Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 4 in review: Extremely good game. I criticize it for being a little long (~50 hours of gameplay), but I keep attempting to play the minigames I unlocked afterwards, so maybe its length was fine. Speaking of the minigames: I am absolutely terrible at them. The fact that the main game stayed at a challenging but achievable level the entire time is a testimony to its fantastic autoadujusting difficulty. The story, dialagoue, and voice acting are complete crap, but it comes off as adorable, not grating. The graphics are past the mystical point where graphics affect my enjoyment of the game, so yay. The level design is fantastic, I might make some minor changes to how maps are displayed but by and large they do a great job at allowing and encouraging exploration without leaving you lost. The final boss fight violated the cardinal rule of story telling by having a pivotal moment driven by another character, but it was still fun. I am in continued awe of the fact that I used four gun types (with two others I ignored) and each served their own individual purpose.

What really stands out is how many different ways there are to beat a particular challenge. You could be a fantastic shot, a good tactician, or spend a lot of ammo. I got a lot of milage out of arranging things so when I shot an enemy, they fell a long way, letting gravity save me some bullets. Boss fights often give you the option to dodge attacks, or climb off a ledge they pushed you over. The quick time events were annoying but tolerable.

In conclusion: totally worth the $9 I spent on it.

Katamari Damacy

This is me, explaining Katamari to a co-worker who said he was tired because he spent all night playing Starcraft.

Me: Yeah, I've been playing Katamari lately.
Him: What's that?
Me: you roll around a ball and it picks up stuff that's smaller than you and it makes the ball bigger.
Him: And then you use the ball to...?
Me: Nothing. I mean, you turn it into a star, but that's just the story, not a mechanic.
Him: but when you pick up certain items, they make you roll faster or shoot lasers or something, right?
Me: Nope. You just get bigger.

The point being: Katamari is an excellent game, but I have probably given up all chance of ever being a hardcore gamer by saying that. Also by being bad at it.

What I learned from Resident Evil was that killing things was fun, but exploration for the point of stealing things was just as fun if not more so. Katamari cuts out the middle man by having a single action that could be construed as both exploring, stealing, and killing, which lets you grow bigger and kill/steal more things. And because you're in the same environment the entire time, you have the satisfaction of moving from running away from things, to absorbing them, to absorbing their houses and then eventually godzilla. It's short, but I refuse to consider that a negative unless a game costs a lot of money, and I borrowed this game from a friend for free. According to the internet Katamari is chauk full of replay value, but I don't seem to be good enough to do anything but make the same mistakes over and over again, so I gave up.

The incessant talking between levels was my biggest complaint. It has that obnoxious old-timey thing where you have to hit a button twice to skip each sentence, with pauses between sentences. If you were lucky. The fact that I found myself leaving to empty the litter box between levels is probably a bad sign. The worst were the levels where, for reasons that don't matter, finishing early meant you'd done poorly. I wanted to retry the level, but I couldn't take listening to my father drone on more than twice, knowing that a gust of wind could have me fail out the next one in 30 seconds too.

Katamari represents a personal triumph for me. I basically had to give up everything but god games because of my weak, inflammation prone tendons. 3 years ago I tried Katamari and loved it, but couldn't play for more than 10 minutes before my wrists caught on fire. This week I played it with no problems. Hurray for healing.

Take home message: stealing things is fun and crushing things is fun and combining them into a single action is awesome.

Am I a feminist?

My friend and I formed the Feminist Science Fiction Bookclub Prime, after I found the real Feminist Science Fiction Bookclub Prime to be intolerably full of hipsters. Seriously, you hear these jokes about hipsters and you think they're exaggerated and then you meet some and everything Stuff White People Like said is true. Anyways, we're forming our own club made up of our friends. Which brings up the interesting question of Am I A Feminist?

I am pro-equal rights but have really serious disagreements with the capital-F Feminist movement (represented in my life primarily by blogs). But I still read the blogs, and that reading has led me to change some of my opinions. I agree that laws forbidding both rich and poor to sleep under bridges don't count as equal, but disagree with Feminists about what kind of laws *are* equal and what interventions should be done.

Capital-F Feminism intersects with a lot of other things that aren't strictly about the rights of men and women, such as poverty intervention. This is true of all movements (because you can't be pro-gay rights without being anti-gun), but I think it's especially entrenched in feminism because of the concept of intersectionality. Which I can't really fault them for: different things are interrelated, and good for them for taking their beliefs to their logical conclusions. But I find myself almost entirely opposed to them on a political level (which is why I stopped reading feminist blogs that talk a lot about politics: I just wasn't learning anything). It appears my libertarian streak is more important than my feminist streak.

SO I guess the answer is: if you hate feminism, I'm a feminist. The differences between me and feminists are immaterial to people who are opposed to the very concept.* If you are a feminist, I'm probably not one, because we disagree so much on methods, and some on the scope of the problem. If you're pro-equal rights but also don't identify as a feminist, I'm probably still not a feminist.

*tangent time: it used to be when men said things like "shit- oops, I shouldn't swear in front of women, I'm sorry", I would attempt to convince them that I was One Of The Guys and they could totally swear in front of me. Now, I encourage the delicate flower attitude. I don't have time to move them off the virgin/whore dichotomy and for the brief time I'm going to be interacting with them, it's easier to be treated like a virgin.

(no subject)

You know landlord, I am really not thrilled with the thought of you entering my apartment while I'm not there. Leaving a key under my mat so some plumbers assistant can get into my house unaccompanied is outright unacceptable. So you are going to do a lot more than "try" to meet him here.