MONDOmagazine

Why your economist doesn’t want you to give it up to everyone.

By Danielle Zacarias
Illustrations by Dara Gold

Look, I am not an economist, but I know a thing or two about supply and demand. Simply put, if the supply exceeds or even exactly matches the demand for it, the thing being supplied will not be valued nearly as much as it would if it were in short supply. If you apply this to yourself and sex it translates into: you have to turn a few (if not many) people down in order to maintain or inflate your perceived value.

That sounds simple, right? Sleep with a few, reject many more – how much simpler can you get? Wrong. In order for you to be able to artificially inflate your value by rejecting people you need three things: 1) something people want in the first place; 2) a filtering process; 3) publicity.

Something people want in the first place

If you are hot, have a great personality, and something to be passionate about that makes you interesting, then you are already set, skip this whole section. If you are not, then you have two options: 1) improve yourself or 2) attempt niche marketing.

Improving yourself is obvious. If you are not hot, go to the gym. At the very least you can be in shape and have a decent body. If you are evil, work on creating a façade of niceness that will last long enough to keep people interested. If you are boring and have no passions, go read a book or something.

Niche marketing in contrast to self improvement is less obvious but that much easier. Once you have found a market you are set. Successful niche marketing will make you like Seven of Nine or Riker at a Star Trek convention. You will be mobbed, albeit by nerds, but mobbed nonetheless. The idea here is to find a place where people of the same sex (or orientation) are a minority, or just not as hot, cool, good looking or funny as you thereby reducing your competition.

Filtering process

You slutty slut you. You want to sleep with them all, don’t you? But you can’t because you have to restrict the supply of you. So now you must decide who to turn away and who to get down with. The best way to do this is to only screw around with people who are close to what you would want in a serious partner, thereby setting you up to possibly find someone along the way that will be more than a roll in the sack.

But like all things that involve sex or love, that’s not as easy as it sounds. It is easy to confuse what you think you want with what you actually want and then confuse that with what you need. More than likely the people you have sex with will not be like the person you end up with; they will merely have helped inform your taste instead of being perfect expressions of it. Also, if you are lazy, like me, you will want a simple way to decide these things. The best way to go about this, then, is to figure out what you want most when you have sex with someone: Hot body? Great sex? Cuddling afterward? Breakfast in the morning?

If you just want someone who is hot, that’s pretty easy – but I warn you, hot people are lazy in bed. They think they are so hot that they don’t actually have to try. Granted, this is not true for all of them, but is true of a significant number, enough so that some other kind of standard is necessitated for those of us who need more to cum than hot abs or perfect asses.

You might want to try matching hotness with low self-esteem – hard to find, but not impossible. Finding someone who is hot and athletic is probably another good way to go. It’s all about stamina, baby.

Publicity

All your work will have been for naught if you are not able to communicate the fact that you have been turning people down. You cannot simply brag about it because being conceited is unattractive. You also cannot rely upon the people you turned down to tell their friends they got turned down; no one likes telling the whole world he or she got shot down. A certain percentage of them will go and mouth off, but the publicity earned might not be the good kind anyway. What you need is a way for people you want to sleep with to see that you have standards and will turn away people who do not meet them. Doing this in public at a club or at a house party of some kind, politely but firmly, is probably a good way to set yourself up as someone with standards. You might also want to try “confiding” in people who will communicate your standards for you.

Reaping the rewards

Once you have done all this, you will have managed to inflate your value. More people will want you and will try harder to get you. Your self-esteem will go through the roof. Be careful, though, not to be too severe with the filtering process, or what becomes your most attractive quality will be the fact that you won’t touch anyone. That kind of over-filtering really only works with the creepy religious types and fanatics. And that is one niche you don’t want to touch, no matter how desperate you are for a market.

Manipulator? I Never Touched Her!

By Danielle Zacarias
Illustrations by Dara Gold

Listen carefully, because I am only going to say this once: love is not about flowers and candy and cards. Love is about mind control. What we have come to call “romance” is merely a soft veneer for the true, darker nature of love. Love is a contest of wills whereby two people seek to dominate each other and the most immoral wins. Ninjas know this. Few others, save for the bravest among us, dare admit that. If you are one of those rare and fortunate brave, read on. If you have what it takes to be a ninja, or at least pretend that you are, I offer these ancient teachings. But if you are one of the weak, if you know you will falter, then turn your gaze away from this page and take solace in your ignorance and chocolate and teddy bears. I will try not to think less of you. For those who remain, I will teach you how to win in this greatest of battles and emerge clothed in glory, victorious and in masterful and in complete control.

Show off your grappling hook

Leave it somewhere in your car or in your bedroom and make it so that it looks as though you forgot it was there. Doubtless they will ask you why you have such a thing. Grappling hooks are sexy but not many people have them. Their curiosity will drive them mad. You should tell them something along the lines of: “Oh that? Uh, look there are some things about me I can’t tell you right now. I promise I will tell you at the right time.” After this throw away the grappling hook so that they never see it again. Anytime they ask you about it, be evasive: it will never be the “right” time. This has the effect of making them want something from you, namely your trust. They cannot take your trust, they must earn it and they will try hard to. This gives you what I like to call leverage.

Maximize outcomes

Whenever you are about to do something really nice for them, act as though you are about to tell them something awful. This means that whatever nice thing you do for them will seem ten times nicer than it would have if they were expecting it. As a result you will have to work less. The majority of your effort will be expended in keeping up the impression that something bad is about to happen and finding new ways to trick them each time. By doing this to them you will be able to gain control of their emotions. You will come to possess the key to their misery and their happiness, and they will become dependent on you.

Name no one, say very little

Remember, your friends do not have names. They should at all times be referred to as “my friend” or “my colleague”. Also, if you can, try as hard as you can to leave gender out of the conversation. If you are asked to reveal who your “friends” and “colleagues” are, say “You don’t know them, what difference does it make?” or, if you are feeling particularly creative you might try, “I can’t talk about such things. It is for your own good not to know.” Remember also to be as vague as you can about where you go. You do not go to the mall to buy Captain America action figures. You “go out.” This saves you from having to deal with any fighting that may arise out of the company you keep or the places you go. On the other hand, if they are foolish enough to reveal names and places, you will be able to pick fights with them about these things. This will put you in a position of power because you are always “the wronged one” and they are always “the screw-up”. If they are mad at you they are really crazy. If for some reason they still find something to be mad at you over, do not lose heart. Pretend to listen, then slowly become extremely and visibly agitated. Pace if you can. At the perfect moment tell them how hard you are trying but that it is really impossible to deal with all their crazy demands/ actions/ thoughts. A good one to use is: crazy insecurities. Chalk up any anxieties or problems they are having to insecurity and you have already won. It makes their anger and sorrow their problem, not yours. Never let them see you bleed. Real ninjas don’t bleed. Do not cry; do not show any strong emotion other than displeasure or, occasionally, happiness when they’ve done something extravagant for you. Emotions are for them. Not you.

Familiarize them with loss

You are busy. You are not always available (unless you want to be). You are also, because you have hardened yourself and trained your mind, not afraid to lose them. They are, however, afraid to lose you if you have done your job properly. Remind them of this. Break up with them at the slightest sign of disobedience, but take them back if they please or placate you enough. If you manage this, you will have, at this point, won the battle and you can congratulate yourself. You can never let your guard down — vigilance is key — but from this point on you can content yourself with knowing that you hold all the cards and have attained for yourself what I like to call a love slave. And what about the real ninjas? At this point you may be wondering what real ninjas do if this is what people pretending to be ninjas do. It’s so simple. Real ninjas don’t fall in love. They don’t even pretend.

Published by Nintendo
Developed by Nintendo EAD

By Danielle Zacarias

One thing that Mario games always make me think is this: man, those folks at Nintendo know what they are doing. New Super Mario Bros. is no exception. Not too hard or too easy, and after the game is done, there is still plenty more to do. It’s perfect for the both gamer who wants to race through a game and the gamer who never wants their game to end.

The game story follows the usual plotline: you, fat little Italian plumber that you are, lose your princess to the evil Bowzer. In order to get her back, you pursue her through a series of worlds. Each world has a bunch of levels in it that you are pretty much forced to follow in a fairly linear pattern. You can go back to old levels and play around, or you can sometimes offer up star coins (there are three of these in each level, to be collected and used to get items or go places) for the privilege of trying out an alternate level, but you can’t really beat levels out of order.

One thing about Mario games that has always simultaneously bothered and fascinated me is how easy it starts out. It seems like child’s play at first. You get new lives just like that, and even when you die, your coins are not lost. Once you reach the halfway point of most levels, you are allowed to return to that point if you manage to die afterwards. There are also goodies everywhere. You get the feeling that the minds behind Mario are kind minds, and that they want you to enjoy your gaming experience the same way that babies like being fed candy.

On the very first level of the first world in Mario, you are offered an exciting prize: a giant mushroom that makes Mario grow to gargantuan proportions. Right away, without even having to try, you get to experience the psychotic fun of stomping everything in your path. It’s like Nintendo Land crack: the high doesn’t last long — he shrinks back to normal size pretty fast — but boy, do you ever want more.

The whole first world is extremely easy. Serious gamers might actually get bored because the challenges are few and far between. I mean, for heaven’s sake, you are in a world where mushrooms have little legs and toddle along and killing them is as bloodless and easy as stepping on them. The first couple of boss fights are also pretty much a joke: all you have to do is fire off a couple fire balls or step on Bowzer or one his minions three times and you’re done.

But you shouldn’t get too comfortable. The game does get pretty hard. It kind of creeps up on you, but eventually you will be losing life after life and cursing Mario and his chubby little legs. I didn’t mind the increase in difficulty too much, though I have to say that a couple of the levels struck me as being a bit ridiculous. There were moments when it really did seem like there were too many bullets, and enemies, and Hail-Mary jumps, and flowers spitting fire balls, all happening at once. It was like I stepped into West Side Story.

My only other real complaint about Mario is that some of the secrets are incredibly hard to figure out. Some are rather clever and involve satisfying problem solving, but there are others leading to fairly big things — like the unlocking of two additional worlds — that are not unraveled without a fair amount of game play and guess work.

However, the touch screen is utilized really well in New Super Mario Bros. It’s used to either show your progress in terms of coins or distance, or allow you to access a sort of back up upgrade (whether it be a giant mushroom, a fire flower, or whatever). It’s all set up so that the screen feels like a worthy — if not necessary — component, which makes perfect sense. Nintendo made the DS, and they seem to know best how to exploit it.

In the end, I still can’t help but think again: man, those folks at Nintendo know what they are doing.

Developed by Amaze Entertainment
Published by LucasArts/TT Games

By Danielle Zacarias

While LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy is a great game on the PS2, the Xbox or the 360, if you play it on the DS you will realize that whatever magic LucasArts managed to capture on the big consoles is utterly and completely lost once it is transferred to the portable screen. What was a great game becomes a nearly unbearable voyage into a land of bad graphics and nauseatingly bad controls.

For those not familiar with LEGO Star Wars, the game won a bunch of awards for being incredibly awesome. In it, you assume the guise of everyone from Princess Leia to various bounty hunters and Sith lords while you play out the story lines from the original three Star Wars movies. Throw in the fact that the characters and much of the scenery is made of Lego and you have one of the most inventive and amusing games ever created. The characters don’t speak, they mumble, and the cinematic sequences are goofy takes on scenes from the movies. It’s bound to appeal to both adults and kids, since the violence is actually cute — it amounts to Lego blocks falling apart and spewing pretty gold and silver bolts — and the missions are fun but not devoid of intellectual challenge.

It’s a shame then that when LEGO Star Wars II switches platforms and jumps down to Nintendo DS size the list of bad things goes on longer than the title screens in Lucas’ films. Everything the game does well on the other platforms just gets worse on the DS. For example, my one complaint about LEGO Star Wars on the bigger consoles was the title screen. I mean really, does “A long, long time ago…” really have to stay on the screen for five minutes without being skippable? Well, on the DS the title screen is even worse because it looks somehow cheaper on top of everything. But I could live with that. I could probably live with the game, too, if I thought for one second that LucasArts had given adapting the game for the DS more than three seconds of thought.

The music, the scenery and even the little gold, silver, and blue screws that fall out of things when you blast them seem to have lost their shine on the DS. There aren’t as many bolts, and with less bolts comes less amusement. But that’s not the worst of it.

My biggest problem with the game on the DS is that LEGO Star Wars II is 3D and the directional pad on the DS is not really meant for 3D adventuring. I first noticed it when I had to move diagonally across the screen and I was reduced to doing so in short bursts. First a little left. Then a little up. Then more left. You can imagine how this killed the game play. It became monumentally frustrating to have to navigate even the shortest distance in this fashion, especially when the distance traversed was over a beam suspended in space and falling off it meant having to do it multiple times. In and of itself this is fine, since falling off and dying amounts to nothing in the game: you have endless lives and there is never any time limit on anything. So you can go and fall off things as many times as you like, the only problem being it isn’t any fun and that was what made this game great on the other platforms. This is the main problem with the DS version of the game. The fun is gone and is replaced by frustration. And take away the fun and you’re not really playing LEGO Star Wars anymore. You’re just playing a bad game.

Developed by Capcom
Published by Capcom

By Danielle Zacarias

Generally, I don’t mind hard games. However, I tend to run out of patience for games that feel like they were developed specifically to drive me so insane I would actually contemplate throwing my DS out the window. Megaman ZX for the DS is hard. Really hard. Even on the easy setting it is still kind of hard. Then again, a couple weeks ago, I was playing Megaman on the subway and a kid, after watching me play, asked to play and then made me look like an idiot. He was seven. So maybe it’s just me. Yet even though Megaman ZX often crosses the fine line between challenging and frustrating, it more than makes up for its more frustrating aspects by being a game well worth playing.

The story of the game revolves around two selectable characters, Vent, a boy, or Aile, a girl. Both work for a delivery company called Giro Express. One day they are attacked by evil robots known as Mavericks while transporting something called biometal. In the hubbub, the biometal fuses with your character and you become capable of morphing into Model X, which comes with blasters and the ability to dash and jump up things. So it’s kinda like taking Ecstasy. As the game progresses you acquire more biometals and the Model Xs get more interesting. There are five models and each one lets you do something a little different. One lets you glide, another comes with powerful fire blasters, and another works well underwater. The best model though is Model ZX which comes with both a blaster and a sword.

This Megaman isn’t markedly different from its predecessors on the Gameboy Advance, but that isn’t a bad thing. First, it means that if you’ve played the older versions of Megaman you’ll already be familiar with the environmental hazards that instantly kill you and how to deal with some of the bad guys. Second, it means there was no attempt to add on excessive gimmicky touch-screen features. The action on the top screen is so intense that a second screen competing for your attention would only complicate things.

All around, Megaman does play well. The visuals are good for a side scroller, as colours are vivid and some of the backgrounds are exquisitely rendered. The controls are comfortable, which is a must since you will be playing for extended periods of time. The music is so good that I found myself lingering in some levels just so I could keep listening. Save for the big and mini bosses, most enemies are not difficult and even easy and fun to deal with. Being able to talk to other characters in the game can often also help immerse you in the game by providing you with a lot of extra back story.

So far it all sounds good, right? Well, now for the reasons why Megaman ZX might drive you mad.

There are not nearly enough save points, the big and mini bosses have insane abilities, you have barely enough lives to get by, several environmental hazards are capable of killing you instantly (particularly on the normal setting), the map needs a helluva lot more detail and in order to get some special items, you often have to talk to people repeatedly. But all of this pales in comparison to the thing that drove me really nuts. Suppose you have three lives for a mission and you have three items that will give you health. Use them all up on one life and you will not have them for the remaining two lives. This is compounded by the fact that such health items (like apples, e-tanks and bread) are rare finds.

This basically means you will be playing missions over again many, many times. When fighting bosses, you will encounter moves that are all but impossible to avoid which take off an uncomfortable amount of health. If you want to play Megaman ZX through on normal, be prepared for hours of frustration and the paranoid feeling that Capcom made this game this hard to drive you insane. I suspect hardcore gamers might actually enjoy this aspect of the game, but anyone else out there just looking for a good game with a couple of intriguing challenges should play it through on easy so it’ll grow on you before it can frustrate you to the point of wanting to throw it out the window. Or give it to any seven-year-olds you know.

Published by Nintendo
Developed by Nintendo

By Danielle Zacarias

Though Metroid Prime: Hunters is one of the most epic and visually stunning games for the DS, it’s not perfect. For everything good in Hunters, there’s something bad. That said, the game is overall worth playing for its graphics, innovation and game play.

We pick up the story somewhere between the original Metroid Prime for GameCube and Metroid Prime: Echoes. As Samus, players visit planets in the Alimbic Cluster looking for “octolyths”, which promise to unlock a great and destructive power. Along the way Samus does battle with other hunters also looking for the octolyths. These, as well as the boss battles, make up the main fights in the game. Whenever a hunter bests you in battle they steal one of your octolyths and you are left with two options: either be cheap, shut off the game and restart from a point before you lost the octolyth, or pursue the hunter, beat them and get your booty back.

The game is designed so that players visit each planet in the Alimbic Cluster at least twice, if not more times. You get a new weapon and then you go back (in typical Metroid style) to unlock doors previously barred to you. There is something a little strange about this set up, though. Every time you fight a boss, you are forced to then make a mad dash off the planet back to your spaceship. The whole thing is timed so you have to be quick about it. But the thing is, nothing really happens once you get on your ship. The whole escape is anticlimactic. Once you get to your ship and save, you can just get right back out and wander around the planet again. So why the mad dash? I’m not exactly sure, but it gets annoying.

The boss battles are also fairly repetitive. There are essentially two bosses that keep repeating throughout the game, the only differences being that they get more interesting weaponry as the game progresses. This, combined with the annoying and seemingly pointless dashes off the planet, can begin to grate on your nerves, particularly since there are no save points after the boss fights and you have to go from the fights directly to the mad dash over and over again.

The other downside to the protracted and repetitive fights followed by the mad dash is that because of how you have to hold your hands (one hand gripping the stylus in order to aim, the other hand working directional keys and a shoulder button, left or right depending on what hand you are), they tend to cramp up. I found that the only way to compensate was to take advantage of the DS’s incredible battery life, pause the game and flip it closed until my hands felt better.

Despite that downside, the touch screen aiming option allows for an incredible amount of accuracy. It is reminiscent of a mouse in a computer FPS. However, since the touch screen that you aim on is also the screen where you change your weapons and select scan visor or morph ball mode if you want it, you have to be careful to not accidentally change weapons or start scanning things in the middle of a big fight.

With regards to the scanning part of the game, I found that having to rescan everything every time I died was a bit annoying. Sure, you don’t have to repeatedly rescan things, but if you want the counter at the save screen to show that you have unraveled a significant amount of the game, you will. For those with an obsessive desire to complete a game in its entirety, this particular aspect of Prime: Hunters may try your patience.

In terms of graphics, though Nintendo has repeatedly downplayed the capabilities of the DS, Prime Hunters boasts some pretty spectacular visuals, definitely some of the best available on the DS right now. The cinematic sequences, which often take up both screens, are stunning and actual game play, though occasionally grainy — and at times a little lagged out — is pretty impressive.