Developed/Published by:Â Melbourne House System: Commodore 64 Released:Â 1984 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Beat it with a score of 100 out of 100.
Itâs 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 âXmasâ on their merry release) Merry Christmas From Melbourne House is a slight cheat because itâs 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. Itâs a short, very easy little adventure game that⊠passes about half an hour and actually manages to feel Christmassy.Â
Like A Christmas Adventure, youâre tasked with making sure Santa can get away from the north pole to deliver presents, but in a shocking twist⊠YOU are Santa. The gameâs blurb claims heâs âattempting to stop an industrial disputeâ that âis threatening the delivery of toys to children of the worldâ and it sounds like jolly old saint nick is a fat cat like the rest of âem, and out of solidarity with the elves and workers everywhere I spent quite a bit of time typing things like âGIVE ELVES RAISEâ and âPROVIDE TIME OFFâ but the parser never understood it, so I almost didnât finish this.
The plot is a bit oversold anyway, considering the solution is pretty much âGet off your fat arse and pack your sack of toys yourself, Santa.â
As youâre not doing all that much, the parser is adequate, and the graphics are⊠genuinely quite evocative. They are important tooâthe toys you have to pack are all on one screen. I donât generally like this design in graphic text adventuresâwhere you donât get told everything in text (Iâm a VERBOSE man in Infocom games)âand 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 todayâs money. ÂŁ3.77. I canât really say people got their moneyâs worth here, but they could do a lot worse.
Festive vibes ranking: HIGH
Will I ever play it again? Iâm good.
Final Thought: Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurerâs Guild played through this as well if youâd 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 âin a matter on weeks using an in-house text engine and a tweaked sprite engine based on Way of the Exploding Fist codeâ and that he didnât even have a copy. They paid people at Melbourne House so poorly that they couldnât raise 95p???
Developed/Published by: Chartscan Data, Inc. System: Apple II Released: 12/1983 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Couldnât get Rudolph to drink his bloody milk.
Well, itâs been two years since I thought Iâd âhave a look at the earliest Christmas gamesâ and I managed to play⊠one of them. And then last year I was sick for most of December so I didnât really play anything other than tapping miserably at Marvel Snap. But Iâm back, baby!
First up, I owe almost all understanding of this game to Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurerâs Guild who has written an insanely detailed post on it which I highly recommend reading, but Iâll 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 Santaâs Sleigh Ride, but Iâve since discovered that thereâs several ZX Spectrum games with a 1983 date (including one, potentially lost media, called A Christmas Adventure as well???) so thereâs probably more out there for like⊠the Dragon 32 and shit. But letâs talk about this one anyway. What makes it more interesting than just potentially being the second Christmas-themed video game ever is that it isnât 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 childrenâs books were all the rage, and you got this crappy book where a jpeg of your childâs face was awkwardly stuck on the main character? Like that basically, with the idea that theyâd start with this Christmas âcardâ and then do⊠well probably Easter, and then branch out to like⊠âHappy 43rd Birthday: the adventureâ or âSorry Your Grandma is Dead: the adventureâ 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, Iâm 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 Sierraâs Hi-Res Adventure line before theyâd go on to make the more sophisticated Kingâs 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 Santaâs Ice Palace. Sierraâs Hi-Res Adventures have insanely terrible art (well, apart from Dark Crystal Iâd say, which has a near stained-glass window approach) so getting something that generally looks like itâs had a bit of effort put in is rather nice.
Telling that classic story, âSantaâs been kidnapped and only YOU can save himâ after the intro youâre 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 Sierraâs early output: the parser is terrible. Doing literally anything is a nightmare, and I will fully admit I had to use Pranevichâs article to walk me through the game, and he had to hex edit it just to understand how to solve it!
Itâs confusing, because this is a commercial concept based on greetings cards. Now, I imagine nowadays you can probably get âescape roomâ greeting cards where you have to like, solve a fucking cypher or whatever to see something that says âWeâre getting divorcedâ (and if there isnât, I should get on that) but in general, if youâre 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 youâre saving SANTA. Not Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) which would of course be for cool adults only.
I suppose Iâve 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 (Santaâs Jewish???) But then like⊠thereâs a time machine. And thereâs just so much wrestling with the parser to get anything done. Typing âHELPâ gives you a list of words that the parser understands which is, 100%, a lie, because almost all the words donât work.
Ultimately, itâs the reason I couldnât finish this. In his article, Pranevich was able to feed Rudolph, but despite having stuck the âwasâbask+mlkâ 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 wasâbask, but Iâm 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 isnât good despite the fact it it is, er⊠not good, just because itâs 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 didnât 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 Iâm making that bastard eat.
Final Thought: Itâs worth noting that you can really feel the developersâat least Frank Winstan?âcared about this project because itâs full of little touches. I love that Santa has a poster of Bob and Doug McKenzieâs backdrop up (as Canadian a reference as youâre going to get) and thereâs non-sequiturs like Pac-Man showing up for a hot minute.
Do you have any famous works that youâve always been⊠scared to start? I donât mean intimidatedâI havenât read say, Infinite Jest not because itâs long, but because [jerk-off motion]âbut that something is talked of in such hushed breaths that youâre worried it just wonât 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, itâs not so much that Iâm imagining these incredible things, as much as thereâs this astonishing possibility space out there that it almost feels⊠wrong to cut it down to just the one thing. Schrodingersâ video game.
For A Mind Forever Voyaging, all Iâve known until now is its striking cover art, and that itâs Steven Meretzkyâs attempt to grapple with Reganâs 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 Iâve experienced by 1985 in video games, as weâre introduced to the gameâs central concept: you, the player, are âPRISMâ who, raised in a perfect simulation believing themselves to be the real person Perry Simm, discovers that, well, no, theyâre actually just an AI.
It gave me enough pause that I actually put the game down and didnât start it for several more weeks! If anything, the possibility space had got larger.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, now Iâve played it, is kind of a hard one to discuss. On hand, itâs flawed. As deeply flawed as any Infocom Iâve played up to this point has been, and for many of the same reasons. On the other, itâs 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.
Letâs get to those specifics. First up, the game really requires you to read the manual. While itâs nothing as complicated as Suspended (which I still canât believe was only Infocomâs sixth game) thereâs a similar sort of âmode switchingâ 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. Itâs really here that you get to what could be considered the gameâs most major flawâhow self directed the player has to be for most of the time.
This isnât the same as something like Planetfall, where the player is primed âyouâre stuck on this planet broâ itâs actually literally like âyouâre a computer and thereâs nothing to do?â
There are big swathes of this game where youâre stuck typing âwaitâ or even resorting to âwait 120 minutesâ which I found almost⊠shocking. Itâs made all the more baffling by the fact that the game has a news network that you can âwatchâ but when youâre in the mode time passes at a crawl, meaning that youâll 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 getsâthat as PRISM, youâre 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 clergymanârecord them, and then deliver the recordings to see if the governmentâs transparently republic agenda known as âthe planâ will work. Itâs here the game takes a massive diversion from what Iâd 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.
Donât get me wrong, this is a meticulous recreation of a town and is an extremely intentionally designed space, but itâs also not a âdesigned spaceâ as any video game developer would know it now. I quickly gave up any pretense of mapping the spaceârelying on the one decent map I could find onlineâand began wandering.
And wander I did. To be honest, you donât genuinely need a map outside of the one that comes in the manual, as you arenât 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, thatâs as long as you understand that, because once youâve managed to âcompleteâ the tutorial-like first simulation, the game literally goes âoh, we donât have anything for you to do now. Entertain yourself.â
I know that itâs 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 didnât find this kind of thing frustrating. Noodle around long enough, and youâll 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 itâs here we hit what isâconfusinglyâA Mind Forever Voyagingâs 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. Itâs repetitive, and by the fifth time you do it you are almost certainly tired of the same interactions.
But itâs 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, itâs 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 momentâa supreme court giving the ok to religious fundamentalists seizing government property?âdoesnât seem that absurd when you ask âcould the current supreme court have sided with the far-right extremists in the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge?â the answer is yes, obviously yes.
And isnât it disturbing that youâve 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 itâs ever been, and while I canât recommend it without caveats, I actually rather like that Iâm not completely certain that my instincts on its subtler âflawsâ are correct or not. Lack of direction and the need to endlessly wait at points? Yeah, those are bad. But I canât 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 canât tell if itâs an acceptable price to pay that so many descriptions are generic (I got tired of things being described as a âtotally ordinary [noun]â). Wouldnât it be more interesting to have puzzles to solve? Like, shouldnât 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 Iâm genuinely experiencing it?
With modern eyes, I think I would prefer the latter (tighter, have some puzzles) but I donât actually blame Meretzky for going the other direction at allâespecially 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 whatâs going on (I really donât know what the hell was going on with Infocomâs playtesters sometimes.) But the only thing I really donât 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 Voyagingâs setting, movingly portrayed or not, doesnât 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. Thereâs 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 disserviceâmemory 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 gameâs 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. Iâm richer for having played it, warts and all.
Will I ever play it again? Itâs an interesting question. Iâm not sure Iâd choose to play it againâthe slow decline of society is⊠slow. However, itâs 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 donât represent in many ways the peak of creativity in video games even now.
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 wouldnât the game finish?
Why did the the game make me keep playing Abby, doing things I didnât want to doâattacking 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 Abbyâs side, after what she did, and then after spending all that time on what was, ultimately, a totally irrelevant ten hours???
They couldnât 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 âvery lightâ and thought, hell, I could be wrong. Maybe theyâre actually going to pay off this story.
They didnât.
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: âŠDamn. Neil Druckmann. Man. Turning out to be a Ken Levine⊠itâs almost sad! Itâs really depressing, actually, that the reaction to The Last of Us Part IIâlike basically everything these daysâgot 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, Iâd love to leave my write-up here, but thereâs this worry that youâll read this and be like âoh, this guy hates Abby because sheâs got muscular arms!â or something.
Itâs 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 youâre playing âThe Last of Us Part IIâ youâve already spent 10+ hours being Joel and that the previous game used that to (very effectively) make you feel like youâve personally led Ellie across the United States, growing ever closer to her, that the player will have enough distance that, sure, theyâll be shocked, but theyâll be more âinterested in how the story plays outâ than âhating Abby with a fire that could burn out a thousand sunsâ. But then they assume that if you spend 10+ hours being Abby, youâll get close enough to her that youâll start to see things her way⊠even though youâve just spent 10+ hours playing Ellie, with your hatred only growing.
And through this, they seem to⊠forget(?) That Abbyâs revenge is not merely for something the player did, but something they goosed the player up to do. Thereâs a horrible smugness to the game standing in judgement of the player, especially when they donât 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 didnât approach it with quite as much of a righteous fury as I did.
Itâs 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. Itâs forced and it simply does not ring true, not to the playerâs experience and not to, well, anything. Sucks for Naughty Dog, but weâre 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 wouldnât want to take it and youâd 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 donât 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 gameâplaying, as it does, out across the three days of Ellieâs halfâwould feature her following Ellieâs 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, Iâm actually yelling now, but itâs not actually just idiotic itâs actually sort of offensive? Iâm no expert (and on this point Iâm happy to accept if people feel Iâm 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, actuallyâbecause itâs completely fair to say that the narrative in âAbbyâs sideâ isnât 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 arenât 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 Iâd read that a lot of Druckmannâs inspiration for this came from his sympathy for the IDF I would never ever have fucking played this. I mean what the fuck.)
Iâll be honest⊠Iâm tired of thinking about this stupid fucking game; I meant what I said above in my âWill I ever play it again?â It has made me more depressed than Iâve 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 DOESNâT KNOW WHAT THE PLAYER KNOWS!
FUCK!
(Itâs 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 donât 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 thatâs some powerful storytelling!!!
Developed/Published by: Al Iapicca, Bob Johnston / Energy Games Released: 1981 Completed: 05/12/2021 Completion: I played it. Weâll go as far as that. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Itâs the holiday season, and I was struck recently that I never make a point of playing any Christmassy games during the period. I mean I donât even get Christmas Nights out! Shocking really. Considering Iâm going through my backlog chronologically, I thought Iâd see what the earliest Christmas games were, and Iâm surprised to find that this, a little-known Apple II game that, like, came in a ziploc bag in 1981 is the first Christmas game everâunless you particularly want to count a type-in memory game from Softside Magazine that just happened to use Christmas words. Well, unless Mobygames is wrong, which I guess it could be.
Update (05/12/2025): It seems a copy of this showed up on eBay this year, a rare opportunity to see the game as it looked, ziploc and all.
Anyway, this is a very strange little shooter where you control an absolutely massive Santa flying behind a huge blue Rudolph (I assume all the other reindeer are to his right depth-wise in a row). You move right to left (odd) must shoot⊠Pac-men? And⊠stars? While trying to drop presents into the chimneys below that you can (surprisingly) control the direction of a bit. All of which you do at about one frame a second, if that.
Itâs, obviously, not very good, and it doesnât particularly make you feel Christmassy outside of a beepy version of Jingle Bells right at the start (itâs silent the rest of the time.) It seems like the programmers (Al Iapicca and/or Bob Johnston of Marin Data Systems, according to the title screen) couldnât work out how to make Santa only move up and down when you held the direction, so as soon as you hit A or Z he just⊠goes in that direction until you push the opposite one1. Itâs also clearâunless the game has the slowest ramp-up of difficulty everâthat they couldnât manage to get more than one enemy on screen at a time with all the chimneys moving too, so thereâs points where youâre just like⊠should I go off and make a cup of tea and come back?
Not that having more enemies on screen would be a good ideaâSanta is so bloody massive and slow [âoi!ââSanta] that itâs hard to really do anything. Itâs not exactly, hardâif youâre dedicated you can slowly line up your shots and avoid the birds that you canât kill, all while dropping presentsâbut itâs really, really hard to want to.
That all said⊠I have this weird suspicion that this was inspired by Defender (which came out in early 1981) of all things. Sure, you canât turn around, but thereâs a Defendery-ness to the stars, Rudolph shoots a similar laser and dropping presents feels inspired by the rescues in Defender, so maybe they thought âyou know what would make Defender better? A MASSIVE SANTA.â
It doesnât, but you know what? It was 1981. They werenât to know where games would go. Hereâs to the dreamers.
Festive vibes ranking: You’re constantly staring at a huge Santa. HIGH
Will I ever play it again? I barely played it the first time.
Final Thought: Thinking about this in the context of 1981, the Apple II had had an extremely impressive year, with seminal RPGs Ultima and Wizardry coming out, and system defining titles including Swashbuckler and Castle Wolfenstein also being released. With inflation considered, itâs wild to imagine how anyone afforded the âaffordableâ Apple II (the price translates to about five grand now!) but letâs assume you lived in one of those mansions from a John Hughes movies in the 80s and you excitedly ran downstairs on Christmas morningâyou could just about accept that your granny bought you Santaâs Sleigh Ride by asking a clerk in a âmom-and-popâ computer store (if this managed any form of actual distribution at all) but youâd be hoping your parents picked up one or two of the other titles Iâve mentioned so you werenât bored ten minutes later and have to *shudder* go and play outside.
Developed/Published by: Dani Bunten Berry / EA Released: 11/1983 Completed: 24/06/2021 Completion: Beat Tournament mode against 3 AI with a colony score of 110,000+ Trophies / Achievements: n/a
MULE is an interesting one. I was trying to think what the cinema equivalent is, as a sort of easy metaphor: a classic that was lauded (if never particularly imitated) by a generation of filmmakers that goes almost completely unwatched these days. Itâs not one of the obvious ones (you know, Super Mario Bros. as Birth of a Nation, or something); itâs too sophisticated to be something super early (Space Invaders as Journey to the Moon) and so I just canât place it. The Red Shoes, perhaps?
The thing is thoughâand I suppose itâs the reason Iâm trying to draw the metaphorâis that if you want to watch The Red Shoes and see what the likes of Scorcese have raved about, you can do so easilyâitâs streamable on about nine different services, free with subscription or even ad-supported; you can buy it on a Criterion blu-ray and get a boat load of special features to give you context. Nothing is holding you back.
Hereâs how you can play MULE: you can pay $8 to Good Old Games to play the trash PC port that is totally unrepresentative (itâs maybe also available on Origin, but I havenât looked.)
Ok, so you donât want to do that (and itâs not Good Old Gamesâ fault: they near-exclusively sell PC games). So hereâs how you play MULE âas intendedâ: You have to download an Atari 800 emulator or understand how to make something like Retroarch make that happen. Then you have to find a ROM (watch out! You might download a pirate one that crashes if you catch the wumpus!). Then you have to find the BIOS files that will let the emulator run the Atari 800. Oh and donât forget that the Atari 800 emulator requires a bit of fiddling to make that work. And because you want to see the game as intended, youâve either now got to make this run on that CRT youâve got lying around for this sort of thing or run it through a shader, preferably with a nice border so it looks like youâre running it on an old TV.
Oh, and for context, youâre going to want to look up the (beautiful) box and manual online.
The alternative, is, of course, to buy an Atari 800, monitor, a copy of the game (good luck finding it for less than $200) and four joysticks.
This is, clearly, absurd. Now donât get me wrong; there are lost films and inaccessible films. But MULE is out there, and in the history of games itâs at least as important as The Red Shoes is to cinema. But you have to be extremely dedicated to play itâand worse, if you donât need to be (for example, you pass an Atari 800 in a âVIDEOGAMES!!!â exhibition at a museum) it will be completely impossible to grasp.
So anyway, that sucks, because if youâre a student of games and their history you should play MULE, and not just because itâs honestly still pretty fun. Because itâs passed into this position that people only talk of it from the second or third handâoften to pay tribute to the pioneering Dani Bunten Berryâand I actually feel a bit sad about that. We pay tribute to those who came before us by playing their work, not just talking about it.
[âOK, now start the criticisingââEd.]
How dare you⊠ahhh you got me. I think MULE is super cool but hereâs the thing that happens after you put in all that work: you go âmannnn this is oldddddâ because MULE is old, and â80s personal computerâ harsh. Itâs at its heart almost a board game, but itâs slathered in early âwe havenât quite worked all this outâ design decisions that sorta made sense at the time but also extremely donât now.
Itâs played like this: you and up to three other players (though itâs always played with four) are settling a planet; each round you have to select a plot of land (from plains, mountains or river) and then select a mule, equip it to either mine ore, collect energy or farm food, which it can do on any plot (well, you canât mine on river tiles) but gain the most benefit from doing so on the equivalent tile. After everyone has done so, a random event happens (a solar storm makes more energy production, for example) each commodity is consumed by your community and the surplus is traded: either to or from other players or to or from the town store. And then the next round happens (oh, and sometimes you can buy plots of land at auction, not just take them when given.)
Itâs actually pretty graspable, but the quirk is the law of supply and demand. With particular lands (and land placement) you can create massive surpluses of certain goods, and you can also choose to ignore some goods even though your community needs them. âIâll make so much money selling this oreâ you think, âthat Iâll be able to buy as much food as I need.â
Trading happens in a format that must have inspired the negotiations in Theme Park (âAh yes, I know exactly the mini-gameââevery reader, who is as decrepit as me) where you walk your characters down or up the screen to meet at a value, with the quirk that if the store doesnât have any of a good to sell you the sellers can walk back infinitely (well, within the set time limit) to bleed you dry. (And the computers will do thisâŠ) BUTâif they do this, theyâre in danger of the colony getting a bad score at the end of the game! So itâs all about the balance of winning (individually) without losing (as a collective). Man sounds like those clowns in congress should play some MULE, am I right???
So far so good, right? The problem is itâs the early 80s, so all of this is done with a one-button stick where you have to control your character and make them walk into the mule pen and then walk out with the mule and then walk into the outfitter and then walk to your plot and then the timer runs out because you didnât make enough food, or because moving your character is janky as hell. And selecting your plot of land? Oh thatâs a reaction test as a cursor moves along the screen (faster on the higher difficulties) meaning the PC is gonna screw you out of half your lands (and mis-timing is going to screw you out of the other half.) And because thereâs not that much space on the screen, actually fully understanding supply and demand in context⊠isnât going to totally happen. You need to remember how much of a good you need to buy to not be in shortage. How the shop price affects things and changes is⊠obscure.
Which is not even to raise the nadir of MULE: random âpunishmentâ events. Yep, this was designed well before balancing was really a thing, and they had the best intentions at heart, but âlift up the low boatsâ wasnât a thingâ âsmash the high ones with a tsunamiâ was. Itâs a bummer because it doesnât really work. Itâs super clever to make the winning players play first (so itâs easier for the worse off to strategise) but some players can get into such a commanding position that losing some money here or there isnât that bad. And instead, things tend to happen like you scrimping and saving, finally getting your engine up and running, lots of ore coming in⊠and a pirate ship shows up, takes all your ore on a turn when the players ahead of you all switched to energy and food, and now youâre stuck with nothing to sell and no way to afford the energy or food you need to keep your plots going. It is the dogshit worst.
That said, while MULE has the capability to cause (and must have caused) Monopoly-esque meltdowns, the game is still dang fun if you can get into the mindset. The AI is hilariously vindictiveâI love that it will screw you on land auctions if you try and force the price up to screw them (itâs all about timing when to walk backwardsâŠ) and that theyâll be extremely selective as to when to buy from you, even if it hurts them (Iâd swear it knows it doesnât need food towards the end of the gameâŠ) and if you save-scum away only the bullshit punishments or mis-clicks (be generous; itâs 2021) the core here is so dang solidâand it only really makes sense as a video game, because Iâll be fucked if Iâm calculating the new cost of mules based on the previous trading period using a table in a board game manual or something.
Is it a classic Iâll return to again and again? No, not really. Is it something that any student of video games should play once, twice, three times at least? Of course, and if thereâs anything you take from this itâs criminal that they probably wonât.
Will I ever play it again? I am desperate to play this on tournament mode with three other experienced (but not too experienced) players IRL. No joke desperate. I think there some of my issues (the misclicks; the punishments) stop becoming as massive an issue when youâre playing with more than two peopleâŠ
Final Thought: Shout out to TreyM for their classic CRT overlays! This kind of thing really doesnât feel right without themâand theyâll continue to help me experience things âin contextâ as much as I can when I get to the likes of Rescue on FractalusâŠ
Developed/Published by: Team Cherry Released: 24/02/2017 Completed: 09/12/2020 Completion: Finished the main story with a percentage north of 100%. Trophies / Achievements: 48%
Kinda funny, but not that funny to be writing at this today [âmonths earlierâ-Ed.] after listening to the Greatest Games Ever Insert Credit Show where Tim Rogers enthused that this was the best Metroidvania ever and Brandon Sheffield hated it very, very much.
Might as well cut to the chase and say I like it far, far less than Tim Rogers but donât hate it quite as much as Brandon Sheffield (but then, I played it more than an hour, and if Iâd stopped at an hour I might have.) However, this is me falling headlong into âno, itâs the children who are wrongâ territory because Iâm going to say that is pretty much everything I hate in Metroidvania design (level design in general, even) and Iâm truly, truly baffled by why this is so lauded. I mean, this is a game that opens with a short tutorial segment (fine, good) but then throws you into a level with multiple long pathways, no map unless you pick the right path quickly, and extremely samey graphics across the area meaning you just stumble around second guessing every move. I mean the whole âyou donât get a map in a section until you find the guy who has the mapâ⊠people like that? And donât get me started on how the game doesnât let you see yourself on the map unless you waste one of your equip slots. Thatâs honestly unpleasant.
I mean the level design is bad enough on the macro level, but each area is also chock-a-block with blind drops, punishment drops, and enemies that take forever to kill because you have to engage with a punitive weapon levelling system that, frankly, youâll wonât be able to engage with unless you literally look up where to get the materials.
This kind of complaint, however, is the exact type of thing that breeds what has to be one of my most hated âextremely online gamerâ takes, which to respond to a complaint something is just tediously hard or obtuse by telling folk to âGit gudâ. Hereâs my response: the game should get good.
Anyway, what I did with Hollow Knight was ignore everyone who says you shouldnât look anything up because I ainât got time for that and just start to actually roll through it using a map to find the traversal skills etc. While I never ever actually liked the level design basically ever, the game only really starts to become anything worth your time once youâve unlocked dashing and even then it wasnât until I unlocked the ability to dash through enemies and damage them that I gelled with it at all (especially because you canât cancel the dash or backdash, meaning until the point dashing was safer I didnât like it).
Even at that, a bit like with Celeste, I didnât ever really care for how the main character controlled, nor how battles felt or having to go and get your âshadeâ any time you died so you could get your money back (guess what! It was never hard to do that, my stomach only ever sank at the waste of time.)
The problem is of course is that metroidvania design is so⊠more-ish? I played this wayyyy longer than I needed to because itâs actually fairly trivial to beat this if you âgit gudâ and just do the exact main quest, but instead I unlocked all the abilities, fully upgraded my sword, got all the equips⊠I mean, I basically dredged this because even if I wasnât really having fun in the moment I was always so close to doing the next thing and so I did.
Anyway I beat it and the spell was broken.
Will I ever play it again? No, and no fucking way will I play a sequel or anything like that.
Final Thought: Hollow Knight is⊠not good. Thereâs no excuse for lengthy, tedious mapping and no excuse for punishing, tedious level design. Or the terrible introduction to the game or pacing/planning of the unlocks (I mean come on, the first unlock being a spell instead of dash, which is so core to the experience; lol). That said, youâll probably stockholm syndrome yourself into thinking itâs the beeâs knees because thereâs just so much content. Plus, to be honest, thereâs some charming animation and even if I didnât like the setting or any of the world design (so bland! So samey!!!) I actually thought the soundtrack was nice. In conclusion: the children are wrong!!!
Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Released: March 13th, 2015 Completed: 25th April, 2017 Completion: Finished all the levels, collecting all but eight of the gears. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Hereâs another Nintendo failure, then! You know, I do like to complain that Nintendo only seem to pump out games in just a few franchises (Mario, Zelda, recently Fire Emblem) but hereâs what happens whenever they put anything else out: it tanks. So no wonder theyâre getting the idea that people just want the same thing over and over until they run it into the ground. And honestly, sometimes itâs fair that the things they release fail, because theyâre insanely misguided (Metroid: Federation Force) but then itâs also sad because Nintendo then learns the wrong lesson from them (âpeople hate Metroidâ).
I mean, the lesson they might have learned hereâIntelligent Systemâs attempt at a Valkyria Chronicles-esque third-person strategy titleâis probably âdonât let Intelligent Systems do anything except Fire Emblemâ because bloody hell I canât keep up with the number of Fire Emblems that have come out. (Remember Advance Wars? Itâs been almost ten years, guys.)
And, frankly: itâs a shame. Because I liked Code Name: STEAM. I know, thatâs insane. I hate everything. And let me state as caveat that I immediately installed the patch that allows you to speed up the enemy turns. But Code Name: STEAM is a completely serviceable strategy title thatâoutside of a few frustrationsâI found completely pleasant.
Now, I can agree: itâs a bit weird looking. It doesnât manage to nail the comic book look it wants, and the enemies are somewhat⊠dull. However, itâs got a weirdly interesting and diverse cast drawn from literature. It gets some points, for example, for gender-swapping Zorro (was this secretly why it failed? Neckbeard boycott?) but loses some for having Dorothy bare her midriff (why?) but maybe it gains those back by including Queen Califa. Iâm not a perfect arbiter of points, ok?
It does have some other flaws. Many (most?) people complain about the lack of a true tactical view, but that didnât bother me because itâs obviously not what theyâre trying to do. With free movement before you commit (hindered by enemy overwatch attacks), itâs a game about careful scouting and much more about the feel of being in a small attack squad. I do think the game is much too stingy with its steam-based action points, meaning you travel through levels very slowly, and the game doesnât have any good sense of a progression of powerâall of the unlocks are similar in power levels, just different, when it could have done with more steam being offered as you unlock new boilers (for some reason, most boilers donât refill fully each turn, and the ones that refill slowly that you unlock I found unusable. Rather a big misstep, I feel.)
Iâd say the main mistakes theyâve made are in working against the slow, methodical play style that the limited action points engender. To mix things up they add a lot of âpressureââfirst with baddies that spawn in (behind you, usually) which is a mild irritant, and then just the worst: âspotterâ baddies in levels featuring mortar attacks. They spawn and you have to get out of their line of sight or take a severe hit. Of course, so you canât stall, you canât kill them (just move them, hopefully out of sight, but itâs generally awkward to do) and this is insanely frustrating with the limited amount of action points on offer. There are certain levels where you will be harried to the point scouting is impossible, and you get situations where you stumble forward, get shot by a baddie with knock-back, and then land directly in the path of the spotter you thought you were escaping, and die by mortar. Oh, and thereâs a couple of difficulty-spike levels outside of that: one with mounted guns that donât have a clear range (frustrating) and another with a bunch of exploding enemies dropping in that I found⊠ragey.
Honestly, at least one of these levels had me considering stopping playing, and thatâs really awful, because the game is so close to being an all-round nice time like Valkyria Chronicles. The final boss is a pain in the arse too, admittedlyâbut at least itâs nothing like the final boss of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, my last dalliance with an Intelligent Systems game.
However, the levels in which it worksâit really works. In general the map design is clever, with a good mix of complex indoor and outdoor spaces, and while generally itâs a bad idea to split up your team of four, the level where youâre forced to do was a particularly fun one, I thought. There are far more fun levels than frustrating ones, itâs just the annoying ones are going to stick in your craw (I mean, theyâre ultimately why I didnât collect all the gears you can find in levels, and I wanted to.)
Iâm gonna say that itâs weird to me that Code Name: STEAM didnât get a fairer shake when it was released. It was slated by almost all reviewers with them almost all concentrating on the (pre-patch) lengthy wait between turns, and I guess that one mistake wrecked any chance of it managing critical acclaim at least.
Well: Itâs got the only critical acclaim it truly needs: that I liked it. I mean, I didnât love it or anything but I had a nice time. That should be more than enough!
Will I ever play it again? I wonât, but the sequel they tease at the end I would have played, except it shall never exist.
Final Thought: I recommend this, actually. Iâm gonna⊠recommend it. Really! Because when I picked it up it was $5, and pretty much any store is gonna have it for pennies. You can do so much worse.
Developed/Published by: Good-Feel / Nintendo Released: October 17th, 2010 Completed: 28th November, 2014 Completion: Finished all the levels. Didnât 100% collect everything or anything, but close (cannae be arsed to boot it up to find out exactly how close.) Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Do you like Starbucks? I really donât. In fact, I go absolutely out of my way to not use Starbucks. I hate it when Iâm at, say, an airport, and the only way I can get a hot tea is from a Starbucks. I mean, look at that, Iâve written âhot teaâ there because Iâve gotten so used to being beaten down by Americanisations from places like Starbucks that I donât just say tea. Thing is, itâs not like Starbucks is that bad. Itâs bland, and competent. Itâs really, when you get down to it, not offensive.
You might want to guess here where Iâm going with this, but Kirbyâs Epic Yarn isnât Starbucks. No. What Kirbyâs Epic Yarn is like is⊠well, imagine a person who loves Starbucks, right? They love it. And so they decides to start their own coffee place, very much based on Starbucks. Their coffee shop attempts to have Starbucks-style coffee, Starbucks-style music, Starbucks-style decor. But, by virtue of being made from the sweat of an individual, it doesnât come out quite that way. The coffee is a little more interesting. The music is some interesting jazz. And the decor has a really cute, handmade feel. This person hasnât got anything wrong, theyâve just made something much more personal, more ârealâ despite basing their design on something bland, corporate and forgettable.
Itâs the kind of place that youâd goâhell, Iâd goâand I wouldnât hate it, you know? Iâd appreciate the cute touches that they put in. The cushions, or the art. Iâd find myself having a perfectly pleasant time there. None of that edge of irritation that Starbucks engendersâwhere itâs so bland, you feel annoyed that itâs been calculated to not annoy you.
But Iâd, without really thinking about it, not bother to go back.
Thatâs Kirbyâs Epic Yarn. Itâs cute, full of lovely touches. Genuinely sweet, really. But the core⊠well itâs just another forgettable 2D platformer, isnât it? If youâre going to put all this effort into making something lovely, please donât base it on a Starbucks.
Will I ever play it again? Nope. And this goes on the sad pile of âNintendo games I wonât keepâ which is rare indeed.
Final Thought: I honestly thought Jeff and Casey Time had taken music from this game. I was pretty sure theyâd lifted one of the tracks⊠maybe Lava Landing? (which is amazing, give it a listen!) but it turns out that itâs an original piece of music, The Infinite Tea Time. Also amazing but really nothing like Lava Landing. This is therefore proof I, and you, should watch Jeff and Casey Time again because it was really good and itâs clearly been too long.
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