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Thoughts on Cookie Clicker

https://stuffwhatigoneandrote.blogspot.com/2019/07/thoughts-on-cookie-clicker.html

Cookie Clicker. That has been a non-insignificant chunk of my life for the last, well, since about January of this year. So, six months.

So, for those not in the “know,” Cookie Clicker’s what they call a “clicker” game, or an “idle” game depending on how you choose to play it. Basically, there’s this giant cookie, right? You click it, cookies come out. But hold on, it gets more complicated. There’s also shit you can buy with the cookies that helps you bake more cookies. For example, there’s the cursor, which starts off generating cookies for you at a rate of .1 per second, then boosts as you pick up some upgrades for it. Then there’s the grandma, a super-integral force in the whole outfit. You amass a veritable army of cookie-baking grandmothers—God only knows what nursing homes, bingo halls and Baptist churches you raid to find these women—and they eventually entangle themselves with all the other buildings and machines in your operation before rising against you in the “Grandmapocalypse,” where the elderly ladies twist and contort into Lovecraftian mockeries of themselves and unleash cookie-consuming “wrinklers” against the giant cookie, causing your CPS (that is, cookies-per-second) to shrivel.

But mostly, they just bake cookies.

So, holy shit, this game is addicting. The furor over it has largely dwindled, but the game has continued to receive semi-consistent updates that bring the game to a new level of ridiculous scope. Honestly, “ridiculous” is underselling it, because when the wise ancients got together to create our numerical system, the numbers that came out of the “now you’re just bullshitting us, get serious” division of that group are the numbers you climb to in the latter part of the game. Right now, there are achievements that require you to get quindecillions of cookies, and I bet you had no fucking idea that number existed before you either read it here or saw it in Cookie Clicker beforehand.

One quindecillion? Like, where in the hell else would you ever need to know that number? Do you have any idea how many damn zeroes that is? It’s one of those numbers where, if you see it in a calculator, it’s written as a scientific notation or 10 to the 30th power or some shit, because the number is literally too fucking huge to fully write out and still have it comprehended by whoever is looking at it:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Jesus god fucking damn, that’s not a number, that’s some guy falling asleep on his keyboard’s “0” key for 37 minutes and then someone else coming along and adding commas just to be a smartass. Like, if you have a million of something—dollars, pimples, refrigerators, whatever—it’s considered a lot. It’s considered downright massive to the casual observer. Yet, that number is only a one followed by six zeroes. If I wrote out the number for one million next to that monster up there, it’d be like comparing the length of a cigarette lighter to that of a baseball bat. Or, to put it another way: if you live to be one hundred years old, this is how many nanoseconds you’ve lived (a nanosecond being equal to one-billionth of a second):

3,155,692,600,000,000,000

(or, over 3 quintillion. Not quindecillion, just quintillion.)

Take a look at how fucking small that number is now that you’ve seen what a quindecillion is. Yet, a billion of that passes every single second you live. That should give you a rough idea of what kind of madness is involved in Cookie Clicker.

So, yeah, the game is insane. There are so many variables, multipliers, combos, mini games and random events, one can sink hours of their life into simply fiddling with all the little boosters that add up to make their score. The depth of the gameplay lies mostly in how much one chooses to engage with it. It’s possible to just set a few things up and let the game sit there and bake cookies on its own, with no further input from the player. Hence why this type of game is thought of as an idle game. However, if one really wants to get all the achievements, the only way they could do that without staying on the page for literally thousands of years (and I do mean “literally,” the game even has a thing you can unlock that shows you how long it’s going to take to afford an upgrade at your current CPS, and I’ve seen that motherfucker say millions of years would have to pass to afford some shit without player input) is to get involved.

Getting involved mostly means mini games and clicking golden cookies. Golden cookies are responsible for probably most of the massive, insane combos that are needed in order to clear all of the achievements in this damn game. They start off appearing at a frustratingly slow rate of about one per eight minutes. Thankfully, early on, most of what you’re doing is buying up cheap cursors, grandmas and farms.

Now farms, that’s a whole other deal. You use sugar lumps—another form of currency in the game, unlocked after your first, like, billion cookies, I think—to upgrade the farms so that you can plant shit. By “shit,” I mean seeds that can facilitate even more cookie production, or sometimes sugar lump production. You can crossbreed the plants to unlock more seeds, some of which make certain buildings produce more, make more wrinklers appear, make golden cookies appear more often, and that’s an important one because like I said, golden cookie combos are basically the only way to jack up production enough to avoid waiting until the heat death of the fucking universe before you can afford a fractal engine.

So you’re basically going to be sitting there at your computer, watching plants grow, clicking on cookies, in the hopes of making a number above a giant cookie JPG go up more quickly. Somehow it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds. I don’t know how they did it, but they turned what is essentially math with cookie pictures into a viable, fun video game. And above all of that shit, it’s addicting. I seriously have this goddamned window up all the time. There’s not even anything happening most of the time, especially because my play style involves idling until golden cookies appear, then when I click on enough golden cookies, using my saved up cookie stash to buy more buildings and upgrades. Yet, I still find myself constantly watching. Vigilantly so.

Of course, the problem is that eventually you reach a point in the game—right before the last few upgrades—where it all just becomes too damn slow and difficult to crawl to those last few achievements. Like, I got to a point where the only way I could make significant progress was by getting a very lucky combination of two golden cookies that would, for a scant few seconds, make it to where I could click my way to an amount of cookies it would otherwise take me years upon years to get. Now, from what I’ve written previously, that doesn’t sound different from the rest of the game, but the difference is that the combo in question is extremely, extremely hard to get. I only ever got it twice, but both times it caused me to attain a holy shitload of cookies. Like, that was when I made it to 25 quindecillion.

From what research I’ve done looking at old ass posts on reddit about the game, that’s actually a common issue. What happens is, the game will hit a ceiling, then Orteil will put out an update that adds a shitload of new upgrades, or some other kind of multiplier, or a new building entirely, and suddenly the game will launch to a whole new level. Then it’ll idle out again at some point far above where it was previously, and stay there until the next update.

Honestly, the game reminds me of the Dragonball series in that regard. The power levels in that show never got as ridiculous as being in the quindecillions (although, honestly, with all of this “Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan” shit, who knows), but they got pretty buttfuck insane somewhere around the Frieza saga. Like, it was established somewhere at the beginning of that saga that a power level of about 18,000 was enough to destroy an entire planet. And by destroy, I mean literally shoot a big beam at and erase entirely. Vegeta, one of the last remaining Saiyans, had exactly that power level. Okay, fine. But then the show moves to Namek, and characters start showing up with power levels of around 60,000. Captain Ginyu, Frieza’s arch-henchman, had a max power of 120,000. Almost seven times what it takes to destroy a planet. Already starting to get pretty insane.

But then Frieza actually starts fighting. He has three transformations from his base form, which already has a power level of 530,000, which is almost 30 fucking times the power level needed to erase an entire planet. That implies, to me, he could blow up 29 planets and still have the energy to fly home for a nice wee nap. Frieza winds up with a power level of 1,000,000 at his second form, as he himself estimates, and that’s actually the last time any power level is measured specifically, because scouters pretty much go obsolete after that point. But according to official power level guides released outside of the show, Frieza’s power level when he’s at full strength is… 120,000,000. Holy fuck.

Actually think about that for a second. Captain Ginyu is his strongest henchman, the guy he calls in with the rest of the Ginyu Force when it’s an emergency situation. And that guy’s power level is .1 percent of his boss’s. Dodoria and Zarbon, the guys who travel with Frieza, are in the 20,000s. So, let’s say Dodoria is at 20,000 exactly. That’s 0.016%, give or take, of Frieza’s full power. No goddamn wonder Frieza has help—could you imagine putting in that little effort to do something? Even kids who flunk book reports probably put 20% of their best effort into bullshitting their way through their presentations. Even coma victims have to breathe while they’re unconscious, that’s what, 3% effort?

So, yeah. Case concluded. DBZ is the Cookie Clicker of anime.

#video game #gaming #clicker #cookie clicker #orteil #dbz #dragonball z #dragon ball z #frieza #essay

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