games | write/geek

I’ve got you back in my life now… wait, drinkwar.92p?

As you no doubt remember, back in 2020 I was looking for this graphing calculator game where you play the role of a shady soft drink dealer. Yes, a weird twist on the venerable Drug Wars.

Well, it seems like I finally found it: COKEWARS.

Well, mostly. First off, what I found has a different name than I thought, but my memory could be faulty.¹ Also, this game was created for the luxurious TI-92, while my graphing calc gaming was done exclusively on a humble TI-83. Oh, and this one wasn’t actually published until I was out of high school. I was not playing this goofy stuff in college.²

All signs seem to point to this being a port of the game I played. But, wow, very close! My long, stupid search is over.

A clone of drug wars but for those of you that play games in school it’s good because you can say it’s for another class because you’re buying and selling things(Coke Products). So… it’s a really cool game

―Andy Barry, the creator of this version

It’s a little disappointing to find solid evidence that this gentleman definitely didn’t think of his creation as the comedy game it was to me. Damn it, Andy, I’m over here in a trenchcoat full of soda and all you can think about is scamming the History teacher!

Oh well, anyway…

On the other hand, the game I found can’t even keep its own name straight, alternately going by “COKEWAR,” “COKEWARS” and even “drinkwar.”[↩]
In college I was playing Counter-Strike, thank you for asking.[↩]

I want you back in my life, colawars.83p

Do you know how things you treasure from your past probably wouldn’t hold up if you tried to enjoy them again years later?

That doesn’t apply here, buddy.

Because there aren’t more important things to think about these days, nope, my mind recently started wandering back to a game I played on my graphing calculator back in high school.

I did a lot of that back then, mostly during classes not necessarily math. And while there were definitely better games, more atmospheric games, more fun games, more Tetrisy games—and dozens of other games I spent more time on—I’m not sure any captured my imagination quite like this one did.

It was called Cola Wars and this game was absurd. You would buy and sell cans of Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew, RC Cola and—because it was the late 90s—Jolt. You’d buy them on the street from a dealer and try to re-sell them. Prices would go up and down. For some reason you had to avoid the cops.

I was struck by the sheer… I guess the word would be “randomness” of the idea. It didn’t cross my unsophisticated mind that it could have been a metaphor, an allegory or something. I sincerely believed that someone in the world just one day decided that they would make a game about the risks and rewards of illicitly selling soft drinks on the secondary market.

So when I later discovered that there was a game called Drugwars, and that TI-83 was definitely not the first platform it was available on, and that the weird drinks game was a rip-off—if not a simple find-and-replace—it explained how this mysterious, supremely odd duck came into existence.

And I guess it took away some of the appeal. But just a little. I’d love to find a copy and play it again, but the places I would normally look have failed me. And I’ve done some serious Wayback Machine spelunking.

Help me, the Internet.

Is this going to be forever?

Let’s talk about me.

Super Smash Bros. Melee wasn’t released at a very good time for me. I was in college, away from home and most of my gaming friends. Also, it was released for the Nintendo GameCube, which history has shown us wasn’t a terribly successful console. In fact, I don’t think any of my closest friends back then owned a GameCube.

But because I know people who know people, there was a handful of opportunities to play Melee over the next few years.

I’d be at people’s houses and find mostly-young, mostly-male groups gathered around the TV trading smash attacks between signature Nintendo characters in the most wonderfully whimsical cartoon fighting game imaginable. Mortal Kombat this is not. Up to four players at a time would spend a few minutes at a time battling Links, Marios, Kirbys, Pikachus¹ (and many others) in levels pulled from familiar Nintendo games. They’d be talking trash and throwing flowers and bombs and baseball bats at each other… much as my closest friends and I had spent literally hundreds of hours doing a few years earlier in the Nintendo 64 Super Smash Bros., the original game in the series.

smash-bros-melee 2001’s Melee, however, was a very different beast from ‘64,’ and is still held in high regard by many, and still a tournament-favorite—despite new installments of the series being released in 2008 and 2014.

Gosh, I’ve always hated Melee.

Even today it’s still the fastest-paced and most brutal game of the series—the speed each game runs at is a design decision made by the developers—but Melee felt especially amped-up coming from the downright glacially-paced 64, even today still the slowest-paced game in the series. That alone made it tough to get into Melee—imagine picking up the controller and being mercilessly pounded by up to three other players (who probably play this all damn day), while you struggle to figure out how to not accidentally fall off the edge of the level.

“Seriously you guys, when you’re ready to play a real game, I’ll kick your ass with Link in 64!” is a thing I probably said every time I played Melee.

Speed was one problem for me in Melee, but my other one was the GameCube controller. Yeah, I know: the design is still held up as one of the best controllers ever, believed by many to represent Nintendo at their peak, right before their Wii-era folly of appealing to the dreaded “casual” market with the waggle-motion-centric Wiimote. The classic GameCube controller is still supported in newer Smash titles, and is still the choice among the hardcore Smash crowd… despite the half-dozen other controller options that are also supported at this point. How could I possibly not see what an amazing gift Nintendo had bestowed upon us with the GameCube controller?

gamecube-controller-smash-bros Yeah, so I never really “got” the GameCube controller. I never learned how to effectively use the soft analog ‘shoulder’ buttons, never became comfy with the layout of the right-side ‘fire’ buttons (X, Y, A, B)—the real meat of any controller. Coming from 64, I knew what the C-stick was for, but it just wasn’t the same as the four yellow buttons of old. And I’m sorry, but the Z button is just wrong—it goes on the bottom, you jerks.

With a decade-plus of hindsight, it’s clear now that my problems with Super Smash Bros. Melee, and with the GameCube controller in general, were mostly due to a lack of familiarity. I didn’t have the chance to spend time alone learning Melee at my own pace… or barring that, having hours upon hours to spend competing with close friends to sharpen my skills, like I did in high school. And I’ve always felt a little handicapped when it comes to picking up steam at new games that favor players with, you know, reflexes. I didn’t really grow up with games at home when I was young—I definitely missed a lot of the formative stuff that other 1980s babies grew up on.

Anyway, although I essentially sat out the entire GameCube era, busy with college and other life stuff, my interest in gaming was reinvigorated with the release of the Nintendo DS and later the Wii. (Yes seriously, the Wii.²) When the Wii-era Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, came out a couple of years later, there was no stopping me from picking it up.

I enjoyed Brawl and played a lot of it. Having my own copy at home put me in a good position to get fairly good at it. It was very different from 64—way more characters and way more everything—and as a lot of the hardcore complain, way, way different than Melee. “It’s so slow!” “It’s for noobs!” Whatever; the slower pace and the not-GameCube controls are probably what I liked most about Brawl. Thank goodness they corrected their Melee misstep, I thought.

My newfound enthusiasm for console gaming died down a few years later. I haven’t really been keeping up with the new Nintendo Wii U or 3DS stuff at all. But my original Wii remains below the TV, and I turn it on every couple of months, usually to play an old-timey 8- or 16-bit classic.³

Something happened last week. An Ars Technica article about competitive Smash, and the enduring tournament legacy of Melee, showed up in my RSS. Before I had even finished the article, I’d already been to Amazon and ‘Prime’d myself a GameCube controller and memory card… and an overpriced used copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee.

My girlfriend was going to be out of town for the rest of the week. The time was right to dive in headfirst.

What happened to me?

Look, I developed this attitude as I grew closer to 30 a few years back. It goes a little like this:

So… is that it? Is this really how it’s gonna be for the rest of your life?

As I read the Ars article through these attitude-tinted lenses, I decided that my hating Melee was based on shaky reasoning at best. The way I felt about it after my few tries may have been a genuine and reasonable reaction to getting pummeled while flailing uselessly with this weird-ass controller, but let’s be honest: I never gave the game a fair shot.

That, paired with the fact that Melee‘s still so widely held in such high regard almost 14 years later—it’s definitely not just mindless fanboys trumpeting the new hot thing—made me think hey-why-not? I essentially have a GameCube just sitting there—it’s actually built into the hardware of the original Wii.

A couple of days later, my little care package from the past arrived. Predictably, I still fucking suck.

But I think it’s going to be fun this time.

By the way—just sayin’—f Pikachu.[↩]
The console was cheap enough, the motion controls seemed interesting enough, and the potential for amazing first-party Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda, etc.) made me take the plunge. I camped out on release night in 2006. Also, I had a job, some money, etc. And despite the tons of shovelware, there were more than enough good Wii games.[↩]
There’s a good chance it’s Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball. Gotta stay sharp.[↩]

On wishing for boredom

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obituary:

I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words something that has been troubling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and I only realized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Internet usage, particularly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to following Twitter feeds (really, talk about a step backwards) of websites and blogs they find interesting, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decentralized power of RSS.¹

What occurred to me back then was that having posts pushed to me daily gave me more reading material than I needed. And since I could never get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d subscribed to, my need to ever go foraging for interesting things to read basically disappeared. RSS gave me tons of serendipity (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, practically none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online entertainment and random bits of enlightenment by browsing aimlessly from link to link, being personally pointed to interesting things by friends on AIM, following latest links posted to proto-blogs like Pixelsurgeon, and… I don’t know, however else we found cool shit back then.

The second time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more general sense. This time it was bigger than RSS; this time it was about everything in my life.

I realized I have far too many options for entertainment. There are two reasons for this: massive digital storage devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actual entertainment budget for purchasing paid media and fancy devices on which to experience it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e-books; more unwatched movies, seasons of old TV shows and anime series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll never finish (thank you Nintendo Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pretty much set for… forever.² Even if I don’t seek out anything new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releases and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plenty, if I could forget about what life was like when I was growing up, before we had the computing power, storage and network capacity to experience all the digital riches of more entertainment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored growing up, aimlessly thinking and daydreaming and such. This was before my first computer; I had tons of books and had probably read almost all of them, made good use of the public library, played with toys, action figures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and daydream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a similarly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find yourself so luxuriously bored, how do you manage? And can you teach me?

Google Reader, please don’t die.[↩]
I didn’t mention music here, because the way I consume music is a little different. I still clearly have more than I “need,” but I don’t feel the same sort of pressure to get through it all, thanks to shuffle mode.[↩]

…I just want some snack cakes

I was playing some Scarface: The World Is Yours earlier this evening on my Wii and while the game is in many ways a series of missions that don’t vary all that much, a part of the game that is pretty consistently interesting is talking to random people on the streets. (What does that leave? A pretty standard 3D open world, drive-cars-shoot-people-deal-drugs rush rush affair that happens to take place in a Miami I don’t quite recognize.)

But like I was saying, the conversations.

I can’t remember what purpose this serves in the game, but you can have back-and-forth conversations with the seemingly hundreds of unique NPCs that line the streets of the game. Walk up to one, press A and Tony spits out a line, to which they respond with something that more-or-less makes sense. Press A and Tony replies with something mostly relevant to what they said. Do this back-and-forth exchange a few times and your “Conversation” count increases by one. (You can only converse with any given individual once, at which point talking to them consists of seemingly-random one-liners that seem to either propose sexual relations or bodily harm… or are just strings of Scarface-style expletives.)

So earlier, I (well, Tony) was visiting our local bank branch when I decided to talk to some of the people hanging around in the stairwell. We walked up to one African-American gentleman in an ugly sweater and the conversation basically began like this:

Tony: Miami is full of pussy, meng. You just need to be rich to get it.
Gentleman: Man, I don’t care about pussy. I just want some snack cakes.

I’m gonna let that one hang for a moment.

…

Okay, I fucking love this game.

Fine wine games

There is a certain class of video game whose existence I’ve been slowly discovering over the last few years. Let’s call these fine wine games.

My idea of a fine wine game¹ is one that is best experienced a bit at a time. You know, enjoyed in moderation. The kind you only pick up and play every once in a while… because it’s just that good.

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Why would you want to take it so slowly with something so great? Well, here’s other side of the coin: this sort of game also has an element of rarity, or scarcity to it. It’s not the sort of game that prints money, selling millions of copies, so the chances of a sequel being made aren’t very good.

So enjoy the game itself. Savor it as you go. Don’t cry because there won’t be a sequel; think of how lucky you are to play it in the first place! Wring every drop of enjoyment from the experience that you can.

Here are a few games you’ll find in my cask:

Zack & Wiki (Nintendo Wii) The original fine wine game in my book. Critically acclaimed; sold quite poorly. Chance of sequel? Slim-to-none. Thus, I decided that I’d only play Zack & Wiki sparingly.

With save dates as my basis, I’d estimate that I would pick it up every couple of months, play for a day or two (enough time to struggle through my current level feeling like the world’s biggest moron until finally feeling like the world’s greatest genius, which is what this game does to you). And then, back on the shelf it would go, to wait for the next time I’m in the mood for savory gaming greatness.

Thus, despite having bought this game in 2008, I only completed it this past weekend. $40 so very, very well spent.

Soul Bubbles (Nintendo DS) While I bought my copy from an Amazon Marketplace seller, this game was released in the U.S. as a Toys R Us-exclusive title. If this artificially limited its audience, that’s simply unfortunate, because this is a beautiful game… one that I tend to forget all about for months on end before rediscovering it anew every time.

I’ve been taking my time with Soul Bubbles, and have more than half of it (read: years of enjoyment) left to go!

Mother/EarthBound series (Nintendo NES/SNES/GBA) Enough has been written about this series of quirky, rather un-RPG-like RPGs, which have attracted a cult-like following. Thus, I’ll offer only this quick assessment: the fact that English-speaking gamers have the opportunity to play any of the three games should be enough to make a fan thank their lucky stars.

While it could be said that three games released over the course of fifteen years effectively nullifies any supposed rarity… hey, you know what? Fuck you. Nintendo translated Mother and then promptly shelved the English version, Mother 2 (EarthBound) received one stinker of a U.S. marketing campaign, and the English translation of Mother 3 had to be undertaken by a team of incredibly devoted fans.

Mother games in English are some mighty fine wine.

Cave Story (Windows, WiiWare, et al.) Cave Story is the work of one dedicated amateur over the course of five years… work that was simply given away for free as a Windows game, and later ported to a handful of popular platforms by fans.

I started Cave Story a few times over the years, but the lackluster Linux port kept putting me off of it; I knew I should wait for a good port to be available for a platform I use. The WiiWare version was released a few months back, and the rest is history. After years of anticipation, I swilled this one down in a decidedly non-fine-wine manner.

Whoops.

Whether games or other media, what do you consider to be your fine wine?

https://writegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/prints_money.gifpr

Initially, the idea I had was that a game of this sort (it was Zack & Wiki that brought this to mind) would be enjoyable to play quite literally with a glass of wine, as this is the sort of game that would be best enjoyed at a relaxing pace, in a chill atmosphere. But last weekend, I instead started thinking of these games metaphorically; the game itself is the wine. I liked that thought, and knew I had to write this post.[↩]

How to kick your own ass

So last night I was letting my mind wander while sitting around playing some Cave Story,¹ trying to decide whether I should blog the story of how I learned the word “residence” (yes, these are the things you think about when you are me), when I had a funny thought. Yes, a second one.

It went a bit like “Everett, you could share bits like that on your blog, but you do realize that in doing so, you’re cannibalizing content that you could be saving up for the memoir you may one day write, right?”

I chuckled at the thought and concluded that the story of how I learned the word “residence” may not, after all, make for that great a blog post. But in another moment of insight, I took my secondary thought to its logical conclusion: if I were serious about considering writing a memoir (and I wasn’t), perhaps at this point in my life I should worry more about who would even want to read such a book.

That’s not to put down my life and those who have played a role in shaping it, but… sorry you guys, I just don’t think it would make a compelling book. And a life spent sitting around wondering if I should write a book about my life seems even further away from a life worth writing about.

I wondered if maybe this principle (one worrying more about some potential future, at the expense of the present, which could be better used to get one to their desired future) is something that a lot of people do, something that has broader implications than some hypothetical, self-indulgent tome. Consider the example of relatively not-well-off people who oppose that which would be beneficial to them, by, say, having political leanings that do more for those who are much better off than they are. Why would they do this? Do they actually think they’re likely to be in that other class someday? Planning on winning the lottery, much?

It’s one thing to plan for the future. But it’s another to fetishize some outcome that, be real with yourself, is unlikely to happen… and is all the less likely, yet, if you sit around daydreaming about it.

Awesome, awesome game. Free download here for Windows/Mac/Linux/etc. or buy it for $12 on WiiWare.[↩]