Let us now praise the poets of the watermelon. There is Frida Kahlo, who arranged them like architecture, a strange city of watermelons, one particular example etched with the words, Viva La Vida, a sentiment so joyous not even Coldplay could ruin it. There is Ricky Jay, the conjurer, actor, writer, historian of magic, who could fling playing cards with such deadly speed that their 52 polite razor edges would pierce the thick, "pachydermous hide" of "his majesty", shining and green on Broadway or on the set of the Johnny Carson show.
And now we must add Fruit Ninja. A hush and that hollow popping noise, a T-shirt cannon has fired off-screen and then the watermelon is tumbling before us. "His majesty" is not the half of it. Are we in space? Are we orbiting, circling, caught in some endless Kubrick freefall, upwards and around? Behold nature's panzered blimp: its outside speaks of snakes and camouflage and armour. Its inside, once the blade has sung and fairly scorched the mineral air, is a revelation of blood. And yet, amidst the snakes and camouflage and armour and blood, amidst the scattered punctuation of those little black seeds, the pedantry of pips, the watermelon is revealed as a thing of purest joy.
I didn't want to write about Fruit Ninja+, which has recently landed on Apple Arcade, because it is not remotely new, and there are other good games that are new, and doesn't everybody know Fruit Ninja anyway, and aren't we all through it and over it? But Fruit Ninja+ gets at part of what makes Arcade sing. Curation! Taste! A platform's sense of its own history. I have a vague sense of checking in on Fruit Ninja over the years, a fading, perhaps false, memory of being disappointed with what had to happen for a game to survive in the App Store. Nothing egregious, just little additions and quirks that ruined the purity of it.
