My Top Ten PC Games of 2008

Transcription

Dolla Dolla Bills, Y'all
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Then now’s the time to pledge your support and not get a free tote bag or
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man the phone banks I also don’t have, so don’t expect any of that
business, either.
PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70%
What I do have is the yearly renewal on my hosting plan coming up, with
nothing budgeted to pay for it. I recently started a new job, which
required a small move, which required fighting a ridiculous custody battle
that I can’t even describe, which depleted any savings we had, etc…
Things are fine now, financially and in every other way. We’re back on
our feet and things are turning around; I can pay our bills and our lawyer
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table and a nice new roof over our heads. I could probably even pay to
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To renew my server hosting at its current level (which is pretty
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I don’t run ads here, because I think they’re annoying. I get no revenue
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Texas, I hosted gigabytes of data for the community to access – and none
of it came free. Or even cheap. But I could help, so I did help. Or tried to,
anyway.
I’ve written a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. Some of what
I’ve written (such as my posts on Depression ) have had a significant
impact on the lives of a surprising number of people, which is why I
wrote them. I’ve helped people, and they’ve helped me. I’ve tried to
entertain you guys with silly posts, goofy jokes, and even a few short
stories ( the most successful of which ended with a pathetic
SWATTING attempt by just a really super cool dude, so that was fun).
What I’m getting at here is this: I’ve been writing and paying to host this
site for a little over 8 years now, and I’ve always done it for free. And I
want to keep doing it for free, but I just don’t feel like paying to do it for
free anymore.
Which is where you come in.
I need to raise $250 by the 15th, or Coquetting Tarradiddles will cease to
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So, I ask you again:
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● Have you ever enjoyed reading anything here?
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If the answer to any of those questions is yes – and if you want this site to
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NOTE: THIS IS NOT CHARITY.
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not, then don’t. Simple, really.
I might come back later and add some kind of progress bar or something,
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PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70%
Once (if) we hit it, I’ll update this page and tell people to stop sending me
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I’ll do that for free; I just don’t want to pay for the privilege. Besides, I
don’t have nearly enough hipster facial hair for patrons.
I’ve paid the tab here for 8 years now. If you want me to keep going, it’s
your turn.
I’ll probably come up with some kind of thank you to send to anyone who
contributes, although I have no idea what that will be yet. I might put up a
poll, and you can just tell me what you want. A new short story? An
insightful commentary on the dichotomy of good and evil? A ten page
report of the efficacy of fart jokes? The possibilities are endless.
The point is, you’ll get something for giving anything. I just don’t know
what that is yet.
All the cool kids are doing it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?
The Click-Clack Man
I was going to post
this all in one go, but people seemed to really like the serialization I did
throughout this past October with my Halloween horror story , so I
thought it’d be fun to do it again.
When I started writing this, I had something very different in mind than
where the story actually went, which is something new and scary for me
since I like to know exactly what it is I’m writing as I write it. But this
one took on a life of its own, and I just went where it led me. I’ll be
posting new entries irregularly, so check back often.
I hope you enjoy it.
The Click-Clack Man
“I like your shoes.”
“Thank you,” replied The Click-Clack Man. He crossed one of his long,
thin legs over his lap and pointed to the shiny black dress shoe on his
right foot. “Do you have any like these?”
The boy paused for a moment, nibbling his bottom lip as he thought.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes wide with recognition. “For Sunday mornings
when we go to church sometimes.”
The Click-Clack man tilted his head to the side, his thin lips parting into a
wide grin. “Only sometimes?” he asked the boy.
“Yeah. For, like, Christmas and Easter and stuff. We don’t go much other
times.”
“Pity,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Church is good for you.”
“Do you go to church a lot?”
“Oh, yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Every Sunday. You can come
with me,” he said. His lips stretched thinner as his grin grew wider. He
leaned closer to the boy and whispered, “if you want.”
The boy pushed back a little in his bed until his back touched the wall of
his bedroom. It was covered in comic books his dad had made into
wallpaper the year before, and his shoulder smooshed into Superman’s
face.
“I don’t think my mom would let me,” he said, trailing the sentence off as
he spoke. He was nibbling his bottom lip again. “Do you know my
mom?” he asked.
The Click-Clack Man nodded. “I know everyone,” he said.
The boy relaxed a little. “Then I can ask her, if you want.”
“That’s okay,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “She wouldn’t like that.”
“Why not?”
The Click-Clack Man uncrossed his legs and stood up, the fabric of his
thin black suit letting out a gentle whoosh of air as he rose. He took a few
steps away from the boy’s bed, nodded, then turned toward the door. As
his hand reached out to open it, he turned his wide grin back to the boy
and said, “She doesn’t know I’m here.”
The door closed behind him, and the hallway light switched off.
click-clack, click clack
The boy listened to The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes fade into
the distance, then went to sleep.
************
He came like that at first, when the boy was young; brief visits in the
nighttime. The Click-Clack Man was always friendly, always smiling.
The pair talked about random things, while The Click-Clack Man made
the boy laugh with a well-placed joke or a funny face. The boy would
answer his questions.
“Do you remember the first time I met you?” The Click-Clack Man asked
the boy.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t think so.” He nibbled his bottom lip again as he
always did, making little sucking noises as he thought. “Haven’t you just
always been here?”
The Click-Clack man smiled. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said the boy. “It does.”
And it really did.
************
“Are you ready to go?” asked The Click-Clack Man.
The boy looked at the superhero clock by his bed, noted the time, then
grabbed the handle of his backpack and pulled its straps over his
shoulder. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m ready.”
The Click-Clack Man smiled, the smooth, thin skin of his face wrinkling
only slightly around the edge of his cheeks. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He reached out his long right arm to the boy and extended his hand. The
boy reached out and grabbed it. The Click-Clack Man turned and walked
toward the boy’s closet door, which had been propped open by a little toy
firetruck. The light inside had been left on.
As they got closer, the bulb in the top of the closet flickered slightly, then
switched off. The Click-Clack Man extended one long, thin leg and
gently nudged the firetruck aside as they walked through the door.
It closed shut behind them.
************
On the other side of the closet door, The Click-Clack Man led the boy
into a large, green field with waves of soft grass rippling as far away into
the distance as he could see.
“Wow,” said the boy. “Where are we?”
“This is my home,” said The Click-Clack Man.
“Where’s your house?”
The Click-Clack Man pointed to a gnarled oak tree on the other side of a
small, quiet lake. Its water reflected the sky.
“You live in a tree?” asked the boy.
“No,” said The Click-Clack Man. “The tree lives in me.”
The boy furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he
said.
“Come,” said The Click-Clack Man. “I’ll show you.”
They walked up to the edge of the quiet lake, until the perfectly still water
just barely touched the tip of The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes.
The water crackled and popped as ice crystals began to form, first from
the edge of the lake, then shooting out in a straight line across to the other
side.
The boy’s jaw went loose and he chin dangled in the soft breeze. “Woah,”
he sighed.
The Click-Clack Man took a step forward, onto the ice. Water lapped
around the edges of the little frozen bridge. “Follow me,” he said.
The boy stayed where he stood, jaw still agape as he listened to The
Click-Clack Man cross to the other side.
click-clack, click-clack
The Click-Clack Man stepped off the bridge, turned, and smiled at the
boy. He raised one long, thin arm and waved him over, his wrist bending
and twisting as his long, thin fingers curled out, then in.
The boy stepped on the ice, but it cracked under his weight and startled
him.
“Don’t worry,” shouted The Click-Clack Man from the other side. “It
won’t melt until I tell it to.”
He took another step. Another crack. A pop. Another step. Inch by inch
and foot by foot, the boy crossed to the other side. As he stepped onto the
grass, he heard a gentle plop behind him. When he turned around, the
bridge was gone.
“Melted,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Just like I said.”
“Wow,” sighed the boy. Again. “That’s cool.”
The Click-Clack Man smiled. Again. “Thank you.”
He led the boy up to the gnarled oak tree, then reached out his arm and
placed his hand on the trunk. “Watch this,” he said.
The oak groaned a deep, throaty creak from somewhere far inside the
wood. The boy could feel it more than he could hear the sound. The
ground rumbled, and his feet tickled from the vibration.
“What’s happening?” asked the boy.
The Click-Clack Man said nothing, and closed his eyes. The thin, pale
skin of his eyelids were almost see-through, which the boy had never
noticed before, back in the darkness of his bedroom.
The rumble grew stronger as the groans and creaks of the tree grew
louder. The long, twisting branches began to sway, and then to move.
They bent and curled, and wrapped themselves around the boy and The
Click-Clack Man, who still had his eyes closed and was still smiling.
“Stop it,” the boy pleaded. “I’m scared.”
The Click-Clack Man opened his thin lips and laughed.
“Please? I want to go home!” cried the boy.
The branches fully enclosed them now, and the world went dark.
The Click-Clack Man opened his eyes.
************
The darkness vanished in the brightest light the boy had ever seen, which
hurt his eyes. He shut them, and started to cry.
“Wait,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Wait.”
The boy fell to his knees and sobbed, his face buried in his hands. “I just
want to go home.”
The Click-Clack Man reached out and touched the boy’s head. “Open
your eyes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Please?” asked The Click-Clack Man.
The boy cautiously opened one eye, slowly. The light wasn’t as bright
now, and it no longer hurt his eyes. He opened the other one and blinked.
“Woah,” he said, once more.
“See?” said The Click-Clack Man. “Nothing to worry about.”
The boy looked out into a massive room, the entrance hall of a grand
mansion. The walls were thick and dark, like the gnarled bark of the tree.
The floor was polished marble so shiny it reflected everything around it.
In the middle of the room, a grand staircase went straight back and up,
then branched off in two directions, each leading to an opposite side of
the second floor. There were candles everywhere.
“Are we inside the tree?” asked the boy.
“Yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “And no.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “Come this way. I
want to show you something”
The boy followed as The Click-Clack Man led the way upstairs, to a
small door in a small corner of a small room.
The little door opened as they approached, with the tiniest of creaks. The
Click-Clack Man stopped short of walking inside, and stood beside the
door. He motioned for the boy to walk on through.
“What’s in there?” he asked.
“Home,” said The Click-Clack Man.
The boy walked through the door and into more darkness. He felt
something soft brush his face, then heard a slight buzz from somewhere
over his head. A little light flickered, and another door opened.
He was back in his room, walking through his closet. He turned to see
where he’d come from, but all he found were clothes and toys, and that
thing in the corner that his mother had told him to throw away but he
hadn’t.
The Click-Clack Man was gone, along with the little door he’d just
walked through. It was nighttime again, and the boy was back in his
bedroom. The superhero clock next to his bed showed the same time as
when he’d left, which was half past bedtime, and his mother would be
coming to check on him soon.
The boy crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over his chest, then closed
his eyes and listened.
The Click-Clack Man was walking away, somewhere beyond his closet,
in his mansion inside a tree by a quiet lake in a green field of soft grass
that went on forever.
click-clack, click-clack
************
To be continued…
Enjoying the story? Want more? Click here to let me know by sending
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I’ve Got A Golden Ticket!
Once upon a time, a legendary candyman
held a contest in which five lucky children won a tour of his mythical
chocolate factory. That man was Mr. Wonka, and this is the story you
were never told…
The moment Wonka launched his famous contest, rival candy maker
Slugworth Cruz immediately began trying to steal Wonka’s secrets for
himself. He prowled the streets at night, looking for the first winner by
approaching random children in the darkness to ask them about golden
tickets and candy. It was kinda weird.
“Hey. Got any candy?”
The first winner was a large, angry young man who was driven by an allconsuming passion to consume anything could. Augustus Christie was his
name, but he never made it to the factory. Tragically, he insulted
Wonka’s union workers in his acceptance speech, who then tricked him
into mistaking the brown water of one of New Jersey’s rivers for
chocolate. Augustus Christie dove in, head first, and was never seen
again.
“Trumpa Lumpa, Doopa Dee Doo…”
The next winner was also the youngest. His name was Rubio Teevee, and
Slugworth Cruz found him before he ever left for the factory. No one
knows what Cruz whispered into Rubio’s young ears while the pair sat on
his mother’s couch in the family room, but from that moment on, all
Rubio Teevee could do was repeat the same three or four sentences over
and over.
“Wonka knows EXACTLY what he’s
doing.”
Ben Carson would’ve won a ticket, but he fell asleep before he finished
opening his Wonka Bar, then stashed it away in a pyramid for later after
he woke up. Violet Fiorina also would’ve won a ticket, but she laid off
the entire staff she’d hired to unwrap candy bars just before the winning
one was found.
The next lucky winner was Veruca Clinton, who felt winning the contest
was her birthright because she felt that winning everything was her
birthright. Spoiled, loud and obnoxious, she was last seen demanding
Wonka give her a goose to lay gold eggs for Easter. Wonka just smiled
and tossed her down a garbage shoot.
“Bad egg,” he said.
“It’s mine. Whatever it is, it’s mine.
Gimme!”
The last young man to win a ticket was approximately 800 years old,
which was getting on for a 12 year old boy, but the years had not been
kind. Born into poverty, Bernie Bucket was convinced he would win a
ticket, because he wanted it more than anyone. Positive that he could use
the contest to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the 1% and expose Wonka
for the elitist fraud that he was, Bernie fished around in raw sewage for a
coin some rich guy dropped, then miraculously bought the last winning
Wonka Bar in existence.
“Let them eat chocolate.”
But then he redistributed Fizzy Lifting Drinks to the 99% and bumped
into the ceiling which then had to be washed and sterilized, so he got
nothing.
None of the children won the real prize that day, which would’ve seen
one of them inheriting Obama Wonka’s factory after he retired. However,
Wonka was now more convinced than ever that no other living human
would ever be qualified for the job, so he just smiled to himself, breathed
deeply, and decided to stay. Forever.
“I said good day, sir!”
My Top Ten PC Games of ALL
THE YEARS
As I write this, it’s the last day of 2015
and I’m surrounded by Top Ten lists for everything from the best games
of the year, to the best fast food burgers in the nation.
It’s annoying, so I thought I’d write my own, because my Top Ten Games
of 2015 are way different than everyone else’s Top Ten Games of 2015.
But then I thought, I don’t want to do that because Top Ten of the year
lists are stupid and predictable and omnipresent.
So I decided to do it anyway, but not just for 2015.
BUT FOR ALL THE YEARS.
Well, since 1988, anyway. Which is when I got my first IBM-compatible
PC and entered the Real Gamer demographic. I had an Apple ][ clone for
years before that, but I’m doing a PC gaming list, so I’m limiting it to
games I played on the PC. This means that only games I played on my PC
will be here. Any cross-platform titles that I played on, say, my Xbox or
Playstation or whatever won’t be.
It’s also a list of my top ten games of each year, so it’s not necessarily
made up of the objectively best games. All that’s here are the games I
actually played the year they were released. Remakes, reboots, and
remasters won’t be included, either. Your favorite game will probably be
omitted, because it’s my list. You can just go make your own, if you feel
that strongly about Speedball 2.
I was originally going to post this all at once here on New Year’s Eve, but
it’s kind of a monumental task. I bit off more than I can chew, as usual, so
I’m just going to add years as I complete them. My plan is to add at least
one year each day until we hit 2015, but I’ll try to squeeze in a few more
here and there, time permitting.
Now go! Gather your party and venture forth or whatever.
#10 – Life & Death
I beat Doogie Howser to
surgeonhood by a full year by playing this game. Neil Patrick Harris
wouldn’t start suturing patients until 1989, and his character was 16 when
the show started. I was only 13 the first time I started up Life & Death
and immediately murdered a patient. I forgot to administer any anesthetic
before I cut into him, so he screamed out in agony and promptly died.
I never did get the hang of this game because screw it, I was only 13
years old. I still had a lot of fun trying, though. And the lamentations of
my patients never got old.
#9 – Rocket Ranger
This game. My first PC was an
8088 with an EGA monitor, which I thought made me pretty hot shit,
until I bought Rocket Ranger based on the the screenshots on the back of
its box. After I got back home and installed it, I realized EGA was
actually pretty crap. The screenshots were from the Amiga version, and
they were beautiful. However, the image on my monitor was limited to 16
colors of sadness.
The game was still great fun, though. Flying around, zapping Nazis,
falling on your face over and over when you can’t manage to take off
because you suck at life. Running out of fuel and crashing on your way to
save the day because you didn’t read the code wheel right. Good times.
#8 – Battle Chess
I’ve always enjoyed chess, but I’ve never been very good at
it. I like to laugh at people who think that mastering the game is some
sign of superior intelligence rather than just being really good at a game,
and nothing was funnier than playing Battle Chess. All of the little
animations were genuinely comical to my 13 year old brain, and I’m sure
I remember more than one crotch-shot, which was pretty much the
pinnacle of human achievement in comedy as far as I was concerned.
The only problem with Battle Chess was that after you’d seen every
animation for the hundred billionth time, they just got annoying. I’d
eventually switch them off, but then I’d realize that I was just playing
chess at that point, which was pretty damn boring. There isn’t a lot of
staying power in this classic, but the fun times are pretty great. Until
they’re not.
#7 – Battlehawks 1942
The first in Lucasfilm’s
WWII flight sim series, Battlehawks 1942 was as fun to play as it was to
not. That’s because it came with a big, spiral-bound manual filled with all
sorts of WWII facts and tidbits. One of the best ways to play the game
was to read through a bit of the manual to get psyched up, then hop into
the game to shoot down some baddies. I played it a lot with my dad, who
was always better at it than I was. The jerk.
This game also ignited my interest in WWII history, which would
continue through college when I accidentally signed up for a graduate
level course as a freshman. I managed to pass, but just barely. Ah,
memories.
#6 – BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception
Outside of Ultima II (which I
played on my Apple ][ clone), I never knew you could combine sci-fi and
RPGs until I played this game. The title screen was much cooler than
anything the actual game had to offer, but it was still a lot of fun. I never
made it very far because it was kind of complicated, I was only 13, and I
didn’t have a manual for it because reasons. Still, I always had fun trying
to figure out what the heck I was doing in a universe I didn’t understand.
Plus, giant robots.
#5 – Police Quest II
They don’t make games like
Police Quest today. And they didn’t really make them like Police Quest
back when they made Police Quest. Sierra went out on a limb with this
series, and it usually paid off. I wouldn’t play the first game until years
after I played part two, but it’s just as well. The first one was super short
and focused more on the mundane routine of an officer’s life (which was
way more fun than it sounds) more than it did its central story. The sequel
improved on that, and by the time Police Quest III came out, I was pretty
sure the series was going to be around forever as it kept improving.
Then Daryl Gates happened, and it wasn’t anymore.
#4 – Playhouse Strip Poker
I was never very good at card
games, but I was getting older and thought it was a skill I should pick up
so I could fit in at parties as an adult or whatever. I discovered this
questionable poker simulation on a local BBS and found that it had a
surprisingly robust and challenging AI that would help me quickly learn
the basics of the game before moving on to the more challenging
difficulty levels as I made my way toward mastery over the various
complex systems governing the game of poker.
Yeah, whatever. I was a 13 year old boy. Shut up.
#3 – Manhunter: New York
Manhunter was one of the weirdest
games Sierra ever made. Heck, it’s one of the weirdest games anyone has
ever made. It’s set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic version of New York
after giant intergalactic eyeballs have enslaved humanity and forced
everyone to dress as monks or something. It was never very clear. It was
also the first point and click adventure game I’d ever played, since it did
away with Sierra’s traditional text parser in favor of a 1st person
slideshow view more like we’d see in Myst years later. I spent hours
trying to figure this game out, but mostly I just wandered around and died
a lot.
My most distinct memory of this game comes from very early on (which
is about as far as I ever got), where I was able to do the knife/hand thing I
saw Bishop do in Aliens. So that was cool.
#2 – Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
I’ve played and completed every
Ultima game…except Ultima V. It is my secret shame.
It was actually one of the first games I bought after getting my first PC,
because I’d been unable to run it on my old Apple ][ due to the game
wanting a crazy amount (64k) of RAM. My machine only had 48k, so it’d
play the intro but always crap out when trying to start up the game itself.
Which sucked, because Ultima V is widely regarded as being one of the
best entries in the series.
So why didn’t I ever complete it? Or even get very far? A couple of
reasons, really. The biggest one probably has to do with my top game of
1988. Once I found it, I had very little time for anything else. But the
second reason is that Ultima VI was just around the corner…
#1 – Maniac Mansion
This game changed
everything for me. Hell, it changed everything for everyone. Multiple
characters, different endings, a mouse-driven point-and-click interface.
Humor. Maniac Mansion had it all.
Once I discovered it, I never went back. All the Sierra games were
suddenly clunky nightmares of keyboard controls and fiddly text parsers,
and I wanted nothing more to do with them. I also didn’t want more
serious narratives or overly fanciful, saccharine fairy tell nonsense. I
wanted good jokes, funny characters, and skewed humor.
I wanted…Lucasfilm Games.
#10 – Pipe Dream
Lucasfilm Games didn’t just stick
to one or two genres, back in its early days. It tried its hand at a number
of different games, sometimes developing them in-house, and sometimes
buying up an existing property to publish. Pipe Dream was originally
released for the Amiga under the name Pipe Mania. Lucasfilm grabbed it,
ported it to other platforms, and called in Pipe Dream.
It was a fun time killer that could get pretty challenging for my budding
young intellect. You might remember having played it every single time
you hacked a machine in Bioshock.
# 9 – 688 Attack Sub
I sucked at this game, but boy was it fun. I
never had any idea what I was doing, since I was again playing a game
sans manual because reasons. (Hey, I was 14. BBSs were a thing, and I
was friends with a lot of sysops. Sysops who had “special” file sections
for trusted users. Don’t judge me.)
It was far too complicated for my stupid newly-teenaged brain to quite
grasp. There were lots of controls and fiddly systems, and I just wanted to
blow things up. But something about figuring out how to make the game
do anything was part of the fun, which I guess was the case with a lot of
old games.
#8 – Populous
My first god sim. Everyone’s first
god sim. There’s not much to say about Populous that hasn’t already been
said before. I liked it for the same reasons everyone else liked it. You got
to play as a god, you had little worshipers you could smite at will, and
you could murder everyone. Or help them. Whichever.
I never did get the hang of raising and lowering land, though. And I never
understood why a god would need to bother with such mundane levels of
civic planning. Why not just set a bush on fire and command it to tell of
one of your subjects to “Go ye forth and grab yonder shovel”?
Ah, well. It’s still a fun game.
#7 – Hero’s Quest / Quest for Glory 1
Hey, you got your RPG in my
adventure game! No, you got your adventure game in my RPG!
Two genres that should have never worked together somehow blended
like chocolate and peanut butter. Yeah, it still had Sierra’s crappy
interface and you died stupidly every five minutes, and you could get
yourself into no-win scenarios like other people get into their clothes, but
damn was it a fun game. It was originally called Hero’s Quest, but Sierra
forgot to trademark the name. After Milton Bradley trademarked an
electronic version of HeroQuest, they were forced to change the name to
the now familiar Quest for Glory.
Sierra had a real thing for sticking Quest somewhere in their titles.
#6 – The Colonel’s Bequest
The first in the long Laura Bow
series of two whole games, this one was an absolute mess. It had a lot of
timed events where you had to either follow characters or be in a certain
spot at a specific time, and the puzzles were traditionally Sierra Stupid™.
Yet, even with everything the game got wrong, it was still intriguing as
hell.
It was a murder mystery, which we still don’t have a lot of in today’s
gaming. It focused on characters rather than puzzles, and had an
interesting story, even if it was mired in the typical bad puns and cliches
of Sierra’s writing.
#5 – Tunnels of Armageddon
Yet another game acquired from
the dubious file section of a local BBS, this game had absolutely no point.
I’m sure there was a story involved in some way, but whatever it was
didn’t matter. All you did was fly through these colorful tunnels while
trying not to crash into walls and explode.
That was pretty much it. And it was awesome.
I used to put on some ’80s heavy metal and then pretend I was an ace
tunnel pilot in some alternate reality where tunnel pilots were a thing, and
then I’d tear into the game for hours. If you manage to track this game
down to give it a whirl – and I highly recommend it – be advised that a
joystick is a must.
All the cool tunnel pilots have them. Don’t you want to be cool, too?
#4 – SimCity
The original city planning game.
What more is there to say? It birthed a genre, eventually led to The Sims,
and you could build nightmare roadways to cause epic traffic jams. It was
great.
I played a lot of this one, but mostly just when I was bored with all my
other games and couldn’t think of anything better to do. It would take a
few sequels for the design to really come together, but there’s still a
quirky charm with how simple yet rewarding the first game can be.
#3 – Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain
I spent more hours in this flight
sim than with any other action game I had on my PC, including Tunnels
of Armageddon. It took everything that was great about Battlehawks 1942
and cranked it up to eleven. Or really, just 10. The eleven wouldn’t come
until the next game in the series, but Their Finest Hour was responsible
for some of the best gaming memories with my dad that I have.
We played the Ultima games together, and we played Their Finest Hour.
It was our thing.
#2 – Prince of Persia
I desperately wanted a VGA card
and monitor, along with a sound card around the time I discovered the
original Prince of Persia. I remember that distinctly, because one of the
selling points of the game was that its EGA graphics weren’t bad, and it
had surprisingly good PC speaker support.
I never managed to save the princess or whatever because the game was
crazy with its time limit and lack of saves, but everything else was
awesome. The animation remains impressive to this day, and the sudden
deaths from the various traps still make me laugh.
My favorite is the blade chomper death. So good.
#1 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Graphic
Adventure
This was – and remains – THE
BEST MOVIE TIE-IN GAME EVER MADE.
Yes, the caps were necessary. The Last Crusade is one of the most
influential, yet overlooked point-and-click games ever, and I honestly
don’t understand why. It took the story from the movie, added a bunch of
stuff (and cut out a little bit), then combined it all together in a great
adventure game that didn’t take itself too seriously.
It even came with an awesome copy of Henry Jones’ Grail Diary,
complete with little scribbled notes and coffee stains on the pages. It
introduced dialog trees, and also eliminated no-win scenarios, and even in
the one spot where you could die (while navigating the traps at the end of
the game), it made a great joke out of it and you didn’t lose any progress.
You just tried again until you got it.
The design philosophy behind The Last Crusade would go on to dominate
all subsequent Lucasfilm (later LucasArts) graphic adventures, along with
the point-and-click genre as a whole. Eventually, even Sierra would get in
on the game, even if they never managed to get it quite right.
Find this game. Play it. YOU ARE WELCOME.
#10 – Life & Death 2
The year I finally
got a VGA card, Life & Death 2 showed up with 256 color graphics and
brain surgery. This one is even better than the last, because you can kinda
sorta actually tell what you’re doing once you’ve cut some poor soul’s
head open, which is nice.
These days, I can only think of it as a Ben Carson simulator, though. I
played it a little bit last night, and every time I cut into someone, I
shouted something about pyramid grain silos and then tried to cut the gay
out of my patient’s brain.
Good times.
#9 – Star Control
This was a cool little game that
had to wait until its sequel to really get good, but it was still fun. It’s
totally not a Star Trek simulator, though. And you totally don’t use the
Enterprise to shoot at Klingons or anything. Those are Ilwraths.
Obviously.
It was mostly an arcade affair, though I remember there being a bit of
light strategy involved, as well. Mostly, you set things up and then went
into the pew-pew battle screen where you shot at other ships until they
exploded. And that was pretty much it. And yet, it still somehow
managed to become a huge time sink for me. Go figure.
#8 – Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire
Origin tried to mix things up a
little with the Ultima franchise by taking everything everyone had grown
to love about the series and throwing it away. But it worked.
In the Worlds of Ultima games, of which there were only two, you still
play as the Avatar, but aren’t on Britannia. In Savage Empire, you’re
whisked away to the Valley of Eodon, which is basically the set piece of
any given pulp fiction rag of yesteryear featuring a lost jungle world
filled with giant insects and dinosaurs.
It wasn’t a proper Ultima, but it was close enough to kill some time while
I waited for Ultima VII to come out.
#7 – Quest for Glory 2
The second entry in the Quest for
Glory series took the player away from the familiar tropes of European
medieval fantasy and plopped you down in more of an Arabian Nights
setting. It was a breath of fresh air at the time, and it all seemed super
exotic.
If I went and replayed it today though, I’m pretty sure I’d notice all the
stereotypes and subtle racism that was sort of an undercurrent in most
Sierra titles that I was incapable of perceiving as a kid. Maybe not, but I
don’t want to replay it and take any chances.
Better safe than sorry.
#6 – It Came from the Desert
Another Cinemaware game, but
this time I finally had a VGA monitor! After seeing this beauty running
on a demo loop in my local software store for ages, I couldn’t wait to buy
it and run home to check out the amazing graphics I missed out on with
Rocket Ranger.
I installed the game, ran the executable, and then…EGA graphics. Again.
The store had been running the Amiga version, of course, and
Cinemaware hadn’t bothered to start adding 256-color graphics to their
PC ports yet, so I was screwed again. I still enjoyed the game and put a
lot of hours into it, but I learned to never trust screenshots again.
#5 – King’s Quest V
I hadn’t played a King’s Quest
game in ages when this one came out, but I was suckered in by Sierra’s
new engine. VGA graphics! Point and click interface! All the cool things!
It’s too bad its puzzles were awful, but the worst part about the game was
how they hadn’t fully embraced point and click yet. No, you didn’t move
around with the keyboard anymore, and yes, you clicked where you
wanted to go and your little dude went there, but…he didn’t always.
Because Sierra loved killing the player ALL THE DAMN TIME, so
sometimes you had to click in just the right spot and make a million little
clicks so he’d walk inch-by-inch through a screen because you couldn’t
rely on his pathfinding to not have him plummet to his death from off a
cliff.
Fortunately, the original version of this game came on floppies because
CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, which meant I only had to read the bad
dialog rather than hear it “acted” out by whoever happened to be walking
by Roberta William’s office on their way to the bathroom that day.
#4 – Ultima VI: The False Prophet
I have a deep and unyielding love
for the Ultima series, so you might be wondering why Ultima VI isn’t
higher up on the list of my top games from 1990. It’s pretty simple,
really. It just didn’t grab me like the other entries in the series. There
wasn’t anything wrong with the game – and, in many ways, it was much
better than all of the previous games.
But for whatever reason, it just didn’t grab hold of my like, say, Ultima
IV did or Ultima VII would a couple of years later. I think it mostly had
to do with the user interface. It was pretty clunky, but it was also the first
mouse-driven Ultima game, so I cut it some slack. It did some things
better and some things worse, but the story was still great. And all my old
friends were back, so I didn’t mind too much.
#3 – Loom
My big Christmas present in
1990 was a sound card, along with two Lucasfilm Games. Loom was one
of them, and it was the perfect showcase for my new Sound Blaster card,
since the entire game is based around using music to cast magic spells.
The game was short and obviously planned to be the first in a new series
that never materialized, but it was magical. It was designed by Brian
Moriarty, who also designed Wishbringer, one of my favorite Infocom
titles. The game even came with an audio cassette containing a radio
drama setting up the game world and your place in it.
I lost count of how many times I listened to that thing.
#2 – Wing Commander
A friend of mine
gave me a copy of this game, and I was immediately hooked. So was my
dad. We used to fight over who got computer time, just to play it. It had
everything: a great soundtrack, awesome graphics, a cool branching
storyline. It was a Star Wars sim before there was a Star Wars sim, and I
loved it.
Unfortunately, since I had a new VGA monitor, I used to enjoy playing
my games in EGA mode for a few minutes, just to appreciate how much
better the graphics were on my new rig. For most games, this was fine.
I’d check out EGA, laugh at all the dithered red people, then pop back
over to VGA and relish my graphical snobbery. However, the way Wing
Commander changed graphics modes was by way of overwriting the
VGA files with EGA ones, which meant that once I’d converted it to
EGA, it was stuck that way until I was able to get another copy from my
friend.
When my dad came home later that day and tried to play a game, he
was…displeased.
#1 – The Secret of Monkey Island
Another year, another Lucasfilm
game in the top spot. But no one can argue with this choice. The Secret of
Monkey Island was an even better showcase for my new Sound Blaster
card than Loom, with a much better soundtrack that I still listen to and
love to this very day. (The main theme is even my wife’s ringtone on my
phone.)
Everything about the game was great. EVERYTHING.
The puzzles were fun. The dialog was sharp. The characters were fully
realized. The music was amazing. The graphics were crisp.
I was in love.
#10 – Lemmings
Ah, Lemmings. Many countless
hours were devoted to both saving and annihilating these little bastards, in
equal measure. There’s a reason this game has seen so many iterations
and sequels over the years: it’s damn addictive. Even today, starting up
the original game risks me losing oceans of time to it. I can’t play just one
level, and I always have to just see what the next level looks like after I
beat one.
Until I get super frustrated and just nuke them all, that is.
Which kind of happens a lot, actually.
#9 – Night Shift
I still love this game, and I still
play it fairly regularly.
Another one of Lucasfilm Games’ dip into the wading pool of other
genres, Night Shift was developed by a third party who brought it to
Lucasfilm. They rebranded it and published it as a toy factory making
Star Wars and Lucasfilm Games related action figures.
You play as a guy or a girl charged with keeping The Machine working,
which is a crazy, multi-storied contraption that’s constantly failing in
spectacular ways.
The toy company is called Industrial Might and Logic instead of
Industrial Light and Magic, and the title screen of the game is a clever
modification of ILM’s old wizard logo. There are also lemmings
involved, but not the suicidal kind from other games or any of Disney’s
fake True Life Adventure movies. There are two of the little beasts in this
game: one that slows you down by humping your leg, and another who
runs around and mucks up the machine. Then, there’s an angry lawyer
who constantly tries to bludgeon you with the hammer of litigation or
whatever, so it’s a constant race up and down the machine, repairing
what’s broken and trying to keep everything in sync.
It starts out pretty simple, but gets really crazy before you get to the end
of the game, which explains why I’ve never made it to the end of the
game. I’ve been trying for a couple of decades now, but I only ever
manage to progress one or two levels every few years. Maybe by the time
I die, I’ll have completed it.
But probably not.
#8 – Space Quest IV
This was the first Space Quest
game I played, because it had VGA graphics and a point and click
interface. For whatever reason, the series just didn’t appeal to me any
sooner. I remember looking at the screenshots of SQIV before I had my
VGA monitor and was longing for one with my nose pressed up again the
pages of a Computer Shopper magazine like a Dickensian street urchin
peering at day old bread in a bakery window, imagining that I could never
get bored with a game that looked that good.
Unfortunately, it was still a Sierra game. It was funnier than other Sierra
games, and even the multiple deaths were kind of endearing, but it was
still filled with the same no-win states and lousy design decisions that
plagued almost every Sierra title. The last straw for me was probably
around the time I found their little joke about Loom, which was one of
my favorite games. It was basically Sierra taking a stab at Lucasfilm’s
design philosophy, and it irked me. I never did complete the game, but it
wasn’t for lack of trying.
I just eventually gave up. You know, like with life.
#7 – Eye of the Beholder
This was the game that taught me
I have absolutely no sense of direction. It was super cool and super
Dungeons & Dragons, which was a pen-and-paper RPG I always wanted
to play, but never got a chance to on account of not really having many
friends because I’m a giant weirdo.
Booting up Eye of the Beholder for the first time was a revelation,
because I could finally play D&D instead of just sitting in my closet
alone, reading sourcebooks and pretending I had friends.
Unfortunately, the stepped slideshow movement and making my own
graph paper maps proved far too daunting a task, and I just ended up
getting lost and dying a lot.
It didn’t stop me from playing, though. Or from playing the next game in
the series. Or the next one.
While getting lost and dying in each and every one of them.
I suck.
#6 – The Adventures of Willy Beamish
The tagline for this game was
something along the lines of, “Who wouldn’t want to be 9 years old
again?”, which was weird because I’d just been nine years old, like, 7
years earlier. But whatever; I was already nostalgic. Plus, this game
looked like a freaking cartoon, which was amazing back in 1991. I bought
it immediately.
It wasn’t as open as other adventure games, because you couldn’t just
click to walk anywhere. You could only click on interactive objects and
room exit points, but it was still a great technological achievement.
The story is about an evil corporation pumping sludge into the town’s
water supply or something, and it’s up to Willy Beamish, his gang of
treehouse pals and his pet frog Horny to save the day. And somehow win
the Totally Not Nintendo (Nintari) world championship along the way.
I haven’t played it in years, so I honestly have no idea how well it holds
up today, but I loved it way back when. I think it was even ported to the
DS not too long ago. I should probably try to track a down a copy.
#5 – Police Quest III
The creeping racism of Sierra
really started to bubble up to the surface with some of the traffic stops in
this game, but solving the main storyline was a lot of fun. It’s basically
the same as the other Police Quest games, but with VGA graphics along
with point-and-click gameplay.
I don’t remember any no-win situations exactly, but I do know you could
screw up some of your traffic stops when they went to court if you didn’t
exactly follow proper police procedure. Which is weird, because this was
California in the ’90s, when proper police procedure was basically just,
“Beat up all the black guys and then lie about it later”.
Which is kinda still the procedure, really.
The next game was called Open Season, which was “designed” by Daryl
Gates and filled with racism and horrible FMV. Seriously, the game was
awful. Just awful.
But PQ3 was still fun. I replayed it not too long ago, and still enjoyed it,
even if I winced at a few characterizations.
Here’s a friendly tip to everyone on the planet: Don’t try to write in
dialect. Ever. Just don’t.
#4 – Wing Commander II
Same as Wing Commander I,
only better.
What else is there to say? It was the last great hurrah before Chris
Roberts’ Hollywood envy would drive him down the dark, dark road of
FMV. And then actually to Hollywood, where he made the Wing
Commander movie that we do not speak of. Ever. Seriously, there’s
nothing more to say here.
Besides, I KNOW THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TIGER’S CLAW
WAS YOUR FAULT!
#3 – Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
The third and final game in
Lucasfilm’s WWII flight simulators was also its best. It took everything
great about Battlehawks 1942 and Their Finest Hour, and cranked it up to
eleven. (See? I told you it would.)
Better graphics, better sound, and experimental jets. The game had
everything, and SWOTL was one of the last games my dad and I actively
played together on a regular basis. I don’t mean we played competitively
or anything. He’d play his missions and I’d play mine, but we’d talk
about them later and it was basically like playing the game together.
It was pretty much the 1991 version of co-op.
#2 – Civilization
I don’t really need to write
anything about this one, do I? We all know Civilization. Everyone knows
Civilization. We all live it every day.
But Sid Meier squeezed it into a few floppies and unleashed the first real
taste of gaming crack to the world. You don’t just play a quick game of
Civilization. You play epic games of Civilization that take as long as they
need to in order for you to either vanquish your enemies or die trying.
Or maybe go for one of those namby-pamby non-military victories all the
hippies seem to love so much.
Damn hippies.
#1 – Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge
Monkey Island 2 remains the
gold standard for adventure game design. Non-linear progression,
interconnected puzzles, brilliant writing, great characters, multiple
interesting locations, constant new art rewards, etc…
This game had it all.
I still love it so much, I used it to propose to my wife.
True story.
#10 – Stunt Island
This is probably one of the least
known titles on my entire list. Released by Disney, it was an odd
combination of flight sim, movie maker, and non-linear video editing
simulator. Whichever area was its focus depends on who you talk to.
Some people think it was first and foremost a flight simulator;
specifically, a stunt flying simulator. You played the role of a pilot
working for a movie studio, and it was your job to pull off various stunts
and get the shot for a film. Other people think it’s a movie creator, and all
that stunt flying business is just one of the flim-making tools the game
gives you.
Whichever camp you fell into, it was a really fun game. Unique in every
way, its flight model was a little wonky and its editing tools a bit clunky,
but playing it taught you a little bit about a lot. You had to learn light
scripting to move “actors” around in the world at the right times, light
flight-simming to get your plane to do what you needed it to do without
exploding, and light video editing to put it all together.
Stunt Island also used a fully polygonal 3D engine with gouraud shading,
and was almost entirely coded in assembly, so chew on that. It also
produced what was I think were probably the first recorded machinimas
in gaming. But I can’t prove that, so please don’t write me angry letters
about your awesome Halo videos or whatever.
#9 – Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin
Hood
This Sierra game doesn’t really
feel like a Sierra game. It kind of plays like one, but it’s actually really
good. It’s also one of their lesser known titles, which is just inexplicable
to me.
You play as Robin Hood, and you pretty much know the story from there.
The game has the usual inventory-based puzzles of a traditional adventure
game, but it also has little minigames like light archery and an medieval
board game called Nine Men’s Morris, which I became so obsessed with,
I made my own board out of a piece of plywood and the wood-burning kit
I had because I was a weird kid.
The game also opens with a lyrical intro, although the lyrics weren’t sung
by anyone because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, and Sierra would’ve
probably just had Diana down in Purchasing sing it anyway because she
was always going on about how great her church choir was or something.
Still, it was an original lyrical song opening a video game, which is the
first time that ever happened, I think. Sierra would do it again the
following year, but more on that when I get to ’93.
#8 – Alone in the Dark
Lovecraftian horror meets the
impossible geometry of 1992 polygonal characters. The true horror of this
game obviously came from the LSD-infused visuals of Triangle Man
beating Particle Cthulhu or whatever, but the rest of the game’s scares
weren’t too shabby, either.
Beating Resident Evil to market by four years or so, Alone in the Dark
was the very first survival horror game. It was slow and clunky and kind
of goofy, but horror games without Elvira’s boobs in them were few and
far between back in those days, so we took what we could get.
The sequels would get progressively ridiculous and awful as the years
went on, so if you’ve ever had any curiosity about the series, play the first
one first. It makes swallowing the spooky cowboy-shaped triangle people
that come later go down a lot easier.
#7 – Quest for Glory III: Wages of War
More Quest for
Glory!
Again, it’s basically more of the same, but this time we leave the Arabian
Nights setting and move on to darkest Africa. Except it’s called Fricana
and is entirely populated by lion people. Which made sense, because
there was a brief period in the early ’90s when an African setting was all
the rage, back before new age “spiritualism” crept in and made the
appropriation of Native American traditions by white people a thing.
One of the lion people’s names was Simba, who was even the son of the
king if I remember correctly, but don’t get your hopes up. Nobody ever
holds him up on a rock to a rising crescendo of Elton John or anything.
The whole plot revolves around stopping a war between the lion people
and the leopard people that’s being orchestrated by an evil wizard who
somehow isn’t named Jaffar. Do that, and you save the day and are ready
to move on to the next Quest for Glory, which I never actually played.
Sorry.
#6 – Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant
I’m almost ashamed to admit it,
but this was my first Wizardry game. It had some really great music, and
creating my characters at the start was detailed and a lot of fun. Then, the
story happened and I had no idea what was going on.
There was something about spaceships and intergalactic overlords, and
then there was crashing on a medieval planet or something, and none of it
made any sense, but I’m pretty sure it was about Scientology.
Fun game. Played it a lot. Got lost and died, mostly. Basically, it was Eye
of the Beholder all over again, but with the occasional space alien rat
monster.
#5 – Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
Who knew that Star Trek would
lend itself so well to the adventure game format? Star Trek: 25th
Anniversary and its sequel, Judgment Rites, proved that the franchise
could not only work as an adventure game, but was incredibly well suited
for it.
As long as you pretended the atrocious realtime, starships-as-nimblefighters battle segments didn’t happen, anyway. Because they were awful.
just awful.
But everything else about the game was great. The puzzles even managed
to mostly avoid traditional adventure game logic, which was probably a
side effect of being confined to the sciencey-science of Star Trek.
Then again, that also means you ran into the occasional ridiculously
obtuse puzzle, like one where you had to convert Base 10 math to Base 3
math, which I guess was this game’s version of Leisure Suit Larry’s
“Prove You’re An Adult” quiz, but for nerds.
#4 – Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
I looked forward to this Lucasfilm
(which had now become LucasArts) game probably more than any other,
including my beloved Monkey Island series. It was more Indy, which was
always welcome in my Indiana Jones obsessed brain.
(Yes, I own a licensed Indy fedora. And a brown leather jacket. And a
whip. Shut up.)
Everyone loves this game, and people are always citing it as the
objectively best Indy game to date, which is kind of silly because The
Last Crusade exists and is clearly the better game. Fate of Atlantis is by
no means bad or anything, but everything it did, The Last Crusade did
just a little bit better.
I’m pretty sure Fate of Atlantis was also the first game I bought on CD
after finally getting a single speed CD-ROM drive, which means it was
the first “talkie” adventure game I ever played, which is what they were
called back when things like adding digitized sound to games was a huge
deal. Some games did this with optional add-ons you could buy that were
usually called Speech Packs. They were basically the precursor to the
money-grubbing DLC we have today.
#3 – Wolfenstein 3D
I remember downloading the
shareware version of Wolf3D from a local BBS back in ’92. It was near
the end of my junior year in high school, and the sysop of the Around The
Clock BBS broke into chat after I dialed in, to tell me about this amazing
new game I just had to try. Having played Castle Wolfenstein on my
Apple][ and remembering it as a really fun game, I headed over to the
Files section and started my download of Wolfenstein 3D Shareware.
Then, I went and ate dinner. And watched some TV. And then went to
school the next day, because these were the days of 1200 baud modems,
noisy phone lines and non-resumable file transfers. That shit took time.
Anyway, once I finally got my hands on it and installed the thing, I was
hooked. I burned through the shareware levels, and decided that I actually
wanted to buy a copy. I’d never actually bought any shareware game
before, seeing as how the demos were usually enough to warn me off of
most of the crap that was out there, but Wolf3D was actually good. And I
wanted more.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t feel the same way about putting a check
in the mail, or giving their credit card info to some unknown game studio
they didn’t care about, so I had to either wait until retail copies started
showing up, or for the sysop of the BBS to buy it…and then make it
available in the secret file section.
Sadly, the rest of the game didn’t live up to those initial Shareware levels
(which was often the case, back in those days, when the best of the game
was shoved to the front to convince people to buy it), but it was still a
good time.
#2 – Ultima Underworld
This game pissed me off. It ran a
lot slower than Wolfenstein 3D and had a much smaller view window!
How could that even be possible?! Those guys are Origin just don’t know
how to program!
Then, I played it. And I slowly realized that there was a whole helluva lot
more going on in Ultima Underworld than there was in Wolf3D. I could
look up and down, for starters. The graphics were also more detailed,
with more textures and animation. Then there were the RPG stats, the
combat, the magic system, NPCs, puzzles, etc…
It was Ultima, but underground. It was all those dungeons I’d crawled
through years before in 1st person that looked like the scribbled line
drawings of a coked up four-year-old with an awful drug habit for a
toddler, only this time it was in “real” 3D. I was hooked, and I couldn’t
stop playing it.
I’m still playing it. I go back to it every year or two, just to experience the
Stygian Abyss all over again. And, thanks to the handy automap and full
movement (as opposed to the stepped slideshows of, say, the Eye of the
Beholder series), I can even manage to play it without getting lost and
dying ALL THE TIME.
#1 – Ultima VII: The Black Gate
The perfect Ultima.
No game in the series before or (especially) after ever came as close to
realizing a simulated world better than Ultima VII and it’s kinda/sorta
sequel, Ultima VII: Part Two: The Serpent Isle. The story was great, the
Guardian was a terrific villain, and all my old friends were back, but it
was the world that got me in U7.
You could cut down wheat and take it to a mill, where you could grind it
into flour that you could then add water to and make dough, which you
could then stick in an oven to make bread. And that was just one of the
many things you could do in the game.
NPCs went about their business, independent of the player’s presence.
People had lives, the world had a schedule, and things mattered. Or they
seemed to, at least. Which was good enough for me.
The only real downside to the game was the “realistic” way all the shit in
your backpack would jostle around as your walked, thereby making the
three-pixel key you needed to find later a damn near impossible task.
Also, getting everyone to sit the hell down in that damnable wagon was a
pain in my ass I’ve still not fully recovered from.
But everything else? AMAZING.
#10 – Coaster
Another little-known title that I
loved is once again from Disney Interactive. Coaster really kindled my
deep love of the marriage of art and science that is the rollercoaster, and
I’m still thankful to it for that. The things used to terrify my as a kid,
mostly because I weighed negative pounds and always felt like I was one
corkscrew away from sliding under the safety bar and plummeting to my
untimely death.
That never happened, though. Spoilers.
I was never very good at this game, which is something I’m now realizing
was kind of a common theme with me and the games of my youth. Still, I
loved trying to make legitimate coasters that would thrill the crazy panel
of judges assembled in this game. But it was freaking hard.
You designed your rollercoasters on what to my soon-to-be-a-highschool-graduate mind was a veritable fully-realized AutoCAD
workstation, but was really just a simplified bit of trickery. The hardest
part of any coaster design, though, was connecting the final bit of track to
the station.
Which is probably a pretty crucial thing to get right if you want repeat
customers, but it was so infuriating, I usually just gave up and made a
simple track with impossible G-forces that would pretty much kill anyone
who looked at it funny.
#9 – Space Quest V
The last Space Quest I played
was also my favorite. I don’t know exactly why SQ5 clicked with me, but
it was probably because I was a huge space and Star Trek nerd, so it hit
all the right parody notes rattling around inside my dusty braincase.
From cheating on my final exam at the Academy, to doing time in the
totally-not-the-millennium-falcon simulator, I loved every minute of it.
Even the stupid fart joke every time Roger sat down in the captain’s chair
of his garbage scow made me giggle like I was 12 years old.
I don’t remember there being a single no-win state in the game, either.
Which was kind of amazing, considering it was a Sierra title. It’s
probably the only real reason I was ever able to complete the thing, now
that I think about it.
#8 – The 7th Guest / Dracula Unleashed
Okay, this one is a little bit of a
cop-out, but I couldn’t choose one of these games over the other. They
were my first (and last) willing forays into the FMV-crazed world of the
’90s (not counting Wing Commander and one or two other misadventures
in really bad videoland), and my memory of both of them really is a flat
tie.
The 7th Guest had the cooler atmosphere, but the whole thing being more
or less just Myst dressed up in a Halloween costume really put me off. I
don’t mind the occasional logic puzzle in an adventure game, but I don’t
want to play a whole game entirely composed of moving chess pieces
around and dividing up slices of cake evenly between demon ghost
people. I don’t want to re-arrange soup cans in an obtuse word puzzle,
and I absolutely hated how none of the puzzles ever told you what they
wanted you to do, or even what the rules were.
Dracula Unleashed went the
complete opposite route, had no logic puzzles at all, and was really just a
choose-your-own-adventure VHS tape on a postage stamp-sized screen. It
wasn’t all that fun and was pretty much an awful soap opera filled with
awful soap opera actors in awful soap opera makeup, but I sunk a ton of
hours into it, just to pretend like I was amazed by how my COMPUTER
was playing a MOVIE.
We were easily amused back in those days.
#7 – Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist
The second Sierra game to
feature a lyrical song in the intro was also the second of any game to
feature a lyrical song in the intro, the first being Conquests of the
Longbow. This time, you followed a bouncing ball over the lyrics, just in
case you weren’t able to hear them in your head along the obvious
melody. It worked, though.
The game itself is really, really short, but it was probably Al Lowe’s best
game. It still has some of his trademark puerile humor, like when the
town is overcome by a noxious cloud of horse farts, but most of it is solid,
clever dialog in a setting we’ve always seen too little of in gaming: the
old west.
Saying too much about the plot would spoil the few surprises it has in
store, but it’s still entirely playable today and is as fun as it ever was. My
favorite part was when the game actually let me be a pharmacist, which is
also how it worked in its copy protection. The manual had a list of
ailments along with their appropriate cures, which you then had to
prepare in Freddy’s little laboratory according to the instructions
provided. It was one of the better uses of manual-as-copy-protection, and
making all the little pills and elixirs for the townsfolk was a lot of fun.
For some reason.
#6 – Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
One of the last Sierra games that
will show up on this list is this one, the first Gabriel Knight game. The
series took a nosedive into crappy FMV followed by crappy 3D and never
quite recovered from either, but the first game still holds up.
It’s devoid of most of the negative trappings of Sierra games, although by
this time, they were making CD versions of most of their games, which
meant they had voice overs usually done by whoever wasn’t busy
working on categorizing their nose mucous according to booger viscosity
that day. Gabriel Knight actually had real voice talent though, even if
actors hadn’t quite figured out how to do VO for a game yet.
BUT…Tim Curry was an awful Gabriel Knight. I love the guy, but he
didn’t sound anything at all like either someone from the Deep South or a
New Orleans native. Here’s a tip, Hollywood and game devs: New
Orleans natives don’t sound like they’re from Gone With the Wind. The
New Orleans accent is a whole lot closer to a New England one than it is
to the typical drawl-ridden caricature of the typical southern accent.
The game is filled with voodoo and mystery, and they even managed to
get most of the locations right. Or at least sufficiently recognizable as
background art. They remastered it recently, too. I’d recommend the
original over the remaster, but hey. Paddle whatever floats your dinghy,
kiddies.
#5 – Sam & Max Hit the Road
I’ve never loved this game as
much as everyone else seems to love this game. It was fun enough, but it
always seemed like it was trying just a bit too hard to be different or
whatever. I don’t know; it’s an intangible thing.
Maybe I just didn’t dig the sideshow vibe or the road trip aesthetic, but
something about it just never really clicked with me. It was good enough
for 1993, had some great art and animations, and I still played it from
beginning to end and even chuckled at most of the jokes along the way –
but if I ever had to rate my top ten adventure games of all time, it
probably wouldn’t make the list.
I know. I’m the worst.
#4 – Ultima Underworld II
Taking place after the events of
Ultima VII, UU2 was more of the same from Ultima Underworld…but a
LOT more of it.
There were more characters, more locations, more puzzles, and even
more world to discover and explore, thanks to a faceted Blackrock gem in
Lord British’s basement. There were even the internal drama-plagued
politics of British’s castle to manage, with things like preventing (or
encouraging) a worker’s revolt and stuff.
It had a lot more going for it than UU1, but it lost some of the original’s
charm along the way. I’m not sure if it had more to do with me getting
older, or maybe I was just getting burned out on dungeon crawlers, or
maybe the damn game was just too big – but I never finished it.
And I’ve never really wanted to, either.
I’m awful.
#3 – Doom
There’s a reason this game
launched a genre, and that’s because it’s ridiculously fun. It’s tightly
designed, has great enemies, satisfying weapons, smart levels and AI bad
guys who can piss each other off until they spend more time trying to
murder one another in the shotguns than they do aiming their death
barrels at your face.
Doom improved on Wolfenstein in every way. It brought dynamic
lighting to the table, for example, so you could run into a fully lit room
with a lot of ammo and the big, shiny key you needed sitting on a
pedestal, and just know that picking it up was going to turn out the lights
and unleash hell. Literally.
But even more than its single player campaign of shooting monster
demon muderbots in the face with shotguns was shooting your friends in
their faces with shotguns, because Doom introduced multiplayer to the
world, which changed everything.
LAN parties
suddenly became a thing. You’d drag your giant PC over to a friend’s
house, where you’d meet up with several other friends who were all
dragging their giant PCs, too. Then, you’d spend an hour hooking
everything up through either a crappy Ethernet hub or ridiculous BNC
connections, and another hour getting all the computers talking to each
other. But then – eventually – you would launch the game and meet your
friends on the battlefield.
And it was glorious.
Pizza, soda, chips, friends and Doom were all any self-respecting geek
needed over a weekend, and Deathmatches quickly became regular afterhours affairs at many a workplace. Doom was everywhere, and if you
weren’t playing it in ’93, then you either knew someone who was or you
hadn’t been born yet.
#2 – Day of the Tentacle
DoTT narrowly missed my #1
spot for this year. It probably would’ve made it to the top, if someone had
bothered to allow the CD-ROM version to BUFFER THE COMMON
SOUND EFFECTS. Or maybe at least install them to the hard drive.
I have no complaints about Day of the Tentacle as a game. As a game, I
love it. It’s perfect. The art style showed what you could accomplish with
great art direction and true mastery over Deluxe Paint. The writing was
top shelf, and the voice acting was great. The puzzles were fun and funny.
But those damn sound effects…
See, I had a single-speed CD-ROM drive back in ’93, just like a lot of
people. This meant it was painfully slow to seek out information from the
shiny plastic Phantasm disc, which translated to incredibly annoying –
and lengthy – pauses every time it had to stop whatever it was doing to go
load up the sound effect of, say, purple tentacle’s suction cup sloshing
along the ground. Every. Single. Time. It. Happened.
Buffering the sound files would’ve fixed that. Loading them onto the hard
drive would’ve fixed it, too. But noooo. I had to go buy a double-speed
drive JUST TO PLAY DAY OF THE TENTACLE.
Which I loved.
But that mistake cost it the gold.
#1 – Star Wars: X-Wing
X-Wing was a space combat
simulator set in the Star Wars universe that allowed me to pretend I was
in the Rebel Alliance which was more of less everything I ever wanted
video games to be.
I had long debates with a couple of friends over whether Wing
Commander was better than X-Wing, and in my mind, they always lost.
Sure, WC had more cinematic flair, but it was an arcade game. X-Wing
was a simulator, with power management and locking s-foils in attack
positions and other crap.
I played the hell out of this game, much more than I played either Wing
Commander 1 or 2. And I didn’t just play it, either. I pretended while I
played it, which is something I’m rarely able to do in a game anymore.
But while I was playing X-Wing, I could make believe I was actually
inside that cockpit. I was really pew pewing my lasers at TIE fighters. I
was really the best hope for the Rebel Alliance.
I really was Luke Freaking Skywalker, dammit!
#10 – System Shock
I can already feel your scorn, so
just stop it. I put System Shock at the bottom because I’m rating these
games from the years when I actually played them, not through the magic
space goggles of retroactive internet peer pressure.
The simple fact is that the original System Shock was kind of a mess. The
virtual reality segments alone should’ve been enough to exclude it from
my list altogether, but 1994 was kind of a slim year, so it made the cut.
Barely.
When this game came out, it punished my PC – which was fine, in a way.
Or expected, at least. This was an Origin game, after all. They loved to
punish inferior PCs.
But more than that, it took the Ultima Underworld engine and made it
overwhelmingly complex. The screen was crowded with the interface, the
level of interactivity with the world was high (a good thing), but actually
interacting with anything was cumbersome and clunky.
Still, it had potential. There was a spark there that I could see somewhere
behind the crowded pixel vomit on my monitor, so I played it. And I
played it some more. And then a little more, determined to find the
diamond somewhere in all that rough.
I never did.
#9 – Ultima VIII
Yes, I put U8 above System
Shock. Grab your pitchforks and ham sandwiches, Internet. You march at
dawn!
I actually enjoyed Ultima VIII, as much as anyone could. Sure, a lot of
the design decisions were stupid – and I do mean a LOT of them – but it
was still an Ultima, and I still wanted to get at the story, despite the
awfulness of pretty much everything else.
The graphics were really pretty, at least for the Avatar, NPCs, and various
monsters. The world art wasn’t all that impressive, and everything
seemed to be drawn on the wrong scale, but the animations were
amazing. They were 3D before PCs could do (realtime) 3D, so they were
pre-rendered and smooth as a baby’s buttered butt.
But the jumping. And the drowning. And the minimal dialogs. And the
nearly unreadable font. And the ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE was
terrible.
Still, the story wasn’t bad. I liked how it made the player take the paragon
of virtue they’d been playing as since Ultima IV and turn him or her into
a monster. I liked the super complex magic system. I liked a lot of things.
So it makes the list. Above System Shock. Because I actually completed
it, and I enjoyed my experience on Pagan must more than my time with
Shodan.
So shut up.
#8 – Jagged Alliance
Tex.
Everything I like about this game can be summed up with Tex Colburn.
He was a Japanese tourist turned cowboy turned mercenary, which more
or less describes Jagged Alliance in a nutshell. The game had great turnbased combat wrapped in a package that never really took itself too
seriously.
The characters weren’t just interchangeable stat sheets. They had faces
and voices and personality, which is why Tex sticks out so strongly in my
memory. He was crazy, over the top, and ridiculous, which was
everything I loved about this game.
The sequels would eventually move away from that sense of zaniness as
the crippling angst of the ’90s slowly crept into every facet of popular
culture and infected absolutely everything. For gaming, that meant things
would soon get more serious, darker, and grittier, as the industry
clamored to inject “realism” into every damn thing they could.
#7 – Magic Carpet
I got to be a wizard
smiting my enemies by throwing explosive fireballs at them from atop a
magical flying carpet. What’s not to love about that?
I don’t remember ever finishing Magic Carpet, but I also don’t remember
not finishing it, either. Its levels were pretty short and sweet, with clear
objectives that could easily be completed in a single sitting, so I don’t
remember if I did all of them, or just a lot of them.
But they were all fun. The magic spells get bigger and better as you
progress, your magic carpet moves at warp speed, and the landscape
deforms around you as you blow things up.
The only thing I didn’t care for was the…I don’t know, Jell-O quality to
the world? It’s hard to describe, but it was always just kind of…wiggly.
Gelatinous, even.
It was weird.
#6 – Under a Killing Moon
After spending years watching
him do cool things in Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum on the
demo PC of my local software store, I finally bought my first Tex
Murphy game. Yes, it was filled with FMV – but it was self-aware FMV.
It knew how awful it was, or at least it seemed to.
It also knew how terrible its puns were, how ridiculous many of its
puzzles were, and it just sort of satirized the entire adventure genre while
still managing to be a compelling game.
The best bits were the little investigatory sequences outside of NPC
interactions and puzzle solving. Creeping around someone’s apartment
and rummaging through their stuff was good, clean fun. This was
probably the first game I was able to actually slide open drawers, which
was pretty revolutionary. People forget.
But its biggest achievement was that it finally – FINALLY – left Access
Software’s ridiculous “RealSound” system behind.
For those who don’t remember (or who weren’t around back in the early
’90s), RealSound was a clever little hack of the PC speaker that allowed it
to convincingly convey digitized sound files. I say convincingly, but
really it was just awful. It might’ve been okay if sound cards had never
been invented, but they had and Access kept insisting that they hadn’t.
The problem with RealSound was that every digital sound that came
through the PC speaker was cocooned in this awful high-pitched squeal
that was like fingernails on a chalkboard to my young and fleshy ear
holes.
It’s why I refused to play any Access Software games until they sorted
that mess out and stopped forcing it on players who had perfectly good
sound cards sitting in their machines, ready to not assault their delicate
senses with high-frequency death squawks.
Which is why Under a Killing Moon was my first Tex Murphy game.
The end.
#5 – Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse
I picked this game
up on a whim one day from the local software store where I was working
at the time, having graduated high school the year before. It was a fun
enough college job, if I ignored most of my co-workers’ aggressive
geekery. I mean, I was a huge nerd myself, but these guys always wanted
to out-nerd each other in terrible, which just led to awful, awkward
moments too horrible to describe. So I won’t.
As for Al-Qadim, I didn’t expect much. I just wanted something to play,
it was there, so I bought it. And it turned out to be a lot of fun.
It was an action RPG before there really were action RPGs because
Diablo hadn’t been invented yet. It wasn’t the clickfest that Blizzard’s
game would become, but it wasn’t turn-based, super strategy, either. It
was quick, light, and…fun.
The best way to describe Al-Qadim is to compare it to the Quest for
Glory series. Where QFG inserted an RPG into an adventure game, AlQadim inserted an adventure game into an RPG.
You should try it.
#4 – The Elder Scrolls: Arena
Boy, did the guys in the software
store LOVE this game. They wouldn’t shut up about it. It was this and, if
I’m remembering correctly, some fighting game on the Genesis called
Eternal something or other. I guess it came out around the same time as
Arena, and it’s all they wanted to talk about. Well that, and going to the
BattleTech center in nearby Houston. It was their dream.
Eventually, I caved and bought myself a copy of Arena and was instantly
swept up in its world. Sure, it wasn’t very detailed, a lot of it seemed
awfully cookie cutter, and if I ever hear that one public domain sound file
of a creaking door opening ever again, I’ll probably murder someone in
the pancreas – but it was still somehow captivating.
But the funny thing about Arena is that I remember absolutely nothing
about most of it. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the story, or even
describe a single sidequest. I don’t remember my character, or any
distinctive locations. I don’t recall anything special about the combat or
the magic system or anything.
The only memory that really stands out is walking into a tavern while it
was snowing, and having a little box of flavor text pop up describing how
I shook the snow from my boots and trembled from the chill as I walked
into the warm glow of the inviting pub. Or something like that.
That’s what I remember from all my time with Area. That one thing.
Oh, and all the stupid riddles.
They were awful.
#3 – Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
For some
inexplicable reason probably involving Luke Skywalker, I didn’t really
mind the FMV in WC3. It just seemed to be a natural fit, I guess. The
series had always used its cinematic flair as its main selling point, so
adding in some actors in cheap costumes just seemed like a natural
progression.
The game was still your standard Wing Commander fare, only this time
with rudimentary polygons and a whole lot less action ever going on at
once, to avoid melting your PC. The detailed, if chunky, bitmapped ships
of the past were gone in favor of super low poly-count models, but it all
still worked. It was still a Wing Commander game.
Right up until it turned Luke Skywalker into Grand Moff Tarkin as he
WIPED OUT AN ENTIRE PLANET at the end of the game.
A planet that, it turns out, was entirely devoid of life and cities and
settlements and even vegetation because the engine just couldn’t be
bothered with any of that business. Kilrah was really just a big, grey rock
in space, and you had to drop a bomb on its thermal exhaust port to
COMMIT MASS GENOCIDE of an entire civilization.
Way to be a dick, Chris Roberts.
My kid didn’t like it very much.
#2 – Doom II
Doom II was more Doom.
More LAN parties.
More carnage.
More chainsaw.
The only thing disappointing about it was how lame the super shotgun
reloading animation was. I usually opted to stay with the standard pump
action, because that classic cha-chink was just a lot more satisfying.
#1 – Star Wars: TIE Fighter
TIE Fighter was, is, and will
likely remain the BEST Star Wars game ever made. Or, at least the best
one with starship combat in it.
I didn’t see how this game would be any better than X-Wing. Who
wanted to play as part of the Empire? Who wanted to fly weak, shieldless TIE fighters around, just to get exploded by a Porkins in an X-Wing?
Nobody, I reasoned.
Until I played it.
Not only was everything about X-Wing improved, from the graphics
(now sporting spiffy gouraud shading and light texture work) to the flight
model, the between-mission bits and all that jazz – but LucasArts actually
made the story work.
They made flying for the Empire fun.
And they didn’t go stupid with it. The game expertly walked a delicate
line between having the player do evil things without ever actually feeling
evil, or that any of your actions were unjustified. It was a great bit of
imperial propaganda, and it worked.
If you never played it, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.
Go. Play it now.
#10 – The Dig
Oh, how the mighty
have fallen. By ’95, LucasArts was already on its way out, even if it
didn’t know it yet.
The Dig was supposed to be this amazing, legendary collaboration
between LucasArts and ILM and Steven Spielberg to produce one of the
most visually impressive, emotionally gripping game narratives ever
created.
Instead, we got Myst with dialog trees and pixel art. And way too much
of the ol’ Showing Off Of What We Rendered in unskippable showcase
animations.
The story was neither exceptionally compelling nor emotionally gripping.
The much-touted collaboration with ILM didn’t amount to much of
anything we hadn’t already seen in a ton of other games by the time the
much-delayed and overhyped The Dig finally crawled out from under
whatever alien rock it was hiding beneath.
It took itself too seriously while blissfully unaware of its goofier parts.
The characters were shallow and one-dimensional. Nothing about it was
special in any way. At All.
It was a massive disappointment for me, but I’m still putting it on the list
of the year’s ten best games because I don’t know why.
Probably because I’m still waiting for it to get better than it never will.
#9 – BioForge
Origin would be right behind
LucasArts soon enough, in their own fall from grace. But at least they
were still taking risks. (So was LucasArts; just not with The Dig.)
BioForge was a crazy blend of survival horror, awful combat mechanics,
and adventure game tropes. But it did have realtime, texture-mapped
character models with skeletal animation, which was new. I still
remember online debates about whether or not they were pre-rendered
like the backgrounds.
People can be pretty stupid sometimes.
BioForge had a really good story, tons (and I do mean tons) of exposition
to digest in the form of mountains of text, and an interesting interface
whenever you had to operate anything with your hand. It was similar to
an older game I didn’t put on this list called Captain Blood (which I think
got a sequel titled Commander Blood), in that whenever your character
needed to interact with, say, a terminal or his PDA, you did it by way of
actually moving his big sausage-fingered mitten across the screen.
Clumsily.
It’s a weird game and definitely not for everyone, but it’s worth trying.
However, if you’ve come for the fork, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Just
an FYI.
#8 – Descent
This was one of the first games I
ever bought more for its multiplayer than its single-player mode. In fact, I
hardly remember anything about the single-player game other than some
kind of red robot things you shot at a lot.
Descent was kind of like a first person shooter where your body was
actually a spaceship flying through caves and stuff. It was extremely
disorienting until you got the hang of it, and the game’s AI was nothing to
write home about, but the multiplayer…oh, the multiplayer!
It took some doing if you wanted to play outside of a LAN party, though.
You needed, if I remember correctly, Winsock and Kali. Or maybe just
Kali. The idea was to turn TCP/IP traffic into IPX/SPX traffic so the
game could understand it, which the two utilities took care of through
your 9600 baud modem. Or a 14.4 if you were lucky.
A lot of games didn’t like this approach, but Descent worked remarkably
well with the setup, so it was a great candidate for online multiplayer
insanity.
And it was insane.
And also tons of fun.
#7 – I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Before I even knew
who Harlan Ellison was, before I’d even read the story this game was
based on, and years before I would ever exchange words with the man
himself (who is one of the kindest, most gracious people on the planet as
long as you don’t piss him off), I picked this game up on a whim. It had a
cool title, the screenshots looked decent, and the blurb on the back of the
box intrigued me.
I had no idea what I was in for.
The game is cruel, the antagonist AI is brutal and condescending and
bitter in a way Shodan never was (voiced by Ellison himself, who always
does an amazing job with narration). It’s hard to describe much of the
game without ruining everything, but just know that it will mess with
your head.
And you heart. And soul. And everything in between.
With any luck, it’ll cause you to go pick up one of Harlan’s anthologies.
I’d recommend The Essential Ellison and, if you can find it, Edgeworks
Vol. 3, which contains a collection of some of his best essays.
Trust me.
#6 – Command & Conquer
Dune 2 might’ve
started the RTS revolution. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans continued it, but
Command & Conquer made it something special.
You knew you were in for a treat when you were installing the game,
which was normally an activity about as exciting as tying your shoes
reaaaalllly slowly. But C&C (the game, not the Music Factory) did
something different. It made the installer part of the experience. It had
graphics and voice and made it all seem super HIGH TECHNICAL!
The game itself was pretty meh, though. I don’t remember anything about
the story other than Tiberium was a big deal, and the harvesters were
stupid. Oh, and grenade troopers were the shit.
Beyond that, it’s all a blur. But a fun, killing-my-dad-in-epic-battles kind
of blur.
#5 – Mechwarrior II
This was THE mech
game in a completely uncrowded field of all the mech games that didn’t
exist until after Mechwarrior II showed everyone how it was done.
Your mech was fully customizable to the point that made some die hard
pen-and-paper BattleTech fans all itchy in their nether regions because
this kind of laser can’t go there, or that kind of missile shouldn’t be that
powerful or whatever, but no one cared.
We were too busy being thrilled by one of the most immersive combat
sim experiences ever. You had to worry about heat dissipation (unless
you were on a cold planet). You had to manage jump jets and weapon sets
and firing orders. And your mech constantly talked to you in this cool scifi computer voice, keeping you abreast of everything that was going
horribly wrong that was about to lead to you exploding all over the
battlefield.
It was a magical time.
#4 – Full Throttle
The next to last gasp of the dying
LucasArts adventure game, Full Throttle was a tour de force of Tim
Schafer’s lunatic dreams. And it was awesome.
Well, except for the stupid realtime bike-fighting sequences that should
never have been there, but let’s not dwell on the negative.
The game had a rockin’ soundtrack, the BEST pixel art / Deluxe Paint
animations ever created for an adventure game up to that point, and made
great use of larger than life characters in both style and stature.
Shame about it being so damn short, though.
#3 – Star Wars: Dark Forces
If you haven’t been
able to tell from some of the other entries on this list, I was a little bit of
an enormous Star Wars fan growing up. Dark Forces was Doom in space,
which was weird because Doom was technically Doom in space, but it
was in the kind of space that had marines and shotguns, whereas Dark
Forces was the kind of space that had laser blasters and stormtroopers.
The map design was also different than Doom, or other FPSs of the time
in that it made an effort to actually make some kind of sense, rather than
just being a big maze filled with battle arenas for blowing things up. It
had those, but they were wrapped in the illusion of real places, so it didn’t
(usually) feel like you were running around a video game level.
It felt like you were blasting stormtroopers in real places.
Plus, it had a three dimensional, rotating point model of the Death Star.
THAT YOU COULD WALK THROUGH.
It was fantastic.
#2 – Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Warcraft II perfected the RTS
genre in a way that Dune 2, Command & Conquer, and even the first
Warcraft hadn’t managed. It had a fun story that didn’t take itself too
seriously, varied units and locations, and you could even fight sea battles
over patches of oil.
Just like real life.
It was also a terrific multiplayer game. It didn’t care much about latency
and the slow ping speeds of dial up modems, so you could play without
too much worry that your buddy would wander up and kill you right in
the face before you ever even saw him, just because his modem could
squawk a little bit faster than yours.
Three daboos out of four zug zugs.
#1 – The Terminator: Future Shock
Yes, my top game of 1995 is one
a lot of people have probably never even heard of because it came out in
’95 and wasn’t called Quake. But you know everything Quake did that id
gets credit for inventing?
Future Shock did it first.
Full polygonal 3D environments and free, three-dimensional movement.
Mouselook. Fully 3D models (with the exception of ammo pickups and
weapons). Vast, open spaces and vehicles.
Wait. Quake didn’t even do those last two.
Terminator: Future Shock didn’t deliver the smooth, polished ballet of
death that Quake would the following year, but what it did, it did well. To
this day, no game has quite managed to capture the sense of verticality
that Future Shock offered. It knew you were moving in three dimensions,
and it exploited that.
Enemies would appear above or below you as often as they did at eye
level. You’d have to navigate tiny catwalks up towering scaffolding,
palms sweating as you looked down, hoping not to fall.
Plus, you got to shoot terminators. So, like. Bonus.
#10 – Star Citizen…oops, I mean Battlecruiser 3000AD
People only call Battlecruiser 3000AD an awful game because no one has
invented a better word that defines the bad, terrible, ridiculous, horrible,
broken, overhyped, underwhelming, buggy, broken mess that was Star
Citizen.
Er, I mean Battlecruiser.
Sorry, but it’s hard
not to confuse the two if you were around back in the ’90s and active
online. The proposed feature sets of both games are remarkably similar,
as are the egos and arrogance of their creators. Star Citizen’s Chris
Roberts is a only more humble than Battlecruiser’s Derek Smart in the
same way that one of these squares is a slightly different shade of green
than the others.
I’m putting Battlecruiser into the bottom slot, but still consider it one of
the best games of 1996 because of what it was supposed to be, and what I
desperately wanted it to be. I tried really, really hard to find the positive
in this game when it came out, because I identified with Derek Smart at
the time. Back in ’96, I was also an arrogant loudmouth who was the best
at everything, thought everyone else on the planet was a moron, and was
constantly getting into online pissing matches with the world.
Which is basically still me today, but tempered by a couple of decades
worth of failure and self-loathing.
I hope Star Citizen can buck the odds and be everything that Battlecruiser
wasn’t, but I have serious doubts. While everyone is busy throwing
money at his promises, people tend to forget that Chris Roberts doesn’t
really have a very good track record.
The only games he developed of note while at Origin were the first few
games in the Wing Commander series. WC had a great narrative with a
branching storyline, but outside of that, it was pretty lackluster. It was a
Hollywood tentpole movie that distracted you with really cool set pieces
so you wouldn’t pay much attention to what wasn’t going on.
Wing Commander’s flight model was basic. Every dogfight became a war
of just turning in tighter circles than your enemies, and by the time
Roberts’ last entry in the series came along, the game was more about
cheesy FMV than anything to do with what the player accomplished in a
starfighter.
After he left Origin,
he started working on Freelancer, which he touted as doing a lot of the
same things Battlecruiser didn’t, and that Star Citizen is promising. What
the game ultimately became was fun enough, but nowhere close to what
was promised. And even then, Freelancer only ever finally materialized in
any form once he left Digital Anvil – a company he founded that went
belly up after two decent, if mediocre releases (the other being
Starlancer).
After that, he thought he’d make some more movies and started a studio
that failed until Kickstarter became a thing and he found a way to milk
the nostalgia cow to fund his newest project.
Which is exactly like his last project…which didn’t deliver.
Time will tell – and I hope Star Citizen is as amazing as its enormous list
of promised features and seemingly bottomless budget suggest – but I
was around in 1996. I’ve heard these same promises before.
I’ve played Battlecruiser 3000AD.
#9 – The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall
Speaking of bug-ridden releases,
the second game in The Elder Scrolls series was pretty awful, too. It was
more of the same from Arena, but everything was a little more focused
this time around. A little more polished. The narrative was a bit better, the
world a little more dense, a little less spartan.
But it still felt hollow. Artificial.
Much of Daggerfall felt like a computer put it together, ticking off boxes
of required parameters as it cobbled together random dungeon layouts
laid on top of a procedurally designed overworld.
Which is exactly what it was.
I’m not sure how much – if really, any – of Daggerfall was hand crafted
by human designers. I’m sure some aspects of it were, but none of it felt
that way. Nothing about the game felt “real” in any sense. It was all just
random (or procedural, or procedurally randomized), and it lacked any
sort of the you-are-there sense that, say, the Ultima Underworld games
managed to capture.
It’s still easy to sink dozens of hours into the thing, though. Which is
what I did, and why it’s on this list.
#8 – Circle of Blood / Broken Sword
Originally titled
Circle of Blood here in the states, the first game in the Broken Sword
series was a terrific return to what the industry had already labelled a
dead genre back in ’96: the point-and-click adventure. It’s a genre that
has experienced many phantom deaths over the years, but that keeps
coming back like either some kind of noble Lazarus figure, or a tattered
old whack-a-mole in the corner of some dirty traveling carnival.
Depending on your point of view.
Personally, I love the genre – and Broken Sword hit all the right notes.
There was murder, an overarching conspiracy, great art and animation,
intriguing characters, etc…
I played this game from start to finish, and couldn’t wait for more. It
wasn’t the best game of ’96 by any means, but it was a really, really good
one.
#7 – Duke Nukem 3D
Another generally beloved game
stuck pretty far down on my list is this little crescendo to dying
misogyny, and I’m probably not going to make many friends by saying
that. Or by putting it in the #7 spot for this year.
I’m sorry, but Duke Nukem 3D was not a very good game. The shareware
version was fine – kind of great, even – but after that, things went
downhill fast. The levels were poorly designed mazes, the ripped off
catchphrases grew stale, and everything about the game just got boring.
Or plain bad.
People argue all the time that Duke was an homage to the over the top
action heroes of ’80s action movies – and maybe they’re right. But I was
around back when the game came out. I was very active online,
interacting with other gamers and developers, following this trend or that
one, and I have to tell you…anyone who thinks that the character of Duke
Nukem was anything other than the absolutely sincere, most flattering
version of himself that George Broussard sees whenever he looks in the
mirror is fooling themselves.
Plus, Levelord was a creepy ass dude.
The only originality in the game came from its inventive weapons –
which made multiplayer a blast, even if everyone always limited games to
the shareware maps. The engine was impressive for its level of
interactivity and destructability, but it’d take the skilled hands of Any
Other Developer to fully realize its potential (more on that next year).
So, yeah. Duke3d is fun, but it’s not great. It threw its best ideas at
players in the shareware version, which probably should’ve just been the
full release.
Less is usually – and this is especially true with a character like Duke –
more.
#6 – Discworld 2
I’m a huge Discworld fan, and a
great admirer of Sir Terry Pratchett. I think he’s one of the greatest voices
of our time, and will go down in history as the British version of Mark
Twain. (Which is how you have to describe Pratchett to Americans
who’ve never heard of him.)
The first Discworld game didn’t make my list because it wasn’t really
very good. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it wasn’t at all memorable, and
the interface made it a chore to get through. Its sequel, on the other hand,
is one of the better adventure games of the ’90s – which is saying
something, when you look at some of the other gems from the decade.
Discworld 2 went the way of cel animation, which was the downfall for a
lot of other games that tried it. Fortunately, this game pulled it off and
managed to convey the humor of the novels in game format for the first
time. I’ve never really been a big Rincewind fan, but playing him here
was fun. Interacting with other characters was fun. Everything was…fun.
The story was a mashup of Reaper Man and Moving Pictures, if you’re
following along with your Pratchett books at home. There are a lot of
nods to other novels in the series, but you’ll definitely recognize RM and
MP as you play.
Which is something you should totally go do. Right now.
#5 – Tomb Raider
Back in ’96, I was away at college in a
strange town without many friends except for the staff at the nearby
Hasting’s, which was an entertainment store that sold everything from
comic books and movies to video games and collectibles. It also rented
games, which was nice.
One day, I walked into the store and bought my very first 3D accelerator,
along with a shiny new 3D-accelerated game. For testing purposes, you
understand.
The card was a 3DFX Voodoo. The game was Tomb Raider.
The experience was amazing.
The dithered colors, chunky textures, and low framerates of the past
were…well, a thing of the past. Textures were sharp, colors were crisp,
and the framerate was buttery smooth. Everything just looked better,
played better, and ran smoother than it ever had before.
The game itself was pretty lackluster and nothing I thought was too
fascinating outside of the weird way you could make Lara do a split
coming out of a handstand from dangling over the edge of a wall.
Which was pretty fascinating, at the time.
Ah, memories.
#4- Diablo
The birth of the action RPG. The
clicking simulator. The shallow, empty, almost narrative-free, nearly statless roleplaying game that never had any right to be good arrived in 1996.
And it was brilliant.
Nothing at all about Diablo sounds appealing. You run around a mostly
empty town so you can dive down into one randomly generated dungeon
to spend hours clicking your mouse button like a coked-up lab rat
hammering the reward level in fruitless pursuit of its next fix.
But it worked.
For whatever intangible, crazy reason, it worked. And the multiplayer
was even better, whether it actually made the game any more compelling
or just because misery loves company, it was tons of fun.
Hours. Upon hours. Clicking. Click, click, click…
#3 – SimCity 2000
What more is there to say about
SimCity 2000 than that it’s a very good city management sim? It was
orders of magnitude more complex and compelling than SimCity 1 had
been back in ’89, and would remain the perfect game in the series until
SimCity 4 came along in 2003.
Everything SimCity did, SimCity 2000 did better. Or actually did at all,
because SimCity 1 was pretty damn basic. In fact, a lot of what SimCity
2000 does is what I imagined SimCity 1 was doing (that it totally wasn’t)
when I played it years earlier. Back in the ’80s, you kind of had to insert
your own imagination into the games you were playing, in order to fill in
the gaps left by the developers and the technology available at the time.
I think that’s one of the reasons classic games were so good, actually…
But never mind any of that now. It’s 1996 and SimCity 2000 does all that
pesky imagining for you.
What a time to be alive.
#2 – Civilization II
If Civilization was a brilliant
game, then Civ 2 was its smarter, prettier, funnier, more interesting
cousin who never got invited to Civ 1’s parties, but who somehow just
started showing up anyway and upstaging everyone there.
I’ll never know how many hours I logged in Civilization 2 because I can’t
count that high.
It’s a time sink of a game; it’s a black hole into which one pours every
waking moment into either actively playing it or thinking about playing
it, or planning how you’re going to think about it the next time you play
it.
It’s infinitely customizable, infinitely replayable, and infinitely satisfying.
It’s digital crack.
#1 – Quake
Quake remains the best FPS ever
made, and I’ll have words with anyone who thinks differently.
It doesn’t have much of a story, there are no characters to speak of, and
the maps are abstract and meaningless. There is no point to anything you
do in the game, apart from the satisfaction you get from killing things and
winning.
Which is why it’s so good.
Among all the other standard “innovations” to the genre that Quake
doesn’t have include, but are not limited to:
● Weapon carry limit
● Regenerating shields
● Regenerating health
● Sprinting stamina
● Realistic damage model
● Realistic physics
● Realistic movement speed
● Realistic anything
Quake is the essence of the first person shooter, distilled and concentrated
into its purest form. It’s a ballet of death, and it is exquisite.
Running down corridors, constantly in motion, constantly swiveling your
view, shooting a volley from your nailgun at a distant enemy before
rocket jumping up to an otherwise inaccessible platform, spinning on
your way up to shoot another rocket down at your pursuer before righting
yourself as you land and lob a grenade around the corner to catch the guy
running up the stairs to frag you.
It was – and still is – a thrilling, almost zen-like experience.
I still play Quake regularly today, as it’s one of my mood games. Which
is not at all weird or anything, right? I mean, surely you have mood
games, too.
Mine are:
● General anxiety – Unreal
● Hopeless depression – Quake 2
● Furious rage – Quake 1
Don’t talk to me when I’m Quaking.
You wouldn’t like me I’m Quaking.
#10 – Fallout
I never really liked
Fallout. There, I said it.
Feels good.
There’s nothing really wrong with Fallout, I guess. The box was really
cool, which is what enticed me to buy the game in the first place, so the
marketing department gets a big thumbs up. That’s something.
But the game itself? Meh. I’ve never understood what other people saw
(and still see) in this game. It had horrible graphics, even for the time –
and not in a technological way. The art design – outside of the Fallout
boy and the manual, really – was just muddy and brown and ugly.
Nothing about the wasteland of Fallout 1 was remotely interesting. It was
just the same thing, over and over.
The combat was also ridiculous, with companions that would murder you
in the face as often as they managed to hit an actual enemy, and the whole
thing was driven by a random number generator so absurd that you could
have the best gear and still manage to be mortally wounded by a
cockroach.
The story was its saving grace, I guess. But I wouldn’t really know. I
played it a lot, trying to figure out what everyone was making such a fuss
over, but I never finished the damn thing.
And I don’t intend to. So don’t paw at me with your petty little guilt.
#9 – Age of Empires
This crazy little
game from Microsoft – back when they made games – tried to be a blend
of Civilization and Warcraft II, but never managed to be either. Instead, it
became its own animal which carved its own unique niche in the RTS
genre.
The campaigns were kind of stupid and pointless, but the multiplayer was
fantastic. I couldn’t even come close to telling you how many hours I
poured into this game, playing epic campaigns against my own father. He
was really good at AoE (but was awful at Warcraft II), so he enjoyed
having a fighting chance against me.
This even matching of our skills led to several stalemates along the way,
the most memorable of which was one game where we literally exhausted
all the resources of the map while managing to annihilate both of our
armies. We spent the last hour of the game trying to hunt down our
remaining peasants so we could have them fight to the last man with
hammers and pitchforks.
Until he managed to find THE LAST TREE on the planet, and was able
to use it to craft a spear or something, which made short work of my last
couple of useless villagers.
Einstein said it best, when describing that epic match: “I know not with
what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be
fought with sticks and stones.”
Smart guy.
#8 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
I’ll keep this one short and sweet:
the game was great, the FMV was awful.
Really, you’d think being made by LucasArts would give the upper hand
to a Star Wars game featuring full motion video. I mean, the Lucasfilm
Archives were literally right next door. It’s not as if they had to just
cobble together fan made costumes or anything.
But they did.
And all of it was bad. The acting, the lighting, the direction, the costumes,
the makeup, the special effects – all of it was terrible.
It kept me from ever finishing the game for years. YEARS!
And that’s all I have to say about that.
#7 – Blood
In the skills hands of any
developer who wasn’t 3D Realms, the Build engine was capable of
producing good games, with this one being the best of them. Blood has
catchy one-liners and the same homage to B-movies as Duke Nukem 3D,
but it wasn’t stupid about it. Because it wasn’t fueled by George
Broussard’s wish fulfillment fantasies, Blood actually managed to be
original and clever without just ripping off everything that had come
before it.
It was a low budget horror movie come to life, with you as the star. It was
dark and gritty in the way of all things ’90s, but it didn’t fall into the
black pit of angst like so many other titles of the decade. It was funny,
fun, self-aware, and difficult.
It’s still very playable today, despite there not being any source ports
available for it.
Just remember how I said it was hard. It’s not 1997 anymore, kids. Adjust
your difficulty levels accordingly.
#6 – Interstate ’76
Ever wonder what
would happen if you took those CGI guys in that Dire Straits video from
the ’80s and stuck them in a video game set in the ’70s? No? Well,
someone did.
Which is how Interstate ’76 was born.
It’s a combat driving sim set in an alternate ’70s America where you
drive around and shoot things and wreck things and blow up things. The
soundtrack is funky. The characters are funky. The funk is funky.
It’s a weird game, and probably not for everyone. But if you can manage
to get it working properly on modern hardware (even the GOG release
has issues), you’ll be in for a unique experience that has never been
replicated, even by its sequel.
Which kinda sucked, by the way.
#5 – Quake II
Back in ’97, id
Software took everything that made Quake amazing, looked at it for a
minute, thought about life while considering the futility of man, and
threw all of it into the garbage can.
And then they made Quake II.
In every way technically superior to Quake, it was vastly inferior in all
the ways that actually mattered. It injected a ridiculous and stupid “story”
into the franchise, then – probably as an over-correction to criticisms
regarding Quake’s schizophrenic level design – tried to make all of its
maps interconnected, with backtracking and multiple objectives and just a
bunch of lame crap nobody wanted.
We wanted more Quake. id tried to give it to us later, by putting more
Quake into Quake 3 – but by then, it was too late. The damage was done.
So then they tried to give more Quake 2 in Quake 4, which was probably
the worst id game id ever didn’t make. That one came to us by way of
Raven Software, who completely missed the point and developed the
world’s most unnecessary and unwanted sequel. And then somehow
made it even more boring and awful than anyone could have predicted.
I still played a lot of Quake 2, though. And it’s grown on me over the
years – but I can’t help but wonder what the game would’ve looked like if
Romero hadn’t left after Quake, and id hadn’t begun its slow and steady
decline into irrelevance.
#4 – Dungeon Keeper
It took years –
decades, even – but someone finally realized that playing the bad guy
could be fun. And boy, was it ever fun.
Dungeon Keeper charged the player with taking on the role of the evil
bad guy at the end of every RPG plot. It relished being evil in a good,
clean, campy sort of way that all those goody-two-shoes heroes could
never hope to understand.
This was a game that not only let you literally slap your own minions, but
actively encouraged it as being motivational for the little bastards. It had
you abduct good guys, then convert them to evil in your torture chambers
– which was really pretty forward-thinking of Bullfrog, seeing as how the
U.S. wouldn’t figure that out until years later, after waterboarding became
everyone’s favorite party game at blacksite prisons.
You could abandon enemies in your cemetery, and they’d arise as
skeletons. You could create warlocks and vampires, and then give
everyone a big casino to play in to let off some steam by way of giving
you back some of their salaries when they lost. And you could rig the
games.
Its sequel only got better, but more on that later. For now…
IT IS PAYDAY.
#3 – Outlaws
A severely graphically
underpowered latecomer to the FPS scene, Outlaws was overlooked by a
lot of people who just couldn’t go back to 2.5D, sprite-based gaming.
Which is sad, because they missed out on the best Clint Eastwood
simulator ever made.
Probably the only Clint Eastwood simulator ever made, but still. It’s a fun
game.
Crank the difficulty up to the maximum, and get ready to be murdered in
one or two hits – FOR REALISM. It makes the game a lot more fun.
Trust me.
Or just keep it on easy and blast your way through the levels like an
unstoppable death machine on a quest to the next cutscene.
I hope you plant better than you shoot.
#2 – The Curse of Monkey Island
The last great Monkey Island
game was actually the first Monkey Island game without Ron Gilbert.
However, enough of the old LucasArts staff were still around to make
sure that it didn’t turn out awful. (That wouldn’t happen until the next
game.)
Decidedly different in tone (not to mention art style) than the previous
two games, it stands on its own as a unique entry in the series. In some
ways, it’s superior to even Monkey Island 2 – but only in flashes, really.
Like when your crew mutinies via song.
The rhyming insult sword fighting was pretty lame, though. And the ship
combat was objectively awful. But most of the characters and jokes still
worked, and Guybrush finally got a voice, which was nice. Dominic
Armato perfectly captured the voice I had for him in my head, which
almost never happens.
That said, there’s something to non-voiced adventure games that you just
can’t replicate with a full cast. Some jokes – some narrative styles
(namely, Ron Gilbert’s) – just work better as text. Some methods of
writing dialog only really work when read, rather than spoken.
Which is just one of the reasons I’m so excited about Thimbleweed Park.
#1 – Ultima Online
Yes, I know MUDs
and BBS DOORS had been around for ages, but Ultima Online was the
first graphical MMO to catch on. And it was amazing.
Until it wasn’t.
Eventually patched with enough Band-Aids to cover a small continent
until the original game was all but unrecognizable, the early days of
Ultima Online were something special. I was one of the many people who
signed up for the first beta, and I was hooked from that moment on. (Until
it started to suck, anyway.)
In a way no other game to date has ever managed to recapture (although
one came close, but more on that next year), Ultima Online really felt like
a second life. Britannia was a new world to not only explore, but to live
and work in. I spent hours upon hours mining and working on my
blacksmithing skills to the point that I started to wonder how good I’d be
at making swords in real life, if I’d only devoted a fraction of my time to
actually learning how to be a blacksmith. I’d probably have a killer beard
by now, at least. And one of those cool leather apron things.
Sadly, the game eventually devolved into the min/maxer paradise
something like WoW would later manage to exploit to its full potential.
People stopped caring so much about living a virtual life, and started
focusing more on just being the biggest PvP badass, more obnoxious than
the last.
Origin tried patching the game to fix different exploits while expanding
the PvP nature of the game, until one day it just wasn’t fun anymore.
But it took a good while before any of that happened. For much of ’97, I
was a happy resident of Britannia, content to forge crappy pieces of armor
on the outskirts of town before trying to sell them at the ping-crippling
bank in Britain.
VENDOR! BUY! BANK! GUARDS!
#10 – Baldur’s Gate
So fleshy
Oh, god. This again. HEYA!
Look, I don’t like this game. I’ve never liked this game. I bought it when
it came out, then spent the next 15 years trying to like this game. I even
recently went back and forced myself to play through it from beginning to
end, which was a misery so exquisite that I documented my (hilarious)
pain every step of the way .
It still amazes me that, to this day, people hold up Baldur’s Gate as some
kind of shining example of great storytelling in a game. Yeah, maybe if
you played this when you were twelve and thought that one episode of
Power Rangers was emotionally powerful, but there’s absolutely nothing
special about BG’s story. Go kill the big bad guy. The end.
Sure, there’s a little more to it and there are some kinda/sorta interesting
sidequests that you’ll do for your companions just so they’ll stop their
INCESSANT CRYWHINING, but none of them are very special. If you
want a version of Baldur’s Gate that’s actually good, go pick up Pillars of
Eternity. If you want something unique and thought provoking, pick up
any Ultima from 4-7.
I’m only including this game on my list for the massive amount of time
and energy I sunk into the damn thing, trying – desperately – to
understand what was so amazing about it. I never did.
Also, shut up, Imoen.
#9 – Starcraft
I enjoyed Starcraft, but not in the
way that a zillion internationally competitive professional gamers did. It
was Warcraft II in space, which wasn’t a bad thing. I liked Warcraft II,
but Starcraft never really clicked with me. It wasn’t boring or anything,
but I guess I just didn’t really dig the sci-fi setting.
I don’t actually remember much about the game itself, other than that I
played it and thought it was fun enough. The multiplayer was enjoyable,
and it gave us the term Zerg Rush, which gamers still use today, so that
was something, I guess.
Strangely enough, I would really get into its sequel years later. I’m not
sure why that one grabbed me when Starcraft didn’t, but maybe I just
didn’t have my head in the game back in ’98. Or maybe the
oversaturation of the genre just had me burned out at the time. I dunno.
It’s a good game, and worth playing. But never go head to head against a
Korean if you do.
That’s just good advice, right there.
#8 – Descent: Freespace
I still have no idea
what this game had to do with Descent. I’m sure it was explained at some
point, but I’m reasonably certain it just came down to the marketing
department trying to create a franchise that never really happened.
Descent: Freespace one of the last, great space combat sims, and it was
fantastic. The only thing better than Freespace was its sequel, which is
still being played and improved upon to this day, thanks to a great
community.
The story in this one is nothing to get excited about, but the dogfights
were amazing. The graphics were great, the game was smooth and fast
and fun. Everything was just top shelf, all the way. Plus, no crappy FMV
anywhere. Bonus!
If you want to play it today, make sure to grab FS2Open and a copy of
Freespace 2, so you can play the original in the new and improved engine
the community has been working on for years.
#7 – Thief: The Dark Project
I’m probably not going to make
many friends by putting Thief so far down on this list, but there were
better games in ’98. I’m sorry, but there just were.
Thief was great fun and brought excellent stealth-based gameplay to the
FPS genre, but it wasn’t great. Thief II was, but we’re not there yet. Right
now, we’re still in ’98 and Thief is still trying to figure itself out while
also competing against some landmark titles. Because 1998 was a pretty
great year for gaming.
All of the things that Looking Glass would eventually perfect in the
sequel were there in the original, but they just didn’t really come together
well enough to put Thief in the top 5 games from ’98. It’s in the top 10,
though, so please don’t murder me with a water arrow to the knee or
anything.
I apologize.
#6 – Unreal
This one makes me
sad.
Years before Unreal was released, I was super involved in tracking its
development. It promised to be the FPS I’d been dreaming of for years, so
I found a community online and joined in. I hung out in IRC and got to
know most of the developers, wrote articles for the game’s top fan site,
and met a lot of people I’m still friends with today. I got to play early
builds of the game as it was coming along, since I was trustworthy
enough that a few of the devs would send them my way as long as I
promised not to tell. (Since almost everyone that was at Epic at that time
is gone now, I figure the statute of limitations on my silence has run out.)
Unreal held a ton of promise, and was brimming with potential.
Then it came out, and it wasn’t very special. Which made me sad in my
feelings hole.
Some of the maps were brilliant – Bluff Eversmoking will forever be one
of my favorite levels in any game ever – but the game itself ended up
being more of a technology demo than anything else. The Unreal engine
could do some amazing things, but the kinaesthetics of the combat just
felt…off. Floaty, even.
It’s hard to describe.
The one super shiny spot in the
whole game (for me) comes from an enemy type called the Krall. They
have a big spear they’ll hit you with that launches you high into the air,
which I thought would be a brilliant thing to have happen in a FPS.
Which is why I campaigned to the dev team to put something like that in
the game, even though my idea was to have them actually impale you
first (which actually made it into the throw animation). At any rate, my
“flinging beasties” made it into the final game, even though Bleszinski
would later swear it was his idea from the beginning and that they’d
always been there. (Except I knew that they hadn’t, because I’d played all
those early builds.) It’s not like I was going to sue Epic for “stealing” the
dumb idea I begged them to put in the game in the first place, but I guess
you can never be too careful.
Fortunately for Epic, the Unreal engine would eventually go on to eclipse
id’s offerings for licensing to other developers, and the 2000s would
come to be absolutely brimming with Unreal-powered games.
So everything worked out.
#5 – Starsiege: Tribes
Back before every
online multiplayer FPS became either Call of Duty or Battlefield, or a
clone of Call of Duty or Battlfield, there was Starseige: Tribes. And it
was wonderful.
I sunk oodles of time into the game, and I don’t even know how much a
single oodle is. It’s probably a lot, though. Because I played the absolute
hell out of this game.
It had all your standard game modes, which were nothing special. Capture
the flag was probably the most popular, but it was how Tribes went about
everything that made it amazing.
There were vehicles to pilot – including transports for your team. There
were bases to maintain, areas to protect, and defenses to build. There
were multiple character types that radically changed the way you played,
and what tools and weapons were available to you. There were even
jetpacks. JETPACKS!
The weapons were almost universally awful, but that’s what made them
great. No gun was very accurate – and the most common weapon fired a
fairly unpredictable disc that took forever to make it to a target. You had
to really practice with it to become any good, but once you’d mastered it,
you became deadly.
Oh, and there was the skiing.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, too bad. Go google it or
something, because it was awesome.
#4 – Half-Life
I know what you’re thinking. How
is Half-Life not my #1 game of ’98? Well, it’s pretty simple, really.
I loved the game. It was immersive, had a unique way of actively
presenting its narrative, played out in maps that felt very “real” and made
sense, etc… It also had terrific AI (for the marines) that would work
together to try and flank you or lead you into an ambush. Everything
about the game was terrific.
But there were other games I liked more in 1998, that I still go back to
today on a regular basis. Games that made more of a lasting impact on
me, and have stood the test of time. But most importantly, they were
games I put a lot of time in back when they came out. They impressed me
by doing something very new, very different, or very, very well.
I loved Half-Life. I just loved a few other games more.
#3 – Trespasser
Having developed a
reputation over the years as one of the worst games ever made, including
Trespasser in my #3 spot might seem like a weird choice. And maybe it
is. I dunno. I can never tell, really. I’m a weird dude.
To get the obvious out of the way, I’ll acknowledge up front that
Trespasser failed to deliver on a lot of its promises, which wasn’t helped
at all by the fake screenshots they used to market the game that showed
off dynamic shadowing from tree leaves on the backs of bump-mapped
dinosaurs wandering the jungle. None of that was in the game.
And it was buggy and strange and goofy.
But it was also way ahead of its time, which is something I recognized
even then.
Trespasser was the first major FPS to have a fully-realized physics
engine, which no one had ever seen before. I used to spend time in the
game just dropping things down stairs to watch them bounce and roll
realistically to the ground. The sound engine was materials-based, and
used something they called Digital Foley (I think), which would blend
sounds on the fly, so that when you hit a wood plank against a tree trunk,
it sounded differently than when you hit it against a metal post.
The much-maligned “rubber
arm” that was the game’s main method of interaction with the world was,
I admit, a silly mess. It took time to get the hang of, and even once you
were really good with it, waving your hand around like a fleshy arm
tentacle still looked pretty stupid.
The dinosaurs were also stupid – even the raptors. The AI was crap, even
though the dinos would attack each other. Sometimes. They also weren’t
animated in any traditional sense. The game used inverse kinematics to
move them on the fly, which was supposed to allow them to navigate
complex terrain and react realistically to wounds. But mostly, it just made
them limp around like drunk reptilian idiots.
So why is this in my top 3 for ’98? Simple.
I LOVE THE GAME.
For all its many faults, the game is incredibly immersive. Once you let
yourself get into the game, you are in its world. You’re creeping through
Site B, dodging dinosaurs and interacting with the environment in very
tangible ways. It’s tense, exciting, and rewarding.
It’s a great game. You just have to give it a chance.
#2 – Heart of Darkness
I promise I’m not trying to be hipster
cool with some of these more obscure games. I’ve just been an avid
gamer for a very long time, so I’ve played a lot of shit that you probably
haven’t. That’s not me trying to be cool or anything; it usually just came
down to being bored and picking up a new game some random Saturday
because I didn’t have anything else to play.
Which is how I found Heart of Darkness. Better than Another World (also
by this game’s designer) or Flashback (not by this game’s designer,
although a lot of people think it was, for some reason), or even Oddworld,
Heart of Darkness is the pinnacle of the cinematic puzzle platformer.
You play a kid whose dog gets kidnapped by some evil dark shadow
wizard dude (technically by a purple Q-Bert with a mucous control
problem that mistakes the dog for you and take it to his master), and its
up to you to get him back. You start the game by watching a really badly
animated pre-rendered cutscene that involves you getting in the
transdimensional rocketship you just happen to have lying around in your
treehouse, and you fly away to save the pooch.
The in-game graphics are actually much, much better than the prerendered cinematics, with excellent animation and brilliant pixel art. It’s
probably the best pixel-based animation I’ve ever seen, to this day.
The game is imaginative, challenging yet forgiving, and is a pleasure to
play. I’m also pretty sure Heart of Darkness was the very last cinematic
platformer, which was a short-lived genre with only a handful of games to
its credit, but I really liked it. The only game of recent memory that
comes somewhat close to the style is Shadow Complex, which is more
Metroid than Oddworld.
I wish GOG could get their hands on this game, because tracking down a
copy is a pain if you don’t already own it on CD. But it’s totally worth
picking up, if you can find one.
#1 – Grim Fandango
This one shouldn’t
come as a shock if you’ve been following along with my list up to this
point. I’m a huge adventure game fan, and this was the last, great
adventure game of the ’90s, and one of the best ever made. Period.
I’m not even going to tell you why this game is so good. It was
remastered recently in a great way that’s now the preferred way to play
the game. If you’ve never played Grim Fandango, I suggest you stop
reading this right now. Go away, grab a copy of the remaster, and enjoy.
YOU ARE WELCOME.
#10 – Requiem: Avenging Angel
I sometimes think I’m the only
person who ever played this game, and it’s not hard to understand why.
During a time when games like Noah’s Ark 3D and Captain Bible were
on store shelves, a game with “Angel” in the title probably got
overlooked by everyone who didn’t enjoy horrible religious games.
Which is a shame, because Requiem is religious in the same way that The
Prophecy was a heartwarming tale about the power of prayer. You play as
an angel named Malachi in a dystopian future where other angels (called
The Fallen, naturally) have taken over Earth and enslaved humanity
because dudes just weren’t righteous enough or whatever. It’s sort of a
sci-fi heretical bit of first person shooting fun, and it’s a surprisingly good
game.
Plus, you can shoot lightning from your palm and kill your enemies with
plagues of locusts. Oh, and you get to turn people into pillars of salt, too.
Tell me what other FPS lets you do that.
#9 – Rollercoaster Tycoon
I fell in love with this game right
from the start. It was like Bullfrog’s old Theme Park, but this one was
actually really good. (Not that Theme Park was bad, but it was pretty
basic.)
Designing coasters and placing rides and shops was only part of the fun,
though. The real joy from the game came from screwing with your guests
by sucking every last penny from their wallets in the most devious ways
possible. Want to sell more drinks? Build a french fry stand. Then, jack
up the prices on sodas next to it because salty fries make people thirsty. Is
it raining? Quickly! Triple the price of umbrellas at every umbrella stand.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was deceptively simple, yet brilliantly complex.
Mastering the interconnectedness of the game’s different systems was the
key to becoming a true theme park tycoon, which took time and
experimentation.
Or you could just create coasters that would murder ever single rider
stupid enough to trust you not to kill them.
Whichever.
#8 – Dungeon Keeper 2
Just like Dungeon Keeper, but
better. Dungeon Keeper 2 featured an improved engine, better graphics,
and just more being deliciously evil.
Of course, I’m probably in the minority on this one. So no big shock
there. But the general consensus among Internet People is that DK2 is
vastly inferior to DK1. I have no idea why they think this way though,
because they usually just go on about how the first game had the better
“atmosphere” or something.
A more cynical person might take this to mean that they played the first
game when they were young and more impressionable, so it made more
of an impression on their squishy brain jelly. But maybe they’re right. I
honestly wouldn’t know, because I love both of the games – I just love
DK2 a little bit more.
Maybe it’s because I like the “dumbed down” gameplay the haters like to
deride, but I’ve never noticed any drastic changes that made the sequel
any easier than the original. In a lot of ways, it actually gets significantly
more difficult.
Then again, I could just be stupid.
#7 – Ultima IX: Ascension
Yes, I played and enjoyed Ultima
IX. I know a lot of people didn’t. Heck, most people didn’t – but its
reputation for being awful is usually just in retrospect, in that same
misguided way that People Who Weren’t There genuinely think E.T. was
the worst game ever made. (It wasn’t.)
U9 is certainly not without its flaws. It’s got a lot of them. But it gets a lot
right, too. And it’s actually a pretty fun game, if you can get past the
snobbery.
But I’ve already written at length about my thoughts concerning this
over-despised diamond in the rough, so I won’t rehash those arguments
here.
Just trust me that it’s not as bad as people say.
Or don’t trust me, and just go read this .
#6 – The Longest Journey
Yet another resurgence in the
“dead” point and click adventure genre, The Longest Journey was a
masterpiece. Lengthy, difficult (sometimes to the point of absurdity…I’m
looking at you, rubber ducky puzzle), with a terrific narrative and great
characters, this game had it all.
It also understood what a lot of adventure games seem to forget: that,
while the Big Reward for playing an adventure game is getting to the end
and experiencing the story, the little rewards that keep you motivated to
keep playing come in the form of New Art. The Longest Journey had tons
of locations, all distinct and varied in dramatic ways. You were always
discovering new places to see and new people to talk to, almost every
time you solved a puzzle.
Then, it took things even further by offering two different worlds: the
dystopian future where the game begins, and a medieval fantasy kingdom
where it eventually leads. It mixed things up, kept everything fresh, and
was great fun from beginning to end.
It wouldn’t get a sequel until years later, which would turn out to be a
really good game in its own right, but The Longest Journey was the
proverbial lightening in a bottle. I don’t think we’ll ever see its kind
again.
#5 – Homeworld
I suck at this game. And yes, I used
the present tense there because I still suck at this game. I sucked at this
game in 1999, I sucked at it every time I’ve tried to play it since 1999,
and I still suck at it today. Even then new remaster is too hard for me,
which is just ridiculous. I feel like an idiot.
Yet, there’s something strangely compelling about Homeworld that
always draws me back in. I’d love to play it while binge-watching
Battlestar Galactica again, but the bastards took it off of Netflix and I
don’t know if it’s ever coming back. But the “going home” and “last of
humanity” vibe that Homeworld captures just seem like it’d be a perfect
fit for a sci-fi series that does the exact same thing.
We need to talk about that damn asteroid mission, though. Or the other
one with the alien base on the far side of the sector with a zillion miles of
radioactive death dust between it and you. Or how, if you screw yourself
in Mission 3, you might not feel it until Mission 9, but by then it’s too
late, so you might as well start over and TRY AGAIN NEXT YEAR.
Story of my life.
#4 – Unreal Tournament
Ah, Unreal Tournament. Sure,
the weapons still felt floaty, but the Flak Cannon was super sweet. The
maps were all tightly designed for multiplayer madness, too. CliffyB’s
“Curse” and Myscha’s “Deck 16” were my two favorites, and I spent
countless hours murdering my friends and co-workers in them. Good
times.
The story was stupid; basically, it was just Mortal Kombat in space and
the big bad guy was a robot (or maybe that was UT2003? or 2004? Hell, I
lost track.), but nobody played UT for the single player story. All that
business was just prep work for the real show, which was exploding your
friends with a fully loaded 8ball gun, or tossing a well-placed flak
grenade around the corner.
Unreal Tournament managed to recapture a bit of the magic of the
original Quake, which is something id would also try to do when they
released Quake 3 a month later. But that game had jump pads, which
were just stupid.
#3 – Nocturne
I love this game
way more than should be legal. Unfortunately, it somehow managed to be
both ahead of its time and behind the times simultaneously, like it had
one foot in the past and the other in the future. It was ostensibly a survival
horror game – a genre people were already tiring of – with all the
standard trappings: 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds,
hunting monsters out to destroy humanity. It had all that, sure, but it had a
whole lot more.
It was the first game I can remember with cloth simulation, which means
The Stranger’s coat billowed in the breeze and reacted to the wind. Any
wind. Seriously, the thing would flap around like a panicked woodland
creature if anyone so much as breathed in its direction. But more than the
rudimentary coat physics, the game had brilliant lighting.
Nocturne wasn’t just 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds,
because those backgrounds – while pre-rendered, still had physical
geometry reflected in the game world. (Which you could see when you
used the night vision goggles and went into 1st person mode.) This
allowed the game to have something for light to interact with, so
everything would cast realistic shadows – and boy, did it ever work.
Nocturne – to this day – has some of the best use of lighting and gorgeous
shadow effects of any game I’ve ever seen.
The super cool look of the laser sights (er, I mean the ectoplasmic
targeting system) along with the flashlight beam through fog was just
icing on an already cool cake.
Nocturne also had a great narrative, and was a sort of prohibition-era XFiles. You play as The Stranger, the top field agent in a secret
government organization known as Spookhouse, which was started by
Teddy Roosevelt after he encountered a monster on a hunting trip.
They’re charged with protecting the world from the forces of darkness,
which leads the player through ancient castles to a small Texas town on
the back of a train, to fighting the undead mafia from out of a speakeasy
in Chicago.
Terminal Reality would eventually develop a Notta Sequel in the
Bloodrayne series, but it just wasn’t the same. And we won’t even talk
about the Uwu Boll movies.
#2 – Freespace 2
I went back and forth with
whether to put Freespace 2 into my #1 spot for 1999, or give it to another
equally amazing game. Both games deserve the highest honors I can’t
give them because I’m just some nobody writing a stupid blog on the
internet, but in the end, Freespace 2 just wasn’t my game of the year for
’99.
Not that it didn’t have every right to be, though.
I still play this game, and it’s still the best looking space combat sim to
date, thanks to a little thing called FS2Open and the brilliant community
of modders and developers that have kept the franchise alive and kicking
all these years. The game looks better now than it ever did, and it’ll look
just as good ten years from now, as long as people keep working on it.
Which I’m sure they will, since people have already been working on it
for 16 years now. I have no reason to think they’ll suddenly stop any time
soon.
If you’ve never played the game, you owe it to yourself to grab a joystick,
head over to GOG.com to buy a copy, then download FS2Open and
experience what is, hands-down, the best space sim ever made.
That’s still being made.
#1 – System Shock 2
Every glimmer of potential I saw
in System Shock that wasn’t fully realized back in ’94 was finally
perfected in System Shock 2. Sure, the game was ugly even by 1999
standards, but the graphics really don’t matter in this game. They’re
serviceable and get the point across, and that’s about it. What saves the
game is its atmosphere. It’s so well realized that you forget how blocky
the character models are, or how stiffly everything moves as soon as
you’ve been playing for five minutes.
This was the game that truly started the Shock “series” that would be
continued through the Bioshock franchise, while bleeding into everything
from Deus Ex to the Thief games and everything in between.
The story is pretty standard sci-fi fare and I’m not going to spoil any of it
for you here, but it’s not what the story is about that grabs you. Because,
like with any good story, what matters is how it’s told.
And System Shock 2 is told brilliantly. The player has immediate agency
in the world, there’s an omnipresent sense of tension and foreboding
dread, it feels like time is never on your side. There’s action and retreat
and careful planning. There’s stealth and hacking and…well, you get the
idea. There’s a lot of stuff to do.
Shame about the weapon degradation, though. Nobody has ever liked it
when games pull that crap.
#10 – Baldur’s Gate II / Planescape Torment / Icewind
Dale
I know Planescape came out in 1999, but I
bought all three of these games in 2000, and all three of them get the
bottom slot on my list. Baldur’s Gate II managed to improve on its
lackluster, overrated predecessor ( but not by much ), I’ve never been
able to get into Planescape Torment despite spending hours upon hours
upon hours of my life trying to, and Icewind Dale was…kind of fun.
I think I liked Icewind Dale because it dropped most of the heavy-handed
and almost universally awful narrative and dialog of the Baldur’s Gate
series to focus on the one thing those two games did well: the combat.
Still, even that was hampered by the ridiculous D&D ruleset, so you take
the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…the
Infinity Engine. I guess.
I know Planescape Torment is good. I believe everyone who says it is. I
know its writing is vastly superior to any of the other Infinity Engine
games. I know all of this, but for whatever reason, I just can’t get into it. I
get bored with it after way too long trying to not be bored with it, and
eventually give up. Then, I’ll give it another try the following year, just in
case I’ve, I dunno, grown or something. As a person, I mean.
This has been going on for 16 years.
I still don’t get it.
#9 – Hitman: Codename 47
For some reason,
whenever Jack Thompson was running around like a millennial Chicken
Little and yelling about “murder simulators” – he never once mentioned
this game, which was odd because that’s exactly what Hitman is. A
murder simulator.
Ever wanted to be a cool assassin, silently taking out targets without
leaving a trace? Well, good. Because you can do that in Hitman.
Or you can run around and murder everyone in sight, if that’s more your
style. Take off and nuke the planet, sort of thing. It’s the only way to be
sure.
The series would take a few iterations to fully come into its own (before
eventually losing the plot entirely and devolving into the generic dickwaggling nonsense that categorizes present day AAA titles), but the first
entry still occupies a warm spot in my cold, black heart.
I never did like all the clone business, though. It got in the way of my
murder simulating.
#8 – Heavy Metal FAKK2
This is an awful
little game. It’s an action platformer and is entirely competent at what it
does – and I liked it a lot when I was a horned up twenty-something with
little regard for societal norms or gender equality – but, in retrospect, it
was pretty bad.
The game itself was good, mind you. It had nice platforming, with decent
combat mixed in. But good lord, everything else was just dripping with
either blatant misogyny or sexual frustration. Or both. (It’s usually both.)
Granted, it’s a game under the Heavy Metal brand, so what it is shouldn’t
be a surprise to anyone. But still, going from the start of the game fully
clothed to barely wearing a thong and nipple strap by the end as your
clothes slowly get ripped off is kind of ridiculous.
Oh, and of course you play as an extremely busty female with SUPER
ACCURATE boob physics and an extremely shiny butt. But that’s not all.
Giant alien mosquito queens attack you with their six fully rendered
mammaries flapping in the breeze, and by the later levels, full on H.R.
Geiger machine porn comes into play.
You’ve never seen machinery so phallic. If you ever decided to play this
one, trust me when I say that you’ll never look at piston the same way
again.
#7 – American McGee’s Alice
The third and final action
platformer this year was Mister Fancypants’ Alice. After cutting his teeth
at id software on classic titles like Doom and Quake, American McGee
figured that he could make himself into his own brand, so he just started
throwing his name onto everything he could.
American McGee’s Alice takes place after the events of Everyone Else’s
Alice, which has led American McGee’s Alice to be locked up in an
asylum where she’s, I dunno, in a coma or something. What distinguishes
American McGee’s Alice from Other Alices is how he pretty much just
vomited Tim Burton all over everything and called it a day.
American McGee’s Alice is more or less Wednesday Addams, who has to
trek back into Wonderland to track down American McGee’s White
Rabbit while fighting American McGee’s Evil Cards and hanging out
with American McGee’s Chesire Cat on her quest to stop American
McGee’s Queen of Hearts.
This takes her on a journey through American McGee’s Tim Burton’s
Wonderland, where she hops on mushrooms and does freaky things with
a knife until she wins the game.
The End.
#6 – Ground Control
One of the first fully 3D RTS
games I remember playing was this gem from Massive Entertainment
(which would later become Ubisoft Massive and not ever make anything
too spectacular again until Far Cry 3). Apart from the 3D thing, its
biggest claim to fame was doing away with most of the standard
conventions of the genre to focus solely on tactical command.
No base building. No resource harvesting. No tech tree climbing. Just
pure, tactical fun.
The story is also really engaging, especially for an RTS game. Until
Ground Control, no one had really figured out how to pull off injecting a
narrative into an RTS, although Command & Conquer tried really hard.
Bless its heart.
It wasn’t until Warcraft III came along a couple of years later that anyone
managed to do a better job of creating compelling reasons to continue
playing an RTS that didn’t involve just blowing everything up. In Ground
Control, you quickly become invested in the story and what’s going on
with the characters, so you keep playing to see it through to the end.
And then you do it all over again, from the other guy’s perspective.
#5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
This was the first
PC adaptation of my favorite angst-ridden, no-one-understands-me-butI’m-actually-super-awesome-and-just-have-to-hide-it-because-hey-lookI’m-in-my-20s-and-the-world-doesn’t-make-any-sense-anymore-but-Ican-drink-and-have-casual-sex-now-so-I’ll-just-focus-on-that-as-if-noone-else-in-the-world-has-ever-been-through-this-before-me pen and
paper RPG series. As such, Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption did
a pretty good job of capturing the essence of everything I just described
via ridiculous hyphenation.
The story is predictable fare for the Vampire crowd, and spans a few
centuries from the Crusades to the present day. Although, to be honest,
the game kind of falls apart once you’re in the modern world with guns
and everything. It not only just feels a little off, but your companions are
horrible with firearms. They’ll mow each other down without blinking,
which just causes them to compulsively suck down blood packs like they
were candy, just so they can stay alive a little longer to shoot back at your
other companions who shot at them in the first place, then the whole
filthy cycle repeats itself.
But when it’s good, the game is a lot of fun. It’s a bit like a more
sophisticated Diablo, with a decent story, multiple characters, and full
3D.
Oh, and the marble floor in the Prince’s castle was just AMAZING to
look at, back in 2000.
So there’s that.
#4 – No One Lives Forever
Completely outdone in every way by
its sequel, the original NOLF still stands as one of the best games of
2000. It relied a little too much on cheesecake for its heroin in this first
entry, but by the sequel, she wasn’t just a hot chick in a shower scene
who could also shoot bad guys. She was a fully realized (well, as much as
one could be in 2002) character who just happened to be a spy who just
happened to be a woman.
But back in 2000, she was a WOMAN who just happened to be a spy.
Which is totally different in subtle, but important ways. Not like that
mattered much to me back when I played it originally and just thought it
was a crappy Austin Powers knock-off.
I was wrong. The only thing bad about NOLF was the LithTech engine,
which still hadn’t managed to figure out proper kinaesthetics yet. The
animations were a little janky, the models were pretty rough, and the guns
just felt…off, in some weird way.
But it made up for it in the story, which gradually breathed more life into
Cate Archer than the beginnings of the game would suggest. The
gameplay itself was hit or miss, with occasional spot-on moments
blending gadgets and gunplay, to complete misses with forced stealth
sections and often unclear objectives.
It’s still a fun game, and if you can put up with a few of the worse
missions, it’s well worth your time. Or you can skip ahead to the vastly
superior sequel and just tell everyone you’ve been a fan for years.
No one will know.
#3 – Blair Witch, Volume I: Rustin Parr
Remember
Nocturne, one of my top games from last year? Well here it is again, with
the closest it ever got to a sequel.
Back in 2000, The Blair Witch was a huge thing. Love it or hate it, it was
a phenomenon – and three PC games were developed to capitalize on its
popularity. Two of them were stupid and horrible, and should be
forgotten to the desert of time. But one of them – the first one – was
actually really, really good.
All three games used the Nocturne engine, but only Volume 1: Rustin
Parr was developed by Terminal Reality, who managed to tie the license
into their own IP, thereby making Nocturne a sort of unconnected prequel
to Blair Witch. And then this game, which I guess would be a sequel to
that prequel, was still a prequel in its own right.
Taking place decades before the events of the movie, the game explores
the aftermath of the Rustin Parr incident, which played a big part in the
film’s backstory. Elspeth Holliday, a minor character from Nocturne,
takes the starring role in Rustin Parr, and heads out to Burkittsville
Maryland to explore the Black Hills while investigating the Blair Witch’s
role in Parr’s murder spree.
There are plenty of jump scares in the game, but where it achieves true
success is in the atmosphere. The woods are as foreboding as any haunted
woodland area could possibly be. It’s filled with odd sounds and spooky
happenings, including invisible children’s feet kicking up a pile of leaves
as they run by in the background, giggling.
I’m not going to ruin anything by going into any more detail than that,
because you really should track down a copy and play the game yourself.
It’s more of an adventure game than survival horror, and while some of it
can be pretty clunky at times, the end result is a complete package of
creepiness that shouldn’t be missed.
#2 – Thief II
Thief II figured out
what the series was supposed to be about: a thief. The first game suffered
a bit from being a little schizophrenic in its approach, probably because
no one had ever created anything like it before, and the development team
wasn’t sure which ideas would stick. So they just threw a lot of crap at
the wall and scooped up whichever bits dribbled down the slowest.
As a result of taking what they learned from the first game, Thief II is a
much more focused experience. It’s more refined and polished and tighter
than its predecessor, with a greater emphasis on what made that game
work while almost completely abandoning everything that didn’t.
It also took a few cues from System Shock 2 (as did the #1 game on my
list this year), and ended up tying everything together into a cohesive
masterpiece.
No other game has ever pulled off being a Medieval Thief like Thief II.
Not the first game in the series, not the third, and definitely not the fourth.
Play it.
#1 – Deus Ex
If you know anything at all about PC
gaming, you saw this one coming.
Deus Ex is the perfect game, but it was also lightening in a bottle.
Attempts to recapture it have proved fruitless, with varying degrees of
success. I actually enjoyed Deus Ex 2, but most people despised it for a
number of reasons, some entirely valid, some not so much. Human
Revolution got a lot more right than DX2, but also got plenty wrong. And
it was super yellow, for some reason.
If you’re not familiar with the original, I don’t know how you look at
yourself in the mirror without crying. It’s got grand conspiracies, ultra
cool sci-fi guys in trenchcoats, nanotechnology, and – most importantly –
the complete illusion of choice.
Every level boils down to one of only a few approaches the player can
take to complete it, but it does such a great job at feeling like you could
do anything you want, it doesn’t matter. Stealth, combat, negotiation,
hacking: they’re all there at your disposal, but which one you’ll be able to
take will depend on how you’ve built your character, which makes
repeated playing a rewarding must.
One thing Deus Ex did that I don’t think it gets enough credit for – and
definitely something that hasn’t been implemented in any other game
trying to recreate the Deus Ex magic – was how artfully it blended player
skill with character skill.
The sniper rifle is the best example of this. If you’re a sufficiently
talented player, you can use it effectively without every putting any skill
points into it. The game shows this by having the the sight wobble all
over the damn place in unpredictable ways, but if you’re quick enough,
you can still pop off a perfect headshot when the crosshairs wobble in just
the right way. Or, if you’re not very good at wobble sniping, you can
invest some points in the skill and your rifle will become as steady as a
rock sitting on a bigger rock that’s sitting in a pit of bedrock.
I don’t think I need to gush any longer about Deus Ex. If you haven’t
played it by now, you’re probably never going to, no matter what I say.
Which would be a shame, because you’ll never be able to fully appreciate
what Ion Storm accomplished back in 2000.
One last thing, though. Warren Spector
usually gets all the credit for Deus Ex’s success, while Harvey Smith gets
entirely blamed for its sequel’s failures. This is unfair for a lot of reasons,
but mostly because Smith was as integral to the design of DX as Spector
was, and the blame for DX2’s design decisions should be focused more
on the changing market than anything else. Yes, it was a victim of socalled “consolification” – but as you’ll soon see as I get deeper into the
new millennium, this was just the way things were going.
Cross platform titles quickly became the standard after Deus Ex 2. It just
had the misfortune of being one of the first. (Smith would later make up
for DX2 with Dishonored, which is probably the best Deus Ex game that
isn’t a Deus Ex game.)
This was probably the most difficult list to put together, because 2001
was a pretty rotten year for PC gaming. I don’t know if it was the
collective shock of September 11, or maybe every developer on the planet
just assumed Y2K was going to melt everyone’s PC so why bother
making new games, but for whatever reason, the year kinda sucked.
#10 – Oni
For some reason, I
always get this game confused with Omikron: The Nomad Soul. I have no
idea why, because Oni and Omikron came out two years apart and are
nothing alike, but I guess one starting with On and the other with Om is
enough to fry the delicate circuitry inside my fragile braincase.
While Omikron was David Cage’s first game back when he was still
making games with things like actual gameplay rather than QTE-powered
B-movies or whatever, Oni is a third-person action-adventure cyberpunk
beat ’em up. And it’s pretty good.
I wasn’t completely burned out on anime back in 2001, so the art style
still seemed kind of fresh. These days, it seems like every artist under 30
only learned how to draw manga characters, so the style is absolutely
everywhere. Everything looks the same, whether it’s an emotionally
moving RPG or a quirky dating simulator involving inanimate objects
growing penises and asking salt shakers to the prom. I’m totally over the
style at this point, but what can you do? That’s what I get for getting old,
I guess.
Anyway, Oni had (for the time) a cool, semi-unique setting in that it was
basically an anime movie brought to a PC game. Shogo tried to do the
same thing a few years earlier, but it was clunky and horrible. (I know a
lot of people liked it, but the old LithTech engine really bugged me, for
some reason.)
Oni focuses mostly on melee combat that’s very polished and feels great,
which is good because the rest of the game feels pretty awful. Guns are
fairly useless, since aiming is wonky and ammunition is so rare it might
as well have been manufactured from the crystallized tears of chronically
depressed moon unicorns, so you rarely use them. Enemies use them
though, and with pinpoint accuracy from miles away, which sometimes
makes it very difficult to get close enough to them to kick punch their
spleens.
The story is fun enough and intriguing, the cyberpunk vibe is strong
(which is something we got a lot of after The Matrix dropped in ’99), and
the game on the whole feels very polished. The environments are pretty
spartan and the map design falls victim to the Everything-Is-A-Square
aesthetic that defined ’90s shooters, but if you can look past the rough
bits, Oni is well worth your time.
#9 – Red Faction
Destructible
environments!
The big selling point for Red Faction was its proprietary GeoMod
technology, which allowed for fully destructible environments in the
game. Casual destruction was nothing new for FPSs though, but GeoMod
wasn’t limited to just destroying “actors” (objects and such) in the game
world; rather, it was capable of allowing the player to destroy the actual
geometry that defined each map. Do you need to get through a door, but
don’t have a key? No problem! Just shoot a rocket and blow a hole in the
wall.
Which would’ve made GeoMod amazing, if it had actually done any of
that. In reality, the only things you could destroy were pre-configured to
allow destructibility, so if the game wanted to force you into gated
progress via keycards, then that’s what you had to do.
In certain situations, GeoMod seemed pretty amazing, though. But they
were rare in a game that was otherwise filled with all the standard tropes
of the genre. It was a neat bit of tech when it worked – or, more
accurately, when it was designed to work – but at the end of the day, Red
Faction turned out to be a very standard FPS.
It’s not bad or anything. Some of it is good fun, but if you go in expecting
the fully destructible environments as advertised, get ready to be
disappointed.
#8- Max Payne
Saying that Max
Payne drew heavily from John Woo movies and The Matrix is a bit like
saying a fetus draws heavily from its parents DNA. Simply put, Max
Payne would not exist without them. Sure, the story of The Matrix might
not be not at all similar to the hard-boiled cop drama of Max Payne, but
the gameplay is all Neo, all the time. Hell, they even called the game’s
main feature Bullet Time (slow motion dodges), which was what the
Wachowskis called the technique when they “invented” it.
That doesn’t make it any less cool, though. Even if it does get pretty
ridiculous really quickly.
The only way to trigger the Bullet Time effect – which the game basically
forces you to use all the time – is to initiate a dodge move. Max will jump
backward to land on his ass, forward to land on his stomach, or to the side
to slide onto the floor. It’s all very cool and impressive the first 800 times
you do it, but by the end of the game you start to realize this dude can’t
go 5 seconds without launching himself into a dramatic flop to the
ground.
It’s fun, but more than a little silly.
Unfortunately, while the gameplay is decent, the story is horrible. Well,
maybe not horrible, but wholly cliched and told through ham-fisted dialog
so on the nose and ridiculous that just thinking about it makes me wince.
Which, now that I think, is probably why Max has that constipated
expression on his face through 95% of the game.
#7 – Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The first attempt to
reboot id’s Wolfenstein 3D franchise was an entirely competent, if totally
mediocre shooter. It doesn’t really do anything wrong, but nothing it does
right is particularly memorable.
You fight your way out of the titular castle filled with Nazis, then do
some stuff, then fight your way back into the castle and kill the big bad
guy. There are mad scientists and ancient relics, along with mystical junk
like the undead and oh god, I’m bored just talking about it. The shooting
is solid, and the standard FPS gameplay loop is still as satisfying as it
ever was, but everything else about this game is a dialtone.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein had decent graphics for the time, so that’s
something I guess. I enjoyed it as much as I could during a bleak year
when almost nothing worth playing came out, but in retrospect, nothing
about it was remotely special or interesting in any way.
It would take a couple more years before anything about this Wolfenstein
succeeded in being something special, but I’ll get to that when I make it
to my top ten games of 2003.
#6 – Runaway: A Road Adventure
Oh, hey. Check it out! It’s yet
another resurrection of an extinct genre that’s been declared dead more
times than the damn Highlander. Runaway was notable for its excellent
art and animation, which took pre-rendered characters and stuck them
into hand drawn rooms with a cel-shaded aesthetic. And it all worked
pretty well.
The puzzles were fun, and the game constantly rewards the player with
new art, which is nice. The story is decent and interesting enough to keep
you playing, although much of the humor falls flat. I don’t blame the
designers, though. Most of the time, it’s an obvious failure of translation,
since the original game was developed in Spain.
I’m not sure why international developers don’t spend more time and
effort on proper localization. I mean, it’s fine to translate a game’s dialog
and everything, but a simple translation is never going to capture the
intent of the language. Good localization takes into account native speech
patterns, common grammar, and colloquialisms. But that almost never
happens.
Usually – and I suspect this was the case with Runaway, as well – a game
just gets a simple literal translation and that’s it. In a best case scenario,
the dialog and narrative might be written by someone who speaks
multiple languages, but that’s as good as it gets. However, if developers
would just spend the extra time to take that one more step and send the
script to a native speaker to doctor a bit and tailor it to the natural
language of the region, then jokes wouldn’t fall flat. Dialog intended to
be emotionally moving wouldn’t come off as clunky and weird. Things
would just work as they were intended (and probably do, if you speak the
game’s native language), and everything would be fine.
But that almost never happens, so we end up with games like Runaway.
Which, while still an entirely competent and decent enough game, falls
short of being anything great simply because of poor localization.
#5 – Empire Earth
Empire Earth is best
described as Age of Empires 3D, or maybe as Age of Empires meets
Ground Control. Whichever.
There’s really not much more to say about EE than that. It doesn’t do
anything remarkable other than letting you progress from the stone age all
the way to a sci-fi future with ray guns and probably hoverboards and
self-drying jackets or whatver. It doesn’t do anything particularly
amazing, and rarely does anything terribly wrong.
It’s not as polished as AoE, and not as focused as GC, but for what it is –
a developer’s first attempt at bringing the historical RTS into the world of
3D, it’s not bad at all.
There are certainly better games of a similar nature out there, but this was
2001. Pickings were slim.
#4 – Gothic
Clunky combat and
abysmal localization are about the only things wrong with this version of
Ultima IX.
To many gamers, the Gothic series picked up where Ultima left off – or,
rather, where Ultima never got to go because EA led the series into the
Stygian Abyss and threw away the key. And, in most respects, they’re
absolutely right.
Gothic drops the player into a highly interactive world simulation that
gamers hadn’t seen since Ultima VII, only it does it in all three of the big
Ds. Sure, the animations are a little janky and the combat can be rage
inducing, but everything else about the game just screams Ultima. In a
good way.
If you like classic RPGs and are looking for something that’s not too old,
but not too new, you can’t go wrong with Gothic. Give it a whirl. Tell
Diego I sent you.
It’s a shame about the dialog, though. It’s downright painful.
#3 – Tribes 2
Ah, Tribes 2. The
best iteration of the series, this one got everything right.
More or less just a graphical upgrade from the first game, Tribes 2 also
featured improved net code and server browsing, better character
management, and increased support for the mod community.
My favorite way to play this game was on a server with – and I could be
remembering the wrong name here, so please don’t disc-blast me in the
face if I am – the Renegades mod installed. After playing on one of those
servers, it was impossible to go back to vanilla Tribes 2.
Renegades added tons of features to the game, mostly in the form of base
building and defensive enhancements, and it was glorious. I had more fun
running around placing various turrets and keeping everything repaired
than I did with assaulting the enemy base and capturing flags.
If you’re a modern gamer with no point of reference, you can imagine
Tribes 2 + Renegades as Team Fortress 2. It’s basically the same game,
but with more jetpacks and less ridiculous DLC.
#2 – Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos
This one almost
made my top spot this year, but it lost by hair. Or a parsec. I really don’t
understand the difference.
Surpassed only by Freespace 2, Edge of Chaos is the second best space
combat sim ever made. Also, it’s unlike any other space combat sim ever
made.
The thing that most separates the Independence War games from the
space sim pack is the use of inertia. Most space combat sims are basically
just WWII dogfights without gravity, which is fine. That’s a lot of fun,
and I love it. But when you throw full inertia into the mix, things get
MUCH more difficult. And interesting.
If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you know how combat works in this
series. You fly in one direction with your main thrusters, while using
manuevering jets to turn and fire on enemies. You’ll keep flying in one
direction until you do another burn in the opposite direction to slow your
ship. They space physics in Independence War (both 1 and 2) are top
shelf.
I prefer the sequel to the original by a fairly large degree, which is why
the first one didn’t make it onto my list back in 1997. Edge of Chaos has
the better engine, better graphics, better flight model, and – most
importantly – a much better story. The game starts you out as a kid who
has to disappear after his dad gets murdered. Then, an old AI pops up and
directs you safely to your granny’s old smuggling operation, where you’ll
find your ship and learn to become an intergalacitc space cowboy grownup. Or smuggler. Freedom fighter. Whatever.
It’s a fantastic game with a steep learning curve, but well worth investing
a little time in.
#1 – Clive Barker’s Undying
I love horror games. And horror
movies. Books. TV shows. Comics. I just dig the genre, so when Clive
Barker lent his name to an Unreal-powered shooter, I was immediately on
board.
Part Clive Barker, part Lovecraft, the game is all FPS at its core, which
was a little disappointing. However, the story helps make up for the fact
that you’re basically playing Any Shooter But With Sometimes Magic,
and the whole package ends up being a lot more than the sum of its parts.
The game isn’t particularly scary or anything. There are no real jumps or
unsettling atmospheric setpieces to wander through, but it nails the
Fun/Creepy vibe of, say, a skewed version of the Addams Family. I don’t
think this is what the game was going for or anything, as it’s fairly
obvious it’s desperate for you to take it seriously and be afraid, but it’s
just too campy for that.
Take it for what it is rather than how I think it was intended to be, and
you’ll have a great time with Undying. It’s kind of like Buffy, if Buffy
were an Irish dude in the 1920s.
Just try it.
#10 – The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
I never completed Morrowind,
but I did play a lot of Morrowind. I just didn’t particularly enjoy enough
of Morrowind to see it through to the end of Morrowind. But, since
everyone else kept going on about how amazing Morrowind was, I tried
to find the fun in Morrowind.
I failed.
It was decent enough to make it into my top ten for the year, but it gets
the bottom slot for a couple of reasons. First, the world was beautiful, but
completely static. It was a set to wander around it, with virtually every
damn thing either nailed down or glued to the floor. I enjoy world
simulation in my RPGs as much as I do hacking and slashing, and
Morrowind completely failed on that point.
It was also just trying way too hard to be different. Sure, the land of giant
mushrooms and floating insectoid stage coaches was kind of cool, but
nothing about the game seemed to be anchored in any kind of
familiararity, which I think is vital to fantasy worldbuilding. It’s really
easy to go too far, which is what Morrowind did.
The character models were also butt ugly, which actually turned out to be
foreshadowing for every other game Bethesda would ever make.
Four “Speak quickly, Outlanders” out of ten.
#9 – Neverwinter Nights
The exact opposite
of Morrowind going too far in trying to be different and strange,
Neverwinter Nights was happy to stick to the all too familiar tropes of the
fantasy RPG genre, and was pretty much a dialtone because of it.
It was also mired in the terrible algebra of pen-and-paper D&D, so any
immersion it might’ve had was quickly broken whenever pages of math
would pop up every time you tried to hit something with a stick.
The story was lame, the characters uninteresting, and everything about it
was just…boring.
BUT, it had an amazing editor. I spent more time creating my own little
single-player campaigns to run around in than I did with the actual game
itself. It was like being alone in my closet again, reading D&D
sourcebooks and pretending I had friends to play with. Only this time I
did, even if did have to make them myself, like some kind of Forever
Alone Dr. Frankenstein.
Community mods and the eventual expansions saved the game, and
ensured it a spot in my top ten.
#8 – Battlefield 1942
Back before the
Battlefield series turned into a frat boy dick measuring contest or a safe
space for female gamers to play in without fear of being hit on every five
seconds by the aforementioned frat boys and all the other sexually
frustrated penis-holders of the Internet (ok, that part is a lie), Battlefield
1942 was a breath of fresh air.
It wasn’t the zen-like (what less imaginitive people might call braindead)
experienece of Deathmatch, it wasn’t the base-building CTF joy of
Tribes, and it wasn’t a strategy game. It was kind of blend of all these
things, and it was great.
Of course, everyone really just played the Wake Island map from the
demo over and over again, even after the full game came out. Something
about it was just perfect, and I lost many a sleepless night to epic battles
over control points. Or whatever Battlefield called them.
The only problem with the game was people who spawned and insta-stole
a vehicle or plane I HAD BEEN PATIENTLY WAITING ON. Those
guys were jerks.
#7 – Mafia
A lot of people didn’t really like
Mafia, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. They complained that the cars
were too slow, or that the game wasn’t big enough, or the world didn’t
feel Grand Theft Auto enough – and they were right.
Which probably explains why I loved it so much.
From crusing down city streets and keeping an eye on my speed so I
didn’t get pulled over, to blaring period music from my radio like some
kind of 1920s hipster, I loved every minute of the game. It wasn’t the
Prohibition-era GTA people expected, but it was still a ton of fun.
The story was classic gangland drama, the sense of place was well
realized, and you got to be a mobster without having to worry about
pesky things like actually going to jail or sleeping with the fishes.
#6 – Star Trek: Bridge Commander
One of my favorite
Star Trek games, Bridge Commander put you in the captain’s chair of a
starship and turned you loose onto the galaxy. Or at least onto the parts of
the galaxy that the linear story took you to, but it was good enough for
me.
You can play Bridge Commander one of two ways: Either manually
controlling the ship in excellent, fully 3D capital ship combat, or you
could leave it up to the AI while you shouted orders at your crew. I
tended to favor the latter, but would take direct control whenever my
crew just wasn’t quite up to getting the job down before we got exploded
by Romulans or whatever.
Shaking back and forth in your chair like a spastic monkey whenever
your ship gets hit is entirely optional, but highly recommended.
As with most Star Trek games, it’s almost impossible to find today due
the licensing hell that defines the franchise. But if you can manage to
track down a copy, go grab the Maximum Warp community mod. It adds
some nice touches to the game, and will keep you shouting ENGAGE! at
your screen for hours on end.
Like a giant nerd.
#5 – No One Lives Forever 2
The sequel to the excellent but
flawed No One Lives Forever corrected almost every problem the first
game had. Cate Archer became a more fully realized character, with the
fact that she was a woman being made a secondary or even tertiary
concern. The in-game characters would comment on her being a female
super spy, sure, but in a self-aware way that belittled the mysoginy that
still plagues the gaming industry today.
The graphics were greatly improved, and for the first time, the LithTech
engine finally started showing a little progress toward nailing down the
kineaesthetics of FPS combat. The weapons still felt a little off, but
Monolith was almost there. (They’d hit their stride soon with F.E.A.R.,
which was an excellent game in all the ways except the one it was trying
the hardest to be. But more on that when we get to 2005.)
The game is smart, funny, and full of excellent setpieces. My favorite
series of events take place in a trailer park as it’s being hit by a tornado.
The lead-in to when the tornado appears, along with its aftermath was a
thing of beauty.
And I’ll never forget the high-speed tricycle chase with a mime and a
fistful of bananas.
Good times.
#4 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Star Wars: Dark Forces III: Jedi
Knight II: Jedi Outcast was the best entry in the overly subtitled series
when it came out. Aside from running on the Quake 3 engine for vastly
improved graphics, JK2 finally nailed lightsaber combat in a way no one
had seen before.
You could switch between Strong, Normal, and Speed stances, each of
which brought along a different moveset to include with your Jedi
acrobats. The number of styles coupled with the acrobatics and speed of
battle made multiplayer lightsaber combat a ridiculous, frenetic mess of
whirling dervishes with deadly laser swords. It looked chaotic and
random if you didn’t know what you were watching, but once you
mastered the different moves, you knew exactly what you were doing.
As for the single-player side of things, the FMV was mercifully gone,
replaced by in-game cinematics. The story was decent enough, but
nothing spectacular – and it took far too long to get your lightsaber. Even
when you finally got to where your lightsaber was, you still had to jump
through a bunch of stupid tutorial hoops to get it.
But once you did, every other weapon became a distant memory.
While using the right Force powers – either Light or Dark – and a
lightsaber, Kyle Katarn became a virtually unstoppable killing machine.
My favorite go-to power was Speed, which slowed everything down but
me. The world became a blur as I weaved in and out of stormtroopers and
dodged blaster bolts on a slice-and-dice campaign of virtual carnage.
Ah, memories.
Still, even with all the improvements JK2 made to the series, the singleplayer level designs could still be maddeningly complex and frustrating.
But then again, you could walk around with your lightsaber out, and it’d
leave a glowing trail of burned wall everywhere it touched.
Which was a lot cooler than it sounds.
#3 – Arx Fatalis
The first “spiritual successor” to
the Ultima Underworld series, this game took everything that was great
about the Looking Glass games and brought it all into the modern world
of polygonal 3D. (It was actually developed to be Ultima Underworld III,
but Arkane Studios couldn’t pry the license from the cold, dead hands of
Electronic Arts.)
It had more interactivity than the UU games, voiced characters, and a
deeper magic system. It took the world simulation of Ultima 7 and
blended it with the first person dungeon crawling of Ultima Underworld,
then removed all the Ultima stuff and called it Arx Fatalis.
The basic idea is that the whole world moved underground ages ago after
some kind of unimportant calamity I never paid much attention to, so you
have humans and goblins and troll, etc… living together in one giant,
sprawling series of caves and subterranean fortresses. Each faction is
vying for control, and you can interact with all of them in whichever way
you see fit.
Notoriously buggy at launch, AF has since been patched and is ready to
go. It’s a wonderful little trip through a Totally Not Ultima Underworld
underground world, and you should give it a try.
Plus, you can taint his cookie dough and give the Goblin King diarreah.
So there’s that.
#2 – Freedom Force
One of the best
titles to come out of Irrational Games was this little gem (along with its
sequel). For some inexplicable reason, developers have always struggled
with making superhero games, so we don’t really have all that many.
(And the ones we do have kinda suck.)
But Freedom Force doesn’t.
The game puts you in command of the Notta Avengers (or the Notta
Justice League, if you’re a filthy DC-loving mudblood), and charges you
with saving the world from the forces of evil. Naturally.
There’s an enormous number of hereos in the base game – ranging from
versions of Marvel’s characters as well as Irrational’s take on DC heroes
– and all of it is wrapped up in the Golden Age aesthetic of comic books.
Which is to say it’s campy as hell.
This put some people off of the game who were expecting an edgy,
modern take on the superhero genre, but I loved it. If you got what they
were doing, then you understood how much they nailed it. And the
campiness suddenly became kind of the whole point.
With extensive mod support as well as in-game character creation, you
can find just about any hero you want on the the web. Want to add
Booster Gold to your team? He’s out there, somewhere. Just download
his files and stick ’em in the game. How about Batman? Well, pick your
favorite version. He’s out there, too.
The game itself is a realtime, pausable strategy sort of thing, along the
lines of a hyperfocused Baldur’s Gate, but without all the stupid D&D
rules and terrible writing. The system is very simple to use, but due to the
number of heroes and the different combinations of powers at your
disposal, the actual gameplay can get pretty complex.
Don’t play it on Hard your first time through.
#1 – Warcraft III
Before Warcraft III came out,
everyone was worried that Blizzard had lost the plot. Adding hero
characters to an RTS? What were they thinking? And adopting a
cartoonish art style? Come on, Blizzard! Get it together!
Fortunately, Blizzard didn’t listen to the empassioned outcries of its fans
and just did whatever the hell it wanted to, which was a good thing
because Warcraft III is probably the best RTS ever made. The hero
characters didn’t break the game; they added to it. The art style was
amazing. The gameplay was refined and polished and tweaked to
balanced perfection.
If they’d only stopped there, Warcraft III would’ve still been a great
game. But then they added the story and the cutscenes, and everything
came together in this wonderful bit of synergistic madness that defines
the game and the Warcraft universe.
Everything people love about World of Warcraft came from Warcraft III.
The lore from War1 and War2 are there, but the aesthetic, the major
characters, the tone of the universe, and everything else about WoW is
pure Warcraft III.
Which is kind of a shame, really. Because I don’t think we’ll ever get a
Warcraft IV now, since WoW pretty much became the sequel no one
asked for but that everyone seems to have wanted.
Except for me. I still want my Warcraft IV.
Sadface.
#10 – TRON 2.0
I remember this game coming out
of nowhere back in 2003. The TRON reboot wouldn’t happen until 2010,
and TRON itself came out way back in 1982, so no one was thinking
about the franchise in 2003. TRON 2.0 just sort of appeared one day, with
no real reason for having been called into existence. It was weird.
It was also pretty fun. The internet was still new enough to be a novelty,
but old enough that people were used to it by then, so whereas the
original TRON movie dealt mainly with PCs and mainframes, the TRON
2.0 game focused more on networking and email and the plague of
viruses.
They even included an entire lightcycle mini game, which is always
welcome. The game itself was a fairly typical FPS, which wasn’t really
helped along very much from being powered by the LithTech engine. But
where other games suffered from the weird, disconnected effects the
engine gave to weapons, TRON 2.0 managed to sidestep the issue by
making all the weapons suck except for one.
The disc.
Just like in the movie, you carry around a disc on your back that you can
use as both shield and weapon, and it’s really the only thing you’ll ever
need in the game, at least until you get to one of the levels where the
developers realize you’re probably having too much fun and take it away
from you. Probably some designer’s nephew worked on the Rod
Primitive, and he didn’t want him to feel left out.
There’s also a fun RPG-lite aspect to the game, where you can level up
(which changes your character’s version number) and decide which
subroutines (bonuses and buffs, basically) to load into the limited space
you have available. You can pick up new subroutines all the time, but
they might need to be ported to your system or cleaned of virus
corruption before they can be installed.
It was a strange, but fun little game.
#9 – B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th!
This game was a nightmare. A
simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, B-17: The Mighty 8th
was kind of like Inception, but with incredibly detailed instrument panels
and an instruction manual thicker than a fat baby’s corpulent thigh.
Once you managed to get in the air, the B-17 itself actually controlled
pretty well. I guess the developers figured everyone would spend so long
just trying to figure out how to start the damn engines that people would
lose patience pretty quickly if it was actually hard to fly. Getting off the
ground took well over two dozen individual steps involving fiddling with
this knob over here and flipping that switch over there, and god help you
if you didn’t get the sequence exactly right, or you’d never make it off the
runway.
I look at B-17 as more of a bomber sim than a flight sim. You can hop
between ten different stations, where each crew member is doing his own
thing. If you want to be the bombardier on a mission, then let the AI fly
while you rain death upon the ground walkers. Feel more like pretending
you’re Luke Skywalker shooting down TIE fighters from one of the
Millennium Falcon’s turrets? Grab a spot and start shootin’, Tex.
It’s a very deep, very rewarding simulation and you should totally give it
a try.
Just RTFM first.
#8 – Gothic 2
Gothic 2 took
everything that worked about Gothic 1 and made it bigger and better.
Then, it took everything that didn’t work in Gothic 1 and made it bigger
and worse, because screw you, that’s why.
The series’ developers took a hardline stance that the wonky combat in
their games was intentional, and player’s damn well better just get used to
it, if you know what’s good for you. Sure, you can get murdered by a
wolf that repeatedly stun-locks you so much that you can never even
manage to hit it with a single stick before it’s munching on the bloody
remains of your battered corpse, but hey. Them’s the breaks, kids.
If you could manage to get through the combat and different aspect of the
interface that I can’t recall specifically right now but that I remember
having annoyed the piss out of me back in 2003, there’s a very deep, very
Ultima-like game to discover.
The world simulation is very strong in Gothic 2, so much so that I
remember starting a family feud between two farming brothers because I
stashed a frying pan in one of the brother’s rooms. When the other
brother discovered (on his own, by walking into the room) HIS frying pan
had been stolen, he freaking bolted out the door, ran out into the field
where his brother was working, then proceeded to murder the crap out of
him with a pitchfork.
I’m not sure if I’m remembering all the details correctly in that little
story, and I was never sure if it was scripted or not, but the end result was
the same.
It was awesome.
#7 – Freelancer
The first time Chris Roberts
pitched Star Citizen, it was called Freelancer and crowd funding wasn’t a
thing yet. As a result, he was stuck working with a publisher who
demanded unreasonable things like meeting milestones and producing an
actual game within a well-defined budget and stuff. I know. Crazy, right?
Over time, most of the promises Roberts made regarding Freelancer
would be scrapped, he’d get all huffy about it, then take his toys and go
home by way of leaving the company he founded, and then the game
would eventually come out.
A shadow of what was promised, Freelancer actually turned out to be a
pretty fun game when taken in short spurts. It was very linear and
progressed along well defined narrative rails, but the mouse-driven
combat no one was sure about ended up feeling very natural and smooth.
I completed the game and enjoyed the standard sci-fi story well enough,
but the repetitive nature of everything you did crept in fairly early on and
never let up. You just do the same things over and over again until you
unlock another story mission, wherein you do the same things you’ve
been doing but now there’s a cutscene at the end, and then you repeat the
whole process for hours until you win the game.
It’s fun, but only in small doses.
#6 – Star Wars: Galaxies
The best way to
describe Star Wars: Galaxies is by calling it Ultima Online in space. Or
Star Wars UO. Whichever.
The early days of SWG were a lot like the early days of UO. There was a
big, functioning economy with an emphasis on player crafting to drive it,
and the crafting itself was highly detailed and very complex. There was
adventuring, too. And player housing, and planets to explore with
landmarks to discover, etc…
If UO felt like living an alternate life in medieval times, then SWG felt
like living an alternate life as an extra in a Star Wars movie. Professions
outside of combat were viable and encouraged. Whole cities sprung up
organically, with some even having elected officials like mayors and such
– all emerging from the player base itself, rather than driven by the rules
and design limitations of the game.
Sadly, just like with UO, a bunch of annoying asshats ruined everything
for everyone by griefing the hell out of the system in their madcap pursuit
of making the game more about DPS and min-maxing PvP builds, so
patches and band-aids were applied until the game was completely
unrecognizable as a second life inside the Star Wars universe.
It got so bad, the developers eventually just said screw it, basically gave
everyone Jedi powers and then walked away while the world burned.
Not long after, the servers went offline for good.
#5 – Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
I never liked Myst. I kind of hated it, in fact. So
why I bought Uru will forever be a mystery to me. Maybe it was on sale?
I dunno. I was still in my twenties, so maybe I was drunk. Who knows?
Point is, I bought the damn game – and I loved it.
I’m not sure if it was the switch to realtime 3D, or if I’d always wanted to
like Myst but just never understood it before, but whatever the reason,
Uru hooked me. It was originally designed to have this whole social,
multiplayer aspect integrated into every part of it, but that never really
took off, and the cost of developing it nearly destroyed the company. But
I didn’t much care about playing with other people, anyway.
By 2003, I was beginning to tire of multiplayer gaming and trying to have
fun with random Internet People, so I was happy to work my way through
the strangely immersive world of logic puzzles and cryptic books all by
my lonesome.
#4 – Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
I said I was starting to tire of
multiplayer games, but I wasn’t completely turned off by them yet. This
little freebie came along out of the blue, and all my online friends started
playing it. So, yielding to the power of peer pressure like a kid who
hadn’t grown up listening to Nancy Reagan’s dire warnings about such
things, I jumped on the bandwagon and joined in.
Enemy Territory became my go-to multiplayer game for most of the year.
It had great gameplay, interesting modes, and the different character types
meant you could play in vastly different ways depending on your mood.
Except that everyone always wanted to be an engineer. Whole teams of
engineers. It was madness.
I’m a soldat!
#3 – Deus Ex: Invisible War
The game that was
never as bad as people say it was might not have been a super duper
sequel to one of the greatest games ever made, but it was competent
enough to be part of the series. I enjoyed it, at least.
I think what people hated the most was down to it being one of the first
AAA cross-platform titles. To get the game working well on both a
controller and the hardware of the original Xbox, concessions had to be
made, which the annoying PC Master Race assholes always took as some
kind of great insult to their people or whatever. As for myself, I just
shrugged, loaded up the game, and made my own fun.
Universal ammo was a good idea, even though people hated it at the time.
The streamlining of the augmentations was a good idea, even though
people hated it at the time. In face, most of the things Deus Ex did would
eventually become accepted elements of standard FPS design that people
love today, but that they hated then. Sometimes, people can be pretty
stupid all the times.
The only real hit the game took by being cross-platform was in the size of
its maps – and this is where all the angry Internet People are right. They
were freaking tiny as hell.
The miniature size of the levels meant that a lot of the illusion of freedom
from the first game was lost, even if all the same “freedom” was still
there. It was just, by necessity, more obvious. You can creep in this one
air duct to do stealth, you can hack this one door to go an alternate route,
you can say this one thing to this one character in the area to try and talk
your way through, etc…
Most all of the same gameplay choices were still present in DX2 as were
in DX1, only this time the elusive illusion of freedom was missing. It was
freedom that had never really been there to begin with, but the original
did such a good job of hiding that fact that the sequel just stood out like a
sore thumb.
But it’s still a Deus Ex game. It’s still fun. And you shouldn’t listen to
other people.
#2 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
The best game in the Dark Forces
series wasn’t actually part of the Dark Forces series. Except that it was,
but it didn’t want to admit it because doing so would turn the full title of
the game into a colon-saturated, marketing nightmare. Star Wars: Dark
Forces IV: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy doesn’t exactly roll off the
tongue, you know.
The single player story was fun and extremely condensed into very tightly
designed, self-contained levels. There was much less wandering around
aimlessly, trying to figure out what the game wanted you to do when all
you wanted to do was murder stormtroopers with lightsabers. Jedi
Academy knew what players wanted, and it gave it to them.
Which, because it’s the Internet, pissed a lot of people off, for some
reason.
At the time, people griped about Jedi Academy because you didn’t play
as Kyle Katarn, the levels didn’t progress linearly, and the story wasn’t
epic enough or whatever. But nobody cares what angry Internet People
think, so let’s move on.
The best thing Jedi Academy did was to absolutely nail the lightsaber
combat so well that the multiplayer mode is worth the price of admission
alone. From fully customizable characters and lightsabers, to crazy
acrobatic moves at super speeds, multiplayer matches were where Jedi
Academy truly shined.
There has never been better melee combat in an FPS (even though it
became a 3rd person game for lightsaber fights, because trying to control
your flippy, spastic self as while doing somersaults and backflips and
super jumps in first person was a sure fire recipe for migraine-inducing
unpleasantness).
#1 – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
I don’t like KOTOR today as
much as I did in 2003, because back then, Bioware hadn’t just been
recycling the same plot elements in every damn game they made. At the
time, KOTOR was essentially Neverwinter Nights in a Star Wars
costume, which was good enough for me. The characters were, for the
most part, engaging. The dialog wasn’t totally awful (except for whoever
thought it was a good idea for every alien to say “Moolay-rah” ever other
damn word), and the combat was good, turn-based fun. (Or real-time, if
you played on Easy and didn’t care about anything other than the story.)
It took me ages to finally get into the game, though. The first planet goes
on for days, and nothing much interesting happens until you finally get
off the rock and snag your first lightsaber. But it took hours to get to that
point. There were hours upon hours of slogging through tedious battles,
lengthy and pointless conversations, and there was absolutely no end to
running around the tiny worldmap over and over again, back and forth
between this location and that location, all of which looked exactly the
same. Seriously, it was so awful that people have made mods specifically
to remove the whole first part of the game. It’s just that bad.
That opening world was enough to make me hate the game and stop
playing it until one day when I had nothing better to do than to force
myself through it. Once I did, the game opened up a bit and I finally
caught a glimpse of what everyone was talking about that made KOTOR
so special.
The big plot twist was awesome, too. Which is one of the reasons I
remember liking KOTOR a lot more in 2003 than I do now, after Bioware
has repeated the same damn twist over and over. Or a variation on it, at
least. I’ll never understand how this studio is so beloved by so many
people. My wife is a big fan of Dragon Age, which is inexplicable to me.
I found it to be a boring, shoebox RPG with a ridiculous “dark fantasy”
world and one-note characters. But hey, everyone likes different things,
so if you’re a Bioware fan, more power to you.
I mean, I like Trespasser, after all.
So what the hell do I know?
#10 – Doom 3
Let’s just get this out of the way
up front: Doom 3 is not a Doom game. It’s neither fast paced nor colorful,
there’s no sense of thrill, no adrenaline rush of rocking metal MIDI
music, no satisfying cha-chink of a shotgun. It’s just not that kind of
game.
That doesn’t mean it’s not good, though.
Back in 2004, I once again found myself the odd man out in an ocean of
people who hated a game I enjoyed. They griped about everything I just
mentioned, but they loved – absolutely loved – to drone on about how
dumb it was that most of the guns didn’t have flashlights.
Because I guess “realism” is super important when you’re fighting
cybernetic hell demons on Mars.
I liked the slower pace and the thicker atmosphere, and I dug the tension
that not having a flashlight taped to a gun provided. Doom 3 wasn’t an
action game, but it wasn’t really a survival horror game, either. It was
somewhere between the two, in its own weird, stylish little place.
And it looked amazing.
#9 – The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth
It’s an RTS in Tolkien dress-up.
What more do you really need to know? Back in 2005, Lord of the Rings
mania was still in full swing because Peter Jackson hadn’t stretched The
Hobbit over too much film like butter scraped over too much bread yet,
and everyone was riding high off the success of The Return of the King.
The Battle for Middle-Earth was light on the base building, and heavy on
the army clashing. I’d like to say it was heavy on tactics, but that would
be a lie. It isn’t a tactical game. It’s a build-up-a-bigger-army-and-crushyour-opponent-through-canon-fodder type of game.
Unless you have the Rohirim, because cavalry beats just about anything.
The game got extra points from me for its super awesome, Hildebrantlike overworld map. That thing was gorgeous, and I wanted to hang it on
my wall.
#8 – S2: Silent Storm
This is a really odd
game that I don’t even remember why I bought, but it sticks out in my
mind for all the stuff it did right. It’s a turn-based tactical game, with
RPG and adventure elements, all wrapped up in a WWII storyline.
What made S2 stand apart was its quirky charm, which reminded me a lot
of Jagged Alliance, if Jagged Alliance had taken itself seriously – but just
didn’t know that no one else would. The dialog was awful, the voice
acting was worse, and the story was goofy.
But it was fully 3D. It had ragdoll physics, destructible environments, and
a super tight focus on doing what it did better than anything else: out XCom’ing X-Com.
I was never a big X-Com fan, but after playing S2, I could at least
understand why people liked it so much.
S2 was better, though.
#7 – Rome: Total War
The Total War games are weird. I
kind of half hate, half love them, mostly because the strategic campaigns
are always slow and tedious and I suck at them. But the tactical battles?
LOVE.
The Rome entry in the series is probably my favorite, just because of how
straightforward the combat and unit types are, which is nice for my slow,
sloth-like brain to take in. I’ve played other games in the series, and the
only other ones that have ever really grabbed me were the Medieval
entries.
I guess I just don’t dig firearms and cannons and crap. Or maybe they just
make things too difficult. I dunno.
But few things are better than binge watching the full series of HBO’s
Rome (which, I know, wouldn’t come out until 2005), then grabbing
some artisan bread and a little olive oil before settling down to a nice big
game of murder in the name of the Empire.
#6 – Soldiers: Heroes of World War II
Yet another WWII
game, this one was an even weirder beast than S2. I guess it was kind of
an RTS, but not really. It was a bit of a third-person action game, but that
isn’t quite right, either. Maybe it was a RTASAGT? (Real Time Action
Strategy Arcade Game Thing).
At any rate, it was an isometric RTS that allowed you to take direct
control over any unit (kind of like how you could possess minions in the
Dungeon Keeper games, although Soldiers doesn’t switch to first person).
You could command your troops to go here or there and to do this or that,
then take direct control of one of your tanks to jump into the fight
alongside your men.
It was weird and engaging and great. The environments were also fully
destructible, which meant that you really got a feel for how much damage
even a small skirmish could do to a quaint little village. Once a battle was
over, very little was left of the buildings and scenery other than rubble,
dust, and giant tank tracks in the mud.
#5 – Painkiller
A proper sequel to
Quake that was never a sequel to Quake, Painkiller did its best to evoke
an earlier era of FPS games, before things like regenerating health and
shields and two-weapon carry limits became the norm and ruined
everything. And, for the most part, it succeeded.
Painkiller was part Quake / part Doom.
It was Quake in the sense of its fully 3D environments and its Gothic
aesthetic, and it was Doom in its approach to enemy encounters. It liked
to throw hordes of baddies at you all at once, which was something
gamers hadn’t seen for a long time when Painkiller came out. (Not
counting the Serious Sam games, of course. But who does, really?)
The story was even more at home in the ’90s than the mid 2000s, with its
angst-ridden, leather-jacket wearing, pseudo-religious angry angel demon
retribution payback revenge whatever story. Honestly, I stopped paying
attention after the first cutscene, because why bother?
I just wanted to murder things.
Don’t judge me.
#4 – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
Take everything
good about KOTOR, then remove all the Bioware from it and you have
KOTOR 2. Except what made KOTOR 2 so special wasn’t just how
much Bioware wasn’t in it, but what all that Bioware had been replaced
with. Namely, Obsidian.
The guys at Obisidian tend to take an established property that held
promise it never quite realized, then they make a sequel to it that far
surpasses the original in every way. However, where Obsidian truly
shines is in their writing. Nuanced stories, well-defined (or intentionally
ambiguous) characters, excellent dialog – all these things are what
Obsidian brings to the table when they make a sequel better than someone
else’s original.
The first time I saw this was with KOTOR2. The next time I’d see it
would be with Fallout: New Vegas, but more on that when we get to
2010…
The only real problem with KOTOR2 was how rushed and unfinished it
was, and how amazingly buggy the final release build ended up being. It
would take a lot of patches – including some from the community –
before the game was ready for prime time, which is the only reason the
original release of KOTOR2 isn’t higher up on my list.
I’m ranking the games I played in 2005 as they were in 2005, and Knights
of the Old Republic needed a couple more years in the oven.
#3 – Thief: Deadly Shadows
Take most everything I said about
Deus Ex 2 and apply it to Thief 3, because the fan reactions – and mine –
to both games were nearly identical.
Accusations of being “dumb down” and “consolified” were leveled at
both games, but Thief suffered a little more unfairly than DX2, in my
opinion. Thief’s levels weren’t nearly as small as DX2’s, and even when
they were, they usually meshed better with a larger whole. Thief’s focus
on stealth also did away with the problem of perceived freedom that the
Deus Ex series continues to struggle with, but that didn’t really matter to
people who were ready to hate this game well before it ever came out.
People tend to double down on that kind of longterm loathing when a
game finally comes out, rather than admit they were wrong.
I know I’ll probably be shot for this, but I actually think Deadly Shadows
was the best entry in the series, just ahead of Thief 2. It has a stronger
atmosphere, some excellent sound design, and is the most immersive
game in the series.
Plus, it has the Shalebridge Cradle.
If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And
you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game.
#2 – Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 took forever to finally
make it out, but when it eventually did, it blew everything else away. It
just nailed everything. Graphics, tech, characters, voices, physics, music,
story – everything it did, it did better than any FPS before it. Well, better
than any FPS in the style of Half-Life, that is.
‘Cause it sure wasn’t Quake.
I don’t think there’s much I need to say about Half-Life 2 that everyone
doesn’t already know, except maybe to explain why it’s #2 on my list
instead of #1.
It’s pretty simple, actually. While HL2 did absolutely everything right
(except for that annoying stuttering sound problem it seemed to always
have), it was still a FPS. It threw in some physics puzzles, but I’d already
seen those way back in ’98 with Trespasser. HL2 just did them better.
Which is what defines Half-Life 2: it just did everything better, but it
didn’t do anything I hadn’t seen plenty of times before.
Which is why it slipped to #2, because the #1 spot this year went to a
game that, while using the same engine as HL2, managed to create
something new and greater than the sum of its parts.
#1 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
The best Deus Ex
game that wasn’t Deus Ex (until Dishonored happens in 2012, anyway),
Vampire: Bloodlines was not only the best vampire game of 2005, it was
the best damn game of the past several years. In any category.
Why? Because shut up and I’ll tell you.
To begin with, it was a first person RPG in the true sense of the word.
You didn’t just create a stat sheet to hold numbers to plug into your
ridiculous THAC0 equations; you created an actual character. And then
you used it to play a role in a story, which is what RPGs should be, but
rarely are.
Once you had your character ready (which, depending on how you
created your him or her, could dramatically alter how you played the
game), you were plopped down into a brand new world of darkness to
explore and get used to, just as your character was the night it became a
vampire.
Remember that illusion of freedom Deus Ex did so well? Bloodlines
managed to do it, too. There are multiple ways to complete any quest, and
the choices you made not only during character creation, but also the ones
you make throughout the game will determine which options are valid.
Nothing will close down because you don’t have this skill or that stat, but
some options will just be a whole lot harder to pull off than others,
depending on your character.
The story is good, the dialog is great, the gameplay is tight and fresh –
and there’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with the game. Even when it
was new and buggy as hell, you could tell that the diamond underneath all
that rough was going to be worth digging out.
Today, with the various mods and community patches having addressed
most major issues Bloodlines might’ve had when it was released, you
really have no excuse for not having played it.
Plus, it has the Grand Ocean House Hotel.
If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And
you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game. Including
Thief: Deadly Shadows.
#10 – Myst V: End of Ages
If you’re surprised
that a second Myst game made one of my top tens, don’t be. By the mid2000s, cross-platform releases were becoming the standard mode of
release for AAA games, which meant I played a lot them on a console
because PC upgrades are expensive and despite my sincerest efforts, I
have never been able to actually poop money.
For the next few years, my lists will get a little weird, because I’m only
adding games that I played on my PC at the time – which means either
PC exclusives, or games my machine was able to run decently when they
came out. The end result of all this is that I played a lot of console games
in the mid-2000s, as my PC aged and became less and less able to keep
up with the big titles of the day.
Which explains why another Myst game is here.
But in its defense, I actually did enjoy Myst V. It did away with the
series’ previous devotion to crappy FMV, and also kept the realtime
movement of Uru – which made it playable for me in a way none of the
other Myst games are, because I hate first person slideshow “gameplay”. I
was also used to Myst’s formula of puzzles after playing Uru, so I wasn’t
as lost as I might’ve otherwise been.
Go to some place new, figure out how to turn on the power, fiddle with
levers or some shit, and boom. You’re done. Consult a walkthrough.
Move on.
#9 – Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)
I played this on my console at
first, before abandoning it for the PC version because I’d heard the
console release was “censored” – and it was, but not in any meaningful
way. Some crude polygonal nudity was cut out, which I guess was done
for the sex-shamed American audience, but really was kind of a service to
mankind in general.
The sex scenes were awkward and painful, with frightening clipping
issues that could seriously traumatize kids who might grow up thinking
sex happens when one person’s leg phase-shifts into another person’s
thigh. As for the nudity? Meh. Draw a triangle and color it in the flesh
tone of your choice, then put a little dot in the middle. Congratulations!
You’ve just drawn a 2005 video game boob.
The game itself was interesting
and different, and I enjoyed it right up until the story just said screw this
noise and went home. It’s hard to explain the disconnect between the
early parts of the game which celebrate the mundane in fascinating ways
(just walking around your apartment doing normal, stupid things is
strangely compelling), and the second half of the game that gets rid of all
that business and focuses on mid-air Dragonball Z kick punching via
quicktime events.
It’s weird.
#8 – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
This game had an extremely
long development cycle – stretching all the way back to 1999 – with a lot
of steady hype coming out of Headfirst Productions along the way. By all
accounts, the game was going to be awesome when it was eventually
released in 2005. Amazing graphics, a physics system, sanity effects, tons
of interactivity within the environment, smart AI, co-op, etc…
Of course, the game we finally ended up getting after six long years of
waiting had none of that.
Changing publishers midstream probably didn’t help much, especially
after the game was picked up by Bethesda who, at this point, had actively
started avoiding innovative gameplay at all costs, like some kinda of
phobic vampire to garlic bread. With most of its promised features
stripped, Dark Corners of the Earth was shoved out the door early and
unfinished.
But it was still fun. Somehow.
Maybe it was the setting, which Headfirst nailed. Lovecraftian horror is
always welcome, especially back in 2005 before it penetrated the
mainstream and Cthulhu bobbleheads started popping up at gas stations.
The game is more or less a retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth,
which seems to be a go-to story for people wanting to make a game or
movie around the mythos. Personally, fish people annoy me, but hey. A
cult’s gotta do what a cult’s gotta do, amirite?
While most of the features were gone, the skeleton of the game remained
intact, and glimpses of what could have been were everywhere – most
notably during a tense escape sequence, where you’re pushing things in
front of doors to try and block your pursuers as you scramble through
rooms and out windows.
Then there are the stealth sections.
Which I’m not going to talk about, because my Mama always told me, if
you can’t say anything nice…
#7 – Still Life
One of the few “serious” adventure
games I’ve ever actually enjoyed, Still Life is a sequel to an earlier game
I didn’t like very much called Post Mortem. But I guess the developers
realized most people didn’t like the first game, so they decided to just
pretend it never happened. Therefore, even though Still Life sometimes
throws you into the roll of the protagonist from Post Mortem via
flashbacks, experience with the first game is not remotely necessary.
I’m not sure what it was about Still Life that grabbed me, but it was
probably the murder mystery angle. Without giving anything away, the
story involves you working as a detective in the NYPD, trying to track
down an elusive serial killer while flashing back to the experiences of the
protagonist from the first game, who was tracking down another serial
killer with the same bizarre M.O. decades earlier.
It’s got a rich story, and the puzzles are fun. Sadly, the dialog is almost
universally awful and the voice acting is ridiculous, but by the mid-2000s,
you had to take what you could get with adventure games.
#6 – Project: Snowblind
If gaming were framed in a drug
metaphor, then Deus Ex would be that first hit off the pipe for some
woebegone soul lying in the dingy light of an 1800s opium den. It was
wonderful and amazing, and every game after it is just chasing the dragon
of that first glorious hit.
Which is why Deus Ex just keeps popping up on my list. Everyone keeps
trying to recapture whatever magic dust that game had, but no one ever
seems to get as close as that first time.
Even when the game is a direct sequel in the franchise, like Snowblind.
“What?” I hear you cry. Hang on, I’ll explain.
Project: Snowblind was intended to be a multiplayer-focused game in the
the Deus Ex franchise, which probably seemed like a good idea to some
asshole in a boardroom at the time. Take one of the most immersive and
well executed single-player games that defines the pinnacle of
achievement in narrative-based interactive gameplay, then get rid of all
that and turn it into a multiplayer pew-pew shooter. It’s brilliant!
Somewhere along the line, I guess someone came to their senses (or was
fired) and the Deus Ex connection was dropped. Officially, anyway.
Unofficially, the soul of DX had already been infused into the game to
the point where it was impossible to cut out, so they didn’t. They just
wrapped a different story around it that sidestepped direct references to
the Deus Ex universe, and called it a day.
And it was fun.
The best way to describe Project: Snowblind is to call it an impatient
man’s Deus Ex, even though stealth is still kinda/sorta in the game, if you
want to bother with it. But the shooting is so tight and fun, and the pacing
of the game so well executed from that angle, that you’d be missing out
on most of what the game has to offer.
The FPS gameplay in Deus Ex always kind of sucked. The shooting was
probably the weakest part of the game, really. In Snowblind, it’s the other
way around. The shooting feels right, it’s satisfying, and the game never
gets too bogged down with story or exploration. It knows you just want to
kill things, and it wants you to have fun killing the things you kill, so it
gets out of your way and lets you start killing them.
The nanoaugmentations (a direct carry-over from DX) are useful and easy
to call upon, with everything from ballistic armor, to a nano-powered riot
shield, and x-ray vision at your disposal. Each augment feels solid and
strong, and by the end of the game, you are as an empowered god, ready
to smite your foes with the swift hand of nano-fueled justice.
#5 – F.E.A.R.
After years of producing shooters
that never quite felt right, Monolith finally nailed it with F.E.A.R. –
which I’m just going to type as FEAR from now on, because acronyms
are stupid. Especially when they stand for First Encounter Assault Recon,
which is a paranormal law enforcement agency the game actually wants
you to take seriously.
FEAR desperately wants to be a horror game, which is the one area where
it fails spectacularly. It’s neither scary nor suspenseful, and all of the
horror elements come off as trite imitations of superior material that itself
was never very good to begin win.
But the shooting. The shooting is where FEAR shines, which is a 180
degree shift for Monolith, whose previous FPS titles normally excelled at
everything but the shooting.
The weapons feel great, the environments feel real, and the enemy AI is
spectacular. When its working at its best, the AI will impress you with
how it coordinates different enemies to surround you, flank you, drive
you into an ambush, etc… It’s still some of the best AI in any shooter to
date, and well worth the price of admission.
#4 – Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
World War II is the
proverbial well from which all game developers seem to go back to when
they run out of ideas. Which is fine, because it normally works, even if
that means we have more WWII games in the world than just about
anything else, including unused AOL discs.
The Brothers in Arms series really wants to be an interactive version of
HBO’s Band of Brothers. Even the title cards between missions look like
the ones from the series. The grim, philosophical voice overs, the witty
banter between troops, the gritty realism of having a grenade explode too
close to your headface are all there. And, for the most part, they work.
Where the game truly shines, however, is in its blend of FPS action and
squad-based tactical combat. It accomplishes this through a clever and
simple to use one-button mechanic for deploying soldiers to specific
locations, and telling them what to do once they get there.
Of course, most encounters boil down to having some guys lay down
suppressing fire while some other guys run around to fire on the enemy’s
flank. And by most encounters, I mean every single one. You’d think it
would get old after a while, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t.
Securing your objectives and moving on the next mission feels solid and
rewarding, and by the end of the game, you leave with a clear sense of
progression and accomplishment.
#3 – Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich
The first of two Irrational titles in
my top three for this year, Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich takes the
superhero squad from the first game and adds Nazis. And that’s pretty
much it.
There’s time travel involved and internal strife within the team along with
plenty of connections back to the first game, but really it’s just more of
the same. But with Nazis.
Because of the proverbial WWII well.
And it works. Because it almost always works – especially when you get
to melt fascist faces with fireballs from your fists.
It’s campy and funny and glorious.
Go play it.
#2 – SWAT 4
I love this game. Love, love, love.
SWAT 3 was the first game in the series to go first-person, but it was
clunky and cumbersome and generally not all that great. It was fine for its
time, but it wasn’t until Irrational got their hands on the franchise that it
truly found its footing.
You play as the leader of a SWAT team, and you go around doing SWAT
things like serving warrants and busting serial killers. Each mission starts
with a briefing and (usually) an accompanying 9-1-1 call, then you outfit
your team, pick an entry point, and it’s off to the races.
The interface for commanding your team is handled through an elegant
right-click menu system that is fast, functional, and easy to use. Of
course, getting the hang of smoothly issuing commands while moving
through an environment trying not to get killed takes some time.
Once you get your head around it though, the game really opens up for
multiple playthroughs of each level. The idea is to be as non-lethal as
possible, which is pretty easy on the first few missions, but gets
progressively more difficult as you move through the later levels when
enemies start wearing body armor and gas masks like great big jerkfaces.
You have to adjust your tactics and equipment for each mission, which
you can play over and over again thanks to random enemy and civilian
placement. It’s never the same twice, and the lethality of the weapons
means that one door you opened last time that was safe might end you
with one bullet from a bad guy’s gun this time. And, since there are no
quick saves, every mission becomes a tense, nail-biting affair as you try
to accomplish your objectives while saving as many lives as possible.
Including the bad guys.
#1 – Psychonauts
I originally played Double Fine’s
first game on my Xbox, but I loved it so much that I bought the PC
version and played it all over again. You’ve surely heard of Psychonauts
by now, so I shouldn’t really need to go into the details. But shut up,
because I’m about to anyway.
You play as a kid who runs away from the circus to sneak off to a psychic
summer camp and learn how to invade people’s minds in order to solve
their psychological problems by way of third person platforming. Which
is all somehow even weirder than it sounds.
The platforming itself can be a little floaty at times, but it doesn’t matter
because it’s really just there to move you through the interesting,
imaginative environments that make up each person’s brain. One level
might have you tromping around the mind of a carnage-obsessed general,
another puts you in the 1950s conspiratorial mind of a paranoid milkman,
while others throw you into a black velvet painting, a levitating
discotheque, or in the middle of a tabletop board game.
Every mind is wholly unique, with nothing recycled between them. The
story is witty, the dialog is sharp and hilarious, the voice acting is
spectacular, and everything about the game is just…perfect.
Well, except maybe for the Meat Circus. But I’ll let you figure that one
out on your own.
#10 – Sam & Max Save the World
Back when Telltale was still trying
to figure out how to modernize the point and click adventure genre before
they just said screw it, gave up, and started churning out licensed chooseyour-own-adventure books with sometimes walking, they really did try to
make games. The problem was nobody wanted modernized point and
click adventures, and Telltale never quite managed to nail down the
magic of the genre. Which probably explains why they just stopped
trying.
The first series of Sam & Max episodes was competent, but it was
nothing spectacular nor particularly memorable in any way. The writing
was as good as it ever was, the art was great, the animation fine, but some
intangible something was missing. I think maybe it was the timing. In a
comedy, timing is everything – which isn’t always compatible with a
somewhat sluggish game engine that never feels like it’s very confident
with itself, like the nerdy girl in every high school movie who could
easily be the most popular kid in the cafeteria if only she’d take off her
glasses.
For whatever reason, nothing
ever really came together with the series. I played the first one and a bit
of the second season, but lost interest somewhere along the way. The best
episode was one where Sam & Max hop into virtual reality, which
worked partly because it was just plain funny, and also as a throwback to
when the original game did the same thing back in 1993.
I like Sam & Max as characters. I loved the comic strip you’d get inside
most promotional material from LucasArts, and playing Find The Hidden
Max inside different LucasArts titles was always a fun minigame. I even
watched the short-lived animated series ( bet you didn’t even know there
was such a thing ), and Steve Purcell is awesome. But for whatever
reason, the franchise has never really worked for me in game form.
I’m probably just broken.
#9 – Secret Files: Tunguska
If your favorite parts of old
adventure games involved the occasionally ridiculous puzzle, then Secret
Files: Tunguska is the game for you. The puzzles here are absurd, and not
just every now and then. They’re always absurd. Taping a cell phone to a
cat to eavesdrop on a conversation is one of the most straightforward and
sensible puzzles in the entire game, if that gives you some idea of how
crazy things get.
The weird thing is that the wonky, Rube Goldberg meets MacGyver style
puzzles actually add to Tunguska’s charm. They’re set against a
desperately serious story, filled with conspiracy and intrigue and a fistful
of cliches, and the contrast between all that and the super silly puzzles
just works on some unconcious level or something. I don’t know, I’m not
a psychiatrist.
It’s a very pretty game, and it’s the first point and clicker I can remember
that had a system that highlights all the interactive elements in a scene,
which is a super nice feature for an adventure game to have so you don’t
have to hunt down pixels when you’re already doing things like getting a
key out of a fishtank by using a magnet you get from a little girl after you
give her batteries for her camera and fix her bike’s flat tire with a rubber
glove and some glue.
Even though the cries of the adventure genre being dead have never really
been true, 2006 was probably the year it was relying the most heavily on
life support.
# 8 – Neverwinter Nights 2
I’ve played a lot of Neverwinter
Nights 2, but I never get very far. The story is just painfully cliche and
boring. The writing is dull, the D&D mechanics annoying, and really just
everything about the game is mediocre. Except that it’s really pretty, I
guess.
So, like any self-respecting shallow jerk, I keep trying to like the game.
It’s attractive, other people seem to dig it, and I want to be where the cool
kids are. But then I have to play through that stupid harvest festival or
whatever it was again, and I lose my will to live.
I hear the expansions add some good content, but I’ve never tried any of
it. I guess I should, but something about skipping through the start of a
game always feels off to me. Like, I wouldn’t start watching Breaking
Bad in the middle of season three or anything, so why should I do that
with a game?
Although, to be fair, Walter White never made me endure an excruciating
hour of Renfest tutorials, either.
#7 – Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Yet another game on my list with
a Looking Glass pedigree, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was created
by Arkane Studios, whose previous game, Arx Fatalis, made my list back
in 2002. (And their next game will show up when we get to 2012.) The
Looking Glass bit comes into play by way of Floodgate Entertainment,
which was made up by a bunch of former LG folks.
Dark Messiah, I guess of Might and Magic although I wouldn’t know
because the story is completely boring and I never liked the Might and
Magic series anyway, is a game that isn’t quite sure what it’s supposed to
be. One way to look at it is as a Source engine-powered version of the
Hexen games with a little Thief sprinkled in for flavor. But the other way
– probably the better way – to look at it is as a prototype for Dishonored.
There are multiple ways to build out your character, multiple ways to
proceed through each map, and there’s even a rope arrow that you’ll use
all the time. There are magic spells, melee combat, and ranged attacks,
but it’s the melee kills where you’ll feel the most connection to the
(vastly superior) Dishonored.
Dark Messiah isn’t a bad game, but it’s all over the place. There are
brilliant moments that will make you feel like a powerful badass or a
clever little bastard, but there are just as many (or more) moments when
you’ll absolutely hate the game and curse everyone involved in its
creation.
It’s terribly unbalanced, especially once you make it through the game’s
midpoint when you stop getting significantly more powerful but the
enemies don’t, and certain builds become increasingly hard to play as the
game goes on. It can be frustrating at times and downright maddening at
others, but when the game hits the mark, it really hits it.
If you like Hexen or Heretic, or Deus Ex or Thief, you’ll find something
to like in Dark Messiah. You’ll just also find a lot to hate, too.
#6 – SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate
Yes, I’m putting an expansion
pack on my top ten games of the year. Some people might cry foul at this,
since an expansion isn’t a proper game, but these are foolish people who
will probably have no problem with me adding another expansion pack a
little higher up on the list, because they don’t consider it an expansion
when it clearly is. Whatever. People are weird.
Everything I loved about SWAT 4 comes back in the expansion pack,
only this time instead of disconnected SWAT calls, every mission
progresses through a cohesive storyline, which is nice. If you care about
that sort of thing in a game like SWAT 4, anyway.
With the expansion pack adding 7 new missions to the base game’s 13, it
brings to total up to 20 missions of brilliant, squad-based tactical FPS
goodness, and I don’t care what anyone says. The Stetchkov Syndicate
has some great, challenging missions and it stands as its own game.
This is especially true since I’m only covering games I played on my PC
and it’s 2006. The industry shift toward cross-platform titles and my
aging PC at the time conspired against me when I started putting together
my list, so you’ll just have to take what I can give you. I only played so
many PC games in 2006, so I’m adding what I add.
Deal with it.
#5 – Rogue Trooper
A weird little game
that I wish had become a proper series but am also kinda glad it never did
because they’d just muck it up with modern AAA aesthetics and crap,
Rogue Trooper is a quick romp through a bizarre world that is just good,
simple fun.
You play as – surprise – a genetically engineered trooper named Rogue
who, through circumstances not entirely unforseen through the clever use
of foreshadowing nomenclature, goes rogue after all his buddies get killed
and he has to put their mindbrains inside his clothes and shit.
What? Yeah.
Whenever one of the GI troopers dies, you have 60 seconds to remove his
“biochip” and slot it into something, like a gun, a backpack, or even your
helmet. Once slotted, the troopers live on inside whatever you stuck them
in, and lend a bit of AI control to whatever it is they’ve become. Your
gun suddenly helps out with auto-aiming, or you can place it down as a
turret. Your backpack can manufacture upgrades and ammo, and your
helmet learns how to hack things and fly sci-fi helicopters and stuff.
It’s weird and it’s short, but it’s tightly focused, well designed, and great
fun to play.
I’m not sure why all the genetically engineered troopers are blue, though.
And I have no idea why all the blue dudes run around shirtless while all
the blue girls get to wear sports bras, or why every single one of them has
a white mohawk at birth, but I’ve been playing games a long time. I
learned to stop questioning some things years ago.
#4 – Company of Heroes
Hey, look. It’s a WWII game!
Something new and different!
Company of Heroes was gorgeous back in 2006, and nearly melted my
PC even with scaled down graphics settings, but the gameplay was a fresh
and innovative take on the RTS genre. Well, it was fresh and innovative
for me, anyway. But I’d grown tired of RTSs by the time Company of
Heroes came out, so some other title in the genre might’ve already done
all the things it did, but who cares. I didn’t know about them at the time,
and this is my list so you can just hush it.
There’s light base building in CoH, but your resources come from
captured control points that you can gain or lose throughout the course of
a mission. This shifts the focus more on aggressive defense and inch-byinch gains, and brings tactical strategic combat into the mix.
I use tactical and strategic in the same sentence, because that’s really
what the game tries to do. There’s more strategy involved than tactical
commands, but the control you have over your units coupled with their
significance in each setting means tactical use of them as part of an overal
strategic plan is important.
Which is all, like, super serious and crap.
#3 – Hitman: Blood Money
Probably my
favorite entry in the Hitman series, Blood Money managed to distill the
essence of what makes the franchise great and concentrated it into a
tightly focused series of missions that range from assassinating the seedy
former manager of an abandoned theme park, to stomping through the
crowds of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras while hunting down people
in ridiculous bird costumes.
There’s really nothing new about Blood Money. It doesn’t radically
change the franchise or try anything daring or risky, but what it does do,
it does better than the series ever has. Fulfilling your objectives is always
satisfying, and managing to achieve a Silent Assassin rating for any
mission on the hardest difficulty is an incredibly difficult and rewarding
experience.
After the success of Blood Money’s focused approach on getting all the
good parts of the franchise just right, the next game in the series decided
nobody much liked the best game in the series, so they turned it into an
testosterone-fueled game with grimdark action, a steamy shower scene,
and sexy killer nuns in latex.
Sigh.
#2 – Half-Life 2: Episode One
Remember when I said a second
expansion pack was going to make this year’s list? Well, here you go.
Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first of three-but-really-two-becausewe’re-never-getting-the-third-one-so-suck-it-up-buttercup add-on
episodes for Half-Life 2. I bet nobody’s going to gripe about this
expansion being on the list, because it’s Half-Life and people love a good
double standard. Jerks.
Episode One focused heavily on the relationship between Alyx Vance
and Gordon “No Lips” Freeman, and felt a lot like I was playing a co-op
game with an AI partner because I’m awful and nobody wants to play
with me. Which was fine by me, because I’m kind of awful and nobody
really wants to play with me.
Taken together, Episode One and Two are arguably better than the
entirety of Half-Life 2 itself, but I can’t take them together yet because
this is 2006 and Episode Two hasn’t come out.
Taken on its own, Episode One is a brief but enjoyable trek through City
17 as you try to escape before some Science Event happens and
everything explodes or whatever. The focus is on working together with
Alyx, who was woefully underutilized in the base game, and the approach
works really well.
Still could’ve used more Dog, though.
#1 – Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
The sequel to one of
the best adventure games of all time didn’t disappoint by the shift to 3D
and away from the point-and-click mechanics of The Longest Journey.
Sure, there were some clunky bits, and the introduction of combat was a
ridiculous choice, but the story was still there. The characters – especially
the new protagonist Zoë, as well as the return of April Ryan from the first
game – were just as memorable and engaging as they ever were in the
original, and the settings just as interesting and unique.
It’s a very sad game, too. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy running
through everything to the point that, even when things are going well for
the characters, there’s always this sense that everyone knows that their
happiness is tenuous, at best. I’m not sure if Ragnar Tørnquist was
actually going for the sort of ambigious, elusive feeling of nihlism that
the game gives off, but kudos to him if he was. Because it does exactly
that.
The whole game feels like a metaphor for lost innocence, really. The
awkward and depressing transition from childhood wonder to depressing
adult pragmaticality is conveyed not only through Zoë’s character arc, but
through off hand, on-the-nose interactions, like when she has to
cannibalize parts from her childhood stuffed animal. It’s a heartbreaking
game, and a powerful one – if you’re in the mindset to take it in.
But it’s also an adventure game
from 2006 that’s making the transition to 3D and trying to break through
to a mainstream audience. That means there are plenty of missteps along
the way, and your reaction to the game could be much different than
mine. But for me, it was my game of the year.
What can I say? It pushed my buttons.
#10 – The Lord of the Rings Online
One of my last dips
into the tepid waters of the MMO world, The Lord of the Rings Online
kind of reminded me of Ultima Online, but not enough to keep me
playing very long. I remember it having a very detailed and interesting
crafting system that was nice, and running around The Shire was a nerdy
joy that warmed my cold, dark heart. But beyond that? Meh. MMO.
In its defense, it was a game more focused on story than most other
MMOs, but it was a story I already knew, and any deviations from the
established narrative – however slight – just felt off.
If I were to go back and play an MMO today, I’d probably give LotR:
Online another shot, but I’m not likely to do that. Massively multiplayer
games tend to be absolutely filled with Internet People, so I like to avoid
them whenever I can.
#9 – DEFCON: Everybody Dies
Would you like to
play a game?
The most effective Wargames simulator this side of a VR-enabled
Matthew Broderick, DEFCON is a bleak, disturbing look at mutually
assured destruction, but in a super fun and stylish sort of way. Lots of
blues. Very high technical.
There’s not much to the game, but that’s more to do with elegance than
simplicity. There’s plenty of strategy involved to emerge victorious, but
the whole point of the game is that there are no winners in a game of
global thermonuclear war.
It’s a game every single Presidential candidate should have to play before
going on stage at a debate to talk about how badass they’re going to be
with the lives of other people’s children.
#8 – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
My PC could barely handle
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which has to be one of the most ridiculous acronyms I’ve
ever heard. Supposedly, it stands for Scavengers, Trespassers,
Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers, but I had to dig
that up on the internet just now, because it was never made clear in the
game so I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m just calling it Stalker, though.
Like I said, my PC could barely run this monstrosity of a game, even
though the graphical returns were meager at best. I don’t know much
about programming and suchlike, but I always felt like Stalker didn’t
really care about scalability or running on older machines, or even newer
machines. When it came out, it was notoriously demanding, even on top
of the line rigs.
As a result, I never got very far in the game because I’d either get
annoyed at getting a crappy framerate at the lowest detail settings, or I’d
get frustrated with dying all the time. Maybe it was both.
I never quite got Stalker, although I really loved its atmosphere. It
absolutely nailed the tone it was going for, and the much-touted guy
playing his guitar around a fire was as effective as everyone says it was. It
was bleak and depressing, and if only my machine had been able to run it
better, I probably would’ve been more willing to overlook its rough edges
and dive into its depressing world.
#7 – Team Fortress 2
An absolute gem when it came
out, Team Fortress 2 was a Pixar movie come to life, if Pixar movies
involved people on a Red Team killing people on a Blue Team for
reasons never properly explained. The gameplay was fast, the character
types well incorporated (even if everyone just wanted to be Engineers),
and the art style phenomenal.
It’s just a shame Valve eventually made it Free to Play and completely
ruined the game with add-ons and DLC and unlockable nonsense. I tried
to get back into TF2 not long ago, and what I found was a jumbled mess
of a game, so overcome with stupid add-on crap that the simple elegance
of the original game had been entirely lost.
But hey, some dude who killed me was wearing a pretty cool hat.
So there’s that.
#6 – Jade Empire
One of the very few
Bioware games I actually like (the other being Knights of the old
Republic) is, just as it was with KOTOR, entirely down to setting.
Whereas one hooked me with Star Wars, Jade Empire snagged me with
its mythical interpretation of ancient China. I loved it.
I also enjoyed the one aspect of the game tons of people hated, so no real
surprises there. I thought the combat was very well done, in a realtime
rock-paper-scissors style that allowed for some truly epic Kung Fu battles
with genuine strategy involved. Of course, you had to play on the hardest
difficulty level for any of that to surface, and even then it was still way
too forgiving, but I liked it all the same.
The overall story was the Basic Bioware Plot, but the side and character
quests made up for most of the main quest’s predictability. As did the
setting, and the beautiful aesthetic the game offered. Everything just felt
sufficiently mystical, bathed in faint glows and awash in colors that ended
up making it feel more like playing inside a painting than anything else.
#5 – Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened
Like chocolate and
peanut butter, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft are two flavors that
go surprisingly well together. The Lovecraftian elements take a while to
get going, but once they do, the game hits its stride as Holmes and
Watson are pulled hip deep into the waters of the Cthulhu mythos.
It was the first title in Frogworks’ series to feature full 3D gameplay,
which took the game in a new, more exploratory direction that the
previous point-and-click titles weren’t really capable of. It misses the
mark several times along the way, but it hits more often than it doesn’t.
There’s a really stupid chase through an area that passes itself off as New
Orleans for people who have never been there, and it doesn’t really work.
The chase, I mean. I don’t really care it NOLA is depicted accurately or
not. The first Gabriel Knight game got it mostly right, but missed a few
key points . I don’t hold anything against The Awakened for getting it
wrong, although there’s one puzzle where you can’t get to where you
need to be because of a lingering swarm of giant mosquitoes.
Which is about as accurate description of the Deep South as anyone could
ever hope for, I guess.
#4 – Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Episode Two was the best part of
the entire Half-Life saga that probably won’t ever be resolved until Valve
licenses the property to a company who doesn’t own a massive online
storefront and still cares about making games. Until that happens, we’re
stuck with what we’ve got.
The interaction between Alyx and the player is the best it’s ever been,
once you get through the boring bits at the beginning of the episode when
Alyx needs to be saved by Male Power Fantasy #37. Once that’s done,
the game really picks up and becomes a great single-player co-op
experience.
The final battle at the end of the episode is lengthy and memorable,
without ever devolving to the point of a boss fight. It was satisfyingly
frantic and ultimately rewarding. The ending cliffhanger was a real
bummer, though.
Ah, well. Maybe one day.
I mean, nobody thought Duke Nukem Forever would ever come out,
either.
#3 – The Witcher
I did not finish The
Witcher in 2007, but what I was able to play before I got to an area that
very nearly melted my PC was an excellent return to form for the RPG
genre. It was kinda/sorta/not really grimdark without being absurd
(*cough* Dragon Age *cough*), and felt very grounded in “reality” –
insomuch as there can exist a reality wherein a mutant white-haired
assassin murders monsters, anyway.
The initial release was a little rocky, but CD Projekt RED released an
Enhanced Edition the following year which not only corrected most of the
problems, but also added a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really necessary, but
that contributed greatly to the quality of the overall product. This
dedication to making the best game possible, as well as showing a
devotion and commitment to its customers would come to define CD
Projekt RED as the years went on, but more on that later.
I wouldn’t finish The Witcher until I upgraded my machine a few years
later, but it’s still getting a spot in my top three for 2007 because it not
only completely captured me for the time I was able to spend with it, but
it exposed me to a brand new type of fantasy world I hadn’t really
considered before. It was a gritty fantasy, with one foot in myth and the
other planted firmly in the depressing swamp of reality.
Game of Thrones did it, too, which I hadn’t heard of it yet, either. But
after playing The Witcher, I went looking.
#2 – Penumbra: Overture
I came very close to giving this
year’s top slot to Penumbra: Overture, but in the end I opted for a game
that was arguably more original and clever than anything I’d seen in
years. Which isn’t to diminish everything original and clever about
Penumbra, because it did a lot of really cool stuff, as well.
Part first-person adventure game, part survival horror, and part physics
simulator, Penumbra hit all the right buttons with me. From keeping me
fully immersed in the environment by having me actually interact with
every object in physical ways (e.g. to turn a valve, most games would
have you hold down a button; Penumbra makes you grab and actually
turn it with your mouse), to the suspense of not knowing what was
around the next corner, Penumbra captivated me.
It was a fine first entry in an excellent series, and the folks behind it
would eventually go on to create the gold standard for first-person horror
gaming, but I’ll get to that in 2010.
#1 – Portal (not Bioshock)
If I were making a Top Ten
Games of 2007 list, Bioshock would probably be here. But it’s not,
because this isn’t a top games list. It’s a list of the top 10 games I played
on my PC the years they came out, and I did not play Bioshock on my
PC. I played it on my Xbox 360. Like some kind of animal.
(This will happen more and more, as this list moves through the late
2000s. Sorry.)
I did play Portal on PC though, and it was amazing. Apart from the
brilliant puzzle solving in the game, the narrative wrapped around
everything was what really sold me. The dialog was sharp and witty, and
the whole package was subversive and brilliant.
It was funny, sometimes creepy, and always entertaining. The fact that
Valve effectively turned a first person shooter into a puzzle game, then
into an adventure game, and finally into a subversive tragic comedy was
something I’d never seen before in a game, and wouldn’t see again until
Portal 2, when they took it even further.
It’s my PC game of the year for being the most original, most inventive,
and most effective use of gaming as a unique storytelling platform than
I’d ever seen before.
And it was fun, too.
This year’s list was probably the hardest to put together. Life was coming
at me pretty hard in 2008, so it was a crappy year for me. I played a few
good games, but mostly I stayed in my living room and played them on a
console with a carton of chocolate ice cream and a bucket to catch my
own tears by my side. I didn’t play much on the PC, and what I did play
was generally awful.
#10 – The Lost Crown
This game was generally awful.
It’s a point and click horror game with a lot of pointing and clicking, very
little horror, and tons of ridiculous character animations. Very, very slow
and ridiculous character animations. Even the protagonist’s walk cycle is
mess. Every time you click to move anywhere, his body just starts sliding
across the ground for a couple of steps before his legs realize they’re
supposed to be doing something.
The good part of the game comes from the little town where all the lack
of action happens. It’s made up of enhanced real world photos, and
everything is presented in black and white, with small splashes of color
for emphasis every now and then. This isn’t anything new, but where The
Lost Crown succeeds is in never feeling like it’s going for the cheap artsy
aesthetic. It just kind of…works.
Shame about the rest of the game, though.
#9 – Art of Murder: FBI Confidential
This game was also generally
awful. Ostensibly a detective game, it’s mostly just an inventory-based
point and click puzzler with no real redeeming qualities apart from the
fact that it looks nice and the characters don’t look like they were
animated by a particularly serious robot.
You do solve crime, though. Along with doing things like trying to give a
bottle of whiskey to a bum who doesn’t like whiskey, so naturally you
have to switch the label on it so he thinks it’s scotch, so naturally you
have to find a way to peel the label off by plugging up a sink with a drain
stopper you find in a bathroom where you can’t use the sink, so naturally
you take the stopper to a kitchen sink where it fits perfectly and allows
you to soak the bottle until you can peel the label off the scotch and stick
in on the whiskey bottle so the alcoholic bum will accept FREE
ALCOHOL since he’s a liquor snob.
Which seems like an awful lot of trouble for an FBI agent to go through,
especially when it’s 2008 and we’ve got seven years of the Patriot Act
working in our favor to rendition the hell out of this guy until he cracks
down at gitmo or whatever. Waterboard him with bourbon. I dunno.
Why are so many detective games not really detective games? They’re
always detective-themed games, where you mostly do something else and
only kinda/sorta do some detective work every now and then. If games
had rules like food does with the FDA, then we’d have a bunch of
Detective Flavored games like we have lots of cheap Chocolate Flavored
candy with little to no actual chocolate in it.
#8 – Overclocked: A History of Violence
This game was generally nothing
special. It starts out as a promising point and click adventure with an
interesting story involving several people snapping and going on
homicidal rampages, but it quickly spirals down into the depths of
repetitive nonsense and annoyingly unskippable crap.
The worst part of the game is the entire central mechanic upon which it
relies. You have to talk to characters to get them to have a flashback so
you can figure out why they went all cray-cray and started killing people
all day-day. What this translates to in the game, however, is just listening
to the same damn dialog over and over and over and over and over and
over again.
It’s like that song that never freaking ended on that Shari Lewis show
with the puppets. But worse.
#7 – Alone in the Dark
This game was generally
mediocre. It’s not as bad as its reputation, but it’s not really very good,
either. The whole problem with rebooting Alone in the Dark (and they
just keep trying, bless their little hearts), is that the first game was never
really that good to begin with. It was impressive for its time, yes. It
birthed the survival-horror genre, yes. But it was triangle man fighting
triangle tentacle, and the controls and inventory and everything else about
the game were all pretty bad.
But the first game hooked players because it had atmosphere. It had to
have atmosphere, because it sure as hell didn’t have much else going for
it. But every time they try to reboot the series, they ignore atmosphere
and try to shove some crappy AAA nonsense in to take its place.
With this one, it was supposed to be advanced item interaction that was
all super impressive in the carefully scripted demos leading up to release,
but that all fell apart once us gamers got our hands on it and realized that
everything pretty much came down to using sticky tape on crap and
making flamethrowers out of hairspray bottles.
By my count, we just had our third failed attempt at a reboot, with the
latest going in the bizarre direction of making an ALONE in the Dark
game multiplayer co-op. Because of course that makes sense.
#6 – A Vampyre Story
This game was
generally disappointing. Crafted by a bunch of ex-LucasArts veterans,
this point and click adventure should’ve been great. But it wasn’t.
It’s not bad. It has its moments. It’s cute. But it just doesn’t execute any
one thing particularly well. The jokes fall flat more often than not, the
animations aren’t bad, but they’re limited, and the locations aren’t very
varied.
I’d hoped A Vampyre Story would bring back the point and click comedy
and revive the lost LucasArts charm, but I’d have to wait until
Thimbleweed Park did that in 2016.
Which it had better do, or I’m going to mail vials filled with my tears of
disappointment directly to Ron Gilbert until he makes me laugh again.
#5 – World of Goo
This game was generally
inoffensive. It was basically a fun mobile game before there were really
any mobile games, so it had no idea it was on the wrong platform. It’s a
decent diversion from doing things like playing fun games, but it’s not
much more than that.
For those of you who don’t know what World of Goo is all about, it’s
basically down to building wobbly towers out of gelatinous goop until
they fall down and you realize you’ll never beat the high score you got
that one time when you were just randomly clicking things while catching
up on the first half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica and
wondering just what the hell happened to Starbuck, anyway.
Other than that, there’s not much else to the game. It’s cute and it’s fun in
small doses, but it’s nothing all that special or interesting. And yet it’s #5
on this year’s list.
Go figure.
#4 – Left 4 Dead
This game is generally not too bad.
It’s repetitive as all hell, but it takes a while before that sets in and
everyone gets bored so they just start setting each other on fire.
It’s a multiplayer co-op game where you fight off a zombie horde as your
try to reach objectives. It’s fun. It encourages team play and cooperation,
and even patience and understanding as you refrain from murdering the
crap out of that idiot who ignited a gas can while we were all trapped
inside a tiny closet.
The only real problem with Left 4 Dead is that it always plays out the
same way. The scenarios don’t really matter, because it’s always run
here, shoot these things, go there. Repeat.
The only time things get moderately exciting is when a giant Tank
zombie comes out in the totally-unscripted and dynamically “directed”
way that happens at the exact same point near the end of every damn
scenario. Then, either everybody dies and the game is over, or one jerk
manages to hide out near the boat while everyone else dies and then it’s
game over, except for the one dude who ignored everyone else and lived
because we all want to think the guy who lives in a horror movie is the
noble hero who sacrifices and leads, but really it’s all down to whichever
sniveling weasel managed to hide the best.
Which kind of explains evolution, really.
#3 – Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis
This game was generally decent.
It’s more Sherlock Holmes, which is usually a good thing. There’s more
Creepy Watson. There’s more Victorian London – a lot more of it,
actually. The game seems to pride itself on how exactingly, painfully
British it is, even going so far as to have entire swaths of the game built
around British history as if I’m supposed to be intimately acquainted with
whatever the hell happened in Trafalgar Square back in some historical
period I never learned about because I was born in the filthy colonies.
There’s plenty of detecting to be done, but the big problem with the
Sherlock Holmes games is just how annoying all of it is. If I want to
measure someone’s boot print, just let me click the measuring tape and
then click the print. Don’t make me drag the tape across it like some kind
of crime scene Bob Vila, because half the time I don’t do it right and
Sherlock just says some bullshit to me like a condescending asshole and I
have to do it all over again.
The best parts of the game are when you get to fiddle around in
Sherlock’s mini-laboratory to figure out what chemicals are in this bit of
evidence, or where that bit of clay comes from.
Also, I’m prettty sure it’s where he makes his drugs.
#2 – Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway
This game was generally good.
It’s more Brothers in Arms, which means it’s more Trying To Be Band of
Brothers and Flanking All The Things, but it still works and it’s still fun.
Hell’s Highway is the best looking game in the series, since the first two
were made on older tech. Hell’s Highway was all next gen before that gen
became last gen, which means it mostly looks the same as the other two
game in the series, but shinier. I remember a lot of pre-release hype on
the cutting-edge visuals of this one, but by the time it eventually came out
after multiple delays, it didn’t look all that spectacular.
It’s fun, though. And it looks as good as it needs to in order to get the job
done, which consists of yelling at these dudes to lay down suppressing
fire while yelling at these other dudes to follow me as we move around
behind the Germans.
The protagonist is also having some kind of bizarre, melodramatic
existential breakdown throughout the whole game or something, but since
none of that really had anything to do with flanking maneuvers, I didn’t
pay much attention.
#1 – Penumbra: Black Plague
This game was generally great.
It’s more Penumbra, which means more physics puzzles and things going
bump in the darkness.
The main thing Black Plague did differently was realizing how much the
first Penumbra’s combat sucked, so it pretty much got rid of it. The focus
in Black Plague is on avoiding bad guys and hiding, which is what the
guys over at Frictional Games would eventually specialize in by the time
they got around to making the hiding simulator called Amnesia.
Black Plague was originally going to be the conclusion of the two-part
series, but then they went and added a third game that was really just an
expansion pack that I didn’t care much about because I remember it
taking place largely in some kind of dream world or fantasy world or I
don’t know what world, but there were a lot of stone walls and a maze
and screw it.
If you play it, just end the series here before things go to crap.
Coming soon…
Christmas Saved
Last month, I was a
mess. I was in a flat spin and spiraling my way into a deep, deep
depression. I was even doing things like listening to country music, which
is a good way to tell just how awful things are. It moves along a sliding
scale, starting with Dolly Parton and ending somewhere around Kenny
Rogers, which – if you’re listening to anything other than The Gambler –
is when you know you’re nearing rock bottom.
Personally, I started by absentmindedly humming Hard Candy Christmas
and worked my way down to listening to Kentucky Homemade Christmas
in a parking lot while choking back tears and wondering where it all went
wrong.
Christmas can be awful.
Later that day, I posted this: Trey’s Christmas Fund . It was a shot-inthe-dark, last ditch effort to try and appeal to the all seeing goat of the
Internet for a small sip of the milk of human kindness. Which I guess in
this metaphor would actually be goat’s milk, which I’ve always thought
was kind of gross for some reason, so maybe let’s just go with human
milk. Except that’s actually worse, because that has to mean breast milk
and oh god what the hell is the milk of human kindness, anyway? I can’t
imagine it’s anything not gross.
But that’s not the point.
Screw the Elf on the Shelf. We got a
Dwarf in a Drawer!
The point is, I was desperate to give my kid – the objectively best kid on
ever on the planet – some kind of a Christmas that didn’t involve me
turning tricks outside a Dollar Tree for enough money to buy a couple of
things inside a Dollar Tree. He’s an amazing, wonderful nine-year-old
boy, with a heart as big as Texas and a smile larger than…wait. I’m
slipping into metaphor again, which kinda freaked me out a minute ago.
Let’s just say he’s awesome and deserves way more than I could ever
give him, even if I were a rich man. (Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba
deedle deedle dum.)
So I wrote the post. Then I posted the post. Then people read the posted
post, and then the most amazing thing happened: it worked. People began
sending me money .
Almost immediately, I started getting little dingle-ding-ping notifications
from PayPal. People were helping. ME. Or, rather, they were helping
Trey – who, let’s face it, is a much more likable guy than I’ll ever be.
For the next few
weeks, that little notification kept going off. $5 here, $25 there, $2, $7…
– each notification was someone out there who gave a crap. Some came
from people I know, some didn’t. Some people surprised me, some
didn’t. But every last cent that came in went not only a long way toward
saving Christmas for my little boy, but it saved me, too. Restored my
faith in humanity, sort of thing. Without getting too sappy about it, you
understand.
I’d planned on writing a personal thank you to each person who helped
out, but then again, I only expected a few people to help out. I never
imagined there would be so many people out there who would care at all
about the problems of some little family in some little no name Texas
town. Anything I could try to write as a personal thank you would quickly
turn into a form letter somewhere around the I don’t even know what
number, because I lost count of how many email notifications I was
getting.
That isn’t to say that we struck it rich with your donations or anything.
Most of them were very modest contributions that added up to us being
able to give Trey a modest Christmas (slightly above really, thanks to a
couple of really good sales and Amazon lightning deals). But there were a
lot of them. Every single dollar helped, and all the small contributions
quickly added up to larger presents, but I still have the post-Christmas
crash to deal with, same as everyone else.
The traditional post-Christmas coma.
Except I’m not just confronted with eating Beanie Weenies every night in
January to make up for what I spent in December. I’m not more broke
than I was a month ago – I’m the same broke. Because you can only ever
really be just so broke. I don’t have credit cards, but I also don’t have
money to pay the mortgage, and the bank is breathing down my neck.
Foreclosure looms. I’m going to have to start juggling which utility works
this month, and which one we can do without until next month. I still
don’t know how we’re going to pay Trey’s school tuition for the rest of
the year. Basically, everything is just as crappy as it ever was – but at
least we gave Trey a good Christmas.
At least he still doesn’t know anything is wrong. At least he went to bed
on the 24th still believing in Christmas Magic, and woke up on Christmas
Day to see it realized. And, at the very least, I still have that memory to
hold onto while I continue fighting to keep the rest of our world from
crumbling around us.
And you guys made that happen.
I don’t know if I
could’ve made it through this Christmas without what all of you did for
us. I don’t know if I could’ve watched him walk into the living room
Christmas morning, to see his face as reality came crashing over him like
a horrible tidal wave. He still believes good always triumphs over evil,
that love wins out over hate, that good people are out there in the world
doing good things, and that he’s one of them.
And you know what? I think maybe he’s right.
Despite every horrible thing that has happened this year, after what
happened this Christmas, I’m a little less cynical. A little less jaded. A
little less defeated.
Because good does triumph. Love does win. And good people are out
there in the world, doing good things. You magnificent bastards are proof
of that, which is just one more thing I’m grateful for.
You grew this Grinch’s heart this year.
All three sizes. And then some.
Trey's Christmas Fund
In my last post, I wrote about how
amazing the GOG.com community is, and about how GOG’s Twitch
Stream Team helped me get through a rotten Thanksgiving . They were
great, as usual, but another – and infinitely more terrifying – holiday is
coming up: Christmas.
And I don’t have any money.
Which is where Twitch comes in!
UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas! Click here for a small token
of my thanks.
If you don’t know what Twitch is, it’s a streaming service that lets people
watch other people playing video games. I know what you’re thinking,
but it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. There’s a chat channel attached to
the stream, so you get to interact with a bunch of great people while
usually laughing at the antics of the streamer. It’s a good time. TRUST
ME.
But what does Twitch have to do with me not having any money for
Christmas? I’m glad you asked!
You might recall that, after finishing my horror novella back in October, I
added a Donation page to this site. Many some a few groovy people
donated, and helped me pay a couple of bills. That was great and all, but I
have more bills coming up – and, more importantly, I have Christmas
coming up. And no money to buy the best kid on the planet any presents.
I was laid off back in May, after my position was outsourced. I made it
through two rounds of layoff before a middle manager I like to call
Hillbilly Voldemort was inexplicably promoted to upper management,
who then proceeded to use the layoffs as an excuse to get rid of everyone
he didn’t like. So that was fun.
So now I’m a 40 year old systems administrator with decades of
experience, and I can’t find a job. I live in the swamplands of Southeast
Texas, in a city that God forgot called Beaumont. It’s a petrochemical
town, which means there are tons of jobs if you’re a refinery worker, but
not so much if you’re in IT. Around here, computers are how the devil
gets inside you.
We have the World’s Largest
WORKING Fire Hydrant, though. So
there’s that.
Moving isn’t an option either, unless the job is absolutely perfect. My
stepson, Trey – the aforementioned BEST KID EVER – needs to see his
dad, so moving would only complicate his visitation schedule. I’d rather
avoid that by finding remote work again (which is what I did at my last
job), but I haven’t had any luck so far. (But feel free to check out my
resume and hire me!)
Now Christmas is coming up right after my unemployment ran out, and
things are pretty desperate. I need help. And, while I’m not above charity,
I would rather do something to earn a little money for the holiday.
Which is where Twitch comes in.
I’m going try doing a little fundraiser for Trey’s Christmas by performing
a marathon stream of a full play-through of Baldur’s Gate. Which, if you
know my history with that game , should be hilarious.
I’ve set up a tip system for the Twitch channel, which will make donating
super easy during the stream. However, if you hate video games and
would rather just send me a few clams the old fashioned way, you can
just head over to my Donate page and take it from there.
Clearly, I’m a professional
book cover artist.
As a way of thanking you for your support, everyone who donates –
either on my site here, or over Twitch – will receive a DRM-free
eBook of my horror novella. (Which you can also read for free here .)
The Baldur’s Gate stream will start this Saturday, December 5, at 10:00
A.M. CST, and will probably run all weekend. (Baldur’s Gate is a
loooooong game.)
I’ll also be doing practice streams all week long, starting at 6:00 P.M.
CST every night this week, so you don’t have to wait for the marathon
stream this weekend to swing by and send me a tip. I might even do some
surprise streams, if I’m feeling really wacky. So jump on in and watch me
flail around with no idea what I’m doing, while I get a handle on
streaming. Mock my ineptitude! Good times.
Whenever the stream is active, you can go watch it by clicking here . I’ll
also add an embed of the stream to this post, just below this paragraph.
While I’m not streaming, you’ll just see a graphic letting you know what
I’ll be streaming next, and when.
Watch live video from Unclejeet on www.twitch.tv
Before you go, let me tell you a little about Trey. He came into my life
nearly eight years ago, after he’d just turned two. I’d just been through a
terrible divorce, and his mother, Brittany, was going through the same
thing when we met. We were friends first, with the potential for more
always on the table, but I didn’t get to meet Trey until we were serious.
He didn’t need more upheaval in his life, if we weren’t going to work out.
But we did. And I’ll never forget the first night I met him. I went over to
Brittany’s apartment, we ate dinner, and then turned on Charlotte’s Web.
By the end of the movie, Trey was in my lap and I was done. Instant,
unbreakable bond.
Brittany and I were married around a year later, and have been a happy
family ever since. Meeting my wife and son changed my life. I was
heading down a rocky path, and they literally saved me from doom. I owe
them everything, and now I can give them nothing. I feel absolutely
worthless.
As for what makes Trey so special, read this from my last post:
About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for
having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from
school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to
charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the
world – and he wanted to give it away.
He is amazing.
So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a
checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the
UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence,
which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults
are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to
those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better
man than most of the grown-ups I know.
Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:
“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a
lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I
already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids
whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in
Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to
bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.”
He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He
believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful,
when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great
kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning?
So please, if you have any scrap of generosity left in the dark cockles of
your cold, black heart, send a little of it my way. Help me make my kid’s
Christmas better than it could ever be without your support. Help me not
feel like a worthless failure.
Just…help. Ok?
*sniff*
I’m no good at self-promotion, so I’ll only be sharing this on my own
social media outlets. If you can’t help out with a donation, maybe you
could share this post? The more people who show up to the stream, the
better my chances of finding enough kind hearts to make my kid’s
Christmas not suck. So put it on your Facebook. Tweet it to your
followers. Share it on message boards, in forums, and chat groups. Pass
the URL around at Bingo night. I dunno. Whatever works!
THANKS!
UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas!
Thank you!
I don’t have the words to express how amazed and awe-struck I am by the
selfless generosity of so many of you. Your kind donations have given me
the means to give Trey the Christmas he deserves. It will be a modest
Christmas, but it will be Christmas – and all of it is because all of you.
And you’re all wonderful and amazing.
One thing, though. Many of you who donated did so almost
apologetically, including notes like, “I’m sorry it’s not much, but I hope it
helps.”
WHICH IS CRAZY. Of course it helps!
Any dollars is better than no dollars, so every last cent has mattered. Each
dime, every nickel, and all the pennies have mattered.
You matter.
I still have bills left unpaid, I’m behind on his school tuition, and I don’t
even want to talk about the mortgage – but none of that matters right now.
Every last cent of the money you’ve given has gone toward giving Trey
the best Christmas morning I can possibly give him, and it will be a
morning he remembers. He asked for nothing and expects nothing, but he
deserves the world.
And you guys have helped me give as much of it to him as I can.
I’ll be sending out emails to all of you very soon (or possibly after
Christmas, because things are kind of crazy) with the eBook and a special
video just for you guys, detailing everything you made happen. I want to
share the joy on his face with everyone who made it possible, but that will
have to wait until Christmas has happened. I’ll probably even write a
longer post thanking each of you, once I’m able to work through all these
Feels enough to be able to Words again.
I hate waiting, though. So I whipped up this small token of my gratitude
to tide you ‘over until I can do something better. Like I said, I don’t have
the words right now. But that’s why god invented Warren Zevon…
Life Bytes: Chapter 11
It’s Thanksgiving. I’m still
unemployed, so I’m a little more broke today than I was yesterday. I’m
sick, my wife is sick, and our kid is at his dad’s for the holiday. When he
gets home, I’ll go buy a Christmas tree with money I don’t have that I
can’t afford to put any presents under, and that’s probably how he’ll find
out the truth about Santa Claus.
Life bites.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
● Introduction
● Chapter One
● Chapter Two
● Chapter Three
● Chapter Four
● Chapter Five
● Chapter Six
● Chapter Seven
● Chapter Eight
● Chapter Nine
● Chapter Ten: Ultima 9 Edition
● Chapter Eleven
● BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate
● BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate 2
● BONUS FEATURE: FPS Retrospective
● BONUS FEATURE: Star Wars Games
I started the day off bleak and miserable, so I decided to do what I always
do when depression’s razor claws dig deep into the tender bits of my
fleshier regions: I retreated into nostalgia.
Which is what this whole Life Bytes series is about, really. Wistfully
looking back on yesterday, when things made sense and the world
seemed kind of fair. Games were black and white – you were a good guy
fighting bad guys, or sometimes you were a bad guy and that was okay,
too. There were clear boundaries. You just had to stay within them, and
everything was fine.
This naive thought process extended beyond the games, too. When I was
a kid growing up in the ’80s, anything was possible. ( More on that here .
) By the time the grunge-tinted ’90s rolled around, I graduated high
school, started college, and became an obnoxious 20-something. And life
was still good.
I still believed in all the same things, even if I grew a little less innocent
with each passing year. I still thought hard work would be rewarded with
something other than just more work. I still believed in the American
dream. I still bought into the idea that you could be anything you wanted,
if you just worked hard enough. So that’s what I did. I worked. A lot.
Which leads us into the new century. When everything went to hell.
My last entry covered Ultima IX , which was released in 1999. I haven’t
posted a new entry since then, because I didn’t want to get into the 2000s.
The turn of the century, for me, marks an unhappy time in my life.
Shortly after the nation was forever changed by the September 11th
attacks in 2001, I began my own little medieval times: my Dark Ages, if
you will. The whole period represents nothing more to me than wasted
potential, missed opportunity, and lost innocence.
This is coming.
I don’t like to think about those years, much less write about them. But if
I’m going to continue this series, I guess I kind of have to.
But not today.
Today, I need one more dip into the soothing waters of nostalgia before
the 2000s come along and pee in the pool. I need…GOG.
For a nostalgia-obsessed freakazoid like myself, there is nothing better
than GOG.com . In the past, it was just a great place to buy good old
games and some amazing new ones at a great price and DRM-free. But
sometime last year, I found the GOG.com Twitch channel , and I
discovered how amazing the GOG community is.
The stream team is great, the chat regulars are amazing, and no one
tolerates jerkfaces. That’s not to say that there’s any specific anti-jerkface
policy or anything – and the moderators rarely flex any enforcement
muscle. Rather, it’s just that a sort of self-policing thing organically
happens in the chat, where annoying Internet People feel unwelcome as
long as they’re being annoying Internet People.
It’s kind of like spraying a petri dish with antibacterial juice and then
watching as nothing awful grows in it.
People are nice to each other.
Decent. It’s as welcoming a community as the one Jenny Lawson has
built around TheBloggess , only it includes video games. If Jenny was a
gamer, she’d stream for GOG.com. Truth.
For example, shortly after I woke up this morning feeling awful and
depressed, I tweeted about not being able to afford to buy any presents to
put under the Christmas tree this year, and about how my son deserves
better than me. (I feel absolutely worthless.)
Almost immediately, I started getting messages from GOGers. They sent
me kind words of support and compassion, of understanding and
encouragement. Unprovoked, unsolicited kindness: the GOG
community defined.
I’m still going to stress about Christmas, even though my kid isn’t
expecting any presents this year – not because he understands how much
money we don’t have right now, but because he is amazing and
wonderful.
About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for
having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from
school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to
charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the
world – and he wanted to give it away.
He is amazing.
So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a
checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the
UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence,
which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults
are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to
those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better
man than most of the grown-ups I know.
Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:
“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a
lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I
already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids
whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in
Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to
bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.”
He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He
believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful,
when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great
kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning?
He’s smart, too.
I’ll get back to writing the next real chapter in this series soon enough,
but today I need my GOG friends. As I said, I’m sick and broke, so there
will be no Thanksgiving feast with friends and family today. There’s just
me, my equally sick wife, and our dogs. And Netflix. Obviously.
But there’s also GOG.com, and the stream team. And the chat. And the
games.
Life might suck right now – and I’ll be just as broke and unemployed
tomorrow as I am today – but for now, I can laugh and smile with friends
I’ve never met. I can crack lame jokes, watch fun games being enjoyed,
and generally not feel like I’m a Dickensian street urchin standing outside
life’s bakery with my face pressed up against the window.
Thanks, guys.
Beyond The Fields
I wrote this slightly creepy, family-appropriate story around 15 to 20
years ago, and dug it out of mothballs to read to my kid tonight after
trick-or-treating.
I thought it might be fun to share it here too, for All Hallow’s Read. You
know, just in case any of you might want to read it to your own kids
tonight. Get them in the spooky spirit. (If you’d prefer a much scarier
story for grown-ups, try this .)
Happy Halloween!
A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, three friends and myself began
to concoct one of our usual mythic dreams of adventure. I grew up in
either a large town or a small city, depending on your economic point of
view. Almost the entire city-town was a suburb. We had a downtown, but
there was hardly anything there other than city hall and the jailhouse. We
had an indoor shopping mall, which was rather small but still the central
vein of commerce for the area. Although such things never bothered me
much as a child, I now sometimes wonder where anyone made any of the
money they spent at the mall. The rest of the city-town was houses.
Houses and woods. There were lots of woods.
My house sat in a neat suburb in the west end of town. The west end was,
apparently, where the rich people lived. I never thought of my family as
rich, though…which I suppose was more or less accurate, and became
evident not even a year after the event I’m about to describe, when our
landlord politely evicted us from our home a few days before Christmas.
A few months prior, in the prime of autumn, is when my birthday
occurred and the scheming began.
There was a section of woods near my house, beyond some oil fields,
which was reached via an old shale road. It was forbidden by the parents
of the neighborhood that any child should venture beyond the small patch
of woodland before the road, which was really just a facade to hide the oil
fields. I suppose the fear was that one of us would undoubtedly, and
rather stupidly, attempt to inspect one of the insect-like oil pumps and be
caught and mangled in its machinations. Whatever the parental logic, it
was a commandment sent from on high to us children – and we dared not
break it. Well, most of us dared not. All save one.
His name was John Westgate, but we all called him Bird for reasons I’ll
get to in a minute. He was a terribly sick little boy, severely undeveloped
for his age, and constantly on medication of some variation or another.
He’d had open-heart surgery shortly after his birth, to correct some defect
which none of us could pronounce except for Bird and his parents. He
was one of the first babies the procedure was used on, which was a fact
he reminded us of constantly. His mother worried over him without end,
as one would expect, and rarely let him out to play with the other kids in
the neighborhood. This method of parenting created a rather strange child
that was more introverted at age ten than most adults I’ve met as I’ve
gone through life.
On the rare days when he was feeling healthy and able, or when his
mother wasn’t looking, Bird would come out to play with us. We’d taken
to calling him Bird earlier, during the summer, when another
neighborhood kid got a BB Gun for his birthday.
There were scores of birds in our neighborhood, which was odd
considering the severe and curious lack of trees in the area. In the entire
neighborhood, excluding the woods of course, there were maybe seven
trees. There were a lot of saplings, but only seven trees. However, we had
power lines galore and the birds seemed rather fond of them. One
afternoon that summer, myself and Andy, Bird, and a kid named Charlie
all met in a vacant lot a few houses down from my house. Here, power
lines crisscrossed and it was a favorite resting spot for the birds. Andy
was first, since it was his gun, and after loading a palm full of BB’s into
the rifle, he pumped it up until it took both he and Charlie pushing
together to close the plunger. Andy carefully took aim, spouted off some
hunter-in-the-woods Errol Flynn nonsense, and squeezed the trigger. The
shot apparently missed enough to not startle the birds in the slightest.
Next up was Charlie, who missed as well. I was next, but for some reason
that I can’t recall at the moment, I passed the gun to John. Andy pumped
it for him, since he lacked the strength for anything beyond three pumps,
and handed the rifle back to John. He took aim, very carefully and very
quietly. He pulled the trigger slowly, and a bird fell from the wire as
hundreds of feathers began flapping madly above us through a deafening
squawk of panic. We all screamed in excitement and ran to where the bird
fell. Andy was the fastest runner, so he got there first. “Guys! This is
awesome!” he shouted. Charlie and I ran up behind him and looked
down. The bird was there, slowly moving itself a bit. There was no blood,
though, and the BB hadn’t broken the skin. “Aw, it’s just stunned,” came
from Charlie. Just before John caught up to the rest of us, I started
prodding the little thing with my foot. As John walked up, it began to try
to stand and squawked a bit. It was a pitifully tiny sound, and it made it
just as he got to the scene and looked down.
“Man, this sucks,” said Andy as he kicked some dirt beside the bird.
“I don’t know,” said Charlie. “It might be dying.”
I jumped in, offering brilliant kid logic. “It’s not dying, moron. It’s just
stunned. If it was hurt, there’d be blood.”
Just then, John got on his knees and reached out for the bird. Andy shot
his hand out in front of him as John reached for the confused creature. He
shouted, “Don’t touch it! You’ll get rabies!”
Charlie, always handy with a random fact, chimed in. “Birds don’t carry
rabies. You might get mites, though. Get it? Might get mites?”
“Shut up,” said John. He reached out and picked up the bird. It squirmed
in his hand as its squawks got louder.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he replied. Without saying another word, he just turned around
and started out of the vacant lot, back toward his house.
We all ran up behind him, shouting all sorts of nonsense about how the
bird was fine and who cared, anyway? But John didn’t say a word. He
just kept walking silently away from us. Just before we left the field, I
grabbed his shoulder.
“Come on, man. It’s just a stupid bird. It’s not your fault,” I said.
John turned, looked up at me, and told me to &!%$ off. None of us had
ever heard John swear, ever. I took my hand off his shoulder and took a
step back. I could see tears in his eyes.
A few weeks later, we’d all but forgotten about the bird. John and his
mother tried to nurse the thing back to health, but it died anyway. John
wanted to take it to the vet, but his mother convinced him that it wouldn’t
have done any good. They’d buried it after a few days, after John’s
repeated insistence, in a private ceremony in his backyard. Once we got
wind of that, his name was permanently changed.
The scheming after my birthday began as it usually did. We wanted to set
out on an adventure. Andy offered up stories about how some bank
robbers had stashed their loot in the woods beyond the shale road and oil
fields. Charlie told him he was full of it, and I offered up my own idea for
adventure. I’d heard my mother tell me about a kid that got caught in one
of the oil pumps, and how horribly he died. Of course, it was just a story
to keep us from venturing out there, but it was a story apparently
concocted in unison by all the parents of the neighborhood – so we’d all
heard it, and we all believed it. What the other parents didn’t tell their
children, though, was something that my mother was happy to embellish
upon. The kid’s ghost still walked the woods around the oil fields, trying
to find its lost head. I, in turn, embellished further. I spun what was
apparently a very convincing yarn about how there was something evil in
the woods that kept the kid’s ghost alive and walking. The kid’s moaning
could be heard at night, if you listened closely enough. This was true, in
the sense that you could hear something coming from beyond the shale
road at night. Granted, we all knew it was merely the metal of the oil
pumps expanding and contracting – but it was enough to convince the
other kids that my story could be genuine.
This all sounded like a great adventure, and one in which we could
potentially dare each other into grand acts of stupidity and torment. We
decided to camp out one night beyond the oil fields. I’d pick the spot
because I knew where the ghost was. Andy would provide the sleeping
bags, and Charlie would supply the cover story. His parents traveled a bit
during the year, on the weekends, to visit his sister at school a few hours
away. He was the oldest among us, beating me to thirteen by about three
months, and his parents let him stay home alone. We would all sleep over
at his house, if we could get our parents permission. We could and we
did, although I had to swear to keep my room clean and practice my piano
every night. Andy didn’t really have to make such concessions. His
mother let him have a surprising amount of freedom, which we all envied.
We couldn’t understand then why his divorced mother would let Andy go
where he pleased and stay as long as he wanted, provided she had a
boyfriend at the time – but secretly I think that we all wished our mothers
would do the same.
The three of us were at Andy’s house, gathering supplies and preparing
for the outing, when Bird knocked on the door. We hadn’t invited him on
the camp-out for the simple reason that, if we had, there would have been
no camp-out at all. He would tell his mother, who would tell our mothers,
and then the whole thing would be over before it ever got started. We
took turns explaining to him that we would have invited him, surely, but
we hadn’t seen him at school the past week and assumed he was sick. He
assured us that he was fine now, and we had no real choice left but to
invite him.
Surprisingly, Bird didn’t tell his mother. Instead, he brought his own
sleeping bag and three flashlights. Part of our arrangement was no
flashlights though, so we left them at Charlie’s and headed out for the
woods beyond the shale road.
We never made it past the oil fields. We set out late in the afternoon, and
dusk was on our heels as we headed down the shale road. The sun had
fully set by the time we neared the first of the pumping rigs. It was
monstrous in its size. We’d all seen them, from time to time, along the
highway – but this was the first close encounter with them for any of us.
We pressed on a bit, past a few more pumps, until it was almost
completely dark and the noises started.
They were subtle at first, small metallic pings from every direction. Andy
was the first to notice them. “You guys hear that?” he asked. None of us
answered, save for a unanimous head nodding. “Maybe it’s just the
pumps,” he offered hopefully. We tried to keep walking, but the sounds
started getting louder. Louder, and different.
“Scratches,” said Charlie, “it sounds like something’s making scratches.”
We all took turns looking around, peering out into the impenetrable
darkness. I spoke softly. “We should have brought flashlights,” I
whispered. I felt a light tap on my shoulder, and turned to see Bird’s hand
pulling back. “What?”
He said nothing, but instead pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket.
“Excellent,” I told him. I aimed in the general direction of the closest
noise and turned the flashlight on. Andy, unaware of the flashlight’s
presence, let out a quiet yelp when a bit of an oil pump was illuminated
out of nowhere.
Charlie punched me in my arm. “We said no flashlights. What’s the
matter? Scared?” he said, insult dripping from his mouth.
“Bird brought it,” I shot back in defense. Charlie just sighed, and in one
motion managed to roll his eyes, turn his head, and kick some loose dirt
onto my foot.
“Whatever,” he said.
I traced the pump with the beam of the flashlight, exploring for any hint
of what was making the scratching noises. Aside from an expected group
of roosting birds, which appeared very much dormant until I shot at them
with the light, there was nothing. They flew away, Andy and I jumped
back dramatically, and then it was quiet again. Quiet, except for the tinny
pings and the scratches. We could place a vague direction for each little
creak and moan of contracting metal, and so our confidence in that regard
was boosted somewhat. Of course, the yin to that yang was that, while we
had no idea what was making the scratching noises, we were also at a
complete loss as to being able to detect exactly where those noises were
coming from. Andy snatched the flashlight from my hand.
“Look,” he shouted as he painted a nearby tree with the beam.
“What?” asked Charlie.
“It’s just a tree,” I said.
Andy argued. “No,” he said. “Look, right there on the ground. Beside the
tree. What is that?”
We squinted our eyes for no reason.
“Get closer,” I commanded.
Andy took a few steps forward before turning back to look at us. He
didn’t have to say anything for us to know that he needed backup. Charlie
and I exchanged a quick glance and a mutual shoulder shrug, then caught
up with him. We walked slowly forward toward the tree. Just when we
were almost near enough to make out the shape lying quietly in the
shadows, a loud shriek shot through my right ear. I jumped back in terror
as my heart decided that this was no place to be at all, and tried to crawl
down into my stomach. I closed my eyes, and only managed to muscle
them open with great effort. When I could see again, I was greeted with a
vision of a maniacal Charlie, who was clutching his stomach in
exaggerated hysteria.
“Screw you,” I barked as I turn my back on him.
“Shut up, both of you,” commanded Andy, who was a few steps in front
of us now, and right on base of the tree. He froze. Charlie quickly stopped
laughing, and we moved in beside Andy.
There was a small patch of leaves covering something, with hints of gray
sticking out between the foliage. A thin ribbon of pink was slipped
underneath and to the right, and there was movement all across it. I knelt
down while Andy focused the light. I realized what the movement was,
but Bird beat me to it.
We’d all forgotten he was even there. I remembered him giving me the
flashlight, but that was my most recent thought of him. He’d been rather
quiet through all of this. He walked up now, slowly and calmly. He
picked up a stick from the ground and brushed away the leaves with it.
“It’s dead,” he said in passing. “Probably died a few days ago. Look at
the flies on its tail.” He knelt down and started prodding the thing with
the stick. “Look at how mushy it is.”
Andy, who was bent over slightly and holding his hands on his knees
asked, “What is it?”
Bird stood up and let go of the stick, which fell silently to the ground.
“It’s a possum. A dead possum,” he said.
“How do you know?” asked Charlie.
“Because flies are eating it,” Bird responded.
Charlie shook his head. “No, how do you know when it died?”
Bird just looked at him. “Because that’s what happens after a few days,”
he said sharply before turning his back to us, walking away into the
woods past the oil fields.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. Bird just walked away,
leaving Andy, Charlie, and I standing by the tree. After a few seconds, I
remember that one of us yelled something at him. He didn’t yell back. All
I remember after that is the noise. In the excitement of our discovery,
we’d forgotten about the scratches. They decided to remind us that they
were still there. They started small, with a tiny scratching somewhere in
the distance. Then they grew louder as they also grew in number.
Eventually they surrounded us, light taps and scrapes on metal grew into
louder and heavier chalkboard nails. Louder and louder they grew, behind
us and beside us, above us and all around us. They grew heavier, too. It
was no longer a scratching on metal, but a slashing of it. We could hear it
with enough clarity to picture all of the oil pumps around us being ripped
to pieces by something that we couldn’t see. Gashes appeared in the metal
around us, in our minds, and something was slashing at it. Slashing at us.
We ran. I remember that much. Running and screaming, the beam from
the flashlight bouncing wildly around in front of us, not so much showing
us where we were going, but all the places that we weren’t. Eventually,
Andy stumbled a bit and dropped it. By then, though, it didn’t matter. We
were back on the shale road, out of the oil fields and near enough to the
neighborhood to pick up the spilled light of the street lamps. Once back
on blacktop, we slowed down. Feeling more secure under the glow of the
street lamps, and surrounded by cut grass and landscaped shrubbery, we
stopped and allowed the breath we’d left behind in the fields to catch up
with us and get back in our lungs where it belonged. We were so relieved,
each of us, to be back in the security of civilization that it took several
minutes before we realized that one of us wasn’t there. We’d forgotten
Bird.
Our parents, minus Andy’s mother, formed a makeshift search party the
next morning. We went with them, in the daylight, out onto the shale road
and beyond it, into the oil fields. What we found when we got there was
absolute normalcy. There was no ripped metal, and no oil pumps lying in
ruin. Everything was as it should be. Everything, that is, except Bird. He
wasn’t there. We led our parents to the tree where we’d found the
possum, only it wasn’t there either. The patch of leaves, yes. The stick
Bird had used to poke at its carcass was there as well, but the animal was
gone. We all fanned out, each kid sticking close to his parents, with Andy
following Charlie. We looked for hours. We shouted until our voices
rasped with gurgling consonants. We couldn’t find him.
After hours spent searching, we gathered together into one group again,
and headed back to the neighborhood. Our parents decided to call the
police. Johnny was missing.
I remember the walk back the most. I don’t remember the details of the it,
except that it was silent. Barring the crunching leaves beneath our feet,
there was no sound. No sound that I could hear, anyway. I was feeling
something then that I’d never felt before. There was a hole where my
stomach should have been, only it was more than a hole because it
seemed to be sucking the rest of my insides into it. Our friend was lost,
and it was our fault. My head was filled with concentration on the
happenings inside my body. I completely lost track of my feet. It was
more like I wasn’t there than anything else. A kind of floating. Then,
without warning, there was a commotion. My stomach found its way back
home, my mind reassembled itself, and I located my missing feet. They
were running toward something. I looked ahead, and could see where
they were heading.
The entire group of us was racing to an oil pump. We’d passed it on the
way in, but there was something new about it now. Something beside it,
sprinkled with leaves. We got closer. There were flies. A man shouted. A
woman fell to her knees. I saw what it was.
He was lying there beside the oil pump, a few handfuls of leaves having
fallen on top of him. Someone brushed them off. Something red smeared
on his jacket. Blood. There were flies.
I don’t know how we didn’t see him when we passed the pump on our
way in. I don’t know what happened after my mother dragged Andy and I
away and back home. I only remember seeing the blood. It came from
what must have been thousands of tiny scratches all over his face and
hands, his clothes, his eyes. His throat. Thousands of them. Tiny. My
mother dragged us away.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I was in my bed, covered up with my mother
beside me. I’d been too scared to sleep alone. She fell asleep holding me,
and I was caught under her arm. I tried closing my eyes. I tried counting
sheep. I tried not trying. I just couldn’t stop hearing the scratches. They
were in my head now, scratching at it from the inside, scraping against
my skull. Then there was a tap. It was light at first, then another came.
Tap. Tap tap. Louder, and not inside my head this time. Tap tap tap. I
shot up. My mother startled awake. She slurred confused questions at me,
wanting to know what was wrong. I didn’t hear her. I just heard the
tapping. The tapping. I looked around. Tap tap. It was coming from my
window. I shoved myself back against the wall my bed rested on. I
brought my knees, shivering, up to my chest and held them there. My
mother shook me, begging me to tell her something. Instead, I just
pointed. I pointed to the window. She got up, went to the window, and
pulled the curtain cord to raise the blinds. There was nothing there. Tap
tap. My mother looked down at the window. I shivered – she’d heard it
this time. It was real. She looked out. Tap tap tap. It got dark.
The next thing I remember, my mother was stroking my hair and
humming to me. I’d passed out.
“What was it?” I asked her, pleadingly.
“What was what?” she asked back.
“At my window,” I said with a shake in my voice, not really wanting to
know the answer.
“Nothing,” she said, as she rocked me in her arms. “Just a bird.”
*******
Happy Halloween!
Supernatural - The Aftermath
Guys. IT’S ONLY A STORY. You
know, for Halloween. Please don’t call the cops on me. Again.
If you’ve been following the little horror series I’ve been writing all
month for Halloween , then you might’ve noticed a new update I posted
to it last night, wherein I was forced to explain that it was only a story
because this is Texas, where people can apparently convince the police
that shadow ghost demons are real and need to be investigated.
Which is why three officers showed up at my house last night and
interrogated me in my own living room. After they saw that my wife and
child were fine, that I was fine, that everyone was fine, they eventually
left laughing about the whole thing and clearly annoyed that they were
ever called out to begin with. But the point is that I had the cops called on
me OVER A GHOST STORY.
(Pssst! Hey, you. Did you know you that could pay what you for a cool
eBook version of the Supernatural story? Because you can! Ask me how
.)
In their defense, they’re required to investigate any calls that come in, and
the person who called them made sure to send them carefully edited and
very specific quotes from the story, with no context or explanation, which
is probably why the officers were pretty confrontational when they first
showed up, with one of them taking the lead and trying to coax me into
telling them that I was depressed and violent. It was surreal.
She just kept repeating questions like:
● Have you ever been depressed? – “Um, yeah. Who hasn’t?”
● Have you been struggling with depression? – “Sure.”
● Do you sometimes want to hurt other people because of your
depression? – “Uh. No.”
● This is about your blog post, where you wrote about wanting to
hurt your family. Are we not supposed to take that seriously? –
“Well, the post isn’t about hurting my family. It’s a horror story.
About ghost demons. For Halloween.”
● So you haven’t hurt anyone? – “Uh. No.”
● Because your post says… – “It also says I’m being stalked by a
shadow ghost demon. Do you believe ghost demons are real,
too?”
It was at that point
that I went and got Brittany out of bed, so that they could see that she was
fine and unharmed. Trey was already in the living room, happily playing
on his computer the whole time. Once Brittany came out and saw the
cops, she just started laughing. They saw that her face was very much unhit and that everything was fine. Then, we all laughed about it, they said
goodnight, and went on their way.
At first, I was kind of flattered that anyone would actually believe the
story enough to call the police. I mean, that’s a pretty big compliment to a
writer. I also thought it was really sweet that someone was concerned
enough to call the police to come check on us. But mostly, I was shocked
that I was answering my door and being grilled by cops at 9:00pm over a
freaking ghost story.
Then, it dawned on me that the call might not have been made out of
concern, but of malice. So, I did a little digging and found out who it was,
and yup. Big fat malice.
The person who called the cops on me is an omnipresent source of stress
in my life, but it’s unavoidable. He makes it very difficult to write
passionately or with any honesty about difficult subjects, because I
always have to be on the lookout for him to pounce on what he sees as an
opportunity or a weakness he can exploit. It’s annoying, but nothing I
haven’t been through before.
In truth, any genuine concern would have resulted in a phone call or at
least a text to one of us before the cops were called. I actually received
quite a few such messages from concerned friends yesterday, and I
responded to each one, letting them on to what it was: a Halloween story.
It all started as a way to prank Brittany, back in July. When October
rolled around, I decided I could turn it into a scary story for Halloween,
so I started writing. Then, somewhere along the line, the whole thing
became one giant metaphor for Depression. If you’ve ever struggled with
depression, then you understand why a psychological horror story was a
good fit. And every horror story is a metaphor for something.
● Freddy Krueger has represented everything from the dangers of
moral absolutism, to homosexuality, parental distrust, the threat of
pop culture and society, etc…
● Jason Voorhees is basically enforcing punishment for the seven
deadly sins, making Friday the 13th an unlikely metaphor for
Christianity
● Michael Meyers is a metaphor for both the consequences of
rebellious sexuality and an assault of conventional domesticity, at
the same time
● Vampires have been a metaphor for almost everything
● Zombies have been a metaphor for how man is the real monster
(so often that it’s immeasurably boring now)
● Frankenstein was a metaphor for the dangers of reckless scientific
progress
● And so on…
The list could go on forever. Horror is
always a metaphor for something else. The monster is never just a
monster. My shadow ghost demon was an obvious metaphor for
Depression, because depression is scary. It stalks you, you can’t predict
when it’ll show up, and you’re powerless to stop it. All you can do is deal
with it as it comes, but you can’t do anything until you accept it.
Acknowledge it. Own it. Then, you can work on dealing with it.
Which is exactly what my story is about.
I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative, so there’s no discernible plot
to it at first glance. It’s random. Things just happen, and then they happen
again. Sometimes, they seem like they might be tied to something else,
some events seem to echo earlier ones, etc… This was all by design,
because I worked hard to actively avoid standard storytelling. Plotting a
standard story arc would’ve been much, much easier.
But I wanted it to come across as an as-it-happens journal of some poor
guy’s descent into madness. The best way to do this was to not write a
story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To not write characters or
situations and plot. I had to write it from the first person and write it in
the same style as the rest of the posts on this site, so it would be
believable. I wanted it to seem real, but never to actually be real.
At best, I wanted to instill in readers a small grain of doubt that maybe it
was really happening, even if they mostly suspected that it was just a
story. That little nugget of doubt is all it takes to get someone to suspend
their disbelief enough for the horror to work. It’s easier in a conventional
narrative, because when someone sits down to read a horror story or
watch a movie they know is fictional, they come prepared to accept
certain tropes of the genre, so they won’t think twice about a ghost
moving things around or the walls bleeding or whatever. Because they
expect it. It’s all just part of a horror story.
But what I was trying to create was, in a way, a text-based version of a
found footage movie, but one that the reader follows more or less as it’s
happening, rather than years later when someone discovers an old video
tape stuck inside the walls of their basement. This presented a lot of
problems though, because when you’re writing something to seem real
and you’re using real people, you have to stick to real things. Or at least
not push too far into the standard conventions of horror, because then the
illusion breaks and the whole thing falls apart.
Still, I wanted to break the
spell, on occasion. I wasn’t trying to convince people that what was
happening was real. I was trying to convince them that it could be real,
even if it probably wasn’t. Uncertainty and doubt are central themes of
the story, and I wanted them to come across organically in the reader’s
mind. The best way to do that was to do things like tell them up front that
nothing they are about to read is real, and then undermine that by mixing
(possibly) supernatural elements into what are otherwise very normal
posts using natural language, very informal writing, and some jokes.
Just as the main character (me) in the story doubts the supernatural bits
are actually happening, I wanted the reader to doubt them, too. I actually
scaled a lot of things back, because I wanted to maintain that sense of
uncertainty. I injected some “physical evidence” of the goings-on to
further blur the line, because I knew such proof would only work against
anyone’s belief that any of it was real. Creepy images and scary sounds
are fine in a movie, but in the context of what I was writing – as if it was
all actually happening, as it happened – then any tangible evidence I
provided would only stand out in stark contrast to the psychological
elements of the story. In short, they’d seem fake.
So I kept purposefully blending obviously staged supernatural events with
(seemingly) very real, ordinary events to keep the reader swaying back
and forth from being 100% certain it wasn’t real one minute, to not being
quite so confident the next. If I had to put a number on it, I really only
needed like 5% doubt. My aim was to make the reader feel somewhat like
the narrator: questioning his own reality while the reader questioned the
story’s veracity.
I think it worked. Maybe it didn’t. I don’t know.
But anyway, that’s what I was going for: a scary story for Halloween,
wrapped in a metaphor for depression. I wanted to have it ready to be
read in its entirety for Halloween week, which is why I ended it
yesterday. I didn’t want to give it a climax or any real resolution, because
it wasn’t a traditional narrative. I left it open-ended and on kind of a
downer, because that’s how depression works. There isn’t a satisfying
ending to an ongoing struggle. Because it’s ongoing.
Then again, my ending might not be such a downer, after all. Accepting
depression, letting it in and owning it is the only way to get through it.
So, in that respect, it’s actually a happy ending.
Or is it?
DA-DA-DAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Happy Halloween, kids.
Now click over here and share the bejeebus out of the Supernatural story
. Please? It’s currently within striking distance of overtaking Ridiculous
Baby Headbands as my most shared post, and that’s really all I want out
of life.
Also, if you feel like helping me out so that I don’t, I dunno, maybe die
alone on the street, penniless and curled up inside a drainage ditch for
warmth while hungry buzzards peck at the ancient disposable contact
lenses stuck to my eyeballs, then you could always head over here to
send me a few clams . There’s even a DRM-free eBook version of the
Supernatural post in it for you.
HOW GENEROUS OF ME! I mean you. Whatever.
Lies. All Lies!
I was a very trusting
child. If someone in a position of authority told me something was true, I
usually believed them. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I
grew up to distrust all authority as an adult. Because authority is full of
shit.
My parents were my first authority figures, which probably isn’t all that
much of a surprise, since parents are pretty much everyone’s first
authority figures. And I believed everything they ever told me, which is a
fact they routinely exploited with the kind of sadistic relish only parents
delivering a little payback to their weirdo kid can.
For example, a favorite pastime of my folks was alternating between
telling me that they were either going to ship me off to the orphanage, or
some supernatural force was going to murder me. ALL THE TIME.
My Other Questionable Decisions
● Growing Up Nerdy
● My Monster Ear
● Death Metal
● Zapped
● The Martian Incident
● Attack of the Killer Bees
● The Special Class
● The time I met The Bloggess
● Lies. All Lies!
The orphanage threats usually came at the end of some parental
frustration involving my being annoying, obnoxious, loud, or excessively
weird. Probably all at the same time. And in public.
We’d get in the car, and they tell me they’d had it. They couldn’t take it
anymore, and it was off to Boy’s Haven with me, which wasn’t really an
orphanage so much as it’s a great local organization that takes in boys
aged 5-17 who need a little help, and gives it to them. But in my home, it
was basically a Dickensian work house for pickpockets and street urchins.
I did not want to go to there.
But every time I acted up, we were, in fact, going to there. My parents
would even start driving and pointing out landmarks along the way, like
they were following some kind terrifying treasure map that led directly to
my incarceration. The whole time, they’d be telling me things like no one
there would be nice to me, I wouldn’t ever get tucked into bed, and –
when I did go to bed – I wouldn’t be able to snuggle with my favorite
stuffed animals BECAUSE THEY WOULDN’T LET ME TAKE THEM.
It was basically the saddest scene in a Toy Story movie, but worse
because I knew they wouldn’t understand. My stuffed animals, I mean. I
hadn’t even been given the opportunity to explain the situation to them or
even say goodbye. For all they’d know, I just got tired of them one day
and never came back. The guilt weighed heavily on my young soul.
Of course, I never did get shipped off to the orphanage. Because they
lied.
Spoiler alert, I guess.
Happy Teddy! Nooooo!
The times when they’d convince me that the devil himself was out to eat
my soul were, I think, meant more playfully. I don’t think I was being
punished for anything when my dad suddenly cut power to the house one
night and started walking into the living room with a life-sized, glow-in-
the-dark skeleton while he made moaning sounds and said things like,
“Mister Funnybones wants your soul.”
Yeah, I think that was just being playful.
Or all the times when we were riding in the car at night, and both my
mom and dad would start FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because they’d
just seen a witch out the rear window, and she was chasing us. My dad
would pretend to speed up, my mom would start having a panic attack,
and then…then the witch would attack the car.
We could hear her big, buckled pilgrim boot-heels scraping against the
roof. We could hear her long talon nails tearing through the metal of the
trunk. We dared not look.
I’d find out later that all the noises came from the power of suggestion
and a little help from the retractable radio antenna on the car. It made this
whirring, electric, scraping noise that, if you didn’t know any better
(because you trusted your parents when they told you that evil, soulsucking monsters were out to murder your entire family), sounded a lot
like a witch attack.
And that’s not even going into how, when we’d go to visit my
grandparents on my dad’s side, the car would always barely make the
drive across the Swamp Monster Bridge, where all the elaborate stories of
supernatural murder, death, and mayhem were that much more believable
because the bridge was is Louisiana. Which you’d understand if you’ve
ever been to Louisiana.
Those were just the standard lies, though. Then there were the exceptional
ones.
The very same year I was being shipped off to The Special Class every
few days at school, my dad decided to tell me how BBs were made. We’d
gone on a camping trip with the Indian Guides (because I was way too
nerdy for the Boy Scouts, and I guess my parents figured adding racially
insensitive feathered headdresses into the mix couldn’t really make things
any worse), when it happened.
I was marveling at a super tall lookout tower near a lake at the
campground (which could’ve just been a normal lifeguard’s chair, now
that I think about it), when my dad decided to ruin my life. He pulled me
aside and, in whispered tones, conveyed to me the secret of BB
manufacturing.
“You see that platform up at the very top of the
tower, son?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where they make BBs.”
“Really? How?”
“Well,” he said – and this is where he would’ve leaned back in his chair
and taken a long, satisfied puff off his pipe if we were near a chair and if
he’d smoked a pipe – “it takes two guys. One guy climbs way up to the
top with a bucket of water. And another guy stands underneath him on the
ground, with an empty bucket.”
“Then what?”
“Then, the guy at the top takes an eyedropper and sucks up a little water.
Then, he carefully squeezes out just one drop over the edge of the
platform. And as it falls, it spins and spins and spins so fast that it turns
into a metal ball, and the guy at the bottom catches it in his bucket.”
Seems legit.
“But,” I asked, seriously concerned for the safety of the poor guy at the
bottom, “what if he misses the bucket?”
“Ah,” replied my dad, taking another happy draw from his imaginary
pipe, “that’s why he wears a hard hat.”
And that’s how I learned how BBs were made. Which I would excitedly
tell all of my classmates at school the following week, but not before I’d
burned my foot on a hot coal and rescued a fish from certain death.
See, on that same camping trip, we also went fishing. I only remember
two things about it, though: the kid who went to cast his line, caught his
hook on his own back fat and then…well, it was gruesome. Let’s not
dwell.
The other thing I remember was The Fish. I think it was a perch, because
every fish is a perch to me since I know exactly jack shit about fish. At
any rate, I managed to catch a fish, and I think it was a perch. But that’s
not the important part.
The important part was my immediate regret
over having caught the fish. I didn’t want it to die, but I also didn’t want
to be the one kid who didn’t want to kill a fish on the camping trip, so I
didn’t throw it back. We tossed it in a cooler where it flopped around,
gasping for water-air and crushing my soul. I showed everyone I caught
it, then closed the cooler and went off to pack up our tent and cry.
Which is when I walked right over the fire pit someone did a horrible job
of covering with dirt, because my bare foot found a still-hot coal. Right in
the arch. Burned like hell.
So now I’m crying and my foot’s on fire, my fish is dying in a cooler, and
all I want to do is go home and never again venture into the great
outdoors where sadness lives. We finish packing up, then hop in my dad’s
old red truck and head on down the road. With me still crying, my fish
still dying, and my foot still burning.
My dad pulls off into a gas station along the way, then goes inside and
comes back out with a little styrofoam bowl of water. He sticks The Fish
inside, then pops a lid on the bowl and tells me to hold onto it. But not to
open the lid, because then bad things would happen and it would
probably die.
It was already dead, of course. But I believed him when he said it wasn’t,
because authority figure.
He gets back in the truck, then turns on the air conditioner and tells me to
stick my foot up next to one of the vents. The AC cools it down and I
manage to stop crying for a little while, with my foot getting some relief
up on the vent and my fish potentially not dying in my lap.
*Styrofoam bowl not to scale
Of course, it was basically Schrödinger’s Fish at that point, both alive and
dead at the same time, and only by opening the lid would I collapse the
probability wave or whatever. So I kept the lid on tight. But any time I
would start questioning why it didn’t feel like the fish was moving around
in the bowl, my dad would come up with some kind of believable reason,
and then switch the AC over from Cool to Heat.
Which my foot would quickly realize before I did, after which I’d scream
and start crying again. My dad would laugh and shout, “Say hello to
Mister Fire!”
After a minute of that, he’d switch it back, and, for a little while, I’d be
too angry and confused to question the condition of The Fish.
Before we got home, we took a slight detour near a drainage ditch. My
dad hopped out of the truck, came around to my side, and asked me for
the fish. I handed it to him, then he told me he was going to set it free in
this large body of water I thought looked nothing at all like a drainage
ditch. Probably very little poop in it.
He walked over to the water, knelt down, I heard a little splash, and then
he came back.
My dad shouted, “He made it!” – and I didn’t question a word of it.
That was a good lie. But then I went back to school Monday morning and
decided to tell everyone who would listen how BBs were made, which is
how I ended up getting into a fight with a kid named Chuck because
SHUT UP, MY DAD WOULDN’T LIE TO ME!
Am I crazy weird?
As I’ve
started opening up a little about my various absurd struggles with
depression and all my weird little quirks – thanks, in large part, to Jenny
Lawson making me feel like it’s okay to be broken – I’ve noticed
something not good: there aren’t many dudes talking about their feelings.
Not in the way that the women are, with jagged bone honesty and brutal
humor to highlight how ridiculous everything is. The few men who are
writing about mental health tend to write like, well, men writing about
mental health. It’s usually very cold and antiseptic, as if depression can
be conquered through spreadsheets and actuarial tables.
Now, I don’t subscribe to the idea that men are from one planet and
women are from another, because I really don’t think we’re all that
different from each other. Not really. We tell ourselves we’re different –
and, more importantly, we’re told how different we are all our lives – but
it’s all just stupid marketing. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. And
that’s about as deep as it goes, except that my penis doesn’t bleed every
month, and I can’t grow babies in my testicles. I suspect there was some
divergent limb on the evolutionary tree that tried this once – men being
the baby makers – but natural selection probably kicked in after every
single dude just started lying around in the fetal position, clutching his
balls and crying for days at a time every month, and nipped that in the
bud.
The point is, while plenty of brilliant women are writing brilliant things
on the subject, men remain pretty silent. Why? If we’re not so different,
then why aren’t more men trying to do what I’m probably failing at
doing?
I think it’s probably down to gender
roles and behavioral psychology and stuff. You know, the same crap that
tells little boys they can’t play with dolls, or that girls need princess tiaras
and pink everything. But that’s all over my head, and best left to people
who have, I dunno, gone to school and learned something about it or
whatever. The tweed jackets with elbow patches crowd.
All I know is that writing about this crap has helped me not only keep
pushing through a serious bout with depression, but with putting my
entire life into ridiculous perspective. Some of the things I’ve done have
just been crazy weird. Most of the things I still do are crazy weird.
I’m crazy weird.
And so are a lot of other dudes. Even if they haven’t been able to admit it
yet, because no one has told them it’s okay.
Instead, we lurk over at The Bloggess or find quiet solidarity in
Hyperbole and a Half, but as far as anyone else knows, we’re only there
to laugh at the jokes, and all the touchy-feely stuff is for the girls. Like
watching a romcom – we’ll do it as long as there’s enough John Cusack
to counteract the Katherine Heigl, but we’ll pretend like we’re not really
enjoying it the whole time.
Men also hide behind manly manliness, which here in the south means
taking long hunting trips or talking about sports. We’ll buy things, too.
Cars in the shape of a midlife penis crisis, expensive sunglasses, stupid
active wear we pretend does some really cool sciency thing, but that
we’re only buying for the stupid logo, etc… We’ll even plop down a
stack of cash for a ridiculous ice chest because it’s the cool new thing to
do. (See also: Toyota’s Scion, Ray Bans, Under Armour, Yeti Coolers…)
Which is fine, I guess. Whatever gets you through it. It’s better than
breaking up with your girlfriend or cheating on your wife, like a whole lot
of other dudes do along their misguided quests to find fulfillment.
But what are guys who hate brand marketing, can’t stand sports, despise
trends, and would never cheat on their spouses or go to the store for a loaf
of bread and not come back until 20 years later supposed to do?
Oh. Wait. I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer for that one,
because I don’t. I play video games, watch Netflix, read books and write
dumb blog posts. And cookies. I eat a lot of cookies.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
The only thing better than gingerbread is nerd gingerbread.
I’m not even sure I have a valid reason to be depressed, which is how
depression likes to make you feel. Sure, getting laid off and being pretty
hardcore unemployable when I live in the Deep South and write about
things like feelings and how stupid I think the God, Guns, and Jesus
mentality is around here is probably a “valid” reason for feeling
depressed, but I was depressed even before my job went to India.
I worked hard at my last job. I was called the “go to” guy of my group. I
routinely resolved more cases than everyone else on my team combined.
Every week. I was basically on call 24/7/365 because I was “the guy who
gets things done”.
But I also had Hillbilly Voldemort.
Hillbilly Voldemort, if you’re new around here, is the name I gave to the
opportunistic, slackjawed bully who was my last middle manager, before
he failed upward and moved on to upper management after contract
renegotiations with our client took a turn and my company ended up
partnering with an outsourcing firm. And, armed with the power of
layoffs, he systematically went through the company roster and
eliminated everyone who was ever a threat to him, or who he just didn’t
like. It was a common theme in hushed employee-to-employee
conversations when it was all going down.
Someone else being laid off would ask, “Oh, hey. Did you, by any
chance, ever happen to piss off Steve?”
And then The Stories would be told, and yup. Common theme.
So maybe I have a right to be depressed now, but why was I depressed
back when I was making good money, before The Dark Lord rose like a
pimple off the back of some slimy dude’s head?
I have no idea.
I didn’t have a bad childhood. If anything, my childhood was too good,
because I constantly want to go back there. It’s why I’ve devoted
countless hours to writing a nostalgia-soaked trip down memory lane .
Sure, life wasn’t perfect back then, but it was a damn sight better than it
usually is now.
I was such a cute kid. WITH PERFECT
EARS.
Yeah, I was a goofy kid. I didn’t have many friends and I was kind of a
weirdo, but my parents made time for me and made me feel loved, even if
they did worry a little too much about my weirdness at times. In short, I
had a nice time.
Even if I’ve filled my life with Questionable Decisions .
Even if I always worried about everything.
Even if the emotional scars left by my childhood peer groups haunt me to
this day, to the point that if I ever walk near any group of people who
start laughing, I’m instantly convinced they’re laughing at me, and I start
running through a mental checklist of everything I’ve been doing since
I’ve been in their eyeline, trying to track down exactly what it was that set
them off in their open mockery of everything awful about myself. And
that goes triple if it’s a giggling group of teenage girls, which is basically
the scariest thing on earth.
But the way depression works – for me, at least – is that it makes me feel
bad for feeling bad. Right now, I have something to be depressed about:
I’m unemployed, money is running out, and I can’t find a job anywhere.
So I’m good on the nodding heads and sympathetic looks from people I
know front. For now. (Speaking of…if you’re looking for an employee,
I’m great at IT work, systems administration, web solutions, and
SharePoint. I’m comfortable working remotely, and I can even handle
PR, technical writing, and making really lame jokes during awkward staff
meetings. Hire me! )
All the other times, though… Times when things are good, when I’ve got
money in the bank and plans on the horizon, when things are happening
and all seems right with the world – those are the times when I hate
myself for feeling like I hate myself.
Other people have it worse!
Be grateful for what you have!
Stop whining.
Why are you so awful?!
The shouts in my head never stop, even as some other part of my
fractured psyche shouts back that I DON’T KNOW WHY.
I don’t know why I wake up every morning feeling like a failure, even on
the increasingly rare mornings when I wake up after having not recently
failed at anything. I don’t know why I don’t trust good days, or why I
think happiness is out to get me. I don’t know why I’m always waiting for
the other shoe to drop, the unexpected phone call, the red letter in the
mail.
I DON’T KNOW WHY.
I don’t know why I feel like I haven’t accomplished a damn thing in my
life, or why it feels like I peaked in high school when I really didn’t do
anything in high school. I wasn’t class president, I hated pep rallies, I
didn’t have many friends, and I did the bare minimum needed to pass my
classes and graduate. If that’s my peak – then my life is a damn greek
tragedy.
But without any of the heroic, monster-slaying bits.
I don’t know why I’m sitting here, typing this out and making myself feel
worse. I don’t know why I wake up every morning, and the only thing I
look forward to doing all day is going back to sleep. Or eating cookies.
Preferably just before going back to sleep.
I don’t know why every post I write that gets a lot of traffic but hardly
any shares feels like a waste of time. I don’t know why I keep hoping
someone influential will find what I’ve written and help get me noticed. I
don’t know why not being noticed makes me feel like a failure, when
being noticed makes me feel like a fraud.
I don’t know why I think the success of nerds being nerds has created a
bizarre tiered nerd hierarchy, where someone as awesome as Felicia Day
makes me feel like even more of a loser because I’m not a cool enough
nerd to roll 20-sided dice and eat cold Pop-Tarts at her super nerdy lunch
table.
I DON’T KNOW WHY.
But I do know I wish other guys
were talking about it. I’m sure they’re out there – and if you know of any,
or if you’re one of them – please let me know. Send me an email, or leave
a comment and link me in their direction. Because as great and
inspirational as it is to read Jenny and Felicia and Allie, I need to know
that there’s at least one other tripod out there who’s been where I’m at.
Who’s going through what I’m going through. Who knows the difference
between who’s and whose without having to look it up every damn time.
Ok, maybe not that last one.
But really, why isn’t there a community of struggling daddy bloggers? Or
depressed single guy bloggers (who aren’t misogynistic asshats)? Or stayat-home dads who constantly get emails from their kid’s school addressed
to Moms?
Where’s my tribe?
Don’t get me wrong. I feel a great sense of community and belonging
from the wonderful people who frequent the other sites I’ve mentioned,
but I need more dude stories.
Are there other guys out there one leaky pipe away from a total
breakdown because plumbing is terrifying? Do any other dads try to
follow the “some assembly required” instructions of any given toy, only
to feel like an abject failure when none of the included, easily-followable
instructions make any damn sense at all? Does the thought of interacting
with other dads scare the shit out of anyone else, when all anyone ever
wants to talk about are hunting, sports, and cars? Are any other husbands
kinda scared that writing about all your internalized oddities will freak
out your wives, who will inevitably leave you for someone less weird
who’s the exact opposite of you and therefore cool and sexy and
everything you aren’t?
Or am I just alone out here, shouting nonsense at the heart of the world?
Because it sure feels like that, at times.
It feels like I don’t have a right to be depressed, or to worry, or to be
depressed over worrying about things, and then angry at myself for being
worried that I’m depressed about how much I worry.
It still feels like I’m weird for enjoying video games rather than football.
It still feels like I’m weird for wanting to pet animals rather than murder
them. It still feels like I’m weird for never feeling like I’m doing enough
for my kid, or that everything I am doing is wrong. It still feels like I’m
weird when I talk about how much I love him, or that I crave his hugs.
Because none of that is man stuff.
It’s just stuff that makes me weird.
I just fixed this today. Not ideal, but it’ll quiet my head demons. FOR
NOW.
And that’s not even going into all the things that make me feel crazy.
Like…
● How I can’t stand for anything to be upside down, even when it’s
a soggy candy bar wrapper underneath a layer of leftover
spaghetti in the trash can. AND I MUST FIX IT.
● My weird fetishes for certain numbers, all of which are even. I
really dig 4 and 12, for some reason.
● My equally weird aversions to other numbers, most of which are
odd. Basically, any number between 1 and 25 that isn’t 4 or 12 is
suspect, and should be treated with caution.
● My obsession over symmetry. Shelving, for instance, must have
EXACT SPACING, and then whatever I put on them has to
balance out on all sides or it’s just a nightmare and I want to burn
the house down.
● My handwriting, which is just made worse by the fact that I can’t
have a single unclosed letter anywhere in a word. If the circle part
of a lowercase d doesn’t fully connect to the tall part, I go back
over it. With fury.
● My nail biting, which is ridiculous.
● My social anxiety, which makes me fear the pizza man and has
seen me hiding in my back bedroom with the door closed
whenever the lawn crew has shown up when I didn’t want them to
mow the grass.
● My compulsion to personify inanimate objects. I still have my two
favorite stuffed animals from childhood and fuck you, THEY’RE
ALIVE. Shut up.
● My crippling aversion to change, which has kept me in bad
situations for a lot longer than should be legal.
● My outrage over stupid things. Like bad font choices, or crappy
grammar in ad copy. THAT SOMEONE APPROVED.
● My debilitating fear of being wrong. Or looking stupid. Or being
wrong because I’m stupid.
● My certainty that everyone, everywhere is always making fun of
me. Especially those damn groups of giggling girls.
● My tendency toward hoarding, which has seen me digging one of
my kid’s school workbooks out of the trash, after my wife thought
she could quietly slip it in there and DEPRIVE ME OF MY
MEMORIES.
● The weird way I have to “unwind” myself if I make a complete
circle in one direction, which even extends to video games. Poor
Mario. How many times have I made you run clockwise into the
lava, after you narrowly dodged a koopa shell by running counterclockwise? I AM SORRY.
● How I can never click the Save icon just once. Or even twice. And
I certainly can’t stop clicking on an uneven number, so…
You get the idea.
Maybe I am alone. When you start listing out just a handful of your odd
little quirks off the top of your head as bullet points, it tends to put things
into perspective.
Yeah.
I’m crazy weird.
The time I met The Bloggess
This is going into my
Questionable Decisions section because…well, you’ll see. Spoiler alert: I
chose wisely.
I met Jenny Lawson tonight. She was super sweet and gave me a bunch of
compliments. It felt great and awkward, and everyone was looking at me,
so I wanted to run for the exit as soon as it was over. Only that would’ve
probably drawn even more attention, so I just decided to walk normally.
But then I felt like I was overcompensating and walking too slowly just
so I’d look like I was walking at a normal pace, so I sped up a little until I
started to feel like I was walking too fast, then I just gave up and looked
at the watch I wasn’t wearing so I could pretend I was late for something.
By the time I had it all sorted out, I was already back at my car.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before any of this happened, it was just
a normal Friday, and I was doing normal Friday things like not cleaning
my house. That all changed today though, because I’ve been wrestling all
week over whether or not I was going to go to Jenny’s book signing in
Houston for Furiously Happy . However, since I’d never been to a book
signing before, I didn’t know what to expect. I had it in my mind that it
would be a tiny space crammed with people who would all recognize me
from my bit in the video I was in for the book trailer , and then I’d have to
talk to them and explain my sign (because I’d be holding my sign since
part of the reason I was going was to get Jenny to sign my sign), and I
just couldn’t handle that sort of pressure.
So instead of not cleaning my house today, I spent most of the morning
dusting and sweeping and rearranging my living room with pathological
tidiness characteristic of both ’50s TV housewives and lunatic serial
killers. I did this because I’d decided to go to the signing, and I was
terrified of following through with it.
● My Monster Ear
● Death Metal
● Zapped
● Lies. All Lies!
So I cleaned like a madman until it hit me, and I realized that I was panic
cleaning. Which is something I’ve never in my life done before, as I
generally feel more comfortable amidst the detritus and refuse of my own
filth than I do in any sort of properly maintained and orderly
environment. But I was doing it today like I was making up for lost time.
Until, of course, it was time to go. It’s Trey’s weekend with his dad, so
instead of waiting for him to drive into town to pick him up at 4:30, we
left at 2:30 and met him halfway at the one gas station of a tiny little town
called Devers, which is only really notable for the fact that it has exactly
one gas station. We met up and said our goodbyes around 3:30, then
headed onward to west Houston.
Which should’ve only taken about an hour to get to from where we were,
but if you roll into the Houston area around 4:00 on a Friday expecting to
get to where you’re going without frustration and heartache, you’re gonna
have a bad time.
We had a bad time.
If you’re not familiar with the Houston area, it’s roughly the size of
Connecticut. This is not an exaggeration.
Sure, Houston itself isn’t all that big, but nobody actually lives in
Houston. They live in the Houston Area, which is made up of all the little
suburbs that dot the landscape around the city. It’s basically like a big
fallout map from a nuclear explosion, if ground zero were Downtown and
the radioactive cloud was just cars. Lots of cars. Everywhere.
With madmen behind the wheel.
We didn’t arrive at Blue Willow Books until around 5:30, after having
spent nearly an entire hour driving the last 15 miles. But we managed to
get there safely, with me only suffering a few micro heart attacks from
swerving assholes and maniac lane cutter-offers. (That’s a real term. No
need to look it up.)
Blue Willow Books was, in fact, a tiny space – just as I’d feared. But it
was a nifty little bookshop with a lot of character to it, and the reading
was going to happen outside, behind the store. So it’d be open air and I
could hide in a corner someplace. No problem.
My wife and I (my wife and me? I can never remember the rule) went to
the counter and bought a copy of the book, since I hadn’t bothered to buy
one earlier. I considered this good manners, since turning up with my
own copy of Furiously Happy that I’d bought somewhere else would’ve
been like showing up to a friend’s house for dinner with my own
hamburger because I wasn’t sure if I’d like whatever they were serving
and also if i had friends.
You get the idea.
So we bought a book, got our place in line – we were in Blue Group,
which was cool because it’s my favorite color, but also a little less cool
because it was the penultimate signing group, which is just a polite way
of saying we were just one step away from being dead ass last – and then
made our way out back.
There were a whole bunch of white plastic chairs, and my wife picked the
4th row back – which was cool, because I’ve always liked 4 and I have a
deep aversion to odd numbers, but also less cool because that left rows 5,
6, 7, 8 and 9 behind us. Which meant I was sitting with people to my
back, and I hate that.
Seriously, I can’t stand it. For example, when we go to a restaurant, my
ideal table is the one in the corner, and my chair is the one on the wall so
nobody can sneak up on me. If there’s no corner table, then I take
whichever chair gives me the best view of the entrances and exits of the
place, so I can keep my eye out.
For what, I have no freaking clue. It’s not like Virgil Sollozzo is going to
suddenly creep up and garrote me from behind or anything. I’m not in the
mob, and I hardly know any Italians. But it’s still a thing.
By the time things got going, most of the seats were filled, and I was just
sitting there uncomfortable as hell, from both the plastic chair of
questionable rigidity I was sitting on, and the fact that hundreds of
eyeballs were looking at the back of my head.
And I started to feel like Luca Brasi.
I spent most of Jenny’s excellent reading laughing while having my arms
crossed in front of me in the universal sign of I AM NOT AT EASE
HERE. But even then, I still wasn’t comfortable because I bite my
fingernails like any self-respecting neurotic psychopath, and my hands
basically look like Snausages. I’m super self-conscious about them,
which is a problem when I spend so much of my time with my arms
folded across my chest.
I have to either tuck my hands into my elbow holes to hide my secret
shame, or ball up my fists and just kind of rest them on my forearms in a
way that makes me feel like, for some reason, one of those “wooden
indians” you see in old movies but never in real life.
Anyway, Jenny read a couple of chapters from Furiously Happy and
everyone laughed at the funny parts and nodded in sage agreement with
the serious parts, and it was generally a good time for everyone. But by
the time she started the Q&A, the backdrop the bookshop had put up
behind her started to make me dizzy.
Something about trying to focus on Jenny with this bright white and bluedotted tarpaulin behind her just started to confuse my brain, and I had to
actively concentrate to keep things in focus as my eyes conspired to
trigger a migraine.
So that was fun.
Once the reading was over, it was signing time. But they started with
Red, and after I saw the horde of people in just one group, I realized that
Blue wasn’t going to come up until much later. They were taking them in
the order of something called Roy G. Biv, which I’ve been told has
something to do with the order of colors in the rainbow or something, and
that I really should’ve learned that in school, only I never did because I
was probably off in the special class that day, playing with parachutes
and that weird ass plastic thing with a ball in the middle to improve my
handwriting.
At any rate, it meant that I had time to kill.
There was an HEB grocery store nearby, so I walked over to pick up
some snacks for the wait. On the walk there, I had to pass an AutoZone,
where I witnessed a very large, very old man leaning under the hood of
his car, with the folded crevices of his upper butt crack just flapping in
the breeze. I tried not to stare, but how could I not? It isn’t every day you
get to see an origami ass crack.
Anyway, I eventually made it to the HEB and ended up checking out at
the register with one bottle of Coca-Cola, some fake HEB Doritos, a
caffeine candy bar, and a bag of Skittles. As I dug into my pockets for the
last of my cash and counted out change, I realized this is probably the
menu of a drunk person. Or possibly a stoned person, although I really
only understand the drug culture from afterschool specials and Nancy
Reagan PSAs from the ’80s, so I’m just guessing.
By the time I got back to the sitting area for the signing, my wife had
Made Friends, and was busy chatting them up about my sign: the sign I’d
carefully kept hidden via discrete book placement so nobody could see
what was written on it. And here she was, chatting about it. Just like that.
Openly. In public. With strangers.
I was mortified. But then they had to start telling me how much they liked
it, so it got really awkward and I wanted to crawl into one of the nearby
garbage dumpsters to hide.
After they finally left (they were nice, but I hate talking about myself in
person…which is weird, because I write about myself all the time), I
relocated to a safe area and sandwiched myself between a Volvo and one
of the dumpsters while I waited for something to happen. Which is
basically just a metaphor for my entire life.
Time passes…
By the time Blue Group came up, we missed it because I wasn’t paying
attention. We ended up getting in line with Pink Group, which I’m pretty
sure was the last group, instead of the next-to-last one we would’ve been
in, if I hadn’t been so busy being awful.
Once we’d realized my mistake, we hopped in line and were eventually
ushered back inside the store, where we then began waiting in another
line while I looked at a bunch of children’s books to kill time and avoid
making eye contact with other humans.
Then, it was my turn.
The lady working the signing table wanted to read my sign, so I showed it
to her. Then, she told me I needed to hold it up while she took our picture
with Jenny. Which was horrible.
But also wonderful.
I’m not going to say much about what Jenny said to me while she was
signing my shit, because it was all way too nice and I’m embarrassed. But
the takeaway is that she really loved the Furiously Happy side of my sign,
and told me that a lot of other people did, too. Then, she said a bunch
more super nice things before signing my sign and writing, “You are my
hero.”
Which very nearly wrecked me.
But in a good way.
After we got done with the chatting and the signing, it was picture time. I
held up my sign as the nice lady from the bookshop took a few snaps as
everyone else in line was LOOKING RIGHT AT ME. And reading my
sign.
Like I said: Terrifying.
Knowing me all too well, my wife redirected attention away from me and
back onto Jenny by telling her the shape of her eyeglasses temples looked
like the Elder Wand, and that she was probably a badass wizard. Or
witch. Whichever.
Everyone laughed and I said thank you and goodbye, followed by my
aforementioned walk/run/walk to the door.
If you’re thinking about going to one of her signings, all I can say is do it
Even if you have to drive through crazy traffic both ways, do it. Even if
you’re socially awkward with an aversion to large groups, do it. Even if
you’re a complete weirdo, DO IT.
It’s not scary. It’s uplifting.
As for me, it was hard, but I’m glad I did it. I’m probably going to frame
my sign now, assuming I can either scrape up the cash to have it done, or
just try to do it myself (and probably end up spending more money to fix
it after I inevitably screw it up).
I want to hang it someplace important that I’ll see every day, as a
reminder to myself to always stay FURIOUSLY HAPPY.
The Special Class
I have some sort of
mysterious, undiagnosed developmental disorder. Or, rather, it was
diagnosed, but said diagnosis has been hidden from me for the past
several decades of my life, ever since I was in 2nd grade and found
myself going to a special PE class just for me and a few other kids.
Which was actually, I would come to find out years later, a special class.
You know, for kids who have something wrong with them or whatever.
Only no one told me that at the time, so I just bounced along, happily
thinking I was getting out of class for an hour or so every few days to go
play on a janky teeter-totter and some weird-ass plastic thing with a ball
in the middle.
But what I was really doing there was working on my penmanship.
SUPPOSEDLY.
● My Monster Ear
● Death Metal
● Zapped
● Lies. All Lies!
According to my parents – two people who I love dearly, but who would
also, without question, be safely categorized as Unreliable Narrators in
the Story of My Life – I was enrolled in the class after my teacher, Mrs.
Wenner, suggested it because she felt that I was a stupid kid who couldn’t
write good.
Ok, maybe she didn’t use those exact words…
It also had to do with me having trouble telling left from right and tying
my shoes, and really just being kind of goofy and clumsy, because I guess
the diagnostic criteria for General Nerdiness hadn’t yet been defined back
in the early ’80s, so everyone just figured I suffered from some kind of
mental illness, rather than simply being a gangly stick figure of a boy,
with a bowl cut and an unhealthy obsession with computers.
Well, they probably thought it was unhealthy, anyway. Them. The
Powers That Be.
So, just because my handwriting was awful and I liked science fiction, I
found myself enrolled in some sort of “coordination class” since I
couldn’t be trusted to walk across a room without tripping on my own
elbows or something.
I actually liked the class, though. We played all sorts of different games,
and we almost always got to have time with THE PARACHUTE – which
was always a highlight of gym class in elementary school – but we didn’t
have to share it with the unclean masses of normal kids. It was just us
weirdos, so we could totally spaz out and nobody would punch us later or
push us into the urinals when we were trying to pee.
Because that tended to happen.
A lot.
This is actually from third grade,
but it’s close enough. The happy,
smiling kid is the one I’m not.
Looking back, I think maybe my teacher just needed a break from me for
a while, every few days. If she could send me off to the special class, then
she could have herself an hour free from my constant questioning,
horribly unclean desk (I had (have) a hoarding problem), and general
disregard for the social rules of the classroom.
She called her class The Apple Core for some reason, and one of the
things she would do is give everyone a little construction paper apple
she’d cut out. We would pin them onto a construction paper tree that was
pinned onto the classroom bulletin board, and every time we did
something good, our apple would get a “nibble” – which was really just a
hole-punch. From a standard hole puncher.
After we’d accumulated so many nibbles, we could exchange them for
things like computer time or extra recess and stuff. I always went with the
computer time, because most of the other kids didn’t give a crap about
them, and I’d spend my recess inside where I was safe amongst the
glowing phosphors of an Apple ][ monitor.
Which also meant I was alone in the classroom a lot. Which meant I
could go up to my apple and punch a few extra nibbles in it without
anybody noticing, which I could then trade in for more even computer
time later after I hadn’t done anything to deserve it except circumvent the
teacher’s authority.
I liked that part. ( More on that here. )
But I was still weird and annoying, so she probably hated me. I know she
hated me the day she made me stay late, after tipping out the entire
contents of my desk into the middle of the classroom floor while all the
other kids watched and laughed. I had to throw almost everything I
cherished away and “get organized” like a good little cog. OR ELSE!
She also hated me when I threw together a science project at the last
minute (because I always did (still do) projects at the last minute), and
ended up winning at my school, then later at the district-wide science
fair…
I built a robot.
Which probably sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. All I
did was spray paint a shoebox silver that I stuck it on top of a remote
control car I had. I glued another box vertically onto that one and stuck
the guts from a couple of Intellivision controllers to it because they
looked cool and all electronic-y.
I used toilet paper rolls in the sides where his arms would come out, then
fashioned a little mechanism with a servo from one of my dad’s model
airplanes so they’d move up and down. I used some kind of building toy I
can’t remember the name of off hand for the arms themselves, but it was
kind of like opposite Lego. They were little flat pieces of plastic with
holes in them that you’d join together with little plastic rivets. They were
fun.
I built a robot.
Anyway, one arm was functionally useless. It went up and down, and
that’s about it. But for the other arm, I attached an electromagnet I put
together from a battery, some old wire and a rusty ass nail I found in the
garage. It could pick shit up. Totally rad.
The head was just a styrofoam ball we picked up at whatever passed for a
craft store back in the ’80s, with some funky metal coil things I got from
somewhere jabbed into the sides and a face hastily scribbled on the front
with a magic marker.*
*Sidenote: The head would’ve been silver, too – but it turns out that
silver spray paint is basically fluoroantimonic acid to styrofoam. It ate
right through the first head as soon as I pushed down the nozzle on the
can. Literally, it just sort of melted. I’m not sure if the same thing would
happen today, though. There’s a lot more concern with not poisoning
children with death cancer paint these days, so I imagine modern spray
paint is a bit more on the mild side.
Anyway, that was my robot. I called him 2-KAB after my own initials
because I was an egomaniacal little bastard. All he could do was wheel
around the room, picking up paperclips and bumping into shit. But I was
pretty sure I was kind of a genius.
But I don’t think she liked that I was successful with my crappy little
project. I was, after all, one of those kids. You know, the kind of weirdo
that has to be dealt with before He Becomes A Problem.
My parents obviously felt the same way, or they’d never have allowed me
to be enrolled in the special class to play with the weird plastic thing with
a ball in the middle. They were just trying to do what everyone was
telling them was right, I guess. Which I appreciate, but it didn’t work.
I’m still weird.
In order to further help me assimilate into the armies of mediocrity, Mrs.
Wenner (or maybe one of the teachers from the special class) also
suggested to my parents that they could help me overcome my shyness
and aversion to social situations by buying me a little black boy to play
with.
Wait. That sounds wrong.
This was the early ’80s – the early 1980s – a full 120 years or so after the
Civil War ended. And yes, we lived in Texas, but it wasn’t like that. The
little black boy was actually a dummy.
Ok, stop. I feel like this is going all wrong. Let me try again.
My parents bought me a ventriloquist
dummy on the recommendation of some authority figure, with the
reasoning being that, by learning to speak through the dummy, I would
overcome my disdain for ever having to actually talk to people. So my
parents took me to the toy store, and the dummy I picked out just
happened to be black. THAT’S ALL.
His name was Willie Talk, which I guess was supposed to be a clever
take on “Will he talk?” or something, but I just called him Willy and
never did very much with him.
Mostly, he just kinda creeped me out. But I played along and made a
show of trying to master a skill that would SURELY expand my social
circle, because who doesn’t love the dude who whips out his wooden
dummy at parties? Amirite?*
*Technically, he was plastic.
The sad news is that, even after all their efforts to normalize me, I stayed
weird. I still liked books. I still played computer games. I still pretended,
well past the age when you’re supposed to stop. (I still play pretend, only
now I can hide behind my kid and call it something like Encouraging His
Creativity or whatever. Makes me look like a responsible parent.)
Looking back, I kind of miss that special class. That was probably the
first – and to this day, one of the only – times I was ever with my own
kind. The weirdos. The freaks. The square kids who will never be
squeezed into your round holes, no matter how much of their souls you
try and carve out to make them fit.
I wear contacts now, so I’m totally cool.
Years later, I’m finally – and slowly – learning to acknowledge my
insecurities, and to embrace being an introvert. All my life, I’ve had to
pretend that I enjoyed the things other people enjoyed. That I could make
small talk. That I was interested in anything normal people are fascinated
by. And it’s been draining.
But I’m finding my pace. My people. My tribe.
And I’ll always be weird.
Attack of the Killer Bees
Growing up, I was
incredibly close to my grandmother. I was even incredibly close to her as
a grown-up, if a punk twentysomething kid counts as a grown up. (It
doesn’t.) And I’d still be incredibly close to her today as a 40 year old
husband and father, but she passed away many years ago and I can’t even
talk about it, so don’t ask me to.
For real, though. I’ve never “dealt” with her…geeze, I can’t even write
the word death in context with her without pausing for way too long
while trying to think of another synonym that isn’t “passing” and getting
weepy. It’s probably not at all healthy, never advancing past the Denial
stage of grief, but I fear change. Don’t push me.
This isn’t about my grandmother, though. So don’t worry. I only mention
her because this post is tangentially about her, in the sense that she
features as only a minor character in this particular embarrassment, but
recalling it did make me think of her, and I had to process it before telling
you about the night I was almost murdered by insects.
You’ll see. It’ll all make sense in a minute. I promise.
● My Monster Ear
● Death Metal
● Zapped
● Lies. All Lies!
I don’t know my exact age, but I was probably somewhere around 10
years old when this all went down, because that’s when KILLER BEES
were really big in the news. If you weren’t around back in the mid-’80s,
the media basically spent several minutes every evening warning
everyone that swarms of homicidal rage bees were bearing down on us,
and that we were all very likely to die any minute.
That happened a lot in the ’80s. If I wasn’t abducted from the shopping
mall and murdered, I was probably going to end up taking candy from a
stranger and then get murdered. Or I’d fall in with a Satanic cult and
murder some other kid who we offered candy to before I was murdered
by the high goat priest or whatever. Or, of course, the bees would get us.
Picture the movie Jaws, but with thousands of tiny sharks that fly. That’s
how I imagined killer bees, only slightly worse because I assumed that
they could actually kill me. Just one of them, I mean. Not an entire hive.
A killer bee was a killer bee, and I figured that one was just as deadly as a
thousand. You know, truth in advertising, sort of thing. They said it on
the news, after all. Had to be true.
I imagined they did this by way of poison stingers that would paralyze,
then kill you in some terrible way. But all it took was JUST ONE STING.
Because that’s how everything worked in the ’80s:
● Have unprotected sex JUST ONE TIME, and you’d either get
AIDS or a baby. Or both, and you’d also quite possibly wake up
in a motel bathroom with your liver hacked out.
● Try crack JUST ONE TIME, and you’d either die instantly, or
develop a crippling addiction you’d sell your body on the street to
support, which would likely involve unprotected sex. In which
case, see above.
● Try marijuana JUST ONE TIME, and then you’d immediately try
crack. In which case, see above.
● Play Dungeons and Dragons JUST ONE TIME, and you’d
eventually start sacrificing kittens to dark gods while listening to
Heavy Metal and smoking weed, which would lead you to crack,
then on to bareback sex in dirty alleyways with underage
prostitutes who had been abducted by other Satanists, who you’d
probably get pregnant, but not before they stole your kidney. Or
liver. Whichever.
The ’80s were weird.
Back to the bees, though. I just assumed that, if one stung you, that was it.
Card punched. Ticket taken. Death would show up on a pale horse, I’d
lose at chess because I was still struggling to master Connect Four, and
off I’d go into the undiscovered country.
It was pretty terrifying.
I mentioned in another post recently that I’ve experienced only one
episode of sleep paralysis – and that was mostly true. And it was a pretty
classic (and terrifying) example of the phenomenon. ( Click here to read
about it. ) But it’s not entirely true, because it kind of also happened
many, many years before I was a twenty-something and living in a
crappy, probably haunted, apartment.
I was somewhere around 10 years old the first and only other time it
happened. And killer bees were in the news. And my grandmother had
knitted me an afghan.
With tassels.
One night, I was sleeping under that afghan when I had a nightmare that I
was being chased by a swarm of the murderous little bastards. I don’t
remember when or where they started coming after me, but I do know
that I somehow managed to outrun them just enough to barely escape
inside my house. I slammed the front door behind me, and could hear
them buzzing and crashing against it. And, being somewhere around 10
years old, I ran to my room and hid under my covers until they went
away.
Or, more specifically, I hid under the afghan my grandmother knitted for
me.
With tassels.
Of course, as with any good horror movie, my dream didn’t end there.
Not before I discovered that one lone killer bee had made it inside the
house.
And it had found me.
That’s when I woke up. In some kind of crazy Inception moment, I’d
awoken from a nightmare where I’d hidden from killer bees under the
exact same afghan I was currently sleeping under. And one of them was o
n my chin.
It was just sitting there, waiting to pierce its terrible stinger into my
tender flesh, rendering me helpless and immobile and very, very dead. I
was terrified.
Killer bees have faces. And also mohawks. TRUE FACT.
But I couldn’t move. I could barely even breathe, not that I really wanted
to. I was scared that any tiny hint of movement would provoke the bee to
sting, and that would be it for me.
So I was just lying there, silent and still and screaming inside.
It wasn’t quite sleep paralysis, because I don’t remember ever thinking I
couldn’t actually move if I’d wanted to. I just really didn’t want to,
because I wasn’t all that eager to piss off the tiny murderer standing on
my chin.
I don’t know how long I’d lain there, but it seemed like forever. Every
now and then, I’d feel the bee move – just the slightest twitch, maybe one
of its legs (but probably its stinger), and I’d panic. Eventually, I tried to
call out to my sister across the hall.
Which was mostly just like that almost-silent whimper a dog makes when
you haven’t given it any of your cheeseburger, and it knows you’re about
to eat the last bite. So she didn’t hear it.
I tried calling out to my parents. Same thing.
So I just stayed still in the bed, terrified and sweating until something
snapped. At some point, I just gave in. I accepted my fate and started
coming to grips with my own mortality.
Yes, when I was somewhere around 10 years old and in otherwise perfect
health, I was saying my goodbyes to friends and loved ones there in that
bed, that night. Apologizing for all my secret wrongs and asking for
forgiveness. Admitting that I did not, in fact, think my sister was a
trollbeast, and that I actually kind of loved her. Wondering what would
happen after I died…
That sort of thing.
Once I’d finished my little existential reckoning with the Powers That Be,
I was ready to go. And I knew what I had to do.
I might be walking into death’s door, but I’d do it on my own two feet.
And maybe – just maybe – I’d defy the odds and live another day. Maybe
I’d even manage to trap or kill the bee, after which I’d be a hero to my
family and then probably be on the local news or something, and maybe
even get invited to appear on Donahue. Who knows?
I spent the next several minutes contemplating my pending fame, the end
result of which was probably just me and Tiffany trying to get away into
the night, then I’d put my arms around her and we’d tumble to the
ground, and then I’d say, “I think we’re alone now.”
Or something. I had a crush. Shut up.
Either way – death or fortune – I was ready to end it. Mustering up all my
courage, my body tensed. I took a deep breath, slowly, and held it. I let it
build up in me until I was ready to gasp for oxygen, then I shot violently
from the bed and swung around in mid-air to, I dunno, roundhouse the
bee into oblivion.
Except that never happened.
Goodbye, cruel world.
What actually happened was that I screamed like a wet cat as I threw off
the afghan and more fell out of the bed than leapt like a ninja. I scurried
backward, away from my bed, dragging my ass on the ground as my heels
dug into the carpet and pushed. All the while, screaming.
My parents remained asleep. As did my sister. Maybe I screamed a lot in
my sleep and they were used to it, or maybe they just figured times was
hard, and if a killer bee wanted to lessen their financial burden by one
nerdy child, then far be it from them to get in the way of nature’s wrath. It
could’ve gone either way, really.
When no one came to my rescue and the bee never dive-bombed my skull
to deliver a death sting, I figured it out.
Those damn tassels.
I’d been dreaming about killer bees, one landed on my chin, and then I
woke up. In bed. With one of the tassels from my grandmother’s afghan
resting against face, which I then just naturally assumed was a murder
insect come to kill me.
I think that was the first time I laughed at myself. Properly, I mean. In the
self-aware, slightly lunatic, way of an adult after you realize just how
stupid whatever it was you just did was.
It wouldn’t be the last…
I'm broken
Not too long ago, the Queen of the Internet (as far as
I’m concerned, anyway) put out a call for help. Her name is Jenny
Lawson, she’s known online as The Bloggess , and she’s weird and
wonderful and damaged. One might even say broken.
She would say that, actually. She has said that. And she needed help from
other broken souls to put together a trailer for her new book, Furiously
Happy . Turns out, I am one of those broken souls.
I’m in the Tribe!
I responded to her request along with thousands of other broken people,
which was pretty simple: she wanted us to tell her why we were broken,
but why we’re also furiously happy. Because you can be both. At the
same time.
I thought about it, then decided to send her my deepest, most secret fear
that I am (was) terrified of anyone ever finding out: I am a failure.
I constantly fail. All the time. I try things, they don’t work, then I try the
same things again, they don’t work again, then I try once more. And
another time after that. And another after that. Constantly.
I try.
I fail.
Incessantly.
It’s part of what makes me who I am, both as a perpetual work-inprogress and as a chronically depressed, anxiety-plagued broken shell of a
man. (I’ve recently started trying to write about my struggles with
depression, which you might want to check out , if you haven’t. I’ve also
started opening up about My Lifetime of Questionable Decisions , which
are a lot funnier than depression. But more embarrassing.)
I have the support
of a great wife and amazing 9-year-old stepson, who see me through the
really dark times. However, even when I’m feeling really low, I still hold
on to the belief that success is predicated by failure as a necessity; there
are no “overnight” successes. Anyone who wakes up a success one
morning hasn’t been sleeping. They’ve been trying, working, and getting
better at what they do until the lightning strikes: skill meets up with luck
and timing, the stars and planets align, and Something Happens.
I’m still waiting for Something to happen.
And I’m still trying. And failing. And trying again. It’s what I do.
I’m broken because I always fail at everything.
BUT
I’m furiously happy because the only difference between a happy ending
and a sad one is where you stop the story. And I’m not done.
Thanks for letting me be part of this, Jenny. You sure are a nifty person.
I’ve embedded the video below, but do be sure to go read Jenny’s post
about it . The comments alone are worth it. If you’re looking for me, my
ugly mug turns up 5th in the video, right after the person who comes right
after Felicia Day .
Yeah, I’m in a video with Felicia Day now, which is kind of amazing. (If
you don’t know how inspiring I find her, you should find out. Seriously,
here .)
Christopher Moore is there, too. Along with John Scalzi. And Patrick
Rothfuss . And, of course, Jenny Lawson .
And a bunch of other really amazing people who make me brave. Which
is the only reason I’m writing this, because I’m still kind of crippled with
anxiety over anyone I know ever actually seeing me sitting there with my
sign, admitting my greatest insecurity to the world.
I tried explaining this strange combination of excitement and crippling
anxiety to my wife, and she responded in the way in which I’ve grown
accustomed: “Think of something comforting. Pretend I said it.”
It’s why I love her.
I put myself out into the world every time I publish anything on this blog.
Sometimes it’s ugly, and sometimes it’s embarrassing. Usually, it’s funny
– but it’s always scary. But putting my greatest insecurity out there –
letting everyone I know see how broken I feel sometimes? That’s
downright terrifying.
But it’s all right. I’m not worried anymore.
I’m in the Cool Kids Club!

My Top Ten PC Games of 2008

Transcription

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