If you’ve not yet checked out all the great posts in UWG’s “guilty pleasure” games community posts, then be sure to take a few clicks back to see what fun we’ve been having in recalling the best of the worst (of the best) since April 1st! And share with us your favorite games that you hate to love and love to love no matter what anyone else says!
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The following article was adapted from a post published on Recollections of Play, April 16, 2013.
Me and Earthworm Jim, we go back…like waaaay back to almost the beginning. I never played the original Sega Earthworm Jim game in 1994, but I did, with all the inane trappings of maniacal glee, play the version that was ported to the SNES in 1995. If games followed movie genres, it was one of the earliest “comedies” I played. The premise was entirely hilarious (earthworm finds spacesuit, becomes a force for good, fights of the likes of Bob the Killer Goldfish and Professor Monkey-For-A-Head to save Prince What’s-Her-Name), and the platforming/shooting/collecting action was beautiful. It was simply a fantastic game. Its sequel, Earthworm Jim 2 was even more fantastically ridiculous and fun. With the release of these games, there was also a short-lived but brilliant Earthworm Jim cartoon.
It seems we all have our guilty pleasures don’t we? After the stellar start we’ve had from the Duck and Chip, I hope to continue to the trend! Read on for more Tales of the Slightly Embarrassing (but not really :) )!
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There’s something so fascinating about the idea of memories. They live in the past but actively shape our present lives. Everything that we are in the present: our personalities, our skills, our motivations, even small matters like the food we enjoy is all defined by our previous life experiences. We are, to some degree, the sum total of our memories up a given moment. So what if someone had the power to alter those memories? What if they could reach into your mind and twist them, bend them to their will, or even remove them completely? Would you still be yourself? How much would you change? What kind of person would your altered memories create? Remember Me not only asks all these questions, but puts you into the shoes of that memory-altering someone! Even though the gameplay itself leaves much to be desired, It’s an existential role that I absolutely love and makes Remember Me a guilty pleasure of mine. Continue reading Community Post: Why Not Remember Me?→
No matter how many times Mario’s adventures are hashed and rehashed, games that prominently feature that famous plumber, his princess, and that evil dinosaur we call Bowser, remain fresh, fun, and playable dozens of times over. Mario games are level-driven games — you’ve got to make your way through stages or levels in a series of worlds in order to reach the final battle with Bowser. And only a few games, like Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG, have deviated from the platformer tradition started by Super Mario Bros. Despite that fact the games usually contain worlds of similar themes, each is unique in presentation and design. Even so, I will never cheer upon traversing a snowy/icy world because Mario is already slippery enough, no matter how many penguin suits he owns. I will never get excited for those pre-Bowser, fire worlds, as I will never have enough patience with lava and fireballs. So when it comes to my favorite Mario levels, there will be nary an ice storm or fire waterfall in site. But there will be something “big.” Curious? Read on!
To know me is to know that I adore Super Metroid. When I first played the game, it was simply love at first sight. Everything about the experience was perfect and joyous…and maybe a little frustrating here and there, but who’s counting? After that first time, I became hooked; and over the course of about a year and a half, I replayed the game several more times, each time becoming more meticulous about my advancement than the last. It eventually became one of those games for which I kept notes. Like, handwritten, on paper. And once I started, I couldn’t stop logging my progress. I just had to keep track of ALL the missile expansions, energy tanks, secret passages, and boss battles, so that I was better prepared for the next time. And no matter how many times I played, each time I always wrote down at least one new thing that I hadn’t discovered before.
My notebook was pretty full before I finally figured out the secrets of the mysterious the etecoons and dachora. Now, these guys weren’t secrets, per se, but understanding their placement in the world of Super Metroid was. Mind you, this was before the Internet, when secrets were discovered on one’s own, through word of mouth, or in magazines. In this case, I had to interpret their raison d’êtreon my own.
We use them in metaphors, often negatively. Granted, there’s the whole “man’s best friend” business, but otherwise we’re wading through piles of thoughts like “sick as a dog” or “puppy love.” They aren’t necessarily the most flattering of comparisons. Among this stack of idioms is the well-known “like a dog chasing its tail.” When we say this, its most often to imply that the subject is acting in such a way that yields no fruit. They are acting pointlessly, spinning in circles. This is, in almost all circles, a bad thing to say to a person. It’s insulting.
Bad News: Cooperative gaming — in board, card, and video forms — is a lot like a dog chasing its tail.
Good News: I think dogs are brilliant.
At the heart of most games is some form of competition. Whether it be against the difficulty of a game or against another player with a similar set of objects, games need something to “beat.” Even if the game doesn’t end, there has to be something we’re working against to achieve our desired ends (points, kills, apples, whatever). This is often another human being. In League of Legends, The Olympics, online shooters, most sports, and trick-taking card games, the opponents are other humans. They see you as an opponent, actually. This seems to me the most pure form of competition; skill against skill.
The problem with this sort of competition is that someone has to lose. Now, losing is not a bad thing. Losing hurts. That pain can — and often does — propel us into success, and it very well should. Life is, after all, filled with failures and responses to those failures. However, losing hurts even more when you get to see your opponent, that person standing on the other side of the field, glowing with pride and satisfaction upon their recent victory. Or, if you’re playing any online game, mocking / shaming you with the intensity of a really sweaty guy asking you “for a glass of water, or some gatorade, or something.” Not the spirit, but the intensity.
This mockery sucks. I hate it. I hate it when I’m tempted to do it, and I hate it even more when I’m subjected to it. Losing is bad enough; losing to sore winners is one of the worst things that happens to me on a daily basis. But I love the shared experience of gaming. I love losing with a team, or winning with a team, or going through anything as a team. So I kept playing online. I kept being ok with the mediocre, less than dream-like state of competitive gaming.
But then, I started discovering video and board games that had cooperative mechanics. I was thrilled. Finally, we had figured out a way to eliminate most of the potential for Loss Shame.
See, cooperative games are like tail-chasing, because we invent opponents. Humanity, in its flawed but eager ambition, found a way to simulate strategy. Those simulations then act as our opponents. It’s amazing. When we win, we feel great, and nobody feels bad. When we lose, we can curse at the game as much as we please, and nobody feels bad. There are the occasional situations in which a teammate can feel as though they let down their compatriots, but other than those, cooperative gaming is one of the best ways to have a shared experience while still being able to feel the thrills of victory. Basically, if you take away the real opponents, you greatly diminish the chances that somebody’s feelings are going to get hurt.
Co-op gaming isn’t the end-all be-all, and competitive PvP is still absolutely a legitimate thing. But the ability to avoid pain while maximizing pleasure — the ability to chase my tail — is why co-op gaming has such a special place in my gaming ideology and my heart.
Despite never inviting anyone in my family to actually read my blog, Pixel Bubble, they all found it eventually. The blog was originally intended for me to get rants out of my system and allow me to have the sort of anonymous freedom of speech that a personally can never really enjoy in real life. Of course, then real people actually started reading my blog, my family included, and suddenly I had to watch what I said, just like in real life. I’ve since come to terms with the fact that having to own up to what one puts in a public forum really can’t be helped, even while under the cover of anonymity, and I’m actually grateful that I have my family to act as a censor. Naturally, I’m secretly very happy that they enjoy reading my writing as much as they do. I’m perfectly okay with my family being my biggest fans.
My sisters wanted me to write a post about them, since they often game with me, and when United We Game announced that the first Community Post would be focused on cooperative gaming, I knew I had the perfect opportunity. I’ve written about gaming with my sisters before, back on my own blog. My sisters have always formed a large part of my gaming interactions, both in deciding which games I’ll eventually play as well as actually helping me play them. We started gaming together as young children, and despite the fact that we’re all in university now, we still manage to game together fairly regularly whenever the family all gathers in one place. Of course, scheduling clashes make it difficult to actually complete games in any reasonable amount of time now, but we’re perfectly okay with chipping away at long RPGs for weeks, months, even years (Tales of Vesperia was finally laid to rest earlier this year after about a year’s worth of work).
A lot of co-op games are built on the idea that you win or lose as a team. If one person screws up, the rest of the team might be left facing overwhelming odds, choke points are no longer held down, panic sets in, game over, fingers are pointed, etc. I’ve felt this way many times when co-oping with random people over the internet, and I’m sure my own close friends have felt that way about me every time we play an FPS. For some reason, I feel much calmer when gaming with my sisters. Sure, we died during a few tough battles in Tales of Vesperia, and I may have shown signs of anger on occasion, but said anger was never directed toward my sisters; rather, I was always pissed at the game developers for designing such a cheap boss battle or platforming section and therefore impeding me and my sisters’ enjoyment of the game. My mom sometimes worries that she’s not pulling her weight whenever we play Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, but when I’m gaming with my family, I really don’t care about anyone’s skill level or experience or what have you; I’m honestly just happy to be able to include my family in a hobby that I really enjoy. That’s the truth.
It’s things like these that make my family my preferred co-op partners. As kids, my sisters and I had vivid imaginations, and we even tried to shoehorn co-op into some games where it wasn’t really intended to be implemented. I know Halo 2 actually has a co-op campaign mode, but we had little interest in it; instead, we played the competitive multiplayer maps and made up our own rules using the general freedom of the Slayer gametype. I would play the role of the army’s general, and I would give my sisters specific tasks to complete, such as running from one Blood Gulch base to the other without getting sniped, or having Warthog destruction derbies, and the like. They would start out as privates and would rank up according to their performances. I would also punish the loser of each challenge with a shotgun blast to the face, but, hey, it was funny to us. We always loved doing these sorts of things, making games within our own games. I can only imagine the mischief we would’ve gotten up to if the games of yesteryear included the robust level-creation tools that are taken for granted these days. We definitely would’ve been all over Minecraft, that’s for sure.
About a month ago, one of my sisters expressed an interest in starting a new town on Animal Crossing. I was surprised, since we hadn’t really touched it in a decade. I picked up City Folk so we wouldn’t have to play the outdated GameCube version (and wireless controllers are always a bonus), and we’ve been chipping away at it pretty steadily over the last month. If you’re all playing on the same console, there’s no way to play multiplayer simultaneously, so it’s not the traditional co-op experience that you might have come to expect, but the game works around that limitation brilliantly. One player can do their chores and leave items or letters for another player to collect. One player might enter the tailor shop one day to find that another player has put custom-designed clothing on display. Ten years ago, we used to play in half-hour shifts; each player would have thirty minutes to collect bugs, catch fish, buy furniture, or what have you, and then they’d have to give up the controller. It’s somehow oddly fitting that exactly ten years later, we’re still playing Animal Crossing using these exact same rules. There wasn’t even really any discussion about it beforehand, just an silent mutual understanding that this is the way we’ve always played Animal Crossing, and we’re not going to change something that worked so well when we were kids. The only thing we had to change was the game’s internal clock, which we set back three hours because university life has turned all of us into night owls.
If you actually like your siblings (hey, some people don’t, but I’m not one of those people), they can often be the best people to play games with. It was always easy to suggest weird, fantastic metagame ideas to my sisters because I knew that they shared my imagination and they were less likely to judge me for a stupid or childish idea; among my friends, I’d have to filter my ideas so as to remain “cool.” Since they’re family, I afford them a level of tolerance that I don’t give my friends or online co-op partners. I have a crap-ton of games on my shelf, but that pile would be a heck of a lot smaller if my sisters didn’t play games with me. Just glancing at it now, I can instantly pick out a number of titles that I would never have even tried had I not known that my sisters would play them with me.
In many modern video games, there is an option to design the main character from the ground up using a robust creation system. For some players, this is an excuse to create the most ridiculous hero ever (eight feet tall and purple hair, yes please), but more often than not, people want to put themselves into the action. It makes sense: video games provide experiences that are wholly unlike real life, so of course you would want an avatar of yourself performing these amazing feats. But the option to create a virtual self is not always available, particularly in the co-op multiplayer games of old.
Back in the saccharine days of the 1990s, when the video arcade was still alive and kicking, huge cabinets provided four players the opportunity to punch and kick their way across cartoon landscapes. Animated shows like The Simpsons and X-Men were riding high, and their arcade counterparts were the featured titles at every gaming establishment across the United States. And at the top of every kid’s playlist sat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. This show (and its respective games) had it all: ninjas, martial arts, skateboarding, and of course, pizza. There was just one problem when it came to actually playing the game with four people: deciding which turtle to play as.
Oh sure, it may seem like an easy decision (Leonardo, duh), but what happens when you have four kids and all of them identify with a katana-wielding do-gooder? You can’t all be the leader – that just wouldn’t make sense. As with so many other co-op arcade games, hard introspection and tough decisions about one’s character had to be made. Several of my trips to Chuck E. Cheese would progress as follows:
“Okay guys, which turtle are you? I am really nerdy and I like to build with Legos, so I should be Donatello.”
“Wait a minute, I like those things too, and I am wearing a purple shirt, so I should be Don!”
“Fine, fine, fine. Well, Cory should be Leonardo, since it’s his birthday.”
“But I don’t wanna be Leo, I like Michelangelo! He has numb-chucks.”
“It’s nun-chucks, stupid! Fine, then I will be Leonardo, Cory can be Michelangelo, Jeremy can be Donatello, and Corey, you’ll be Raphael.”
“Nuh-uh! I am not gonna be Raph, he sucks!”
“Well someone has to be Raph!”
This would go on for some time, until one of us would just break the argument and pick our favorite character before anyone else had the chance. It seemed like every co-op arcade experience went like this until each of us had settled into our roles. For me, I became the grappler/support of the team. My roster was made up of characters like Haggar, Lisa, Nightcrawler, and Ryan, while my brother would take the leading roles of Cody, Bart, Cyclops, and Alex. We had learned which characters best suited our play styles, but more importantly, we identified with these heroes and our time spent gaming became even more special.
Even though arcades have mostly vanished from the world, the experience of molding yourself to a character is far from extinct. There are several modern co-op games that do not allow players to create an avatar from scratch. When playing Left 4 Dead or Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, my friends and I still have to figure out which character is the best representation of our personalities. Most first-person shooters limit the visual customization options to basic colors and body armor, so players must determine their role in the group using the weapons and tools available. Maybe you are the sniper who stays back and picks off enemies for the team, or perhaps the job of a medic might be a better fit. The choice is yours.
While the arguments and debates over character selection were mostly superficial among my friends, there was a deeper reason for all of it. When you get to the nitty-gritty of co-op gaming, there needs to be less focus on your individual progress and more care put into how you can best help the team. After all, if some jack-ass is stealing all of the pizzas when his/her turtle doesn’t even need health, the rest of the team will suffer. Just like Master Splinter said, “Together, there is nothing your four minds cannot accomplish. Help each other, draw upon one another, and always remember the power that binds you.”
