Tea Leaves

As something of a test, we’ve set up a web forum, here. If you’re a regular reader, please consider registering and trying it out.

We’re not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there’s enough of a community that’s interested in using it. The choice is yours.

One of the strangest games you’ve probably never played is Princess Maker. Ostensibly a parenthood simulator, Princess Maker is yet another male attempt to define, categorize, understand, objectify, and, ultimately, dominate teenage girls: reduce a girl to a finite state machine that can be told what to do, and command her to become the ideal woman. Make the right decisions, and your “daughter” will become a princess, or perhaps, if she’s Jewish, a doctor. Make the wrong decisions, and she works as a tavern wench or whore.

Princess Maker 2

The psychosexual aspect of this is, needless to say, fascinating (you should see some of the pictures I decided to not embed as representing Princess Maker) but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Rather, I want to talk about the mechanics of the game: at its heart, Princess Maker is a scheduling game. There are so many days in a month, there are countless potential activities, and you can bully your adopted daughter into engaging in just 2 activities per month. Those activities will increase or decrease her abilities, or her stress (or, of course, her weight). The core of the game is deciding how she spends her time.

In Japan, the game is one of the forebears of the Hentai game. In these games, you schedule a protagonist’s time, engage in some branching dialogue, and inevitably your character has sex with 5 or so girls (or boys) along the way (SomethingAwful’s Rich Kyanka nicknames one game’s girls as “Smarty”, “Sporty”, “Youngy”, “Angryy”, and “Sicky”. These five will be in every hentai game. You’ll see.)

Hentai games never really took off in a big way in the United States, which I think is proof that perhaps things here aren’t quite as bad as they could be. But using scheduling as a game mechanic is something that American game developers have been trying recently, in a different setting: rock band games.

Today a short basketball rumination and tutorial. With the Celtics in a serious playoff run for the first time since I was in college (yes, they made the East Finals in 2002, but that doesn’t count because even if they won they’d have been crushed by the Spurs or whoever) I’ve been watching some NBA basketball on TV lately. One thing I have come to realize is that I’m really tired of watching the pick and roll.

I was a bit skeptical of Mass Effect so I didn’t pick it up until I found it at the Exchange at something of a discount. I called Pete, “Is Mass Effect worth $40?”. He said he thought it was. I’m not going to say he’s a liar. Reasonable people can disagree about these things. I thought that the experience started out slow, had a slow middle, and ended, well, slow.

Everyone has their favorite pans. Mine are restaurant-style aluminum non-stick pans. I’ve used these for years, generally just buying another one when the coating on whichever one I had started to go south. The pans are durable (except for the coatings) and perfect for lazy people like me who don’t like cleaning frying pans. They are also really good for cooking eggs. Always important.

It’s a rule of this weblog that we don’t post bare “Hey, look at this” links. I’m breaking that rule for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) story of a man who introduced his ailing mother to Animal Crossing.

I think the major conundrum when describing GTAIV is the conflict between the intrinsic and extrinsic narratives in the game. For the purpose of this note, the extrinsic narrative is the one that the player has no control over: backmatter, non-interactive cut-scenes, the story that is imposed by the authors from on high. The intrinsic narrative (also usually called the emergent) is the one that the player imposes on the system, the text he creates through his own interaction with this virtual playground.

Several years ago, with the help of Lidia’s restaurant we organized a tasting of Italian amari - bitter digestifs. It was a fabulous event, both informative and fun, and we immensely enjoyed writing about it in this space.

It was so much fun, in fact, that we decided to do another group tasting. This time, however, we chose a spirit from a little closer to home: Tequila.

In case you’re wondering where tonight’s post is, my Mario Kart Wii code is 1032-1807-7532. See you on the track.

Here’s how it works:

1. Previews of GTA IV appear in every magazine and weblog on the internet. Afraid of being attacked by mobs bearing torches and pitchforks, they universally give it 10/10, 5 stars, whatever the rating is that means “Jesus has returned to earth in the form of a videogame.”
2. Everyone buys GTA IV, including all of your 12 year old cousins.
3. Eventually, you give in to the hype and buy it too.
4. At this point, you realize that the “innovative” gameplay all of the reviewers in Step 1 talked about is, in fact, nothing more than the exact same gameplay from the past 5 games, only now with more pixels.
5. After about a week, you put the game down and never play it again.

Lather, rinse, and repeat with whatever other hit titles our corporate masters want to sell you in a given month.

I suppose people are probably expecting me to tear into the ethics behind GTA IV. I’ve certainly done the same with respect to other games. This time, I won’t bother for a few reasons. First, I haven’t played the game, and have no intention of playing the game. Second, and more importantly other people are making the argument for me, which I take to be a very healthy sign.

The more interesting question, to me, is: should I pick up Mario Kart for the Wii?