I can't think of a good title, but this post is about Yoshi's Island

I was playing Yoshi's Island recently* and Girlfriend walked into the living room, drawn by the bouncy music and the boings and ka-dings. "Jumping!" she exclaimed. "Coins! This game is triggering reward centers I forgot I even had!"

"You're telling me," I replied (or something to that effect). "At the end of every level, I get graded out of 100 points!" I proceeded to show her my (disappointing but in-progress) B average across the current world, and my string of perfect scores across World 1.

I think that Yoshi's Island may be the game I loved most out of the entire SNES oeuvre.** It's been my go-to game now ever since I reunited it with my SNES. I'm discovering the feeling of realizing that the 11-year-old version of yourself actually had good taste.

I didn't really have the vocabulary to explain why I was enjoying myself so much, but I definitely was. I pretty clearly remember gushing about the game in a journal assignment in school soon after I got the game. I was pushing the limits of my fledgling vocabulary and I specifically remember praising the games abundance of "simple complexities." I got that journal entry back with a red-ink chastisement about "simple complexities" being a contradiction. I knew what I meant! (But, little Cory, it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate it.)

What I realize now that I meant was that the game consistently found ways to surprise me by building on a consistent, if whimsical, internal logic. It was full of Aha! moments. Some of my favorite were the things they did with the eggs which Yoshi would lay and which would then follow him(?) around like ducklings until he(?) used them as projectiles.

About halfway through the game you run into a ducklike creature with a trail of little ones following behind it. Sure enough (by the game's logic) you can scoop up the little duckthings, who then follow you around like eggs--as if you were their mother. And yes, you can throw them at things--they act like cute little boomerangs.

Somehow I loved this at the time and yet I don't think I understood the visual pun behind it.

It's been--oh wow--almost twenty years since Yoshi's Island came out. I've learned a lot of useful things in that time, but I've also learned a lot about video games and media and how we enjoy them. Playing this game again I get to see all the craft that went into all the fun I had.

So now I can see, and actually recognize, how the game teaches you how to play it. How the game controls how you encounter new elements and nudges you toward understanding how to interact with them. You would learn that you could stand on a rolling boulder because the game would show you the boulder and then show you goodies that you could grab if you stood on that boulder. The game would reward experimentation and mildly obsessive-compulsive behavior, which would drive you interact with the world and see what happens. I didn't notice the game teaching me back in 1995. But about a year ago I ran into a YouTube video where a man explained, with a surfeit of enthusiasm and NSFW language, how it was done in the Mega Man series, and I've been noticing it ever since.

Sometimes when you get older and discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were insipid. As a compensation, sometimes you discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were actually brilliant--sometimes better than we remember.

* My whole SNES game collection was reunited over Christmas, thanks to my sister, who delved into my parents' attic on my behalf in exchange for the N64.

** Possibly in a photo finish with Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon

Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices.  I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal.  (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable.  I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog.  But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.)  Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.

Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one.  But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons.  The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.

The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember.  Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes.  There’s a lot of bad.  But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.

The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series.  It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica.  (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)

All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus.  In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.

But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits.  Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy?  Tolerance?  Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking.  We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”

One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.

I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room.  As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.