A July 4th Post About Videogames Because I Can

Nostalgia is not only a drug; it is the ultimate abusive relationship. You start out loving something before growing tired of it. Eventually, you stop caring about it potentially to the point that you hate it. Next thing you know, it’s been years since even thinking about it and suddenly you want it back to the point of putting tears in your eyes.

Believe it or not, there was a point in time when we collectively hated translucent casings on our electronics. We thought it looked downright ugly. It’s only been in recent years with the rise of identical-looking smartphones and samey notebook computers that we look back on those see-through housings with fondness. From the perspective of those old laptops and music players, we’re standing outside with a Bluetooth speaker over our heads blasting love songs via Spotify, only probably way more pathetic and certainly not going to end the way that movie did.

I was thinking about all this today having just beaten Monument Valley on my iPad, including all its add-on chapters. I know I’m about eleventy-billion years late to the party on these games, but they’re new enough to me to be interesting and old enough to everyone else to be retro. I got it through Netflix, who is delisting the game a few days from now. I’m probably not going to get to the sequels in that time, but maybe I’ll just buy the damn things from the app store after all.

Speaking of abusive relationships, puzzle games and I have a similar standing as RPG’s in that I love them dearly, but I don’t have time for them. I have a rather addictive personality, and as such generally don’t play games on my phone because of the distraction and time sink. If I want to play a game, I’ve got to work for it, fire up the Playstation or the Switch and sit my ass down on the couch. There are still games on my phone, mostly as a contingency plan if I’m stuck somewhere for a while and need my dopamine fix. The exception to that is Pokemon Go, which I’ve been playing religiously for some years now. In my defense, at least that game has me get up and out of the house when it isn’t exhaustingly hot or blisteringly cold. When it came to Monument Valley, I was certainly aware of the games, but I never gave them much thought. I saw a few screenshots and clips of gameplay and my response was a resounding, “It’s probably okay, but so what?” It reminded me of a game I tried out on my PSP called Echochrome. The games have a fair bit in common in that they both involve navigating Escherian landscapes using a combination of dream logic and lateral thinking. Echochrome predates Monument Valley by a few years, the former very much still a product of buttons and joystick gaming while the latter was born and bred to work with a touchscreen, be it a phone or, better yet, a tablet.

This led me to thinking of similar sort of puzzle games, ones that involve navigating a space rather than simply sliding blocks or matching tiles. One of these games is Crazy Castle for the NES. Specifically, and depending on what region of the world you reside in, Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle (more on this in a moment). The game has you navigate a scene while dodging enemies in order to collect a number of carrots before moving on to the next level, of which there are 60. For a NES game, that number certainly seems crazy, until you realize each level only occupies about two screens worth of real estate and they employ a kind of modular construction. I remember my brother and I losing our minds at the idea of Bubble Bobble having some 100 levels, until we realized each level was only a screen and of a similarly repetitive level design. Although I do remember playing Bubble Bobble as a rental from a local grocery store in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, I never actually played Crazy Castle. I don’t even think I knew it was a puzzle game. Frankly, in my mind, at that time a puzzle game consisted of falling blocks or sliding tiles. I do remember seeing the game at the same grocery store and reading the back of the box. What stood out to me most was this image of Bugs Bunny embracing a female version of himself in a blue dress. According to the text blurb, this is Honey Bunny, a character who has appeared in a few classic Looney Tunes shorts, though her design has never been set in stone. The image on the box baffled me because of how much like Bugs she looked. In fact, she looked like Bugs when he’s wearing a dress to fool Elmer Fudd. On the whole, it seemed weird to me to give Bugs a love interest at all, much less in a videogame, as if someone said, “It’s a videogame! You gotta rescue a damsel!”

It turns out the reason for the love interest is rooted in the game’s origin. This was around 1989 and in Japan the game originally starred Roger Rabbit (his wife Jessica being the captive Honey Bunny). As for bringing it to America, there was a problem. There was already a Roger Rabbit game on the NES and not produced by Kemco. So, the game was reworked graphically to feature Looney Tunes characters.

More games would be released in the Crazy Castle series, at least 5 depending on how you set up your spreadsheet, with multiple versions of each one depending on the region of their release. For the Japanese version of the second game, Roger Rabbit was replaced with Mickey Mouse. North America would still get Bugs Bunny right up until the 5th game in the series, which would star Woody Woodpecker. As for other regions, intellectual properties varied, from Garfield to the Ghostbusters to a Danish troll named Hugo.

It’s interesting to compare these titles to Monument Valley and Echochrome in terms of their presentation. In Echochrome, the character you have to guide around the impossible objects is an articulated artist’s mannequin, going with the game’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic, almost as if you’re playing a prototype rather than something finished. Monument Valley has you take on the role of Princess Ida, a small and silent little girl in a white dress and conical hat as she traverses a sea of soothing color gradients and isometric architecture. While the game has a story, it is not emphasized beyond some cryptic lines of text, the ending being almost symbolic more than anything concrete. Ironically, Crazy Castle has an equally anonymous quality about it, so much so that any number of characters and scenarios can be swapped out as needed, leaving the game with no real identity of its own. The closest thing the game had to an original character was in the Japanese version of the third game, with Mickey Mouse being replaced by Kid Klown, who would go on to have his own series of completely different games from Kemco. This game would see a release in North America, though its connection to the Crazy Castle franchise was nowhere to be seen as it does play a bit differently than the Bugs and Woody entries.

Having a major IP attached to a game creates a number of problems when it comes to preservation. While an original cartridge of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castles is neither rare nor fetching some high price on auction sites, it’s not been made available through any current console platform, namely the NES library of the Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how exactly the licensing deals work for that particular service (notably they haven’t removed or retired any games from the library, unlike Netflix), but having to deal with both a game developer/publisher as well as the owners of the license, in this case Warner Bros., has got to be a nightmare. This is the unfortunate fate of many licensed games, especially older games from the 8 and 16-bit era. They’re made to cash in on name recognition, they sell as many copies as they can, and then they fade into the haze of memory until suddenly they’re wanted again.

If Gex can come back, maybe there’s still hope for Crazy Castle.

Control Issues: Offspring Fling!

So I bought Offspring Fling! which you should totally do as well, and the game is awesome. It's a platform puzzler that many people compare to the Kirby games, though I get more of a Lemmings-meets-Flicky synergy from it, but whatever it makes you think of, it'll always be good. You play a cuddly, floppy-eared... well, I think she looks like a Clefairy or possibly Wigglytuff... something that'll make an awesome plushie. Anyway, this loving mother has been separated from her children, and she has to explore a modular environment, gathering them up, and returning them to safety. The main twist is that, like real children, they're a terrible burden on their poor mother. You can't jump as high depending on how many of the little rascals you're holding over your head, and you can't fit through certain spaces with as few as one. This is where flinging comes in. Don't worry, your little bundles of joy are built like tanks wrapped in bubble wrap and goose down, and won't even yelp a little at being hurled at the walls, as long as you don't throw them into naturally-occurring pools of acid or in the path of ravenous lizard monsters. On top of that, the little guys can actually help you save them by activating switches, breaking brittle blocks, or even stunning those mean ol' lizard things. It's not exactly rocket science, but kudos to them for knowing to sit still and not step off the switch or the precarious ledge they may land on.

There's not that much to say about the game, but that's not a knock against it. It's very straightforward, very pick-up-and-play, and tends to use gameplay to teach you how its mechanics work. Most levels fit on one screen, giving you the chance to think ahead and strategize, and many exist entirely to teach you various gameplay mechanics, like how many babies you can hold over your head at once or how many of them can stand on narrow platforms (the answers being, respectively, a lot and hardly any). The graphics are bright and colorful, with lots of little details and nice animations. The music, while a tad repetitive, isn't annoying and fits the cutesy-but-not-cavity-inducing atmosphere. The puzzles are challenging, but not punishingly hard, overall extremely forgiving (one of the early levels practically forces you to mess up to teach you to restart a level if you get stuck).

My only honest gripe is in the nuts and bolts of the hardware support. Of course, I don't blame the developer for that; developing for the PC (as well as Mac and Linux) is tricky enough without all the hassle that comes with getting controllers to work. For however bad consoles get knocked for bad user interfaces, the PC side of the equation is the wild west by comparison.

Here's the thing: I don't like PC gaming. I don't hate it, I don't think PC gamers are elitist snobs or losers throwing away money or that consoles are better or any of that stupid nonsense. I simply don't like playing with a keyboard and mouse. It's just so unnatural to me and while stuff like Starcraft or most shooters work well with the keyboard and mouse, playing Offspring Fling! that way simply feels weird, downright wrong. Sadly, I didn't have that many great options at my disposal. I don't like dealing with drivers or most config programs, and even if you find a fairly user-friendly one, compatibility with a specific game is still a roll of the dice. I looked around for a few controllers like the Logitech F310 and some wired XBox360 controllers, but they were kinda pricey, the F310 got some real iffy reviews, and I don't care much for the design of the 360 controller (especially the D-Pad, which this game plays best with). I also looked at a retrofitted N64 controller that connected through USB, as well as an adapter cable that would let me use an original XBox controller I had lying around. That's when I remembered my Thrustmaster. It's this PS2/PC hybrid controller I got a few years ago for the first PC I ever bought (grew up in a Mac household). It looks almost exactly like a PS2 dual-shock except for some really nice triggers below the shoulder buttons. I wasn't sure it would work with my current version of Windows, which is 7, as I barely got it to work on XP. Still, I figured there was no risk in trying (unlike the others which would have meant dealing with returns in case they didn't work), and dug the guy out.

Time was not kind to the Thrustmaster. It apparently hated being stuffed in a bag with random cables for years and really let itself go. It still worked fine and dandy, but the rubber for its grips had some kind of chemical breakdown. It's sticky and so far has not come clean at all.

I persevered:





The moral of the story is: NEVER GIVE UP and the best solutions are always the simplest ones.

I may have to take the controller apart and run the casing through the dishwasher or, more likely, wrap the damn thing in athletic tape, so it'll look like a burn victim. In any case, it's all about the games.