T w e n t y S i d e d

A poem, about animal crossing. Please enjoy.

Animal Crossing actually never hooked me. I understand that for some the game is a powerful narcotic, but I found it to be an irritant. It’s more brazen with its time wasting than any “hardcore” game would ever dare to be. People faulted Too Human for the long, un-skippable death animation, but that’s trivial compared to the time wasting exercises in Animal Crossing. Imagine if you had to watch that long animation at every level change, every chapter break, and at the introduction of every new enemy and every new weapon.

The game pisses away little chunks of time here and there, making you sit through repetitious chatter and perform mundane tasks in the service of the town rodents. And then there is Mr. Resetti, who will torment you with a long harangue if you turn off the game without saving. Who devised this idea of punishing players by deliberately wasting their time? It’s one thing to fail to make a game fun. It’s another to make it aggravating on purpose.

True story: A few years ago my youngest was a little too young to know how to use the living room electronics properly. He’d want to watch a movie or something and end up pushing the wrong button. So, we had a rash of console resets until we taught him properly, and my daughters had to deal with Mr. Resetti a few times. The last time, my daughter cried. She wasn’t upset at the last hour of gameplay that had just been wiped out, she was upset at the prospect of having to endure Mr. Resetti again. The thought of paging through his angry rude chatterboxes for several minutes was enough to drive her to tears.

Screw you, Nintendo.

A lot of time is squandered in the game accomplishing very little. In the end, the random number generator has far more creative control over the town than you do. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine that harvesting ALL blocks takes fifteen seconds, like mining obsidian. And it takes time to craft each and every item. And you can only acquire tools from the NPC’s that live around you, who are all irrational assholes. And you usually can’t ask for what you need, but must wait for their random behavior to bestow it.

I love the art style. I love the concept. I hate how cruel the game is with regards to wasting the player’s time. I’m sure existing fans would defend the time-sink as “part of the game”, but I’m convinced that if you removed all the deliberate time-taxes in the game it would provide an experience that is more entertaining and just as addictive. I don’t think the time tax is required to make the game fun, it’s just something players have learned to tolerate.

As I’ve said, I don’t play the game myself, but I still get angry at it. I’ll walk through the living room and see my kids playing it. They’ll click on the owl that runs the museum to see if he needs a particular fossil they’ve dug up. I’ll pass through to the kitchen, get a drink and some food, and come back into the living room and see that they are still trying to extricate themselves from the conversation, when all they needed was an an answer to the binary question, “do you need this item or not?” They’re just slamming through endless dialog bubbles, all of them stuff they’ve seen a hundred times before.

Whew. Maybe I should have published this post under “rants”.

And also, it bears repeating: Screw you, Nintendo.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve written quite a bit about survival horror in this space. I was always talking about some far-flung future then game designers would “get it” and make a game that set out to cultivate fear rather than just daunting combat.

It’s as if someone read those articles, and made the game according to my specifications.

It’s a good game. It’s a cheap game. It’s much smarter than Dead Space and many times as scary. I like to think that if this thing had marketing behind it, it would be tearing up the sales charts. (But maybe not. The imagery is really disturbing. I find realistic text descriptions of human torture to be a lot more frightening than gross space aliens being splattered by my shotgun in full 3D.)

As always, your mileage may vary. Do give it a look if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Today’s comic was more or less written in the comment thread of last week’s column. Thanks for the help!

This column was way harder than I’d anticipated it would be. Constructing it turned out to be a fairly complex logic puzzle.

Requirements:

* Between four and seven companies.
* Companies must appear in both lists, which means the companies I choose must have exceptionally strong points and weak points.
* Because I don’t want to thread-jack my own joke, I should stay away from controversy if possible. For example, my hatred of Rockstar’s gameplay is not universal and so including them in the bad list for gameplay would just muddle things. Same goes for Bungie and other hot-button developers.

In order to make this comic, I had to make a chart with all of the possible properties (gameplay, marketing, QA testing, voice acting, etc) and fill it in with the names of companies that would be exceptionally good or bad at those things. Then I had to trim it down to attributes which had both good and bad entries. Then I had to try to build a list that formed a closed loop where a set of companies would appear in each list exactly once.

There were a lot of companies I wanted to work in there but couldn’t. For example: In Hell, Zynga would be in charge of marketing. But adding one entry like this creates two dependencies. First, Zynga must be exceptionally respected for something else so that they can appear on both lists. And then I need to come up with another company to do the marketing in Heaven.

I had a few companies in both the good and bad lists, sometimes for the same thing. You can make the case that id Software could be listed for gameplay in Heaven. (The rampant popularity of Quake III Arena.) Or in Hell. (Doom 3’s monster closets.) I did this because it made it easier to construct the loop when I had a lot of possible candidates. At first I didn’t want to list someone for the same thing twice because it felt like cheating. But eventually I remembered that I was trying to write a joke and not solve a puzzle, so I ran with it and listed BioWare for dialog on both sides.

I really wanted to include id Software for “technology” in Heaven. In my chart I had it so that id could be in charge of “story”, “dialog”, or “character design” in Hell. I could include Bethesda for “technology” in Hell, but then what would Bethesda do in Heaven? And then who would do that in Hell? I went round and round on this. I had a few lists that nearly worked but required eight to ten companies. I had a good list constructed, except that it needed a company that was awesome at story and horrible at technology. (And Obsidian was already used elsewhere in the list.)

Still, fun puzzle. Take a crack at it if you’re so inclined. As a reminder, here is mine:

IN HEAVEN:

Story: Obsidian
Dialog: BioWare
Cutscenes: Square Enix
QA Testing: Valve
Release Schedule: Capcom

IN HELL:

Story: Square Enix
Dialog: BioWare
Cutscenes: Capcom
QA Testing: Obsidian
Release Schedule: Valve

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.