Crash Bandicoot 2 arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago from my online game rental service. Tonight, I finally got around to playing it, hoping to discover the next 3-D platformer that could hold my interest as the Spyro the Dragon series had earlier this summer.

I played a few of the early levels, trying to get a feel for the game that had spawned so many sequels and spin-offs. As a fan of Crash Team Racing, I enjoyed familiar character voices and the knowledge of which hazardous boxes to avoid. However, I found myself quickly disappointed.

I got off to a rocky start when I suddenly died after running over an armadillo’s tail. I played through the short intro level, collecting fruit from the benign boxes and avoiding the various hazards. Unfortunately, I ran into a lot more trouble on the first full level when a rocky column fell out of the sky, shocking me as another life disappeared. After touching a couple of seals accidentally a few times, I was faced with a mad scientist leering, “Game Over.”

I was pleased to discover a continue option on the “Game Over” screen. I was now determined to try a little harder and not to be so hasty. I entered another level, this one involving platforms over water. I soon discovered that falling into the water meant death, and barely moved twenty feet in game space before dying again.

At this point, I was frustrated and upset. The plot was shallow and weak; I had been sent off to collect mysterious gems for an unexplained reason. This created little motivation. Lives were difficult to acquire yet I could barely hang on to them. There was no friendly “three strikes and you’re out” philosophy after getting hit as in Spyro. Instead, the philosophy was to learn the lessons the hard way (yes, even touching the tip of the armadillo’s tail meant death). Even the controls were less rewarding: the jump feature was rigid and offered no slack, unlike Spyro’s hover and jump options.

The Spyro series is not without it flaws, however. The fourth game, A Hero’s Tail, was created by a new company and doesn’t fit within the context of the first three games. The new developers changed character voices and personalities. This helped me to realize that the jump features and storylines cannot create the game, but instead help to enhance a solid underlying gameplay. When returning to the old classics of the PlayStation, I find that my patience with the less advanced graphics and sometimes less sophisticated controls wears thin if the core of the game is not forgiving in the beginning to pull me in.  

Today I had the pleasure of playing a game for homework. While I have done so before for the games and literature class I took last semester, I found this one to be particularly entertaining. The assignment was to download a simple game from the internet involving pattern recognition and posting a screenshot online. We were to play for an hour until the game’s trial shut down. The game I played was called Zuma.

I entered this experience slightly skeptical. I assumed that I would get bored playing for an hour. Fifty minutes later, I found myself racing the clock, hoping to get the highest score possible in the few minutes left. I swore under my breath anytime I approached death, and was entirely engrossed in the game.

When I finally did stop playing, I was shaking my head in fascination of the emotional investment I had voluntarily placed in this simple, one-hour game. I knew it was a trial and I knew it had to end. The game mechanics were simple, involving shooting colored balls at rows of similar-colored balls before they reached a target. There were a few power-up options to add a little variety. The music was monotonous but grew more exciting as the balls reached a certain proximity to the target.

How could a game with such a simple premise become so fascinating? It wasn’t the music or the sounds; I had played many such games before without sound and was equally intrigued. The only reward was the score and even that disappeared after an hour. Perhaps it was the fact that a strategy could still be formed. Or maybe it was the clock: a test of speed pattern recognition proving your puzzle-solving prowess.

However, it doesn’t have to be narrowed down to a certain aspect. Each player may find their own fascination with a piece of the game as simple as pretty colors. Probably the most important experience I can take away from that one-hour diversion was that a game doesn’t have to be fancy to be fun; it simply has to engage and entertain.