Daniel

By Paul Equinox Collins

Genre: Arcade: Existential flinch

This marks Paul’s second entry to the competition and it’s another introspective one.  Done in the 1990’s the game is based on a bonus stage from Super Mario on the GameBoy and named after his then best friend at school, Daniel.  Through Paul, Daniel met and is now married to one of Paul’s exes, and they are now committed Christians.  Paul said he didn’t have time to weave this tangled web into the game, but I would suggest that given the themes explored here – luck, fate, life, death, purpose, longevity, in a way he already has.

 

Ready or not, on loading you leap straight into the game (no introscreen or wait for keypress here) and have to work out what to do.  You randomly appear on one of the 4 platforms at a disarmingly fast rate and must press a key to ‘get’ the object on that platform.  Objects are green crosses (lose a life), clocks (extra time) and yellow boxes (extra life).  There is no scoring to speak of, unless you count the number of goes as such.  The speed of change is too fast to properly target anything, so it is at best guided, at worst random which item you get.  So like life, Daniel is a game of chance.

I tried to play through to the magic number, 256 goes, but annoyingly lost all my lives at the last few tries after plain sailing for ages.  Then it was game over and reincarnation straight back on the trampoline…

Thankyou Paul!

Download here.