James

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Oh shit!

But without the stick in my ass I wouldn't have anything to say about anything.

The worst thing about GTA V is that I probably won't play nearly as much multiplayer as I did of IV, because my living arrangements have changed and I've generally become a bit rubbish. I also think I burnt out pretty badly on IV, as well as the other games I played with Thumbs. A shame. Other than that, I'm moderately excited. The trailer wasn't nearly as good as the first GTA IV one, but I like the look of the protagonist. Sure, he's a bit of a cliché, but as far as games go it's a pretty unusual archetype for the player character. Could be fun.

The thing that's so weird about it is that what they're producing is a facsimile that's only really significant for the amount of time and effort it took to assemble. It's reproducing rather than producing. Playing Gears of War and watching the Superbowl doesn't produce anything, but those are activities that don't have any pretensions of creativity or craft.

Chiming in well after the fact: I pretty much agree, although I'm not angry about it. I mean, people can spend their time on what they like as far as I'm concerned – I'm not in much of a position to judge – but laborious tasks aren't automatically admirable. To me this is just as baffling as painstakingly tracing all the pages of a book by hand: it takes a lot of time and meticulous attention to detail, but it's not really a demonstration of any skill,* creativity or insight. It's more obsessive than it is anything else. (As an aside, I wonder whether gaming fosters such behaviour – I'm pretty sure it has in me, although mainly within the context of games themselves.) Dedication to a task, while it might be personally valuable or satisfying, is not necessarily interesting or impressive to outsiders. Even as a curiosity it's fairly weak, as the block-based nature of Minecraft allows the images to be matched almost exactly. If it had, for example, been reconstructed with real-world objects, the medium may at least have imparted some qualities on the reproduction, differentiating it from the original (which isn't to say that that would have appealed to me, but I think I'd find it less bemusing). I don't know, if people appreciate it that's fine, I guess, but it does feel a bit like yet another example of culture disappearing down a pit of post-modern reference and self-reference. Still, as long as someone got something out of it, great. * I will concede that for all I know there was some skill in getting this done in five weeks rather than, say, five months, and perhaps in the planning and the specific methods of execution. I'm not especially well-versed on the ins and outs of Minecraft, so I couldn't really say. But in and of itself, reproducing a pixelated image in a grid-based system is a trivial problem.

I finally got around to giving some Tokee a proper listen last night. It turns out I really like it. K-wB23BpVX0 If this catches anyone's fancy, you can listen to two full releases here.

Well I prefer 16:10, so those links you posted might be useful. This thread has some value!

Hey look, I'm nearly two days late with a stupid thing! I don't know.

I use Winamp because I don't know any better. My experiences with iTunes have been variously unpleasant, ranging from completely failing to work on several computers, to just being a bit overbearing in aesthetic and function in terms of what I actually want from it. Perhaps my aspirations are limited, but I don't really want a great deal from a music player other than the ability to play music. Still, there may well be better options for me out there; I've just not spent much serious effort looking.

I would like you to know that I am wilfully misinterpreting what you mean by "tramp".

I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin earlier this week. I felt like I should mention it, but I couldn't think of anything to say about it other than it was a) depressing and very good. It's frustrating not to have the analytical insight to properly sing the praises of things. The best I can really manage is to say that it's an uncomfortable exploration of a side of motherhood not often seen. And obviously there's the whole nature versus nurture thing. Behold, the full extent of my critical insight!

You never finished Sonic 3?! That one had saves!

The other day I wrote a brief post about how I keep writing posts, deciding they're shit, and not posting them. Then I didn't post it because I felt that it wasn't really appropriate to the Life thread. The irony wasn't lost on me.

The pricing on the GTA stuff seems pretty strange. Both the classic pack, which includes all the pre-IV games, and the complete pack, which includes everything, have their package prices listed as £19.99, which is pretty dumb in itself, but what makes it even stupider is that the complete pack is on a 75% off offer, while the classic pack is only 66% off, making it more expensive. Anyway, I already have most of it from a previous sale, but I don't think I have Episodes from Liberty City. I'm almost tempted to buy the complete pack again just for that, as it'd be cheaper than getting it on its own, but that seems pretty stupid. I'd never play it, anyway.

What Rodi said, minus one year.

I'm pretty sure I must have had a book illustrated by him or something when I was little, because that style rings such a bell. SUCH A BELL.

INTERROBANG

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I'M ONLY JOKING I ACTUALLY HAVE NO REASON FOR SAYING ANY OF THIS I'M SORRY

Surely the two are mutually exclusive.

Woman.

I was going to weigh in on the comma thing, but pretty much all my opinions and intuitions regarding punctuation are based on analogies with speech, and I putting that into words makes me feel like a complete idiot. Good luck with those recent developments, Tanu!

I know this is from ages ago and no longer really at all relevant, but I only just read Timothy Francis Gagnon's amazing review: It's worth noting that this same person thinks that a second-person perspective is the same as a first-person perspective, but with no visible body for the player. I'm not sure he's familiar with the terms' origins in literary narrative. Obviously that's not nearly as offensive as the other stuff he comes out with (such as "You should always be going out with at least two girls at a time"), but it did make me laugh. Anyway, Prince of Persia. As I remember it, I really enjoyed the whole Sands of Time trilogy. I'm sure I noticed that the story and characterization got kind of dumb, and the aesthetic kind of adolescent (although if I'm honest I'm not as bothered by that sort of thing as a lot of people seem to be), but I enjoyed the puzzles and traversal well enough. Conversely, while I didn't hate PoP08 by any means, it did leave me kind of cold. Some combination of its characteristics made it seem too unreal and abstract for me to properly engage with it. Between them the micro-checkpointing, the super-stylized environments, the loose timing and the crazy physics of that claw of his put me at too much of a distance from what was going on. I felt more like I was vaguely guiding proceedings than actually controlling a guy in a world that made some sort of sense to me. I realize that a lot of these objections could be levelled to some degree at the SoT trilogy, which I had a much better time with; I guess it's a matter of crossing a line, and for me the line fell somewhere between those two styles. Of course the physics in the earlier games didn't make much sense either, and of course the architecture was pretty fucking balmy, but it was just sensible enough for me to suspend incredulity. I should clarify that I had no problem with the graphical style; it's the weird utilitarian sparseness of the geometry that was jarring for me. Perhaps all I needed was a little more set dressing or fictional context. I'm not sure. And I do quite appreciate the possible story implications of all the claw marks on the walls, but unfortunately the overall effect is that the whole thing looks like an obstacle course to me. Yes, that's kind of what these games are anyway, but I don't like it to look like that. It's like playing a paintball FPS or something. Anyway, like I said, I didn't hate it. I played it to the end and it was OK, but those things held it back for me. Finally, the very original Prince of Persia was a fantastic game, but I was terrible at it. My cousin and I used to play it together, and he did eventually beat it without cheating. I don't think I got much further than half-way.

The guy also says he converted twenty-odd 'witches' all at once. That sounds like bullshit to me. Then again, he did offer them coffee and hot chocolate.

Somebody else told me it means penis in Croatian or somesuch.