Videos from My Quest to Play Basically Every Game Ever
This thread uses the #fuzzy-gaming-quest tag so that you can find it anywhere!
On this blog, I'll be cross-posting from another social media account where I have a thread going on with videos of various games that I find interesting, as I work my way through what amounts to basically every console + arcade game ever made (probably no PC stuff, consoles are my heritage and childhood)
I'm gonna be rapid fire posting the first 15 or so to get up to speed so hang onto your pants for today if you're currently following me
This is the first time I've ever blogged publicly about something like this. I usually talk to friends about it, but I just as often don't say anything, because when I talk about video-games I get hyperfocused and sometimes the conversation takes a long time, so I often feel like it's a bit rude to get people wrapped up in it. But I remembered I have a tumblr now and people actually blog on here sometimes, so: prepare to suffer.
To set up why I'm so weird about games allow me to explain: first of all, I'm obviously not neurotypical in some way I don't know but one day would like to figure out. SECOND, I've been playing video-games literally since I can remember. My first real memories of cognition are watching my dad put cartridges in the NES, and climbing on the bed to put our Thai bootleg cart in there myself so I could play weird sprite hacks of Super Mario Bros. So anyway, gaming has factored heavily in my life since the beginning.
Anyway long story short, this has led to, for a long time, me wanting to leave some kind of legacy behind me in the form of a trail of beaten-up old video-games. Often this takes the form of just wanting to curate out a collection (physical or unholy--I mean digital) that I can leave behind in some state of completion, but on top of that it comes as me wanting to sit down and truly spend time with the games that are most important to my history over the course of my lifetime.
This has led to me making innumerable 'systems' for approaching the task of having a humongous backlog of video-games (some might say longer than is completable than anyone in a life time, and I recognize this) and often these systems get replaced or revised for being inadequate in some way. The latest no-thought system on my part was the Fuzzy Gaming Quest, in which the goal was basically to play through games starting from the beginning of time and blasting through at hyper-speed, with the intention of covering as much ground in order to induce familiarity as fast as possible with arcade games from an era I've rarely played (but longed for in my old man's soul).
This was working but I quickly ran into a snag (after recording about 250 videos 😥): I wasn't spending as much time with individual games as I'd like by any means. On one hand, I was backlogging games I was enjoying just to get them out of the way and continue the progress. On the other, sometimes I wasn't sure how much time you'd even spend with a game to consider yourself familiarized enough to rank it in some way, without necessarily having to beat everything (who has the time?). Not to mention arcade games that have no viable ending for the regular player (Pac-Man, Galaga, etc).
So anyway all this is leading up to me explaining the next iteration of the Fuzzy Gaming Quest. Here's a picture!
What you're looking at is essentially a 7 day scoreboard for various games that I selected out as important during my previous pass through the 70s and most of the 80s. These are all games I wanted to play more of or possibly log in a list.
7 days is my naive answer to how long I think would be good to spend on a game, in order to get competent enough at it to get a decent score and/or feel you've experienced your average game enough to go ahead and put it somewhere in a list. It might seem like overkill for a simple arcade game (though I'd argue you need to play repeatedly and give your brain time to absorb it to get the true experience), and it may seem like underkill for an RPG (though I'd argue that most RPGs probably aren't changing much more if you've been playing for 7 days already, but this doesn't forbid from continuing to play if I choose to), but this is my naive and probably flawed answer, anyway.
This is meant to serve the purpose of:
- Progressing reasonably fast (notice this is a list of basically banger games everyone has heard of, I will probably only include a few games here or there that are lesser known that I just happen to like--I'll also be avoiding some consoles intentionally that I don't particularly like (like the Odyssey 2, sorry, it's my list though--convince me otherwise if you like))
- Filtering into some kind of "best of" list (if I don't even want to play it for 7 days (in brief sessions), it must not be very good after all and doesn't deserve to be on any best of list I would leave behind me--games that I do get through the 7 days I should understand enough to rank competently enough to make myself happy)
- Giving me an excuse to spend more time on the games that really matter to me, today, in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow
- Giving me a target for when I'm able to comfortably say I've experienced a game enough and don't need to feel bad about moving on if I want to but still haven't "beat it," and also leaving room for playing more if I like (I can sort it, take it off the board, but finish it anyway on the DL) (Also, if I do beat it, I can stop there with the board)
- Satisfying whatever kind of ADHD thing I have going on by allowing me to keep a variety of games on rotation for some amount of time and not just getting stuck behind one game at a time
- Breaking game experiences down over multiple days to allow a longer time to think about them and grow accustomed to them, also to allow me to fit them into my busy schedule by playing Space Invaders on the toilet for ~10 minutes
- To leave behind a journal of high scores or information about how far I got in various games as I plod on
So, you may (rightly) ask: What's the point of all this? Why can't I just play games that I like and call it a day?
Well my first answer would be, "shut up I know you're right I just can't, my brain is broken," but my second answer, the one I would say aloud, might be that I really have always wanted to take a targeted approach to going through all of game history and that's what this is in service of.
I have no false expectations about getting all the way through game history up to now in one lifetime, at least not without sacrificing a lot of games in the process. I definitely won't ever get to the point where I'm always keeping up with contemporary games. It's lucky for me that I mostly fell out of favor with games around 2011 for various reasons, but really it had been a steady decline of interest since about 2005 or so. I have a shorter-hand target, but if I were to ever reach it, I'd like to keep going on, even if it means playing PS4 games in 2061 when I'm almost as old as my dad is now.
Anyway, your second question (and wow, if you made it this far) might be: "so what does this mean for your tumblr, which I care about intimately after seeing 20 posts, and was gutted when you temporarily took a break, and have been looking for meaning in my life ever since?"
Well, true believer, if you want I might post my 7 day high-score for various arcade games or something along with some pictures or videos of high points of the game (when I get to games complicated enough to have cool art). I haven't decided yet. I'm open to suggestions! I'd love to see people try to (and succeed!) at beating my scores (I'd feel like I influenced someone into maybe playing some old, great game they wouldn't have before deciding to just then).
If nothing else I hope it was interesting to see my thought process about this stuff.
If that's not true, I hope you were entertained by a write up of someone's journey ever deeper into video-game delirium.
And yes, I will get frustrated with the system and change it again in approximately a month.
Fuzzy Gaming Quest #23
Space Fever
Release: 1979
System: Arcade
Developer: Nintendo
An example of Nintendo's long-standing tradition of taking other company's ideas and polishing them. They added color and new patterns to Space Invaders.
Fuzzy Gaming Quest #19
Galaxian
Release: 1979
System: Arcade
Developer: Namco
You're well familiar with Galaga, but do you know Galaga's somewhat dopey older brother?
It's like Galaga but not as good. We love it anyway. It iterated on Space Invaders and paved the way for much to come!
So if you read my blog post last night that I made in a 1 AM fervor, you know about my new gaming system. If you don't, don't worry about it, here's the short version: I have a fictional currency for trading for games to play and a particular date of games I'm limited to in month increments.
The first month was January 1984, and I just finished it and am ready to move on.
So what did I play the most with my two hours? Here's the top 3!
#1 - Super Mario Bros. - NES - 48 mins
This one's actually 1985, but due to spreading the library out evenly, it ended up in the 1983 batch. No, it doesn't make sense. No, I don't care, THIS IS MY SYSTEM STAND DOWN.
I avoided buying this one for the $30 (I start with $100 each month) because it was pricey, but at some point I could see it was the only game I could sink my teeth into for a good minute, so I went for it. Glad I did.
#2 - Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack - Intellivision - 21 mins
Once I was getting to the last 20 minutes I realized I needed another non-arcade style game that I could play for awhile without fear of dying and starting over quickly. So I picked up Las Vegas Poker for a solid $5 out of my $100.
It entertained me for 21 minutes and I foresee it doing so again, so cheers to it. I like the shifty-eyed dealer dude. Also I turned 100 chips into over 1600 in this game so I'm ready to go to Vegas whenever.
#3 - Crazy Climber - Arcade - 11 mins
Mostly what I bought this go around were arcade games and this was the only one I played for a few loops. It's hard to play early 80s arcade games over and over again back to back, but they are future investments--they're fun to play once daily or something.
Crazy Climber I've never been very good at so I saw an opportunity to have some more goes at it. I'm still not good at it.
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So anyway, there you go. That's "month" one (it was literally a day)! So far the system is working fine. I foresee a problem already. Game selection is tight currently in these years because it's all Atari and early arcade and it's hard to find something to fill two hours.
Also, if you're wondering, I had $10 left. Yes, I bought that many $5 arcade games that I played for 3 minutes. I have decided to up the monthly budget to $100 from $60 for sure. It's all about balance!
