This is Part 2 of ‘Gaming Myself Happy’, a blog/journal/review series where I attempt to play the 500 Best Video-Games Of All Time, whilst taking a look at my own mental health and working on getting better. You don’t have to read them all in order, but the full intro and Part 1 can be found HERE.
Sleep has been a complete pain in my ass for a long time. At the end of my last post I described it as the first major boss battle of fixing my mental health, and today I can confirm that it’s not going to go down without a long fight.
It was hard to sleep last night, but after trying for almost two hours, I did finally manage to drop off sometime between 4 and 5am. To be honest, just the decision to actually go to bed early was a small win for me; and those small wins are going to be a core part of this journey.
EDITORS NOTE: Oh hello, it’s Present-Day Jon here. I’m releasing these articles about six months after I first wrote them, and reading my original notes is pretty interesting; especially seeing that I wasn’t sleeping until 5am, because at the moment even 3am is a pretty bad night for me.
Sometimes progress is happening even when you can’t see it, and those ‘small wins’ really do add up to a lot.
Anyway, now I’m awake, alert, and ready for a new game from the list! Two down, only 498 to go. LET’S DO THIS!
Game #3: Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising
RELEASED: 2003
PLATFORM: Game Boy Advance
REVIEW: “one of the finest games to hit the Game Boy Advance” — IGN
Wow, ‘Black Hole Rising’… now that’s an ominous and thematically-appropriate-for-this-blog subtitle.
Polygon describes this title as having ‘strategy-game elements’ and ‘long-lasting sessions’, and I’m immediately unsure about this whole ‘500 Games’ project once again. I’ve never been a fan of strategy, and to my mind the only thing worse than a strategy game is a long-lasting strategy game. Still, I’m up for trying something new, so I’ll try to keep an open mind.
My first impression is: this game has some TUNES! Maybe it’s just the relative silence of the first two games I played, but the synthesised rock music has already convinced me that this is the greatest game of all time. A good soundtrack goes a really long way with me.
My second impression is: this game looks really nice. Just look at the colours on that title screen! Again, maybe I just have super-low expectations after a slow start yesterday, but the graphics have a lovely, simple, pixel-y beauty to them that I am 100 percent onboard with.
And here comes my third impression: this game is really, really fun. Somebody get the Pope on the phone, because this a genuine bonafide goddamn miracle: I’m actually enjoying a strategy game!
Nintendo have this amazing ability to make any kind of game feel accessible, interesting, and addictive. One way they achieve this is through the ‘reward loop’: do a simple task, get rewarded for it, do a slightly harder task, get rewarded for that, do another even harder task, get rewarded for that, on and on until you’re an absolute pro. It keeps teasing you forwards into the next step, and it‘s got me pretty much addicted to Advance Wars 2 from the get-go.
I mean, look at the screen you get just for finishing the Extremely Simple Tutorial Level For Babies:
It’s like the game is shouting: “YOU ARE FUCKING INCREDIBLE!! I’VE NEVER BEEN PLAYED SO WELL IN MY LIFE!!” Advance Wars 2 wants me to feel good about myself, and I am okay with that right now.
I played for over three hours in my first sitting, and time flew past. It ended in brilliantly dramatic fashion, with a fight against Flak, the ‘boss’ of the first area. I was completely outnumbered and my units were being decimated all over the map; this was truly our darkest hour, and the odds were stacked against us.
There was only one hope: to capture a nearby airport before our enemy could reach it, and launch a bomber straight towards their main factory. I was down to three units against Flak’s twenty, and it seemed like a suicide mission; but with my back against the wall, at the last possible moment, we finished building our aircraft and utterly destroyed the enemy HQ in one sweeping bomb-run. SUCK ON THAT, FLAK!!
These are the kind of moments that make video games so damn fun.
This was also the moment where I began to doubt this entire ‘Play 500 Games’ project, as well as the idea of writing in general. Who in the world is going to find this interesting to read? How am I going to have time to play even a fraction of these games? And how am I ever going to turn this experience into an enjoyable piece of writing that isn’t just a thousand pages of me saying: ‘yep, this game was fun’ or ‘nope, this game was shit’?
It’s the classic cocktail of self-doubt and negativity that plagues every creative idea I’ve ever had, and it feels a lot worse when I’m already in a very bad headspace.
But I’m already forgetting why I started this idea in the first place: to have fun, to enjoy the practise of writing, and to try and make something creative out of the shitty situation I find myself in. Maybe I should take some wisdom from the Advance Wars guy:
Good advice sir, good advice. In video-games and in life, I needed to hear that.
Today I remembered that tactics games are HAAAARRRRRDDDDD.
Even a friendly-looking and accessible title like Advance Wars 2 can smash all your hopes and dreams into tiny pieces with one cruel swipe. That’s what happened to me on the first stage I played today, and suddenly I feel slightly less great about my chances with this game.
I try the level one more time, and I eventually manage to defeat the enemy and win; but then I see that I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game, and I don’t think I have the strength to sink another 20 hours into it.
I wouldn’t mind returning to Advance Wars 2: The Black Hole Something Something at a later date. It kept me interested and entertained for four solid hours, and for a tactics game to hook me in like that is quite an impressive feat. Well played.
Game #4 (FAIL): Dragon Age: Inquisition
RELEASED: 2014
PLATFORM: PC/PS3/X360 & more
REVIEW: “an immense fantasy epic… unapologetically mature in its exploration of politics and brazen in its combat” — Joystiq
Sadly, this is where I hit my first major roadblock of the project, and I’m only four games in.
My first problem is that I have no way of finding a copy of this game to play or a system to play it on: all my older consoles are about 180 miles away, back at my family home in Wales. I’m realising that I haven’t prepared for this project, and I may need to exercise a bit more forward-thinking from here on.
My second problem is that this game is freaking huge. Like, over 100 hours huge.
EDITORS NOTE: And my third problem is that I have no idea whether to write ‘videogames’ as one word, or hyphenated like ‘video-games’, or totally separate as in ‘video games’. Now that it’s time to publish this, I have no freaking clue which one is better; I’ve been using them interchangeably in my notes, and everyone on the Internet just seems to argue about it (no surprise there).
I’ll probably keep switching until I settle with one, so feel free to post your opinion in the comments! That’s right, I’m actually asking the Internet for grammar advice.
The sheer epic size of Dragon Age brings up an important question that I probably should have thought about before starting this quest: how many hours of playing games am I actually in for?
Let’s try to answer that with THE POWER OF MATHEMATICS!
If I take a low estimate and assume that I can find a way to actually play 4 out of 5 games, that’s 400 games total; quite a large amount! How long is each game going to be, on average?
The best way to get an idea of how long it takes to beat a videogame is the aptly named website ‘How Long To Beat’. HLTB collects data from players on how much of a game they played, and how long it took them, and gives you an average. So, Advance Wars 2 should take an average of 26.5 hours to complete the main story, without doing any extra missions or events. That’s a whole lot of time, but it’s nothing compared to Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is a 46 hour game at least, running right up to the 127 hour mark for completionists.
I got lucky with the first two games on this list: a 5-minute flop and a nice 2-hour arcade smash; but now I’m aware that won’t always be the case. Video games are LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG. And usually, I’m totally up for that. I sank 130 hours into Red Dead Redemption 2 earlier this year, and loved every minute of it, but that was over the course of three months. If I try to complete all 500 games, I’ll be writing and playing for years.
I don’t want this thing to last forever; it’s supposed to help me get out of a dark and difficult time in my life, not to actually become the rest of my life. So, I need a slight rethink of my strategy.
With Advance Wars 2, even though I got nowhere near the end, I feel like I gave it a proper crack. Four hours is a decent enough time to get a feel for most games, especially those with simple, repeating mechanics.
So here’s my game-plan (literally): I’m going to check out the HLTB website for every new game on the list. If the total is 8 hours or less, I will try my best to complete the game, unless I absolutely hate it.
If a game is longer than 8 hours, I won’t force myself to finish it: I’ll just make sure to play at least the first major section. It’s hard to set strict rules here, as each game is so completely different, but I think ‘first boss’ or ‘first main area’ is a good rule-of-thumb.
When I come across a game that I can’t find any way to play, like Dragon Age, I’ll look up some footage online so I can at least get a feel for what I’m missing. In fact, I think I’ll do that right now!
So, Dragon Age… well, yep, I’d say it definitely looks very RPG-y. Lots of elves and swords and big fantasy lands to explore, plus corny dialogue and a barrel full of tongue-twisting names.
Honestly, I find it really hard to get excited about this kind of game right now. I just finished The Witcher 3 recently, another 100+ hour fantasy RPG, and I’m feeling a bit tired of the whole genre. I’m sure that Dragon Age: Inquisition is probably a cool game, but I just don’t have the energy to explore another huge open-world whilst managing my inventory and slowly ticking off a huge list of mindless side-quests.
After watching the beginning section of the game on YouTube, I just felt tired. Maybe I dodged a bullet here by being unable to play this one.
And yes, the ranking below is based on one hour of a YouTube video, so sue me.
Game #5: Super Meat Boy
RELEASED: 2010
PLATFORM: PC & others
REVIEW: “a hard game. It should make you want to throw the pad across the room” — EuroGamer
It is such a relief to see this game right now.
I’ve had a horribly stressful day. Up until a couple weeks ago, I had barely left the house or spoken to another human being for two months; I’ve been pretty much isolated and hidden away from the world. Now I’m trying to pick up the pieces and slowly get better, but it is HARD and SLOW and often it’s too much to handle.
On top of all this, I have to move house next week. I’ve heard it said that moving house is one of the most stressful experiences of life, and that’s on a normal day. In my current mental state it feels like an impossible task; it was kind of a last-minute thing, and I don’t feel ready AT ALL.
And then on top of that, I had to go to the dentist today, and it turns out that I need root canal treatment. The fact is that I’ve not been taking care of myself properly over the last year, and now I have to pay for that with dental surgery. Here’s a completely unrelated screenshot:
Anyway, this afternoon everything came to a head and it all overwhelmed me. As soon as I got home from the dentist I collapsed in an emotional puddle. Honestly, it’s pretty wild to watch myself fall apart in situations like this that would normally just be kind of annoying.
Video-games have always given me an immense amount of relief, headspace, and escape when I needed it the most. On a day like today, I REALLY need that; and of all the possible genres of game, there’s maybe none I enjoy more than a challenging 2D platform game. Give me Super Mario, Rayman, one of the Kongs, a spicy Bandicoot or the Hollow Knight and I’ll be a happy man.
So it felt extra good to see Super Meat Boy pop up this afternoon. I’ve completed this game multiple times in the past, but I’m excited to crack it open again and escape from the pressure of the day. It’s got spikes, wall-jumping, lava, heaps of levels, and I love it. If anything I’m surprised to see it so low in the Top 500, but I’m not complaining. I’m ready for some Meat Boy action.
But after playing for the first time in a few years, something’s not quite right. I’m as surprised as anyone to be writing this, but…
…I don’t think this game has aged well.
RECORD SCRATCH SOUND EFFECT!!
I know, I know, this sounds crazy to me too, but hear me out.
For starters, it controls horribly, like I’m fighting my own controller the whole time, and the physics feel like I’m constantly walking on extremely slippery ice. The graphics and soundtrack feel REALLY out of date, and worst of all, it plays like shit on my computer. It looks like the game hasn’t been updated for a long time, so on current hardware it’s jerky, glitchy and just not nice to play at all.
At the time it released, this was probably one of the only challenging indie 2D platformer games around; but now we have a whole heap of beautiful examples like Celeste and Hollow Knight (two of my recent favourites), and Super Meat Boy just feels kind of old.
I played as far as the second area boss, but at that point the game glitched out to the point where it was unplayable, and I literally couldn’t continue. This was pretty disappointing.
So instead, I decide to go and find the original Flash version, simply called ‘Meat Boy’, and I play through the entire game in about 35 minutes. You can play it along with me for free if you click right… about… here!
It’s fun, and short, and again it feels like a relic of a different time. In contrast to something like Super Mario World, a 25-year-old game that still feels incredible to play, Super Meat Boy sadly doesn’t hold the same quality that it once did.
Oh well. Some things are best left to nostalgia I suppose, both in games and in life.
Onwards to better things! See you next time :)
