30 seconds if you mash through the text.) Why did I dock a star then? So as to not look *too* flattering on this as to get ignored it's totally not because of a glitch related to high scores with which I have an easy time putting up when I only beat one high score every few days now. Why's it so hard? Because the game's creator designs things to feel good to him, and he has claimed that he "has the attention span of a four-year-old" who doesn't like waiting for things to happen. What makes this so great? Well, as long as you can put up with the difficulty for the first week or so, it's a wonderful game to pass the time and to forever want to improve at: no ads, no IAPs, no nothing, just the six levels and your high scores on them. I've traditionally held exactly three in that regard: Threes!, VVVVVV, and Super Hexagon, and also secondarily osu!stream. So imagine my surprise when it was in the brief moment a friend stepped away to use the john that I finally found victory, in between bites of burgers and musing about our futures.Ninety-nine percent of iOS games are abysmal, but there're a few that shine through. Waiting in the wings of the theater between showings for the last patrons to finish watching the credits (there's always at least one person who does this in every screening of every movie, no exceptions), I'd turn my phone's brightness all the way down and try my best to hit sixty seconds in Hexagonest. Because I spent most of my time there working doubles to chip away at my student loans, it also meant that's where I spent most of my time playing Super Hexagon. ¹ I was waiting for a friend to return from the bathroom at a pub in our hometown, it was the middle of the afternoon and I had the day off from working at the movie theater where I spent most of my time. That Terry consistently updates the game and ensures we as its players can continue to go cross-eyed in the pursuit of a seemingly impossible high score is a blessing, and one unfortunately not shared by many of the other apps I loved from that era. To this day I have a shockingly vivid memory¹ of finally surviving a run for one endless minute in the blistering "Hexagonest" difficulty level after weeks of attempts, a feat I just tried and failed to replicate while writing this.Īnd it’s a miracle I can try to beat "Hexagonest" at all in 2022 given the ways in which Apple has slowly eradicated the App Store's own legacy through forced deprecation and obsolescence over the years. In retrospect I can identify an eventual fan of FromSoftware's particular brand of masochistic game design through the lens of my score-chase-driven obsession with proving I can master a video game that uses a majority of its sparse copywriting to telegraph its own insurmountable difficulty. Even my brief foray into working on smaller indie game projects was in some ways brought about by the simple fact that I couldn't put Super Hexagon down, and I dreamed of creating something that would make others feel the same way. Visually, the bold and geometric art style influenced my own design sensibilities. Chipzel's unreal soundtrack inspired a track of my own as I started to experiment with creating chiptune music. Even back in 2012 I remember its aesthetic directly changing my relationship with games and the kinds of works I wanted to create. I consider Super Hexagon to be one of my more formative game experiences, and without it I'm not sure I'd be writing blog posts like this or hosting podcast episodes about video games on a weekly basis. I would never have imagined that anyone would still be playing it 10 years on. I didn’t expect any kind of reaction to it, let alone the one it got. It was a game that just sort of came along, while I was working on something else, a game I very much made for myself, tuned to my own reflexes. I still don’t really know how to think about Super Hexagon, sometimes. I don’t have any big plans today, sorry – but I wanted to mark the occasion here. Game designer Terry Cavanagh via this blog post: So, hey! Today is the 10th anniversary of Super Hexagon’s original release.
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