Best Games - The Irritating Maze
The Irritating Maze is not a complex game. It is not a game that defines or extends a genre. You will not find a compelling narrative or ingenious mechanics here. The Irritating Maze is simple. But it’s the right kind of simple. The Irritating maze is the most pure sort of game there is. A test of skill. When you start you get to choose from a wide selection of playable characters. Either Man or Lady. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the game plays identically no matter who you choose. After that, you guide the tip of a metal rod through an electrified maze filled with hazards. That’s it. That’s the game. Guide what amounts to a round cursor through a maze. Don’t touch the walls. Then do it again. Then again. Win. But you probably won’t win. The Irritating Maze might be simple in concept and design, but it is ridiculously hard to play. There are only three levels, but just making it halfway through the second one is an accomplishment. Some of the hazards are truly devious. Parts of the maze move, there are rapidly moving wheels, and at one point the game traps you in a small box, and then moves the box around. Sinister. Released to arcades by SNK in 1997 without much fanfare and based on a mid 90s Japanese variety show segment that very few people in North America and Europe would have been familiar with, it’s no wonder that The Irritating Maze is not a very well known game. Maybe you will just have to trust me then, that this game is so perfectly executed that it’s amazing it didn’t spawn a wave of copycats and sequels. The Irritating Maze is one of the few Neo Geo arcade games of the time to be built into a special cabinet. It used a trackball controller and sported an air cannon that would blast air in the players face when they collided with one of the walls. I suppose that incorporating a metal trackball that would actually shock the player would have been a lawyer's nightmare, so they went with the air cannon. Probably a safer choice. Still, the game starts with a warning that any person who is pregnant or has a heart condition should not play The Irritating Maze. Maybe they should have put that on the cabinet in bright glowing letters. We would probably be playing The Irritating Maze 15 today if they had. There is a place in this world for wild dynamic systems based games and vast arrays of player verbs, but sometimes, sometimes, you just want to move carefully through a maze. That makes The Irritating Maze one of the Best Games.
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Today I submitted the last of my ‘one story a week for six weeks’ stories.
I’m gonna take a little break from writing (like a couple days… not like a break break) so I think this is all the words I have left in me this week. I only have one more story to write for the ‘write one short story every weekend jam type thing’ that I have been doing.
I will be glad to be done, since it is slightly stressful coming up with something new every weekend and then having a bunch of strangers judge it and pick it apart. On the other hand, it is pretty fun to push yourself and just see what you are capable of coming up with. And maybe it’s even a little fun to have a bunch of strangers pick apart your work, while you pick apart theirs. The hope is That in the end any story that comes out of this process will be that much better. You have passed that first draft, first read hurdle, and you can really try to send it. I still find that writer's block is not a thing. At least not for me. I can pretty easily come up with a handful of story ideas for any given prompt, toss out all the really bad ones and run with the sort of okay one that I have left over. It usually takes me a couple of hours of jotting notes and stray lines to come up with something approaching cohesive, but coming up with new story ideas or scenes, or characters, or situations. That’s not really a problem. That doesn’t mean that I write fast though. Many people in the competition would write a couple of stories and choose the one they liked best. A weekend is just enough time for me to write one sub 1000 word story and polish it up to any sort of presentable state. If I thought I had a few thousand words to work with, maybe I would write faster. Long dialog scenes or detailed action scenes. Stuff that can really get away from you if you have no hard word cap to deal with. That’s that sort of stuff that can really flow out of you when you get going. Or, to be more specific, If I really get going. I don’t know how you write. Maybe you are one of those fast people. Over the past year, I have only finished a couple of stories. I have two that are on the verge of done, and another two that need a bit of work but are otherwise humming along fine. But, like I said, I don’t write fast. I like to take some time and consider words and phrases. Try on different ways to describe things. Rewrite a single sentence 7 or 8 or 25 times until I get it just right. I do think that, for the most part, my stories this year are better, or more workable than last year. It’s tough for me to judge. I think I have less trouble getting them out, at any rate. Well, it’s time I submit my story for this week. Wish me luck. |
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