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bluelanderMy body has felt like it's trying to fight something off for the last week. I don't think I'm actually sick, and my symptoms are very vague—just kind of general body aches and an overall icky feeling. You know the icky feeling? I got that. I think I'm somewhat prone to psychosomatic sympathy¹—if I'm around someone who's sick a lot I start feeling like I'm a little sick too. My spouse doesn't have covid and my symptoms don't line up with it, so I'm not worried on that front. Just a little temporary unpleasantness, and nothing compared to what my spouse has gone through.
Gonna be another short one today. I actually have a bit of a backlog again, because I've been spending a little too much time writing (and using my phone generally) and not enough time working. Now that my condition is treated, and my brain is able to focus on things, it wants to focus on all the things. It's ok, I'll get caught up. I'll simply focus on focusing. Balance in all things. Whenever I feel the urge to do something with my hands, like the 8 seconds every few in minutes in which I need I have to scan a document, I'll go for the bubble bracelet instead.
Bubble Bracelet!
It's one of many thoughtful or cute trinkets my spouse put in my Easter basket this year (my spouse made me an Easter basket! 🤯) but this has by far been the most useful. It works just like any other silicone bubble-pop fidget toy, but the fact that it's a bracelet means I always have it with me. I put it on my right wrist when I leave for work in the morning (my watch goes on the left) and any time I need something to do with my hands, I pull it off and get a-poppin. A lot of people probably have something similar on their keychain, but the shape and size of the bracelet make it more interesting to fidget with than something that would fit in my pocket. To me, anyway. I can rotate it with one hand and pop with the other. I can count the bubbles before I get back to the beginning (there are 10), etc. A dollar-twenty-five very well spent.
Worms Armageddon 1999 PC league
I'm loathe to recycle social media posts on my journal. The level of my aversion probably isn't rational, but in the twilight years of Livejournal, a bunch of my friends set up bots that would make a post once every 24 hours that just contains all their tweets from that day, and it made me very sad. All those abandoned zombie accounts reposting tweets at other zombie accounts made me feel, and this might be overly dramatic, some kind of existential dread.
But I want to spread the Worms word, so:
It's so weird that they ported Worms Armageddon 1999 to the newest consoles. That's the Worms game people should play, but the PC version still works fine and will run on a baked potato, it controls best with keyboard and mouse, it's extremely moddable and there's a plethora of extant player-generated maps and other content. People just stopped playing it. Online W:A was some of the best fun I've ever had with a multiplayer game. Anyone else wanna get back into #WormsArmageddon PC?
Having an action physics-y sandbox game where players take turns made it a perfect hangout game. You can open the chat window and talk to your friends while you're watching the other players take their turns. You really don't want to try to chat on an Xbox controller. All you can type are words like AX, BAY, YAB, BART, ARBY, etc. Gets old after awhile
Two people expressed potential interest, but they're both in wildly different time zones from me, so I made an aspirational collaborative document (edit: peerpad doesn't work, awesome. Re-made the document on rentry.co) to maybe help people come together and play Worms. If you think you may be one of these people, see the link for more information.
Why?
If you don't know what Worms Armageddon is, I probably won't convince you to spend 15 bucks on it. It's sort of a niche genre. If you've ever played an artillery game, it's basically one of those except your tanks are worms that can move around. How much they move is dependent on the game mode you're playing. They can always scooch around a bit left and right, but their mobility is limited and they can't fall very far without getting hurt. Mobility items such as the ninja rope, parachute, jetpack and teleport give you a much wider range of movement. These items can turn it into a completely different game; the ninja rope especially has exceptionally good physics, and if you get good at using it, you can fly around the maps with acrobatic fervor. Many of the most popular modes from the early aughts we're mostly or entirely about rope movement; you can look up rope race videos on youtube for a sense of what that looks like. It might not seem like the most exciting thing if you haven't played, but there's a very high skill ceiling and getting good (or even okay) is a lot of fun.
I got okay at it. I was never much into the pro rope stuff. My favorite mode was called a "shopper". You start with no weapons, and every turn a crate will appear. You have to use your rope to get to the crate and launch an attack before time runs out. The skill level required depends on the map, but this is generally considered a more casual mode because of the luck involved. A crate has a chance of containing any weapon. Weaker ones like mines and bazookas are most common, but you always have a chance of getting one of the more powerful/chaotic weapons like a holy hand grenade, or potential team-ruining banana bomb. To me, the shopper is the perfect mix of luck and skill. You can't feel too bad about losing if you play well, because you can only use what you're given; but if you're not at least somewhat competent at roping and using the weapons effectively, you're probably not going to get far.
If the rope action isn't for you, there are a bunch of other more traditional modes. My favorite "normal" mode was the T17. It's similar to a shopper, but you start with a few basic weapons and mobility tools, including a limited number of ninja ropes. This one is more about using your resources strategically, but is more interesting than a straightforward artillery duel.
The customizability is the game's killer feature. This is the only game I've played that can either be eSports or Mario Party or somewhere in between depending on how you set it up. That's how we should rate the sweatiness of competitive games, in my opinion: where does it fall on the esports-Mario Party spectrum? Me, I like a good balance, but definitely closer to the MP end. I like to have fun and goof off, but I don't want complete chaos. I want some amount of structure to both motivate me and to put boundaries on the activity. I've never been someone who can just drop into a Minecraft² server with a bunch of people (or by myself, for that matter) and have fun just noodling around for hours. Worms Armageddon is a structured, time-bound social activity that requires neither too much or too little skill, is extremely customizable and doesn't require you to talk to other people with your physical animal voice. If these sound like qualities you value in a game, maybe give Worms a try.
I feel like I've written some version of this post at least three times over the years, but Team 17 porting the game to new consoles is a bizarre and unexpected development that prompted me to think about it again. I've mostly made peace with the idea that I don't like the same kinds of multiplayer games as other people, but events like this make me think "...what if?"
1. Beastie Boys voice psychosomatic sympathetic, sympathetic psychosomatic
2. This is the problem with the Mario Party-Esports spectrum, I don't know where Minecraft would fall. People take it more seriously than anyone should take MP, but it's so unstructured it barely feels like a game to me. It's left the spectrum entirely and is off in a field somewhere, doing its own thing. (There are like a billion people in this field. I recognize that I'm the weird one)
