NESessities of Life – Pipe Dream

Genre
Puzzle

Dominant Algorithm
Tile placement/Goo

Gameplay
Tapping into the same sense of wonder that all children associate with the field of blue-collar labor, Pipe Dream tasks you with the ever-thrilling enterprise of connecting steel pipes so that fluid can flow through them freely. Knowing that just placing pipes on a grid wouldn’t be enough to pump kids up, the programmers added a challenge – the fluid that will be carried through the pipes is already flowing. You have to work quickly to make sure the slow-moving goo doesn’t spill everywhere.

Basically, your responsibility is to turn mundane this:

Into fabulous that:

You may now return from the edge of your seats. I know that this is really exciting.

Sweetness
Menial, repetitive task allows the user to experience the trance state that a plumber experiences. Unlike actual plumbing, user’s muscles may effectively atrophy by not making them actually pick up a wrench.

Weakness
While taking a few fantastic liberties with the vocation, the game is pretty effective in how well it emulates the thrill of plumbing.

Invaluable Life Lessons Which I Still Apply To This Day:

1. With a bit of practice, you can do anything. Even plumb!
2. Plumbers are rewarded for making loop-ditty-loops to confuse the fluid passing through the pipes.
3. Just sit back and imagine gallons of sticky white goo pumping endlessly through long, hard tubes. That’s it. There you go. So much sticky white goo. Focus on that image. endlessly flowing sticky white goo. And, if you aren’t careful, **SPLASH** sticky white goo will come out of the pipe and slop everywhere! **SPLASH SPLASH** Goo everywhere! That sticky white goo mess is so sticky and gooey that cleaning it up is impossible. Just leave it there to crust over and get started on pumping the next load of sticky white goo through the next tube.

Still Fun?
Not fun, per se, but an excellent menial task to occupy your mind with if you’re riding the train or laid up in a hospital bed.

Actually, scratch that. I played this game for two days straight when I was laid up in a hospital bed. The combination of gaming, heavy medication, and my own biological systems collapsing internally led to a nightmare that I was a tile in the game. The pipes were connecting me to hundreds of corpses and pumping our innards to and fro. I felt so many levels of decay pass through my body in that dream that I haven’t played the game since.

Relevance Satellite to the Paradigm Shift from my Youth:
The title of the game is an idiom in the English language that means an unrealistic dream or overly-fantastic idea. The origin of this phrase is from opium dens where people would smoke opium pipes and then have balls-out nutty ideas and dreams. Between the thoroughly explored issue of sticky white goo pumping out everywhere and the types of ideas you have while cranked out on opium, this game is amazing.

One can assume that this game was made based on the popularity of Mario, who was by trade a plumber. Perhaps the folks at LucasArts thought the concept of laying pipe would really resonate with the children.

Fan Art:
Unfortunately, the concept of hewing pipes together was not incredibly resonant with budding artists in the late 80′s/early 90′s. However, there are a couple pictures floating around the internet that are related. These are those:

See? Now, that’s just cute.

Though not a gaming site, www.thereifixedit.com is pretty fun to look at.

“That’s the mentality here. That’s the reality here. Did I hear somebody say they want to challenge me here?” – Eminem

I don’t know why that picture makes me think of that quote.

Geddit? geddit?

Jesse Koester is a film producer working in Tokyo. His work can be seen at www.iceblockfilms.com. Jesse’s most infamous problem is a blinking red power light.