No Post Tonight.

Sorry, I got in late, and honestly I'm not in the mood. "Crazy moon language you people call love, die alone and unloved, yadda yadda" and all that. I'll try to make tomorrow a twofer, though.

My Inspirations: Come On, Like You Have to Ask

There really only can be one subject for this week. The only surprise was that I forgot to include him among the original list I planned on using for this blog. Despite that oversight, how can I not write about Gary Gygax this week? I mean, I think I have to. You're not legally allowed to remain on the Internet without talking about it.

Sorry, I don't want to be too glib here. It's harder to write about this sort of thing when you're a few days past the original shock, but that doesn't mean Gary doesn't deserve it. My story on how Gary changed my life is a bit different than most, however.

Part of the problem is that I'm 28. Many of the stories I read in the past week were made by people slightly older, and who grew up in a different time. They predated not only the Internet and the general fad of geekiness, but also video games and other semi-popular geeky interests. For them, Dungeons and Dragons were often it. It becomes the tale of a shy, awkward outsider who made their first close friends, and sometimes even found love, through the game.

My story was a bit different, because by the time I was in grade school, let alone junior high, high school, and college, low-level geekery had already flooded the world. The Internet wasn't a mainstream thing until high school or so, but until then, everyone and their brother had a Nintendo. School lunch rooms rang with battles between Nintendo and Sega supporters. Our entire generation grew up to be gamers, of one degree or another.

And so I already found a place and a community of sorts that way. I read gaming magazines, memorized the names of famous designers, and dedicated much of my mental capacities to gaming. And I had friends in the same way. My closest friends as I grew up were all gamers in one way or another.

But they weren't role-playing gamers. Bonding for us meant playing Earthworm Jim or Contra 3. I nonetheless tried to influence them otherwise. I asked, pleaded, and/or browbeat them into at least occasionally trying other types of games. And it wasn't always Dungeons and Dragons, either. In fact, it was often Toon, a much simpler RPG designed to do little but make the players laugh, or even an even simpler, almost rules-less game of my own making. I will be dealing further with both of these games in later blogs, but I'll be focusing on D&D now.

But that begs the question of how D&D, and thus Gary, became one of my inspirations. I never played regularly until college, after all. Sure, I enjoyed the trappings of the game. I liked going to Gen Con annually, and getting the books, and making campaign settings. But finding nobody who really wanted to play was disappointing, and watching games I planned in the very long term crash and burn before they could even start was often painful.

But it did inspire me, just not in the "here's a social group for geeks like us" way. It inspired me to create. I didn't exactly need the help; video games did this well before I even realized Dungeons and Dragons existed as something beyond the Pool of Radiance video game. But the differences were notable, because making something in an RPG gave you two things that making video game design documents didn't. They offered validity, and they offered public evaluation and gratification.

The former is a bit ironic, since Mr. Gygax himself was once famous for his hard-line stance against house rules. But it's still applicable. When I want to make a video game, my ideas never can get past stage 2, at least in a foreseeable future. I conceive of them and then, if I really get lucky and passionate about it, I write down the details. That's really about it. Very simple ideas could theoretically be made using cheap and novice-friendly build engines, but the big ideas, the ones that really inspire me, are forever elusive without a massive budget and an interested development team. An RPG idea, though, ends at the written level. If I write a module, I have a module. It may not be as polished as a professional one and the art is nonexistent, but the basic element is identical.

The second aspect is harder to appreciate, but just as important. Since my video game ideas never get past the design level, they can't ever be evaluated. I can't determine if they're good or bad. When I'm DMing, though, the idea can be evaluated by an interested and appreciate group immediately. Is the game fun? I won!

This does feel less like a tribute to Gary Gygax and more like a general "why I like tabletop RPGs," I have to admit. But I know precisely how any of these things came into being. Gary Gygax (and Dave Arneson; let's not forget him,) were largely responsible for this codification of fantasy, of adventure, of the arts that have inspired so many of us geeks. Without that system, making adventures, campaign settings, and monsters for that system would be impossible. And the influence of D&D is felt throughout the world well beyond D&D. The same ideas were used to influence video games, and both influenced modern fantasy in television, movies, and other mediums. And who do we think design these modern fantasies? People who, more than likely, were themselves players of D&D as kids. No, Gary Gygax didn't personally create Megaman, or Final Fantasy, or Buffy. But the greatest artists are the ones who uplift other artists, to support kings and philosophers, and to elevate culture throughout the world. Gary Gygax did just that, and I can only hope to do the same some day.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Gygax. I hope you're somewhere out there still, groaning with irritation at all the "he failed his saving throw" jokes.

My Ideas: The Valley of...Something.

On tonight's horrendously late blog, we discuss the third of the video game ideas fit for this column. This is the third and last game of the Genres category I'll be sharing with you; remarkably, the fourth one managed to generate 180 or so pages of material before I started losing interest. To be fair, I got excited over that one in the summer, so I had time to kill.

This game, however, was more traditionally an idle concept, with one exception. The inspiration was another Playstation classic called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I'll provide a bit of background. The Castlevania games are a series action/adventures stretching back to the original Nintendo. Most were strictly arcade affairs where the main character, a warrior with a magical whip and/or morning star, had to travel the countryside and a haunted castle to fight Dracula. This sequel to earlier Castlevania games had a similar premise, but the normal warrior was replaced with Alucard, Dracula's far more versatile and noble half-vampire son. And instead of a normal series of levels, the game featured a single, often open-ended maze of a castle that could be explored in many different ways. It took the original concept and turned it into something bigger, more expansive, and extremely entertaining. It also turned it into Metroid specifically, but that's fine. If you have to borrow, borrow from the best.

I was enchanted; I had to improve upon it! Sadly, the first idea I had to do so was "make it 3D." I feel sort of dirty typing that, as if any indy cred I had just flew out of my soul. But I couldn't help it! The game painted the castle as such a big, beautiful, surreal, horrific world that I wanted to see what I was missing. And yes, something can be both beautiful and horrific. Especially in my mind. But there were so many mysteries in the background of the game; stairwells to nowhere, ruined towers, a giant floating eyeball, etc. It made the game feel a tiny bit incomplete.

So, in my game, the game's setting, a cursed manor (instead of a castle! See how clever I was?) was in full 3D. It wasn't the only change. I realized I couldn't utilize Earth's mythology, since Castlevania already used so much of it. Classical horror tropes, Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian demons, classic undead, it had them all. I had to get creative, which is only fair since I started this project by shamelessly ripping off someone else.

I worked on a mythology for the game and then created a simple child's faerie tale to work the story around. The story revolved around the Valley of...Something. I had the name written down in the faerie tale, but that was only written on paper, not stored digitally. I have no idea if I still have that paper, and in the ensuing years, I forgot the name of the Valley. It was Korroth or something; on my scale of made up names, it got a 3 or so out of 10. So it's just the Valley for me and has been for years.

This Valley was created by the gods, or specifically by a god. When I made the game's mythology, I wanted to create a pantheon of gods, but I did something I never saw in fantasy before; I made them all women.

I saw all-male pantheons before, you see. Tolkein's counted, I think, and some of David Eddings' works had one as well. Most are nicely mixed between genders, but this was different. Once I agreed on the idea, I had the gods spring into being and handle things the usual way; each one added their godly focus into the collective universe, altering the lives of mortals as they did. This continued until one goddess, Bas, didn't get the chance. The next gods came too quickly into being, so she never had the chance. This, understandably, pissed her off.

And so, when the last goddess appeared, the twelve goddesses, called the Sisters, collectively decided to start a new planet fresh; one untouched by the chaos that came from emerging goddesses imposing their own views onto a pre-established civilization. And it was good, up until when Bas got involved. This time, she would give the world a gift. She would give it war and strife.

Since that was exactly what the other Sisters wanted done away with this time, they opposed her. But fighting a war god is always tricky, and all of them combined had to defeat her. They couldn't kill her, but they defeated the divine element within her, leaving her massive body to fall onto the planet she corrupted. She hit a mountain range with such force that it created a giant valley. She was buried, to sleep forever ideally.

Instead, her body began to emit demons; the products of her war nature. And eventually, a tyrannical wizard discovered the Valley. Megalomaniacal, this wizard, named Prince Khaspar or simply the Nightmare Prince, wanted to become a god himself. He believed he could subvert the sisters by proving himself the master of all their elements. He thought he proved it for all but Bas, but to prove himself her superior, he would have to summon and control the demonic hordes she created, and possibly tap into her unconscious form's power directly.

It's here where things get complicated. The other goddesses sent avatar to try and stop him, but he defeated and imprisoned or killed most of them. But his own experiment went awry, and the demons were summoned but not controlled. They trapped his immortal body in stone and flooded the valley and the manor itself. This continued until two of the imprisoned avatars escaped. The players controlled one or both of them, as they explored the manor and below it. Eventually, they found Bas' dormant body and defeated it just as it began to awaken.

I'm not that embarrassed about this project. Some parts were bad, sure. The main playable leads were incredibly weak. They had no personalities, and in fact I couldn't even tell you their names without looking them up. But the setting, that's another story. It really was a tragic, deep place, and one well divorced from vampires and their hunters. There were horrific elements, like the fate of many of the avatars, and sad moments, like the levels the surviving servants of Khaspar were willing to go to survive the demon-infested manor. There were even rudimentary explorations of gender relations, and that was well before I became a Buffy fan.

In fact, Khaspar and the Sisters made their appearances in many places beyond this story. They were central to my first serious Dungeon and Dragon game's setting and present in the second, and they often factored into the meta-plot of my other ideas. In many ways, the lesson of this game is the opposite of that of the Dark Banner. There, the lesson was to remember the characters and concepts even if the game itself never panned out. In this case, it was the game's outer casing, its shell if you will, that was valuable, and it merely needs a game and characters to fill it. I can tell you that of the four original genre games, this is the one that still has the best hopes of becoming something real some day. Let's see the 180 pages of spaceship components and mechanics say that!

Rantings: Ode to Plot Judo

I remain burned out on writing, and events of yesterday have left me a bit shaken anyway. No, I'm not talking about the primary; at least not much. I mean that yesterday, we lost an icon. This isn't really the time to discuss it, but I can tell you I already have my next Inspirations topic plan. For now, it will have to be a Ranting, which I'll dedicate to another deceased idol of mine who earned an inspiration blog some day as well. That idol is Douglas Adams, the work in question worth idolizing is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the design concept of his that I would like to champion is Plot Judo.

Adams described this in the script of the radio play that launched the multimedia series. He described a problem he had with his script, which was like all Adams products done notoriously close to or well past deadline. In this case, he wrote himself into one hell of a cliffhanger. He had his characters thrown out of an airlock by hostile aliens, where they faced certain death. There was little he could do. He could have them get rescued, but the odds of a passing ship finding them in space before they died was astronomically small.

He was stumped, until he saw a television show about the martial art known as Judo, which let its practitioners use the strength and momentum of their opponents against them. This skill with counters inspired Adams. Instead of fighting the sheer improbability of the characters in the story, he used this potential plot hole against it and created one of his greatest ideas: Improbability Drive, a method of spacecraft propulsion that ran entirely on unlikely odds. It was amusing, let the heroes get rescued (this time,) and set up constant scenes where the inherent chaos the ship's engines released affected the people around them. It even saved the ship from a missile attack later in the plot, by conveniently and very improbably turning the missiles into a whale and bowl of petunias.

I love using this method, especially if you have the time to really ponder the problem. Or if you have so little time that it's your last hope. Either way, it's good. Because the work I revealed to you people are so ancient, I can't use many examples, since I didn't really practice Plot Judo when I made them. Really, they were so simplistic I rarely had to, though you could argue that solving the problem of having too few characters by tossing in a pile of homeless characters might count.

Instead, I'll use some limited examples from more complex "investment" works. One of these was a long-needed revision of an action-rpg made in college. It's very close to my soul; I first made the thing when I was 12. No, I don't know why these two time periods specifically pop up so often. I guess I was in a creative slump when I was 11 and 14. Anyway, despite it being close to my soul and already on its third major revision by the time I was in college, it was also incredible tripe. It was clichéd up in every possible way. This wasn't entirely my fault. Months after I started working on it, Final Fantasy Seven came out, and that game altered everyone's perspectives on what a role playing game could be. Hell, it even used one of the same climatic plot-based dooms that I had planned for my game, which annoyed me at the time.

When I wanted to revise the game to match up to my current standards, this became a problem I had to work on. I couldn't remove the clichés completely; they fit the plot and setting too much. So I made them my weapon; I made the game into a bit of a deconstruction of the fantasy genre my making the world one where the clichés often spring to life. Yes, it's a bit like Discworld, but different enough to give it its own voice. More importantly, it offers a sort of counter-argument to the idealism of fantasy. This is especially true by making the fantasy elements not an inherent part of that world's scientific law, like it is in Discworld, but rather something planned by imperfect and potentially sinister forces.

Another example of how this works is in character development. Often, a plot develops in a way that forces a character to do something stupid or requires incredible coincidences, as it did for Adams. Instead of trying to work around it, Plot Judo suggests that the weakness of character be studied. No character can ever be completely explained, detailed, or rendered. There are also facets to explore, psychological issues left untapped, and secrets to reveal. These moments are perfect to expand the depth of a character. I can't tell you how often that's worked for Dot, just to use one example. Coincidences can become conspiracy, moments of weakness can show hidden phobias and traumas, and annoying character traits reveal facades the character keeps up or just leave a new opening for development.

Hell, technically, every example of Plot Judo is not just a way to explore your writing's weakness, it's a way to explore your own. If you were really a perfect writer, you never would even get yourself into these sorts of messes. By engaging in this sort of thinking, you can use it to explore your own weaknesses, discover new things about yourself, and develop your own personality at the same time you do it to your characters.

My Life: And My Writer's Group

I'm a little burned out with writing lately, and time is short, so I'll focus on a simpler topic than normal. Today, we'll be talking about one of the few groups I belong to that isn't directly geeky at an incredible level. It's just a little bit geeky.

You see, about a year-year and a half ago, while looking for inspiration and possibly a new place to meet friends (and girls,) I learned that a local book store had a writer's group every two weeks on Thursday. At this point, my writing was a bit more random. I wrote game design documents, and I did National Novel Writing Month almost every year (that's another blog topic right there,) but that was about it. And it was all designed to be processed only through me, at least so far. That's fine for what it is, but it wasn't helping me, either professionally or to be a better writer. I needed actual advice, evaluations, tests, or at least projects different from the stuff I worked on for most of my life.

The writer's group provides that. Through the able hand of the group's current leader, Paul, we go over goals, plan our lives, brainstorm for each other's work, and, in my favorite part, do writing challenges. These are little, improvised tests that last 3-5 minutes at the most and that had topics we couldn't know about until the last minute. This is exactly what I need as a writer. No simple write up of video game idea #25's spell list; this could be fiction, dialogue, description, or anything, and I had to make it up on the fly.

I find that my style, whenever possible, drifts towards irreverence. I go for the humor, usually of a satirical or surreal nature, if I can. I don't mind this especially, as everyone has their own writing style. But I have to admit that I worry it's a bit of a crutch, which is a common trait among humorists anyway. What if I rely too much on humor, to the point where it's difficult for me to write anything serious? But learning to write the "real" way is not an easy process, nor is it one you can do quickly, at least not when already stuck with unemployment. As long as I remain enthusiastic, I can improve. And I already got some compliments on the subject, both about the writing and (even more importantly,) the presentation. You can't just pass what you just wrote to other people, since that would take too long and most writers tend to have illegible handwriting anyway, ironically. You have to speak out loud, which is an unnerving concept at best for the socially awkward like myself.

I also enjoy interacting with different writers. Our group consists or consisted of a former nuclear scientist, a fiction writer, a verbal storyteller, a former financial writer turned magazine contributor, a poet, and much more. Each has their own story and their own style, making comparisons interesting and every writing challenge different.

It's not like everything's perfect, of course. Sometimes the writing challenges fall by the wayside as we focus too much on goals or discussions of specific writing elements, which don't tend to get us as far. And the group's still looking for a more specific level of organization. I get annoyed when our normal spot at the bookstore gets abandoned, forcing us to crowd in the coffee shop's little tables. Plus, well, the whole "meet girls" plan? This hasn't really helped. It's been a long time since there was a woman even remotely near my age there. My best bet has been to admire the barista from afar. But that discussion's getting into creepy territory, so it's time to move on.

My point, though, is that I generally do enjoy the writer's group. It gives me many things I feel I need; good friends not meeting by geeky necessity, a chance to grow as a person, and actual social demands, damn it. Not that I need more writing-themed demands after this month, but you know what I mean. All that plus the excuse to buy expensive coffee shop cookies every two weeks; that's more than worth taping Lost and The Office/30 Rock every other week.

Reviews: Thanks You, Makers of Most Addictive Video Game Ever

Wow, this'll be a late one! But it was a weird day. Moving on.

Today's review is for the recently released and very recently completed game, Persona 3. Now, I would like to start by saying that normally, I'm not the type of person who gets addicted to one activity above all else. I multi-task, schedule, and plan my free time way, divvying it up into tinier portions until I generally have 20 things to do every day anyway. As a result, barring some weekends, I have almost exactly an hour to an hour and a half every day to play video games. The rest of the time is for work, sleep, meals, transit times, television, reading, daily internet website checks, and this blog, among other things. My self-control remains good, and most games that are notorious for their game sink natures either fail to attract my interest in the first place, like World of Warcraft, or don't last in the long term, like City of Heroes/Villains.

Persona 3, however, is an exception.

Oh, I never had the five hour marathon sessions the cliché demands. But if I had free time, or even time that wasn't remotely free but where nothing essential had to be done, this game would be what I would do. I got the game for Christmas. On February 29th, I finished it. It took me about 102 hours. You can do the math; in the meantime, I'll think about it, realize I played and defeated other whole games in this period as well, and quietly weep.

The game itself is a strange one. It's a role-playing game from Japan for the Playstation 2, as many games are. But. like its predecessors and most of the other games from the series Persona spun off from, it abandons the usual fantasy setting for a more modern one, albeit a twisted version of modern life. The game takes place on a small island in Japan in the years 2009-10, making it more or less modern. The players are high school students who discovered an invasion of sorts from another plane of reality. Every night at midnight, the world mostly shuts down, and most people enter a sort of suspended animation in coffin-shaped crystals. Meanwhile, the world shifts into a sort of alternate reality.

This period, called the Dark Hour, is a dangerous one for those not safely suspended, as it is filled with evil monsters called Shadows. the players are awake during the Dark Hour, but they're better protected than most, as they can create protectors out of their own minds called Personas. These Personas give them extra strength, protection, and a source of the usual RPG magical powers, letting them take the fight to the Shadows. This usually comes from attacking a mysterious tower they call Tartarus, which in actuality is their high school after transforming every Dark Hour.

The first really strange thing about this game is how they access their Personas. The user must undergo severe mental trauma, which can be done using fairly morbid methods. In this case, they use devices called Evokers, which resemble guns, and point them at their own heads, simulating suicide. This game has a "Mature" rating for a reason. I mean, they're not really shooting themselves in the heads every time they use their powers, it just looks like it. That still doesn't help.

The second strange thing is the game's time limit. In addition to Tartarus, the Dark Hour also releases a major Shadow boss every month or so in game time, giving the party limited time to explore Tartarus and gain experience and treasures. This is made more difficult by the third strange thing. The main character, which is nameless until you the player give him one, doesn't have one Persona like the other main characters. He can instead create new ones and alternate between them, giving him much greater versatility. But to get the best ones, and give them often useful bonus levels, he must make connections with living people in and around his school that correspond to types of Persona. So when not exploring the monster-filled tower of the damned, he has to spend time attending classes, taking tests, making friends, dealing with girlfriends, and other real-life stuff.

In short, the game's addiction comes from combining two very addictive game genres into one. Tartarus is a randomly-generated dungeon, so it's new every time you explore it, making the grinding experience comparatively fresh and Diablo-esque. Thank Lonny the weapons aren't as random or varied, or you'd never want to leave. Meanwhile, the social half of the game resembles a normal dating sim, which I never really explored before but now can definitely see the appeal of. Often, I was annoyed at having to explore Tartarus and do normal RPG stuff out of a desire to focus on the relationship with the latest girlfriend!

The appeal of the game is threefold. There's the usual enjoyment of tactical combat, gaining levels, working to optimize power, and the other benefits of a good RPG. There's the surreal setting, combining semi-normal childhood experiences, the often alien Japanese culture when compared my own childhood, and the whole alternate reality full of evil beings. The last source deserves more exploration, though. Just what about the dating/social elements appealed so much to me?

I think the real answer, at least in my case, is a little depressing. Video games are a lot about fantasy fulfillment. And while my high school experience was not that bad, it certainly wasn't much fun, either. A game like this offers a chance to re-explore high school, often in a way I didn't or couldn't in real life. And it's not just the experience, it's the illusion of control. The Sims was another game that affected me the same way. Everything was quantifiable, understandable, and had a clear path of correction. Not socially confident enough? Just perform a courage-building activity like karaoke enough times, and your courage boosts automatically! See a girl you like? Talk to her x times, convince her to go out, say the answers that don't make you look like a total jackass, and love was guaranteed! Being socially awkward at best, concepts like the elusive "chemistry" drive me crazy. If two reasonably attractive people had similar interests and philosophies, then it would only make sense for attraction and love to develop given time, at least as my thought processes think. Frankly, the idea that real life was so simple and love so successful is as much a hoped fantasy as that of the world-saving hero to me.

Not that the game doesn't have downsides, even if most were intentional from the concept. For all the control issues I just commended, the game is often eager to show how little choice you really have. Events in game come regularly and without warning, ruining any plans you made on how to advance your character. One day, you have an entire week planned, and the next, you learn that you're being forced into summer school for days on end. Or a typhoon hits. Or you get sick. Or Dark-Hour themed plans intrude. Similarly, the relationships you have are often without any long-term realism or death. For example, your friends would often call to try and make plans with you on Sundays. This is fine, except you have no way to call them. If you don't see them at school, you can't even talk to them in most cases. And the game rewards you for how many maximized relationships you achieved. So when a relationship reaches this maximum, there's nowhere else to go. Your friends will rarely even want to hang out again, and the girlfriend you just formed an everlasting bond of love with will not only never date you again, she won't care in the slightest that you're dating other women in an attempt to maximize THEIR bonds.

The only other complaint is that the randomized Tartarus dungeon and some of the daily aspects of high school life both get tedious midway through the game. Nonetheless, this game would earn a solid A just for innovation and appeal. In fact, this was the game that motivated me to try to make another game of the Genre section. The trick is both coming up with something new and up to my modern standards while also original enough to not be Persona 3.5, but I'm confident I have something. If a game manages to compare to Final Fantasy Tactics and Symphony of the Night, there's little other praise I need to give it.

My Inspirations: The Crappy, Awful Game That I Loved

This entry is more or less part two of the story of my entry into the video game world. Part one featured my visits to Showbiz Pizza and a little game called Super Mario Brothers, which I loved but almost never played. This one features the first time I actually played one of the games at Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese/whatever and played it regularly.

The game was called Pack Rat. If you don't remember it, and you won't, it's a bit of simple, late 80s maze hunting in the general style of Pac-Man. There were differences, of course. The game used semi-realistic, two dimensional side-view maps instead of Pac-Man's more abstract maze, and as such the character had to climb up ladders, fell of the sides of platforms, etc. But the goal, though more complex than Pac-Man, was about the same. Traverse the map, find a bunch of shiny objects, and bring them back to your nest. If you got all the items a level required, you move on to the next.

It was not an easy game, and in fact I later decided that not only did the game suck, I pretty much sucked at it. The problem was how easy it was to die. Your character, who was as you may have expected an anthropomorphic pack rat, died after one hit by collision with any of the dozen or so types of enemies that may populate any level. Some were simple enemies, like less humanoid dogs and cats, who stuck to one level of the maze. Others, like other rats, could climb ladders freely and tended to move in simple patterns. There were even birds and other flying creatures. The real problem with all these enemies is that the maze was several screens high, so often it was a matter of guesswork if an enemy was right above or right below the screen and about to kill you.

Your own offenses were limited. You could fire other minor collectibles as obstacles. But if you didn't have any left, you could only fire the important collectibles, if I remember right. Either way, ammunition was limited and only fired straight to the sides, which like I said was rarely the problem. And the map was often very good at dumping you into dangerous places. The ledges were often limited and led to slides that dropped you even farther. So while falling off a ledge was sometimes a viable way to escape a deadly threat, it also often dropped you right into another certain death.

Add that in with the limited three lives and (if I remember right,) the fact the game dropped you back to level 1 as soon as you ran out of them, and you can understand how child me never got past level 4. This might be one of the reasons this game has haunted me; it represents one of my earliest and most embarrassing failures. Now that I thought about it, I would love to play the game again, just to see how my own skills have improved, and how the game even ends.

But that doesn't explain why it caught my attention in the first place. I don't know if it was anything special, really; it was just the game for me To Play, and it was substantially less complex than Super Mario Brothers. I think it was the variety of levels and enemies that appealed to me. For all its simplicity, I still remember it looking better than Mario, and even at this primitive stage, the thrill of seeing something new visually was appealing. The levels had a relatively decent range as well, including things like buildings, underground tunnels, and giant trees. Who knows what the theoretical final level would have offered? Similarly, the game's attract mode included a display of all the enemies, including ones the first four or so levels never featured. I wanted to see what they could do, even if they almost certainly would have been identical, game play-wise, to the ones I saw earlier.

It's hard to describe what this game specifically inspired me to do. Well, it did inspire me to play more video games, so thanks for that at least, game. I think it also helped grow some of the types of funs I briefly reviewed earlier. The thrill of exploring a game and seeing the unknown was already in me thanks to Mario, but this was the first game where it became a drive, possibly even my primary priority. But ultimately, it inspired me by being the game I had the bravery to play, even when failure was so inevitable. Losing still isn't especially fun for me, but realizing its role in game design is needed to even play games so often, let alone make them.