Example from work.  I work as a customer service rep (seasonal position) for Enstrom’s Candies.  We happen to ship exclusively through FedEx, which is an interesting story if you have a love for the world of shipping, so naturally we get a lot of their trucks coming and going.  However, the occasional UPS truck shows up, and here is where the game world intervenes…

You see, we had a bit of a falling out with UPS.  Thus I sometimes imagine that rather than delivering packages to us one day an armed riot squad will leap out in order to lay siege to us for our impudence at rejecting their services.  This is probably a result of too many hours of playing F.E.A.R. where your average jaunt through a parking garage would likely be interrupted 15 times by trucks full of people intent on ruining your day.

Of course, all of this probably related back to the image I posted about how after enough driving games everything in life becomes a bit of a race.

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Then we have weeks like the past few days.

Farah Fawcett – Dead

Michael Jackson – Dead

Billy Mays – Dead

Donald Trump – Alive, but still a jerk

Yeah, weeks like this past one make me happy to be blissfully average.  There are no sudden spikes in the number of regular people dying, it pretty much stays at a regular rate.  Those few times it does really spike tend to be huge plagues or world wars.  Besides that, the number of us coming into and out of the world happens at a pretty constant rate.  Famous people have to deal with sudden unexpected upswells in dying that us average folks get to avoid.

So today, I fell quite happy to just be a guy, not some famous guy.

The whole thing though has some rather ominous overtones.  If there were to be a zombie apocalypse, we would have to fight an unexpected number of very famous zombies.

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I’ve been known to play some games.  I can thus attest to the truth of the the statement above.  In fact, I was playing Burnout 2 with some friends the other night and a very similar discussion came up.

Now, if you don’t play Burnout here is the basic premise: You have cars, you blow stuff up.  Ok, not there are some races, but the parts we love playing are events where the goal is simply to wreck as many cars as possible within a time limit. 

This skews your image of reality after awhile.  You start looking at intersection as chances to score points and your fellow drivers as targets.  I also used to play Forza Motorsports a lot.  By a lot I mean that I had unlocked the vast majority of cars and memorized most of the courses.  Driving at over 100 mph and taking sharp corners at 60+ began to feel like a natural thing to do.  Luckily my city is on a grid system and provides few places that would seem remotely race worthy in the Forza sense of things.

Fortunately for the world, games don’t shape minds to the degree that the media would like you to believe.  I still drive the speed limit (generally) and have not been involved in a single street race.  But when I hit the open road, I like to check that mirror and look at all the people who won’t be winning any races that day.

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I have a friend who is very excited about “The Watchmen” movie that is coming out soon.

The above is a redo of some frames from the graphic novel the movie is based on.  So here’s to my friend, The Watchmen, and free fire.

This actually reminds me of an old saying that may be common where you are from:

“If life hand you lemons… keep them, because, ‘hey!’ free lemons.”

The same goes for fire, if life hands it to you, keep it, because who couldn’t use some free fire?  It could come in handy for those zombies that are about to eat your best friend, or for cleansing your bathroom of the unholy spirits you have released from your body.

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Oh yes, I am going there…

Now that both the subject of prostitution and role-playing have been broached, I feel it may be safe to move right into the world of role-play for prostitutes.

For those of you who don’t know Rule #38, let me explain, as the image above illustrates it well.  If there is something from your childhood that you hold sacred, there has been porn made with it.  There are no exceptions to rule #38.  If you try to provide and exception something pornographic will immediately be made to fill the gap.

All of you who are my age grew up with Nintendo.  If you were one of the lucky kids, you also grew up with The Legend of Zelda, that first and greatest of the RPG hit things with swords until the storyline makes sense games.  It mostly lacked towns, but your main quest is to find a princess.

Let’s face it, a lot of kids probably never finished the game.  What happened to all the Links that never found Zelda?  My guess is they took all those rupies and found themselves the next best thing.  For reference, these girls also do not want to hear about your character.  They just want to hear the clinking noise of all those wonderful gems you’ve beaten out of the hapless creatures that once inhabited their peaceful land.

Come to think of it, those girls sound a lot like the girls in Liberia and their penchant for the sound of blood diamonds hitting a wood countertop.

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I like the fact that you could indeed hope that she wants to hear about the last time your rolled a natural 20 to get a huge crit on that troll that whacked your party’s rouge… However, there is probably a harsh reality.

Notice those guys in the background?  They’re wearing name tags, and that is a projection screen above them.  This means your ass is at a convention, and the hot girl with the great eyes and smile is being paid to not kick you when you talk about your character… being paid more than your entire comic collection is worth.

Why?

Because after you get done with round eight of masturbating back at the hotel, you will buy their product.  Not only will you buy it, but even if the product sucks, you will remember the hot chick that hawked it.

For spirited debate: Would it be better if she filled out the top or bent over more?

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So, being that I am now staying with the girl, it is a necessity that I make highly theoretical jokes at her expense.

For those of you who know, she happens to have a family history of being French.  My side of the family has more of a tendency to be either very American or German.  This set of conditions creates a conundrum.

Being German, I may have indeed conquered her.  I may have even declared “all your base are belong to us.”  However, being very American, should I also liberate her?  Or have I already done this in the process of conquering?  This is an important question!

After all, on the outcome of this internal debate, I will have to raise either an American or German victory flag.  I could be nice and actually declare her a liberated woman and fly her own flag like we did after WWII, but look how that turned out.  Now France is snobish and has a workable nuclear power solution that allows a great deal of energy independence!

Or if I follow WWI logic will I force myself to pay punitive reparations to her?

I may need to call an expert…

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“I’d Hit That”

You hear kids say that a lot these days.  Hell, you hear me and my friends say it quite a bit these days, although we mostly do it for satire.  But really, where did all the creativity go?

Why not hit it like Odin?  Or for that matter, dance it out of creation like Shiva?  Or my personal favorite, hit it like the fist of angry god.  that shows the kind of dedication that girls are looking for these days… ok, maybe only a very small subset of girls these days, at least if you believe the media.

However, if a girl overhears you come up with a creative turn of phrase like that she will be much more likely to at least have a nice giggle before becoming full of bitter rage at your infantile ability to do nothing with your life than rank every woman that walks by as either a “hit it” or “hit it with a ten foot pole.”  Besides, it takes a certain amount of stellar creativity to come up with the sort of run-on sentences I do.

Remember, you’re buddies will also give you +5 man points if you can use Samuel L. Jackson, Chuck Norris, or the Pope in a hit it phrase.

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If you know me, you know I’m not a big fan of Apple.  The reasons go from “Apple != Games” to the fact that they enjoy trying to foist software on you through iTunes updates.  However, I do think the MacBook Pro and related products are pretty solid.  Another however… I despise the MacBook Air.

More than that, I despise vanity electronics.

By that, I don’t mean MP3 players, Portable media devices (although those get rather close to my list), and things that generally serve a purpose.  What I hate are electronics that forcefully degrade usability and utility to “be cool.”  If you need attention so much that you buy mostly useless hunks of plastic to drag around I recommend hookers, they have more features, are cheaper than, and some even look better on your arm than the Air.

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Here is a thread on the forums about the problem.

So, why is this a lesson in piracy?

Because this is only one of many problems.

Game developers crossed the line of consumer trust a long time ago. In fact, they have been busy plundering our homes and raping our women for quite some time, but we knew their were some shining knights out there somewhere to be trusted. One of these trusted companies was Maxis, the maker of Spore.

Most people are currently blaming EA, the parent company, for this fiasco. I don’t, I blame Maxis and EA and every other developer who has taken the same road. they had an all-star developer cast and were allowed 12 years to develop the game. If you have forgotten, Maxis is also SimCity, The Sims, and many other IPs. They are no small fish. However, we (I included) generally think of them as a small fish that was eaten by big bad EA. So I bought the game (pre-ordered is a better word) and shelled out my dollars to support Maxis.

I played through all the stages of Spore in one day. It was cool, it may even be worth the price tag. However, this is not a game that feels anywhere close to a decade of development. What it feels like is a collection of cool editors for creatures and building and a sandbox environment to play with those toys.

The game starts out feeling like it builds in complexity, and you want to invest your feelings in the growth of your creation. But quickly it becomes a fairly disconnected sequence of mini-games that bring the instruction “wash, rinse, repeat,” to mind. Then jumping to space brings to bear a very complex world that you don’t care at all about, and which mostly pulls you out of any immersive activities you want to attempt in it. So what I am left with are some cool building block sets, and a great deal of gameplay I could pass on. This problem is what I feel really teaches us a lesson.

Currently the only way to properly demo a game is to pirate a copy of it. This is how deeply our trust has been broken. We are also tired of insane DRM and authentication procedures to play a game we legally own. What makes us much more angry is that the pirated copy works better, runs faster, and often crashes less often than the commercial release. We are restricted from sharing a game with our own family in a meaningful way.

This is a reversal of how things should be (and in most ways used to be). If you pirated a game in the past you worried about it working and no support if it broke. Registering your game was easy, or not even required for legal purchases. A game demo took you through the first few levels of the real game, not an engineered playroom that shows off all the best features but never comes close to reality in the actual game. Developers would also sometimes throw out a number of small additions or freebies over time to those who did register to make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

I have frequently – and will now always – pirated a game just to see if it is playable. To check that the fun factor actually resembles what the developers have touted. If it passes these tests, I do, in fact, buy the game. I have played through the entire story of a game I have pirated only to go back and buy the game. I have become a consumer you have to “win” dollars from. And Spore makes that breaking point clear.

Many of us followed the game for years. We were told how awesome every part was. How it would engage us on many levels. That the systems for going from cell to space were richly developed. And what I have found is that while the game is fun for a couple of days, the hype was not backed up by any substance.

Speak with your dollar! Pirate, pirate, pirate! And only pay a developer once their content has proved to be passable. Force developers to earn our trust again.

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