Rating Curve

sometimes I'll set the grid size in megahack to 1 and then doodle in the editor like I'm using a pen tool. hell of a lot of fun. yall should do it more often

this rating is dedicated to somehow getting 70% on this level on my iPad when I was an underclassman in high school. the amount of spam sections jeezus

the highly defined aesthetics of most of the game's updates definitely weren't any more than an afterthought by rob. during that initial year of consistent updates I'd imagine it was mostly a lot of "here's a good spot in my development to release this chunk of features, hit send", and very little "this is the precise way I want the game to look". and yet we've ended up in a community steeped enough in nostalgia that update numbers have become visual shorthand in their own right, these moments in history forever crystallized and internalized by creators as looking a particular way.

you probably have a very similar mental of image of 1.9 as everyone else, despite the diversity and wonder of the update, and you're probably sick of what you see because it's been drilled down so hard over the last 10 years (the way it shows up in the portfolio of every design creator trying to "retvrn to stripped-down arrangements" like they're taping for MTV unplugged). we are obsessed with the affects of that update probably a hundred times as strongly as rob ever was. and 2.0's awkward middle-child-syndrome vibe has been making similar waves, indicating it's not anything really special about 1.9 but rather a general affinity for the romantic past

you ever think about how it could've all been so different? if the move trigger was a thing in 1.1 rather than 2.0? if we didn't get access to the Newgrounds audio library until 2.2, 10 years later? if different block sets had been entirely rearranged and folded into completely different updates? imagine how one or two subtle changes in an update, a delayed feature here, a rushed feature there, would've radically altered the fabric of everything, perhaps uprooting the entire lineage of creating as we know it.

spanish love songs is a brief wormhole peering into that alternative timeline. seldom have I seen a stronger examination into the butterfly effect than here

there's no way for me to separate this level from the social circumstances & memories it's come to represent for me personally. so I'm not gonna. eat your heart out

PS have you ever had someone in your life that you wish you could be friends with again but you just know it's never going to happen

there were likely better and more poignant examples for the time that've escaped my memory, but when this dropped desty's vision burned brighter through the sky than just about anyone else. the context of the Viprin CC makes it even better - while people were bucket-tooling their by-the-numbers design levels blue, voyage was too busy towing the line on what could still veritably be categorized a "design level". wouldn't be surprised if it accelerated our descent into the monogenre. surely ahead of its time, although I'm forced to revoke its classic status cuz it's nothing to write home about today

just love watching the way the player moves in this one. it's the singular thing unique to this game as a medium and yet we get like one level a millennium that bothers to play with motion the same way

to bite on nostalgia for a bit, this was truly a "you had to be there" typa thing

a testament to the following things

1) despite 1.9 as an era lasting 9 months we still cling to the childlike wonder it brought us a decade ago

2) being early to something can often carry more cultural weight than being great at something

3) a perceived theme can and should be more than just priming your color channels and copy-pasting in some assets

4) red level no send

the embodiment of my once-a-year impulse to listen to Stars of the Lid - for most of your waking hours it'll feel like boring repetitive nonsense and then you'll find yourself in a weird pocket of calm where everything makes infinitely more sense in the stillness of your mind

beating this before it got rated is one of those shitty brownie points I will take to the grave