[blink]

Excerpt:

"I love you so much, sometimes I think I... I'm..."

"A carrot?"

"Yes, I think I'm a carrot."

"I know how you feel!"

lolwut?

-Anthony

i'd doubletake, but frankly, this is almost par for the course

Cats are from Orisinal, Dogs are from Azeroth.

Something occured to me today after smacking one of my puppies in the face with a rubber ball: he didn't want the ball because he wanted to play with it, he just wanted it because I had it.

Then for some reason, I straight away made a comparison between core and casual gamers.

I've kind of sat on the fence between the two for a while now. I've dabbled in WoW and WAR, and I've spent vast amounts of time match-3ing. I tend to go in and out between what I like and dislike between the two.

But it got me thinking - whenever I play an MMO, it feels like a job. I don't actually have fun playing games until I play a fun game. Like Portal, which I played for the first time last night.* Incredibly fun! Done with in a handful of hours. I didn't have to get anything, find anything, I didn't have someone standing nearby with an item that will take me 60 hours to pass the pre-requisites just to hold.

When I was playing MMOs, it felt like I had to have stuff. Actually, scratch that, I will go ahead and say: to play MMOs, you have to have stuff. You're forever finding upgrades to stuff that's now no longer competitive, or even serviceable. To partake in certain content, you have to have certain level gear or you just won't make it. There's some content 99.98% of a game's subscribers that won't ever see, but lordy, if you do happen to have that specific epic loot, everyone will know about it.

Core games is about stuff - the getting and having of.

And y'know, right now, I'm not about stuff. I just like... doing.

Shooting? TF2.
Punching? Freedom Force.
Growing? Plants vs. Zombies.
Wearing a tiki mask and belting a hell of a curveball with my super spear? Mario Smash Tennis.

I think I like not having to get stuff just to play a game. I just want to play the game.

In other sweet, sweet news, Margaret River Chocolate Factory has taken my tastebuds and programmed them to love nothing else but their dark chocolate buds. Mmmmmm.

-Anthony

*There was too cake!

mice are from hyrule, i don't know why

I got muh new shoes on.

And they're comfy.

Since I've taken the puppies' training a bit more consistently, Vicky insisted that I buy myself some proper walking shoes.  After spending all of 1.5 minutes in Foot Locker amongst a dozen or so playaz*, we beat a hasty retreat and crossed the mall to the significantly less busy Athlete's Foot.  After a quick measuring and assessment without a single mention of "bros" or "hoes" from the in-store music selection, I walked out with brand new sneakers!

I haven't owned a pair of sneakers since I was in primary school, and now I own a pair that I consider the most expensive item in my wardrobe.

They're white with blue gel stuff.

-Anthony

* playaz [plahy-uhz]  n. 

- See douchebags sense 2

lookin' back on when

The business of not-quite-knowing.

I've now learnt it's best to write these using the actual site's 'Compose' space - cutting and pasting even from Wordpad does wacky things to the html that takes, me at least, a long time to fix.

So, hep! and all that jazz.  Today's a day of cleaning for me - mostly spent with laundry so far, but I'm to be tackling the kitchen as soon as I've finished procrastinating here.  I didn't have much of a weekend this week, and once I did get some time to myself last night, I sadly spent the most part of it completely failing at doing anything useful in TF2 that I think I might give up on the game for a while.  The upside to which is that I can spend some time finishing Freedom Force (for freedom!).

We recently posted my new blogpost on the rockethands.com website.  There's obviously a lot to the issue of classification of games and the proposed internet-filtering by the Federal Government - I'm certain I don't have complete and total understanding of the situation, but I'm also certain I have enough to rightfully be concerned.

I have to admit I've been mulling over the next part of this post for a few hours now, and I'm not quite sure what I want to get out of saying it.  Censorship bad mmkay? - most people would agree with this, or at least have some good input.  Penn Jillette had something to say back in May regarding the banning of the Japanese game Rapelay.  I don't know if I agree with all of his spiel, but at least he's thinking about the idea of censorship instead of knee-jerking.  (On the topic of this "game", how could a group of adults sit down in a room together and even consider the idea, let alone spend the significant amount of time needed to implement it into an interactive product?  I honestly don't understand.)

Is it as simple as the Classifications Board being prone to kneejerking themselves?  That seems a little harsh as far as criticism goes, but their results don't seem to help prove anything otherwise.  As I mentioned in my RH post, how the hell can Godfather II ship to Australian retailers without a single whimper from anyone; not the retailers, "watchdog" and supervisory groups or sensationalist media outlets?  Kane & Lynch nickname its difficulty settings with drug names that almost caused Fallout 3 to be outright banned.  The decisions of our classifications board seem arbitrary at best.

It's fair to say that if this board will be an important element in Conroy's filtering of online games, I'm a little concerned how this might affect local digital content creators.  Looking at the case studies listed on R18games.com.au, a lot of refusals have come about because of "high impact violence".  I don't see God of War, Godfather or the Warriors feature on this list, so what's their definition of "high impact violence"?  If these decisions can cause a product to be completely blocked from public consumption, shouldn't content creators have access to at least the broad terms of these definitions, if not the specifics?

It makes sense to me that if the public cannot have an Adult Only classification for interactive media, the OFLC should explicitly provide the details of their guidelines for content creators so we can have a better idea of what boundaries we can work within.  I can foresee this kind of request providing one of two things; a solid framework for game makers to adhere to when creating mature content, or evidence that our classifications board is based on the merits of arbitrary subjectivity.

Either or, I don't mind.

In other wind-tossed news, my darling fiancee has taken to replying to my statements of "All business!" with "... at the front, all party at the back."  It is evident I am in dire need of a haircut.

-Anthony

toasted bad guys comin' up!

The Haunting of the Bell

It started with beeping.

Similar enough to the fire alarm’s that I actually checked the alarm’s batteries the first time it happened.  Press the button, squeal in my ears – nope, not the fire alarm.

It didn’t beep again until the next day, by which time I figured out the source to be the doorbell we hadn’t yet deployed.  It was a simple thing from Bunnings – a plain button and a block of grey plastic that promised to spew out inane mono-tonal tunes on command from strangers at our front door – and we’d already inserted the batteries in anticipation of the hordes of visitors we expected this timely technology, well-positioned for ergonomic ease, to summon to our simple home.  I’d set the device to the ding-dong chimes of Westminster a few days earlier, and this high-pitched legato beep was certainly not bringing about fond imaginations of Big Ben.  Slightly annoyed, but not yet perturbed, I removed the batteries and promptly forgot about it all for a week.

The second time the batteries were inserted, it took only two hours to beep again, this time three long beeps in a row.  The next morning both Vicky and I were in the kitchen on another repeat performance.

“What is that?”

“Doorbell.”

“It woke me up last night.”

Oh, that’s not good; anyone who’s had a fire alarm battery go flat at 2 in the morning knows the pain of electrical devices cracking shits when you’re deep into nappytimes.  I’ll look into it I said.

That night, in the middle of an episode of Studio 60, it chimed.  Neither of us had obviously touched the button – were anywhere near the button – but there it was, sitting on the kitchen bench, LED display merrily glissing up and down, the speaker blaring out an almost in-tune Three Blind Mice.

“…”

“…”

“Whaaaaat,” he both droned, staring at each other.  After a quick ‘it wasn’t me’ check, I got up and found the button transmitter.  Hit the button.

Diiiiing doooong diiiiing doooong it spluttered in awful grandfather-clock mimicry.  I slowly backed away from the device, ran for cover under the doona and refused to come out until well into the next morning.

There were another two incidences of the ghostly Three Blind Mice melody, the last happening well late into the doorbell's last fateful night.  The device, its life-blood batteries and wiring guts now sprawled throughout the house, no component in line of sight of the others, has not cried again since.  And hell come henceforth for any who break the holy seal that separate these parts.

-Anthony

see how they run