The Nintendo DS Build-A-Bear Game

Today I played 'Build-A-Bear Workshop: Welcome to Hugsville' for the Nintendo DS, just to feel something. This is a game for toddlers, mainly, and so it can easily put an adult into a trance as the slow, peaceful music plays, and the overly long waits between dialogue stretch out before you like a highway.

The first thing you do, obviously, is choose your stuffed animal. I chose the pink cat, because I can sense her crazy personality. You then have to "rub the heart" to imbue your creature with a soul.

After this act of witchcraft, you're plopped down into Hugsville, the place where all the other stuffed animals live. There, you can play mini-games presented to you by each animal, that are, as suspected, uninspiring.

The elephant offers you a maze game. You can win a gold trophy for doing well. And it's delightfully easy to do well.

I named my character 'GLUMP', as you can see, and I think she is shortly going to be the champion of every mini-game in the village. I like that she wears a little denim skirt. A very simple outfit, but I like it. I enjoy the super boring style of the animals here.

At one point you're introduced to a rabbit who knows about fashion, and then you're asked to dig a hole. This is society. This is real. This is Build-A-Bear.

A Strange, Impenetrable Final Fantasy VIII Bootleg

Some time ago, I came upon a gamer's curiosity of particular interest to me as the number one fan of Final Fantasy VIII in the whole world, and a freak about old and obscure games in general: a demake of Final Fantasy VIII for the Game Boy Color.

Hell yes.

This oddity is by Waixing, a producer of many Chinese bootlegs of games, and it's called 特种部队 A计划 (tèzhong bùduì a jìhuà), which translates to something like 'special forces plan A'. Given that it is in Chinese, a language I cannot read, I can't comment on the dialogue, but there is an unstoppable delight in seeing Squall and Quistis right away as little Game Boy sprites.

There they are!

Most of its music consists of chiptuned versions of songs from the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack, but on getting my first game over I was delighted to hear a rousing Game Boy rendition of Eyes On Me. The game over comes quick, because as soon as you encounter your first enemy it becomes clear how unbalanced and dangerous this game is. Squall got killed after stepping one foot into the fire cavern. It's over. Ifrit's waiting in there, but my man is dead.

The second attempt (I had to start from the beginning) had me dead after finding this game's version of the training centre. Squall and Quistis were mercilessly murdered by what looked like a bite bug. I'm beginning to think this game is unplayable. At least Selphie is here though!

She is very cute.

I like a lot of little design elements, like Quistis's portrait, and some of the monster designs, which are quite faithfully translated to GBC style pixel art, and clearly a lot of work has gone into constructing some of these environments - but I do wish I could progress beyond a single battle.

I suppose such a massive deterrent adds to the mystery of a project like this. I've read that it takes you up to Esthar, which means there surely must be a lot crammed into this game, but how can I see it? For now, the enemies elude me, and I am still.

The Beauty of Wren Library

This week I visited Wren Library, the historic library of Trinity College in Cambridge, and it's a fascinating little space. A while ago I read R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, and she describes one of the segments of hell that loose souls float through as similar, with booths that they park themselves in to write essays that may, eventually, allow them to progress to hell's next zone. Kuang luxuriates in Cambridge in a very fun way - the novel is set at Cambridge University, and hell mirrors it. The whole world and underworld are Cambridge. So true.

The space does have a wonderful, almost arcane beauty - the tall wooden shelves, the presence of many busts, etc - but what I really love are the desks.

You can really imagine the joy of being a researcher, sitting down at one of these desks, draping your cardigan across the chair, and touching some really old books. It must be immensely distracting to have visitors mulling about and looking at you in your beautiful booth, at your organised and delicious desk, but it must be satisfying to be there - to be the person not just there to look at the spectacle.

There is also the lovely view of the river just outside, with its cascading willows and steady stream of punting boats. The college itself was closed to visitors when I visited, which lead to some confusion, but the Wren Library was open (for only two hours in the middle of the day), and so it felt almost sneaky to be there. They don't want you to be there. You could touch a Shakespeare manuscript, potentially. And that wouldn't be right.

It's an odd sort of space that I felt I should leave quickly. It's too special, and people are doing work there, and one researcher in particular was dressed in the perfect houndstooth blazer outfit befitting a Cambridge student.

It's truly beautiful. I'd like to be the sort of person who is permitted to touch the medieval manuscripts. 
Let me at 'em.

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.