[Rant] Why "Cook, serve, delicious" should be mandatory

Imagine this: It's a hot summer's day, you're standing in line at the post office/bank, waiting to pay your bills. The air-conditioning is broken, and all you nice people, who just want to do your civic duty, are boiling and melting within your own skin. You lean sideways, to see how many people are in line before you and count them again. Hm... still 17. It's been 17 for a half hour now. What's the hold up? Once you reach the window, you figure it out. It's the person taking your money!

Has this ever happened to you? There's a person sitting there, staring at the screen to check your data, and then at the keyboard, awkwardly punching one key at a time with one finger of one hand. They do this at a speed which makes it seem as though they have only head stories of these mythical "keyboards" and have never used one for themselves. But! These are people who have years of experience under their respective belts. So how is this possible?

Part of it is probably due to being bored out of your skull, I won't deny that. The second reason, though, it would seem, is that they just can't be bothered to speed up their typing. They're suffering there, in their tiny booth, so why shouldn't you suffer with them?

It is inefficient, annoying and just plain mind-numbing for all parties involved. Here is what I propose: much like welders, various tellers should re-qualify every few months! They would need to be capable of doing quick and precise data entry in a somewhat stressful environment.

This is where Cook, serve, delicious (CSD) comes in. CSD is a brilliantly paced typing game. You are required to enter specific key combinations which correspond to the recipes that the patrons of your restaurant order. Sort of like entering account numbers.... See where I'm going with this. As you progress, the combinations become more complex and there are more impatient people to deal with.... like you would find in a line at the bank. Who ever claims this is a girly, mom-type game that middle aged people play during work hours has obviously never played CSD.

When re-qualifying, a teller would be given a day or two to prepare then when testing comes around, they would need to deal with a three star restaurant at 100% buzz. Buzz determines how often people stop by your restaurant and 100% would make for a constant flow of orders. I picked 3 stars because that is the furthest I've come in the game. It's right at the point where a novice like myself starts clenching her jaw because of the focus and speed required. I believe that for a veteran of keyboard-fu, this should require less effort than it does me.

Gamification has been popular for a while now. Giving anybody who was at least 7 when Pong came out should keep them more interested in the task more than a standard test would. On top of that, some folks have a nasty competitive streak and would just love the opportunity to outshine their coworkers/friends/mum. The game would provide the stress, the scoring and a curve-ball of random combinations, making tellers prepared for anything!

Now imagine a world where your papers and data and money are dealt with quickly and efficiently. Isn't it beautiful?

Until next Thursday!

LaDIY Tasha

P.S: Hey, I'm not picky, it can also be Typing of the dead!

Disclaimer: CSD is property of Vertigo Games, ToD is property of Sega (I think) and all the images from the games are theirs.

[Gpost] Knock-knock and the reality fragments

This is your brain on Knock-knock

If you were to say to a seasoned gamer: "Oh, it's an Ice Pick Lodge game.", that would be all the description they needed. For those of us with far less XP, I will translate what I believe this means: This game will mess with your head in subtle and creepy ways. 

Knock-knock is supposed to be a horror game. I say "supposed to be" because it isn't outright scary. It's subtle, it is what "Zodiac" is to horror movies. You won't scream and jump out of your seat as you might with "Amnesia". You may not even realize it's creeped into your head and set up residence in that part of your brain that would still check for monsters under your bed.

 

You play the Lodger, a wild-eyed self-proclaimed scientist (world-ologist, by his words), observer of nature. His slippers, night shirt and shawl make him look clumsy. His voice is a murmur of a claymation character. You never quite know if he is an insomniac, insane or just unlucky. He mutters to himself (and you) about what happens in the house. He draws you in with his peculiar ritual of checking all the lights in the house: his real house and the dream house.Your mission is to survive until morning. Sounds easy enough. It isn't.

But don't take my word for it. I asked my S.O. to write down his experience with the game, being an experienced gamer and all. So, for the first time, I'm having a guest post! Yay!

Knock-knock is a game I know by reputation. It's by Ice-Pick Lodge, a highly reputable band of lunatics. And that reputation was enough to make me reluctant to play it, because I don't deal well with the dark, or the things your imagination might put into that dark.

Knock-knock is a game about a lunatic. He reveals it immediately, as he rambles to himself about having to check the doors, walking strangely through a deserted house where the furniture fades in gradually as you stay in a room. Sometimes pop-up messages appear with his diary notes. Sometimes you go out of the house and wander through a dark forest where a little girl shows you fragments of reality.
It's eerie. Unsettling. Freaky. At the start, I was nervous what would happen. But nothing happened, so I kept playing. The house became comfortable, the weird shifting of rooms and appearance of furniture becoming routine. There was nothing to fear. 

Due to some weird glitch, my Guests have no heads...

And then the guests arrive.

The guests are strange nightmarish creatures lurking just off the edge of your vision, off the edge of the screen. If they touch you, something happens. What is it? I don't know. Things shift, weirdness appears at the edge of the screen. Just when you've got used to the house, the guests throw you off again. You don't know what touching them does to you, but it feels wrong. So you run.

It's implied that turning on the lights keeps the guests under control. Does it actually? I don't know, but I stumbled through the rooms, turning those lights on. The protagonist mutters about hide-and-seek, so I hid behind furniture, and sometimes the guests went away. There are rules, but it's hard to figure out what they are. And then the big eye appears, staring at you as you try to turn on a light. If you keep going with the light, the eye hurts you. If you don't, you can sort of step through the eye, finding yourself in an endless hallway.

What does it all mean? I don't know. There's a lot of things I didn't know about this game, because it never tells you anything, but you guess at the rules from what happens. Eventually you just want to make it through each night, watching gleefully as a progress screen advances and whimpering as (what you assume is) the health bar goes down every time you touch a guest. You run panickingly through the rooms, trying to avoid the guests as your health bar dips, shrieking as one appears just out of nowhere. And sometimes there are other things, freakish dopplegangers and little babysitters weeping in corners. Can they hurt you? You don't know, so you try, and then you still don't know.

Eventually the game ends as you finish that progress bar. An ending appears. You have no idea what it means, and you're not sure if you won or lost, but it feels satisfying. That's Knock-knock for ya. You have no idea what it's happening, but it feels like you're making progress, and it's so very satisfying.

I loved the art style of this game. It reminded me of old Russian cartoons I watched as a kid. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Ice Pick Lodge is Russian! The game contains some beautiful surrealistic artwork, named "fragments of reality", which you can obtain by facing a small spectral girl or wandering the infinite corridors, which the breaches in the reality fabric lead to. I replayed the game, just so I could collect all of them (the fact that there is a Steam achievement for it has nothing to do with it).

Disclaimer: All artwork is property of Ice Pick Lodge.

Star Wars Day 2014

Ok, ok, for this to work, imagine that movie previews guy reading the following:

"It was 1997. She was 11 years old and her life was about to change.... forever!"

Dun dun duuuuun! Pretty dramatic, huh?

Yeah, it was 1997 and the re-mastered version of Star Wars was out. My dad took me to the movies. I found out years later that he isn't really that into SciFi, but he took me anyway. I didn't know what the story was about. I hadn't even seen the trailer. Dad said it was an interesting movie and that I would like it.

Ten minutes in and I'm overwhelmed with déjà vu. I've seen this before. But it was different. It was funny. It was basically the same thing as Spaceballs!!!

For many people the thing that started them out in SciFi was Star Wars. They have fond memories of seeing the movies, enjoying the adventures. For me, Star Wars was a big ol' let-down because in my 11-year-old mind, it was a spin-off, an unworthy copy of the amazing cult classic, the best movie of my life - Spaceballs!

I asked a few people what Spaceballs meant to them. Feedback brought warmth to my heart. I was not the only one in love with this movie. "They don't make comedies like that anymore!" was the comment that stuck with me the most. I think it's true. The mysterious "they" do not. Mel Brooks, though maybe not very sophisticated, had a way of making you chuckle on a very human level. It was silly, tongue-in-cheek, a little bit dirty at times, but it was always warm.

I had seen Spaceballs at the tender age of five or six. You miss a lot of the jokes and references when you're that young and relying on your budding knowledge of English. It's been 20+ years since and still I discover things I hadn't noticed before. Like this one!

So in honour of May 4th, this is a tiny mention of, what will to me, always be the unsurpassed original movie from which all your fandoms were born.