Gespenst

I've got a vague sick thing going on right now, some sort of sneezing sore throat fevery thing. It's not super terrible, but the weird thing is I've started to zone out completely. I'll kind of stare at the computer screen, and then ten seconds have passed without my recognition or consent. It's kind of disconcerting, but I also appreciate that it skips over some of the boredom produced by convalescence. Really, I want this to be over so I can get back to my exercise regimen, which had kinda gotten on a roll. Soon enough, I suppose.

I've got that overheated-brain feeling right now, the notion that any idea that hits my mind is a fragment of cosmic genius. Drugs are usually my source for such imagined grandeur, so it's strange to experience that elevated self-estimation from a simple fever.

Dead Man's Notes

This Valentine's Day, I'm going to be at home, with my cat, baking a cheesecake. I guess my life is a Cathy strip now.

Recently, my capacity to play games increased dramatically. Before, I would rarely be able to keep up with the larger ongoing conversation about games. The gaming media predominantly focuses on the most recent thing, which is lost on the value-conscious/broke. Maybe I'd rent a new release the week it came out, but most games crossed my palm once they'd hit the twenty dollar sweet spot.

Now, I'm trampling my way through Mass Effect 2 along with the rest of the gaming biosphere. It's a curious feeling, to be on the cutting edge. Without financial limitations, I don't feel any desire to play games that don't land completely true on my mesolimbic pathway. If a game doesn't demand my attention, I let it slide. Assassin's Creed 2 is on the shelf right now, barely played - good, but not quite good enough. It's no tragic alteration to my pattern of play, but it's awfully strange to switch from quiet serial monogamist to globetrotting, lackadaisical Lothario.

I've been trying to work out a bit. There is an awesome, narcotic feeling that comes with the mastery of one's body, and I want that feeling back. From the cradle, I was a pudgy little fuck. Everyone looks at you differently for it, though I'd hesitate to say that fat's among life's greater burdens. When I was a senior in high school, I took a weightlifting class, catapulting me to the best shape I had and have ever been in my life. Before, I had been three hundred thirty pounds of bubbling disdain. After the class was over, I was a smug two hundred twenty pounds. Everyone outside of my inner circle seemed to treat me differently, and it made me happy, because now I had a chance to spurn them.

Valentine's makes me reflect on these things. I'm alone and still a bit afraid to admit that I'm lonely. Right now, I carry three hundred pounds of undead fury. But if I lost the weight, if I passed properly, if I got my stuff in order, would I like my choices any better? Would I just use it as an excuse to revel in the power of rejecting others? God, I really want to draw a parallel between this and my mostly-virgin copy of Assassin's Creed 2, but I'm drawing a blank. That really would finished this post off spectacularly. Well, at least I got something out of Valentine's Day.

Horseshoe Crab Blood Purity Test

I get sick a lot in the winter. This year, I didn't. Four months into the season and still going strong! But now I'm paranoid that I'll get sick, and so I see every sniffle as an indisputable diagnosis of some new animal flu. Winter gets under my skin.

Be the Beat

I just spent a little under an hour obtaining and fiddling with an erotic text adventure from my youth. It's called A Night With Troi, and you cannot fathom how embarrassed I am for admitting this. I put up a good facade of solidarity with my fellow nerds, but I have a threshold where my racial memory of swirlies and anti-proms kicks in and I start backpedaling so as not to be one of them. A pornographic (text!) game based on Star Trek (:TNG!) is far beyond that gentle Rubicon.

And it's not even good! Imagine: your partner disrobes, pecs/breasts almost glowing in the soft light. You embrace, the only thing separating the two of you a layer of glistening sweat. You whisper in his/her ear: "I love you." S/he stiffens, and says, monotone, "I don't understand the word 'love' as a noun." A tin-eared text parser sucks all the sexy out of the room. Getting the game to recognize your words is an awkward struggle, and even then it may deny you for reasons that aren't clear.

But because it's so clumsy and frustrating, there's an inestimable feeling of reward when you finally consummate your keyboard-clacking coitus. Around ten or twelve, when I was reaching the age of sexual immaturity, a I'd play strip poker games on my 133Mhz Compaq. No matter what Microsoft does, there is no Achievement that can truly capture the accomplishment of spending two hours at bad video poker just to see a boob.

A Night with Troi is some tedious smut, but its antique presentation and straight-up oddness really endear it to me.

Addendum: Actual gameplay footage!
>replicate lube_
The harmonics of the replicator play briefly, and the tube of lubricant you asked for appears.  You pick it up and nod in approval.

The Ballad of Winston Zeddemore

I'm caught in a temporary dark age right now. Christmas' whirlwind of baking, buying, and consuming are gone, and the mess needs to be cleaned up. But my kitchen goes uncleaned and cookies uneaten, because I'm stuck doing late shifts so I can put some money together before I go back to school. Everyone's going back to school, now; recessions teach people just how bad their current jobs are.

Winston was the most unnecessary Ghostbuster. He inspired me to feel the unutterable pity one feels for the perpetually unloved. According to his Wikipedia article, "Winston Zeddemore was intended to be the smartest and most capable of the Ghostbusters, a former Marine with multiple degrees and a Ph.D., making him more suited for the job than the founding three Ghostbusters." Amazing! I say this from the perspective of a six-year-old mulatto kid with self-esteem issues, but I always thought they'd hired him to carry their stuff. The die of history has been cast, and it did not land in Winston's favor. You can't change that. But read his (wiki) biography, and maybe then you can give him the remembrance he deserves.

But I Never Saw the Good Side of the City Until I Hitched a Ride on a Riverboat Queen

As a kid, a lot of presents were given to me that I had no use for. There was this retrospectively awesome book of weird paper airplanes, given to me by my friend Andrew (I think he's an astronaut now or something.) Sadly, most of the designs were too complicated for me by half, and I could never get them to fly. I had useless little hands, really not even good for playing videogames - that's why I mostly played RPGs.

God, I always feel guilty for never using a present given to me in good faith. Like I'm letting the person who gave it down. They lie awake at night, it's 3am, and they're squirming in their bed, tortured by the disappointment that I'm not listening to their CD of ambient Native American spiritual rhythms. Sorry, mom!

Legacy Weapon

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 was a big game for me; the demo was on a PC Gamer disc, and it allowed for a lot of playtime without requiring a purchase. If you typed in 8675309, you got black dragons, which eliminated any of the strategy elements from the battles. It warmed my cheaty little heart. Point, click, kill, win. The game was a bit of RPG (collect artifacts, learn spells) and strategy (create units at your base, then use them to fight your enemies in hex-based combat). It was like a PC RPG interpreted through the lens of a board game. Settlers of Wizardry, maybe, or Pool of Carcassone.

In the present tense, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is a retool of the Heroes of Might and Magic series for the DS. It's largest deviation from the formula is the combat. Hexagonal turn-based strategy has been replaced by something far more novel: the puzzle gaming. Match three rows of units, send them flying through your enemy's ranks, deplete their HP, win. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I can't exposit on the ins and outs of the gameplay here without boring you and myself. Instead, I'll say that it's really pretty great.

The single player campaign cycles you through the game's five different factions. Knights, demons, wizards, elves and the undead - the starting lineup of the RPG cliché All-Star team. Every faction has different units and magical attacks. Amazingly, each one plays differently and is fun in its own way. (Except the knights. I hate the knights.) Most battles are of a simple "smack them in the HP till it hurts" persuasion, but there are enough variations to keep Random Battle Exhaustion from setting in. In these unique, puzzley fights you must hit two switches simultaneously or smack a demon who throws exploding cocktails at you from behind a bar, etc.

The game requires you buy your larger units on the world map, each at one specific location which sells one specific type of unit. It feels like an unnecessary holdover from Heroes of Might and Magic, a useless bit thrown in to show a continuity of design between the two games. The champion units were never so overpowered that I ran roughshod over my opponents, and trudging from one end of the map to another to restock my army felt pointless. It didn't severely impact my enjoyment of the game, but why not allow the player to buy units anywhere? Or, better yet, take out unit-buying altogether?

The game also isn't as portable-friendly as a DS game should be. There's no option to save during battles, which made me have to repeat a few battles when my DS died in my pocket. Also, the game will often allow you to start fights you can't win without warning. If you encounter an enemy far over your level, you can retreat, but you'll lose a portion of the resources you use to purchase units. However, if you die during the battle, you'll restart from immediately beforehand with no ill effects. It led me to waste a lot of time trying to die as quickly as possible against an overwhelming force.

None of this matters, though, because this is a game that is both boss and the bee's knees. I would say that it's too short, but I probably only think that because I played it for about twenty hours in the span of three days. Play it. Hell, pay money to play it. Coming from a cheapass like me, there is little higher recommendation.

Non-Compete

I find it half funny/half sad whenever someone puts, say, a three out of four star review on the poster for their movie. Grade scaling notwithstanding, it's like a schoolchild proudly displaying the C+ she got on a test. Yes, very well, you got a passing grade, no one's going to fault you for it, but it falls a bit short of the threshold for public shows of pride.

Cymothoa Exigua

I've been thinking about the structure of videogames. Iriquois Pliskin or someone made a comment that's been smoldering in my mind for a week now: referring to the traditional End Boss as a final exam of sorts. A game will present you with a new mechanic, let you loose to experiment with it, and then, perhaps, give you a boss as pop quiz, separating those in the class who've mastered the material from those who need to stay after class. Then, at the end of the game, the final boss is a recapitulation of all the bosses beforehand, a last test to see if you've truly mastered the concepts that came before.

In school, I liked math. A lot. My memory has a bit of a nostalgia halo, but I derived a pure satisfaction from learning new rules, solving problems, and acing tests. I think that the specific challenges I seek in games are a substitute for that kind of pursuit. That same spot gets scratched when I play Sudoku or do crosswords or what have you, but they lose their flavor after a too long. Sudoku is unsatisfactory to me because it lacks the protean ruleset present in games and algebra. n will always equal n, but in the process of learning new rules are introduced that build on one another. You learn the quadratic equation, and you use it for awhile until you get a new, shinier weapon, but when you're fighting Calculus you find that you need to pull it out again to win.

Braid disappointed me for multiple reasons. Despite all of Jonathan Blow's talk of melding gameplay with story, he chose to segregate the two in a pretty artificial way. There's no sense of progression in the puzzles; what you learn in one world doesn't really apply to the next. But its mortal sin, in my eyes, is not including a final exam. I can understand using anticlimax as a device to shape the experience of a game, but Braid didn't do anything with it. Near the end of each world, there's a very large boss-guy, who is basically Bowser, from Super Mario Brothers 1. It walks around and shoots fireballs in a fixed pattern at every encounter. You must use your time powers, in a fairly rote manner, to drop chandeliers on it. It is to the traditional boss what a sheet of busy-work math problems is to a well thought out test.

Often, games get criticized for being all work and no play. But the play that games offer us is no more than novel work. We want work that will change, or, failing that, work that will challenge us in different ways as we progress. The type of games that earn the most love resemble a waltz, rather than a march: escalation and descent, rather than step by step by step. Even games like Tetris, which only ever presents the player with a single set of problems and a single toolset, adheres to this cycle of tension and catharsis.

When asked what my favorite games are, I run through a mental checklist of my favorite final bosses. The ending is not the point of a game, but it's what I remember best. I'll play horrid games to their completion in hopes they'll pull a Vader and be redeemed by their final act.

I've got no conclusion to this post. The irony is eating me up inside.

If...

So I've finally figured out why I keep playing games that I hate, long after the point where I know I don't want to play them anymore. I need to understand why I dislike them. If a friend asks me, "Should I play X?" I want to be able to tell them that it's a ten-day open-air crapfest without having to resort to a wishy-washy, "But that's just my opinion." My viewpoint doesn't solidify into law after that magic ten-hour point, but I feel that savaging a product requires a greater burden of proof than deeming it Pretty Good. Dan Hsu's policy at EGM was to play a game until he felt like he could give it a review score in good faith, then keep playing it until he'd doubled that playtime.

But then, this may all just be equivocation. Maybe I enjoy hating games. (Actually, I'm sure I do.) Maybe I play bad games so long so that my dislike can congeal into bleeding odium.