Chris’s Year of the Sicko 2024

Hydlide 3 The Space Memories

If I am being honest, my journey into the Year of the Sicko was probably kicked off by this release of this game. I’d kept my eye on the EGGConsole releases, a series of emulated older Japanese PC games, for a while, but many of them had a language barrier that I am not equipped to overcome. So when I came across a blurb on this one mentioning that it was in English (…sorta), I thought about it a lot. Also that title. “The Space Memories” is just such an amazing 70s prog rock album name.

The English in the game is that amazing brand of game localization done by someone who speaks the original language, but maybe isn’t fluent in the language they are localizing to, so it is full of weird idioms and things that barely make sense at all. Honestly, if I hadn’t also started playing Super Hydlide at the same time, I might not have understood what was being said. It doesn’t help that with even an accurate localization, Hydlide 3 The Space Memories is a game full of weird dream logic.

Someone in the game (in the second village that you can only find by having an intelligence level high enough to be able to read the tombstone in a graveyard that hides the entrance (dream logic!)) tells me the above. Since I have explored the overworld a bit, I have noticed that there is a giant crack in the ground, and it looks like maybe stars inside it, and this is meant to confirm it. In the Super Hydlide translation, this person tells you that when their friend fell into the crack, he told them he could see outer space just before he died. The Hydlide 3 The Space Memories version is so much more poetic, if also more cryptic.

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My life in 2024 seemed to grow ever more chaotic. Even as my job situation worked itself out, my kid finished eighth grade and spent summer mostly hanging out at the house before going to a two week long camp about shipwrecks and then starting high school. His behavior would get worse and worse, fighting more and more when asked to do anything, more and more violent with each passing battle. I would come to hate how I reacted to him, and how much we fought, but also to feel like I had no control in the situation, like there was no logic or rules that I could understand to make it better. Nothing about it made sense.

Hydlide 3 The Space Memories is a game full of rules and logic, even if the world it is in only makes sense to itself. There is an order, day and night cycles, invisible hunger levels, stats to judge my moral fiber based on which enemies I kill. Each day in the game follows a pattern as I explore more and more of the world. Wake up, get some food, go out and explore. Come home, stop off at the church to level up, head to bed. It’s clean and regimented. It’s the type of routine I so desperately want in my own life but can’t have.

At the same time, this routine takes place in a world full of insane logic. The first big mission I have is to climb a two hundred story tower, only to find a town on the clouds that float near the top. That town is the only place in the game I can learn magic. It also has a castle, where I can get an item that lets me fall as far as I want and not die, so I can leap off the clouds to land on an island castle. The king there wants something novel, which I can only get by murdering a dragon that lives in a cave hidden under a warehouse in the graveyard town. The game eventually does let me jump into the space canyon, letting me float in outer space, which is under the ground, in search of a space craft built by the people who originally lived in Fairyland, the main world of the game, in their attempt to escape a horrible evil. Dream logic.

For me, the appeal of being able to just jump into space, away from the real world and all its troubles, away from all of the issues of my kid and job and life, is very real. At their best, videogames can give me a small piece of that feeling, letting me escape into a world that makes sense, even if the dream logic of that world doesn’t make sense at all.

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Everyone still has their own videogame history. The Hydlide series as a whole has often been the victim of this in the US. The first game wasn’t released in the US until after The Legend of Zelda, a game it clearly influenced, but which built significantly on its foundation; it probably isn’t a surprise that it didn’t succeed. Hydlide 3 The Space Memories would come out only two years later as Super Hydlide, a game that also rules, but probably felt pretty dated by 1989 for any gamer obsessed with the newest games. We never got a release of Hydlide 2 over here, though it was eventually translated to English by a Dutch team in 2006, and is playable in MSX emulators.

Playing them now, like Xanadu, feels like getting to see an entirely alternate history, though one that influenced the games that are a part of so many of our personal histories. It’s rebuilding my understanding of videogame history, while building a new personal history for myself.

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