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Best Games - Choplifter!
The best early 8-bit computer games did a lot with a little. They were written for computers built around MOS 6502 or Zilog Z80 processors. Moderately powerful chips at the time, but still absolutely dwarfed by the comparatively monstrous boards and chips in most arcade machines. There was never any hope that the graphics of an Apple II would come anywhere near to the graphics of a contemporary arcade machine. The frame rate would never be as smooth. The sound would never be as rich and full. An Apple II computer can do a wide variety of things, but being a match for any arcade machine would never be one of them. Maybe this is why a lot of the greatest innovations in gameplay arrived on computers first. If you can’t match them on razzle dazzle, you better be able to make the game interesting in other ways. Choplifter! is a rare breed of game where the main objective is something ancillary to the main verbs the player has available. If I told you that you are controlling a helicopter that can fly quickly or slowly, pitch up or down, fly backward or forward, rotate to face in one of three directions, and it can shoot in any of them, what would you imagine the main game objective would be? If you picked flying around and shooting, I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems obvious that the player would use those verbs to play the game. Other than flying, you don’t really need any of them. It would be possible to play, and win Choplifter! never firing a shot and never rotating the helicopter. The main objective of Choplifter! Is to save as many captured prisoners of war as you possibly can. Not all, not a set amount. As many as you can. Maybe that’s only one. Maybe that’s all of them. Honestly, that’s up to you. The game only demands that you save as many as you can. You could fly out, land, pick up prisoners, and take them back, while never engaging with any other verb in the game. Never pressing a button on the controller. It wouldn’t be as much fun, but you could do it. Add to that, all the small interactions in the game. There are tanks, airplanes, and depending on the version you play, ground based cannons, and some sort of drone unit. You can choose to fight them or avoid them, and most of the time it’s best to just avoid them. You can shoot open the prison huts, or get a tank to do it for you. Prisoners can be killed by tank fire, missiles from airplanes, your own shots, or just by landing on them. The best part about all of this interactivity is, you don’t really need to engage with any of it to play the game. You will, because it’s fun, but you don’t need to. How you play the game is left to you. This is really what I mean when I say ‘did a lot with a little’. Sure, the processors and memory of those 8-bit computers were laughably small by comparison to today, or even the arcade machines of the time, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Here is a game that is about a single objective. Rescue prisoners. But the way you go about doing that is extremely nuanced. You can shoot every enemy, or never shoot at all. You can pick up as many prisoners as your chopper can hold, or you can make dozens of small trips. The game doesn’t care. There are a lot of tools here, and you can use them however you like. Choplifter! Lets you decide how you will play it, and that’s almost always a recipe for the best games.
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Okay. Three weeks. Three stories under 1000 words.
While I don’t think that it’s getting any easier to write these things, I think, at least the last one, is a bit better than the others. Just like anything, if you practice a little, you get more comfortable with it. Gauging the pace of these sub 1000 word stories is tricky, but I think that’s the part I am getting better at. I like to open stories rather slowly. Give the reader lots of time to acclimatize and get into whatever it is I am writing. That’s not really a great way to write a story that only takes a few minutes to read. I still had to trim a little to get under the word count, but not over 200 words like the first week. So, what do I hope to learn by writing these? In such a tight word count, I can’t be flowery or wander too far. I have to make sure my dialog gets to the point, or if I’m doing my job right, several points. I’m learning to echo concepts, without, I hope, making the text repetitive. I’m learning that I can go from concept to finished story in a handful of hours, and I can do it repeatably. Reliably. I think that all of these stories will require several passes and probably more than a handful of additional words before they are ready to send out, but they are done. They are self-contained, functional stories. I think that’s all I really aspire to write. Best Games Albums - Geddon Dangerous by Doublegeddon
Normally this is the place for games, best games even. I’m just going to drop a link here. If you are going to read this, you should at least have a listen to one of the best albums of last year. https://youtu.be/h-iUtkleVt8 While you could just listen to this music and enjoy the blend of power metal and new wave synths, I don’t know if you would get the whole experience. There are a lot of concept albums, but there are fewer concept bands, and only a tiny handful that make good music. Only really Ghost and Gorillaz come to mind. To sum up, Doublegeddon is, at least by their descriptions, two 5000 year old Sumerian demigods who have re-emerged from the 7th dimension to play metal music. One lives on the moon and one lives in Antarctica. Since one hates heat and the other hates oxygen, it works out. I’m a sucker for satirical lore. Doublegeddon has it in spades. If you would like another link, here is an interview they did with a metal magazine. https://www.filthydogsofmetal.com/interviews/interview-with-doublegeddon All of their songs are similarly silly, but with a narrative consistency that speaks to some real writing talent. The lyrics of Revenge of the Vampire sounds like a bunch of metal tropes laid end to end, but it’s not just nonsense. The song tells a story. It’s a goofy story, but it’s fun, and good, and most important, well told. None of these songs are just tossed out there. The musical skill is obvious, but there is some real songwriting skill on display as well. Writing almost forty minutes of good music in service of a joke is worthy of applause. Jokes aside, Geddon Dangerous is just a really listenable album from end to end. I have put it on several times this year, and I will probably listen to is several more. I look forward to whatever they do next. I just tried writing my first flash fiction. Flash is a story that is typically under 1000 words, but I have read that some people consider anything under 2500 words flash fiction. A while ago I tried writing a drabble, that’s a story exactly 100 words in length. Here’s something that might seem counterintuitive. Writing short is very hard.
The story I wrote is less than 750 words, but I made sure that it had as many parts of a story as I could cram in there. There are defined characters, a goal, stakes, and a twist ending that seems obvious in retrospect. You know, story stuff. Packing any of that into 750 words is really tricky. This post is more than 400 words and I am only telling you about the story. I write outlines longer than 750 words. Flash fiction seems to be a popular format. Easily devoured by readers during a break or on their phone, but still long enough to deliver a compelling tale. I see a lot of other writers selling them. I don’t know if I’m going to be among them. It’s just really hard. I function better with a bit of room to breath. I often find getting under 5000 words to be difficult. The obvious question would be, if it’s hard and I like writing longer stories, why try writing a flash story. The obvious, and correct answer, would be why not. You don’t learn anything by not trying. I think I will try a few more in the coming weeks. I will probably find that I need to expand these stories quite a lot before I feel happy with them. On the upside, it seems to only take a day or two to write a 750 word story. That’s a far cry from the weeks or months that I spend on my more than 5000 word stories. To be perfectly clear though, it might be a small word count and a short time, but it does feel much more difficult than writing a longer story. Unfortunately, like always, I won’t be posting them here, unless I really can’t see any way to sell them. I would like to. I would rather just post up anything that I write, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the publishing world works. Until it does, I suppose you will just have to be satisfied with these vague descriptions of what I am writing. Hopefully, in the near future, I can let you know about actual published stories I may or may not have coming out. Are you supposed to make resolutions for the new year? I don’t really do that. I haven’t done that since I was a kid. I don’t really see the point.
To be clear, it’s not the resolutions, or the idea of making a promise to yourself and sticking to it. I love that sort of thing. I just don’t understand the timing. This blog was a resolution of sorts. I wanted to write. I wanted to get better at writing. I decided that if, at the very least, I wrote one small thing every week, that would be good enough. I have continued to write, at least once a week, for ten years. Has it made me a better writer? Difficult to say. It has done this though. Now, I can write on demand. I can sit down and start writing. I don’t have any delusions that the muses will work through me, or that I need to wait for inspiration. Writing, like drawing, is a practice of work. It’s a thing you do and a process for doing it. The piece of writing you have at the end of that practice may or may not be good, but making something good instantly, and without revision, isn’t the point. That’s not writing. Drawing is a process of building up lines, finding the best lines in the noise, and refining those. 3D modeling is a process of building up forms, finding the best shapes in the noise, and refining those. There is a process for these practices that moves from undefined to precise in both of those arts. The only way to know how to select the precise shapes from the noise is by practicing. Moving through the process over and over and over again. Writing, it would seem, is much the same. You do it over and over and over and you get used to finding forms in the noise. The only way to do that is practice. Moving through the process. You resolve to do it. It’s not a goal. It’s a constant and unending practice. It doesn’t matter when you start, but there is no end. That’s a resolution, at least for me. So, for this year, I think I will continue to do what I have been doing. Maybe I will draw a little more. |
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