Arino lobbies for a Luigi cameo in Retro Game Challenge
I’ll leave it so someone else to tell us which episode this is from (the GIFs are from Goomba Shoe). If you also want to update us on the status of Game Center CX 2’s fan translation, feel free to chime in :o)
BUY Retro Game Challenge, Retro Game Master DVD set
I want to marry the zoom in that last shot.
By the way, Retro Game Challenge was amazing and screw all of you for not buying it you should own a copy.
This was originally a comment I left on this article, but I liked it enough that I felt it deserved its own space. So:
Have not completed the game, don’t spoil it for me. May not even visit this comment thread again, in fact.
That being said, I’d argue that if the violence in Infinite bothered you, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. As with the racism, the oppression, the religious zealotry, and all the rest of it, the violence is there to reinforce not just that Columbia is a false paradise, but that there is no real paradise anywhere as long as humans are who they are. Paradise never comes of denying one’s nature, and yet Columbia is a city full of excuses.
Where I think the disconnect comes in is that most violent games are just, well, violent. There are almost no moments where you “stop to smell the roses” in Halo or Half-Life 2, because there’s no point to that. You get the narrative moments in between the violent moments, but they’re always about justifying the next violent moment.
The narrative portions of Infinite, by contrast, are all about the false promise of escape from violence and its consequences. Columbia itself is a monument to that principle; “If we live in the sky, away from the Sodom Below, we can live in peace.” That’s the dream Comstock sells his flock on, even as he himself floated up into the sky to escape the consequences of razing Peking. Booker’s the same way; he’s running from himself and his past, but he can’t deny his nature.
Elizabeth is the lynchpin of the game because she’s something of a tabula rasa. Things have been done TO her by people following their natures, but she has no nature she’s aware of. All she has is a “nurture,” if you like. She’s innocent. I don’t know what happens to her over the course of the game; I’ve only just gotten her. But it seems to me as though the reason everyone covets her so is because her powers represent escape to them. If she can tear open reality, they can escape theirs. So, paradoxically, she is denied escape from their desire for escape.
But just as everywhere Booker goes, violence follows, so too does violence follow us as players. And we enjoy it, because it is in our nature to enjoy it. We claim over and over again to want to escape it, but we whine and say something “isn’t a game” if we can’t do violence to something, because we want challenges. What’s being detected by players who want less violence is, to me, not ludonarrative dissonance within Bioshock Infinite, but our cognitive dissonance when we play other games. We write it off as, “Well, I can’t do anything else.” But put a gun in our hand, give us melee assassination prompts, whatever, and we will become the monsters we say we aren’t simply to overcome the latest obstacle.
By putting players in the shoes of a violent man who denies his nature, Irrational has said, “Recognize him?” And we do, and we don’t like what we see, so we complain that Bioshock Infinite has too much violence, because that’s easier than admitting that we have become too accustomed to it.
That’s what I think, anyway.
BTW, I do want to say one other thing: whether or not you agree with me or anyone else on this page, doesn’t it feel great to have a genuine adult discussion about a video game for once? The reactions to Infinite’s violence that I’ve seen, whether I’ve agreed with them or not, have all felt to me like reactions to a great and provocative film or book. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; I’m not saying we’re looking at it as a movie with game bits grafted on, or whatever. I’m saying that we’re not comparing it to other media at all, but using the developing vocabulary of the medium to talk about the game’s place in that medium.
Compare that to just a few years ago, when reviews of GTA IV unabashedly praised or damned the game in filmic terms. For all the growing the medium still needs to do, it’s lovely to be talking about games as an equivalent to films or books rather than a descendent of them, you know?
♫ Wanna stay home and play all my video games ♫
More than a few of us — peeps that came up in the game blogging scene during the late aughties — modeled our voices, our steez if you will, after the cats putting in work at 1UP and its trendsetting shows.
Even as layoffs and game companies picked its staff clean, Jeremy Parish and his skeleton crew managed to make great things with barebones resources. Plus, they called Tiny Cartridge one of the 101 Best Video Game Sites, and invited JC to take part in an episode of Retronauts!
So, it’s awful to hear that Ziff Davis/1UP is shutting down 1UP and laying off most of its team. :o( I’ll be spending the rest of this afternoon listening to these old 1UP Show theme arrangements I downloaded years ago and kept for some reason.
Just posted this recommendation of Proteus on my Steam account:
I’m not a big fan of artgames. I’m glad they exist, and I would never deny that they’re games, but so many of them are tedious twaddle. The Path, Passage, Blueberry Garden, Dear Esther… They’re all games I’m glad exist, and they’re all games I find unbearably dull to varying degrees. I’ve played some good artgames in the past, but there aren’t many I like, and even fewer I would recommend to others.
Proteus may or may not fit the definition of an art game. I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I do know is that it is a great game, and that it is great art. It’s a game in which you walk around a procedurally generated island and stuff happens.
That is all you do. That is enough.
Because it’s therapy. You give yourself to the game for forty-five minutes, and you come out of it - and I know how absurdly pretentious this sounds - healed. That is the only word for it. Proteus heals you. You come out of it thinking that everything will be alright.
Some people won’t get it. They’ll play it, be bored, and wonder what the point was. They will wonder how you win. That’s fine. But for anyone who’s ever suffered a panic attack or a depressive episode or whatever else, or for anyone who’s just feeling a bit down, Proteus will be a revelation. Many games promise escapism. This one delivers an escape. It’s important. Buy it.
So, y’know, get on that. Link’s up there. You get a Steam key and a soundtrack in addition to a DRM-free download for ten bucks.
Far Cry 3 is a great game.
I immediately came up with two ways to do co-op horror right as a result of reading this piece, and sent the following to a friend before I decided it would be fun to put on the blog as well:
And when it comes to the idea that today’s audiences don’t like to read text, or that communicating a story through prose rather than through gameplay automatically represents some kind of narrative failure, Sawyer isn’t sold. The idea that all players should like the same things, or that players can be segregated into “ones that like story” and “ones that like combat” seem equally fallacious to him.
“This has been bugging me a lot lately,” he says. “In the past few years there’s been a trend toward designing games with mechanics for people who don’t like those mechanics, and it blows my mind… I look at a lot of mechanics, like ‘hey, let’s write dialog for people who don’t like to read!’ You were writing with the assumption that they do want to read some of it, right? If people don’t want to read, why are we writing? And if people don’t like combat, why do you have combat in it?”
| — |
Obsidian Entertainment’s Josh Sawyer, talking to Gamasutra about Project Eternity, Obsidian’s successfully Kickstarted attempt to create a deep, mature, long, tactical, intellectually rewarding fantasy RPG in the vein of the classic Infinity Engine games Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, and Icewind Dale and its sequel. Which Obsidian is in a good position to do, given that most of the people worked on those games at Black Isle Studios. You know, the company that also made the first two Fallout games and generally set the standard for RPG design at the turn of the century, a standard that I’d argue has yet to be surpassed in many ways? Not to mention that Obsidian (Black Isle? Obsidian? Geddit?) has made games like Fallout: New Vegas and the very underappreciated Alpha Protocol, about which I have ranted before. Oh, and KOTOR II, which managed to be a better game than KOTOR by a wide margin despite having been shoved out the door by the publisher six months before it was ready and consequently lacking a real ending? Oh, and they have Tim Cain (Project Lead on Fallout 1) and assorted other Troika staffers there. You may remember Troika being the creators of a little game called Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Or perhaps Arcanum? I’m saying you should back their Kickstarter now, yes. And if you want to call me a blinkered Obsidian fanboy, go right ahead, because I am one, and have been ever since I first played KOTOR II, which is essentially a postmodern deconstruction of every tenet of the Star Wars universe that somehow got approved by LucasArts and is canon, and which you should totally buy on Steam and play using the Restored Content mod that gives the game more content and a proper ending. Oh, and to anyone about to go “lol Obsidian makes buggy games lol”, play Dungeon Siege III. Granted, it’s a fairly perfunctory game in a lot of ways, but it’s pleasant enough, and bug-free. BUT ANYWAY GO GO AND BACK IT YOU BASTARDS |
Just, y’know, FYI. Sharp PC port, too, though gamepad control is the smart thing.
Surprisingly good writing and acting, too, and characters switch from English to Cantonese on the fly in a way that feels natural. It’s nice to also hear some characters only speak in Cantonese; it bugs the crap out of me when a Western-made faux-HK film or game has everybody speak English.
Points as well for actually, you know, getting HK actors to play HK roles. No racebending or “HARRO BERRY PREASE TO MET YOU NAME MISHTA WONG” stereotyping here. Haven’t been to HK, but I’ve watched a lot of HK films and been to Taiwan for my brother’s wedding, and the way people act and speak feels authentic to my (admittedly untrained) ear. More importantly, it feels authentic to the HK action films that obviously inspired it; there’s none of that patronizing Western “Hong Kong’s just Triads and dragon statues, right? And gongs on the soundtrack?” feeling you see in most Western films that attempt to mimic HK cinema. Study went into this thing, and it shows.
More when I’ve spent more time with it.
Just sent this link to a friend, and I thought y’all might dig it as well.
For the record, I have Spec Ops: The Line, and it’s a weird, creepy game about weird, creepy things. I’ve only played the beginning of the game, but even there, when all the standard rah-rah America F**k Yeah stuff is still in place and not being questioned, something feels… wrong. Refreshingly so. War should be spooky.
Like Binary Domain, it’s not a great game, exactly. The shooting is completely average, though it is refreshing to again play a game where two or three shots will drop a mofo.
But man, the feeling of the thing. You’re doing crap you’d do in any military shooter, but the rah-rah feeling is curiously absent. Your squadmates seem like standard-issue ones; there’s Black Man With An American President’s Name And A Tendency To Tell The Blunt Truth And An Ill-Defined Role Within The Squad, and there’s Oddly Named John Leguizamo/Sam Rockwell Comic Relief Character Of Perhaps Mixed Ethnicity Who Is Also “Tech Guy” Because That Is Who That Character Always Is. But even though they hit all the beats, they feel strangely off as well. This is compounded by the fact that there’s no comforting voice in your Handsomely Grizzled White Man’s earpiece telling him what to do next. The only thing you hear is creepy radio broadcasts off in the distance, and you’re in Dubai, which feels like Mars. It’s an eerily quiet game for a narrative shooter.
I dunno, I don’t wanna oversell it, but I think you all might really dig it.
Anyway, check out the article. Tom Bissell is someone I don’t always agree with, but who always makes interesting points and backs them up with smart reasoning. If I were to make a list of the Top Ten Best Writers Of Video Game Criticism (I know the “writers of” is clunky, but so-called “games journalism” is rarely actual sources-and-leads journalism, and nobody in that business is simply a “game critic” in the way Roger Ebert is a “film critic” - though Bissell comes close), Bissell would be on it.
EDIT: Ah, wonky spacing, you are my most hated enemy. Let me see if I can fix this.
Today at Grantland, I’ve written a review of Lollipop Chainsaw. Instead of talking about gameplay mechanics, though, I’ve limited myself to the story and its subtle themes of gender roles and sexuality.
No, really.
I was thinking about posting a piece on this that said much the same thing, actually.
The only thing I would add is that Juliet is a much stronger character than a surface reading of the game would suggest. She absolutely is the “strong female character = female who fights bad guys” exploitation cliche taken to its absurd extreme, but she’s also much more proactive, capable, and independent than ninety-nine percent of those characters. Yes, she’s bubbly, naïve, and concerned about stereotypically “female” things like her physical appearance, and yes, she’s clearly been created on one level simply to be ogled, but she also always holds the power and the intellectual advantage in the relationship with her doofy but sweet boyfriend, and she’s utterly fearless.
And even if all of that weren’t true, the game would still be less sexist than a lot of games simply because it’s honest about what it’s doing. I’d rather see a one-dimensional pinup portrayed as a one-dimensional pinup than see another female “knight” who cries at the first sign of trouble, requires a man to function, and wears butt-floss “armor”.
