I just marathoned the now infamous Endless Eight story arc of fan favourite anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzamiya and I’m feeling somewhat fatigued. You don’t really need to know anything much about the show to understand the issue other than that it’s probably the anime of modern times with one of the most loyal and dedicated fanbases. The show’s producers apparently decided that they’d put that fanbase’s loyalty to the test by developing a story-arc based on a very short story, in which events repeat themselves to infinity until the characters work out how to stop it. Not a particularly original premise, I’ve seen it in movies and I’ve seen it done particularly successfully in an episode of Star Trek : TNG ‘Cause and Effect’.  The Enterprise keeps blowing up at the end of a looped sequence of events and Beverley Crusher has to work out how to stop it. The difference here is that, whereas in other incarnations the narrative repetition is used as a device to move events forward and over 45 minutes to an hour it can be a lot of fun seeing the same thing differently, here the narrative is replayed 8 times, once per 20 minute episode per week, and nothing changes. There’s no building sense of drama, no characters leaving themselves messages to pick up, no significant differences episode to episode, it’s pretty much the same thing every week only directed slightly differently.

The result is a complete artistic failure, but one you can sort of admire at a distance, given that I’d rather a world in which insane creative decisions such as this can get the go ahead than one where we just get the same old story dressed up differently for mass consumption. In all probability this was the point that the show’s creators were trying to ram home, if you’re going to watch the same old anime week in week, harems, panty shots, walking in on girls in the bath etc etc you may as well have exactly the same thing week in week out and have it nicely animated. After the third or fourth run-through though, I confess I was beginning to look for interesting spots on the paintwork rather than the TV screen, my interest only really peaking to see what Haruhi’s new bikini was like each episode and to laugh at a couple of parts of dialogue I happened to find particularly funny. Ultimately though, despite the fact that the ending to the sequence -namely the final 5-10 minutes of retelling number eight - stood tall with any previous episode of the show, I felt that my time could have been much better spent.

Yet, I’m not filled with outrage about the whole affair like the anime community seem to be. For instance, this is a typical online response

“Great, it’s over. But guess what? The damage has been done.

By wasting eight episodes of the new season that I waited for years for, they’ve effectively lowered my opinion of the anime as a whole. I probably won’t be purchasing any DVD with Endless Eight on it. A story that should have taken two episodes at the most doesn’t deserve a buy.

I almost want to throw out the Haruhi DVDs I already have. If I could return them, I would, and buy something from a company that doesn’t spit on the fans of its works.

(If I could find such a company.)”

Kyonami - Melancholy’s studio -  may well have predicted the petty small mindedness of the majority of people when deciding to go through with this arc. Some people are going to appreciate the experiment, some will be bored, some may even tune out of the show. Others, however will destroy their DVDs and their merchandise because they did not like 8 episodes of a show they used to be incredibly passionate about.

You have to wonder who is giving who a bad name, really?

Another blogger has summed up why the Endless Eight arc of Haruhi was the anime event of 2009

http://m3.dasaku.net/twelve-memories-of-anime-2009-02-endless-eight/1396/#more-1396

so I won’t repeat his words other than to emphasize that I agree that sometimes the primary interest of art can be in watching people’s reactions to it and maybe sometimes that’s why art is actually created. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzamiya was never a show that did things by the book and it built it’s fan base on that very fact, the first series of the show notoriously airing it’s episodes in an apparently random order, just because it felt it could. Now it seems that following this “stunt”, if stunt it was, a movie has been released adaptaing the story arc that all of the fans were complaining they were missing out on because the Endless Eight arc was taking so long (The Disappearance, or Vanishment of Haruhi Suzamiya) and one can’t help wondering if partly the whole exercise was meant to get people talking about the show purely as a bid to market the movie.  Therefore, one could argue that the whole point of the show is to get people talking about the show.  It’s paradoxical maybe, but whilst most art is pertaining to being an emotional truth, or perhaps just a rollicking good time, here’s a show that’s deliberately being dishonest, is begging people to hate it and basically existing  just so as to be noticed.  the subsequent flamewars and constant accusations of televisual trolling by online commentators are maybe the end in themself that the producers of Haruhi were looking for. 

Regardless, it seems to have worked out for the best.  The movie’s ticket sales have been very good in Japan and despite the fact that Endless Eight didn’t set my world on fire, I for one will still be watching the feature as soon as I possible can.

Finally, one of the funniest Youtube videos I’ve seen in a long time. Hitler himself complaining about his frustrations with Endless Eight.

It’s probably been about a year since it was originally announced that Keanu Reeves is to play Spike Spiegel in a forthcoming live action movie version of anime classic Cowboy Bebop. I had a good healthy rant and moan when I found out (only a few close friends lost their lives in the incident), but it’s still taken approximately a year for me to assimilate and process the knowledge and as yet I still haven’t found my peace with this.

For those that don’t know, Cowboy Bebop is probably the most widely admired and well respected anime TV series of recent times. This is partly because it’s an all round well made and produced show with great characters, great artistry and a good sense of fun and excitement. I suspect it’s also partly because it’s a show that borrows a lot from western sensibilities and modes of storytelling. It’s a sci-fi western featuring a crew of ragtag, good for nuthin’ bounty hunters with compromised morals just trying to get their next meal and to get by. One is a young, dashing guy, good at martial arts, sarcastic, selfish but also in love. Another old and wise and more benevolent than he’ll let on. A third is a sexy, dangerous woman trying to find answers about the mystery of her past, ad so on. It’s a great show to watch for anyone interested in finding out about anime as it’s sharp and cool and usual anime convention is largely absent. It also has the advantage that it was a show that actually aired on US TV at a time when TV companies were interested in giving it a shot.

But the point is, I needed to explain what the show was.

Those who don’t know the show probably outnumber those who do by about 100,000 to 1. As well regarded as the show is amongst die hard anime fans and a few casual geeks, realistically if you walked into your local cinema and questioned the people you found there, you’re going to get a lot of blank looks if you start asking people what they think of the decision to cast Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel.

In theory I’m not against the idea of bringing a Japanese TV show to mainstream attention by making a live action movie version but I do wonder at the motivation of those who are prepared to spend a lot of money and effort in doing so when the first thing they do is cast Keanu Reeves as the main character.

Remember Constantine?

Most probably you don’t, and that’s largely because Reeves was cast as John Constantine, a character who, in the comic Hellblazer is a blonde chain smoking foul mouthed abusive, vicious cockney who in image and tone couldn’t be further from your generic Keanu Reeves hero type. When Reeves was cast as Constantine there was outrage in the fan community and this is because anyone who had read the Hellblazer comic knew from that moment that there was no commitment from producers to adapt the comic; just to use the name for commercial benefit. And yet, Constantine the movie didn’t do very well despite Reeve’s supposed star power even though the film was as solid in an average way as most blockbusters are, and that’s probably because no-one in the world except the die-hard comic fans had ever heard of Hellblazer and had no real buy-in to see a movie. Fans of the comics – of which I wasn’t one at the time, but am now – would only have been irritated by the adaptation, particularly as many comic fans love to see their favourite series turned into a good movie, and would only have given the film poor word of mouth. The upshot is that the movie won’t have made much money and very few people will have been encouraged to check out the excellent source material for this dire movie, wrongly assuming that it’s similarly generic in tone and feel.

So here we are again. A studio has offered up a lot of money to bring a much loved show to the big screen presumably with the hopes of making a lot of money and getting a lot of people interested in the franchise (footnote), but they’ve done so with the proviso that the movie features a big name star as a marketing pull. Yet again this star is the hopelessly uncharismatic, bland and frankly incapable actor that is Keanu Reeves, and as with Constantine, I couldn’t imagine anyone less suited to play the lead in this movie. So, yet again we have a situation where studios are going to be pushing a movie based on a property that no-one has ever heard of, the upshot of which will be no-one’s going to be going “ooh, Cowboy Bebop, awesome!” and director Watanabe won’t be propelled to international stardom as a result. Fans of the show who could potentially help broaden the appeal for this kind of thing – like me - are simply going to be cursing everyone involved with this project for blotting the copybook of one of their favourite shows. I’m aware the original series won’t be tarnished by a bad movie – I don’t even like the original anime movie much, for it’s portrayal of Faye as victim – but for those who even notice, it will tarnish the very idea of the franchise in the heads of the west and serve to make it even more difficult to persuade people that anime is a medium worthy of their time.

With the popularity of both comics and anime fading in the West and many genuine companies and distributors of these things struggling to keep their heads above water, I confess that I find this ignorant attitude continually frustrating and annoying. Ultimately it would be much more rewarding for everybody if, instead of pushing more junk on us, the time and effort were put into marketing and promoting the original quality franchises in the first place,

I learned about retrograde motion during college, but it was always a concept that slightly eluded me. As much as the teacher would explain why it appeared that planets would travel backwards through space, I never quite grasped how this could be so. I finally learned why today, thanks to the website Planets. There’s not a ton there to monkey around with, but what is there is a very nice demonstration of what retrograde motion is and why it works. There’s some freaky spirograph shit going on inside. It’s rather frightening, and more than a bit amazing, to think that a website had an easier time conferring to me a concept than a university system could.

A big argument that keeps reccuring in the video game community is the one of casual games vs. hardcore games. Apparently gaming has become so popular with such a diverse amount of people, that gaming companies are putting out more casual games that “every one can enjoy”. This wouldn’t be a problem except that these games are taking away from the hardcore market who like really indepth games which require actually reading an instruction manual and playing sessions lasting in the hours instead of mere minutes. I’m not sure why this i such a new and unique trend for people. Apparently no one remembers the Tetris craze in which everyone was addicted to falling blocks. Even my parents played that one, and my parents had a hard time getting to world 1-2 in Super Mario Bros. I guess I’ve been part of the problem since my wife and I have been having a lot of fun playing through 2D Boy’s World of Goo. Which is as casual as you can get out of the realm of popcap games.

I’d like to say that World of Goo is a bit hardcore, since some of the puzzles within can be rather challenging and require a number of play throughs before accomplishing, but I’d probably be lying to myself. I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad considering that the game was made by only two guys, and has been garnering quite a lot of praise, and well deserved praise at that. The game has an excellent production value. There’s no overblown CGI video welcoming you to the world (of goo) but everything from the level design to the load screen has a very unique (and fun) style to it. I got the game first for my PC, and since my wife showed interest in it, I bought it for our Wii, and it’s one of the better looking games on both systems, not because of any technically magnificent rendering or particle physics, but because the artwork is so rich and vibrant. It’s really beautiful in some parts.

There’s also amazing soundtrack. When we first started playing my wife heard the music and asked who composed it; she said, ‘it sounds like that guy.’ Luckily enough, I knew exactly who she was talking about. The music has a very Danny Elfman-esque feel to it. It’s energetic, light, and (again) fun. We were both surprised to learn that it wasn’t Elfman but one of the two developers who composed the score for the game.

Okay, so the game looks and sounds great, but how does it play? Well, it plays like awesome. In each level, there are goo balls and a pipe. The goal is to get the goo balls to the pipe. Luckily the goo can stick to each other and make basic geometric shapes, but the shapes are more fluid than rigid and will kind of sqoosh together. If you make a trianlge, the sides will bulge. It makes building things a bit more complicated since there’s always a certain bit of bounce to the objects. If you make something too unstable, the joints may fail and the whole structure might collapse in on itself. Luckily, the game provides a number of do-overs on each level, in the form of lightning bugs that follow you around. Squishing one will take you back one move.

The levels, and building goo pieces vary quite a bit and add a lot to the game play. In one level you have to climb up two towers, using friction to keep your structure from falling. As the towers get higher, one of them leans so the area between them gets larger. Luckily you are given green goo balls, which can be reused. Instead of making a giant tower that climbs up the whole level, you keep re-arranging a bridge; cannabalizing the lower levels to add upper levels. In another level, you have to use balloons to raise and lower bridges to allow you access to different areas. A lot of the fun of the game is seeing what each level has in store for you. One of my favorites involves a lot of wind and a lot of destructive windmills. Get too close and your goo balls disintigrate along with the structure they were apart of.

Once you get playing through the full game and figuring out all the puzzles, there’s the apply titled OCD mode, which gives you certain goals to accomplish for each level. This often involves collecting a certain amount of goo balls, but can also include beating a level within a certain time or within a certain number of moves. While the main game involves quite a bit of trial and error to get past the puzzles, OCD mode requires some pretty deft handiwork and quite a bit of forethought.

World of Goo is only $20 if you buy it online, though if you hunt around you may find a retail copy for cheaper, and only $15 on the Wii virtual console. I think it’s definitely worth the money. If you’re not convinced you can always download the demo or watch the preview.

If you’re too cheap to buy World of Goo but are intrigued by physics based games, you can always try http://www.physicsgames.net/ which I’ve also become addicted to recently. A lot of the games involve stacking and balance, probably my favorite of which is 99 Bricks, which asks you to use (wait for it) 99 bricks to build as high of a structure as you possibly can. The shapes are the same as the ones used in Tetris, so it sounds easy, right? I mean, the easiest thing about tetries was the moment after a monumental fuck up when you realized that there was no way to save the game and you just pressed down until the pieces hit the top of the screen. Well, 99 Bricks is a bit different then Tetris in that all the bricks have momentum and thier own center of balance. If you just lower them all down, they’re going to topple over. Even lowering a piece down and then shifting it over into an empty space can move a tower enough to cause the whole thing to come crashing down.

There’s also Invention Suspension which is a Wallace and Grommit tie-in game where you pilot a little helicopter around to pick up varios parts of an unbuilt invention. The game has a number of achievements that you can earn while flying through the various levels.

Probably my favorite game, though is Civiballs which has you cutting chains to release different colored balls into different colored vases. While the first couple levels are as easy as it sounds, the game quickly becomes frightfully challenging as you have to figure out the correct order to cut the chains in, but also deal with the moment of the balls as they fall and fly through the air. It’s intensely rewarding when you figure out a particularly difficult puzzle.

Posted by Tycho

The OnLive website is set to launch this evening, unveiling information about (what they hope will be) the future of gaming. Luckily you don’t have to wait until the official launch since CNet has already gotten the scoop. OnLive promises to revolutionize gaming by allowing someone to buy a small device that can be hooked up to a television or computer and stream games.  In concept shots, the device looks to be no bigger than an average T.V. remote, and reportedly can be hooked up to most any computer running a Mac OS or Vista or XP regardless of system specs.

They’ll accomplish this by hosting all the hardware remotely and streaming the games through a broadband connection. As long as someone has a 5 Mbps broadband connection, they should be able to play. A pricing structure hasn’t been released yet, but it’s assumed that there will be a monthly fee in addition to the cost of the games, which can be bought, rented, or tested out.

I would really like OnLive to succeed, but I’m positive that they will fail.

I’m sure that this is the end point that we’ll eventually get to with gaming systems, and it’s the kind of concept that people have been hoping for and dreaming about for a while now, but it seems like to ambitious of a project and too soon. That’s not to say that OnLive will be a total failure. Any fans that it may earn and any hurdles that it might overcome will help pave the way for future releases of similar products. It just seems that in tech, it’s often beneficial to be the second or third to reach the summit, so that you can learn from whomever was first.

When talking about streaming content, the question must be asked of whether or not people will actually be in favor of buying something they don’t actually own. I’ve bitched and moaned before about having too much stuff, and it seems like the only logical solution is to go to an on-line only form of ownership, but there are certain downsides to this. First is that I would never be able to loan a game to a friend, similarly, I could never resell a game that I no longer played to a second hand store. I’ve done this numerous times in the past. The other downside is that I would never be able to buy a game cheaply from a second hand store. I’ve made numerous purchases on games I would’ve otherwise ignored because they were so cheap.

These are a lot of the same arguments that people made about MP3s when they were first released, but despite all that iTunes and similar sites are raking in the dough. There is a bit of a difference between a $.99 song and a $50-$60 game. There’s also the fact that places like iTunes were created in response to a changing media structure. With more and more people downloading MP3s illegally, the record companies adopted a ‘if we can’t beat them, we’ll join them’ attitude and focused less on physical CDs and more online distribution. With games, there’s not as much incentive to make a digital push. There’s no Napster for Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though there is a small community of modders.

The other downside to OnLive is the cost of actually streaming the games. Not everyone will have a 5Mbps connection speed, and even a lot of those who do may be constrained by download caps. I would hate to lose my internet connection because I was playing too much Mass Effect and eating up bandwith.

Then there’s the question of how the streaming will even work. Even with a fast connection, it’s hard to imagine that the games will work lag-free as advertised. When I play games on my PC there’s no lag, but that’s because the machine is two feet away, processing all of the input instantly. How will a server miles away from me be able to read my button presses and transmit it to the actual game in the split second reaction time that most games require. We’ve been streaming music and movies over the internet for a long time now, but that’s a one way street.

Despite the insurmountable hurdles that OnLive will have to go through in order to succeed, I want it to. It’s got at least 9 publishers and a lineup of 16 games helping it out so far.  The sooner we get another source of media in an digital distribution environment, the sooner that others will follow suit.

posted by Juss

If Judd Apatow were making video games right now, I think he’d be looking to sign up to produce the next Leisure Suit Larry sequel.  The appeal of this supposedly lovable cretin has apparently passed me completely by; but then I’m no longer an overly hormonal teenager or a sad lonely, balding middle aged man.  Right now I’m somewhere in the middle and just don’t need to play games like this one.

Naturally, I played it. (for all you geeks, that’s the VGA remake and not the original)

Perhaps I should cut this game some slack for being one of Sierra’s earlier outings.  But I’m not going to because it cut me none.  The first noticeable thing about this game that pissed me off right royally is the stupid age protection scheme wherein you have to answer questions to prove that you’re over 18.  Being British I couldn’t answer most of them as they were largely about American Presidents, so already I felt pretty bad having to resort to cheating before I’d even started the game.  The second noticeable thing was that my main character was some retarded middle aged dweeb who, understandably, hadn’t yet had sex with a woman.  So, I’m thinking, why do I want to play a game as this guy?  Surely I want be some handsome knight on a noble quest, a young boy discovering his true destiny, or at the very least a virile manly cop beating the crap out of society’s wrongdoers.  I loaded this up thinking I was going to be playing a manly game for manly men about SEX.  But nope.  Apparently I get to be the dork.  This game is rapidly going downhill for me and I haven’t even got started yet.  Oh well, I think, I’m playing a dweeb but at least there’ll probably be a good storyline attached.  Adventure games are all about the storyline, after all.

Well, Leisure Suit Larry is not so keen on giving away its secrets in that area either.  No, it’s not stupid enough to tell you what the point of the game actually is.  You have to work that out yourself in much the same way that you have to work out to buy the whiskey from the bar, so you can give it to the collapsed drunk so he gives you a remote control so that you can change the channel with it 9 times, so that the pimp let’s you through the door.  Yes, it’s that obvious.  So again, I look it up.  Apparently, according to the internet, the aim of the game is to get laid.  That’s not an especially compelling storyline, is it?  But don’t worry because once you’ve managed to sleep with the local prostitute it all changes.  You then have to get married and get laid again.  Well, Ok, I figure that getting laid in a computer game should supply me with a certain amount of entertainment.  Well, guess what?  Even though I had to undergo the torture of having to answer questions on Richard Nixon to prove that I’m old enough, when you get to the sex scenes, they’re all censored.  Yes, byt this time I started feeling despondent and I’ll tell you why – because of what I had to suffer to get to this point.

Infuriating as they can be at times, the puzzles in the game are for once not the most annoying thing by a long shot.  What’s actually annoying is everything else.   This game plays like a dog: a really obstinate pissed off Rottweiler.  That stupid Sierra icon system is made even worse by the addition of taste and smell icons,and one to remove your clothing.  This is not great, given that you don’t need to taste anything to complete this game and it means that hours are spent selecting the right icon to use.  Added to that, all the icons look the damn same.  It would have been quicker to type the words into a text parser.  Yet there are greater headaches than this.  The game is split up into a few locations – the bar, the convenience store, the disco, the casino etc and you have no idea which one you need to be at.  Fine – explore.  Only, every time you want to go somewhere you have to hail a taxicab and endure a non-skippable sequence which involves the taxicab going faster and slowing down before you reach your destination. This doesn’t encourage exploration of the game world, it makes you determined to avoid unnecessary trips.  Then there’s the fact that using a taxi costs money.  The only way to get more money is to play at the casino.  I didn’t sign up for umpteen rounds of Blackjack, I wanted an adventure game, but I have to endure them to progress.  Of course, there’s no clue to how much money I need so guess what happens?  Right, the $250 I win is not enough so I run out of money after my bride to be takes $200 and can’t pay for the cab back to the Casino to get more.  This was roughly where I lost patience and threw my PC into the toilet.  I haven’t even mentioned that when Larry enters the casino for some reason he walks at ¼ speed, or that there’s a 15 minute long comedy routine of one-liner jokes you have to endure.

So, beyond the gamers identification with the lead character and the promise of some sexual scenarios, is there any reason to grapple with the game and take the few hours it would actually take to play and finish it? (it’s a fairly short game provided you don’t get deadended financially like I did.).   Well, the real shame of it is that underneath it all, game creator Lowe clearly has a fine wit and a great sense of humour and the game does deliver some good belly laughs every so often.  Every room is littered with funny descriptions, a good example being the bar toilet, which is scrawled wall to wall with amusing graffiti.  The excruciating embarrassment of buying condoms at a convenience store is well represented by a longish sequence where the storekeeper asks you if you prefer mint, ribbed, coloured etc and at the end of it he yells out “Hey everyone, he’s buying…. x” and a whole bunch of people leap out yelling “YOU’RE A PERVERT”.  Having had my own awkward condom buying encounter, that one struck a comic nerve.  When you meet a girl in the disco she shows no interest in you whatsoever and scowls.  As you hand over roses, chocolates and a ring the expression rapidly changes amusingly to a grin and the girl offers to sleep with you – but only if you’ll marry her first.  The joke is brazenly politically incorrect, yet I can’t help giving Lowe the benefit of the doubt and thinking that he is actually winking at potential misogyny of his audience here not trying to persuade them that this is somehow a better version of reality.  That the girl later ties you to a bed also suggests that Larry is really going to need try a little bit harder to genuinely connect.  Like Apatow though, for Larry success ultimately comes a little too easily and so any sense of genuine feminine empowerment gets wiped away in a smug air of “I got to have sex in the end anyway”.  Disappointing, but not unusual.

If you’re feeling patient and you love Apatow then maybe this game will appeal.  However, there’s not enough good in it to make it the retro classic it has become in the minds of many and I can’t help thinking/hoping tha,like King’s Quest, it’s the superior nature of the sequels that people have truly latched onto.  I’ll be playing them - I’ll let you know.

Since I’ve restarted school, I’ve noticed that my previously annoying tendency of procrastination has transformed into a full-blown maelstrom of time wastery. When something needs to get done, there’s nothing I want to do more than not do it.

With that in mind, I was delighted to discover this simple net-app, called Ball Droppings. A ball drops from the top corner of the screen, and you need to set up a platform for the ball to bounce off of. When the ball bounces it makes a little blip. Set up another platform, get another bounce, get another blip.

Eventually there’s balls and platforms everywhere and you’re inundated with a cacophony of blips, bleeps, and bloops. Like the amazing Line Rider, there’s no score or goal, it’s just a free form project to do what ever you can to have fun.

I can only hope that soon youtube will eventually start hosting videos of the amazing patterns that I know people will start making.

Posted by Tycho

To hype coincide the release of the Wolverine movie, Marvel has decided to celebrate Wolverine appreciation month in April. To celebrate, they are releasing a slew of comics with special covers done in the style of famous artists. Some are too cool for words, others are merely cool.

You can read the article and view a couple more covers here.

My weekend just planned itself.

Those of you with access to steam may have already noticed that the weekend deal starting today is the Oddworld series (which includes Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus) for 75% off. This is a cracking good deal, and I expect each and every one of you dear readers (all 3 of you) to take this offer up. You can get the games seperately for $2.50 each or buy them together for $3.75 total. Not to sound like an informercial douche, but that’s less than the cost of a super fancy delux-o coffee with low-fat no sugar soy whipped non-dairy creamer.

Aside from the outstanding price, you should get the games for their cleverness and humor. The games involve a rather weak, ugly alien creature who is trying to escape from an evil corporation that wants to turn him and his friends into snack treats. Your only real weapon is mind-control, which you can use to (wait for it) control the minds of the guards that would otherwise be out to kill you. You can then make the guards do various things, push buttons to let you in to previously locked areas, kill other guards, or even walk off the edge of a platform and into a bottomless pit. The first part of the first level is basically a walkthrough, telling you what to do for every scenario. On one screen, you run into one of your co-workers, who is busy scrubbing the walls. The walkthrough tells you to go up to a lever and push the action button. When you do, a trap door opens underneath your coworker, and he disappears with a slowly dimming, “AIIIEEEEEEE!” Followed by an eventual thud. You don’t really expect for a tutorial to screw you over (the more coworkers you save, the better your score) but Oddworld lets you know that you should take everything with a grain of salt. Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

The game is part platformer, part puzzler, part stealth. You sometimes have to hide from the guards as much as possible to get past certain areas, while other times you just have to run like hell and hope that you jump, sneak, or roll at the exact right moment. It’s less Mario and more Flashback with a little bit of The Lost Vikings thrown in for good measure.

I love platformers. They’re probably my favorite genre of video games. The new trend in games seems to be to make games in the sand-box style with an open world. You can do almost anything and there’s really no rules as to how the game should be played. While I am intrigued by the freedom these games offer, and rather enjoy putzing around in a virtual world with no real purpose  (imagine that), I’m also turned off by them. As the worlds become bigger, and there’s more to do in them, I find myself torn about what I should do. I’m a completest by nature, and whenever I find something new in a game world, I feel compelled to find everything. Spider-Man 2 is one of the best examples of this. Beyond the story line, you can run around a virtual new york and find 100 tip markers. There’s also a bunch of skyscraper tokens scattered amongst the roof tops of the (wait for it) skyscrapers. Then there’s the photography missions where you have to climb and crawl to various points on buildings to get the perfect angle for a shot. After a while, it becomes too much and I find myself giving up the game as hopeless because I know I can never complete everything.

It’s nice to have a game where the world may be large and varied, but is still constrained to levels, with a specific end goal in sight. Platformers like Ratchet and Clank, Jax and Daxter, and Super Mario Galaxy are perfect examples of this. There usually is some extra incentive to go back and replay levels (beating a time-trial, collecting a certain amount of coins or gems or bolts) but these I see these as goals that can be accomplished with varying degrees of difficulty, but not daunting never-ending tasks.

While most people can site Mario and the Super Mario Bros. series of games as their first introduction to the platform genre (freaks, losers and weirdos probably will choose Sonic), my first real introduction to platforming was on the Atari 2600 through Roderick Hero and Pitfall Harry from H.E.R.O. and Pitfall II respectively. I never played the original Pitfall when I was young, and after playing Pitfall II I never felt the need to. Whereas Pitfall was just an endless series of screens and traps going from left to right, Pitfall II had you climbing up and down ladders, going from the leftmost screen of the game to the rightmost screen and then back, and even catching a balloon to quickly bring you up from the bottom of the game area back to the top.

Pitfall Harry is still just a passive adventurer, though. All he can do is jump over or duck under the various dangers that surround him. There is no way to strike back or kill any of the game’s dangers. However, none of the animals in Pitfall II really harm Harry either. They just send him him back to the last save point, while taking time off the clock. Given the steep difficulty level of most Atari games, this made Pitfall II relatively easy. Despite this, I never completed the game. My sister did once, she was probably 8 or 9 at the time and the three extra years of dextrous development probably aided her more than anything. A large part of the game is pattern recognition with the various beasts, with the last third of the game involves running under flying condors and bats. The condors have a fairly slow frequency and are easy to duck under once you get the hang of it. The bats, on the other hand, have a much faster frequency. You can still manage to run under them, but it takes much more skill and patience.

In order to win, you have to rescue Harry’s niece, Harry’s pet mountain lion, and find a giant diamond ring. Oddly, finding Harry’s niece is the easiest to do, with finding the mountain lion being the last. There’s also a bonus for collecting a cave rat, which is entirely pointless, because if you rescue the mountain lion all you have to do is go left one screen and you collect the cave rat. All in all, Pitfall II was a nice way to spend a couple hours, and it was made even more enjoyable by being able to use save states and not having to repeat large sections of the game over again because your finger slipped on the controller while trying to run under a bat.

While Pitfall II involved one huge world and no actual way to die, H.E.R.O. consists of 20 different levels (which are designed differently but all basically look the same) with a number of ways to die. The first few levels just have spiders and bats, which pretty much do nothing but wait to get killed, but soon you run up against moths, snakes, and water-bound tentacle monsters. As if this weren’t bad enough, in the later levels, most of the walls and even some of the platforms turn into a molten state, and if you touch them you die. Luckily, the hero, Hero, in H.E.R.O. (which stands for Helicopter Equipped Rescue Operation) has a personal (wait for it) helicopter attached to his back, so he can fly around the levels.

While the helicopter is totally bitchen, it doesn’t really help Hero kill any of the baddies in the level. Have no fear, because Hero comes equipped with a few sticks of dynamite for each level. Most of these are needed to blow up walls that block your way, though, and in latter levels ALL of the dynamite is needed to complete the level. It’s also nearly impossible to kill the moths or snakes with dynamite. So what’s Hero to do? Only shoot laser beams out of his helmet. Mario had fireballs he could throw only after collecting a mushroom and a flower. Hero had frickin lasers from the get-go.

The point of the game is to get to the end of each level and rescue a trapped miner. This gets very difficult once you reach the tenth level or so. Luckily the Atari game had an option which let you start out at different points throughout the game, so you could instantly start on level 15 instead of having to play through the game every time you wanted to try and beat it. Even with this, the game was unforgivably difficult. Using an emulator and save states I probably reloaded sections upwards of 20 times. Still it was a blast to play through.

Like King’s Quest II, someone has taken it upon themselves to remake H.E.R.O. with better graphics. I couldn’t be happier about this, because for most of my life, I figured that I was the only one that ever played this game, since I never see it talked about or referenced any where. It’s a real shame because it’s probably the best game I played on the Atari.