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.

NO ABSOLUTES
NO GRAND MASTERS

within interactive media, one could find myriad instances of games that could be best described as wasting one's time. menus and metaprogression for hours, idle selection. story sequences to kick back and soak in. this is a phenomena that is best described as "low gameplay density".

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS is the absolute opposite. from the moment you hear the barely-human "ready, go", you begin to waste each and every millisecond of the game's time (don't worry, it's counting them for you!).

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS iterates on the desperately needed improvements to the timeless soviet program of pattern recognition made by Arika with 1998's Tetris The Grand Master. quality of life improvements have been made, less for the player and more for the arcade operator, but one should never underestimate the performance of proficient player. emphasizing speed and precision amidst the chaos of fair, high-frequency pseudorandom number generation. movement at instant gravity, managing the shape of the stack as a means of player survival. i tend to consider TGM1 as the transitional entity between the "old" school of tetris, alongside Tetris DX and other proto-SRS games from BPS. (the old school of tetris includes but is not limited to nintendo's 8-bit RSI-inducers, atari's endurance testers and sega's 1988 single button primate neuron activator.) arika iterated on, and subsequently continued to perfect the rotation and piece movement introduced in sega's 1988 release, which is a far cry from the sanitized snoozefest that has manifested as the henk rogers mandated Official Tetris Guideline. 7-bag randomization and the Standard Rotation System are without question the absolute worst thing that has happened to falling block puzzle games, and that culminated in a set of rules that is only conducive to player proficiency within a competitive multiplayer environment (read: oops! all t-spins), which i will never care care for, and i will not be be paying for an online service on the thing that has collected more dust than my wii u just to give arika's return to the four blocks dropping a lot a try. (smash that mf <3 button if you've ever passed out [as in started falling asleep] 3 hours into an endless marathon game, 2 hours past the timer's upper limit, in any post-Tetris Worlds Official Tetris Company Licensee Product Strictly Abiding By The Official Tetris Guideline)

100% Video Game: Complete With Life Ruining Potential!

alongside the third Leader Bee game from world renowned mobile gacha game developer Computer Art Visual Entertainment Interactive Company Limited (the fourth one of those overall, and the third Great [as in prefix] one. Now Avaliable On Nintendo Switch And Sony Playstation 4), Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS was the arcade game i played the most throughout my 20's. for months on end, and pretty much the entirety of 2015, the only video game i could touch was Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, an incredibly efficient use of video game playing time all things considered. it is probably not coincidental that 2015 and the first half of 2016 were the worst years of my adult life, and it would make sense that i spent my video game playing time playing a variant of what is probably the only video game with healing attributes, but even then it's not without detriment...

firm/sonic drop was a mechanic arika added to Tetris With Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart, which is effectively momentary 20g on demand, instantly bringing the piece down WITHOUT locking in place, unlike the hard drop required by The Tetris Guideline. firm drop's effect on the pacing in the first half of a clearing run is monumental, pushing the skill ceiling to heights never duplicated in the realm of four blocks dropping a lot. now, the player is in control of the game's rate for the most part, pushing the game until the game begins to push you, total player agency in making order of pseudorandom chaos. any millisecond spent in a state of uncertainty is a millisecond spent wasting the game's time. a rhythm consisting of any order of rotate, firm drop, shift and lock begins to unfold, and if your performance is on point you will be locking the pieces on your own terms up until the lock delay begins to decrease. every addition to the stack should account for the piece you might get 5 peices from now, despite only being able to know about just one piece ahead. the rotate-shift-drop-lock rhythm sears itself into the subconscious, the tuned bleeps announce the next piece to help you keep your eyes attached to where it matters most. a perfect connection between human and machine. you might forget to blink.

...perhaps some things are best experienced sparingly, too much medicine can lead to destructive behaviors permanently altering ones brain chemistry. during the periods of my life where most of my recreational interactions with machines involved Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, something about my thought processes seemed off. beyond a state of what's been studied as the "Tetris Effect" (not to be confused with Rez Tetris), bordering on full blown Tetris Psychosis. maybe it was just an uncovering of a latent, broader ailment that had been chiseling its way to the forefront of my synapses, maybe it was just an obsession not unlike a dependency. waking moments, in situations far removed from the interaction between human (me) and machine (x86_64 computer pretending to be a hitachi sh-2, with lever and multi-button interface), patterns recognized within Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS would intrude the moments of life removed from it, as my brain would try to make order of the sensory chaos of the world. maybe i will reveal an aspect of the self for the sake of this anecdotal retrospective, but it's more likely that this piece of software revealed that aspect of my self to that very self. i am pretty sure i'm not supposed to be hearing this when i'm out at the grocery store, but i did, and it was at first a bit terrifying, but i've come to live with it and things like it, and accept it as a part of me. heightened pattern recognition amidst the pseudorandom chaos of life is a trait, a trait that can be as overwhelming as it enlightening, as complimentary as it is all-encompassing, as damaging as it is enriching. such is life.

Mastering Mode

a key difference between arcade games (both electromechanical and video) and its far seedier relative is fairness. you master the machine, rather than the other way around. despite sharing bits of language (but not the entire language) with one another, they exist(ed) in disparate realms of machine-human communication. a machine that masters the human is one rooted in cognitive exploitation, a human that masters the machine is emblematic of a state closer to the martial arts rather than the "haha number go up" such programs and machines are far too often misconstrued to be. a skilled player will get the most out of their credit, a rightfully earned state of success. contrast this with the relatives of such machines, ones which do not require skill, which seek get the most credits of their victims "Players", feeding off their anticipation of a probable, yet uncontrolled state of presumed success. "Do Nothing And Win Big!!!" vs "Take Everything You Learned And Perform To The Best Of Your Ability"

before my supple mind was altered by Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, i had spent around 12 alkaline AA's worth of time on Tetris (v1.1) for the Nintendo Game Boy (an unmodified DMG-01, to be exact). that's probably the only version that i have come close to actually being a master of as of this moment (more on this later, well technically simultaneously but Later is how i will roll), alongside Sega Tetris (1999). firm drop, 20g, zangi-moves and even the concept of lock delay were foreign to me, but the sheer speed and seemingly infinite skill ceiling of arika's take on the soviet computer game of pattern recognition would burrow its way into my subconscious, permanently cementing itself into the upper echelon of Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation, or perhaps a part of the lowest unmoving foundation that all Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation sit upon. subtle alterations made by arika may not seem present at first, especially to a novice player (to arika's flavor), but a player is very unlikely to be completely fucked by the (pseudo)randomizer here as it would be in, say, any of the versions preceding Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS's predecessor. it provides a much more engaging and challenging assortment than the malaise of that which is now required by The Official Tetris Guidelines. what's the point in making order of chaos if the order isn't slightly chaotic? chaos will ensue, but it's a chaos that is fair and under control rather than whatever the fuck was going on here.

Tetris Affect

once 20g is in full swing, you have no more chances to second guess. that's not to say second guessing won't occur - it will, and you are likely to be punished swiftly if you aren't adept at managing overhangs or the misdrops that come with the act of second guessing (or with careless haste!). i've come to recognize that some problems are best addressed at a later moment, when the mind has achieved some clarity, but not lost focus. but, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, unlike it predecessor, continues its trend of actively minimizing downtime once the player has reached 20G (a quality of Not Your life improvement). it leaves them less time to spend ruminate on where the 5th peice from now might go, less time spent removing that which no longer needs to be, less time spent dropping four blocks, more four blocks dropped. it primarily does this through tightening the various delays until it becomes something only the most adept players can manage, but something that can still be overcome with human intervention. in fact, the player never, ever loses control until either a failure state is achieved or until AFTER the credits roll. some inputs (rotate and shift mostly) can be buffered during some delays even as they grow ever tighter, but there is never a moment where a player is not in control of the peices somehow. i didn't quite realize this until about a year into playing any TGM, but initial rotation is a thing, and it rules, an absolute necesity for the back half's instant gravity. it too plays an audio cue as soon as the peice comes into the field and leaves the queue. less time spent rotating four blocks, more four blocks to rotate. an unrelenting pace for all <10 minutes it would theoretically take to see those credits begin to roll. not a single moment wasted in every respect, the sounds give just enough information without being totally drowned out by some of the finest work by aya and megaten, and beneath the playing field and peices lies a constantly moving assortment of machines that never once tend to distract (see: Sega Tetris[1999]).

what you've heard is probably true, but is probably more of a byproduct of human pattern recognition, ritualistic machine interaction and neuron activation, courtesy of said machine. i would continue to just see squares everwhere, as if they were mocking me. sometimes they were beckoning me. i didn't mind and wouldn't have had it any other way. maybe the next time i really start to play this game i will see and hear them again, maybe they miss me. sometimes i do too.

any other iteration of four blocks dropping a lot will never surpass this, certainly not under supervision of henk rogers. i feel like arika themselves didn't quite surpass this with Terror Instinct, which may be mechanically robust, but is a major step back in its presentation, with just rotating .pngs for its backgrounds, lacking the sharp, cold bite present in Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS. a perfect, audio-visiual-interactive experience. arika were The Absolute best to ever do tetris. forum dullards who love to go "if you can't handle Hardcore Games like "Doom eternal" just go and play tetris because that is baby game for people like you (babeys)" should be forced to play Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS' "The Absolute Death" mode until they can last for 4 minutes in it and nothing else.

bless the fine folks at hamster for making this far more accessible, and maybe there on my Ketsui Deathtiny machine i will one day see it through to that orange line.

but the most i've seen is an S7.

the tribal stuff is awful and the sense of humour stinks of greasy 90s posturing. bombards you with unbearably unfunny pop culture references, plays sexual assault for laughs, and couches all its insipid beerbong edgelord shit in THATS THE WASTELAND BRO because it has no conviction or insight whatsoever that wasn't set up in advance by cain and boyarsky

avellone + friends' worst work by miles and miles. the only thing I like here is My Chrysalis Highwayman which mark morgan probably plagiarized like (allegedly) half the music. everything bad bethesda did to the series' integrity (and worse) started here. this is ground zero and the common (delusional) notion that FO3 was a bolt from the blue tells me the classic fanbase doesn't know shit. Bro??? it's all right here. it's been here since 1998, inside this gross, smelly software that you (allegedly) played. imagine clutching your pearls about a fridge ghoul when FO2 canonized talking deathclaws and tom cruise — even pete hines unwittingly had you boneheads pegged. who the fuck cares about the world building in the knowyourmeme ass family guy rpg?

"this is worse than the time I got beaten at chess by a freaking radscorpion"

lower gen x into the ground already

As time goes on, I feel less and less impressed with Portal 2. It's still a bit jarring when I see that everyone I follow has it at at least a 9/10. I'd never go as far as to say i dislike it - urban exploration is THE shit - though there's not much here that I enjoy over the original game. Yes, the writing, story, and atmosphere all provide a different, cinematic take on Portal 1's premise. Yet I can't help feeling like that bigger scope and budget wasn't a good thing. Portal 1 is a leaner game, but also a meaner game. The last hour or two of puzzling here is an absolute slog, because you can only throw so many clever portaling ideas at me in the sequel to a game about clever portaling ideas before I start to get a little desensitized. The magnificence of Cave Johnson aside, I can only hear so many snarky "cleverly humorous" comments until the writing starts to feel like its running on empty and I get annoyed. Call me an insane contrarian; Portal didn't need a sequel.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup puts the Playing Game in Role-Playing Game.

It's the best game ever made. Ok, not really. But good luck finding another strategy game that offers the same level of tactical depth without any of the boring parts.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup simultaneously remains a capital T "Traditional Roguelike" and utterly breaks the mold of tradition by actually caring about the player. There is no grinding. There are no tedious, multi-step rituals to accomplish basic tasks in the name of fluff. It is pure tactics. Everything that is not tactics is taken out. If something is not tactics and they can't take it out, it is automated. It does not require a google search or wiki to play (and beat).

This game is a hundred thousand lovingly hand-written "fuck you" letters to another beloved game called NetHack. Every day they push another commit and write another letter.

the bush family is playin with that voodoo bad

bogwater oil company crusader propaganda disguised as the closest to an arcade game people born after 2000 will have statistically experienced. i did try to play it with genuine video game enjoying intentions (best moment was a noobtube headshot across the river and into the house on overgrown) but that desire just went away after getting even more depressed every time i looked at my statistics on the leaderboard, friends or global, it didnt matter. pointless statistics in a scheme run by the powers that be.

in order to fight off this game's primary intent (convincing teenagers to go die for an oil company under the guise of education, in its heyday i almost succumbed to an ammosexual autism spearheaded by this very computer program) i would proceed to nearly become another statistic (victim of the opioid crisis), join a hardcore search and destroy lobby (de_ for the cstrike fiends) attach a rubber band to the right analog stick to spin around, and another rubber band to attach a shitty earbud to the 360 headset mic, load up a soundboard on a laptop and wreak havoc upon the Most Serious G*mer's, absolutely convinced there was another human on the end of that mic, as i spun around rapidly in spawn, letting the rounds drag on as i hear the degrading words degrade into sounds no longer resembling words. that was the most fun i had within the metaverse of call of duty 6 lobbies on microsoft direct-x box three hundred and sixty's Direct-X Box Live Gold Connectivity service. i wouldn't be the f[THIS USER CAN SAY IT!]got i am today without the stern encouragement of the average microsoft Direct-X Box Three Hundred And Sixty's direct-x box live gold connectivity service user.

alteriwnet was alright too