Texture is often as important as flavor to me, if not more so, when it comes to food. I like tomato sauce but not tomatoes; I like cherry flavor but not cherries. Call me weird if you must, but I'd say rejecting a food because of its texture is like rejecting a hug because the person offering it is covered in mud. Fruit, in particular, is a texture minefield for me—there are very few fruits I enjoy eating, despite how much I enjoy various fruit juices and fruit-flavored foods. Apples are by far my favorite fruit: gimme something I can bite into with a nice crunch and no seeds, stems, or pulp (at least, not right away). Sadly, I haven't had a good apple in several years.

Actually, let me amend that statement: It's been several years since I've had consistently good apples. I don't recall exactly when it was, but I started noticing that the quality of the apples at my local grocery store was declining—the apples I bought didn't taste like much of anything, or else they tasted more like the tree than its fruit. Prior to that, I remember a vibrant array of flavors: Macintosh, Pink Lady, Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Macoun, Pacific Rose, Winesap...even in an off-year when crops weren't doing as well, the taste of each variety was distinct and dependable. I figured my local grocery store had started buying its fruit from somewhere else, or was getting it shipped in too early or too late in the season. Surely an entire category of fruit couldn't suddenly lose its appeal.

I soon discovered my local grocery store wasn't unique in this regard: every major chain I went to was selling disappointing apples. Stop & Shop, ShopRite, Pathmark, Shaw's, Target, Walmart, Weis, Aldi...perhaps a fancy-pants Whole Foods or Wegmans somewhere had stolen all the good fruit? Even the smaller farm markets and corner stores I visited were hit-or-miss with their apples. In a matter of months, apples had gone from a diverse and reliable treat to a decent alternative to bananas, I guess. Tolerable apples were common, good apples were few and far between, and great apples were incredibly rare. The texture was basically the same as always, but now the flavor was lacking. It was heartbreaking.

I was in Cortland, New York recently, the birthplace of Cortland apples. I've got many almost-favorite apples, but Cortland is decisively my favorite: a perfect balance of crispness and softness, a lovely bright white interior, and delightfully sweet. I'd hardly seen a Cortland in the last few years, let alone had a good one; of course I was going to stock up at the local farm we spotted. And you know what? The apples were good. Certainly above average. But...not the same as I remembered them. If it weren't for the sign on the table, I wouldn't have guessed what type they were, before or after eating them. I couldn't even recognize my favorite apple.

Kinda sounds like all my other favorite fandoms, doesn't it? I barely recognize Metroid, Star Trek, Mega Man, etc. as such in their latest incarnations, and now I don't even know what my favorite apple is like.

Fortunately, this story has an unequivocally happy ending. A week later, I was at a small farm stand elsewhere that was selling apples. Cortland apples. And these ones looked like the real deal. And so they were. A perfect balance of crispness and softness, a lovely bright white interior, and delightfully sweet. Almost as though I'd plucked them from the tree where they grew in my memory, where I could still distinguish between different types of apples without the aid of a sign. This wasn't some nostalgia kick; this was the world remembering with me that apples aren't all supposed to taste like leaves and twigs.

And I'll be darned if every single Cortland in the basket didn't taste equally superb. Maybe there's hope for the fruiture after all.

I've enjoyed adventure games for as long as I've known the genre existed, but there aren't too many adventure games I've managed to finish without some outside help. Often, turning to a walkthrough or hint book is a matter of impatience—given enough time, I can usually figure out how to get past the puzzles and areas that have me stumped, but there comes a certain point when going around in circles simply isn't fun anymore. More recently, I've discovered a new reason for giving up: recognizing when the developers haven't provided the kinds of clues and structure I require to have any chance of succeeding by my own brainpower. I may not be an adventure game expert yet, but I've played enough of 'em to tell when the designer and I aren't thinking alike.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not the logic behind the puzzle solution that matters; rather, it's how you present the puzzle to the player. A puzzle only works well if the player thinks the same way the developer does—and just like any platformer or FPS or RPG, there needs to be a learning curve to ensure the player is thinking the way the developer wants him or her to. A great idea for a puzzle is only the beginning—the implementation is critical.

Based on my experience as a player, along with my experience as a Dungeon Master who likes to throw riddles and puzzles at his Dungeons & Dragons players from time to time, here are three key rules I've developed for implementing puzzles that are both intuitive and enjoyable:

1.) Make it clear that there is a puzzle. There's a big difference between exploration and aimless wandering—keeping the players focused on accomplishing tasks and overcoming obstacles strengthens the story and makes the gameplay more engaging than if the players spend the whole game looking for something to do.

2.) Provide clear and consistent feedback about what does and doesn't work. Adventure game players are problem-solvers, not mind-readers; unclear, misleading, and absent feedback about a player's actions can ruin even the most logical puzzles.

3.) Establish clear causality. People of all different cultures, languages, religions, and educational backgrounds will potentially play your game—the more your puzzle solutions rely on knowledge not communicated inside the game, the more likely your logic will come across as baffling and obtuse to anyone who doesn't share your background or way of thinking.

To help emphasize the importance of these three rules, I'd like to present a series of examples from King's Quest V—which prompted this post in the first place—that demonstrate how a conceptually sound idea can provide a great challenge in one game but a terrible challenge in another, depending on the implementation. Needless to say, spoilers ahoy.

Challenge: Enlist the help of others to accomplish something you can't do alone.

A recurring theme in King's Quest V is helping others who, in return, help you. After tricking a meddlesome dog into leaving the colony of ants it's been terrorizing, the leader of the ants (whose speech you can understand due to some magic) thanks you profusely and offers to help you in any way you might need. Now, one might expect to be able to talk to the ants again to request a favor, or perhaps to see an ant icon on the inventory screen that can be used to call in the ants precisely where you choose. Instead, you get...nothing. The ants don't discuss the offer further, so you can only assume you'll need to come back and ask again once you've come across something they can help with.

Wrong! All you have to do is click on the right object, and the ants will automatically deploy. Perhaps you've seen the haystack behind the inn. Perhaps you searched it, hoping to find the proverbial needle, with no success. Perhaps you noticed the back door of the inn, which is near to the haystack, and began envisioning a scenario where you could get the bandits inside the inn to chase you through the back door, at which point you could dive into the haystack and wait for the bandits to disperse in search of you elsewhere, leaving the inn empty for you to safely explore. Perhaps you weren't expecting anything different to happen when, out of tired desperation to figure out what to do next, you clicked on the haystack for a second or third time. Perhaps you were surprised to see a colony of ants march into the haystack without any prompting whatsoever, coming from a screen that isn't even within earshot of this one, to retrieve an item (the proverbial needle) that you haven't been given a reason to search for, especially after the game told you the first time you clicked that there were no needles in this haystack! All three rules are thrown to the wind here.

It should also be noted that Cedric, the owl who follows you throughout the entire game, does not once offer to lift a finger (assuming owls have fingers) when it comes to doing anything he could possibly help with. Cedric, could you hop onto those icy platforms to see if they break under your weight before I go hopping on them? Cedric, could you distract the gypsy man so I can sneak into his wagon? Cedric, could you swoop in and pluck that poisonous snake from the path while his attention's on me? No? Of course, Cedric. Tell me how to get to the bakehouse again, because that's all you know how to do.

Gemini Rue is a game that does this kind of challenge right. There's a tense sequence relatively early in the game where you and your buddy Matthius are trying to escape from a building that's now swarming with enemy goons. You make a break for the exit, but you can't get the door to the roof open. Trapped at the end of the hallway, you have only moments to open that door before bad guys start pouring in through the way you entered. Fortunately, you're not alone—Matthius is just as capable of kicking doors and picking locks as you are, and you can instruct him to perform different actions on anything you can click on. With a little teamwork, you can make it out alive. All three rules are intact here: it's obvious that the door to the roof is the only way out; you get clear and immediate feedback from the game about how Matthias can be used to assist you; and the consequences of your actions (and inaction) are plainly visible and stem from the logical interplay of armed goons, two average-strength heroes, one door you can open, and one door you can't.

Challenge: Navigate an area that's seemingly endless.

In King's Quest V, the land of Serenia turns into endless desert if you travel far enough west. Cedric the talking owl tells you that. And even if you didn't believe him, you'd find out for yourself, and end up dying of dehydration after a few screens. It truly is nothing but desert. You start to make a map, or perhaps move systematically through the desert, but then you notice the same four screens repeating. And then you die of dehydration again. Heck, the northernmost part of the desert is up against a steep cliff, and that's the same screen over and over if you try to cross the desert up there. Besides, you've played King's Quest III and you remember that there's nothing across any given endless desert except death. You have absolutely no reason to explore the desert. You've ventured into the desert three times, in three different places, and there is nothing there.

Except for the oasis you missed that's four screens in. And the skeleton with the grody old boot. And the bandit tent with the magic staff that lets you into the temple with the coin and the bottle you need in order to solve two of the game's most pivotal puzzles. But you've already explored about 20 screens of the explicitly-stated-to-be-endless desert and found nothing but dehydration, death, and reused backgrounds. So, no, as far as you're concerned, there is nothing out there. If you happen across a jug of water or somesuch later on, perhaps you'll bother with the desert again. Until then, out of sight, out of mind.

You never do find that jug of water.

In The Secret of Monkey Island, there's an underground network of lava-filled caves that is so confusing to navigate that the landscape might completely change when you backtrack to a screen you were just on. You know for a fact that you'll have to go through here to reach the villainous Ghost Pirate LeChuck, but even if you hadn't just spent this entire portion of the game trying to gain access to this area, this confusing maze is too far out of the way to simply be a dead-end. Based on your experience with the confusing forest earlier in the game, there's gotta be some trick to getting through...and so there is: some cannibals who captured you earlier mentioned a Head of the Navigator that'll be perfect for the job.

King's Quest V violates Rule # 1 and Rule # 2 with its endless desert--there's no obvious need to enter the desert, and the feedback you get about the desert all points to it being a dead-end that's meant only to kill you, or else a place you're not ready to enter yet. The Secret of Monkey Island, on the other hand, leads you directly into the endless caves, so there's no question of whether you should bother with them, and makes a puzzle out of obtaining the item you know you need to make it through the caves—though you're certainly welcome to try navigating them on your own.

Challenge: Avoid detection.

By the end of King's Quest V, you've infiltrated the castle of the evil wizard Mordack in an attempt to rescue your family. As far as you can tell, Mordack is unaware of your presence, so you poke around the castle a bit, taking your time to examine your surroundings. Halfway across the dining room, Mordack appears out of nowhere and magically chokes you to death, offering you no opportunity to defend yourself or run away. Okay, you think to yourself as you reload, maybe walking around out in the open is a mistake. I'll stick to the walls and move faster next time. On your second attempt, you get a little deeper into the castle, but Mordack still shows up and puts an end to you. Wow, you think. There really isn't any time to lollygag. I'll rush through next time and will examine each room more closely once I've got a way to protect myself. Yet even that doesn't work; it seems there are specific locations where Mordack will show up no matter how quickly you move, but his timing elsewhere is still unpredictable—sometimes he shows up right away, and sometimes he lets you go through several rooms without incident.

King's Quest V fudges Rule # 1 and ignores Rule # 3 altogether. What, exactly, is the puzzle here? Is it avoid Mordack? Is it confront Mordack? Is there a pattern to his movements? Is there something specific you're doing (or not doing) to hasten his arrival? Is this just a sign that you shouldn't be poking around the castle until you've done something else first? Who knows?! If you're going off of your encounter with the witch back in the forest earlier in the game, then the obvious answer is that Mordack appears at random and you need a powerful magical charm to ward off his attacks...but the real answer is that you first need to thwart one of his goons—a big, blue beast that appears at random and for some reason hasn't shown up for you yet—so that Mordack will appear less frequently. The nature of the puzzle is unclear, the relationship between the different components is unclear, and there's a randomized, unrelated component you don't even know you're missing!

Contrast this with Space Quest I, which starts you off aboard a starship that's been invaded by hostile aliens. Every so often, you'll see a message that you hear footsteps; moments later, alien soldiers show up. It becomes apparent after the first encounter that they shoot on sight, so unless you can rustle up a weapon of some sort, the only way to survive is to avoid them. Outrunning them is difficult, if not impossible, but there are elevators you can duck into to hide from them—and the game congratulates you the first time you evade the aliens. All three rules are fully intact here: You know enemy soldiers are actively patrolling the corridors, you're given a warning to go hide yourself, and you get clear feedback about whether your course of action is successful.

Challenge: Wait for the situation to change.

If you can stay alive long enough in King's Quest V to explore the top floor of Mordack's castle, you'll come across a strange machine with a plate on either side and large cones pointing down at the plates. After some experimentation, you discover that it's possible to activate the machine (nevermind how; dropping a piece of moldy cheese into the machine deserves a paragraph of its own). You also find that you can leave your useless magic wand on one of the plates, so perhaps you can drop something on the other plate to recharge your wand or something. Exploring the castle more, you find Mordack's bedroom and an adjacent library. There's a spellbook there, and you memorize the first two pages you see...but now what? Getting the machine to work seems like the only way you can recharge your wand to cast those spells and rescue your miniaturized family from their prison, but none of the items you have on you will do the trick. Are you missing something?

Yes. Obviously, you need to steal Mordack's wand.

But...it's never explicitly stated that you need Mordack's wand to complete the circuit on the machine, and the game doesn't let you figure that out for yourself by putting incorrect items—even magical ones—in its place. I tried transferring magic power into my useless wand from my no-longer-helpful magical amulet (nice job you did protecting me from Mordack's death magic!) but was denied without explanation. You figure there's gotta be something to put on the other plate, but there's not enough direction as to what that might be. Heck, you can't even tell that Mordack has a wand unless you're looking extremely closely; there's no grand flourish where his whips his wand around, so it usually looks like he just Force Chokes you to death. There's not even an indication that he's got a special place to store his wand—clicking on the little table where he eventually rests his wand gives you the same message as clicking on his bed. Rule #1 is on the rocks here, and Rule #2 is on vacation.

Even if you haven't figured out what the deal with the machine is, maybe you've considered secretly swapping out Mordack's wand for your useless one, so that he'll blindly pick it up and have it fizzle when he tries to kill you again. The problem is the same in either case: How do you get Mordack's wand? Every time Mordack appears, you die before you have any opportunity to react. You've played King's Quest III, and Mordack is the brother of the evil wizard from that game, so maybe Mordack also keeps his wand locked away in a safe when he's not choking you with it. Not seeing a safe anywhere, you scour each room from top to bottom, clicking on every object with every icon you have.

The solution? Wait in the library until Mordack appears in the bedroom to take a nap, at which point you can steal his wand and use it with the machine. OK, so let's throw all three rules into the bonfire now.

Standing around everywhere else in the castle has gotten you killed repeatedly, so there's no reason to think the library will treat you any differently--especially with a creepy eye over the doorway tracking your every move, like a magical security camera. At no point do you see any indication that Mordack is getting tired, or that his bedtime is approaching, or that there's anything he's got on his agenda today aside from killing you. And there's virtually no chance of accidentally discovering that Mordack takes a nap, because even the most thorough adventurer will run out of things to click on well before Mordack shows up: despite a grand variety of books and interesting objects on the table, you get one response for clicking anything on the bookshelf, and one response for clicking anything on the table that isn't the aforementioned spellbook. With as quickly as you've needed to move through the rest of the castle, it's unreasonable to expect the player to slow down so much when there's no obvious need or incentive to do so.

This wasn't a problem two installments ago—or, at least, it isn't a problem in King's Quest III Redux, a fan-made remake of the third game in the series. Mordack's evil brother Manannan is constantly on your case for a large portion of the game, but you've got a timer at the top of the screen that changes colors depending on how close Manannan is to checking in on you. Even without the timer, it's established almost immediately that Manannan goes about his evil business and has different things he likes to do in different rooms of the house. He'll bust you if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he's clearly on a schedule, and he's clearly got more things to occupy his time than just turning you into a pile of ashes. Manannan's house is where he lives; it's not simply where you die. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a player to try waiting around in a specific location with that kind of foundation in place.


King's Quest V is chock-full of problematic puzzles; I'm only scratching the surface here. The rules of clear objective, clear feedback, and clear causality are broken left and right throughout the game. In my tirade about King's Quest IV, I reiterated that these games really aren't my style, but I'm wondering more and more as I play through the King's Quest series whether it really is just a matter of taste. If I can appreciate good game design in genres I'm not too keen on (such as tactical RPGs—I disliked playing Shining Force but I don't think it's a bad game), then I should be able to appreciate good game design in genres I love, regardless of my style preferences. I laud King's Quest V for its beautiful graphics, clean interface, decent story, and acceptable voice acting (even the high-pitched Cedric isn't that bad after playing through Mega Man X7); it's the gameplay that spoils it for me. I knew there would be aimless wandering, random events, and unannounced time-based challenges, but accurate expectations didn't make the game any more intuitive or enjoyable.

King's Quest VI, it's up to you to persuade me that your series can deliver both great ideas and great execution. I'll buy you a little time to prepare yourself--Quest for Glory has been calling my name, I'm due for another round of Leisure Suit Larry, and I've had this sudden hankering to play Tomb Raider 2. Be ready.

Despite all the critical analysis (read: complaining) I do on this blog about one thing or another, I consider myself to be a pretty upbeat guy. I have my dark and serious moments like anyone else, but I'm a fairly reliable source of positive energy. Still, every so often I need a boost to get me out of a slump—a little reassurance that I am liked, that I am loved, and that what I do has meaning. I can tell myself these things are true, and I can know in my mind or my heart that they're true, but nothing beats being on the receiving end of someone else honestly expressing those sentiments, in actions or in words.

Over the course of the last week or so, I've received a tremendous amount of encouragement: uplifting feedback at work, glowing praise for my creative projects, comments on posts and videos I wasn't sure would get comments, an enthusiastic and out-of-the-blue message from someone I haven't seen in forever, kind and thoughtful words from a close friend who was thinking of me, a phone call expressing a newfound appreciation for the videos I make...and that's to say nothing of the love notes my wife regularly sneaks into my lunch, or the smiles I get from strangers in the elevator when my attempts to be friendly and funny actually work.

We get so wrapped up in living for ourselves sometimes that it's easy to forget we're not alone. We get used to living inside our own heads; often we don't think about how important we are to others or how important they are to us until a strong reminder shakes us out of our self-reverie. Sometimes all it takes is an impromptu bouquet of flowers or a cheerful e-mail. Other times it's a story on the news that's too close to home, a car accident, or a suicide note. I feel like a dork sometimes when I try to say or do something nice when there's no holiday or event that prompts me to, but it's usually worth that fleeting moment of awkwardness to make that connection with someone. From the self-conscious convention-goer who thinks her costume is terrible to the chef at the breakfast buffet who's making perfect omelets, we have countless opportunities to give encouragement to total strangers—how many more opportunities do we have with the people we know?

How many opportunities do we let slip because we assume our love and appreciation go without saying?

For what it's worth, and at the risk of sounding awkward, I'm grateful for your encouragement. Doesn't matter if I know you personally or if we've never met before. Whether it's a "thinking of you" phone call, an exclamation from across the parking lot that you love my t-shirt, a huge hug, or a simple Like for something I post on Facebook or YouTube, it all makes a difference.

After such a tedious and disappointing experience playing EarthBound Zero, you'd think I'd want to take a break from tedious and disappointing. Instead, I started replaying Mega Man X7. There must be something wrong with me.

Mega Man X7 is not a game you'll hear too many fans say they love, let alone like. It's a major departure from the norm: most notably, the game adds a third playable character and a third dimension—the graphics are 3D instead of the traditional 2D, and gameplay shifts between classic sidescrolling action and an "all-range mode" at various points in each stage. There's also a bigger focus on the story, with occasional animated cutscenes and frequent "talking head" cutscenes interspersed throughout the game. All the standard upgrades of Heart Tanks and armor parts are supplemented by a choice of further upgrades (such as increased damage and longer saber combos) that can make a tremendous impact on the difficulty of the game. X7 doesn't introduce anything inherently abhorrent or out-of-place for an X game, but the ham-fisted execution of the new ideas combined with an inconsistent handling of the old ones makes the game stand out as different for all the wrong reasons.

In other words, it's pretty terrible.

The graphics are fine. The sound effects are functional. The music is good. With a few exceptions, control is pretty tight. Menus are clean and organized. The overall story isn't any worse than anything we've ever seen before in a Mega Man game. The voice acting is adequate, but not stellar. Replay value is higher than usual because of all the upgrades. Special weapons are generally useful and decently fun to use. Many aspects of the game are, at the very minimum, acceptable. Unfortunately, X7's problems are so widespread and are rooted so far below the surface that all the better aspects of the game would need to be amazing to compensate for them.

There's one place in the game that exemplifies nearly everything that's wrong with the X7, and that is the battle with Flame Hyenard. First off, "Hyenard." Seriously, "Hyena" isn't that difficult to spell. The battle begins on a very large square platform surrounded by lava; not one but two Flame Hyenards run at you, launching small fireballs at you, as a huge four-legged machine slowly and innocuously marches around the outside of the platform. Obviously you need to defeat Flame Hyenard, but it's not immediately obvious (a) which of the two Hyenards is the real thing, and (b) what the marching machine has to do with anything, aside from shooting missiles at you. Maybe you can turn on your radio to get some useful information from Alia, but you're so sick of, "Can you hear me... [overlong pause] ...Zero?" that you've learned to tune her out when she tries to contact you.

So you attack the Hyenards. And you discover the most unbearable sound in videogame history: Flame Hyenard shouting, "BURN IT TO THE GROUND!!!" or some variant thereof every time he attacks with fire. He is constantly attacking with fire. And there are two of him. Is there music in this battle? Because all I hear is, "BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND BURN IT TO THE GROUND" mute TV.

So you attack the Hyenards in silence, hoping there aren't any audio clues that are necessary to your survival in this battle. They soak up a lot of damage, and it doesn't look like the boss's health bar is going down, so either they're decoys or they need to be destroyed before you can fight the real boss. Then again, it's difficult to tell sometimes how much damage you're doing to a boss, if any at all; their health bars are long enough that the tiniest bit of damage should be easy to see, but even some of the most powerful attacks only shave off only a little bit at a time. Boss fights have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in length, depending on your technique—even the wimpiest attack in Mega Man X could fell a boss in 32 hits; Axl without any power-ups needs to unload hundreds of shots to take down the bosses in X7, and that's even before their health bars grow to ridiculous proportions in the final stages.

Oh, but here's a surprise: as soon as you destroy the Hyenards, new ones immediately take their places. So they are truly decoys. Guess you should look at taking out that huge walking robot, then. There's lock-on targeting system that should identify where you can hit the robot...but nothing's coming up. And you're still being hounded by Hyenards. Zero can't really get close enough to damage it, so you use X or Axl to look for a lock-on...but you don't realize you're just far enough away that you can't get a lock. Eventually, by accident, you lock onto a leg and start firing, and before too long you've managed to stop the machine in its tracks. Now what? Is there something else to lock onto? Are you too far away? The machine starts moving again, so whatever it is you need to do, you need to do it quickly. Stumped, you consult a walkthrough, which tells you to wall-jump up the side of the leg to get on top of the machine. Why, that's absurd. Wall-jumping only works on about five surfaces in the entire game, like this is Metroid Prime 2 or something. There's no way you're throwing yourself over a lava pit to try to wall-jump up a leg. Even if you do manage to grab the side of it, you'll probably fall off the moment you land at a funny angle that totally would've worked in any other X game.

You do it anyhow. And it kinda works. You're up on top of the machine, and it starts moving again. The real Flame Hyenard is there, and you manage to land a hit before he starts attacking with two of his clones. But hey, that time you did damage. Soon the Hyenards have got you trapped, circling around you with fireballs blazing as missiles launch from the doors beneath your feet. Now it's just a matter of damaging the right one—which would be a heck of a lot easier if you could disable this worthless auto-aim that's preventing you from firing where Hyenard is going to be by the time your weapon reaches him.

Tired of your auto-aimed shots just missing the circling targets, you get into position to fire a point-blank range during the next pass...except the machine you're standing on is still moving, and you're gradually sliding backwards out of position. Consequently, you miss a shot with Splash Laser, Flame Hyenard's weakness, and find yourself frantically pressing the button to take another shot...but nothing's coming out. Are you out of ammo already? The weapon energy bar is so absurdly thin that you have no idea how many shots you have left. Beyond that, the color gradient across the bar makes it unnecessarily difficult to read when it's partially full—the empty space in your energy bar was solid black in previous games, making it easy to tell the difference; now it's transparent, so your multicolored energy bar all too easily blends in when it's against a multicolored background.

Hours later, once you've spent some time away from the game, you'll have an epiphany that the downward-arcing Splash Laser went off the side of the machine, and you must've been locked out from firing another shot until the projectile was completely off the screen...and it's quite a fall from the top of the machine to the bottom of the lava pit.

Presumably out of weapon energy, you resort to charging up your buster as X to take out Flame Hyenard. Except there's this weird thing that happens sometimes where you try to fire a charged shot, and your charge just disappears. Like, poof. Not so much as a dinky shot fired. It's like you never started charging up at all. Which is a serious problem when you're rapidly losing health and need to kill this clown ASAP.

So you switch to Axl, or Zero; whoever the other person is with you at the time. And somehow you just manage to squeak by with a victory. And you proceed to the menu screen, where Alia will tell you AGAIN about how you can upgrade your systems thanks to the Reploids you rescued in the stage you just beat. Except you don't want to upgrade either of the people you have in your party at the moment. You want to save that upgrade and use it on the other guy. But you can't. And there are only 16 power-ups in the game to cover the 36 upgrades across all the three characters (12 upgrades per character). It's one thing to have more upgrades than you can afford to get in a single playthrough; it's another thing entirely to force you to buy upgrades at regular intervals when there's a third character you might want to upgrade who's not available until roughly halfway through the game. And it's not like it's safe to skip power-ups until you have him, either, because several of the Reploids you need to rescue can be permanently destroyed by nearby enemies if you leave them alone.

Once you've listened to Alia blather about everything from your new weapon to assigning power-ups to Hunter rankings, with no option to tell her to can it, it's back to the familiar menu choices: Stage Select, Save, or Exit to Title. Well, you have no interest in fighting Flame Hyenard again, so you definitely want to save your game. Alia asks you whether you really want to do that. You've been through this dozens of times with other games; just keep on clicking the confirmation button to speed your way through the options. Except X7, by default, positions your cursor on "No" instead of "Yes," as though the game is expecting you to make a mistake every time you choose an option. So instead of speeding through the saving process to quickly get back to the action, you need to carefully select each option, including whether or not you really want to save your game in that slot, and whether you really want to return to the game instead of the title screen. Between the endless prompts, the plentiful slow-moving text that you can't ever speed up, and the atrocious load times, the game screeches to a halt between stages. In the time it takes you just to save your game, you could've made it to the midway point of Air Man's stage in Mega Man 2.

Seriously. There are entire Mega Man games that are shorter than the amount of time you'll spend on the menu screen in X7.

Replaying X7 was inevitable, though: My first and only playthrough was a mess, both in terms of item collection and my ability to stay alive. It's not like me to leave a Mega Man game so far from 100% completion, and I'm too much of a fan to walk away from an installment I know I can do better at, no matter how much I dislike the game. Besides, with how drastically different the game experience can be depending on which boss order you choose, I strongly believe that you need to play through a Mega Man game at least twice to truly get a feel for it. X7 nagged at me both as a player and as a Mega Man expert of sorts: I owed it to myself, the game, and the people who listen to my opinions about Mega Man to give X7 a second chance. And if I was going to replay a game I was so glad to be done with, I was sure as heck gonna make sure to cross it off my Backloggery and not leave myself a reason to subject myself to the game ever again: this playthrough would be done on the hardest difficulty with the intent of 100% completion—if a single Reploid got killed before I could rescue him or her, I'd get up and manually reset the game, sitting through all the loading screens and replaying whatever miserable portion of the stage I'd gotten through just to try again.

Because clearly, I am insane.

I admit that the second time through X7 was notably better than the first. Not enough to improve my overall opinion of the game, but it was definitely less painful. Knowing what to expect helped me to structure my approach to the stages, and I could focus more on refining my strategy than figuring out what I was supposed to do in the first place. I also decided to try using Zero this time instead of relying entirely on Axl (and later, X) to keep my distance from the enemies who'd surely cut me apart even faster if I tried to get in close with Zero's melee attacks. As it turns out, Zero rocks. His attacks are very powerful, he's nearly unstoppable by the time all his key upgrades are in place, and the special attacks he gets from bosses are not as difficult to pull off as I'd originally thought. (I'm still haunted by visions of X6 and the Zero series, which feel more like combo-heavy fighting games than the platformers I'm any good at.)

The middle of X7 was honestly, genuinely enjoyable the second time around. My characters had been thoughtfully upgraded for a change and were powerful enough to be a fair match against the bad guys, before their health bars got all ridiculous in the last two stages. I discovered the joys of swatting back enemy projectiles with the Z-Saber, knowing where all the power-ups and Reploids were hidden so I didn't have to keep revisiting the stages to search for them, and using A-Trance against random stage enemies whose temporarily stolen abilities made life easier. I was comfortable enough with the challenges to start playing around with the special weapons more, trying them out in places where they were more of a gamble than my default weapon. And after the endless random battles and unnecessarily large locations in EarthBound Zero, I was in the right mindset to deal with the wide-open areas of X7 and all the start/stop action that comes from taking so long to get from one challenge to the next.

That, I think, is the primary reason I decided to replay X7 so soon after first beating it: EarthBound Zero warmed me up for it. I wanted something more modern, with less repetitive graphics and a more streamlined interface; X7 fit the bill. I had been dealing with skewed challenges and uneven character progression for so long that X7 would feel more like it was par for the course than a downgrade from the norm. EarthBound Zero's story progression and character motivations hardly made sense at times; I haven't even touched on how questionable X7's story really is when you start to analyze the cutscenes, but I wasn't getting my hopes up by turning to a game that promised to have a compelling and cohesive story. If I was ever going to replay X7, now was the time.

I never deliberately sit down to play a game because it's terrible. Unlike movies, I find that bad games rarely have the potential to be so bad they're good; that extra element of interactivity ruins the fun of watching a train wreck, because you're on the train when it crashes. My compulsion to play (and replay!) games after I've established they're terrible stems from my intellectual curiosity about what makes a game good or bad, my completionist tendencies, my loyalty to the franchises I love, my penchant to look for the positive amidst the negative, and my passion for objective analysis of a largely subjective medium.

Plus, bad games provide great inspiration for blog posts.

Are EarthBound Zero and Mega Man X7 truly terrible? No, I don't think so. There are absolutely redeeming factors in both games. But I'm in no hurry to recommend them to anyone. The low points are far too low and plentiful to gloss over, no matter how good the rest might be.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a talking owl who seems to want me to write about King's Quest V next.

A few days ago, I finished playing through EarthBound Zero, the never-released North American localization of the Famicom game Mother. The original EarthBound—AKA Mother 2—has been one of my all-time favorite games since I first played it back in the unforgettable year of 199X. Hilariously quirky dialogue? Creative characters and interesting locations that bear no resemblance to the overdone sword-and-sorcery aesthetic that dominates the RPG genre? Meaningful turn-based combat that requires legitimate strategy to survive? Free-roaming enemies you can see on the map, and potentially avoid if you're clever? Of course I'd want to play a prequel.

Trouble is, EarthBound Zero isn't a prequel. "Prequel" implies that a game takes place before the events of another game, but was created afterwards, potentially streamlining and improving on the original. In truth, EarthBound Zero (Mother) is the original, and EarthBound (Mother 2) streamlines and improves on it in virtually every way possible. EarthBound is a shining example of a sequel done so well that it's almost a waste of time to go back and play the original—which makes EarthBound Zero one heck of a lousy prequel.

Expectations make a huge difference in a person's enjoyment of a game. If you've read my review of Gemini Rue, you know that I've been guilty at least once before of letting myself be disappointed by a game for reasons completely beyond the game developers' control. Perhaps it was foolish of me to expect that EarthBound Zero's menu system would be as elegant as the one featured a half-decade later in EarthBound. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that a contemporary of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior would also have endless random battles out of nowhere. I might've been happier taking each new party member at face value instead of holding my breath for a full compliment of four party members, which I was certain was the standard. By playing the unreleased English version of Mother like it was a prequel to EarthBound, I found myself growing more and more disenchanted with the game.

Yet it wasn't solely my expectations that brought me down. Once I got past the initial shock of how unrefined the game was by comparison, various aspects of EarthBound Zero continued to nag at me. The music, for instance—most of the tunes are recycled from EarthBound. But wait...EarthBound came later. So that means the sequel is guilty of recycling almost the entire soundtrack of its predecessor. That's so disappointing. And it doesn't end there—enemies, PK/PSI powers, weapons, even the heroes are nearly carbon copies, too. I don't know anymore whether to praise EarthBound for taking all the great ideas of its predecessor and presenting them in an altogether better package, or to deride the game for laziness, overdone nostalgia, or creative poverty. I'll need to go back and play EarthBound again with this fresh perspective to see how it holds up, but I suspect my high opinion of the game won't be shaken—after all, the novelty of a game doesn't matter as much to me as how the old and new come together to form a game worth playing.

EarthBound Zero? Incredibly novel for its time. And that's the best thing I have to say about it. Even with judging the game on its own merits instead of making comparisons, things don't get much rosier.

Locations are wastefully oversized, superficially inflating the length of the game—straying from the path at all to explore your surroundings is a sure-fire way to get lost, there's not enough variety in the scenery or the random battles to justify spending so much time traversing each area, and there's virtually never any reward for poking around. It's just cruel to let the player spend several minutes wandering into a part of the overworld so remote that there's got to be treasure nearby, only to find it's a dead-end. It's tiresome to continually backtrack through areas where the same four enemies you keep fighting are also the same four enemies you were fighting in the last area, and the area before that, and the area before that.

Character progression is a mess: I fended off the attacks of inanimate objects in my home, explored the town of Podunk, rescued a girl from a zombie-infested graveyard, beat up loose animals at the zoo, marched out into the boonies, transported myself to the dream world of Magicant, wandered across the clouds, navigated an underground maze of ladders, limped my way through the mountains down into town, stopped at the ATM for cash, got run over by crazed vehicles a few times on the road back to Podunk, and hiked back into the boonies to return to Magicant with more than $20 in my pocket to buy MY FIRST PIECE OF ARMOR IN THE GAME. At which point I had amassed so much money that I bought out the entire store and was decked out with all the best protective equipment in the game before meeting my first new party member.

Then there's the issue of talking with townspeople. Nevermind that I kept anticipating they'd be as entertaining as the NPCs in EarthBound (there are a few chuckles in EarthBound Zero, but I get the feeling the localization crew was more focused on basic readability than flavor). Instead of spouting humor from their mouths, EarthBound Zero's townsfolk more often spout status ailments out of their noses. Talking to people is a liability—if they're not sneezing on you and giving you a cold (which deals damage as you walk and is stupidly expensive and inconvenient to cure), they're getting you thrown in jail and overcharging you for tickets and picking fights with you. I have never played a game with so many negative consequences for striking up conversations with strangers, and while that might be more realistic or an interesting change of pace for the genre, it happens so often that I actually stopped talking to people altogether toward the end of the game. The NPCs are neither helpful nor humorous enough to justify the hundreds of dollars I spent on hospital visits and mouthwash to cleanse myself from speaking with them.

The entire time I played EarthBound Zero, my list of grievances grew. I bemoaned everything from the unwinnable giant robot battle that no one warns you about, to the overly rapid progression of PK powers (you gain new powers more quickly than you can reasonably figure out how to use them all), to the terribly unfocused plot (You there! Eight-year-old boy! Leave the house and go do something! Oh, and your grandfather was important somehow). Music, controls, graphics, gameplay, story—everything that could possibly find a way to annoy or disappoint me did somehow. Both as a precursor to EarthBound and as a standalone game, EarthBound Zero let me down. I resorted to frequent consultation of maps and walkthroughs about halfway through the game to ensure I wasn't wasting any more time on this than I had to.

What kept me playing, then? For one thing, a curiosity about the game that paved the way for one of my favorite RPGs of all time. For another thing, I'm a completionist, and it doesn't sit well with me to drop a game after I've already invested enough time to make a dent in it. As a review writer and student of gaming history, playing bad or mediocre games can be creatively and intellectually stimulating, providing me with more to talk about and offering me a broader perspective on this pastime I enjoy so much. Then there's always this hope that the game will suddenly improve if I keep playing (which is not totally unfounded—tough games like Mega Man X3 get better as you get better, and the last quarter of Golden Sun: The Lost Age is disproportionately fantastic compared to the rest of the series up to that point).

Most importantly, though, I continued playing because there were things worth playing for. The core mechanics are solid. The enemies are creative—I love that there's a cave-dwelling enemy called The Fish, who pops out of a hole to fight you, and I'm amused by Dr. Distorto and his band of scrapyard robots. I actually laughed out loud when I thought about the ramifications of disgruntled farmer Wally chasing me around the countryside despite repeated wallopings. I also laughed about finding "that weakling" Loid hiding out in a trash can, only to meet his father later on who also hides in a trash can. Having the nonlinear freedom to go wherever I wanted, provided I was strong enough to survive the battles in any given area, was refreshing. Riding around in a tank and teaming up with a super-powerful and incredibly tall robot was a figurative and literal blast. Having an item that instantly teleported me back to Magicant at any time for emergency saving and healing was immensely useful.

So many good things in this game. So many things to interfere with the enjoyment.

EarthBound Zero was a slog. It started out fine, and slowly descended into tedium peppered with just enough creativity to keep me curious about what else the game had in store. Had I grown up on the game, I probably would've loved it, and would be more forgiving of the flaws. But I grew up with EarthBound, and there's such a world of difference between the two that it's difficult to go backwards. Many of the ideas are the same, but it's the execution that launches the sequel so far above the original. Unfulfilled expectations were simply the beginning.

Despite all my complaints, I did buckle down and beat the game. With an exhausted sigh of relief, I almost let the ending run without me as I stood up to stretch and walk around. Neither the story nor the characters had hooked me enough to care too much about how things got resolved, and I was so weary from the gameplay that I didn't want my hands anywhere near the controller for a while. Whatever positive things I had gotten out of EarthBound Zero, I was happy to be done with it. I could update my Backloggery and move on to other games that weren't so needlessly drawn-out, narratively disjointed, and inconsistently fun.

Naturally, my first instinct was to replay Mega Man X7.

...

WHAT?!?!?

[Continued in Part 2.]

Happy END DAY! It's been an interesting and busy past month, both online and offline. Perhaps the most exciting news is that my wife opened up a new shop on Etsy.com called Hoovercraft (clever, right?) and now she's working from home full-time to create and sell handmade arts and crafts of all types—soldered wire necklaces, wood-burned geek keychains, paintings, whimsical pillows; anything and everything, really. We've both been in an upbeat, creative cycle recently, and I know the projects I've been working on reflect that to some degree. There was a nice balance of new and familiar with my side projects in September, and I get the feeling next month may be even more diverse.

This Blog:

I almost didn't end up writing much of anything this time; my focus was all but entirely elsewhere. Still, with a little help from some outside influences (for better or for worse), I found some inspiration.

- Retrospective: August 2013
- Open Letter to Google
- Be My Muse
- Gaming Outside the Mainstream

GameCola:

A somewhat significant month for GameCola history, September saw the resurrection of our collaborative "Versus Mode" column along with what I'm anticipating will be our final "Spam Attack" column, at least for a long while. Last year's Crystalis D&Dcast served as a warmup for an October-long celebration of The END DAY (more news on that next time), and a few gears started to turn behind the scenes for the next RPG podcast. Lastly, I broke some news. That, like, never happens.

Columns:
- Spam Attack: Wine and Freckles
- Versus Mode: Mega Man, Capcom, and Mighty No. 9

News:
- No, Really, It's Completely Different From Mega Man

Videos:
- Crystalis D&Dcast on YouTube

GameFAQs:

Whoa! Speaking of things that never happen, I finally released a walkthrough that's been on indefinite hold since...erm...2009. This was ridiculously fun to write (I daresay it's entertaining to skim through even if you're not playing the game), so much so that writing guides for GameFAQs has officially gone back into the rotation. Because I need another side project right now.

- Hamlet FAQ/Walkthrough

YouTube:

Keeping up with a regular recording schedule has me on track to release a new video about once a month, and the next installment in my long-anticipated MM7 playthrough arrived right when I expected it to. Let's see how long it takes before I start to slip again.

GeminiLaser:
- Mega Man 7 - Part 2: Polar Droid Solution

The Backloggery:

Not much of a gaming month for me; I spent a couple of hours here and there chipping away at EarthBound Zero, but I took a break for a few days to delve into a game I had wanted to play for some time and kept forgetting I had. I'm so glad I finally got around to this one: It's not often that I find a sequel that far surpasses its predecessor (in most ways, in this case), let alone one that's so engrossing and perfectly up my alley in terms of humor and game design (I swear, Alternate Universe Me was involved in the development of this game).

Started:
- StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge (NES)

Beat:
- StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge (NES)

Completed:
- StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge (NES)

All in all, another creatively satisfying month, and a springboard to the next phase of my side projects.