sclpls

In Brawl they are reaaaalllly corny.

So hard how to evaluate a new Smash game. I mean, I'm happy to play it. It looks great, and it's still Smash, so all is good basically. But at a critical level it's so difficult to judge. Because there aren't any obvious major design changes to point to and say this is different. Instead you have a ton of little things. I will say this, the stage designs seem way better this time around. Besides that one F-Zero track level there aren't any stages that I find really irritating. It seems like Nintendo has figured out what people hated about moving platform stages, and fixed all that up, and that makes me happy. All the nerfs I've seen for some of the old characters all seem sensible to me. Has anyone figured out the Villager? He can plant and grow a tree, but what does that accomplish exactly? Very confusing guy. The board game makes me feel like I'm on heavy drugs and trying to follow someone explaining the rules to a game, and I just don't understand anything at all. Weirdest thing.

There's an article by Zohra Atash that someone I follow on twitter linked to that I think is super relevant to the discussion happening here. She discusses the impact her identity as a woman and as someone of Afghani heritage has on trying to operate as a musician. She even mentions Taylor Swift towards the end. http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/zohra-atash-talks/ The three main quick takeaways: 1. We need to be really careful when talking about women making music that we aren't using language and concepts that carry a lot of sexist cultural baggage. Because sexism is so ingrained in our culture its really easy to do these things inadvertantly. 2. We also need to be really careful about double standards we might be displaying. 3. We should be suspicious about claims about authenticity, particularly if someone making the claim is an outsider to the culture in question.

I don't know where else to post this, but this seems like a pretty good thread to do so because there is an incredible New York piece on Twine games that features an interview with Porpentine, and it is one of the best things I've ever seen written about video games. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/magazine/twine-the-video-game-technology-for-all.html

I wouldn't frame it as her being inauthentic. I think the question of authenticity just doesn't even enter the picture. There isn't some contrast like the music of John Coltrane vs. Kenny G or something where there's questions about how in tune the performer is with the cultural heritage of the music. When we're talking about Top 40 pure as pop can be music there is no historical axis to evaluate it. It's music for literally everyone, and thus it belongs to no one. Also I want to be clear that none of what I'm saying is a criticism of her as an individual or as a musician, or other people enjoying her music. Her music is in one ear and out the other for me so I just have no opinion about it, and as best I can tell insofar as she is a role model for teenage girls it seems like she is a positive influence, so that seems admirable.

Yeah, they're definitely, like, related uses.

Ha yeah, that really cuts to the whole problem with how people use the word objectivity. It's basically an attack on people for having a point of view that is not that of a straight, white, able-bodied male.

I agree with feelthedarkness that the villain's appearance in Far Cry 4 definitely seems to be utilizing some Asian cinema tropes. I think the Thumbs point about Ubisoft's weird approach to marketing the Far Cry games still stands though. Also, while thinking about parallels between cinema and the Far Cry games, I think game 3 and on are kind of disappointing in the same way I find it disappointing when schlocky horror films switch from being unintentionally bad to self-consciously bad with lots of winks to the audience. Like in Far Cry 2 lots of absurd events would happen, but it was all happening in a setting that had a fairly grounded tone, but since then the tone has been all, "yeah brah, you're gonna jump off a hang glider and punch a shark in the face! Let the dubstep wobble!" That shift is really unappealing to me, although it seems like the series has gotten much more popular since that shift in tone happened so I don't think it's ever going to revert back unfortunately. Also, all the animal violence in the games grosses me out too. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on with that attitude because it isn't something that necessarily bothers me (I've caused my fair share of stress to the chickens in Zelda games), and I think it's just the way murdering animals is tied into a crafting system. Because the crafting system is so nonsensical (this is how you get a larger wallet? Okay dude) it always seems like I'm imagining design meetings where developers are trying to figure out how you reward the player for killing these creatures because it seems like a "feature" they should have in the game, and so they come up with this crafting system. And that seems perverse. And this is all frustrating because while I skipped out on FC3 without sweating it, I do kinda really want to play this game because the Himalayan setting really does look beautiful and fun to explore.

Yeah all of that is fair. My rant was definitely really polemical, and missing some nuance, and maybe also just like the perspective of a grumpy person getting older. In some ways things are great in terms of tools becoming easier to use, less expensive. Recording an album is much easier now than twenty years ago. But distribution channels are much more of a mess now in my opinion, and for people that aren't like super marketing savvy I feel like the current environment is a really frustrating one to operate in.

As a musician that finds our current digital era to be a depressing, dystopian future this topic is near and dear to my heart. I think its interesting that digital distribution in the video game space seemed to have created a more even playing field where there are a lot of indie developers who can be fairly successful thanks to Steam where in the past what they are doing would have been impossible. In the music space with the advent of Spotify, Pandora, and other services the opposite seems to have happened and really exacerbated the economic inequality that exists for musicians. In the 90s the goal described by the Thumbs of the folks that made Monument Valley was something achievable for a lot of people in indie bands or people making experimental music, or other stuff that wouldn't really have any mass appeal but could at least find a sizable niche audience. Those musicians could go on tour, and put out records, and continue on in a fashion where no one was getting rich from any of it, but it was a sustainable practice where you weren't going to go lose a bunch of money doing this. Now its all much harder to sell any music without having your name attached to something else. If I tried to book the kind of tours I used to book I would just lose money, and in fact that has been the case even for the more modest tours I have done in the last 5 years have not been able to break even. Gas has gotten more expensive, the payout from shows is about the same, but people are spending less on merchandise. Spotify doesn't ameliorate any of that, not even close. If you want to reward musicians for their music, listening to them on Spotify is the worst way to do it short of straight up pirating their music. You're right that someone like Taylor Swift pulling her music from Spotify doesn't change anything about how the music industry operates, it just indicates that she is in the privileged position where she doesn't need Spotify. Because ultimately what Spotify is about is exposure, and superstars don't need it. Radiohead, U2, Jay Z and any other megastar can do whatever they want with their music and they will continue to be successful. Everyone else is told they need to devalue their work so they can build up a larger audience so that then some money can be made through licensing deals. The music industry as it exists is great for lawyers and other people that handle contracts. For people making music it is kind of a raw deal. I think Bandcamp is great. I wish someone could crack the code to make it really take off so it became the Steam of music because then we might see a fairer deal emerge for musicians, but I dunno, it is a real tough problem to solve.

If people are outraged by the $2 for 8 new levels of Monument Valley, I wonder what they think of the $3 macchiato I drank this morning (I think both were exquisite).

Also I take issue with the claim that she is authentic. Whether or not the lyrics in her music contain genuine sentiments, it's still fashioned in a highly contrived way so that songs about New York, or teenage love, or whatever are the products of the pop music machine's idea about these topics. Like I don't even know how you can even discuss authenticity, it's like a totally immaterial concept to the world she operates in.

There is but it's pretty rudimentary I think? That's the impression I got from Bruce Geryk on the 3MA episode about the game anyway...

For a lot of adventure games that would be correct, but for humourous adventure games that is incorrect because a bunch of different verbs = more jokes.

Also hilarious that they have a backer level for absolution of guilt for pirating adventure games.

YES!

Yeah I don't get the excitement. Like, all the not not good stuff about GTA is still in the game.

There's also uhh... Britain's rather massively sized role in the history of colonialism. It's such a significant part of history that we can't even comprehend what the world would look like without the white persecution of other races. But some Indian and Pakistani families in the town where he grew up seemed to do alright for themselves, so lets just call it a draw. Also Robert Ashley is rad.

I think basically they are just trying to make the game more accessible, not more casual, although some of the changes may have made it more casual, I'm not sure. Based on I Saw Dasein's description, it seems like they've succeeded in the accessibility issue, you don't need to obsess over the game looking up guides & videos to try and get better at the game (incidentally, I think having to do that is what makes the typical LoMA that sort of perfect object of desire for a lot of people). The trick is will making the game more accessible make it less viable as a competitive game? Hearthstone and Starcraft 2 are certainly proof that accessibility and competition don't have to be opposed to each other.

I totally get it. Those movies were just like staples of something you saw at video stores (rather than something you'd go to see in a movie theater), and were therefore outside of any clear reference of time where you would organize them chronologically.

I'm reluctant to burst the bubble here, but a quick glance at the wikipedia page revealed that the leprechaun went to space before either of the hood movies.

I feel like these terms are about as hopelessly meaningless as the term hipster. You can probably come up with a reasonably precise and useful definition if you really want to put your mind to it, but the proliferation of hack writing pretty much guarantees that these words are going to be ground into oblivion.

Yeah, I get the impression of someone that isn't familiar with the nature or purpose of critique. I get not wanting to engage with critique. It really is an unpleasant thing to engage with if you aren't of a certain disposition. I think people that create things need to engage with critique so they can continue to do meaningful work, but people that simply enjoy art, writing, games, or whatever else don't need to, and that's okay. Anita's videos are way less harsh than your typical piece of literary criticism, and her videos are far less biased (having an author that has written a book awfully close in subject matter criticize another author is pretty standard practice). The amount of hand holding demanded by gamergate is pretty eye rolling.

This clickhole article is pitch perfect: http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/might-not-be-politically-correct-enough-you-overly-1411