Jalapeños: Same Pepper, Different Challenges

For those of you who have never eaten with me in person, I like spicy food. One of the things I like about spice is all the different places it can come from. This month, we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite versatile spicy foods, the jalapeño.

As a spice fiend, jalapeños don’t really feel all that spicy to me anymore. Sure, I still get a kick out of them, but when I think of jalapeños, I often think of their citrus overtones and their appetizing crunch.

To illustrate my point, let’s talk about jalapeños in pho! Pho is one of my favorite winter time foods because it combines hot soup with all the vegetables I start craving as winter goes on. But pho without jalapeños lacks the same citrus taste as pho with just lime in it. While lime can give the soup a light citrus taste, it’s the jalapeños the dish depends on to highlight that bright, flavorful note in the soup. Pho doesn’t have to be spicy, and jalapeños that have steeped in the gelatin rich beef broth of the soup are often more mild than outright spicy.

If you’d like to try jalapeños in pho, here’s a good recipe for you.

But I do love the spice of jalapeños. So much so, that I’ll even eat them just roasted from the taco truck in Boring. If you want to create your own roasted jalapeños, just hold it over an open flame until the skin blackens. Then seal it in a plastic bag or a tupperware to let it steam for a minute or so, and remove the skin to enjoy the sweetened and spicy flesh of the pepper. This is a great way to soften up a jalapeño to include in any recipe of your choosing, but also a great way to prepare them if you want to appreciate jalapeños on their own.

Another option is stuffing the pepper with cheese and then deep frying it to create a jalapeño popper. I prefer my poppers a little less deep fried and a little more roasted, but the beautiful part of this method is that you can cut the heat of the jalapeño by using thick cheeses like cream cheese to stuff your poppers. Some of my favorite jalapeño poppers come from a sushi place in Portland called Miyamoto. They call them jalapeño ninjas. But if you want to try making your own at home, here’s a handy recipe for you.

Jalapeños aren’t the only versatile thing I’ve been enjoying lately. Two weeks ago, I finally played the first game from Danish Indie studio, Ultra Ultra.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, here’s the premise:

ECHO’s mechanic is that the Echos will always learn from you. What’s interesting about this is how many times the game forces the player to use that in different ways.

The player has a number of abilities available to them—but depending on the level and the objective, some will be more valuable than others. For example, I never lethally shot an Echo in the light while the Palace was watching. I also avoided crossing water and sprinting when the Palace was watching. However, in some stages, I wasn’t allowed to keep these abilities from the Echos—forcing me as a player to adapt and play the game differently.

But that’s not all.

It turns out the game trailer is lying to you: the Echos don’t want to kill you. They want to acquire the cube on your back. That’s right, the red cube on En’s back is what they’re after—and they’re willing to kill to acquire it.

At a certain point in the game, the player loses the cube. What that means is the player is now working with a Palace full of Echos who learn from them—but that don’t want to kill them.

In that instant, the mechanic that was already so engaging is turned on its head. Suddenly, stealth is no longer an option. Thinning the Echos’ numbers isn’t beneficial. Teaching them to do things for you is easier, and more beneficial. The mechanic is the same, but the goal changes from strategizing to survive the Echos to making them work for you as you encounter them.

Once the player reclaims the cube, however, the Palace has another surprise in store.

Hyper Echos are the “perfect” version of En. They don’t require her to do something in order to be able to do it. They also attack the less advanced Echos in the palace and kill them as if they were En herself.

The mechanic of the Echos learning from En remains the same, but the goal changes once again. Instead of strategizing to create weak enemies or to use the Echos to complete puzzles and help En advance through the Palace, the goal becomes to balance the talents En gifts to the Echos so that she can survive encounters with them, while making them more difficult targets for the Hyper Echos to capture and kill.

Making Echos that are good distractions for the Hyper Echos is exceptionally beneficial to En, because while she may survive an encounter with an Echo that can do everything she can, En will never survive an encounter with a Hyper Echo unless she manages to kill it before it kills her—and, let me tell you, managing that is HARD.

Not only are Hyper Echos twice as tall and twice as fast as En, they kill her in one hit once they catch her. There’s no way to push them over or sneak up on them like with the other Echos either. A Hyper Echo dies after two shots from En’s gun—but killing them like that draws the attention of all the other Echos in the area.

You see now why having Echos that can distract Hyper Echos is so beneficial.

All in all, I was blown out of the water by how many different ways Ultra Ultra managed to challenge me with one simple mechanic. The game was more challenging and more rewarding than any other game I’ve played since Undertale.

If you still need convincing that this is the very next game that should be on your list, don’t take my word for it. Take the word of everyone who’s reviewed it so far:

Once you’re done playing and as in love with this game as I am, go support Ultra Ultra by liking their Facebook page, and Twitter.

(I’m shamelessly plugging them because I want them to make a sequel. Help me out, y’all!)

And maybe enjoy some tasty jalapeños when you need a break from playing. Enjoy!