Limbo+Documentary+Wii+SWTOR+Miscellany
By ahoodedfigure 1 Comments
Limbo
Been playing some Limbo, after "splurging" here. What started out with some pretty cool atmosphere, neat physics, clever, contextual puzzles, weirdness, and fucked up kid death has become a lot of kid death and a lot of puzzles. What stopped me from playing, though, was more that my having squished a little globe wasn't recorded by the automatic checkpoint save the game has. At one point I found I'd missed a hidden globe, and I went back to get it, then bypassed the save state I'd originally made, but it kept the old one: when I checked to see if the globe was still there, it was.
For all the puzzle frustrations I had, this was something else entirely, and I sorta set the game aside after that.
The kid death... bothers me. I guess I've never been up on kids dying in my entertainment. Bothers me in meta ways, where I'm no longer thinking about the reality of the setup I'm watching and just wondering what the creators were thinking. Hell, I'm starting to be bothered by contextless death in general, but even if the Limbo kid is really a horrible person, watching his lifeless body flop around isn't entertaining or even creepy, it just makes me wonder what the Limbofolks were trying to say. Like, getting up in the morning and to model kiddie entrails? Super.
That One Video Series That One Gal Is Making on Kickstarter
Yeah, I threw some bucks at that project. Partly because some of the reactions to it disgusted me, which isn't a good reason to sponsor anything, but whatever arguably contentious labels she wants to use, I think the core point is well made anyway, and I wouldn't mind seeing the industry be a little less obsessive... at least in many AAA games. I dunno, I don't see repeated aesthetic nonsense being as abused in independent or niche gaming as it is for mass-market. Which is probably WHY she got a lot of insane hounding... If you've gotten the attention of the Whole of Gaming Culture, congratulations on your successful marketing, but you're going to compound all the jerks into a fine paste that moves much more fluidly on the 'net. Here's hoping she doesn't drop the ball when her project gets moving, and her efforts keep people talking, at least.
I tend not to go on about moral implications because I feel a lot of this does boil down to aesthetics and a sufficient level consistency in embarrassing portrayals leading to alienation, stuff that can change if there's enough will behind it. I sorta feel there's plenty of will already, but from my brief experience in the industry itself, it's not going to necessarily be market demand that changes things, or the will of individual creators. For the large scale, it may actually take a new generation of game creators who don't look at women/whateverelse as if they were a different species.
And here's where things get really weird: As much as the market can be a force for change and for cool stuff, you have to be in a position to NOTICE these tendencies and want to innovate on them. There are people on the inside who believe they understand all the indicators, whether or not they notice their own biases, and will continue to plow forward doing the same thing over and over. The sad stereotypes we see, whatever stereotypes they are, are a result of playing it safe. I'm willing to believe many of them don't even worry about what a given consumer actually wants, even if they WANT the stereotypes. It has to do with decision makers' beliefs on what sells in the aggregate, with consumers being little more than an inscrutable money-generating engine.
It's a big enough market, though. Possibly due for a crash, but it's still large enough to allow for a lot of ideas to get through on a lot of different frequencies. What concerns me is the general tone of these kinds of discussions from just about every viewpoint: people keep talking about All Gaming, as though that can ever easily be encompassed. I think we've reached a point, finally, where it can't be anymore. Thank god.
Wii...(said in a high-pitched tone, with voice trailing off)
Boom Blox continues to piss me off. I haven't touched the game in a while. Too much shooting, not enough crashing around. Sometimes I breeze through stuff, sometimes I get stuck on one puzzle and can't advance.
Samurai Warriors 3, for all its charm, is finally illustrating to me exactly why people are generally against Dynasty Warriors et al. Could it hurt to have different buttons do different attacks, guys? I start to feel like it would be nice to be able to spread out the load a bit. My thumb is starting to get an "A" imprint in its growing callus, and the button doesn't even have a raised "A" on it.
Borrowed Bully, the Gamecube upgraded Zelda, and some others that promise to be a bit more fun. Will see.
You know what, though... consoles are rather expensive for not being as versatile as PCs are. I find that every console game purchase has me wondering how much Dollar Value vs. Time Spent I'll get out of the damned thing, where as potential PC purchases are graded on whether or not I want to taste what they're cooking. This may be the point where I give up on my constant dreams of playing console games and focus on the PC. Weird for me to say, since I've been console gaming since Jimmy Carter was president.
SWTOR
Been playing a fair chunk of SWTOR, which brings me to a bit of an awe moment that has nothing to do with intent. They've decided to merge servers, finally, after many of them were fairly vacant. Problem is, they've decided to focus one-way transfers into an already heavily populated server. The result, friends, is this:
And yeah, this may not look like a lot to people used to this sort of thing, but when it goes from a fairly friendly, small group of people on a given server to a TRUCKLOAD OF PEOPLE SEARCHING FOR THEIR GUILDS LIKE CLONE-KIDS LOOKING FOR CLONE-PARENTS IN A TINY ARCADE it sort of boggles the mind. They could have tried to combine tiny servers together. I don't understand.
MISC (NOT MINSC)
I have the Lilly demo installed, but I haven't tried it yet. Common theme in my life. I have frigging Tribes 3 installed too.
Kickstarter's also a common theme, and I really should knock it off. I keep backing horses that get out of the gate. At least I know what I'll be playing in the future... PC games, if they get made. I just hope I didn't get played.
I haven't been able to get back into the delicious Grimrock or the... Skyrim for many a mayfly's ages, both because I'm finally powering through their middle-to-endgame and I find I'm not sure I want to. With Grimrock I felt like I'd reached another puzzle wall with respawning ice-dinos at my back, while Skyrim felt like it ran out of novelty before I'dcontinued on the main quest, whereas old Morrowind seemed to have a bit more novelty... or maybe my exploration of Morrowind was longer because it took forever to find anything by virtue of bad directions. Maybe the DLC will matter? I really like their attitude toward DLC this time through. It's encouraging that they make it a big product, although I'd like them to add layers to incidental gameplay rather than a series of quests.
In non-video game experiences I played a pirate board game. I died a lot. I still liked it, though all the dying made me think that it focused a bit too much on a single stat. Yarr.