Woo, another update. I had a comment posted in my last update from someone I didn’t even know read my blog, so, happily, I feel obliged to keep updating. :)

In less heavy and far happier news, I’ve started playing games again. For a while I was working about 16 - 20 hours a day working at Liquid and doing art tests to find a new job, and had to cut out everything that wasn’t directly productive. Now I’m relaxing again.

I picked up Burnout 3 and The Sims 2 this past couple weeks. Typically I hate racing games, but I tried Burnout 3 while I was interviewing at Ready At Dawn and was immediately hooked!

The game’s amazing on many levels. The controls are very arcadey and it’s very easy to memorize the general control philosophy so controlling cars becomes so instinctive, you forget you’re holding a controller. I fall deeply in love with games that allow this sort of freedom, because ultimately I believe a game’s interface should be so simple and easy to comprehend that it quickly transcends the need for intensive mental processing and instead becomes instinctive and reflexive.

To put it more simply, I don’t want to THINK about what I want to do. I want to know what I want to do and memorize the pattern to follow to complete it. If I see a turn coming up, I have a close enough feel for the mechanics of movement that I know exactly the right time to tap the joystick to turn and to tap the brake to drift around the corner, and quickly and unthinkingly make minute adjustments to right myself. It’d be a burden to think all that through, but the control scheme in Burnout 3 is so simple, perfect and easily predictable that it’s a breeze! An example of a terrible interface and controls would be Resident Evil Zero for the Gamecube, where I never know what direction I’ll head.

There’s more beauty to the game, however. The graphics are fantastic, naturally, but what makes me keep coming back is that every action in the game is constructive in some way. You have a set of immediate goals and a set of secondary, almost passive goals. Your immediate goals are to either crash into a crowded intersection and cause $X amount of damage, or crash 10 cars, or get a gold medal in this event. Your secondary goals are something like achieving 500 Takedowns (crashing other cars), or $10,000,000 crash damage dollars, which are small milestones that unlock new cars and tracks.

If you’re in a normal race, even if you place badly, your Takedown count or Burnout Points (style points for driving, basically) add up and unlock new vehicles, tracks and events for you. I never feel like I’m wasting my time. In other racing games, if I crash once in a race, it’s all over and I have to restart the race. Some extreme situations in Burnout CAN be that bad, but even then, if I crash in a REALLY cool way, I get bonus points for it that accumulate.

Between the unlockables, great graphics, fantastic gameplay and control scheme, this is a really fantastic game. I’ve even gotten Dea into it, which is pretty cool.

Sims 2 I haven’t played much of, but I’m impressed with all the improvements so far. Most of the bullshit micromanagement that made the first Sims frustrating is gone, and it’s been replaced with FUN. More soon on that.

HEY, speaking of something completely unrelated, I’d like to extend an enthusiastic “fuck you” to all apartment complexes in Orange County. You are all stupid for not allowing more than two pets, regardless of species. I can see how charging a $1000 pet deposit per FISH is necessary. Guppies are, of course, notoriously messy creatures. I had one get out once and SHRED this sofa I had. No joke!

That’s all I’ve got for now. 12:44am. Time for another glass-o-wine, enjoying Conan O’Brien then bed and back to the grind. One more week from tomorrow is my last day at Liquid Development. Yay!