2372: The Lost Art of Puzzle Games

I’ve been playing some old puzzle games recently. By “old” I mean “predating the smartphone”, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t all that old, but in technology terms is positively ancient. And, while I’ve known this for a while, the difference between puzzle games now and puzzle games of then makes it abundantly clear, beyond a doubt, that the modern age has done our collective attention spans no favours whatsoever.

The reason I say this is a simple matter of timing and commitment. The age of mobile and social gaming — Bejeweled Blitz in particular had a lot to do with this, I feel — has redefined the puzzle game as an experience that must be over and done with within 30-60 seconds, lest the participant get bored with the experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be easy, mind you — quite the opposite, in fact, in the case of free-to-play games, where “friction” (ugh) is specifically incorporated into the game design at regular intervals for the sole purpose of extracting money from lazy players.

There are some people who are too stubborn to pay up to get past an artificially difficult level in Candy Crush Bullshit, of course, but these people are in the minority, because the 30-second structure of the levels that are easily beatable trains one to expect a bite-size, painless experience rather than having to actually put in any work or practice. And so for many players, the option to pay up to bypass a particular challenge — or at least make it insultingly easy, for the illusion of them having beaten it themselves — becomes an attractive one.

Compare and contrast with a puzzle game designed in the old mould, then. Rather than being designed as rapid-fire timewasters, puzzle games used to fall into two main categories: those which, like the best arcade games, challenged you to see how long you could last against increasingly challenging odds; or those which, like the other best arcade games, challenged you to demonstrate your superiority over either a computer-controlled or human opponent. In both cases, said challenges took a lot longer than 30 seconds to accomplish — in the former instance in particular, a good run could go on for hours or more if you really got “in the zone”.

In other words, puzzle games used to be designed with a mind to keeping a player interested and occupied for considerable periods at a time, rather than allowing them to while away a few minutes — that’s what simple shoot ’em ups were for. Everything from the classic Tetris to slightly lesser known gems like Klax and oddities like Breakthru were designed in this way; these games weren’t just “something to do” — they were a test of endurance, observational skills, strategy and dexterity, both mental and physical. Having a Tetris game that went on for an hour was a badge of honour rather than an inconvenience; you weren’t playing the game until something better came along, the game was the better thing that had come along.

This change in focus for puzzle games is a bit sad, as I miss the old days of them offering substantial, lengthy challenges to tackle over time. That’s not to say that there’s no place for rapid-fire puzzles, too, but it just disappoints me that 30-second “blitz” challenges are all we have these days.

At least the old games still play just as well as they always did — with them being so graphically light in most cases, puzzle games tend to age a whole lot better than many other types of game.

1554: Hyperlynx

The Game Boy apparently turned 25 recently, but I didn’t own an original Game Boy when they first came out. (I did later pick up a Game Boy Pocket, a Game Boy Color and indeed every Nintendo handheld since, but no original Game Boy.) As such, I don’t have quite as many fond memories of the little yellow-and-black wünderkind, because our household instead elected to indulge in the Atari Lynx for their handheld gaming needs. (More specifically, the Lynx 2, which was considerably smaller than the monstrous original Lynx but still far too big to even think about putting in your pocket.)

The Lynx was a surprisingly impressive machine for the time, boasting a full-colour backlit screen, a 16-bit processor (compared to the Game Boy’s 8-bit) and hardware scaling for smooth “zooming” of sprites and images a la the SNES’ Mode 7 facility without the “rotation” part. All this technological advancedness (spellcheck tells me that’s not a word, but I’m going to use it anyway) came at a price, though; the system gobbled batteries like they were rapidly becoming extinct. (In fact, the rate the Lynx consumed AAs, it’s a wonder batteries didn’t become extinct.)

So bad was the battery life that it was literally impossible to make it through the entirety of a game such as Gauntlet III without having to plug the AC adapter in partway through the play session. And with the Lynx’s “game card” cartridges lacking any sort of battery backup functionality (and, consequently, the ability to save games) this meant that every time you started playing a game you had to begin from the beginning again, unless the developer had thoughtfully included some sort of “password” function. (Oh, remember passwords? What a hellish time we used to live in.) This meant that games either had to be very short or friendly to replaying. Certain games handled this well. Others, like the otherwise excellent quasi-point-and-click adventure based on Dracula, did not.

There were some really solid games, though. Unofficial Pole Position sequel Checkered Flag was a particular highlight due to its impressive use of the Lynx’s sprite scaling facility (albeit on a distinctly “retro” style of racer, and Warbirds proved that it was indeed possible to have a good crack at a flight sim on a handheld device. The aforementioned Dracula had some impressively stylish visuals and was a good adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story, lack of save function aside, and Gauntlet III was arguably the best version of Gauntlet the world has ever seen thanks to its wide variety of characters and sprawling, interesting levels.

One of my favourites was Electrocop, a game whose technological achievements were really quite impressive for the time. Effectively a 3D third-person shooter before anyone knew what those were, Electrocop cast you in the title role as you wandered around a 3D base from a side-on perspective blasting robots and hacking terminals to open locked doors. It was far more than a straight blastathon, and the side-on 3D effect, in which you could run left and right as well as “into” and “out of” the screen in smooth motion, was utterly gobsmacking for the time. I also vaguely remember it having cool music. Let’s see if I can’t find some.

Also of particular note was the Lynx version of Klax. Klax remains one of my favourite puzzle games of all time — there was just something so satisfying about it — and the Lynx version was pretty much arcade-perfect, right down to having a vertically-oriented screen.

Yes, the Lynx was not at all afraid to demand that the player hold the already unwieldy device on its side with the joypad at the top and the buttons at the bottom (or the other way around if you preferred — there’s a feature that modern handhelds don’t offer!) and indeed boasted a number of vertically-oriented games, of which Klax was one and the aforementioned Gauntlet III was another. After you got your arms used to the initial awkwardness of the arrangement — a problem mitigated marginally on the slightly smaller Lynx 2 — it was actually quite a good way to play, and an eminently sensible solution to the problem of how to accurately represent ports of arcade games that originally played on vertically-oriented monitors.

Anyway. I sold off my Lynx a good few years back now, along with the hefty collection of games I had for it. There are occasional days when I regret doing that, but unlike a lot of the old Game Boy games, many of the Lynx titles don’t hold up particularly well these days, sadly. Although there were a few standout titles — most of which I’ve mentioned in this post — the majority of the library was fairly mediocre in retrospect, and would probably come as an unpleasant shock to people used to the incredible depth and breadth available in handheld games today. Like many systems that failed to endure as well as others, the Lynx was an impressive gizmo in its day, but today, I feel, owning one would be little more than a curiosity rather than something to take particularly seriously.

Or perhaps just a Klax machine. Which, frankly, is actually probably reason enough to own one.

1121: Dreamscape

I had a “game dream” last night. As any longtime gamer will tell you, these happen with increasing frequency the more you like or have spent time playing a particular game, are often extremely vivid and are usually quite memorable, too.

In my case — and disappointingly for this blog post, which is about to get a whole lot of padding — I can’t remember the specific details about said dream. What I can remember, however, is the peculiar combination of games that formed the basis of said dream. First up were Ar Tonelico, which is my new RPG jam having finished Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2; and Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 itself — hey, I really, really liked it, okay? These two aren’t especially weird to put together, since Ar Tonelico’s developer Gust also contributed to Hyperdimension Neptunia and was even personified in the game as the character called, err, Gust.

Combining with Ar Tonelico and Hyperdimension Neptunia was the visual novel Kira Kira, which I was reading shortly before I went to sleep last night, so it’s perhaps unsurprising it put in an appearance. Kira Kira doesn’t really fit with the other two, though — it may also be Japanese, but it’s 1) not an RPG 2) not in a fantasy setting and 3) not quite as “crazy” as the other two.

This isn’t as bizarre an inclusion as the presence of CD Projekt Red’s dark fantasy opus The Witcher, however, which also put in an appearance courtesy of its white-haired protagonist Geralt, who looked very much out of place alongside the colourful characters from the other games.

As I say, I can’t remember what actually happened in the dream, so this story is mostly a waste of time, but I thought it was an interesting combination of things that my subconscious chose to put together — particularly since I haven’t played The Witcher for quite some time.

Game dreams don’t always blend together experiences like this. Sometimes they’re a focused experience based on a single game. Puzzle games used to be particularly bad for this — I remember shortly after getting my very own Lynx (Atari’s ill-fated 16-bit handheld which was absolutely enormous) and playing a whole bunch of Klax that I had a number of Klax-related dreams, which mostly centred their attention on my mental image of the female voice that whispered such sweet nothings as “Klax Wave!” and “Yeah!” and “Oooh!” while you were playing. (I think it was the latter that made me go weak at the knees. It was quite a sexy “Oooh!”. I have tried to find it on YouTube but instead found nothing but Flight Simulator videos. Apparently “KLAX” is the abbreviation for Los Angeles International Airport. What was I talking about again?)

Um, anyway… Yeah.

Dreams are a strange thing. I am fairly convinced that you can influence your own dreams strongly by what you’re doing immediately before you go to sleep (wash your mind out, pervert) but it seems that the most vivid dreams tend to show themselves when you’re not specifically trying to think really hard about something, and instead have a mind full of things that have stimulated it. In my case last night, the rather wordy prose of Kira Kira obviously kept my mind active as I drifted off to sleep, and then other influences that I felt strongly about drifted in there, too.

That still doesn’t really explain the presence of The Witcher, but eh, I’m tired, so I’m off to read a bit of Kira Kira and then go to sleep for hopefully some more subconscious happy fun times. See you on the other side.