Tamrielo

I lost an entire day this weekend to Rocket League. If you’re not familiar, it’s soccer-like, only you’re driving around in ridiculous cars with rocket boosters. It’s a completely nonsense premise that sounds like the kind of idea a bunch of kids would come up with– “oh man, what if we played soccer but IN CARS but also WITH EXPLOSIONS and the cars COULD FLY?! WOULDN’T THAT BE AWESOME?”

The game defies a no-caps explanation. It gleefully sets up a fantastically arcade-y soccer match between teams of unlikely vehicles, and within a few minutes, the premise melts away and what you have is a very compelling team game with really intuitive controls and a tight, polished physics engine. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t, but it *is* extremely fun; it’s the pure, simple fun of Mariokart in a more streamlined package.

It scales surprisingly well to the number of players you have, from 1v1 to 4v4. I played mainly with Kodra, Eliyon, and Ash, but as our group grew and shrank, it was easy to go from 3v3 to 4v4. We played against the AI, since none of us had played the game before, but the AI gave us a bunch of fun matches. Games last about five to seven minutes, so it’s easy to hop in for a game or two.

It’s also a surprisingly DEEP game. Controls are fairly simple, but the combination of the physics engine and the… liberties the game takes with the laws of physics let you set up some really awesome shots and saves if you’ve got the presence of mind and controller finesse to pull them off. There aren’t different types of handling for different cars, either– every car simply handles more or less identically, turning tightly, accelerating quickly, and having a frankly silly top speed. Without the constraints of a race, there’s no reason for differing levels of imperfection in a car, so Rocket League does away with all of that entirely. All of the car customization is entirely cosmetic, and pretty hilarious. Eliyon won a mariachi hat in our first game and wore it for pretty much the rest of the day. This is a gigantic hat that just goes on the roof of your car. Why? It doesn’t matter!

The best review of Rocket League I’ve heard is “I don’t like driving games or sports games at all, but I like Rocket League.” It pretty much says everything, and the fact that it’s a game where you drive cars around that Ash has fun playing also says a lot (haha I’m just kidding Ash). Seriously, though, it’s a really fun game and worth your time. It is to soccer what mariokart is to racing, which is a title I used to give to Super Mario Strikers, but frankly Rocket League does the same kind of thing better.

Rocket League also became an e-sport in record time and has a ton of youtube and twitch videos. Watching really, really good players is pretty exciting, because they pull off insane stunts. Definitely worth a look. If you like fun and like mariokart, give Rocket League a look.

I’ve been dabbling in PvP games recently– Battlefront a few weekends back, FFXIV’s Lords of Verminion, a bit of Starcraft. I even jumped back into Tribes to check it out, since I remember loving that game.

Of these, one has decent matchmaking, and one is too young to have enough data for good matchmaking. It’s an interesting problem with PvP design in general– for the vast majority of people, it’s only really fun if the sides are even, and otherwise it’s miserable. Furthermore, the speed at which players quit if they’re losing is a lot faster than if they’re bored of winning, so you quickly get into impenetrable situations where any sense of stratified play is eliminated. There’s no space for new players to learn how to play the game, and advanced players benefit from stomping new players.

At the same time, a lot of PvP games (especially MMOs) try to blur the line between levels of player skill, making each match a crapshoot as to whether it will be a close, fun match or a total blowout. It tends to make PvP feel more random and less “balanced”, which doesn’t satisfy PvP players, and it frustrates players who dabble in the gametype because it feels punitive and random compared to the rest of the game.

As a recent example for me, I’ve noticed that the Lords of Verminion metagame has, broadly, three tiers of players. There are the low tier players, who are trying new strategies and testing out minions against players (because the AI, even at its hardest, isn’t that challenging outside of some of the pre-scripted challenges), who tend to lose most of their games against other players (owing at least partly to a lack of rare minions). There are the mid-tier players, who are what I was running into a few days ago, who supplant skill with rare and overly powerful minions. Then there are the high-tier players, who are using no more than three or four different minions (a couple of which are rare), all generally with the same special ability, but are adept at using it and reacting to the other player’s moves. They tend to beat the mid-tier players who just use rare minions, because they’re better at the game and know which rare minions are the best and which more common minions can beat them. Unfortunately, I’m paired with all of the different tiers of players essentially at random, and the lower-tier players tend to stop playing after two or three matches. They tend to be the best and most even games for me, because I also lack rare minions, though I can occasionally beat a mid-tier player, though high tier players are both better than I am and have better minions. As a result, after a scant handful of games the only players remaining on the field for me are the ones I’m at a stark minion disadvantage against.

In a similar vein, Starcraft divides its players up by “leagues”, from bronze all the way up to platinum, diamond, and master. Every game you play adjusts your overall ranking, so that you’re more or less always being paired with players of your skill level. Starcraft’s downside is that even the very lowest tiers of play require knowledge of the game that’s hard to get without exposing yourself to other players. Other players, especially in PvP games, tend to be abrasive and combative– League of Legends is a prime example of a game that’s been fighting this for years with mixed results. Even in the usually surprisingly positive FFXIV community, I had a person (who was the top-ranked player in my server’s tournament last I checked) tell me to “just quit, you’re not good” in our match. It’s a bad environment to learn in, and worse if you have both opponents AND teammates to interfere (again: see League).

Solutions to this are interesting. In the MMO space, the number of players who actually actively participate in PvP is vanishingly small in most games– depending on the game it sits anywhere from as low as 2% to as high as 35%, but it’s always a minority of players. It’s a relatively inexpensive source of content, which is why you see it as much as you do, but supporting teaching systems (which would be significantly more expensive) are vanishingly rare.

Here’s the thing that frustrates me. PvP is fun. Probably a majority of my readership just read that and winced, or outright said to the screen “no, it’s not!”, but I assure you it is. Mariokart is a fun game. Smash Bros is a fun game. Lots of board and card games are fun, and they’re PvP. Bar Trivia is PvP. It’s possible to have fun in PvP in a video game, and I’d be honestly surprised to run into someone who’s played games for a long time who hasn’t had fun with PvP somewhere in there. It’s just that when you’re playing Mariokart with friends on the couch, you’re (probably) not dicks to each other, and you can make adjustments for slight skill differences to make it fun for everyone. No one wins if someone just slams everyone else and smack talks about it, and if someone does that, they’re probably not getting invited to the next game night.

Despite this, PvP in online games continues to be inaccessible for all but the most devoted. It’s something I think about a lot, because I think there’s a niche for a game that teaches PvP skills in a friendly, accessible way without being frustrating or leaving a huge skill gap between players who have just played the campaign and some “vs AI” matches and players who have played against other players. There’s got to be a way to pull it off.

In the meantime, though, I’d also like to see games lean on more serious PvE on a wider variety of levels for its challenge. Diablo 3 does this rather well, and while that game isn’t my cup of tea I think it’s a good example of a game with basically no PvP that’s still compelling over long periods. I’ve talked before about wanting an MMO with a legitimately scary world, too.

I have a constant urge to experience new things. It’s what I imagine wanderlust is like for other people, except for me it’s not necessarily places, it can be all kinds of things. For most of this year, it’s been food. One of the closest food stores to me is a Japanese grocery, and over the course of the year I’ve been shifting my diet as a result of what I can find there. The change has been interesting for me.

Whereas I used to eat a lot of bread and meat, I’m now eating more rice and fish– mainly because that’s what’s inexpensive and readily available. I already ate with very few condiments, so it’s been pretty easy to transition and be extremely selective about what I season my food with. It’s simplified my meals considerably, and as a side effect I’m eating a lot more healthfully than I have before. In order to get the exciting flavors I like in my food, I’ve had to start trying different things– rice seasonings, various types of chilis, and new types of sauces. One of the best I’ve found is dried garlic in chili oil, which I use on a variety of things but mostly eggs– it makes for amazing scrambled eggs.

Today I picked up a package of umeboshi– pickled plums. I’d had a bite of one some time ago, and it was intensely sour cut with honey sweetness; one of the only foods I’ve had where honey doesn’t make for a cloyingly sweet flavor. It was a balance between extremes, and I wanted to try to find my own. I’d been told that the kind I was looking for were “sweet umeboshi”, but I have no idea how to differentiate those. After looking over the shelf in the grocery store, I confidently selected a package at random to bring home. I got an approving nod from a fellow shopper, which made me a bit concerned.

These were, as it turns out, not the sweet kind. It’s pretty much an intense hit of saltiness and sourness, with a sweet, fruity aftertaste. The flavor was, at first, almost overwhelming, and pretty unlike almost anything else I’ve tried before. It took me a solid ten minutes to work up the nerve to eat more than a bite or two, and finally just finish the whole thing. I did manage to finish it, and a little while later I suddenly understood why they’re so popular.

After the intense shock of salty and sour, what’s left is the faint taste of plum– slightly sweet, slightly tangy, very mild. It’s a very pleasant aftertaste, like plum wine without as much sweetness or alcohol. It’s a sensation that manages to be both similar to and unlike eating an actual plum, and I’m ultimately really glad I experienced it. I’ll be prepared for it next time I eat one of these, knowing that the real experience is in the complex aftertaste, not the initial salty/sour shock.

I’m so used to food that centers its experience on the consumption step– where the highlight of the experience is when the bite is actually on your tongue. The only place where that really diverges for me are mixed drinks, where the appealing part isn’t necessarily the flavor of the drink, but the aftertaste, or the aroma, or the texture. Umeboshi fits into this interesting space where I appreciate the flavor AFTER I’ve eaten it, but not during. It’s possible that will change, but it’s a flavor I couldn’t have imagined myself enjoying even just a year ago.

It reminds me of why I like to experience new things, try new sensations, and understand new concepts. Understanding that this salty, sour pickled plum is widely enjoyed made me want to try it, and approaching it with an open mind gave me the chance to have an entire new world of food open up to me– there are a bunch of things that I’m interested in trying now. I think it’s easy to have an experience that doesn’t fit in neatly with what I’m used to, and simply dismiss it as “weird” without a second thought. It’s an automatic response that I consciously try to fight.

Part of this is that I believe that people are fundamentally pretty much the same everywhere. Things are often just arranged differently. There isn’t some magic cultural trait that prevents me from understanding and enjoying the flavors of other places, and there’s a lot out there that can surprise me, still.

I think it ties in nicely to games– when I was younger and hadn’t experienced a ton of games, relatively mainstream, relatively popular games could still surprise me and make a big impact. As I’ve gotten older and have expanded my gaming palate, it takes ever more high-quality, original games to get my attention. However, if I start delving into genres I’ve never touched, or thought I didn’t like, I can often find new experiences that are familiar enough to be compelling but different enough to be new and exciting. The best part is, for a lot of those genres have their own outstanding, top-notch games to try.

The first taste might not seem interesting or palatable, but there’s a reason so many people like a given thing. I find it fun to try to find out why, find that spark that gets people excited.