The Weirdness of Powerwash Simulator | Semi-Ramblomatic
This week's episode of Semi-Ramblomatic is now available!
The Weirdness of Powerwash Simulator | Semi-Ramblomatic (YouTube)
Comments (17)
How about Zachtronics-ish games? I've been playing a lot of Block Factory lately, and I've spent a lot of time on similar games such as Opus Magnum and Infinifactory. These are all puzzlers where you are given an object and have to build a machine to churn out endless amounts of them. Making a mess, parts all over the place, and getting nowhere (as fast as possible).
I discovered Powerwash Simulator when it was on Game Pass. When I was streaming Final Fantasy VII for charity a few years back, I took a break one night and played the FFVII DLC for Powerwash Simulator instead. When I pressed the button to reveal the dirt in Tifa's bar, I actually gagged. Good thing I didn't learn until later that my mic's feed had glitched out the whole time.
As a busy OCD father with a toddler I found myself always (A) Chasing after said child to keep them from yeeting themselves off everything and (B) cleaning up their figurative and literal shit.
Hang in there Jeff, I'd say it gets easier.... But at least the literal shit tails off in the end
And then there's circuit racing games (where you're racing around a fixed circuit). Is it going somewhere if you're ultimately staying in the same place? Puzzle games could be seen as cleaning or building, but that's a stretch... Sports games. How is Pong cleaning, moving or building? You can shoehorn it into cleaning, but at that point the analogy is strained to breaking point.
nah I think he needs a third thing as mentioned by previous posters. building things.
I mean, there's also the 3rd option of building which is neither cleaning nor getting somewhere in my opinion which is also the only type of game yahtzee doesn't play, so he might not have thought of that
I WILL NEVER TIRE OF MASTURBATION JOKES
Factorio and satisfactory are great examples of games involving creation in addition to cleaning and going places. Also Minecraft, sometimes. I don't think building a giant blocky cock can be considered cleaning, though revising it might be.
The factory must grow is factorios motto, not aliens must be cleaned from existence. Creation is the core objective in that genre.
Creating is definitely absent. Writing a script for one of these videos is creation, while editing it is cleaning. Sex is also tickling a different fairly niche set of pleasure receptors. It's subconscious whereas cleaning, going places, and creating are conscious activities.
Interesting idea, but consider SimCity, which is the _opposite_ of cleaning, you're taking a big lovely empty field and you're mucking it up with human complexity.
Then you clean it up with a cleansing disaster.
In which Yahtzee reinvents the concept of tops and bottoms from scratch. (<3)
I think you're on to something but I also think you've pared it down a bit *too* much. I'd add two more verbs, "create" and "acquire" on top of "move" and "remove".
For the argument's sake: This could be understood as "getting to a place" as the thing you are building towards already exists in your head. You cannot build a piece of furniture without a complete plan of all its parts. Once that plan exists you are merely moving towards its completion, as in a jig-saw puzzle. Notice how the factory-builder genre is very linear in how you "advance" in the game. It is difficult to call that creation, its linear filling of blanks.
Agreed