Playing Spore?

You know you are. We know you are. Look for us under the handle "DonGusano". If you friend us, our creatures will appear at random to be your mortal enemies, allies, and pets.

DG's are the ones with eyes in inappropriate places that he insists are NOT penis creatures. Mine are red and/or have too many legs.

Enjoy.

The Sad, Sad Face of an Academic Game Addict: Traveler IQ Challenge, reviewed

I don't play computer games. Why? They are addictive. Correction: I would be an addict. So I made a promise to myself in college (when I saw my buddies slipping in classes due to computer games) that I would stick to paper-and-pencil gaming.

But a map quiz isn't a game, right? Right?!

The TripAdvisor "Traveler IQ Challenge" on Facebook is totally addictive. For me. Which is sad. But since it is obvious I'm never going to be great at this game (although I AM in the top 400 for the quiz of my own regional specialty, thank you very much!) I will take the academic way out.

I will critique it.

Stop laughing.

The game is based on a standard projection world map. Names of places are flashed at the top of the screen, and you are timed on how fast and how close you can click to the location. Points are awarded and you get a score. You have to score a minimum on each level to continue to the next.

There are some obvious critiques for this game, no doubt made elsewhere. The map is too small, which means that Belize is barely visible and Easter Island doesn't appear at all. Locations have to be given a single point, which means large features like Lake Titicaca are marked for scoring purposes with a single point. There's no credit for knowing that Easter Island is in the Pacific far west of Chile, or knowing merely that a city is somewhere in China -- scoring is all based on distance and time.

My deeper critique has to do with the use of the standard projection map. Sure, it's the one we all grew up with. It's the one we consulted to learn where Timbuktu actually was and such. But it is an inherently skewed vision of the world, where the equator is 2/3 of the way down the page, Greenland is disproportionately huge, and the southern hemisphere is unnaturally condensed.

When I worked in Central America I was introduced to the Peter's Projection Map, which corrects these problems. It has been criticized -- what hasn't? -- but it sure does make the world look very different. My colleague told me he liked it better because his nation looked bigger. It does, but so does everything in the south. As it should. Africa is huge.

What does this mean for my addictive map quiz? Because you are judged on how "far" you click from the actual location -- in terms of miles in real space -- mistakes made in the southern hemisphere (where there are more miles per pixel) are punished disproportionately. This does mean that to do well in this game you need to know where Swaziland and Montevideo actually are; you can't guess as well as you can with locations in Macedonia, which barely covers more than a couple of pixels anyway.

Nevertheless, one's attempts look more accurate in the southern hemisphere because the distance on the screen is far less. Perhaps there is a hidden irony here -- we North Atlantic types usually think we mostly understand the rest of the world until it comes back to bite us in the ass.

Now if you'll excuse me... I have a top score to beat.

It's always zombie season here...

A few months ago I got a new computer.

This means that I can now play all the new games that came out 2 years ago. Don't be silly. The games that come out this year require far too much computing power.

It makes for an interesting insight into what must be very hard to program, moderately hard to program, and so forth. For instance, mirrors must be very difficult. You're more likely to find a mirror in the house of a self-conscious acne-plagued vampire than in a first person shooter. Bullet holes are moderate. Given how much shooting goes on in shooters, you might have thought this would have been solved already. But either they don't make holes, or the holes disappear after a while (which looks really weird when you see it happening).

But what must be virtually impossible to do is deviate at all from the script of the stupid FPS genre. Every damn one of them, since the start of the genre, uses the same elements. Start off by fighting "soldiers." Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them (insect soldiers in Halo, for instance), but they all do the same thing. Run around, hide, and shoot at you. After you get tired of slaughtering them for a while, add in zombies. Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them. (mutants in Far Cry, demons in Doom, etc.), but they all do the same thing. Run up and try to bite you. Then, do combos (soldiers and zombies together! zombies busting out of a closet! soldiers fighting zombies!) Finally, you'll need a boss fight. Of course, if you don't want to use zombies, you can always use Nazis. Ain't nobody like no Nazis.

You'd think that if the companies could spend $1 million getting their engine to push polygons 3% faster and shade their pixels 3% better, they could spend 100 bucks to come up with a new form. But the best anyone has come up with (aside from Thief, which is now probably so old that only net Gomers like myself remember it) is to make cosmetic changes to what is essentially the same game.

Is it the Hollywood problem? People are now sinking so much into these games, that they'd rather make an uninspired but profitable sequel? Is it an open contempt for the consumers (who, granted, are usually profane 10 year olds playing in an internet cafe and screaming obscenities at each other). Is it just what consumers really want?

--- supplemental rant follows ---

Oh, good, another jumping puzzle. That's just what I want in my shooters. Give me a character who can jump one, and only one distance; force me to jump on a series of improbably placed objects over a deadly chasm. They lack the kinetic joy of movement and balance, and they are generally frustrating as hell because the controls for jumping are usually an afterthought in a game that is, let's face, all about firearmy carnage. But they ALL have them. They're e-syphilis.