Thanks to Steam I regret buying games all the time. Years ago, when I had to travel to a store to buy a game, I occasionally had regrets as well, but I bought fewer games because stores never have sales, never have anything in stock, and Do you really want to be seen entering or leaving a computer game store? Steam solved all these problems. Of course, it also introduced new ones.
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
2/23/11
Notes on 'The Facebook Revolution'
Momentous undertakings continue to occur all around the Mediterranean coast and beyond, and for once it is the morally bankrupt, not the fiscally bankrupt (though the two are often simultaneously at fault - especially among autocratic regimes) that are being protested. Sure, Greece is still serious, but the real action is on the north coast of Africa.
There's lots of perspectives, and the media, as usual, is ignoring all of them in favor of 'reporting' and 'geopolitical daydreaming' and other nonsense. The fact that the Egyptian revolution was singled out and named the 'Facebook Revolution' is a particularly distasteful piece of sloganeering. Let us, this once, be honest: autocracies were toppled before Facebook. Facebook did not produce this revolution, Egyptians did. We do not need to make a mountain out of the fact that these people employed Facebook for the first few days of protests and we have to admit that they would have organized themselves without it, as they did after their internet was killed. Mark Zuckerberg has paid for enough product placements, and his property is neither particularly novel nor all-powerful - the media and every other out-of-touch organization are just romancing social media because it is the new, somewhat powerful, young, hot, and above all confused apparatchik on Journalism Blvd. Plus, Facebook is a western thing that western viewers are comfortable with, so that helps make this uprising half a world away more personable.
Oh you've no doubt seen my fallacy by now: the media sloganeers more than it reports these days. On some levels this is true, but attacking the media for sensationalism is an old approach that never really made an impact. However, that said, the media failed to report the Egyptian revolution properly, and continues to fail with other revolutions. From erroneous remarks that Egypt is part of the Middle East (it is part of North Africa, and people are displaying less geographical consciousness now that Libya is taking off) or even the Fox News map which swapped Egypt into its own geographical narrative, to lazy statements that these uprisings are an Arab thing (ever done ethnographic research into north Africa, or the history of Araby?).
Amid all this exciting happenstance, I am in North America and every day there is just news that uprisings are happening, that regimes are in danger, and what this might mean for America or the rest of the world. These kinds of stories do not help me understand what is happening, why it is happening, or who it is happening to. I already knew about Mohammar Ghaddafi and the million ways his name can be spelled. I have heard enough of Hosni Mubarak, and I realize from his constant about-face maneuvering that he is reluctant to give up the throne. What about the relatives of a dead protester? What are they saying? Why the panicky and slightly hostile talk about the Muslim Brotherhood?
But the death knell of informative, non-sensationalistic reporting came when Anderson Cooper got assaulted. I don't even know the details of this story, but he got attacked or beat up. Not to be outdone, another story surfaced about Lara Logan being sexually harrassed and beaten, and then the circus opened its dumb mouth and the focus shifted from 50/50 (uprising reporting/western news) to all the way western perspective. In a country where women and girls are harrassed, beaten and probably raped at a rate of at least one a month in every town, an invasive species of news reporter is groped, pushed, pulled, slapped into the spotlight. That's not exceptionalism, is it? Now, wait, I have to be outraged? About sexism? Again? In Egypt? Egypt? Aren't there other Egyptian things to learn about? to be outraged about?
People are dying, revolting, and rising up – in the same country, one individual faces the sort of sexism/oppression that happens in elevators and street corners in New York City (aka The Capitol of the West) every other day, and suddenly there is no other story but to shame a repressed society that is trying to undo at least one kind of repression. Bloated reactionary media response – and you can compare the 'mid-east reporting' with reports about, say, the New Zealand earthquake. There are some notable differences.
Thanks a million for the lack of information... I guess I'll have to see what RussiaToday or Al-Jezeera English have to say on the matter, while the media circus strokes its perspective, for all to see, on the television. For all I know, these uprisings are about the price of halal beef.
There's lots of perspectives, and the media, as usual, is ignoring all of them in favor of 'reporting' and 'geopolitical daydreaming' and other nonsense. The fact that the Egyptian revolution was singled out and named the 'Facebook Revolution' is a particularly distasteful piece of sloganeering. Let us, this once, be honest: autocracies were toppled before Facebook. Facebook did not produce this revolution, Egyptians did. We do not need to make a mountain out of the fact that these people employed Facebook for the first few days of protests and we have to admit that they would have organized themselves without it, as they did after their internet was killed. Mark Zuckerberg has paid for enough product placements, and his property is neither particularly novel nor all-powerful - the media and every other out-of-touch organization are just romancing social media because it is the new, somewhat powerful, young, hot, and above all confused apparatchik on Journalism Blvd. Plus, Facebook is a western thing that western viewers are comfortable with, so that helps make this uprising half a world away more personable.
Oh you've no doubt seen my fallacy by now: the media sloganeers more than it reports these days. On some levels this is true, but attacking the media for sensationalism is an old approach that never really made an impact. However, that said, the media failed to report the Egyptian revolution properly, and continues to fail with other revolutions. From erroneous remarks that Egypt is part of the Middle East (it is part of North Africa, and people are displaying less geographical consciousness now that Libya is taking off) or even the Fox News map which swapped Egypt into its own geographical narrative, to lazy statements that these uprisings are an Arab thing (ever done ethnographic research into north Africa, or the history of Araby?).
Amid all this exciting happenstance, I am in North America and every day there is just news that uprisings are happening, that regimes are in danger, and what this might mean for America or the rest of the world. These kinds of stories do not help me understand what is happening, why it is happening, or who it is happening to. I already knew about Mohammar Ghaddafi and the million ways his name can be spelled. I have heard enough of Hosni Mubarak, and I realize from his constant about-face maneuvering that he is reluctant to give up the throne. What about the relatives of a dead protester? What are they saying? Why the panicky and slightly hostile talk about the Muslim Brotherhood?
But the death knell of informative, non-sensationalistic reporting came when Anderson Cooper got assaulted. I don't even know the details of this story, but he got attacked or beat up. Not to be outdone, another story surfaced about Lara Logan being sexually harrassed and beaten, and then the circus opened its dumb mouth and the focus shifted from 50/50 (uprising reporting/western news) to all the way western perspective. In a country where women and girls are harrassed, beaten and probably raped at a rate of at least one a month in every town, an invasive species of news reporter is groped, pushed, pulled, slapped into the spotlight. That's not exceptionalism, is it? Now, wait, I have to be outraged? About sexism? Again? In Egypt? Egypt? Aren't there other Egyptian things to learn about? to be outraged about?
People are dying, revolting, and rising up – in the same country, one individual faces the sort of sexism/oppression that happens in elevators and street corners in New York City (aka The Capitol of the West) every other day, and suddenly there is no other story but to shame a repressed society that is trying to undo at least one kind of repression. Bloated reactionary media response – and you can compare the 'mid-east reporting' with reports about, say, the New Zealand earthquake. There are some notable differences.
Thanks a million for the lack of information... I guess I'll have to see what RussiaToday or Al-Jezeera English have to say on the matter, while the media circus strokes its perspective, for all to see, on the television. For all I know, these uprisings are about the price of halal beef.
2/18/11
Internet Provocateurs
What recommends a troll is wit. On the internet you do have a certain amount of anonymity in certain situations, and in those situations a type of witty but trollish response is the best-scoring. It's 100 points, all the way, when you don't swear or act like an irredeemable ass, but someone is still put down ruthlessly.
It's because I don't see enough of this that I think 1) all message boards are inversely, dimishing-returnedly useless and 2) that the internet has actually qualified as a net increase in the overall stupidity of humanity. Of course, the internet is still the postmodern paragon, the supreme effort of our time. Or at least part of it, right? 33% or somewhere around that type of importance.
I see enough people glued to the internet like barnacles at bars and in public, and I've only recently begun to look for it. I cannot and will not disperse myself in public to write something as nonsense as a blog post. That is weak usage all around: of time, bandwidth, and focus. I cannot, so I don't have the temptation to check facebook between drinks, but I won't do it.
Unless adequately recompensed, of course.
It's because I don't see enough of this that I think 1) all message boards are inversely, dimishing-returnedly useless and 2) that the internet has actually qualified as a net increase in the overall stupidity of humanity. Of course, the internet is still the postmodern paragon, the supreme effort of our time. Or at least part of it, right? 33% or somewhere around that type of importance.
I see enough people glued to the internet like barnacles at bars and in public, and I've only recently begun to look for it. I cannot and will not disperse myself in public to write something as nonsense as a blog post. That is weak usage all around: of time, bandwidth, and focus. I cannot, so I don't have the temptation to check facebook between drinks, but I won't do it.
Unless adequately recompensed, of course.
 |
| For only one Koala a day, you can support a family of four. |
2/14/11
Inconsistent Hype Engine
I don't know if that title referred to the Grammys or Valentine's Day. In one, people you hear about stumble around like nervous robots; in the other nervous robots attempt to seduce people. Oh if only, right? I guess the Grammys are so named for the gramophone, and what this means for the music industry is anybody's guess, personally I think it's a matter of stubborn atavism.
And the lavishing of awards upon Lady Antebellum was really almost a sort of shameful display, as if the industry is aggressively courting this band. Best song, at least, should have gone to someone else. I guess it's really not worth even saying, since it was never going to happen, but it would have been fitting if Cee Lo got it. There were too many awards as it was and he put on an awesome show and "Fuck You" should be the anthem we take from 2010. It's a great anthem for just about any year, but that's beside the point.
And Gwyneth can sing! Will she ever take on a serious dramatic role, though? I guess there were more than 7 Grammy awards in 2011, now that I check Wikipedia, which surprises me. I only saw a little bit of the program and everyone showed up and bummed around uncomfortably between songs. That's what it looked like to me. Too many awards, really. I guess I just don't know anything about music, because a few of the award choices were a little peculiar. Some real upsets, apparently, and I think there's probably a few interesting stories behind some of them.
Great to see Mick Jagger, as always. I guess it really is a show that's worth checking into for at least 15 minutes unless they're doing something crazy. Maybe next year they'll have a host. And if they do, I recommend they get Mick Jagger to host. And if he hosts, I hope he decides to rock the whole thing. Then I might watch more of it.
Justin Bieber's shock was visible when he was defeated by a relatively unknown jazz chick, but Drake upheld Canada's polite image by standing up to clap angrily. That Best New Artist category seems to be pretty tough, and, despite Bieber's considerable service to the record industry, sometimes uses its discretion to award trophies to jazz chicks.
Before I even had time to process the shock, another distracting high energy performance/superficial and annoying commercial took off. For an impressive hype machine, the Grammys seemed erratically driven. There was a palpable level of hype, background level stuff, which a few artists seemed to harness very well – and I might be alone in saying this, but some of the presenters seemed uncomfortable.
Seth Rogen only told one joke. It was cool and unexpected to see him there, and his joke wasn't bad, but still. That sort of institutionalized aversion to humour, coupled with the sterilization of Cee Lo's masterpiece, not to mention the erratic direction of the awards or the misplaced Best Song award, doesn't really give me a lot of faith in the Grammys. Apparently Britain had some film awards on the same night? Seems a rather unnecessarily aggressive play, since they just awarded all their prizes to American movies anyway.
And the lavishing of awards upon Lady Antebellum was really almost a sort of shameful display, as if the industry is aggressively courting this band. Best song, at least, should have gone to someone else. I guess it's really not worth even saying, since it was never going to happen, but it would have been fitting if Cee Lo got it. There were too many awards as it was and he put on an awesome show and "Fuck You" should be the anthem we take from 2010. It's a great anthem for just about any year, but that's beside the point.
And Gwyneth can sing! Will she ever take on a serious dramatic role, though? I guess there were more than 7 Grammy awards in 2011, now that I check Wikipedia, which surprises me. I only saw a little bit of the program and everyone showed up and bummed around uncomfortably between songs. That's what it looked like to me. Too many awards, really. I guess I just don't know anything about music, because a few of the award choices were a little peculiar. Some real upsets, apparently, and I think there's probably a few interesting stories behind some of them.
Great to see Mick Jagger, as always. I guess it really is a show that's worth checking into for at least 15 minutes unless they're doing something crazy. Maybe next year they'll have a host. And if they do, I recommend they get Mick Jagger to host. And if he hosts, I hope he decides to rock the whole thing. Then I might watch more of it.
Justin Bieber's shock was visible when he was defeated by a relatively unknown jazz chick, but Drake upheld Canada's polite image by standing up to clap angrily. That Best New Artist category seems to be pretty tough, and, despite Bieber's considerable service to the record industry, sometimes uses its discretion to award trophies to jazz chicks.
Before I even had time to process the shock, another distracting high energy performance/superficial and annoying commercial took off. For an impressive hype machine, the Grammys seemed erratically driven. There was a palpable level of hype, background level stuff, which a few artists seemed to harness very well – and I might be alone in saying this, but some of the presenters seemed uncomfortable.
Seth Rogen only told one joke. It was cool and unexpected to see him there, and his joke wasn't bad, but still. That sort of institutionalized aversion to humour, coupled with the sterilization of Cee Lo's masterpiece, not to mention the erratic direction of the awards or the misplaced Best Song award, doesn't really give me a lot of faith in the Grammys. Apparently Britain had some film awards on the same night? Seems a rather unnecessarily aggressive play, since they just awarded all their prizes to American movies anyway.
2/7/11
Theatrical Thoughts
There was a short period in time when I went to see movies regularly. I mean a movie in a theater, with an audience, that you have to pay for. It was the season of Drag Me To Hell and Adventureland and other movies that were pretty enjoyable but not particularly great, in other words they were the type of movies you go to see because they are good enough, usually better than you think they'll be, and a decent way to spend a few hours. The two movies I named were the ones I remembered. They may have been the only two I watched around that time, but I saw them within a few weeks of each other, which barely ever happens.
Which gets me thinking: why does it take the prompting of a friend to get me to watch a movie? The answer that comes most naturally is: because most movies suck, because they can be seen at a discount later, and because most theaters in North America are full of people crinkling snack bags and dropping their garbage everywhere, not to mention the masturbators and the cell-phone rebels and the surly theater personnel.
Recently I saw True Grit on a discount night. Discount night means half-price, and half-price on a movie I want to see means that my odds of seeing it increase to 60%. So I walked over to the show, and the theater was busy, but everyone must have been going to another movie, because the True Grit theater was less than half full. This wasn't really surprising.
The first 10 minutes I had problems following any of the dialogue and felt like I had lost my ability to understand English. Sure I was buzzing a little, but that usually helps me understand any person's rambling. I was impressed by the dedication to olde tyme speeche the Coens (or their screenwriter) displayed. I got used to it, as well, but the attempt at authenticity surprised me so much that I couldn't really get into the opening, which is a shame, because the opening was fine.
Many films that are historical or geographically isolated just give everyone a common accent (if it takes place before 1850 everyone has an English accent, if it takes place in Japan but is made in the West the characters are either heavily accented or have an English accent; if it takes place in Germany and is made in the West the characters speak English with a Deutsche accent) and keep the dialogue as modern as possible. True Grit goes for the accuracy, and does pretty good, although I don't know what people spoke like in the 1860's. It did take place in the 1860's, right? Or was it the 1840's? Goddamn it there were references to the civil war, so I'm going with late 1860's.
Well, most movies are still pretty horrible, and the more they are advertised the less faith I have in them. I doubt I'll watch another, in a theater, for at least the next two months.
Which gets me thinking: why does it take the prompting of a friend to get me to watch a movie? The answer that comes most naturally is: because most movies suck, because they can be seen at a discount later, and because most theaters in North America are full of people crinkling snack bags and dropping their garbage everywhere, not to mention the masturbators and the cell-phone rebels and the surly theater personnel.
Recently I saw True Grit on a discount night. Discount night means half-price, and half-price on a movie I want to see means that my odds of seeing it increase to 60%. So I walked over to the show, and the theater was busy, but everyone must have been going to another movie, because the True Grit theater was less than half full. This wasn't really surprising.
The first 10 minutes I had problems following any of the dialogue and felt like I had lost my ability to understand English. Sure I was buzzing a little, but that usually helps me understand any person's rambling. I was impressed by the dedication to olde tyme speeche the Coens (or their screenwriter) displayed. I got used to it, as well, but the attempt at authenticity surprised me so much that I couldn't really get into the opening, which is a shame, because the opening was fine.
Many films that are historical or geographically isolated just give everyone a common accent (if it takes place before 1850 everyone has an English accent, if it takes place in Japan but is made in the West the characters are either heavily accented or have an English accent; if it takes place in Germany and is made in the West the characters speak English with a Deutsche accent) and keep the dialogue as modern as possible. True Grit goes for the accuracy, and does pretty good, although I don't know what people spoke like in the 1860's. It did take place in the 1860's, right? Or was it the 1840's? Goddamn it there were references to the civil war, so I'm going with late 1860's.
Well, most movies are still pretty horrible, and the more they are advertised the less faith I have in them. I doubt I'll watch another, in a theater, for at least the next two months.
2/5/11
The Postmodern Option
Every day I wake up, do some 'real life' things that I think are important (like texting people to ask them if they want to see me, and texting resumes to potential employers, breakfast related chores) and usually after a few hours I am forced to go to the internet to try and see if there's a soul in the entire world. Most of the time my doubt still exists after I close my browser and hide.
Using the internet to escape life has become a chore, because in a way you have to trade your life for an internet life, even if you only want to escape into the internet. There are people who never signed up for Facebook, and they have healthier social lives than anyone who ever did join that devilish network. The point of YouTube is to 'create, share, etc' or some other thing, but at least 50% of users are passive and only want to find decent videos to while away time. Then there are internet power users who do more than post racist shit in comment sections; these people form communities and post video responses and get sweaty about views per month and always badger everyone to subscribe or rate or leave a racist comment.
So it seems that the internet draws you into the nonsense labyrinth of pointless, infinitely recursive information.
Yes, I am clearly attempting to add to that luminous festering mess of so-called 'information' by blogging. I know that I must be doing something right, because I am not an internet millionaire by my blogging. It's hard for me to know if anyone even reads anything I post here that doesn't directly address them or their concern, so I am always asking myself "is it possible to circumvent public interest and still gain some mediocre type of fame?"
The answer is that, no, it is impossible. I do my best to write clear, amusing, somewhat advanced and mostly pointless blog posts, and I am proud of being a sloppy blogger. Most blogs I visit are quite professionally done. I don't even have gadgets or extra pages to hook people into checking my website regularly.
I am caught in the 21st century catch-22. I want to be anonymous in the era of internet disclosure, and I want to be a respected slacker in the era of the power user, and I want to maybe make a living writing. All of these I'm stupid to hope for, but I chase these dreams and attempt quality – and really, if one person benefits by it or smiles because of it, that is satisfying. Single-digit blog statistics are also depressing, but a satisfying depression is better than just sitting around and trying to create the ultimate manuscript.
Of course it's stupid to criticize the banality of the internet by using the internet, and that's why I don't do that so much. Media criticism is not going to get me anywhere, no matter how sharp an insight I provide on the late-night talk show scene, and there's really not much I can do that hasn't been done, and done better, by someone else. And. And. And. But. However. Furthermore. Good luck.
Using the internet to escape life has become a chore, because in a way you have to trade your life for an internet life, even if you only want to escape into the internet. There are people who never signed up for Facebook, and they have healthier social lives than anyone who ever did join that devilish network. The point of YouTube is to 'create, share, etc' or some other thing, but at least 50% of users are passive and only want to find decent videos to while away time. Then there are internet power users who do more than post racist shit in comment sections; these people form communities and post video responses and get sweaty about views per month and always badger everyone to subscribe or rate or leave a racist comment.
So it seems that the internet draws you into the nonsense labyrinth of pointless, infinitely recursive information.
Yes, I am clearly attempting to add to that luminous festering mess of so-called 'information' by blogging. I know that I must be doing something right, because I am not an internet millionaire by my blogging. It's hard for me to know if anyone even reads anything I post here that doesn't directly address them or their concern, so I am always asking myself "is it possible to circumvent public interest and still gain some mediocre type of fame?"
The answer is that, no, it is impossible. I do my best to write clear, amusing, somewhat advanced and mostly pointless blog posts, and I am proud of being a sloppy blogger. Most blogs I visit are quite professionally done. I don't even have gadgets or extra pages to hook people into checking my website regularly.
I am caught in the 21st century catch-22. I want to be anonymous in the era of internet disclosure, and I want to be a respected slacker in the era of the power user, and I want to maybe make a living writing. All of these I'm stupid to hope for, but I chase these dreams and attempt quality – and really, if one person benefits by it or smiles because of it, that is satisfying. Single-digit blog statistics are also depressing, but a satisfying depression is better than just sitting around and trying to create the ultimate manuscript.
Of course it's stupid to criticize the banality of the internet by using the internet, and that's why I don't do that so much. Media criticism is not going to get me anywhere, no matter how sharp an insight I provide on the late-night talk show scene, and there's really not much I can do that hasn't been done, and done better, by someone else. And. And. And. But. However. Furthermore. Good luck.
2/3/11
2010 Retrospective, pt.5: Winner among the Free Games
I've spent more money on computer games than I should have. I've probably spent more money on just about every other thing, but unlike food or drink, computer games can be ridiculously disappointing. This is because most developers don't really care, because everyone who likes a game will buy the sequel to that game, just like with the movies. Look at Doom 3, or the movie they made about the Doom series. Nobody understands gamers, but everyone is looking to make fast money on the computer game upsurge. Since girls started fearlessly admitting that they do in fact exist in online gaming worlds, even stone-cold businesswomen with snake eyes have been getting in on the feast, and you better believe their parasitic-yuppie husbands do the coding.
So the analogy that works best is that the computer gaming industry is more or less like Hollywood, if Hollywood forced you to buy special equipment to watch their movies optimally, and if they left all the bad scenes and failed sequences in. Greed, illusion, nonsense et cetera. Computer game critics are regularly paid off to provide beaming reviews, and the ones who aren't tame, if they exist, are held under the radar by the invisible hand*. No wonder gaming took so long to catch on.
Now if games you pay to play are like Hollywood, free online games must be like TV commercials, right? Surprisingly, there are free games available on websites that do not cost money and are probably more enjoyable than many retail games.
Free games have always existed. Up until 1648, if you had the right friends and lived in a city, chances were you could play chess mostly for free. Then card games exploded. Then board games, and finally table-top pencil and paper games emerging around the same time as the first video games. Time went on.
To be honest I can't be bothered with the history of games, and I made it all up within reasonable parameters. At some point between 1995 and the wide-spread adoption of the internet, shareware games went extinct. The free-online game was in its larval stage in those years, but in the last 16 years it has grown up with all kinds of misspelling, uninspired sequels, and borderline plagiarism.
I was introduced to the tower-defence-genre game Cursed Treasure in the closing days of 2010, and I finished it before 2011 with time to spare. It is hosted on www.towerdefence.net, along with any other TD-variant you could wish to find. I was addicted pretty much instantly, because tower defence games are addictive, especially if they are designed well.
Despite the goofy music and sound effects (which I now have a sort of Pavlovian approval of) the game epitomized what is best about free gaming. It is relatively simple, it is clean and well designed, and it is fun to play. Lots of online flash games that you can play at no charge can do one or the other of the above things, but almost none of them are presented so well that they actually redeem the format.
The gameplay is engaging and deceptively simple, and the addition of skill-trees and XP are not original, but nowhere else have they worked so well. Your towers shoot monsters, dead monsters drop gold, your towers level up, and then you upgrade them so they can kill more monsters. You also have mana that you use for various helpful spells. At the end of the round, you may level up and assign skill points to make your towers and spells better. It sounds easy. To the right person anything seems easy. This is why you must play the game.
Several of the levels, and especially the second-last one, are devilishly hard to beat and require tactical thinking and good use of material. Unfortunately, the game is not completist friendly – perfect scores on all maps require grinding and luck, but the possibility exists for those who want to try. There are only two or three levels which are really hard to complete perfectly, though, and most people don't care about that. So, audience of one bot, spread the word about a game that might be better than Desktop Tower Defence, but also entirely different.
So the analogy that works best is that the computer gaming industry is more or less like Hollywood, if Hollywood forced you to buy special equipment to watch their movies optimally, and if they left all the bad scenes and failed sequences in. Greed, illusion, nonsense et cetera. Computer game critics are regularly paid off to provide beaming reviews, and the ones who aren't tame, if they exist, are held under the radar by the invisible hand*. No wonder gaming took so long to catch on.
Now if games you pay to play are like Hollywood, free online games must be like TV commercials, right? Surprisingly, there are free games available on websites that do not cost money and are probably more enjoyable than many retail games.
Free games have always existed. Up until 1648, if you had the right friends and lived in a city, chances were you could play chess mostly for free. Then card games exploded. Then board games, and finally table-top pencil and paper games emerging around the same time as the first video games. Time went on.
To be honest I can't be bothered with the history of games, and I made it all up within reasonable parameters. At some point between 1995 and the wide-spread adoption of the internet, shareware games went extinct. The free-online game was in its larval stage in those years, but in the last 16 years it has grown up with all kinds of misspelling, uninspired sequels, and borderline plagiarism.
I was introduced to the tower-defence-genre game Cursed Treasure in the closing days of 2010, and I finished it before 2011 with time to spare. It is hosted on www.towerdefence.net, along with any other TD-variant you could wish to find. I was addicted pretty much instantly, because tower defence games are addictive, especially if they are designed well.
Despite the goofy music and sound effects (which I now have a sort of Pavlovian approval of) the game epitomized what is best about free gaming. It is relatively simple, it is clean and well designed, and it is fun to play. Lots of online flash games that you can play at no charge can do one or the other of the above things, but almost none of them are presented so well that they actually redeem the format.
The gameplay is engaging and deceptively simple, and the addition of skill-trees and XP are not original, but nowhere else have they worked so well. Your towers shoot monsters, dead monsters drop gold, your towers level up, and then you upgrade them so they can kill more monsters. You also have mana that you use for various helpful spells. At the end of the round, you may level up and assign skill points to make your towers and spells better. It sounds easy. To the right person anything seems easy. This is why you must play the game.
Several of the levels, and especially the second-last one, are devilishly hard to beat and require tactical thinking and good use of material. Unfortunately, the game is not completist friendly – perfect scores on all maps require grinding and luck, but the possibility exists for those who want to try. There are only two or three levels which are really hard to complete perfectly, though, and most people don't care about that. So, audience of one bot, spread the word about a game that might be better than Desktop Tower Defence, but also entirely different.
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