Wrestling is ridiculous. I don't think many people in the GB community will come after me for saying it's dumb as hell.
However, I'll totally own up to the fact that I was a big fan as a kid. I would tape Monday Night Nitro and rent PPVs on VHS all the time. I had a bunch of wrestling action figures, rings, etc and of course I spent a lot of time creating my own storylines and matches with them. I was definitely a huge WCW fan to begin with, but at some point their shows got less interesting to me and I started watching RAW. Fortunately, Chris Jericho made the switch at about the same time I did. I watched WWF (now WWE, weak) shows for a while until my interest totally got away from it.
Despite my changing interests and maturation, I still have a pretty strong fondness for pro wrestling. So here's my question: what happened? I couldn't be less interested in watching pro wrestling now, even just to watch and laugh as these huge men yell at each other in their underwear.
Is it just me, or did the product get way worse? Is it because there are no iconic characters like The Rock, Stone Cold, etc? Is it because there's virtually no competition and the WWE is now a huge dinosaur? SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.
What do you think?
Edit: spoiler isn't working. Let's just say that...um...wrestling is "heavily choreographed" or..."carefully constructed"....or...."Santa isn't real".
In Fall 2009, I made a Flash thingie as a final project in a class all about digital media production. It's about chiptune, pop music, Timbaland, copyright infringement, and what happens when all those things converge! Do you like C64? Do you like Amiga? Do you like Windows 95 shareware?! This has two of those three things in it!
I figured now was as good a time as any to share it with my favorite internet community: Gigantic Bombs!
I played with it just now for the first time in months, and I still think it's a good bit of fun. It's also got a message behind it (oh no)!
I just uploaded a song I recorded more than two years ago: an improvised guitar solo over a metal version of "Chocolate Rain".
I know, I know. Meme's old and people doing their own versions of it isn't the most novel idea, but I'm actually pretty proud of the solo I laid down. I think it was the second take I did and, other than a small mistake I made (which doesn't sound like one) and my harmonizer being wobbly-sounding (because of it being a cheap harmonizer and my guitar not being perfectly intonated), I don't think I could've done better.
Title's "(White) Chocolate (Frozen) Rain". Should be easy to find from my main page. I think you fellow internet types will enjoy it.
Sad part is, I barely practice anymore and I'm probably not half the guitarist I was when I recorded this. Oh, growing up.
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I love Capcom's fighting games. But I already said that in the title.
I suck at Capcom's fighting games. But, again: said it in the title.
However, I think it speaks volumes about the quality of said games that I have a great time needing to play my best (which obviously isn't very good) to beat the CPU on normal difficulty and get my ass handed to me if I make the mistake of playing online. How many games is that true for?
MvC2, Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, Street Fighter IV, and the various incarnations of Street Fighter II are some of the most fun I have with video games. The Marvel crossover games are just so over-the-top and ridiculously fun.
That's all. Not the most incisive blog, but I think it's really rare that a company can make games that appeal so broadly all the way from pro-level players to schmucks like me that have a hard time doing dragon punches on cue.
Edit: to open it up to discussion, I feel like asking if there are any games anybody else in the community can think of where they can barely handle the A.I. on lower difficulties and get wrecked online, but still have a great time. So chime in!
I spent the past couple days putting my more recent compositions on last.fm. If you like Steve Reich, Cynic, Meshuggah, or listening to music written on a computer (because practicing and recording instruments is so 20th Century...or maybe just work I don't feel like doing now that I'm not in high school), stop on by. If you don't like one track, don't let that stop you from listening to any others. My Featured Tracks are fairly diverse and range from a Guitar Pro composition to a short jazz trio number I wrote and produced in Reason.
I've followed the Roger Ebert-inspired "Are games art or not?" situation to some extent and there are some positions that some people are taking in the debate that confuse or disturb me. The debate as a whole seems somewhat misguided, but I'll address the following points one-by-one first:
"Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?"
"Some games are art, but most aren't."
"Games aren't art, but they have art in them."
"Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?"
This one is the silliest to me. I'm of the opinion that, with the PS3 and Xbox 360, we've reached a plateau in both game design and game technology. On a purely graphical level, it seems like the industry can't handle another great leap forward in graphical fidelity. First of all, games look really good today. With the Xbox and earlier consoles, I think we all knew games could look much better if the hardware was better. I don't think that thought comes into most people's heads today, though. I think we're all pretty satisfied with the graphical fidelity of our games. Anything much more photorealistic would be either technologically or economically impossible. We've already reached the point that the most high-definition graphics are too expensive for most developers to handle. Naughty Dog figured out how to push the PS3 really hard for Uncharted 2, but most people trying to make a game don't have the resources that they do. We do have stereoscopic games coming in the near future, but that really doesn't add anything to if games are art or not. I don't think so, at least. Until we reach technology that rivals the Holodeck from Star Trek, stereoscopy will always simply be turning existing flat media into a pop-up-book version of it. I'll be more surprised than most if games have a silent-films-to-talkies kind of revolution. Again, it just seems to me like we're at a plateau.
But that's all technology. What about game design? I also think that, in the past 5 years or so, game design has matured to the point that it seems silly to believe that some game designer could truly revolutionize the medium itself. I hope people keep trying to, because it'll undoubtedly result in interesting projects. Realistically, though, games are basically as artful as they're ever going to get. With all of the style and nuance of games that already exist, I don't know what could possibly impress someone who isn't impressed yet. People will keep pushing the form and finding new ways to tell new stories, but people have still been doing that with film long after the form was established and accepted as art.
"Some games are art, but most aren't."
This argument certainly has some relevance. If you want to tell me that games like Pong and Madden barely qualify as art, I can see your point. However, even the most amateurish and/or least ambitious of sculptures/films/paintings/novels are still art. Unless a game is making no effort to communicate on a creative level, I think all games are art. A bad film is still a film and, therefore, is still art.
Video games don't compare to other art forms perfectly in cases where the player's experience is basically just one of overcoming challenges. Pong is a good example because of it's absolutely minimal graphics and simple gameplay. It's purely a game. By the same logic, I wouldn't call checkers very artistic. I think it's safe to say that the people behind both Pong and checkers were interested in competition and rules, not communication or beauty. However, there's a reasonable argument to be had that the conflict and tension experienced by the player is an emotional experience desired by the game designer(s). If that's true, there's a strong argument for a pure game being art. We can likely agree, though, that these types of experiences are less artful than the story-driven games that tend to be cited in the games-as-art debate. A sports game can evoke strong emotions, but because of how purely representative of familiar reality the aesthetics are, we can say that these are much less creatively designed than other games.
I can't agree with anybody dismissing any game with a story as non-art. Video games have become much more than simply games. They really are interactive fiction in many cases. Why would interactivity make what is essentially a computer-animated film go from art to non-art?
Even something with a very abstract or no discernible narrative should be considered art if it has enough style, in my opinion. At some point, it's got enough going on aesthetically that it needs to be appreciated on that level, just like we would any other form of visual art.
"Games aren't art, but they have art in them."
On the surface, this makes some sense from certain perspectives. But if you really think about it, it doesn't hold up especially well. Music is most assuredly art and, even though sports games (which, again, can be argued to be the least artistic of video games) tend to have licensed soundtracks, the music in them doesn't really make them any more artful as a game. However, when a game is defined by the arrangement of the art (music, sound effects, graphics, story, level design, etc) that it's made up of, the person who did said arranging is most definitely an artist. They've deliberately designed an evocative experience for an audience. That's art in a nutshell.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the thing all of these arguments have in common is that they treat art as a binary quality. They assert that humans create two things: art and non-art. It really seems to me that what's closer to the truth would be that all human creations are varying degrees of artistic. While I do think it's important to value professional, serious art over amateur ramblings, I also think we try to separate the two in far too absolutist terms. If someone types something funny in an internet forum, isn't that art? If someone makes a funny image in photoshop by combining existing images or an image with text, how is that not art? These things are relatively ordinary, but they're creative and evocative.
This blog entry is art. I don't feel pretentious saying so, because I don't think art exists as a Venn diagram of two separate circles. I think it's much more akin to a continuum.
This is where Ebert is fundamentally mistaken, in my opinion. I think this blog is art because it's a creative attempt at human communication. I don't think that's a crazy definition of art. However, because of Ebert and others treating art as exclusive rather than inclusive, we end up engaged in (what are essentially) flame wars about the topic. I can't emphasize enough how much I think we should distinguish between good art and bad art. If we didn't believe in criticism, we wouldn't be on a site like Giant Bomb (which has a lot of editorial content) and we wouldn't care about what Roger Ebert had to say.
I just think that the good art versus bad art considerations get perverted into arguing about what is art versus what is non-art. Every creative endeavor by a human should be considered art, but when it's unimpressive or impressive for all the wrong reasons, there's nothing wrong with expressing exactly that.
Note: This blog is so long and _serious_business_ that I feel remiss not taking longer to write/edit it...but, whatever, it's a blog and not a thesis. You get what you pay for.
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So, let me blow your mind: Roger Ebert wrote a game review in 1994. In his latest blog, he mentioned a game I'd never heard of: Cosmology of Kyoto. He wrote a positive review of it in 1994 in Wired magazine. Say what?
Anyways, I wrote a response to Ebert's latest blog. Who knows if it'll get approved.
I was going to post my response here, but I'm a dope and copied it without pasting it anywhere and then I copied the URL of his blog. Yup.
So, basically my point was that if writing that works its way into non-interactive media is art, why does something being interactive make writing non-art? Also, I pointed out that, while some games have branching/dynamic narratives, you don't have total freedom and the game designer(s) are always trying to funnel you through some specific experience, even if you have a few specific experiences to choose from.
I guess I'll leave it at that until it gets approved (if it does). Blah.
Edit: Oops. There was already a thread about this.
If you thought $5 was too much for any of the first four Sonic platformers for Genesis or just never got around to buying them, this Thursday Sonic is getting wasted on some Labatts and Molsons and will be (personally) cutting $2 off the price of each of his 2D Genesis platformers.
For whatever reason, I've yet to buy (on XBLA) any games of the franchise that practically defined my childhood gaming experience. I plan to grab the only good Sonic games this Thursday, though. Maybe I'll get Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, too.
Okay, fine, I'm being a little harsh: Sonic Spinball is kind of fun too, but it's not on XBLA.
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If i had to pick a favorite game, the easy answer for me is Rez. For me, Rez was a game that made me take games seriously. I've had similar moments in other forms of media: 2001: A Space Odyssey made me realize that film could be used to tell stories more awesome than Raiders of the Lost Ark (not that Raiders ain't awesome; it definitely is) and Rage Against the Machine and CKY got me to stop listening to bad music when I was a teenager.
So, needless to say, I was extremely anxious to hear what the new Q Entertainment game was going to be, especially when they used the word "synaesthesia" in a tweet about the upcoming announcement.
Enter Child of Eden. It's easy to think of it as Rez II: Synaesthetic Boogaloo, and, as such, I'm so excited about this game (as evidenced by my wiki edits and constant "YESYESYES" comments in response to any blog/news/forum posts about it) that it might be the thing to get me to buy Microsoft's poorly-named and poorly-considered Kinect controller. However, I think I'd prefer having force feedback with a regular ol' controller like in the original Rez, which I'm assuming Child of Eden will also have (because, seriously, thing is pretty much a sequel to Rez...seriously).
Anyways, even if I won't personally buy a Kinect controller, I'm glad that Child of Eden seems to be one of the most exciting games to be a part of Microsoft's lineup for the EyeToy Plus. This is getting it way more publicity and I'm so glad people who aren't already fans of Rez seem interested in this game. I don't think Rez ever got its due (probably because it's such a short game), but hopefully this is the game that gets Tetsuya Mizuguchi to be as much of a household name as any Japanese game designer's name can be.
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