Caltrops - We Love Katamari





	[quote name="Injustice"]See, you're over here, setting up hypothetical three-pointers with the imaginary basketball that only you can see. Meanwhile the real ball is getting dunked repeatedly on my behalf by the cold ghostly hand of the sixth man that is reality. [quote name="blackwater"]SimCity is actually a radical leftism simulator. All of the initiative in the game comes from the player, who simulates the Great Helmsman or Soviet Premier, making his 5-year plans. Private industry never builds anything, never asks for anything, except for what the player has explcitily enabled. All power plants, roads, power lines, trains, busses, etc. are owned by the government and controlled by the Premier. They can be demolished instantly if needed. As the game simulates a world in which the proletariat has seized the means of production, there is no need for individual capitalists any more. Instead, the state provides for all-- to each according to his need, from each according to his ability. A panel of trusted advisors (the politburo) advises the supreme executive in his difficult role as servant of the People. The people have transcended religion, the old opiate of the people, and arrived at the final destiation of a workers paradise carefully managed according to the scientific principles of dialectical materialism. Needless to say, construction of government projects is instantaneous. Nor are there cost overruns or complications in building things such as power plants. See what I did there? Do you feel more informed after reading that? Or did I just jerk off for a few paragraphs and try to manipulate your emotions with content-free spew?[/quote] Our high-level interpretations of SimCity's simulation model are dueling like the ostriches in Joust! At this point two things need to happen to produce an interesting article: first, we need to look more closely at the sprites in Joust, to see whether it's the ostriches fighting and the little men trying like Jewish husbands to hold them back, or whether it's the little men fighting while the ostriches do a "morning Sam"/"morning Ralph" routine under their butts. Then we need to obtain the source code to SimCity - possibly by posing as an educational institution, the my name first your name last school of schooling your name's ignorant ass - and dig in like ostriches trying to fucking kill each other. But as long as we're only dealing in Washington Generalities, instead of examining how the actual rules function in actual play, our all-star games complaining's as worthless as you accuse that Dick Vitale's Awesome BTW article of being. [quote]Simcity's tax simulation is dumb because Simcity was a game written on the Apple ][ years ago. And when more powerful machines arrived, Maxis discovered that more accurate simulations were not more fun, which the goal of games (remember?) It's not a vast political plot to convert you to Ayn Rand's way of thinking. And people realize this. When Herman Cain proposed his flat tax rate, it was mocked as "the SimCity tax plan." People understand that this shit is not real. They don't need the Offenderati to tell them that stealing cars is bad EVEN THOUGH GTA is all about stealing cars.[/quote] Why are you talking about games criticism like it's a witch hunt? Is it because of that time Caltrops called for the Mass Effect developers to be rounded up and drowned in sacks, for their shitty Harvest Moon on the moon relationship mechanics and dialogue lifted wholesale from Stargate Universe fan fiction? Because these days, that's really more of an unwanted kitten or Chinese girlchild thing than a witch thing, and we were only being half-serious anyway. If you feel like your pet games developer is getting bullied, maybe try defending his or her or whatever kind of inbetween thing you're white knighting for this time's game on its own merits, instead of dismissing legitimate bitching as some kind of ploy by your ideological enemies (me, twitter's Caelyn S, the prestigious Rock Paper Scissors blog, etc). [quote]A full discussion by an economist of why Simcity's tax code and economic model are inaccurate would be extremely boring to most people. Even a partial discussion that just touched on the high points would probably make most people close the tab pretty quickly. The solution isn't to write some clickbait piece about how it's all a vast Libertarian/Republican/Democrat/Reptilian conspiracy, but to keep your mouth shut about things you don't understand or care about. If you don't care about economic modelling, don't write about it. And there will be less uninformed garbage on the tubes. Same thing here. Some guy wrote a stupid model of how his virtual Sims interact. I don't need a games journalist to tell me that dumb models of people as simple finite state machines are dumb. But is it fun? Does it fit with the mood of the game? That is what a games journalist should be writing about (assuming you believe games journalism should even exist any more.)[/quote] I realize I'm talking to a guy whose definition of folksy is calling the internet "the tubes", which is amusing to him because it's really made of cables running INSIDE tubes. So I'm just going to gloss over the part where you suggest that writing about video games is something you have to believe in, like fucking Tinkerbell, and now it's maybe going to disappear because you're over your mom's death and don't feel like you need it anymore. Instead I'm going to remind you the whole point of the article was the author didn't like the way this particular subsystem functioned, she didn't think it was fun, and she was willing to pull it apart in excruciating detail for the benefit of anyone who cared to read. That sort of criticism is infinitely more valuable than whatever Infinite Warfare screenshot blowout or long overdue Grim Fandango retrospective you think should've got blasted down the tubes in its place. Anyone who believes this article is worse, and not MUCH BETTER, than every single other piece of games writing not about Cryptozookeeper on Rock Paper Scissors is an idiot.[/quote]