Goat Simulator (2014)

After blowing up a couple of cars, I went in an elevator, ended up on a rooftop where I completely disrupted a rave by smashing things and headbutting guests, then strapped a firework to myself and left the party in style in a dramatic explosion that dropped me in a harbor conveniently close to a carnival in need of my particular brand of attention.

Have no idea how most of these things happened, but I had a spectacular time. 10/10 would blow myself off a rooftop like Action Goat again.

Goat Simulator feels like one big joke of a game and surely does not take itself seriously. I cannot even imagine how you can come up with this and how you turn a normal everyday animal into a video game. But they did, and it works!

If you take a simple look at the game, it is nothing more than a square sandbox in which you can screw things and people up as a goat. You earn and unlock mutators for even more carnage and madness like flying, spawn goats, build blocks Minecraft style and many, many more. Normally this type of games bore me pretty quick because there is no end goal or clear end to the game. But because the game as one hundred and twenty-four achievements, requiring you to do certain things and interacting with the world and the various secrets and Easter eggs, I automatically got a purpose to play the crap out of this game. It also gave me a full tour throughout all the crazy and hilarious stuff in this godforsaken piece of glitch. Going for the achievements is the way to go to fully explore everything and feeling that what you do matters.

The graphics for Goat Simulator are fair and are not that bad to look at, the music is hilarious, it is silly, and it is perfectly fitting for the game you are playing. Once again you can see that the developers wanted to state that this game is not to be taken seriously. The physics in this game are broken and out of control but this is to be expected and Goat Simulator is the one game that can pull this without complaints. It fits the experience.

Sometimes I was really focused, I tried to get a certain objective and then when I looked at my character, I forgot that I was playing as a freaking goat. It is just the magic of this game.

Goat Simulator has many, many references, Easter eggs and parodies on other video games and movies. They are hilarious. Mainly because the realization kicks in that it is a freaking goat which is now the super star of that movie or game part. You can clearly see that the developers had the best of times when creating this thing.

There are four DLC’s available for this game and all four of them are totally worth it. They have all the same humour, crazy mutators and NPC’s and add cool new features like the apocalypse, a goat in space, flying in a freaking spaceship with the worst controls god ever created and “pranking” people instead of doing heist in the Payday DLC. Definitely recommend the various DLC’s. The MMO simulator is perhaps one of the best. You get the feeling that you are in World of Warcraft, the fake chat and players in the game had me fooled for nearly two hours and once again, the references and parodies on other video games were fun.

Even though you must not take this game seriously, I wanted to make a special note for the Flappy Goat achievement (score 10 points in Flappy Goat). It has been a long time that I attempted and got an achievement this horrendous. I thought I was cured from my gamers rage but that one got it back in full swing.

Definitely recommend this gem.

É válido considerar Goat Simulator como um dos jogos já feitos. Por ser um sandbox de caos ao qual você está livre para fazer (dar chifrada em todos) o que quiser como uma cabra desgraçada -- e todos os outros adjetivos de desprezo -- que destrói tudo que vê pela frente.

No geral, o jogo é chato por não ter tantos objetivos assim, tanto que pude platiná-lo em quatro horas -- considerando que levei cerca de 3 horas e meia tendo de jogar aquela desgraça de Flappy Bird para pegar o troféu de platina.

Creio que é um jogo feito apenas para passar aquela tarde tediosa de domingo quando você já jogou todos os jogos da sua biblioteca.

Um aspecto que me agradou muito foi a questão de poder liberar MILHÕES de cabras diferentes enquanto joga... E perceber como eu odeio esse animal -- confia em mim, eles irão dominar o mundo.

Seguindo a própria descrição do jogo, apresento as quatro reações que tive enquanto jogava:

1. Ok, Cabra... CABRA DO INFERNO POR QUE ELA VIROU O DEMÔNIO?
2. Destruir coisas me dá pontinho... ESPERA, POR QUE DESTRUIR COISAS ME DÁ PONTO?
3. Física inexistente no jogo e bugs 100% do tempo (eu me diverti muito com isso, adoro como funciona o ragdoll do jogo)
4. Bééééé

Reading Response: Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics

​I wonder about what the future will hold for cartoon physics. It seems to me that the extremely exaggerated style of cartoons on display in Road Runner has somewhat fallen out of fashion, there are, of course, extreme examples largely confined to adult-orientated animation, but even the strangest or most ambitious of children’s animation generally sets rules and follows them. Bodies have weight and the anarchy of classical cartoon physics feels muted; instead, narrative content has become more absurd, a different sort of anarchy that appeals more to logic than the senses perhaps (in that we understand what is going on is weird rather than confused by the illogic of the world itself).

​Bakutman points to the rise of digital animation as a potential explanation for this (312) in that the technology has been so designed around realism that it naturally lends itself to creating realist animation. He brings up the absurd internet comedy videos that use the video game engines to create outlandish animations that conform somewhat to traditions of cartoon physics, and questions how these would be perceived at a larger scale (i.e. in a game that uses a non-real style). One answer is the 2014 PC game Goat Simulator where the player controls a realistic looking goat attempting to destroy a city. ​The game’s primary mechanic is illogic (here, the developers have intentionally not fixed any glitches in the game and set no boundaries on physics, meaning the goat will frequently bounce off of walls and accelerate to absurd speeds). So does Goat Simulator work to subvert the logic-driven world of realistic animation? Sorta! It gets old very fast. Some game theorists have proposed that games exist to blur our lines between the player and the screen (inherent in the nature of interaction), and perhaps what makes this cartoonishness fall flat is that it fails to blend that line, it fails to ever put the player into the absurdity because so little of it makes sense.

​The question raised by this trend towards realism is what is lost without cartoonishness? (I can’t believe I’m getting into this but…) I feel that there is a way in which cartoon logic ties itself into something I’ve been using to describe Guy Maddin’s 2012 experimental short Only Dream Things: an expanding tapestry of consciousness. The film is an abstract depiction of the process of remembering someone (itself constructed only from the home movies, photos, and recorded conversations/songs of Maddin’s late brother), where images blend together in service of new images (dream images?). There is an extent to which Maddin is creating a more actively experienced sense of a person than merely showing us images of him would create. He is remaking his memories, and that is where cartoons tie in.

​The anarchistic illogic of the cartoon world creates in us a sense of a universe driven by our own senses (remaking the universe!). I was struck by Bukatman’s asking, “is it stranger that these cartoons didn’t seem all that strange in the first place?” (301). Cartoons are more felt than they are understood. Things happen in cartoons because they seem like they can happen in cartoons. Just like Maddin’s film, in focusing on how it feels to perceive rather than on depiction, cartoons are creating a world beyond our own. There is an essential barrier of separation (perhaps like that barrier between mind and body?) in the audience’s relationship to the screen and cartoon logic exploits this to emphasize its own dreamness (i.e. a train comes from off screen because anything can exist in the off-screen world).

Damn, this response got out of hand.