Terraria

Terraria. It's basically Minecraft in two dimensions.

Pros: Freedom and Exploration

You get to run around, digging and exploring, or building as high as you want into the air. There are a lot of things to find all around you. The items are neat, and the interface works well. Thankfully, you don't have to figure out recipes, it just lets you know what you can craft with what's in your inventory.

I particularly like messing with water and lava. Water is the ultimate safety device; you can ride waterfalls down any hole, and it makes a safe platform of obsidian on lava. You can jump higher in water too, so you can "ride" waterfalls up to places that you couldn't normally jump to. I just wish water had some effect on your opponents.

Cons: MONSTERS

The enemies are terrible. There are three kinds of enemies, and they're all stupid.

The default enemy walks at you until one of you dies. If you're in a small area with them, you can get bounced around by the damage knockback, which prevents you from doing anything at all.

Then there's the enemies that teleport near you and shoot a projectile that goes through walls, so they can shoot you, but you can't shoot back.

Then there are the enemies that "fly" through the ground. Basically all you can do is attack as they get near you, trading damage until one of you dies. Once you get to the biggest ones, it's even odds which it will be, and they just keep coming.

The main problem with all of these opponents is their spawn rate. When enemies spawn as fast as you can kill them, and shoot magic shots at you from another room, it gets old extremely quick. Even the normal enemies can overwhelm you with numbers when they start dropping down from above, and you forget to seal yourself against them.

The Saxxys

I've been spending quite a bit of time voting on The Saxxys, and I have this feeling that not many other people are.

When I start voting in a category, it is thick with ineligible videos. As I proceed, the number of videos that have nothing to do with TF2 thin out as I flag them.*  If my work is making a significant change in the proportion of ineligible videos, days after the beginning of the contest, there must be very few voters indeed.

I can't blame the people that don't vote, why bother voting between two videos which obviously aren't going to win anything? This is by far the most common pairing of videos, and it's a waste of time.

I'd guess about half the videos are ineligible. Half the remaining videos are so terrible there's no chance of winning.** Only about one percent of the videos are good enough I would suggest anyone watch them. If I were running the contest, I would change two things: I would allow the voter to flag both videos as ineligible, and I would have a button that would indicate a vote against a video. An average voter can recognize that a video's general crumminess means it's not going to win anything, even if it's technically appropriate for the category.  If a video got enough of these anti-votes, it'd be moved off the list of eligible nominees.

*this could be a psychological effect, which would mean that none of this is significant.
** A particularly annoying kind of video is a demoman sticky jumping to the enemy, and hitting them with the Ullapool Caber (see below). If it had never been done before, I could see the attraction. Instead of a novelty, it's become the most common thing in the contest.

The Best Animal Ever Tourney

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