“I decided to put my ego aside and actually use some of the junk”
Putting seven years worth of ROCKET LEAGUE cosmetics to use
NO ONE WOULD ACTUALLY FLAUNT THE DECAL YOU GET FOR LAST PLACE
My Rocket League inventory looks like the inside of one of those antique shops full of vintage pins, Raggedy Ann dolls, and ceramic beer steins. I have a floppy cow udder hat, eight variants of wheels with 3D elf faces on them, a Game Awards statue, a Wonder Woman flag, various animal miniatures, a Hot Wheels sign, and hundreds of other items that no one actually uses, including me.
I could trade some of them in, selecting five unwanted items at a time to smush into one rarer one, but I hate deciding what to keep and what to scrap. It may be trash, but it’s trash I’ve collected over seven years. It has sentimental value! And what if I want to make a Christmas-themed car one day, only to discover that I threw out my 2018 Frosty Fest candy cane speed trail? I’d be devastated.
I’ll probably never want to do that, granted. The few Rocket League cosmetics I actually use strike a calculated balance between showiness and modesty. You’ve got to use a couple high rarity cosmetics so that people know you’re an old-timer, but either stop there or use a few common items to show that you value good taste over ostentation.
FAST FASHION
In a self-critical moment the other day, though, I decided to put my ego aside and actually use some of the junk I claim to care about. At first, I went gross: floppy udder hat, gooey pizza wheels, pie texture. The resulting car was hideous, but too matchy to be genuinely tasteless. I replaced the udder with a giant foam cowboy hat to disrupt the food theme, but it still felt too self-aware, and looked sort of fun. Swapping the pie paint for a Bronze rank season reward decal made it uglier – a dull plasticky brown – but even less sincere. No one would actually flaunt the decal you get for a last place competitive ladder finish.
As I scrolled quickly past a pair of Rick and Morty toppers, I noticed an odd sensation: it was like I was trying to hide them from myself, afraid that I might actually feel embarrassed if I made myself use them. When I put Mr Poopybutthole on the roof of my car, I knew I had conquered my ego. I stuck the Reddit alien on my antenna in reference to a T-shirt I unfortunately wore in a few mid2000s photos and picked a set of wheels covered in irredeemable hot pick camo netting. I selected the car body I used back in 2015, a Mad Max-style armoured vehicle called Ripper, which no one uses these days, and put my Season 12 Diamond rank decal on it, which is actually the best competitive reward I have, and something I was actually proud of. Finally, I’d made a truly bad car. I’ve never actually used it, of course. I have a reputation to uphold.
CREATURE CREATOR IS A REAL MONKEY’S PAW OF WISH FULFILMENT
Spore is one of those games I’ve been long curious about, but never got around to playing. I know enough, however, to recognise that this is basically a Poundland version of it. As a result, this might be the only game I’ve ever played where I would have been happy to have paid five times the asking price.
This game is janky, unpredictable, thoroughly imperfect, and I love it. It’s a bundle of contradictions. There are dozens of little touches that I adore. The way that the screen is black and white until you place eyes on your creature; the fact that one of the maps (a literal sandbox) has multiple footballs, two huge buckets for goals, and a working scoreboard; the fact that, although it’s a zerobudget endeavour, you can meet and chat with fellow creators online. Making and testing something, though, is an exercise in equal parts frustration and hilarity.
It’s wonderful and smooth in theory. Creation is user-friendly for the most part. Basically, you stretch out and shape the body, then start sticking things like legs and eyes onto it. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Whether what you make bears any resemblance to what you had planned is an entirely different story. A story with an ending that is either sad or indescribably funny depending on your perspective.
Creature Creator is a real monkey’s paw of wish fulfilment. Everything, and I mean everything, that I’ve made so far is nightmare fuel, whether I wanted it to be or not. The one I keep coming back to is my two-headed giant insect thing. I wanted it to look disturbing, and it does. Once it gets moving, however, it’s disturbing in entirely the wrong way.
What bothers me is the leg movement. I don’t know how this happened – maybe the body’s not far enough off the ground, maybe I’ve put the legs on at the wrong angle, perhaps the weight distribution is off – but whenever this thing walks, it swings its hips around in a sexually suggestive manner.
CREATE EXPECTATIONS
My tour de force is the result of my asking, “How close can I get to a human?” It’s a bipedal monstrosity that needs a new word to describe it, waddling around bow-legged as it does with a crown atop its head.
From others I’ve seen Hellraiser’s version of Sonic, some good Pokémon, and a version of Kirby that will haunt me. It’s broken, it’s glitchy as hell, and it’s endless fun.