Over on Dire Critic, Kris Ligman has a post up on trying to name the various patterns in Super Hexagon. This, as luck would have it, was a project I wanted to do myself a few weeks ago but knew I lacked the audience (and time) to isolate all the patterns I wanted to try to name. However, since Kris has gotten it started, I thought I would throw in some I tried to capture on the iOS version about a month ago.

(At the time, I also wanted to write about how Super Hexagon portrays “reading” the patterns. It’s a thread David started last month — and I commented about. There is something very powerful going on there, in that you must be highly “fluent” in the game’s grammar in order to do well. I don’t feel like I’m equipped to write about it other than to say that we cover some ideas — notably an analysis of the navigation of “lacks” being similar to Silverman’s ideas — in a The School of Athens episode that will go up at some point within the next few weeks. )

[Since it was only a couple dollars on Steam, I decided to buy and try that version too while I was in the middle of writing this post. It’s… slightly different, I think. It’s the same mechanics, true, but my response to it is as if I’m trying to “read” a different dialect of the same language. I understand the meaning, but can’t seem to react fast enough to do as well — yet.]