First, a quick complaint. I recognize that it comes down to a good old-fashioned generation gap, and that I may be requested to evacuate the immediate lawn-like area, but it still catches me off guard how many people of the older generation don’t get video games. At all. They both fail to recognize video games as legitimate media, and fail to recognize that video games have continually evolved over the years to meet the demands of their growing audience. Because they remember that 20 years ago, video games were strongly geared towards children, they continue to labor under the assumption that video games are something to be outgrown. I consider my parents to be technically competent and generally aware of technological trends, yet even they frequently express surprise that I “still” play video games.

My mom is a little better in this respect; she seems to like the idea of the Wii, even if she never actually plays hers, and she had my old DS for a while to play a mahjong game we picked up in Japan. (There’s also her late sister, whose Tetris-playing stamina was nigh legendary.) Maybe with the four major video game platforms now embracing the “family gaming” concept, the DS and Wii having done it for years now, and the Move and Kinect bringing the other two into the fold, we’ll see the old assumptions fade away a bit. There is hope, after all–I don’t think I’ve heard anybody refer to a non-Nintendo game as “playing Nintendo” for a little while now.

With that, let us continue on to a mildly-cliché “end-of-year review”. These were my two favorite games of 2010. As some warning, my tastes are not particularly, er, mainstream, so I haven’t played Gears of God of War Solid: The Sands of Liberty, and don’t intend to. But then, my esoteric choices will be evident shortly.

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

This is a game you have never heard of. Unless I’ve told you about it while playing it, or you read Jeremy Parish’s stuff (which maybe you should).

This is not a game with a large target audience. It’s a little old-fashioned. There are no fancy cutscenes, there is no tutorial, and I actually had to read the manual once. On the surface, it’s tedious as all hell: the player is tasked with exploring a vast labyrinth and mapping it—by hand!—on the DS touchscreen, while fighting random battles. As the first few hours tick away, depending on the player’s tastes, this either does turn out to be tedious as all hell (the majority case), or reveals an intricate, elaborate world with fascinating corners to explore and rich details to discover (I guess I’m weird like that). I can think of pretty much one other person I know (a Mr. Legion, of the Connecticut Legions) who would likely fall into the latter camp with me. This is a classic, old-school RPG experience mildly reminiscent of the Bard’s Tale series.

Etrian Odyssey delivers a classic dungeon-crawling experience, yet is informed by a quarter-century of game design wisdom and evolution. There are no sudden deaths lurking around blind corners, no ridiculous Shadowgate-esque kills. Virtually every party death, of which there are plenty, is accompanied by a sense that it was the player’s own fault for getting in too deep, for getting careless and skipping necessary precautions, or for just being downright dumb.

On top of that, the game is beautiful, and the soundtrack is fantastic, with the PC-8801 sound lending it an appropriately retro feel. The music is made pretty distinctive by being full of drums, which is easily missed as they don’t really come across that well on the DS’s tiny speakers. But when fed through headphones, or, say, your computer’s speakers, the music really comes alive:

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

There’s no in-game clock, so it’s hard to know how much sleep I’ve lost diving into the labyrinth under Armoroad. Seven DS batteries is the best estimate I can tender.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Mario Galaxy, unlike Etrian Odyssey, is highly accessible, was widely-advertised, and contains a variety of dissimilar gameplay mechanics. What it has in common with EO is that it doesn’t really bother with plot, per se. What few threads of plot exist are woven weakly into the game, never getting in the way of interesting gameplay mechanics, like combining hot peppers and dinosaurs, and thoroughly confusing children about how gravity works.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The game has shed even what sparse packaging its predecessor had. Gone is the sprawling Mario 64-style overworld that was Rosalina’s observatory, replaced by a lightweight, mildly retro world map for choosing a stage. Interludes laying out backstory for the world are eschewed, most such details being relegated to optional dialogues with NPCs. The result is distilled Mario action with minimal padding added to tie the many disjoint galaxies together into a single package. The game boils down to being an expansion pack of the first Galaxy game, with fresh platforming gimmicks and little tweaks and improvements scattered about. Considering what a solid game Galaxy was, it’s hard to ask for anything more.

Also, the Throwback Galaxy (spoiler alert?) is incredible.

Some of the others

On the puzzle-y front, I finally played World of Goo, which I recommend highly (thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle). I spent far too much time on Manufactoria, a Flash game about Turing machines (no, seriously). Finally, I dropped about 60 hours over two months into Star Ocean: The Last Hope, which is actually a pretty bad game in many ways, but which I am a little ashamed to admit I really enjoyed.

So, did you play anything good this year?

The Creation Museum is not above irony.

I went to the Creation Museum with some friends yesterday. I’d been avoiding it ever since it opened and started bringing shame to my hometown, but a high school (and college) friend had some company in from out of town, and somehow the Creation Museum wound up higher on the priority list than, say, the Cincinnati Zoo.

The museum is Buy 1 Get 1 Free all this month, apparently—that’s good because I was pretty hesitant about giving them any money. I think I’ll head to Union Terminal later and make an offsetting donation to the Natural History Museum. I haven’t been there for years, probably since junior high school, and it might be about time to pay another visit.

We weren’t a hard group to spot. I was easily recognizable as the asshole in the Obama-Biden t-shirt who was making fun of all the logical fallacies.

Hats off to the museum—they sure can put together nice-looking exhibits. I think a lot of the exhibits were designed by people with movie and special effects experience; everything was visually impressive. Also, there seemed to be a lot of gratuitous animatronics.

We’re right because we said so

As best I could tell, the thesis of the museum seems to be, “Science and human reason are subject to error. The Bible isn’t.” This, of course, requires that you accept the assumption that the Bible is inerrant. Various exhibits try to convince visitors of this point by arguing that no challenge to God’s Word has ever been  successful. (Never mind the underlying assumption that anything that appears to go against the Word is, in fact, either a divine test of faith, or a Satanic deception.)

Among my favorite arguments on the Big Wall of Reasons the Bible is Right were:

• “New efforts to attack God’s Word regularly appear, such as The DaVinci Code, but their popularity is temporary.”
• “The infidel philosopher Voltaire forecast that within a century no Bibles would be left on earth,” but he was wrong. (Yeah, they really called him a “infidel philosopher”—what a badass!)

Science kills!

Then, if that didn’t convince you, later exhibits resort to just trying to scare the shit out of you. There was a whole section of the walk-through decorated like a dark city alley, the walls plastered with newspaper clippings describing various tragedies. The lesson was supposed to be that moral relativism is evil, and that without the absolute truths of the Bible, your children will be raped in their sleep.

There was also a dark passage where Scary Noises were piped in, and clips depicting the Holocaust were projected on the walls. No context or explanation was provided; just a reminder that bad shit goes down in the world.

Later in the museum, the museum made its attack on science more explicit:

Without any absolute authority for right and wrong, humans in every generation have devised a multitude of excuses to justify abuse. Modern humans are no different. They have abused science to justify all sorts of evils.

Left unsaid is the universally-acknowledged truth that no human has ever abused Christianity to justify evil.

A “very good” creation

That's ... not how you eat those.

There were plenty of signs and plaques dedicated to explaining what life was hypothetically like before the Fall, as best as can be inferred from the Bible. From one such plaque:

Before man’s Fall, animals were vegetarians. In a “very good” creation, no animal would die, so there would be no carnivores. All the beasts of the earth, not just the “beasts of the field” that God brought to Adam to name, ate only plants.

This principle is illustrated by an exhibit of a dinosaur licking a pineapple. I guess the pineapple isn’t spiky because that wouldn’t be “very good”. (What I want to know is why couldn’t God have created a chaotic good world—or was he playing 4e?)

In a "very good" creation, no creature would have the Delta Brainwave.

This “very good” creation idea was repeated all over the place (with minor variations)—so often that it became tiresome. I guess God created le meilleur des mondes possibles, in the words of my favorite infidel philosopher. I’m not sure why they were so obsessed; I guess it could maybe be a counterargument to the problem of evil (which I have occasionally called “The Epicurious Paradox” by mistake). More likely, the “evidence” in the Bible of what life was like before the Fall is pretty scant. I guess it’s only a fraction of Genesis, so there’s not that much to go off of.

And yet they somehow managed to make half a museum out of it.

What’s with the dragons?

The museum seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with dragons. I mean, yes, dragons are awesome. That’s one of the few absolute truths in the world. But what do they have to do with creationism or even Christianity?

The gift shop was full of dragons, probably because they're cool as hell.

The gift shop was named the “Dragon Hall Bookstore”. The gift shop had all kinds of dragon figurines and plushes. There were dragon statues mixed in along with all the dinosaurs in the main entrance of the museum. There was even a short film for kids about dragons.

Proof that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. And also robots.

Plaques in the dinosaur exhibit repeatedly mention that depictions of dragons throughout history are very similar to modern understandings of dinosaurs, in some sort of attempt to suggest that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. The argument seems to work something like this:

• The flag of Wales and human mythology suggest that humans and dragons lived at the same time.
• Dragons look kind of like dinosaurs.
• Job 40:15 mentions a “behemoth”, which might be a dinosaur.
• Also, God created all the land animals at the same time.
• Therefore, humans lived among dinosaurs.

It’s a pretty outlandish argument, even by this place’s standards. Personally, I think the focus on dragons was (1) an excuse to talk about dragons, and (2) a gimmick to keep kids interested in the museum while their parents try to “educate” them.

There's going to be a test afterwards.

Exodus

As we left the main exhibits and entered the Tourist Trap Exhibit common to all museums, we noticed a small table containing some stuff for visitors to take home and distribute to their friends (or enemies). As we were staring at a card that affirmed that the holder had accepted salvation (there was even a spot to sign and date it), a woman approached two of us and asked, point blank, “Have you developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

In my experience, this is not how normal people start conversations. We just sort of returned a blank stare, and she repeated the question.

This poster is supposed to tell me that God can help me find meaning in life... but it just makes me want to kill myself.

I’m not sure why she felt a pressing need to ask us. I couldn’t tell if she was a museum employee or not—does the museum hire people to hang around the exhibit exits and just ask everybody questions like that? That would be kind of weird. Or was she a well-meaning visitor who had specifically decided to seek us out? And if so, why us? Was it because our group was wearing clothing indicating that we were, in all likelihood, evolutionists? Was it because we were audibly being assholes skeptics and making fun of some of the exhibits? … Was it because we were a group of minority heathens?

I have no idea. As I unsubtly slipped away, the other guy gave an awkward response and smile. She left us alone at that point, so I guess we’ll never know.

Barack Obama
His name has five syllables
Very convenient

C. Saxby Chambliss
Has a crazy fucking name
And groped his grand child