Build orders, sending loot off on your pet, typing out a cheery GG.
But the best rituals go beyond any individual games.
They exist, as platform holders might say, at the hardware level.
Here’s a favourite.
I find a spot in the park.
I check for the position of the sun.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to go past even that former ritual.
I wanted to go to the source, to the land before the GBA.
I dug out the silver Game Boy Pocket I bought on eBay a while back - boxed!
- and then filed somewhere on a bookshelf.
This is clearly not literally true, but still.
The ritual makes it better, and the perseverance makes it better.
What I’ve found out these past few weeks, is that the Game Boy is still it.
It’s where it’s at.
It’s the business.
It doesn’t play music.
It doesn’t allow for messaging services or apps or keeping track of what your friends are playing.
When you remove a game from it, the game is forgotten.
Argh: I’m going to say it.
If you love solitude, the Game Boy is happiness itself.
And the purity of the rig seems shared by the games you might play on it.
And only three of them I’ve been playing.
(I should mention also that I first heard about this game on the wonderfulThe Back Page Podcast.)
This has been torture in a way, but even then a very pure torture.
The three games I have played: Tetris, obv.
Mole Mania has been great, and somewhat puzzling.
I bought this a while back as an old Nintendo curio.
It’s pretty much a lost classic - although these days little about Nintendo is very deeply lost.
It’s a puzzle game with a narrative and bosses strung through it.
Complications are added quickly, and it’s a neat, pacy thing.
But Mole Mania feels ingenious rather than genuinely fun, I think.
There’s a lot of Zelda DNA here, and a lot of Mario DNA in places.
It feels like one of those start-up incubators that companies have in Silicon Valley.
Not bad for a fiver on eBay.
The Game Boy Tetris.
The Game Boy does nothing but play games.
Tetris does nothing but play two versions of a very classic Tetris.
No soft and hard drops.
No holding a piece.
No spying two or three pieces into the future.
It’s Tetris the A-Level paper, and you’re not allowed to take anything in with you.
Except unlike an A-Level paper, it’s also brilliant fun.
Allow me to get cosmic.
One of them, the perfect video game, or close enough.
The other, the perfect video game console - or close enough.
And how’s this for solitude.
With Game Boy Tetris nothing is referencing anything.
Take that eternal question asked of all new handhelds: Yes, but what’s its Tetris?
The question that launchedLuminesinto orbit and damned Polarium.
With the Game Boy, its Tetris is Tetris.
This is where it begins.
Weirdly, it’s where things still begin.
The battery might go, certainly.
You might lose the cartridge down the lining of your coat or drop it off a ferry.
But if it’s Tetris, it will be Tetris forever, even at the bottom of the ocean.
If it’s Mole Mania, it will be Mole Mania forever.
And there’s a singular purity to that.
It still fills me with excitement.
