GameCola Recap: December 2011

This is the part where I begin to make up for the last two months of minimal contributions to videogame humor website GameCola.net. With the wedding and honeymoon seen through to completion, my spare free time (that's right: spare free time) was once again available for GameCola use in the month of December.

Consequently, I've got a fresh take on my wedding story and a brand-new review to spotlight, along with participation in a podcast (that you probably won't hear until February) and two all-staff articles. I'm quite happy with how everything turned out, and I'm pleased to report that what I'm about to list is all quite accessible to non-gamers. Enjoy!

Blog:

- A Very GameCola Wedding 3: Wed Hard with a Vengeance

Columns:

- GameCola's Top 50 Worst Games Ever Made (Part 2)

- Q&ameCola: Strange Games

Review:

- Gradius (NES)
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Coming Off a Konami Kick

If you've been following the blog for the past month or two, you know I've been writing excessively about Konami games. Well, yesterday marked the finale of our two weeks of Comic-Con buzz, so it's only fitting that I take today to wrap up my two months of playing almost nothing but Castlevania and Gradius.

If you're just jumping on board and have no idea what either of these games is, here's a quick overview: In Castlevania, you fly around in a spaceship, shooting up hordes of demons and undead on a quest to blow up Dracula. In Gradius, you run around a castle, knocking spaceships out of the sky with your whip.

Or something like that.

I'd previously had some exposure to these games--I grew up with the original Gradius for the NES, I'd played through all of Castlevania (also NES) and I'd had a fair amount of exposure to Castlevania II (NES) and Super Castlevania IV (SNES)--but I was completely out of touch with the last two decades of sequels and spinoffs.

I already owned a few Castlevania games that I was curious about but had never gotten around to trying, and I vaguely remembered playing through Nemesis, a Gradius mashup along the same lines as the first few Mega Man Game Boy games.

Once I started on Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance and found inspiration to get back into Gradius, it looked like nothing could stop the momentum of my Konami kick.

I was excited to get caught up on 20 years of popular gaming history; many more games were at my fingertips thanks to an Amazon.com gift certificate and the Wii Virtual Console; and most importantly, these games were just plain fun. Especially after slogging through a series of secret-filled RPGs requiring 40-80 hours of commitment, it was like a vacation to sit down with a game that'd take either 2-3 weeks or just a single evening to complete.

In the last two months, I've made excellent progress through my backlog by finishing off two new Castlevania games and six (!) different Gradius sequels and spinoffs. Let me tell you a little bit about each one:

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (GBA)
I appreciated the potential of the original Castlevania with its challenging gameplay and fine assortment of weapons, but the sluggish hero and the extreme penalty for failure (losing all your powerups) ruined the fun for me. HoD won me over by sanding off the rough edges of its predecessor's gameplay while still retaining the distinctive game mechanics. I realize there were several games before HoD that did this as well--Super Castlevania IV, for instance--but putting these game mechanics in a more Metroid-esque context of exploration made for a refreshing experience with a learning curve I could handle.

With its well-crafted atmosphere, creative enemies, and wide array of weapons and equipment, HoD was quickly shaping up to be, indisputably, my favorite Castlevania game (which is an odd statement in and of itself, considering how little I enjoy demons and the undead in my books and movies). Unfortunately, some serious repetition and backtracking come into play later in the game--even more so if you're trying to collect 100% of the items--which reminded me a bit too much of the RPGs I'd been playing. I ultimately decided to pass up 100% completion in favor of moving on to something more fun, but I enjoyed (the majority of) the time I spent on HoD.


Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA)
Just as Mega Man 5 and 6 attempt to refine and build on the formula established in Mega Man 4, so does Aria of Sorrow attempt to streamline and develop the gameplay and ideas of Harmony of Dissonance. The RPG elements and menu system have been cleaned up considerably, and backtracking through the castle is seldom a chore thanks to a convenient teleportation system.

There's more of a plot this time around, though I've got mixed feelings about it. It's nice to have a bit more depth to the characters and their motives, but a few lines here and there seem like they don't entirely capture the gist of the original Japanese dialogue, and there's just a smidge too much standing around and talking for my taste. Still, the huge variety of weapons and special attacks you can steal from enemies makes this Mega Man and Muramasa fan quite happy.


Gradius II: Gofer no Yabō (TurboGrafx-16)
Now here's a sequel that improves on its predecessor in every possible way (except for the music, which is equally as catchy). The graphics are more detailed; your ship's arsenal is more customizable; the scenery, challenges, bosses, and enemies types are more numerous and varied; and the difficulty can now be adjusted for veterans and newcomers alike. It's a perfect example of what a sequel should be.

However, it's not just a matter of more--the changes and additions are often quite clever, and I found myself frequently laughing out loud at the surprises and sneaky tricks the game pulled that were unheard-of in the NES Gradius. Between bosses flying in from unexpected directions, an insane boss gauntlet, and a wickedly fast level that finally makes it worthwhile to overdose on Speed Up upgrades, Gradius II expands the boundaries of what to expect from the series while still staying very true to its roots.


Gradius III (SNES)
I'd been wanting to play this one since I first read about it in Nintendo Power magazine all those years ago, and I am disappointed to report that it did not live up to my expectations--and Gradius II is partially to blame. Gradius II set the bar for a sequel quite high, and Gradius III let me down by relying too heavily on rehashed challenges from previous games. It's one thing to bring back the Moai again and again but add laser beam eyes or rotating walls of stone heads; it's another thing to spend an entire level bursting bubbles that behave suspiciously like the crystal asteroids you were breaking up throughout an entire level in the last game.

To its credit, Gradius III offers a tremendous amount of customizability for your ship's armaments, but that's really the only part of the game I truly love. I've come to expect a tough challenge from Gradius games, but there's something about the enemy placement or the level designs that makes even the lower difficulty settings a little more tedious and frustrating than usual. The music also didn't leave much of an impression on me--with the exception of one or two songs, the soundtrack isn't all that memorable for some reason (perhaps because the difficulty overshadows the atmosphere, as was the case with Mega Man 10). Bummer.


Life Force (NES)
Technically an adaptation of the Gradius spinoff Salamander, Life Force does very little to encourage me to play any other spinoffs. While the mechanics and powerups are all comfortably familiar, there are three critical differences: first, the levels alternate between sidescrolling shooter and top-down shooter; second, there's a considerably larger focus on dodging obstacles than on shooting enemies; third, instead of restarting at a checkpoint when you die, you continue immediately where you left off. I don't mind the first difference; it gives the game character and opens up new level possibilities. It's the second and third difference that bother me.

At first, I liked the thought of being able to seamlessly press on through a stage after dying, instead of going back and redoing a section after losing all of your powerups. However, this frequently leads to respawning in places where your newly de-powered ship is completely incapable of defending itself properly, leading to another quick death. The game quickly becomes a matter of how many ships you can slam against a wall until you get back to an area with some powerups. But even then, the abundance of indestructible obstacles frequently makes the risk of going after powerups to strengthen your vessel a pointless one--all the firepower in the galaxy won't make a difference if you can't weave through those incoming asteroids.


Nemesis (Game Boy)
I first played this one years ago, but I had difficulty remembering anything about it. So, into the lineup it went. I'm willing to cut it some slack because it's a Game Boy interpretation of the Gradius games that came before it and not a true sequel, but it's about on the same level as Gradius III as far as reused challenges go. It's still fun, though by no means novel.

There are plenty of game options (including increasing your starting total to as many as 99 lives!), but the smaller playing field of the Game Boy screen makes for a few sections that require extreme precision and allow for little or no improvisation. This is the only game where I ever willingly utilize the Double shot option throughout a stage, as there's hardly any room to maneuver into a position where you can shoot anything above you before colliding with it.


Gradius: The Interstellar Assault (Game Boy)
I was overwhelmingly impressed by the quality of this game. The music is some of the best I've ever heard come out of a Game Boy speaker, the graphics are clearer and the gameplay smoother than in Nemesis (though still a bit choppy by console standards), and the stages feature the same fast-paced Gradius action I know and love...without falling back on any of the established conventions.

There's no boss gauntlet. No mountainy volcano stage. No Moai. The final boss fights back. While Gradius II proves that you can bring back old ideas without being repetitive, The Interstellar Assault proves that you don't have to bring back old ideas at all to have a solid Gradius game. The intro stage alone is worth the price of admission--outrunning an enormous mothership bearing down on you at high speed. Add in some cutscenes that give neat transitions from one stage to the next, and you've got one of the best (and most unexpected) games in the series, as far as I'm concerned.


Gradius ReBirth (WiiWare)
Speaking of unexpected...I had no idea they'd made a brand-new Gradius game for a system I owned. The title is highly suggestive of the content--it's a revival of all the familiar conventions of the series, blended together in such a way that it feels more like a tribute than a rehash.

This is the first time I've seen the plot discussed outside of the instruction manual; the graphics are about as pretty as they come; there's finally a snow level (which makes me happy); and some of my favorite bosses in the series appear in this game. While it may not be the most innovative or substantial entry in the series, it's still good fun, and I find it to be the most accessible and replayable one in the bunch.

--

I've officially run out of Gradius games for systems I own, and I've had my fill of whipping succubi for a while, so I can safely declare that my Konami kick has ended. The past two months have been the most fun I've had gaming in ages, and beyond that, I've determined that (a) I'm better at space shooters than I give myself credit for, and (b) I would do well to keep a steady supply of shorter games in my playing queue.

I think I might dive into one of the games I picked up at Comic-Con next, or maybe something like Sparkster or Jolly Rover that I received as a gift and haven't tried out yet, or...

...wait a minute...

I forgot a GBA game.

...I could play Gradius Galaxies.

Looking for More Options

After writing yet again about Gradius (and other games I cheat to beat) on Tuesday, I did a dangerous little bit of research--I looked up whether any other sequels or spinoffs were available for systems I owned. I had exhausted the options available for the Wii Virtual Console and still wanted just a little bit more, in part because Gradius III was a bit disappointing coming off of Gradius II, and in part because I'm officially hooked.

C'mon, you should be happy I'm not talking about Mega Man for a change.

As it turns out, there's another Game Boy game I recall passing up some years ago, and there's a Game Boy Advance game I wasn't aware of. There's also a WiiWare title called Gradius ReBirth that had been waiting for download all this time. Silly me, only searching the Wii Shop channel for older games from different systems, rather than new games made specifically for the one I own.

And that's the reason you don't have a real post today.

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

I realize now that if I had grown up playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Gradius, and Castlevania instead of Mario, Mega Man, and Metroid, I wouldn't be such a terrible cheater. Or, conversely, I'd be more of a cheater.

When I was younger, cheating was the only way to survive. I've explained how I got into gaming, but I didn't go into much depth about the role Game Genie played during my formative years. I was a cheatyfaced little kid, and all the first games I owned or remember playing were conquered with the assistance of Game Genie, including the likes of Super Mario Bros., Crystalis, Gradius, and The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout. I'm not sure I ever would have learned how to play games honestly if the Game Genie codebook didn't only contain cheat codes for Mega Man 1-3: it wasn't until Mega Man 4 kicked my butt that I learned what it meant to earn your victories.

It's easy enough to believe that winning = fun, especially at a young age. If you're winning, you're having fun; if you're not winning, you're not having fun. Game Genie, therefore, was guaranteed fun! Never mind the fun moonwalking and moon jumping codes (all fun emanates from the moon, apparently); with infinite lives, energy, magic points, etc., there was no way you couldn't eventually prevail, unless your immortality proved to be your undoing--infinite health but finite weapon energy is hardly a point of concern until you fight the wall turret boss in Mega Man 2. That's when winning turns to whining.

Since I started on my Konami kick, I've found myself doing a whole lot of losing. It's been a hoot. Most of my Castlevania Game Overs were from hilariously bad tactics, and I smashed my ship into so many of Gradius II's clever traps that I began to look beyond simple shooting and dodging and started to find enjoyment in strategizing a way out of the difficulty. Whether I won or lost, I was still having fun...to a point.

Inevitably, I got to a level of the space shooter du jour that I could not beat. Gradius II, Gradius III, and the NES spinoff Life Force allowed me to play around for two, three, or even four stages before cutting me off and reminding me that I just wasn't good enough to keep up. I didn't put in the time growing up to get good at these games, and I hadn't earned the right to see their endings. I was faced with a decision every time: keep practicing, or give up?

Having no intention of leaving these games to rot on my Backloggery, I went back to my roots: I cheated. The satisfaction of winning would still be there, but more importantly, I'd get to experience these games more fully with 30 extra lives and multiple continues to propel me to the end. Skill and effort were still required to beat each game, but I didn't have to continually replay an entire half of a game just to practice the one part where I keep getting a Game Over.

Cheating worked well for Gradius II and III, but it somehow ruined the fun of Life Force. The difference is that Life Force immediately brings you back into the game after you die, rather than restarting you at a checkpoint and forcing you to retry the section where you died. When you can't slow down to practice a trouble spot, the entire game becomes a matter of throwing enough disposable ships at a level until you've made it to the boss, who takes forever to defeat because you haven't been able to catch your breath long enough to power up your ship before exploding again.

Upon grumpily completing Life Force, it seemed my Konami kick was at an end (though I recently picked up Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow; so much for that). Reluctant to start any longer games before my impending wedding, I sifted through my catalog to see what else could be a short diversion. I found Sonic the Hedgehog.

I had played the first few games before, but I had never beaten them. I sat down to beat them. They beat me. So I cheated. I used a level select code to put me back at the stage where I got my most recent Game Over. This worked for Sonic 1. This almost worked for Sonic 2...until I got to the final boss.

Previously, I had reached the final boss of each game the honest way. Between luck, practice, and a friend who's better at Sonic than I am, I had earned my right (or so I told myself) to skip these levels I'd already beaten. No sense wasting time replaying the first few levels that I've got under control. However, no amount of level skipping makes the final boss of Sonic 2 any easier.

My primary difficulty was that I could never stay alive long enough to identify where or when the final boss was vulnerable to damage. The first boss of the final level had a clear pattern that I memorized, and I could take him down quickly...but I still needed to re-beat him every time I wanted a shot at the final boss. So I cheated again. I transformed myself into a ring, and scattered rings all around the battlefield so that I wouldn't die instantly when I got hit. I never learned a pattern; I just kept hurling Sonic at the boss until he fell, scrambling to collect the rings I was losing as I got hit every three seconds.

It just wasn't fun. And I don't see how it would have been fun if I'd taken the time to practice enough to not need to cheat.

Game Genie served as my training wheels when I was younger--sure, I cheated my way through Crystalis the first time, but it prepared me enough that I knew what I was doing when I attempted to beat the game honestly, saving me a lot of frustrating and needless retries. Games like Sonic and Gradius and Castlevania that have built-in cheat codes, though? How much longer would I have cheated if the cheats were a legitimate part of the game?

As I continually smacked my ships against the rocks and pillars in the later levels of Life Force, I couldn't help but think that I was intruding on someone's fandom. I didn't belong here any more than someone who never beat a robot master before Mega Man 10's Easy Mode; I had no business saying I had beaten Life Force. Because, really, all I did was smash ships into walls until there were no more walls to smash into.

I want to find some real-world parallel reinforcing that cheating is bad, and that cheaters never prosper, but I'm surprisingly at ease with my underhanded tactics. I got to play some games through to completion that I otherwise might never have found the skill or desire to finish. That might make a pariah among the true fans, but does it make me a bad gamer?

On a Konami Kick

I am officially on a Konami kick. It started with Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, followed by Gradius II, followed now by Gradius III. I'm even considering an attempted playthrough of the original Gradius for the GameCola YouTube channel. (I say "attempted," because I'm not sure I've ever beaten the game honestly, without Game Genie or emulator savestates.) How did I get so hooked?

I've already written about getting into the Castlevania game, and about getting into Gradius II, and it's a logical progression to Gradius III: I just barely beat II (after discovering there was an option screen to set the game to Easy Mode with 7 lives and infinite continues), had a great time playing it, and was left just a smidge unsatisfied by the ending, which implied I wouldn't see a real ending unless I beat the game on a harder difficulty mode. I wanted more, but I recognized I'd never be skilled enough to get the full replayability out of Gradius II that the game offered...so I saw whether the Wii Virtual Console offered Gradius III instead.

It did. And I just happened to have a few dollars to spare on Imaginary Virtual Currency. I also noted that Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was available. Good to know, in case this Konami kick continues after Gradius III, because I'm already getting a hankering to dig into my collection and play through Castlevania III and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, having completed about as much of Harmony of Dissonance as I care to spend the time on right now.

I've beaten the game, collected almost about 98% of the items (and still can't determine which ones I'm missing, even with a walkthrough), gone through Boss Rush mode on Easy and Normal difficulties, and tried playing as the two top-secret unlockable characters. I know there's a final final boss I'm missing out on, and a secret Hard difficulty for the main game, but I'm finally beginning to question how much of my life that Completed status on my Backloggery is worth when I've already Beaten a game and experienced the majority of what it has to offer. Amazingly, I feel pretty satisfied...but I wouldn't mind taking a shot at Completing another Castlevania game that contains less to complete.

In addition to anything I've already mentioned, I believe there are three major factors driving my continued enthusiasm for Konami games right now:

(1) I'm excited to continue experiencing more of these long-running fandoms I've had such little exposure to over the years;

(2) the games are genuinely fun, and rarely get bogged down by the kinds of gamewide problems and shortcomings that have spoiled my enjoyment of too many games over the past few years (see: Mighty Bomb Jack, Police Quest II, Link Rides a Choo-Choo Train, etc.); and

(3) they're short. Castlevania took me, what, two, three weeks of regular playing? Gradius II took me about a week. Maybe I've just had too many RPGs in my gaming diet, but it is refreshing to pick up a game and not feel like I need to commit the next 6-12 months of my life to finishing it.

We'll see how long this kick lasts; Gradius III is not fully living up to my expectations so far, despite the welcome ability to completely customize my weaponry (which is why I've been interested in playing this game since I first read about it in Nintendo Power oh so long ago--similar to how Nintendo Power got me interested in Mega Man once upon a time, incidentally). The music isn't as catchy as that of its predecessors; several of the challenges are more tedious or frustrating than clever or fun; and unlike Gradius II, which brought back a few ideas from the original Gradius and its spinoff, Salamander (or Life Force, if you prefer the NES version), most of the revisited ideas in Gradius III feel more like rehashes than tributes.

Space for a Sequel

Gradius was one of the first three video games I ever owned, yet despite the fun hours my father and I spent playing the frantic space shooter, I never so much as watched somebody else play any of the sequels and spinoffs that followed. Part of that was because I never saw any new or used copies of anything in any of the GameStops or Electronics Boutiques of FuncoLands I ever visited; part of it was that I am really terrible at space shooters.

Oh, sure, I love space and spaceships and spaceship weaponry, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've made it--honestly, without cheating--past the third stage of Gradius.

You know; the stage with the Moai heads. Gotta love the Moai heads.

I excel at platformers, I'm pretty decent with first-person shooters (provided I'm playing with a mouse and keyboard), and I was exceptional at RPGs until Final Fantasy V Advance ruined everything...but I have never--not ever--been good at top-down or sidescrolling shooters.

Yet I still play them, and I still love them. (I say "love" with the typical exaggeration most people apply when saying they love inanimate objects.)

When I visited the Wii Shop channel to test my Nintendo Wii's wireless Internet connectivity in this new apartment, I found myself with a few hundred Wii Points kicking around, left over from my purchase of Mega Man 10's downloadable (dis)content some time ago. I debated for a few weeks about what game I should pick up with my newfound loot, but I kept determining that any game I wanted to download was one I'd rather have on a cartridge for the original system.

I finally got the inspiration I needed while listening to random video game music on YouTube to help me through the workday. If you're connecting the dots and coming up with Bonk's Adventure, you need help. No, it was Gradius II that caught my attention. Between the spiffy new music and the sort of Easter egg I recently found in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance where one of your special attacks mimics the shield powerup from Gradius, I found myself wanting to play a new Gradius game.

I take back what I said in the first paragraph--actually, I did own a Game Boy Gradius spinoff, Nemesis (not to be confused with that other Nemesis). What I wanted was a new Gradius game, one with all the bells and whistles of the SNES era (because that constitutes "new" in my book). I had seen a Nintendo Power magazine preview of Gradius III oh so long ago, and it blew me away that you had options (hah!) and weren't limited to just one progression of powerups.

So, even though I ran the distinct risk of burdening my Backloggery with a game I might never beat, I downloaded Gradius II: Japanese Subtitle for the outrageous price of 900 Units of Imaginary Currency.

I was obliterated in the first 30 seconds, and it was the most fun I'd had all day.

In control of a spaceship that exploded at the slightest proximity to danger, and with no continues and no likelihood of scoring any extra lives anytime soon, I found myself in one of the most intense and absurd gaming experiences I've had in a long time.

Gradius and Nemesis start you off slow and give you time to adjust to the feel of the game; Gradius II tosses you right into a situation that's crazy enough to be the second or even third stage, with vertical scrolling and blazing suns all over the place and the fiery dragons curving around and breathing fireballs at you. I was genuinely giddy thanks to all the fun weapons and creative challenges--and the more outrageously impossible they appeared, the more I loved them.

I relish a good video game challenge, so long as it's fair. I don't mind losing if it's entirely my own fault for being no good at a game, and Gradius II pulls no cheap shots for me to get upset about. If I'm paying too much attention to the endless stream of enemy projectiles to notice the rock pylon right in front of me, I can't whine and whimper when I smash into it and blip out of existence.

I secretly hoped I'd breeze through the entire game in one incredibly lucky sitting, but realistically, I knew I was just practicing. Not that I know anything about surviving space shooters, but there's a fair amount of memorization and careful planning required to get past Stage 3. Most of my time was spent playing around with the special weapons that weren't in the original game, and figuring out the most powerup-heavy route through the first stage. I was especially amused by the Japanese-accented announcer; though there's certainly the potential for the digitized voice to become grating after a while, there's something special about having a video game declare, "PHOTON TORPEDO" or "YOU NEED MORE PRACTICE." (I cracked up when I heard that one.)

My only complaint so far is that the Game Over screen lasts longer than I can typically stay alive while playing a stage, so that unusually fluffy losing jingle (preceded by the ominous digitized laughter that accompanies the loss of your last life) will undoubtedly become the object of my ire when the tedium of replaying the parts I'm already decent at to get to the parts I need help with becomes a serious issue.

In the meantime, I'm having a blast. And not just because I'm getting blown up every five seconds. I'm rediscovering just how fun a game can be when you're not playing it just to win.

I Have Standards, You Know

Yesterday I was weighted down by my own indecision, and couldn't commit to any one of the three topics I wanted to write about: wedding planning, video games, and comics. After the day I had yesterday and the night before, I've got a story that encompasses all three topics.

But mostly video games.

When I wrote yesterday's post on Thursday night, I found myself continually coming back to the question of what video game(s) I should play next. It is unusual beyond unusual for me to have no single-player games going, but such times are typically the only times when I'm willing to take a chance on something...different. Here's the breakdown of what I had been playing:

I'd just finished Back to the Future: The Game, having started back in December 2010, when the episodic PC game series first began. Each episode only took me a few evenings to a week to complete, but at the rate I was able to actually sit down and take the time to play, each new episode was released right around the time I was just coming to the end of the previous one. Given how little waiting I actually did between episodes, it genuinely felt as though I had taken eight months to finish this game, and that's quite an investment.

I had recently conquered the final boss of Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS, read about how I was totally missing out on a bunch of sidequests that I could only unlock by rounding up a group of ten friends and exchanging Friend Codes with them, and proceeded to free up another 20 hours of my life by taking the game out of my DS and putting it in a safe place where the obsessive completionist in me would be reluctant to lazy to look for it.

I had just wrapped up a few weeks of love-'em-and-leave-'em platforming, enjoying a brief fling with Tobe's Vertical Adventure, visiting my old flame, Mega Man (the PC game, which I'll be reviewing on GameCola before too long), and suffering though a mercifully short relationship with Mega Man's sororal twin sister, Mega Man III. (OH, THE GENDER CONFUSION, IT HURTS.)

Two lengthy commitments and a string of one-night-stands all at the same time leaves a guy ready for a break, so it was a welcome change to have nothing whatsoever on my gaming to-do list. For one night. Then I started to get antsy, and wanted to get at least one new game going. I considered polling our blog readers, or asking for opinions on the Racketboy forums I used to frequent, but I started to find that I was already formulating a list in my head.

Ideally, I like to have three games going at any given time. As a self-imposed requirement, I must at all times adhere to my Standards for Upholding Variety in Gaming. The Standards are met by ensuring that each game I'm playing represents a different item from both of the lists below:

Genre:
- Adventure/Puzzle
- First-Person Shooter
- Platformer (as my favorite genre, this can be counted twice)
- Roleplaying
- Other

System:
- Console (NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii)
- Handheld (Game Boy/Color, GBA, DS)
- PC

It should be noted that I become progressively more lax about adhering to the Standards once I have three or more games going at once. I can't tell whether this all sounds more like common sense or complete nonsense, but it's a system that has served me well for many years nonetheless.

My normal procedure anymore when choosing a new game is to consult my Backloggery, scroll around until I find inspiration, or let the site's Fortune Cookie feature decide on my behalf what game I should play. Normal procedure was thrown out the window when a tremendous thunderstorm hit, and I hurriedly shut down my computer and retreated to the couch to read Dune for a while.

When the lights began to flicker, I shut off my lamp and sat in the dark for a moment, accepting my fate: I had no other suitable source of light on hand by which to read, and I wasn't about to put my PC or TV at risk of electrical overload. I had no recourse but to fetch my Game Boy Advance.

My initial thought was to try out Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. I'd been seeing a lot of references to the pink puffball on the Internet, and it had gotten me to think about how the most modern Kirby game I've played was released in 1995, when Bill Clinton was still in his first term as President. As I lifted the game out of my travel case, I noticed another game below it I had completely forgotten about--the Castlevania Double Pack.

I've played Castlevania, half of Castlevania II, and about an hour of Super Castlevania IV, and I can tell you right now that it's almost my type of game series. I'm a sucker for platformers, and the distinct game physics give the series a unique feel (which gets less painful the farther away you get from the original), and this is a big series that people like to talk about--so on one level, I'm curious. Still, it's a series featuring vampires and zombies and mummies and all those things people love around Halloween time, and I don't like Halloween. Ah, but the music is terrific.

It's a toss-up.

Much like I bought Kirby & the Amazing Mirror to get a handle on where the Kirby series has been in more recent years, I picked up the Castlevania Double Pack (featuring two games from 2002 and 2003, respectively Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow) to see what the Belmont clan was up to some twenty years after the days of Simon Robo-Belmont. Curiosity got the better of me.

Alone in my living room, pitch black except for the occasional flashes of lightning, utterly silent aside from the sudden cracks of thunder, I sat down to play a video game crawling with every possible iteration of the undead.

It was fantastic.

As far as I've observed, Castlevania has always been just creepy enough to have atmosphere and character without being over-the-top scary, and that held true for the twenty minutes I got to play Harmony of Dissonance before the Game Boy ran out of power. I was having a blast exploring Dracula's castle with a responsive character who could level up and be decked out with fancy equipment. It was so nice to have RPG elements without being a full-blown RPG like the ones I'd been playing for the past two years, with their interminable cutscenes and endless random battles.

I finally understood what people meant when they called the newer games Metroidvania, and the simple satisfaction of discovering new areas and collecting powerups without any stupid gimmicks or aggravating game design decisions to detract from the experience suddenly made me feel that much more unfulfilled by the last official Metroid game. Everything was fun because everything worked. Well, aside from the part where the game stopped working.

The timing of my Game Boy's battery failure was awkward. It was almost time for me to consider going to bed, which is both too early to go to bed and too late to do anything other than continue playing Castlevania on my Nintendo DS, which I knew still had some battery life left. Not that I had many options other than bed or video games, but still. Awkward time.

More awkward: Having your DS tell you that there is no game inserted in the game slot, when you have very clearly just loaded the Castlevania Double Pack. Maybe two games was just too much for the system to handle. I was annoyed, because I was in the middle of one of the best gaming highs I'd had in a while, but I was willing to settle for a time-waster DS game, like Metroid Prime Pinball or Tetris DS. If the GBA game slot wasn't being recognized, at least the DS game slot would be.

Or not.

I can only assume that my DS is affected by the weather, because none of the games I shoved into it were recognized during the thunderstorm. I chalk it up to that, or to fumbling around in the dark with sensitive electronic equipment. Two portable gaming systems rendered completely useless for totally different reasons. At least I now had a substitute flashlight; the DS screen glows pretty brightly. Except I was too angry to strap the DS to my head so I could have enough light to read. "Fine! I'll go to bed!" was my response.

Last night was worse, yet somehow better. My plan was simple, as plans that fail always are: get home from work, watch a few YouTube videos over dinner, do some vital wedding planning (see, I told you there'd be wedding planning), call my family to say hello, and then do some writing before capping off the evening with more Castlevania.

What ended up happening was that I got halfway through dinner, received a phone call that led to another phone call that had me talking with my family during that awkward time where you want and need to talk, except your dinner is getting cold, and then hung up the phone to hear that another thunderstorm had overtaken the neighborhood. I died a little inside, turned off my computer, and brought my dinner into the living room, where I still dared to leave a lamp on in the midst of the cataclysm outside. Doggone it, I was not going to bed at 7:30.

It also occurred to me that I should plug in my Game Boy, if only for a few minutes, to ensure I still had something to do if the power cut out. I made a mental note to buy a proper reading light this weekend, along with five other Game Boys as backup. For the moment, though, I had ample light for reading, so I fetched a Star Trek trade at random from my bookshelf and sat down to read The Modala Imperative over dinner, and until the storm cleared. (See? I told you there'd be comics.)

I was a few paragraphs away from the end of Walter "Chekov" Koenig's introduction when my apartment lost power entirely. I unplugged the charging Game Boy, flicked the On switch, and panicked for a moment when it didn't turn on. I flicked the switch again, and all was well again. The battery light seemed to indicate I might not have to go to bed at 7:30 after all. I settled in for almost two hours of pure gaming, and I would've stayed there until the battery died on me again if the storm hadn't eventually cleared up and permitted me to get back to the wedding planning and blogging I had been meaning and needing to do.

I had officially found my first new game, though, and I hadn't (and haven't) been this enthusiastic about playing through a game since I picked up (and quickly finished) VVVVVV back in January. It looks like there are enough secrets to keep me busy awhile, but I'm still making excellent progress. Now I need two more games to add to my active roster.

I'm thinking that, to satisfy my Standards for Upholding Variety in Gaming, I should go with a 3-D platformer for the Wii and an adventure/puzzle game for the PC this time. Specifically, I'm looking at either Donkey Kong Country Returns (which is technically a 2-D 3-D platformer) or Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and Police Quest III: The Kindred for the PC.

There's a third and fourth aspect of my Standards that I'm taking into consideration here: Games that were given as gifts by friends or family should be part of the lineup whenever possible (which is the case for the Wii games), and games that bring me closer to writing an Exfanding post about a series are encouraged (which is the case with Police Quest).

However, I'm open to suggestions--the universe seems to be telling me to play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, for example; I was toying with the idea of installing it (and its two expansion packs) on my computer when I found I had no more active games to play, as this might be the only time I'd be willing to sign myself up for what will probably be the lengthiest RPG experience I've ever undertaken. I dismissed the idea, citing to myself that I'd been playing RPGs continuously for the past two years, if not longer, few of which were completely worth the time spent playing them. Then I got a message from another Backloggery user who was currently playing Morrowind and Castlevania, and then my Backloggery fortune cookie also told me to play Morrowind.

I think it's going to be a matter of which install CD I find first--Morrowind or Police Quest. Though, as I said, I'm open to suggestions.