Salacious Snake

Thanks to this episode, I bought Super Hexagon. I was aware of it, but hadn't gotten around to trying it, so thanks for the reminder. It's great. I just now finally passed a minute in the first mode, and I'm terribly excited about it. JP Sniper mentioned Space Giraffe, and that is a very similar experience for me… I find I do best when I sort of unfocus and take in the whole image at once and get lost in the music. I love games that really induce getting "in the zone." I don't understand what it is, but I know I like it. Space Giraffe is one of those things that I know I'll always want to go back to from time to time. It's the only game in which I've ever purposely hunted down all of the achievements. It's unbelievably good. I have more to say about this, but I'm still in a weird mental state from playing Super Hexagon, so I can't calm down and order my thoughts.

I liked episode 3. The only disappointment for me was when Clem responded to the reveal about Lee's past as if it were new information that he had kept from her, when in my game, he told her about it already (back in the pharmacy, I believe). The game is usually great about respecting your choices (even if it's kind of superficial some of the time), but it was a very discordant moment to have it simply rewrite history on me.

I enjoyed the cast very much. I appreciated how you summarized events as you went along, because I had already gone hazy on some of the details. You wouldn't, because the story is told from Tony's perspective. This ties into what the fellows were saying about how you can only see the barest sliver of another's internal life. We operate on assumptions of what motivates other people, while the reality is that it's alien. I don't mean to say that you can have characters do whatever the hell without any sense of consistency and use that as an excuse for poor writing, but in this case, I think it's fitting for her to be inscrutable to Tony (and, by extension, the reader). People who I think I know well do things I can't fathom all the time. You may have an idea of how you (or a similarly-wired person) would act in her situation, but that will only take you so far. I like The Argobot's interpretation of her actions; I think it makes a lot of sense. It may not be explicitly present in the text, but it shows that there could very well be an emotionally consistent explanation for the way Veronica acts, and in this case, that's good enough for me. Our narrator is kind of a clod, after all. (In the same way that we can all be clods sometimes.)

For the most part, they aren't stealth games. Being sneaky was a design goal originally, but it didn't really pan out. Throughout the series to date it has become more viable to get through big sections without alerting anyone to your presence, but it still is not a very central concept.

The Cheetah is fucking nuts!

I don't read Kotaku, because they don't have sweet tips and tricks.

I'm replaying Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and it made me think of the discussions of Spec Ops and subverting the player's, you know, stuff. MGS 4 has a nifty version of this. The major theme of the game is the PMC-driven, self-perpetuating war economy. The game features a store through which you can purchase, sell and upgrade weapons and equipment (and remove the nanomachine-based ID locks from scavenged firearms). In any other game, this would be an upgrade mechanic for its own sake, because apparently you're supposed to have one in everything now. In this case, it's a temptation to engage in the war economy. If you use the store, you may be helping to perpetuate the various conflicts around the world in some small way. The nice thing is that you're never overtly chastised or punished for using this service. You're also free to eschew it altogether; some sections of the game may be more challenging this way depending on your style of play, but it's entirely doable. It seems crazy to praise MGS for subtlety, and it does hit you over the head pretty hamfistedly with its themes, but I like the way it's up to the player to give a shit or not when it comes to utilizing this particular system. (Although I could be forgetting a conversation in which someone gives you shit for doing it. Still, it's not a thing that takes control away from the player and makes you do something indefensible, nor is it doing the "you were being a shitty guy all along" rug pull.)

I should read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is truly great (and has a terrific film adaptation starring Richard Burton). It's an antidote to Bond-style spy fiction in the same sense that a sharp kick to the groin is an antidote to one's sense of general well-being. I didn't realize that George Smiley was a recurring hero character, which does undermine things a bit (he's a minor dude in this case). It's cool that le Carré realized this and moved away from it.

Haha, that reminds me of the one computer science class I took (learning FORTRAN 77). The teacher and TAs did not apprectiate my variable naming. It was always a bunch of nonsense. I love it.

Nice! It looks very classy, and also SICK. Subscribing to that book club feed, UNGH.

Last night, I finished Persona 3 Portable for the PSP (on a Vita). This is significant for me, because it's the first time I've played a Japanese-style RPG to completion. I have tried a handful over the years, but invariably found them to be tedious and unrewarding. Both Eastern and Western computer and video game RPGs seem to stem from someone seeing Dungeons & Dragons and missing the point of what makes it interesting. Numerical stats and dice rolls and rounds of combat are the best you can do to simulate things around a table with pencil and paper, but it's in service of pretending you're in a magical faerie forest and lording around or whatever. The stats aren't an end unto themselves. (This is not the only view, and to be fair, plenty of games take tabletopesque wargaming mechanics and make compelling electronic experiences through creativity and selectivity in their application.) That's a bit of a tangent, but in my limited experience, the bulk of one's time in a JRPG feels like sitting around a table and taking an hour to resolve what is supposed to represent 3 minutes of realtime combat. The combat in Persona 3 is conventional and boring, and primarily takes place in a single dungeon which way overstays its welcome by the end of the game. It leans heavily on a rock-paper-scissors style of elemental interaction, prioritizing finding weaknesses, etc. I'd be happy to never again see the classical elements represented in a game system. What kept me slogging through this exercise in attrition was the writing. Now, I should be specific, because in the broad sense, the story of the game is generic and stupid. There is a bad thing afoot, and monsters are shitting up the town, and only you and your squad of high school students (and an eleven-year-old and a dog and a robot) can stop them. Holy shit, right? The crazy thing is that I gave a crap about those students and robots and dogs and shit, and their classmates and teachers and still others to boot. Little stories are attached to each character, most of which are to be explored optionally at the player's leisure (many of which I missed out on altogether or only dipped into). When you're not in combat, things play out like a very chatty adventure game. I think it's the same as the social simulation/dating sim genre, though I wouldn't know, because I'm not a weirdo. You can choose to spend your time after school hanging out with people, and this turns into a little series of dialogs (voiced at key points) in which you find out more about them, and probably help them through some kind of difficulty. It's mostly pretty mundane stuff, like dealing with parental expectations or social anxiety or coming to terms with being an artificial life form who was created solely to destroy. You know, high school. It's all very linear, and it's all very predictable. Your interaction is limited to dialog choices which barely affect the course of things. It's simply a matter of what kind of attitude you want to project at any moment. Your protagonist is a barely-there cipher type. The explanation that such protagonists exist in order to promote self-insertion by the player usually seems like an excuse for laziness, but here I think it actually works. I made my dialog choices based on how I thought I'd react in each scenario. The linearity should be a turnoff for me. As was probably obvious in my earlier tangent about RPGs, I like the self-destination that RPGs allow, or at least often try to present (even if it's illusory). So far, most of this post looks like a list of reasons why I shouldn't like this game. I love it, though, and I think it's for one reason: the writing is snappy. I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with these characters. Even if my choices didn't matter, I liked seeing their reactions. The characters are well-realized enough that as you get to know them, you can predict how they'll respond to things, but they can still surprise sometimes. The writers and translators deserve a lot of credit; every similar-looking game that I've tried to get into has been utterly dreadful in this regard by comparison. There is, however, a weird side to how each character arc progresses, in that they are driven by a mechanical system. A meter increases as you hang out with someone (which has an impact on your ability to fart out magical beings), and you always know when some kind of emotional breakthrough is imminent because it's getting full. It's rigid and prescriptive in structure, but the moments within that structure are deftly handled. It helps that the world (aside from one hour every night when all hell breaks loose) is the real world, and the people in it have concerns to which I can relate. I remember what it was like to be worried about exams… It's much more difficult for me to relate to a fucking elf in a mystical bog who fears the weirding of the dragonwytch. That kind of shit is in here, too, but there is always relief in the form of a little snippet of character growth right around the corner. (Most of the characters aren't aware of the magical elements of the setting, so you're free from that stuff during most interactions.) Spoiler alert: I saved the world and all life in it. But, what I'll remember from Persona 3 is sleeping in class and hanging out with a bunch of jerks and talking about beef bowls. It's funny how refreshing mundanity is in games. It's the reason I love Heavy Rain; chunks of it are about familial love and doing chores. That's way more interesting than space bugs and gnomish steam tanks and all the other nonsense that games tend to be about. (Seriously, if you're making a fantasy game and even consider putting in a begoggled little person who tinkers with anachronistic technology, then fuck you.) Needless to say, I'll be playing Persona 4 when it comes out for the Vita.

Thanks to the tiny italic lettering, I thought great things were "atoot."

I just created my "Gameface," so now I'll be able to watch a creepy-looking mannequin version of me get twisted around like a pretzel and tripped up all over the pitch. sports games

Yeah, the AC!D games are interesting at least. 2 had a fold-out paper apparatus that you could stick in your face to make it stereoscopic. It… worked better than you might expect! They never came out as downloads, did they? I'd play them on the Vita.

Haha, Madden Forever, indeed. Nice work.

It's way, way better than PoOPS.

I'm getting this today. I played the demo, and I'm a sucker for physicsy animation systems. It can make for some really cool and/or goofy shit. It'll be interesting to see if I can get a grip on the controls and stuff… it's crazy how much shit you can do. I only have the barest understanding of football, so I don't even know what half the words mean. At least with Kinect, I can shout at my TV. Advertising! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgMT2YqsLw&feature=relmfu If anyone wants to push my face into the dirt, add Xbutts 360.

Yet more graffiti. And this time it's a cat! BIDEO GAMES credit for above:

What do I have to huff to see a new Hopkins FBI?

By Brian Blessed's bollocks!

I could see that. BI's work caters to a very particular set of tastes. I just couldn't parse the language, but I get it now. I think you're right, but I'm also pretty skeptical of Gearbox's intent. Also, like you say, there isn't much characterization of any kind happening in Borderlands, at least from my experience with it. In my opinion, that negates the "strong character" defense.

Boobs trying to escape her jacket and no face… along with her hips cocked to the side. A person or group of people made a series of decisions which resulted in a faceless bosom to represent one of their protagonists. It may not be a high crime, but the game is obviously using its female characters for titillation. I have no idea what you're saying here. ArmA II is awesome, so you should play it anyway! edit: didn't notice the intervening posts while I was away from the computer, d'oh.

I snapped some graffiti, too. Looking West from the Pulaski Bridge: A duck in Central Park: Yo duck, will you marry me?

I'm not really convinced.

I think DayZ kinda hacked in support for playing as a woman. With the editor, you could always play as various bystanders and stuff in ArmA, but I don't think they ever fully made everything work with female characters. Like, I don't think you can normally play as a female character in any of the official ArmA campaigns or missions. I could be wrong. That sounds like a shitty panel, but I don't think that invalidates the topic. I think I get where you're coming from, but it's kind of a crappy attitude to say that people should drop it, because it's usually fruitless. That means we need to elevate the discourse and have better discussions!