and actually manages to feel Christmassy. 

    Like A Christmas Adventure, you’re tasked with making sure Santa can get away from the north pole to deliver presents, but in a shocking twist… YOU are Santa. The game’s blurb claims he’s “attempting to stop an industrial dispute” that “is threatening the delivery of toys to children of the world” and it sounds like jolly old saint nick is a fat cat like the rest of ‘em, and out of solidarity with the elves and workers everywhere I spent quite a bit of time typing things like “GIVE ELVES RAISE” and “PROVIDE TIME OFF” but the parser never understood it, so I almost didn’t finish this.

    The plot is a bit oversold anyway, considering the solution is pretty much “Get off your fat arse and pack your sack of toys yourself, Santa.”

    As you’re not doing all that much, the parser is adequate, and the graphics are… genuinely quite evocative. They are important too–the toys you have to pack are all on one screen. I don’t generally like this design in graphic text adventures–where you don’t get told everything in text (I’m a VERBOSE man in Infocom games)–and having to work out directions here was not my favourite, But it worked well enough, and I was even charmed by the full screen advert for Melbourne House games.

    Anyway, lemme see how much 95p is in today’s money. £3.77. I can’t really say people got their money’s worth here, but they could do a lot worse.

    Festive vibes ranking: HIGH

    Will I ever play it again? I’m good.

    Final Thought: Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild played through this as well if you’d like to read something more in-depth about it, with the bonus that one of the developers, Dave Johnston, shows up in the comments, revealing that it was developed “in a matter on weeks using an in-house text engine and a tweaked sprite engine based on Way of the Exploding Fist code” and that he didn’t even have a copy. They paid people at Melbourne House so poorly that they couldn’t raise 95p???

  • Santa (Artic Computing, 1983)

    Santa (Artic Computing, 1983)

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  • A Christmas Adventure (Chartscan Data, 1983)

    A Christmas Adventure (Chartscan Data, 1983)

    Developed/Published by: Chartscan Data, Inc.
    System: Apple II
    Released: 12/1983
    Completed: 11/12/2023
    Completion: Couldn’t get Rudolph to drink his bloody milk.

    Well, it’s been two years since I thought I’d “have a look at the earliest Christmas games” and I managed to play… one of them. And then last year I was sick for most of December so I didn’t really play anything other than tapping miserably at Marvel Snap. But I’m back, baby!

    First up, I owe almost all understanding of this game to Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild who has written an insanely detailed post on it which I highly recommend reading, but I’ll summarise some of the findings here.

    A Christmas Adventure is generally considered online to be the second Christmas-themed video game ever released commercially, following the somewhat bizarre Santa’s Sleigh Ride, but I’ve since discovered that there’s several ZX Spectrum games with a 1983 date (including one, potentially lost media, called A Christmas Adventure as well???) so there’s probably more out there for like… the Dragon 32 and shit. But let’s talk about this one anyway. What makes it more interesting than just potentially being the second Christmas-themed video game ever is that it isn’t just, as you might expect, a Christmas cash-in, but an attempt by a French Canadian fellow named Frank Winstan to make video games that acted as greeting cards. Mind how for a while personalised children’s books were all the rage, and you got this crappy book where a jpeg of your child’s face was awkwardly stuck on the main character? Like that basically, with the idea that they’d start with this Christmas “card” and then do… well probably Easter, and then branch out to like… “Happy 43rd Birthday: the adventure” or “Sorry Your Grandma is Dead: the adventure” I guess!

    Unfortunately (or not) due to time pressures they never quite managed to get the company off the ground, with this selling poorly its first Christmas, although Winstan would continue to work on it through 1986(!) updating and improving it. As far as I know, I’m playing a version from the same era ion Pranevich did, which seems to be a later version than the one you can watch on Youtube.

    Anyway. A Christmas Adventure is an early graphical text adventure; originally released in 1983, it would be contemporary with the very end of Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventure line before they’d go on to make the more sophisticated King’s Quest, and surprisingly, very few other examples, making this… sorta cutting edge?

    What does feel cutting edge actually is the opening cinematic, which you have to flip the disk to see, which includes an animation where you fly to Santa’s Ice Palace. Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures have insanely terrible art (well, apart from Dark Crystal I’d say, which has a near stained-glass window approach) so getting something that generally looks like it’s had a bit of effort put in is rather nice.

    Telling that classic story, “Santa’s been kidnapped and only YOU can save him” after the intro you’re dropped in his house and have to wander about picking things up and using them to save him. I very quickly hit the issue that has stopped me bothering to play any of Sierra’s early output: the parser is terrible. Doing literally anything is a nightmare, and I will fully admit I had to use Pranevich’s article to walk me through the game, and he had to hex edit it just to understand how to solve it!

    It’s confusing, because this is a commercial concept based on greetings cards. Now, I imagine nowadays you can probably get “escape room” greeting cards where you have to like, solve a fucking cypher or whatever to see something that says “We’re getting divorced” (and if there isn’t, I should get on that) but in general, if you’re giving someone a gift like that you want them to… enjoy it? I really assumed that this would be very simple. You know, for kids. I mean you’re saving SANTA. Not Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) which would of course be for cool adults only.

    I suppose I’ve said it before, but maybe people in 1983 were made of sterner stuff; less likely to give up. I guess some puzzles in this are easy, like dressing up like Santa to fool his safe, or the disk that tells you the password right on it (Santa’s Jewish???) But then like… there’s a time machine. And there’s just so much wrestling with the parser to get anything done. Typing “HELP” gives you a list of words that the parser understands which is, 100%, a lie, because almost all the words don’t work.

    Ultimately, it’s the reason I couldn’t finish this. In his article, Pranevich was able to feed Rudolph, but despite having stuck the “was’bask+mlk” in the fireplace I could not feed him. I went through every possible thing I could imagine, really tried to get Martin Luther King out of that was’bask, but I’m starting to believe the archive.org version of this is just bugged. It is what it is, and I watched the ending on youtube (and for good measure used the HELP to see the message as well.)

    Feels a bit harsh to say this isn’t good despite the fact it it is, er… not good, just because it’s an interesting attempt at something that just seems to have come at the wrong time and with some rather wrong-headed ideas about how challenging it has to be. Also: it didn’t make me feel Christmassy at all!

    Festive vibes ranking: Despite the setting… LOW

    Will I ever play it again? I have a save. If anyone can tell me what to type to get Rudolph to eat I’m making that bastard eat.

    Final Thought: It’s worth noting that you can really feel the developers–at least Frank Winstan?–cared about this project because it’s full of little touches. I love that Santa has a poster of Bob and Doug McKenzie’s backdrop up (as Canadian a reference as you’re going to get) and there’s non-sequiturs like Pac-Man showing up for a hot minute.

  • A Mind Forever Voyaging (Infocom, 1985)

    A Mind Forever Voyaging (Infocom, 1985)

    Developed/Published by: Infocom
    Released: 14/8/1985
    Completed: 17/11/2022
    Completion: Finished it.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Do you have any famous works that you’ve always been… scared to start? I don’t mean intimidated–I haven’t read say, Infinite Jest not because it’s long, but because [jerk-off motion]–but that something is talked of in such hushed breaths that you’re worried it just won’t live up to whatever you might have imagined?

    I have it a lot, and because I generally try to read as little as possible about things before I experience them, it’s not so much that I’m imagining these incredible things, as much as there’s this astonishing possibility space out there that it almost feels… wrong to cut it down to just the one thing. Schrodingers’ video game.

    For A Mind Forever Voyaging, all I’ve known until now is its striking cover art, and that it’s Steven Meretzky’s attempt to grapple with Regan’s then-recent re-election by landslide. So it was with some trepidation that I started pouring over the box, feelies and manual.

    The manual is worth reading, with the most empathetic piece of writing I’ve experienced by 1985 in video games, as we’re introduced to the game’s central concept: you, the player, are “PRISM” who, raised in a perfect simulation believing themselves to be the real person Perry Simm, discovers that, well, no, they’re actually just an AI.

    It gave me enough pause that I actually put the game down and didn’t start it for several more weeks! If anything, the possibility space had got larger.

    A Mind Forever Voyaging, now I’ve played it, is kind of a hard one to discuss. On hand, it’s flawed. As deeply flawed as any Infocom I’ve played up to this point has been, and for many of the same reasons. On the other, it’s a genuinely captivating piece of speculative (interactive) fiction that will probably stick with me forever, not least because while it might over-extend itself on specifics, politically and thematically it is one hundred percent correct. 

    Let’s get to those specifics. First up, the game really requires you to read the manual. While it’s nothing as complicated as Suspended (which I still can’t believe was only Infocom’s sixth game) there’s a similar sort of “mode switching” as you begin not able to walk about and pick up stuff but can simply switch between locations in communication mode (largely able to just see the same locations, or veg out and watch the news) or read backstory in library mode. It’s really here that you get to what could be considered the game’s most major flaw–how self directed the player has to be for most of the time.

    This isn’t the same as something like Planetfall, where the player is primed “you’re stuck on this planet bro” it’s actually literally like “you’re a computer and there’s nothing to do?”

    There are big swathes of this game where you’re stuck typing “wait” or even resorting to “wait 120 minutes” which I found almost… shocking. It’s made all the more baffling by the fact that the game has a news network that you can “watch” but when you’re in the mode time passes at a crawl, meaning that you’ll probably burn through basically the entire thing (hundreds of lines of script) just waiting to get to the first simulation!

    The meat of the game is in that  simulation, however, and this was a massive surprise to me. The game presents what is pretty much the only direction the player gets–that as PRISM, you’re supposed to do a lot of very mundane things in a simulation of a small town, Rockvil, ten years in the future, like eat in a restaurant and speak to a clergyman–record them, and then deliver the recordings to see if the government’s transparently republic agenda known as “the plan” will work. It’s here the game takes a massive diversion from what I’d expect from a Infocom game at this point, because you enter a genuinely huge recreation of a town that is nigh-unmappable, with hundreds of rooms and most rooms having as many exits as there are compass points.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is a meticulous recreation of a town and is an extremely intentionally designed space, but it’s also not a “designed space” as any video game developer would know it now. I quickly gave up any pretense of mapping the space–relying on the one decent map I could find online–and began wandering.

    And wander I did. To be honest, you don’t genuinely need a map outside of the one that comes in the manual, as you aren’t really needing to hunt anything out. As has been written elsewhere, in A Mind Forever Voyaging, you are an observer, not an active participant, and as a result, simply wandering as your wont takes you and recording what you find interesting or pertinent is genuinely enough to progress.

    Of course, that’s as long as you understand that, because once you’ve managed to “complete” the tutorial-like first simulation, the game literally goes “oh, we don’t have anything for you to do now. Entertain yourself.”

    I know that it’s easy to accuse modern players of wanting everything on a silver platter (or at least, with a silver arrow pointing in the direction of the platter) but I really do find it hard to believe that even players in 1985 didn’t find this kind of thing frustrating. Noodle around long enough, and you’ll work out that you can get to a simulation twenty years in the future. But what do to there? Might as well just record the same stuff you did ten years in the future, right?

    And it’s here we hit what is–confusingly–A Mind Forever Voyaging’s most glaring flaw but also what might be the thing about it that makes it the most memorable. For the majority of the game all you do is revisit Rockvil and record how it changes across the years. It’s repetitive, and by the fifth time you do it you are almost certainly tired of the same interactions.

    But it’s also a perfect experience in seeing the slow decline of society under rule by Republican values. In 1985, this was just a scary warning of how the future could look. In 2022, it’s a sharp shock to the player, showing them how much has been lost and how much more will be lost if we continue the way we have. It is too easy to experience the decline of our civilisation as a frog, slowly boiling, and A Mind Forever Voyaging asks you to remember what temperature the water actually is.

    As Steven Meretzky noted in 2017, everything came true. The game features a border force who act as judge, jury and executioner; viciously racist policing, and the complete MAGA-fication of politics long before anyone even imagined such a thing. Even the things that seem far fetched in the moment–a supreme court giving the ok to religious fundamentalists seizing government property?–doesn’t seem that absurd when you ask “could the current supreme court have sided with the far-right extremists in the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge?” the answer is yes, obviously yes.

    And isn’t it disturbing that you’ve probably already forgotten about it?

    It is painful, genuinely painful at points, to be playing a game that shows horrible things happening in a decade to represent a society that is past the point of no return and recognise that these things are already happening around us. That Meretzky was far too kind to expect things to not have gone to totally hell until 2050 at the earliest.

    To be honest, a game like A Mind Forever Voyaging is as vital now as it’s ever been, and while I can’t recommend it without caveats, I actually rather like that I’m not completely certain that my instincts on its subtler “flaws” are correct or not. Lack of direction and the need to endlessly wait at points? Yeah, those are bad. But I can’t decide if choosing to create a huge, often samey and empty Rockvil is actually worse than making something more tightly designed. Rockvil might feel more real to me because I had to traipse through several parking empty parking lots; I can’t tell if it’s an acceptable price to pay that so many descriptions are generic (I got tired of things being described as a “totally ordinary [noun]”). Wouldn’t it be more interesting to have puzzles to solve? Like, shouldn’t I have to steal a ration card to make the ration card fraud arrest happen so I can record it? Or would the ludic nature of that undo that sense that Rockvil is real, and I’m genuinely experiencing it?

    With modern eyes, I think I would prefer the latter (tighter, have some puzzles) but I don’t actually blame Meretzky for going the other direction at all–especially considering the one puzzle in the game (avoiding being killed in act 3) involves, annoyingly, having to wait (again!) in the right place at the right time to even notice what’s going on (I really don’t know what the hell was going on with Infocom’s playtesters sometimes.) But the only thing I really don’t think works in the game is the saccharine epilogue. The digital antiquarian goes into probably too much detail on it, but he successfully raises that A Mind Forever Voyaging’s setting, movingly portrayed or not, doesn’t make a ton of sense if you go one level down, and ultimately only serves as backdrop for a polemic, which would ring more true I think without the San Junipero wish-fufillment. There’s no guarantees a utopia awaits if we do the right thing now. It requires constant vigilance.

    (And I have to agree that casting Perry Simm as mere observer does him a disservice–memory was at a premium even with a new extended Z-Machine interpreter allowing 128k instead of 64k to fit the game into, but that the game’s descriptions are often so dispassionate, and we never see or experience Simm grapple with his new existence as an AI is a disappointment. But A Mind Forever Voyaging is already doing so much, probably too much.)

    So after all that, how do I feel now that A Mind Forever Voyaging is the thing that it is, rather than whatever I imagined it could be? Incredible, honestly. I’m richer for having played it, warts and all.

    Will I ever play it again? It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I’d choose to play it again–the slow decline of society is… slow. However, it’s a game I would relish showing to others.

    Final Thought: Late summer/early autumn in 1985 was insane. A Mind Forever Voyaging was quickly followed by Super Mario Bros. in September and that was followed by Ultima IV days later. Hard to argue that these three don’t represent in many ways the peak of creativity in video games even now.

  • The Tower Of Druaga [Famicom] (Namco, 1985)

    The Tower Of Druaga [Famicom] (Namco, 1985)

    Developed/Published by: Namco
    Released: 06/08/1985
    Completed: 18/08/2022
    Completion: Played a few levels in both the original dungeon and the secret “Another Dungeon” but life is too short.
    Version Played: Namco Museum Archives
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    You know, I’ve had fun playing the old games I’ve got access to; I’ve discovered some hidden gems, rediscovered old favourites… but there’s definitely points where I’ve honestly wondered how video games as a medium didn’t merely survive but thrive post 1983 crash. Because to be honest, the last chunk of games–action games, anyway–have been pretty miserable. The Famicom’s output has been totally uninspired, and every arcade game is so brutal and relentless that there’s no time to get hooked–you just die.

    So, no matter my own attempt to understand these games within their actual context, it’s been really hard to get into them. I’m still playing them in the 2020s, and I’m still me.

    And this Famicom port of The Tower of Druaga is a perfect example of that friction. I don’t like the The Tower of Druaga. You can read all about that here. But it’s also insanely seminal and was a genuine phenomenon in Japan. I’m sure Namco’s Famicom port was hotly anticipated and as far as I understand it was a massive hit. And academically? I understand it completely.

    Because this is a great port! Sure, it’s got the muted colours of a Famicom/NES release and like Mappy chops down the level sizes (7 tiles vertically rather than 9) but most importantly not only does it feel similar but all of the hidden bollocks (I mean treasure) are unlocked as in the arcade (bar some very minor differences) allowing you to actually throw yourself into finishing the game without having to spend a small fortune in 100 yen coins–you can even continue! I can understand totally why you’d be running out to get this for your Famicom in 1985.

    But it’s 2022 and this is still just unbearable to play. I just can’t put myself in the shoes of a wee guy in 1985 playing this and (apparently) enjoying it. Booting this up and being faced with just how slow Gil moves on the first level? It’s revolting. How boring were things in 1985 that I would sit there, playing this with the tips page of Famitsu (or whatever) open? 

    What makes my total inability to get this worse is that this version even includes an entire extra dungeon, with a whole new range of inscrutable things to do required to complete it. It’s actually hard to argue with the insane value here and how thrilled you’d be to discover this! But to me, in 2022, it’s like finishing a plate of rocks and being served a plate of glass.

    That said, it’s a matter of months in 1985 before dessert shows up, and it’s literally ice cream. I know why the video game industry survived a crash and then whatever this is: Super Mario Bros.

    (Oh, but I’ve got Namco’s Battle City to play first. Dang it!)

    Will I ever play it again? Thankfully, these are the only two versions of The Tower of Druaga I have access to. I know the Game Boy version has bosses and things (sort of interesting) and I believe the PC Engine version is significantly different (more of an action RPG thing) but I’ll stick to ice cream from here on out.

    Final Thought: Struck by the fact that as I’m back into collecting Game Boy games and I hope one day to go back to Japan to pick up an bunch of cheap fodder, I’ll already be seeking Namco’s Game Boy compilation cartridges meaning I may end up with a copy of the Game Boy version after all via Namco Gallery Vol. 2. I’ve never been one for toppings on ice cream really, but guess I might as well sprinkle some broken glass on it…

  • The Last Of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020)

    The Last Of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020)

    Developed/Published by: Naughty Dog / Sony Interactive Entertainment
    Released: 19/6/2020
    Completed: 24/05/2022
    Completion: Finished it.
    Trophies / Achievements: 78%

    This write-up contains massive spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, unavoidably. 

    Abby died. Ellie killed her, in the theatre.

    Again.

    And again.

    And again.

    It was what was right. It was what I wanted, it was what Abby deserved.

    So why wouldn’t the game finish?

    Why did the the game make me keep playing Abby, doing things I didn’t want to do–attacking Ellie? In fact, why was the game making Ellie a boss? I thought… were the designers of this serious? Were they expecting me to feel… conflicted? To possibly feel like I was on Abby’s side, after what she did, and then after spending all that time on what was, ultimately, a totally irrelevant ten hours???

    They couldn’t be that foolish, could they? Did they have that much hubris that they thought this story work?

    So maybe I switched the game all the way down to “very light” and thought, hell, I could be wrong. Maybe they’re actually going to pay off this story.

    They didn’t.

    So yeah, Abby died. Ellie killed her, in the theatre.

    Will I ever play it again? I will never play this again. I intend never think about this game again after writing about it here.

    Final Thought: …Damn. Neil Druckmann. Man. Turning out to be a Ken Levine… it’s almost sad! It’s really depressing, actually, that the reaction to The Last of Us Part II–like basically everything these days–got tied up in tired culture war bullshit, because it only serves to undermine any extremely legitimate criticism of a badly conceived story poorly told. To be honest, I’d love to leave my write-up here, but there’s this worry that you’ll read this and be like “oh, this guy hates Abby because she’s got muscular arms!” or something.

    It’s genuinely quite hard to know where to begin, but if you need my problem in precis, it is simply that The Last of Us Part II manages to tie itself into knots in how it feels about interactive storytelling. On one hand, it decides that despite the fact if you’re playing “The Last of Us Part II” you’ve already spent 10+ hours being Joel and that the previous game used that to (very effectively) make you feel like you’ve personally led Ellie across the United States, growing ever closer to her, that the player will have enough distance that, sure, they’ll be shocked, but they’ll be more “interested in how the story plays out” than “hating Abby with a fire that could burn out a thousand suns”. But then they assume that if you spend 10+ hours being Abby, you’ll get close enough to her that you’ll start to see things her way… even though you’ve just spent 10+ hours playing Ellie, with your hatred only growing.

    And through this, they seem to… forget(?) That Abby’s revenge is not merely for something the player did, but something they goosed the player up to do. There’s a horrible smugness to the game standing in judgement of the player, especially when they don’t know how the player actually felt about what the previous game literally forced them to do (if they wanted to see the end of the game) and I know others didn’t approach it with quite as much of a righteous fury as I did. 

    It’s even worse than that, really, because they actually have to do one of the weakest-ass retcons to make standing in judgement work! At the end of the game the Fireflies are real dicks, who unjustifiably are about to kill essentially a child without giving them any say in the matter… but Part II makes it clear that it was very hard for them! They felt sad about it! Also it was the only thing they could do, and they needed to do it immediately! Also… Abby would have let it happen to her, so really, what a monster you are! We mean, uh, what a monster Joel was!

    It is, I can not put too fine a point on it, just the most embarrassingly desperate writing. It’s forced and it simply does not ring true, not to the player’s experience and not to, well, anything. Sucks for Naughty Dog, but we’re all currently living through a global pandemic where it turns out vaccines are not a panacea, and even if Covid turned your head into a fucking mushroom half the US wouldn’t want to take it and you’d never reach the required immunity, meaning the Fireflies were as likely to kill a lassie and get fuck all out if it as anything else. So fuck off. 

    I don’t even really understand some of the storytelling decisions from really any angle. Even structurally; when playing the only way I could basically justify spending the second half of the game playing Abby was going to be that her side of the game–playing, as it does, out across the three days of Ellie’s half–would feature her following Ellie’s trail of destruction and seeing the cost of that, or somehow presenting a meaningful mirror. But… actually her side of the game is almost entirely completely irrelevant story about TWO OTHER CHARACTERS!!!

    Sorry, I’m actually yelling now, but it’s not actually just idiotic it’s actually sort of offensive? I’m no expert (and on this point I’m happy to accept if people feel I’m in the wrong here) but The Last of Us has previously handled a queer story naturally, but The Last of Us II goes big on using a trans character that basically only exists to make us like Abby more and I found it, well, I found it fucked up?

    I mean, this is where the culture war bullshit gets iffy, actually–because it’s completely fair to say that the narrative in “Abby’s side” isn’t what a player wants to be spending their time on in this game, and definitely not at the point where they get to it. Not because queer and trans stories and representation aren’t valuable! But this feels very clearly like a queer/trans story being used not shared; and it only gets even dodgier in my opinion when you read up and realise that the entire WLF vs. Seraphites angle is meant to be some kind of allegory for Israel and Palestine; the technically superior WLF versus backwards religious zealots with bad opinions but guess what: they just might be as bad as each other!

    (If I’d read that a lot of Druckmann’s inspiration for this came from his sympathy for the IDF I would never ever have fucking played this. I mean what the fuck.)

    I’ll be honest… I’m tired of thinking about this stupid fucking game; I meant what I said above in my “Will I ever play it again?” It has made me more depressed than I’ve probably ever been about triple-A video games as a form for storytelling and it has literally taken me weeks to sit down and write this because it just bummed me out so hard. I keep thinking… did they actually think this was profound? Then I remember how the game has an entire EXTRA THIRD at the end that adds nothing except to make the entire experience only more miserable and make Ellie seem like an idiot, culminating in her making a decision that she literally would not make because she DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE PLAYER KNOWS! 

    FUCK!

    (It’s actually quite funny to read Druckmann dither noncommittally about why she makes that decision in interview in a way that makes it clear it was a necessary story decision, not a character decision.)

    Anyway, please don’t ever waste your time with this. The game has less intelligent things to say than the deleted scenes from Austin Powers (that got left in the UK release, making it a better movie, honestly.) I mean, watch this. Now that’s some powerful storytelling!!!

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.

  • The Tower Of Druaga (Namco, 1984)

    The Tower Of Druaga (Namco, 1984)

    Developed/Published by: Namco
    Released: 06/1986
    Completed: 23/11/2021
    Completion: Got all the required chests and beat it.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is one of the most important games in Japanese RPG history (despite not being Japanese itself), and here’s the other side of the coin: arguably the most important game to the action RPG genre: The Tower of Druaga.

    The Tower of Druaga is known for a couple of things. One, that it’s built around the player performing obtuse, un-explained behaviors to make chests appear that without which the player cannot complete the game; and two, that although it was a smash-hit in Japan (second top grossing machine of 1984) it never received a wide release in US or European arcades and so goes almost completely unknown in the west.

    (I’d actually be fascinated to find any articles or information about The Tower of Druaga being released in the west—there’s very little to google for in English about it, so it would require proper digging. That’s how unsuccessful it was here.)

    That said, Namco has a dedication to making “fetch” (The Tower of Druaga fandom) happen, because it keeps sticking it on every collection it does and you get weird things like how in Pac-Man 99 there’s The Tower of Druaga DLC and that. This probably seems weird, but it’s a side-effect of the fact that “fetch” happened in Japan and it would be a waste of time to remove The Tower of Druaga ROMs or references from western releases plus people would obviously complain even if they’ll never play it.

    Anyway. Should you play it? I didn’t come away recommending Wizardry, though I found it very educational to play. And Tower of Druaga has an obvious influence on The Legend of Zelda, Ys, and so on, so you can feel its DNA in some respects coursing through practically everything we play nowadays. It’s similarly educational, then, but holy lord do not touch this with a fucking bargepole.

    I’ll give props to the team who put Namco Museum together, though. On the Switch version, you’re a mere push of the X button away from seeing what idiotic thing you have to do to find the next chest, and it even informs you if you need it or not (well, that said, it accidentally claims one of the Balance items is a trap. It isn’t, you 100% need it.) This turns the game from “a completely impossible treasure hunt” into “a nigh impossible puzzle.”

    I think I imagined this would play… better? I know it’s from 1984 and that, but I just assumed it would have a Pac-Manny sort of responsiveness. No such luck, as the game locks improvements behind treasure chests and at the start of the game you control a pitifully slow hero who swings his weapon lethargically and is killed by touching anything. At the end of the game you control a slow hero who swings his weapon… still pretty slowly, to be honest? who dies after touching nearly everything.

    This might be fine, except within a few levels you are navigating a maze where wizards near-randomly teleport and can fire spells at you through walls that kill you immediately unless you make sure you’re facing the spell with your shield. They’re supposed to not spawn any closer than two squares from you, but if you’re moving it doesn’t update that so you can easily walk into them as they spawn in, too, which is amazing. And if two guys shoot a spell at you from different directions? Sucks to be you I guess. Oh and when you stab them you’ll not get any feedback that they’re dead. Again, sucks to be you.

    I’m fascinated by the idea that in 1984 Japanese arcades were awash with people who were pumping in 100 yen coins into this and enjoying it. That’s a lot of money for 1984! Famously, the game encouraged a communal aspect, where players worked out how to make the (brutally necessary) treasure chests appear, and I imagine that in arcades across the land there had to be notepads lying out where players jotted down their discoveries. However, this blows me away because the game is just so unrelentingly brutal, with several “gotcha” levels where it feels like wizards are upon you immediately, requiring you move instantly and specifically or die, and requirements that I genuinely can’t imagine working out or performing with any success in arcade conditions.

    I mean this game, near the end, requires you defeat six enemies on one level in a specific order… and then do it again on the next? Enemies that move faster and massively outpower you? It’s not so much that I can’t imagine anyone working these kind of things out–it’s that I can’t imagine players reaching the level of virtuosity where they could, for example, get to level 30 enough times that walking around the level and surviving they’d eventually work out that you needed to walk on a specific square three times. Players must have maddened themselves touching every wall, standing in place, spinning in circles—all things you need to do to progress, while just surviving.

    I beat this by saving every level—I couldn’t save during any levels, because I was worried I’d fuck up somehow and Namco Museum only allows a single save–and this took me literal hours. The final level is an exercise in brutality as you cannot defeat Druaga if you’ve taken a spell hit before he appears, and yet the game gives you such poor feedback you can easily take a spell hit you don’t notice while fighting a wizard who attacks you from four directions at once.

    I’d love to see a master of Tower of Druaga play this. While playing it, the hardest levels quickly devolved to become Pac-Man like memorisation strategies—I knew that if at the start of the level I moved in a particular way, I’d spawn enemies here and there and could therefore survive, but if I ever died I’d have to reload because on my next life I’d not be able to make the same thing happen. Did people’s guides, or do official guides, show you how to navigate the maps a bit like How To Win At Pac-Man? It’s the only way I can imagine seeing this through to level 60 on a single credit.

    I am, to be honest, baffled by Tower of Druaga. The mania that surrounded it you’d expect to have dissipated when people realised how insane the requirements were, but the game had multiple successful home conversions in Japan (I believe the Famicom version was a massive hit) and people love it so much that many of the conversions include even harder, more obtuse dungeons to play though! I had hoped that playing with solution in hand this would be a fun arcade title that felt good to play and I just had to puzzle out how to complete a level, not what to do but no such luck. This is a miserable exercise in dying and reloading and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

    Will I ever play it again? I’ll be taking a quick look at the Famicom version as part of Namco Museum Archives on the Switch, but I find it massively unlikely I’ll play it more than a couple of times.

    Final Thought: Something else wild about the Tower of Druaga: the hero (Gil) actually has a health bar, but it’s hidden from the player. And the bad version of important pick-ups look exactly the same as the good versions! The game goes out of its way to make you not know what’s going on. How. Did. Japanese. Players. Like. This.