thisiswhyimbroke.com

My little brother, in preparation for the holidays, introduced me to thisiswhyimbroke.com

It's one of those frustrating web sites that has some awesome shit, the best thing you've ever seen, right next to an item that represents everything unholy, stupid, and disturbing about commerce.

Come along and see!


Snuggle Pillow

Uh, this pillow was invented to give one the illusion of snuggling with a human man. A human man in a button-up shirt who was sawed in half at some point. Frankly, I'd rather buy a fuck doll because getting caught snuggling a fuck doll seems somehow less embarrassing than snuggling this thing. I'm a sad guy, but I have my limits.

R2-D2 Trash Can

This is the first I'm hearing that R2-D2 was not originally intended to be a trash receptacle.



Novelty Monopoly Money Tie

Can someone explain to me the situation where it is appropriate to wear a novelty tie? Because if you're supposed to wear a tie to something, that means it's formal. But if you wear a novelty tie, it's now informal. It's the worst thing to happen to fashion since the tuxedo t-shirt worn to a rock show.



Glass-Bottom Canoe

I'm not so much opposed to this item as I am the way in which it's being sold to me. How come every water craft or floaty or whatever has to be advertised by a babe in a bikini? I don't need to be hard when I'm picking out water wings. I really don't. I've gone over the exhaustive list I made of times when it is crucial for me to be hard, and purchasing pool shit is not one of them.



Corn Dog Machine

I already have a corn dog machine. It's called the Carnival. And the great thing about the carnival is I don't have to keep it in my cabinets.



Futon Bunk Bed

A couch that converts into not one, but TWO beds? I never thought you could turn a couch into two shitty beds, but you did it. And maybe the futon is a lost cause in terms of quality, but this is at least a step forward in quantity. It's never been easier to have two drunken friends stay over, one sleeping while the other one lies awake in sheer terror, waiting for his buddy to fall through and crush him.


Baby Carrying Jacket

Yeah, why buy you and your baby separate jackets when you can horrify me by buying this single jacket that makes you look like that dummy who turned into a blueberry on Willy Wonka plus the added terror of a baby head emerging from her stomach?



Labyrinth Aquarium

This would be kind of cool, but I think after a while I would start to feel bad for the fish. They don't seem to be the sharpest creatures in the sea. I don't know that fish can cry, but watching a fish weep seven months into the search for the particular bubble he's adopted as home would be bad times all around.


The Water Jet Pack

....

It's about fucking time.

This thing is two-fold the best thing that has happened in our time.

First, having any sort of jetpack is a win for science in my eyes, and science wins are pretty rare these days.

Second, even if I never use it, I can already feel the rumblings of a belly laugh when I read the headline "Sophmore on spring break killed by jetpack malfunction at Lake Havasu."

Lytro Camera: What's the Point of Photography?

So this little box is the next thing that is transforming photography from the art of capturing a moment to the art of pointing a thing at a thing and then fooling around with it on the computer.

It's very scientific and all that, which you could probably guess by the description that starts, "The very first light fields were captrued at Stanford University over 15 years ago..."

Really, all you need to know is that this little bugger captures a very full image, which means that you can change it in ways that were not possible before. If you want to understand the difference, look off at an object 5 feet away from you. While still focusing on that object, you can see that everything between you and that object and beyond that object is blurry. This is what we call depth of field.

The way cameras worked traditionally is similar to the way an eye works in that you would capture an image, and the depth of field was set, permanent. It was what your eye was seeing in that moment in time.

This camera, however, is a little different. You can experiment on their web site, but here's a sample of how this would look:

Here's picture A:

In picture A you can see that the can in the foreground is crystal clear, and the clarity fades as the row gets further and further away.

Let's look at picture B:

In this image, the first can in blurry while the middle cans are clear.

Okay, so this is Photo 101, but the difference is that before, with film and digital, you had to decide what to include in your depth of field beforehand, as you took the picture. Once you took the picture, it was difficult to sharpen some parts while blurring others to create this effect. If you took picture A, it would take enough work to warp it into picture B that it was prohibitive. With the Lytro, you just click with the mouse. That's it.

So this is awesome, technologically. But what about for photography?

To be honest, I think it must be harder and harder to be a professional photographer anymore. Even ten years ago, there was enough technique and practice that you could see a huge difference between an amateur and a pro. But now you can make up a lot of that difference with money and software.

It's a fairly close analogue to hunting. Bow hunting is pretty challenging, and you have to be good at shooting, patient, and have some sort of skill to get close enough. If you were allowed to use top military technology, you could blow up a deer with a missile that you pilot, and you could screencap the entire event.

But on the other hand, I think bow hunting is kind of silly when one considers that you're really just handicapping yourself for the sport of it. I mean, I sort of get it, but couldn't you just start forcing sprinters to smoke cigars while they ran? Or why not hunt with only a knife?

What I'm getting at here is that there is, to me, a disappointing and sad devaluing of the photographic image because an image is no longer what it once was, which is a moment of time captured for others to see (at the least) and an artistic interpretation of that moment (at best). Whereas before the photographer had to do both of those things at once, now all that is required is to point and shoot. You can worry about the rest later.

These improvements in technology can have an upside. For example, the fact that someone can now make a feature-quality film with equipment that can be purchased at Best Buy is pretty awesome in that it allows people with ideas to create and make something that maybe would not have been made if it had to go through a studio. But the downside is that all of this equipment being available means that it's also available to dummies who have no ideas and figure the good ideas will just come to them at some point.

The technology also gets rid of something that we don't talk about a lot in art: the complete fuck-up.

Take this A and B example, also from the Lytro web site:

Okay, artistic license and all that, but I think most people would agree that photo A is a fuck-up. You've captured an interesting background, but with a blob in the foreground that's way more interesting than what you focused on. Alright, so you fucked up.

But fucking up is how you learn to do things right. When you develop this picture, that's the moment when you say, Okay, next time I need to make a different aperture adjustment to capture exactly what I want.

And fucking up is important because if every photo is edited to be perfect, then a good photo really has no value anymore.

Celebrity Doppleganger

The other night a couple friends and I were having an argument/discussion/boozefest where we all discussed celebrity look-a-likes. This happens a lot in my circle of friends, the question, "If you were casting a movie of your life, a biopic, who would you cast to play so-and-so?"

There was much discussion. Names were thrown around, everything from the lovely and talented Nancy Kerrigan to the less lovely and less talented (at least in the ice skating world) Danny Devito.

So, to see if I could find an unbiased answer, I turned to the internet.

I found a celebrity lookalike generator at this address: http://celebrity.picadilo.com/

There are certainly others out there, but this is the only one I found that doesn't require any email address, logging in, or any other nonsense. I try not to do that whenever possible. Giving up your email to find a celebrity lookalike is like telling someone your phone number to buy batteries.

Let's take a look at the results, starting with myself:

Hmm...okay, some awesome ones mixed in with some...Jay Leno. I see a couple problems with this right off. For starters, if I match Jay Leno 59% and Pierce Brosnan 58%, does that suggest that there's only about a 1% difference between the faces of these two men? Because I think people with the use of their eyes worldwide would disagree.

The other big problem I see is that looking like David Bowie could be pretty great. He had some handsome times. However, looking like the pale, vampiric version of David Bowie above is slightly less complimentary.

In order to see how much difference it makes depending on the picture, I tried a second one as well:

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I should get some extra points for getting 2 of 3 male Friends, and the two best, in my opinion. But if I looked 93% like Matt Damon, I would be far, FAR too busy working my way through trim to write blogs. And clearly, that is not the case.

Let's move on to friend #1:

Now, while the idea that my white male friend in his late 20's looks like Queen Latifah (my mom's favorite "rapper"), a black middle-aged woman, is hilarious, it doesn't really help me cast the movie so much. And again, a 1% difference between Queen Latifah and Owen Wilson? This shit ain't working. And though I feel like Ellen is funny, I don't know if the world is ready for that gender-bending role. So another picture was absolutely necessary.

A guy could do a lot worse than this. Denzel and the white Denzel (who could be Richard Gere OR Harrison Ford, depending on how you feel about cinema).

So how about a female friend?

What's interesting is that, of the three of us, she most often hears that she looks like different celebrities. None of THESE, but others of equal quality or better.

And though I respect what JK Rowling has done, I think seeing her as a celebrity look-alike is a stretch. She's a lot more famous for inventing a game where people straddle brooms than for having some kind of a face.

Second try:

Sooo....this is a little all over the map for my liking. Julianne Moore and Mariah Carey, both very beautiful. And Roman Polanski. Maybe this thing is really advanced, and maybe this particular friend has mannish hands.

Anyway, this strikes me as a good tool for determining celebrity lookalikes for two reasons:

1. It does not in any way take into account personality, which doesn't matter. If someone is going to play you in a movie, they learn your mannerisms, not the other way around.

2. Arguing about it is kind of pointless because if I say, "You look like Richard Dreyfuss," and you say, "No I don't. I'm a woman" we'll reach an impasse very quickly. But if you feed it into the machine, and everyone uses the same machine, you get what you get. And when it comes back with Jay Leno, you can walk away assuming that it's a programming issue instead of standing in front of the mirror for forty minutes, doing bits on newspaper typos while studying your chin.

New Oregon Trail

Today I learned that there is a new Oregon Trail game coming out for the Wii.

First there was excitement. Then dysentery.

Because after the initial excitement wore off and I wiped up, I remembered that there was the AWESOME Oregon Trail (1992-ish) that I came to know and love in elementary school, and the shitty version (1995-ish) that had better graphics, but was mouse-dependent and everything else about it was total shit.

The new game just didn't have the same appeal. So what were the appeal factors of the O.G.O.T. (Original Gangsta Oregon Trail)?

1. Naming


Before you could hitch up your wagons, you had to name your family. This small customization is endless fun and can add so much to a game.

I started by naming the characters cool shit. Optimus Prime and his son Galactus were the only ones to make the ford across the first river. Their daughter/sister, Rainbow Brite, unfortunately didn't make it.

Then, when I got smart, it was time to put in teacher names. This didn't pay off right away, but when the message "Mrs. Pesja has died of a snake bite" hit the screen, you'd say, Damn right she has. Serves her right for making me MEMORIZE times tables. Barbaric practices, barbaric death.

Of course, then you also hit on the idea of swears. "Shithead has died." "Fuckface has starved to death."

And finally, in case you are like me and enjoy giggling in your apartment alone, adding racial epithets to any game adds a bizarre element to any gameplay scenario. All of a sudden it appears as though this friendly shopkeeper has a bad case of the Klansies. OR, if that doesn't push your button, just add "Goddamn cocksucking" to the front of every character name, transforming every video game into Deadwood: the game.

2. You were in charge


Being a kid, it was like role reversal. All of a sudden, you were like the dad on the road trip, making all the decisions with disregard to this dumb family that don't really even exist to you off paper. One of the kids wants to stop because he's ill? Too bad. We're making good time. Someone needs to be buried? Great, we'll bury him right here and get on the road. Good thing we were hauling all these tombstones. And if I wanna try and just drive straight through a river, maybe a couple people don't make it out. Oh well. All part of the adventure!

You also decided to set the pace. Though I didn't really understand the meaning of the word fully, "grueling" was always the obvious choice. It's called the Gold Rush, not the Gold Get There When We Get There.

You also got to pick your career. You could be a carpenter (if you were an idiot), a farmer (if you were a bigger idiot) or a banker (which was the obvious choice because you started with GODDAMN MONEY).

3. Hunting


Clearly the best part of this adventure was shooting. I'm certain that we must have been the last generation to grow up in schools that PAID MONEY for a video game that featured the use of GUNS.

Anyway, even a 3rd grader can appreciate the hilariousness of standing in a field with 7 downed buffalo, 4 squirrels, and a couple rabbits, more meat than a family could ever hope to eat or carry. It was enough to make a Native American man shed a single, badly pixellated tear.

4. The Rafting Endgame


The last sequence of the game involved piloting your wagon, transformered into a raft, down a raging river. It was awesome, and all of a sudden you were playing what appeared to be AN ACTUAL VIDEO GAME.

5. It Was Played At School

Probably the most important point.

I'm not sure how schools were tricked into thinking this game was educational, but they were suckers, man. It must have been before people understood what video games were, because I learned a hell of a lot more (almost nothing) from Metal Gear Solid than I did Oregon Trail.

I learned the word "typhoid" but still had no idea what it was beyond the fact that it was fatal to ShitBitchHell, my only son. I still have no fucking idea what a wagon tongue is, nor what effect it's breaking may have on a traveler.

Oregon Trail was far from a great, great game. But compared to doing anything remotely resembling work, I'd be happy to march pioneers to their grueling deaths, squashing the spirit of American westward expansion one family of unfortunately named travelers at a time.




See Also:

Organ Trail (zombie version)
Thule Trail (roadtrip to a music fest, scroll down to middle of page to play)

Things That Wreck Video Games to Shit: Looking for the Damn Yellow Key

You found the blue key, the red key, and you've killed every single thing that moves, blown up every barrel of toxic/explosive waste, and pushed space bar while facing a wall and heard that oddly sexual grunting noise as the character tries to open a brick wall.

And you still can't find the goddamn yellow key.

Here's the thing, when you spend 20 minutes on one level of a shooter like Doom and others, 15 of those minutes will be spent walking around, shooting nothing, listening to the music that you never really noticed before and now hate like poison.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I play shooters to shoot. That's why they're called first-person-shooters and not first-person-key retrievers.

And how long is this reality supposed to hold up? Isn't this supposed to be some kind of working military facility? How did people get around here before? Did they all just get to work, go to a keyboard and type in "idclip" and hope that they never tried to walk through an outside wall because then you were lost in a really graphically annoying limbo?

There should be a code you type in where after not shooting your weapon for 20 minutes, a text pops up on the screen that says, "Oh, wait. You just found the yellow key in your OTHER pocket" and then the goddamn thing shows up on your inventory.

Drinkify

So it's almost certainly just a way for people to nail down demographics (you know, I type in "Drive-By Truckers" and then "Lucero" and then "Gaslight Anthem" and that data all goes into some insane database) but it's still pretty fun. Type in your favorite band name and see what you're supposed to be drinking.

Some of my results:

Lucero: 8 oz Maker's Mark, 8 oz Ice cream, Combine in highball glass, stir. (I'm not really an ice cream guy. Is this a thing?)

Drive-By-Truckers: 12 oz Whiskey, 12 oz Monster Energy Drink (actually, this isn't too far from what I had last time I saw them: 3 back-to-back-to-back whiskey shots, then slam a cup of coffee. I'm told the show was pretty fun)

Jason Isbell: 4 oz Southern Comfort, garnish w/ cucumber slice (the Southern Comfort part makes sense. If I were dating Jason Isbell, that would definitely be my nickname for him. But I don't know why garnishing with a cucumber is necessary. EVER.)

Bon Iver: 1 bottle red wine, serve w/ a twist of grapefruit (red wine is kind of lame, but an entire bottle is worth an attaboy)

The Hold Steady: 1 PBR, serve cold (hmm, okay. Although they DO have an entire song about whiskey, citrus, and ginger.)

The National: 1 PBR, serve cold (hey, something's up here...)

R.E.M.: 1 PBR, serve cold (oh, goddamn it! Okay, I know how to fix this)

Lynyrd Skynyrd: 1 oz Canadian Club, 1 oz coffee (alright then)

Finally, I'm seeing Centro-Matic tomorrow...

Centro-Matic: 4 oz whiskey, 4 oz half-and-half, 6 oz Rose's Lime Juice (good lord. Between the sweet and the milk, and to a lesser extent the whiskey, this is going to be like being a baby again)

We've learned an important lesson today. Apparently, I'm allowed to drink PBR, whiskey, and whiskey combined with stimulants. I AM allowed to drink red wine, however it has to be an entire bottle of red wine.

Anyway, see what you find out about yourself www.drinkify.org

Slydial

Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know about this already.

All you have to do is dial 267-slydial (this is normally the place where people put the corresponding numbers, but c'mon. I think we've got this figured out by now, and doesn't it kind of defeat the point when you get this awesome number and then have to use the regular number anyway?) and it will bypass the ringer on your "friend's" phone and take you straight to voicemail. If you don't know why that's awesome, your life must be much better than most.

http://slydial.com/

Things That Shit Up Video Games pt. [something]

I got you, you bastard. I've got you right in my sights. I just have to make a slight adjustment downward.

Wait. Shit. I can't remember if this is one of those games where the control stick goes up to go up or goes down to go down. Fuck. Shit. Okay, I'll try- OH GODDAMN IT!

Who the hell decided that the controls to a sniper rifle scope would be like goddamn airplane controls? How in the hell, in what world does that make any sense?

I hate this shit. Think about it like this: People generally hold a controller one of two ways.

#1: Horizontally, the wire headed directly towards the TV.
#2: Vertically, the wire coming straight up out the top.

If you're holding it vertically, how does it make sense at all? And nobody holds it vertically the other way, with the buttons facing away from the player and the cord going straight toward the floor.

I guess there's an established system for these sorts of things. But that's the same kind of thinking that ended up America being the only place on Earth that uses the goddamn non-metric-system, whatever that's called. The Bald Eagle System?

Things That Ruin Video Games pt. 3: Obstructed View

You want to see me fucking lose it? Give me a game where you can't see what the hell you're doing.

Castlevania, hard as it could be, was always a personal favorite of mine. So when I got the chance to rent Castelvania 64, I jumped at it, and then immediately started jumping into canyons, creeks, and any number of endless pits.

Or sometimes you'd get a view like this:

So you're walking towards the player, but three steps from here you might find yourself falling into a big pile of bullshit. Actually, that would be fine because you wouldn't die and have to goddamn start over. You fall into a canyon.

The game was like playing Pitfall: Grand Canyon at Night Edition. You'd be walking around, then you would be falling. Just that fast. It's like my nights. I'll be sitting around, then I'll be sitting around eating Flavor Blasted Goldfish, just like that. No transition, no warning.

This wasn't an uncommon thing with the quick proliferation of 3D-ish games. Take this classic, for example:

You're swinging Bowser by the tail, and you have to let go at just the right time so he flies into a bomb. Not too hard, except that half the time the camera pulls in tight like this and you have to guess where the bombs are.

There are occasions where fooling with the view is okay. If there's darkness, smoke, or something that would affect one's view, then it gets a pass. It's still obnoxious, but it feels on purpose and you can hope that the environment is designed with the obstructed view in mind.

But what is bullshit is when you look at the character and think, If I were standing on that platform, I would be able to see where the fuck I was going. If I were walking in those woods, I definitely would have seen that gigantic canyon before I skipped along and then didn't touch the ground. Nothing more embarrassing than having your last step off the lip of a canyon be a skipping step.

Making the view the main issue in a game is a little bit of Gotcha gameplaying, the type of game where there's no amount of skill that can save you, only a repetition of play that gives you a Daredevil-esque sense of the digital world you're occupying.

If you design a game that's difficult because you can't see shit, why not just send it to me with a goddamn blindfold? Or have blind payers test it out?

Figure it out, Nintendo of the late 90's.

Ubuntu Linux Laptop Save

This one is not for the un-nerds. It's not really for the true nerds either. It's somewhere in between.

Like a lot of people, I had a laptop that was getting to the end of its useful life. All the normal signs were there. It took in the neighborhood of 7 hours to properly start up. The battery lasted just long enough to unplug the computer and move it from one room to another. Where once I would have stabbed someone in the heart for approaching the machine with a beverage in hand, I now used the open keyboard as a coaster, a tiny individual glass on each of the keys. Yes, I designed a set of glassware for the express purpose of demonstrating how much I disliked the machine. Like you've never wasted a couple bucks.

My laptop was one of the first models to come with Windows Vista. Windows Shitsta. It was crap, and worse, the laptop was clearly not meant to handle the strain. It was built for XP or the like, and Vista was crammed in there. The little progress ring, that blue circle that says, Take a seat. This'll be a while, even that blue ring was too graphical for my computer.

I decided, after getting a new laptop to change the operating system. I don't need all the graphics, all the animations and whatnot. Just something that functions.

I started off looking for a Windows XP installation disc from my desktop. No dice.

Then it was Linux, Ubuntu 11.04.

The installation was a bit of a process. You had to make an installation disc, then change the boot order of your computer.

For the un-nerds who got this far, that means changing your computer's settings so that it looks to the CD-ROM drive for instructions on how to start up.

But, overall, not bad. It took a little while to reinstall, but I was pretty happy with the speed. Plus the narwahl, which is a dolphin with a corkscrewn dildo jammed on its head, was easily removed from the background.

Why are we obsessed with unicorns when a narwahl is a real thing? It's pretty much the unicorn of the sea. Why is a horse horn better than a fish horn?

Anyway, things were going great until I discovered that I was no longer able to connect to wireless. At all. Not just a particular network. Ubuntu didn't even acknowledge that the laptop had the hardware to connect.

Down the digital rabbit hole.

After some quick googling of Ubuntu + [my laptop model] I discovered a bunch of articles along the lines of "Why isn't my wireless working?" "How the fuck come my wireless isn't working?" and "Why in the hell shit ass isn't my wireless working, bitch!?!?"

Again, their words, not mine.

The fix wouldn't be too bad if you could connect to a landline. Which I couldn't. So, the trick was to rip out a driver, replace it with another one, and do the entire thing wirelessly.

I'm not going to bother you with the whole process, but let's just put it this way: It involved using a command prompt, a cutter, an installer, and checking the architecture, whatever the fuck that means.

For me, it meant following hard-earned step-by-step instructions to a T, and then it worked.

Until the computer connected to the internet, installed updates, and then I had to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not a computer genius, clearly. But I have to say, for all its expense and annoyance, Windows still works pretty well for me. I'm not claiming that things are not possible on Ubuntu, but I will claim that for me, and for anyone without a pretty good amount of computer experience, it's going to take you twice as long.

In other words, it's a good idea if you're looking for a hobby. But if your hobby is playing King's Quest and you have to work for hours to get a laptop back in shape to play a game that originally came on floppy disc, it's a lot of work for nothing.

Drilled

Interesting little thing that came across my radar the other day.

Randy Sarafan, media artist, has created these little stickers for your personal use. In fact, he's not even selling them. You can find his templates, including directions on how to best print them out, here.

He suggests that you open up your computer (or check online), locate the hard drive, and then place this sticker on the outside. Then, if you need to destroy your hard drive for whatever reason, you can do so within moments with a drill or power saw.

The guy seems to be on the up-and-up, putting forth the idea that maybe you, like him, are a media artist who pissed off the wrong people and need to delete, as in permenently delete, all your shit while someone's busting down your door.

Maybe it smacks of paranoia. But I'm not so sure.

After reading this book and seeing how Kevin Mitnick got fucked over and over again in court because people didn't understand what he was doing or how, it makes you think twice about whether or not someone might twist the contents of your hard drive into "evidence" of some kind.

This makes me sound paranoid on the level of a raving lunatic, but I have to say, what's to stop someone from putting something on your computer sometime between you being arrested and it showing up as Exhibit A?

There's an old saying that people with nothing to hide don't have to worry about their privacy. I call bullshit on that.

Just remember, you have a right to privacy, but nobody is going to protect that right FOR you.

As a quick P.S., how long before people get this shit tattooed on their heads?

Things That Make Video Games Suck pt. 2

Water Levels

Nothing ruins a fun game like a good, or a bad, or really any, water level.

You’re chugging along, working your way through known territory, when all of a sudden you find yourself faced with working through some horrible underwater temple of some kind. All of your weapons, items, and movements are useless.

These levels are always the shittiest ones. Always. Why? Well, maybe it’s because people spend months and years designing the physics, gameplay, and controls of a game, and then decide to completely ruin them for the sake of one level. One level that combines boredom and terror in a really overused way.

On the terror side, facing the fear of drowning is not one of my favorite activities. Whenever people compare horrible deaths, it’s either drowning or burning alive, and let’s face it, at least if you burned alive you would make for some good news footage later to be used in a Metallica video.

Also, there aren’t a lot of really terrifying burning alive deaths in video games. I’m not saying people don’t burn to death, but I am saying that you usually don’t spend three minutes struggling, panicking, trying desperately to find a fire extinguisher or decent blanket or bucket of sand or whatever.

And another thing. If you did happen to go to the brink of drowning, I would think your brain might be permanently affected. Maybe if you push it too far, Link should walk with a limp for the rest of the game. Or maybe dialogue is altered so people are constantly talking about how you’re “not like you used to be” and then quickly stop each other as you enter the room.

On the boredom side, the plan for a water level seems to be pretty much like a normal level, but slower and darker.

How about a look at some classic horrible water levels?

TMNT

This might be the granddaddy of them all. So many problems it’s hard to know where to start.

For one thing, as a turtle man, shouldn’t a water level be easily navigable? If you can run through a warehouse and kill with a sword, I would think that swimming around would be easy as hell. A welcome break, like if I spent the day attacking robots with nunchuks and then someone asked me to nap and eat a whole bag of Doritos. I would be in my natural environment and therefore very comfortable, not likely to encounter any big problems.

Instead, this whole thing is shit because you can hold your breath for about four seconds, and everything around you is electrified. Also, you pretty much suck at swimming.

I could understand if one of four turtles was bad at swimming. Maybe Michaelangelo was spending too much time being a party dude and never learned. Maybe Raphael was cool, but crude to his swim instructor. Maybe Donatello was busy screwing around with a laser-guided…you get the idea.

But not one decent swimmer amongst all these TURTLES! Unforgivable.

Earthworm Jim

I have a real love/hate thing going with this series.

On the one hand, it felt like they did some interesting stuff, and they mixed it up a lot. The first level of EWJ has ups and downs in terrain that make it feel like a real environment instead of a 2-D walkway that happens to be covered in baddies.

But some of it was just plain annoying, and nothing more so than the stupid submarine made out of the world’s most breakable glass and with a very limited time limit.

I know that there is a limit to applying logic to things that were designed to be illogical, but come on. Could you think of a worse submarine to be in? All glass, difficult to control, and has to be refilled by connecting a device that’s like threading a needle with spaghetti? And maybe a glass bubble boat would be awesome for looking at fish and crap. But when designed for navigating cramped rocky caverns, I would suggest, well, any other material known to man. Cardboard. Mucus.

Just like TMNT, you have a limited amount of air, a low ability to navigate around, and you find yourself more delicate than a robin’s egg I completely destroyed in my hand as a child. Doesn’t that sound fun?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Much has been said about this one, a castle where you have to equip heavy boots in order to sink to the bottom. Then unequip the heavy boots to rise to the top again. Then re-equip to sink into another chamber. The re-un-equip to—you get the idea.

The less you have to use a menu in a game, the more the game has succeeded in making gameplay fast, logical, and fun. There are fifty goddamn buttons on a modern controller, can’t one turn the boots on and off? Select maybe? Select don’t do shit.

What’s really obnoxious about this one, and this type of thing, is that the gameplay has removed an ability from a character that is a very common human ability: sinking. I know not everyone can float, but goddamn it, everyone can sink. Ask any corpse in a river how they sank, and they’ll explain “I just…did.”

I like collecting items to gain special abilities in games. What I don’t so much care for is collecting items that make you into a normal human. Why not start the game with the guy paralyzed, and he can slowly collect magic totems that allow him to talk, then eat, then wipe himself? That sounds like a ball.

This one make me upset to a level that I'm not proud of and prefer not to discuss.

As in the last entry in this series, I’ve got a handful of suggestions regarding making these water levels tolerable:

1. You don’t need to slow the shit down so much. Just a little hint of blue, I get it. Changing the entirety of the physics of a game makes no sense, and it never works quite right. When I used Moon Boot cheats on Game Genie, it was always fun for about four seconds, and then you would go flying off the screen and not really even know where you were. These worlds and the objects in them were designed to be used by a character obeying certain laws of physics, so don’t pervert those laws to the point that they have to be served papers and fret over impending court dates.

2. There is a huge difference between challenging and outright frustrating. That difference: In a side-scroller where I’m slicing up foot clan assholes, a stage where I’m swimming, which is impossibly difficult, is enraging. You wouldn’t make level 3 of Tetris a first-person shooter. Because people who want to play Tetris want to play Tetris, not Medal of Tetris Honor. So make your water levels consistent with the gameplay style of the rest of your game, in terms of WHY it’s fun or WHY someone would be attracted to it.

3. Gameplay has progressed to a point where a character dying upon contact with water is an unacceptable proposition. You should be allowed to struggle back to the edge, and just the mere act of taking a dip shouldn’t kill you. I’ve fallen out of a boat at a time when I was so drunk that I couldn’t even figure out why I was in the boat in the first place, and I’m still alive today. It’s not asking much that an intergalactic bounty hunter in a full space/battle suit would be able to swim A LITTLE.

10 Things That Suck in Games, Pt. 1

There are two words that strike into my heart every damn time I play a game:

Escort Mission.

So many, so very many games, involve a mission where someone says, Hey, would you mind being my bodyguard while I do some inane task that you can’t do for some reason? It’ll only take forever, and I will be of no help, and in fact likely present another obstacle to my own protection.

Sounds okay. Maybe you shoot a couple guys and carry a pre-cracked-out Whitney Houston from a building?

No.

Instead, you try over and over to keep someone alive who has no sense of self-preservation, no ability to fight back, and no actual will to live, apparently.

For me, memorably, was the stage in Nintendo 64’s Goldeneye where you had to protect the hapless Natalia while she did some computer hacking garbage. For her hacking mission, she elected to wear a skirt and tall shoes. Which is perfect because the room you have to be in is reminiscent of a nightclub filled with multiple levels, exits all over the place, and an endless stream of hostile dudes looking to destroy a woman.

I feel there’s a necessary conversation to be had before escorting someone through a building filled with hostile terrorists. For one, hows about not sprinting down the hallway the instant the elevator door opens? That’s kind of a rule here. Or hey, why don’t you stay ducked behind a wall while I run in, kill, kill, kill, and then I’ll come back for you. Hide in this cardboard box. If a cardboard box is good enough for Solid Snake, it’s most certainly good enough for you, lady.

After a panicked sprint through hallways to find some keycard, she would stand, dopey, at the computer while you fought off dudes with machine guns for what felt like hours. It never ended. And then, just when you were taking a breath, a guy would pop out of some side door and blow her away.

As a super hacker, was it really necessary for her to select the terminal in the middle of the goddamn room? Couldn’t we have picked one off to the side or something?

Also, what a bunch of bullshit. Having been in a lot of buildings with IT departments, I can tell you that there’s not one where the tech geeks are in a huge, well-lit room where all the action is. This aesthetic clashes with their own, which involves cables and corn chip bags.

I wish this was the only time this sort of thing happened, but there are tons of other escort levels in games too.

Grand Theft Auto was always a fan of these. Some idiot gets into a car, you get in another car, and you’re supposed to keep everyone else from crashing into and killing him.

This is a pretty tough task, and why the asshole can’t just get in the car with you is beyond me.

Pretty soon, it turns into a driving mission that’s less like the Road Warrior and more like trying to follow a dumb friend through traffic. He’s weaving around, turning from the outside lane, and almost can’t believe it when he loses you on unfamiliar, crowded city streets.

There’s always that moment when following someone when they hit a stale green light, floor it through the yellow, and you’re left on the other side. You’re sitting, ready to gun the engine on a moving van with no brakes to speak of, watching your friend fade into the distance. That anxiety and frustration is basically the way you feel the whole time.

By the time your escortee has been killed a dozen different ways, including you immediately shooting him or her in the head on sight because you’re just so damn sick of it all, you don’t give one damn whether he or she lives or dies. In Yoshi’s Island, a game that is basically ALL escorting, I would find myself jumping into pits or spikes, committing suicide with a clear conscience because I knew I was taking the squawling infant Mario down with me. It was worth it. Well worth it.

If these escort missions are going to happen, I’d like to see some ground rules:

1. Escortees should behave somewhat like real people.

I don’t know how to clear a room with an M-16, but I know enough to let James Bond go ahead and walk out of the elevator and into the secret military bunker first. I do know that. And if someone is supposed to be using a vehicle to protect mine, I generally let them know where the hell we’re going to go before we get there.

2. You’re a human being, the escortee is a human being. Therefore, you should be able to take about the same amount of damage. It never works like that in the games. The escortee is basically the human version of Humpty Dumpty, and a trip off the curb is a pelvis-shattering debacle. Let’s even this up a little.

3. The escortee, when being escorted, should show a little goddamn gratitude. I guess game designers think it’s cute when the escortee is witty and complaining about the job you’re doing. Well, it’s not cute, and if some dude wasted an army guy who was about to blow my head off, I think a Thanks Bro, or at the very least NOT making fun of him would be in order.

4. When the escortee dies, make it worth my while. I know I’m going to have to start this stupid mission all over again, so couldn’t you make it more interesting for me? Exploding neck collar? Nuclear heart valve that blows the hell up? Convenient wardrobe malfunction (have you noticed that in movies no female characters are ever shot or stabbed in the breast? I would think this would happen all the time).

Learning as You Go

This weekend I got Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii.

Something you might notice is that I pretty much stay a consistent 2 generations of games behind everyone else. This is partially because it saves a hell of a lot of cash, partially because I'd rather let everyone else wade through the garbage and let me know about the top 10% of games. I recommend it. It works great with games, too, because it's pretty rare that someone is going to spoil a video game for you by accident. Plus, an unfortunate truth, spoiling story usually has very little effect on videogames.

Anyway, I get this game, and I'm excited, man. I'm thinking how rad it's going to be to swing around the remote like it's a sword. Just the night before I had walked home from the grocery store with a tube of wrapping paper, and I couldn't help but carry it sword-style, swiping at all kinds of bad shit. If a tube of bright red wrapping paper can be a sword when I'm wearing athletic shorts and carrying a pint of ice cream in a plastic sack, then doing the virtual sword thing should be a hundred steps up.

I have now played three hours of Zelda: TwiPri, and I have not once swung an actual sword.

It's like they're fucking with me. See that picture at the top? THAT'S what I wanted to do.

First, you have to do a few nonsense missions. Find a lady's cat, destroy a beehive. You know, that stuff that is meant to be an in-game teacher for all the various stuff you're going to be doing in the game. I DID enjoy sic-ing a hawk on a monkey. Nothing better than fatally wounding a screeching monkey. But beyond that, I started to get frustrated.

I wanted to swing a sword around, dammit. I did not want to locate a lost cat. I don't want to locate a lost cat in real life. Not even for money. You know where every lost cat is? Either dead from being struck by a vehicle or living in someone else's house with no memory or emotion about leaving you in the lurch.

I don't want to fish. I don't want to fish in real life. Because I think it's boring. And, as someone much smarter than me has said, It's insane to impale a worm on a metal hook and then use it to trick another thing to being caught and gutted alive.

But this is the way of most games.

Old games, you could read the instructions if you were a dork or someone with Crohn's disease who spent a lot of time on the shitter. But you really didn't have to. There were two goddamn buttons. What's to know? The big discovery in Mario is holding down the B button to run. That's pretty much the end of technical discovery there.

Then games started having a tutorial level. I guess things were getting too complicated, and they didn't expect that you would get to everything on your own. There was a part of me that liked these, but it kind of spoils the game. In Army Men 3D, which was fun as hell, you started off in a boot camp that taught you how to use every weapon in the game.

What the fuck is the point of the game if I've seen all the cool shit before I've even started?

So, more recently, they try to integrate the tutorial into a first mission. This ranges in style, everything from a text scroll popping up and saying "Push X to punch heads in" to a character, usually an old man, instructing you in that bizarre blend of gamespeak and actual direction: "My son, this is a very dark time in the world of elves. You are our only hope. But first, you must learn to defend yourself. Start by pressing B."

I don't get the point of that shit. Once he says press B, I imagine myself in a forest, pressing B on a remote and looking around for something to happen. Who am I, Captain N? (good lord, that sounds like a Richard Pryor album)

There are games that are simple enough that they don't require a tutorial, or they only dole out occasional advice. New Super Mario Bros? You pretty much just go. Although every time you get to a bonus level, it instructs you, again, on how to play the very, very simple mini games. This is akin to sitting around in the morning, watching a 10-second video about shoe-tying every time you go to tie your shoes. It's helpful the first few times, then mind-melting the next 230 times.

At some point, in Twi-Pri Zelda, I got a sword. A wooden sword.

I hear there is a rich tradition of this in Japan. I also hear there is a rich tradition of buying panties from vending machines.

To my American mind, there is nothing more almost-there-but-not-quite than a wooden sword. Except, possibly, for panties vended in a little plastic egg.

But I kept playing, and finally the game was getting somewhere. I was at least killing things and swinging my arm wildly and with complete disregard for the fact that I would be super-sore the next day. It turns out that flailing wildly and jerking your arm around for three hours has some potential negative effects that I would like to complain about not being aware of, although I wouldn't have done a damn thing anyway.

Then, finally, I get a sword.

Only problem is that in the course of getting a sword, I've been transformed into a wolf. Not the were kind either, not a wolf with six-pack abs and a cunning expressed as romantic entanglements with teens. No, a wolf. With earrings.

I don't know much about wolf anatomy, but I do believe that this game accurately portrays wolves as unable to wield swords.

Damn it. Damn your accuracy, Nintendo of America.

How do we solve this problem? How do we get me from screwing around and chasing a cat to decapitating dwarves in under three hours?

There is the God of War Method.
In God of War, you're dropped into the middle of the action and given little pieces of advice as you go, just enough to get you to the next part. This is awesome, but the problem for me is that I get a couple dozen different moves in my brain, and that's already far above my retention limit. It's a short time before I select a couple favorite attacks, and all of a sudden when a bad guy requires a specific type, I'm fucked. Kratos might not have an iPhone and google access, but if he did he would find a lot of helpful guides (with an unholy number of banner ads that slow the sites down to glacial speed) fairly easily.

There is the Angry Birds Method.
Angry Birds doesn't really tell you much. You just start, figuring things out as you go.
The obvious problem here is that it only works for pretty simple games. If your game involves any of the following, forget it: Leveling Up, Mana, HP/MP, Inventory, Materia, Stealth Mode, or over one hour of unique play.

There is the Wii Party Method.
In this method, you are given an information dump. Here's how to play. You can practice if you want as well. But, being a complete idiot, I can never remember anything until I've actually done it. It's like sex. Seeing millions of stills of pornography did not do anything to inform my sexual tactics and or form. I had to do it once to realize that I was very, very bad at it.

There is the Derk Method.
This method involves watching your older brother play, claiming the controller immediately after him, and running over the same ground that he just did himself. The downside is that it's embarrassing how quickly you die the moment you surpass his progress. He doesn't want to beat the guys for you. You could let your younger brother do it, and you could also gift him your nutsack right there on the spot.

I guess I don't know the best method, and games aren't getting simpler. But I think the key is ratio. If your game has too much to learn, there's really no way to deliver the knowledge that doesn't make it feel like you spent the entire game learning. Too much learning (of how to play, mind you, not learning in general) kills the replay value as well. That old man lecturing you on how to check your wallet is fine the first time, maybe necessary. But starting from the beginning again, my god, you want to stuff the wallet in his mouth while you torture him tied to a chair.

Key: Game developers, for the love of god in heaven, give us the option to skip, fast-forward, rewind, and so on. If you're teaching us, let us learn. I spent a half hour looking for fishing bait that didn't exist because I didn't read the dialogue from some fool in TwiPri. I mean, how many times do you have to talk to these idiots?

Also, if I have to talk to characters time and again, don't make them repeat themselves. If they're going to repeat, give me some signal. That way, I won't waste my time, and I won't waste the time of the kindly shopkeeper who simply wants to knock down his bee's nest in peace.

World's Biggest Pac Man

Have you ever wanted to play Pac-Man and just felt that it wasn't quite enough of a waste of time?

Thank you, the internet, for World's Biggest Pac-Man.


Boom.

The gameplay is just like normal Pac-Man except that the little chutes on either side of the main screen (you know, those tunnels you go into that cough you up on the other side of the screen) lead to other mazes.

And the damn thing is humongous. That pink square in the middle-ish region above is the size of one Pac-Man screen, one of these:



The grid is something like 120 interconnected screens of Pac-Man. As if that weren't sickening enough, you can see in the upper-left corner a navigation panel. And in there (this is a really Russian nesting doll thing) is a red square. The area contained within the red square is the 120 squares we're seeing. And that navigation pane goes all over the damn place.

Grand total, 55,000 mazes.

To give you another idea on the size of that, assuming that the maze grid as a whole is square, the width would be about 235 mazes (square root 55,000 is approximately 235) and assuming that it took approximately 5 seconds to cross one maze, it would take about 25 minutes (if you throw in load times and whatnot) just to travel from one side to the other. That's not deviating to eat power pellets, kill or avoid ghosts, or anything else. That's just traveling like a farmer on a combine, harvesting in a straight line.

Pluuuus, if you use the navigation pane, you can create your own maze just as long as it is attached to an existing maze. So it is ever growing.

I haven't had time to take a Pac-Man roadtrip yet, traveling from one side to the other, but I'm going to give it a shot and let you know how it goes.

Greetings

I know everyone does this, one of those best of the web things. But it turns out that everyone has horrible taste, so I'm doing this myself. I figure this will be my big chance to share the stuff I like online. Being a big chance, I will certainly blow it almost immediately.

Truth be told, the internet has grown to be bigger than the actual world that contains it at this point. Way bigger. If you spent your entire life bumbling around the internet, you'd see a smaller percentage of it than you would using the same technique in the real, analog world.

So why not share some of the good shit out there. These aren't necessarily your Eiffel Towers, your Arcs de Triumph (or whatever that piece of shit is called). You can find that shit on your own.

On the other hand, I find stuff when I find it, so if you've seen it all before cut me some slack. Better yet, start your own damn BOTW blog and I will comment on how I think you have made bad selections. Lol Cats? Really?

For this welcome post, I will share www.helpfulsnowman.com

That's my web site.

The best of the web will get better from there.