MrHoatzin

Oh, good lord there is a lot to read here. Just to touch up on a couple of points: • With a video game, the creator may not have the power to put thoughts and actions in the mouths and hands of the player, but they do have the power to put together a place for the player to explore and establish some verbs for the player to apply upon the world. Currently the most popular verbs are gun, rifle, bazooka, hand grenade and the multipurpose use, applied exclusively upon buttons, levers and NPCs. The game can be a highly curated experience with a lot of verbs, like an adventure game, or something looser with fewer verbs like a FPS. For some added complexity verbs may be joined by objects that have their own verbs; units in a RTS, for example. While the player has faculty over the action, the creator is still needed to set the stage. This is where the auteur lies. It is no less powerful a position than the poet or the playwright or the sculptor has. The only difference is that the audience has more of a hand in looking at things. And the creator is the architect and decorator and giver of powers. It is a far more nebulous kind of control, but it is not an irrelevant or useless kind of control. • I don't buy the hypothetical claim a "negative" experience cannot be done in the game. Most of what we think here when we say "negative" amounts to GAME OVER BECAUSE YOU DIED kind of scenarios, where the designer penalizes the player arbitrarily. A musician can choose to have ear-piercing spectrum tape noise sampled in the song. That is a similar kind of thing that would alienate listeners. There can be a reason for doing both, but they are not any kind of roadblock to making games or songs that do interesting things. • Chrickakes (Chris+Nick+Jake portmanteau anyone?) critiquing and deconstructing FarCry 2 is a more exciting example of looking towards the future of game design than these kinds of loose and non-specific This Shit is Neat, Yo kinds of articles that devolve into Fun vs. Art arguments. People who don't care for the FarCry 2 discussion, who see it as pretentious drivel, will not be drafted into thinking about neat things to do with games, while people who do care are already there with you. I don't think this was necessarily the case five or ten years ago, but it definitely applies in 2010.

I hate it when people INSIST on talking about DPI when and after I tell them that the image is for a website and I don't give a shit what DPI the file they deliver to me is in. They still come back and say, is that 1200 pixels at 75dpi? Yes! Yes it is, fuck you.

If your finger is strong enough, you don't have to cock the gun. It cocks and fires with the single squeeze. I don't know if this is how all revolvers do it. If it is a semiautomatic gun and the clip has just been replaced, you have to cock the gun the first time before you can fire, and then after that with every shot it cocks itself... I, uh, have never fired a gun. If this is all true, I have somehow internalized this knowledge without caring to.

Fixt.

Jeez, thanks a lot guys! Way to piss on my parade.

Dear Life, I'm getting married in December. We didn't want it to be a huge mess of a thing, and ultimately it will likely, hopefully not be. I think by American standards this will be a free wedding, even though there will likely be a hundred people. Initially we planned to elope and throw three equally low-key parties: one in San Antoan for our US friends, one in Monterrey for the Mexico peeps and her family, and one in Belgrade for my family. But then the first party exploded in scope and somehow became the wedding proper. My parents have been surprisingly eager to let us do whatever we want and are helping in tangible ways. My mother will do some of the cooking for the buffet. She says she has the experience in cooking for huge parties, and I choose to trust her. They pitched in for the dress we ended up getting (which is totally not something one would imagine wearing to one's wedding, but is quite fancy all the same and will probably be a lot easier to repurpose down the line). They didn't demand we invite anyone in particular. We're not following any Serbian traditions because fuck that. The only thing they wanted was not to put my name at the top of the invitation, which I complied with readily, 'cause fuck the patriarchy, let's go alphabetical. And then her parents. Oh jesus, wtf. They've been popping monocles at every decision we've made, as if they have a say. Her father asked us to print an extra 20 invitations (we screen printed them ourselves, in three languages, they look quite rad) for random acquaintances he doesn't expect to come, but whom he absolutely HAS TO INVITE! The invitations weren't enough and the RSVP website we put together was a BIZARRE THING normal people shouldn't be expected to comprehend (plan was, you RSVP online, and before the wedding if you are invited for the ceremony at the Justice of the Peace, we email you the directions and time, since we want it to be a small affair. Otherwise you get the directions and time for the reception, simple as that!), so he made a written addendum to the invitations proper, explaining to these people who are not even expected to come to anything, where the Justice of the Peace is, what is his name and where the subsequent reception is going to take place. These mysterious people we don't give two shits about currently know more about the wedding than the closest of our friends. The buffet idea was UNCONVENTIONAL and a cause for confusion, as was my name not being at the top of the invitation. All the Serbian traditions (that we're actively ignoring) are odd, but I get the feeling all the Mexican ones are taken for granted as not negotiable. Her mother initially wanted to come to San Antoan two weeks early and crash at our place, and stay through our wedding night. She doesn't approve of the dress choice. She also volunteered to make something, but there is some uncertainty in the air about that and asdghfhgrewuihqwelhnsadkjfnxcmnvioajxcoiedf... :( It is an annoying mess. A rogue mother-in-law and a conservative father-in-law with EXPECTATIONS about how things are supposed to happen. Plus, to make things more annoying, for the most part they are not actively being obstructionist. They're just being passively aggressive. And to top it off, I don't really have a complete picture of all that is going on. I just see wifey-to-be grinding her teeth as she sends a wall of allcaps text in the latest email exchange, and I feel like defending her, but I have no power over them.

I think historical accuracy is a bit of a red herring. GTAs don't map to any one city, bit they feel like the cities they are supposed to represent (I'd say San Andreas and GTAiv most of all). Directorial control over the cities is a must, unfortunately what this often boils down to is the wrong kind of directorial control. The kind of control that takes stupid shortcuts to make things fun (Nazis on dinosaurs!). In this regard FarCry2 shines like nothing else we've had in a long time... ... and that is basically what I would like this game to be. FarCry2 in Nazi-occupied Paris.

But but but... GTA in Nazi-occupied Paris... ;( :\ I do agree with your points. I think making the dude Irish is dumb, and it is really not GTA enough for my taste... but it is the closest anything has yet come.

"Dantey!"

They don't have to say it out loud. One gets the idea that's what they're doing.

Why is it that "new, fresh and mature", nowadays inevitably means plugging characters from the original story into a tired, immature battle epic of sorts? WTF does that trailer have to do with the Divine Comedy? Ack. :frusty: Tale of Tales should totally make their own version of the Divine Comedy. It should interface with the player's facebook account and populate the suffering sinners you see throughout hell with actual buddies (those who have a million profile photographs should go into the vanity circle of hell, the pagans should be in limbo with Socrates and Julius Caesar, etc.). And it should be as exciting and extreme as a guided walk through a zoo, which is what the structure of the damn poem boils down to.

Hah, I am illiterate!

That looks like your standard Austin hipster right there .

Huh! Where did "Will" come from then?

To tell you the truth, I'll probably check out Antichrist, mainly because it is so wonderfully photographed, but I have really no expectations for it one way or another.

Tru, but his hackiness has nothing to do with Willem Dafoe's bare ass.

On an unrelated note, Lars von Trier is a hack. Carry on.

This is England is not like a Tyler Perry film, nor do I expect Precious to be like a Tyler Perry film. Because it is a Oprah & Tyler Perry present film with a happy ending, I suspect it will not be a disturbing mindfuck like something by Todd Solondz (which is what I thought it would be when I saw the first trailers), but a sappy—if extreme—drama. Because I don't have high hopes for the story, and the acting is getting a lot of good press, I suspect it will be like Monster and This Is England, two movies that had pretty solid, emotional acting and relatively meh stories.

The fact that this movie is being championed by Oprah and Tyler Perry makes me think that a) it can't have anything but an uplifting ending, there will be a lot of gratuitous, torturous pathos on the way there, and finally, c) it will be the kind of actor-driven, actor-glorifying movie with little to say besides. Something like, for example, This Is England or Monster.

To Yahtzee's defense, there is only so much you can do with cynical teenagery angst format he fell into. It does get old and it's not very constructive, but that is what everyone expects him to keep doing. Well, that wasn't much of a defense, I guess.

That's interesting!

What?! ?

I wonder if they keep doing it in such a binary fashion because of the good PR they get from the more formidable new IP wave? As far as big publishers are concerned, they never seem to find a happy place between trying out new IP and harvesting the old ones.

Man, will they ever optimize this stuff? It is still sluggish in every browser I tried it in. Edit: kingzjester's me name for the interested.

Still, wtf is going on when they give a game a 9.5/10, and the entire community shits on it?