Irredeemable Critiques
Are you properly informed of where you should be eating and when? Do you consistently make poor choices when you choose a restaurant? Hi, the Irredeemable Critic here to correct you on your flawed dietary choices. Well, until you’re inside the establishment. At the point, I’m leaving your choice of diet up to you.
There’s a many tiers of restaurant, but I will only delineate by the wider margins for the purpose of this message. You have your top tier establishments. The type of cuisine doesn’t matter, but this is an established haunt with multiple star ratings on your favorite website of choice with at least 2+ dollar signs in price. This is where you go to impress clients, pay exorbitant costs for bottles of wine and eat tiny portions arranged by the chef. There’s delineations of top tier restaurants, but that isn’t important for this. This exercise is about the proper line to stop scraping when you’re going out to eat. Quality of food starts to decline from there. You have sit down establishments which are great for dates but will not likely have any Michelin stars, or Mom & Pop shops that have that secret sauce you keep going back for. If the food is well made and the establishment is clean, you’re doing great. Following that, we have non-fast food chains. Those are usually acceptable lunch choices, although you should try and diversify your eating interests. This can include the “build your own” fast food establishments like Chipotle, if the given establishment is lacking E.coli. As long as you don’t go to these every day and eat at them in moderation, you should be fine. At a similar level of quality are the food trucks, if not better most of the time. You’re advised to avoid the generic halal trucks that have menus larger than the capacity of their kitchen. Unless those trucks are larger on the inside—and I sincerely doubt that—they’re physically unable to have enough ingredients to have breakfast, lunch and dinner of various different cuisines. The other food trucks are usually specialty trucks or offshoots of established businesses, able to meet the dietary wants of even the most discerning eaters. Finally, you have the lesser Mom & Pop shops. They’re good, they’re just not that good, but it’s still better to eat here than the following locations. Now you have the fast food shops that should be avoided at all costs. Why would you go a Burger King when you could go to a chain with food that is actually edible? The only purpose for going to a Burger King and other comparable fast food chains is to avoid eating at a gas station and the like on a road trip and getting parasites. These chains may be cheaper, but are you eating to survive or eating for pleasure? If you’re eating to survive, you might as well cook a meal that’s tastier and cheaper still than what is in Burger King. If you’re eating for pleasure, you could go to somewhere where the food is made with legitimate ingredients. The last tier of eating is highway gas stations. Don’t eat there. If you’re going to eat there, get prepackaged food as though you’re in a convenience store. You don’t deserve to die due to a lack of food options and you deserve to eat food cooked by people who understand how to work an oven. You can consider yourself properly informed of where to eat. Any poor decisions you make from now on cannot be excused by ignorance and should earn you the mockery of your friends and companions.
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Munchkin is a much beloved game in the world of hobbyist board games for an inscrutable reason. It doesn't offer anything particularly novel. It's a game parodying perhaps the most well known tabletop role playing game there is, Dungeons & Dragons. That's about all it really has going for it, and that's not saying much. With all the market value Dungeons & Dragons holds, it only delivers a certain fantasy-- but that's a rant for another post.
No, Munchkin is a promising game up until the point of playing. You can backstab your friends, you can temporarily work together to advance your own cause, there's hilarious cards that reference classic DnD tales like "The Dread Gazeebo": what more could you want? Well, for starters, you could want valid endgame play. The game of munchkin is simple, which isn't a bad thing, but it causes a certain bottleneck. Near the end of the game, everyone will likely be level nine (the penultimate level. Hitting your tenth level will end the game and cause winners and losers.) Any single monster will be sufficient to level you up, even if you somehow gimmick out a level 1 monster. So there's really one one thing you can do: you're not playing to win anymore, no, you're playing to not lose. You spend your resources to deny your opponents and them in turn until the last person standing cannot be denied any further. You'll waste time, arguing about who is going to be the one that breaks and allocates resources to deny another's victory-- most of the game of munchkin is negotiation and arguments over minor elements, all for a forgone conclusion of the finale. There's a reason people tend to not like things with a known ending-- where's the excitement, the drama, the challenge? You know what's going to happen: the only uncertainty is who the wheel ends up on. Munchkin has about three games of play-ability. The first is filled with wonder & joy, uncertainty at what will happen, learning the rules and arguing your heart out. The second is comfortable with the rules but rehashing out the ending, vying to be the one that the gods of chaos smile upon. The third is the same as any other instance henceforth, a begrudging commitment to a game that necessitates more arguing than Mario Kart with only a fifth of the fun. If you want the experience of being a murder-hobo, the quintessential experience that Munchkin captures, you're better off playing an actual tabletop role playing game. As much as Munchkin diversifies its brand with different spin off games and divergent rules, as long as the end result is the same, the game is no different. You can argue it's about the journey, but when the journey is fixed and the ending is known, you're just prolonging a pointless trip. Munchkin gets a 4/5 for the first game, where you're optimistic that it's enjoyable and has replayability. It receives a 3/5 for the second game, where you've become familiar with the rules but are coming to the sinking suspicion you've seen every card and done this all before. For the third game and up, I rate Munchkin a solid 1.5/5. You've seen it all, you've done it all, now you're just trying to fill the gap in your game night in-between larger games, forgetting that one game of Munchkin is prolonged far too long or pulling it out during a party because you can remember that you once enjoyed playing the game but not the actual game's contents in itself. To start things off auspiciously, I’ll attempt to deconstruct everyone’s favorite party game, Cards Against Humanity, and why it’s perhaps only slightly more enjoyable than Munchkin. I’ve played Cards Against Humanity a fair amount of times and the novelty of a vulgar Apples to Apples was really appealing for my first few plays, but for a game with so many options, so many cards, the choices fell flat.
The game is rather simple. There’s two types of cards: white cards & black cards. The white cards have either nouns or verbs on them, from things like “The fanciest hat” or “pooping back and forth forever” whereas the black cards are the cards that create mad lib scenarios with the white cards for the “card tzar” to judge. Everyone gets to be the card czar until you arbitrarily decide whoever has won the most black cards wins because you’re tired of the game indefinitely going on but you don’t want to use the rules as written & end the game with the haiku card because using three of your white cards at once is so hard when many of them just aren’t worth playing. Everyone loves to think they have a sharp wit, able to pierce a blustering buffoon with a carefully placed word but mostly people sink to the depths of accessibility with throw-away puns and topical reference quips. I know I crack up just as much as the rest of the gang around the water cooler when I make a clever reference to the latest Game of Thrones episode and how I was running for the elevator earlier that morning. This falls apart on an even more basic level when playing Cards Against Humanity. Those tired phrases live only within the context of the game. Each time I hear someone state “Biggest blackest dick” is their auto-win card I grow confused. What kind of game has an auto-win card? What kind of players want an auto-win card? When did everyone declare that there’s one phrase that is the funniest phrase in existence? And why is that card not even funny? I know the game is supposed to be for horrible people, but are they just horrible because they’re not funny? I’m not offended at the item—I’m offended they think it’s funny. They’ve offended my sensibilities of humor. That’s partially why I groan any time people suggest it as the game to take over the party with. A game about humor is only as funny as its players, and most players aren’t that funny. You appeal your friend being slightly racist—you’ve seen it peak through, or your other friend’s hard-on for hating conservatives. You consider actually performing The Aristocrats, but would they understand that as much as they would understand you playing “pooping back and forth forever” on the subject of what the currency of the future would be? Probably not. The issue with Cards Against Humanity is how easy it is to reach for the lowest hanging fruit of humor. You have to appeal to other’s underdeveloped senses of humor with a limited toolkit, stock phrases that already appeal to only limited demographics. Why should I be shocked by a card like “Biggest blackest dick” amongst all the other cards that exist with how overused it is? Humor is largely born of context & innovation. Repeating a joke weakens a joke. Telling a joke out of context weakens a joke. Attempting to create anything within a set of constraints is supposed to create innovation, but instead, we’re left with lazy attempts and derivative phrases. Why be creative when you know that your friends fall apart at the first mention Cards Against Humanity was innovative when it came out for adapting the child’s game of Apples to Apples into something people could actually enjoy, but now it’s only staying power is comparable to that of Dungeons & Dragons with the layperson— primacy and recognition. It’s conditionally funny in context, if you can people funny enough to create humor worth laughing at without drinking your liver into cirrhosis. Nowadays if I want to play the match two sets of cards and see who makes the people around you laugh best, I’d rather play Snake Oil, Superfight, Red Flags—games with some degree of purpose and entertainment that aren’t based on trying to make baby’s first troll attempt on the internet. It’s not that Cards Against Humanity is bad. It’s just that you won’t play with people that are funny more often than not, and why both wasting your time figuring out that your friends & coworkers are best suited to topical references & witty repartee with an easily accessible quip from your favorite television show. Even then, the replay value is low. Given that most people can only access jokes made with the cards with the “built-in” humor, that makes many cards dead weight, and if you play the game semi-regularly at all, you’ll start to recognize the cards & lose much of the limited humor as it is. For my arbitrary rating scale, Cards Against Humanity’s value varies with who you’re playing with. If you’re playing with your good friends who you know struggle to make jokes outside of inside humor, observation comedy & reminiscing on the old days, CAH gets a solid 1/5 cards thrown down to the table in disgust as your clever joke lost to a lazy racist card that makes people feel dangerous for spewing low levels of racism in a socially condoned way. If you’re playing amongst individuals that can take the pool of crass cards and make it work in a larger context, CAH gets 3/5 glasses accidentally spilled as you spit out your drink in shock in response to a joke that’s perhaps more shocking than your version of the Aristocrats ever was. If you don’t particularly care about the quality of things you laugh at as long as you’ve had enough to drink and your friends are around, you might as well be at a bar just talking all the same, but you decided you could only get 4 drinks for the same value of 5 bought at the liquor store. Final ratings: 1/5 when you're playing with your humor-challenged friends. 3/5 if you're around people that have a defined sense of humor. 4/5 if you're more dedicated to drinking than the art of comedy. |
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