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?