So, fun fact, at one point at the beggining of the 2020s I stopped playing videogames. My friend from Spain was telling me all about these more modern games that were masterclasses at artistic expression and brought something of phillosphical and personal use for the player and I was there, thinking gameplay was the only thing that mattered. I didn't have a good PC to play more modern titles, I only had a phone which filled up with memory pretty quickly so I couldn't play native games on it (and I still won't) because deleting them to have space for everyday life meant deleting its save files.

That's why since I had a phone with android, I always used emulators, playing games from the 16 bit generation (and the GBA) and below as that was the most I could run. If anything happened, I would just move the save files to PC and then back, I could transfer them between devices and still have a record of my memories with the games.

So I ended up building a criteria as an excuse to playing these games, now I don't think a game should neccesarily be "fun" as art can communicate things in other media like film without serving as a way of escapism, but back then I only had Youtube channels like Game Sack or the AVGN or the stupid Console Wars to build up ways to analyze games. My go to review channel was Implant Games, I still have respect for him, as he went into extreme detail in the games he covered showing the inner workings of level design.

"Oh... So that's where games can be like art!" I thought, "if the games I played can't reach the elegance of a Bergman film or the depht of a Dostoievski novel, then it's like architechture, there has to be a very well planned construction for it to be great, and not only that, it's not held back by the physics of the real world!", since few games I had played up to that point tried to handle story or themes and my memory of having played the beautiful expression that was the Mother trilogy, which didn't mind having a boring section where you were a factory worker just to portray how boring it was in real life, was becoming ever more distant, as an exception to the rule.

But then I played more games, all retro, and then more games, all retro, and then more games, all retro. Eventually I bought the phone I'm writing this in and my brother bought a better computer. And then while my friend from Spain started seeing games as art, depending on expression and telling me about modern indie titles, I came up with Toaplan's shooter games.

"Something is missing" I thought. They were fun to play with, they were competently designed, but why were they getting progressively more uninteresting as I played them from the older to the newer if I was experiencing how the design became progressively better at being "more fun"? Why wasn't I having fun? Why did I feel I was wasting my time? "This can be good level design, but I feel I have seen this done before in other games. It's just copying a formula to have fun with, but what makes this stand out from the other things I've played?"

That's when I realized, if I removed all the aesthetics and only played a game with the graphics of a Magnavox Oddyssey, I would see that good gameplay, the only pillar I thought that could be the support for the entire medium, would leave me with something that didn't automatically make something stand out, something that communicated anything.

"But then what makes architechture be considered art?" I asked myself, trying to go to the roots of the problem. And then I realized, in architechture, you could either have something as expressive as Antonio Gaudi's buildings, which wasn't just the infrastructure, it was also how he stylized the buildings, what he put inside, what mattered and expressed something, or else you could end up having just a dumb office building, which don't express anything but do have a practical use.

So videogames if looked like I looked at them weren't trying to achieve Gaudi, what were them? I thought they were made for fun, so I tried to find anything to give them the prestige that rivaled other forms of art just through game design alone. But then it came to mind, they are like those amusement parks. They weren't expressing anything through gameplay alone, they wouldn't contribute anything to a person other than a more elaborated form of escapism just to have a momentary thrill. A game only focused on gameplay to have fun was no more expressive than a roller coaster with the most varied and amusing tracks at best and a simple duck shooting game to win prizes at worst.

And then it hit me, I didn't have anything worthwile to talk about with my friend from Spain. I had been mostly on amusement park rides my whole videogame life, playing only retro games with very few things I could bring about which could be beneficial for self improvement or just to talk about greater scope topics. I only had Earthbound to offer, and that's why it's still my favourite game just like 2001 is my favourite movie even if they are not objectively the best, it's what introduced me into a greater scope.

I finished playing Toaplan's Twin Hawk, one of the most generic games I've ever played, and since I realized videogames wouldn't contribute anything more the way I experienced them, I just took a break for a few months. In a way I should be thankful to that boring ass game, since it allowed me to change my paradigm at how I approach gaming. Talking with my friend from Spain about the potential for exploring something more made me look for interesting and in-deep ways games could be used to communicate things (like how "That Dragon, Cancer" uses the interactive medium itself to present a fun time so that the latter exploration on the characters' suffering to share how one goes through a tough situation can be more arresting), or even if they didn't and were made just to have fun just like a summer blockbuster, to see what personality it conveyed (today I can think of Cuphead which I recently played: even if it grabbed from other things for its aesthetic, some of the bosses had backstories which could be infered just by the way they move and the attacks they use, by incorporating techniques from the animated medium). And then I came back, enjoying videogames more than ever, seeing both their potential and intriguing depht; and a more colorful and inventive look to their escapist side, a rollercoaster which wasn't just for fun but also had something only portrayed by its own identity.

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The Toaplan vertical scrolling shooters I've played until now had very little of that personality, and that's what made me realize gameplay by itself wasn't enough. They are just a bunch of planes fighting other planes with none of Compile's more cinematic camera movements to at least convey more adrenaline. Fire Shark is like that, though at least it shows a tiny thing that makes it a bit less generic than Twin Hawk. At the start of every level there are a bunch of soldiers who are doing funny background events. And yeah, that's it.