Nerd Mentality

You burned my lunch, Koei

Posted March 4th 2007 by Jordan Mammo.

The scene is set!

I used to play and finish every game I bought. It used to be something I liked saying about my game playing habits: that when I threw down some cash on a game I was going to at least get through to the end of it. I never even used to buy two games at the same time, and the one time I did I refused to touch Beyond Good and Evil until I had thoroughly dominated P.N.03. What will power I used to have!

These days, I don't have so much.

I'm not really sure what happened. All I know is that now I have a collection of unfinished titles ranging from games that I liked and want to go back and finish one day (like Devil May Cry 3 and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (the latter probably being my favorite platformer of the last generation!)) to games I know I‘m probably never going to touch again (like Final Fantasy X and Okami). Maybe I'm just not as interested as I used to be. Maybe I'm just buying too many games and not letting each one settle in. I think I've just become less patient with videogames in general, which I guess can be good or bad. Either way, right now it feels like there's no going back.

So what I've been itching to play more of these days is Electroplankton, which I've finally been able to experiment with. I can't finish Electroplankton even if I try to, but it's a pretty amazing piece of work. Playing makes me want to write something horribly pretentious about it, but I'll probably spare you all and not do that. I will say, though, that I like it because it's about enjoying the now. There's no save feature; you create sounds and together they form music and maybe you'll like it. And maybe you'll try to recreate that music again, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to. Perhaps you'll stumble onto a different arrangement that clicks, though, and you sit back and enjoy that.

What I also think is interesting is that Electroplankton is a videogame developed by a man who deals with things outside of videogames, and Nintendo's gotten a few of these guys to work with them: neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, whose involvement with Nintendo brought forth some pretty good brain games, writer Shigesato Itoi, whose Earthbound I've just recently begun to delve into and may very well be brilliant, and now with Electroplankton, media artist Toshio Iwai. I hope they keep up stuff like this in the future.

And now, an interlude!

Scurge Hive is a terrible name for a videogame. Exhibit A:

Christine1249: Have you played anything on the DS lately?

JrMammo: hmm

JrMammo: my roommate got scurge hive

Christine1249: Is he OK? Not feeling too good?

JrMammo: what

JrMammo: scurge hive is a videogame

Christine went on to say that Scurge Hive sounded like a disease. I gave a hearty laugh and thought she had a point.

The rousing finish!

Games like Dynasty Warriors bug the shit out of me. I will say right now that they bug the shit out of me because I don't get them. I don't see what there is to like about them. I mean, I get why people might like the idea of the whole thing, but really it's so goddamn boring I just don't know how people can make it through a couple of missions, much less entire games involving multiple characters.

Samurai Warriors 2 is a videogame published by Koei. It's a sequel to Samurai Warriors, which is basically another Koei game called Dynasty Warriors, but set in Japan. This is, apparently, enough to differentiate it and make it worth creating. In a past issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly in which they compiled "The Top 50 New IP's," a game called Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War, also from Koei, was described as Dynasty Warriors but in Europe, and the "cool factor" for it was that it was "not set in Asia." Is this for real? And this is the game listed above such titles as Blue Dragon, Contact, and Dead Rising? The mind boggles.

Samurai Warriors 2 is a game about running around areas that look like barf and hacking the attack button until you down countless armies of men. One of the combos I saw a friend of mine buy is executed by hitting the square button on the Playstation 2 controller about nine times in a row. I'm sitting there and I think, "This is what you're doing anyway!" He likes the game, though. So does his brother. They're both my roommates.

One day the two of them were playing the game cooperatively and I was starving. In the refrigerator we had a lot of nothing and a pack of hot dogs. I throw one into the oven, sit down and watch the two play. I ask how far they are and they mumble something that I can't recall. So, I watch. The two characters run around the screen slashing the crap out of anything that moved. Brian is not talking. Christian is not talking. I guess they're looking at the game map and just going where needed. Maybe. Minutes go by in silence, and eventually even my eyes are transfixed onto the television screen. Enemies attack in endless streams and they go down one by one; environments that never change drift by as fast as the enemies do, and I get lost in the pattern. Before I know it, the smell of burning thrusts me back into reality, and I realize my jaw has dropped a little. I wonder how long it's been like that, and dart into the kitchen where I turn off the oven.

The hot dog looks like charcoal. You burned my lunch, Koei. But I kind of get it now.

Anticlimactic ending!

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