Diablo III is a good game; don't let its detractors fool you. I found it a little laughable for IGN to claim it was "well worth the wait" in every regard in their review, choosing to systematically exclude some major issues the game is having and write them off as being "minor complaints." The game has problems and there is no questioning that. For a game that was also in development for a decade, I had expected it to blow away its only real competition, Torchlight. In the multiplayer department it certainly does this well enough, since TL has no online component to speak of. But as far as polish goes, I can't decide which game I find more aesthetically pleasing certainly, or which I enjoy the overall gameplay of more.

The combat in D3 is fantastic. Everything is fast, fluid, and furious, and this to me is the natural evolution of the mainstream action rogue-like. Wow, is that even a genre? Nevertheless, I find myself playing D3 a shit ton just because I find the combat so much fun. It's a real extravaganza. Torchlight is fairly dull in comparison, and definitely feels dated, but the more traditional Diablo-esque elements of that game jive better with me. I love the dungeon scrolls, the slower rate at which good loot is dropped, and I just feel that the game is a slower paced experience, which is something I enjoy. But people saying that Diablo III isn't a "true sequel" or such other nonsense, I think, are missing the point. D3 does a good job at pushing its own brand of gameplay forward, and the changes I don't think can be construed as negative; only preferential.



My favorite inclusion in both titles however, is the Hardcore mode. Staying true to the roots of the roguelike genre, both D3 and Torchlight include a mode where one death ends the whole fucking game, rendering your character unplayable, and making you start from scratch. D2 had this feature as well, although I didn't become interested in it until now, since I have been playing rogue-likes for a few years and have gotten used to the high risk gameplay they provide.

The biggest problem with D3 however, is that Hardcore mode just isn't fucking worth it.

It's bad enough to take away everything you have from a single flub, moving into a room packed with enemies, or other similarly ballsy mistakes that will get you murdered faster than you can spam the potion button, (er, in Torchlight anyway.) but add in the completely random lag spikes caused by the constant DRM the game has, and you have one hell of a problem. It's like there is someone constantly rolling the dice under the hood, and everytime they roll ones, you just die for nothing that was your fault. After rolling and having two Hardcore characters die for this reason, I decided that in its current state, there is no real point playing a Hardcore character in D3.

And that was really what led me to take a second look at Torchlight. I had bought it upon release, but was still rather burned on D2 by that point to care. I shelved it and hadn't touched it since. I didn't even know there was a Hardcore option until someone mentioned it in a forum, and upon the death of my first character in D3, I thought I'd give it a shot.



It actually made me a little sad; not because TL is a bad game, but because of how goddamn good it really is. So good, in fact, that apart from a fairly low difficulty level, I am having a hard time deciding which game to play, although Torchlight seems to be winning so far. It's just strange that a game in development for ten years only impressed me equally to one developed for considerably less, and released three years ago. Of course there is room for both; the mentality that says "nah fuck this, waiting for Torchlight 2" kind of eludes me. If you can't afford both, I get it, I'm in the same boat more or less. But deciding now to pick one over the other before being able to try both of them is absurd. We can all get along, folks.

Diablo 3 and Torchlight really offer different things, and I think that will be true of the sequel as well. It's a real disappointment that upon discovering how much fun Hardcore is in D3, I can't realistically play it right now without having those dice roll. I am confident things will calm down, or that Blizzard will continue to find solutions but goddamn; everyone has the right to be pissed about the lack of an offline only option, especially those who enjoy Hardcore. I just think it's completely absurd that they didn't even offer an alternative, while Diablo 2 players are still enjoying such an option.

Torchlight 2 looks really promising, especially after playing Torchlight and realizing just how fucking stellar it is, even compared to D3. But that's just it; both offer similar, yet very different experiences. Torchlight seems to be an homage to the older days of Diablo, whereas D3 is a step in a different direction while still offering the addictive, "kill em all, loot em later" gameplay. I don't feel torn, really, because I don't find it a tough transition between the two, and I like them both for different reasons. Multiplayer has never really been my thing, although I have to admit D3 does a real good job of making it fun. I can only hope the same for Torchlight 2, although I will enjoy it regardless of the option.



So what is the point here? Well, I guess there isn't really one. I just wanted to share my thoughts on Diablo. I think it is getting raked across the coals for good reason, but I also find it a bit of a shame that some will not take these criticisms with a grain of salt and will miss out on a very enjoyable game. I ran through the storyline in two days, and while I will admit it left a bit to be desired, the ultimate point of Diablo has always been the hack and slash, and it does that extremely well.

As for Torchlight? It's an extremely impressive outing even three years later, though the sluggish pace might be a hard pill to swallow for those entrenched in D3. I like having both of them because I can play my hardcore character in TL, and leave D3 exclusively for multiplayer fun.

It will be really interesting to see just how Torchlight 2 fares, and I am really glad people are paying attention to it (even if it is for the wrong, spiteful reason of avoiding D3) because it is a solid franchise that deserves it. And from everything I have heard about it so far, it is shaping up to be something pretty special in its own right.

But enough of this bullshit; time to go play some games again.

It's funny; in all the times I have written something about the game Dwarf Fortress, not once have I actually sat down and really talked about the game itself, why it is so addicting, and why you should stop reading this immediately and go check it out - for better, or probably worse.



If you have heard about Minecraft, there is a good chance you have heard about DF. Minecraft seems to be a stepping stone, a gateway drug into the most complex game ever conceived due to the fact that Notch has cited the game as a direct influence for his masterpiece, just as much as the almost identical Infiniminer it was modeled after. Dwarf Fortress was fairly quietly sitting in the background before that and a Reddit post put it into the spotlight, its fifteen minutes of fame culminating in a New York Times article about Dwarf Fortress and its creator, Tarn "ToadyOne" Adams, a man who eats handfuls of cereal and popsicles for sustenance, works all night on his magnum opus along with the help of his brother Zach, and who survives exclusively on fan donations and endless two liter bottles of Cola.

Dwarf Fortress is actually a sequel, and its full title is "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress". In development since 2002 by just one man, Dwarf Fortress captured attention for its archaic ASCII "roguelike" graphical style, it's incredibly complex simulation gameplay, and ridiculous sheer face learning curve which keeps all but the most dedicated players from experiencing the unique and endlessly rich experiences which it provides. The premise is deceptively simple; you take seven dwarves and a wagon full of provisions out into the world (where everything is randomly generated, and where hundreds of years of changes are simulated before you even set foot there) and try to find a suitable location to build a sustainable fortress where you will eventually mine into the great depths below, with the ultimate goal of survival; something which is impossible to maintain forever due to the constant, unpredictable hurdles you must jump over including lava floods, goblin attacks, and even invaders from hell itself.

The first thing most people will notice upon downloading the game, which is available absolutely free here, (near the end of this article is a better link for newbs, however.) is that the interface is about as unfriendly as an Apple II dungeon crawler. Being modeled after an entire genre of games, roguelikes, which are modeled after text based RPG fare from the eighties, Dwarf Fortress is an aesthetically revolting mess to all but the most tolerant of gamers, ones who are generally already used to looking at a screen full of @ signs and apostrophes, as those are the people who will usually hear about it first. It has been said that such a simplistic graphical representation helps to aid the imagination of the player, to immerse them further in the experience. This would not be true if ALL DF accomplished was bringing a low-fi Minecraft experience to the table, since a world in two dimensions deals with 3D very poorly, which is what is happening here. But when you fire up the game for the first time, create your world and hop in, it quickly becomes clear just why the game looks so damned ugly.



It is because of the sheer number of simulations alone that Dwarf Fortress would run at a slogging pace if it were to have the production values of most current games. The game is incredibly processor intensive, with Tarn professing that the simulations taking place under the hood are more complex than those used to determine the aerodynamics of an airplane wing. That sounds very impressive from the layman perspective, but all you need to know is this; DF can slow to a snails pace even on the most beefy of machines depending on what is taking place on screen, making an already intimidating game even more unappealing to the casual user. There is so much going on at any given time that it can be very tough to process it all, and this speaks volumes about the level of depth inherent in the simulation, one that becomes readily apparent once you start digging into the interface of the game and really start seeing everything the game is accounting for on a regular basis.

So let's say it if your very first time launching the game. You went to the website, found the latest build, and ran it with building anticipation; everyone has been talking about it in your circle, whether that is a forum or a Cblog like this one, and you are excited to see what all the fuss is about. To you, it all sounds impressive, a challenge you just can't wait to accept. There is definitely an elitist appeal to the whole thing; a game nobody can play? I'll prove them wrong you think to yourself as you select create a new world. So far so good, right?

You become instantly befuddled at the world building options available to you. Aquifers? Available metals? Temperature? Well, it can't be so bad; you kind of understand what these things are, and how they might affect the game. You have played other sim games after all, and you understand the basic concepts of how the game plays. You decide to go with the defaults, generate a new world, and after a few minutes of waiting for erosion, civilizations, and history to run, you have a lived in world at your disposal. Time to go explore it!



You spend a few minutes, much longer than you would have liked selecting a plot of land to embark upon. Soil, metals, and forests all sounds like useful things to have. Aquifers are dangerous you are warned, so you try to find a spot without one. Eventually you stumble across a temperate zone with moderate trees on the side of a mountain right near a rushing river, luckily, with plenty of metals and no aquifer. Done. You go to embark before being informed that you need to outfit your seven dwarves for the journey ahead. You go to customize them yourself but with a labyrinthine list of available provisions to bring, skills for your dwarves to learn, all with a limited amount of points attributed to each for you to distribute among your A-Team of little people, you start to feel exhausted already. And this is only the beginning.

Eventually, you settle for what seems reasonable, or if you aren't quite as ambitious, pick a prebuilt option. If you were perhaps a little more observant, you may have discovered the DF forums, and found a thread about the Lazy Newb Pack, a launcher designed to make the experience as straightforward as possible, also packing in extra goodies such as graphical tiles, 3D visualizers, and even management programs to keep track of your dwarves and their professions as the fortress begins to expand. Either way, you eventually come to the moment of truth when you are forced to hit e to "embark!", and after a short text introduction and some rolling acoustic arpeggios (played by Tarn himself, of course) begin playing the background, you find yourself in a field, with little symbols (or pictures, if you were smart enough to choose a tileset beforehand) representing your dwarves, any animals you decided to bring with you, and what is supposed to be your wagon full of provisions.

And then it finally hits you as the blood drains from your face and you come to the realization of just how titanic the game really is; you look upon the sparse interface to find many options with little help, and realize you have no idea what the hell you're doing.

At this point, you have come upon a crossroad that will change your gaming life for the next several months - or not at all. You will either immediately turn the game off, never to touch it again, or if you are curious and slightly masochistic, you will start perusing the internet for some semblance of direction. You may eventually find yourself on the DF wiki, on YouTube, on blogs, all searching for a tutorial which will outline the basics of the game for you.



"It's not difficult to start a fortress" most of these will announce, somewhat smugly as you sit cross legged and try to absorb the influx of information coming your way. First, you will be directed to start digging a hole in the mountain. You do this by hitting d and then m, which stand for "designations" and "mine" respectively. So far, so good. You will use the num pad to move your cursor around the map, and find a suitable digging spot; the up arrows surrounding a black mass indicate that you are looking at a mountain, the arrows signifying an upward slope. The game is in 3D even though it is presented from a two dimensional overtop perspective, and by hitting shift and > or < you will be able to move up or down through each layer, with each layer being one "block" in width, an easily digestible piece of information if you have played Minecraft, wherein the entire world is represented in blocks. As you go up, you start to notice that black mass becoming smaller, which indicates that you are moving up through the layers of a mountain. You lose your way but discover that hitting F1 will bring you back to your starting point, and that is when you dig a long tunnel into the side of the mountain, the initial spark of what you are sure will be the greatest fortress ever conceived in the world you just created.

You make a few rooms, you learn how to build a Carpenters Workshop, one of the many different workshops in the game, and you figure out how to command your dwarves to chop down trees. All you are doing is designating tasks, however; hit the space bar, and the game will unpause, hopefully sending your dwarves to immediately go to work on whatever task you have assigned the collective to do. A dwarf will only undertake tasks you have assigned to it, so every now and again you might find your colony is lazy, and simple doesn't do what you ask of them. By changing the available tasks a dwarf is capable of, you figure out how to solve this problem, but you do notice that some dwarves are faster than others at certain tasks because they have the required skills to be proficient, where others do not.

You use that wood you were chopping to start making beds; your dwarves will need a place to sleep. You go down one Z level to the layer beneath your current set of rooms, your dwarves build a set of stairs down there at your command, and start making a hallway full of tiny bedrooms. After producing beds at your Carpenters Workshop and doors at your Masons Workshop, you tell your dwarves where to place all of this new furniture and they quickly get to work, picking up the completed items and bringing them downstairs, placing them where you command until you have seven tiny bedrooms. The dwarves don't seem to use them at first, but by hitting q for query, you select one of the beds and hit r to "make bedroom". Now the dwarves know this is a bedroom where they can sleep, and they will automatically claim rooms for themselves.



Pretty soon you might figure out that you can view the thoughts of every individual dwarf in your fortress. Glomdring, your Farmer, apparently can't seem to find a comfortable place to sit. So you make a new room, a meeting hall, full of tables and chairs where all your dwarves will get together, drink, and eat merrily. Of course, you are starting to run out of liquor, dwarves first choice in drink, because the barrels you brought are running dry. Luckily you have some Plump Helmet seeds with you, which can be planted in the ground to grow mushrooms which can be brewed into cheap moonshine. Unfortunately, you can't seem to plot a farm anywhere so you go on the wiki and discover irrigation, running water over the ground to make it damp and useable. You dig a channel from beneath a lake into an underground room which then flows down another Z level into a giant pool, and voila, you can now make a farm!

It is around this time when the breadth of the game really starts to dawn on you. Finding consistent ways to constantly produce food and drink is not hard, but eventually, more dwarves start to migrate to your fortress. Now you need more food, more drink, more rooms, and eventually, some entertainment. You will need to produce clothes once the dwarves wear through theirs. An animal might die in the fort and start producing miasma, a purple gas which makes your dwarves suicidal. Traders will eventually come, so you will need to have an ample supply of high quality goods, created in your dwarves spare time, to trade with them. You'll get an anvil perhaps through trade, and eventually start learning what all the many types of stone in the game are, and how they are to be used. You might suffer a small but concerted goblin attack early on, prompting you to create a hospital, and start producing weapons. Eventually you will need a broker and a manager to start bookkeeping for your fortress, which will give you a much more detailed idea of what kind of goods you have on hand. As more immigrants pour in, you will start digging further down until eventually you find out how to smelter that ore and start making better goods. You will learn to make traps to defend your fortress as dangerous enemies in outlying lands start to learn of your wealth and begin to want what you have.

Eventually, the inevitable decline of your dwarven empire will become frightfully clear to you; maintaining such an unwieldy fortress will become to overwhelming, and out of a little bit of random chaos, perhaps a bar brawl in the recesses of your fort, or maybe something as dangerous as a demon attack after you dig too far down, the world will begin to collapse around you, and you will realize the ultimate fate you were destined to suffer as soon as you hit the e key; defeat. Because in DF, losing is something that is celebrated, expected, inevitable. But the stories your fortress will have left behind will keep you talking, will inspire others, and eventually, even if you give up after that fort you worked so hard on becomes hopelessly lost, you will come back to do it all over again, with completely different results each time.



People talk a lot about the learning curve DF has, how massively out of proportion it is to other games, and the most common question players who have an understanding of the basics will eventually ask is "so...now what?" Strangely enough, there is no answer to this question because the only real "goal", if you could call it that, is to get as big as you possibly can before something eventually comes along to stomp you into the mud. This makes DF unique for the sole reason that it is one of the only games in existence where the learning curve itself, the trial and error and hopefully, eventual intimacy with the mechanics, is a key part of the appeal, of the gameplay itself.

Most games expect you to understand how they work before going in, and once you have the revelation of "oh, I get it." that it when you can really expect to begin enjoying the game. With DF, you will have a limited understanding going in, and even spending hours and days in the wiki or on YouTube, you won't get a real sense of understanding for anything until you take the plunge and start experimenting, and most importantly, failing. Dwarf Fortress for that reason is not really a "game" at all; it is a trial and error simulation of the highest degree, an electronic science experiment, one where you could spend a lifetime and not see everything there is to see. When a game is so detailed it simulates everything right down to broken bones on your dwarves after they have been engaged in combat, nothing is static or predictable, and consistent results are difficult to achieve by design. When you play Dwarf Fortress, you are not a god; you are simply a hands on observer whose relatively limited involvement in the hostile, living world on the computer screen will eventually boil down to that of a bewildered onlooker as the environment you have helped to sustain eventually becomes to sprawling for you to properly micromanage, as the in game logic, nature if you will, eventually triumphs and civilization crumbles, becoming nothing more than a small page in the generated worlds own recorded history.

You will feel overwhelmed. You will feel emasculated. You will be crushed by an intimidating, monolithic slab of difficulty and required learning. Only those with true gaming grit, with perseverance, with patience, and with intelligence are allowed to survive and thrive within the brutal landscape of Dwarf Fortress, but those who do will also flourish; they will have found an experience unmatched by any other, because even within the excessive emulations which exist, none can even come close to replicating the unique, bewildering, awe-inspiring, and brilliant experience which DF provides.

This is a game that is very close to my heart, one which I have spent many dozens of hours exploring, only to barely scratch the surface of. So for the bold, for the brave, for those pioneers whose only reward will be inescapable doom should they choose to venture into that minimalist landscape and to see what lies in wait; good luck.



You are truly going to need it.

When you have a child, you very quickly learn a fundamental, ugly truth about other people; they really do believe that they are right one hundred percent of the time, and that most importantly, you are probably wrong.

There is no greater sense of entitlement than that of the responsibility of child care. Even though it is the most biologically natural thing we can do on this planet apart from pooping, child birth and rearing is considered one of the most difficult and commendable jobs anyone can take upon themselves; and I do understand why. With the generally praise laden attitude people take towards those pumping out slimy brood, criticism is hard to come by, and with some parents taking on a not-so-humble or objective view of their perfect ubermensch quality spawnlings, too much adoration can quickly turn into a bad thing when they begin to look at their children as perfect snowflakes, and not as the growing, flawed-by-nature creatures of cruel innocence and curiosity which they actually are.

In shorter terms, the next generation is one conspicuously full of "winners", even though a significant portion of them will eventually succumb to the oppressive weight of the world eventually, and will resign to watching TV and eating Cheetos for a fairly sizeable period of their lives when they realize just how much they have been lied too, and how much the world really sucks.

Life is a series of crushing defeats piled on top of one another until you just wish that Flanders was dead. Happiness comes in generally short, restrained bursts, usually in the form of simple pleasures, and it is all we, the amazingly resilient products of the human genome really need to survive it for several decades before we finally give in and take on new full time jobs as soil displacement units. Those small, fleeting moments of victory teach us almost nothing except, occasionally, that we CAN be rewarded for hard work, patience, or so many other cliches your mother told you about. However, and far more interestingly, it is the constant onslaught of obstacles we face who really shape us into real, interesting people, and as the modern world keeps pushing on forward, these character building experiences are becoming more scarce for some.

Think about it; how many people working through The Great Depression would have had the balls to complain about working on a Saturday, how many people would have their asses kicked because they bitched about "first world problems" in a time when food was tough to come by? We are living in a golden age, a bunch of modern Caligulas by most standards, and there is a good chance that most of the people reading this are living in a Democratic nation where a "bad day" usually equates to specialty coffee being a a degree lower in temperature than expected upon point of purchase. We got it made, and it becomes more and more "made" every day, especially for kids. This hand holding mentality has made its way into games over the past decade as well, in a big (but substantially less important) way.

It is my theory however that, despite the constant insistence of new games to give is a constantly railroaded, digestible experience, that "losing" is not only a positive experience even in a distilled, entertainment related form, but that it can actually be fun as well.

I got the term "Losing is Fun" from a game called Dwarf Fortress, a title which I have talked about quite frequently and one which is notorious not only for its grand complexity, but also for its enormous wall of difficulty. The reason the term was adopted is simply because, in that grandiose simulation of Dwarfenomics, the inevitable end to the otherwise endless experience is very simply a painful death due to the many thousands of random, mitigating factors that can endanger a Fortress at any given moment in time. Despite this problem, fans of DF have persisted for years, spending many hours building up new creations only to see them come tumbling, often brutally, down to the ground.

Despite the games borderline nihilistic treatment of its players, people continue to play and love the game, with some especially reveling in the "losing" part. Simply put, the experience of the game revolves around the journey, not the end, and seeing something unexpected and quirky put a quick end to all that hard work is a tongue in cheek reminder of how one little event can literally be life changing, and how there is something amusing about that kind of orchestrated chaos. Since the game does not allow the player to win, the real fun comes in the wake of the experience; sharing stories of the time your grand magma fortress was invaded by goblins, how you defended it, but how a simple thing like forgetting to grab water before it freezes was able to throttle you into oblivion due to your poor little colony dying of thirst.

Another game (and both were brought up in another blog which is why I am mentioning them, as they are both great examples of this) which forces death upon the player is Dark Souls, which has such a reputation 'round these parts that I don't even need to offer exposition into what a grueling experience it really is. Victories had in that game come with tremendous value attached just due to the sheer difficulty hurdle you are required to leap over in order to attain them, and players are brought together to form strategies, leave tips behind, or occasionally to team up and overcome parts of the game which are otherwise nearly insurmountable.

In both experiences, something unique is happening; people are being brought together. The sheer adversity of each of those games forces players to work together, or at least to share their experiences with one another just to be able to relate, to say "I did it, too." When you play most MMORPG's these days, there is usually an option to solo up until the highest levels of the game, and seeing anyone get into groups below level 30 is not only quite rare, but is also laughed at. I was playing WoW, and just looking for some camaraderie, put out a notice looking for another level 15 player to quest with. I had no less than three people tell me I was "stupid" to start grouping together, and that I could solo up until level 60 no problem without needing the help.

I was stupid for seeking companionship, in an online game.

In the earliest days of games like Everquest, you had no choice but to party, and that was what made the games so fiendishly addicting. Even with a group of three other people, you would still be facing death quite often especially in the more dangerous areas, but it was the difficulty of the situation, and the high stakes of death that kept people huddled together in a proverbial cave, fending off the approaching wildlife with makeshift spears; again, companionship, friendship, and camaraderie, all in the face of massive adversity.

You can teach things with games, but nothing teaches us more than loss. If you win a thousand games of chess against a player at the lowest skill level, all you have done is bored yourself to tears playing pointless games against an unskilled opponent, and the likelihood of you actually learning from that and being able to improve becomes effectively zilch. Play against someone on your level, and not only will it be much more thought provoking and enjoyable, but the losses you sustain will teach you to adapt, to change your strategy, and eventually, to actually improve and become better.

When we sit kids down in front of games which are now effectively a 60fps slideshow of neon signs pointing them in the right direction so that they don't accidentally get confused and actually *gasp* spend time exploring the game world and looking for solutions on their own, they have no choice but to eventually win. They aren't being challenged, and therefore are not learning, and I personally think that even entertainment and the people who create it have some small sense of social responsibility to uphold and be accountable for. This isn't a serious problem, of course; there will always be challenging experiences, and will always be a sustainable supply of well crafted and difficult games out there to enjoy. It is up to us to make the right choices in the kinds of experiences we are absorbing, much like it is an unhealthy persons responsibility to watch what they are eating, and make sure they are getting enough exercise to go along with it. Eating at McDonalds every once in awhile can be fun, and it's a hell of a lot easier than cooking a really good meal. But the time and energy put into that meal is eventually rewarded with a much more fulfilling payoff than a hockey puck burger and ultra preserved potato sticks could ever be.

Losing is fun because of that eventual feeling of triumph we get when we finally win; and even in games where it isn't possible to do so, it's a hell of a lot more interesting to talk about how your fortress was flooded with lava than it is to talk about how you successfully killed ten wolves three levels your former and harvested their claws for a couple hundred experience points in your favorite WoW clone.

So go ahead; be a loser. You will also be a lot wiser and more humble for it ultimately, and you might actually learn something every now and again.

I purposely left pictures out of the blog in the spirit of offering a less aesthetically pleasing experience in order to cut the bullshit and get my point across.

It probably just made this worse.

Life blows sometimes. My mid life crisis happened at 26 when I got real scared of impending reality, and bought a modded Turbografx-16. I didn't fuck anyone behind my wifes back, unless you count humping a dry shampoo bottle while crying "making love." Personally, it looks a lot more like one big step before suicide to me, but I'm not cool or brooding enough to try and end my life. I avoid anything that remotely resembles pain, which is why it was so damn hard to finally go back to work.

By that, I mean REAL work. The kind of work where you are physically active, accomplish several tasks, and actually feel sore at the end of the day. After working in an office for a year, and kicking crackheads and skaters out of business complexes for several years before that, I kind of forgot what it was like to actually move the bloated unattractive misery vessel I call my body. Smoking pot in the boiler room and reading a novel a day is hardly what I would call "productivity", but I did learn the wonders of Chuck Pahlaniuk, Jack London, and realized just how fucking stupid and pointless Naked Lunch is.

When my wife got pregnant, it was decided pretty quickly that I was going to stay home with the baby; fair enough. As a complete social shut in, I was right at home sitting in a living room all day and getting excited by the prospect of sweeping the kitchen. My wife on the other hand, not so much. She happens to like people for some reason, conversation, and all the other frightening nonsense I wouldn't touch with a forty foot pole unless it had a bayonet firmly attached to the pokey end.



We are coming up to the end of a year now, and when my six months of paid parental vacation expired a couple of weeks ago, I knew I needed to find work again. I have been working since I was fourteen, and have literally never gone more than a few weeks without employment in between things. My personal philosophy is that work builds character; "arbeit macht frei". Historically, that didn't really work out so well for a certain group of people, and in retrospect, all it has done for me is to be able to afford more bullshit. But having to provide for another living human has taught me to appreciate the value of a dollar, mostly because of it's "oh shit!" reaction inspiring absence.

So back to work I went. This time, I got a family member to hire me, and the locale is a grocery store. Grocery stores are one of the most woefully under-appreciated jobs around, at least in Canada. I know quite a few people who work in them, and my brother in law specifically makes the same as his Dad who has worked for the fucking railroad for the last fifteen years. You move up the ladder fairly quickly, there are decent benefits, and it is the type of employment that will always be around in some capacity. After seeing the bullshit that big business, office types environments provided, I swore to never set foot near a cubicle again. I would be perfectly happy to make a career out of putting grapes on a shelf, and I am not ashamed of that rather proletariat way of thinking.

But goddammit, does it have its drawbacks. My wife is still the primary bread winner, with me playing second banana so to speak. I still clean the house, do the laundry, cook the meals, and when I feel up to it, properly care for my daughter. When that is all over, I work for eight hours, bust my ass, and come home conscious just long enough to slam back a scotch and go the fuck to sleep.

There is something missing here, though. And if you are as anal about me as seeing these blog thingies stay topical, I'm sure you have figured out what it is by now.



I used to have hours of time devoted to games, and now I have minutes. On breaks, I go stand with the smokers. In the daytime, I play with my daughter. During naptimes, I write shit like this or listen to music, have a coffee. On days "off", which are never totally free of any work, I spend time with my wife, or my stupid friends. I don't have any time for video games, and I am already missing them so very bad.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I never spend a lot of time playing them to begin with, but my point of comparison is usually other gamers who are admittedly "hardcore", I.E., people who don't think Farmville is time well gamed. Even then though, I usually tend to get an hour a day in, so it really sucks to see that time fly the fuck out the window and into unreachable places. I was really getting into simulations lately, mostly stuff like Sim City 4, and Microsoft Flight was piquing my interest too. The game of the year for me is likely going to be Power of Illusion, and my friends finally turned me on to the new Soul Calibur which was a buttload of fun. Now, I'm lucky to squeeze in a five minute round of Dolphin on the 2600.



Growing up kind of sucks sometimes, and this post is really my realization of that. When I was young, I had so much time to kill that all the eighty hour RPG's in the universe couldn't satiate my hunger for introverted fantasy. Now, I consider playing Kirby's Dream Land on Game Boy "a tad too involved." What the fuck, man? What happened? I still drink Guinness every day, listen to Black Flag, and swear. Yet some little fucking punk called me "old" on my first day of work. I'm not cool, I'm not "hip", and I can't even be a gamer anymore? Life really blows.

I feel like the "hip, cool, 45" year old guy from Kids in the Hall, and I'm not even 30 yet. Fuck my life, I want my games back!

I am really enjoying these things. I think every member should be required to do one, and should be sentenced to penalty of torture should they choose to think otherwise. I don't generally put a whole lot of time into my blogs, and even less so lately, but I have been welcomed and well received here by the lot of you, and I really am grateful for that. It's only fair that you should have some fairly useless knowledge about me as an individual, particularly since I have exposed my personal life here in a not so flattering manner in the past. So here are ten things about me you probably don't care about.



10. I really hate writing.

It may sound strange to say that, but it's true. Specifically, since the time I was very young I dreamed of being a novelist. Pretty much since the time I was old enough to write, I was putting my imagination to work and transferring the poorly copied results down on a pad of paper. As I became older and moderately less imaginative, I started to put a lot of time and effort into many fruitless projects before finally becoming thoroughly discouraged. Now, writing is something of a burden for me, but I feel emotionally pent up when I don't do it to some degree. So when you see me blogging very sporadically, it's quite literally because I've found something better to do. I seemed to have developed a certain level of competency in the English language despite this problem, but it isn't a skill I am particularly fond of exercising for the most part. It's sort of like taking a shit in the morning; you don't have a choice, it's just kind of something you do.

11. “7.6 hours of Steam play time in the past two weeks”

I don't actually spend all that much time playing video games, either. I like to try many different games, my forte being older console generations, but on the whole I only spend a few hours a week sitting in front of one of my many machines. Variety is the spice of life, and as someone who finds it difficult to commit to anything, I have a real hard time sitting down and focusing on one game for any substantial amount of time. The one game I consistently go back to is Dwarf Fortress, followed by Minecraft. But like all the others, my time spent with each is relatively brief before we part ways; though we never stay strangers for long.

12. I haven't had cable in over ten years.

This is completely one hundred percent accurate, barring a brief two month trial period with Telus before I decided to cut the cord. Commercials have become completely intolerable for me after such a long hiatus from the glowing one eyed god, and I never plan to go back. I'm somewhat outdated because of this, and along with my complete ignorance of popular culture (I didn't know who the Kardashiens were until a few weeks ago) I can rarely communicate with the outside world on any kind of meaningful level. Which leads me too...

6. Misanthrope, cynic, unlikeable curmudgeon.

I don't get on well with people. Working with the public for years and having a really tough time being bullied at school for just as long caused me to grow a huge chip on my shoulder. I like to be alone quite frankly, and any extended period of time spent with friends where I am not inebriated in some capacity is, quite frankly, fucking irritating. I have had two good friends the last ten years, both of whom are still my best friends today. After the birth of my daughter, I decided to lighten up a bit and have learned to be a little more social, but nothing beats a minute alone, and the best conversations with all the right people don't entertain me a fraction as much as the worst pulp novels or campy B movies ever could...unless there is booze or drugs involved. Then I can deal with you motherfuckers just fine.

11. Aspiring nutritionist?

I have very few interests apart from eating bacon and playing with myself, but one of them happens to be nutrition. As someone who has always struggled with weight, nutrition became a topic of extreme interest for me at some point, and the hobby is ongoing. I decided a couple of months ago that, for the sake of my health and my family, I didn't want to be a big fat ass anymore. So I started employing the principles myself instead of flipping through health books between bites of bacon cheeseburgers. I've lost damn near twenty pounds in the past month and a bit, and have decided that if I ever want to do anything as a profession, it would have to be a Nutritionist. It's practically an obsession at this point.


6. (For real this time.) Full time Dad.

I am a stay at home dad, to put it bluntly. My wife is somewhat the opposite of me; she likes people, she is fairly friendly and outgoing, and she enjoys time spent in the sun. Yuck. With me on the other hand, being a social shut in has given me the acute ability to stay at home with a baby and clean the house on a daily basis. I also cook dinner, and a damn fine one at that. My wife gets panic attacks and cabin fever due to claustrophobic tendencies, so she found the first six months staying home with our daughter very emotionally taxing. Half way through, we planned for me to take on that roll instead. Don't worry; I still work. I just do it after a full day of putting up with crying, whining, and shitty diapers.

19. Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie.

Martin Sheen drunk and punching mirrors. Need I say more?

8.5. Muzak.

Despite my lack of interest in popular culture, I listen to quite a bit of music. I played electric guitar, was briefly in a heavy metal band, and used to regularly attend local shows, specifically death metal and grindcore. I enjoy a bit of Pig Destroyer, I dabble in Brutal Truth, and Municipal Waste is always good for a laugh. But my tastes are a little more diverse than that. I can't deny the allure of early nineties rap, I could probably get a perfect on Protect Ya Neck in Rapstar, and I've been known to like some J in my Pop. Oh and you know what else? I don't mind Lady Gaga, and Dropkick Murphy's are the best folk rock whatever band on the planet.

4. Drive?

I didn't start driving until I was 25 years old. Before then, I walked everywhere, or biked. For the first year of my marriage, we walked around and took the bus. It wasn't until my wife became impregnated with our future miracle spawn that I finally bit the bullet and bought my first car; a 2004 Chrysler Sebring, for 3000 in cash. Oh and also, I don't like cars, nor do I like driving. The only thing impressive about cars are their price point, I can't tell the difference between Hyundai and Honda, and one day when somebody accidentally slammed their car door into mine, I gave them a friendly wave and they took off like Speed Racer thinking I'd actually give a fuck that they made a minor dent in my door.

1. Cats are best pet.

I don't like dogs, sorry. Cats are the perfect pet. They entertain themselves, they live in harmony with you, and best of all, they have soft warm tummies. I'd wager to say that, in general, the majority of cats I meet are more interesting and enjoyable to be around than most people. Sorry, human race; come back to me when you don't look like a bunch of repulsive hairless chimps. More importantly, come back when you have soft, fuzzy tummies. Dogs are too needy; you might as well have a kid. And ninety percent of the population of dog owners treats them like they are human, trains them improperly, and generally has no scope or understanding of the immense dedication and time you need to set aside to properly care for dogs. I respect dogs too much to have one; but they get on my nerves nonetheless. At least cats know how to shut the fuck up everyone in awhile – something a lot of people would do well to replicate too, in my opinion.

People.

Actually, I think that's about as clever as I'm willing to be this morning; that word basically speaks for itself these days.

While a legion of goofballs cried all week long about how some 3D space RPG didn't end in the way they expected it too, I was playing Contra 3 on hard mode, trying to finally get the ending I so deserve to see. I know it isn't a big deal, it lasts maybe 30 seconds and is little more than a couple of pictures and a congratulations. But for those days, that is what we had come to expect. In the first Super Mario Bros. we were rewarded with having to play the whole fucking game again an infinite number of times until we got bored and slashed our own throats. But we sucked it up and dealt with it, because really, who cares?

I have never played a Mass Effect game, simply because they look about as entertaining and exciting to me as a punch to the groin. I could butter you all up by saying something about how I respect Bioware, and how Mass Effect is probably good if I gave it time, but no; I can't think of a single Bioware game I actually sat all the way through and enjoyed to the last. I dunno, did they do Baldur's Gate? If so then, at the very least, I WANTED to love that game, but I didn't. It probably makes me a worse person, and certainly a less informed gamer. But fuck all of that shit anyways.

I don't need to love Bioware games or even RPG's to understand a simple concept; life is about the journey, not the destination. The fact that so many people felt Mass Effect came to an unsatisfying conclusion makes me question one thing; how much did they really enjoy it to begin with? If it had been a fun riveting experience, a thrill ride set over three long, satisfying games, then why did a simple ending piss everyone off so much?

More importantly, why do any of them feel entitled to their own custom conclusion based exactly on their personal wants and needs? It doesn't look like a bunch of loyal fans getting screwed out of something owed to them; it looks like a bunch of whiny little consumers who think that raising money out of spite for Childs Play and spewing vitriol on forums will get them anywhere. I am not sure how much overlap their is between these assholes and the people who were hurling shit at one of Bioware's lady writers, but it really wouldn't surprise me considering how smug this recent bunch of spoiled babies has been acting.



Personally, I am glad Bioware is giving them the stiff middle finger on this. Asking someone to literally change their personal creative vision because you simply didn't like it is one of the most arrogant, childishly insane propositions, and one that is completely laughed at in any other medium. If it were to become a reality, it would set a real nasty precedent. We already have a sea of people crying about a chicks hair color in their favorite game and getting away with it, people swamping companies like Nintendo with millions of requests for RPG's on a system that is effectively dead, and even millions of dollars in donations dictating which designers get to make games. Some of these things could be construed as positive, but there is one real bit of nastiness behind it all; a gross display of irresponsible consumerism.

Part of what I do in my free time is hang out in retro centric forums, specifically places like Sega-16. Recently there was some controversy there over a homebrew developers new system for developing games. Essentially, you would pay for a kind of fake "currency" which you would then use in any amount of your choosing to essentially decide the direction the company would take on their next game. So if you donated, say, five hundred dollars of this currency, and your "bid" was the highest, they would make the game in the genre type you had selected, even getting down to the details of how big the Sega cartridge itself would be. Myself and a few others were questioning this idea, and were a minority, for one simple reason; having your fans decide what you should make is generally about as effective and inspired as asking a four year old what he would want to see in a film. The suggestions were varied and some of them were good, but how can their be any kind of motiviation or creative spark on the part of the developers when they are literally being paid to implement certain ideas?

The more frightening part is how many people were immediately willing to part with large sums of money just to see this happen. They were paying money to later pay money for a product they had had paid to see designed. In reality, the game payed for itself based on their donation, so they wouldn't have to fork out an extra 50 bones when it was finally be released, but the concept is still so bizarre for me, and indicative of, at least I feel, how careless some people are. There is the meme of "shut up and take my money" which is a fairly accurate tongue in cheek depiction of just how obsessed we are with our material possessions. Just like everyone else, I have had moments of weakness where I payed an inordinate amount for what ended up being a fairly stupid decision on my part; it's only natural, and something everybody does from time to time. I just feel sometimes it gets out of hand; to the point where we feel our money is worth more than the end product, such as an already lengthy and well made game where, because of some stupid ending, we get all up in arms and demand retribution.

What people fail to realize is that these companies owe you nothing, they don't care what YOU want. When Nintendo announces they are releasing Xenoblade, it isn't time to kiss their ass all day like Operation Rainfall might want you to think and starting tossing your money away on Nintendo shit. They did it because they saw a potential fiscal opportunity, all at the expense of a bunch of loud mouths who wanted them to "shut up and take their money." When Nintendo saw just how many people were willing to pay it forward, they were licking their lips and swooping over us like vultures. And at the end of the day, Xenoblade and The Last Story are not going to change lives. They are going to end up being decent games like any other which will promptly be shelved by most, and sold off by a few previously over excited few. There will even probably be a bunch of dickheads like the folks at Bioware who let the hype get to them, who expected the second coming of Christ, and who will be ultimately disappointed and bitchy that what they got was just another half decent RPG.



They will do it because people are spoiled. When they finally get the bottle they are crying for, they will cry because there is no chocolate milk in it. You can give them everything they ever ask, but they will only keep wanting more. So kudos to Bioware for being exactly what they are; yet another developer looking for your hard earned money, and trying to create a decent, memorable product along the way. Kudos to Nintendo for cashing in on an opportunity, and thoroughly milking a bunch of chumps who have more cash in their hands then they do in their bank account.

It's only deserved because these people are practically begging for it. The fact is, you don't HAVE to give them what they want, whether it's a new game or a good ending to a new game; because they have a constant hole being burned in their pockets, they will give you their money regardless. There were so many people bitching about how "ME3 is gunna SUCK" way before it ever came out, yet every single one of those cocksure hypocrites payed 60 dollars for it anyways, bitched about how bad it was, yet will probably buy every single piece of DLC ever created for it. They'll do it because they are consumers, because all they know how to do is consume. If the people bitching about ME3 had such a problem with the story, is it too much to ask that they try to create something of superior value?

Yes it is, because you can't buy that kind of ownership at a store. And for some of these people, that is all they are capable of doing.