prettyunsmart
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Posts posted by prettyunsmart
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I'll admit that Loadout's aims are relatively modest. It's a free-to-play third-person arena shooter in the vein of Quake or Unreal tournament featuring excessive gore and lots of juvenile humor. I'm not too sure if it is reasonable to expect much from a game that features this as a purchasable outfit:
or animates character death like this:
Still, it isn't the violence or adolescent sense of humor that's driving me away from the game. Admittedly, if that was the case, I'd have to avoid a great portion of the games released since the NES era. No, I actually want a big, dumb arena shooter which can bring me back to the days of playing Unreal with my friends in high school; something fast-paced with a good variety of weapons and some interesting modes to keep things entertaining. Loadout has all of these things. The weapon customization works nicely and adds a clear sense of progression from the game. The gameplay is fast and skill-based. The free-to-play model is not too bad either, making only boosts and cosmetics purchasable with real money. From almost every perspective, this is the UT successor I've been waiting for. Except for one: the character models.
The two male playable characters are pretty clear attempts to make off-brand cartoon versions of Sylvester Stallone and Mr. T. respectively. Fair enough. Not particularly original, but not anything to get worked up over either.
On closer examination of "T-Bone," the Mr. T. look-alike, something started to bother me. In the picture above, things seem to be generally on the level. Maybe something feels a little bit off, but nothing too egregious. The concept art similarly looks relatively subdued in its style:
It's only when you get a good look at the character's face up close that things get really creepy. Take this picture for example:
You get a similar perspective on the character on the game's main menu if you've been using T-Bone as your character, complete with unsettling eyes, gold teeth, and distorted features. The problem only becomes clearer looking from T-Bone to his Stallone-looking counterpart who is all symmetrical features and wry smiles. It dawned on me after playing a few rounds of the game that T-Bone's character design, whether consciously or not, feels uncomfortably similar to the racist caricatures coming out of minstrel shows. Some examples:
Each image shares some quality with T-Bone's design, whether it's the gold teeth, the exaggerated features, or the general menacing tone. I hesitate to even post this since the gaming community (as much as you can define a thing like that) seems to shy away from discussing race to an even greater degree than issues of gender...and we all know how well that tends to go.
And on that topic, here is the game's lone female character:
Helga, like T-Bone is complete with a variety of grotesque and distorted features and mostly seems to exist for the purpose of finding humor in the fact that an overweight woman is wearing tiny clothing.
I'm frustrated with this game, and my own conflicted feelings about it. I want to outright condemn it for putting forward attitudes toward race and gender that should have been abandoned many, many years ago. On the other hand, I'm frustrated with myself for still finding the game to be pretty fun. Am I getting too worked up about this? I know that as a graduate student, my general tendency toward most things is to find them problematic, but I don't think that's the case here. So, fellow thumbs, am I alone in this? I am the only one seeing this?
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I really wouldn't care much if I got into the beta, but this is probably the one chance I'll get to see how it runs on my PC before release. Minimum requirements are pretty low, but I want to see how shiny I can make it look (as well as read reviews, make an informed decision, etc.) before I decide if I want to buy it. If only demos still happened more often.
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Jazzpunk isn't really working for me, and I think it could be my fault. I started playing with the intention of finding as many jokes as possible and covering as much of the map as possible to do so. The problem is that this just kills the pacing. You end up clicking on each person you encounter over and over hoping a new thing will happen, or returning to areas with nothing in them in hopes of a neat secret. Since Airplane! has been a point of reference for understanding the game, I was thinking about how its the pacing that makes that movie work. Jokes are layered in over jokes without much of a break. When playing Jazzpunk obsessively, this isn't the case. I rarely feel like I'm playing a game wrong, but maybe I am this time.
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Rumble at sunset, Sharks v. Jets style?
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I had just about given up on Rust since I don't really have time right now to play consistently. I logged in last night to find that my house had disappeared, either because of the patch or decay. Then again, the prospect of setting up a police gang sounds too awesome to pass up. I'll have to check out that podcast
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This was amazing, and I only wish I had seen this thread soon enough to contribute.
Now we just need to swap out the portrait of Breckon with a subtly aging and more grotesque version a few times over the next few months.
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As much as it pains me to admit, I think I need to quit Dark Souls. I had a good run. After walking away from the game a few month back after getting stuck at the gargoyles (I know...), I managed to make it to Anor Londo without too much trouble. I hit level 50 and was working on leveling my Black Knight Halberd to level 5. Then, while walking through the cathedral, I decided to check out that interesting painting on the wall. I got sucked into the Painted World, which everything I read leads me to believe I'm about 10 levels underleveled for without any items to cure the toxicity all the enemies around seem to inflict on me. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel. You win, Dark Souls. You win.
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Parabolic: an interesting concept, but I don't see how you can construct a whole game around it. It feels like a pixel hunting adventure game. For a 2 week game jam this gameplay element seems to be too thin.
It could work as a story-based experience, I think. It reminds me a lot of The Conversation which is one of my favorite movies. I could see it working well with the tone of a 70s paranoid thriller, possibly (spoilers for The Conversation)
with a similar twist toward the end where your reading of the situation turns out to be wrong with disastrous results.
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This game is weird.
I have a short sequel to my other story. A few nights after my failed mountain-climbing expedition, I logged back into the same server to continue building my house and regain some of the loot I lost over the course of the journey. Things seemed to be running smoothly enough with the server chat remaining friendly for a while and players seemingly helping each other more than they were harming each other. Then, he showed up. In spite of the quasi-utopian community we had built on our server, a player joined who was fixed on the goal of fucking things up for everyone. He took to killing everyone on sight, offering to give gear, only to shoot people who came to collect it, and generally taunting everyone else over the server chat.
Things only got worse when the airdrop came in. I saw the packages fall from my house in Rad Town valley and I started running in that direction. I managed to clean out the first one without any trouble (I ended up with 250 9mm bullets, shotgun shells, m4 bullets, some grenades, and some health kits) and I contemplating heading back. But, the appeal of two more packages was too much for me to pass up, and I hadn't seen anyone else in the area. I started climbing the hill where the second package dropped when I saw a player in a red shirt rise up from the ridge. He pulled out an M4 and started firing immediately. As I tried to run, a bullet caught me in the back and I saw the "bleeding" indicator kick in. My red-shirted assailant followed me around the other side of the hill and I pulled out my shotgun to meet him. As he rounded the corner, I fired. At this point, I realized my attacker was Caboose, who you might remember was my travelling companion from my last post. He thought I was the player who was killing on sight (or so he said). I managed to patch myself up and handed Caboose a bandage to do the same. As I did this, a zombie came up from behind me, finished me off and Caboose bled out before he could apply the bandage. When I respawned, my gear was gone and the airdrops had been fully looted.
Yeah, this game is weird.
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Here's my Rust story, which I felt compelled to write down after last night. It's a bit long, but I'm not sure how else to tell it.
I had only played Rust twice before last night. Both times a man with a balaclava and a large gun promptly shot me in the face and stole my meager supplies within minutes of spawning. A few days ago, I noticed a post on the Giant Bomb forums about a new server a reader had started focused around collaboration and not killing each other on sight. When I logged in, I was glad to find out that this really was the case. Within a few minutes of signing on, an established player had offered to give me some supplies to get me started and pointed me in the direction of a larger settlement of players. Another led me around to spots where good items frequently spawned, and yet another helped me build a house.
It is with this last player (who I’ll refer to by an abbreviated version of his in-game name, Caboose) that my real story begins. After helping me build my house, Caboose asked if I could help him get to the large Giant Bomb settlement. I agreed, figuring that I owed him for helping me to build my house, and that this sounded like an awesome piece of emergent gameplay/story. I followed Caboose across the road, into a large valley where we gathered supplies before heading out. Caboose lead me up the side of a mountain, I assumed in the direction of the settlement. The sunset over the mountain was gorgeous, and it really did feel like we were on a post-apocalyptic adventure, trying desperately to find the last human settlement.
We crossed another valley and Caboose started climbing the mountain on the other side. At this point, I started to wonder if he knew where he was going. I later learned that while I thought he was sure where he was going, he was under the impression that I knew where we were going. It was on this second mountain that our journey took a tragic turn. I missed a jump across a crevasse and fell down inside. Caboose, in his attempt to help me get out fell in as well.
When we told other players what had happened, I was surprised to see that a few of them immediately started searching for us. We fired off flares and gunshots to help them find us, but since we didn’t have a clear idea of where we were, they all ended up searching in the wrong part of the map. After a while, I just asked Caboose to shoot me. He reluctantly agreed, and a single shot from his shotgun brought up Rust’s signature “You Are Dead” screen.
At this point, I just want to say that my character’s life, from carving out a meager existence with the help of a few friendly survivors to dying tragically after crossing two mountain ranges and failing to help his companion reach his destination felt like a complete story in itself. Of course, I respawned, because, video games.
After gathering enough food to make the journey back across the mountains, I headed out. It was now night, which in Rust makes navigation nearly impossible. I found my way back to the valley below the mountain where Caboose was still trapped when my torch ran out of fuel. With no other way to navigate, I asked Caboose to fire off the few rounds he had left to help me locate him. Faintly, I heard a few small pops off to my left, and I started walking. It took some time, but I was able to climb back to where I had fallen, and I soon saw the glow of Caboose’s torch.
We had tried to drop objects down to climb out, but the uneven ground at the bottom of the pit made it impossible. Our only choice was for Caboose to toss as much of his gear as I could carry to me, and for me to put him out of his misery with single bullet (actually, it took two now that I think about it).
We met up back in town, and I gave Caboose his gear back. I’ll probably play Rust again soon, but I’m not sure any story that comes out of the game will soon match the tale of when Caboose and I tried and failed to cross the mountains to the Giant Bomb settlement.(PS - I attached a couple of pictures since I got an error when trying to send embed them. Also available in a more readable format on Medium)
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Last night, I finished Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which was pretty neat. It was nice to see a comedy game come out where the humor comes both from the writing and the mechanics. Too often "funny games" just have wacky item descriptions or something like that on top of an otherwise rote experience. It falls apart at the end due to a difficult curve that ramps up a bit too steeply, but overall I thought it was a good experience. Video games aren't constrained by actors, sets, props, or anything like that, so they can be about literally anything (even if they often tend to just be about a small handful of things). Octodad is refreshingly different, even if it might prove a bit too strange for some.
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Oh man, now I want a Sam Greenbriar announcer for Dota 2.
"Dear Katie, I could tell that Lonnie was upset about our bottom tower going down, but she wasn't saying much. She just sat there watching approaching creep wave come our way."
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In terms of non-fiction I'm happy for anything, I have some classic fiction on my list already but would be happy to entertain suggestions.
For newer fiction that's both literary and accessible, you might try Gary Shteyngart. A Super Sad True Love Story is a fantastic, funny, melancholy near-future science fiction novel about man growing old in a youth-obsessed culture told through alternating diary entries and social media exchanges. Absurdistan is the story of a rich oafish Russian man who accidentally becomes an important figure in a civil war in a former Soviet republic.
For non-fiction, I haven't actually read this, but I bought my wife a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum for Christmas, and I've been anxiously waiting for her to finish it so I can steal it without feeling guilty.
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I'm not sure I would characterize most contemporary literature as subtle, but also at this moment in history I wouldn't say there's a dominant literary style.
That would be true for most periods of literary history. I was just reading yesterday about the standard narrative of early twentieth century fiction that suggest that realism dominated for 10-20 years, only to have modernism come along and replace it. Really, over the course of those decades there were melodramas, science fiction novels, pulp magazines, short stories, poems, children's books, as well as the canonized texts that everyone remembers being read just as widely.
Anyway, more broadly, I was wondering what contemporary fiction you think of as subtle or not?
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I have kind of a similar question. I just beat ACIII finally so that I could play ACIV, but I don't want to jump right into it lest I burn out on the whole endeavor during the game that I was actually trying to work my way to. I need a palate cleanser. What is a good, low-commitment game I can use as a break between ACs?
I picked up Octodad yesterday, and I think that might be the perfect palate cleanser. It's short, light in tone, pretty well written, and only frustrating in a comical way. Every time the controls get hard to handle, I always end up just laughing at the ridiculousness of the premise.
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Howdy, everyone. I've been a long-time listener of Idle Thumbs, but haven't visited the forums until recently. Like Caspar, I'm also a college professor. My gaming experience began in earnest back in 1980 when we received an Atari 400 computer for Christmas, and my neighbor and I began programming text adventures in Basic (in between bouts of Missile Command and Star Raiders). I look forward to participating on the forums more regularly in the future.
What discipline are you in if you don't mind me asking? I'm a grad student in English, so I'm always interested to measure faculty interest in gaming across fields.
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Euro Truck Simulator 2 is pretty relaxing, but not really for the reasons you cited. I just enjoy tuning in to Hot Mix Radio and cruising around mini-Europe.
I'll second Euro Truck Simulator. I picked it up on a Steam sale just for the hell of it, and it turned out to be one of my favorite relaxing games. Since you drive assigned routes, there are objectives and time limits, but nothing too unbearable. Plus, the game incorporates some sense of progression since you can work up to owning multiple trucks and managing a larger business with the money you earn from doing jobs. What I like about that is that there are goals, but nothing is pushing you to do them in any kind of timely fashion. It lets you go at your own pace, which is what I want out of a game like this. Good for listing to podcasts and audiobooks/10
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I think Search and Loot would be way more entertaining if you had to spend a limited resource to even look. So you get to open either the cupboard or the barrel but you can't look at anything else. You would probably also have to build the game so that you didn't have to search through shit to find the resources you need to play, which would also be super.
DayZ does this in a way. Your hunger and thirst are always in play, so each moment you spend looking through a town consumes some of those resources. If you are too meticulous in your search, you can end up not having enough energy to make it to the next town. My last character starved to death because I searched to slowly and came up empty.
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So how bad at video games can I be and still enjoy La Mulana? If the meets-meets-meets of the game is Spelunky/Dark Souls/Fez, that seems a little scary to me (who is a baby apparently).
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Has anyone see the movie Her yet? I went to go see it last night and absolutely loved it. It is one of those rare instances of science fiction not focusing on some kind of dystopia or military conflict, and does so beautifully. If you haven't seen it yet,
is an illustration of the overall tone of the film (NSFW). It has a way of being romantic, funny, and serious all at the same time.I really enjoyed about 85% of the film, but the ending felt a bit hollow to me. Is that strange?
I figured that Sam was going to continue to grow and move beyond her relationship with Theodore, but the whole "now the OSs have all disappeared into the ether" thing just felt a little sudden to me. It's nice to see a version of the singularity take place in a film that doesn't culminate in a Boston Dynamics-style-killer-robot apocalypse, but it felt somewhat contrived. I'm not sure how else the film could have resolved, but it left me feeling uneasy.
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Some recent favorites:
Ben Okri's Stars of the New Curfew: Quasi-magical realist short stories from a seriously under-appreciated Nigerian writer. Worth reading for both their originality and the devastating critique it offers of the international oil economy.
Richard Wright's Native Son: I have no idea how I went this long without reading it. In any case, it's one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Visceral, effective, and impossible to forget.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia: An only somewhat fictionalized account of the writer's time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. A fascinating study of both the fascination/horrors of war, and the complex political situation of early 20th century Spain.
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Hi all,
I've been listening to the podcast for a while now, and I decided to check out the forums. It's nice to see a place on the internet where people seem to be able to talk about video games without being outright horrible all the time (I'm looking at you reddit). Anyway, I'm a grad student in English and film, so I don't have as much time for games as I'd like. Still, I'm managing to spend a few hours here and there wandering Chernarus in DayZ, playing the Spelunky Daily Challenge, and trying to not be so terrible at Dark Souls.
Loadout: Am I the only one seeing this? [NSFW]
in Video Gaming
Posted
Sorry. Is there a way to add the NSFW tag retroactively? This is my first topic.
And yes, I could be projecting something negative on the game, and that's partially why I wanted to post this. Basically to see if I'm being troubled by the game because I'm troubled by everything or if there's some legitimately messed up things going on.