eltopo715

@sombre: totally agree. the sequel is a little more thematically ambitious than the first, but they're both immaculately produced reworkings of the pop-nihilist "what if man is the real monster" cliche

This was great! I was hoping I'd see some reevaluations of Doom 3. I played the demo when it first came out, but I had to run it at the lowest settings and it didn't really leave that much of an impression. In fact, what I most clearly remember was thinking how clever it was when your crosshairs becomes a cursor on computer screens, and just being in awe of the pre-release screenshots. Some fifteen years later, I'm still impressed by the crosshairs/cursor trick, but I was a little surprised to find that Doom 3's clearest antecedent was probably the first Half-Life. From it's pacing to how it handles environmental story-telling, Doom 3 really feels like a pale imitator of Half-Life. And the thing is, while I can appreciate the importance of Half-Life situated in the development of FPSs as a genre, I'm kind of lukewarm on actually playing Half-Life. I got it on my Switch, so I'm mostly enjoying the novelty of playing the big bad graphical benchmark game of my early adolescence on a handheld, but overall, the game feels maybe a bit better than serviceable. I don't know if I would necessarily care that much about it if I had either played it to completion in '04, or hadn't had some tangential contact with it.

@opusofthemagnum: Wow, it would really be a shame if a totally neutral hand gesture like the roman salute was ruined by... [checks notes] phalangists, fascists, and Nazis??

Throwing up political gestures isn't like "amateur painting"; gestures are a form of non-verbal communication, not entirely dissimilar to flipping the bird or the peace symbol. Like spoken and written language, systems of signs can only exist when they can be made intelligible by other people. So yes, wrestling fans may recognize the grey wolf salute as an innocent in-joke and can be totally ignorant of it's darker connotations. However, that doesn't mean the grey wolf salute has been totally emptied of it's original meaning, particularly when the wrestlers likely unwittingly picked up the symbol from Turkish ultra-nationalists.

@seikenfreak: Hmmm, for five bucks thats sorta hard to turn down. On the other hand, I just watched the first couple of levels on youtube, and it is, uh, definitely a product of the early-00's. It seems pretty self-serious for how stupid it's concept is, and its attempts at jokes don't really land... Watching the footage, I'm also remembering how hard it is to go back to shooters from that period.

Come to think of it, I'm 99% sure The Old Blood is based on Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I'll probably watch a playthrough of RtCW and just replay the Old Blood tbh.

@seikenfreak: Enemy Territory was a (free, I think) multiplayer spin-off of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the first "modern" fully fledged reboot of Wolfenstein. I'm a little hazy on this because I didn't spend a ton of time with the multiplayer demo, but I think there was an Omaha Beach beach map included...

I seem to remember it being pretty good, although it felt a little bullet-spongey and floaty. I'm sure I would like it a whole lot better now than I did then, but it came out concurrently with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and just before the first Call of Duty. A weird, campy occult Nazi-shooting game that felt a bit like an arena shooter just didn't really gel with me, especially after playing through "serious" and "realistic" games like MoH:AA and CoD.

Shadow of the Colossus is really a spectacular game, but I would add a small caveat to the love fest it's getting: it runs pretty poorly on the PS2.

Don't mean to be the Digital Foundry pedant, but it's such a good game that it's totally worth playing it on a PS3, at least to ensure a stable frame rate. Also that 720p resolution really does wonders for the big open vistas in that game...

I'm weirdly glad there are people that are also conflicted about this game. I don't understand how I managed to sink the better part of my weekend into completing items on a checklist, playing dress up with what is essentially an assassination squad, and just generally fiddling with tacti-cool bullshit.

It's all very confusing...

If anyone's got a spare PS4 code PM me! Thanks!

@sloppydetective:I really dig the idea of this thread. It's always fun to see what the community gets up to besides video games. Have you read Ronson's earlier book, Them? It might be semi-out of print (it was published at least fifteen years ago), but it has a fascinating section where Ronson accompanies Alex Jones to the Bilderberg Group's annual meeting and I imagine "The Elephant in the Room" is a bit of a successor to Them. Regardless, I'll have to check it out when I get a chance.

I'm reading a couple of books, at the moment:

The City & The City by China Miéville: A readable police procedural that takes place in two cities that, through some unspecified fantastic or sci-fi narrative invention, have come to occupy the same geographic location. An imperfect, but apt metaphor: imagine Borges writing a hard-boiled detective novel that happens to be keenly interested the dynamics of movement politics. It reminds me a little bit of Roberto Bolaño's final novel, 2666 if that does any work in explaining the gist of The City & The City.

And: The Phenomenology of the End by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi: I read Berardi's previous work Heroes last year and this might be a better starting place if you haven't encountered autonomist thought before (Heroes being maybe 250 pages, while And is considerably heftier). Basically Heroes represents a --morbid if effective -- attempt to theorize mass shootings and suicide. Not only why extreme interpersonal violence occurs from a psychological perspective, but an exploration of the social, material, and technological aspects that motivate individuals to such affective extremes. And is a bit of a re-centering to more commonly experienced emotional (and aesthetic, Berardi would argue) states. I'm not terribly far into it, but so far it seems to be concerned with attempting to understand how certain private and social sensibilities are effected by economic and technological dislocation. Fun stuff, all around.

Anyways, sorry for the long post; I don't get as many chances to write down my thoughts on the books I'm reading as I once did, so this thread is pretty welcome.

@sravankb: Holy Christ, most of the people using mics I've encountered in GTAV are hands down some of the biggest scumbags. If they're not just spewing vile racist shit (have a PSN ID in Spanish, good stuff), they're either trying to imitate the lamest of Rockstar's comedy or trying to get the people playing with them into some weak YouTube-personality antics. I don't know what it is GTAV multiplayer to make all of these people behave like the worst parodies of "hardcore gamerz".