Health and Happiness Club

When I was a young munchkin with an original Nintendo DS, I loved the Super Mario Bros. Games. My sister used to say that watching me play was like watching an artist; I knew exactly when to jump, exactly where to go to get that extra life, to push that high score. I made a goal of beating every level--perfectly, immaculately. I did--except the last one. For some reason I could never bring myself to finish the games. Why? Who knows. Perhaps I got distracted. Perhaps I'd change preferences and attempted to beat Temple of Doom. Perhaps I changed my fixation to Surfer Ken. Frankly, there were too many roads for distraction to even guess at the cause of my abandonment.

Flash forward almost twenty years to a game for my iPhone called Ricky. With its recent update, it's a pretty blatant knock off of the Original Mario Bros. Except it's a little different, as in annoyingly inconsistently different. And when I say annoyingly inconsistent, I mean the controls don't always work the way you want them to, the "enemies" don't always die the way they should, and the characters/jumps/moves are inconsistent to the point where you have to rush through the game to win, never being able to solidify a strategy due to its ever-changing rhythm. I found myself so aggravated that I couldn't get it perfect the first go round, any go round, couldn't explore the perfect play, that I would scream obscenities and exit out of it mid-level. At some point, I caught myself--weren't these games supposed to be fun? Weren't they supposed to be difficult to master/conquer? Weren't the original games just as difficult for me to play?

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