The Longing (Studio Seufz, 2020) - 5/? (Literary Interlude #1)

EDIT: After some thought, it struck me that the 'Let's Play' format really wasn't something that I was finding to be terribly interesting to follow through with, and what little readership I have wasn't particularly interested, either.  I'm leaving this post up because it's at least on literary topics, but I won't be keeping that format any longer.  When I'm done with The Longing, I'll do a wrap-up post instead.

Infinifactory (Zachtronics, 2015)

So, I started on Infinifactory last night.  It’s an entry in a genre of puzzle games that I particularly enjoy, which...  I’m going to call this something akin to programming, actually.  Basically, what any game in this genre does is give you a set of tools, an input of some kind, and task you with using your tools to construct a way to take the inputs and make the outputs it wants.

Usually, though, these games task you with placing things in a 2-dimensional array.  Moving things around is generally a factor of preventing objects from crashing into each other, making sure the right parts go the right places, and so on.  As far as I can tell in Infinifactory, the part where things can’t crash into each other doesn’t appear to be an issue.  Rather, the game actively encourages it, even using one of the (rather brilliantly designed) tutorial graphics to show that it’s something you’re allowed to do.

One of the things that I’ve consistently loved about the titles released by this developer, Zachtronics, is that the in-game scoring is done in a way that promotes creativity in solutions. If your solution completes the task asked of it, you’ll be scored based on three metrics.  There will be a speed score, which looks at how many turns have to go by, a score that looks at how many objects you placed, and a score that looks at how much space is taken up by your solution.  Typically, a solution that excels in one of these might not do so well in the other two, so there’s plenty of reason to revisit puzzles, and a player can decide after finding a working solution initially that they want to find a better solution in one particular way.  In addition, there are no leaderboards; rather, you’re shown a histogram that tells you where most players’ solutions fall, and where the outliers are, so you can always tell if your score is above or below the average, and by how much.

As an aside, I love that this game lets you generate animated images of your contraptions hard at work.  The previous game from the same developer, Spacechem, allowed for videos of solutions to be uploaded to YouTube, but they were typically somewhat hard to make heads or tails of if you didn’t view them full-screen, and certainly if you didn’t know what you were looking at.  His most recent title, TIS-100, is... quite literally playing with assembly programming, and videos are thus rather dry to look at.  This one, though...  It’s pretty easy to tell what you’re looking at.  Boxes!  On conveyor belts!  Being moved around!  It’s great!

OK, yes, boxes on conveyor belts are kind of dry, too.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the game.  

On Nostalgia, Memories, and Things Missed In Childhood

I've been a geek for a long time.  A very, very long time.  I remember watching Star Trek with my parents when I... well, I couldn't have been any older than three years old, really.  There are images from the first season of Next Generation that have stuck in my head for years, images from the first few episodes in 1987...  Enterprise crew members investigating a ship that is completely frozen inside (and no, I didn't remember all the nudity there... why was that on Star Trek?), a hand-to-hand battle involving weapons that seem inspired by hedgehogs...  And a particular sequence that gave me nightmares (warning, very violent/gruesome/why was this kind of stuff on Star Trek anyways) as a four-year-old...

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  It can make us look back at things from our childhoods, and through the haze of memory, all those things we knew when we were younger seem like they were the most awesome things ever.  Sometimes, they actually were - Looney Tunes were always great, and anything with Muppets from my youth seems to hold up spectacularly.  Sometimes, not so much...  I may be poking a bear with a stick by saying this if anyone of my vintage notices it, but Thundercats was kind of cheesy.  And let's face it, Transformers was always a half-hour-long toy advertisement.

Of course, there were other things I was exposed to when I was young.  I've played video games for my whole life, starting on my parents' old Kaypro 286 system (Nostalgia failure: CASTLE.EXE is not as fun as I remembered.  At all.  Commander Keen is still great, though... largely because of nostalgia, I suspect) and the Ms. Pac-Man machine at the local burger place.  The family got a Nintendo when I was in Kindergarten, and we managed to have a generally quality game collection, most of which I still have and enjoy playing, though I know not all of those games are as good as I think they are (oh, hi, nostalgia, there you are again).

I developed a healthy appreciation for board games at a young age, as well; sure, the early ones were the standards of Monopoly and Life and Scrabble and so on, most of them not games I particularly enjoy anymore, but that's less a nostalgia-failure and more a factor of having been exposed to other games, more complex rules, more strategy-driven play rather than being subject to the whims of dice, and subsequently becoming more able to tell where the problems in a game's design lie.

So, all that said... what of cases where one finds some deep-seated nostalgia that hid under the surface, so forgotten and obscured that it's a total surprise?

That video gamer part?  That's never gone away.  Moved on to new systems, new consoles, new games... Some tastes have changed, some have stayed the same.  I've become a big fan of the independent games that are coming out now, outside of the major studios.  And one way to get ahold of those that I've become a particular fan of is Steam, an online marketplace that lets you buy games, download them, and have access to them on any system you can install their program on.  There's an easy feed in their store to see what the latest games that have been added to the store are, too... which brings us to this listing that turned up a couple of days ago.

This may not be anything particularly interesting to a lot of people.  But it did get my attention, because it's a name I've heard before.  That said, the only context I've ever heard it in was in reference to a cartoon that was run on Nickelodeon in the 1980s, and that I don't honestly remember watching.  If I did, I couldn't have been any older than six years old; they took it off the air right around the time I was reaching the end of Kindergarten, in 1990.  Of course, I was watching a lot of Nick at the time...

In any case, the sheer time difference got my attention, what with it being 2013 now.  Games based on shows that have been off the air for almost 25 years?

So, I did what seemed the best thing to do to find out what was going on... I clicked on it so I could look at the promo video advertisement thing.  Which didn't seem to have any sound that wasn't... the theme song from the new season of the cartoon, 30 years after it originally came out (Oh look, there's why there's a game now).  And which not only tweaked some little twinge of familiarity in me, but made me wonder just why it was doing so.  After all, I didn't even know there was a new season, and I don't remember watching the original...

Time to go digging around a little more.  Say... by looking on YouTube to find something about the original cartoon?  Maybe the opening theme... oh.  Same song.  Different recording, but... same song.  And not only that, but a couple of stray images that stuck in my head for all these years turned out to be in there, too...  Which means I must have watched it at some point in my early childhood.  But I certainly don't remember anything more than these two images (specifically, a camera zooming down a volcanic tunnel with stone columns in it, and a golden bird plane thing that I honestly should've looked into sooner because those can't be all that common), and the passing familiarity with the song... which then proceeded to get lodged in my head for the following 48 hours.

Now, I'm not the sort to go halfway in poking at things like this, so I kept looking at material about this show, and as I did, I realized that while it might not have been something I'd have enjoyed or been able to follow when it was on the air (what with being short on action scenes and 39 episodes long on story, rather than every episode being its own action-packed story like other cartoons I watched at the time), it could easily have been something I'd have gotten into as an older child... or even later; the series and story are originally French, but the animation was done in Japan (as a co-production with one of the big TV channels there), so it has a lot in common with the Japanese animation that I became somewhat obsessed by during my high school years.

So here I am, getting ready to find myself a way to watch the show as an adult, to see what kid-me missed by being just a little too young.  Part of me hopes it'll help get the song out of my head... and part of me hopes that I'm finding a real treasure, rather than somebody else's childhood bits of nostalgia that just don't hold up across the years.