Fuckin’ With Kilroy (not porn, I promise)

It was way early in the morning and we were fucking with Kilroy. You may remember Kilroy del Dancefighter Estallion the Third from when I fired his ass unceremoniously from the Injun for suggesting that my output was lacking and that he had to pick up the slack. That’s just something you don’t tell the editor, motherfucker.

I had a few things to tell Kilroy. “You suck at time shadows,” I half-croaked. After all the coffee, and cigarettes, and yelling things at people, my usually impressive voice was taxed and totally punk rock. “Look, he’s sad, you fucked it up.”

“Stop failing!” shouts another friend, as Kilroy misses the puzzle piece again. I started to think that Kilroy wasn’t as much of a time travel understander as I previously thought, and decided to drag my laptop outside so I could smoke.

On the way out, I heard Kilroy say “I’m going to make this jump just to spite you guys,” followed by more screeches from the peanut gallery.

Outside was cold and colder, thanks to the constant wind that goes through the city. I sat on the yellow scooter just outside the shop, one bought for transportation that found more utility as a place to sit and smoke. Or in my case, a place to sit and smoke and write.

We spent the entire day at our home away from home, a little place on the far eastern side of the city known as Game On!, exclamation point and everything. I’m not exactly good at sitting still, and Game On! is one of the few places in town that I could actually do so for more than a few hours. We were on hour nine or so, which is extraordinary, mind-blowing, and typically Saturday behavior.

I looked through the window and watched Kilroy deftly manuever through a puzzle that I once saw him trip up on for over an hour. As he tripped up on the boss in the next level, the manager of the store yelled something I couldn’t quite hear. I wanted to, though, and I was done typing anyway, so I stomped out my cigarette butt and headed back in.

I’ve been off the gaming beat lately, folks. Yesterday marked the first time in a little while that I could actually dedicate some time to it. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s just that my usual raging boner for video games seems to have gone, err, soft. Seriously, this has never happened to me before, not in the nineteen years I can remember hating Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Blowout.

It’s been a nice break, though; not gaming has made me really appreciate the times I get to toss my hat in and wreck shit. I played the Brutal Legend* demo that night, and elevated its status from ‘probably one of the best games ever’ to ‘probably the most fucking important thing to ever happen to humanity, and yes I’m including the invention of the nuclear missile’. I also got to watch some people fool around on Scribblenauts, which is a joy for someone so in love with words as myself.

(the best part of that one was when mothman ended up driving an anti-air vehicle around and shooting indiscriminately at the player)

So, in the terms of cutting-edge games journalism**, I’m down but not out. I’ll be sure to sound the sirens if anything important happens, but for now I’m out living like a goddamn alive motherfucker.

*umlauts omitted on account of a raid by the Umlaut Police

**something that has never been, and never will be done on the Injun

Difficult Equation Draws Near!

Hello, gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I prefer to spend my time playing games rather than writing about games. This brings me to all sorts of odds with the rest of the staff of the Injun*, most of whom* spend far more time writing as many words as possible on the subject with little to no actual research**. Eventually, they* start asking questions as to why their* glorious leader and the founder of this great thing hasn’t written anything in, like, three decades.

Bastards.

So, I figured I’d take some time out of my busy schedule*** and answer a question posited by a curious individual*.

Why do people play RPGs?

Or rather,

Why do people play JRPGs?

I guess that one needed clarification. Everyone knows why people still play pen-and-paper RPGs, they’re awesome. And western-style RPGs, for the most part, riff off of that, and have since way back when, making them occasionally awesome.

But JRPGs… man. Just thinking about them brings up my horrible, tormented childhood****, a magical time when I could still believe in grand adventures and the triumph of good over evil. Eventually I became horribly jaded, and though I still have a shelf full of RPGs of all sorts, I occasionally find myself wondering why*****.

Believe me when I say that I am the best man for the job (of answering Kilroy’s stupid question).

Back in the day, there weren’t too many ways to depict a group of four people bashing on a horde of goblins and taking all their money. The best solution at the time, it seemed, was to put everything into a menu, and task the player with hitting the Attack button for all the characters and watch them beat down the goblins and take their money. And the best way to show exactly how hard you were beating the goblins, or how hard the goblins were beating you, was to use numbers.

Health measured in Hit Points. Magic measured in Magic Points. Your experience noted by how many Experience Points you’ve amassed by damaging monsters’ Hit Points with your Magic Points. Levels and so on. A lot of these things are really just throwbacks to pen-and-paper RPGs which, as I’ve mentioned before, are awesome******.

But in a pen-and-paper RPG, you end up with significant rewards******* beyond the numbers, things like entire kingdoms and magic rings that let your turn opponents into sandwiches. All JRPGs usually do is give you more numbers. Then you use those numbers to fight enemies with bigger numbers, and repeat until the game is over, the bestiary is complete, all the minigames are done, and you’ve beaten that superboss that takes seventeen hours of horrifying grind to even get close to harming.

But, uh, I guess that’s its own form of achievement? People seem to like making their numbers go up********. Some people, driven mad with numberlust, will do anything they can to make those numbers go up higher, and will play the absolute worst games in order to sate that feeling*********. Horrible, brutish creatures, in my opinion.

But eh. This all reminded me of one of the reasons I don’t enjoy MMOs that much. I’m gonna go ahead and put this one to bed and play some Final Fantasy IV. Ciao**********!

* Kilroy.
** In games at least. He does a ton of research on other stuff.
*** Busy playing Final Fantasy Tactics, mostly.
**** It actually wasn’t all that horrible or tormented at all.
***** Nostalgia, mostly?
****** Infinity Injun: Completely Impartial To Everything.
******* Well, if your GM is actually good at his job.
******** Deets, make sure to thank Kevin for having such an accurate description of RPGs handy.
********* I’ve got a lot of them on my shelf.
********** Probably doesn’t mean what I think it means.

Battle not with monsters

Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with my more closely held beliefs; beliefs in objective truth, falsificationism, freedom, and justice, overtly expressed in every inch of my writing. These beliefs have colored my tenure here at the Injun, from my reviews straight through to the adventures which Mazo and I have reported. I believed in these things because they were told to me by people I respected and admired. I am now at a crossroads. It started with a routine argument on a forum, as much of my education has. In this case the RE5 thread on SelectButton.  Nothing I know will ever be the same; actually, I am not even sure knowledge is possible now.

I brought up Popper, and Tarski; they countered with Wittgenstein and Godel.  Their arguments were passionate and well reasoned.  I… oh god, what have I been doing with my life?  There was a time when everything made sense to me.  Now I realize that time was a lie.  It was impossible, in fact.  How could I have been so mistaken?  In my arrogance, I read books thinking they contained knowledge, but what claim does any one man have to knowledge?  And supposing he knows, what good are his words when their meaning can only ever be debated over endlessly by his readers and critics?  I was the grandest sort of fool.  I am remembering now my Xenophanes.  I thought I knew what his words meant then, but now I am not sure.  I present them to you for your own judgement, but perhaps they stand instead as a judgement of me.

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw

And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods

Like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

nor will he know it; neither of the gods,

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The final truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Loyal readers, this is the end of business as usual for me.  A new beginning, of sorts, getting over my old foolishness.  It was easy enough to see with my Mother 3 article.  I went in with preconceived notions of objectivity, and in the end, when all was said and done, only the last paragraph held any meaning.  From now on I will give and see meaning wherever it suits me, and I will be better for it.  The world will be better for it.  I am done with arrogance.