Oh. That was, ummm…Huh.
So I finished playing Bioshock Infinite. A few remarks on style, which I think I can make without absolute spoilers.
It’s set in the year 1912, alternate universe version. This is an interesting choice. Not too many shoot-’em-up video games are played to the tune of a barbershop quartet singing ragtime (“God Only Knows” – Columbia’s Gayest Quartet!). Fun Fact: I once collected 78 records; I own at least two of the tunes they played for ambient music.
And then there’s…well, the picture. I was floored by the game’s casual use of this kind of racist imagery. Lots of it. I thought there were some ideas society couldn’t revisit even in jest.
And the thing is, while racism is a running theme and it’s certainly not portrayed as a good thing, it’s also not the shown as the worst thing ever in the whole history of the world. Which, I dunno…I thought we’d collectively decided racism is the worst thing ever in the whole history of the world. It wasn’t the most important aspect of the whole game, either, which I assumed it would have to be the moment I hit the first Racially Ugly Incident.
I was so sure of this, in fact, I paused the game, scooted off to a gaming forum and asked “is the whole damn game like this?” I got answers like, “oh, it was so over the top, I didn’t take it seriously.” Hm. I thought over the top racism was the worst kind.
The game developer clearly knew this story element wasn’t going to be a big deal, and it wasn’t. Tectonic plates must have shifted somewhere.
August 7, 2013 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 28
The Steam Sale is here!
The Steam sale is here! The Steam sale is here!
Okay, this is kind of a dumb post, because anyone who cares surely knows and anyone who doesn’t know surely doesn’t care. But the Steam Sale is when they put games — sometimes quite new and expensive games — on a deep discount for a limited period of time. They do it a couple times a year, Christmas and Summer.
I kind of hate this, because I stock up on a shitload of games and then don’t play half of them because somehow I feel…bloated and overwhelmed. Back in my day (she said, hooking her thumbs in her lapels) you bought a game and you played it for, like, a year because that’s All You Had, Missy.
Now I have shit-tons of games and all’s I do is sit on a hillside in Skyrim and pick off bandits in the distance, because I love that place and I have mad crazy archery and stealth skills and I’ve finished all the quests.
Okay. Yes. I bought several games.
July 11, 2013 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 24
So, what’s the problem?
This is Li Meng. He hasn’t left this computer terminal for six years. He gets up to pee and shower and they hold his place for him. The rest of the time, he’s sitting in this internet cafe in this very chair playing video games. If you Google “Li Meng” and “internet cafe” you’ll get a ton of different takes on the story, mostly a bunch of handwringing about “internet addiction”.
But here’s the thing: renting a spot full time in the internet cafe costs him about eighty bucks a month. Playing video games, he says he’s making about $325 a month. You know what I say? THIS MAN IS THE KING OF AWESOME.
Plays video games all night, sleeps in the chair all day, slips out for a wash and some Chinese takeaway and puts money in the bank every month. I am NOT seeing a problem here.
It’s like when heroin got cheap in the Nineties and there were all these articles about how horrible it was that junkies could take a McDonald’s job and have enough money to rent a small apartment and support a smack habit. And I’m thinking, “wait…they’re fully supporting themselves and their wicked habits with an honest job? So what part of this is your business?”
April 2, 2013 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 33
And then there was this
Eh, I got nothing interesting, so let’s stick with Doom for the weekend. So, there was a comic. Did you know that? A couple of years after the game, id software released it. God alone knows why.
What do you do for dialogue when your plot consists of some guy running at full tilt through a building shooting stuff? Well, these folks decided to go with Doom Guy’s stream of consciousness.
I’m cookin’ with gas! I’ve gotta handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah. That’s your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who’s the man? I’m the man! I’m a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I’m 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness! Don’t need a gun…guns are for wusses!
Huh? Whuzzat? Whuzzat? I like what I see! An important looking door…
Knock Knock. Who’s there? ME! ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME
This is something between Ripley’s hissed version of You Are My Lucky Star while she shoots the alien out the airlock, and that dog who REALLY fucking wants him some Kibbles ‘n’ Bits.
My favorite part is toward the end, when he splashes radioactive goo on himself and gives a speech about protecting the environment. It’s like his meds kick in for thirty seconds. Just go read it.
Have a great weekend. And remember, kids — rip and tear!
January 11, 2013 — 11:48 pm
Comments: 19
Doom. DOOOM!
No, seriously — Doom, the computer game. Steam was offering the whole franchise for a few pounds over the holidays, so I bit.
While not technically the very first First Person Shooter, it was the first large, really functional, major mega-ass hit FPS. It’s hard to overstate how popular this thing was when it was released in 1994. It was a phenomenon. It was HUGE. It gummed up computer networks and ate up productivity from coast to coast.
It was a great game. But there were two additional clever things id software did that helped make Doom a gorilla: they gave a third of the game away for free, encouraging players to make copies and spread it around (unheard of in those overpriced, aggressively copy-protected days). And they allowed users to modify the game — change the graphics, build new levels, make it a whole ‘nother game.
I worked in a corporate art department, so we got an official boss sanction to play, provided we didn’t spend an obscene amount of time at it and were able to couch our activity in the corporate bullshit language of Learning New Things. We developed a whole office vocabulary of Doom, full of Pink Boys and Scratchy Guys.
First time I’ve played it in a decade and a half, anyway, and I’m horrified to report the grooves worn into my head are fresh and clear. Turn right, turn left, there’s a secret door behind the green panel, watch out for the Eyeball Monster coming through the teleportation pad. I remember more Doom than High School algebra.
It’s nigh impossible to believe we ever saw this goofy, clunky thing as a challenge to play, let alone an existential threat to American society. But the violence, the gore, the kinda sorta Satanic iconography was viewed with great alarm by the usual Great Alarm Viewers. Particularly when it turned out the Columbine shooters were big fans.
p.s. I can’t pass the topic without mentioning my great invention. I am inordinately proud of that.
January 10, 2013 — 11:40 pm
Comments: 30
We’re winning ONE of the culture wars, anyway
With all the (perfectly justified) handwringing about the culture wars and how we’re decisively losing them, I’d like to point out one battlefield that right-libertarians have absolutely PWNED!!: computer games. Particularly first-person shooters.
Partly because geeks trend libertarian. Partly because you’re, you know, shooting stuff. Partly because these games tell stories, and dystopian, Road Warrior-type stories are a fun and obvious way to tell stories about, you know, shooting stuff.
Most games of this kind are, I reckon, 80/15/5 libertarian/conservative/sociopath. Varies, depending on the game and your own playing style.
In most of them, government is either useless or actively working against you (not necessarily counting the military in a military game). And while Black Mesa or Aperture Science have a shockingly lax attitude toward employee health and safety, nonetheless it looks like corporate labs are the only player up to inventing a portal gun. You’re the lone, heavily-armed, super-athletic Randian bad-ass that’s single-handedly going to save the frickin’ world (or the embers of it, anyway) whether it likes it or not. You are capital-I Individual.
Even cooperative games, you’re cooperating to throw pipe bombs at hordes of onrushing fast zombies.
Don’t underestimate this. Playing 8 or 20 or 300 hours worth of game is an incredibly vivid and personal experience, and an awful lot of kids are playing an awful lot of games. It’ll be hard to make a liberal out of anyone who grew up being Gordon Freeman, the one free man.
Curious? Sure you are! The mega games distributor Steam is having their annual holiday sale. Up to 80% off a lot of great games.
I think I’ve scooped up about ten games for under £20. Total.
January 3, 2013 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 36
My weighted companion cube
Before I euthanized it, obviously.
Playing my way through Portal and Portal 2 for the first time this Christmas. I know, I know…they’re getting on for six and three years old, respectively. I was a huge fan of the HalfLife games, but I put off playing Portal — mostly because I knew it was a puzzle game, and puzzles enrage me. I’m bad at puzzles, but I think I should be good at them on account of I am a smarty pants.
It makes me sad when things demonstrate that I am stupid.
BUT, as it turns out, the puzzles in Portal are highly visual, so I’m really pretty good at them. Yay!
Two things I want to mention. First, computer graphics have developed to the point that a six year old game still looks spectacular. The three year old game looks better, but only just. So we don’t have to chase that technology so hard at the moment.
And second, I am blown away by the maturity of the story line. I don’t mean mature like PG-13 mature; I mean it’s funny, subtle, clever and unexpected. The dialogue is wonderful, the plot is complex. It is not by any means just a puzzle game — or a shoot-em-up, for that matter.
This is as engaging as any movie or novel.
I know, I know…a certain percent of my readership hates computer game posts, but I am loving this thing so much. And I am positively determined not to talk current events until the New Year.
December 27, 2012 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 30
Postcards from the Renaissance
Look, it’s me! Freerunning across the rooftops of Renaissance Florence!
Yup, I’m playing my way through the Assassin’s Creed series, now that the first few are older and cheaper. The first one was a little brain-hurty, offing all those Crusaders. But it was awesome to parkour my way through Jerusalem and Acre.
Also, I discovered if you grab a beggar woman by the front of the robe and give her a shove, she falls down and you get to see her underpants. As to why I might want to see a beggar woman’s underpants, this chick was the most irritating indigent ever. “But you don’t understand, sir, I haven’t any munnay!”
Wham! Underpants!
As a nodding aside to current events, of course violent games are dangerous for potentially murderous crazy people. And violent movies. And music. And the next-door neighbor’s barking dog. But particularly games. They’re like dress rehearsals for atrocity. But we don’t really want to live in a world where everyone’s entertainment is tailored for the one-in-a-hundred-million, undescended violent nutcase, do we?
No. We do not. Thank you.
Anyway, I’ve just started Assassin’s Creed II. Renaissance Italy. Leonardo da Vinci has repaired my spring-loaded assassination blade.
Say, who in the HECK thought it was a good idea to start a game with a realistic childbirth scene? I’m a woman of fifty-something, and that shit makes me cringe.
December 20, 2012 — 12:09 am
Comments: 26
But my husband doesn’t even know I’m the Dovahkiin
Yes, yes…that’s a giant humanoid lizard in banded leather gauntlets shoveling a snowberry crostata into a brick oven. And why not?
The folks who brought us the wildly popular game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim decided their nice little game of dragon-slaying, zombie-stomping, vampire-staking and empire-conquering really needed to be…a little more like real life. Their latest add-on fixes that.
Now you can buy property, build a house, get married and have kids. You think I jest?
New Objectives and Interactions – Guard your home from unwanted visitors like marauding kidnappers, armed bandits, and skeever infestations. Turn almost any follower into your personal steward to improve and protect your home. Or if you require more help, hire a personal bard or carriage driver to ease the burdens of home ownership.
Adoption – Transform your house into a home with Hearthfire’s all-new adoption system. Adopt children and discover new ways to interact with your family. Play games with the kids, allow them to have pets and gain new bonuses from having a family.
Oh, doesn’t that sound like a little slice of Hades? One minute, I’m in Markarth repeatedly beating an apostate priest to death with a rusty mace while a Daedric prince repeatedly resurrects him, and the next, I’m all, like, “hi, Honey — I’m home!” It’s like Second Life with horned helmets and beheadings.
Well, for £3.49 ($4.99 American) I might just have to buy it so I can abuse my kids.
Steve pinky swears he didn’t break Steve’s Rule — he picked Alex Karras fair and square while they were both still breathing. Dang it, I just put his third dick in the mail. I’m’onna have to come up with some kind of virtual dick for this guy; he’s killing me for postage. Yes, friends, Steve has now won his fourth dick. Congratulation, Steve. STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM STEVE.
Meet you back here Friday, 6WBT, for Round 39!
October 10, 2012 — 9:29 pm
Comments: 17
Play pinball, live to a hundred
Steve Kordek, widely credited as the Godfather of Pinball, died last week, aged 100. He didn’t invent the pinball machine, but he came up with many of the innovations that make the modern pinball machine familiar.
Dual flippers. Multiple balls. Pop-up targets. He designed hundreds of the things.
But not the one in the picture, Jungle Queen. That was my machine.
I mean, I played it a whole bunch. The four or five months between the time I turned 18 (and thus could legally go into bars) and the time I went away to college, that was my passion: a brandy alexander, a roll of quarters and Jungle Queen. With bonus games, that could last me a whole evening (or until the third brandy, which stole my superpowers).
See those triangular things near the top? Those are two rows of five drop-targets with monkeys on them. If you caught the ball on the flipper and held it to a standstill, then slowly let it fall and popped the flipper at JUST the right picosecond, you could sling the ball down a whole row of monkeys and take them all out in one move, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
God, I loved those monkeys.
The last time I saw Jungle Queen — actually the two-player variant, Jungle Princess — was in a fairground in Rhode Island. It was like bumping into my best friend from High School (what the hell – Jungle Queen was my best friend from High School). I had spent a quarter and won a free ball on the first go and I was feeling fine, when a young man with Down’s Syndrome pushed me away and started playing. My bonus round.
I stood there a moment calculating how bad it would look if I got interrupted in a shoving match with a handicapped person, and then I walked sadly away.
February 27, 2012 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 19