Category: My Favorite Games

Lately I’ve been enjoying the podcast My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin, in which he asks guests to choose five video games that have had a particular impact on their lives and/or their careers, and assemble them all into their version of a perfect game console. My favorite entries that I’ve heard so far have been the ones with Jake Solomon and with Phil Wang.

I’m not famous enough to be on the podcast, but I’ve still got a blog and a fervent belief that the internet needs to have my opinions on it. Except I’ve already got a running list of my favorite games going, updated periodically whenever I remember another one and have time to write a blog post.

And I mean, let’s be honest: that’s all the people on that podcast are doing, is making lists of their favorite games. Even if it were a thing for video game consoles to include five games on them, most of the lists that I’ve heard so far wouldn’t make for good console games. Cool that some Infocom text adventure from 1985 forever changed your perception of how interactive narrative can work, but nobody’s playing that on a console without a keyboard and mouse.

It’s almost as if they chose a format best suited to thoughtful discussion on a podcast, instead of an actual “perfect console!”

Anyway, I aim to fix that. Here’s a list of the five games I’d choose. They aren’t necessarily my favorites, but they’re the games that had a big impact on me and would be ideal for including on a home video game console.

Featured image is taken from the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki

The Elder Scrolls III was my first game in the series, and probably the first time I got completely engrossed in an RPG. I’d played Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy Tactics by that point, two games whose mechanics I’d loved, but the stories were overwrought and confounding.

I’d also played Might and Magic VI, and enjoyed it a lot, but I thought it was about as generic a fantasy RPG as you could possibly get. And I adored Final Fantasy IX, but it felt strangely like borrowing other people’s nostalgia — I could never shake the feeling of how all of it would be so wonderful and familiar to people who grew up playing JRPGs, but since I never did, I felt like I was kept an arm’s length away from being entirely absorbed.

But Morrowind hooked me completely: story, setting, mechanics, visuals, everything.

It’s extremely rare for me to finish any video game, much less super-long ones, but I felt like leaving Morrowind unfinished simply wasn’t an option. I had to see what happened. Even though the last third of the game is an extremely tedious slog through a volcanic wasteland in the middle of an ash storm, and I was tempted to abandon it so many times.

I’ve got two key memories of Morrowind that help explain why it made such a huge impact on me.

To manage expectations: I don’t have any new epiphanies about Half-Life 2 or anything, but I’ve been seeing lists of people’s favorite or most influential video games going around, and it occurred to me that I forgot to add Half-Life 2 to my own running list. The problem is that I forget about Half-Life 2 simply because it had such an impact on me; it seems as trivial to say that I like it as it would be to say that I like chocolate or puppies.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this game changed how I think about video games, and what I think they’re capable of.

Until I played it, I’d been perfectly happy with the hard divisions between games that had become calcified over the years, to the point where I believed that different aspects were inherently mutually exclusive. You can have a well-written cinematic story… but at the expense of action. You can have puzzles… at the expense of pacing. You can have systems-based game mechanics… at the expense of direction and “authorship.” Half-Life 2 just said, “Nah, we want all of it.”

For some reason, I can never remember that Subnautica is one of the best experiences I’ve had with a video game. I only first heard about it as an interesting VR experience, so I downloaded a pre-release version to try out on a headset. It was so clearly still in early development that I wasn’t very impressed.

But it hooked me just enough that I started playing the non-VR version of it, and it was completely captivating. It was engrossing, clever, funny, terrifying, and somehow epic in scope but still the perfect “indie game” length.

I was reminded of it during a recent conversation on Mastodon, where I was insisting that my preference is for sandbox games to remain sandboxes, and narrative games to stay focused on the main storyline. I’ve been adamant about that — and then I remembered that Subnautica exists, merging multiple types of game without doing a disservice to any of them, all seemingly effortlessly.

Subnautica presents itself as a survival game. You start out as the sole occupant of an escape pod jettisoned from an enormous spaceship that crash landed onto an alien planet. You’re alone and adrift in the middle of a vast ocean, and your first task is to find food and shelter, just to survive long enough to start finding a way to be rescued off the planet.

Over time, your priorities shift. Not just as you gradually work your way up the hierarchy of needs, but as the focus of the game changes from survival, to exploration, to base-building, and then to story-telling. Not only is the difficulty curve so well-balanced as to be nearly invisible, but the presentation shifts as you go along. Once your basic needs are met, you can be focused on uncovering more of the story about what happened.

There’s a wry sense of humor throughout, as you learn more about the soulless mega-corporation that you worked for, and the lengths it’ll go to to exploit the natural resources of a newly-discovered planet. But it never overwhelms everything to become too self-consciously jokey. And the game not only has long stretches of tension — driven by needing to reach an objective while your resources are dwindling — but a few of the most effective jump-scares in any horror game.

The game’s presentation and pacing are so well-done that it’d be perfectly understandable if the base-building component were left as an afterthought. But it’s not; it’s a lot of fun and allows for a good bit of creativity while never feeling like a completely separate activity from the main game. Many of the additions you’ll make to your home base are purpose-driven: they’ll let you explore longer and reach distances farther away, efficiently store the tons of stuff you collect during exploration, and have more efficient food and energy production so that you’ll be generally more self-sufficient. There’s tons of room for customization just in terms of aesthetics, but that all feels like a reward for your hard work, not just an unnecessary tangent.

I haven’t yet played much of the sequel, Subnautica: Sub Zero, but what little I have seen suggests that they play up the story and character aspects even more. Instead of the anonymous every-person of the first game, you’re a more well-defined character with personal relationships at the game’s start. I don’t know how well that will work in practice, but the concept is a solid one: the storytelling in Subnautica wasn’t just more substantial than I’d expected from a seemingly open-ended survival game; it was masterfully done, period.

I still say that video games in general should focus, instead of trying to be all things to all audiences: side quests and mini-games are anachronisms left over from a time when games needed to be padded out to reach some vague threshhold of being “worth the cost,” and nobody’s got time for that these days. But I’m still very happy that Subnautica is out there, proving me wrong, showing that it is possible to be both open-ended and narrative-based, and to do both extremely well.

As I said back in 2013: Device 6 is a painfully good game for iOS by Simogo. From inspiration to execution, art direction to technical implementation to music, it’s just a masterpiece.

Everything I loved about it in 2013 is still true. It’s so imaginative, so slick and inventive in its presentation, that I was scrambling to solve the puzzles just so I could get to the next scene. It still feels like they approached the project as if they could do anything they wanted, and every decision they made was exactly the right one. It’s even got a few really catchy songs!

One thing that’s changed since back then: a while ago, I realized that I’ve been absurdly fortunate that people have made the effort to get in touch with me a few times and tell me that they really enjoyed something I worked on. It makes me feel great every time, but my imposter syndrome always kicks in before I can really appreciate what a gift it is. And yet I never do the same for the creators of stuff I like, instead just coming here to gush about stuff on a blog that essentially might as well be private. So one night I wrote a fan email to the Simogo website, sending thanks for the game and a link to the above blog post. And I got a kind and gracious response from one of the makers of the game, assuring me that yes, the homages to The Prisoner were very much deliberate.

Looking back at the game now just reminds me of how, early on, it seemed like iOS was a platform with infinite potential for imaginative new games and an install base big enough to make development of those games sustainable. Thinking of non-shooting games a few days ago reminded me of another favorite iOS game, Helsing’s Fire, which had such charming presentation and a central mechanic that was a) ingenious, and b) really only suited to a pocket-sized, powerful computer with a touch screen¹I’d forgotten how clever that game was. “DRACULA: What are you doing? Stop it.”.

Unfortunately, iOS didn’t go in the direction of Device 6, but instead encouraged a race for the bottom and the overwhelming preponderance of free-to-play²Or more accurately, pay-to-win games. Lately I’ve been using the Duolingo app again, and the ads for Unity puzzle games just make me feel like they’ve found a way to take all of my optimism from the early days of the App Store, crystallize it, burn it to cinders, pee on it, bury it in a deep hole near a sewer, plant a tree, pee on the tree, cut the tree down, set the remnants on fire, eat the ashes and shit them out, bury the shit in the same hole, point and laugh at the ground where my optimism is buried, and then come to my house, ring the doorbell, and when I answer the door, slap me in the face.

But Device 6 is still really, really great.

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  I’d forgotten how clever that game was. “DRACULA: What are you doing? Stop it.”
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  Or more accurately, pay-to-win

I’m not going to be the guy who suddenly has a breathtaking new insight about Portal. Even if it hadn’t been analyzed and re-analyzed and over-analyzed over the past 15 years, I’ve already had multiple chances to write something clever about it. And I’ve never come up with something better than “Damn this game is good, huh?”

While I’ve been making this ongoing list of my favorite video games, I’ve been trying to come up with a concise¹At least, as concise as I ever get explanation for why it’s so memorable to me. That’s especially difficult with Portal, because it gets everything right.

It’s the perfect length, lingering on each idea just long enough for you to get it before moving on²Which is a big part of why I like it more than its more ambitious and frequently more spectacular sequel. Its antagonist is one of the best-written and best-realized characters in any game. Its aesthetic is instantly unforgettable and fits perfectly with the tone of the game. And that tone was a revelation: confidently hilarious, sinister, and self-aware while never coming across as trying too hard. It’s obvious why it more or less became the default “voice” of the whole company.

And while a lot of people (including myself) were navel-gazing and trying to figure out how narrative games function at their core, trying to solve the unresolvable tension between what the game wants and what the player wants, Portal just did it without making a big fuss about it. “What, is this supposed to be hard?”

Now that it’s been so long since I last played it, and I’m so far removed from it, what sticks with me is how it seemed to be making a point of shattering the fourth wall, when in reality it was doing anything but. While there seemed to be a fad at the time for game developers to wave their hands like stage magicians and whisper “ludonarrative dissonance!” as if they’d just blown your mind, Portal just seems to treat the whole question as if it were silly.

The game’s most surprising moment — when you first “accidentally” get a peek outside of the test chamber — is still fantastic, but in retrospect, it’s not actually as performatively avant garde as I’d thought at the time. The designers weren’t suddenly turning around in their high-backed chairs, taunting us with a sneering “Well well well, it seems you have discovered that this is a video game. But the question remains: are you the player, or are you being played?!” In reality, it was just an unprecedentedly ingenious way of saying “hey, the tutorial is ending.”

I have to be a curmudgeon here and admit that I’m now unimpressed with the games that did make a much more overt assertion that they’re meditations on the nature of player choice and free will. They seem kind of obvious and clumsy now, like the people who act astounded that the Rescue Rangers were designed to look like Indiana Jones and Magnum PI and nobody ever noticed! It’s kind of silly for a game to act like it’s making some deep philosophical observation about player agency when they’re all observations that every player makes the first time they’re allowed to jump on a table or teabag someone during a mission briefing.

So what’s remarkable to me about Portal now isn’t that it breaks the fourth wall, but that it keeps the wall completely intact. It embraces the “gameness” of the game in a way that makes players feel like we’re all in on the joke. The last half of the game, outside the test chambers, is constructed of puzzles that are every bit as contrived and artificial as the ones in the first half; the only difference is that the goal of the puzzle and all of its components aren’t as explicitly spelled out for you.

At the time, I misunderstood that to be a minor flaw in an otherwise perfect game, since all of the “real-looking” environments just drew attention to the artificiality. Now, I feel like they were never all that interested in making it feel “real” at all, but instead assuming that people buying and playing a video game understood how suspension of disbelief works.

It’s not a comment on narrative game design, it’s just really good narrative game design. It keeps the player and the player’s character perfectly aligned throughout: what you want is always exactly the same thing that she wants.

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  At least, as concise as I ever get
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  Which is a big part of why I like it more than its more ambitious and frequently more spectacular sequel

There are two video games that have delivered moments of pure, unrestrained joy for me, but that I never bothered to finish. To be clear, I don’t finish the majority of games I play, but I usually at least play enough of them to feel that I’ve gotten the bulk of what they’re trying to deliver. With these two, though, I stopped early on, partly out of a desire to preserve my memory of that one moment where I laughed out loud from sheer delight, as if I were in an advertisement, or an early 80s Spielberg movie.

One of those was Super Mario Galaxy, which I stopped playing not long after the first time seeing Mario getting launched gleefully from a volcano, shooting through stars along the way. The other was the original Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64.

As somebody with a long-running obsession with Disney parks, I tried just about every Disney-published game that promised to deliver the experience of their best dark rides. It seems like it would be a natural. Put the player in a ride vehicle, set it off through the level, give the characters more freedom of movement than would be possible with an animatronic, boom, you’ve got a best-seller.

But Disney Interactive never seemed particularly interested in recreating the theme park experience — probably a good thing, actually, since it likely would’ve felt like an unimaginative retread. Of the few Disney-licensed games I know of that are actually set in the parks, the most interesting was probably the cart-racing game through Walt Disney World, and still the novelty wore off fairly quickly.

So I was surprised that the game that best captured the feeling of being on the best of the Disney dark rides wasn’t a Disney-licensed game at all, but Pokémon Snap. The first time I set out on a photo safari, riding the vehicle along a preset path while creatures jumped out from all sides to have their pictures taken, took me right back to being a little kid at the Magic Kingdom.

It also bears pointing out that the creators of Pokémon Snap did a better job of creating an interactive dark ride than any of the actual interactive dark rides that have come out in the 22 years since. Not just because even a Nintendo 64-era virtual environment is capable of being more fantastic and dynamic than a physical one, but because the interaction itself is more interesting. You’re taking photos instead of shooting. I haven’t seen or heard of a single actual ride with an interactive element¹Maybe the Mario Kart ride at Universal in Osaka? I still don’t have a clear idea of how “interactive” that ride is. that isn’t built around shooting at a target in some form or another.

Whenever you complain about games — and entertainment in general — being over-reliant on guns and shooting, it’s always interpreted as some kind of scolding, liberal pacifist agenda. As if you’re being too uptight to just let people have the kind of fun that everybody knows they really want to have. And while I do in fact believe that the pathological obsession with guns as entertainment is a significant part of what keeps America’s epidemic of gun violence alive, that’s not even my main objection to guns in interactive fiction. My main objection is that it’s boring. It just shows a lack of imagination.

Obviously, there are some great games that are based on shooting as their primary mechanic²And rides, too. I’m a fan of Toy Story Midway Mania, for instance. But when you have a game like Pokémon Snap (or Fatal Frame, or Portal, or Luigi’s Mansion) that’s giving you a template for how to design an experience that lets the player interact with the world in a new way, it seems like a shame to keep going back to the same old thing.

I’ve always meant to get back into Pokémon Snap and play more than just the first set of levels, but then they released New Pokémon Snap for the Switch. I figured I’d enjoy playing the 20-years-newer version with all the various improvements on the basic formula. I’ve still only played the first set of levels.

But I still feel like I got my money’s worth! It’s not as much of a novelty as the original was, obviously, but it’s still a uniquely satisfying experience, with a gameplay loop not like anything else I’ve played. And now that Universal’s building Super Mario Lands all over the world, maybe one day there’ll be an actual dark ride version of the best dark ride video game?

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  Maybe the Mario Kart ride at Universal in Osaka? I still don’t have a clear idea of how “interactive” that ride is.
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  And rides, too. I’m a fan of Toy Story Midway Mania, for instance

Featured image is from a post about Suikoden 2 on VG247.com

None of the main-line Final Fantasy games will show up in my list of favorite games, because I haven’t loved any of them as much as I loved Suikoden 2. (Final Fantasy 9 comes close, though). It’s my favorite JRPG, and it showed me why people like JRPGs so much. And I probably wouldn’t have heard about it at all, if I hadn’t worked at Infinite Machine.

Final Fantasy 7 was my first introduction to JRPGs, and I was every bit swept up in the hype as every other video game player at the time. I thought that not only was that game representative of the entire genre, but that it was the best possible example of the genre. Did you see those cut-scenes, after all? That epic story that just seemed to keep growing and growing? The absurd production value? I was stunned that they’d drawn or rendered a different combat background for every single environment you could fight in!

By that standard, the Suikoden games seemed like unambitious throwbacks. Why were my coworkers so obsessed with this game? You want me to play a sprite-based game after I’ve just finished this huge adventure with fully-3D characters?¹Cloud Strife alone must’ve had at least a dozen polygons! More than that, though: Final Fantasy 7 genuinely pushed video game storytelling forward, both with its more cinematic presentation and also its more complex world-building. Suikoden 2, on the other hand, starts with the most cliched premise for a video game RPG: the main character is a boy whose quiet home town is destroyed in the game’s opening.

As it turns out, that feeling of “old-school JRPG” is a huge part of Suikoden 2‘s charm. And the appeal of a somewhat simpler and more straightforward story, where more focus was put on the game mechanics than a linear storyline, felt like comfort gaming even to those of us who’d never actually played the old-school JRPGs. (There’s a reason Final Fantasy 9 went back to the basics, combining all of the aesthetics of its roots with the series’s newfound focus on more linear and cinematic storytelling: it felt like welcome fan service for people who’d loved the earlier games).

But for being “somewhat simpler,” Suikoden 2 is still enormous. Its basic premise is the same as the other games in the series: the main character must recruit the “107 Stars of Destiny,” characters who will combine to summon some divine power to defeat a great enemy. That means finding each character and completing some type of quest — sometimes simple, but often surprisingly involved — to convince them to join your side. At a certain point in the story, you unlock an abandoned castle as your base of operations, and you can return to the castle and have conversations with all of the characters you’ve recruited.

More than that: an absurd number of those characters can join your adventuring party, using their unique skills in combat. You have a party of six, cleverly split into a front row and back row based on close-up and long-range fighting. There’s a version of Yojimbo, whose animations even include Toshiro Mifune’s mannerisms from that movie, with devastating sword skills. There’s a chef who fights with his frying pan and ladle. There’s a makeshift robot made from a barrel. There’s a squirrel, as well as a noble Kobold warrior and the Kobold puppy who idolizes him.

Many of the characters who don’t join you in combat will instead open up shops in your home base. Meaning that as your team grows, you can buy and craft better items and equipment. Some of the characters will continue their storylines after they’ve been recruited — for example, the chef will frequently be visited by people challenging him to an Iron Chef-style battle mini-game, using the ingredients you’ve found during combat.

And the characters combine in interesting ways. Having similar characters in your party, or in specific placement within your party, will unlock special combination attacks. The two kobolds can unite to unleash a pack of hundreds of dogs onto your enemies, for example.

In terms of game design, it’s just an immensely satisfying combination of systems, all building on top of each other and feeding into each other. But in terms of experience design, it perfectly captures the appeal of the first adventure game or the first RPG that you truly loved: the feeling that the story allowed for limitless exploration, and it would just keep growing and surprising you without end. To be clear, none of the characters’ stories in Suikoden 2 are particularly deep. But they’re all appealing, and there’s so many of them!

I’ve forgotten many of the details about the game, but I can remember the point where it really hit me that this was going to be one of my favorite games.²I’d already fallen in love with Gabocha the Kobold puppy at that point, but I was still thinking of the game overall as “basically charming.” I was exploring the castle that was serving as my home base, and I was surprised that it seemed to keep going and going. It felt as if it’d been clearly set up with areas where a character was obviously going to set up shop, but it also felt as if there were a lot of wasted space. Then I found a cave with an underground lake. What was going to be there? I had no idea, but I couldn’t wait to find out. It struck me like a moment from a Hardy Boys novel. It occurred to me that the real appeal of this game for me wasn’t depth, but delight.

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  Cloud Strife alone must’ve had at least a dozen polygons!
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  I’d already fallen in love with Gabocha the Kobold puppy at that point, but I was still thinking of the game overall as “basically charming.”

To start with, two personal notes about Myst:

1. The dialogue poking fun at the game in Curse of Monkey Island was not written by me, because I was a big fan of the game. And I respect the people I worked with too much to throw Jonathan Ackley under the bus by saying who did write it. (Seriously, though, he’s always said he liked the game, too. The gags in Monkey 3 were just a side effect of Myst being the 900-lb gorilla of CD-ROM adventure games at the time, making it ripe for parody).
2. My first surprising¹Surprising at the time, completely obvious in retrospect crush on a video game character was Achenar in the original Myst. You guys be cool and don’t tell Rand Miller I said this, but Atrus could get it. But I only met Atrus later. For most of the game, the way Achenar would get uncomfortably close to the camera and ham it up, begging me for the pages just got me confusingly twitterpated. What can I say? I admit I’ve got a type: mentally unstable guys trapped in inter-dimensional voids via magic books.

A glance at all the Myst-related wikis tells me that the “trap books” were retconned in subsequent games, although even after reading two separate accounts, I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly how or why. The ensuing lore after the first game — built in novelizations, several sequel games, and a seemingly never-ending line of remakes of the original — never managed to grab me. I read The Book of Atrus and played Riven, but that was about as much of D’ni as I could handle.

But that’s not a knock against the extended lore so much as an acknowledgement of what made the first game so special. It was perfectly evocative of a deeper and weirder fantasy story unlike any I’d seen before. The possibilities suggested by Myst were more intriguing to me than any book or game would be able to make explicit.

I think over the years, we’ve collectively come to an over-simplistic explanation for why Myst was such a huge hit: it came at exactly the right time. Both CD-ROM drives and 3D-rendered imagery were still a huge novelty, and the people buying new computers wanted something to show off the potential of a machine with all this newly-available storage. Everyone at the time was talking about the potential of multimedia and new media, but there was little to show for it, apart from discs filled with uninspired shovelware, The Seventh Guest, and Myst.

I think that explains why it became so huge a hit, but it doesn’t explain why Myst has had such longevity. Creatively and artistically, it was all novel and stunning. It went beyond the “steampunk” aesthetic to combine classical architecture, early-20th century sci-fi, contemporary science fiction, and high fantasy. Even the presentation was completely novel to me: the windows into the trap books appearing like static-filled television broadcasts is such a formative idea, and I’d never seen anything like it.

It’s perfectly fitting that a story whose core conceit is the ability to create new worlds by writing in books — worlds limited only by the imagination of the creators — would hop across so many different genres.

Also, I loved it because it was originally made in HyperCard. It seemed like the ultimate realization of what was possible with the software many of us had fallen in love with for its seemingly limitless potential.

A VR version of the original game came out not too long ago, and I tried it on the Oculus Quest. It was not for me. Not only did it give me motion sickness that lasted over 24 hours, but I’d forgotten the degree to which it requires note-taking and generally being aware of the world outside the screen. I tried taking off the headset, updating the notes on my phone, putting it back on to get more information, taking it off again, etc… and it almost immediately felt like more trouble than it was worth. It’s a reminder that VR games in general come from a different age²So to speak: when Myst first came out, it was still pretty common for games to require you have at least a note pad handy, if not a full supplement of printed maps, guides, and code keys. VR took off only after games demanded that everything be supplied in-game³And often with over-long and too exhaustive tutorials.

I’m usually the exact opposite of one of those people who says “In my day, we made graph paper maps for games, and spent hours figuring out ciphers and logic puzzles, and you kids today are too damn soft!” But I’ll make an exception for Myst, since it’s so good at giving you the feeling of being trapped in a world with nothing but clues and scattered pieces of paper, and it’s entirely up to you to puzzle your way out of it.

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  Surprising at the time, completely obvious in retrospect
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  So to speak
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  And often with over-long and too exhaustive tutorials

Along with Uninvited, the game I played incessantly on my Mac Plus in college was Dark Castle. (And then, Beyond Dark Castle). Unlike Uninvited, I can call Dark Castle a classic without any qualifications or reservations.

It’s easy to fall into comparing the two games, not just because I played them both around the same time, but because they were very much of an era in Macintosh games. I was late to the Mac because they were so expensive, but even in 1988, there was still a novelty to a home PC with a mouse and a GUI. The standout Mac games are the ones that capitalized on the novelty.

Dark Castle ran in full screen, so it didn’t adapt the Mac Classic UI (but its sharp 1-bit display made it look 100% Mac-like), but it did embrace the mouse. Even though it was ported to other PCs, using the mouse to aim your character’s arm and throw rocks made it feel made for the Macintosh at its core.

The other novelty was digitized audio, which Uninvited also used to a more limited degree. The first thing players of Dark Castle are likely to remember are the Curly noises from the one-eyed goblins, or the sound your character made when running into a wall or falling off a platform. (And in Beyond Dark Castle, it’s like the sound of the torturer cracking his whip at the hanging prisoners).

Another aspect of the game that I didn’t fully appreciate until reading The Secret History of Mac Gaming was how fluid and detailed the animation was. I hadn’t played Karateka or Prince of Persia at that point, so having a characters move in ways more like traditional animation instead of simple Atari 2600-era sprites was completely new to me. If I remember correctly, the animation for Dark Castle was first done analog before being converted to Mac pixel art. It really paid off, as the game felt more like an interactive cartoon than the flashier but more limited Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace.

It only occurs to me now how often games go through the same cycle — new hardware brings an initial burst of creativity as developers make games tailor-made to take advantage of it, and then everything gradually becomes more homogenized as it’s streamlined, simplified, and cross-ported. Some of the first and best games for iOS took advantage of everyone on the planet having a touchscreen with an accelerometer, resulting in games like Flight Control and even Fruit Ninja. But people still were eager to just slap a virtual joystick on the screen and keep making the same types of games they were already familiar with. I think that’s another part of the appeal for the Playdate to me — yes, the crank is a novelty gimmick, but it also tempts developers into thinking of novel ways to use it and entire game mechanics based around it.

If for some reason you get cornered by a gang of hostile media critics¹Redundant? demanding a good example of the difference between format and content, show them Uninvited by ICOM Simulations. I can’t in good conscience call it a “good game,” but its interface and presentation were amazing and hugely formative for me.

The premise is that you’ve crashed your car outside of a haunted house, and you have to go into the house to find your brother. There’s really not much more to it than “random haunted house things,” although I do vaguely remember a wizard being involved. There’s one unforgettable jump scare near the beginning, and it is well-rendered and pretty well-executed; I showed it to some friends in my dorm, and they screamed out loud, and it was the first time it occurred to me that a video game could get such a visceral reaction out of anyone.

But it’s also full of puzzles that aren’t sufficiently set up, obstacles that you can only get past from dying the first time you encounter them, nonsensical additions, and a long, tedious maze in the final act. The ending is also the ultimate anti-climax: you find a static drawing of your brother sitting on a balcony against the sunrise, and as a MIDI version of Ode to Joy plays, there’s a 10×10-pixel, one-frame “animation” of him giving you a thumbs-up. Then you got a full-screen certificate of achievement that you could print on your ImageWriter. I played the game with my college roommate, and that became a running joke: we said “congratulations” by sitting stock still for a minute, and then raising a single thumb.

But the interface was entirely ingrained in the Mac GUI, in ways that made me think “this is how all video games should be.” Everything was point, click, and drag between separate windows. One showed the current scene, one showed push buttons for your verbs, one with the available exits, one for your inventory, and a mysterious one called “self”²The full ingenuity of that one only became clear once I started trying to design adventure game puzzles.. The Inventory was the best, since it adopted the “Clean Up” menu item from the Mac Finder, but also added a “Mess Up” option to make everything disorganized again.

As a HyperCard devotee, I immediately tried to recreate that interface with my own adventure game. As I recall, I only made it about three screens into the project, but it says a lot that I was so quickly inspired to make my own.

If I like the format but not the content, then it seems like I’d like one of ICOM’s other games, Deja Vu and Shadowgate. I’ve only tried them in the past few years, and they were already so dated that I couldn’t get very far before being too frustrated. Once I played The Secret of Monkey Island, I embraced the SCUMM philosophy and never looked back. Puzzle games with fail states just seem like bad design now.

• 1
  Redundant?
• 2
  The full ingenuity of that one only became clear once I started trying to design adventure game puzzles.