Shitty One-Ply

I used to have a friend at Ithaca College who would go on about the sad unfairness of one-ply toilet paper. While all the student dorms and the bathrooms the students used were stocked with one-ply, dry and scratchy and irritating and easily ripped, all the bathrooms in faculty areas had soft two-ply toilet paper. He used to point out how very unfair and classist this is.

I'd like to go beyond this Marxist rhetoric and speak instead to an even wider problem: the very existence of one-ply toilet paper. Why in the world do we need this product? Is there anyone out there who prefers what is universally known as a genuinely inferior product? Of course not. The only conceivable reason anyone would buy one-ply is because it's cheap (and, in the case of universities, the people who buy it won't be forced to sandpaper their asses on it). Imagine if factories only produced acceptable classes of toilet paper. I would be willing to bet that the greater efficiency involved in having fewer choices would ensure that the decent two-ply would cost as much as one-ply does now. This leaves me with the conclusion that one-ply exists only to justify the existence--and higher cost--of a separate, BETTER variety in two-(and multi-) ply toilet paper. We don't have shitty one-ply so we'll actually buy and use it. We have it so two-ply costs more when we actually do buy it.

This theory extends to other products. Take, for instance, optional packages on automobiles. For instance, optional passenger airbags. How many people are going to say, "No, thank you. I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to get into an accident, and if I do, I don't like my passengers all that well anyway."? This also applies to just about everything we can buy, from video games to operating systems to razors. So many of them are genuinely inferior products that it doesn't make sense to me not to offer just one product that's the very best it can be. Instead of having a $1000 and $2000 version of a computer, for example, can't we just only offer the very best at, say, $1400? The efficiency of only having to make one model would make it all the more worthwhile. What's wrong with letting everyone enjoy the very best of things? And nobody would have to put up with shitty one-ply toilet paper anyway.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went into one of the local used bookstores, Books of Yesterday, and delved into their dungeonlike basement, where half the books are just lying around in towerlike stacks or unsorted on big shelves behind the desk I never see anyone at. In the back corner, they keep their fantasy books. I saw a copy of R.E. Howard's King Kull stories, but the book had mold in several places, and I'm not about to pay five bucks for a moldy book. I also found an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry. Wikipedia says Fafhrd amd Gray Mouser is one of the seminal swords and sorcery series. The only other time I remember reading about Gray Mouser is when he dueled Zorro way way back as a joke in InQuest magazine. The store had two copies of the book. One had a laminated cover, and they wanted more than ten bucks for it. The book cost 1.25 in 1973. The other, the one I bought, was five bucks. It has a page loose and several pages torn, so I was going to try to talk them down, but my nemesis at the register beat me to the punch.

When they say Neanderthals would fit in with modern men, I wouldn't be too sure. This guy had a brow ridge that would do a silverback proud. He barely spoke three words to me, didn't say hello when I did, and literally threw my credit card onto the counter when he was done swiping it. Since I was worrying about whether I was going to get brained by a stone-headed club, I didn't have the audacity to question him about the quality of his product. And so I walked out, five bucks plus tax poorer, but with a book that, according to the back cover, promises "the greatest heroes in the annals of fantasy." Can't go wrong there, now can ya?

The Truth Will Out

Every now and then, if I'm very bored and I think no one is watching, I make the little plastic men talk to each other.

Developments

You might notice that I've removed the bit about where I live and it not being very cyberpunk. The reason for this, as I alluded to briefly in my last post, is that I'm really not very cyberpunk these days. The reason for the original theme of this blog was that I was writing a cyberpunk novel, and it was to be things that I came across tangentially or just material related to that genre, in which my mind was revolving at the time. Things have changed, however, and by no choice of mine that novel is on hiatus. For the time being, my writing is more along the lines of burly men swinging swords at snickering sorcerers, not to mention whatever else I come up with on ficly. I am also ghostwriting a fantasy novel, which comes with its own thick share of challenges, so I do my own writing in my 'free time.'

So be warned that, aside from a general writing theme, this blog will be about just whatever's on my mind. Well, I suppose it will continue to be. Excelsior!

Wild West FPS

I think I abandoned any coherence of theme or topic in my blog a long time ago, so now I'm going to write something that might even interest one person in the world: why I believe no one will ever make a Wild West first-person shooter game that feels right. I have tried Call of Juarez, Red Dead Revolver, and Gun, and none of them made me feel like I was either in a Western movie or in a real-life Wild West situation. The reason is that video game developers are too tied to traditions of first person shooters, traditions that are opposed to the way a Western game should feel. These include:

1. You Run Everywhere. Since the days of Doom and Quake, first-person shooters have featured a guy running endlessly. Although some modern games attempt to make this a bit more realistic by giving you limited amounts of running, these still, more often than not, give you superhuman abilities to dash from place to place like a giddy pony, prancing merrily while laying down a hail of bullets.

Why it doesn't work: How many Westerns have you seen in which the heroes, instead of moseying down Main Street while tumbleweeds blow by in the background, instead charge down the dusty lane like a maddened bull? Or, in the middle of a firefight in the tavern over the only good-looking showgirl, dodging back and forth like a paranoid with a bladder problem? It just doesn't work. If there's a run function at all, it should be used extremely sparingly: very brief bursts of speed paced far apart.

2. You Piss Bullets: In the original FPS games, the only limit to your ability to shove out a living wall of ammo was your total ammo capacity. Even in more modern games, your guns carry dozens of rounds and take only a second or two to switch magazines. This lets you spew out such a ridiculous number of bullets that it makes that scene from Hot Shots Part Deux seem like a tea party with stuffed animals by comparison.

Why it doesn't work: In the Wild West, your gun didn't have an ammo belt leading down into a mystical lead reservoir in the Marianas Trench. In fact, the famous Colt Peacemaker held six bullets, five if you didn't want to shoot yourself in the leg if your gun got jarred. To reload, you first pull the hammer back to half-cocked, then use the reloading rod to push out every used cartridge, one at a time, rotating the cylinder as you do so. Next, you insert each new cartridge, one at a time. Even assuming you walk around with a handful of cartridges and have completely steady hands while bad men try their very best to improve your body with convenient blood ventilation (as all games seem to do), this is highly time consuming. Of course, some guns allowed for entire cylinders to be swapped out for pre-loaded ones, but I doubt even a skilled gunfighter would carry more than a few of these at a time. And that only applies to pistols; rifles were frequently single-shot, and even lever-action rifles had to be reloaded one bullet at a time.

3. You Mow Down Hordes of Bad Guys: This one is self-explanatory. In most games, you practically win entire battles single-handedly. Considering how many busloads of remarkably similar-looking enemies you kill, I'm surprised your character doesn't get carried off to Valhalla by valkyries during the inevitable death sequence. (The Call of Duty games are particularly bad at this: on the one hand, they expect you to chew through more bad guys than Rambo. On the other hand, despite your jaw-dropping killing power, you get walked through the missions by your squad commanders like a directionally-challenged twelve year old, as though having a single set path to travel from beginning to end of the map wasn't enough. Apparently, your supervisers think you are the embodiment of god's wrath on Earth sent to mete out justice on the unworthy, with the problem solving skills of a kidney bean.)

Why it doesn't work: While there are Westerns with high body counts (The Wild Bunch comes to mind), these inevitably involve Gatling guns. Since I don't want to go on another tangent about what annoys me in FPS games in general, let me just say these parts are basically pointless mini-games; entertaning only so long as the thrill of massacring the entire population of a small town with a powerful weapon lasts. In most situations, fights are between fairly small numbers of people. In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Tuco and the man with no name sneak up and blow up a bridge and everybody leaves. In an FPS, they would have to shoot everyone anywhere near the bridge, blow it up, and then fight and kill the army that shows up to avenge it. Actually, it wouldn't be both of them. It would be the man with no name doing it all, while Tuco shoots one or two enemies, tells the same jokes ten times, and complains about how poorly you're doing as your soft squishy organs are slowly and forecefully replaced by lead.

4. Everyone is a Superhero: You shoot a bad guy in the stomach at point-blank range. He convulses for two seconds. Then, he shoots you in the face. Everyone takes as much killing as a buffalo, not to mention your own character survives so much he might as well make a living dynamiting train tunnels by holding the explosive in the right place and waiting patiently for it to blow, only to repeat again once he waits a few seconds or consumes a few health packs for his health to recover.

Why it doesn't work: Nothing is worse than shooting someone with your last bullet, only to have him shoot you right back as you struggle to reload. Also, just how well would Unforgiven have worked if Gene Hackman would have gotten up, brushed himself off, and squared off with Clint Eastwood all over again after Clint shoots him the first time? What about if during the climax to The Quick and the Dead, if Sharon Stone had to shoot Gene Hackman seventeen times instead of twice(actually, let's not talk about The Quick and the Dead. It's a silly movie.)? It's just not right, man.

HOW IT SHOULD WORK: Fewer bad guys. Fewer bullets. Each bad guy has a good chance to kill you; one or two hits and you're gone. No health packs or bandages or any such bullshit, except maybe bandages to partially repair limbs crippled by one bullet. When you're done, you light a cigar, toss your poncho over your shoulder, and ride your horse off into the sunset.

Bonus: Oh, and no freaking half-hour cut scenes. I don't want to have explained to me why my character wants to kill these people. I can fill that in for myself. Heck, I can do so in three words (four if you count the contraction): he's being paid. And that's plenty good enough for me.

Here's the final scene to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, my favorite Western. Now imagine if, instead of standing there firing one shot, they all charged in from opposite ends of the cemetary, banging away the whole time. Then, once they closed to within the ring, they were all three dashing around in circles, shooting off bullets all over the place, each getting hit a dozen or two times, reloading all the while, before finally collapsing... and respawning to start shooting all over again. It's just a good thing Sergio Leone doesn't play FPS.