Category Archives: Geeky Wednesdays

How It Feels to Grow Up

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I dislike many things about adulthood, but I’ll be the first to admit it has its perks. As an adult, I get to eat anything I want. (What I want, apparently, is apples, sandwiches, and the occasional pie.) I am the master of my household, free to arrange and decorate my apartment however I like. (What I like, it seems, is machetes, plushies, and video game posters.) Like the young gentleman in the comic above, I have both a car and the license to drive “wherever my heart desires.” (What my heart desires, more often than not, is to stay home.)

Being a grownup is exciting. It brings freedom and independence. In time, however, the privileges of adulthood become commonplace. No longer a triumphant emblem of autonomy, my car has become the quickest way to run errands, get to work, or grab burgers at McDonald’s. While never losing their value, the perks of growing up lose some of their magic.

All the same, I must say, being a grownup is pretty sweet.

You Have to Burn the What?

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Geeky Wednesday posts on this blog generally feature a song, picture, video or literary excerpt. Today’s post is a little different.

This particular Geeky Wednesday features a video game. Most games are far too long for this blog, but this one can be completed in a couple of minutes. If you don’t want to play it, that’s fine; I’ll explain in just a moment why this weird, wonderful little game is significant.

If you’ve ever played a video game, spare a few minutes of your life and give You Have to Burn the Rope a try. The game’s controls are up arrow key to jump, down arrow key to throw axes and left and right arrow keys to move left and right, respectively. (As with YouTube videos, a brief ad may play before the game begins.)

Go forth, brave reader, and burn the rope!

You Have to Burn the Rope is a joke, a critique of the video game industry or an exercise in postmodernism. I’m honestly not sure which it is.

Right from the start, the game gives the player the following facts:

  1. There’s a boss at the end of this tunnel
  2. You can’t hurt him with your weapons
  3. To kill him you have to burn the rope above

Thus the player proceeds along the tunnel and finds the game’s one and only boss, the Grinning Colossus. This towering enemy can’t be hurt by the player’s axes, leaving the player to snatch a torch from the wall and burn the rope above the boss. Burning the rope sends a chandelier crashing down upon the boss’s head… and that’s the game. You have burned the rope. The end.

As the credits roll, the player is rewarded extravagantly by this wonderful song.

“Congratulations!” exclaims the song. “You’re the hero we all wish we could be! You made it through the tunnel and grabbed that fire from the wall! You burned the rope and saved us all! Now you’re a hero! You managed to beat the whole damn game!”

The irony here is obvious. This short, easy game gives the player step-by-step instructions on how to overcome its only obstacle—heck, the game’s title gives away the only strategy needed to beat it—and then congratulates the player as though completing the game were an extreme challenge.

Since a friend of mine recommended You Have to Burn the Rope a long time ago, I’ve wondered what its developer is trying to say. Is the game an elaborate joke? Is it a protest of how modern video games are becoming too easy and rewarding players for negligible achievements? Is it a postmodern deconstruction of traditional video game design?

I don’t get it. All I know is that you have to burn the rope.

This post was originally published on March 12, 2014. TMTF shall return with new content on April 20, 2015!

Jesus Broke the Fourth Wall

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Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.

~ Matthew 26:13

One of my favorite storytelling tricks is called breaking the fourth wall. There was once a playwright, you see, who insisted on making his stage productions as realistic as possible. In a play performed on a stage with three walls, the audience must be the fourth wall.

Thus the fourth wall became a phrase describing the imaginary boundary between the audience and the performers, or (more broadly) between reality and fiction. When a performer acknowledges the audience, that fourth wall is broken. This trick is often used for comedic effect or even as a clever, self-aware way for fiction to communicate its meaning.

It occurred to me not long ago that Jesus seems to break the fourth wall, so to speak, in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. The story is a familiar one. Days before his crucifixion, Jesus is anointed with perfume by a woman. His disciples are indignant: “Why this waste? This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”

Jesus gives this touching reply: “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial.”

Then things get awesome as Jesus breaks the fourth wall.

“Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

In simply speaking those words, recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and later preached to countless people over many centuries, Jesus made them come true.

As much as I’d like to assume Jesus specifically meant the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Mark when he said “this gospel,” history tells us otherwise. The word translated gospel in this passage—and later applied to the books of Matthew and Mark—means good news. By “this gospel,” Jesus was speaking broadly of the good news of his life, death and resurrection—not of a specific Gospel in the Bible.

All the same, I chuckle every time I read that passage. Jesus was a man of miracles. He walked on water, healed the sick, raised the dead and did what no one (as far as I know) has ever done outside of fiction.

Jesus broke the fourth wall.

This post was originally published on April 17, 2013. TMTF shall return with new content on April 20, 2015!

A Collection of Fabulous Video Game Mustaches

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Stache Stash

Clockwise, beginning at the top right: Yang (Final Fantasy), Mario (Super Mario Bros.), Dr. Eggman (Sonic the Hedgehog), Dr. Wily (Mega Man), Wario (Super Mario Bros.), Naked Snake (Metal Gear Solid), Don Paolo (Professor Layton) and Marvin Grossberg (Ace Attorney).

This is a collection of magnificent video game mustaches: a stache stash, if you will. Which is best? My money is on Mario’s mustache. It lacks the extravagant flair and staggering size of the competition, yet it boasts an understated charm.

This post was originally published on May 8, 2013. TMTF shall return with new content on April 20, 2015!

If Pixar Made a Video Game

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I don’t plan to play this game, but dang if this isn’t the most entertaining video game trailer I’ve ever seen.

After a brief, faux-propaganda introduction, the trailer for Overwatch shifts to a style more like Pixar or Disney: let us say, The Incredibles meets Big Hero 6. There’s a gorilla wearing glasses, a sprightly gunslinger, a couple of brave kids, and (of course) some explosions. I really enjoyed this trailer.

The video game industry is full of games with guns. (These games are widely known as shooters.) They’re nearly always gritty and gory. Some of them are actually quite good, yet their unrelenting doom and gloom are depressing… and some of the people who play games with guns are just mean. Bullying is common among players of shooters.

It’s nice to see the developer of Overwatch, Blizzard, taking the games-with-guns genre in a brighter, friendlier direction.

Chris Metzen, a developer for Blizzard, shared a refreshingly positive philosophy for the game: “Is it even possible to build a shooter that doesn’t feel cynical, that doesn’t feel cruel, that doesn’t feel nasty? Can you build one that really promotes teamwork and relationship and having fun with your friends, and not getting killed with a thrown knife from halfway across the map as soon as you jump in?”

I hope it’s possible. Overwatch seems like a great step in the right direction. At any rate, I must give it bonus points for the gorilla.

A Wrecking Ball? Smashing!

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I hate country music.

At work, country music is frequently played on the radio. I suffer in bitter silence, trying to block out the endlessly repeating songs about trucks, tractors, back roads, beer, intoxication, and promiscuous women. The music mostly sounds the same to me, and the lyrics are deplorable.

Pop music is nearly as bad. It’s no less shallow than country music, but at least it’s not as muddy. Pop’s obsessions with dysfunctional relationships, cheap sex, and glamorous appearances are depressing.

To be fair, I’ve heard pop and country songs that are pretty good. I can’t think of any, but I’m sure they’re out there.

Much to my astonishment, the Gregory Brothers have fused pop and country into something that sounds… actually pretty awesome. Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” makes a great country ballad.

I particularly like how the camera, near the end of the music video, pans slowly across an action figure of Ryu from Street Fighter, which later falls over inexplicably. It’s obviously a metaphor for something incomprehensibly profound, and I respect the Gregory Brothers’ artistic vision.

Lore in a Minute

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Do you know what’s confusing? Video game stories. Seriously. Have you ever played a narrative-driven video game? Too many games set up complicated backstories or mythologies to rival Tolkien’s, which nearly always leave those games with one of two problems: explaining too much, or else not explaining enough.

I’ve played a lot of games with fantastic settings, brilliant characterization, and intricate plots—only to see those things obscured by poor storytelling. (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Metal Gear Solid.) All the worldbuilding in the, um, world won’t matter if a game’s lore is too complicated for players to understand.

Fortunately for video game aficionados everywhere, a YouTube group called Lore in a Minute has taken it upon themselves to explain the complex lore of various video games, each in one minute… ish.

The video above explains the (admittedly complicated) setup of Chrono Trigger, which I consider probably the greatest RPG ever made. It takes one heck of an explanation to make sense of the time-traveling adventures of a swordsman, an inventor, a princess, a steampunk robot, a prehistoric cavewoman, a demon king, and a medieval knight/talking frog.

Yeah, it’s kind of a weird game. You should totally play it.