Tag Archives: WHY

The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

I am legitimately angry about this and you should be too.

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Games are no stranger to controversy. We’ve had Carmageddon, we’ve had Mortal Kombat, we’ve had Postal, and these are just games the media gets worked up about. Of course a lot of this is just nonsense, it may be crude but it boils down to “old people don’t get hip new things”. Or they tell outright lies. Then there’s things which actually warrant comment, such as Custer’s Revenge or Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Well we can add another one to that latter list, a list of games which probably warrant genuine criticism.

It is called Lady Popular. Kotaku has a writeup, but I will relate the gist of it here for those of you who are understandably averse to anything Gawker-related (Though it’s written by one of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun chaps so it’s not their usual drivel).

Lady Popular, explicitly billed as “A game for girls”, is a game where you play the role of a female. Or, a female in the bizarro reality-TV world that someone clearly conflates with real reality. Your first task to becoming a “smart, talented, and successful woman” is to move out of your parent’s house. You do this by completing three tasks. One is to rent an apartment – all fine and dandy so far.

The other two tasks are to get a haircut and to buy something at the mall. Getting haircuts and going shopping seems to be quite literally half of the stuff you can do in this alleged game.

But okay. Let’s stretch the definition of charitable beyond all reason and allow this. After all, people do give a lot of consideration to their appearance. It’s part of one’s identity. Being able to take care of such things and to make purchases is a part of being an adult, even if it’s not exactly up there with raising kids or paying off your mortgage. So we’ll allow it, because much worse is to follow.

An early objective sees you invited to a party. But oh no! You don’t have anyone to go with! Yes, a fundamental and early objective in this game is to seek a boyfriend. “But Mister Adequate!” you cry, “That may be poorly presented, but relationships are a part of growing up as well!” Yes, well. Put aside that acquiring a boyfriend is presented as a central objective to a young woman’s life – not as one part of it, not as an option among many options from abstinence to having many one-night-stands, not as something that tends to just happen when you meet someone you click with – a central objective without which her life literally cannot proceed – put that aside. Because do you know what happens when you do find a boyfriend?

Do you? Can you guess?

He gives you money.

Every day.

Us too, Twilight, us too.

He gives you a daily stipend. Although there are jobs in the game this appears to be a major source of income, and as far as I can gather you keep getting your girlfriend allowance as long as you’re dating someone. A core part of this game is literally to find a sugar daddy. Now I don’t know about anyone else, maybe things changed whilst I slumbered wreathed in fire beneath the earth for a hundred thousand years, but last time I checked the concept of a “successful woman” did not tend to involve finding a boyfriend for the sole purposes of attending parties and paying for your hairdressing and shopping needs. If you wanted one at all (Dear God can you imagine if these people tried to allow for lesbian relationships? That would be such a clusterfuck I’m glad they just plain pretended it doesn’t exist.) it was more about companionship, having fun together, and being a best friend. You know, equal parts of a whole. Maybe I have become the old fogey who doesn’t understand the hip kid way of doing things? But I doubt it. Of course this also means that the monetary success of the guy is THE major factor in his worthiness. Truly a good message to send to our young ladies in this straitened economic times, with unemployment rising around the world.

Another important objective, and one which seems to persist throughout the game, is to watch your weight. Now I’m a lazy neckbeard, so I freely admit that messages about good health tend to pass over my head unheeded, but this isn’t even that – this is just straight out “Remember that excessive weight loss or gain is not healthy and will make your lady unhappy”. Getting too fat will MAKE YOU UNHAPPY; this is presented not as a societal construct but a simple fact of reality.

I honestly cannot begin to fathom just who on Earth would come up with something like this, who would greenlight it, and who would program it and put the art assets and everything together. This game seems to be designed to travel back in time and kick Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony in the ovaries so hard their great-grandkids feel it.

Now for a palate cleanser. Something that has strong female characters with realistic flaws, motivations, and personalities, which is neither patronizing nor insulting. Something like…

Girls, you've got an important mission. You must save our fillies from this horrid thing!
The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

A Little Story For You All

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The other day Mister Adequate and I were on Sporcle doing quizzes together, which is a fun little pastime that we do on occasion. We had discovered the mother lode of strategy game related quizzes and were having a blast doing things like trying to name all the Civilization IV techs in 14 minutes and whatnot, and then we discovered one particular quiz that was called “Name Every Sim Game” or something.

So we took the quiz. We knew full well that we weren’t going to remember every single Sim game, but we wanted to see how well we would fare anyways, because we both have a huge soft spot for the Sim series. We did pretty well; we probably got about 75% or so, and then at the very end we eagerly went through to see which ones we had missed. It was standard stuff that we should’ve gotten; SimRefinery, Streets of SimCity, Sid Meier’s SimGolf…

…

…

Wait, what?

Sid Meier’s SimGolf.

Sid Meier’s SimGolf.

It’s actually a thing. That neither of us knew existed. Quickly we scoped out the Wikipedia article:

Sid Meier’s Sim Golf is a computer game created by Sid Meier, Firaxis, and Maxis in 2002.

Okay, so, let’s get this straight. Firaxis and Maxis got together. And made a game.

Firaxis and Maxis made a game together.

But instead of taking all the strategic turn-based depth of Civilization and combining it with the sandboxy micromanagement of SimCity to make the ultimate civilization simulator… they made a golf game.

Have a picture of our exact reaction.

And then we were confused for the rest of the day.

The end.

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Favorites

I have a dream

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No, I really did. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream wherein I played a remake of X-Com. Let me tell you about it.

This was my reaction when I woke up.

It was in glorious 3-D, still intended to be played as an isometric game, but you could move the camera around freely and stuff, and when you took a shot it would sometimes go into an over-the-shoulder camera or something (Think Fallout’s VATS camera, used fairly sparingly). It was turn-based, but because the characters had little animations and stuff based on what was going on it felt extremely active and fast-moving (e.g. ducking at the sound of gunfire, kneeling behind nearby cover, etc. – kind of how Company of Heroes does things). Also, though the basic calculations seemed to remain very similar to the original, your guy and an alien would look like they were having a firefight, and others on the field would give supporting fire which I don’t think actually hit anyone, but which could give some bonuses and stuff? Also it seemed like you almost always had reaction fire when fired upon, and your chance of success in that was determined by your remaining TUs. A character with 0 would just spray’n’pray and have maybe a 1% chance of hitting, but the added effects of it all really contributed to a sense of combat.

I only dreamed one mission, in which I had downed an enemy UFO and was doing the usual cleanup. As it turned out it was on the edge of a medium-sized town; the UFO was crashed in the forest and we had to fight through that, but several aliens had retreated into the town itself and were holed up there, meaning I had to chase them into it. The map was huge, but you could get around by commandeering vehicles and stuff; one of my guys rode into combat on a freaking motorcycle which promptly got blown right up by an alien grenade or something.

I was only fighting Sectoids, but they were really really vicious and tough to kill. It was a gloriously difficult fight and one which resulted in my guys getting slaughtered horribly. We finally made it through to the city streets; the civilians were inside, but a few bodies suggested they and the aliens had had a fight (At least one alien was dead in the city when I arrived, far from the crashed ship.) These last couple were really hellish to fight though, they just kept blowing my guys to hell no matter what I tried, it was obscene. Then they ran out of grenades or whatever and I won. Then I woke up, and I thought “Wow I can’t wait for this to come out!” and looked like Rarity, then I realized the horrible truth. And cried.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Custom Rims (Mods and modding), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Yes. Yes we are, in fact, mad.

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Stay awhile and listen.

In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.

I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;

1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.

I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.

2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.

I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.

(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)

3) No mods allowed.

You read that correctly.

Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.

In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.