Thursday 20 May 2010

VVVVVV's Lesson

If you want to set friends at each others' throats over a game, there's no better question than "how hard was it?" You're asking "how much did the game frustrate you," or, finally, "how much do you suck at playing games?" The conversation enters a death spiral as one party says old games aren't playable, another says every good game is hard, another says that real men play Wizardry, and someone or everyone is called a "baby."

But it doesn't have to be like this! If everyone plays Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV, the world might be mended.

There's a sequence in VVVVVV that deserves to be famous. Everyone who plays the game will remember it; Kieron Gillen already wrote about it. It's the titular sequence of rooms called Veni, Vidi, Vici!*, and in it you learn how to play games again.