Addiction
Man, I am so addicted to the Nintendo DS right now. I could play it all day and all night long. I need to be able to focus on school work, but how can I when I can make so much money from making fourheads have sex and then selling their babies in Viva Pinata?
I think Nintendo is totally brilliant–the Wii and DS are harangued by dudebros all the time for not being 360 and PS3 clones and having first person shooter games, but man, that’s just the thing–they are trying to appeal to everyone else. Every demographic outside of 13-27 year old males. My mother-in-law has a wii for cryin’ out loud. Everyone has one. Maybe it’s not for “serious gamers,” but why the fuck should Nintendo appeal to that demographic when it can put out like 100 games about horses and puppies and card games and language learning and get everyone else on the planet to buy? And a DS is only $130, I’m sure this christmas a lot of parents were like, “I want to get my kid a gift and he or she wants video games, but gee I just can’t afford any of those systems and their myriad accessories. Hey, look, the Nintendo DS is $130 and there are a ton of cheap games for it. Hmm.”
Not only that, I think these systems will break a lot of people into more hardcore games when they may otherwise not have been inclined to do so. For example, I have Super Princess Peach right now and it’s piss easy, but stuff like that and the hundred Barbie horse games might convince parents who might otherwise think “oh videogames aren’t for girls” to give a game system to their little girls and get them hooked for life.
It’s brilliant, I’m telling you.
I always wondered why more video game companies don’t try and appeal to a broader audience, and I think Nintendo has shown that doing so actually IS the smart thing to do.
As for the DS in particular, I don’t know why, but I love playing games with the stylus.
I think I’m going to start a little side blog to review the games I’m playing. I think I’ll try and update it weekly. I have to actually finish some of these games first though so I can review them! Since I’m playing like five at once it’ll be a little while!
No I will not dig through turd piles for you!
Oh man, when I played warcraft I freakin HATED those quests where someone would ask you to dig through poop for whatever reason. I especially hated the one where this endeavor culminated in the unearthing (or unpooping, I suppose?) of a bunch of berries which you FREAKIN EAT in order to breathe under water. It’s like the developers were sitting around thinking, “LOL dudes I totally bet if we make a quest where people dig through shit, and then eat stuff inside the shit, they will totally do it. They’d probably do a quest if we made them say ‘I am a sparkly turd pile and I eat mice fetuses while vomiting all over my body’ for 10 experience points.’” They’d be correct in that assessment. If a cool item was involved they could probably get people to call their mothers and confess to having buttsex in a bathroom stall at Chuck E. Cheese.
I always hem and haw about these quests. I whine that I really don’t want to dig through poop. I want the stupid elves to go poo diving themselves and quit asking me to do it. I would just go all role-player and skip the quests, but my husband is like “experience is experience!” He doesn’t have any qualms about subjecting his pixelated persona to the humiliation of eating turd-encrusted fruit.
If I designed an MMO, I would have the option of just slapping the living snot out of anyone who asked me to get anywhere near a turd pile. I’d be able to respond with, “no I will not dig through dog shit for you to look for prayer beads, I’m just going to pummel you in the face until you give me what you want.” I mean, I defeated Ragnaros and Onyxia! (Obviously I am not a hardcore gamer) digging through excrement is a little bit below my pay grade. This is also why I hope Fable II comes out for PC, because I’m not in a position right now where I can afford an XBox 360, and I hear Fable II is full of opportunity to smack people around if they annoy you. I like a game where my options are “comply with the request” or “beat this person into submission.”
Oddly enough, I don’t enjoy Grand Theft Auto even though I have a small affinity for random violent mayhem. I mean if someone asks me to dig through poop they sort of deserve the beating I’d like to give them. I don’t really get a thrill out of smacking random bystanders with a bat. I’m not desensitized enough to find that amusing. I might slap some annoying elf around if I lived in a fantasy world, but I wouldn’t hit random people in the street with a bat.
Anyway, I’m not sure why I randomly started thinking about this, yet here I am writing about it. I need some new material.
Daydreamin’
I always wonder how many people, and how often, people daydream. Daydreaming is a serious pasttime of mine. It keeps me entertained in class, on the toilet, before I go to sleep, on the bus, while waiting in lines for various reasons–daydreaming is totally awesome.
I think, though, that my daydreaming might be stunted compared to a lot of people. I hear people say they can still smell and taste something they’d eaten before, or dissected before. I’ve never once had a memory of how something smelled or tasted. The closest thing I’ve ever had to experiencing that is an after taste, which I do not enjoy. I’ve never smelled something or tasted something in a dream, either. It’s all visual. My brain is all up in the occipital lobe hizzle, I guess.
I daydream about everything, from how I’m going to make deviled eggs for thanksgiving, to plots for various stories I’ve concocted that I will one day set down to write, to an elaborate Mary-Sue post-apocalyptic world where I have totally awesome super powers. It’s also really hard for me to answer the question “if you had a super power, what would it be?” Because I cannot decide what is most powerful. Sometimes I think it’s super intelligence–then I could discover cold fusion, and I could make myself a robot and a robot suit and be all powerful that way. I know super strength is not my forte, I wouldn’t want to accidentally squish people or something. I think having some sort of psychic power to influence people’s thoughts would be insanely powerful. If a genie came to me and asked what super power I wanted I’d have a hard time deciding, is what I’m saying.
If I ever write a book or a comic or tv show or something with someone with powers in it, there are a lot of things I’d throw out the window. #1, husbands who won’t let their wives use their powers. I thought Bewitched was such a load of shit, if I had awesome witch powers and I was with a dude, and I told him about my powers, and he was like “you must never use your powers” I’d say “you must never use your penis” and turn it into a frog. Ok maybe I wouldn’t be that harsh. But I’d definitley call him a jealous fuck, and the relationship would probably end right there. I would not be too worried about him “telling people” my secret. If he went around like, “dude that woman I was dating has POWERS!” the person he said that to would be like, “hey, the looney bin called, they said there was an escapee!” And then I’d smite the dude.
#2, just not telling your significant other. Super heroes often have significant others they don’t tell about their secret identities. I understand this is to keep them safe, but let’s be real. If I had super powers and I was suddenly making excuses for being out all of the time, my husband would think I was cheating on him. Plus, I can’t even stop myself from telling him what I got him for Christmas months ahead of time, there is no fucking way I could have super powers and not tell him. It just would not happen. A lot of characters EVENTUALLY tell their loved ones, but the plot mechanism of “hey let’s find ways to keep a secret” is milked for a good long time. I’m saying my character would tell RIGHT AWAY. I don’t imagine that every fictional character could be so tight-lipped about this if I couldn’t be, so I’d make my character spill the beans for a change.
#3, I’m pretty sure someone who acted as a super hero would have to wear a burqa and gloves in order to not be discovered immediately all over youtube. To have a secret identity, there would have to be some other mechanism there. The Hannah Montana wig thing would be insufficient too, is my guess.
That’s all I can think of for now.
I also have a lot of ideas for MMOs, if I could ever design one. First of all, it bothers me that in an MMO I can totally decimate a population of a certain type of people, pirates in Booty Bay, for example, and I just become more and more hated. Look–after I ravage them for so long, they should be begging for mercy. I should go from loathed to exalted. I should be the pirate queen. If I made an MMO, that would happen. But before you became exalted, you would be hunted down everywhere you went. If you were just drinking some ale in a major city, you might suddenly be attacked by a band of pirates. People of the opposite faction who are friendly with the pirates (or if no opposite factions and the game is a throwback to evil, free for all MUDs, just random people) would get quests to kill you. You would have to go through hell for your choice of making the pirate civilization your personal stomping grounds.
I also think a Super Mario Bros. MMO would be the freakin’ shizzle. There are already two obvious factions, and I would totally play as a goomba. The races would have to be thought out a little bit since there’s so much more to work with on the side of evil (not all the forces of good can be stupid toadstool people), but it could be done. I would totaly play this and it would be supremely awesome.
Speaking of cute, colorful MMOs, I am so disappointed with the Hello Kitty MMO. I’m disappointed in it for the same reason I was disappointed with animal crossing. LET ME PLAY A CUTE LITTLE FUZZY ANIMAL. I do not want to be the human in the world of furries. I am no furry, but goddamnit it if I’m playing an MMO in a world full of adorable creatures, I want to be an adorable creature!
I thought for a second I got off track with the daydreaming thing, but I really didn’t. This is the kind of drivel which swirls throughout my screwy brainmeats day in and day out.
