My Review: Pokemon Go

There is a genre of games that have come to be known as walking simulators, because the main verb in the game is 'walking' and then there aren't any other verbs. (Except 'looking' and the occasional 'opening'. Mostly there's no killing, which to many people is what games are all about. That and finding multiple objects that look the same and organizing them into a line. That's a surprising lot of games.)

Anyway, whenever there's a new genre of games people make new games for it until someone takes it too far, and arguably that's what happened when a walking simulator involves ACTUAL WALKING. That's right, this game expects me to get up and walk around. It even offers rewards for doing so, like breaking open eggs and being attacked by wild animals that want me to play ring-toss with them.

The company that makes RingTossWalk already made a game that was essentially the same game, named Ingress, where space energy was leaking into our world and only we could stop it/help it. There wasn't any ring toss in it, though, and that's all I played it before I switched back to RingTossWalk, because you can only play one at a time and if I miss twirling a pokestop, I won't have enough pokeballs to catch a ratatatatatata, which I can only assume was named by a machine gun.

Still, it's doubled Nintendo's worth, and more importantly there are no Gorons in it. 10/10.

My Review: Oracle of Ages and/or Seasons

I have spoken of Zelda before, and of Link who is the star of the games named after her, most of which she appears in at one point. Top-down adventury exploratory puzzle dungeons, and a lack of continuity that either annoys or inspires people who are really bothered by complicated, contradictory continuity. These games help that a lot.

At one point, shortly after Nintendo discovered color, they released two games -- Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages -- that tied together somehow and let you use passwords called "secrets" to pass information between the games. They could also be played in either order, which is where continuity gets messed up this time -- after all, which was played first? Obviously the one that lets you travel 400 years in the past, or however many years I wasn't paying attention -- will have been played first chronologically, but if we ignore the befuddling effects of time travel (which I never do, but just this once for you) the game FLOW can work whichever you play first, but a lot of events change based on the order. Two timelines, both of which are contradictory except for "Link beats some dungeons and then SPOILERS Ganon I know you never expected Ganon to show up in a Zelda game but HERE WE ARE I GUESS".

If I were to pick one weakness of the games, I would definitely go with the presence of Gorons. No one likes Gorons, Nintendo. You can stop obsessing over them. Go back to your pokemon.

Still, it has the overland theme and that's really all I need: 10/10.

My Review: Calvin and Markov

First off, if you don't know what a Markov chain is, this won't make much sense to you. It'll still make some sense, I suppose, but it's mostly nonsense of a fancy, computery sort. Advanced nonsense. The Markov chain you're most likely to be familiar with is a phone's autocomplete guessing at what the next word you're going to type will be, and we all know how great THAT is.

Secondly, if you don't know what Calvin and Hobbes is, this will make even less sense to you than the poor fool who isn't hep to the latest stochastic models. Probably if you think they're John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes this will make slightly more sense than if you think they're Calvin Kline and his secret nickname for Lorraine Baines, but the point is that this doesn't work without some basic background in both statistics and comics of the late 80s/early 90s.

On the plus side, if you don't know who Calvin and Hobbes are you have some wonderful reading ahead of you and if you don't know what Markov chains are you have some math ahead of you, which I can only assume is your personal favourite pastime or you'd have just clicked on the link already to see the comics.

Anyway, some dude tried Markov chains with Calvin and Hobbes, and the results are ... well, see for yourself.

10/10.