I like swords

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I've been re-discovering 8-Bit Theatre today. I forgot just how friggin' hilarious it is. And I think it's the first sprite-based webcomic. Kudos to you, Brian Clevinger! Here's a series that I think you, Mikey, especially will appreciate. The premise is the creator goes on vacation and Fighter (who's a big idiot) takes over making the comics. Kinda like Family Circus, but 1000 times funnier. And with more exploding ninja heads.

So there are some new folks in my unit. A couple of 'em have sat with me and watched me work. You know, for educational purposes. And because I'm so hawt. I've been told they're all impressed with my mad skillz.

God this job sucks.

Changing Gears

I'm gonna put the Awesomeness formula aside for a moment and confess something. There are two shows on television I really enjoy watching, and I feel somewhat guilty about one of them. The one I don't feel guilty about is House, MD, the new medical-dramedy on Fox. It's a real fun show, very amusing at times. But I think I've got the formula for an episode of House down now:

Act I.

Random guy/gal going about their daily lives. S/he collapses, brought to House's hospital.

Wilson: You've gotta help this person!

House: (something snarky)

Wilson: But s/he's really sick!

House: Well, okay. What else am I gonna do for the next hour?

Foreman: I think it's some kinda crazy brain disease.

Cameron: I think it's some kinda crazy bacteria.

Chase: I'm an asshole. Americans suck!

House: (something snarky) Let's treat her for some crazy disease nobody's ever heard of.

Act II

(Treatment begins, patient gets better for a while, then falls into a coma/has a heart attack/skin starts falling off)

House: Oops.

Foreman: Let's do an MRI/X-ray/perform some other random test.

Chase: You're an idiot!

Cameron: Why can't we all just get along?

House: (something snarky)

Cameron: You're hot.

(They perform aforementioned crazy test, which turns up some other thing they haven't noticed before)

House: Treat her for that weird thing.

Act III

(Treatment begins, but has no effect/patient gets worse)

House (to patient's mother/father/brother/uncle/son): You lied to us.

Aforementioned Relative: All I didn't tell you was about that one time s/he went to Africa/ate some bad sushi/brought home a flea-ridden cat!

House: A-ha! The disease is actually some rare thing that only occurs in 1 / 500,000 people! Fortunately, the cure is aspirin. Here ya go.

Patient: Thanks, Dr. House, you glorious bastard!

House: (something snarky)

So, you know, kinda predictable. But still fun.

The other show, my guilty pleasure, is Angel. The not-so-successful spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, I didn't really like Buffy, but I find Angel highly entertaining. I'm curious what you Buffy fans out there thought of Angel. I'm guessing you didn't like it so much since it was only on for 5 seasons. You ungrateful bastards.

Awesomeness Formula: Revisions I & II

Okay, time to make some revisions to the ol' Awesomeness formula.

The first one is pretty simple. Although I'm a big fan of replay value, I think I might've placed a bit too much value on it. So, I'm changing Q_gp to be:

R(I*C) / G

That makes me feel better.

The next one is a bit trickier. It has to do with T (Time). I've been thinking about it, and the Awesomeness of a game doesn't decrease arithmetically over time. It's more like there's an ideal length for a game, and I think that length varies depending on the quality of the gameplay. That is, a game with really awesome gameplay would have a longer ideal length than a game with crappy gameplay. Makes sense, right?

Furthermore, the quality of gameplay also varies over time. That is, the governing mechanics of a game may be really fun and interesting for the first 2 hours, but after 60 hours of the same damn thing over and over, it gets boring and tedious. See Final Fantasy VIII. So here comes a new factor that has to be considered, which is what I'm gonna call the Variety factor (V). It's also given values of 1 - 10, based on the variety of gameplay throughout the game. I'm giving Oddworld a V of 3 -- pretty much sticks to the same formula of running around and shooting stuff throughout.

So, I'm not really sure this makes any kind of sense, but here's what the new Awesomeness formula looks like:

A = (Q_e*Q_gp) / (|T - Q_gp/V|)

Oh yeah. That's wacky. It's times like this I wish I knew more about math.

So, the new score for Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is...

A = (7 * 25) / (|6 - 25/3|) = 75 Units of Awesomeness (UAs)

Pretty big difference. I welcome comments/help from my more mathematically-inclined friends.

Modest Proposal in Action

So I just finished playing through Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath twice. Time to put my formulae into action.

Q_gp:

I: I'm gonna give this a 5. The mix of FPS/3rd-person adventure styles is pretty cool, and the whole "bagging baddies for bounty" aspect is kinda fun (though not really original). What really boosts this game's Innovation factor is the critter-based ammo and plot/setting. It's kinda like Firefly, what with the whole futuristic-old-west thing going on. Plus, the plot is pretty darn cool, although a bit disjointed. About halfway through, the game switches gears to a completely combat-driven model, which is kinda weird, like two different teams were working on this game and had two completely different ideas as to how it should turn out, so they compromised by putting both in. But the plot twist(s) are neat.

C (again, out of 10): Over the character, I'm gonna say a 7. I like the whole running-on-all-fours thing -- makes for fast and less tedious travel. But there are times when I kinda screamed at the TV 'cuz he wouldn't jump when I told him or would walk around aimlessly while he got shot. Over the environment, I'm gonna say 2. Very linear gameplay, no sidequests, no real chance to alter the environment or take control over the reality of the game at all. Total Control score: 5.

R: 1. The experience of the game is very enjoyable, and it may be worth playing through more than once just so you can ogle at the cool scenery and FMVs again. But it's short, and the aforementioned linearity doesn't really help. It's a renter.

G: 1. Reasonable level of difficulty, gets pretty tricky at times. May be a bit on the easy side for some people, but I was still getting my ass kicked at points even on the second playthrough.

Q_gp = (5 * 5)¹ / 1 = 25

Q_e(again, out of 10) = 7. It's a short game, so there's a short ending. But it's satisfying and cool to look at. The tone is a bit strange, though -- it's very dark and sad, while the rest of the game is upbeat and silly. Plus, it's open-ended (i.e., implies there's a sequel), which always pisses me off, 'cuz you never know if there actually WILL be a sequel. And sometimes, there isn't, so the game feels incomplete. I call it the "Beyond Good and Evil" syndrome.

T (in hours): 6. Like I said, short game.

A = (25 * 7) / 6 = 29 1/6

So, uh, I don't know what that means yet, but Oddworld has 29 1/6 Units of Awesomeness. I think I'm gonna have to crunch the numbers on a few other games to get a frame of reference. But that no replay-value thing really hurts its overall Awesomeness. Well, that makes sense, in my mind -- replay value is really important to me. All in all, I'm glad I only spent $5 on it instead of $50. Still, definitely worth renting. Very amusing.

Modest Proposal Part Deux

So, um, it turns out my cessation of AIM-related activites during work has occurred earlier than expected. Like, yesterday. I got a nastygram from the IT folks telling me to uninstall Trillian. So I did. I feel very ... isolated without my IM. So, to make me feel better, start emailing me more. Or commenting on m'blog. Gimme somethin', folks.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about my magical game-rating formula, trying to come up with a way to take some of the nebulousness out of the Q_gp factor. So I've developed a formula of sorts to calculate Q_gp. Here 'tis:

Q_gp = (I * C)^R/G

Translation:

Quality of Gameplay = (Innovation * Control)^{Replay Value} / God Factor

Notice "quality of graphics" is not included in determining the quality of gameplay. That's right. Graphics are not important.

A note on "God Factor" -- this is something that I saw on somebody's blog once a long time ago (sorry for not linking, but I really don't remember where I saw it). Basically, it's kind of a yardstick to determine how difficult a game is. The ideal difficulty level for a game is such that a god-like player would be able to play through it all the way from beginning to end without dying or being forced to start over. So, in my equation, the ideal is for "G" to be 1. As a game moves away from the ideal difficulty, G increases. A game that was literally imposssible to beat would have an infinitely high G, therefore a non-existant Q_gp. A game that was too easy would have no replay value, making Q_gp at most 1, which I think is fair.

Re: Control -- this is a combination of two things. How much control a player is given over his character and the facility of that control, and how much control a player is given over the game environment (including the camera, if applicable), and the facility of that control. More control over the character and the environment = better. What do I mean by "less" control? Think Galaga. All you can do is move left and right. Now, admittedly, technology probably had something to do with that, and that's not to say that Galaga is necessarily a bad game (although I always got bored with it real fast), but c'mon. For a more modern example, think "The Bouncer", a fucking awful Squaresoft (pre-Squenix) game for the PS2. That game was basically a bad movie with some shitty fighting sequences thrown in every now and then. Too many cutscenes = no control = bad.

*turning to glare at Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3*

Re: Innovation -- possible values are 1 - 10. 1 means it doesn't do anything new. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though -- Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is essentially a third-person adventure game with FPS stuff thrown in, but it's still friggin' awesome. Starscape is Asteroids at its core, but is super-friggin' awesome. It's pretty hard to get a high Innovation factor nowadays, but things like Gish and Katamari Damacy (although, I admit, I haven't played it yet, from what I've seen, it's got some whole next-level trippy shit going on) spring to mind.

See what happens when the Man takes away my IM? It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Geek.

New rating system for video games: A modest proposal

I was feeling nostalgic last night, so I went and downloaded the ending to Final Fantasy VIII. It's a half-hour long FMV orgasm. And it's the best video game ending. Ever. Seriously. It's that good.

Which made me realize, that for console RPGs especially (but also non-MMO games in general), a video game is only as good as its ending. I say console RPGs especially because these are the games that originated the 80-hour playthrough. We're talking a helluva lot of time invested in these mofos, so the payoff better be worth it. I remember in high school, a friend of mine saying, "after I beat Final Fantasy, I feel like Square should send a prostitute to my home for a free blowjob." A kickass FMV ending is the next-best thing. And, you know, it's less problematic.

This is why Halo 2 sucks. Yeah, I said it. I don't care what anyone says, that game is stupid. Oooh, look! He can hold two guns at once! Gee, we haven't seen that before! No in-game map + no ending = lame.

So I propose a formula to determine the value of a video game:

A = (Q_e x Q_gp)/T

That is, Awesomeness is equal to the quality of the ending times the quality of gameplay over time (i.e., time required to win). Note: This only applies to traditional single-player video games, not MMORPGs. It also does not speak to the quality of the multiplayer modes of games.

Now, it may seem that, according to this formula, a game that was 3 seconds long but had a great ending would be the most Awesome game ever. However, a game that was 3 seconds long would most likely not have any kind of gameplay, so actually, it would have an Awesomeness factor of 0. And yeah, "quality of gameplay" is kind of nebulous and subjective. But that's the way it is.

Okay, geek mode off.

And now...the end is near...

Well, party time is over. I just found out that, effective March 31, I won't be able to use AIM at work anymore. They're blocking it. Now, technically, I shouldn't have been using it anyway, but come on, my job is boring and lame. I should at least be able to bitch to people about it during the day. Oh well. Guess it's back to desparately searching the web for entertaining flash games. By the way, folks, if you have any suggestions along those lines, I'd love to hear 'em. Here are the sites I already know about:

Miniclip, The Flash Games, Addicting games, and ArcadeTown.

Hook me up, o you surfers of the Internets.

On a completely unrelated note to the good folks at Blogger, I've noticed my profile has my "most recent posts" as being from October. How do I fix that? Or should it fix itself? Like some kinda crazy self-correcting plant?

Six links in one post. I am awesome.

Yet another website that's gonna get me fired

The Uncyclopedia. It's like Wikipedia, if everything in Wikipedia was made up and silly. The potential for getting me fired comes from me laughing my ass off in the middle of the office. To wit, this article about the Pope.

The Pope is the overlord and master of The Vatican. In the late 1920s he used the awesome power of Vatican City to write his grocery list on the sun. However, this caused a chain reaction, the result of which is that the sun will become a supernova in 2037 as opposed to millions or billions of years from now. The Pope shows no remorse, because he is also the immortal son of King Kong and Elvis.

The article on Sauron, a.k.a. Lord of the Dance and Saint of the Step, was also enlightening.

Proto comic

I may have mentioned before that My Personal Lord and Savior and I were working on a comic. Well, this isn't it, but thanks to boingboing, I've discovered a website that allows you to create your own pseudo-comics. So here's a kind of rough draft of what it would be like. It's a lot funnier with Jesus' illustrations. Maybe, someday, y'all will get to see 'em.

Playing with Google -- a personal message to Ms. Mynx

Sometimes when I get bored, I put my name into google to see if anyone's talkin' about me on the Internets. Unfortunately, my name's pretty common, it seems, so there are 23,900 hits. And none of them (well, in the first few pages, anyway) are about me.

However, Ms. Mynx, if you put your name into google, there is but one hit. And I think you'll be amused by the result. Try it. Your full name, in quotes (i.e., "First Last"). You can also do it without the quotes, and the first result is also about you, but not as entertaining.

Sorry, folks, for not linking to the search directly, but some people like to preserve their pseudo-anonymity.

Cellar Door, or why I like Tori Amos

There's a new Tori Amos album out now, called The Beekeeper. I've yet to purchase it, but I've listened to the single ("Sleeps with Butterflies") from Tori's website, and it's groovy. It's been described as being a lot more mellow than her previous stuff, which I agree with, but it's still beautiful.

So I've been trying to pinpoint exactly why I like Tori's music so much. I mean, no other artist comes close to how I feel about her. As I was driving home from work yesterday, I thought of way of explaining it: Cellar door.

Tolkien once said that, of all the combinations of words or phrases in the English language, "cellar door" is the most beautiful. And I quote:

Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.

He went on to use his affinity for the phrase "cellar door" to explain why he thought the Welsh language was so beautiful:

...In Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

If you replace "In Welsh" with "In Tori Amos' music", that'll pretty much sum up why I love her. The pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense.

Hrm. I guess that's not very profound after all, since you could use that to describe why anyone likes anything.

Anti-Gone

Okay, so Mikey just reminded me about this, and it is definitely blog-worthy. And this'll make up for me not posting yesterday. Still on track, baby!

As long time fans of my blog (read: those of you who know me in real life) will know, I was in a classical a capella group in college. It was awesome. We rox0rzed. Anyhoo, one time this experimental music group called Antigone (pronounced, in this case, "Anti-Gone") wanted us to perform with them. Their whole deal was that they used toys to make music. Those little multicolored six-note xylophones, squeaky toys, tickle-me Elmos, those little wheel-things where you pull a string and it says "The cow says mooooo", etc.

Our contribution to the performance was to sing this really slow, sad song completely straight-faced, dressed all in black (which was actually our normal concert attire), while the Antigone folks rode around on mini-tricycles making various toy-noises and generally being silly. It was a hoot.

The grand finale for the show involved the Antigone guys coming out on stage naked holding various toys over their naughty bits for one final, slow, sad farewell. A good time was had by all.

And speaking of naughty bits, check out this blog I just happened to stumble across whilst surfing around. Now, I won't say exactly how I stumbled across this, but suffice to say, google will turn up some crazy shit when you're looking for perfectly innocent things. Eh, who am I kidding? I am so gonna get fired one of these days...

Oh, by the way, mom -- don't click that link. Thanks.

It ain't my fault

Blogger's servers are interfering with my goal of posting every day. Damn you, blogger! I pay good money for my blog! And by "pay", I mean "don't pay".

Stupid link for the day (thanks, Mikey): Football badger. Keep an eye on the score -- it keeps increasing! I've been told that someone has taken a screenshot of it at 10,000,000. How long can you watch before your head implodes?

I've been feeling pretty Jewish lately. I think it's 'cuz I haven't had good Chinese food in a while. Not many quality Chinese restaurants in my corner of the country.

The one movie I'll never watch again

Requiem for a Dream.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great movie, film-wise. But it's just so overwhelmingly depressing and disturbing that I can't watch it without crying/shaking/having nightmares. It's rather unmanly, actually. So I'll never watch it again.

And speaking of disturbing movies that I'll never watch again, didja hear that Mel Gibson re-released The Passion of the Christ, but re-edited with less violence? It's called "The Passion: Recut". Now, is it just me, or does that title strike anyone else as being somewhat...ironic?

And the geek stuff continues...

So George Lucas was on 60 Minutes last night, talking about how dark and spooky the new Star Wars is gonna be. Ooh, it's PG-13! Must not suck as much as the previous two!

One of the questions he was asked was something like, "Critics hated Episodes 1 and 2. Do you give a shit?" (Although, a more accurate question would've been, "Critics and fans and everyone over the age of 5 hated Episodes 1 and 2")George's answer: "No."

"It'd be like if I wanted to paint a house green, but someone else said, 'I think that house should be white.'"

Actually, a better analogy would be, everybody in the world who looks at your house tells you that it's ugly, that the foundation is weak, and that it's built on top of an Indian burial ground and the walls will bleed while you sleep. But you say, "Well, so what? I like crumbling, ugly, haunted houses. Fuck all y'all!"

Oh well. So much for going out on a high note.

And the winner for worst intro sequence in a video game goes to...

So my new goal is to post every day. But since nothing ever happens to me, I'm gonna have to occasionally fall back on that old standby: geek stuff. So, put on your pocket protectors and whip out your 20-sided die, it's time to geek out.

Now playing: Metal Gear Solid 3.

My first impression was that they took everything that was good about Metal Gear Solid 2 and added a whole bunch of unnecessary realism to the gameplay just to piss me off. Yeah, in reality, Snake probably wouldn't be able to look up and to the right to view a little radar of all the enemies in the area and their fields of vision, but how the hell else am I supposed to know where the hell everyone is? But then I got used to the whole sonar/motion detector/AP vibration thingie, and finally managed to get past the first three screen without getting detected and shot.

Then there was the god awful intro credit sequence. As I was listening to the song that played over the credits/trippy snake graphics, I wondered: Are these lyrics really as bad as they seem, or am I just hallucinating? Nope, no acid for me. They're really that bad.

Someday you go through the rain,
Someday you feed on a tree frog...

Yes, those are actual lyrics in the song. Now, if you haven't played the game, imagine them being sung James Bond intro style. You know, a throaty alto with overdramatic vibrato, big brass and string swells, the works. Pretty stupid, huh?

Then there are the INCESSANT CUT SCENES. Jesus fucking christ. If I have to hear another lecture about how nuclear weapons are bad or how being a soldier is all about your soul, I swear, I'm gonna ... fall asleep. And it's not like important plot stuff is being revealed. Just shit about the Cuban missile crisis in case you fell asleep during your high school history class. Well, thanks, Hideo, for the history lesson. Can we get back to the fucking game now?

And what the hell is up with this bullshit "Cure" system? You know, it used to be that when your video game hero got shot, some HP was lost. He ate a ration, got a bandage, and his HP came back. Sure, it wasn't realistic, but it's a goddamn video game! I wanna kick ass, not go to a virtual hospital and present my virtual insurance card and be interviewed by the virtual police about how a virtual bullet ended up in my virtual arm. But now you gotta pause the damn game and perform faux surgery on yourself (assuming you've collected the necessary disinfectant, styptic, stitches, and bandages). Retarded over-realism.

The game may be good, I can't really tell. It doesn't really want me to play it so much as be pissed at it.

Most overrated game in history. And this is coming from a Final Fantasy fanboy.

So anyway...

...and that's why I hate cabbage.

So, like I was saying, things sure are uneventful 'round here. I finally got a promotion and a raise -- call me SENIOR customer service rep, bitches -- but otherwise all is the same as before. My life is like Waiting for Godot ... nothing happens. Twice.

Oh, but yesterday, I got a friendly little note in the mail from the Office of the Jury Commissioner, telling me that my name has been pulled for jury duty! I'm kinda psyched, actually. It'll be like Law & Order, but, like, boring. I haven't actually been summoned yet, but I could be anytime between this July and the next. I do know that it would be for a "petit jury" (as opposed to a "grand jury", and no I didn't make up the term "petit jury"), so I could totally throw someone's ass in jail. Or not. I guess it depends. I think it's gonna be like Twelve Angry Men. Only with air conditioning. And in color. And, like, with some women thrown in there. Probably.

Wil Wheaton was on CSI last night and was friggin' awesome. I think the crazy homeless cracked-out hobo Walter should be a recurring character. Like the Traveller from Next Generation. But with more crack smoking. And yelling at invisible voices. And then, at the end, Walter could go to the Native American planet and fuckin' disappear. That would be sweet. Oh, and right before CSI was the Star Wars: Episode III trailer on Fox. It actually looks like it could be considerably less shitty than the previous two episodes. Like Star Trek VI. But I think the dialogue will still be gag-inducing. Like Star Trek VI ("you've never fully appreciated Shakespeare until you've heard him in the original Klingon! nyuk nyuk nyuk").

So I'm reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" now. It's a fun read ... disturbing, but fun. And full of cool math stuff, like the Monty Hall Problem. That blew my mind, I tell you what. Oh, and I also read some of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde -- and a pretty great paper about the same by a certain someone -- which has made me want to read the Shakespeare version, but I think it's one of those Shakespeare plays that suck. Like Pericles or Winter's Tale.

And I've finally listened to Wizard People, Dear Reader, and nearly peed my pants at least a dozen times. "I am a destroyer of worlds! I am Harry fucking Potter!"

That's all for now. And, as that one guy in The Last Dragon said, catch you on the flip flop.