Yeah puzzle games are great and all, but nothing really keeps my att- OH MY GOD ARE THOSE FLASHING LIGHTS.

I’m back, yet again, to talk about puzzle games. And today, I happened to land on one made 23 years ago, and one I’ve never heard of. This is Fantavision. A game developed to show the capabilities of the PlayStation 2 for some reason. Come on, you know me. I can’t like a video game console if it hasn’t got one game which has FLASHING LIGHTS. Anyway, let’s get into the uniqueness of this game and why I kinda like it.

Your mission in Fantavision is simple: you control a circular cursor and quickly match up different firework colours (known as flares). You use a ray of light to gather up these flares by pressing the X button and then press circle to detonate them. You need to string together a minimum of 3 or 4 to be able to get any points out of them. You also have different types of flares which explode in different and mesmerising ways. If you also happen to get a multi-coloured flare, you have the chance to make chains which go on for a ridiculous amount. However, if you miss quite a few flares, it affects your play meter and if that goes down, it’s game over. You can also chain along different power ups which award extra points or help with your play meter. There is also starmine. When you chain together these certain stars, they create these letters which spell out starmine, which is essentially your bonus stage. In the stage you have to detonate as many flares as you can within the time limit. And that’s Fantavision! You can watch replays if you decided to save it and can also have the ability to unlock harder modes and extra stages, but other than that. That’s Fantavision!

So, what did I think? It’s a pretty good puzzle game all things considered. It definitely kept me invested at multiple points and the music is really nice and chill. I will say, the only problem is the replay value but it’s still a nice game to come back to every now and then. This game would later get a rerelease for the ps5 titled 202X. Whether I’ll play it or not we’ll see, as fun as it looks. Also uhh, it’s the American anniversary of this game in 2 days so uhh. Happy early birthday Fantavision!

FLASHING LIGHTS, chill music, good stages

the most forceful and fascinating aesthetic statement Fantavision makes is setting its play in some kind of false, alternate, quasi-1950s dimension. when you boot up the game, you’re greeted by smiling, white faces, straight out of a “classic” commercial or magazine illustration. playing the game, these actors will continue to interrupt the experience as their own instead of something meant for the player, and it seems to suggest that their retrofuturism is our nostalgic gateway into videogame-flavored technopositivism. I think this is truly a headfuck because it’s taken as-is, without commentary. it’s taken as-is so I feel compelled to try to make sense of it.

first let’s get the obvious out of the way… it’s pretty safe to dismiss Fantavision as at least most likely lacking any kind of foresight or insight when presenting these aesthetics. I think there’s grounds to argue that the game presents some actual occidentalism, meaning the smiling white faces are taken to be some kind of symbol that, first, is meant to have uncontroversial appeal for the USA market to coincide with the PS2, and, second, to present an uncontroversial desire or mirror for people outside of the USA market. all that matters is that the actors seem to be happy.

accepting the game at face value like that is pretty boring, so let’s problematize those assumptions.

in the year 2000, a kind of neo-retrofuturism was still in vogue. I want to specifically point at the demoscene renders that modulate a playthrough of Fantavision as trying to, at least to the best of their ability, represent some forward motion into a science-fiction, futuristic “there” that we, hopefully, soon will attain. we didn’t attain it, so in retrospect Fantavision seems coiled around these two rings of positivism, the staged happiness of the future-looking past bunching up against and antiquated vision of techno-progress. that uneasy (retrospective) paradox, coupled with different flourishes of superflat-type art quirks in the UX and how the FMVs are presented, starts to make the aesthetic of Fantavision feel like a parody or pastiche of these desires… they are literally too corny and saccharine to be convincing, the shallowness almost registering as type of hyperpop condemnation.

and the thing is Fantavision really is operating on the level of parody, if you’ll follow me along the trailing end of my conspiracy. Fantavision evokes one certain canonized game at very strong visual, if not mechanical level: Missile Command. Missile Command is a game that’s either inert or terrifying depending on when you play it and how much you play it. Missile Command is something of a successful, very immediate, ripped-from-the headlines kind of exploitation material. its effectiveness as predatory agitprop is maybe a litmus of how seriously one can take bloops and bleeps.

Fantavision is the Chex Quest of Missile Command. well, it’s way more sophisticated than Chex Quest, but that’s the drift. the goal in Fantavision is not to stave off the destruction of the world, but to put on a fireworks performance to the best of ones ability for the enjoyment of the spectator(s). the ephemeral aspect of playing is very obviously not lost through this artistic metaphor. and while the game isn’t wholly non-competitive, its mechanics conjure a purely expressive, social, sharing kind of competition, absent of the enticements of power and violence.

instead of firing surface-to-air missiles that are bounded by some physical logic, the player controls a possessive taser that can move between undetonated fireworks. the abstract arcade puzzle aspects—three of a color must be possessed in order to detonate anything, although many objects count as all colors and allow different colors to be chained together—force, rather than merely encourage, an active sense of selfhood through stressful, millisecond-timed, yet ultimately trivial decision making. that is the starkest contrast from Missile Command, which requires complete intuitive sublimation into a machine, forcing a cyborgian, predictive playstyle, where your thoughts are completely exhausted, even unintelligible, as they ineffectively model what the computer will do next.

can it be a coincidence that Fantavision’s non-abstract, human faces, date their existence right in the conservative peak of the cold war? it doesn’t feel like it is one. and it closes out the potential of an easy interpretation. Fantavision puts these contrasts next to each other, inviting their comparison, suggesting this type of inspiring, non-violent, incredibly twee gameplay conceit somehow pairs perfectly with the invocation of reproductive, repressive, normative western conservatism.

Punctuate a moving picture? I'm no painter and don't dance in mirrors. But here I could watch a mysterious transformation of my movements taking place on the other side of the room, my own participation in the animated interface unfolding in an extraordinary spectacle of lights, colors, and sounds. Improvised painting, organized doodling, with somebody doodling against you to make sure you keep doing it. —David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld

FantaVision is definitely... interesting. Been fascinated by this game since I rented it at my local video store as a kid, back during the PS2 days, and I finally decided to put more time in recently to attempt a shot at it.

It's tricky. I don't know.
I always love Japan Studio and the infused Japanese, otherwordly charm they throw into their games. Especially during the early PS2 days, there were a ton of games like this that felt magical in a way, transitioning from PS1. The VO reminds me a little bit of Intelligent Qube, the FMV cutscenes that would occasionally play between levels, there's some uniqueness to be found here.

But as a video game, it fails. Clearly from the intent of its design, FantaVision is meant to showcase PS2's graphical capabilities through a puzzle arcade game. The requirement of chaining colors together and in a timely manner is cool, but it ultimately feels bad to play. Aiming to the colored rocket that you want to chain is almost never accurate, and even the indicator for upcoming colors is difficult to keep track of when it's too low on the UI and out of the field of view. The game itself has no checkpoint system of sorts either, making it very challenging to make it through a full sitting. (I personally couldn't even make it through Level 3.)
Neat take on the genre, but flawed in its execution. And while it does contain that illusive Japan Studio charm, it's simply a technical showcase for the hardware.

Always hated this game. It feels so unresponsive and boring and nothing about it compels me. Oddly enough, it was the PS2 game I owned the longest, as I believe that I got it with the console in maybe 2002 and then I never found a buyer for it as I sold off my collection through the years, and didn't end up getting rid of it until like 2020 even though I sold my console in 2009. Then I bought it again for PS4 and realized that, nope, I still hate it. Embarassingly, I only bought it again because I forgot that I hate it and I thought I was buying Boom Boom Rocket.

very very cute-looking. unfortunately i tried for way too long to get past that initial wave of pain points and little frustrations you always get with games in that Q? Entertainment vein and just could not get with it.

feels way too common with SCE projects for people to say "oh it's just a tech demo lol" and that definitely doesn't apply here even with the runtime. it really is impressive not only how much they managed to wrangle out of the console graphically so early into its life, but also in how beautifully overdesigned all of its UI/UX is

"FantaVision" has always been this illusive game for me. I remember it on store shelves when the PS2 released. I even remember there being mulitple used copies in store shelves when I worked at GameStop a long time ago. Now that I've played it, I can put that curiosity to bed. This game sucks. It's basically Missile Command with a sort of lite rythme mechanic thrown in. There's really not any forward momentum to the stages, so the whole thing feels stale and boring. The tutorials are so long and drawn out and for a game that isn't even that difficult to understand or have much underlying complexity. There's really nothing going on here. The only real value I can see is it would have been a graphical showcase for the PS2 in 2000. That was decades ago, so that isn't a boon anymore.