I was Wrong! Super Meat Boy is Good!

Oh, how good it feels to admit I was wrong! That my former mind was weaker! That I am now smarter than my dumberer self!

Back when I was young and stupid (2010) I wrote that Super Meat Boy was a "monotonous" "penis-crusher" of a game. Well, this year (2012) I've been playing bits of that superb indie platformer, and I have found a play-style that prevents it from feeling monotonous.

And about the "penis-crusher" thing, I'm not sure what I meant with that. The game, now, doesn't seem to crush penis. Maybe the description had something to do with the game being hard, and that somehow that crushes penises.....

But anyways, the monotony thing: the way to prevent monotony from setting in while playing with Super Meat Boy is: to not play with it so often. And that is it! Simple. And it is easy to do since Super Meat Boy isn't an evil addictive game in anyway. At least, as long as you play it on Steam it's not addictive. I imagine that, with XBOX Live achievements being worth "points," Super Meat Boy's super-hard-to-get achievements could be tantalizing, somehow. But at the same time, no; Super Meat Boy isn't addictive. It's just good and hard. For not realizing this a year ago I will now write something beautiful:

Oh Team Meat!

Your game is neat!

During twenty-eleven I thought of playing Super Meat Boy,

in Costa Rica, where I couldn't play Super Meat Boy.

This is bad poetry.

To what depths go my low-etry?

"Low-etry" isn't even a word.

Washing machine.

Portal 2 is better than Portal

My original idea for this post was for it to be 240 pages long and composed entirely of sonnets (with every sonnet ending in "I took an arrow to the knee"). But I decided against it. I do like writing sonnets, but 240 pages is 239 pages longer than 1 page. And all I really want to do today is -- tell you that Portal 2's singleplayer is better than Portal's, and then play more Red Dead Redemption (a game about bringing extinction to the wildlife of the West, especially to birds; it's a cool game).

But enough bracketed tangents! The title of this post is "Portal 2 is better than Portal." Not "Why won't the toilet flush my poo?" Therefore I will, in the very next paragraph, begin explaining why Portal 2 is better.

For there are people out there who believe Portal is just better than Portal 2, on the grounds that Portal is Portal and that it is better than everything, even better than itself....

Erm.

Reason number one why Portal 2 is better: is that the average joke in Portal 2 is funnier than the average joke in Portal. I can tell because I laughed a lot more often and with actual thigh-slapping, while playing Portal 2.

Reason number two is: that the funniest jokes in Portal 2 are funnier than Portal's funniest jokes.

Reason number three is: Portal 2's singleplayer puzzles are easier. Therefore the game doesn't run into the pacing problem of: the player standing in a room for half-an-hour, just trying to figure something out.

I think this sort of opinion of mine-- the "easier is better one" -- irks a lot of gamers. And thus I should explain it.

The reason why "easier puzzles" = "better game" in the case of the Portals is that:

1) Portal's puzzles aren't what English-speakers call "fun." They are interesting, a series of experiences, context builders for the story. But not "fun." Therefore-

2) if the singleplayer puzzles were really challenging, then there would be a pacing problem wherein it takes too long to get to the next joke and whatnot.

And now for-

The fourth reason why Portal 2 is better than Portal :D

Portal 2 is more interesting to look at and listen to. There's a lot more variety to the average everything. Its environments even move more. A LOT more even.

And that's pretty much it!

The original Portal has many fans who say it is superior on the grounds titled "It Came Out First" and "It Has No Noticeable Flaws, Something Portal 2 Can't Claim!" And those points are hard to deny. Portal does indeed seem to have come out before Portal 2. And Portal 2 does have flaws, undeniable flaws, evil flaws! (one of mine being that GLaDOS, early in the game, is more annoying than funny, with her near-constant, practically-the-same-joke, three-liners). But when it comes down to it, people need to exercise more and drink less sugary drinks. Also, Portal 2 is better than Portal.

Why Skyrim is Boring

Need proof that there are problems in the world? How about me playing Skyrim for 120 hours and being bored for 119 of them?

........tear :(

But the game press said it was the Game Of The Year! In the same year as Portal 2! So I figured that it would be worth it!

[And I knew I wasn't having a good time during pretty much the whole playthrough, but I kept playing, anyway...]

And after finishing Skyrim, I ended up thinking about it for another 120 hours

:(

Realizing that I had been pwned by the games industry made me want to understand it. A want bolstered by my being pretty sure that what happened to me happened to most everyone else who played it.

And here be my scientific conclusions:

Most of us play a game like Skyrim to get lost. We play it to utterly break from our quotidian lives via living in a fantasy world -- in this case, the kind of world with cloud-covered snowy mountains, massive tundras, mystery-hiding caves and ruins, and car-sized spiders. A world with orcs and romans and goths, with manifold things to do.

And I want to focus on the "manifold things to do" part for just a moment. Just read this list of but a few of the things I did in Skyrim:

1) Became a werewolf

2) Rose zombies

3) Saved a priest from being eaten by cannibals

4) chopped wood

5) killed, like, twenty bears with magic (I had the magic)

6) fought dragons

7) used a lot of dragon shout jedi powers

8) failed to save people from being executed

9) collected 20 red ninroots and brought them to someone because my quest log said I should

10) hired mercenaries and watched them do all my fighting for me (three out of four of my mercenaries died)

11) got in half-hour long fights with all the guards in town.

12) chopped some more wood

13) mined iron

29) and many other exciting things that most of us don't do in "real" life.

It is a massive fantasy product! And I'm sure my desire to find every interesting thing in it is why I was willing to be bored for 119 hours.

Most of the time, you the player won't be experiencing the interesting moments unless you follow a strict guide for how to play Skyrim; but how many of us wants to do that? And even if you follow guides, you'll still have to grind through boring stuff. There's just so much boring in between the good stuff.

I probably spent a third of my Skyrim time exploring, in the hope that what I'd soon discover wouldn't be another dungeon/cave/ruin, or another elven dagger, or another group of the enemies I just fought. There are so many dungeons/caves/ruins/elven daggers/etc. sprinkled all over the place that it makes the fantasy world seem less real and more stupid. There are so many enemies in Skyrim, it felt as if there was a line of code in the world making it so I had to fight something every few minutes of travel, as if the world thought I'd get bored from lack of enemy contact.

It doesn't help that many of the enemies are boring to fight, as Skyrim's combat is very much composed of pausing the game to drink health potions, not made more fun by the fights largely being one-sided affairs -- the difficulty level of the game scales so that either you can beat almost every enemy with just one or two strategies, which take little skill to implement, or the game's so hard that you're pausing every twenty seconds to drink a health potion. I.e. if the battles are challenging at all, they're really just become a pausy drinking game, in which you do some attacks, take a lot of damage, pause, search for a health potion in your inventory, unpause, and repeat until the enemies die. (Maybe on PC there's a way to avoid this, but I was determined to play with an XBOX 360 controller).

The level design doesn't really help, probably because there isn't much of it. I don't know how many dungeons, caves, and ruins there are. But the amount perhaps is too much, as most of them are pretty much the same.

Most of Skyrim's dungeonscavesruins/levels go like this: A simple maze, with a boring puzzle somewhere (the puzzles are usually matching games in which you must match animal symbols with animal symbols somewhere else to get a door to open). There will probably be booby traps, and yeah there are enough different types of traps that they're kind of interesting (especially when they kill you). At or near the end of the dungeon there'll be a boss battle; the boss is almost always a more powerful form of the things you were just fighting; the boss might have minions. Behind or on the boss is a reward -- which is usually loot, a new dragon shout Jedi power, or a quest development.

It seems like half of the game is spent in boring fights and exploring, and that another fourth is spent listening to the boring people of Skyrim say boring things, like: "Boring. Boring. Boring." No seriously, I find it amazing that Bethesda managed to record so much boring dialogue and not feel weird about it (or maybe they did). I think what happened in the development offices was something like this: Bethesda put in so many characters and were so determined -- more determined than anything else -- to make believable their Middle Earth cliche fantasyland that they said to each other, "You know, I don't really wanna spend time making all these virtual people I don't care about interesting. Let's just make the NPCs say things that would make sense -- given the history of Tamriel and their role in it -- and let's make sure they talk a lot, A LOT, about their personal histories and the history of Tamriel, for world-building reasons, and let's ship this thing and make money." Yep, something like that happened.

So maybe a fourth of this game is, at the least, interesting.

I feel like the best thing about Skyrim (and it is a good thing) is its visual art, especially that of the land Skyrim itself. Seeing giants and their mammoths migrate across the vast, unforgiving-looking tundra, backdropped by tall, snowy, cloud-covered mountains (almost all of which you can walk to) is really immersive, especially with those wind-blowing sounds and that subtle (epic) music. And I could go on about this; the visual art is good, also steeped in cliches, but good.

But despite that I can't even recommend the game based on the immersion-value. I can't recommend it even for that, because it just isn't immersive enough. It's not merely the bugs that prevent it from reaching the desired level of immersion, nor the awkward gesticulations and tone shifts in conversations. It's the lack of computing power and the ambitious fantasy they're trying to achieve with it. It's when a dragon lands, ready for battle, and you think you're going to experience something great, but then the dragon crawls around like a geriatric, and awkwardly decides to fly around again. Or the other dragon that barely survives a battle against three measly town guards. Or the epic, civil war battle for a major town, involving thirty troops!

You know what, even if this game were immersive enough, I wouldn't recommend it. Too much of it is boring.

Review score: 3 chickens / 1 Dragon

Chocolate Milk

This is going to be a much different blog entry then what I normally write about. TL;DR: my friend Morgan wanted to make a post on their blog, but didn't know what to write about. I suggested they write 500 words on Hot Pockets, which Morgan then proceeded to do. So to return the favor, I shall now write 500 words about chocolate milk (which is inspired by a true story):

It was another day in the graduate student lounge. I was passing the time surfing Facebook, a shameful practice I know. As I parsed through the waves of new information, one status post caught my eye. It was the Informatics department’s black market vending machine. It was on the black market because it was stocked by the faculty itself. As a result, it contained a treasure trove of goodies you could not buy anywhere else on campus. Like Coca-Cola products. Or Arnold Palmer. Or LEDs complete with battery (refrigerated of course).

Judging by today’s status update though, today was special. My eyes widen as I reread the post for the third time. There, as plain as day, were the operatic words:

“Chocolate Milk! No you didn't.....”

Now, when receiving status updates from a vending machine, there are a number of salient thoughts that should run through a person’s head. This includes:

“Since when did vending machines become sentient?”

“Why is it talking to me like it knows me?”

And my personal favorite: “Why am I Facebook friends with a talking vending machine!?”

None of these thoughts crossed my mind, for at that moment all I could think was, “OH.SHIT.CHOCOLATE.FUCKING.MILK.”

I jumped out of my seat, nearly knocking my chair over. My behavior attracted the confused stares of my colleagues who were also in the lounge with me. I replied with a glare of my own as my mind frantically tried to piece together an exit strategy. “They must never know!” I thought as I stood there for what seemed like hours if not minutes (you heard me!).

Finally, I slowly closed the lid of my laptop, gave a faint cough so as to misdirect my competition, then nonchalantly walked out of the lounge. Really it was the cough that made the entire performance.

As soon as I was out of sight, I rushed over to the vending machine. Facebook had not lied to me. There, sitting quietly and neatly in its little spindle, were eight little bottles of Nesquik brand chocolate milk. The yellow plastic bottles glistened in the backlight of the vending machines fluorescent lighting. And then there was the bunny. That brown, delightful bunny holding his caricature glass of chocolate ecstasy. His eyes were sparkling, his face beaming, as if to say, “Fear not child. For I hold the elixir of paradise. I implore you, please sample, for you shall know no finer love than this.”

How could I resist? I dove for my wallet. It seemed fate had been kind to me today. For there in my leather pouch stood exactly eight crisp dollar bills. “Truly, this night was to be a victorious night,” I said as each bill was eagerly masticated by the machine, its whirring and clicking harmonizing in all the right ways. There was nothing else in the world. There was simply me, and the chocolate milk.

And that is the story of how I drank eight bottles of chocolate milk in one day.

There you go! 500 words on Chocolate Milk. Hope you enjoyed that Morgan!

Virtual Legos

I never really did like Legos much as a kid. I would always get frustrated by how easily those rainbow colored blocks came apart and dismantled whatever I was building at the time. Plus I hated it when this happened:

Really, the one thing I enjoyed doing with Legos was following the instructions to build the in-box stage piece, which I then used to make up stories with the included Lego people.

The reason I bring this story up is because the latest indie game to set the world on fire, Minecraft, is essentially a virtual Lego simulation. You gather materials from the randomly generated environment and you build stuff with them. There's a game mechanic where you're supposed to be building a fort to defend yourself against monsters during the night cycle, but most people tend to ignore that mechanic in favor of just building things. By all accounts, I should not like this game. I don't have the patience to build a 1:1 replica of the Starship Enterprise. Nor do I have the creativity needed to build a 16-bit processor within the game. There's also the fact that anyone can mess with what you create if you're playing on a multiplayer server, which means griefing has never been easier. If I didn't like playing with real Legos, then I shouldn't like playing with virtual ones right?

Well, the strange thing is, I actually like Minecraft. And I'm still not truly sure why.

Despite everything Minecraft has going against it, the game has become oddly endearing to me for some reason. I find the more time I spend with the game, the more I appreciate its nuanced design.

You see, there's a rhythm to the way a game of Minecraft unfolds that seems to keep me excited about playing. It starts with the aesthetic style of the game. I'm going to try to explain it, but first, let me simply show you what the game looks like before it gets touched by human hands.

This is the style of Minecraft: cubes and incredibly low resolution textures. This art style adds a lot of charm to the game. It might be the nostalgia factor or it might be the fact that I like Cubism, but the game's aesthetic design is very warm and inviting. It encourages me to explore the rest of this world and see what it has to offer.

Which leads me to the second part of Minecraft's "rhythm" of gameplay: exploration. At the start of every single player game, a new world is created at run time. This means that every new game is a chance to explore something new. And since I consider myself to be part spade gamer, this is perhaps my favorite part of the game. Exploring the world, and getting lost only to find something completely new and unexpected is a great experience. During many play sessions, I'll find myself aimlessly walking around and taking in the environment before I even realize I need to build something to protect myself at night.

The final piece of Minecraft's gameplay is the way in which you manipulate the environment. As I stated before, you destroy blocks to gain materials, which you then use to build other tools and items for your impenetrable fortress. It's a simple and enjoyable mechanic on its own, but it's the previous two parts of the game that really help the building portion stand out. Here is how I think the structure of Minecraft works:

The aesthetic style and the unfamiliarity of the world encourages the player to explore their surroundings. This allows players to find new and essential materials throughout the world. The player can then use these new materials to build the things they need to survive the night cycles. The possibility of finding stronger and rarer materials for building new items keeps the player exploring the world.

It's this structure of gameplay that makes Minecraft an entertaining game. Very few of the ideas in Minecraft are that unique. Randomly generated levels are nothing new in game design, and many of my friends have described Minecraft as "Dwarf Fortress Lite." But the fact that each portion of the game is influenced and built upon the previous gameplay "beat" is a key element to keeping the game fun. Because I was intrigued by the design of the world, I decided to explore it. And through exploring the world, I feel there's more of a purpose to gathering and building in Minecraft that I never really got by playing with Legos. So maybe this is why I like Minecraft; it offers a purpose to building blocks.

Or maybe it's just because I don't have to search for that one piece for twenty minutes.

Aside: I would like to take this moment to apologize to Garrett for accidentally blowing up his replica of the Parthenon the last time I was on the server. I totally wouldn't have used dynamite if I had any other materials. :p