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.