Argobot

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Everything posted by Argobot

  1. BAFTA 2013 Games Awards

    Everyone looks so fancy in their tuxes.
  2. BAFTA 2013 Games Awards

    UUUUGHHHHHH.
  3. PAX East 2013

    I'll be there! Haven't had a good chance to look over the panel list yet, but I saw there will be a panel on video games and ethics that sounds pretty interesting. (Also, if the schedule is accurate and DF is giving their talk on Sunday afternoon, then there goes any plans I had about getting back to DC at a reasonable hour. It'll be worth it though, I'm sure.)
  4. Tomb Raider

    I saw that Chris Remo had linked to this on Twitter, but I think it's worth reposting: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/02/tomb-raider-review-multi-platform.html It's the best, most reflective review I've seen for this game, and it really made me reconsider a lot of the opinions and conceptions that I had about this game in the lead up to its release.
  5. Tomb Raider

    This has come up in other threads, but I think it's worth pointing out again that there's nothing inherently wrong with having attractive looking women in a game or any media--as long as their attractiveness isn't the only aspect of their character. If you want to make Lara Croft a good-looking lady, fine. But there has to be some justification for why she's good-looking beyond--'we want to make the straight male players happy with what they're seeing.' That means when you're designing a female character, you have to pay more attention to her depiction than you would if you were making a male character. Is that fair? Well, no, but it's a constrain that people will have to be aware of and deal with until we start getting some better diversity in character design.
  6. Tomb Raider

    I really wanted to buy and enjoy this game, but ugh, that Conan preview is destroying the goodwill that I was feeling towards this game.
  7. Books, books, books...

    In the run up to the PBS documentary about Philip Roth's writing career, NY Mag polled 30 (mostly male) authors on their opinion of Roth. There were some amazing responses (all handily tabulated in chart form) http://www.vulture.com/2013/02/philip-roth-literati-poll.html This was my favorite quote, on whether or not Roth is a misogynist or if his writing is sexist: "Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?..." Keith Gessen Personally, I feel the same way about Roth as I feel about Updike or Mailer: I admire their writing talent, but do not really enjoy the actual writing. Especially in the case of Roth--whose work I've read more of than Updike/Mailer--he clearly is a very gifted, intelligent human being, but his writing and much of the gender relations it contains was very much limited by the society he grew up in. He's relevant for his place in American literary history, but that doesn't mean I actually like what he's written.
  8. Pynchon is one of the few authors who could write about 9/11 and not make me angry.
  9. Books, books, books...

    For me, The Road was all about the relationship between a father and his son, and the natural fear that a parent feels, especially an older parent (for context, McCarthy has a very young son), knowing that at some point you will die and your child will be expected to continue life without you. The Road takes that very real fear and puts it into an extreme environment, but that's still the core of the story: a father trying to protect his son from the harsh realities of the world and ultimately realizing that no matter how desperately you want to keep your child safe, you will inevitably fail because you will die. I don't really read the ending as optimistic, but more of a resignation to the realities of the world. The boy will carry 'the flame' that his father passed down to him, just like all of us will continue to carry the lessons our parents passed down long after they are dead. It's a very harsh lesson to accept, for both parents and their children, which is why I think the ending tonally fits with the rest of the book.
  10. Books, books, books...

    Wow, I couldn't disagree more. The ending of The Road was perfect; exactly what it needed to be for the type of story McCarthy was trying to tell.
  11. Books, books, books...

    I agree that it's not a weakness, but I do think Mantel applied it better in the second book than she did in the first.
  12. Books, books, books...

    The pronoun usage in Wolf Hall was something that I also struggled with when I initially started reading, sometimes it was difficult to immediately discern who exactly was speaking. Mantel fixes this in the sequel, because Bring up the Bodies is much clearer with its pronouns.
  13. I wonder if a city simulator game could ever represent the haphazard, organic way that older cities usually develop and grow, or if the required mechanics and design of the game automatically make that impossible. Unless you purposefully build your city in a disorderly way, but even then, you're not truly representing how a 1000 year old city gets planned.
  14. (I was afraid of this.) Everything that you disliked about the book is something that I either enjoyed or didn't mind. Specifically the narrative tricks that Ullman uses to delay the story: the appearance of the manager towards the end or the constant interruption of the patient's story when her sessions conveniently ended. Here you have this unbelievably outrageous story that involves orphans and Holocaust survivors--just as cliche and over the top as you can imagine--and in addition, there are all artificial narrative twists that are clearly there to prevent the narrator, and by extension the reader, from reaching any satisfying conclusion with the patient's story. That worked for me and I had no problem going down the same obsessive path as the narrator. But, I can understand why those elements might not work for everyone else, because they are so ridiculous and frustrating, and ultimately lead up to this non-pay off climax. Despite all that, though, I have a hard time faulting a book that I got such visceral entertainment from.
  15. BioShock Infinite

    Congratulations Nick on releasing Bioshock Infinite!
  16. Books, books, books...

    It's a shame you didn't get more enjoyment out of Jacob DeZoet. It's true that it doesn't deal in the same grand themes that Cloud Atlas touches on, but I appreciated the kind of small-scale, detailed depiction it gives. If you're looking for more Mitchell to read, I'd try Ghostwritten, it's his first novel and is much more similar in scope to Cloud Atlas (albeit less deftly handled). The Dutch to English to English translation is yet another example of how insane the idea of translating a book can get, and I'd be interested to know how the Dutch-translation handles the deficiencies in the English version. For those of you interested in literary gossip: Hilary Mantel, the author of April's (?) book club pick Wolf Hall, is getting a lot of flack from the British press for supposedly criticizing Kate Middleton in a speech she gave for the London Review of Books. You can read the text of the speech here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies Mantel spends most of the speech talking about her research into Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII and only devotes a few sentences to Middleton (where she is very clearly not criticizing her, but criticizing the media's obsession with her physical appearance), but no media outlet has ever turned down the chance to buildup a fight between two woman--whether it be real or imagined. Even though this whole thing is dumb, it's apparently boosting Mantel's sales in the UK, so this whole imbroglio isn't completely useless.
  17. So something that I've seen a lot of review of this book, is how the narrator's one-sided relationship with the patient is a representation of the Internet. Ullman has said in interviews that the book isn't meant as any kind of criticism of how the Internet affects relationships, but I think it's a fair reading of the book to see parallels between the narrator's actions and they way people interact online. For me, it added this inescapable second layer to reading the book. Here I am reading a story about two people who have this lopsided relationship where neither person really 'knows' the other, and knowing that eventually I would be listening to a podcast of people talking about this same book on the Internet, who've I've never met and have never met me, and it just made me feel kind of odd (not that I'm saying online communities or relationships or whatever are inherently bad or weird, I just couldn't help but make these connections while I was reading). Maybe it's not that big of revelation to have about Internet communications, but it's still something that I was thinking about while reading the book. I'm curious to know if anyone else had similar reactions.
  18. I remembered liking Tony much more as a person than the narrator of By Blood. Sure, Tony had a lot of flaws and did a lot terrible things, but he was still fairly likable. On the other hand I went through this oscillation of pitying and outright hating the narrator of By Blood, mstly because his particular obsession came from a much stranger place. I still was able to identify with him, but I very rarely ever liked him in the same way that I liked Tony. I think most people are able to admit that they've acted in the same obsessed way that Tony did at some point in their life; his brand of solipsism is so normal that you can forgive him for acting that way. The narrator of By Blood however, his obsession comes from this much less-defined, weirder place, that I think people can still relate to, but maybe don't want to think about too much, because it forces you to recognize that you have the same capacity to act in this creepy, pathetic manner.
  19. Antichamber

    A big barrier for me initially getting into the game was that I couldn't help but feel that the puzzle solutions were completely arbitrary. On a few occasions, I literally just stumbled into an answer, so the game didn't really feel fun, it felt more like a series of random actions that eventually led to an unpredictable solution. But after playing through a few levels, I finally started feeling comfortable with 'reading' what the game was telling me, and the puzzle solutions stopped feeling random. Now that I trust that the game has a point and isn't just trying to purposefully confuse me, I'm enjoying myself much more while playing. As far as the lack of narrative is considered, I'm actually really glad the game doesn't bother with it. The mechanics are enough to handle on their own, I think I'd be overwhelmed if their was a story that I had to also pay attention to. The little philosophical/hint cards that appear between levels are enough to keep me going.
  20. That's a shame that reading the intro affected your enjoyment of the book, because besides the issue of an unreliable narrator, I think most of the interpretations you mentioned were overreaching. I can't even begin to comprehend how East and West Egg are meant to symbolize the two political sides in America, or how Daisy is representative of America's future (doesn't it make far more sense to say she represents the past?). This form of literary interpretation is so frustrating to me, because you already have a well-written book stuffed full of meaning, there's no need to go piling on all this extra content about how Jordan is the automobile industry; it detracts from the overall strength of the book. And you can tell that Fitzgerald never meant to intentionally add any of these elements into the book, because the book is actually readable. When an author is very obviously creating characters or settings to fit some kind of allegorical-mold, the book as a piece of fiction almost always suffers. A good example is Super Sad True Love Story, which overloads you with symbolism and meaning that it starts to feel childish, like the author was afraid that no one would understand his satirization of political news, so he had to label a conservative news channel 'UltraConservativeFoxNews.'
  21. I'm sure the inevitable singularity will solve this problem. In the mean time, I will continue to spew nonsense on twitter.
  22. Space

    My favorite part of the Russian meteor story, is that the Russian military is trying to claim they fired a missile at it.
  23. Agreed. I think the Walking Dead does a fair job of presenting this character who a background that isn't immediately known to the player. It works great in the first episode, and while the importance of Lee's background does disappear in later episodes, it makes narrative sense for this to happen. If the game was still making oblique references to Lee's past in later episodes, it would have felt too overblown.