Corelli

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Posts posted by Corelli

  2. Posted

    This was my favorite game of last year and I didn't even finish it. I stalled on that boss with all the animatronic bodies, I literally couldn't beat him no matter what I did. And yet - my favorite thing of last year.

    When you consider the competition, I think that's pretty telling.

    Edit: Thought spurred from a previous post in the thread: Reloading like twenty times to save Malik was probably the best thing I did in a Video game last year.

  7. Posted

    Well, it's about coming of age, isn't it? That age wherein everything is just 'meh' and things just seem to happen to you. I remember very little of note happening in CitR, but it was totally written for my age (around 14, I think.)

    Just because it's a classic doesn't mean it's not for Young Adults.

    That's an interesting take. Again, it's been a while since I read it, but I saw it more as a book about the effects of emotional trauma than a coming of age story. I mean, does the protagonist really come of age in that book in any meaningful way? I'm not sure that he does. It's really more about him dealing with losing his brother.

  9. Posted

    For what it's worth, this isn't really why I think someone like Franzen writes more vital fiction than someone like Tolkien. In Freedom, Franzen's powers of human observation are astonishing. That book genuinely affected the way I see other people and the world. There's a depth of humanity present in the work of a fiction writer like Franzen that I have rarely encountered in genre fiction--that's absolutely not to say it doesn't exist, but I don't think genre fiction writers treat it as their highest responsibility the same way literary fiction writers do. When you're writing in a genre you're necessarily beholden to whatever tropes and conventions exist in your genre; you certainly may try to transcend or subvert them, and may do so successfully, but to me those elements can't help but be the centerpiece or at least steal a lot of the show. (That is after all why people read a particular genre.) I think this is especially true when (as is the case for many, many genre writers) you're writing these series that seem to go on forever, with book after book, and then your responsibility becomes to this self-contained universe you've created, which exerts its own pressures on itself in terms of needing that world and its characters to remain viable as an indefinitely-lasting or at least fairly long-term concern, which to me is at odds with how fiction operates at its best.

    I know this is all highly subjective, and I don't claim any of this is automatically the case for any one given author. But having read a whole lot of various kinds of genre fiction during different stages of my life, it is part of why I have largely abandoned it.

    To me it sounds like you haven't read much good genre fiction. Just from the standpoint of science fiction, if you've read Zelazny or Stephenson or Pynchon or whatever, you wouldn't be conflating genre fiction with bad fiction, which, even though you say you're not doing, is pretty much what you're saying when you say genre fiction is not "adult".

    To put it another way, you're not looking at the cemetery. Sure, Franzen is great. I'm not disputing that. But there is lots of awful literary fiction, just like there is lots of awful genre fiction. For every Franzen or Updike there are ten Gutersons. Just like for every Zelazny there are ten Star Wars Expanded Universes. Or something.

  10. Posted

    Cg Trailers shouldn't exist for a debut in my opinion.

    I couldn't agree more. I understand that this stuff has to be done for marketing purposes, and it's in no way a bad trailer, but it's disappointing to get this instead of gameplay.

    But hey, Bioshock did it too. It's probably a necessity for a "AAA" title these days (whatever that means).

  11. Posted

    Social politics. There are really no good games (that I'm aware of, anyways) that delve into the social psychology of a given place and time.

    I've thought of one way to do this that might work well: a Jane Austen family-marriage simulator type thing, trying to shepard your children/immediate family through a web of social intricacies and match them (and yourself?) in the most effective way possible. Even better, put an RPG layer on top of that with dialogue trees and stats, procedurally generate the NPCs, and there you go. I would play the shit out of that game.

    Alternatively, I'd like to see a Total War-esque game based off of the Exalted license.