If you are reading this, you are assumed to be a human being. That means that, in the year of our Deus 2025, you are the product of literally centuries of humans surviving. Your ancestors may not have had a concept of a rudimentary Bluesky post, but literally every mother, grandmother, and great great grandmother going back to the age of the pyramids was someone who had the wherewithal to survive to at least the age of 13 or so. In many cases, your ancestors lived much longer! And why did they survive? Because they solved problems. The ones that could not solve problems died off (presumably having been eaten alive by their problems, because the entirety of the past is a Far Side cartoon), and you (yes, you!) are the product of hundreds or perhaps thousands of people solving problems. So, with years of what-we-are-legally-not-allowed-to-call evolution on your side, you are wired from birth to be a problem solver. It kept your ancestors alive, and it will keep you alive.
Which brings us to today’s topic: what happens when you cannot solve a problem? What happens when you cannot perform the task that you thought was the entire point? How do you deal with that?
So we are going to start with why I was considering this question: I am divorced.
I am not going to get into all the lurid details. The simple answer to “why?” is that my spouse was lying to me, and when that truth was uncovered, she was completely unable to admit to reality or be remotely contrite. Excusing a few random moments when honesty was used for the express purpose of causing pain or confusion, she reveled in her own deceit. And I was forced to make the decision that I (literally) could not live with this being “us” any longer. Our marriage was over. Some months of legal proceedings later, I was divorced, and that was that.
But getting to what passes for a finale… that took some doing.
So here is the universal problem with relationships: they are imaginary. It’s true! Any sort of connection you have with another human being is tenuous from the start, as we create these relationships as meager labels to define expectations. Of course you are going to help me move, you are my friend. Of course we are going to have sex tonight, you are my significant other. Of course you are going to throw me a big birthday party, you are my mother. But even those “concrete” relationships like family may be ephemeral. Just ask anyone that discovered that they were adopted. Does it mean a parent loves a child any less? Absolutely not. But it further reinforces how we create these relationships with words and then work backwards to what that means. If your sister is no longer your sister, would they still be important to you? Would you still expect her to pick you up from the airport? Is it blood that makes her the ideal taxi service? Or is it the bond you share as two siblings who once saw 
Uncle Morty puke vodka all over your mother’s mashed potatoes? Whatever the case, as anyone with an estranged friend or family member can tell you, that bond can dissolve faster than you ever imagined…
So why bother? Why do we build relationships at all? Because we enjoy them, obviously. Relationships have benefits, and defining ourselves in relative terms to others sets the boundaries of those benefits. You can tell a joke with your friend that you would never utter in the presence of a coworker. You can repay the favor of an acquaintance that you would not with a stranger. And you are allowed all sorts of sexual latitude with a significant other that would literally get you arrested if you tried it with anyone else. And I’m not just talking about the butt stuff! Try telling your boss that they are really filling out that pair of jeans, and see how that works out for you (wait, that might still be butt stuff).
But this is exactly where the problem starts: what happens when there is a schism between what you want from a relationship, and what is actually happening?
I want to state something plainly: I loved my wife. When we got married, I did not have any doubts. Well… I mean… Obviously I had some doubts, because I am a paranoid person that imagines new uncertainties as easily as some people order a burrito taxi… But! I can safely say I did not get married thinking a bad ending was inevitable. I married that woman because I wanted to be with her, I enjoyed being with her, and I relished making her happy. I honestly, completely believed we were good for each other, and I thought we could be good for each other until such time wherein our life insurance had to make a payout. I married her because I wanted to be with her forever. I believed the feeling to be mutual.
And, in simply typing out that previous paragraph, I am forced to interrogate the “why” of that reasoning.
No. Wait. I’m going to deflect with an anecdote.
Sorry to deceive you, dear reader, but if I gave the impression my divorce was fairly recent, that was a mistake. As of the writing of this essay, it has been literally years since my divorce, and even longer since said divorce became inevitable. It is something firmly in the rear view, and the fact that you are reading this is a sign that I am coming to grips with what happened (but not quickly!). I can write/talk about this now. This whole… everything… is something I have put behind me.
Yet.
I finally got around to watching the new Wednesday Addams series. It was released three years back, but I managed to miss it at its premiere. Which is a shame! Complete with the involvement of Millar & Gough, this is a CW series reborn. Teenagers/Young Adults have superpowers and routinely lie to each other which only causes more problems and maybe somebody involved is a secret Incredible Hulk. Straight characters with extremely queer-coded problems! Relationship drama after relationship drama! The sweetest little thing is inevitably going to turn out to be a villain, even if it takes three seasons! It’s dumb. It’s pulpy. But damned if it isn’t entertaining television.
So, going to lightly spoil the finale: the whole season is basically a “supernatural” murder mystery. People are dying, who is doing it? And to be clear, this is a show with a pet severed hand “walking” around, it is not serious-serious, but they do treat “people are dying” with some weight. That aside aside, it is eventually revealed the monster is a “Hyde”, as in Jekyll and Hyde. And to confirm the parallel of Jekyll and Hyde, the finale reveals that the nice, cute boy that is (kinda) dating one of the characters is and has always been the Hyde. So there is this scene in the final episode where he does a visible personality shift from cutie pie to “I am a murderer and no one will ever believe you. You, girlfriend, are trapped in this situation because, as previously stated, no one will ever believe you.” The whole scene is, at most, two minutes. It is short, and since they have a lot to cover in the final episode, it is not really much of anything. It is the villain taunting the hero with the stakes of the situation, and the episode barrels off in other directions from there. It is a section barely worth remembering. It is blunt and crass and screenwriting 101.
And the damned thing gave me a panic attack. I was sitting alone on a bean bag chair, completely safe and content in my own home, and a fictional monster man talking to a comic strip character from 1938 gave me a panic attack. It was not a full blow blown “omg gonna die” situation, but it was definitely “oh this streaming show that stars ‘what if Pinkie Pie was a werewolf’ just put me in fight or flight mode.” Dumbest thing in the world, and I was instantly and noticeably triggered.
And that isn’t the end of this sad tale! I was telling a buddy about this a couple of days later. See, it was supposed to be a vaguely explanatory tale about trauma, and how it hits you at the strangest times. A mutual friend of ours 
had recently experienced something that could appear to be “mood swings” or alike, but could also be explained by trauma that both of us know they had experienced before. And in comparing my own trauma to our mutual friend’s situation, the person I was speaking to noted, “Yeah, but this is different. You know your ex-wife sucks.”
And it occurred to me: no I don’t. Even after goddamned everything she put me through, “she sucks” was not an established fact in my mind. I can see how someone would think that, but… Damn, man. She was my wife. She can’t just be objectively “bad”. Did I mention I married this woman? That is a super important fact! I was in love with her more than any other person on this Earth. She can’t suck! Why did you say that?!
Oh yeah, I remember why. The dishonesty and the gaslighting and the months of torture over the previously mentioned lying. Right. Okay. That sucked. But does she suck? She, the one doing all of those sucky things? No, I’m not certain my brain is ready to register that factoid. I can objectively claim I have accepted what happened, but subjectively, that reasoning is still out of reach.
We are human, and we learn from patterns. We recognize what is happening, and expect the same behaviors to happen again in the future. But we are also stupid. Maybe you are luckier than I am, but I am guessing you have, over the course of your life, had a handful of friends that are jerks. Or, as you may have found yourself saying in the past, “Sure, John Doe is an asshole sometimes, but you know, when the chips are down, he’s got your back.” It is very common! Particularly with a generation that grew up on sarcastic superheroes (“Well excuuuuuuse me, princess!”) and sitcoms featuring protagonists that were sentenced to prison for selfishness. It happens! But the trick of that reasoning is that you are very unlikely to be in a situation where one specific person can or should step up to “save” you. Years and years may pass, and, if your life is stable enough, it is improbable that the hypothesis of your friend being “good deep down” is ever tested. And when it is tested, and you find that someone you loved would abandon their principles for the sake of convenience… Was that some temporary madness, or is this just who they are? Did they ever have principles? I really thought they were somebody else. Somebody I could trust openly. Did that person ever exist at all?
And how do you trust anyone else after that? After you learned that you so totally failed at understanding another person and who they are? How do you do anything but doubt yourself after such a colossal failure? And how do you get through an episode of Wednesday without teenage melodrama causing a panic attack?
And, brothers and sisters, I wish I knew.
But! I do have some recommendations! There is a purpose behind this article beyond therapy through writing (which is free therapy! The best kind!). So here is my advice: Get your Qix from Taito.
Qix is one of the rare games covered on this blog that is older than me. Released in 1981, Qix pretty much defines the concept of “easy to understand, hard to master.” You are a dot (you are a dot), and you travel around the perimeter of the big rectangle that is the screen. Your job is to get out there in the playfield and draw lines (Stix) to create complete shapes. As you draw more shapes, you can travel along the lines of those new figures, and eventually you can fill at least 75% of the screen with your own quadrilaterals. However, your opponents in this ordeal are the nefarious Sparx, which travel along those same lines and may trap you into an early grave. And beyond the Sparx, there is the omnipresent and titular Qix, which is a sentient screensaver that randomly bounces all over the playfield. Sometimes Qix plays off in a corner and you can get your work done, and sometimes that jerk comes roaring at you with the fury of a thousand suns. Could go either way!
And we are going to claim that whole “could go either way” is the moral of today’s story.
You have one job: draw boxes. And those Sparx? Those are the Blinky and Pinky of this adventure. They want you dead, and they will hunt you. You know they are a threat. They are a known problem, and there are ways to “trick” or otherwise evade those wily Sparx. But Qix? Our favorite color beam? You cannot prepare for Qix. Qix is truly random, and it does not care if you live or die. It will kill you, but Qix has no purpose in its erratic movements across the screen. Qix is a colorful, arbitrary jackass. The Sparx have intention, but Qix could trap itself in a box or murder your entire family. And when the worst happens, when Qix has drained your lives down to a game over… could you have done something differently? Was it just pure chance? Would you have conquered 50% of the screen in one go if Qix did not swerve at the exact wrong moment? If not for this one random chance occurrence, would everything have been different?
No. That is the lesson of Qix. One way or another, Qix was eventually going to win. Maybe it could have happened differently, maybe it could have lasted longer, maybe you could have obtained a higher score; but, one way or another, you were always going to see that game over screen. No quarter lasts forever. You were always going to reach a point where Qix is revealed to be a monster. You recognize that pattern. You know all of this because it happened. There is no alternate universe where everything worked out better.
There was no solving the problem.
But just because there was one unsurmountable problem, that does not mean it is all over for everything. Qix is unbeatable, but there are other line-based games out there. You can triumph. You do have more quarters. And just because one stix succumbed to a sparx, that does not mean the world has ended. You can move forward elsewhere. You can triumph over other, solvable problems.
I’m Goggle Bob, and I’m not going to let my divorce/Qix haunt the rest of my life.
FGC #711 Qix
- System: Qix started in the arcade, and then ran the gamut of practically every system available for ten years. Amiga, Atari, other systems that don’t start with A… Qix hit them all! Then, by about the SNES era, it fell off, and now only returns on random Taito collections. As a result, much of the gameplay you see here is technically from a Nintendo Switch 2.
- Number of players: Qix for the Gameboy lets you play as Mario and Luigi as first and second player, so we are going to call the whole franchise two player.
- Port-o-Call: Nearly every port of Qix of its era seems to run slower than the arcade origin, so playing this on an Atari or Gameboy makes the game significantly easier. I can see where you are going, Qix! I am the Flash now! Or some speedy videogame varmint I cannot immediately recollect!
- So, do you actually own a copy of Qix? Yep! I have a version of it on Gameboy. I may have purchased it because I thought it was Kwirk, as I was a big supporter of the Power Team.
And that’s the racist one, right? I think Nintendo just… did not understand the ramifications of what they were doing. When you lose a game in Qix for Gameboy, there is a brief scene of Mario in a different culture. If you attain the absolute highest score, Mario is seen in the Mushroom Kingdom with the cast of the Super Mario Bros. 2 cast. Anything lower than that, and you get a simulacrum of Mario in a different place, like three Mario guards in front of Big Ben in England, or Mario as a matador in Spain. The only issue is that the second-to-lowest score will net you an African Mario wielding a spear on the African Savanah, and the absolute lowest score gets you Mexican Mario playing mariachi for a vulture. The implications of these cultures being the worst rewards are… not great.- Other Kicks: Because it is difficult to copyright “draw a line”, there have been a number of Qix-alikes through the years. I played a little Gals Panic SS for the Sega Saturn for this article. That is one of those titles where drawing your boxes gradually reveals a sexy (“sexy”) anime lady, and your “Qix” opponents are more shoot ‘em up themed. It… isn’t bad? The weirdest part is playing a lot of Qix with its right angles, and then trying something where you can move at any angle. Qix is not meant for that kind of precision!
- Did you know? Qix was created by Randy and Sandy Pfeiffer, husband and wife. I was considering working that factoid into the article, but I kept getting stuck every time I was reminded that a man named Randy married a woman named Sandy. That should be illegal.
- Would I play again: Qix is the ideal kind of game that should exist in an arcade cabinet that is always on in your home or office. Unfortunately, that would take up too much space, and Qix is only available to me on a console where I can (at the latest estimate) play every videogame ever made (except Chrono Trigger). So, unfortunately, I am unlikely to play Qix again. It’s good! Just not compelling enough to make me ignore the rest of my prodigious backlog (or the entire Mega Man franchise).
What’s next? Alright! Back to ignoring my personal life and just talking about videogames. Next week is the last Friday of the month, so we are returning to the Smash Bros. Challenge with a look at… Goemon? He was in Smash Bros? Well, we will have to investigate this further… Please look forward to it!
I cannot imagine walking into a videogame store and buying this from one of the six Sega Saturn games available