(dogs barking)

Howdy, readers! The game you're going to read about today should hardly need an introduction. Since its release, it's touched the hearts of players everywhere and brought new meaning to video gaming itself. Chances are, unless you've either been ignoring video-game-related news for the past year or been living under a rock, you've already heard of this game and possibly even played it for yourself, or at least gotten annoyed by its massive fanbase. Whatever the case, it's surely had quite the impact on video game culture.

I am, of course, talking about Winnie-the-Pooh's Home Run Derby.

The nightmare becomes reality.

Just kidding! It's Undertale.

A friendly game!

Writing about Undertale here is difficult, for several reasons. First, it's (currently) the only game on this blog that actually costs money in and of itself, and although there's a free demo and the full game is a reasonable $10, that is money nonetheless. Second, as mentioned before, there's a good chance that you already know things about this game even if you haven't played it, due to its media coverage and extremely vocal fandom. Finally, and most importantly, Undertale is really the sort of game that really benefits from going into it with as few expectations or prior knowledge as possible. So, I'm going to be vague about a lot of things, but I hope to convey at least some sense of what's going on.

The opening.

Undertale takes place in a world inhabited by both humans and monsters. The monsters were sealed underneath the earth as the result of a war between the two peoples, and since then, they have been trying to escape their underground prison. You play as a human who has fallen into the underground and must defend themselves from monster attacks as they try to reach the surface world.

Gameplay-wise, Undertale is usually described as being a turn-based RPG, but it's very different from how these sorts of games are normally done. Sure, you run around rooms, check objects, solve puzzles, and get attacked by monsters, but there's several key differences in the way that these monsters are represented. For one, while many turn-based RPGs require players to simply defend and heal from enemy attacks, here every monster fires bullets which the player (represented by a tiny cute heart) must physically dodge. It's reminiscent of old-school shoot-'em-up games, and it's a system that strongly rewards skill over luck or grinding.

Individual bullet patterns provide not only difficulty, but also personality.

The human's side of the fight is drastically simplified from the average RPG, too. While most games give you all sorts of wonderful weapons with which to annihilate your foes or strengthen yourself, Undertale only has a few basic types of actions. FIGHTing is the only way to actually damage and kill monsters, and it's quick and efficient. On the other hand, the human can also ACT, which provides a variety of possible interactions that are different depending on the monster. Once certain actions are performed, the MERCY option allows the human to spare the foe and end the conflict nonviolently. The dichotomy between attacking and sparing monsters is a very big and important part of the game. While it may be appealing to avoid violence in every possible situation, killing monsters is the only way to gain experience and level up, and unless the human gets stronger, later fights will get more and more difficult, to the point that the player may feel forced to grind in order to beat tough opponents. And in some cases, one or the other option might seem to be unavailable. Tough calls have to be made often.

And the impact goes beyond gameplay. Each and every monster is designed to have its own personality and given at least a little bit of dialogue. It's up to the player to decide whether their foes will live or die, and these choices really do matter, in ways that are often unexpected (and just as often totally expected). Describing the exact consequences delves furiously into spoiler territory; just know that Undertale will make sure you remember your decisions, even hours into your journey.

Maybe it's best to just be nice to everyone. Or maybe not...

And what a journey it is. Undertale is filled with fantastical lands, dangerous adventures, bad puns, skeletons, bad puns about skeletons, pasta, incredible music, things that don't entirely make sense, and an uncountable number of dogs. It's a world of emotion, where even the most minor of NPCs come to life vibrantly. Underlying everything is an incredible, occasionally warped sense of humor that parodies every aspect of normal life and every convention of video games, all mixed generously with genuine feeling. When you're not laughing your butt off, you might just be crying. Sometimes both within the space of a single scene.

Well, sometimes, anyway.

Most importantly, you'll be thinking. Undertale's choices go beyond the battle system and permeate every element of the lives of the underground's denizens. It's a game that, even when it's cracking silly jokes about fast-food restaurants, feels meaningful both inside the game and in your own life. Even though many parts of the game are totally beyond anything reasonable in reality, Undertale asks players to look beyond the fantasy and into their own reality, to examine their own lives and the very real choices they make.

It's easy for a game that tries to have deep meaning to come off as shallow or pretentious. However, Undertale is also very self-aware about its nature as a video game, and makes sure to balance out its serious elements with loads of humor and personality, as well as being just plain fun to play. As a result, the game's style has earned it a spectacular number of fans. Of course, the fandom sometimes proves detrimental to experiencing the game, as spoilers are thrown around with no mercy, and the game's often accused of being overhyped. Realistically, it won't solve your life problems or cure the world's ills. It's only a video game, right? But it's a great video game, and if you're even a little bit interested in video games, it's definitely worth your $10.

A Dark Room (less is more)

More and more games nowadays try to cram as much content, beauty, awe, and spectacle as possible into one package. While it's true that this does sometimes result in incredible masterpieces, it's also true that sometimes, you don't need high-definition graphics, sweeping soundtracks, or hundreds of hours of bonus features in a great game. Sometimes, all you need is A Dark Room.

This is what the game looks like.

As you might expect, A Dark Room begins with you in a room, and as it turns out, that room is dark. Fortunately, you can make a fire to bring light and warmth to the dark room. Stoking the fire for a while leads to other wanderers finding your room, which opens up new actions, which lead to other things happening... From this point, A Dark Room is difficult to classify. At first, it seems like a text-based adventure game, but soon the player is charged with producing and managing resources, and then other gameplay elements are added in, and from there new complications keep appearing. I suppose it could be called a mystery, where the conundrum to be solved is what the game even is.

As you begin to get the hang of things, the game starts to look more like this. But I'm only scratching the surface...

The one thing that A Dark Room never gives you is any sort of instruction on how to do things or what needs to be done next. You're simply thrown right into the room without so much as a physical description of yourself, and the game actions given to you speak for themselves. One might think that this could be confusing, but there's a certain wonderful simplicity to the style of the gameplay; while new actions keep getting added as the game progresses, they're given at a slow rate to ease the player into getting used to the new factors, and few things get much more complicated than "press this button". Rarely is your full attention required, and then only for short bursts at a time. Certain parts can and should be completed by just leaving the game open to run itself while you do something else. Overall, it does a great job of tying many disparate gameplay elements together in a way that doesn't feel disjointed or rough, but instead carries momentum right up to the all-too-soon conclusion.

This simplicity extends to every element of the game. Rather than show off with fancy graphics, A Dark Room instead confines itself to the black-and-white text-based format, as can be seen in the screenshots here. There's no sound other than what you provide. Occasionally graphics do appear, but they're made entirely out of text too, and the vast majority of the game is just written out. The game's writing is itself very minimalistic; there's little to no dialogue, and every event or object, no matter how major, gets only a bare, straightforward description, no more than a few sentences. Even capitalization is rare.

Even in tragedy, the game rarely breaks tone.

Normally, such writing runs the risk of coming across as bland and unemotional, but A Dark Room uses this style skillfully and brilliantly. There's layers of characterization and worldbuilding hidden subtly throughout the game's events, and sometimes a single line or even one word can dramatically twist the story. The result is an engrossing narrative where nothing can be taken for granted, and questions the player never even thought to ask get unexpected solutions. Ultimately, the answers to the game's mysteries are never stated outright, instead indirectly implied through the simple descriptions and left largely to the player's imagination. I won't go into much more detail about the plot or setting for obvious reasons, but it's definitely worth pursuing to the end. There's value in playing more than once, to catch details that may have escaped notice the first time but turn out to be shockingly important or foreshadowing (it helps that the game is fairly quick to finish, taking a few hours at most including idling time).

A Dark Room is truly a unique game, one that never seems to be entirely clear in its meaning but constantly leads players onward in search of solutions that only lead to more questions. Combine that with smooth, casual gameplay, fantastic writing, and a genuinely interesting story layered under all that mystery, and the one thing that becomes obvious about A Dark Room is that it's a game that's absolutely worth your time.

I Wanna Be The Guy (But Is It Really Worth It?)

In choosing games to write up for this blog, I've generally stuck to a few self-imposed rules. Use mainly freeware games that don't take lots of effort to find and download (while this does sadly exclude pretty much every console game ever made, it's a lot easier on me and on readers to stick to a college-student budget of zero dollars). Only post about games I've actually played and beaten at some point. And, most importantly: talk about GOOD GAMES. I don't want to waste my time or your time on something that's just plain bad, even if it's kinda fun to mock for a while.

But sometimes, being a bad game just isn't important. And sometimes, I just can't push myself through a whole game. And, every once in a while, there comes along a game where both of these are the whole point.

Which brings me to I Wanna Be The Guy.

The Movie: The Game.

The game opens with a very brief text scroll detailing the life of "The Kid" and his eponymous quest to become "The Guy"; this is pretty much as far as story goes in this game. Experienced gamers (read: nerds) may find that the whole sequence looks a little familiar. Yes, I Wanna Be The Guy is jam-packed with references and elements directly lifted from other games, primarily from ye olden days of the NES. But if you're expecting an ordinary, cute retro platform game, you're in for some surprises, which I'm now going to proceed to ruin for you. Behold one of the earliest areas of the game:

The Kid is down near the bottom there.

Even armed with nothing but a tiny pea-shooter, a double-jump, and a big ol' smile, this doesn't look like much of a challenge, right? Just walk through those trees and...watch as one of the red fruits falls from above and crushes the Kid, turning him into a ludicrously massive pile of pixelated blood. (If you don't like ludicrously massive piles of pixelated blood, this is not the game for you.) It's possible to rush past a few fruits, but players will quickly find it's much easier to just jump over the fruit, thus avoiding delicious death from above.

At which point the fruit flies upward to kill the Kid mid-jump.

Get used to this.

I Wanna Be The Guy is a game won not through skill or reflexes, but through perseverance and pure trial and error. Eventually, a persistent player will be able to pick their way through the fruity minefield and make their way to the next screen, where even more tricks and traps await. It's as much a puzzle game as a platformer, and "solving" the many death chambers sometimes requires totally counterintuitive moves, upending everything you thought you knew about playing video games. There's a lot that must be memorized and pulled off flawlessly, and save points are often scarce. One wrong move, and it's back through the same gauntlet of fruit, spikes, malevolent platforms, and giant airplanes. To make matters worse, there's bosses to fight as well, and commiting their attack patterns to memory often isn't enough to best their challenges.

Bosses are generally familiar characters from familiar games, with unexpected twists. Case in point: Giant Mike Tyson.

Is this fun? The average gamer would say, "Heck no." But the game isn't supposed to be fun, in the conventional sense. Its appeal is to players who seek to pit themselves against the toughest challenges available, overcoming obstacles for no other reason than because they can, and eventually being able to brag to their friends that "I am the Guy!" (Neeerds.)

Of course, anyone outside that particular group will quickly grow bored and/or irritated, especially as the game's presentation suffers from issues similar to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. It's a mishmash of graphics and sound either created originally or pulled from other games, and as such it tends to clash with itself. A lot of humor is derived from referencing other games (would you have guessed that was Mike Tyson, specifically?) or it's just offensive (the game's idea of mocking you for playing on the easiest difficulty is giving the Kid a big pink bow, as if the worst possible insult is comparing him to a girl). It also contains gratituous blood, swearing, and slurs that are there for no other reason than to seem Cool and Edgy. And obviously, some people just don't want to play a game where they do nothing but die

over

and over

and over again.

But hey, if you are the kind of person whose idea of a good time is ramming headlong into the same spike wall ten times in a row, then I Wanna Be The Guy is right up your alley. It's by no means a good game, but it doesn't try to be a good game; it tries to be a hard game, and in that area, it certainly delivers.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (Everybody Get Up, It's Time to Slam Now)

Ever since I posted about OFF, people have been saying: "You should write about another obscure indie RPG with a bizarre premise, a post-apocalyptic setting, and a protagonist who plays sports!" Actually, no, I don't think anyone has said that, ever. But in any case, you're all in luck! Introducing Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, or as it's properly called, Tales of Game's Studios Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa.

Really.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden follows the story of Charles Barkley, real-life professional basketball player extraordinaire, living in an alternate timeline ravaged by the Cyberpocalypse. B-ball was once one of the Post-Cyberpocalypse's few joys, but all of that changed when Barkley performed a dangerous maneuver called the "Chaos Dunk" in the middle of a heated b-ball game; the resulting cataclysmic death and destruction led to the sport being banned and many of its greatest stars hunted down and executed. Barkley was one of the few survivors, but the world was never the same without b-ball, and he still carries the weight of his sins.

And so the stage is set for an adventure that is essentially one long running joke about basketball, the Internet, and the RPG genre as a whole. Honestly, without a premise like that, this would be a pretty ordinary game. You explore dungeons, fight monsters, level up to fight stronger monsters, and eventually get to fight some really strong monsters to win the game. The environments are simple, with few puzzles of any sort to be found, and while combat mechanics are surprisingly solid, they're rarely used to much effectiveness. All in all, it would be an average RPG.

Except, y'know, it's Charles Barkley doing all that stuff.

But this is not an average RPG. This is Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and with a name like that, presentation is everything. Not that the presentation here is good, mind you; for starters, virtually all of the game's graphics are "borrowed" from various other games and shoved together haphazardly (although the soundtrack is both mostly original and pretty sweet). No, every moment of the game, from the moment the theme from Space Jam strikes up on the title screen, is devoted to pushing the sheer ridiculousness of the Post-Cyberpocalyptic world as far as it can go. Nearly everything is devoted to the glory of b-ball, from the real-life basketball stars who populate both this world and the next, to the bouncing and dribbling ghosts and referees who make up the bulk of Barkley's foes, to a character whose skin is replaced with basketball leather. References abound to the great teams and b-ballers of the past, as well as to the aforementioned Space Jam, that '90s movie where Michael Jordan teamed up with the Looney Tunes to beat aliens in a basketball game. (By the way, the events of that movie are canon to Barkley's plotline, and provide an important plot point.) It's all about as cheesy and over-the-top as you can imagine.

Our heroes visit the B-Ball Dimension.

When Barkley isn't hamming it up on the court, it's parodying those RPG games that all the nerds are playing off the court. The plot could be described like nearly any other game: our strong and masculine hero with a dark and troubled past makes new friends, faces betrayal, and overcomes impossible odds to defeat a mysterious villainous organization set on acquiring a mystical artifact with the potential to destroy worlds. Sure, said hero is Charles Barkley, and said mystical artifact is a scientifically-engineered basketball, but when this is stripped away, Barkley shows that RPGs in general are just as ridiculous already. Several specific common tropes show up and are quickly slammed, particularly the tendency of many games to bring up new plotlines out of nowhere and drop them just as fast, and throwing in new antagonists and dei ex machina just to shake things up. The result is a story that, while obviously flawed, shows a clear sense of self-awareness that keeps things fresh and humorous. Indeed, the impression that I got from much of the game is that the developers could have made a really great game if they wanted to, but instead intentionally chose to create Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.

Unfortunately, Barkley is not the perfect parody one would hope for after seeing such a title affixed to such a game. Its sense of humor is very referential, both to professional basketball and to the video gaming community. The things I "got" gave me plenty a chuckle, and even some of the more obscure in-jokes had enough context to still have hilarious effect. However, referential humor is bound to fail at some point or another. References to great basketball players and sports events were generally lost on me, and even as a self-described Person Who Cares Way Too Much About Video Games, I still found myself running to Google on occasion to figure out just what an Angelique: Tenkuu no Chinkonka is and why I should care. And generally, jokes that require the recipient to run to Google to figure out the punchline don't work.

At least I learned a lot about Ghost Dad.

More importantly, though, there are times when Barkley's attempts to be wacky and off-the-wall cross a line and become offensive. Much of the dialogue is filled to the brim with swear words for no real reason, which could be interpreted as making fun of games that do similar to make themselves seem "edgier", but here it just gets annoying (and definitely not child-friendly). While the game generally tries to avoid straying into racist or sexist territory, it's to be noted that there are approximately three major female characters in the entire game - a game whose all-male player party is made up of four people. Being a game about pro basketball, one might be tempted to give it a pass here (pun absolutely intended), but it's still pretty jarring when the number of women in the game is about equal to the number of people named Barkley. And insensitivity even extends to the gameplay itself, where standard RPG status effects like "poisoned" and "confused" are replaced with real-world conditions such as "diabetes" and "Asperger's" and other things which are generally considered Not A Joke.

I don't want to end this article on a low note, so have this picture.

Is Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden a good game? That's certainly debatable. But Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is not about being a good game. It's about slams and jams, about the squeak of shoes on the court and the bouncing beat of b-balls on blacktops, the three-point shots that tie up the game in the fourth quarter and the slam-dunks that write and rewrite the history books. And it's a game about being a bad game. Whether or not it's successful at failure or just plain a failure is...also debatable. If you want a good RPG, go try out OFF, or Star Stealing Prince, or Undertale. But if you want an RPG where Charles Barkley can take on a trenchcoat-wearing Michael Jordan in space with nothing but two double-dribbled b-balls and raw athletic skill, look no further than Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.

Oh, and be on the lookout for The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. To be released in 2013. Mark your calendars now.