A hallway of marimbas fart at you. You didn't remember something important. Throw your steed into the loam. They would have appreciated knowing how you felt. It is a nothingness being here. The idea that this is an answer is perverse. What kind of sentiment lives here with this choice? Can you remember the first time you had meat? It's a nothingness being here. A shaft of memories, all wounded and of wanting. The little fucking circle, did it blink this way or that? It's a nothingness being here.

3's better, i guess is what I'm saying

I love to teach my friends fighting games. I'm secure enough in myself that I'm happy to watch them grow and even surpass me, should it come to that. If they can beat me, I can enjoy them growing as players as well. If I could, I would use fighting games as a way to teach people helpful psychology.

I feel the opposite about competitive puzzle games. I have told everyone I know that I am a monster in them, that I will not slow down, that I cannot explain to them how to see, and that if they HAVE TO KNOW what it's like to be on the other end of it, I will show them, but not willingly, and they will not enjoy it.

This is a really good competitive puzzle game.

It is really hard to recover from a loss of mystique, especially when you build it in your own mind of something else. To me, Hyper Light Drifter was a perfect video game. It was everything I had desired to see in games for years, of mood and grist and evocation without dialogue. A perfect smoothing of weaknesses to plant pillars of strength.

To my mind, Solar Ash is a game about hiring people to try to supplant those weaknesses, instead of owning them as a creative perspective. Put another way, if this game would shut the fuck up, it could really say something.

I took this game with me to the premiere of 300 and before the movie I was working on improving my time on Airship Fortress, my favorite Mario Kart track ever and one in which I was briefly competitive for world record times. Suddenly I heard screeching around me. My tendency to sit at the back of the theater, combined with the ungodly bulbs of the DS Lite, illuminated a group of bats for everyone to see overhead. No one went to get any ushers to try to get the bats, for fear that they'd tell us to get out and we'd miss the midnight premiere of 300.

Mario Kart games are impossible to divorce from their time period. I could have written this about Super Mario Kart battles at the orthodontist's office. I could have written this about feeling alienated at the video producer's birthday party when they played Double Dash and refused to explain how it worked. I could have written this about playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe deliberately as though we were at a roof party with everyone behind us screaming, as part of a multi-stage competition. Nintendo's approach to "every game in a franchise is someone's first game" shows through most brightly and blatantly here in the Mario Kart series.

I was just good at this one so I like it most.