Dorothy Fennel

Reviews of video games have a lot of somewhat disingenuous warnings about addictiveness. "You won't be able to put it down!" But addictiveness is in fact just about the only thing wrong with Super Crate Box-- it's a really elegant tiny game that's unfortunately tempting to play all the fun out of in one sitting.

It's ingenious, though. You face a room constantly filling up with monsters; your weapon changes randomly every time you pick up a crate, and your score is the number of crates you pick up before a monster gets you. With a good weapon, it only takes a few seconds to clear the room, at which point... well, if the next crate sucks, hopefully the one after THAT will be good. Or the one after that.

The thing to realize is that although there are new weapons and levels to unlock, this isn't a game with a constant supply of treats to give you. You should think of the weapon unlocks as an extension of the tutorial-- the weapons that are hard to use will be introduced one at a time, but still all pretty fast. After about 20 minutes, once you've got them all, it's just you and the high score board.

When Portal came out, Jerry Holkins called it "slapstick", which struck me as weird. How can slapstick happen, if you're in control of the protagonist and you aren't trying to get hurt? But slapstick is about timing, and if Portal's physics are such that you sometimes fling yourself into a wall with perfect timing, it's funny! And so it is, sometimes, in Super Crate Box when a monster falls on your head, or you open fire with a gun whose recoil pushes you into a pit, or... well, I'll just say that one of the best power-ups comes with a well-deserved apology from the designers.

Unquestionably worth a few minutes of your time, and impressively deep and well-balanced for how simple it is. It's just not quite deep enough for how much fun it is.

(I've unlocked SMFT on the first arena, but not the other two, and I haven't gotten Ambush Mode. So there may be gameplay I'm missing. The stuff I *have* seen doesn't make it seem that way, though.)

Super Meat Boy is very hard. I think. It seems hard, anyway; I'm close to 4000 deaths (it counts for you) and that's at not quite halfway to the real ending. A lot of levels I've finished seemed impossible, which makes me feel good for beating them but just proves my sense of these things is highly fallible.

Is the game forgiving? Maybe that's the key. It's brutally unforgiving about basic failure/success; if you're jumping over a sawblade, a split-second mistake usually means doom. On the other hand, if you have the right plan for a speed run, you can bobble the execution in a few places and still get that satisfying "GRADE: A+" at level's end.

Plus, the more you focus, the more forgiving you can make it. Meat Boy and his friends are all very steerable in mid-jump, though this will do you more harm than good until you internalize just what rates of acceleration you can expect from various characters and situations. Most of the levels are designed to reward precision recklessness-- take every jump at full speed and everything lines up but the floor is always falling out from under your feet; jump cautiously and you can catch your breath, but the angles are awkward.

It's a very technical game. You have to enjoy seeing how the little details fit together, because there is no big picture other than "beat enough levels and you win". If you're capable of feeling like a winner for getting through level #28 out of 300, though, even knowing that level 29 will be even harder, you have to play Super Meat Boy at least once.

2. There is no cultural, aesthetic or critical question that can be resolved by asking whether a thing is art.

3. If someone thinks they enjoy an artwork, they do.

Today something (masochism?) had me rereading discussions about Roger Ebert's idiotic* declaration that video games were not art and never could be. As wrong as people like Ebert are, it's true that we're just barely leaving the time when it would take someone maybe a week to get familiar with all of the games that might get mentioned in any games-as-art debate (play Portal, Bioshock, Braid, Katamari Damacy, So Far and something by Jason Rohrer, and you're prepared for 50% of those conversations). So it's cool that short-short games which add to the discussion are flourishing now.

The first time I played Loved, I thought it was a little heavy-handed. After reading the discussion at Jay Is Games, I had to change my mind-- Ocias did an excellent job of making the game genuinely ambiguous, even if most people, like me, didn't initially see any readings other than their own.

One interesting bit is the radically different interpretations people had for hard parts of the game based on different readings of the 'death' mechanic. I still think of video game 'death' as being death-in-the-story (or at least failure); it's just that the medium allows you to try until you reach the end of the story. Some other people, though, interpreted a section which took multiple tries to get through as the protagonist learning to perform a difficult but not impossible task. And under the latter reading, since the game is not actually that hard, when the voice sends you toward the more dangerous of two paths, it's teaching you something for your own good.

(Since I can't help seeing Loved as about an abusive relationship, I find the "for your own good" reading upsetting. But by almost any conception of the designer-player relationship, I am happy when designers do unpleasant-seeming things for my own good. It matters, of course, that they aren't taking my autonomy away, just, at worst, wasting my time.)

It used to be rare that I thought a game was worthwhile without being much fun (and indeed, Loved isn't much fun, though it depends for its power on some of the yay-i-did-it satisfaction that provides the fun in plenty of games). Now it happens a lot! These are interesting times.

* Strong words! I was chastised by a friend yesterday for having a narrow view of the world when it came to things I feel strongly about. But there are at least a dozen insupportable things about Ebert's essays on this topic, and come on, the man is a professional art critic working on a medium that was considered inherently worthless in living memory. That he doesn't understand what's going on speaks really, really poorly of him.

I'm temporarily fascinated by this song. As Uffie says early on, "There's two kinds of MCs out there / The ones who rap and the ones who don't care / And frankly I don't give a fuck". In other words, she's too tough to bother being good at music, and that toughness is (unspokenly) exactly what she thinks makes her qualified to be a rapper. That and record sales, anyway.

I feel like that's the aesthetic argument implicit in a lot of Ol' Dirty Bastard too. I mean, plenty of performers are more endearing for lacking technical skills, but most genres don't have a convention of totally identifying some non-musical characteristic with being good at that genre. Maybe if Madonna or Britney wrote a clumsy song about how lazy she was, in a way that made laziness seem sexy?

There must be some other example involving slackerhood and mid-90s indie rock. It's tough, though; I never felt like the looseness of "Slack Motherfucker" would have been self-described as incompetence by the band at the time. Maybe!

Interestingly, I've seen multiple references recently to the fact that Xbox Live's indie games section has an increasing number of non-game programs in it. With no official word on what to call these, commentators seem split between "application" and "app". Which maybe makes sense given that an Xbox is split on the two factors I mentioned above (not handheld, but there's a single, mediated store for programs).

Suppose the universe is deterministic. Now define the property P as being true at a given moment if and only if, were that state of the world run forward 100 years, some person on Earth would then be wearing two neckties at once.

Next, suppose that I decide it would be nice for property P to have been true 99 years and 364 days ago. All I have to do is wait a day and then put on two neckties. Presto! But my actions can't have caused property P to be true in 1909; causation as we understand it only works forward in time. Therefore, says Drescher, there is such a thing as an "acausal means-end link". And from there it's off to the races with a translucent-box version of Newcomb's Problem, which aaaaaagh never mind, the point is that I don't buy it.

I've run into "property P" before, and at first I thought this usage was obvious garbage-- just playing with words to make a future turn of events be "in the past". But of course, in a deterministic universe, property P really is a property of May 22, 1909, even if we have no way to evaluate it until tomorrow.

Anyway, there's a lot of relevant philosophical literature I haven't read, so I might be barking up the wrong tree. But I was not moved to make Drescher my guide on the topic.

Download ZORBA THE LEOPARD presents AN UNKNOWN QUANTITY. The rest of this year's mixes are all now here. Tracks:

( To the thief who calls himself the Great Hammerhead... )