AP52?
Well, I think we can declare this blog somnolent, if not dead. Do we want to make it go again, and if so:
a) why?
b) how?
c) how long?
it’s been a while, baby
Hi, guys. It is: not Saturday. It is also not several weeks ago, which is when I was supposed to be writing some stuff.
But whatever, here’s my blog post, it is about food, check me out.
(I have been moving, and working, and busy all the time. Also I have no internets, except borrowed work USB 3G adaptor internets, which is not so fast as one would hope for, for internets usage in the modern age)
Today I am cooking two things, and neither of them are being cooked on my bbq.
“What!?” some of you might say, making good use of the interrobang, “not on the BBQ?! Madness!”. I mean, actually probably only Heather would say this, because she is probably the only one who is aware that, since Rudd Money Day I have had a BBQ and I have cooked something on it every day since. I mean, this is only like three days at this point but three days BBQ in a row is still pretty epic.
But today it is raining, and I cannot be bothered going outside in the rain to cook things, when I can just cook them inside.
Also they’re both a bit easier to do inside for various reasons.
Here is thing one:
Speck and Potatoes in Peach Sauce
Basically, you get some speck, from your butcher/smokehouse/franklins. You also get some small potatoes. You get a cast iron cooking vessel with a lid, or any other cooking vessel with a lid you have that will go in an oven. You put some brandymel, if you have it, and some peach juice, in the vessel, along with the speck and the potatoes. You jam a fork in the potatoes a couple times so there’s holes for the delicious peach juice to go into. Then you put it in the oven at about 140 degrees or so.
Later, you take it out, and turn over the potatoes and the speck. Because the peach juice and honeybooze sauce will not have evaporated enough with the lid on, take the lid off and leave it off. Turn the oven up a bit to help evaporate.
Even more later, take the potatoes out and put them on a plate or something. Smash them up a bit, but not too much, just kind of rough them up. Make sure they know that you were there, you know, and that if they try that shit again, they’ll have to deal with you. Punch them in the snout to establish superiority.
Once you’ve got a beaten up but still recognisable potato, put some butter and white pepper on the top of it, and put it back in the cooking vessel. Do this until you have no potatos which are not in your cooking vessel.
Later, the juice+honeybooze should have reduced to a thickish sauceish thing. This will also have delicious flavours of delicious speck in it. Relish it, people. The potatoes will be moist and tender, but where you beat them up and covered them with butter and pepper, they will be crispycrunchy and delicious.
As I write this I am somewhere between beating the potatoes up and the sauce being reduced enough to count as a sauce. But I know it will be delicious because the sauce already tastes delicious, the potatoes cannot fail to be delicious, and speck is basically GIANT SIZED BACON, so how is there a problem there?
I might provide photos later, but probably I won’t, because a) I haven’t taken any, b) it’s not going to look that pretty.
But it will be delicious, that is for damn sure.
The other thing I am cooking is:
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork
Getcherself a crock pot. If you do not have a crock pot, do not make this recipie. Unless you have a BBQ you can get to sit at really quite low temperatures reliably for hours and hours and hours on end.
if (crockpot){
Get a big chunk of pork, for roasting. I got a way-too-large bit of pork leg, with the bone in it still, because that was all I could get from my shops at the time. Then I cut it in half and froze the bone half, and used the non-bone half.
Get some spices and stuff if you’re into that, and some nice sea-salt. Rub the spices and sea-salt into the pork roast, giving it as even and complete a coverage as you can. This doesn’t really matter but it makes you look like a pro. …Fessional. Chef Guy.
Put the big chunk of meat in the crock pot, then cover it with BBQ sauce. I would personally recommend to anyone that, instead of plain old BBQ sauce, you use this stunning example of condiment engineering, as, really, it’s the best thing ever.
Also put in some water, and other stuff if you think it will help the FLAVOUR FORCE or whatever flavour-rating system you use. In my crock pot was: a bunch of the worcestershire steak sauce, some celtic sea salt (fancy!), some woolworths all-purpose seasoning (surprisingly efficacious!), and some white pepper. I think that is probably all.
Then turn the crock pot on to low and leave it alone for ten hours.
Ten hours, at least!
Actually you could probably succeed ok after 5 or 6, but making this overnight seems easier.
This is the stage I am up to now. Tomorrow, in the morning, I will, using my hands and a fork, rip the pork to shreds. Then I will put the porkshreds back in the crockpot with the bbq sauce/water/etc juice, and smoosh it around a bit. Then I will take some of that and put it in a frypan, fry it up, then put it on a breadroll with some smoked cheddar cheese, and eat the goddamn hell out of it.
Then I will put the rest in the fridge, and go to work.
It’ll be great.
}
Hopefully, by next week, I will have proper internets, and less crazy stuff going on, so I should be ready to get back into DISCIPLINE again.
DISCIPLINE
Cyberexpression through images
I know I was meant to do a post on travel, but I will save that for later. Today, I want to talk about how people on the internet use images to express themselves in new and unique ways.
Throughout human history, auditory literacy has been widespread. Not being able to read or write was common, and the written word was usually reserved for the upper echelons of society. In the latter half of the twentieth century, people’s visual literacy was increasing quite dramatically – movies, advertising and television were opting for a highly visual, rather than dense text- or auditory-based method of communication.
The internet, however, is primarily text-based. Still, people manage to use the images of the real world to express themselves online, making use of the higly visually literate audience. A picture of a face or an animal can convey an emotion far more convincingly than any emoticon, and can even help drive a point home.
I’ve delved into my stock of pictures, and I thought I’d share them with you!
First stop, pointing out failure.
The best way to win an argument:
…and its variants:
…or winning through absurdity:
…to expressing surprise:
…and using TV clips to drive your point home:
…calling out trolls:
…or congratulating them:
…a desire for more:
…or less:
…laughing at others:
…getting angry:
…or laughing at another’s stupidity:
…celebrating good content:
…feeling overwhelmed with awesome:
…to making fun of another’s posting style:
…using a mix of themes to emphasise the intended expression:
…celebrating:
…and calling others out on their newbie cryfaces:
…more animal/emoticon confluence:
…and a congratulatory applause from the internet’s favourite anarchist:
I can’t help it – I adore the use of .gif and .jpeg to enhance and enrich my online experience, both in my own expression and the creation of a culture.
Travelhopes!
I got a lot of travel done when I was growing up. Every 3 years my dad would whisk us off to wherever he was spending his 7 month Sabbatical/Study Leave. In this time he would usually take us to live in parts of the UK or North America with good University Libraries and Theological Colleges so that he could work on his books while escaping his normal teaching/marking/preaching duties. I was also lucky enough to visit loads of places in Europe and Asia on the way to and from the UK/US. I’ve lived in Cambridge, Sheffield (UK) and Vancouver(Canada) and visited Beijing, Bangkok, Rome, Brussels, Munich/Bavaria (castle!), London, Hawaii, Belfast, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Innsbruck … I think that’s all of them… Another post from me will be about the best travel/holiday experiences I’ve had and why. Cos there’s a bunch to say about that!
So, to a large extent I’ve been spared the travel bug that seems to have hit the majority of my fellow twenty-somethings throughout their uni years. I love seeing the world, but I was OK to wait for a few years while I studied before going for it again. I can understand the urgency for everyone else, but I think it’s been a good thing that I’ve not been absolutely dying to travel over the past six years, because I’ve had absolutely no opportunity to!
As for the future, travel is finally starting to look like a real possibility.
Melbourne has been calling me for as long as I can remember. That was really stirred up by Heather’s post about all the good food, shops and cultural attractions they’ve got down there! Being a native to Newtown, and now having lived in Surry Hills for so long, I’m so in love with cafe culture, restaurants, bars, beaches, museums, art galleries, concerts, plays, bakeries, markets, and clothes/shoe shops. I’m such a city girl! And I hear Melbourne is the best city in Australia for all those kinds of things. So, Andrew and I are planning a Melbourne Honeymoon!
Andrew and I have also had serious discussions about moving to England for part of Andrew’s PhD/ Post Doc study. He and I would really love to live there for a while. It’d be really good for his career as an Academic, and it’s easy for Aussie Physios to get work over there. I love the idea of really shaking things up and exploring a new city/country together. Staying anywhere for too long freaks me out a little, and we’ve been here for 5 years! Also, I see the next couple of years as a time for us to be young adults, with spending money, and without kids. I want to live it up a little!
We’d also really love to visit Japan, and have talked to Ingrid and Alan about maybe going there with them or visiting them there someday. I find Japan’s culture fascinating. In a way that makes me want to check it out but never, EVER live there. It has some really disturbing stuff (work/gender roles), some intricate customs (sake pouring, tea ceremonies, art, food prep), and some awesomely entertaining youth culture things (I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about here lol). I think it would be such an eye-opener, and incredible fun.
I, myself, am very interested in visiting some areas around Launceston, Tasmania because my Aboriginal Ancestor came from there. His family line is very well documented, his daughter having married into a very wealthy and influential white family whose home is now a museum. I plan to talk more about this in a futurpost after I have read more about the history and/or visited the place.
At some point in the future, I plan to go to a Third World country to work as a volunteer Physio. Apparently the volunteer agencies ARE looking Physios to send over along with the nurses and doctors. I suppose, the main reason I wanted to be a Physio was to help people who really need help. That’s why I want to work in a hospital, not a private practice. That’s why I like Intensive Care and Stroke Rehab more than working with knees and shoulders. This would be a really good way to do that. I think I would appreciate the perspective I would gain from it, and knowing that what I’m doing day to day is worth it. I would also really love to explore whichever place I’m sent to, and find out more about it’s culture and history.
Last of all… my other dream locations: Fiji (over water bungalo), Egypt (ancient historical sites), Venice (ALL), New Zealand (mountains and skiing).
History’s runners-up
I have a feeling I’m probably a bit too oblivious for most travel. I’m reasonably alert, given coffee or an amphetamine-flavoured substitute; I have a grounding in a number of romance languages, I can put on a surprising burst of speed if menaced by thugs, and I’m reasonably sure I can hide things in my anal cavity, given 5 minutes and two condoms. So I’m likely to make it through an airport terminal relatively unscathed – but I do worry about what I’d actually gain from the trip. It’s a vicious circle, in fact – I’m worried that I’d be so concerned to make the most of it that I’d cram too much “important stuff” in, and miss getting the feel of the place, or meeting the locals. Or that I’d avoid doing anything at all to preclude that problem, and wind up sitting in a blisteringly hot hotel room, waiting daytime soaps on peseta-per-view.
Apparently great TV, not worth the airfare.
So it’d have to be somewhere that doesn’t have too much “stuff”, but not none, either. Because, really, wilderness is just another word for “no-one could be arsed to tidy”, isn’t it? So Rome’s out. The Grand Canyon’s out. No Beijing – too busy, no Kenya – not busy enough. Unless you’re in the private security sector. What I’m really looking for is an area that never really “made it”, world-dominationally speaking, but at least had a bit of a crack. Looked like it was going somewhere at one point, before sputtering to an ignominiousstop. The kind of regime Harry Turtledove might pit against aliens.
So, given those restrictions, I have two excellent alternatives.
The first:
Cartagena
But wait, Spain was like, the biggest empire on earth for a couple of hundred years – that’s a heavyweight champ, not a near-miss! No, further back than that. Cartagena’s name is a distorted clue to its actual origins – originally Carthago Novo (in Phoenician, of course), it was founded by Hamilcar Barca in 228 B.C. to solidify off Carthage’s claim to the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, less than 30 years later, his son, Hannibal, found out that it’s not safe to drive elephants on Italian roads, and the gig was up.
In Cartagena, you can see the remnants of this brief window when the scales of world history were so precariously balanced – before the centre of Western civilisation was cemented with finality, and a dash of mythical salt, on the unlikely Italian peninsula.
But there’s another important way in which the city came off second best. In the 1930’s, Cartagena was on the wrong side of history again, during the Spanish Civil War. The deep water port that had attracted the sea-faring Cathaginians centuries before had made Cartagena the home of Spain’s Mediterranean navy; and it remained loyal to the Republican cause until the bitter end. Cartagena was the last Republican stronghold to surrender to Franco, and suffered some of the most brutal experiments in urban aerial bombardment carried out in the entire war. Thanks to the superbly named Condor Legion for those shennanigans.
Oh, and there’s other cool stuff, too.
Second:
Buenos Aires
Again, Spanish-speaking, but that’s not the connection. During the 19th Century, Latin America was t
he Next Big Thing. After finally clearing up the debris of San Martin’s revolutionaries, having won their freedom, looked to be on the same trajectory as the North Americans – a robust economic balance between urban industrialism and rural slave-run plantations. Agressive expansion into untrammelled wilderness, clever protectionism and open immigration turbocharged their ascent into the ranks of first world economies. But it all went horribly wrong in the 1930’s. Unlike the US, who renewed the social contract with the New Deal, Argentina turned to oligarchism and protectionism, and spent the bulk of the 20th Century at war with its own citizens under a variety of military and civilian regimes.
But so close! From the 1880s to the 1920’s, Argentina considered itself one of the emerging powers of the new world order, and built its capital city on that scale; and in a style both European and American deco. Here’s a few of the best:
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THEME WEEK #2 – Armchair Travel
It is for make places go and stuff. Where say you?
Away.
Engage!
daa-da-da-da, da-da da-da dada, dada, dada, dadadadadadadadaaaa
The above, though you would not recognise it to read it, is a visual representation of the Sonic the Hedgehog (invincibility) theme music. This is an important sound for me, and, though it is not a sound I actually make out loud (unlike the Mario theme, which I will sing or whistle at the drop of a hat), it is often going through my head.
So I was going to write an extension of my last footnote in this post, but then I listened to a lot of sonic music, trying to find the theme I was after, and then it seemed like a good idea to talk about videogame music.
Then I had a great big shitfight with my family and maybe now I’ll do something else.
So!
Castle Adventure!
This is the first videogame I remember playing. I must have played it on several different machines, because I clearly remember playing it in bright green text on a black background, bright orange text on a 8″ monitor, and on our TV, on the Sega Super Control Station 7000:
That sticker, under the IO in station, says $599.00c, which is an absolutely incredible amount, given that this was bought in probably 1985 or something. I have absolutely no idea how my dad managed to afford it. But I do know that now, it is mine, and no-one will take it from me unless they are prepared to give a whole bunch of money!
The SCS is basically unheard of, as a console, so a little history: it was released at about the same time as the Master System, and had basically the same internal hardware, but it came with a GWBASIC compiler built in, so you could use it to program things. Castle Adventure was never one of the games that we had code for, because it wasn’t ever released, but we had a book of 1001 BASIC games, where we’d type in the code, line by line, and make ourselves some games to play.
We also got to learn to program at the same time, though I then forgot all of it and had to re-learn it later.
Castle Adventure, as games go, is pretty shit. You are trapped in the castle, it is full of treasure and monsters, and you need to get out.
Sometimes there’s a hole in the wall in the north east corner, and if you can walk all the way to the front of the castle without the game crashing, for some reason, you win.
Most of the time there is not.
You fight people by pressing the arrow key towards them. However, the key-resend time of the keyboard is usually slower than the clock speed of your computer, so the snake (almost always the first enemy you encounter) will pretty much kill you. The ogre in the throne room will always kill you. This is pretty much unavoidable. This is why I never finished that game.
But it was my first game, as far as I remember. Certainly my first PC game.
We bought a Master System when I was in junior school. I’m not sure what year it was, but we bought it from some friends of ours, and they used the money to buy a Mega Drive. Damnit!
But we had Sonic, and a bunch of other stuff. Sonic is the only one that counts, though.
The decision to buy the Master System was fateful. It was the first time an object contributed to my identity in any way I was aware of – because, see, I had a Sega system, which meant that Sonic was cool, and Mario was a dumb game. Also, that the SNES was rubbish, etc etc.
I played SNES intermittently at friends houses, but I didn’t own one personally until well after they were dead (2002 or something? I found one in Cash Converters for $35 bucks. I still have it, but I don’t know if it works anymore), which meant that I missed out on, basically, the flower of videogame experience, as it happened. The SNES was not a better machine than the Mega Drive, in terms of hardware (well, from memory – I am pretty sure that Sonic 2 on MegaDrive was designed to show off how damn fast their processor was. Can you imagine it, showing processor speed by how fast your main character moves on screen? Madness), but the sheer number of developers pumping out amazing games for it means that, still, to this day, there’s more games on the SNES that I want to play than on any other system.
I should look into a SNES emulator for my DS, actually. That’d be shit hot.
But I missed out on CRPGs in the meantime – all we played were platformers. There might have been a couple of top-down action games, and a few flight sims (G-LOCK, I think I am thinking of), and a puzzler or two (Fantastic Dizzy Adventures!), but there weren’t any RPGs. There weren’t many on the SMS or the MD, especially compared to the SNES – and since they were the SNES’s genre, I couldn’t really be interested in them.
I am not sure that, if I had been a Nintendo kid, not a Sega kid, that I’d have played RPGs anyway. We certainly had the attention span for it, back then. We hammered away at Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Sonic, etc. There were lots of games we never finished, but we knew the first three levels inside out, man.
Speaking of Alex Kidd, I recently played an emulated copy of it, and it is: astoundingly more easy to play on an emulator. I mean, especially since you can just go and save state, and not die immediately every time you fly near an overhang, and accidentally land on a fish in the water. Goddamn fishes. But I missed a thing and I can’t be bothered finishing it without it – my damn dad sicced a ghost on me! That shit don’t play.
Anyway, so the point is that I didn’t discover my favourite genre until I was in highschool, when I should have been in year 9. Instead of teaching myself the maths I was supposed to catch up on, I would play emulated copies of FF5 and 6, and then my friend Yun brought FF7 to school… And it was on from there.
But I wish I’d been a Nintendo kid, so I could have got my CRPG on earlier.
Short post today, as now I’m gonna go to Heather’s place, get XP set up on her machine, and maaaybe set up that MegaDrive we found the other day!
TF2, BRB
I was gonna post, but I have the, hehe, burning need, hehe, to burn some people.
later!
Knife edge adrenaline stressmeter set to: PERCY!
I have played many, many video games in my life. Thousands of hours have been poured into everything from Crash Bandicoot to Diablo, SimCity to Baldur’s Gate, Smash Brothers to Pokemon and most things in between (except for sport games, because: whatever). Rather than tell you about all the gaming I’ve ever done, I want to write more about the games which have had the greatest impact on me and what I think it says about me as a person.
The first console I owned was a NES. It had Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt with the awesome orange gun:
and a bunch more games that aren’t worth mentioning. Mario was the game I played the most, and I played it until it couldn’t be played any more. I found the challenge so compelling that I wouldn’t even notice that the horribly shaped controllers:
Ergonomics be damned!
… were hurting my hands, or that my thumbs cramped up from too much vigorous pressing. I played it through until I could get through the whole game without dying, and then doing the same on “Hard mode” where your life counter was replaced with a crown (ooh shiny reward), but I couldn’t do that without dying even though I tried so very hard! I remember bouncing around with joy when I completed a level and got the maximum points, and screaming with frustration when I died.
I played a lot of multiplayer games with my brother, and it was one of the activities that I really enjoyed. He was (and still is) far more active than me, and the “sitting down and playing” style suited me much more than his “go to the park and play cricket” mode of fun-having.
Christmases with cousins always set my envy meter to maximum. My cousins always had a console that was one generation better – their SNES to my NES, their Nintendo 64 to my SNES, their PS2 to my PS.
If my parents had bought me a 64 before it was already passe, I would seriously have been like this at Christmas:
Any excuse to post this video will do!
Anyway, my cousins always obliterated my brother and I, for obvious reasons. This was really, really frustrating to someone who prided himself on his mastery of any game he played! I have a strong memory of sneaking out of the room I was staying in after everyone had gone to bed. I memorized every move of Sabrewulf’s from Killer Instinct, playing him over and over again:
ULTRA COMBO!
After a few days of this, being completely sleep deprived, I challenged my cousins to a game and BEAT THEM. I memorised the finishing moves just to give it a satisfactorily gory ending each time.
I don’t think my parents were too fussed about my gaming, but they saw it as a mere distraction – what was wrong with the games I had?, they would ask, and it would always take much begging for them to buy a new console or the latest game. I would play the games until every secret was unlocked, every part discovered, and I would fight the feeling of “diminishing returns” on the effort:fun ratio with every ounce of effort my brain and fingers could muster.
I didn’t own a computer that could play games, but I was always interested in computers. I wish I had had regular access to a computer from a young age (because I probably would have learnt how to program, as well, not just for the gaming times!), but instead I used to go to friends houses and take turns playing Doom or puzzle games or anything they had, really. I abused more than one friendship because of this, and still feel really guilty more than ten years on.
Eventually, we got a computer that could play games. Starcraft was the first game I ever really played. I enjoyed the micro-management combined with the intensity and adrenaline, the elation when you beat off an attack only to swarm their base, to time your hydralisks’ unBurrowing just at the right time for maximum effect… I rarely cheated, also, because I couldn’t claim to be the master if I was a filthy cheater, now, could I?
I never really enjoyed the more turn-based strategy games. Civilization and its variants were nowhere near as visceral to me, and that was an important reason why I played games. I wanted the adrenaline pumping through my body while I mastered the intellectual complexities of the game, and I wanted to be rewarded in both my successes and my failures. When I made the wrong moves in Civilization, I felt like a failure, and wanted to start again, as if I couldn’t shake off the choice to build my city in so stupid a place. When I made the wrong moves in StarCraft, I would hang on and build and build and see if I could recover and hold on for dear life as my people got obliterated right before my eyes, never surrendering before the relentless onslaught of the AI! The immediacy made all the difference. I used to spend whole days during the holidays drinking way too much coffee and playing StarCraft for 8 hours straight while my parents were away at work.
The subtle art of the zergling rush
Half-life was another game that I played several times through, eventually beating it on the hardest difficulty setting. I loved the immersion of this shooter, the complicated storyline. When the military who were supposed to save me started shooting at me instead it was such an enormous shock, I felt so personally affronted! I loved the aliens, the guns, the changing environments, the puzzle-solving and heart-racing action.
Headcrabs beware!
I also played a lot of the original Team Fortress and Counterstrike once internet gaming took off, but it was always so difficult due to my parents’ refusal to upgrade our internet to cable. Oh, lag!
Ye olde Team Fortress!
Final Fantasy X was another game I will remember forever. The storyline was good, but it was the strategizing and unlockable features, the secrets and the puzzles that had me going for hours. All up, I played it for over 150 hours in the five or six weeks building up to my year 12 exams; I defeated the final Monster Arena boss just before my Maths exam. If I wasn’t studying, then I was figuring out the optimal path through the sphere grid so that my characters would be the best they could be, running around the beatiful world capturing creatures and summoning my fearsome Aeons.
Crush them, Valefor!
In short, gaming was a huge part of my recreation. Writing this post has made me remember all the hours I spent, and the true joy I experienced while I played them.
When I moved out of home, I didn’t take anything but my crappy laptop with me – everything else was technically my parents’, and I didn’t leave on the best of terms. For the first few years of university, I didn’t game at all. I truly missed it. I would hear about a game, and realise I had neither the time nor the money to buy it, and no means to play it. When I wasn’t working or studying, I was spending time with Tabitha, which didn’t involve computers or consoles at all.
It wasn’t until my housemates started playing World of Warcraft that I got back into gaming. My new laptop barely ran it, but I enjoyed it so much. I only ever played in a group, and I have never liked playing WoW solo (questing just seems monotonous to me after a while), but I loved the PvP and group stuff. I played a healer, which engages all my multitasking skills and requires lightning-fast reflexes to snatch victory from the hands of defeat time and time again. Playing a support/leader role in a team situation rather than damage-dealer has always suited me, as I can keep track of everything and lead from the rear!
I just bought myself a new computer, and the main reason is so I can play Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 without begging time from my housemates. Playing TF2 much better, richer, smarter, funnier and modern than the old Team Fortress, but it feels like coming home at the same time. I am still woeful, having only played it for about 4 hours total, but I plan to perfect my skills.
L4D, on the other hand, is something that I frankly rule at. I love how immediate it is, how intense and knife-edge the gameplay is, and how much it relies on teamwork as well as personal excellence. I love surging through zombies as fast as I can with my teammates, I love joining a team that’s losing and turing it around to victory, and I love to destroy the survivors as Infected with a well-placed smoker pull or Tank strike, exploiting the errors of the opposition to maximum effect. The atmosphere is perfect for the incredibly tense, immersive, edge-of-your-seat stimulation that I crave.
I’m glad to have computer games back in my life. I plan on turning Tabitha into an ubergamer, so I can share with her this thing I love so deeply (I will stack the fridge however you like if you play Versus with meeeee 
). I like how Steam operates as a way to connect with your friends through gaming, and I am seriously looking forward to doing a lot more of that in the days, weeks, months and years to come.
TF2 tiem!
Sims Fortress 2: Total War
When I was growing up, computer games weren’t allowed. My mother abhors anything she considers violent – quite famously, in the early years of her marriage to my father, she was shocked to discover he enjoyed watching The Bill, and felt that this meant he was a violent and angry man. I’m talking about 1984 The Bill, with Reg and Polly and “You’re nicked, my son!” “Fair cop, gov!” Not exactly Oz. But this hatred of violence (mostly because she can’t stand raised voices or conflict) meant that computer games didn’t happen for me.
Even as a teenager, when I had friends with consoles, I didn’t enjoy playing them because invariably, my friends were much more familiar with the game and controls, and always kicked my arse. A steep public learning curve is NOT the Julia way.
I didn’t really get into computer or console games until I moved in with Tom. A month before we moved in together, I bought him a PS2 as a moving-in gift. I figured he’d love it, and that it would work as a DVD player. This was in 2002, when DVD players were often over $300. $400 for a DVD player that als0 played games seemed like a bargain (and it was, we still use that thing 7 years later). I wasn’t really expecting to play games on it, it really was a present for him. One of the games that came with it was Project Eden. I really enjoyed watching Tom play, and he often let me have the controller to do certain things. I found that I was surprisingly good at the puzzle-solving aspect, as well as being able to spot important items. The game can be played as co-operative multiplayer, but we were doing this as co-operative single player, and it was a really enjoyable couple activity for us.
About six months after we’d moved in together, Tom bought me The Sims for Christmas. I’d seen ads for it on TV, and it seemed sort of interesting. I’d dabbled a bit with Civ 3, and I liked that, because of its history-basis, but this seemed like even more fun. So, he bought me The Sims, and I absolutely fell in love with it.
This was also during my recovery from bulimia, and Tom quickly worked out an excellent reward system – if I went a month without purging, he would buy me an expansion pack for The Sims. I LOVE extrinsic rewards, and because I wanted The Sims so badly, and because I couldn’t bear the thought of lying to Tom, it gave me the willpower to break patterns of behaviour I’d had in place since I was 14. I stopped seeing food as the ultimate reward for good behaviour, and started focusing on computer games instead. Say what you will, but I think that’s a lot healthier. Also, it got me totally hooked on computer games, which I think may have been Tom’s cunning plan all along.
I love The Sims because there’s no winning. I grew up as an only child, and so I’m far more focused on narrative-based play than Ludist (or Gamist)-based play (Hey Tom, I payed attention to your thesis). Competition isn’t exactly enjoyable for me, and so if people are playing MarioKart or another party game, I’ll generally just read a book. I like WiiBoxing, but only because I have competed against some EXTREMELY sore losers. But for me, the story is the most important thing. With The Sims (and these days, The Sims 2, and soon to be The Sims 3), I can create my own story. It’s got all the features I loved about Lego when I was small, which was my favourite toy. I can build whatever the damn hell I want, and be creative and have fun, but I also have little people to play dolls with. I can change their clothes, in The Sims, I can build a house to look like whatever I want. I can tell stories. The Sims franchise is a game which I believe encourages imaginative play, and I absolutely adore that. I also really love the potential for user-created content – websites like Mod The Sims 2 have anything you could want. I have downloaded Victorian clothes and furniture, medieval stuff, and an entire set of Harry Potter themed stuff, including uniforms for university-aged Sims (like, for all four house, and for boys and girls, and some with robes on, and some with robes off, and some with shirts untucked etc), and furniture for the different common rooms, and so on. If I want to make a themed neighbourhood of some kind, the stuff will certainly be available. I even have some downloaded furniture that’s better than the stuff in the game, which I think is rad.
As well as The Sims etc, I find I also dig city-building games, like Sim City, and recently, CivCity: Rome. But I like to play these with the cheats on: I want to build a beautiful, functional city, not having to worry about running out of cash or shit like this. I don’t like my gaming to be stressful, I like it to be creative and beautiful. When the little dude pops up to tell me my treasury’s running low, I tend to shout HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO WORK UNDER THESE CONDITIONS and go off and have a liedown. This is probably why I’m not allowed to be Prime Minister. (“All children should travel to school on elephants!”)
I’m digging the Total War games pretty hard, and I think I actually like them better than Civ (don’t taze me, Tom), just because everything is themed properly. With Civ, I find I can’t deal with the concept of the Americans v. the Roman Empire, and things like that. So I’ll make a Classical Period game, with the Romans and Greeks and Persians and Celts and Carthaginians etc, or a Modern Europe game, with England and France and Germany and Russia and so on. But I am deeply uncomfortable with crossing the streams, or playing America as an ancient civilisation. It’s just not right, man! So, the Total War games appeal to my sense of order. The map is correct, (none of this “London is right next to York and right near sources of ivory and dyes” malarky) and I understand where things are. If I want a medieval game, I can have one, and there’s no Americans.
Fucking Americans.
But, I also like how the game dynamics change depending on the era. Gameplay for Medieval II is very different to Empire, and a lot of that is based on the historical period. They’re also games that are more enjoyable if you’re a bit of a history buff, which appeals to my love of entertainment which doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator. I’m just getting used to Empire, right now, and it makes me want to play Rome: Total War, which I avoided when Tom played it due to my lack of knowledge (at the time) of Ancient History. But now I’ve done a bit of Ancient, and learnt more, and I think I would get a bigger kick out of the game. Awww yeah.
I find that I have varied and extremely specific tastes. I don’t tend to like everything in a genre, I will like one or two examples of that genre. The only real-time strategy games I like are the Age of Empires/Age of Mythology games. I mostly enjoy the campaign, rather than the multiplayer skirmishes, probably one again because of my love of narrative. AoE III and AoM were also very pretty games – I liked building the towns, and deciding where things went.
WoW doesn’t appeal to me, but that’s mostly because I don’t care about the world it’s set in. If they made an MMORPG set in Regency London, with society intrigues and you could go to Almack’s and have a character and run around and be social and go to balls, I would be all up in that, ALL THE TIME. I would call it World of Ballcraft (hurr). I would also totally play an MMORPG if it were set in Rapture (from Bioshock) before all the shit went down. But I’m not interested in Second Life, because I can get that shit on The Sims, and The Sims is less full of furries and French fascists (I am not even kidding). I only want to run around in a virtual world with other people if the world has a cohesive narrative and aesthetic that I enjoy.
Another game I really enjoyed was Portal. I played Portal before I played TF2, and I adored it. I know people call it an FPS, but I find this to be a useless description. It’s a puzzle-solving game! You don’t shoot other people! It’s first person, and there’s a gun, but FPS, to my mind, conjures up stuff like TF2, or Counterstrike. Portal kind of is a genre all its own. I think I also dislike the idea that a computer game genre is based on some mechanic of gameplay, because for me, the primary appeal of a game is its narrative and setting. But yeah, back to Portal. I kicked arse at it, and I was actually better than Tom, which was sort of a new thing for me. Being good at things is always exciting, and because Portal didn’t really require me to have spent my teen years with my fingers permanantly glued to the WASD keys, I loved it. I’m good at that kind of puzzle-solving, too. But, at the same time, it gave me greater familiarity with FPS-style controls, and this eased my way into TF2.
Now I will talk about Team Fortess 2 for a while.
I freaking love this game. Before this, the only FPSs I’d actually enjoyed were things like Battlefield: 1942 and Battlefield: Vietnam, because I knew the period quite well, I enjoyed the different type of gameplay (I’m gunning down planes! I’m sniping the VC! I’m steering an enormous ship!), and it was fairly low-stress. Counterstrike never appealed to me, because, I guess, modern-era real-world killing is kind of depressing. I don’t like futuristic sci-fi games (I don’t really know why). So, these few historical FPSs were what I played at shootybang nights, until the arrival of TF2.
TF2 is, I think, the perfect game for people who didn’t spend their teen years playing FPSs. The wide range of classes means that you’ll find at least ONE class you’re good at (for me, it’s sniper and pyro), there are different maps, and the visual aesthetics of the game make things extremely obvious. There are huge arrows pointing the way to intel rooms or control points, the other team is very obviously the enemy, marked out by colour, and it’s obvious what each character can do. It’s fun, too – it has lots of injokes and doesn’t take itself seriously, which I think is good for a game where the whole point is to kill people. The flavour text is always hilarious, and you can play a really team-worky character, or a solo one. I think it’s got more flexibility than most other FPSs, and I enjoy being able to play one round, and then going off and doing my own thing. I also like being able to play with friends, without having to have them in my house.
Lastly, some console games. I enjoy some things on the Wii – I really like WiiBoxing and WiiPlay, but mostly to do on my own. I enjoyed Zelda, and I liked the Harry Potter 5 game for the Wii, because the spellcasting was fun, and running around and getting a sense of how the school was laid out was really interestiong for me. But ultimately, I am a Playstation girl. I’m looking forward to earning money and buying Tom a PS3, because I love cooperative RPGs. We’ve played a few really good ones together: the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games, as well as the X-Men: Legends had really fun cooperative play, and I kind of loved sitting down on the couch next to Tom for a whole day and killing bad guys together. But I also love Rockstar games, like Bully, which Heather already talked about, and I’m looking forward to LA Noire when it comes out.
So, yes. From being someone who never played video games, they’ve become kind of a staple of my entertainment. I enjoy playing them, and talking about gameplay and mechanics with Tom, and all that kind of stuff. I think that it’s also a good time to be a lady who games, because game designers are making games with women in mind (which means that World of Ballcraft is only a few years away, I hope), and so I can find games where “winning” isn’t necessary. Video gaming is, for me, an activity which can be done solely on my own, with Tom, or with groups of my friends, and I kind of love that. I can be running the British Empire in 1700, or I can be Harry Potter at Hogwarts, or I can be a guy who sets people wearing a different coloured shirt on fire. I can play games requiring thinking and strategy and puzzle-solving, or ones that need me to be creative, or ones that require improving my reflexes. Ultimately, I guess, I think that video gaming has broadened my mind and taught me new skills, and any hobby that does that has to be pretty awesome.
