This is where I take everything I’m thinking about and mush them into one giant post because I’m too lazy to flesh any single one of them out. Here goes:
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My sister hates rubberneckers. She makes a point to avoid looking at accidents as they happen because she feels that she’s contributing to the traffic that had just plagued her for the last umpteen minutes.
Me, I don’t like rubberneckers either. But I ALWAYS look. I don’t know why. I just need to see if everyone’s OK, how bad the accident was, if there’s more than one car…My justification is that you’re stuck in traffic until JUST right after the accident. Might as well take a look if you’ve been in traffic for all that time. But maybe I’m just feeding the beast. Who knows.
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My favorite game from the past year has to be Scribblenauts for the Nintendo DS. Not that I’ve played it or anything (I don’t have a Nintendo DS), but the concept behind the video game is amazingly refreshing. The basic gist of the game is that you play as this guy who’s trying to collect stars in a Mario-like stage. The cool thing is that at any point in the game, you can write pretty much ANY word in the dictionary, and it will appear to either help or antagonize you. So say that the star is across a lake. Well, you can write “boat”, and a boat will appear to carry you across the lake. Let’s say there’s a shark in the lake. Well, you can write “gun” and shoot the shark. Or if you’re more voyeuristic, you can write something like “kraken” and watch the two monsters battle it out while you grab the star. The possibilities are endless. Or you can be like this guy:
Sadly, this didn't occur to me until after I read this comic. By the way, this doesn't work.
As a computer scientist, I have to tip my hat to the team that made this game. /start-nerd-talk /start-extra-nerdy-talk Coding a new sprite for every word in the dictionary, and then coding rules for how each object in the world can interact…wow. That’s probably like 5 man-years worth of time. To compare, Bejeweled probably took 5-man-days to code, if that. /end-extra-nerdy-talk
Even with all that though, I can’t really bothered to play it, especially if it is on the DS. Even when my sister brought it home for Thanksgiving, I didn’t really want to play the game. The only reason I saw it in the first place was 1) to test whether you could actually write the word “Starite” and 2) because the first thing my sister said to me when I got home was this:
Rachel: “Nothing beats the vampire in Scribblenauts.”
Now, for those of you who don’t know, I really don’t like Twilight. I actually tried to start reading it once just to see what all the hubbub was about, and I couldn’t get past page 40. It was horrible. So you could say that I have an anti-vampire agenda.
Naturally, I had to find out if this was true. So we fired up Scribblenauts to see if anything, anything at all could beat the vampire. We knew that holy water and garlic made the vampire stay away from the character, but we wanted a monster that could beat this thing one-on-one.
The first thing we tried, of course, was “god.” Thankfully, the makers of Scribblenauts seemed to have avoided trying to give the Maker of the universe a digital representation. On the other hand, they did produce some sort of Zeus-type figure, so I don’t know if that’s much better. Anyway, the vampire turned the thing into a zombie about .01 seconds into the fight.
We tried “hercules” and “angels”, but we quickly found that anything with a humanoid disposition got turned into a zombie by merely touching the vampire, which seemed kind of unfair. So we had to take a different tack.
Next we tried “dragon.” No dice. “Hydra”. No good. “Werewolf.” Nope. (Sorry, Jacob, I think Team Edward wins.)
My sister was pretty confident at this point that nothing could beat the vampire, but I was just getting started. “Chimera”. “Kraken”. “Griffin”. “Cupid”. (Vampires don’t need love apparently.) “Lion”. “Medusa”. “Cthulhu”. (Rachel: “Why do you KNOW this stuff?!”)
After Cthulhu, this massive tentacle-faced monstrosity fell to the mighty vampire, I was ready to give up hope. I mean, the thing’s corpse took up half the screen. But then we tried “manticore”. For whatever reason, the manticore managed to destroy the vampire. I’m not really sure why. We pit the manticore against the other monsters, but it lost to a bunch of them, so I guess it’s not an almighty being or anything.
So there you have it. Manticores are vampire killers. Take that, Edward.
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Wow, that went on longer than I thought. Guess it’s not so much of a laundry list after all
-Tim