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"TALK"

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"HALL"

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"SWALLOW"

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"TV"

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"ADVICE"

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You Can’t Force a Metaphor

From July 13th, 2020, at 11:14PM

I’m going to turn 23 in 46 minutes.

I’m sitting here, listening to an old Topanga demo tape and drinking Carling Light (and here Chris turns to open the white can sitting next to him, taking a sip and thus rendering the previous declaration true).

I drove to my sister’s house today. We exchanged birthday gifts and I played with her little puppy Leia. They fed me dinner and peanut butter chocolate cake. It was delicious.

Earlier in the day, I ordered a brand new laptop. It’s going to allow me to play weird, new indie games. After that I took my mom’s car (my car temporarily for the past four months), and wandered around Walmart, listening to an old episode of the Insert Credit podcast. After I left Walmart, I came home and asked my sister if she’d like to do the gift exchange today. She said yes and I went there.

I stayed at her house for maybe five hours, and then I drove home, with what was left of the cake (half), and my gifts from her and my brother (which had been delivered to my house, and which I had therefore brought to her house to open with her and her fiancé before bringing them back with me, now unwrapped).

On the way to her house and back, I listened to the new What a Cartoon episode about Adventure Time. On it, Bob and Henry talked about how Rebecca Sugar had decided that she would do animation work in order to make money and pay rent and eat food, and that she would accept that it would be a possibly soulless, commercial venture. She decided that she was fine with this, because she would continue to pursue her online comics as her real creative outlet—the thing that really mattered. She figured she could live with commercial work, because she would always have the thing that really mattered, her real artistic venture, her real means of self expression, her online indie comic.

I wonder if it’s possible to live a life like this. Could I just work a job, any job, that I mostly liked and that afforded me enough money to pay rent and eat food, and continue to just write however the fuck I want and have fun.

Of course, for Sugar it didn’t work out this way. She ended up finding a commercial job that would also allow her to express herself and create art. This is beautiful; what a ridiculous thing that is. Her webcomics and all her beautiful art led to her getting a spot where she could reach such a wide audience and pay her rent. She rules, and I found out today that she was born July 9th, the same day as Isaac Brock and my grandmother.

Her situation is ideal, of course. You make amazing beautiful things, and one day you also get the chance to make money and reach millions of people. She’s a one percent of a one percent of a one percent or whatever the fuck it is that people usually say about that sort of thing. The point is that that’s not the point. The point is to meet people, and to create beautiful, meaningful things. The point is to pursue art and people. The point is to pursue the things that actually matter.

So, it’s seven minutes until my birthday. Thinking about the ends or the beginnings of things can become so overwhelming. It can be so impossible to try to properly end or begin things, so scared that you might fuck up everything you’ve done or everything you’re going to do. It’s scary, and it seems like the only option is to say fuck it. The only option is to not think about it, and enjoy fucking up just as much as you might enjoy any other thing. I watched somebody die in a car crash in Montreal and I stood there. I didn’t run towards the car and I didn’t call the police. I stood there and wondered if maybe a car flipping over and rolling into the side of a bridge and crashing through the cement wall was a normal occurrence, and I worried that if I overreacted people would think I was weird or look at me. I stood there and I worried what people would think of me.

Or, something like that. I don’t know.

The point is that you can’t control anything and to try is only to increase or guarantee the pain that comes with fucking it all up. All you can do is try your best and hope for the best and let go of control. There isn’t really any other option, or at least not one that I’ve found.

There’s two minutes left, and I don’t know, that Pup demo tape is still playing. Did you know Pup released a full demo tape under the name Topanga in 2012? I didn’t.

Also, I should note here that it is probably impossible to really give up control. No matter how care-free or relaxed or whatever the fuck else other people might be or pretend to be, it seems like I (and maybe all people) can never really let go, and part of the challenge might be to let that go as well. You maybe have to let go that you can never let go of everything. You can never let go of it all.

I sure can’t.

(and here, I should note, that just as I finished writing the sentence “I sure can’t,” the Pup demo tape stopped playing, and the clock struck midnight, and I felt like a ridiculous clown for worrying that I had maybe been given a perfect moment but somehow fucked it up. I don’t know. I feel pretty good. I feel like I have, at least for this one moment, let go of not being able to let go of not being able to let go of not being able to let…)

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a few places where something happened

from august 7th, 2020

. . .

I just went for a walk beneath the dark sky of London, Ontario.

It’s 9:44PM, and I’m sitting beside the window of a ground floor hotel room. Outside, I can see a mostly lit parking lot, with three cars in view from the desk where I sit. A friend of mine is asleep in one of the two beds in the room. All of the lights are off, besides those flooding in from the parking lot outside.

I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska. It’s dark, and hollow, and full of static and dark streets and fear. It’s mostly just acoustic guitar, harmonica and his voice. It all feels like it was recorded in the shadow of an old building. I’m gonna start playing Lithium City soon. It’s a game I meant to start playing nearly a month ago. I couldn’t at the time. Now, I can, and I’m going to, and I plan on writing a review about it and sending it to the man who made the game. I bought the game after reading a blog post of his about his having been making games for 10 years. I feel like there was a pretty good darkness throughout that post. It doesn’t end on a happy note, really. It’s beautiful.

So, anyway, I plan on sending him the review. I’m hoping the review will turn out to be ridiculous and dark and indulgent, and that he’ll be confused by it. I hope he reads it. I hope it turns out to be worth his reading.

I’ve been feeling as though my writing has been pretty worthless as of late. Like there’s no point in any of this, or something like that. Well, I went back and started reading Tim Rogers’ 2006 Insert Credit Fukubukuro and, well, yeah, things feel worthwhile again. I wonder if it’ll ever be possible for me to properly communicate the impact he’s had on me.

I couldn’t get beer tonight. The hotel bar closed at eight, and I only managed to get one Bud Light before then. I walked to a Metro nearby at nine, but it had closed as well, despite saying that it was open until 10. I guess it’s a holiday.

So instead of a beer, I’m drinking a 473ml can of bubly that I got from the hotel vending machine. It cost $1.75, and I’d say it was worth it. As long as I’ve got some kind of cold carbonated drink I’m alright.

But yeah, I’m in a Best Western in London, Ontario. There’s a pool here; it was a little too cold to be comfortable. I finished A Short Hike yesterday, and wrote some weird bullshit review of it. So now I’ve got to play Lithium City, and then Long Gone Days, and then I’m free to do whatever. I think I’m going to get that one month of Xbox Game Pass for $1, and allow myself to wallow in all of those games I’ve never played. I’m going to play that first Gears of War (Tim Rogers’ game of the decade), and I’m going to play that first Halo, and I’m going to play that Yakuza Kiwami, and maybe that Yakuza Zero, too. Maybe I’ll try out that Subnautica, finally, I’m thinking.

That’s a lot of video games I’m thinking about playing. I sure do enjoy thinking about those things, and reading about them, too. And writing about them sometimes.

Well, I’m not so sure I’ve got much else to write about right now. Maybe I’ll come back to this thing later tonight, in the early morning. Right now, I’m going to go back to this Tim Rogers 2006 Fukubukuro. It’s dark; and my friend is still asleep; and I’m glad that this new laptop has a keyboard that lights up, so I can see the letters on the keys I hit; and the artificial lights of the parking lot are still picking certain spots in this room to illuminate, most notably the ones where my friend’s body lies; and I don’t know if they ever turn off these lights.

I assume they’ll be on all night.

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i found the patience for jazz

from october 21, 2020

. . .

I talk myself out of myself

When I’m overwhelmed

-Touché Amoré, “Reminders”

Six fucking months. 

Six fucking months I’ve been a fucking worthless, jobless fucking nothing.

Fuck. I honestly sat down to write this to feel like absolute fucking garbage, but “Come Heroine,” is helping me to feel a little better. Fuck. fuck me. Like fucking PUP in the past.

Fuck. I haven’t had a job in six months. I fucked my tooth up last night because I accidentally bit my fucking fork. What a stupid way to fuck your teeth. Three times last night I woke up from the pain of grinding my injured tooth. 

So I’ve been feeling a little insane since that happened. It can be really hard for me to calm down. Sometimes there’s just that little thing hanging inside of you screaming at you to just fucking rip it out. I just want to be alone.

I’m still sort of in between being okay and not. 

I have that feeling, like I should just rip it out. It’s not a healthy one. I don’t know. I sat alone on the bathroom floor for a while.

I feel fucking stuck. Like I can’t just fully lean into a feeling and totally feel it. Like, I can’t feel totally fucking angry or sad and I can’t feel fucking good either. I just keep going back and forth between it all. It really bothers me. There’s this terrible frustration at not being able to fully commit to being fucking angry.

Maybe it’s fine. Let’s try thinking about video games.

I’ve been playing Outer Wilds recently. It’s pretty cool. I don’t think it’s going to change my life or anything, but it’s cool. You explore space, you die over and over, you slowly learn things, you slowly start to feel like you do actually know what the fuck you’re doing. Really the greatest parts haven’t been learning or any dumb shit like that, they’ve been the weird, chill, interesting surprises. Like the first time I went to Giant’s Deep and plunged into the green haze surrounding the planet and everything went dark until I emerged on the other side and found myself surrounded by green hurricanes over a green ocean. That was really cool. That makes me feel like the game is worth playing. I don’t really care about learning the secrets or figuring out what happened to the Nomai or whatever, I just kinda wanna chill and hang out and wander around space and look at stuff. It’s okay to not have everything resolved every moment. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re trying your best. It’s okay to deal with the world however you can. I wonder if this game is going to wind up being something that fully sticks with me. Like, I imagine I will continue to enjoy the chill vibes of floating around and looking at shit, but I wonder if any of the mystery parts will start to feel interesting or cool. Maybe it will, dude. Who knows. 

Other than that, dude, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dragon Quest XI. Man, I wanna play that god dang game. It’s so big and ridiculous and chill and pretty. I wanna just fucking hang out with that thing for 80 hours, dude. I want it. I’ve been thinking about buying this thing for my Switch for the last couple days or so now. Man, I’m down for it. I’m down to just go into this thing and have a ridiculous, chill time. 

Fuck, writing is still a real good time, dude. 

So yeah, Dragon Quest XI, man. I want to soon be just hanging out with that thing and playing it for half and hour every night before bed. That’s beautiful!!! That sounds really chill, man. Sounds like a heck of a time, dude. 

Keep trying your best, it’s all a real weird, long, chill journey.

Let’s embrace the Twilight

While burning out the Limelight

-Touché Amoré, “Limelight”

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Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020

An Introduction

I graduated from university in May of 2020. In the 7 months since, I haven’t done much. I’ve spent a lot of time in empty homes, trying to get up.

What I have done, though, in this time, is play a lot of video games. There’s been very little else to do. I played classic indie games I’d never touched. I played dozens-of-hours-long-JRPGs I never thought I’d finish. I’ve gotten a lot better at just hanging out with video games.

So at the end of this year I’ve written what might be the only thing I could really write about 2020: a list of my favourite games of the year.

And so I now present:

Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020

10: The Stanley Parable

The most important thing that happens in The Stanley Parable comes in the first five minutes of the game. You watch the introductory cutscene, leave Stanley’s work station, walk through the deserted office, and come to a set of doors. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left.” But you haven’t. You haven’t done that. He doesn’t say that you should or that you would, he says that you already have. But you’re still standing there. You haven’t done anything.

And so the rest of the game unfolds from the brilliance of this opening statement. The Narrator says what you’ve done, and then you either do or do not do it. There are some good jokes in there, too.

But so the point is that the rest of the game, all the possible endings/jokes/things to see, are just a fun sort of way to spend some time, none of them being the actual important part of the game, because the important parts already happened.

Okay but so there are some endings that feel like they’re worth writing about. This one’s called the Dream Ending, unofficially or maybe officially. It goes like this:

When you get to a stairwell, and the Narrator says that you went upstairs to see your boss, you go down the stairs, and when you do that, the Narrator begins talking about how you just couldn’t face your boss. It was too scary. He’d think you’re crazy.

The Narrator then says that Stanley begins to think that maybe he is crazy. He says that Stanley begins to wonder why doors always shut behind him, why he can’t see his feet or body, why the basement hallways and rooms he’s been walking through have clearly been repeating themselves, over and over, the entire time he’s been walking down there.

The Narrator says that Stanley comes to the conclusion that he’s dreaming. He (Stanley) begins to make himself float, and makes the space around him turn to stars. The Narrator says he begins to wonder how he’s got so much control over his dream. And then, the Narrator says, Stanley begins to wonder why there’s a voice in his head, describing all of his thoughts and actions. He begins to wonder why the voice is describing him wondering about the voice. He wonders if this voice speaks to all people in their dreams.

The Narrator says that, of course, this is not a dream. Stanley decides to prove that it is.

He closes his eyes (the screen goes black), and the Narrator describes him feeling the sensation of lying in his bed in his apartment. When Stanley’s eyes open, we see the same repeating basement we were in before. The Narrator says:

“Stanley began screaming.”

Eventually, the screen goes black, and the Narrator begins talking about Mariella. He says that one day while she was walking to work she came across a dead man lying on the sidewalk. He says that the woman knows that the man was crazy, and she becomes thankful that she is not crazy, and that she has her life together, and she generally looks down on this crazy man. Then she turns from the body and resumes her walk to work. Then it ends.

This game has a lot of things to say about a lot of things. They might all be brilliant. Stanley spends his days sitting in front of a screen waiting to be told what buttons to press and how long to press them for. The Narrator says that to most people this would be torturously boring, but Stanley feels like he was made to do it. He’s happy. He enjoys being told what to do and then doing it and then receiving the desired positive result. This is maybe too obvious a metaphor for me to explain here without feeling ridiculous.

So but anyway, The Stanley Parable is most interesting to me as a game that’s taunting video games and sometimes maybe narratives and reality as a whole, or that’s presenting you with the exciting nightmare feeling of reality breaking down around you.

I guess let’s maybe talk about the scene that takes place right before the credits roll.

I don’t remember how you get there, what path you take. All that I remember and all that matters is that you find yourself removed from Stanley’s body, looking down from atop the room where Stanley is first presented with a choice. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left,” and nothing happens, because we’re not there to control Stanley. We’re just watching. Stanley stays motionless as the Narrator again asks for him to please make a choice. The asking turns to pleading. The Narrator’s voice cracks as he begs Stanley to please just make a choice. He says it doesn’t even matter which he makes, the Narrator promises that Stanley will win and everything will be great either way so just Please make a choice. It gets desperate and surreal and you’re standing there above it all as the names of the people who made the game begin to scroll past your eyes.

Yes, this game is great.

9: Paratopic

Paratopic is a game made of only the things that need to be there. It cuts from scene to scene in an instant. When it wants you to go in a certain direction, it makes you do so.

It wasn’t until I googled this game for some reason that I can’t remember that I learned that it tells the story of three different characters. I didn’t like that. I much preferred playing this game and feeling like things were just happening. That’s how I continue to think about the game: things just happen.

At the beginning of the game you sit alone in a restaurant, a gun sitting unloaded in front of you. Pick it up, load it, walk around the restaurant if you want. It (the restaurant) is empty. Walk to the door behind the counter, kick it in, point your gun at the man therein, the game cuts to a black screen with the word “Paratopic” at center,. It cuts again, you’re standing in front of an elevator in a dim and faded apartment building. Minutes later, mid-conversation with your neighbour, the scene cuts. You’re driving a car. Your car moves forward on its own, you can steer. You sit there and listen to static-backed radio stations wherein the hosts speak what almost sounds like English. It’s incomprehensible. Different objects (gun, briefcase, nothing, etc.) appear beside you in the passenger seat as you look and look away.

The whole game is like this; things just happening.

That’s the value of this game to me. It just shows you a bunch of things, little sketches of scenes and conversations and forests and atrocities, and then it cuts away and you’re somewhere else, back in the car. The game ends with you finding the corpse of the character you’d earlier been playing as. It costs $6.92CAD on Nintendo Switch.

This game works from a philosophic foundation that all video games would be better off using. You don’t need things that don’t need to be there. You are playing a video game; you don’t need to lie about that. You don’t need to explain things. Things can just happen.

Because of its total lack of video game bullshit, I was able to show it to a friend who does not really play video games. I was able to put a controller in her hands and let her play the game without having to explain a hundred different terrible mechanics and justifications. She could just play it and sit there and feel creeped out by this work. That’s what happens when you make a good video game; it can be shown to a human being.

And so Paratopic is the first example on this list of what I consider to be one kind of great video game: the Straight Razor. Something so fine and clean and simple that it needs no justification or explanation. It is Good and Well Made and Not Full of Shit.

There are going to be a lot of other games on this list that exemplify these qualities, but let Paratopic be a poster child for what a good, clean, focused video game can do.

8: Videoball

Videoball came out in 2016 and was a commercial failure. It forced its lead designer back to a day job. It’s near impossible to find anyone to play against.

So I never did. I’ve been playing Videoball alone, off and on, since I first bought the game on my laptop in June. I sit there and I play through the arcade challenges, one after the other, and when I get stuck, I go back and play the ones I’ve already beaten.

There’re a lot of good feelings to be had when playing Videoball. You are a triangle that shoots smaller triangles, and depending on how long you hold the action button (any button), the triangle you shoot will be either small, medium or large. All three have different effects. Videoball is a game about holding the action button until you’ve drifted into the spot wherein you feel you have the right angle to release that triangle towards the ball.

It’s a really simple game. You shoot triangles at the three balls and try to hit them towards the opponent’s goal. The opponent does the same. You can only move the balls by shooting them. If you touch the ball with your body you’ll be stunned and the ball will stop on the spot. If you shoot your opponent with a triangle, they will be stunned and pushed in the direction your triangle was going. That’s the whole game. Best played 2 vs. 2. Use the standard arena.

But so I’m missing 1 vs. 2 out of the required ideal play situation. And so I sit with my Xbox controller and play the arcade modes against robots. It feels good.

I guess the best feeling of the game is letting the triangle go at an angle that you’re not 75% sure was correct, and watching it go across the court, and sometimes seeing it hit the ball just where you wanted. If you were playing 2 vs. 2 with all humans, there would be endless opportunities for cooperation and strategy and disaster. As it stands, I’m having a good time watching those triangles hit those balls.

Videoball’s visuals are as clean and straight as it’s design. It’s all just shapes.

There are colours, too.

Today I moved from my sister’s home back to my mother’s home in my hometown. I’m sitting there (here) now, alone in the house and listening to Barely Civil’s I’ll Figure This Out. The house is giant and empty and full of other people’s shit. I hate sleeping alone here.

It’s 8:22PM and it feels like midnight. It feels like I have school tomorrow. I feel tired and like a degenerate. There’s nothing to do.

My friend invited me to my other friend’s house, but I’m not sure I want to go. It’s just a lot of sitting around and watching other people drink. The only thing anyone does is play drinking games. It’s not really my thing right now. I’ve got to read more of my book. 18 more pages today, still.

I’m going to stop writing this now, I think.

Okay, one more go.

I feel dirty and tired and like I’m not a part of time right now. Sitting in a big empty house that has no connection to any world. It’s just me here alone and there’s nothing happening out there and there will never be anything happening again in my life. That’s it.

My life starts again tomorrow. In a new old town, still with no job or purpose or friends to talk to about the things I like. Still no purpose. Still not a real person. Not progressing. That’s how it is right now. I just want to get out and go to Victoria, British Columbia and make friends and play in a band with those friends and play a house show with that band and have people who care about video games the way I care about video games and well maybe be able to actually go outside places and speak to people and meet new people and be happy and feel like I’m aiming towards something and spending time out of my house.

Things are okay right now. They just feel weird is all. It’s fine. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself to write things. But I’m feeling it a little bit. Like, I spend half the year being excited about writing this thing, but when it comes time to do it all I feel is a vague sort of disinterest about it. Like I’m not in the mood. Like I just want to play guitar and read my book. I don’t feel excited or happy or interested in video games at the moment. Not right now. Life doesn’t feel totally real. I don’t know. None of this is ever going anywhere so why can’t you just totally fucking relax and let yourself just write whatever the fuck you want and not worry about it because fucking blah blah blah who cares it doesn’t matter no one will ever read any of this and you’re just a crazy person in a minus forty refrigeration baseball cap and it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter so it’s fine.

7: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

My sister asked me what I wanted as a gift for Christmas 2019. I sat and thought and tried to decide between asking for Dragon Quest XI and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I eventually decided that Nintendo first-party games are always good and beautiful and worth getting on Switch. This may have been the wrong decision.

I love Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the same sick sort of way that I love bad emo music. It’s dumb and funny and so long and bad and I love it deeply. At one point during my 50 hours with the game, I wrote into my phone’s notes app “This game feels like an episode of The Weekenders! I love it!!”

So much of FE:TH is spent doing nonsense. I think maybe the entire game might just be nonsense. You’re just wandering around this kind-of-ugly school, talking to kids who want you to, like, go find their belt in the auditorium. It’s awful.

I don’t want to talk about the battles.

I guess the reason you keep playing this game until the end is because you’ve developed some bizarre attachment to your obnoxious students. Hilda, Lysithea, Bernadetta, Claude, that rude asshole one (remembering now his name is Lorenz), the one with the glasses that likes painting (Ignus? Something like that), the big one that I actually do not care about at all and never will (fucking Ralph), the blue-haired one who hates herself because she feels as though she is irrevocably fucked up (Marianne? Marietta?).

There are some real good things in this game. Hilda, a pink-haired axe-wielder, at first seems like a one dimensional ‘lazy’ character. She doesn’t want to train or battle, she just wants to sleep and lie around and do nothing. 15 hours into the game, during a conversation between her and your character (a female teacher named Price), it is revealed that the reason she does not want to battle is that she is deeply afraid of dying. She explains that she likes her classmates, but she would never die for any of them. All of a sudden she’s a human being.

This game was nice. It was the second big game I played once the pandemic started. I’d moved back home, finished my final university essays and exams, and found myself unemployed and living alone in an empty house with no conceivable thing to do. I spent hours each day playing Fire Emblem and trying to not lose my mind. Seeing those kids, those dumb, annoying, sometimes poorly-animated kids wander around and whine about their various ridiculous and deadly serious problems helped me to calm down. Seeing my playtime in the game slowly go up each day helped me to feel better-anchored to the passage of time.

And so I arrived at the end of it in probably May, feeling a real fondness for the whole thing. I still do. It was just a thing that I spent a lot of time with when I had nothing else to do. I’m glad it was there.

I’ll maybe just say that at the end of this game, you get little one-paragraph explanations of what all the characters go on to do after the ending of the game. Some of them get married, or take over their family kingdoms. My favourite character, a blonde, deeply-angry and -driven young woman named Lysithea, had some motivation throughout the whole game that I can’t quite remember. I think she wanted to save her parents from something. She’d been experimented on as a child, and it had ensured that she would die very young. She was driven because she knew she would be dead in her early twenties.

I don’t remember what happens with her inevitable death, or where her parents had been, but I do remember her final paragraph. It stated that after the final battle, Lysithea reunited with her parents and receded into the desolate forest town from which she came, and was never seen again. And that was it. That was the end.

Thinking about Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes me weirdly emotional. It’s been a hard year to remember.

This game is stupid and goofy and it was there for me and I will remember it.

6: Into The Breach

Into The Breach is a game about getting rid of everything that doesn’t need to be in a strategy game. It’s clean and simple and always telling you everything you need to know.

The Epic Games Store says I have 6 hours, 25 minutes and 8 seconds played in the game. I imagine 90% of that time was spent with me staring at the screen, hands in my lap, thinking about what to do. It’s a game that reminds me of playing chess in high school against my one friend who was slightly worse than me at chess. I sit there and stare at a small handful of decisions for long stretches of time. Something about that experience feels good.

It’s story is a thin, crisp coat of pain on the concrete walls attached at right angles to the floors of the game’s foundation.

I guess that I don’t have many strong emotions for this game. It’s just a really well-made thing. Like a comfortable chair that I sit in once every couple weeks. It doesn’t bring any strong memories up. I don’t know how much I’ll really be thinking about it for the rest of my life.

Though, I guess, it does have a lot of things that I would like the sort of video games I hypothetically one day make to have. It’s clean and simple and elegant. I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t have anything else to say. Let’s talk about something else, then.

I got an email today from an online magazine saying that they appreciated me sharing my work, but that unfortunately I would not be selected as a finalist for the essay contest. Well, that’s fair. The essay I wrote was kinda wild, I guess.

I think it had a good ending though.

It ended like this:

And so you walk away feeling nothing, and when you leave the warehouse the sunlight hurts your eyes and your head in a way that feels ridiculous, since the sky is grey and the cloud-covered sun has nearly set, anyway.

Well there. At least the whole thing isn’t wasted, now.

5: The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide is maybe a high artistic achievement. It feels like one of the few games I’ve played that I can really sit around and think about for a long time. It’s ambiguous in the way that leaves me feeling things about it a lot.

Throughout The Beginner’s Guide you play through video games made by a fictional person named Coda, and are walked through those games by Davey Wreden as narrator. I played the game through the first time thinking Coda was a real guy.

But so Wreden walks you through all these small, experimental games, and he tells you things about the games and about his ideas about them and about his and Coda’s relationship. They’re all first-person.

I guess what we’re thinking about throughout the game is art and meaning and where those things come from. Wreden tells us his ideas about what the games mean, and always notes that this is just his interpretation. It’s some real good David Foster Wallace-type literature. Who is Davey Wreden? Who made these games? Who is Davey Wreden talking about when he talks about these things? Which Davey Wreden are these things coming from? The video game developer or the game character? Who’s writing the book?

“Who’s writing the book?” is a question that’s come to me a lot while reading Infinite Jest. It came loudest when, maybe 500 pages into the book, the writer of the book said “And has anyone mentioned the shape of this guy’s head?” and I thought “Yes. You did. The book did. It’s big and square we already know that, the book’s said it many times.” and the book said “It’s huge and square.” and I thought “Who is writing this book and who was writing it before and who is writing the footnotes?”

So, yes, The Beginner’s Guide has me thinking book-type thoughts, which I guess is probably one of the better compliments I could give a video game. It’s also really beautiful sometimes.

There’s a scene (and here “scene” means “game”) wherein you find yourself in a beautiful home in a dark, snowy place. Upon entering the building there’s guitar picking and airy, distant singing and you’re asked to please straighten up the house. You do so over and over while Wreden talks about how happy Coda was while making this particular game, how he’d been in a really good place. It’s really calming. I could hang out in there for hours.

Coda left that good place soon after, I guess, because things get dark. There’s prisons and labyrinths and obelisks and desperate, shaking narration. It’s a lot to think about.

4: Portal

Okay, well, so let’s maybe start at the beginning.

A friend and I were talking about something on Friday January 31st, 2020. At some point in this conversation, the video game Portal came up. I don’t know how this happened. This friend of mine was not someone who liked video games. I obviously brought it up. I must have been reading the Action Button Review of Portal from 2008. I must have brought the game up. My friend had recently bought a new laptop for school because her old laptop had been a slow brick house. She got one of those Windows ones with a touchscreen that can be folded back into a pretty-big tablet. She downloaded Steam so we could look at the game because well I guess there was nothing else to do this Friday night. She made a Steam account. She searched up Portal. She saw it was only $11.49CAD. She said something like “Oh, it’s only $11? Let’s just buy it!” She was not great with money. She bought it. She did not have a lot of money. “Come on, $11? Why not!” she said. She was that kind of person. I figured Well, yeah, cool, let’s do it. We started playing the game. We started drinking.

I was worried it wouldn’t be very enjoyable for us. I was worried she would have wasted her $11. It was pretty immediately clear that that was not going to have happened. The game was beautiful. We took turns playing. It was haunting. The game was so still, so clean, so direct. Everything was straightforward and simple and showing you what you needed to be shown. The walls were a sickening, sterile white. A robot voice spoke to us.

We continued drinking and playing for a long time that night. We didn’t go anywhere. We both agreed that the game was great. At some point, while she left the room to use the washroom, I felt a lot of things at once. She returned, and I said “This game is minimalist performance art.” I felt that that was true in my bones. Saying it aloud felt good in my head. I’d had a lot to drink. She laughed. I laughed. The next morning we both laughed. We agreed it was ridiculous and dumb and meaningless. I couldn’t help but feel, then as I do now, that I was a little bit right.

We continued to play the game throughout Saturday. As the puzzles got harder, I began to be the one playing more, with her by my side drinking and talking and playing music. Again we went nowhere. The game felt as though it was still deep within itself.

The next day we woke up, sad and detached and hungover. We drank coffee and sat in the living room and played more of Portal while her roommate watched a documentary about Aaron Hernandez. It was Sunday February 2nd, 2020. We both watched the end of the documentary. The roommate reminded us it was Super Bowl Sunday. I felt that warm, dark assuredness that I had class the next day, that I had things I should have been doing, that I could not feel good. I remembered that I’d promised my roommates that I would meet them at the bar near our house to watch the game. I’d agreed to take part in some sort of gambling game. Later I would find out this entailed filling out two sheets of questions about what sorts of nefarious and irrelevant things would or would not take place in the game that day.

I sat and stared at nothing and put off the cross-town walk that would be required of me to get to the bar. My friend and I continued to play Portal. It felt like the end would be soon.

The puzzles got harder, they took longer, my clouded brain felt farther away from my hands and the screen. I planned in my head the exact latest time I could leave the house while still making it to the bar in time. We beat the game. The song played. We did it.

I said goodbye to her roommate and to her and left into the dark afternoon. It was cold and wet and I had a hood up over my toque. I made it to the bar and my roommates pushed a beer-full glass towards me and I drank it and I drank a few more. I filled out the gambling sheet. We watched the game. I accidentally won a free Travis Kelce Super Bowl LIV jersey. I put it on that night. I have not put it on since. It’s in a closet somewhere.

The game ended. My friend drank and ate too much and vomited beside a bridge while my other friend urinated a meter from his head. I took a picture of the scene. We walked home and played video games and I watched them get high. One month later I moved out of that house and left those roommates to finish the semester back in my hometown. One month after that, I graduated. Two months after that I found myself at a parent’s friend’s empty cottage on Lake Huron. On that June Saturday I left early and drove back to that college town to see that friend, the one who’d bought Portal. We sat and drank and talked about a lot of really happy things and laughed hard remembering all of those terrible memories. We drank until very late and played ridiculous drinking games and enjoyed each other’s company. At the end of the night, we hugged, and then she went to her room and I slept on the couch. The next morning we drank coffee and talked about our hangovers. Her roommate showed up and I helped her father and younger brother move her things into the home. It was awfully warm. I drank water with my friend and decided I’d best head out. She walked me to my car and we hugged and said our goodbyes and that it had been nice to see each other.

That was six months ago. I haven’t seen her since. I haven’t talked to her since September. I played Portal 2. I played Portal, again, this time alone, on my own laptop, and thought about her, and thought of that terrible Sunday afternoon when we beat that great game. It took a lot less time to beat, the second time around. Through all the drunken excitement and hungover malaise, somewhere in my brain the solutions to those puzzles were still stored.

It just…wasn’t as much fun that way.

Interludes and Errata: awfulcomingdown Presents the Top 10 Albums of 2020

2020 was the first year of my life where I found myself finding a lot of new albums that I really loved. It was like the first time I’ve ever really followed new releases in what felt like a really enjoyable and meaningful way.

Because of this, I would regret not putting out a little list of my favourite albums of the year. So here they are: The awfulcomingdown Top 10 Albums of 2020:

10. songs by Adrianne Lenker

I’ve never really been a Big Thief guy, but I have a perverse sort of place in my heart for Adrianne Lenker as a human being, for reasons I will not go into. This is to say I’m always more interested in her solo work. This album is just her with a guitar, written and recorded alone somewhere in Massachusetts. In the Bandcamp description she says she fell in love with the cabin she was renting in Western MA in March. She says “The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.” A couple of days ago I was in the empty former-bedroom of my girlfriend’s mother. I was alone in an empty space with an acoustic guitar on the 29th floor of a Toronto apartment building. The sound of the guitar was like nothing I’d heard before. songs is what making music is about. It’s a document of the value of playing music for yourself.

9. Floral Prince by Field Medic

This album cemented its place on my list the second time I heard “it’s so lonely being sober”. The sound made its way to my bones. It’s just Kevin Patrick Sullivan with an acoustic guitar and his voice. The chords are C G Am F G Am G C F G C. Pick the strings however you want. I’ve played this song maybe a hundred times on my guitar since I first learned it. The line that always gets me most is when, after the first refrain of him singing “it’s so lonely being sober,” he says “feeling proud / and my stomach’s feeling better.” It’s such a hopeful and sad little celebration. It’s one of my favourite lyrics of the year.

8. Shore by Fleet Foxes

I listened to this album a lot this year. It was one I’d just throw on any time I was driving around, to get groceries or whatever. It’s clean and calm and smooth and has a feeling that comes from a lot of things that are often not accessible; nature, the ocean, warmth, friends. On “Sunblind,” Robin Pecknold sings, “I’m gonna swim for a week in / Warm American Water with dear friends.” It’s a warm, sad reminder of the good things and people in the world.

7. I Had Everybody Snowed by Growing Stone

This album came out eleven days ago. If I have any future regret about its place on this list, it will be that I didn’t put it high enough. It’s an album made by a now-sober man that is solely about being a drunk. Instead of writing any more about it, I’ll just say that my favourite line from the album perfectly summarizes the feeling of pushing yourself to drink so much, trying to get that good feeling, that warm glow it once gave you, to the point where you’re making your life worse and not even having a good time doing it; you’re just sad and desperate and dejected. The line is:

Morning came early

And no one got lucky

Or picked up their garbage

Or anything

6. Ways of Hearing by The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

There’s a humming bird

That looks just like David Byrne

Ways of Hearing is a slow, quiet music. There’s always strings. There’s often male and female vocals overlapping with one another, not fighting for attention but instead seeming like they’re hoping you’ll be distracted by the other and miss what they’re saying. “Joseph Stalin” is my brother’s favourite song of the year. If you’re looking to sit in a darkening room, looking out the window at dusk, this is the music.

5. Notes On A Conditional Form by The 1975

“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” has earned a place in my top 3 The 1975 songs of all time, along with a definite place in my top songs of the year. “The Birthday Party” is one of my friend’s favourite songs of all time. Matt Healy sings: “Saw the girls and they were like / ‘Do you wanna come and get fucked up?’ / Listen, I’ve got myself a missus so there can’t be any kissing / ‘Oh don’t be afraid, you better wise up, kid / It’s all adderall now, it doesn’t make you wanna do it.’” What a relief.

4. Welcome to Conceptual Beach by Young Jesus

If you’re looking to spend 46 minutes floating and feeling good about things, you should hang out with this album. There’s some ten minute songs. I love those. It’s a big, complicated, ambitious, aspirational, vast and expansive album. Sitting in my mother’s car in a Walmart parking lot on August 16th, I got a text message from a person I’d not spoken to in 7 years. As I read the message, the music got quiet, with only the sound of shiny strings being strummed. John Rossiter began saying “I wanna be around and live it.” He said it over and over. I put my phone down and stared over the steering wheel at the mostly-empty parking lot. The engine was running. He started getting louder. I leaned back and felt myself nearly crying. He was yelling now. The tears wouldn’t come out. “I wanna be around and live it.” He was screaming. My face crumpled and I couldn’t understand why. The tears almost came. Maybe they did. The music cut out. He stopped yelling. The shaking strings faded out. It was silent. I put my seatbelt back on, drove out of the parking lot, and headed South. I didn’t know where I was headed.

3. Melee by Dogleg

“Kawasaki Backflip” is my most listened to song of the year. This surprises me. When I checked this, I hadn’t really listened to the album since it came out in March. When I think about the album while not listening to it, I maybe don’t feel that much about it. I was never able to see Dogleg live. By the time the album came out I was no longer anxiously walking around a university campus, my #1 reason for wanting to listen to horribly intense emo music. I don’t think about the album all too much. But then I put it on, and I hear that opening faded riff, and I know that there is about to be a fucking explosion; I know there is always about to be one.

2. Lament by Touche Amore

Touche Amore is as intense a music as I can enjoy. It’s loud and fast and Jeremy Bolm is always screaming. It’s also insanely melodic. It makes me want to dance. During what was maybe my worst mental episode this year, reeling from the combination of a destroyed tooth and a hurtful comment made by someone close to me, I stood up from my washroom floor and left the room and told my friend I needed to be alone for a bit. I grabbed my laptop and a beer and opened a google doc. I put on my headphones and played Lament. It was the exact sound of how I felt. Desperate and shaking and about to fucking collapse, with an absurd, exciting optimism always pulsing throughout if only as a result of the great melodies of the songs. “I talk myself out of myself / When I’m overwhelmed,” he yelled. It’s an album about feeling better, and on the last song Jeremy Bolm sings — this being the one moment in maybe his entire career when he’s singing and not screaming — two of my favourite lines of the year:

I’ve healed more than suffered

and

I found the patience for jazz

Nothing this year felt as much like getting better as these two lines.

1. you can never have a long enough head start by floral tattoo

Here is an album that’s not about getting better. It’s an album about being in the dark. It’s an album that came out January 3rd, one that I listened to for the first time walking home in the cold dark of London, Ontario. I played it many times walking home from my friend’s house during sad, shaky mornings that winter. I played it on my radio show. I listened to it enough to start to feel like it was the first time in my life I’d been right there for the release of a great album. I tried writing about it in a coffee shop in a mall while waiting two hours for my friend to pick me up at the beginning of Spring reading week. I didn’t listen to it much once I’d moved back home. I haven’t listened to it for a while, until now, sitting in the now-completely-dark living room of my mother’s home. It was daylight when I sat down to start writing this all. No one else is here. I guess my favourite song on this album has become “(my life fell apart this year)”. It was “Life in Colour” at first, and then “(redding forest fire / fermi)” for a long time. I guess in all that time not listening to the album, “(my life fell apart this year)” began to be the one that stuck out in my mind. I listened to it, just that one song, a couple of weeks or months ago. I guess that was what decided it. There’s an explosion, in that song. It’s the thing I’m always chasing; the desperate celebration. There are monologues about working jobs and trying not to kill oneself. There’s chanting about twisting and swerving and confusing the ones that we love until another voice comes in, and it screams: “I’m letting go.” The music disintegrates and erupts and the voices continue to chant “When I’m 25 / I will look back on / all this mess and think / I was worried for nothing,” while this voice continues to scream “I’m letting go.” Eventually the screaming fades out, and so does the chanting, and there’s just drums being played, and you can’t help but feel like this is very sad music, but that that sadness sounds beautiful, and that this complete darkness is meaningful.

There will be things after it.

3: Metal Gear Solid 2

What I like about making games is that they don’t survive. You can’t play old games as game machines are constantly changing. The Japanese proverb that says ‘you discard your shame when you travel’ is what games are to me. Games should remain in people’s minds and in history. That means that people forget about the games we make, which is good.

-Hideo Kojima

I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 off my friend. He’d gotten a big box of games at a garage sale for $20 and said I could look through it and see if there was anything I wanted. I went through and pulled out three games and asked him how much.

He sold me Dead Space, Mass Effect 2, and Metal Gear Solid 2 for $10. I haven’t played the other two yet. I don’t have an Xbox.

I took home Metal Gear Solid 2 and put it in my PlayStation 2. I played the first six hours of the game. I loved how long the cut scenes were. It was hilarious. I hated playing it. At the end of Christmas Break in January 2020, I figured I was done with the game. I left my PlayStation 2 in my childhood bedroom and went back to school.

Three months later I’d moved back home and decided to put the PlayStation 2 away. I couldn’t do it, though. Not yet. I had to boot up MGS2 one more time. Just to make sure.

I turned on the game. I had no idea what I was doing. I was at some insufferable moment wherein I was supposed to use a sniper to locate and then shoot a bunch of motion-sensors so that they wouldn’t set off explosives so that I could cross a bridge without it being destroyed. I didn’t even have a sniper.

I googled how to find the sniper. I watched a video of someone else shooting the sensors. I got the sniper and shot the sensors.

I kept playing the game. It kept being boring. At some point it became charming.

I remember, earlier on in my playing experience, during December 2019, having a distinct feeling. It was this: I get that this game is cool, and that Hideo Kojima is a wacky guy who was doing some stuff that must have been real wild in 2001, but I just do not think this game is good. It sucks to play and it’s boring and dumb. I still thought the 15-minute-long cutscenes were pretty funny. But I was done with the rest of it. I thought I don’t understand people who like this game.

This is all a long way of saying that I didn’t start to like this game until very near the end. At some point I started to find the gameplay kind of goofy. It seemed alright. The story was doing some funny stuff, I thought. This game’s alright.

But so the ending. I don’t know whether it’d be interesting or not to directly talk about the things that happen at the end. Not the plot or anything. I don’t know what happens in the plot. I don’t think I ever really understood what a Metal Gear was. But there are some things that happen, there, at the end. A lot of things.

Raiden gets caught, and he gets stripped naked and strapped to a metal board. Someone lets him free. All of a sudden you’re playing as a naked man. When standing still Raiden covers his genitals with his hands. Somehow you never see them, the genitals, even while fighting and running.

So you’re creeping around this factory, naked and weaponless. The Colonel and Rose keep calling you. The things they say get progressively more horrific. Things get desperate. Things start to be said about things.

I played the end of this game alone in my childhood bedroom at night. The emptiness of the house made me shutter. At one point the Colonel called. He said “TURN OFF THE GAME CONSOLE NOW.” I got up and shut my bedroom door. I needed less empty space around me. I needed to be enclosed.

After finishing the game, I went and wrote some weird stuff and put it somewhere on the internet. I think I called it my favourite game of all time. I was feeling intensely. I said that I thought Kojima had read Baudrillard and Lyotard and Jameson and maybe George Berkeley. I called it “Our Sad and Messy History”.

At the end of the game, after things have been resolved, Raiden stands in the streets of New York. There are montages of real-life footage of the city. It’s one of the better moments I’ve had in my life playing a video game.

During the montage, Solid Snake speaks. Allow me to maybe contradict Hideo Kojima’s statement, and allow him to maybe do the same, by writing out what he says:

Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies, what we’ve seen, heard, felt; anger, joy, and sorrow. These are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for.

We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is worth something. It’s got something in it that’s worth thinking about. It’s got something that great art has. It’s got something like literature. It’s informed by cultural theory. It worthwhile.

I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. I dislike so much of it. I know that I still love those long cutscenes, and still love Raiden, and will forever love Hideo Kojima. I know that this game gets at something so few things do. Thinking about that bizarre contrast, between its literary quality and its mundane video game existence, I wonder if maybe Hideo Kojima has accomplished his goal: most people will never read this book.

2: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

I’ve been writing these entries and feeling a little stressed out by them. Stressed might be too strong a word. I’m going to try to have a good time with this one.

I don’t really know where to start with Getting Over It. It’s one of the greatest games of all time. It’s a video game that should be put into some sort of and any video game museum. It’s a game that fully capitalizes on the potential of video games. It’s a game about climbing a mountain.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a game that is very honest about what’s happening. All of the objects in the game exist exactly where they look as though they exist. I’m having a little thought in my head about how the sprite vs. hit-box relationship in video games (this is to say where it looks like something is vs. where the game actually considers it to be (i.e. where you can make contact with it etc.)) is really similar to the the conversation in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous wherein Hylas pleads with Philonous and says that there must be some real-world material substratum underneath the mind-dependent images that we perceive as being objects. The hit-box is this supposed substratum, and the sprite is the image that we perceive as being the thing itself, even though in the code of the video game it literally isn’t. The image isn’t the thing, the hit-box (in coding called objects) is the thing. Holy shit.

Anyway, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy gives us a world wherein the substratum and the images are exactly the same. This is to say the sprite and hit-boxes line up exactly. When you put your yosemite hammer in the indent of a rock, it will hit it exactly when it looks like it will hit it.

At the beginning of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Bennett Foddy tells us about a game called Sexy Hiking. He says that at the beginning of this early internet game, there is a tree that is nearly impossible to climb over right at the beginning. You forced to sit there and poke at it and fuck with it and try things and see what happens. It’s kind of what all great video games should be: something you poke at.

I haven’t beaten Getting Over It. I might never. I recently fell from a very high area back to the very beginning of the game. I’m currently at like the fourth obstacle again, just opening the game up and climbing around whenever I feel like it.

Okay, I made it back up to the top of that building with the fridge at the bottom of it, waiting.

I wrote in my notes somewhere the first night I played this game that it’s life-affirming, that it reinforced two important ideas in my head.

The first was that video games matter and are worth pursuing. This was when I was still learning to code and using Gamemaker to make some god damn games. I don’t do that anymore.

The second was that my ideas matter, and that people’s ideas matter, and that your ideas are worth fucking pursuing even if no one else on earth gives a fuck about them, because if you keep pursuing them you will find people who really, really do (give a fuck).

When I started writing that out, I was gonna say that the first lesson’s importance had faded, while the second was still crucial. This isn’t true. They’re both still vitally fucking important. They’re everything.

I don’t make video games anymore. I focus on the other things I do. I write about art, I write fiction, I play guitar, I write songs. These are the things that are important to me. They matter and I am getting better at them.

There are a lot of different ways to contribute to making great art. This is one of the reasons learning about artists’ lives (whether they be video game developers, musicians, animators, writers, whatever) is so exciting: it reminds me that there are infinite ways to create things and to get to the point where the things you’re creating are good and meaningful and worthwhile. It’s really important.

And so I don’t make video games anymore, but what I do is a lot of things that I deeply love and care about; things that will or could one day make me a valuable contributor to the creation of a video game. The point is to just keep fucking going, keep pursuing whatever it is that you enjoy doing and the ideas that matter to you, so that one day you’ll find the right people in this world who value this work and these ideas as much as you do and you’ll be fucking ready.

So, no, I haven’t beaten Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I might never. But I for damn sure will be here for the rest of my life, coming back, poking, experimenting; climbing that fucking mountain.

1: Earthbound

In 1994, Mother 2 was released in Japan. In 1994, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was released in Japan.

In 2020, I played Earthbound and read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I accidentally did this simultaneously.

I started Earthbound on March 2nd. Shortly after, I finished reading Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. I hesitated for some time deciding what book I should take next from my university library. I had planned to have The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle be the last book I ever read during my time at the university. After a lot of thinking, I decided I would just start reading it, right then. I thought maybe, just in case something were to happen, I should start reading it now, to avoid any possibility of me not having the time to read it later in the semester.

Less than two weeks later, classes were cancelled. I packed my essential belongings and moved to my sister’s house an hour East. A couple of days later, I moved back to my hometown, where I’ve been living for eight months now. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would end up being the last book I ever took out from the D.B. Weldon Library.

So I found myself home, finishing up essays and exams and preparing to graduate into nothing. I played Earthbound everyday.

I guess the thing to say with Earthbound is that yes, I think I consider it to be my Favourite Game of All Time. I guess the other thing to say would be that yes, huge amounts of this game are boring and repetitive and tedious. It’s a lot of pressing A to select attack in turn-based-battles. It’s slow.

I sort of learned how to chill out with a game. How to just calm down and not worry too much about if I was getting anywhere, or if I was having fun. I learned to just play the game and relax. I learned to let myself die and to just try again. I ended up spending 40 hours with the game.

So, I don’t know, yes, Earthbound is my favourite game of all time, though maybe that’s a little bit by default. It’s the most a video game I’ve played has felt like a Haruki Murakami novel. It wouldn’t be until after I’d finished both Earthbound and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that I would learn that Shigesato Itoi and Haruki Murakami published a collection of short stories together shortly after the releases of these two masterpieces. Wild stuff.

Well so okay, I guess there’s one important moment to talk about. There’s a moment in Earthbound and a moment in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that seem deeply connected.

Here they are:

400 or so pages into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, many, many pages are spent slowly detailing the event of a Japanese man being skinned alive during World War II. He’s been captured, along with his fellow Japanese soldier who is recounting this story to the book’s main character, and is being tortured for information. He doesn’t give up the information, and so he is slowly skinned alive, and Murakami describes this in sickening detail. I was sitting in the D.B. Weldon Library reading this and having to stop every once in a while to look around and remember everything was okay. But so okay, the point is that 400 pages into this book that begins with a goofy guy named Toru wandering around his neighbourhood looking for his cat, we find ourselves staring down a man who can no longer close his eyes because his face and eyelids have been peeled off by an enemy soldier. This is what I love about art: things being hidden deep into long works; things that you could never be told of; things you just have to find.

And so 25 hours into Earthbound we meet the fourth and final party member, a Chinese prince living in a kingdom in the clouds named Kenny. When we meet Kenny and begin playing as him alone (the other party members in a far-off part of the world, unaware of Kenny’s existence, other than Ness, who is dreaming of the following events after eating “Magic cake”), we’re told that it is time for Prince Kenny to undertake his final trial, and that we must “Go to the ‘Place of Emptiness’ and endure this final test.” You leave the palace, and walk over to a narrow cliff with a rope on it. Kenny climbs the rope and sits atop the peak, facing the player. The screen goes black, and we enter the first-person battle screen against a large, disembodied head. The head says:

“To complete the trial, I am going to break your legs.”

He does it and you lose HP.

“Next, I will tear your arms off…

I shall then take your arms and feed them to the crows.”

He does so and your HP goes to 0.

“Now, I’ll cut your ears off.”

He does so and the game’s sound cuts out. It’s silent.

“(So, Prince Kenny.

No legs, no arms and no sound…

By floating words through the air, I must ask you…

Do you care if I take your eyes?)”

He does so and the screen goes black.

“(So, Prince Kenny.

Now, I can only communicate directly with your mind.

Your mind is all you have left…

In the end, I will take your mind,

though you probably don’t want to allow that, do you?

So…you can’t answer? You can’t even move?

Are you sad, are you lonely?

If you lose your mind, you also lose any feelings of sadness.

I will take your mind, Prince Kenny, know that I will possess it…)”

So it is that 25 hours into a children’s video game about a young boy living in a brightly-coloured cartoon America saving the world from time-travelling aliens, we find ourselves witnessing/experiencing the mutilation of a child first-hand.

This whole thing gave me that same stunned, sick feeling as the skinning scene in the book. All this darkness hidden beneath the beautiful, charming veneer of friendly entertainment. It’s the reason I read books; it’s the reason I play video games; it’s the reason I like art.

I’m really glad that I finally found in Earthbound the feeling I’ve been looking for in my favourite medium for the past three years.

But I guess it’s time to get back to looking.

An Epilogue

Well, there it is. I actually wrote something I’d been planning to write for nearly the entire year. I wrote this over the course of like 12 days, one entry a day. I’m sitting here on December 24th, wondering about it all.

I’m feeling a little bit like maybe I’ll be writing less about video games in 2021. I wrote my new year’s resolution into my phone’s notes a couple days ago, when it suddenly popped in my head. I wrote:

write more fiction

write more songs

I think those are the things I want to pursue. I feel pretty certain at this point that video games will always be a part of my live, but I guess I’m feeling like they won’t be the center of it. They maybe already aren’t.

I’m feeling like writing about art in general is something I’m drifting away from. I’m feeling more and more like I just want to make art. I want to write fiction; I want to write songs. I keep feeling like that’s maybe what I’m better at. I guess I don’t know.

So, anyway, that’s the end of this. I hope if you’ve read it you’ve gotten something out of it. I hope it wasn’t just me saying nothing about nothing. I hope there was some good in there.

This is the most I’ve worked on a personal thing in my life, and so I know there’s at least value in that. There’s always value in doing things.

I guess I’ll end this with a quote from a book I’ve been reading this year:

Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head.

Happy holidays, I wish you good luck in the new year, and every year after that, too.

Here’s to hoping we can all just keep doing.

-Chris Price, 12/24/2020

[awfulcomingdown]

Pikuniku (Or, “The Emo Game Backlog”)

I just finished Pikuniku. I don’t know why this game exists. Why does any game exist?

It was just boring, and charming, and goofy, and kind of funny, and fruitless. It led to nothing. I don’t know why I did it.

All I can think is that maybe I need to completely stop playing any video games that aren’t dark. Like, no more goofy, charming video games about some bullshit cute characters. Fuck all that. I need some sadness. I need some fucking profound, lofty aspirations. I need something that is trying to fuck my life up. My fingernails are literally painted dark blue; I refuse to enjoy a goofy puzzle-platformer.

I really don't want to play something that doesn’t give a fuck about doing anything meaningful. Also, I mean, it’s not even like these games are fun. Like, that was mostly boring. 

Why do these games exist? Why would anyone play them? Why would anyone like them? They’re boring and leave you with nothing in the end. I don’t want this! I want to feel something. I want to fucking think about shit.

I want a game that at least tries to fuck with me, to make me rethink some aspect of my life, or rethink the medium itself. That’d be fucking sick. That’s what I want. And I’ve found about two video games that have ever done that.

I want to start playing video games that are dark. Games that, for better or worse, actually try to affect you emotionally. I want some fucking Emo Games!!!

So, here we go. It’s time. It’s time to start playing through my Emo Game Backlog. Here’s the list:

Inside

Gone Home

What Remains of Edith Finch

That’s all I’ve got right now, but I will henceforth only play games that fuck with my life. I want them to fuck my life up.

No more bullshit. No more goofiness. No more fucking video game bullshit. I want darkness, and I want to be left thinking about everything in my fucking life!!!

Why did it take me so long to realize this? Of course this is what I’m meant to do. This is what I’m meant to do. I’m meant to play dark shit, and only dark shit. I’m meant to feel like garbage, over and over again, because that’s what I fucking like. Fuck everything else. 

I love this shit. I feel excited. No more bullshit. 

I don’t give a fuck about level design. I sincerely don’t. I don’t give a fuck about mechanics, or systems, or fucking stats. Fuck all of that. I only care about shit in as much as it fucking ruins my life and makes me feel like shit. That’s it. Fuck everything else. I’m not trying to collect all 100 apples; I’m trying to experience some shit that’s going to change me as a person. 

It’s fucking taste! That’s the whole point of all this shit! Fuck everything else. I want the shit that I fucking care about. That’s all that matters. 

No decisions tonight. Fuck!!!!!!

Postscript (Or, “The Next Morning”)

I have calmed down a little bit (lol). I still feel the same way. It excited me to read all of that. I believe it is true and right. I mostly do not want to play things that are just goofy and lighthearted. I mostly just want to play dark indie games.

But that’s also not entirely true. I love 3D Mario games. I love Super Mario Odyssey, and that game is about as goofy and meaning-free as interactive media can get. I love those games. I love Breath of the Wild, as well. If/when the rumoured Super Mario All Stars 3D collection or whatever comes out, I will buy it instantly. The same goes for the next 3D Zelda. The same goes for Metroid Prime 4. The same goes for a bunch of other big, fun, 3D and 2D video games.

So I still like that stuff. I like chill ass, fun games. I love them, even, sometimes. But those are specific ones. Giant, highly polished, AAA video games that are gorgeous and chill. I want to hang out in and with them, even if I don’t necessarily want to write about them. 

What I don’t want, I don’t think, is any more goofy, charming indie games. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I still need to play A Short Hike when that comes to Switch; it looks sick. But, for the most part, if an indie game is just goofy and fun, I’m probably not going to be that into it. The same goes for any game that is just a really good game. I feel like Into the Breach is the example here. I’ve never played it, but it seems to be just a really terrific strategy game, of which I have no interest. No games that are just amazing games, unless they’re going to make me feel like I’m existing in another world. But that would be something else entirely.

So, what does that leave us? Dark, thoughtful, sincerely trying indie games. Maybe they’ll be pretentious. Maybe they’ll be profound and amazing. Maybe they’ll be fucking terrible! It doesn’t matter, because at least they’ll be trying to be the thing that I want. 

Maybe then I’ll feel more motivated to actually write about the game that I’ve just played.

Anyway, Pikuniku is fine. 6.3/10.

[awfulcomingdown]

Earthbound, and Being Alone

I finished Earthbound today. Later on, I told my friend that I was going to be going to meet a girl soon. My friend said she was upset, and hung up.

Now, I’m sitting in my living room, alone. My speaker is sitting across from and above me, softly playing music. It helps to feel like there are noises being made in the house by things other than myself and the house’s own infrastructure. 

I’m reading Tim Rogers’ review of Mother 2, which is Earthbound’s original and Japanese name. He loves it. He calls it “the literature of the moment.”

Earthbound is the first real, big, old game I’ve ever beaten. It’s the first JRPG I’ve ever beaten. It’s the oldest non-Mario game I’ve ever beaten, by a long shot. It’s nearly the only canonical video game I’ve ever finished. It feels like the only insurmountable, inscrutable video game I’ve ever beaten. It feels like the only impossible video game I’ve ever beaten.

But I beat it.

I didn’t really care about it that much.

Tim Rogers raises many brilliant points about the game’s greatness. Tim Rogers is a lot  smarter than I am. Tim Rogers is a genius.

I don’t really value the things he’s writing about. I value reading about them. I love reading about them. But I don’t value them being in the game itself. I don’t value these things, the things my English literature professor pointed to as being valuable in The Matrix.

I thought The Matrix fucking sucked. 

I don’t like those things. Maybe I have bad taste. I don't think that that’s what it is.

I think it’s something else.

I love a lot of things, and I have valuable reasons for loving those things. 

I don’t love any of those things for the reasons that Tim Rogers loves Earthbound.

I think that someone reading my reasons for loving The Dream is Over, or Teen Titans, or Adventure Time, would find them to be just as elusive and difficult as I find Tim’s reasoning for loving Earthbound.

I love those things. I nearly love some video games, too, I think. I don’t know.

It feels like Earthbound taught me to keep heading in the direction that feels right. I think I’ve got some ideas about where that direction is.

Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m still drifting, aimless. 

[awfulcomingdown]

The Touryst Review

The Touryst is a game about a compact, blocky dude in a hawaiian shirt. This dude is, or at least he is told that he is, on the search to discover some secrets, secrets that pertain to the islands he explores.

The game begins with a small, two-man motor boat pulling up to and docking in a place called Touryst Island. Then you, being one of the two men on board, are free to get out and begin exploring the island. 

A handful of things quickly become obvious. 

First of all, it is immediately beautiful. The entire game has a bizarre, blocky style. The bizarre thing is the way in which this blocky, childish style contrasts with the beauty of the world. The lighting is beautiful, and shines through the trees and into your eyes, so as to make your vision less clear. The background, which is to say everything that is not immediately in front of you, is blurred slightly, as if you’re looking through a camera lens and your character is the focus. 

Second of all, it is clear that this game is not going to be about following instructions. You wander around this island with little instruction, and the instructions you do receive feel more like personal requests of characters than they do the game needing to tell you what to do.

At one point, standing atop the first monument—which are the self-contained, puzzle-filled dungeons—you may notice that the answer to the puzzle is far off in the distance, down on a part of the island that you’ve most likely already visited. That is to say, it feels as though the game is giving you the opportunity to have a reminder of how to solve it’s first explicit puzzle by looking around the environment. 

In that first monument, you’ll solve some puzzles, and then you’ll talk to an older man, and he’ll tell you that there are four monument cores you need to collect, which are located on various other islands. He gives you the travel guide to your next destination, which you’ll need to show to the captain of the ship you arrived on in order to leave for the next island.

On the next island, you’ll begin to realize that going back and forth between islands is going to be a necessary part of this game. Elderly couples will ask you if you have any recommendations for islands they could visit, and you’ll have to say sorry, no, you don’t yet know of anywhere that would suit their desires. A note pops into your head—and another onto your menu—”Come back to these people when you’ve gone to an island that seems appropriate for an elderly couple to hang around and enjoy themselves,” you tell yourself.

Other things will bring you back and forth between these islands as well. Items you need to buy, pictures you’ve taken that you need to return for cash at the first island’s item shop, a young man on the second island who needs you to “Prove you know about soccer.” These things sit in the back of your mind and the middle of your start screen, waiting to be addressed.

There are, however, larger, vaster, more mysterious things to figure out. These are the secrets.

Immediately upon arriving on the island, people begin to speak to you of secrets. Not only do they explicitly tell you that the island you’re on is full of secrets, but they directly state that you, they know, love secrets. And so you do. You do because you are told you do and, maybe, because you really do.

This repeated, specific mentioning of the word “secrets” begins to itself take up space in the back of your mind, along with the other, named, secrets. Things are building to something.

Or so you might think.

The majority of The Touryst never lives up to the hopes it creates in you in the opening minutes.

There are plenty of interesting things to do, but often these interesting things are not mandatory.

For example, there is an arcade on Leysure Island, outside of which a man named Bob will challenge you to defeat his high scores on the three arcade cabinets therein.

So, you might think that this is something you need to do, and you might spend 25 frustrated minutes attempting to beat his high score in “FAST,” a fictional arcade game that is an homage to Shin’en’s Switch launch title Fast RMX. The game is fun and charming, as are the other two modest arcade games, but this is indicative of a larger problem with The Touryst.

That problem is this: nearly all of the most interesting and fun things to do in this game are slightly frustrating and entirely optional. The two of these, together, manage to slowly erode any desire you might have to commit yourself to overcoming these challenges.

If they were slightly less frustrating, or were necessary for you to do in order to progress the game, then they would feel as though they were worth your time. But they are neither, so they do not.

Another example: located on Soggy Island, a place in which it is always raining, there is a mine shaft. Once you have cleared this mine shaft of its rat infestation—which is, in and of itself, a fun and charming challenge—you are able to go diving in the mines in order to hunt for crystals.

Now, you may remember that there is a diamond shop on Leysure Island, in which a pawn-shop-owner-resembling man named Larry will tell you to come back once you’ve found at least ten diamonds.

So, you figure, Okay, I can sell these diamonds I’m going to be collecting. But this seems more important than that. Maybe there other uses for the diamonds as well.

So you begin spelunking, and it is, without a doubt, the most clearly entertaining and interesting thing you’ve done all game. It is 3D platforming in which you are always going directly down. You have a rope that you are sometimes forced to use but, for the most part, this is about making jumps into a dark cavern and attempting to land on small platforms. It’s great.

And then it slowly begins to frustrate you. As you get deeper and deeper into the shafts—which are divided as levels, at the end of which you can return to the surface if you so choose—you start to wonder, Wait, are these diamonds actually just for selling to that dude in that pawn shop? Do I not need to be doing this? Am I wasting my time?

It turns out, yes. 

They are only to be sold at the pawn shop. You do not need to be doing this. You are wasting your time.

And so it is with most of the optional activities in the game. None of them grant you anything more than money, something which you always have in excess.

It’s a bizarre feeling. Should I just be grateful that these somewhat interesting side activities are available to me? No, I don’t think so. Without participating in these side activities, this would be an extremely short, straightforward game. So why not integrate them into the story? Why is the most exciting part of this game a purposeless quest for capital?

Of course, this wouldn’t be such a big problem if the main objectives and story of The Touryst were good and interesting. But they aren’t.

The story of this game never goes any further than the original premise of “There are secrets, and you want to find them.” The secrets themselves involve answers about how the monuments were built and why there are blocky robot monsters in them. These answers are never interesting enough to remember.

The most interesting of the secrets is, again, an entirely optional one.

Upon wandering around the first island, you might notice a bottle floating just off shore. Collect that bottle, and you will be told that it is a fragment of a Touryst Guide, and that there are four of them in total. Collect the other three, and you will have yourself a guide to a new place called Tyny Island.

Once there, you’ll find a crashed airplane, inside of which you’ll find a safe, inside of which you’ll find a parcel. All you’re told about the parcel is that it’s addressed to “M…...m,” and that it’s up to you to figure out who to deliver it to.

I discovered this all after having already completed the rest of the game, and I couldn’t help but think, “Why is this significantly more interesting than the entirety of the main story?”

Sadly, even this mystery is slightly undercut by it’s ending. It turns out that the “M…...m” you were searching for was not a person at all, but instead was the “Monuseum,” a museum of monuments on the island of Fijy. That the person you were looking for was actually a museum is great. That, upon discovering this, the museum curator essentially says “Thanks” and tells you its an ancient artifact of some sort, makes you feel as though maybe this was all just another way for the game to take up five minutes of your time.

In the end, the story does very little explaining. You collect the four monument cores, and then you collect one last piece of technology, still unsure of why you’re doing all of this. And then something happens, and then the credits roll. In a post-credits scene, a sequel is directly implied in an inelegant bit of self-reflexivity.

And then the game’s over. And you’re sitting there wondering what it was that you just experienced. And you call your friend, because you feel the need to yell at someone about what the fuck just happened.

I told my friend that the game had been fine, but that no part of it had ever made me feel as though any of it was worth my time. I told her that I was unsure whether or not I should criticize something like this; something that is well made, and cared for, and in no way bad or upsetting, but just mostly pedestrian. 

I said that I was pretty sure that I should. She countered by saying that some people just want something pretty to look at and something to do, that she herself used to love playing video games just because they give you something pleasant to do. 

This was what made me sure that I am right to criticize this game.

Video games are more than just something to do with your hands. If video games are art, and they are art, then they should be treated as such. It is very easy to defend video games as an artform, it is much difficult to practice what your preach. 

I would never recommend this game to someone in order to show them that video games can be great and interesting. This game is rarely an echo of either of those things.

Some video games are art. The Touryst is an alright way to spend five hours.

[awfulcomingdown]

Nintendo Switch Demos Review (Or, “Without a Paddle, I Might Add”)

Introduction

Over the past couple of weeks, or maybe months, I’ve downloaded some demos on my Switch that I’d intended to eventually play. And then I didn’t play them, which led me to believe that I might never do so.

And then, a couple of days ago, I found my self drunk, alone in the darkness of my sister’s home office, while her and her fiancee slept in another room. While drinking and staring out the window into the unfamiliar street, an idea hit me. I should play all those demos, right now.

And so I quickly walked down the hallway, as if afraid the inclination to really do this might dissipate as quickly as it’d formed, to my temporary bedroom where the Switch was laying on a nightstand, and brought it back to that dark office. I then proceeded to do it. I played all four demos, writing and becoming progressively more drunk as I went, until typing itself seemed an impossible, or at least undesirable, task. And then I went to sleep. 

And now, I’ve taken those somewhat less than clear notes and formed them into a mostly comprehensible summary of my feelings on those games. And here they are. 

The Touryst

I heard about this game for the first time in a Nintendo Direct, I think. It looked goofy. It looked too goofy for my liking. I planned to not ever think about it again. And then I didn’t for some time.

The next time I thought about it, it was because a Youtube video extolling the virtues of this game’s beauty and graphical prowess scrolled past my eyes on the Youtube homepage. I didn’t click on it, and I didn’t think much about it. However, I did think some about it.

Then I saw this demo, and I figured, sure, let’s try it.

This demo is very short. Well, at least, it felt very short to me, sitting in my sister’s makeshift home office, a couple of drinks in to what would eventually become a too many drinks to be having alone night. It flew by.

As soon as the game began, I was struck. It’s beautiful, in what feels like an extremely unique way. 

It’s bizarre. The background is completely blurred, and you’re running around what feels like a tiny, static world that’s been put together by hand and pushed out to sea. It all feels very still. Apparently the people who made this game have been making video games since 1999. I feel as though they may have learned some very worthwhile things in that time.

The other thing that struck me as significant while I played this short demo was the fact that I had managed to ignore and look down on this game for so long. How was it that nobody was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me, and screaming “The Touryst is a fucking masterpiece, idiot. Just because the main character has a goofy mustache doesn’t mean this whole thing’s a joke. Play it. Fuck you.” 

Now, that might not be totally fair. I mean, that Youtube video I saw about the game was literally titled “The Touryst is Stunning: Switch Game of the Year Contender?” which, to be fair, is a very funny thing to name a video. I would like to know who made the call on adding that question mark. Wild stuff.

And, again, to be fair, if you search “The Touryst” into the old Youtube search bar, you’ll come up with dozens of videos (okay I actually only saw three, but I didn’t scroll that far) making similar claims about the game’s greatness (funnily enough, all three of the videos I saw ended with a fucking question mark. That’s not a joke. Like, they really wanted you to be tempted to click the video just to find out if the game is, in fact, a contender for Switch game of the year. What a time.).

So my point is maybe less that there weren’t people talking (or, asking?), about this game, and more that it doesn’t seem as though anyone was giving this supposed masterpiece the respect that a masterpiece deserves. Which is to say, after watching exactly four minutes and 37 seconds of the first of those videos, I was able to conclude that not a single video on the entirety of Youtube had a single interesting or worthwhile thing to say about the game. And this seems...shitty.

If this game is a masterpiece (and sadly it seems as though we’ll never know, but, by god, we will continue to ask), then maybe it deserves something more than a Youtube video of a dude talking about its “tight gameplay” and “excellent soundtrack.”

Maybe we should do more than that. Maybe we should treat masterpiece video games with the same respect that a masterpiece film or album receives. 

Maybe we should be writing thousands of words about the brilliance of said masterpiece, and actually attempt to discuss what exactly about the game makes it so noteworthy.

Maybe we should take the time to say whether or not it is a masterpiece, and not just ask the fucking question.

Dragon Quest Builders 2

As I finished the very short demo of The Touryst, I decided I would play the demos in whatever order they happened to be lined up in on my Switch homepage. As I scrolled to the right, I was struck with fear when I saw Dragon  Quest Builders 2 was next up.

Despite being too drunk at the time to notice that the game icon literally says “Jumbo Demo,” I still knew, having learned from the Dragon Quest XI demo, that this demo could literally take the rest of my life to finish.

“Fuck,” I wrote. “I really didn’t want to play this one next. For all I know, this demo lasts eight and a half hours, and I’ll be here ‘till sunrise. It’s been loading for 30 seconds now, and I’m scared. Dear god.”

Some amount of these fears were quelled when the game finally finished loading, and the music began to play. Despite having never owned or really played a Dragon Quest game, I fucking love Dragon Quest music. Sure, it’s beautiful, but it’s not just that. Something about the music makes me feel as though the music has no idea as to how beautiful it actually is. It feels as though the music doesn’t know how profound it really is, and this only serves to make it that much more affecting. I feel this is a part of the charm of the series as a whole: Dragon Quest games never go out of their way to let you know that they know how brilliant they are.

Anyway, I grabbed another beer, bringing the Switch along with me to the fridge so I could continue to listen to the title screen music while I did, and began the demo. The beer was stronger and more expensive than anything I would’ve bought - and I doubt it was my sister who bought it, it was probably some bizarre house warming gift - and tasted to me like a mixture of apple cider and rock salt. It was palatable.

The game, DQB2, as it will henceforth be known, opens with a character customization screen. Now, I may have just been drunk then, and I may just be an asshole now, but the minimal amount of customization one can actually apply to their character struck me immediately, and continues to strike me now, as profound.

All that you’re allowed to change about the character is their hair colour, skin tone, and eye colour. Along with this, you’re also allowed to choose their name.

This small amount of change that you’re allowed to make to the character makes it feel as though you are inserting some very small amount of yourself into this pre-existing character. Like, the character you’ll be controlling is their own living, existing being, and you’re now just a part of that being. It almost feels like a tidy summation of what it is to control any character in any video game you’ve ever played. Which is to say, these characters always exist, having been made long before we gain control over them, before we come into contact with them, and as such we are incapable of actually fully putting ourselves into them. No matter how much character customization or character control they (the creator) allow, the player will always only be meeting them halfway, as the two of them work, isolated from one another, to create what is now a unique being. 

Okay, I’ll stop now. But I’m serious about this.

Anyway, the opening of this game is pretty terrific. You wake up a prisoner on a large, monster-ruled pirate ship, and are immediately let out of your jail cell in order to help fix some things around the monster ship. You are enlisted for such duties as the result of your known designation as a “builder.” The skeleton pirate who frees you from your cage makes it clear that while you are a shitty, unimportant builder, that’s still enough for you to be capable of handling the small jobs they have for you. So, you help the monsters clean up the ship, and this acts as the first of what I assume to be many, many tutorials.

The dialogue during this opening section left me legitimately shocked. Nearly every thing that every monster said to me managed to make me silently laugh and/or over exaggeratedly look around the room as if to ask “Is anyone else seeing this!?” (nobody else was - everyone else was asleep and not thinking about video game dialogue).

In order to not write out fifteen different things, I’ll put here what struck me as the most clever of the writing. After asking the skeleton pirate who originally woke you up who he is and what you’re all doing on this ship, he answers:

“If you’re that desperate to find out how far up the creek you are - without a paddle, I might add - go and talk to those five monsters beneath the flag over there.”

This line in particular, along with the majority of the rest of the lines, led me to think about the absurd amount of time it must have taken for the localizers of this game to craft such a great translation.  I mean, yeah, obviously the writing was terrific to begin with in Japanese, but the fact that they were able to translate that into such immediately brilliant English text is insane. I’d like to meet the people behind this translation, so that I could ask them what drives them to care so deeply about what they do.

The rest of this demo - or, at least, the rest of it that I managed to play that night* - was made up of me doing menial tasks (talk to monsters, learn to craft, learn to fight, etc.) until I finally decided that I simply could not play any longer, and left it at that for DQB2 for the time being.

*(note: I was really loving this demo, but decided that I needed to move on to another game, as it was already 1:16am and, as I wrote in my open google doc that night, I was “already pretty fucked up.” I played through the beginning of the demo again the next day while sober, and it took me about two minutes to get to where I made it to in like 45 minutes while drunk. Gotta love it.)

I’m mainly really curious about how a game like this gets made. I don’t know what the sales figures for this game were like in Japan, but as far as I could tell, very few people in North America really gave a fuck about it. The thing is, it seems really, really well made, and I know for a fact it is ridiculously large. I have questions about how something this big and seemingly great (and definitely carefully made), gets created, released, and then ostensibly immediately forgotten about. Art and commerce are weird. 

Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever play this game. It is too big, and too chill, and I have too many other things that I need to be doing, or at least I often feel as though I do.

Ape Out

I literally can’t think about this game without referring to it as “Ape Escape” in my head. I’ve never played Ape Escape, but that is definitely a better freedom-seeking-ape based video game name.

Anyway, this game is beautiful, in a really jarring way. It’s beautiful in a way that I guess can’t be communicated through trailers, because something about this demo immediately struck a chord with me that no trailer for it had done.

This game is electric. You play as an ape, making your way out of a poisonous building, murdering any human who gets in your way (which is to say you play as an ape who is attempting to escape).

You can move with the left stick, aim with the right stick, grab with the left trigger, and throw/punch with the right trigger. And then you just fucking kill.

The music is an absurd mix of smashing drums and symbols, getting hit in time with your launching of men into walls, turning those men into limbs and torsos (which you can then pick up and throw at other men to stun them), and turning those walls into red paint splattered canvases.

Playing this game makes me really want to play the rest of this game, if only to see how far they can take this kinetic energy that pulses throughout the first three stages. How long does the novelty of having a drum hit perfectly coincide with a body hitting a wall and becoming a corpse last? Or, should I say, what did the developers (Gabe Cuzzillo, the game says, is the creator) do to make it so that fucking pulsing excitement deep in the players sternum lasts for the entirety of the experience? 

I feel like this is a game that I could beat over the course of one delirious, sleepless night, though for now we can all only sit and hope that when I do finally purchase and play the full game, it forces me to do so. 

Cadence of Hyrule

The music is so good. It sounds like you’re standing in an alternate universe Legend of Zelda elevator, a universe in which the Legend of Zelda isn’t a video game series, but is instead a religious belief.

Remember when this game got announced, and we were all like “What the fuck!?”? And then it came out, and some people were like “This is really good!” and other people were like “I like real Zelda better…”

Anyway. We should appreciate things more.

You know, I bought the first one of these games, on sale, for $5, and it really just did not click with me. Something about having to move on beat really bothered me. Like it was always the game’s fault, and not my own, that things were going wrong. It always felt like my Guitar Hero guitar was missing one battery, or like my Wiimote was miscalibrated, and that was causing all the troubles. It always felt like I was missing some peripheral accessory. It’s not a feeling that feels worth dealing with these days.

This just...isn’t as fun, and doesn’t feel as good, as any of the other three games I was playing. Specifically, I can’t stop thinking about The Touryst and DQB2. I thought that I didn’t like many 3D games, but fuck. Those got me. 

The End (Closing Thought That I Wrote Immediately After Finishing These Demos)

This was cool, and this was good. We might even say that I “really needed this,” or, at least, “am really happy to have had this.” 

But I’m sobering up, and a remix of some old Zelda song is playing, and I love it, and it’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow, one of my friends will come pick me up from my sister’s house, and I will return home, indefinitely, for now. Everything is fucking weird. But I’m going home. I can’t sit in the darkness of my sister’s home office playing Nintendo Switch demos forever, sadly.

After The End

I’m home now, and I’m tired. Everything is bizarre. I am definitely going to play all of The Touryst eventually, and I am almost definitely going to play all of Ape Escape eventually (I actually wrote the wrong name here by accident, and didn't realize it until now, a day later. They should have just named it Ape Escape. Fuck it.). As for DQB2 and CoHR, they were chill,  and I will remember them, and the drunken night we had together, fondly. But I suppose this is the end of the road between me and them. 

Anyway, I’ve got four essays due in the next 10 days, and then some online essay after that. I’m also playing through a very long and old JRPG right now, and I think I love it. All of that is to say that I won’t be playing any of these games any more for the time being. So for the time being, I’m thankful we all had that one night together. One night of repose, and of lonely drinking, in a house and a town I’d never been in before, in a room that was not my own, staring at a street that I couldn’t recognize. I’m home now, for some amount of time, and hopefully that time is good.

Goodnight.

[awfulcomingdown]

The Gardens Between

I started playing The Gardens Between the night before the first day of classes of second semester. If all goes according to plan, this will be my final semester of university, and of school in general, for the rest of my life. Four months from now, I will be a graduate. A real person existing in the real world. I will be working, and living, and trying to pay rent and feed myself, with no immediate goal other than to continue doing so. That will be real life.

I hadn't been feeling very well in the weeks that led up to me beginning second semester. It was winter break, and I wasn’t really doing anything. Just living in my mom’s house in my hometown, hanging out with my high school friends, sleeping, and drinking. I started to feel dark and gross. This feeling was still resting densely within me when I began the game.

. . .

The Gardens Between is a puzzle game, and I don’t like puzzle games, I don’t think. I might even extend that to say that I don’t like puzzles of any kind, whether in video games or in real life. They generally make me feel bored and detached; almost always disinterested and sometimes confused. They’re just not for me. At best they are usually something I tolerate in a video game because I like the rest of the game enough to do so. Even when I solve them, I find no joy, really. 

In The Gardens Between you don’t control either of the two characters you see on your screen. You control time. Push your joystick to the right and time will flow forward, push it to the left and time will flow backwards. Leave it be and time itself will stop, along with everything on the screen. Through this, the game creates puzzles based on manipulating objects that exist independently of the flow of time to allow your two characters to continue walking forward, until they reach the peak of the current level

In presenting these puzzles, The Gardens Between didn’t ever cause me to feel frustrated. Even when I didn’t know what to do, it always felt like all of it was in front of me, and like I would be able to figure it out. It always felt like I didn’t mind having to take a little time to figure it out. 

This is probably because The Gardens Between feels good to look at. It feels good to listen to. It feels good to manipulate its time, back and forth, just watching the rain fall and rise, over and over. It feels good just to watch those two characters walking, pointing, holding hands, jumping, climbing, waiting. When you base a game around the mechanic of the player manipulating time, you can control every movement of each character. And so their movements are interesting, and telling. You learn things about them through the ways they interact with one another. When one of them walks over a narrow pipe with ease while the other hesitates before slowly, carefully traversing it, you feel like you’ve learned something about each of them, and about their relationship to one another. Maybe you see one of them as being more like yourself, and the other as being more like someone you know. Maybe you see a little bit of yourself in each of them. 

Regardless of what you see, you will see it strictly through their movements and gestures, because there are no words in The Gardens Between. The story is entirely told through the characters’ movements, the places they traverse, and the music they are accompanied by. 

It is a short story, and it is focused on two things: the friendship of these two, and its coming end. 

You quietly know it from the beginning, that one of these two is going to be leaving the other. They will no longer be nextdoor neighbours and, you might infer, they will no longer be friends, at least not in the way they once were.

And there’s nothing to tell you otherwise. There is no ending glimmer of hope that these two might one day find one another again. They hug, and they say goodbye, and then they part ways, one sitting in the backseat of their parents’ car, the other waving from the sidewalk. And then the camera pans up towards the sky, and then the credits roll, and the game is over.

The game ends with them saying goodbye and them not being together anymore. They’ll have to move on.

I’ve been thinking about it recently, maybe even today, that that’s just the way some things are. You meet people, and you get close with them, and then one of you leaves town, for school or for any other reason, and you slowly stop being people who know one another. You slowly stop wishing them a happy birthday via text message. You slowly stop feeling like you need to catch up. 

And I think that that’s okay, and that that’s inevitable. That’s just the way things go. People leave one another, physically, and slowly, unconsciously, come to the realization that they just aren’t going to be the same people to one another that they once were. 

Life is not about holding onto the things we used to have and wishing they were still here. Endings are sad, and it seems as though we often hope to avoid them, both in our lives and in our art. But they don’t have to be as bad as they sometimes feel.

The two characters from this game might never see one another again. They will both grow older and change as people. They will begin to have important life experiences without one another. They will meet new people, and they will tell these new people about their old neighbour, their old friend, and about the good moments they had with them.

[awfulcomingdown]

No Longer Human

[awfulcomingdown]

I’m waiting for my friend to text me back.

I’m waiting for him to tell me whether or not he is willing to go to another one of friend’s houses to drink and, uh, hangout?

I’m not even sure if I myself want to do this. But it’s Friday, you know? This is what you do.

I haven’t seen this friend - the friend whose house I am going to - in around four months.

I think I should start getting ready. I told this friend I’d be there by 9pm. It’s currently 9:05pm and I am only 25% ready to leave my house and go out into the world.

[awfulcomingdown]

Day 6: Sitting Inside of Your Own Bad Feelings Can Feel Impossible Sometimes, Even if You Know They’ll Eventually Pass

This Christmas will be my 23rd. I can’t remember any of them, really. That’s not true, I guess. I can sort of remember a lot of them.

The days have gotten long since I got home. Rarely leaving a place has a bizarre effect on the human mind. I feel like everything lasts too long and then every day is over.

I beat the second dungeon of the dark world in A Link to the Past today and despised it. I will beat the third dungeon tomorrow.

I continue to read Tim Rogers’ “Nine Different Christmases” and Osamu Dazai’s “No Longer Human.” I continue to watch Looking for Alaska. I continue to listen to Tilly and the Wall’s 2004 album Wild Like Children. 

This day that has just ended has been my third full day of being home. I can hardly remember any one of them. Tomorrow I will wake up at 11am and begin my day.

Tomorrow, or, uh, today, is Friday. I will probably have to drink. Before that, however, I will be awake for around eight hours. I will read Tim Rogers and Osamu Dazai, and I will play A Link to the Past and listen to the Bad End Podcast. Those are the things I will do tomorrow. Maybe I’ll go get my friend’s guitar, too. 

I’ve been sick since I got home. I think the sickness is, finally, mostly, gone.

My brother said today that he doesn’t understand video games. What he really meant by this was that he does not understand why people play video games. What he really meant by this was that he doesn’t understand why people waste their time playing video games. I didn’t bother arguing with him. I mean, it’s a worthwhile question. Why do it? Why do anything? you might say. To that I say: Yeah, we should be alright with finding ourselves asking that question for everything we do. 

Why play through a game you feel hatred for? It’s not just because you want to finish something you’ve put time into. It’s because, in some small way, you are hoping for something. You are hoping that in beating the game, something will happen. Something might happen, I don’t know.