𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫 🕷️🍂

One thing I feel strongly about is, if you enjoy video games, you should play old games. Especially if you're a zoomer or a millennial like me, you should play games that came out before you were born.

This isn't me being like "the games I played as a kid because those are the GOOD games", like some kind of nostalgia freak. There's a lot of modern games out now that are legitimately fantastic, and do things that those old games could never do. There's just value in knowing what path games as an art form have taken over the years.

Video games have their own art history, and as far as I'm aware, this is largely ignored in the broader conversation about them. Often recommendations to play old games are pushed back against due to being "clunky and ugly", and by modern standards that's kind of true, but I think it's not fair to dismiss them off hand like that. A good understanding of the games that inspired your favorite modern games can help you appreciate them more.

Diablo* was a game I played a lot as a childe, and one I revisited as an adult. One of the main differences between my first playthoughs and my more recent one was that I had been introduced to the roguelike genre, and more specifically Nethack. Suddenly I became aware of direct lines of inspiration from Rogue in Diablo**. It gave me a new appreciation for Diablo's*** mechanics that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Also play games made in flash, because those have been far more influential than you'd think, considering how completely out of the mainstream conversation they are.

I just think video game history is as important to the medium as art history as is to paintings or whatever. And it's kinda sad that this older stuff gets neglected, even if it's for reasons I understand. Also this is a way for me to indirectly encourage more people to play games I love, that they might ignore otherwise

[eighteen hours ago]

days like today really make me appreciate that i don't have a developed uterus 😵‍💫💀🛌🏻

[now]

and today... 💀💀💀💀

had to cancel, reschedule an appointment i'd already rescheduled once. never mind drawing all that blood, there was no getting me there in one piece or sitting upright all that time.

the pain kept me up all night. amethyst turned up early to help and accompany me to the clinic, and found me prone and frazzled in a puddle of tears, unable to climb out of bed or make it to the bathroom unassisted.

they fed me ibuprofen and held me until i finally dozed off. i don't know where they are now, getting my meds for me? getting me groceries? spending more hours on basic shit for my benefit?

god i feel so helpless. more now than i ever have been, despite all those years of effort and recovery. i must be absolutely insufferable for anyone who has to deal with me in person. it's hard to see what i'm adding to their life. we never even do anything together but sleep.

yes this is just my period, yes they've always hit me hard, incapacitated me, made me weepy and weird and erratic. but no it's not just that, because i'm already so weak now. absolutely the wheelchair is a revelation, but there's no way i could carry it out or work it by myself.

like, these last couple days are a certain kind of extreme within my current situation, and of course things could always be worse, but the way i have been degrading since march, a bad day like this feels like a glimpse of every day for me before next summer. and i'm... not managing it, not coping. i don't know what to do anymore.

it's not like lying in bed and crying all day is new for me. been doing that all my life. but this is another level of dysfunction.

i don't like this. i don't like myself like this. i don't want to be awake anymore, when this is all that i am.

guys i don't think the dude from quake is very good quaker representation

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Scramble Formation (Taito, 1986)

PSN
EU
US

Switch
EU
US

Although this release is referred to as Scramble Formation in the West, the game's original Japanese name, this was actually a dip-switch setting originally, so you can select between the Japanese version and Tokio, the English version. However, the
'Old' version of the game is not present, almost certainly because Tokyo Disneyland appears in that version and Taito were asked to remove it. You can see it at 49:30 in this video.

Above the skies of Tokyo, a great battle is brewing, with a huge enemy army taking over the entire metropolis. A lone fighter pilot is all the stands between the opposing army and total victory, but they're not alone- by destroying enemy ships, they can gain extra mini-ships to help them in the fight, eventually gathering enough to make their own formation, their own scramble formation (get it?) with switchable formtions for focusing on ground targets, air targets or a mix of both. Take back Tokyo while flying over various famous landmarks!

This is one I first discovered on the first Taito Legends collection and it's a fairly interesting vertical shmup with the common Xevious system of having normal fire for air targets and bombs for ground targets (in this case, both are assigned to the same fire button). The main mechanic here is the formation system- as you collect more mini-ships (a maximum of four on-screen, but you can keep any others you grab in reserve should your others get shot down), you can tap the second button to cycle them through a few different formations, where you have to trade something for an advantage. The anti-air and anti-ground formations prevent you from attacking the other type of target, and the formation with both shots and bombs is extremely narrow, so you'll be switching between them constantly.

I must admit, this isn't one of my favourite Taito shmups from this era- I'm more of a Halley's Comet kind of person. The presentation is interesting in concept- you're flying over Tokyo and do get to spot a few landmarks here and there- but a lot of the game is spent inbetween those sections above the clouds which isn't quite as striking. It might just be me, but I also find the bullets really difficult to spot in a lot of these areas- they're quite small and don't stand out among the backgrounds which is pretty frustrating as it'll often take your mini-ships away from you and I've had multiple credits where I have no idea what killed me! It's also checkpoint-based, if that's the sort of thing you need to know. Still, you might find it interesting, plus it has a great soundtrack.