I’m sleepy. I’m sleepy because, against my better judgment (and, several agreements I’ve made with various powerful, more responsible people in my life), I’ve been staying up ’till midnight this week, playing this stupid game (on the 360, not the flash-based original masterpiece).

By “stupid”, I mean that N+ (or, N-game, if you prefer) is simply fantastic. In it, I am a NINJA, and I do things quite impossible for normal people. For money. Also, I die a lot.

(For those of you who are older than dirt, N+ is the second coming of Lode Runner. The gameplay is much more jumpy/platformy than climby/diggy, but the core gameplay experience is still remarkably familiar. You’re even collecting freaking gold boxes.)

I think it says something profound about this game that the second achievement I unlocked for it (“Practice Makes Perfect”) is awarded for dying.

1000 times.

The second. Achievement.

Now, my daughter (daughter the younger) is, flat out, a disciple of the original flash game. She routinely will happily take time out of her day to remind me that she is a ninja (or, as she says it, “a NEEN-ja!!). Just last night, in fact, our entertainment room was briefly transformed into a Thunderdome of the mind, as she (while I was playing, mind you, and dying over and over) asserted that she was a ninja master.

She then proceeded to critique my “ninja style”, in some detail.

I protested this ludicrous stance, and it was on.

This “debate” led to two things:

1) Many more deaths for me. Alas, debating and being shot at by missiles while leaping around a grey void don’t mix well.
2) Some remarkable improvements in my gameplay (I can only assume that playing while ignoring her distracting “advice” elevated my mind to a higher plane of ninja-ness).

Ninja master. Feh. She quit the goddamn game. See, her save game cookie for the flash game got deleted a while back, and she gave up in disgust. She describes herself as unwilling to go back and do it all over again. When I call her a coward (or, words to that effect), she retorts with confusing statements about how “I’m not obsessed with games, like some people I know.” I can only assume she means her friends, but how that applies to my argument escapes me. Kids.

While we’re on that topic, here’s the problem with her argument!

One cannot both be a ninja master and have quit the game at the same time! Impossible!

…

At least, that’s my position. I shall soon overtake her ninja accomplishments, and then I will be the master. Wait, is this mike on?

Never mind that. Listen, okay, so I made my own goddamn MySim last night. He’s… he’s awesome. As predicted, I got a glimpse into exactly how far I’m willing to go with this “building stuff” thing. Turns out Kaiser was right: there is an object limit to the things you build. It’s just very high.

My house (more of a compound than an abode) now sports four distinct buildings. They are joined together by a second level (of unholy evil). Each building has its own door. Except for that one, in the back. We don’t go in there any more. Not since the incident. Gargoyled… things… perch on every pillastered corner… the lawn is scattered with fountains (of EVIL)…

My wife sat down next to me briefly, to observe. After a moment, she said (with a touch of awe in her voice): “Uh. Isn’t that… overkill?” I could tell she was impressed.

“It’s intimidating,” I replied.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, which I took to mean “You are a genius.”

My workshop fared no better. Get this: you get “stats” of some kind for adding certain types of objects to your buildings. I have no idea what these little stats are, but I have some of them maxed out. The one with the icon that looks like a little guy with a graduation cap on, for example. I can only assume that one is the “genius” category. That seems right.

That was as far as I got, alas. I play games with a timer sitting next to me these days, which helps me not… um… well, if you’ve read my blog previously, you have a rather exact measure of what that is designed to prevent. Anyway, at that point my time was up, and She had Rome all loaded and ready to rock. So we debauched our way through the ascension of Cleopatra, and called it a night.

I think I had a point when I started this. What was it?

Oh yeah. Tired. Yeah. I’ll sleep when I’ve died! 10,000 times. And, you can’t die in MySims, so I should be good to go.

I just got done watching my daughter (of 16 years) interacting with this crazy MySims game.

Actually, “done” isn’t quite the right phrase. I “fled”.

Even though it is technically redundant to use the phrase “let me explain” on a blog (as, of course, that is rather the entire point of the website), let me explain.

It’s marvelous, and cute, really beyond any reasonable justification. The designers went ahead and took an already cute game (that would be The Sims) and just lopped off anything that wasn’t cute enough. And then, they boiled it in sauteed baby essence or something, because the result is just terrifyingly adorable.

I might be making this sound like a bad thing. It’s not. I’m just warning you: the game is fucking cute. If you get any kind of reaction from cuteness, do not, under any circumstances, stand in the same, like, shopping mall as a store with this game in it.

Which, as of its release date, should be all of them. We are talking about EA here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Fleeing.

So, said daughter person? She makes this cute (yeah) little hippy Sim, and she runs around, doing little cute things (collecting Apple Essences(tm), building houses and stuff…), and… uh…

[ASIDE: For the record, the mayor of this town? She does not, by any reasonable measure, have her shit together. It's rare that you meet a mayor who is unaware that your house (which she, by her own direct statement, is responsible for) doesn't fucking exist. Lady, what is the story here? It is fortunate that you (the player) bear house-making powers - if this hadn't been the case, then Ms. Mayor lady might well have been fucked, and my daughter's hippy Sim would have been sleeping outside.]

Okay, okay, so yeah, and she’s having a great time (her MySim, by the way, is named “Billup”, and her town is named, ahem, “Pewptahn” – kids these day, huh?). Then, she finds this wonderful little “workshop” mechanic. It uses a system (much like the Gummi Ship building system in Kingdom Hearts) to let you construct household objects out of regularly-shaped blocks! Whee…

…and then, while constructing said household objects, she picked “sculpture”.

Yeah, okay. See, here’s how this works: “sculpture” in this game is actually a placeholder for “whatever-in-the-fuck-you-want”. The “blueprint” for a “sculpture” is literally a spot for one block, and the rest is kinda up to you.

This mechanic is probably meaningless to gameplay. I mean, it’s a decorative function (most likely). I imagine it is also a feature that many people would turn around once or twice, and then set aside with a “Hmm!” that indicates at the same time their appreciation of the possibilities such a “sculpture” includes, and their equal disinterest in taking advantage of same. Any experienced gamer would assume, given the level of potential expressiveness such a mechanic has in it, that it couldn’t be actually used for anything.

Of course, I don’t know whether or not any of my above suppositions are true. Because at that point I shrieked (well, maybe more of a murmered exclamation of horror… I don’t really remember), and then I fled the room.

Fuck the designers who made this game, fuck them to a cute hell filled with little happy cartoon people for doing this to me. That’s right, I mean you, man. I mean, there’s not even any limit to the number of blocks you can use, like any reasonable, fair-minded designer would use.

It’s like they want you to make stuff in this game.

Forever.

See, instantly, a pounding desire to create a MySims TEMPLE TO APHRODITE looms huge in my imagination. Various sculptured antlered gods and goddesses leap to my mind, painted with 8-ball textures and pink apples. I crave to fill MySims houses with objects that resemble traps, and torture devices, and mini-golf courses, and reproductions of my favorite Animal Crossing sets, and complete chess boards, and mazes, and — and — and –

Damn them.

Have you seen it? A delightful dramatization of what it might have been like, here and there, in Rome, during the clash between Pompeii and Ceasar (a clash that I had little if any prior knowledge of). It features:

• Sex
• Fornication
• Killing
• Politics
• Murder
• Sex
• Slaves
• Blood

And that’s not all. There’s sex, too.

Also, it’s supremely entertaining. Acting, writing, production values, comedy, it’s all there. It’s unpredictable, dramatic, tense, gross, and supremely alien. Like a good re-enactment should be, it’s a little bit like looking into another world. Certainly another culture.

People in Rome were less restrained about sex than we puritannical Americans are, if we are to believe this presentation as true-ish. In case you were wondering.

History (and a quick browse through the database of posts on this site) will show that I tend to publicly humiliate myself in blog form when I have something on my mind. Something… unpleasant, usually. Volume 1 of this blog (for example) could be summed up as “the darklord plays a lot of World of Warcraft, and then has a revelation about his rapidly increasing weight”. The outcome of the tale was a happy one, and, two years later, I’m still free from both previously mentioned lunacies.

Which is not to say that I am sane. Quite to the contrary. In many ways, my being forced to directly confront my “issues” with various (legal) consumables has made the problem worse. How? Visibility.

Having climbed up the hills of my subconscious some, I now have a rather sprawling view of my Valley Of Behavior, and… dear god, is that a crater over there? There’s a whole town on fire down there, and the roads are being chewed to pieces by lumbering things… it just isn’t pretty. Seemed okay when I was down in the weeds, ignoring it all, but I no longer seem to be graced with the inability to notice how my obsessiveness bleeds over onto (and hurts) the people around me.

Damn this conscience. Life would be simpler without it.

Too vague, I know. It’ll have to do for now.

Ciao. Been nice seeing you again! Been too long, really.