Tuesday, March 13, 2012

A Journey into Darkness: 5: That ****** Cave

 
You know what I hate in Pokémon games?

Caves!

You know that scene in Xmen: The Last Stand where the Juggernaut says the whole, “I’m the Juggernaut, Bitch!” thing and every dumbass in the universe cheered? Then they went home to watch that video of He-Man singing whatever the hell song it was and laughed their asses off because he was SOoOoOo gay? And you remember when I finally snapped and murdered all those people because they are ruiners of all things ruinable.  

Just wait for the last one.

Caves in Pokémon White are for those people, people who don’t understand how to enjoy anything. For people who STILL insist that Pearl Jam was not the catalyst for all the crap that came after it. Or people who wouldn’t dare do anything different because if they did little gremlins would come out of the walls and turn all the quarters to pennies and all the pennies into copies of the Carpenters album Passage. In short, people who are crazy.

The lesser-known Gremlin of Neophobia
As I’ve explained before, I hate grinding. If you don’t know what grinding is let me explain. First you walk around and fight an enemy, then you do it a million more times. Why would you do this thing that sounds suspiciously like work? Because if you don’t your little Pokermans won’t get stronger.

In Pokémon White random encounters only happen in tall grass. The purpose of doing this is so that if your Pokémon are weak you can avoid random encounters by not walking on tall grass. But OH NO, not in caves where random encounters can happen anywhere. At the end of the day you end up being forced to grind which isn't good for me because I have authority issues. Caves in Pokémon games are typically mandatory, arbitrarily long and a huge pain in my ass.

There is also a problem with the random encounter coding.  You see, when your character walks around a piece of code runs to determine if there is going to be a random encounter from tile to tile. Apparently the people at GameFreak can’t set a range for how often this happens because sometimes you’ll walk forever and you’ll be encounter-free. Other times you can literally change the way your character is facing and that will register as movement and therefore the code must run, sometimes causing an encounter which causes me to lose my fist in my own skull.

It’s re-goddamn-diculous. 

At the end of the cave I found N waiting to share his most recent Winston Churchill/Hunter S. Thompson/John Wayne Gacy inspired speech. As usual, I politely listened and made note of height, weight and distinguishing marks for my report to the police. But then something really unexpected happened.

Enter Professor Aurea Juniper.

Professor Juniper is the Pokémon scientist who gave me the mission of “gather information about all Pokémon in your Pokédex, child of which I am not a guardian of”. However, N isn’t having any of that Biological Classification shit. He explained (in an uncharacteristically catty manner) that Juniper is putting Pokémon into categories that they did not choose and therefore denying Pokémon freewill.

fig 1: Shit, N will have none of.

As myself, it sure did sound like sexual tension to me.

As my character, it was just another reminder of the broken home from whence I came.

Next up: More Philosophy Lessons

1 comment:

  1. Was looking at old stuff and this came up - "ruiners of all things ruinable" wow, that was pretty pointed considering we all watched those videos together. What a dick

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