@onenicebugperday

@onenicebugperday

Peek WITHIN the petals of your rosebushes and you TOO may find a friend and lad

My dumbass forgot to preempt my stair climbing with a couple puffs off the rescue inhaler again

Footnote: recognize this? Or feel like more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing the future rambles therein!

Media Marvel Monday, #1:

The Bittersweetness of Tri-arachnid

What can I say, I grew up practically obsessed with short, “artsy” games during the haydays of flash media. Didn’t really matter the website, but I found myself on Newgrounds for an almost embarrassing amount of my terminally online youth. Now, it made a great hub for unique pools or art and animation in general, but the games are what really drew me in, and I’ve considered Edmund McMillen to be something of a core-memory dispensing legend since I was roughly 8 or 9 years old. Ages before something like the Basement Collection would have been conceived, I had already played through a decent amount of the titles that would composite it together, back when they were just random titles you’d stumble across in a sea of indie nuggets.

What I’m trying to say is the dude’s work left a really big impact on me from a young age, and there are two particular works of his I always keep coming back to. The first is Coil, and the second is the topic of this specific post, originally released in 2006.

Even Tri-Arachnid’s title is something to be endeared. It’s to the point and accurate. You play as an actual, tripod arachnid, one of a species of adorable tripods, and perhaps, maybe even one of the last of a special kind.

At face value it’s a fairly challenging, but not very frustrating game, with some very hands on controls. The spider-like in question is moved through levels by manually guiding the legs, one at a time, to walk along, up, down, and around the map and its obstacles, grabbing and manipulating objects as needed to solve puzzles. You can additionally use the keyboard to adjust the arachnid’s balance and spin your own all-purpose silk ropes, which can be swung from, hold your things, or even be used to trap enemies within. The three-legs model and straightforward control scheme honestly makes it play pretty damn smoothly for its age by intentionally aiming for something other manual-physics-sim type of games aren’t really known for: simplicity. It’s actually a pretty fun and unique design for a playable creature, and I still don’t mind replaying the game through even for the one or two rockier levels. The concept design is also just what it needs to be, not too much, and certainly more than enough to get me invested into a other one of McMillen’s curious fictional ecosystems.

The particular Tri-arachnid we play as begins his story as one half of a mated pair of parents, each playing a part in watching their literal bundle of pride and joy, by which I mean their silk bound egg sac. Everything’s going great for the happy fella until some jerk bigger monster comes along with the audacity of needing to eat to survive, and picking the arachnid’s mate for its next meal. And the rest of the game thereafter follows our endangered tri-arachnid on the quest to reunite with his egg sac and to trek across a dangerous rockface, dive through caves, and even plunge through the belly of the beast itself in search for a better home, and therefore, a safer future for the dwindling species. Oh, and I can’t forget to mention the whole thing is set to some amazingly memorable works from Tin Hat Trio.

You’d probably guess from an opening like that it’s… kind of a sad little game? And it is. The Tri-arachnid really can’t catch a break even after he’s recovered his young the first time. Yeah, first. You do become separated again, and have to deal with many manners of dangers and challenges. There’s even plenty of “stray” or orphaned little tri-arachnid larva scattered throughout the playable levels. Mechanically, they’re collectibles you can find to unlock sections out of the game’s bestiary and other bonus features. Story-wise, though, it’s pretty clear they’re yet another sign of the dire situation your kind has fallen into, and left to their own devices, probably don’t have a kind fate in store for them.

All that said, the central theme of this tale is not actually the bleakness of a dying species. It’s filled with hope and determination to salvage what remains. It’s about this funky little three-legged critter and what a massive and courageous heart he has, not just to find a haven for his own young, but to carry along all of the other little tripod grubs(?) he comes across without a moment’s hesitation. Its about how he expresses a whole swath of emotions we want to empathize with without a single word of dialogue. It’s about moving on from the tragedies behind him and his will to keep crawling, one leg over another, to reach a a brighter place. For all his hard work, I think the tri-arachnids may just be alright, in the end. At the very least, he’s fought hard to give them a beautiful opportunity. He succeeded, and I gotta be happy for him, even granting his uncertain path ahead.

Footnote: recognize this post? Or wanting more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing the future rambles there on!

Media Marvel Monday, #4:

Kitty Horrorshow’s 000000FF0000 REALLY Doesn’t Want You to Play It

Some games let you be a hero. Some of them let you be a villain. Some of them, an ultimate badass, and some of them, a Joe-Shmoe who’s way in over his head. Nevertheless, a general assumption we all hop in with, for the most part, is hopefully that the new game we’ve booted up is going to treat us as a player first, and whatever role it wants to hand over second.

Some games have a different idea in mind. Some games, in fact, seemingly don’t want to be opened in the first place. “000000FF0000” does not treat you as a player in its world, no. It treats you as an interloper.

And I’m not saying this in a “oh it’s really hard to beat! It hates the player!” kind of way. Like most of Kitty Horrorshow’s work, it’s about as difficult to progress through as any 5 minute walking simulator. The hardest part of playing this for most is actually just to start it up, if you would believe it. Let me explain.

When “000000FF0000” is downloaded onto a computer, it arrives in the form of a metaphorical onion of gibberish-titled junk files loaded within gibberish-titled junk files, meaning that you are demanded to do a kind of “find the needle in the haystack” trial/error search for the one specific executable zip that actually will let you boot the real game up. It personally took me about 15 minutes of combing through branches and layers of dead ends until I literally had to look up a guide on how to find and run this game.

That’s already a welcoming sign, I’m sure.

Once you have successfully ignored this first attempt to keep your intrusion at bay, you are greeted with a small, low res maze, an unpleasant cacophony of sound, and a very upfront message.

“I don’t want you here.”

The walls and textures of this maze brighten and darken from vivid reds to pitch grays. The barrage of visuals and sound is unrelenting, and the curious second half of this sentence is given as “-but I need you here.” Before the player finds themselves in on a platform. Surrounded in glitching reds and broken textures at every angle, an idol of some massive, bird-headed figure crouches motionless at the center. Its imposing and mysterious appearance resembles the mental imagery of a cowering, or weeping god. The entire game also has this “corrupted” feeling to it, being stylistically glitchy and never really letting up on how it seems to groan and rumble for no reason than the fact that it’s running. It sounds… painful, almost.

Garsh, what a vibe

“Shooting” the statue seems to be the only option for progression, earning a series of cries and the abrupt transportation of the player to a new kind of maze. There’s no real end or exit here. You just wander around the suspended pathways while your surroundings continue to glitch into something out of hell and more garbled, manic text cards blink over the screen. Eventually, the madness reaches its climax as grotesquely deformed, red figures begin floating ominously around the area, honing in on the player. From this point, the window abruptly closes itself and sends you back to your desktop screen (a very classic way for KHS’s games to end themselves).

Effectively, it behaves like a sort of cursed media experience you’d read about in a random creepypasta somewhere, minus the whole specter coming out of the screen or possessing the player part, thankfully. Just another short but spicy work of KHS’s that I enjoyed and I think really flies under the radar compared to her other titles. I would love to hear some further thoughts or theorizing about this head scratcher, about how it came to be or what the bird creature possibly symbolizes. But that’s the prattle for now!

2021/03/23 - Double King

:,y ! <3