The Mammon Philosophy

Halfway through finishing the third floor of Nethack’s special Sokoban area, Simon the Barbarian’s senses began to play tricks on him. First he became confused, then stunned. On the other side of the screen, my concern was growing. I knew from experience that a series of messages in quick succession could mean very bad things, and my previous barbarian died of food poisoning after eating a rotten corpse that his god wouldn’t accept in sacrifice. (Every single situation in Nethack is roughly this complicated.) Soon, when Simon the Barbarian “felt incredibly sick,” I nearly panicked — had my recent fight with a werejackal been more nefarious than I’d first suspected? Was the unpleasant egg I’d eaten actually harmful to me? Or could there be a hidden foe or trap doing something out of my line of sight?

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DCF — Rextron gives us his hazy recollections of 2007; Frosty the Snowman gets what’s coming to him.

Memento Deus — One of those “memes” has been going around, so I took a crack at improving on the basic idea. You can thank me later. Also: I start liking synthrock.

Happy Christmas, christians and neo-pagans alike! Come back later in the week when I’ll be laying my blessing upon Blades of Steel.

Once again, the spectres of recorded gaming have crept up on me. According to my Wii calendar, I barely played for three hours last week. It’s half a lie, since they can’t keep tabs on all the other consoles cluttering up the basement, but it’s the cold facts that I got shut out by the rest of my life. Still, I got in some quality time with my old pal Wii Sports, since I wasn’t feeling up to running all over Hyrule to get the letter to show the prince to get the fishhook to catch the fish to feed the monster to find the dungeon where the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around. One of my few complaints with the Wii is that I have to actually get up and cross the room in order to change games. This is because the Wii spoils its userbase; discounting the game disc shuffle, the only time you need to go anywhere near your console is when you hook it up for the first time. Everything else, from powering up to working the settings, can be done with the remote. A classic gamer such as myself could (and, in many respects, does) get all their games and apps from the Shopping Channel, basking in the joy of jumping from game to game without leaving the couch or struggling with cartridges that don’t quite want to work correctly. It’s a good thing I still have my clunky ol’ PS2 to remind me that those days of enforced halcyon haven’t quite arrived yet.

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I just deleted Nintendo’s “Check Mii Out” channel from my Wii. Every competition was won by a trio of clones. My eye for Miis was improved from “Average” to “Impressive” on the basis of selecting three Miis that used the exact same technique for entertainment value. In the past five competitions, I found one finalist whose entry was sufficiently unique to entertain my download out of 50 top selections. I’m not the kind of guy who wants to stock up on Zoidberg and Darth Maul faces; I’m satisfied with my ability to occasionally whip up a decent likeness of Rick Mercer or Jack Thompson and then have them show up on my baseball team.

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As I traipsed across the country last summer, I realized that I’d need a watch if I was going to be on time for things like morning checkout or bus departures. It was one of the many things I didn’t think about until after I stepped off the plane and onto the west coast. Things go better when I try to think as little as possible about the time, because otherwise I can get bogged down in a sort of temporal obsession, constantly glancing at my wrist as I try to go about my day, worrying if the bus is late or if I’m just running fast. So no watch, clocks placed in unobtrusive positions where I really have to crank my head around to see them, even my radio alarm is pointedly turned at an angle away from my bed.

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Couldn’t stand the aching feeling that I’d miscategorized TP as an OoT clone, so I plugged in the old N64 and gave the time-warping classic another spin. Turned out I had an old file with some decent gear: Biggoron’s sword, both special tunics, Iron Boots, Longshot, Fire and Ice Arrows, and Silver Gauntlets. I was surprised; apparently, whenever I’d started this file, I’d decided to do a bit of sequence breaking. Skipped the Fire Temple and went straight for the Water, then picked up the Lens of Illusion and headed to the Gerudo camp. Now, some games are good candidates for ignoring the basic narrative path (Chrono Trigger gives you some bonus character information if you go to the prehistoric era before you’re supposed to) and some even actively encourage it (Metroid: Zero Mission has a vertical passage running parallel to one area that can take you to items you’re not supposed to get for another quarter of the game or so.) But I’ve never really thought of the Zelda series as the kind of game that rewards clever bastards who skip through the game in any way other than what the programmers intended. The proof’s in the pudding: there was a glitch in the original Link to the Past where rescuing Zelda would automatically mark all the other trapped maidens as rescued, allowing quicker access to Ganon’s palace. But it wasn’t that much quicker; you still had to delve at least halfway into five other dungeons to get the key items that would allow you to bypass the traps and the boss. And once you’ve gotten far enough into Blind’s Dungeon to get the Titan’s Mitt, why wouldn’t you just seal the deal? You’re practically next door to the boss. You wouldn’t earn anything for skipping it: no special endings, no extra details. And by the time they got around to remaking the game for the GBA, they were savvy to the glitch and they took it out. So what’s the point?

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Not one, but two new comics up at DCF. The first one kinda phones it in but the second is full of valid social commentary.

Expect to hear more about women ogling each other and less about video games at the LJ. It’s good to have that separation clear. Hockey stuff will stay over there, but I’ll keep linking to it here.

Life is easier when it’s organized, unfortunately. I’m a very poor organizer. I would also be a very poor organ grinder, since I don’t own a monkey.

When I was in university, I started a giant list of all the video games I’d beaten or wanted to beat on one of those big erasable posters. If I’d used it for my assignments then I would’ve graduated from the English department and this blug would be about Tom Stoppard or something. Since I haven’t seen a decent performance of his since the last time I went to Dogg’s Hamlet (they replaced Cahoot’s Macbeth with an improv troupe) I figured the thing to do was to revive my videogaming exploits. So without further ado, here’s The List, my own little shrine to electronic diversions. Green for “high priority” (stuff I’m more inclined to play) and red for the opposite.

Right now I’m working through Twilight Princess. The new bits are fantastic - wolfin’ it up in the shadow-lands, the Lynchian redux of the three-goddess creation story - but anything that’s been done before is unremittingly boring. Saving the Gorons? Done it. Hurtling through the Water Temple with a hook on a chain? Done it. Remember how it felt to play Link to the Past, seeing how they’d taken the old formula and turned it into something that was compelling, but oddly familiar? TP is the reverse: it’s a retrace of Ocarina of Time that occasionally rewards you with a flash of wonder. But I don’t think I’m more than halfway through the game, and I’m already hoping the next game isn’t adventure-by-numbers again.