Memorial Day Picture Show

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Animal Well, Oom

I imagined I’d scribble out a regular Friday newsletter, but vacation swept me away. So I’ll take the belated opportunity to share a few pictures from my England trip and the games I played to and fro the Atlantic.

Nintendo’s remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door carried me through 7-hour flights and long train rides, often accompanied by audiobooks when I had to play through repetitious combat or tedious puzzles. While I have my gripes (and wish it was as short as the comparatively pithy Super Mario RPG remake), the game’s chockablock with witty asides and endearing characters — it’s heartwarming and heartily entertaining.

Meanwhile, my wife Arvilla and I spent most of our time scouring museums and historical sites — including my old stomping grounds at King’s College Cambridge, now the site of a Pro-Palestinian encampment.

Excepting our rain-soaked day in Cambridge, the English weather was surprisingly glorious. It actually fit the Mediterranean setting of Much Ado About Nothing, which we saw at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. I took one picture before the show, which captured only a corner of Arvilla’s face and failed to focus on the orange-strewn set. I’d be embarrassed to share this awful photo if it didn’t amuse me so:

During the show’s interval, Arvilla and I sat down so we could keep our spot as groundlings, and I took out my Playdate to struggle through Oom, which bills itself as a “rhythmic dungeon crawler.” You fire behind you to destroy enemies or blockades while pulsing forward. This brilliant conceit uses the Playdate’s hand-crank to great effect, but the game gets too complex and sadistic in its final stages.

I’ll have more to say on Animal Well later this week, but by the end of the trip, I returned to its neon puzzles.

So for now, I’ll leave you with one last, similarly luminous picture from the trip — a glimpse at a coliseum in Roman London, now displayed in the basement of the Guildhall Art Museum:

The wireframe gladiators made me feel like we had walked into Tron: a union of the modern and antique that’d be right at home in a video game.