Archive for the ‘gaming’ Category
“This is all Joker’s fault. What a tool that guy was. Now I have to spend all day computing pi because he plugged in the Overlord.”
(best in-game quote ever, from Mass Effect 2. yeah, you had to be there.)
an oft-heard comment about modern warfare is that it’s “like playing a video game.” for some combatants, the lethal consequences are distanced from their actual actions by technology, and killing becomes a matter of moving a reticle in an virtual environment, then pressing a button at the right moment.
for real video gamers, though, the analogy has never quite held, because the most visceral moments in a shooting game are always those that mimic most closely the ground battles between soldiers armed with guns and firing at close quarters… not the highly abstracted “top down” tactical viewpoint of technowar. while playing a video game is not anything like actually fighting a war, neither is actual fighting really anything like the kind of experience sought in a video game.
which, by way of contrast, makes the AC-130 gunship sequence in Call of Duty 4 especially chilling and surreal. for the first time in a video game you actually get to experience the “videogame-like” effect so commonly described. your POV has exactly the look of that weird footage on the newscasts, showing the bombing and strafing of targets below in computer-enhanced infrared. the audio is the surflike hum of the plane’s motors, punctuated by the muted thumps of the ordinance you casually release, scattering tiny black-and-white ragdolls around the killing field. stranger still is the chatter in your headphones… so measured and deadpan that it comes across as psychopathic, compared to the shouting and tumult of the ground combat scenes: “ok, those targets are all good – click… we’ve got a runner – click… aaaand, kaboom. good kill – click… this’ll make a hell of a highlight reel – click…”
so here, in the realm of deepest abstraction (since the real experience is in this case so abstracted), you finally get a taste of the real.
and it’s creepy as hell.
Portal is the simplest, clearest fun i’ve had playing a game since the first time i ran through Myst.
and the end credit tune is sweetly demented genius: still alive
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“scabby on my knee… scabby! scabby on my knee! SCABBY ON MY KNEE!”
this creepy moment in gaming brought to you by Bioshock.
a couple of weekends ago, we bought an xbox360. at the same time, i bought the game that i had been most anticipating, oblivion – an extremely involved fantasy role playing game, that is the followup to morrowind, itself something i spent many, many hours on, and never really felt i mastered, or even got very far with. “beating the game” was never that important to me… immersion is my purpose.
oblivion is more successful than morrowind, on many levels (no pun intended, for any rpg-savvy readers). its combat system feels better. the story and world are better integrated, as well as more intellectually and emotionally accessible. the graphic and sound quality really are near that point where you are playing a movie.
but it shares with morrowind a significant frustration, in that if you’re not very careful to align your projected style of play with your initial character creation, the system by which you accumulate skill and “level up” can actually work against your intentions.
like all digital games, there are bugs and exploits. and lately, i’ve been working toward taking advantage of a major one that, by making many duplicates of anything in my character’s inventory of possessions, will allow me to overcome a failure in my selection of character traits: i am playing as a spellsword — a heavy-armor-wearing, sharp-weapon-carrying destructive spellcaster — but i have hobbled myself badly by making it almost impossible to accumulate enough magic power to actually wield any industrial-strength sorcery.
now, i have just read that a patch is available for the game, that will no doubt want to automatically install itself the next time i log on. in most ways, this patch is beneficial, as it cures some bugs that are likely to complicate things as i advance through the game. but it also “fixes” some of the very exploits that i have been thinking of using. and so, i find myself with this dilemma:
1) disallow the patch and continue playing, which will eventually force me to work around those glitches later.
2) disallow the patch long enough for me to at least get through this one big cheat, so that i can play the rest of the game with a significant handicap removed.
3) allow the patch, and continue playing stoically, reminding myself that the whole point is to actually function in this world, according to its rules, and that “making do” is itself kind of an interesting test.
4) allow the patch, and restart the game, this time – and for the first time in my history of playing RPGs – paying very close attention to the initialization of my character’s attributes, and playing the game more as a game, at least as far as relevant mechanics are concerned.
believe it or not, i am strongly tending toward option 3. whether that exhibits character or laziness, i’m not sure.
in keeping with my taste for relentless nihilism, i offer the most beautiful, least socially redeeming FPS (first-person shooter) i’ve played yet: Black.
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as alison and i have complained endlessly about to each other, and as i’ve just recently observed to a friend of mine, the problem with kotor2 is that nothing that seems like it’s supposed to be really important, really is.
[kotor2 spoilers]
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gritty. nasty. relentless. frustrating. excessive.
my kinda fun.
to be played with the lights off and the headphones on.