The Worst Atari 2600 Games

I have a catalogue of Atari 2600 games that I like to dip into every so often, y'know, find a new gem of this weird era to enjoy. I like the style and the super simplistic gameplay, which can produce, on occasion, a game that rocks.

Mario Bros. (1983)

However, I've been vaguely wanting to go through them all and prune the ones that are unplayable, or close to it, for a while - because, let's face it, a lot of games from this era are simply not good - so today I'm going to talk about some of the ones that suck.

1. Cookie Monster Munch (1983)

Much of my displeasure with this game comes from the fact that it requires a special controller. This means that, basically, if you're emulating this game, you won't be able to move dear Cookie Monster. How sad. He will never be able to get his cookie.

Really, it must be deleted and purged because it is, quite literally, unplayable, but I'm also not inspired by the apparent gameplay: you must traverse a tiny level to grab a cookie. Now, this game is for small children, and I can't look through their eyes, not least because I can never be a little kid in the early 1980s to really meet this where it came from, but nevertheless, it just doesn't inspire.

I do like the way Cookie Monster looks, and I enjoy that this first level looks like a diagram of a womb and ovaries, or indeed, a stick figure devil giving you the finger, twice.

2. Sneak 'n Peek (1982)

This is an interesting one. It's hide and seek, and the wonderful thing about the Atari 2600 is that with two joysticks, we get the opportunity for some 2-player madness. Yes, one player controls the white stick man, and the other controls they grey stick man. One must hide within any number of strange hollows within the house, and the other must find.

I love the intro screen here, which shows a big house, the setting for our game, and the white stick man walking steadily and happily towards it. He is in for the time of his life. Bright music plays. Let the game begin.

The thing is, it's hide and seek. It's a simple translation of the game hide and seek, in which the endless opportunities for crevices and secret spots available in the real physical world around you is the draw. This computer version is fairly stylish, but there's simply a weird hole in every room that you can hide in. It's not quite the same.

That said, this is not really a game I want to delete, because there is a certain charm and fun to it. I think it's pretty funny that each player has to look away from the screen while their opponent hides, and I enjoy that the stick men vaguely look like they have erections. I could see a fandom forming around this game, and I would like to make that happen.

Sneak 'n Peek is not a good game, but it is quite beautiful.

3. Mr. Postman (1983)

This game is hideous. It has about three screens in total, but the first one says it all. A dismal environment. The player character's animation frames are so jumbled that when you walk, it sort of looks like it's glitching. This is hard to convey with still images, so I've gone to the trouble of providing an animated gif:

You're welcome.

Beyond that, the gameplay is desperately strange. You have to walk over to the side of the screen, avoiding a bird's projectiles, climb a ladder, and then, for some reason, leap back and land on the bird. This is, immediately, an impossible and insane task, but most of all it's bafflingly unintuitive. You're reading the manual to find this out, and that's fine, but neither the narrative, characters, or any aspect of the gameplay feels good. It's repulsive. I hate it.

*** 

These are my three picks for today, but tomorrow, and perhaps forever, the Atari 2600 will offer me more disgusting games. I look forward to playing them. 

Visiting the Computer Museum

This week I had the pleasure of visiting The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. This is a small, charming museum filled with all sorts of old computers that you can play with. Finally, I was able to realise my dream of touching a Commodore 64 - hooray!

The building itself is an unassuming and old fashion one with a strange, industrial yellow roof. I thought something about this felt perfect for the house of all the Amstrads and Amigas. There's something about the design of the building that seems just right. I also really enjoy the window decals of a robot enjoying the games inside. She's just like me.

There were tons of interesting things in here - they had prototypes of the ZX Spectrum and ZX81, both designed in Cambridge, and some very good signage.

One of my favourite things was this gorgeous diorama of the environment in Creatures. Look at it... majestic. And they have the actual game on the floor, where it belongs.

There's quite a focus on computer games throughout the museum (they even had a PlayStation 2 with playable EyeToy plugged in, so I played the window-washing minigame and remembered how deeply horrible it actually was to control - delightful), but they also have a 1970s office room set up, with an ASCII drawing of a Womble on the wall (it was Tobermory), and this fabulous Bisto mug (which, as we can clearly see, is not from the 1970s).

Really good stuff. I love all the computers. 

Irresistable Animals

I bring you more gorgeous Wigglypaint drawings. Behold, her:

Yes, that's right. Another beautiful dog, frolicking. This is the truest symbol of pure pleasure and comfort my mind can imagine. This is it. Undeniably, this is the creature of unbridled joy. Nothing can stop such a free and easy and wiggly type of being.

This is the simplicity on offer. This is the perfect world that could exist, if all ideals were possible.

It was accidental, but of course very predictable, that I ended up drawing essentially three versions of the same drawing here. Although, sure, one is of a cat, and the cat is clearly receiving an incredible kiss, but you know, basically I became creatively bankrupt at this moment - or gave into the overwhelming power of my motif, if you prefer.

There it is. The unstoppable love between animal and human. Nice. 

A World of Creatures

Here I am, working diligently on my onion skin journal once more, that dastardly see-through journal. I've gotten into really filling the page - I think a lot of darkness, in beautiful blocks of pencil, really compliments the transparency of each one. The pencil marks themselves have this wonderful softness, but the sections of completely filled-in pencil background give a nice murky feel to the drawing. The contrast is really nice without being as intrusive to the other pages as it might be in another medium.

What is this?

What I like a lot, also, is sort of letting the journal contain a certain sort of world. There's something of a continuum here. The weird creatures are lurking. For some reason, it makes me think of all the forest-dwelling things in Over the Garden Wall. I think they would be at home in here.

Oh, that's what it is.

I've always thought that I needed to do backgrounds more, but I've never really committed to that. Instead, I love carving out a dark void that sits behind a simple foreground - a small mound for a character to sit on, or a cluster of large daisies. There's something nicely suggestive there, a glimpse into a natural world. The vast darkness gives the image depth without really containing anything, and the foreground provides a sliver of place.

Beautiful woman.

There's also something approaching sinisterness about the pairing up of two mysterious creatures. I suppose twosomes are, in some way, a running visual theme across my drawings, but something about these duos in particular makes me think: wow... what are they up to?

No doubt, they are up to no good. 

More Thoughts on Pluribus

Last week I posted a video about my frustrations with Pluribus, and some of the responses have been interesting.

Lately when I post a video I get a wave of sticky anxiety that stays with me for a few days. There is something frightening about dropping the video over the cliff and into the deep, dark ocean of viewers - a distinctly unusual feeling, so different from posting here to a small, usually very chill audience of blog enthusiasts.

It makes one shudder. 

Many of the comments on this video, though, were reasonably similar to the comments on the Pluribus-hating post I made here a while ago. Yes, some agree, the plot meanders and the season stretches out its episodes in a sometimes unsatisfying way. Maybe, some say, Carol isn't that interesting when left alone for long stretches of episode time.

But some of the ways people disagree with me (and they sure do!) are fascinating. Maybe most baffling of all is the stalwart conviction that I can't be right about the season's position on the plurb, because they (the commenter) think the plurb is morally excellent. Regardless of your own philosophical wrestlings with the plurb as a force of good or evil (which, I have to admit to you, I do find deranged), the season makes it clear by the finale that this is a sinister force with absolutely no concern for preserving any facet of humanity beyond an encyclopedic pilfering of its knowledge. Those humans aren't in there! Not really!

Yes, the season wants to play with our moral view of the plurb, make us ask questions about whether there could be a net positive in such a complete takeover of human life, or at the very least if it could rock ass to be the lucky individual who gets to interface with the plurb as if it's a personal sex butler, but why is Manousos rushing to the action if not to be our vector for rooting for the plurb's reckoning and destruction? That's the arc, baby!!

Not that I begrudge rooting for a villain - I said I'd love a more evil Carol in this very video - but let's call a plurb a plurb here.

Another related thing I'm seeing is impassioned defense of the non-Carol individuals who love that plurb. No Lilly, people are saying. You don't get it - they accept the plurb because their family members are plurbed, and because to them, this collective mass is not such a nightmare. They come from more community-minded cultures, you see, and quite frankly they're right and I love the plurb and I wanna get plurbed myself.

And to that I say, okay plurb-lover, I get that you love the plurb and that you wanna for real get plurbed. However, there's a few reasons I'm not into this one. The first is that, as I said in my video, the season doesn't explore why these people think the plurb is fine. We don't see a single meaningful interaction between one of these individuals and a plurbed family member of theirs. We categorically don't explore what their reasons are for deciding they're cool with it, and I don't buy that coming from a culture which values community over the inidividual would mean you'd see a big alien thing that absorbs all of the humans you know and love as equivalent to said community. I think one could see that as a threat to community! I mean, community is a thing comprised of individuals, not a hivemind. They're not the same. Couldn't it even be reductive and insulting to reduce community-focus to this extreme erasure of the individual? Individuals can exist without community, after all, but community can't exist without individuals.

I would love to see a more complex view of these characters within the show. I'm not saying these characters are simply 'bad people' for having no problem with their apocalypse, just that the show gives us no reason to understand them. We don't spend time with them, and we don't gain any perspective on what their views are. Koumba is the only real mouthpiece for pro-plurb sentiment within the show, and he both doesn't offer a convincing argument (unless you love the no crime thing), and seeks to primarily use the plurb to have all the young women of the world service him indiscriminately. The plurb-lovers, then, come across as idiots and dweebs. I can't relate to them. And I don't think I have to, but it would be nice to feel that they weren't so much like cardboard cut-outs.

Finally, if these characters are so happy with the situation - with their family and friends being enplurbened - because of their alleged cultural predeliction for community, then why do all of them (with the exception of Darling Kusimayu) refuse to join the plurb themselves? You'd think if this was such a culturally defined moral good in their eyes that they would join too, but no - they're happy for their families to be sucked up into the plurb without consent, but when they have the choice: it's a no. That's pretty interesting. It's almost as if the show is categorically characterising them as a hypocritical group of thoughtless rubes who are willing to destroy the world and throw other people away for the benefits afforded to them in a mass-death event. Hmm...

But perhaps my favourite viewer response was one commenter's claim that reviewing the first season of a TV show, that judging an entire hypothetical show by its baby season, is like judging a movie based on its first ten minutes. A very silly one, but yes, perhaps. Let's all be quiet until father Gilligan feeds us a scrumptious fourth season. Then, some say, I may be permitted to judge.

 

This Hurts My Eyes

In my search for fun, unique, and satisfying online drawing tools, I stumbled on Rob Manuel's ZX81 Draw by serendipitous accident, and in a secret way. What happened was: I saw him posting drawings he was making with this tool on Bluesky and asked him if he was doing that in-browser, and then he kindly sent me a secret link, because the thing isn't intended for public use, at the time of writing.

Rob's frightening image of a dog.

So, lucky me, I have secured for myself a glorious new tool. And the great thing about this one is that it can very quickly strain my eyes. Yay!

I'm not familiar with the ZX81, a British home computer model released in 1981, but as you can see, it has a particular display aesthetic, comprised of some interesting black and white glyphs that can rapidly create a sickening kind of magic eye puzzle texture, if arranged optimally, that boggles the senses.

You're seeing the gorgeous art it's capable of here, and I don't think it's too bad just looking at these images, but drawing them made me feel genuinely nauseous, so I think this tool may be one to use in short stretches.

Fortunately, I am a fighter. I am strong, and I can endure such computer-based illnesses if it means drawing beautiful images that anyone on Earth would surely be delighted to see. And you know what else is great about these pictures? They're like, six measly kilobytes. I love that for them.

The Red Shoes: A Strange Movie About Women

I watched a Korean horror movie called 'The Red Shoes' recently, and it was a total accident, because I had meant to watch the 1948 movie of the same name. Oops!

Made in 2005, the most important thing to know about this film right away, is that the shoes featured in it are not red. They're pink. This has befuddled many an English-speaking Letterboxd user, many of whom cried and screamed and threw up when seeing these incongruent shoes - but the truth is: the Korean title of the film is actually The Pink Shoes. This is a simple translation issue. Mystery solved. Stop crying. It's okay.

Now, this movie oozes with a certain style. There's a fabulous blue-green colour grading on this thing, which means that yes, we are in Twilight mode. That feels right, and I love to see it. We open in a startlingly empty train station, where a girl sees these dazzling pink pumps, and thinks: yeah, I need those.

Sadly, her nasty little friend shows up and grabs the shoes for herself, but she promptly dies, so here we are right away with the truth revealed to us: the shoes are cursed, and they will kill you.

From there, we meet our protagonist who is mega-divorced (yay!) and struggling a bit with the care of her young child. One day she sees these damn shoes on a train, and she picks them up, because she has a high heel addiction and she can't resist them.

The movie feels very confused for the most part. Everyone simply starts acting weird because of these shoes, and we see about a million scenes of someone seeing the shoes and then screaming at the person who currently has the shoes. The mother and her approximately four-year-old daughter have the same shoe-based screaming match a number of times, which I guess is just what motherhood can be like, but I personally didn't need that many iterations of it.

Anyway, it turns out that the shoes belonged to an evil Japanese woman or something, and in the movie's greatest moment, we see a flashback of a stage set with an insanely striking Imperial Japanese flag during the occupation of Korea. This is where a dance will be performed (featuring the shoes) in front of all the Japanese soldiers.

It's incredibly arresting and you're thinking, oh wow, okay, let's get into some scary occupation stuff - that's amazing! But sadly, the movie mostly only makes vague allusions to this. Yes, there's a Japanese vs Korean woman drama about a cheating husband and murderous wife, but it all feels unfortunately soap opera, too focused on the deeply uninteresting personal troubles of the ghostly shoe-wearers, and neglectful of the genuinely harrowing setting with its immaculate imagery.

In the end, the movie has a strange and somewhat interesting view of woman-rage. We see the futile woman vs woman destruction sown by these shoes (pink, not red because... that's the woman colour), we see the creepy way it encroaches on the malleable psyche of the young daughter when she starts being sort of possessed by the shoes and wearing makeup, and we reach an immense freakout from our protagonist, too twisted by her reliance on shallow markers of femininity to cope, damning her daughter as a threat and an adversary in her pursuit of the shoes.

It's an interesting movie in its exploration of femininity as a spectre haunting women through the ages, but it has little to say on the matter, and is so one-note that it's hard to interpret as anything but a misogynistic tale of the fickleness and unpredictability of the ladies. They all just go feral with uncontrollable consumerism. It's just like with Labubus.

There are some undeniably haunting images though.

Two ugly shoes out of five. 

 ★★☆☆☆