Category Archives: random mental floss

My problems with indie platformers…

This week I bought They Bleed Pixels, and after three chapters, I gave up and walked away in frustration. I didn’t play enough to make a proper review, but the experience did help bring to mind several complaints I’ve had with indie platformers, and I want to talk about them after a few days to calm down. If I had written about this immediately after leaving the game, about 80% of every sentence would have been variations of fuck.

To begin, I love platformers. Back in my youth, Nintendo was full of these side scrolling gems, and I think back on how many of my favorite games were the 2D jump/attack variety. Among some of my favorites were Super Mario Bros. (And 2 and 3), Castlevania (and 3, screw 2), Bionic Commando, and Contra (And Super Contra). Those titles give you some idea of the variety of the formula, with each game having a very different feel and look, and they were glorious. They had a great blend of challenge and fun, and to this day, I can still go back and play some of them over just because I love them so much.

Then at a certain point, all the new consoles coming out created a shift away from the 2D side-view platform in favor of the 3D environment. I’m not knocking this because there are a lot of 3D games that I’ve loved over those consoles as well. But the dearth of the familiar platformer was always something stuck at the back of my mind. I wondered why we lost this particular style of gameplay when the increasing hardware capabilities should have made it possible to have some really pretty games on the 2D plane. Continue reading


Let me start over…

Long time visitors are going to feel a bit disoriented, disappointed, disillusioned, or otherwise dissed today because the rest of my blog just disappeared. First let me apologize and assure you that this change was intentional and not the result of me screwing up my blog. You know, like all those other times in the past when I screwed it up.

Part of what motivated me to take this drastic step is that as I’ve moved this site from one host to the next, there’s always some sort of technical gotcha that’s made the transfer fail. Sure, I read the documentation and tried to follow the instructions, but it never really worked out like I hoped. The only time that didn’t happen is when the techs working for Infinity Cloud did the transfer for me, and those poor souls went out of business. (A damn shame, really, because they were great people to work with. (Not that my current host is bad, mind you. But they did make me do my own blog transfer, and look how that turned out. *Sighs*))

The rest of the times, the only reason I could still recover the site is that I never gave up on updating my mirror at the WP-hosted address. This recovery method has problems because when I import the files over to this site, I’m not actually importing the graphics to the new server. There’s now this forced connection between the two sites, and to fix that kind of thing would take a long time. I’m far behind on several other projects that should have been done already, so I’m not too keen to get all up in the guts of my blog to untwist the kinky bits of code.

The other reason is more a matter of my changing perspective. In the last few years, I’ve tended to look at some of my older rants and think, “Wow, I really was too pissed to think straight, wasn’t I?” Being angry is one thing, but being incoherent to the point where I can’t find the connection from one idea to the next is…well, it’s cringe inducing. Continue reading