Over at Every Game Ever the original plan was to write a little piece about every NA-released SNES game in alphabetical order. For about two weeks, I slogged through te games starting with numbers, and the games starting with A. After a while, though, I lost steam, and it sunk into unfinished obscurity. Two years later, my friends Mekki and Brian berated me until I resurrected it, in a new capacity: many writers, each doing one article every week (well, that was the original plan. Some people are two months behind, INCLUDING BRIAN WHO MADE ME START IT AGAIN). The only rules are:
1) 150-450 words, roughly, unless it’s a special case;
2) At least one screenshot;
3) No number scores (6/10, 85%, etc).
It was a good idea, though. I brought it back and started recruiting friends to write for it. It started with myself, Scott, Angus, Brian, and Mekki. From there, it began to flourish. Monday through Friday, we’d bravely wade into the sports-game-infested waters of the SNES catalogue. I had (and still have) an ulterior motive, though: by forcing deadlines and topics, I got some of my most gifted writer friends motivated enough to actually write something. Looking at those previous blogs will show you how long it’s been since they even wrote something of their own accord.
And, despite my own shoddy writing on the site (my own official excuse is twofold: one, my focus is now on badgering people who are late to submit ASAP; and, secondively, I’m experimenting with copying other people’s writing styles or toying with my own on a weekly basis), it’s going fabulously. We’ve since doubled in authorship. Scotty joined the team, bolstering the ever-important “dick jokes” quota required for a modern website; Travis, too, was recruited for another quota: pretentious English Master’s student-style existential pontification. Adam found the site through my blog (I think) and expressed interest, so I hooked him up to help with the load. Alex showed interest, and contributed to the noise with his debut article on Chessmaster– in all-caps. Tiff Chow joined the team to round it out to a nice, even ten.
Since the site gets little traffic, aside from some very weird search engine results (my favorite at the moment is still last week’s “where can a condom get lost in vagina”), so I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite articles from the site over the past few months. I’ve included links that will allow you to read just that author’s works, as it’s a lot more enjoyable to read one author at a time and develop a sense of their style. These are in random order, except for the first two who I recommend above the rest of us (sorry, everyone, but Scott and Travis truly have this thing locked down — step up your game if you wann be at the top of the next roundup in a few months!).
TRAVIS makes you want to read from the get-go. From his review of the diabetes edutainment title, Captain Novolin: Captain Novolin is a brilliant metaphor for the struggle with obesity and diabetes, but also the simple yet unending fight against temptation that we all face as ultimately flawed human beings.
Also check out his Chrono Trigger review. It’s some of the best game-related writing I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s a crime he isn’t writing more about the games and the industry. But there is a difference between your standard unsophisticated video game story, upon which I now smirk from my ivory tower, and something like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a fantasy/sci-fi genre epic translated from Japanese, and it wasn’t written by professionals in either language, I’m fairly sure. This is, generally, not a recipe for the most delicious of successes. But it’s something special. It has a rather intricate narrative of time travel and the alteration of the future through your actions; it has characters that, to some extent, come alive. It has a nasty, big-boss villain who you can even convince to come to your side, if you do it right. It has multiple endings and a terrifying final boss that destroys worlds and waits for you at the terminus of every timeline, like a living, breathing dark god of entropy.
SCOTT manages to turn many of his pieces into hilarious little bits of short fiction. From his review of Andre Agassi Tennis: I’m glad these 16-bit graphics don’t allow the detail necessary to see the disappointment on the faces of my family as they sit in the audience and hold back tears of shame and disgust. How did this spastic even find his way to the tennis court? I knew there was something wrong with him…spends his whole day watching Mr. Belvedere re-runs and eating Sun Chips out of a dirty wooden bowl.
WILL (that’s me!) misses the simpler times. From Brett Hull Hockey 95:Originally I was going to talk about the weird 3/4 perspective in this game, and the even weirder old guy with greasy hair who POINTS at your coaching resource allocations with his HAND, in effect being a living cursor, but what’s the point? You don’t care about that. I don’t care either. I do, however, care about a bygone era where kids had artifacts other than the ones you see in poorly-encoded Youtube videos.
SCOTTY hates rudders, even though the word sounds sort of dirty. I hate flying games. Flying games are way too complicated and there’s usually no pay off. It’s like trying to sleep with girls that listen to NPR and check Pitchfork every 5 minutes. I just don’t have time to devote to something that won’t end in burgers or orgasms, or if I’m lucky, both, in any order I see fit.
MEKKI gets why Battletoads included two modes. From Battlemaniacs: The game is full of great times for two players. You can select between two modes. In one mode, you can hit your teammate. In the other mode, you can’t it each other. The first is great for trash talking. The second is great for actually making it anywhere in the game.
BRIAN managed to truncate every story ever quite succinctly, with Art of Fighting: (the) Art of Fighting’s plot is simple enough. Ryo’s sister gets kidnapped. Ryo and his friend Antonio Banderas go save her. Along the way you uppercut some dudes. The end.
ANGUS has been MIA for a while (finals tend to do that), but he’s coming back with a vengeance. From his recent article on Beavis and Butthead: It would be a beat-em-up if there was any sort of combat system. It would be a platformer if it had platforms. It would be a puzzle-platformer if it had any puzzles. It plays a little bit like A Boy and His Blob. Except the blob doesn’t do anything. And you can slap it. Repeatedly.
ALEX hasn’t been with us long, but his first review, of Chessmaster, is a lot of fun:
THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S CHESS VIDEO GAME, FUCKERS! THIS IS ON SOME REAL, STREET-LEVEL SHIT. TOP OF THE LINE MOTHERFUCKING CHESS GRAPHICS! INSANE MOVES! WHITE KNUCKLE ACTION! THIS IS THE BAD BOYS 2 OF CHESS VIDEO GAMES FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO!
ADAM, as well, is new to the site. He has two reviews up (should be three later today!) and he was lucky enough to start with everyone’s archnemesis: the snackfood tie-in. But maybe I’ve been asking all the wrong questions. Would it sell a pack of Cheetos? Probably it would!
“Screw this, Cheetos are heaps better than this game. Wanna get some Cheetos?”
“HELL YES.”
Please check it out. While they can’t all be hits (I turn beet-red when I think about how bad some of my articles were. My Axelay acrostic poetry stands out as one of the most embarrassingly pathetic jokes I’ve ever commited to a computer), there are gems worth looking to as great pieces on games you (and, usually, the author) have no interest in.
And if you’re interested in writing, let me know. We may add a couple more in a month or so.
