Letting Go of Worldly Desires en Route to The Nuclear Throne

I’m a competitive gamer. I play for fun first and foremost, but I also play to win. Always have.

I play games for fun, which is a good thing, because losing doesn’t frustrate me overmuch, and even if I get frustrated, I do not get angry, I do not go on tilt. This is a good thing, because even if I’m not entirely without talent in video-games, and my siblings and cousins would come to me now and then for aid with video games, I’m not exactly talented in those games either, certainly not mechanically. The progress I make in such games is usually through much trial and error, growing wiser in the way of the game, gaining game sense more than mastery over the mechanics themselves. It also means I tend to do better in games where manual dexterity plays less of a role, such as turn-based strategy games, or non-video games, such as miniature wargaming, or card-games.

Thrice over have I benefited from not going on tilt, from not getting overly frustrated when losses come (though some losses do frustrate me, I’ll make no lie, as that’s part of the competitive spirit). First and foremost, some of the fun is sucked away from the activity if it frustrates and angers you, and you’re certainly not happy at the moment. Second, in many games, you could have won, had you not gone on tilt, and so one loss leads to another, and that to another yet. Finally, since my skill came from playing those games many a time, or at least thinking of them, frustration would’ve had me play them less, and so I wouldn’t have gotten better. And I usually learned more from losses than from victories, which meant one has to be willing to tackle on their loss, not try to ignore it.

LUFTRAUSERS – The Most Important Button is the One You Don’t Press

LUFTRAUSERS is a shoot’em up, or an aerial dogfighting game, where you get to make a plane out of 3 parts (weapon, body, engine) making up 125 combinations, each with a different audio track (I assume they have 3 layers/parts, for each bit) – I personally like the nuke body (where you blow up when you die, but take extra damage from collisions) the best.

This game is elegant, there are a total of four buttons you can click: Right, left, up (accelerate) and “Shoot”. Nothing else. Actually, the game has 6 buttons. Right, left, pressing on accelerate, not-pressing on accelerate, pressing to shoot, and not-pressing to shoot. While it seems weird for me to note these, as we don’t talk of “not shooting” as a button in most games, there the choice is often what to shoot, or how else to circumvent an enemy (Stealth games).

Media Month in Review – March 2014

I’ve been all sorts of busy and pre-occupied this month, which explains the relative dearth of movies watched, as well as all the editorials I said I’ll write and hadn’t. I’ll also use this entry to give a sentence or so on each of the currently airing anime I’ve watched, and there’d been a metric ton of those.

I use this post to go over all the media consumed/experienced over the past month, with 2-4 sentences per item. A way to give short thoughts on each topic.

Movies:

• How to Train Your Dragon – Had this lying around for a while, and felt like watching more films recently, so gave it a go. Yes, I love cats, and that the main dragon is so very cat-like made me go “Awww!” – It’s a small and harmless little film. It only has one real character, and no real character growth anywhere. It’s mostly there for neat moments, for gag moments, and for ye olde “Be yourself, and you’ll change the world and win the girl” message. Take it or leave it.