What do I have against Terraria?

Pictures the scene, a zuckerbook chat approximately 176 hours ago at the time of writing. My colleagues and I were engaging in a bout of light merriment, when of all things, a youthen delinquent came crashing in through the saloon doors, red faced and clutching a bottle of XXX. he staggered across the dusty floorboards to pester the Barkeep.

“Terraria is a good game,” he stammered. No one deserves to be to talked to like that, the barkeep was a just hard working blue collar joe with a wife and family, and here this chowderhead was trying to take all that away. The posse and I rose to feet pulling out our six shot, single actions.
We took aim at the filth when I stepped forward and said, “this is why you’re wrong, bucko.”

A few years ago after moving house I had to spend a few weeks without internet, a troubling experience for any youth. When I came back online I found a 2 bit 2D side scrolling rpg sandbox had taken the scene by storm. I picked up a copy and hence began a delve into the deluge of paranoid mania and swirling addiction that was, my first terraria playthrough. I’ve never been the same since, i’m a shell of my former self.

The game had more bosses than a meeting of people who are in charge of stuff, haha perfect metaphor. it has more amours than a french love poem. More weapons than a american high… fantasy novel. Over time they added more features like a hardmode, events, and fishing. It could be quiet easy to derdride the for the inclusion of such extraneous elements but how can I be angry when it’s given me an excuse use a gratuitous elephantine utterance.

To call it grindy undervalues the sheer banality of it all. Labouring with keys and mouse: building, crafting and searching past the last points of tangible thought. It feels like the game makes the smallest incremental change possible to gameplay in order to keep one playing, and keep one playing it does. three hundred and more hours of my life i’ll never get back. If I wanted to struggle against such tedium i’d be sat at a desk pounding the keyboard… writing a review of... Shit.

The myth of sisyphus was a greek myth about this the titular character having to push a rock up a hill for daring to try and have a little fun or whatever. Some french smart guy who liked to smoke, descriptive right, called Camus was like,
“yeah, that’s basically my life in a nutshell #relatable.”
lots of smarties agreed so how we have absurdism, Camus thought that we must imagine sisyphus as a happy chappy, which is hard at first until you remember that kid who came into the bar in the first paragraph, he too seemed to have found a way to enjoy in the joyless monotony of tasks that leaves you where you started with its every cycle of progression, he liked terraria.

So if we take progression through the game to be absurd then Camus leaves us with three ways with which to deal with it. First is suicide, bit harsh, we’re not dealing with league of legends here. The second solution is believing in a higher power, something Camus labels as philosophical suicide, how snarky! The third is accepting the absurd, given that he saved it until last and options one + two were, in essence KYS. we can conclude discussing this was a waste of time, but i’m happy about it.

Even though terraria is an objectively bad game that is shit it has the potential to help us to cope with the absurdity of everyday life by being slight less tolerable than talking to your drunk aunt. A quality that makes it more akin to a therapy session, often needed after aforementioned conversations. Then again if I want to do something to help me get on in life I wouldn’t be playing video games now would I?

The boy collapsed with an clumsy thud, the contents of the smashed bottle ran along the floorboards seeping down the cracks in the floorboards going unnoticed before the streak of red that now painted the bar. I gripped by six shot with a furious intensity, my mind was racing. Heart thumping and soul screaming. A thin trail of smoke wafted out from the warm barrel, I was a outlaw now, a bounty for the murder of the mayor’s boy would see all manner of lowlife roused to follow my hooves.

I fled zuckerbook and ran off into the night and spoke my last “,Terraria’s shit m8.”

Faster than light: how one game exposed the lies at the heart of the games industry

The problem with extended caffeine use is the slow but inevitable erosion of one's connection to their calmer self. Even the most innocuous inquires become loud bombastic cries from the steeples of notre dame. The idea of having any thoughts that don’t race through one's mind quicker than they can be scribbled down starts to seem foreign, a experience that only other people have, and the idea of stoppeing brings with it the dread of knowing that for a day or two, one will be transmogrified into a shell-less one inch gastropod. Sounds a bit sci fi really, speaking of which have you played FTL?

I have, engaging with the media in question is a foundational component in forming an opinion about something, along with sacrificing goats and sipping kool aid. Though some just make do with the latter. Speaking of opinions and FTL, i am writing of a review of it. You’re reading that review right now. Ftl- as in Faster than light is a game that’ll make physicists froth at the mouth, namely at it’s unrealistic depiction of space. It’s treated as a cold heartless vacuum filled with meteors, nebula and really hot bright things that they don’t bother to name in game, another example of flabby and poorly thought out worldbuilding, it isn’t even hard: TVtropes.org has all the tropes you’ll ever need, then combine a few with the current thing that you’re really into and you’ll have a fresh new idea.

In this universe your encounters, and hits are determined by chance. But as Albert Einstein said “god doesn’t play dice with the universe” clearly these two statements are at odds with one another, either god is truly dead, or has decided to slack off a bit since Bert’s day. Now that is applied physics if i ever saw it, beam me up scotty.

If god is dead then what limits remain in place to stop us procreating with other more exotic forms of life. Can i mate with a mantis? Should i bring protective headwear? And how will they reciprocate with those sharp pointy mandibles? It was with these questions in mind that i set off on the maiden voyage of Uss lyes.

At the helm the devilishly handsome ziggy stardust. Space commander: bruce willis took over tactical after his recent transfer from the yippee ki yay and his trusty sidekick ben batfleck was in engineering trying to reinvigorate his career as it collided with a meteor, what a daredevil. The crew settled into their roles and got ready for their first FTL jump. They arrived at planet populated by spiders called planet spider, an ill advised colony of robots were in the middle of evacuating so they sent down ziggy to help, in the end he formed a band with the spiders but their practice session conflicted with the crew’s poker night, so he left.

Several jumps later they were boarded a group of mantis men on a stag do. they began tearing up the engineering, were uncooperative when asked to fill in a questionnaire about their mating practices and became demonstratively violent towards to the crew, who bravely hid in sickbay while they vented the air into space. This raises another one of those sci fi questions. Does the Geneva convention apply in space? And does it cover mantis men on a stag do? If their mating practice involves the wholesale slaughter of a bald space primates are we kinkshaming them or introducing them to auto erotic asphyxiation?

Next came a space battle, which were originally modelled, at least in part, on submarine movies. Which are apparently a thing. Wouldn’t the actors get wet during filming? Maybe they CGI them in, but then does CGI work underwater, Questions for a film critics. The point is i’d forgotten to repair the life support system so everyone died after torpedo, space speak for missile blew a hole in the side of the hull, well they were going to die anyway due to a lack of oxygen, but it wasn’t peaceful is what i’m trying to get across here.

This left me with some lingering questions, will these being face a eternity of non-existence? Will they remain stranded in purgatory for all time? Is asking questions all sci fi is able to do? Can i now, having experience this game write something that isn’t a question? What would something that wasn’t a question even look like? How can we come to terms with a eternity of questions? Dunno, but it’s kinda cool to think about.