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Jake

Idle Weekend April 11, 2017: Making Up Is Hard To Do

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Idle Weekend April 11, 2017:

Idle Weekend April 11, 2017


Making Up Is Hard To Do
Yes, this is something of a make-up episode, since we have been tardy lately. Comically so! But that won't stop us from discussing things that we stick with, even if we don't think they're super great.

Related: we appreciate that YOU stick with us, even when we aren't super great about being on schedule.

Discussed: Caprica, Snake Pass, Battlestar Galactica, The Bridge (FX series), Jay Cutler of the Chicago Bears, The Young Pope, Nier, Nier: Automata, The Last Express, Ashes (comic), The paintings of Mark Tansey at the Broad Museum

 

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Man I don't know what you're talking about with Snake Pass. The execution is *perfect*. It's challenging, but in a good, interesting way. I mean, this is like complaining Dark Souls is not quite there because you die a lot.

 

Snake Pass is the most original and inventive creature-based sim/platformer I've played and frankly more games should aspire to this kind of creativity. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

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That feeling you describe though, that's how I feel about Mirror's Edge, especially the sequel. Posted this on FB the other day:

 

Quote

Played [Mirror's Edge Catalyst] recently. Such a missed opportunity, this game:

 

https://youtu.be/snHa6-eXQG0?t=15s

 

On paper open world Mirror's Edge seems perfect, but everything about its design, from the single connecting pathways between areas (leaving no room to explore or choose alternate routes), the collectibles that stop you dead in your tracks, the nonsensical world design - Why are there business people hanging out on top of skyscrapers? How did they get up there? - and the long exposition-heavy cutscenes with characters you are given no reason to care about whose motivations do not line up with your own, Macguffin-chasing fetch quests (go here, now there, get the thing)... all of it going against the core of running, jumping, flowing with grace and speed and purpose through your environment, making moment to moment decisions trying to escape your pursuers... Like the first game, when it works it *really works*, but these moments of brilliance are so often interrupted by momentum-killing distractions. I guess we'll have to wait for a third game to fully realize this series' potential.

 

see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg0Nbfzo_00

 

Seriously EA/DICE: Please make a Mirrors Edge that is actually about *being* a runner, delivering messages (not thinly veiled time trials) in a glittering dystopian city. Ease off on the overly dramatic story and focus on world-building. Make all your gameplay mechanics in service of free-flowing exhilarating player-directed movement. Make the grappling hook a deep physics-based navigation tool, not a Quick Time Event. Make the messages you deliver actually affect the world around you: maybe something happens because you got the right information to the right person, or maybe you were too late and things went badly.... Make the story about *the thing you do as a player*.

 

Maybe, like the Witcher series, third time's the charm. I hope so.

 

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Great conversation about fictional religions. I find myself wondering what the difference is between a religion and an ideology which includes ritual and tradition. 

So would something like feeling an importance to continue colonizing solar-systems in order to spread humanity for no particular reason but that humans are the light of the universe be a religion or ideology. If they had a ritualistic meal to express it and ritualistic performances of this arbitrary Purpose , I think it might be a religion.

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