4:37:05. 5555 flips. 1500 deaths.

That pretty much sums up VVVVVV. This retro platformer uses late-Atari graphics and some handwaving about a spaceship that’s skipped dimensions to fuel hours of exploration.

The basics: As captain of the spaceship, you’re looking to gather your scattered crew by exploring a gradually revealed map. The mechanisms are simple: you flip back and forth between ceiling and floor, resting on platforms before the next round of spikes.

There are lots of spikes. Endless rows of them, with flying obstacles, vanishing platforms, warp stations and rising floors that threaten to crush you. You develop new means of travel as you go; there are thin wires that reverse your momentum and rooms that loop endlessly on themselves.

The game offers inventive variety on a strong central theme. The controls are precise enough that even the countless deaths avoid feeling arbitrary. And the “shiny trinkets” give you ample reason to keep exploring. I collected all of them, even snaking my way through this twisting monstrosity.

It’s a rare game that prompts me to visit every corner, but VVVVVV is a real achievement. If you enjoy platforming at all, I’d recommend it.

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

I finally read Taylor Branch’s takedown of college sports in the Atlantic, and it’s a knockout. “The Shame of College Sports” details how the NCAA oversees a billion-dollar industry, diverting profits from participants to the top stakeholders. The organization uses the student-athlete concept to—perhaps illegally—strip athletes of their rights to their representation and labor. They have opaque, arbitrary enforcement and appeals mechanisms. They’ve enlisted universities in perverting their own central mandate: education.

And I eagerly consume their product, so I’m a big part of the problem. In a perfect world, I think athletic scholarships shouldn’t exist. At minimum, students should have proceeds from their likeness (jersey sales, video games, etc.) placed in a lockbox until after they graduate.

But in the meantime, it’s exciting to hear that players have contemplated taking matters into their own hands. As Branch shares, “William Friday, the former North Carolina president, recalls being yanked from one Knight Commission meeting and sworn to secrecy about what might happen if a certain team made the NCAA championship basketball game. ‘They were going to dress and go out on the floor,’ Friday told me, ‘but refuse to play,’ in a wildcat student strike.”

Can you imagine the reaction? I’d love to see it. Dunkers of the world unite…