The Desert Mermaid

WHY THE HELL AM I SURPRISED BY THIS

One quote from Scott Cawthon, the game maker: "The story really lends itself to being a movie ..."

It ... it does?

I dunno. I think it lent itself pretty well to being a video game, but I am really curious to see what they come up with.

So, Five Nights at Freddy's is over.



And you guys, it's kind of embarrassing to say this, but I feel a bit wrung out.

Seriously, I'm going to miss these characters. Last time I got Stockholm syndrome THIS bad about a video game bad guy, it was GLaDOS.

You get closure in the last one--good or bad, depending on how you play it--and I wouldn't have thought that I'd need closure on a game that started out seeming to be nothing but spooky jump scares. But that's the cool thing--the games had a simple enough mechanic on the surface: just stay alive. A lot of people who were unimpressed by it just saw this surface feature (see: the Honest Trailer for FNAF2), and yeah, that does get old fast.

But the REAL game--the thing that really pulled you in--was figuring out the story. Sure, you could just spend a few hours giving your limbic system a nice workout avoiding getting startled by monstrous robots. Or, if you dug deeper, you could piece together a whole sad, strange ghost story spanning decades. And while the jump scares are fun, the true excitement for me came from figuring out that story--even if I, specifically, was reduced to combing through YouTube videos to get it because actually playing it was TOO GODDAMN TERRIFYING. Such an experience of immersion, of emotional involvement, is rare, so we need to celebrate it when it comes along.*

And really, it's a brilliant way to show off what video games can do. You can become so involved in the mysteries behind the game that you got some real brain exercise--and that's a feeling that can't be beat. We love solving mysteries, and this was a good one.

Plus, watching YouTubers curling up into a ball when grinning haunted robots came screeching at them was, admittedly, pretty entertaining.


FUN FACT: I actually own Five Nights at Freddy's on Steam, despite the fact that, when I bought it, I was pretty sure I was never actually going to play it. At that point I'd had so much fun just watching other people play it and studying the mystery that I felt like I still owed it to Scott Cawthon to toss some cash his way just for making something so enjoyable.


*Speaking of which, if you're sick of hype, enjoy the Nostalgia Critic's discussion of hype that gets out of hand, which explains a lot about backlash. I would add that the backlash also comes from the people who AREN'T completely enchanted by something who are tired of being left out and could respond with backlash. Hell, I was underwhelmed by The Dark Knight, and it was difficult not to be rude about it when people were gushing. So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're sick of hearing about Five Nights at Freddy's (or Frozen), um ... sorry? Hopefully time will settle them out as classics, but meanwhile I say let us have our excitement.

Aw, man, Majora's Mask 3D is great! I'm really liking the graphics--once again I'm just barging into people's houses to have a look at the new skins.

A lot of the changes are definitely for the better, too. It's way easier to Goron, too--his punch isn't so clumsy, and the steering seems better. You can skip to specific times, so you don't have to stand around waiting as much.

But what I'm really liking are the boss battles. They were always a bit of a weak spot in Majora's Mask, rather confusing and haphazard. To fix that they've installed GIANT OBVIOUS EYEBALLS on the two I've fought so far, so that you know what to stab at when you've knocked the boss over--and figuring out how to do that is far more straightforward, too.

I'm not sure how I feel about the somewhat micromanage-y way your notebook handles events and people now, though. I mean, I am finding it extremely annoying, but that's partly because I've got this game pretty much memorized.* And as a kid I hadn't learned to make a lot of those game logic leaps yet and thus relied extensively on the Player's Guide, so I really can't begrudge an in-game aid. I just wish it was optional, because it keeps interrupting the play.

But overall, loving it! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go battle aliens with the power of ARCHERY!


*Except I always forget to actually go back to the Great Fairies after I beat a temple. Which is another improvement--in the old game you'd go back to the first day and then be like FUUUUUCK when you realized you'd have to go collect those goddamn fairies again. Here, though, the Song of Time doesn't automatically save your game, so when I inevitably forgot to reassemble a Great Fairy before going back to the first day I could reset the game and I was back at an owl save point and I still had all my fairies! Sweet!

Amazon's been trying to get me to buy "Tales from Deep Space," because Amazon makes video games now.

... It's kind of awesome.

I mean, for crying out loud, you play as basically a space hobbit on a raygun gothic space station! How is that not awesome?

Well, the bad news is that I had to leave before the Space Place Staff party tonight on account of the snow coming down on the mountain. But the good news is that even though I'm missing one of the main attractions, which was the video games on the IMAX, I actually got to try it last week. So even though I was looking forward to the rumored Five Nights At Freddy's on IMAX,* I did get to play it. So that's pretty fun.


*Srsly, TWO-STORY SHRIEKING BONNIE BUNNY.

Recently a conflation of many disparate events--specifically, watching that Five Nights At Freddy's LP and subsequently a bunch of others, waking up my long-dormant Steam account to play with Universe Sandbox, and my brother and me trying to explain video game logic to Mom using examples from Day of the Tentacle puzzles--has made me come to a realization: I miss point-and-click games. Suddenly I've been fondly looking back on the good times I had as a tiny little game nerd floundering my way through Myst with the help of the weirdly novelish player's guide, since I lacked the cognitive development necessary to really figure out what the hell I was doing.

So I've been tooling around Steam and my Kindle's app store trying to satisfy my dopamine needs,* sampling various games based on important factors like user reviews and, importantly, what's on sale. And it's working--I'm having a fine old time playing casual and more in-depth adventure games. So far I've enjoyed The Book of Unwritten Tales (fun puzzles, humor like Bad Discworld), its prequel the Critter Chronicles (where, to their credit, the humor got less annoying), and a stack of Artifex Mundi and similar casual games (which offer about a million layers of sociological analysis fodder, what with way they seem to market to females and are less "hardcore" but more story-driven with tragic romance and so forth, but fuck you they're PRETTY and the stories aren't bad). I have a few others queued up (Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People has been on my list for a while) but am always looking for more. If you give me a good space-themed casual adventure puzzle game, I will ... well, probably I'll just be very happy, but if we turn "make Amelia happy" into an achievement, your brain will think it's a real reward, and that'll be great!

Probably I'm overdoing it at the moment because I'm excited about this, and it could easily become a money pit if I'm not careful,** but it's really nice to return to some absurd problem-solving adventure.

By the way, I'm Polmelia on Steam, if anyone's interested, too!


*I wonder why something like managing to make a cup of tea comes with such a feeling of triumph in video games when in reality locating a kettle, tea bags, teapot, mug, and tea leaves filling the kettle with water, turning on the stove, boiling the water, pouring the tea leaves and the boiling water into the teapot, letting it steep for fourish minutes, and pouring the tea through the strainer into the mug is just a thing you do to get tea. It's almost as if game design has tapped into a collection of terrifyingly effective psychological hacks. I hope they use this awesome power responsibly.

**I have a complicated thing going right now where I OWN Portal 2 but can't actually PLAY it because [pointless boring computer fuckery]. I could easily re-buy it on Steam, but dammit I already own it so I'll just save it for when I fix my computer fuckery. Money, dangit!

There are some bottles of experimental Earl Grey cream soda settling up in the fridge. I'll let y'all know how it tastes. If it goes well, I may try some Pride of the Port soda next.

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Have been taking up jewelry-making again. Taking chainmaille a bit more seriously this time around. It's always difficult to get started with something, but this place has a few great starter kits. Plus, it's got colorful jump rings, and I am a sucker for colors. So far I'm trying a simple Box Chain rainbow necklace. I'm idiotically proud of how closely I'm managing to get the jump rings closed.

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In the meantime, I've come across some pretty nifty-looking images of handmade LED Zelda-style Fairy-Inna-Bottle necklaces, but none of them are for sale. So I went with the next logical course of action and decided to make it myself.

Problem is, my knowlege of electricity is roughly that of a fifth-grader working through Fifty Fun Science Projects You Can Do At Home: something something battery something zinc copper something something circuit something LIGHT! And, y'know, for some reason I've picked up the impression that a potato is involved somehow. So I called my brother, what with him being an electrical engineer and all,* and he offered me some tips. The rest has been trial, error, and a lot of Googling. Oh, and gathering components. Once I get that done, the rest should be easy.

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Mom got herself some roller skates, too. Now we just have to find a place to skate--outdoors, possibly, as spring gets moving.

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I have mastered the art of Fish'n'Chips. I'd make myself a medal, but I'm already making a few other necklaces, and that would just be redundant.


*On the one hand, this a running joke along the lines of asking a linguist how many languages they speak. "Can you program my TV? I mean, you ARE an electrician!" No, he's an electrical engineer. On the other hand, though, I figured he probably knew a LITTLE more about practical circuitry than me and my potato.

Batch #3 worked! I have brewed a passable ginger ale. I made soda!

Okay, it was just from an extract, but hey! I got the bubbles into the bottle. That's a pretty entertaining achievement. (I have to say, using yeast feels a little bit like raising sea monkeys. You get the same sense of having a mass of tiny pets. Except then I freeze and drink these. I am a capricious god.)

Anyway, I have discovered that there are drawbacks to using half-liter plastic bottles. For one thing, I can taste plastic. This has been my curse since I was a kid: I always feel soda (or, in fact, any beverage) is better in cans or glass bottles. And for another, there is no way I am going to drink even half a liter of soda at a time, and once I open one the flatness begins to creep in.

So for my next experiment, I have gotten myself a couple dozen 12-ounce glass bottles* and a bottle capper. This way I can open a smaller bottle each time I want a cream soda--my next extract attempt. Plus, it is super fun to put the caps on the bottles.

I'll probably try to calibrate my skills with a few more extract sodas, on account of I have all these extracts lying around. But I'm getting interested in trying some of the recipes in my books. Got me some various barks and roots and things. I think there's even a recipe in one of them that uses garden roots, like carrots and parsnips and beets and whatnot.

That's right, you heard me.

DEEPER'N'EVER SODA.

BWAHAHAHAHA *lightning crash*

I may be having too much fun with this.


*Every time I have to buy something that comes in a bottle I'm gonna use once and throw away, I think about how much bullshit I have to go through to get just ONE DAMN BOTTLE in a Zelda game. An Empty Bottle is the ULTIMATE treasure. I will battle ghosts and race beavers and break into houses and chase burglars, all for the chance to get a FUCK YEAH EMPTY BOTTLE. Oh, you say you've got some Gold Dust for me so that I can upgrade my sword to its ultimate stabbiness? That's nice--HOLY SHIT IS THAT A BOTTLE AROUND THE GOLD DUST? OH, HELL YES. I can put all KINDS of shit in there!

... It's enough to make one feel like an ungrateful slob when tossing out a bottle after a single use without a second thought..

So today George Takei shared this photo on Facebook, and it got me laughing because I totally used to do that to my little sister when she wanted to play, because when you're little you're a right bastard. (She caught on pretty quickly, though. Damn you, swiftness of child development!)

But then I got kind of fascinated by the sheer number of sanctimonious people pitching a fit about Spending Quality Time With Kids in the comments. Normally I try to avoid comments sections, but sometimes I just can't help but look because you think, "There is no WAY someone is going to get angry about ... oh, my bad." I have a whole lot of opinions about well-rounded child development and parents who terrorize their kids with the Quality Time ideal and the values and drawbacks of video games ... but better folks than I have commented on those things.

Right now I want to address one aspect of video games that doesn't get mentioned very often. I'm not sure if that's because it's an experience unique to me (because I'm guessing it's not), but here's something you never see pointed out in these arguments: video games are an avenue for imaginative play.

Sure, they're no substitute for being outside--but neither is reading a book. You've got to just balance your interests. And when we were in front of video games, my siblings and I treated them a lot like we treated, say, playing with Ponies or Legos or Transformers or any of our other toys. We invented elaborate scenarios and dialogues for the characters--Mario's trek over Dinosaur Land was filled with arguments with Luigi, chats with Yoshi,* football games, food fights, random phobias, and all-around silliness, projected by our imaginations onto levels where the goal was SUPPOSED to be just getting from the left side of the screen to the right side. We would make up explanations for some of the weirder in-game phenomena. We'd abuse the hell out of our onscreen avatars as they acted out something that was only funny because our added narrative made it so.

As for the idea that video games can't possibly allow for interaction with other people--PLEASE. All of us--me, my brother, and my sister, plus any friends sitting in that bare room with us watching the action--were actively engaged. One of us might be playing, but all of us were involved in the invention, character development, song composition (yes, really), and resulting entertainment centered around the screen.

And later on I wrote sweeping epics set in Super Mario World and Hyrule (which were in the same world, actually, so Mario and Link had crossover adventures, as they did with Donkey Kong and Star Fox and Megaman and the Pokémon). I got a lot of writing practice from video games. Hell, my breakthrough into writing conlangs came when I decided to write a sentence in "Yoshese" and realized that I'd have to give it a real structure and thought "... this is fun."

I think people who never grew up with video games don't see that. And that's understandable--from the outside, a kid reading a book doesn't look very engaged, either; they're just sitting there staring at a chunk of paper. You have to look at it from the kid's point of view. Anything--rag dolls, Lego bricks, ponies, aquarium beads, paper dolls, yarn, toy trains, American Girl dolls, the sticks and rocks those self-righteous people are so enamored of--ANYTHING can help foster imaginative play, if the kid knows how to use them right. And believe me, if there's one thing kids know, it's how to use their imaginations.

So shut up about the damn video games, already.


*I think this is specifically why I don't like full voice acting in video games--the most I prefer is the incidental Charles Martinet-type noises, because I am supplying my own dialogue.