Tea Leaves

You adorable little minx. Now if I can just convince you to get me a sneak preview of Banjo Kazooie 3 beyond what’s in the trailer, I’ll fill you so full of Belgian beer your friends will want to put a tap in you.

For those of you who haven’t played the previous editions, Banjo Kazooie is only the best 3D platform game ever made since the beginning of time, ever.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, about goddamn time, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Reading through my daily list of online “media”, I’ve lately felt a low, almost background level of annoyance with the subject matter and tone of some of the content that has streamed my way.

Here is the problem: pick any of the current questions of our time, and listen for a while to the debate that rages in the various media. The only conclusion you can come to is that everyone is stupid.

The particular trigger this time around was the most recent cycle of “blame the gamers.” You know the drill. Some violent event happens in North America (violence in, say, the Middle East is never caused by video games, it’s more complicated there) and various chest-thumpers start stamping their feet and shaking their fists and screaming about how the minds of our youth are being turned into a bloody jelly by urban crime games.

Because, really, the only game where there is juvenile and gratuitous violence and mayhem is Grand Theft Auto. There aren’t entire genres of games that are just a huge boxing ring where the winner gets to pull the arms off the loser. There aren’t games where the sole purpose of the entire enterprise is to headshot as many people dressed in the wrong color clothing as you can. There aren’t games where you kill zombies with a lawn mower. There aren’t games where you use your psychic powers to make people’s brains melt into a puddle of liquid.

Nope, the evil on this planet radiates from a single center, and that center is in the development offices of Rockstar Games. A little bit of that evil is used to burn each GTA DVD before it goes out into the stores to corrupt your children.

OK. So I am overstating the case for dramatic and sarcastic effect. But I can’t escape the feeling that this side of the argument is starting from a position of ignorance and choosing a target at random.

However, these people don’t bother me that much. They don’t really know what they are talking about, and they don’t have any interest in actually figuring out that they are ignorant boobs, but other than that they have commited no great sin.

What really bothers me is the vociferously defensive response from the gamer community. First, it’s not really clear to me that one wants to be in a position of defending violent games in general, and GTA in paticular, as some kind of cultural treasure. I realize that people find the games enjoyable and entertaining. But this by itself is not enough to justify their existence. There are all kinds of things that people find enjoyable that you do not want to defend as artistic. It seems to me that if the game industry wants to gain any credibility at all, they should start their arguments from a more realistic position: GTA and games like it are juvenile escapist fantasies. They don’t really have that much to offer from a cultural point of view. They are not intelligent or mature. They are not, for the most part, even that well written.

They are an entertaining diversion. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, this is not what is said. Instead, we get a series of badly argued ruminations from a variety of different angles, each one of them stupid.

You can’t prove that game are bad

The reasoning here is usally something along the lines of “millions of people play the game and don’t go crazy and shoot up their school, so how bad could it be?”.

Well, millions of people smoke cigarettes and only a relatively small percentage die a horrible and painful death as their lungs rot away inside their bodies. But that doesn’t make it a good idea.

It’s clear that people like to play these games. I don’t really think we should stop them. But that doesn’t mean we should say it’s a good idea.

The games are actually good for you

This is an extension of the argument above. If it doesn’t kill you, it must make you smarter. I suppose it’s true that at a minimum games can give you really good twitch response. The nuttier arguments in this space try to convince you that GTA teaches you the wonder of exploration, or how to experiment with your environment a la the scientific method. The most pathetic arguments try to claim that the games carry a deep and political message and therefore will teach the more observant little 10 years olds among us about their own world and history.

I think it’s stretch to claim that driving around a fictional city offing hookers is teaching kids a deep and reflective lesson on the modern socioeconomic problems of the modern urban environment. But that’s just me.

Help, Help, I’m Being Oppressed

This is a new and interesting angle that plays to the dork community’s inbred persecution complex.

The most recent example of this psychological tic was a piece in that bastion of intelligent journalism: Joystiq. The article shows an idyllic scene from Tokyo of a Japanese father helping his son out with some handheld game, and then speculates about what a wonderful world it would be if only we could lift the “stigma” of gaming from the shoulders of the downtrodden geeks of the West.

I think two facts argue against the idea of the oppressed game player. First, EA sends two bojillion copies of Madden into homes everywhere the at roughly the same time every year. You don’t do that by pandering to just the hard core. Second, most of the rest of the industry has not figured out how to escape pandering to exactly this set of people. How else do you explain something like DOAX2, a game where you make bouncy women drive jet skis.

It’s hard to look at what the hard-core gamer asks for from the world and not come to the conclusion that if indeed they are being oppressed, it’s because they were asking for it.

In the end, my advice to the people on both ends of this tug-of-war is to try and argue from a position of intelligence rather than one of either ignorance or stupidity. On the one hand, those who would rail against the destructive video game culture should perhaps play with the machines some more before coming to a summary judgement. I suggest they try out Mario Kart: Double Dash or Guitar Hero.

On the other hand, I think that the gaming community should take a more realistic look at itself and come to grips with the fact that it is still dominated by the aesthetic sensibilities of Beavis and Butthead. If you really want to convince people that games have more to offer than drive-by shootings, urban warfare, and misogyny, then maybe you should stop defendng that sort of content and show the world that you have something more worthwhile to offer. I suggest demoing Mario Kart! or Guitar Hero.

Recently, Bill Harris of Dubious Quality has been raving about a game called Dwarf Fortress. And let me be clear, when I say “raving” I don’t mean “saying nice things about it” but actual raving. Like, he saves the game to CDs, gets naked, and rubs them all over his body. Bill doesn’t just like Dwarf Fortress, he has gone completely around the bend over it.

So of course, I had to check it out.

Now, I like Bill just as much as bagels like lox, but he’s overselling the game. Or rather, he’s overlooking its flaws because he is blinded by its brilliant parts. This happens to all of us, from time to time. For example, I myself felt very strongly that The Lost Admiral Returns was the best game of 2004 by a mile. Unfortunately, I was also the only person in the entire world who bought it. I understood why: the interface was a bit clunky, and the graphical trim hadn’t been smoothed down quite enough. We can talk about gameplay over graphics all we want, but the truth is that rough edges raise the barrier to entry of a game.

Dwarf Fortress has a lot to recommend it. It also has a lot of rough edges.

In fact, my first impression when I started the game was “Is this some sort of joke?” The game’s full title is “Slaves To Armonk: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress,” which is just a little too close for comfort to Bladehunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge. The game begins with a 30 second cinematic, multiple-scene ASCII-art animation, of a sort that I haven’t seen for 15 years or more (view it yourself here). What the hell? It’s a joke, right? It has to be a joke.

Farming with floodgates.
Click to enlarge.

It’s not a joke. The game has the look of a roguelike. But it isn’t a roguelike. The closest I can come to describe it is to say that it’s like Age of Empires with text-style graphics from Nethack. But in many ways, it’s better.

For quite a while now I’ve hated that gamers have settled on the term “real-time strategy” to describe games like Warcraft and Age of Empires. Strategy is about making large-scale decisions that affect events, usually through logistics. Almost by definition, any game where you say “Lugdush, go chop that tree over there” or “Lugdush, go bash Frank on the head with an axe” are not strategic. Dwarf Fortress comes closer to the strategic ideal, although there is still micromanagement in the early part of the game.

So, let’s talk about the good parts. We’ll start with the setup: you have a party of a small number of dwarves who are setting off to find their fortunes. You choose what skills your dwarves will have (the skill list is incredibly long, ranging from mining, carpentry, farming, down to details such as lye and potash production). You pick what supplies you are going to take with you. And then, you pick a wealthy-looking mountain, and prepare to build a settlement.

You don’t directly move dwarves around or tell them what to do. There are two main ways you influence what happens. First, you can tell dwarves what sorts of work they should be doing. So you can tell your metalsmith, for example, that he should also be willing to help out with the farming or hauling trees. Then, you designate areas where work can happen. So you say things like “This area over here is for cutting trees. The garbage dump is here outside the cave. I want to build a mineshaft going this way for 30 squares, and then carve out three 6×6 rooms here. Store your food in the first room, build a masonry and carpentry shop in the second, and we’ll put some beds in the third.

Then, you just sit back and watch.

Jobs, and who is doing them

The priorities you set create a pool of jobs, which the dwarves try to fulfill if they are within their brief. Dwarves that perform jobs gain experience, and become better at them over time; they can change professions. The strategic challenge of the game is that at any given time there are more jobs than their are dwarves, and they’re all important. Most people’s first game ends in all the dwarves starving to death sometime in the deep midwinter.

The most interesting part of the game is watching your dwarves decide what to do, and I say that as someone who absolutely despises the Sims. The dwarves are just incompetent enough to keep things interesting, but generally are not so irrational that you want to strangle them. Unless they get sad, or go insane. Dwarves have wants and needs — food, shelter, fulfilling work, alcohol, and companionship — and a sad dwarf with an axe is someone to stay away from.

Your initial challenge is to survive. That means figuring out a way to get enough food to make it through winters, which means learning how to farm (and, most likely, build an irrigation system and create fertilizer). It means finding a source of fuel. It means learning how to mine ore and smelt it into metal, and working that metal into weapons, and working stones and metal into crafts which can be traded to occasional travelling caravans for food and cloth. It means fighting off wild animals from outside your mountain demesne and fighting off horrible creatures from deep within the heart of the mountain. It means preventing your own people from starving, or becoming so morose they commit murder and mayhem.

There are a few drawbacks to Dwarf Fortress. The game is currently described as an alpha test, so some or all of these may be fixed by the time you try it. But if you try it today — and you should — you’ll need to go in with your eyes open about these issues.

One drawback is that at present it is a Windows-only game, although the author is currently looking for some assistance to port it to SDL, so there is hope for a Mac and Linux port down the road.

A more serious problem is the user interface, which is ad-hoc in the extreme, and somewhat tragic. Just to take one example, the game uses three completely different sets of keys to mean “next choice” and “previous choice” on menus, depending on which menu you’re on, using some heuristic I don’t actually understand. Likewise, at various points in the game you have to size regions. Sometimes you do this by setting a mark and region at two corners of an area, using the arrow keys to move a cursor and “enter” to mark. Other times (for example, when building a bridge) you use a completely different set of keys to specify the length and width of the area covered. And then sometimes you use a third set of keys to define a diamond-shaped radius around an object. I’m sure there are rationales for all this interface, but I don’t think they were worth the trade off.

The in-game help is minimal. At one point, I hit the magic key that made the on-screen cheat sheet disappear, and I haven’t been able to get it back since. Fortunately, there’s a wiki devoted to the game that helps fill in a lot of the gaps.

Is Dwarf Fortress, as Bill Harris claims, a paradigm-changing game? Will it disrupt the game industry and bring about a new Golden Age? Absolutely not. I think, to be blunt, that Bill has simply been playing so much Madden lately that he’s forgotten exactly how good a computer game can be when it’s not designed by committee. What makes Dwarf Fortress worthwhile are its quirks, which come from it being the product of one person.

Despite the fact that it won’t change the industry, it doesn’t need to. I stayed up until 3 in the morning on Saturday night, literally unable to put the computer down, because I had to continue to help this little microcosm develop.

It’s been a long time since any game has kept me up until 3 in the morning. Not everyone will have the stamina to get past the interface and appearance of Dwarf Fortress and give it a serious go. But those who do will be rewarded with a game that has depth beyond their most optimistic expectations.

Dwarf Fortress is availble — for free — from Bay 12 Games.

Richard Hammond

I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to take a quick moment to say that Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond who has been seriously injured in a jet-powered car crash, is in our thoughts today. Our hopes go out to him and his family.

Top Gear might be my favorite show on TV right now. I certainly enjoy their wild stunt segments, many of which Hammond hosts. I’ve always thought that they were stunts that looked more dangerous than they were. Evidently, I was wrong. I think I speak for all the fans of the show when I say that I’d give up those segments forever with no regrets if it means that Hammond’s two daughters, Isabella and Willow, can have their daddy back safe and sound.

If you’re so inclined, donate a few dollars online to Yorkshire Air Ambulance in his name.

You’d think, since I’m always bossing people around and telling them what booze to drink, that I’d have strong opinions on Margaritas and tequila. After all, I have already written booze-snob instructions on how to make the perfect daiquiri.

But here’s the thing: I don’t really know anything about tequila.

This lack of knowledge probably stems from university traumas. Sure, sure, I’ve heard people talk about “sipping tequilas,” but I was more familiar with what I call “gulping tequilas.” Or, to be perfectly accurate, “puking tequilas.”

Despite that, I’ve done a little research and can say a few things about margaritas. They’re probably all wrong, but if you were looking for sober reflection and informed opinion, you wouldn’t be reading a weblog, now, would you?

The canonical Margarita recipe is simple:

• 2 parts tequila
• 2 parts lime juice
• 1 part Cointreau

For the tequila, the only thing that really matters is that it be 100% blue agave. I settled on the Cuervo Tradiçional, a reposado, as giving a good flavor at a very reasonable price — about $20. In talking to tequila snobs, I’ve discovered that José Cuervo eats wolf babies and grinds up cute little bunnies for fun, and all of his alcohol is terrible and I’m a bad person for using it. But I stand by it as a reasonable choice for someone who doesn’t want to spend $50 on a bottle of tequila for mixing. It has a nice tang, and doesn’t have the attenuated, breathless taste that the bottom-end tequilas have.

I took the recommendation of a friend and also invested in a bottle of El Tesoro añejo, which ran me about $45 (note to faithful Tea Leaves readers: thanks for reading the google ads that appear on these articles, since they are funding my drinking. I’m not sure what my liver thinks about all this, though.) The El Tesoro was interesting — very smoky and full bodied. I liked drinking it neat, but it seemed wasteful in my Experimental Top Shelf Margarita. The smokiness was lost, and it wasn’t quite as bold in the mix as the younger reposado. So I’ll stick to the Tradiçional for mixing until I get a more economical good recommendation.

For the orange liqueur, use Cointreau. Using Grand Marnier is both wasteful of an excellent liqueur that should be drunk on its own, and it doesn’t really give the right tang to the drink. I actually tend to be somewhat generous with the Cointreau — my ratio is more like 3:2 tequila to Cointreau. Don’t use triple sec. It lacks joie-de-vivre.

A word about limes. The type of lime you use will have a major impact on the drink. When I have very bitter and sour limes, I tend to use less; when I have sweet and lemony-tasting limes, I tend to use more. I haven’t tried this with key limes yet, but given that my key lime daiquiris were much better than my persian lime daiquiris, I have high hopes.

Shake over ice. Pour into a glass. Drink. Post your results here after having a few glasses.

Today at lunch, Pete was talking about how he had bought a house in Oblivion and how he had amused himself for a few minutes collecting things to put into the house. He had found the odd trophy, various books, but of course no candles.

Item collection is a dominant gameplay mechanic in almost every major genre of video game fantasy. We collect coins, clothes, money, weapons, health packs, experience points, gay porn cards, magic items, racing medals, houses, pets, keys, and plants. The list is too long to complete.

I think it’s no surprise that collection is such a major form of gameplay. After all, gamers themselves have an in-built compulsion to collect things in the real world, so it’s obvious that they would be attracted to the same kind of behavior in virtual worlds.

It is also no surprise that there are entire games which, when you get down to it, are about nothing but collecting. Animal Crossing and The Sims are the prime examples of these “sandbox collecting” games.

But, what about all the other games? Why is it that while you are saving the world, you find yourself needing to stop off to pick up that purple velvet suit of +5 speed, or that nice gay porn card which you can trade for a magic dress?

Often, the items are just a different way to keep score. Rather than the more mundane and abstract accumulation of “points”, the player instead accumulates something that is more like an actual concrete object, like money, or zombie heads. It’s amazing how compelling even the simplest collection mechanic can be. Just think about the “brain” levels in Robotron, where you would risk throwing away a whole quarter’s worth of lives just to collect a couple more of the pink humans.

The next logical step is to tie the collection of objects to actual progress in the game. Platform games, for example, will often require you to collect a certain number of widgets to clear a stage. Or, you might have to rescue a certain number of humans to progress to the next mission.

In these settings, collecting can also be a smokescreen for the in-built linearity in the game. You really can’t do anything but progress from area A to B to C, but along the way you have to do a lot of “free” exploration in the name of finding the required number of coins.

Other games allow you to trade in what you have collected. Here is how it goes: you walk into an area, you defeat some enemies, the enemies turn into money. You can then use the money to buy things that allow you to defeat more powerful enemies and get more money. And the game goes on. This is just the ever-increasing R in a different form.

This pattern is everywhere. In action games like Devil May Cry or God of War you get Orbs which you use to upgrade your abilities and weapons. In Resident Evil 4, when the zombies die, they leave money and items behind. In Zelda, you chop stuff up and it turns into money, or healing potions, or magic points, or hearts. In racing games, you win races for medals and money, and use these things to progress in your “career” and buy new cars and upgrades for cars. In Madden you collect bonus points that you can trade for cards that let you cheat. And, of course, in Lego Star Wars you blow stuff up, collect the lego blocks, and trade them in for various unlockables.

But, of all the genres, the RPG, and in particular the so-called “Western” RPG takes collecting the most seriously. Where other games conveniently make their treasure big and shiny and easy to find, Western RPGs make you scour entire dungeons for a meager few coins and piles of dirty clothes.

Consider the typical encounter in one of the most widely acclaimed RPGs of all time: Knights of the Old Republic. You have been tipped off that 4 beasts of great power are hanging out in a nondescript square room. You approach the room. You spend five minutes in the menu system turning on all your armor and various force powers. You dive into the room and vanquish your foes with your overwhelming tactical advantages. As a reward, the game then makes you

1. Walk up to each of the dead bodies, hit A, find out that they are carrying a few bones.

2. Walk around the room to each of 5 barrels of identical construction (sometimes the barrels are trunk shaped, or basket-shaped, but they are always the same).

3. One of these will contain money.

4. One of these will contain a useful item or two.

5. Two of these will be empty. The other one will be locked, and require you to either win a roll of the dice to open it or play some lock-opening mini-game. Then you’ll find out that it’s empty.

Oblivion puts you through a similar level of torture. As an added twist, your four pieces of copper will often be in a hole you can’t see because you are in a cave with no light! What fun!

You are then left to consider that without all this useless looting, the game might take half as long to play. But wait, there is more.

Half the time, the game won’t even give you money. It will give you some item that you already have, but which you must schlep around until you can find some store in which you can sell it for some tiny amount money. In other words, not only is the game insulting you skimpy rewards, it makes you do an extra level of indirect work to collect on them.

The Japanese RPG, in general, handles this better. You beat up some thugs and the game just drops money and stuff you will actually use right into your pocket. Your pocket also tends to be infinitely large, which is another great feature. This is because the only thing more boring than selling stuff in a game’s store is the inventory management required to get the stuff to the store. Finally, when the game does make you open a chest, it’s hardly ever locked or empty.

My suggestion to game designers, and especially RPG designers, is this. After each encounter, I should be able to hit the A button and have everything in the room that I can collect instantly turn into money. Then I can trade the money for whatever I want.

Of course, if you actually made this improvement, it would lead to howls of rejection from the hard core simulationist RPG contingent. These are the people who think it’s fun to go to an in-game weight room and do “curls” to increase their character’s strength. This is “fun” because it is so “realistic”. No amount of tedious busywork is too much for them. Faced with this streamlining, they will undoubtedly fill the Internet with forum posts about how your game is a stupid dumbed down sell-out to the mass market.

Don’t listen to them. The rest of us are all tired of running around looking into empty barrels and locked chests. We want move on to something more interesting, to see the next dungeon, or explore the forest that is on the other side of that hill. It would be a shame if your game kept us from that because we were stuck in a cave looking for those candles we accidentally dropped because the +5 Sword of Flensing was too heavy for us to carry back to town. Those candles were gonna look great on Pete’s fireplace. But now they are lost forever.

Issue #11 of Played.toDeath magazine is out, and the PDF can be downloaded here.

My contributions in this issue include:

• Retrograde: Fool’s Errand, a review written to celebrate the fact that it is perfectly clear that The Fool and His Money (Hi! I’m True Believer #14) will never, ever, ever be released. (page 12)
• Indiescene: Deadly Rooms of Death, a nifty Sokoban-like puzzle game for Mac, Windows, and Linux, available from Caravel Games (page 10)
• A review of Glory of the Roman Empire (page 48)

There’s lots of other good stuff, too, including a review of one of my favorite SNES games, Earthbound. Check it out.

Against all odds, there are now two good games on the Xbox 360 that are not called Oblivion. The games are just well executed and fun. They are small and simple pleasures in a sea of large scale next-gen complexity.

The two games are Table Tennis and Lego Star Wars.

Table Tennis comes from Rockstar games, of GTA fame. The game is pretty simple. You make a character, you play in tournaments. When you win, you can buy clothes. When you lose, you play over again until you win.

The “tennis” part of the game is pretty easy. To return shots you hit one of the four buttons on the gamepad which will spin the ball one of four ways. You can also try to place the ball using the left stick as you hit it. In theory you should use the various spins to counter the spin on the ball as it is hit to you. This part of the simulation was not that true to life though. It’s not that hard, for example, to hit top spin against backspin, even though in real life that’s a tricky shot.

You play matches against a series of characters, each of whom has a well defined and almost predictable style. One may hit the ball impossibly fast, but have no way to deal with repeated returns and soft shots. Another might not have as much power, but very good spin and accuracy of placement. You task is to figure out how to use the shots available to you against the opponent until you can win easily. It’s like a simple fighting game, but without the weird moves that require dozens of button presses. This makes it easy to pick up and play, especially if you are old and slow.

What stands out about this game is not the depth of the gameplay or the volume of the content. What is fun is the surreal presentation Long rallies are rewarded with thumpy techno music and off-beat lighting effects. It’s ping pong on a dance floor. This game would be at its best head to head with two human players, and the online should be fun, but I could not actually find anyone to play with, so I can’t say. Too bad.

Lego Star Wars 2 is also a great game to play with two controllers. I played the first one on the PS2 with my son, who was really too young to know what was going on, but loved watching Lego people fall off cliffs.

The sequel recreates the same design sense and off-beat humor as the first game, but follows the narrative arc of the good movies. Lego Jedi wielding light sabers just doesn’t get old, unless you are thinking about it too hard, like this guy.

The Xbox 360 renders the shiniest Lego Blocks yet seen in a video game. There are depth of field effects, particle effects, reflection effects and explosion effects, all of which are enough to create occasional frame rate problems. They took a game where the characters are low-res Lego Blocks and made it slow on a machine with so much CPU and GPU power that it can melt lesser TV stands. Truly we live in retarded times.

This sort of idiocy aside, you have to pick up this game. There is a lot to do, and many reasons to run around with your Lego person and swing a light saber. You can even record your achievements on Xbox Live. I’m looking forward to the free play as Darth Vader, who truly comes into his own as a character when rendered as black Lego blocks.

In 1986, a girl fell through the skylight of a building at Carnegie-Mellon. She had been drinking on the roof with her friends, and lost her balance. On the way down she straddled a water pipe, which broke her fall and probably saved her life. She hit the ground pretty hard, and was knocked out.

When the ambulance arrived and the paramedics started to move her, she regained consciousness. She opened her eyes and said, very groggily, “Are you from Capri Pizza? You must be, because you’re slow and stupid.”

I never heard what happened to the girl after that — I like to think that she perished in a freak eyeliner accident — but the incident stuck in my head because it reminds me that anyone will eat lousy pizza, if it’s cheap enough and the pizza place delivers

Most people have never had great pizza. Most people like pizza that sucks. So I’m going to give you a brief guide to great pizza, what makes it great, and how to find it.

Typically when a foodie talks about pizza, they’ll rant about Napoli, and how the pizza there is transcendent and delicate, “totally unlike anything you’ve had before.” These are damnable lies. Pizza, as everyone intelligent knows, was invented in New York. Pizza in Napoli is a different thing entirely. Napoli is a fascinating city. It is crowded, filthy, beautiful, dangerous, and decadent. Apparently as some sort of apology for that whole Pompeii thing, the Gods have blessed Napoli with the best soil in the entire universe. The produce from the area around Napoli is better than anything you have ever tasted in your life, especially if you’re used to anemic California vegetables.

In Napoli, you can go to the dingiest vegetable stall in the city, pick up a tomato, and eat it like an apple. They’re that good.

So when people try to make Napoli-style pizza here, they usually fail. Because we’re not in Napoli, and we don’t have those damn tomatoes. So let’s be clear: good pizza in the States is a different sort of thing.

There are two attributes that make up a good pizza: texture and taste. Here are two simple tests to help describe what they should be like:

Texture – You should be able to pick up a slice, folded, in one hand, without the entire thing breaking and pointing downwards. Only the first bite is allowed to droop.

Taste – truly great pizza doesn’t need any toppings beyond cheese and sauce.

That second point is key. Take a moment the next time you’re about to order a pizza. Ask yourself “How would I feel if instead of getting a pepperoni-mushroom pizza, I just got a plain cheese pizza?” If you feel excited, happy, or at least OK with the idea, you may be ordering from a good pizza place. If you feel vaguely disappointed and sad, you should hang up the phone and find a different place. You might think this is a matter of taste, but it actually isn’t; your body has tiny structures called Langerhans cells that emit certain chemicals when they anticipate contact with bad pizza. By meditating on the primordial cheese pizza you are allowing your subconcious to open up to the messages these cells are sending. Listen to your subconcious. Stop eating bad pizza.

I’m not saying, by the way, that you should never eat pizza with things on it. I’m just saying that if a place doesn’t make good cheese pizza, they don’t make good pizza-with-other-stuff-on-it, either. Just make sure you don’t put so many toppings on the pizza that you cause it to violate the texture rule. Pizza shouldn’t be eaten with a fork. You have to be able to one-hand it.

My description of the proper texture, above, is intended to be a rule of thumb. There’s a special case, however, that is worthy of attention. I call it the Detachable Cheese problem, and it’s a guaranteed detector of bad pizza. Great pizza has the three elements (bread, cheese, and sauce) in perfect harmony. When cooked correctly it all merges, along with the toppings, and sticks together until you bite into it. Bad pizza has too much sauce and too much cheese. What happens to these pizzas is the sauce forms into a little lake, and the cheese seals it in. The overall effect is that the cheese is floating on the sauce like a duck on a pond, so you take one bite of the pizza and the entire inch-thick solid layer of cheese slides off the slice like a hockey puck. It’s a true tragedy.

You can also divine a little bit about a place from their topping selection, although this is closer to phrenology, and not always reliable. My two guidelines that I feel comfortable sharing are: good pizza places have anchovies, and good pizza places don’t use breakfast sausage on their sausage pizzas.

Pizza in Pittsburgh

Turning to our local market, we can apply these principles to find the best pizza in town. My personal favorite is Sorrento’s on Atwood Street (currently in the process of a rename to “Pizza Roma Sorrento’s”, apparently — but it’s the same owner). Sorrento’s is the ideal pizza in nearly every way. The crust is thin. The bread tastes good. The sauce is yummy. They don’t use too much cheese. It’s inexpensive. You can one hand it. And their plain cheese pizza is great. They have a nice selection of toppings. Their sausage is especially interesting; they cut it like pepperoni instead of crumbling it chopped-meat style, and it’s quite good. If you can only get pizza from one place in town, get it from Sorrento’s.

Squirrel Hill has a few pizza places with cult followings, for reasons I’ve never been able to discern. Most people’s favorite is Mineo’s, which is more proof that people have no taste, because Mineo’s is terrible. I’ve never had a pie from Mineo’s that didn’t suffer from the Detachable Cheese problem. If I’m in Squirrel Hill and need a slice, I’ll usually go to Napoli’s. They’re not actually great, but they get the texture right, they’re consistent and somewhat reliable, and I like their red sauce, which goes a long way.

If you’re in the Strip district, stop by Piccolo Forno next to La Prima. This is the perfect compromise between “authentic Napoli pizza” and the New York style we know and love; ask for one with spicy green olives on it, and you’re in heaven. Other people rave about Regina Margherita, but they suffer from the Not Actually In Napoli problem I outlined above. His technique may be flawless, but the end product just doesn’t gel.

The Thing About The Vinnie Pie

The other local pizza tradition is to crow about Vincent’s Pizza, home of the fabled “Vinnie Pie.” This is a monstrosity born of hell. A Vinnie pie is approximately the size of a small fawn, and has the consistency of gloopy beef stew on the inside, but makes up for it by being nicely burnt on the outside. A typical Vinnie pie is a structural mess, with several cups of grease pooled in the middle, eating through the box and the table underneath. Vinnie himself is a local legend, 300 pounds of heart disease and moustache, giving rise to the claim that the pizza tastes better when Vinnie accidentally drops some cigar ashes into the pie.

Here’s the thing about the Vinnie pie: it isn’t good pizza. Here’s the other thing about the Vinnie pie: it’s actually a pretty good whatever-it-actually-is. So enjoy it without guilt. Just make sure you have your health insurance is paid up, and don’t tell me it’s the “best pizza in town.”

In case there’s anyone else out there who wants to play this game, here’s how I got it working on my MacBook Pro running Boot Camp. Thanks to the various commenters who made suggestions and helped convince me to not give up.

(1) Install from the CD. The cut-down version on the-underdogs isn’t good enough. The game is cheap. Buy it.

(2) You can install daemon tools and make a virtual disc image if you don’t want to keep the disc in the drive.

(3) Patch the game to version 2.3

(4) Apply the Windows NT fix.

(5) Put the line “safe_texture_manager” in shock.cfg

(6) Start the game.

(7) When you reach the main menu, alt-tab back to the desktop. Bring up the task manager. Click on “processes”, right-click on “SHOCK2.EXE”, and choose “set affinity”. Set the game to run on only one CPU. There is a “multithreading patch” that people claim solves this same problem, but it didn’t work for me.

It’s that last step that seems to make the big difference.

Once you’ve got it up and running well, consider applying some of the texture map enhancements to improve the graphics.

For any other game, I’d say this wasn’t worth the hassle. I’ll explain later in the week why it’s worth it for this one.