I’ve never liked love letters, unless they come in the form of a videogame. Look: who has time for heartfelt declarations of love these days? The real world feels like it’s best abandoned – this is a buy in for any game I’ve ever played made by Analgesic Software. I tend to look forward to their releases in a way that I reserve for strange, fan-made romhacks and bizarre Super Metroid experience dungeons that old webforums crank out. There is a mist now, a green, mint tinted mist in the world that keeps me from seeing very far in front of myself. Is it the acid trips, the late night music and benders, the insistence on fighting for nights that I need to be my own?
Or, is it just having played too many games on the N64. The strange, black box released by Nintendo in the 90’s. A particular box of hardware that never matched the scene popping or distorted, razorblade cuts that bound other consoles textures. It was soft, cuddly, splotchy worlds that come around every so often and we remember pasts and futures not dominated only by the hunt for ever more Fidelity.
Is this all preamble? I can’t tell you what to do. Angeline Era currently has a free demo available on Steam. It’s the next Analgesic Software game. The people who made Anodyne 2 which was a well received indie darling, a comfortable little game about being a tank that sleeps somewhere under my bed. There was a strange time in my life where I was surrounded by perfect strangers, and talking about Anodyne 2 kind of got us all together. I have It in my heart that that’s the strange aesthetic tie of how nostalgia works. It becomes quiet and private and sometimes the domain exclusively of horror. The pitch black and shivering ghost consumes everything until we’re all blood spattered.
Somewhere, drifting in all of that, is the idea that videogames need to be Talked About. Not just online, but with friends, shown off. Strange little conversation pieces surrounded by the colored walls of our house. A TV screen is a lot like a painting, and a house is a lot like our personal art gallery. There’s a definition of how games can be art for the future: make your friends talk to you about Bulk/Slash. Don’t just put things in the dating profile and wait for someone to comment on them. The things we love don’t have to be traps we want travelers on the road to walk into.
This is still about Angeline Era by the way: for the people who might search for this blurb on SEO it’s a top down, bumpslash based adventure game. Like all videogames that are bought and sold, it’s often at times a frenetic shooter, a puzzle game, and all of these little labels and genres. Names and place cards that have a tendency to turn.
The N64 was, at one point in time, The Next Generation. The black box wasn’t a dusty old relic found on a LED lit shelf somewhere in the kinds of places where men in baseball caps sell videogames. It was Speed, Sound, and was going to set your heart on fire: it never explicitly promised them, but what else is all of this technology for if not to try and deliver a final sequel to the heart of the X6800?
(screenshot: the beginning of alien soldier. Caption: put THIS in your dating profile, instead)
Stranger than history is sound, and the N64 was not reminded until the kids got old enough to no longer have bedtimes. Music like an “aural remembrance” halfway between a wind instrument and a KORG synthesizer: sometimes, changing channels and producing spontaneous percussion itself that was muted in a way it could sound like someone was playing a set of drums in some room that can’t be reached.
It wasn’t a “half step” or any clear direction from the SNES: The N64’s sound and graphics were handled by the same processor. Developers early on in the consoles lifespan would lean a little to heavily on the graphics aspect, leaving the music behind as a strange after effect. It couldn’t directly translate the chipper buzzsaw music that was made by a factory arrangement of downsampling and pitching. Whole instrumentations could be clipped to seconds: a guitar note reused as a footstep sound.
Time alone might only be capable of freeing us from this, and freeing us from even the N64 itself. Nothing about it can hurt you: it’s all just tools and memory now. A whole cultural moment taken and repossessed. Angeline Era will burst to life with a surprise of crisp pixels and pattering footsteps. Aural synths replaced by quick, pattering and assaulting downsampled chips of music. Videogames especially feel like packages from futures not explored. Underneath the heart of our new hardware, we can be free from time enough to talk about it.
Enough of the world is feverish to split itself into binaries, binary pasts, binary futures. An aesthetic drain, where the details of the past become malleable and the details of the future become hyper fixed. A no exits solution: this is where you’re getting off. I don’t want dreams that can only ever be soft memory, I don’t want to go to bed with the TV playing in the other room. Only now can ever be in front of us: I want more videogames to play!