Well, it’s Thursday, and that means I’m only starting the day’s blogging now, at 7:49 pm.
I meant to start at 7 pm,.but then I got sucked into playing Plants Versus Zombies and totally lost track of time.
I bought the game last week,. The “Game Of The Year” edition was on sale on Steam for 99 cents and I figured, what the hell, it’s worth that just for the nostalgia value.
Turns out it’s also still an amazingly fun game. It’s one of those rare “Casablanca” level creative projects where you can’t point to one facet of it and says “there! That’s what makes it so great!”.
It’s more of a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” type thing. The total package. It all comes together in a game that is charming and delightful and adorable and just plain gosh darn fun.
I could point to its virtues. It’s easy to learn but tough to master, which is always a huge plus. The challenge level is more or less perfect. Tough enough so that you feel like you are accomplishing something but still easy enough for even casual gamers to beat.
In fact, the game is so addictive and absorbing that you forget that they have set things up so that it’s actually pretty hard to lose.
And the whole thing is adorable. Sounds weird when you are talking about a game full of zombies, but it’s true. Even though you are pitting killer plants against zombies, all the plants and zombies are charming and cute with a shy, sly sense of humour and a real sense of cartoony fun.
And I am all about the cartoony fun
Beyond that, there is something gentle and human about the whole thing. Again, that’s an odd thing to be saying about a game where plants fight zombies, but it’s true. Somewhere deep within the game’s DNA is a warmth and care that comes through despite the potentially gruesome subject matter.
And as if the game itself wasn’t awesome enough, when you beat it, you get this :
(WARNING : Spoiler for a game from 2009)
I am so very glad that I had completely forgotten about that video when I beat the game half an hour ago, because that meant I got to be sruprised, delighted, and charmed by it all over again.
And there’s definitely nostalgia there for me as well, and not just because I was only 36 years old back then.
Ah, my long gone misspent…. everything.
Dunno what I was doing in 2009. More, I assume. But I do remember what a massive sleeper hit the game was.
I mean, I never saw any ads for it and yet it spread all over the internet in days. And so it was like the whole world discovered this hidden gem at the same time.
Oh, and just to put a bow on the nostalgia, at the very end you get the end credits for the game…. and they only take up one screen.
And 40 percent of that was the people who added the “game of the year” stuff.
I am so used to video games having more credits than most movies these days that it was quite refreshing to see a game made by only a dozen or so people.
I suppose that’s still possible for simple games. App type games. I am sure it didn’t take an army of 3D modelers, riggers, and programmers to make Candy Crush.
But for AAA games, it takes more people than it took to build the Titanic.
And I am still not sure why that is.
Oh wait…. there was a topic I meant to cover….
Oh right. How best to use my vast, godlike mental powers.
Meh. It can wait.
More after the break.
I wasn’t kidding
That’s really what I am going to talk about.
As patient readers know, the truth is that I am terrified of my own mental power.
I am not bragging. It truly scares me how far above most other people my intelligence et al can go. When I try to truly confront and integrate just how smart I am into my self-image and self-esteem and such, I get this horrible feeling like I am going to float away into the stratosphere, far far away from the rest of humanity, never to return.
Words cannot properly convey how terrifying that thought is to me. What makes it worse is that in that scenario, I am totally okay with it. Like I had finally decided to hell with humanity and trying to connect with it and left it all behind.
That is, more or less, what I think it would be like if I finally snapped. I would disappear into the sky of my mind and give up on reality entirely.
Of course, back here in the real world, I’d be a drooling vegetable.
Still, it’s an option.
I feel like I have far more power in this brain of mine than my sad and broken soul can handle. Like I am a car with a powerful engine but too weak a chassis and suspension to handle it.
And I don’t want to loom over others. That’s the other part of it. Not only do I not want to disappear into my own head, I don’t want to lose what little connection with the rest of humanity that I have.
I want to go in the opposite direction and connect with others. But I feel like I am drifting upwards every day.
Sometimes I dream of leaving it all behind. No video games, no internet. If I want someone to talk to, I have to go find them. If I want to do something for fun, I need to find someone to do it with.
Throw myself off the deep end. Sink or swim time. I either learn to connect with others or I finally give up and become a crazy ranting homeless person.
That’s so crazy, it just might be really, really crazy.
But that doesn’t matter anyway.
Because I’d never have the courage to do it anyway.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.