On Terraria – or Why i like games where nothing happens.

It doesn’t take much for me to enjoy a game. Imaginative games tend to be better recieved. I like playing things that i haven’t played before. Changing the guns in an FPS doesn’t count. Unless the guns are really really different. Like one of them picks things up and you can fire these items across the room. Or…a chain gun that pulls people towards you, or pulls you towards places. But even then, the rest of the game has to be something quite special.

I like sandbox-y type games, but if it’s just that you can blow cars up in a variety of ways, that’s not good enough. I want to be able to pull buildings over using a rope attached to a tank. I want to be able to fly a helicopter into the lair of my enemy and chop the guards in half. I’m easily pleased as you can tell.

The less choices I have, the happier i tend to be. When i am told that I have infinite choices I get lost, (even those these infinite choices end up actually being about 3) and I always think “Even pacman had nearly infinite choices.” You could go up, down, left or right. And then at every turning you can choose again. And this lasts as long as you can stay alive for. So providing you’re good enough…infinite.

Right now i am particularly enjoying the game “Terraria”. It was released yesterday, and has been recieved very well. For those of you not up to speed, I will describe it, without using the words sandbox, minecraft or build-em-up. (I hate the phrase build-em-up)

It’s like owning a terrarium (i assume that’s where the name is from). Picture the scene. You have been shrunk down to miniature size and put into a large tank. Inside the tank is dirt, trees, other people and various minerals/metals. You begin with an axe and a pick, and are left to your own devices. Oh, and there are enemies. During the day, as long as you are on healthy ground, there are just slimes. Not too much trouble. However at night there are zombies, flying eyeballs, giant worms, even giant-er worms, and things which i will let you discover for yourself.

The best thing about the game. You are left to your own devices. After playing games like Lost in Blue, Stranded 2 and others of that sort, I can’t help but feel there is a connection there, if not intellectually, then emotionally. There is the same element of discovery, of new frontierism. Of finding solutions to problems that the environment has provided you with. Not problems like finding keys or getting into the bank. Problems like “How much wood will i need to make a bridge over there?” or “will 100 torches be enough to get into the skeleton cave and back?”

I will admit, if you don’t like games where there is absolutely no story, you will probably be disappointed by this. If you don’t want to be chased through caves by multicoloured balls like Patrick Mcgoohan, don’t bother. But if you even vaguely enjoy exploration and experimentation, this may well be the best £5.99 you can spend on a game.

Minecraftsandboxbuildemup

Anton Krasauskas

This is not a drill…

I’m not a gamer. Not really. I used to play games, many moons ago but that was when you had a few colours and really cheesy music and you never actually felt as if you were being sucked into the screen.

My first games console was an Atari Lynx and I played ‘Scrapyard Dog’ endlessly. I still have it, upstairs, sitting in it’s box in near perfect condition. We had a Megadrive and a SNES and I played on those too, but never really got the hang of the controllers, unless I was very, very drunk and then I could complete Sonic in one night, probably because I nolonger had the ability to care if I died or not and just ran, full speed, collecting rings and beating the living daylights out of Dr Robotnik.

I was pretty good at Street Fighter but only because I hit every button all at once and if a special move appeared it was more by chance. (I have my training as a Touch Typist to thank for exceptionally speedy fingers, thereby giving me an unfair advantage over my opponents, but that was all. No actual skill involved).

When Starwing came out for the SNES I spent hours trying to get used to the controls. Down was up and up was down. How many times I crashed into those hoops I don’t know but that was the beginning of the end for me and my short lived career as a would be gamer.

And today I have to say that most games freak me out. I don’t think my brain is wired to respond to so much information all at once.

Which would be ok, except for the fact that I live in a house with three avid gamers. I love them all dearly but I have to admit that I don’t actually understand their alternate worlds.

I have tried. Honestly.

Club Penguin has been introduced and Puffle Cup Cakes have even managed to find their way into my list of birthday cakes to make this year.

I watched the World of Warcraft DVD that came with the Collecters Edition of Cataclysm.

I have feigned interest in Runescape and all it has to offer.

But what I really cannot grasp is the obsessive pull of the latest edition to our online gaming family;

Namely Minecraft.

Sometimes my home is filled with the sounds of digging. And not because we are having an extension built or the garden landscaped.

No.

It’s because one PC and two laptops are simultaneously tunnelling.

My whole family now live and breathe this game. From the minute they get up until going to bed it’s all they think about and talk about. Their eyes light up and their voices get louder as they decide which way to tunnel or what to collect next and it was almost unbearable when my eldest Son found diamonds and fashioned them into a pick. As far as I could work out, this meant he could dig faster, but I might be totally wrong.

It’s not as if the graphics are even great on this latest offering but something has them addicted. I’m told that it’s because Minecraft is as near to being a Lego Man as is humanly possible and as I have always believed in the virtues of the fabulous Danish invention then I can’t really find an argument with this. (Maybe that’s why they told me this in the first place?) You have the opportunity to build your very own creations with as many bricks as you want and the pleasure of actually mining for them makes it even more exciting…but to me this game is too claustrophobic. I hate being underground and so playing a game that revolves around this concept is more like torture for me.

It may sound as If I’m against games but I’m not. I just don’t understand the allure of trying to complete something that to me is not ‘real’ but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t to the rest of my family. They have all tried to explain just what the attraction is but it’s like me trying to explain how exciting it is to watch a bulb grow into a plant and then flower and the sheer enjoyment I get from knowing that I made that possible. We just don’t have the ability to see each others worlds fully. We can stand at the perimeter and look at the fun being had and the enjoyment it brings to the participants but never totally be a part of that particular experience.

But for me, knowing that we all have things that we love to do, be it gaming or gardening and accepting that this is how our family coexists is perfect to me.

Jenny King

Tags: Minecraft

Games, guns and kids.

There’s something that bugs me constantly about games. Moreso than it does with films or with books. (it doesn’t actually bother me at all about books come to think of it.) It’s amazing to me how many parents still consider games to be the realm of children and so will happily buy their seven-year old games not intended for these seven-year olds to be playing for at least another eleven years.

It used to be that I was annoyed about it because it was situations like this that create the problems that become headlines in The Daily Mail. These children are not mentally prepared to see blood and guts in such a visceral. It, as far as I have ever seen, tends to make them a bit weird.

There was a kid when I was at school who claimed to have watched Terminator 2 when it came out on video. He said his mum just let him watch whatever he wanted and he could eat whatever he wanted. Back then I may well have been amazed at what a cool life this kid had. Now it worries me. This kid was a prick, to be blunt. If there was an animal, he was going to try to stamp on it. If there was another kid there, he would try to find a way that he could trip them over or give them a dead leg without making it look like he did it on purpose. If he wasn’t brutalising living things, he was describing in graphic detail the gory bits from films his mum let him watch. I hated that kid.

Maybe that would have been the reason that I disagreed with it, if I hadn’t changed what the issue was for myself. Children will be pricks whatever you give them. Some kids just are evil. What makes them dicks is what defines their choice of entertainment. Not that everyone who has seen Terminator 2 is a dick. But everyone who’s seen Faces of Death 3 is.

After some argument and a certain amount of allowance on either side i backed down from this argument. I was playing Splatterhouse when i was 10. There was no games rating system at one point, and so Mortal Kombat, Splatterhouse and slightly later on things like House of the Dead were the games kids wanted to play. Now they’ve sort of toned it down at any arcade you go to. It’s all driving games and those ones where you have to stack rapidly moving blocks on top of each other to win 5 iPods taped together and wrapped in a £20 note. We’ll come back to those at a later date.

My next reason for wanting to stop children getting into this stuff was because it was obviously that the parents didn’t know what they were letting their children play. If they did, they would never allow it, right? Wrong.

Whilst enjoying an afternoon jaunt around the various games shops in the fine city of Leeds some weeks ago, i happened to get stuck behind a young-ish mother and her slightly younger child. He was about 8 or 9, she was about 26, maybe younger. She was shouting at this kid telling him “No. Black ops is for your birthday. You can’t play it until your birthday.” She reaches the counter, and pays for the thing. The guy behind the desk is ultimately trapped in a dilemma. Even though the kid isn’t buying the game, he knows that kid will be getting into tonight if he can possibly help it. He can’t stop the woman giving the game to this child, and if he refuses to sell it to her, she’ll just go somewhere else anyway. At least this way he gets to keep his job.

The point that annoyed me was that she knew what it was. She knew that her son would be blowing people up, watching blood and brains fly and getting into a pretty heavy political and philosophical story and a moral discussion about death and war. The kid wasn’t going to get any of that. He just wanted to shoot people in the head. I am all for people being allowed to experience the art that they want to experience, but this kid wasn’t even going to understand the fucking story. He would be skipping past that stuff as quick as he could so he could go play online against his friend and give people abuse over his headset.

But ultimately this argument fell flat too. I don’t care whether or not this kid has nightmares. I am not the least bit interested in what happens to this kid or his mother once they get out of my way. And to be honest, it was her total lack of interest about what her son was getting into that shocked me more. The same way that parents get really shocked and upset when they find out that their fifteen year old daughter has been meeting up with people off the internet for group sex and coke binges. Whereas if they’d just taken, perhaps A SINGLE MOMENT OF FUCKING INTEREST IN THE LIFE OF THEIR CHILD, then she might not become a prostitute and she might be able to deal with men on an emotional level that doesn’t involve taking her knickers off at the slightest hint of a smile from the guy. But that’s their business as always, and while it is sad when parents allow the TV or the internet to bring their children up, in most cases it’s not going to be any worse than it would be if she was just out on the streets with her friends. Whores are whores, and the outlets they have in life are the ones they choose to get into. That’s the simple truth of it. In this unfortunately true story, this is just how it happened to work out.

So here it is. The actual argument I am sticking with for the moment. It’s been a long hard road to get here, but we did it. The reason I don’t like children playing games that are rated out of their age range is simply this.

Children have no god damn taste.

If it wasn’t for children playing violent games, we would have been done with the Halo series 5 years ago. Every shooter would have had to knock some sort of difference into what is essentially a re-skinning process at this point. They couldn’t get away with re-releasing the same game once every two years if kids weren’t playing them. (I’m looking at you Activision) We would perhaps have some originality. Perhaps.

Everything about it is even pitched at children. Dead Space 2 for example, was specifically targeted at teens. The tag line “Your mom will hate this game” is not even trying to describe what the fucking game is. It is just blatantly shouting “This is violent and it’s for children and you will buy it for your own little spawn because it’s easier than raising the child yourself” There is, in my eyes, no justification for launching games like this that are, if not specifically targeted at children, then very likely to see some revenue from that sector. It seems fairly clear that the marketing people are only interested in the money coming in (well duh!) wherever it happens to come in from is not their concern. So it’s justifiable in this case, because it’s just another demographic they haven’t tapped and blah blah blah.

I’m not that bothered about children playing the games on any other level. But it takes so little imagination to crank this bollocks out and children will thrive on it, because they do. Children aren’t interested in whether the engine works correctly, or whether the backgrounds clip in and out, or whether the thing is bugged to the eyeballs. So there is less incentive to make these things anything above average.

And i just fucking know that as soon as some kid is found by his mum playing Duke Nukem, and she sees someone’s tits, that game will get fucking banned. Not for the blowing things heads off, or the kicking an eye-ball over a…thing that you kick the ball over in american football. Or anything like that. It will be sex that gets completely blown out of proportion again and I will have another reason to add to this list.

Choking on the Pixels

Scrabble- A game of majesty and honour. A game of skill and cunning. A game of lots of little lettered tiles. I love scrabble, but i’m not going to tell you why I do. I’m going to tell you why I the computer age has taught me to hate it.

There have been around 150 million sales of Scrabble in its original board form. That’s the equivilent of every person in Scotland owning 30 copies of the game. Imagine how good we’d be at Scrabble as a nation if that were the case. Anyway, Scrabble was enjoyed by millions all across the planet, and it was good. The people rejoiced.

And then came the internet. As with so many of the worlds greatest board games, the transition of Scrabble into the online world was inevitable. First came the scrabble-like games; unofficial rip offs that offered the scrabble experience. But in reality these never quite live up to the real thing, like buying cheap hash. It alters your mind alright, but you’re not actually stoned. Facebook had great success with their “Scrabulous” game, so great that Scrabble rights holders Hasbro and Mattel decided to sue the games creators. Realising they had missed out on a trick, they quickly set about creating their own official Scrabble game for Facebook. Scrabulous was taken down, changed, and reborn (in the States & Canada at least) as “Lexulous”. To me, scrabble on facebook seemed a great idea, but during my first game i knew the transition from board to screen had failed. The games were timed, the dictionary was bizarre (it seemed a strange mix of english and american spellings), and there was a “hint” button to push. I hate those dam hint buttons. It just tells you the best word you can do.. Meaning the whole idea of competition, of two or more brains locked in battle is void. Plus users could easily open another tab with a dictionary on it, or even the online official scrabble dictionary. I quickly stopped playing online scrabble. Technology had tried and failed to improve on an already beautiful gaming concept.

And then came the Ipad. Now, i do not own an Ipad or any Apple products. (well, i own an Ipod i was given 3rd hand, and i use Itunes. There is no escape). I am not one of these people that prematurely ejaculates whenever Steve Jobs waves something shiny in my face. I appreciate the aesthetics of Apple products, and i’m sure the things they can do are a marvel for some people. It’s just not for me. There is one thing that has really annoyed me though- the scrabble app. Firstly, IT’S A FUCKING APPLICATION! Are you too lazy to use the real word? If so, why the fuck are you playing scrabble, a game that prohibits the use of abbreviation? But my real issues arise with cost, consumerism and the idea that if something is more technologically advanced it is therefore better. An advert came on for Apple, they were flogging the new Iphone and Ipad, as well as the scrabble application. They said that you could use your Ipad as a scrabble board for gaming with your friends, and that your Iphone would become the tile holder. Great! Hours of fun for you and your mates, cheers Mr.Jobs! However, If you want a 4 player game, you and your friends will have to spend at least £1,000 on Iphones, plus another few hundred on an Ipad and the couple of quid they undoubtably want for the application. Oh, and your friends will probably have to buy the application as well. So once you’ve shelled out all that money, at least you and your friends can play scrabble whenever you want. No. You need electricity. You’ll need to pay a different multi-national for that privilige. If one of you runs out of battery half way through a game you’re screwed. If there are localised power cuts, or a failure of the national grid you’re in even more in trouble. God forbid the global capitalist markets crash, cutting off trade and energy supplies. You may just be forced to have a dig in the closet for a wee cardboard square and a bag of 98 lettered tiles ( and 2 blanks).

Jamie Woods

Tags: board games, scrabble

Mariothon Pt 1

It’s been said that Nintendo are evil. From their earliest days they were intent on making games that were easy enough to get started with, but that would force the player to pull hair from every hair growing part of the body as they went on. Mega Man is an oft cited example of this sort of game. Contra is another. Mario is the one that you start children off on, so that they can cut their gums on something slightly more forgiving, before being dropped from a great height into a never ending barrage of masochistic delight.
A week or so ago, as a challenge to ourselves (more of a challenge than we had forseen), three of us sat down determined to see Super Mario Brothers 3 to the end. We had hoped that it would be achievable in one sitting. It was not. We were perplexed as to how this was possible. At 12 years old we seemed to be able to steam through the entire game with no problems, and now 15 years later a potted palm could have done better than us. There were no real problems to speak of, except when it came to the Ice World (God damn you Ice world, in all your forms). It was just a general lack of motor skills and a level of incompetence that we had thought ourselves incapable of.

But that is the reason why we play Mario, correct? We get past the first world with no real problems, and then we realise three hours in that we are so fucking shit at this game that it is no longer just a fun past time. It is a grudge match. We are determined not to be beaten by a game that we ourselves had almost zero problems with when we were babies. It may just be that we are remembering the past through some sort of rose tinted history goggles. It may be that we were in fact completely useless at this game when we were kids, but we didn’t care as much. But it hurts ever so slightly, and so we must keep playing. Now it is a quest to prove to Mario, to Nintendo and to ourselves that we are not babbling, soft headed infants. We are Men and Women of the world. And we will not be beaten by a childrens game.

Incompetence won through in the end as I happened to accidentally delete our save file and reset the game simultaneously. So we had to replay the entire thing from the beginning again. We were only up to world 4 so we weren’t as upset as we would have been if we had been at the final castle. But still, it was somewhat galling. As much as anything else, we were unprepared to accept that this was a real risk; that not even a save game was sacred. Such is the way with antique consoles.

We started again on sunday.

From little acorns…gigantic acorn dispensers.

Welcome to Pixels Are Good Food. This little bit of writing here that you are currently reading is just to let you know that we are all busy working on putting together a collection of articles and writings for our opening. I suppose that I should also tell you what the hell this actually is.

It’s all too common, in my opinion, to find sites that claim to be the biggest, brightest, bestest, most exclusive gaming blogs on the whole wide internet. I will not even attempt to make such lofty claims. We know that status like that takes time.

We are a group of people who enjoy playing games above all. Over the coming months we will be proving that with articles, comics, reviews and reminiscenses. For the most part we enjoy games that evoke that feeling that you had when you played your first game. Whatever generation that game belonged to, the feeling is the same. We hope to be able to bring a little of that feeling back, whilst making fun of ourselves and our whole culture.

There are far too many stuffy blogs taking themselves and their pastimes far too seriously. And for us, it is about fun. There will be moments where we get a bit metaphysical about it all and maybe take it all incredibly seriously. But that is just par for the course.

As you might be able to tell from the name, we are (for the most part) people who got into gaming in the days before 3d anything. In the days when pads had 4 buttons MAX, and where it would take the better part of an afternoon to load an 8 bit adventure from a tape. We are people for whom gaming is not just a hobby, but a way of life. We are, for want of a better word, Dorks. And we are proud of it. And we aim to prove it.

We hope you enjoy what we have to offer. If you feel that you would like to contribute in any way, please feel free to get in contact. Join our twitter feed and our facebook page. Get involved in any way you fancy, and keep gaming.

Anton