Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Not much to talk about today. Considered not even writing a blog post but... meh. I kinda feel like waffling a bit. Got no topic in mind or anything, but future historians love mundane descriptions of everyday life. I spent the morning recovering from a late night. Had a cast party to celebrate a successful run of a community theater production. I think I got home at like 2:00 AM? I don't know I wasn't really paying attention to the time. While lying in bed waking up I felt a random urge to play UNO, and naturally there's an android app so I played quite a few rounds of UNO on my phone. I do wonder how many real people I actually played with if any. It's not uncommon for online multiplayer games to populate a playsession with bots if not enough people can pull together a full game. Obviously, they don't advertise this fact so it's difficult to know for sure. With a lot of console and PC games it's a bit easier because game developers are pretty bad at coming up with "gamer" usernames. The UNO app encourages people to use their first name (eww don't do that), and the player base is probably full of "normies" who might just use their first name. So bots can hide pretty easily using common first names. I elected to stay as guest022264. Also, it occured to me how little skill UNO actually requires; especially online. There are so few actions that it's pretty easy to determine the optimal one, and more than occasionally you don't even get a choice on your turn. It really is predominantly luck based. Makes it perfect for a mobile game. By weighting your odds of winning, the developers can pretty reliably control when you win or lose so they can maximize engagement through operant conditioning (the same mechanism that gambling leverages: inconsistent positive outcomes to encourage repeating a behavior).
After I finally pulled myself out of bed, took my meds and a shower (no new developments on the HRT front). My roommate and I went to check out a place we might move to soon. The management there did not inspire confidence. There was a severe lack of internal communication that succeeded only in wasting everyone's time. But, at least when I got home I had the whole day in front of me with no pressing obligations. Decided to boot up Enter The Matrix for the first time in ages. Never did get around to completing that game despite what a huge Matrix fan I am. Played it for an hour or so. Better than I remember. Controls still suck, and it's structure and pacing are fragmented and breakneck respectively, but it's smoother than I remember. Also elected to play on easy this time, because I'm just here for a good time, and I wish I first played the game on easy. It delivers a very satisfying power fantasy and better emulates the effortless vibe the protagonists in The Matrix have when beating up the standard low level bad guys. The Agents, despite being invulnerable, don't really inspire the right ammount of threat on easy as they don't do enough damage and you can smack them around quite a bit, but the game is designed well enough that the threat is still communicated. Oh, and I fooled around with the "Hacking" minigame. It's probably one of the neatest parts of the game. It's an option on the main menu that opens a command prompt that allows you to explore a computer system. Through dos style (but not exactly dos) text commands, you can access bonus content and solve puzzles to unlock some additional minor story content (messages from Matrix characters like Trinity and Neo), and some gameplay stuff like a hidden Multiplayer minigame. Ooh and the way it contextualizes cheats is pretty neat too! They're treated like alterations you're making to The Matrix itself. It's not just a code you put in a menu. You run a cheat program that alteres the conditions inside The Matrix that gets applied to your save file so those condiditons will be present in the game. It's pretty neat.
And that kinda brings me to now. Leaving a lot out obviously. Played a bit of Beat Saber on my Quest 2. Always a good time, but thats nowhere near as interesting to talk about as Enter The Matrix. Do wish I had a sedate VR experiance I could do sitting down besides Tetris Effect. Though Tetris Effect is super cool; it gets pretty stressful. There's a 3D jigsaw puzzle game Puzzling Places that looks pretty cool. Might pick that up soon.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com