As an analog to John George Jones' ZX Spectrum titles I think this works rather well. The trouble with those games is how tedious and difficult they are, taking a half-hour of, frankly, impeccable play to finish if you know where to go. But Go to Hell and Soft & Cuddly aren't noteworthy for their mechanical depth or how fun they are. Go to Hell was made purely for Jones' own amusement, both games functioning as a showcase for the creative liberties allowed by the microcomputer boom of the early 80s. They are theoretically great because of their juvenile nature, but seeing more of Jones' inner machinations requires you to play and play well, a frustrating endeavour.

Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed cannot even hope to replicate that moment of novelty in creative expression. Imagery that was once shocking has become quaint, in gaming and apart from it. Jones' works were from a time before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, before the grotesque literature of Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Irvine Welsh, when imagery of deformed children and smashed skulls were associated with the depraved minds of arthouses.

Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed exists in a world where these deliberate transgressions rarely faze the chronically online mind. What is offensive is how it controls, a blistering interpretation of Soft & Cuddly's floaty platforming given the momentum of Lunar Lander. Death in Jones' games meant either labouriously beginning again from the start, or reviving in a nearby screen, but here the player quickly continues from where they died, a great concession. The interwoven screens of Jones' games are vaguely simulated, but perhaps to exacerbate their labyrinthine atmosphere, they illogically connect and disconnect from one another seemingly at random in Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed. The oddities of it all wind down incredibly fast, thankfully, with the player getting to the end seemingly at random. Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is like an amuse-bouche of Jones' work, a decent recreation of the idea of those games without their punch.

Recommended by maradona as part of [this list]

Following the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998, Dallas-based NVision Design emailed their first Macromedia Flash project, Good Willie Hunting to 200 people on April Fools Day of that year. The small 1.4MB file garnered 5,000,000 downloads and 300,000 site visits by October, quickly cementing NVision Design as self-proclaimed proprietors of "aggressive design for the internet and traditional mediums."¹ As an early advergame, Good Willie Hunting was plastered with the creators' creed, website, and contact information, and the company quickly found themselves contracted the likes of AT&T, Miller Brewing Company, Texas Instruments, and Lucent Technologies.² Subsequent releases Good Willie Speaks, Y2K - The Game, and Frogapult kept the clients rolling in and the site views climbing. The December 1999 release of Elf Bowling would be where NVision Design truly exploded in popularity however.

It's critical to know that at this time in the Internet's relative infancy, .exe files (among other filetypes) could not be removed from email strings, hence the popularity of these small programs when they were sent en masse. Their proliferation made them a ripe target for fictitious claims of them being viruses. Around December 8, 1999, email strings and usenet posts on the alt.comp.virus newsgroup stated that Frogapult, Y2K - The Game, and Elf Bowling contained "a delayed virus attached to them that will be activated on Christmas day and will wipe out your system. Let everyone know of this."³ A similar hoax email proffered:
"If you have received Elf Bowling or Frogapult games that have been circulating the Internet, or know anyone who has, they must be deleted before Christmas day. They contain viruses that are set to go off on Christmas day and will delete your hard drive. If you don't believe me, just wait and see. Our IT guy here just tested it on a non-networked PC and everything was wiped out. Make certain that every copy is off of your hard drive or any servers. Please spread the world. These games are very detrimental to your computing life."⁴

This was quickly disproved by Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center, but that didn't stop the name of NVision Design's titles from spreading even further. If anything, the notion of such innocuous games - particularly Elf Bowling - harbouring malicious intent made them a great curiousity, particularly when they were demonstrated to be safe.⁵ It isn't as if the claims were entirely spurious, however, as email-distributed viruses had wreaked havoc previously in cases like 'Melissa,' and NVision's games in particular accessed their servers without express permission from the user (only to upload high scores and perform very basic analytics, but the point remained).⁶ Regardless of its safety, the risk in opening a random program sent to you without your consent that would unknowingly make an outside connection was immense.⁷ As such, when the virus claims turned out to be a hoax, the media looped back around on NVision Design by labelling games like Elf Bowling as potential spyware, a claim which was adamantly fought against by the company as per their official correspondence.⁸ Even today, Elf Bowling is labelled as spyware on TechTarget's site in a definition article updated in July 2021.⁹

Ultimately, Elf Bowling was and is simply a juvenile time waster which exploded in popularity to the point where the mainstream media audaciously claimed by 2001 that it was bigger than Quake or Doom.¹⁰ The gameplay couldn't be simpler and everything about it is so cheesy that it's almost charming. It received an astonishing number of sequels, the majority of which weren't bowling at all. Elf Bowling 2: Elves in Paradise is a shuffleboard game. Elf Bowling 3 is a target shooting game. Super Elf Bowling returned to the series' roots only for Elf Bowling: Bocce Style to once again veer off course. Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits bears similarities to Elf Bowling in that elves are to be knocked down, but this time these pin-replacements have another elf thrown at them rather than a bowling ball.

With Elf Bowling 7 1/7: The Last Insult, 'true' bowling gameplay returns, this time with powerups and powerdowns and a method of control that has you spinning your ball as it rolls down the lane, a la HyperEntertainment's HyperBowl Plus! or Skunk Studios' Gutterball 2. And you know what, it ain't half-bad! The items are largely irrelevant since you can either avoid them or counter them with your own powerups, but it plays fine. And when you get a strike the game slows down to comical levels as it shows the elves launching like you're playing BeamNG.drive and want to relish those softbody physics. I'll have to save the remainder of my paltry 43 remaining minutes in the trial version for when I want to play some more of this, which will probably be never.

Recommended by Nightblade as part of [this list]

1. "NStorm Takes Internet By Storm," NStorm, archived October 18, 2000, http://www.nstorm.com/whatis/willie.html. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20001018131151/http://www.nstorm.com/whatis/willie.html.
2. Abby Miller, “NVision Makes a Game of Better Marketing,” DMNews, November 7, 2007, https://www.dmnews.com/nvision-makes-a-game-of-better-marketing/.
3. Motoaki Yamamura, "FROGAPULT, ELFBOWL, Y2KGAME Virus Hoax," Symantec AntiVirus Research Center, Symantec, publication date December 8, 1999, archived February 29, 2000, http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html; Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20000229230522/http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html; “Frogapault Warning (Hoax?),” Google Groups (Google, December 9, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/CLa9zFjBMEA/m/Lu1RDeqcOGMJ. “Elfbowling Virus,” Google Groups (Google, December 9, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Rwwlfwu5hPM/m/paYcVzz04GsJ; “Possible Trojan in Elf-Bowling Game,” Google Groups (Google, December 7, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Qmcqg8Co6ME/m/goVFGgq3Y7kJ; Evan Hansen, “Vectrix.com Acquires Creator of Frogapult,” CNET (CNET, January 3, 2002), https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vectrix-com-acquires-creator-of-frogapult/.
4. “Elf Bowling Virus.html,” Scambusters, November 25, 2020, https://scambusters.org/elf-bowling.html, quoted in H. Thomas Milhorn, Cybercrime: How to Avoid Becoming a Victim, (Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2007), 284.
5. Fw: FROGAPULT, ELFBOWL, Y2KGAME virus hoax, accessed September 11, 2022, http://www.enron-mail.com/email/bass-e/all_documents/Fw_FROGAPULT_ELFBOWL_Y2KGAME_Virus_Hoax_1.html.
6. Dan Briody, CNN (Cable News Network, March 29, 1999), http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9903/29/melissa.idg/.
7. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; Heidi Prescott, “Truths: No Santa's Elf Virus, No Free Stuff,” South Bend Tribune, December 13, 1999, sec. Personal Technology, p. 16.
8. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; “Elf Bowling,” Elf bowling (NVision Design, November 1999), https://www.geocities.ws/Colosseum/Court/7685/elfbowl.html#privacyconcern; David Wilson, “E-Mailed Game Secretly Connects Private PCs to Firm: Bowling Santa Knocks down User's Privacy,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 27, 1999, sec. High Tech Report, p. B5.
9. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; Alexander S. Gillis, Kate Brush, and Taina Teravainen, “What Is Spyware?,” SearchSecurity (TechTarget, July 13, 2021), https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/spyware.
10. itzaferg, “Elf Bowling Fox News Interviews Elf Bowling Creators,” YouTube (YouTube, August 3, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD3nBXwPjRg; LGR, "Elf Bowling: "Bigger Than Quake or Doom!,"" YouTube (YouTube, December 5, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28TyIsCwkQo.

If you look at the Reception section for Tempo on Wikipedia you'll see that one 'Captain Squideo' of GamePro thought Tempo's 'extremely low difficulty' made it "a perfect game for novices." He gave it a 3.75/5. Meanwhile I cannot for the life of me complete a single level. I checked the manual, I watched some longplays, I cannot do it. I suppose that makes me a bozo. But Mr. Squideo (which I doubt is even his real name) also gave Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for Sega CD a 4.125/5, with the controls in particular getting a perfect 5/5. I guess that makes us both bozos. At least this bozo isn't ostentatious enough to call themselves a 'Game Pro'.

As a bozo, all I can say is that Tempo is one of the cutest characters I've ever seen. The way he bops to the beat in each level is so infectiously charming, and his animations are simultaneously snappy and smooth. The Margaret Keane-inspired, Craig McCracken-esque massive eyes make me melt. I'm so sorry that I've failed him. I still have Super Tempo sitting on my Saturn's SD card, but I don't think I've earned the right to let Tempo down again.

Recommended by radicalraisin as part of [this list]

Frisson rendered concrete.

The impending release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic has sent a prevailing wind of ennui through my being. A little over a year ago I deleted my Battle.net account. Activision Blizzard's handling of the Blitzchung situation, the news breaking of their abuses towards employees, the disaster that was Warcraft III Reforged, the patronising announcement of Diablo Immortal, Heroes of the Storm entering maintenance mode, the unmitigated mess that was Battle for Azeroth, the notion of an Overwatch 2, the ballooning of the WoW cash shop, the insistence on annual subscriptions, the time gating of content, the borrowed power systems, the lore trash fire of Shadowlands, and the ostentatious claim of Eternity's End being the 'Final Chapter' of a supposed Warcraft 3 saga, in an attempt to combat Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker's Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga all broke the proverbial camel's back. This was not a spontaneous act. This was a deliberate decision on my part to fundamentally erase the record of my participation in a game I spent over half my life with. I've permanently denied myself the possibility of returning to something I loved with my entire being. Wrath of the Lich King Classic theoretically extends a hand from the beyond to welcome me home, but despite what Blizzard might propose, I can never go back. No one can ever go back.

It is this memory of Arthas that I choose to keep in my heart.

Others learned of the unlivability of a reborn nostalgia with World of Warcraft Classic and Burning Crusade Classic, but that original game and its expansion were before my time. They were antiquated in comparison to Wrath of the Lich King. Wrath of the Lich King was a direct continuation of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, rather than just a tale within that realm. This wasn't some hodgepodge of rote item collection to counter minor threats, or the battling of foes so literally alien as to be largely irrelevant to me and my character. This was a considered effort to contend with the horrors of the past, an opportunity to feel like an active participant in an era-defining event.

Wait... I remember you... in the mountains.

The issue of reviving these past experiences is that their original forms were borne into a more naive time. Old School Runescape demonstrated before World of Warcraft Classic the ills of older MMO design in a hyper-online world. Whereas our playing of Runescape in 2007 was informed by rumours and assumptions of what was and could be possible, 2007scape exists in a world where every iota of information is readily documented. 2013 and 2022 are not the time of Zezima, of Unregistered HyperCam 2, of proto-Machinimas, of frag videos, of fishing for lobbies in Catherby for hours, of playing the game for the fun of itself rather than to 'succeed'. What Old School Runescape taught us a decade ago was that, as Sid Meier put it, "Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." I am not so oblivious as to claim people had not already done this in Runescape, but without the omnipresence of YouTube open-mouth thumbnails and Reddit megathreads, your average player probably wasn't min-maxing then as they would now. Old School Runescape is perhaps the most perfect representation of efficiency being the game itself, like Factorio if it were a fantasy MMORPG. It has become an antisocial MMO experience, because socialising is itself inefficient. And yet, World of Warcraft Classic came out only to suffer the exact same problems.

A hero, that's what you once were.

The core issue with recuscitating the original World of Warcraft experience is, I think, one of iteration rather than of inversion. Players clamored for a return to 2007 Runescape because the game had fundamentally changed in no small part because of Summoning and the Evolution of Combat update. It was no longer the point and click, set and forget MMO of yesteryear, but an involved, cooldown based, hotbar experience. World of Warcraft on the other hand has always been basically the same game, improving (mostly) with each patch and expansion, iterating on that foundation. To be sure, the WoW of 2019 was radically different from its 15 years gone forebear, but it wasn't a completely different package sold as something else. Reduced to its base elements, both versions of the game are the same. A different flavour of chocolate, but chocolate all the same. What made the 'Classic' experience so great when remembered was that WoW was novel for so many. The notion of a massive world you could explore with others, all interconnected with no loading screens (outside of instances/teleporting), with forty player raids, with an air of discoverability was specific to the time period. Thottbot existed, but not everyone needed (or felt they needed) to use it, and its data was primarily anecdotal rather than informed by hard statistics. With fifteen years of info at our fingertips, the Classic experience quite literally can't be reproduced, just as the Runescape of 2007 remains firmly in historic memory.

This is the hour of their ascension. This is the hour of your dark rebirth...

With the fun optimised out of World of Warcraft, and without substantive novel content outside of forty player raiding and untouched questing, the playerbase rather quickly turned apathetic towards Classic. It did not, and could not, live up to that memory, and it left Blizzard in a tricky position. Without updates, Classic had little to keep players invested. With Old School Runescape style updates, it would not be the World of Warcraft of yore. The solution, it seems, was to have a divergent path. World of Warcraft Classic would persist, with players having the option to continue to Burning Crusade Classic. This is well and good on the surface, but it was soured by the Digital Deluxe edition's inclusion of a character boost, in-game cosmetic items, and a new mount. Even ignoring the addition of items which didn't exist in the original release, the character boost alone betrayed the supposed ethos of the Classic experience. As a means of preventing players from missing out on that initial rush of the expansion's release, a boost isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but it being locked behind a paywall made the playing field uneven. This was no longer about reliving bygone days, this was about a fear of missing out, this was a chance to rush to the destination, rather than revel in the journey itself.

I will treasure it always - a moment of time that will be lost forever.

The same thing is going to occur with Wrath of the Lich King Classic. I was only 11 when I started playing WoW. Ulduar had just been added to the game. I couldn't have cared less about optimisation. I made numerous characters and ambled around aimlessly. I played comically poorly. I drew my characters on looseleaf. I was so excited and enthralled by this world which stretched before me. Eventually settling on a Tauren Hunter, every moment of the game was precious. As a child, it was a formative experience. I can still remember struggling with the quest Mazzranache, entering the Barrens for the first time, seeing gold sellers float auspiciously in Orgrimmar, killing dinosaurs in Un'Goro Crater, wondering where all the quests were in Silithus. Outlands never grabbed me quite the same way perhaps because of its contrast with Azeroth itself, with its inhabitants whose problems were literally a world away. When I reached the prerequisite level, I created a Death Knight. The random name generator bestowed upon me a moniker I still use to this day, Chuulimta. The starting zone genuinely shook me, at once appealing to my prepubescent desire to commit virtual atrocities while making it crystal clear that these horrors exacerbated the problems of the realm. I was hindering the world I wished to save. And when I eventually stepped on the zeppelin bound for the Howling Fjord, and gazed upon those verdant cliffs, I was agog at the quiet beauty of it all.

For you, I would give my life a thousand times.

I was actively helping an effort to rid the world of an unspeakable terror. And yet, I was also able to find moments of levity and calm. It's almost laughable in retrospect, to think I was having an appreciable effect on anything in this virtual landscape at the peak of WoW's popularity, but it felt and feels real after all this time. Even imagining the nyckelharpa of the Grizzly Hills theme, or those claustrophobic peaks in The Storm Peaks, or the amber grasses of Borean Tundra, or the bustle of Dalaran, those recollections rend my heart in twain. This frigid land clinging to life in the face of decay was home. At a time of change for me and my family, Northrend was my constant.

Do with it as you please, but do not forget those that assisted you in this monumental feat.

At a time of friendlessness, Wrath of the Lich King afforded me social opportunities, however fragmentary, that kept me moving forward. Names flitter away from my grasp, their recall an impossibility by now. The familiar faces when I would fish, those smile-inducing comrades who would greet me when I logged in, those scant few who would run content with me for no gain outside of the pleasure of the act itself. They will never return to me, nor I to them. And that atmosphere will not for anyone. The compartmentalising of social gaming into Discord servers and group chats forbids that earnest connection with the unfamiliar other outright. Just as in Old School Runescape, the game might be massively multiplayer, but it has become more solitary than ever.

Leave me. I have much to ponder.

I didn't kill the Lich King until much later, around Mists of Pandaria. I had seen so much of Icecrown Citadel, completing every fight up to the Lich King, but its mechanics were beyond me until I vastly outleveled, and outgeared it. Even with a statistical advantage, I wasn't able to do it alone. I brought along a friend who had just been getting into WoW. For him it was the first time starting ICC, for me it was the first time bringing the tale of Arthas to a close. When Arthas was felled and that iconic cutscene played, I was moved to tears. I had closed the loop on such an important part of my life. From then on, I would and could only have the memory, for there was naught left for me to find.

Alas... you give me a greater gift than you know.

Each expansion of World of Warcraft sees the outgoing content largely deprecated and abandoned. This only compounds, making it all the less likely you will encounter someone in an old expansion as time shambles on. Like revisiting your childhood home, this makes going back to see what once was gut wrenching. It was such a simple time, one of joy. It was an experience that can never be relived, by me or by anyone.

At last, I am able to lay my eyes upon you again.

Shortly before I logged out of World of Warcraft for what would, unbeknownst to me, be the last time, I flew across Northrend, descending into Wintergrasp to take in one of my favourite pieces of music. Crested on a snowy mound, an unfamiliar face landed beside me silently, and offered to me one word.

"Hey."

That was, and always will be, enough.

Since Steam reviews and the gaming press are just ceaselessly repeating the same already tired jokes and sharing videos of people playing the game poorly, allow me to offer a modicum of actual thought about this game.

Trombone Champ is a mechanically fine rhythm game. As every other reviewer feels the need to qualify it, yes, I too played trombone for a brief moment in time in juniour high band. The trombone sounds silly, its exacerbation of glissando especially so. Trombone Champ leans hard into the comedy of slide instruments, where being slightly off can make a recorder sound sophisticated in comparison. That's probably the only aspect in which the game's humour lands successfully. The gameplay itself works surprisingly well, kind of like an evolution of Wii Music's instruments which utilised the gyroscope. Hold the notes, slide as needed, it's nothing groundbreaking if you've played osu! or any rhythm game really. The controls defaulting to the mouse inversely matching pitch is novel but I turned it off quickly. There's a breath mechanic that literally does not come into play unless you play the game incorrectly.

And that's the gameplay! Everything else is separate from the actual meat of the game and its twenty-ish songs. The tracks available are fitting to the trombone but it means a predominance of pre-twentieth century tunes. I don't find that to be a problem, but part of me feels if there isn't a need to pay for licensing most of the music, there could be a hell of a lot more. As the tracks are usually accompanied by busy visuals, that would certainly prohibit a massive amount of content but when some of these amount to a static image with some fading pictures of beavers, that effort argument falls a little flat. The eyecandy is stellar at times, and I particularly love the use of old woodblock prints and magazine cartoons which are almost never seen in games. At times it's like playing John Tenniel's cartoons for Punch.

The rest of Trombone Champ is where I take umbrage. When you fill your Champ metre during a song, you hear airhorns. Some tracks have MLG frag video style effects, you get to see sunglasses on Mozart, your character has the same flat sausage-ish vibrant aesthetic as a Mount Your Friends or Human Fall Flat avatar, the way they move as you play has the vague physics silliness of QWOP or Surgeon Simulator. The collectible cards you can unpack come in a loot box style bag, emblazoned with faux-truths about trombonists all ending with how many hot dogs they can eat in one sitting. The loading screen 'tips' state similar falsehoods about things like the world record holder for most trombones owned has two whole trombones. There are baboons scattered about because baboons are funny? It all feels so temporally separated from the year it came out in, and the year it was announced. I guess comedy equals tragedy plus time but to me this just feels old and tired, maybe lacking enough separation for an ironic enjoyment. And it's a shame because its all superfluous! The game is fine without any of it. It's a misstep akin to The Stanley Parable Deluxe, it's like a Frog Fractions without the shock value. I hesitate to use the phrase 'flavour of the week' but I see no timeline where this is remembered, much less thought of fondly, in a few months. But who's to say, I mean, we all still love Goat Simulator and Fall Guys and I Am Bread and GIRP and What the Golf and Happy Wheels and...

When you first open Work Time Fun you're greeted by a screaming cat, then a screaming man, then a car filled to the brim with garbage photographed with harsh flash at the dead of night. Is this last image a sign of a hoarder mentality, a messy person, or a houseless individual? It's impossible to say, but Work Time Fun's design leads me to believe it is either the first or last of these possibilities. You fill out a short profile with your name, sex, blood type, DoB, address, and message. The urine coloured dithered background image of someone near a standpipe gives way to a blood tinted photo of another person near a window box of flowers. A woman and face-painted figure awash in blue while inputting your message for multiplayer offer a sort of levity, perhaps, but this triptych is nonetheless impersonal, the gaze always directed away from the player. All the while, the echo of dripping liquid persists like torture ordained by Hippolytus de Marsiliis.

A BITE O' HELL

Clock into work. Check your email. One message to welcome you to the WTF Network. Go to job placement. Be greeted by the job demon?

Unbeknownst to the player, and as I will touch on later, the WTF Network and all its job offerings are in Hell.

You're offered four jobs to start.

Baseball Superstar

Baseball has been a staple of video games since the days of early mainframe gaming. Those early iterations, be they on the DECsystem-10, the RCA Studio II, the Famicom, or the Epoch Cassette Vision all follow the same primitive approach to the sport. You swing and hit the ball. Rarely, if ever, do you catch. The aforementioned DECsystem-10 interpretation is an exception, but even there fielding consists purely of boolean choices. If I had to posit a guess, this omission would be because the act of catching is simply less engaging and fun than taking a crack at bat, particularly with no conveyance of height or distance. Missing a ball is a quick process when swinging, retrieval of the ball is a labour. Baseball Superstar makes this painfully clear. The angled perspective of those ancient versions is on display, the field not a verdant blanket of manicured grass, but a piercing monotone orange, as if the mounds have subsumed the totality of the space. Here one does not even get to pitch, the batter automatically lobs his own ball for you to catch. Your movement is semi-slippery and arduous. Despite your size, the tiny ball slips by without perfect placement. Diving or jumping for the ball is a commitment that rarely pays off. Throwing the ball to your first baseman takes a while as it arcs through the air. However, if you throw the ball 'perfectly' it zips straight to them and you get a gravelly 'OK!' The counter at the bottom ticks up by one, expecting a similar performance for the next 999 hits, with only two failures permitted. The hits become harder to predict, and that goal must be an impossibility. From the outset, Work Time Fun is setting the player up for a one-two punch of overpromise and underdelivery. When your defeat comes and your player smashes their glove into the ground, you're presented your first paycheque. With how hard the work was, surely the pay will be great to compensate for the difficulty, right?

You get around $0.02 per ball.

Pendemonium

Far and away my favourite job offered in Work Time Fun. The description puts it perfectly: 'Put the caps on the pens.' Start the job and you see a horribly dithered and artifacted image of factory line workers, facing away from you and stretching into the distance. The fluorescent lights flicker incessantly. The only modicum of colour in this space is the rust-red script hanging from the ceiling, presumably stating not to speak to your fellow employees. Atop this all sits a polygonal ballpoint pen with a rotating cap floating overhead. Press X to cap the pen. Press up or down to invert the pen. Press X to uncap the pen. Press O to proceed to the next pen.

The bottom of the screen displays a counter, sitting then at 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001.

The counter goes up to just shy of one undecillion. That number is literally impossible to reach, even if you capped one pen every millionth of a nanosecond for the entire age of the universe. There's no conceivable end goal here, the player has no choice but to stop when they feel it appropriate.

As you cap the pens, you hear the inhuman whirring of machinery and the faint mutterings of your co-workers. "I guess I'll wait till payday." "I love celebrities." "I wanna go home." "Have you ever thought about divorce?" "How are the stocks today?" "They should change the design of these things." "My hands are so dry." "I'm hungry." There's a hollowness to it all, and you quickly become numb to this prattle as the pens move along. The volume of the pens and their conveyor belt is vastly higher than the background noises anyways.

You can only ever see three pens at once: the one you are capping, the one you just capped, the one you will cap. This prevents any sort of planning for the upcoming series of pens, preempting your movements for maximum efficiency. This also means that your mistake becomes apparent only for the length of time it takes for you to cap one more pen. As Pendemonium offers a substantial bonus for perfect capping, missing that chunk of change because of a mistake, particularly one you missed even making, becomes a horrifying proposition. One has to wonder when they went wrong, one starts to second-guess themselves, questioning if they should clock out when those doubts manifest to minimise the damages incurred by a potential mistake, or continue apace and hope for the best. You enter an intense rhythm in due time, cursing those streaks of upside-down pens, and feeling enthusiasm for streaks of correctly oriented pens. I've given myself literal blisters on my thumb from this job. I adore it, despite it being so soul-crushing. It is a perfect skinner box stripped of its pomp and circumstance. The only endorphins released by my brain come from that number going higher, not from any flash or cheer.

On numerous occasions I have recorded myself capping pens into the thousands. I have also watched myself capping those pens. It is an ultimate catharsis.

Mushroom Xing

You guide blocky, Minecraftian pedestrians to the other side of the road while avoiding cars. You can get mushrooms for extra points. That's kind of it, a resurrection of David Crane's Freeway on Atari 2600. I personally find this to be one of the worst jobs available for its slow pace and poor theming. Besides the mushrooms in the road, you get a little image of mushrooms on the side of the screen. This, as it turns out, is because this and the other jobs thus far are actually sequels to jobs found in Groove Jigoku V: Sweepstation Version. The Japanese release of Work Time Fun (there titled Baito Hell 2000) labels these returning jobs with a 2 in their title screens, but as this is the first in the duology released in the West, no such numeral appears here. Mushroom Xing in Groove Jigoku V lacked the decorative mushrooms because of its aspect ratio, but the widescreen of the PSP compensates for this change with the mushrooms. Mushroom Xing is the feeling of waiting for an old person to cross the street so you can make a left-hand turn with a line of cars behind you turned into a game.

Traffic Counter

As the title suggests, this job involved counting foot traffic in an area. It's a primitive form of more nuanced means of people counting in the modern day. Electronic people counters allegedly existed as early as the 1980s, but it is nonetheless a job prone to error, making its human operated form a perfect inclusion. As your definitely-not-DOOM-guy (given glasses in the West to avoid legal complications) gazes upon the street, you are instructed to count passersby who qualify as people, ignoring everyone else. Your counter occupies the bottom-centre like a super shotgun. The difficulty comes from the overlapping and speed of sprites, as well as the fact your counter only goes up. If you overcount by accident, you're hosed.

On completing a day, another crimson or blue dithered image appears, blurring the bodies on display so as to be largely dehumanised. Those deformities that were being counted a moment ago become normal by comparison.

The backgrounds are largely monochromatic pixel streets punctuated by rust or blood or water. By round 5, however, a photographic landscape becomes your playspace, littered by physically impossible skyscrapers and boundless concrete cubes. The next round is amidst the flames of hell. The last, an inky void. Your final reward is the image from earlier back in saffron tones. Failing a single round nets you an empty cheque. Perfect play pays $32.00.

DENKI DETOUR

As mentioned above, Work Time Fun is a sequel to the Japan-only Groove Jigoku V: SweepStation Version. This prequel is erroneously titled Denki Groove Jigoku V: SweepStation Version across much of the English-speaking internet despite 'Denki' not appearing in the title at all. This confusion seems to be caused by the game Groove Jigoku being produced by the musical duo 'Denki Groove,' a fact which appears only in the intro cinematic for Groove Jigoku and has no English sources. The Japanese Wikipedia article for 'Denki Groove' does list the group's involvement in Groove Jigoku as producers, as well as front man Pierre Taki's producer role for Baito Hell 2000. Jigoku itself means Hell! Is this hell real or imagined? In Groove Jigoku V it is clearly literal as the player character dies at the beginning. In Baito Hell 2000 who is to say for certain. Apparently 'Denki Groove' considered their game to be deliberate kusoge, which Famitsu seems to, in part, agree with, stating something along the lines of 'the happiest time is while reading the game explanation in the instruction manual before playing the game' (very roughly translated). Also, the original Groove Jigoku site is archived for your perusal here.

BACK TO THE GRINDSTONE

What these four jobs illustrate with crystal clarity is the dehumanisation of work, central to Work Time Fun and antithetical to its title. It is not only that the work is itself degrading in its evaluation of the player as a producer of labour rather than as a player of a game, but also that the Other is rendered as less than human. Those photos from the information input screen at the start of Work Time Fun refused the player a gaze to render them visible, to acknowledge them as participants, as people. The first contact made to you by your temp agency is a generic introduction from the corporation itself. The job demon is themself non-human, and their recognition of the player amounts to little more than a sounding board for their own problems, with the worker/player's name never coming into the fray. Your name is an unchanging statistic next to your funds at the bottom of the screen. Your name is nothing more than a destination for those miniscule cheques written and signed by machine which would quickly deny you the satisfaction of an earned wage if it could get away with it. All representations of people in those four jobs are wet with Otherness in turn. Baseball Superstar has only the player and demons. Pendemonium has your co-workers malformed into blobs that camouflage with the concrete and rust, their voices a distant echo. Mushroom Xing's pedestrians lock their gaze upon the player avatar, but not the human player themself until the crossing is completed. Even then, their acknowledgement is terse yet passive. Traffic Counter has no 'ordinary' humans to identify with apart from our not-DOOM-guy.

Returning to the Inbox that was so impersonal at the start, the player by now has received a few messages. One comes from WTF Net again, a congratulatory gift of $5.00 for completing your first job. One comes from Hariyama-Mart to inform you of a 'Popular Comic Book Box Set' available for purchase. Depending on performance, some additional messages from WTF Net might arrive to congratulate you on 'Your Great Achievement' and bestow you a title in the vein of 'Ballpoint Pen-Robot'. Again, your value as an individual here is that of your production. Shattering this facelessness is one message from a 'Ken' with the subject 'Yo!'.

Ken's email suggests some degree of familiarity with the player and implores for any questions to be brought to him (though this is an impossibility with Work Time Fun's one-way email). His face, contorted between a smile and a cough, cements him as of 'personhood.'

With some funds, the player will no doubt be intrigued by the next menu option 'Vending Machine.' Another demon greets us with a little more charm, and we are presented with three identical 'Bronze' gashapon machines. Plop in a dollar, open the capsule, and more often than not you'll receive a little trinket and a cheery jingle! Receive a duplicate and the chime becomes disappointed. With luck, you will instead receive a new job, or a tool. Besides these three machines are the $5 Silver, $10 Gold, and $50 Celeb tiers with potential rewards differing with each tier.

TOOL TIME FUN

The tools are a new addition seemingly to take some advantage of the PSP's portability. They function largely as ur-apps from the near-launch of the iPhone App Store, those halcyon days of iBeer, Sonic Lighter, and PhoneSaber. These are admittedly more utilitarian, but they nonetheless fit specific niches that are largely ignored by the App Stores of 2022. In keeping with that kusoge intent, those niches are, lets say, not champing at the bit for a tool in a 2005 PSP game to meet specific needs.

The only ostensibly useless tool is Eye Spy, a swappable set of eyes intended to be held in front of your face like goggles. You manipulate the eyes with the analogue nub, blink the eyes independently with the shoulder buttons, and can toggle a censorship bar at will with X. We could consider these eyes to be an instance of the game's acknowledgement of the player, but as this artificial gaze is subject to our own control, is it really anything but us looking at ourselves? Perhaps in using them as intended for the amusement of an other we approach the possibility of being perceived by said other, but as they obscure our own real vision we become prisoners in a panopticon that is itself in the dark; the panopticon itself and its observational guard might not even exist in that moment. Unrelatedly, the only walkthrough on GameFAQs has the authour mention he used this tool to make fun of a Vietnamese guy in his class.

Ramen Timer is, as the name suggests, a ramen timer with options for 3, 4, or 5 minutes, as well as a Male or Female version. When the timer starts we're greeted by a bikini-clad gravure idol or speedo-wearing oiled up muscle man on a fake Hawaiian beach making small talk about ramen for the duration while posing. The portrait layout of the FMV makes Work Time Fun seem all the more prescient. The tool is twofold here in the functionality of the timer, and the placement of the chosen figure as objet petit a. Our desire perhaps is not only some gratification through or with this virtualised other, but a longing to be seen as we-- Oh! Timer's up, your noodles are ready! Goody goody!

Handy Light is a light, filling the screen with a single hue like Uber's Spot feature (I have no idea if that is still a thing). We are told explicitly not to shine it in other people's eyes. Restaurant Bill Splitter is also self-explanatory, though it curiously includes a 'Gentleman Mode' to, unknowingly, exacerbate the gender dichotomy and in turn create a greater distance between the self and the other within a gendered binary. The suggested split when using 'Gentleman Mode' is around 80/20, turning the feminine contribution into a pittance. Counter is fascinating in that it provides two counters with the option to set 'units' which are effectively bases. One option for the noise that plays when another unit rolls over is 'Sexy' which is predictably a woman moaning. Chinese Astrologer helpfully informs us we do not need to be Chinese to use it. The results are gendered and obtuse with the vague nothings of any horoscope.

King of the Castle Tool is the oddest in the collection, being a tool for the playing of a Japanese parlour game called "Ōsama Gēmu" or "King's Game." It is in effect a game of Truth or Dare without knowing the specific identities of the participants, all involved being reduced for a moment to numbers. The tasks that can be chosen randomly vary from the simple 'sip your drink' to the gnarly 'gargle your drink and have X' drink it to the profane 'X, describe your sexiest body part. Y, take a picture of it.' The idea of passing around a PSP with a copy of Work Time Fun in it in the West to play a Japanese parlour game is endlessly confusing and amusing, but its anonymising of the tasks to be performed could theoretically make this a great means of playing said game.

Matchmaker has you inputting the names of up to five men and five women to determine romantic compatibility. However, the name input field allows only three characters, an obvious holdover from the Japanese release which forces participants to identify their Snoo-ish putti by their initials, not that it ultimately matters. Unlike the love testers that we might consider this to be an analogue of, Matchmaker does away with these pretenses of warmth equating to interest. Each participant simply chooses one other, opposite-gendered participant and selects their level of interest. What's strange is that despite being able to choose different levels of romantic desire, you can only pick one person. This means if the person you choose doesn't choose you as their sole suitor, this is read as a rejection. When the confessions are revealed, the male putti walk with a rose to their chosen sweethearts, with other suitors for the same partner professing their love in turn. Whoever that potential partner chose is the one that gets the match. Where the levels of affection do come into play is in the 'Feeling Index' shown for the 'winning' couple, erring closer to the vague gauge readings of those electromechanical love testers.

Bingo is bingo. It chooses bingo numbers. It doesn't include the letters appended to each number but I suppose that isn't necessary. There is a small mustachioed, cowboy-hat wearing, maraca shaking man in the corner. He is named Mr. Bingo. If anyone has ever used this for bingo night as an old folks home, I would love to know about it.

The last tool is potentially the most useful. World Clock is what one would expect, letting you see the time in 73 cities across the world, and bearing an alarm function. It doesn't display every possible timezone, however, so even this purely functional tool refuses to wholly fulfil its duty.

MORE WORK TIME LESS PLAY TIME

After using each tool or playing each job for the first time, you'll invariably receive another email from Ken. In series these read as a mini-memoir of a man who has time for infinite play and infinite work, of a man who engages in countless social activities that the player can never join in on.

Other allegedly familiar faces rear their head too in time. Lai, whose photo is of a small boy shoving mandarins in his mouth, is generally braggadocios about his performance. Mr. College stares at us, cigarette in hand, red eyes thoroughly not reduced and offers small nuggets of encouragement. Vernon's femininity is disquieting abutted against anecdotes of abuse and harassment. Before long our inbox is as crowded with emails from co-workers as it is from the company and junk mail.

This re-humanising transpires in the jobs themselves. Lumberjack shows the player as well as an elderly sage. Three Count is resplendent with actual humans in its parody of Fire Pro Wrestling. Private Number involves direct engagement with a specific individual as we try to guess their phone number in a clone of Mastermind. Ready to Order involves painstakingly copying down the food orders of an indecisive group. We even receive an oppai-filled rhythm job in Hand Bell Delight where the girls get visibly annoyed with you, letting you consume them with a (in 2005) presumably male gaze which they transform into disdain. It is not only the human element that returns to us, but the notion of fun as well.

The jobs which are unlocked begin to more closely resemble actual games rather than work. While they would still remain out of place in a minigame collection like Wario Ware or Mario Party they nonetheless capitalise on the absurdity of turning work into games and games into work. Some jobs are obscenely short, taking mere seconds to get your cheque. Some are obscenely long, like Chick Sorting, an exactly 10 minute long job of separating chicks based on their sex (Fun fact: Chicken sexing via venting (opening the chick's cloaca) was first discovered in Japan in 1933!) (Not fun fact: Male chicks are considered useless and are culled almost immediately, and overcrowding in hatcheries leads to further deaths, probably explaining why there are so many dead chicks to be sorted.) Some are infinite like Pendemonium or 4 Fingers wherein you play the knife game with an awl. Some remain hopelessly tedious like Caddy Quest, a Brendan Keogh's Putting Challenge-esque collectathon. Some are just retools of other games, like Copycat, a spittle-infused Simon clone, or Pollinator, a Lunar Lander-like Some are cruel jokes, like Space Blaster, a shmup with a massive hitbox and hyperfast lasers that cut off your profits around $0.16.

TINKER FAILURE WORKER, DIE

In reviews and contemporary coverage of Work Time Fun, a word that always rears its head is 'Japanese-ness'. Like the 'Japonisme' of early modern France, there's an obsession among gamers and the gaming press with 'Orientalism' in the interactive arts. Jeff Gerstmann noted the 'Japanese eccentricity' in his review for Gamespot. Angelina Sandoval said Japanese games like Me & My Katamari or Work Time Fun might seem bizarre in her review for GameZone. Steve Tilley said for GamesRadar+ that unlike frozen Kirin or hentai, Work Time Fun is a Japanese concept we aren't missing in the West. Karen Chu of 1Up.com said Japan must be bizarre and into metaphysics. Perhaps what is so fascinating about Work Time Fun is that it doesn't compromise its vision for a Western release. Hell, I'm surprised it even got one. The idea of a sequel to a piece of kusoge by a Japanese music duo that only released in Japan getting a release stateside is absurd. And while temporary work is degrading in the West, anecdotes of arubaito paint an even more grim portrait. These reviewers might all say that the Japanese-ness of Work Time Fun is seen in its jobs, but I see it most potently in the trinkets.

One of the first trinkets I got from a vending machine in Work Time Fun many moons ago was a menko card. I still don't really know what menko is! There's the whole gamut of shogi tiles, finger puppets for careers that patently don't exist in the West like ama and shimei. Certainly the majority of the available trinkets are not exclusively Japanese in origin, but the sheer novelty of these items is reminiscent of buying Japanese snacks at an import grocery store. Yes many of these objects are functionally identical to ones seen or originating in the West, but their placement as something foreign makes them worthy of attention. These objects are othered because we have heard them to be an other. If Work Time Fun were not sold to the West by the gaming press as a Japanese title exuding Japanese-ness, would we even notice? Would we even care about its origin? Would the game itself be of any merit? Does it matter if we're really in Hell or not? Isn't life itself a Hell?

WORK TIME FUN

What every reviewer, every fan, every off-hand mention of Work Time Fun seems to stress is that the game is not fun on purpose. I don't know that I can fully agree with that, or rather, I think the idea of intrinsic fun is counter-intuitive to understanding Work Time Fun. Obviously as deliberate kusoge the intent was never to make an objectively 'good' product. Taken at a surface level, the jobs almost universally suck to play. The rewards are so meagre as to be insulting. Leaving the opportunity to get new, more fun work up to utter chance and running the risk of getting another Muscleman eraser is potentially infuriating. Being granted a title that only identifies you as a bozo that wastes their time when you do well in a job is cruel. But at the same time, it's all hilarious. Work Time Fun is a hysterical work. And yet I don't laugh at it, I laugh with it. Here lies a game which antagonises not only the player, but the creators, the gaming industry, and life under capitalism as a whole.

Work Time Fun has the confidence to not only ask you to put caps on pens in perpetuity, but to laugh at you for expecting some grand recompense.

Work Time Fun doesn't hold up a mirror to society, it is society.

Work Time Fun is making the best of a shitty situation.

Work Time Fun is entertaining oneself in solitary confinement.

Work Time Fun is whistling while you work.

Work Time Fun is the realisation that hell is other people.

Work Time Fun is the car full of garbage, a horror from the outside, someone's reality on the inside.

After 10 years I'm starting to think the fact that a serial abuser, four groomers/pedos, an e-beggar, an alt-right chud, and two actual sociopaths in my life all loved osu! might not be a coincidence.

Also when I watched some official osu! tournament in like 2013-2014 on Twitch, the presenter accidentally went to their desktop and the background was some loli in a bikini so there's that. I guess that's not very surprising though since every other map has scantily-clad lolis as the background.

At least I had fun for the thousands of hours I put into this oh wait no I didn't, good riddance, give me back 250GB+ of hard drive space on your way out

A nail-biting showcase of visual, navigatory, mechanical, zealous, and expectational blindness. Fittingly, you should go into Nix Umbra blind, and stay blind throughout. Rely not on discussion between players for insight. Feel around in the inky void for fragments of illumination. Embrace ignorance.

Nix Umbra's 1-bit aesthetic is an achromatopsiac binary agony of only light and dark.

Nix Umbra's adimensional representation of the infinite space, its flitting locational markers, and the constant turnarounds make a set travel path mere wishful thinking.

Nix Umbra, like other concealed rule games, offers zero explanation of how anything works. Information is ladled in front of the player without their knowing, gleaning it is little more than a vague gesture at understanding.

Nix Umbra ensures the following of a goal opens oneself up to assured failure. The lack of digestible visual information occludes a playstyle which goes primarily for crystals while being fully aware of the monsters in the dark.

Nix Umbra suggests for a fleeting moment that, like its nearest point of comparison, Devil Daggers, speed is the name of the game.

The main thrust of it, that blind reverie of the light, belies the dangers of the light itself. The light is a beacon, the light is a hope, the light is an embrace. The light is an open flame for the moths, the light is a burden, the light is something to run from. The light granteth power. The light absconds with ty life. The light turns thy world upside down. The tendrils of the abyss offer a warmer comfort.

Recommended by Bojangles4th as part of [this list]

Without divulging too much about my own mental health, I can at least safely say that Milk inside a bag... is eerily relatable and arresting for me. Metatext aside, I think it adequately achieves what it sets out to do for a very specific subset of people who in turn have processed their own traumas in a very specific way. I don't feel comfortable rating it because it's so personal and so affecting for me. I understand the sense some might get that this glorifies mental illness in some regard, and I even agree in part, but I think some of that is going to be inevitable when trying to transmit a piece of yourself for wider consumption. These things necessarily need to be gussied up due to the limits of language and the lived human experience. My red is not the same as your red. Maybe I wouldn't be as fond of it if I couldn't relate, it's impossible to say.

I was going to trauma dump but that's not fair to myself or to anyone else. The fact of the matter is I don't have to explain why this resonated with me. I am grateful this is (mostly) not my life anymore, but it certainly was my lived experience.

A day of my life in a day of my life in a day...

Either the cumulative mindpower of the Backloggd intelligentsia is too weak to crack a simple four-digit combination lock, or this is a shitty failed attempt at an ARG. Considering the only people who claim to have beaten it apparently did so in eighteen minutes or less (an impossibility with how illegible the text is), or deduced the solution with the help of a 'friend' (that player being the dev's brother, their friend being the dev), the latter is more likely. As the game files do not contain content beyond this lock, we the undersigned parties declare this game to be a big piece of shit.

Fuck you,
Beach
Detchibe
Erato
Spin
Squigglydot
turdl3

Postscript: drigo figured it out three beers deep at random.

When I was maybe eight years old, my curator aunt took me and my brother to an underground gallery where Canadian artists had installed arcade machines with their art games available for play. For the life of me I can't remember their names or find any online documentation, but two games remain burned in my memory.

The first had the player jumping out of an airplane to skydive. Unlike a skydiver, the player didn't have a parachute. You could manoeuvre yourself as you fell, but regardless of your actions, you would always hit the ground at terminal velocity and become a splattered corpse.

The second had the player in a grocery store with shelves scattered around. A wave of acid would come in from the left side of the screen like that scene in Season 7, Episode 2 of The Simpsons. Like Radioactive Man, no matter what the player did, the acid would eventually consume the space. The player would be nothing but a pixelated skeleton.

In both games, the player would be told to try again. Obviously I tried many times to affect the outcome, to no avail. At the time my brother and I decried these games as stupid because they were impossible, because our actions did nothing, because there was no point.

Nowadays, I consider these games to be formative in my appreciation of what games necessarily are and can accomplish. With so many itch.io titles and walking simulators and art games under my belt, I understand now that a game does not have to be fun, does not have to have mechanics, does not even have to definitionally be a game. In theory, the 'program' I made in an intro compsci course in university in which you clicked a button to have a .gif of a wizard appear and disappear is itself a game just as those indie art games were. The My Dinner With André cabinet Martin plays in Season 5, Episode 8 of The Simpsons is no longer a joke in my mind, but something I would totally play with vested interest.

All this is to say that 000000052573743 is the same sort of game I would have loathed nearly two decades ago. It is punishing, it is harsh, it is ugly, it is loud, it is 'stupid.' Unlike those games, there is an actual goal here which is only accomplished by not doing anything for a long enough time to be granted the opportunity to proceed. In this dystopia, you are not Gordon Freeman or JC Denton. You aren't even Bing from Season 1 Episode 2 of Black Mirror. You are an actual and actualised nobody, less than a nobody, beyond subhuman, a mere number. There is no overthrowing of your oppressor, only your abiding of their rule. You do not overcome insurmountable odds, you hope against hope that those odds favour you at the expense of the Others around you who are in fact true reflections of the Self. There isn't a reward at the end, only the continuation of a perpetual machine.

Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. - Harlan Ellison

Recommended by fweged as part of [this list]

After Technopolis and Emporium, I was immensely excited to delve into Autogeny. From the outset, however, Autogeny demonstrated with crystal clarity that it is not the work I wanted or expected it to be.

Much of this is no doubt due to my own misunderstanding of what the Pagan titles were trying to convey to me. Autogeny makes it explicit that the space the player delves into and reclaims are part of a dead MMO, something that never occured to me with the previous titles. Autogeny is undeniably about the trans (re)claiming of digital spaces. One of your skills is Estrogen, a character tells you that walls are little more than clandestine passages, Body Forging is levelled by appending thigh-high socks to a busty mannequin. I find those aspects fascinating, and fitting for a dead MMO. Not that I can speak with any authourity, but I think like with STG (keep in mind the top Battle Garegga player in the world is a trans woman), the appeal of trans/queer inquiries into the dead MMO space have to do with an a-communal appeal. For an MMO, here exists a land ostensibly populated with other people, real in the case of a 'living' MMO, a simulacra for a dead MMO. Those fictionalised representations of people don't harbour the same discriminatory sentiments that real players might. These false selves hate goblins and demons, not a real person's actual existence. One won't be called a slur for any number of reasons, these players become as ghosts in the machine, consuming that which is no longer considered suitable for consumption. And all of this is fantastic and deserves to be realised in a cohesive, singular gamespace that is agnostic of actual MMOs, I just don't think Autogeny operates well as that space.

The appeal of Technopolis and Emporium largely arose from the non-labelling of them as dead MMOs. The thought hadn't even occurred to me. The colour-banding grey miasma of Technopolis didn't strike me as a dead digital space, but as a non-place between life and death. The pervasiveness of John Atkinson Grimshaw's nocturnal urban purgatories and John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle and Hylas with a Nymph made it plain to me that this was a time before death, a time of abduction, a time of awaiting a true end. The skills of Technopolis suggested responses to catastrophe, the grey concrete nothings mining away at cars a sort of coping through this transitory period. When rapture is on its way (or perhaps occurrent) would we not descend into a mad reverie of our silicon masters, or stoke the flames of seared flesh in the name of an urban scavenger? The accompanying player piano's ceaseless echoes of Bach's Jesus bleibet meine Freude call to mind The End of Evangelion's audience scene where we see the world continuing, and the world without the body to occupy it. It is a pre-post-present apocalypse.

Emporium only cemented this in/after the end reasoning to me. The overwhelming bass as the world collapses around the self, every fragment of life gone apart from the knights. This is a realm of post-apocalyptic techno-serfdom as conveyed in James Ferraro's Four Pieces for Mirai. It is a land of desiccated theology, of fire's warmth, of murderous necessity. When the meaning of tarot is lost, we look to those omnipresent Bicycle brand playing cards for some answer from the cosmos, given to us like manna by a video poker machine. This is the Strugatsky Brother's notion of a Roadside Picnic, these fragments of someone's dicarded past misunderstood and misapplied to eke out some sort of undeserved existence. Were that not enough, this space is explicitly Hamilton, Ontario. This is not an MMO space, this is a real space. When we get on the boat to leave, we are not headed for brighter shores for there are none. We continue a spiral of non-life and non-death until, mercifully, it will end.

The combat of Technopolis was a non-act, your targets unflinching though they oozed digital red. Emporium had combat as a means to an end for progression, your spear poking into flaming bodies with no retaliation. Autogeny by contrast insists on an actual combat system, at odds with the previous Pagan titles' recontextualisation of violence. It exists only to further the notion of this being an MMO locale. The inventory becomes a clusterfuck of labour vouchers and multiple copies of limbs as items reappear out of necessity when changing locations. The difficult navigation of a blurred, fogged landscape makes everything a frustration exacerbated by agonisingly slow movement. It wastes time by having death as a possibility, by having its multiple endings locked behind repeat full playthroughs a requirement.

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THIS NEWSLETTER COMPRISES ESSENTIAL AND INTERESTING SCIENCE UPDATES FOR INSTRUCTION AND EDIFICATION OF ALL SCIENCE LIFE, EVERY BEING THUS DRAWN FORWARD IN SCIENCE AND UNITED IN THE HEAT OF COMMON SCIENCE, ACTIVATING SELF AND OTHERS IN THE CAREFUL JOB OF SCIENCE EYES, NOTICING ALL FORMS AND SOMETIMES INHABITING THEM. -- TRUE SCIENCE VISION

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It's pretty easy to forget how much of a wild west the late 2000s and early 2010s were for indie games. The separation we have from this epoch has seen the chaff decomposed and rendered inert for the prosperity of a chosen few. What we are left with is arguably the best of the best, but only by the standards of the day and of the now.

In time, those works which dared to do the oblique and the unique resurface as internet weirdos, myself included, try to find and claim some dustcaked artefact as a harbinger of great things to come, of tremendous unseen influence. For me it's Geograph Seal, for others it might be Ultra Resort Keroncuel or Otocky, perhaps Ryan Trecartin's feature-length video I-Be Area or Ingrid de Kok's poems collected in Terrestrial Things. It might not even need to be something we think is intrinsically good. Our encomia need only point at these figureheads and say 'this did it first, this did it best, this did what we love but look how neglected it is and was and shall always be'. In reality this praise often amounts to little more than a celebration of a trivia nugget which will no doubt be unsheathed whenever it is most apt and most pedantic.

The reason I bring all this up is so *I can now be that asshole and laud FJORDS for being so forward thinking in the miasma of Obama-era indie gaming.

IT IS OK!!!
SCIENCE PRACTITIONER!!!
☻ IT IS OK ☻

The game-breakery of Baba Is You is clearly on display in FJORDS*, although without the same player-authoritative wanton illogic seen in Arvi Teikari's work. This seemingly stiff platformer effectively pushes the player to a wall where they're forced to close out of the game or interact with its in-universe terminal. The commands available are sparse and obtuse. TRAVEL is a fast travel with two locations, the starting Pizza Place and right outside the Pizza Place. SET allows the player to toggle on and off certain aspects of the world with some options being inscrutable. SETting WATERFALLS to F is intuitive, but at no point has the player encountered a BOMB, or a GHOST, or MAGIC, or an ESCALATOR.

So maybe you change the settings of some of these just to see what will happen and proceed apace. ESCALATORs litter the landscape now. WATERFALLs have run dry. Grapple your way up and

W̶͍͊̄͋͘͝A̴̧͓̭̫͚̲̎̈̇̏̄̂R̸͚̹̦̠̻̗̋̎͛̉P̶͉̻̩̱̆̈͋
̶̧̮̗̯̤͆̀̀͂̃̈͐
you are levitating in a miasma of desaturated blues and browns, deconstructed sprites surround your bubble, stay calm and find your place and

G̴̤̈́O̵͓͋ ̴̨̋Ā̷̻N̵̟̒Y̷̪͒W̷͖̓H̷͉̀E̶͙̓R̵̭̿E̵͈̿ ̷̥́Ẃ̷̨I̶͚͌T̴̨̑H̸̼̄ ̶͍͆S̷̥̈́C̵̺̈́I̴͕͆E̴̝͝N̶̥̈C̷͕͐E̵̛͕

What follows with this revelation is that the water hazards and ferries and blocks are mere suggestions of where the player can go. With DOORS, water is a non-truth. With MAGIC, ascension does not depend on a ceiling. With WARP, the world is ripe for exploitation and exploration.

U KNO WUT I LUV ☻

P I Z Z A ☻

And with enough faffing about you come across another pixel person and get teleported back to the start. And you do it some more. Maybe you fall into an endless hell abyss where you who are not you ceaselessly spews the letter K as a plea of self-destruction.

In time your exploration of the world suggests...

THE WORLD, BEING IN REALITY SEVERAL WORLDS, AND UNITED ONLY TENUOUSLY, THE PRACTITIONER OF SCIENCE INHABITS ALWAYS THE KNOWLEDGE OF SEVERAL, AND IS SEVERAL AND MANY.

The self has been lost in dead ends with no escape, logical ends for a journey in the quest to explore and deliver pizza. Or maybe it hasn't, maybe these aren't you, maybe they are just signifiers of progress.

U KNO WUT I LUV ☻

P I Z Z A A A A A A A A A A A ☻

This is only half the story, however, and if anything this self-made ruleset isn't even the most interesting aspect of FJORDS.

This is a SHARECART1000 game. A brief flicker of an idea with minimal documentation online, with no explicit creator, with a bizarre purpose. SHARECART titles all use the exact same savefile, meaning your progress in FJORDS affects your save for Michael Brough's POST-FUTURE VAGABOND, for Theta Games' A Colored Topology, Andy Sum's ap drive, Damian Sommer's YOUAREABOUNTYHUNTER. Your play order of these titles thus affords you a wholly different experience to everyone else. FJORDS is not limited to how it can be broken in-game, but across games. The SHARECART1000 idea is the hypothetical notion of blockchain gaming a decade before your mom asked you what a bitcoin was. It's a crossplay not for one game across platforms, but for one platform across games. And like those blockchain games from the beginning of the 2020s, a lot of those SHARECART1000 titles are effectively lost to time.

For as much as I love Michael Brough's work, I might never get to play POST-FUTURE VAGABOND. I can't even get some of the still-online titles to work with FJORDS. There is this incredible idea of an indie landscape that is non-accessible to me and will probably never be accessible again since it withered on the vine.

What else are we missing out on?

IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF TERMINAL WORLDS DISSOLUTION

IT IS THE EXPRESS RESPONSIBILITY OF ANY SCIENCE PRACTITIONER TO MAKE IMMEDIATE AND TIMELY REPAIR TO THE FOLLOWING VARIABLES

As a queer historian, my research has operated at the far periphery of a history that society sought to erase entirely. What is available is largely circumstantial, or self-referential, or operates on assumptions, or makes up a truth where one is absent. It is a pain in my heart. Of course information must inevitably be destroyed in an increasingly unstable world and universe. Nothing will survive the passage of time.

And yet, you and I and all of us should take the time to exhume those forgotten soldiers, to look at our past with reverie and curiosity.

Look for the weird, the esoteric, the obscure, the forgotten, the misconstrued, the auxiliary.

Dig deeper.

Write about it.

Share it.

U KNO WUT I LUV ☻

P I Z Z A

U KNO WUT I LUV ☻

U R P A S S I O N ☻



Recommended by roboSteven as part of [this list]

My doomer phase is largely over by now.

I used to doomscroll endlessly on r/collapse.

I was enamoured by arctic-news.blogspot.com, a site which has baselessly claimed for over a decade that within four years, global temperatures will rise up to 18°C.

I cried at the Arctic death spiral.

I refreshed the NSIDC's charts daily, fearing that descending line would plummet below the 2012 threshold.

I watched carbon clocks in terror.

I checked Climate Reanalyzer and was agog at global hot zones.

I devoured Peter Wadhams' A Farewell to Ice, Extinction Rebellion's This is Not a Drill, Nathaniel Rich's Losing Earth, and David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth.

I scared my therapist with my talk of climate catastrophe.

That's not to say that I'm entirely past that phase of my life. I still regularly check the NSIDC and Climate Reanalyzer. I read IPCC reports. But I'm a little better informed now on the realities of climate collapse. I know shit is currently hitting the fan. But I also know that, no matter what happens, I lived, and I was here. I know it isn't my fault. I know that my efforts to save some fragment of the planet might be in vain, but it can still make me feel better. I do litter clean-up on the side of the roads near me. They still fill with trash after, but for a brief moment in time they look beautiful.

And while I can push to the side of my brain those qualms about sea ice and desertification and microplastics, I can never get the smoke out of my head, out of my nose, out of my lungs.

Living in southern Alberta, I've been used to rapid changes in the weather my whole life. Our proximity to the Rocky Mountains means chinook winds are frequent in the winter, raising the temperature from the low -30s up to the +20s at times. The dry air means hot summer days can quickly cool off. This semi-arid air comes with a caveat though. It's perfect for wildfires. And we have swathes of forests (many of which are awash with trees killed by mountain pine beetles). The same is true of Eastern British Columbia.

Every summer there are at minimum a few days where smoke fills the air. It can be downright cozy at times, when the skies remain clear and blue but you get that whiff of seared wood. It's as if someone is brewing a delicious cup of lapsang souchong (coincidentally my favourite tea). But it isn't uncommon for the smoke to linger for around a week, to make the skies overcast, to reduce visibility so that you cannot see downtown from the outskirts of the city.

With increasing frequency, the smoke has gotten worse. And it has stayed for longer.

In 2015, wildfires in Washington state and western Canada drove air quality in Alberta to be the worst on the planet, shooting to an AQHI of over 28. On a ten point scale.

In 2016, Fort McMurray was partially destroyed by wildfires. It was the most expensive disaster in Canadian history. Fort McMurray is very far from where I live yet the skies were nonetheless a miasma of smoke.

In 2017, 100 Mile House, British Columbia was the site of what would become the largest single fire ever in British Columbia history.

In 2018, the AQHI soared past 10 again. I remember the deep red sun, turning darker as it set. I remember it being the first wildfire season where I had an N95 mask. I had to wear that mask indoors. It was the year I got my cat, and I was horrified at what the air quality would do to her tiny, new lungs. I remember the non-stop headache. And even after the smoke dissipated, the smell remained.

In 2019, the AQHI reached 18 in May. You could see maybe a kilometre into the distance.

In 2020, despite COVID restrictions on activities as distanced as camping, smoke rolled in again. This time it was much less of a danger than previous years (we never broke an 8 on the AQHI).

In 2021, we got the heat dome. A somewhat novel meteorological phenomenon, temperatures in my city reached 36.3°C, only 0.2°C away from the highest ever recorded here. Lytton, British Columbia rose to 49.6°C. And despite the crushing heat, there was almost no smoke. It made it seem almost tame. People were dropping like flies of heat stroke. It felt like being in the fires of hell. But at least there was no smoke. Air quality still became dreadful, but at least there was no smoke.

In 2022, the AQHI only rose past 10 briefly in August. There was some smoke in September. The other day I smelled it on the wind again.

I know the smoke will be back. I know the smoke will be worse. I know the climate will get worse. I know everything will get worse. I know the smoke will be inescapable. I know the air quality will be worse even without the smoke. But as long as charred pine does not poison my lungs, does not burn acrid in my nose, maybe I can hold onto the fragment of hope inside me that thinks things can get better.