Over the past year or so, ever since I started my podcast, I’ve offended a lot of people. My goal in creating the show seemed simple: play games that were perceived as masterpieces upon release, and try to determine if they’re truly classics. I wanted to break down everything - the graphics, the music, the gameplay, the level design - and compare it to the titles of today. I went in expecting a mixed bag of experiences - some good, some bad and some truly dreadful.

Perhaps the worst game that I played this year was Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland. I was incredibly dismissive of it on the show and had basically nothing positive to say about it. “It’s a game for children,'' I said, my face contorted in a nasty sneer. I was a professional gamer, and this game dared to present me a simplistic, fun and cute adventure instead of the brick wall challenge that I craved.

I was expecting people to be angry with me. I was prepared for that. Anger and insults would just allow me to counterattack with even more arrogant condescension, breaking down the game to its purely technical components. It would let me strip the game of any romanticism or artistic qualities and engage in a jargon laden barrage. But, unfortunately for me, the show, and even my article, didn’t lead to angry outbursts. The response was far worse.

It was met with sadness.

I heard a story of someone who used to struggle to sleep as a child Defeating Nightmare and restoring Dreamland to peace in game helped them to fall asleep. More commonly, I was just told of a general feeling of warmth towards the game. Nostalgia wasn’t being used as an argument for the game’s greatness, but their experience with the game was defined by it. They said that they were sad for me that I didn’t get to experience it when I was younger, and that I couldn’t understand how they felt about the game.

It made me feel uncertain. Its not that the criticisms I made were invalid. Instead, there was some kind of bigger picture interfacing issue. I’ve always been highly critical in how I approach most art, spending far more time talking about the things I dislike than what I love. But I ultimately put my concerns aside, because there were more shows to do, and no time to second guess myself.



Until recently, that is. The reason I’ve started reflecting once upon this troublesome idea is a game called Supraland. It was released earlier in April this year, but I only started playing it about a week ago. It's a shonky, amateur game, filled with physics glitches, dubious ‘writing’ and presents basically no challenge. And yet, for all its apparent flaws, I still love it. So I decided to write a bit about this game, in an effort to understand exactly why this game evokes a warm feeling in my heart. If I’m lucky, at the end of it I might just understand Kirby a little better