a idiot cynic tries to write with an open heart. in our current landscape it is only prudent to suspect that every word uttered is a form of engagement bait, and i hope the following is not coloured as such. i write only for myself, not you. sometimes we just need a spot to unload, particularly if we are the type of person built without a release valve. i guess an anonymous, parasocial, gamified tracker website is as good a place as any.

as i type, i am preoccupied with thoughts of a decade-long companion awaiting the outcome of a coin flip. to think they could be gone at any moment, stuck in a hospital i can’t reach quickly enough to say goodbye, is enough to induce a fresh heart attack every other minute. so i wanted to feel something, anything, beyond a drip feed of negativity.

our tendency to use media as a salve for despair is frankly stupid, a sign that we can no longer relate to our real, lived environment in a meaningful way (like come on just go for a fucking walk and look at a bird or whatever). nor does it provide much reward or tangible relief. let’s say we want to min-max our distraction therapy: open world game #642 could easily occupy my idiot brain for 100+ hours with its garbage (which, at a time like this, i cannot pretend to be above). no offense to open world game #642, of course; this truth would as easily hold for something good, engaging. all for what, though? is it just to forestall the levee breaking? so rarely, if ever, can consumption act as tourniquet. for now, though, let’s try.

i booted tower of heaven for the millionth time in as many years. mainly to hear the music. but why not see it through. a game whose runtime you can count in minutes is good for the soul—at this time, at any time. i can only wonder (rhetorically) why games struggle to be this efficient, succinct. in no way does this hamper it: this is a flawless game in the only sense that means something. an instance where a creator simply made the thing they wanted to make, expressing what existed in their own mind.

i do not wish to discuss the game too much. i could not care less about some gamereviewese bullshit right now. i would just implore others to try - it’s pretty fun! it is a short, ostensibly difficult platformer with a game boy sheen and fantastic compositions. as we know, flash games were required by law to have loose, questionable notions of momentum and inertia, and this one does not disappoint. all told, you should be done in thirty minutes or less. maybe longer if you want to find a secret ending. it is the exact kind of game i wish i was young enough to experience as intended: playing in your high school pc lab while ignoring your work.

the tower of heaven itself, allegedly insurmountable, at least mirrored my predicament to the extent which i have rationalised my circumstances. it has been a while, and i had somewhat forgotten about the laws and their broader lessons. i should have my ass beaten for using a phrase like “mechanics as metaphor”, but fuck it. where so many games contort themselves to chase this paradigm, usually failing, and even where games handle this gracefully (let’s say bloodborne), tower of heaven manages to capitalise on this in a handful of minutes, elegant, efficient, and convincing as ever.

i reached the point where ‘luna ascension’ plays and shed a couple of tears. to be fair, i would do the same in any state. even as sucker for silly midi orchestrations, i cannot think of many which carry such richness and emotional weight. this stands for much of the soundtrack. the use of motifs, even in a game with so few tracks, each part recalling and referencing another, could put toby fox to shame. i realise i’ve found a small sense of lasting catharsis.

upon reaching the end and [redacted], i ponder the laws once more. i’ve seen this sequence countless times, i won’t pretend they offer any novel or deep insight (at their most trite and simplified they can amount to, for example, ‘don’t look back, live in the present’). that’s fine: sometimes we just need a reminder of the basics. the fact these are here at all, ingrained in the entire game flow, and deepened further through some surprisingly consistent allegory and visual symbolism, all within a tiny fifteen year old flash game, astounds me. right now, this is just what i needed.

god is in his heaven. i will keep climbing.

Sometimes I like to play games before the AVGN covers them so I can laugh at the same stuff he makes fun of. That said, I don't think I got very far when I played this, and there is one good reason why.

Colorblindness Rating: F
Having one of your stage gimmicks be based on being able to traverse yellow pipes but not green pipes is AWFUL. Who made this choice? I spent more time trying to figure out where I could cross over and over again because I can't tell the yellow pipes from the green pipes. AVGN put it best. What a shitload of fuck.

i accidentally played this one for a couple hours on my genesis flashcart instead of the genesis/MD version which made it pretty funny when i discovered that version was the original... this europe-exclusive port is mildly impressive for master system despite the unnecessarily blown out colors and generally ugly sprite conversion, but tbf the MD original was barely a step up from its SMS predecessor (The Dragon's Trap). of particular note is that, being that master system carts rarely came with battery backups, this conversion opts to use hilariously long passwords -- positively dying imagining some poor british kid writing this shit down, seething with jealousy at his classmate who owned a megadrive

can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.

the part where the author asks whys so many games reward killing enemies or have a combat system is very interesting to me. games can be so much deeper than killing shit yet so many games involve beating the shit out of something. and it made me think about kirby because kirby just seems really confusing to me. in the ads and products its shown that he protects dreamland and loves any creatures and making friends and it’s really cute, yet in the gameplay he’s just beats the shit out of anything that moves and doesn’t even pose a threat which is just really odd messaging of what kirby is, and most of the creatures kirby beats up are just really cute dudes that are just hopping around. it would’ve been much more interesting to play a platformer where instead of resolving conflicts via violence you would’ve solved it via cuteness and friendship and the power you obtain aren’t from eating people and instead from making friends

We got milkshake ducked, this sucks. I can’t consciously endorse a project where the entire team chooses to espouse transphobia as if it is an “opinion.” Also if a pokemon fan game is taking time away from your faith you either have fallen into 1990s televangelism moral panic or have such pisspoor time management that you can’t set like 2 mind aside to pray. This sucks. The community was in love with this game but bigoted creators ruin anything. Fuck a pokemon battle this a long life battle with yourself.

This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!

If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.

While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.

I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.

Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.

For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.

Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)

I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.

Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.

I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.

Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.