Things I Learned About Today

1) how to use microsoft outlook; Also, how silly some people who regularly use said program have NO IDEA how powerful it is.

2) All about the Uncanny Valley.

Yes, I am posting a blog post while at work. What's this say about my work ethic?

Frighteningly Bad Game Design

among things that happened today, I got bored and decided to play Vector Tower Defense because the order of the day was lazy-tiredness as well as frustration. Sadly the link in my favorites had died, thus I had to either google it... Or there was this whole games site full of handy flash games. Naturally choose "Endless Zombie Rampage" as it gives evidently continuous play value. Also it looked terribly a lot like Crimsonland only not good. I was correct in the not-good because although yes, it is a level-based upgradathon, it is rapidly evident how to 'break' the game.
Your laughable starting pistol in which you have no choice but to painstaking shoot the slowest zombies with 3 hp a piece, 3 times, clearly indicating the damage of said bullets, killing them leaving large blood pools all over the place and your pistols brass scattered about.

15 zombies and a whopping 75 xp later level ends and you get your first look at the
"upgrade" screen. Various choices of healing yourself and your base as well as a selection of new guns you purchase with that xp. These guns range from 100ish to 9000 xp, healing and other improvements also vary in price. After examining the upgrade screen and all the gun stats (which include damage, rate of fire, capacity and reload time) what the most important ones is are damage per second (take damage, multiply by rate of fire) and RELOAD TIME. Ie. time you're NOT killing zombies. Since every timea zombie is hit, it takes a pace or so back regardless of how much damage the shot did unless it was killed in which case it falls down.

The section of guns known as "assault rifles" is immediately noticed with the first tier doing double the damage of your piddling pistol, a higher rate of higher, a large capacity and a FASTER RELOAD than even your pistol! Not to mention the increased capacity. The cheapest one is admittedly 350 xp, but you have that my the fifth level if you don't buy anything beforehand.

Picking up the G36 assault rifle quickly destroys your foes on the next level, and the next few, while the level before you get it your pistol is seeming a puny weapon indeed. Now that you've staved off zombie hordes for the time being, it's time to break the game.

Clicking the "powerups" tab you come to the usual assortment of increased zombie slaughter... Running faster (always nice), extended magazines for more zombie death, speed loader for cutting down on the non-zombie-killing time, hollow points for a largely useless 10% more damage and the "game breaker"... "Bloodlust"-"Every drop of blood spilled counts for 1 Exp". Woot. Something that rewards high rate of fire over damage of individual shots. But there is also "Overkill", every point of damage done over an enemy's max hp counts towards Exp. Same thing but rewarding high damage. Solution: get bloodlust, use tons of exp from bloodlust bonus buy HIGH DAMAGE assault rifle, use that to trivially dominate the game until you can afford overkill, use tons of xp to buy everything else in the game. Although all one needs is the 9000 xp GAU-8 Minigun (40 damage per shot, 30 rounds/s, 999 ammo capacity, 4 second road), although arguably the third tier assault rifle is better (40 damage, 15 rounds/s, 150 ammo capacity, 0.4 second reload?! you can barely tell it reloads, it feels just like a bit of lag)

As far as I can tell the enemies just get faster and have more hp up to a point. But then it gets hard to distinguish enemies when your screen is entirely red from blood except for the little circle of brass from the discarded ammo casings around where your dude stands. Sometimes it gets hard to see some of the enemies as they blend in with the dead zombies and blood. I'm wondering if there is any "boss" or end of zombie upgrades but I've bought everything in the game and have roughly 10x more max hp and base hp, and still have 40k exp. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a zombie type is new since they're so low detail and die pretty much instantly to a sweep of minigun fire or if i'm feeling bored, laser pistol (useless... 100 damage, 1 ammo capacity 2 second reload. Why not call it infinite capacity, 0.5 shots per second?)

*Kills more zombies*

Now that I've actually see how much damage zombies do and how effective the collision/damage detection is (by standing there and letting zombies build up so I could cut them down in huge swaths with the shot gun), it has become abundantly clear that with those exp boosting abilities, even a horrendously bad player who let zombies hurt them and thier base, would be able to repair any amount of damage done in a single level with the single level's worth of exp... and have a bunch left over.

Why did I write so much about, and play so long, such a bad game. When I could be doing something so much more productive... Like staring at a ceiling, or watching paint dry.

*goes to find something else to do*

Furry Mouse People -> Squishers

People, by and large, love endowing things and creatures around us with human qualities. We do it so often that we have a word for it: Personification. Which from it's Latin roots means "To make like people" conveniently enough. I couldn't think of the number of books I have read where mice, rats, birds and bats are given human qualities and interact out a microcosm of the human condition. Often times where the micro part comes from in fact, a physical scaling down. Mouses in tiny houses and so on.

In fact, we've done this on a non-literary scale in the real world. Dogs. And many other domesticated animals. They're definitely not people, and yet, we've given them something. We've given wolves, dangerous creatures in their own right, and given them that little extra something... That extra capacity for horrific violence, that is so very human. There has not been a single claim of unprovoked wolf violence on a adult human ever, or so I've read. I'll try and find a source. Admittedly I don't believe it, because wolf-eating-people-in-woods don't leave that much evidence behind.

Modern society kills hundreds of dogs every year because that extra level of violence we've given them rages within unchecked and uncontrollable.

Then you have aliens. We're back in the literary world now and probably more comfortable territory for regular TCSM-blog readers. How often do you see movies or read books about aliens who come to us in a position of an insurmountable technological advantage and are peaceful, serene creatures with no ulterior motives. I can think of very few. This is because we find it hard to empathize with such creatures. Humans aren't built to play that way with others. We turn everything into dumbed down copies of ourselves, or failing that, destroy it.

Thus you have stories of conquering aliens. Aliens who see us as nothing but bugs to be squashed. Because that is what we shall be when we leave this rock. Squishers bringing squishiness to all those we find until someone squishes us first.

Wikipedia does really have all the answers I want.