i had a lengthy blog all typed up and apparently it went into Crazy Nowhere Land after i submitted. because i couldn't hunt it down, i get to just write another one.i here's a video blog:

at this point it seems like Persona 4 is ages away, and for once that's not because we hit a wormhole into June 2008. i'm eking my way towards being able to sit and commit to that game, but just when it seems like there's a clear horizon, L.A. Noire comes out, or inFamous 2 comes out, or review product shows up, or it's E3 2011

speaking of which, i accidentally put thought and effort into my list for the Giant Bomb E3 quest. here it is, "Mr. Spinnington's "lies from E3", but i know you won't click that so i'll nutshell it for you: i'm a Sony fanboy now and Skyrim was dead last because it appeals to me as one of the last normal games

at this point in my original entry, i broke nostalgia and reasoning into dichotomies which defied definition and overlapped at the end

i was arguing with a friend about tutorials in games. she was agonizing over the beginning of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and i had to remind her that in-game tutorials are comonplace now. we only notice them when they sit on our faces for the first 10-30 minutes of a game, but can be invisible teachers when done right. Valve games are a good example. Portal 2 is a game. tutorials essentially murdered the art of instruction manuals, and the consequences of that are debatable

thanks to technology, we have more room than ever on a game disc for content, where back in the day developers were tasked with the strategy of breaking down elements of game instruction and game playing. in-game instruction manuals exist too, and while serving their function they also lose a lot of value. they can't be taken to school in order to help survive the day, or poured over in a bathroom while the illustrations and text whisk us back to the fictional world that we weren't currently in. the question starts to become whether or not game manuals are necessary, or just a thing we loved being able to have as a kid. are they nostalgic

there's a parallel example of technology-versus-tradition in film, which will be in the limelight once peter jackson's The Hobbit hits theaters at 48FPS. you see, theatrical releases are played by default at 24 frames per second, but that may soon change. that 'film' look that we're used to-- the one that still has motion blue, also comes with its flaws-- one of which being the juddery motion that camera pans assault audiences eyes with. the steady tracking doesn't fit a filmy framerate, but the higher we go, that problem starts to disappear. audiences will be challenged with a framerate closer to the home video camera 60FPS, and while this is optimal in games, it can in many people's eyes, cheapen a production-- making it look like a daytime soap opera

but then i hated 60fps when i noticed it in Call of Duty 4. i was at the time used to my Halo, and shooters running at 30fps. i grew used to it, and perhaps taht won't be an issue after a few minutes into the film. video games are still young, however. they're young to the point that we still review them based on technical performance rather than their theory or storytelling. in fact, i thin it says a lot about a game when people mention that it looks gorgeous, forget to keep counting pixels, and focus on the gameplay or identity of a title instead

in any case, in-game tutorials are a very new standardization. Nintendo is aiming their games at an audience of all ages, and may have a more obvious, archaic teaching system so that even walmart customers are clear on how to jump. over time, the tutorial segments in games will become more invisible, but what it leaves behind is the corpse of game manuals. i'm a sucker for video game paraphernalia, and in no time at all will be forced to read new material on the can, rather than revisit the same two paragraphs of backstory between Sonic and Dr. Robotnick whether i like it or not

here i find a can of worms on the subject of new technology and whether it warrants use in every part of our lives that were fine before. do we need to put motion and touch controls into everything? probably not. is it a thing we can do? yes, so we're going to see how much we can integrate that. 3D as a topic in general is a whole other entity i don't want to tackle right now, but i'm the kind of person who sits back and waits for thing to mature before i judge how great of an idea they were. if any of us were graded as a baby, we'd all be fucking failures from the offset

and i didn't even talk about the four other games. that doesn't matter so much as the fact that they're a roadblock

back to work