Spring Break
The planet Earth - A product review
Johnathan Kastner
Issue date: 4/22/09 Section: Opinion
Like all made-up holidays, Earth Day was created by a collection of corporations to push a product. From the makers of The Sun, Mars and the now defunct Pluto INC comes -- Earth.
Earth has been around for a long time, between 6,000 and 4.6 billion years (give or take an angry debate), and has great brand recognition, coming in just behind Coke in recognizability to the average American. But despite all this, Earth has gone largely uncriticized and unreviewed. Consider this fixed.
Technical Specifications -- 5.9736 × 1024 kilograms. Several million USB ports. Problems with internal cooling.
Operating System -- Carbon based.
Features -- The Earth features "sandbox" style gameplay, with fewer mandatory objectives than might be expected. Some of the early "training" missions are rough, but most people are lucky enough to find a trainer straight off. These trainers provide helpful guides to world basics such as, "No, the fork does not go in the wall," "Food goes in the mouth" and "The cat is not food. Please stop putting him in your mouth." But they can be somewhat overbearing, making the Earth feel confined until later levels.
Other features include a wide variety of prebuilt "animals" and "people," ranging from the mundane to the wildly inventive. There were some misses here, such as the platypus -- a poisonous duck-beaver with electrical vision. Really, Earth? And some of the insect and fish models seem to just be recolors of the same base model, but we can let that slide, as Earth is home to millions of different and unique species.
This may be revised in a later patch.
Unfortunately, Earth seems to have put a heavy emphasis on PvP (player-versus-player) interactions. Nearly every creature is expected at some point to come into a clash for resources, sometimes even killing and eating other creatures. Needless to say, this focus on aggression is expected to reduce player enjoyment and may result in non-cooperative gameplay.
Earth has been around for a long time, between 6,000 and 4.6 billion years (give or take an angry debate), and has great brand recognition, coming in just behind Coke in recognizability to the average American. But despite all this, Earth has gone largely uncriticized and unreviewed. Consider this fixed.
Technical Specifications -- 5.9736 × 1024 kilograms. Several million USB ports. Problems with internal cooling.
Operating System -- Carbon based.
Features -- The Earth features "sandbox" style gameplay, with fewer mandatory objectives than might be expected. Some of the early "training" missions are rough, but most people are lucky enough to find a trainer straight off. These trainers provide helpful guides to world basics such as, "No, the fork does not go in the wall," "Food goes in the mouth" and "The cat is not food. Please stop putting him in your mouth." But they can be somewhat overbearing, making the Earth feel confined until later levels.
Other features include a wide variety of prebuilt "animals" and "people," ranging from the mundane to the wildly inventive. There were some misses here, such as the platypus -- a poisonous duck-beaver with electrical vision. Really, Earth? And some of the insect and fish models seem to just be recolors of the same base model, but we can let that slide, as Earth is home to millions of different and unique species.
This may be revised in a later patch.
Unfortunately, Earth seems to have put a heavy emphasis on PvP (player-versus-player) interactions. Nearly every creature is expected at some point to come into a clash for resources, sometimes even killing and eating other creatures. Needless to say, this focus on aggression is expected to reduce player enjoyment and may result in non-cooperative gameplay.
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
John
posted 4/22/09 @ 4:19 PM MST
Quick note from the author - the earth weighs 10^24 KG, not that other, much lower number. Silly lack of superscript on the part of the editor.
Severin
posted 4/23/09 @ 4:21 PM MST
The most original and entertaining article I've read in connection to the Collegian. Mr. Kastner should be given control of this abortion of a news source. (Continued…)
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