As The Stars Are Going Out

Stippling is fun.

When I posted Synaptic Breakdown to my Tumblr page (and subsequently to my Twitter) ~missy-tannenbaum commented that it made her think of those glow-in-the-dark star stickers you put on a ceiling. It had been years since I thought of it, but one of my earliest memories is walking past my bedroom (I couldn't have been older than three, maybe four) and glancing my parents standing on my bed putting stickers on my ceiling. That night, sure enough, I had star stickers all over my ceiling. Thanks for the memory <3
The only thing Breakdown made me think of while putting it together was Qix, the classic Taito game. It's kind of got the same problem that Pac-Man does in that it's an awesome game but plagued by a number of inferior versions. After putting the finishing touches on this, I sought out some footage of the game (because I only have Super Qix and Volfied on the PS2 compilation) and found it had a Game Boy port, which was so appallingly easy to win, it was laughable. For those of you who don't know, the game has you play as a little diamond-shaped cursor that draws lines inside a rectangular frame, creating "negative space" if you will, earning points and limiting the movement of the titular Qix, which looks like a wave of lines. If you claim or fence off more than 50% of the field, the round is over. Between the Qix itself and a few other enemies, getting that 50+ can be a bit tricky, but the guy playing this Game Boy version was getting well over 90%. Like I said, it was laughable.
I love Qix because it's basically playable abstract art, and I'm firmly in the camp that says games are art (with all due respect for Roger Ebert and even Hideo Kojima). Speaking of which, ThatGameCompany's Journey is awesome, so awesome I wanted to see what Flow was all about and downloaded the PSP version. The game is, well... a bit simple, a bit short, but mind-numbingly beautiful and its concept has this bizarre moral ambiguity about it. You play a single-then-multicellular evolving organism that eats other such creatures in order to grow. The twist is that most of what you eat are actually other players' creatures. It made me feel like a jerk, but I think that might have been the idea all along, to make me question the notion of survival in light of feeling selfish. Anyway, the Qix has been replaced by a Flow, so to speak, with a bit of a Hydra thrown in for good measure.
The title is a reference to a line in Dubstar's song Stars. Maybe, "Is it asking too much...?" would be more appropriate....