For the record, I suppose that’s it for Pickle Zombie Prime. You’ll have to pardon us while we retune the set to an alternate universe. That may take some time.
So while Forrest is working on that, Danielle and I have taken up Perfect World International as sort of a nicotine patch for World of Warcraft addiction. It has all the basic components of an em-em-oh-are-pee-gee; you hack at poor, defenceless bunnies with weapons of ill-conceived proportions to gain levels and then spread soft, melted experience points over a thick, crusty character sheet. All of this for the ultimate goal of acquiring what the locals call ‘epic lewt’ in an effort to render your avatar visible from space. The production value is much lower, especially in the categories of story design and writing, but that’s to be expected as the game doesn’t charge a monthly fee. So when we need our experience point fix, we boot this stuff up and don’t feel the slightest guilt not doing so again for weeks at a time.
Now, at a mere level of four, which is about the half-hour mark for those of you counting, the game hands you a very strange item. It’s a trinket that hangs around your character’s neck and has the ability to automatically revive you to full health any time your hit points drop below the fifty percent mark. The only thing keeping it from being just straight-up immortality is that it only works ten thousand times. Tossing a little perspective on that, my character has achieved the eleventh level and still has ninety-nine hundred deaths to ignore. Always one to look a godhood in the mouth, I was puzzled over this blatant attempt to circumvent the game’s mortality system for such a long period of play. Then I noticed that another limitation of the device is that once you put it on, it cannot be removed until it’s power is expended.
You see, at the end of each level, you are given a fixed number of points to allocate into any of your offensive or defensive statistics. You can probably see where this is going.
Naturally, I had thrown all of my character’s life experience into my most offensive stat so I could reduce enemy life-expectancy and progress faster. I’d imagine most beginning players do the same, having been spoiled out of their sense of mortality by the mysterious trinket. It dawned on me that when the thing did finally run dry in another twenty hours of play or so, my defensive abilities would likely be insufficient to hold my character up against a stiff breeze let alone a horde of rampaging crystal laser rainbow dragon-unicorns from the End Plane. I cannot even accurately adjust my spending habits as the temporary immortality drive skews my perspective. Now, the coup de grâce: this point allocation is permanent, save a reset service costing fifteen dollars in real money.
That’s dastardly game design, guys. What’s better is that in you don’t want to spend the fifteen dollar sanity adjustment fee, you can always spend five bucks to get another immortality trinket.
I’m not mad. If I find a video game engaging enough to play for thirty some-odd hours I suppose it’s reasonable to expect to pay the developers a small fee for their efforts. I’m just sayin’ their invoicing structure is a little less than opaque.
Ja.