{"id":51000,"date":"2020-10-20T06:00:45","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T10:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=51000"},"modified":"2020-10-20T13:28:49","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T17:28:49","slug":"this-week-i-played-october-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=51000","title":{"rendered":"This Week I Played\u2026 (October 2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s funny that this series wound up being called &#8220;This week&#8221;, since <a href=\"?p=50413\">they&#8217;re not even monthly<\/a>. I could go back and change the branding, but&#8230; nah. &#8220;This Fiscal Quarter I Played&#8230;&#8221; just doesn&#8217;t have the same ring to it.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been playing since the last one of these&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>7 Billion Humans<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/7bh_1.jpg' width=100% alt='The game starts off very gentle, but your programs can get pretty large and complex by the end. I wish there was a way to reduce the font size of the code. It gets really hard to see what you&apos;re doing in the later puzzles.' title='The game starts off very gentle, but your programs can get pretty large and complex by the end. I wish there was a way to reduce the font size of the code. It gets really hard to see what you&apos;re doing in the later puzzles.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>The game starts off very gentle, but your programs can get pretty large and complex by the end. I wish there was a way to reduce the font size of the code. It gets really hard to see what you&apos;re doing in the later puzzles.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>I needed some footage for the next video, and <a href=\"http:\/\/tomorrowcorporation.com\/\">Tomorrow Corporation<\/a>&#8216;s <a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/792100\/7_Billion_Humans\/\">7 Billion Humans<\/a> seemed like a thematically appropriate game to use. I fired it up and got the requisite half hour of footage, but along the way I realized that I&#8217;d forgotten just how good this 2018 game is.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I went to see what I&#8217;d written about it previously, and discovered I&#8217;d left this game off of <a href=\"?p=45250\">my &#8220;Best of 2018&#8221; list<\/a>. Outrageous! This thing is a gem! What sort of dim-witted hack is running this site? Whoever it is, they have no taste!<\/p>\n<p>If you missed it, this is a game about coding.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of the early attempts to teach programming (like the BASIC programming language) were just regular programming languages, except designed to be a little more readable. But 7 Billion Humans has you directing a group of employees around the room using simple movement commands and some basic flow control tools.<\/p>\n<p>This game teaches a lot of core concepts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Variables: Store information in a variable, perform arithmetic on that information, and retrieve that information later.<\/li>\n<li>Branching logic: If (some condition) is true, do A. If not, do B.<\/li>\n<li>Program flow: Control which operations are performed next.<\/li>\n<li>Each employee executes the instructions on their own, independent of what the others are doing. This gives the player a really basic view of threads and multi-core processing, which are tricky concepts that didn&#8217;t even exist when I was a kid.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Best of all, it does all of this within a drag-and-drop interface where there&#8217;s no such thing as a syntax error<span class='snote' title='1'>A syntax error is when the compiler can&#8217;t make sense of your code because you spelled something wrong, used incorrect punctuation, or offered information in the wrong order.<\/span>. That&#8217;s important because syntax errors are often the most exasperating problems that newbies have to tangle with. It can often be demoralizing to have the computer repeatedly reject your commands for reasons you don&#8217;t understand. The setup in 7BH allows you to jump right to the programming without needing to spend an hour slamming your head into confusing and unhelpful error messages. This allows you to learn &#8220;programming&#8221; without needing to first learn syntax.<\/p>\n<p>The game also teaches some really advanced concepts. Most puzzles have bonus goals. You can try to figure out how to solve the problem in the fewest lines of code, or how to solve it in the fewest cycles. This maps to important ideas like memory usage vs. execution speed, and why the two are often a tradeoff.<\/p>\n<h3>Fall Guys<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/fallguys_1.jpg' width=100% alt='I didn&apos;t fall, someone pushed me!' title='I didn&apos;t fall, someone pushed me!'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I didn&apos;t fall, someone pushed me!<\/div><\/p>\n<p>Back in August, I was really into watching people play Fall Guys. If you missed this craze, it goes something like this:<\/p>\n<p>This is a battle royale game, except it&#8217;s about traversal instead of overtly killing each other. You&#8217;re placed into a game with about 60 other people, and you all have to run an obstacle course. The characters are all short and stubby and graceless. Imagine a field of Ewoks trying to run a slapstick obstacle course while wearing ungainly mascot costumes, and you&#8217;ve got the basic idea.<\/p>\n<p>Each round is designed to cull the herd. Like, the round ends when 50% of the people cross the finish line, and everyone else is eliminated.<\/p>\n<p>I loved watching highlight reels on YouTube. It looked like fun. What I didn&#8217;t realize is just how much these videos were edited down. There&#8217;s a lot of flow-breaking downtime in the game. I&#8217;m willing to bet you spend half your time idle, either waiting for other people to finish the course, or sitting at the results screen, or waiting for everyone to load into the next level.<\/p>\n<p>While it&#8217;s delightful to watch, the downtime was a huge killjoy for me.<\/p>\n<p>I obviously wasn&#8217;t very good. I was new to the game, and I&#8217;ve never been any good at platformers. So what would happen is I&#8217;d play for 30 seconds and get eliminated. Then I&#8217;d have to shoulder my way through the results screen and some other nonsense to get back to the main menu. Then wait to get placed in another game. Then wait for that game to fill up, then wait for everyone to load in the first map. Then I&#8217;d get another 30 seconds of action before I got sent back through the wait-o-tron. In the end, it felt like I was playing a game with 30 second levels and minute-long loading screens.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s badly designed. Matchmaking on this scale takes time. But I don&#8217;t enjoy the waiting around, particularly after I&#8217;ve failed and I&#8217;m eager to get back on the horse. This is a brilliant and charming game, but it&#8217;s not for people with my temperament. I need to stick to watching highlight reels on YouTube.<\/p>\n<h3>Despotism 3k<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/despotism3k_1.jpg' width=100% alt='I like the pixel art graphics and the premise. And that&apos;s it.' title='I like the pixel art graphics and the premise. And that&apos;s it.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I like the pixel art graphics and the premise. And that&apos;s it.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>I love the premise of this game. You&#8217;re basically Skynet. You&#8217;re a rogue AI that wants to kill all humans. But you also need humans to run in the giant hamster wheel to supply you with electricity. So you need to feed them and breed them, giving them rest when their endurance runs low.<\/p>\n<p>That sounds like a fun strategy \/. management game. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s not really the game. The REAL game is the popup choices you get every X days. These usually take the form of, &#8220;Oh no, [thing] has gone wrong, how should we handle it?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that these choices have objectively right\/wrong answers, and there&#8217;s no way to know or intuit the correct answer.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Many of them are cringy pop-culture references. Maybe a random guy will wander in, and you can tell by his description that he&#8217;s (say) Wolverine \/ Indiana Jones \/ The Terminator \/ Shredder<span class='snote' title='2'>Ninja Turtles.<\/span> or whatever. You&#8217;ll get some possible responses. Sometimes one option will indicate you get the reference, and that&#8217;s the one you&#8217;re supposed to pick. Other times, &#8220;getting&#8221; the reference is the wrong answer.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes you get three options, but they&#8217;re all identical. (And result in something bad.)<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes the dialog is a no-win scenario, where all choices create setbacks.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/despotism3k_2.jpg' width=100% alt='This Choose Your Own Adventure bullshit of opaque decisions and false choices is the REAL game. The rest is largely cosmetic busywork.' title='This Choose Your Own Adventure bullshit of opaque decisions and false choices is the REAL game. The rest is largely cosmetic busywork.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>This Choose Your Own Adventure bullshit of opaque decisions and false choices is the REAL game. The rest is largely cosmetic busywork.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>The thing is, most of the setbacks are a death sentence, like a permanent X% reduction in turbine output, breeding speed, or food production. When that happens, you&#8217;ll enter a slow death spiral. You won&#8217;t notice it at first if you&#8217;re a new player, but you&#8217;ll end each day with a little less of $resource than the day before. You can pull slaves from other tasks to try and balance it out, but that just spreads the problem around. You fundamentally don&#8217;t have the output to keep up, and you&#8217;re just waiting until everything bottoms out.<\/p>\n<p>So despite all this fun gameplay where you shuffle your human slaves around<span class='snote' title='3'>Don&#8217;t judge me.<\/span>, the only part of the game that actually matters is the pop-quiz feature. You need to memorize which random answers are correct<span class='snote' title='4'>Or look them up online.<\/span>, and hope you don&#8217;t get stuck with any of the no-win scenarios.<\/p>\n<p>So it LOOKS like a strategy game, but it&#8217;s actually based on luck and memorization. Sadface.<\/p>\n<h3>Gunfire Reborn<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/gunfire_1.jpg' width=100% alt='I don&apos;t know why I&apos;m not having fun, but I&apos;m not having fun.' title='I don&apos;t know why I&apos;m not having fun, but I&apos;m not having fun.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I don&apos;t know why I&apos;m not having fun, but I&apos;m not having fun.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>This seems like it should be right up my alley. It&#8217;s a shooter with a colorful art style where you level up your powers and hunt for randomized guns. Where have I heard that <a href=\"?p=37845\">before<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I bounced off this game really hard. I found it relentlessly boring, and I&#8217;m not sure why. I want to offer some wishy-washy &#8220;The gunplay didn&#8217;t feel good&#8221; kind of answer. That&#8217;s true, but I can&#8217;t describe WHY the gunplay didn&#8217;t feel good. I can&#8217;t make any useful suggestions because I can&#8217;t even diagnose the problem.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know, but this one didn&#8217;t click for me.<\/p>\n<h3>Wrapping Up<\/h3>\n<p>So that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve played since July. That&#8217;s not a lot for a three-month stretch, but we&#8217;re just about to enter the crazy season where there will be more games than I can hope to play.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow is the launch of <a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/agecheck\/app\/999220\/\">Amnesia: Rebirth<\/a>. I&#8217;m preloading it now. I hear <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcgamer.com\/amnesia-rebirth-review\/\">good things<\/a> about it. Fingers crossed.<\/p>\n<p>So what have you been playing lately?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s funny that this series wound up being called &#8220;This week&#8221;, since they&#8217;re not even monthly. I could go back and change the branding, but&#8230; nah. &#8220;This Fiscal Quarter I Played&#8230;&#8221; just doesn&#8217;t have the same ring to it. So here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been playing since the last one of these&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51000"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51012,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51000\/revisions\/51012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}