The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.
Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.
“We’re dealing with archaic industries that were built around the impossibility of that which is now possible. Their time is up, and they know it. But they are so massive, so enormously powerful, that they are going to do everything imaginable to defend their fortunes. And that’s why we have SOPA and PIPA. They know it won’t beat piracy, because it’s immediately obvious to anyone with half a clue that it cannot. But it will give them terrible control of the internet, that all history shows they will abuse to the most ludicrous degree. It will give them terrible control of the internet, which is presently the thing that terrifies them more than anything else: free.
“The most insane thing is, they don’t quite know what for. They just know that it’s the means by which their business models are rendered pointless, and they know they currently can’t control it.”
— John Walker, Why People Are Still Failing to Accept the True Horror of SOPA/PIPA
When I had killed as many enemies by kicking with my boot as by shooting, I started to question the name of this game. Its points-for-combos approach to combat and emphasis on using environmental hazards is fresh and exciting, but the story it has to tell follows Epic’s trademark bro-gamer recipe, with a sprinkling of comedy—sadly not self-aware enough to be parody. However, I give it points for its lush, colourful (if post-apocalyptic) setting.
Many dungeon designs have the player entering the dungeon, travelling deeper and deeper into it while facing foes and/or traps of increasing difficulty, culminating in a climactic encounter, often a boss or mini boss.
That’s fine: these are chieftains, or guardians of great treasures, or whatnot, so naturally they’d surround themselves with minions for their own defence.
No, what bothers me is what all too often comes next: a convenient doorway that leads directly out of this deepest hold of the dungeon and back to the outside world. Even more irritating is when this exit has you emerging right beneath the entrance.
Brad Gallaway, in his post Fifteen Hours With Skyrim described this happening in Skyrim:
Almost every dungeon I’ve been to roughly follows the same “underground narrow hallways with some larger rooms” blueprint, and each final chamber has a very convenient shortcut door back to the surface.
I’ve not played Skyrim yet, but I’ve noticed this pattern occurring a lot in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and to some extent also in Zelda games and the like.
Here’s why it irritates. Imagine, if you will, a narrator, telling the tale of this hero (my avatar) and his quest into the dungeon:
“The hero Ulfang dares to enter the Cave of Unfirthaur. For days he slays many goblins in the Upper Chambers; he defeats the three Guardian Trolls in the Middle Halls; and finally, a week after entering, he penetrates to the deep Underfortress, where he vanquishes the great Gnarr himself, and takes his prized jewels.”
The narrator takes a sip of water to moisten his throat, and continues.
“Ulfang now spends another week retracing—”
He looks up at me. “You look a little impatient. Tell you what, why don’t we skip ahead to when Ulfang gets back outside. I’ll just pretend that there was a little express elevator here that takes him back to the surface in just a few minutes.”
“Don’t!” I plead. “It doesn’t fit. You can’t break the rules of the world just for me. It isn’t my world—it’s Ulfang’s world, and Gnarr’s. And if Gnarr has a fortress seven miles deep, then by The Dribbling Goddess, Ulfang should have to walk back out the same way he came in!” But it is too late. The narrator has already changed the story.
My complaint isn’t about realism, but verisimilitude. In a moment, the game world has broken the fourth wall and is now acknowledging me, the player directly, instead of my avatar. It’s a disconcerting discontinuity, like the pop and skipping of a scratched track on a CD.
In Call of Pripyat, there are areas of odd chemical, electrical, fire, or gravitational behaviour (and usually high radiation also); these are called anomalies. For the most part these are merely incidental obstacles in your way, but from time to time objects called “artifacts” appear in them.
These artifacts are highly valuable to sell, but if you carry them they also provide protective ability, mostly against the hazards of the anomalies. So they are well worth the time to carefully explore the anomaly fields (throwing bolts to identify where the anomalies lie and where is safe to walk) to find them.
In the parlance of the game (something it borrows from the book Roadside Picnic which inspires it), “stalker” is the name given to the people who wander the zone, hunting for artifacts. It contrasts with the military or paramilitary factions and bandits who are also there; unlike those groups, stalkers usually travel alone.
The game itself has a very rich AI system: animals hunt, feed, and sleep; and defend their territory against intrusion from humans. But there are also many NPCs from all factions that are AI-controlled. The military go on patrols, the stalkers explore the anomalies hunting for artifacts, and the bandits look for lone stalkers to steal from.
All of this contributes greatly to the feel of the zone as a living place.
I wrote about my experience in Call of Pripyat when I first played it on release in February 2010.
“The bottom half of the Internet” is an interesting phrase, especially when it is accompanied (as it so often is) by an admonishment to shun it. The phrase refers to user commentary on websites, and is an implicit declaration of superiority—we are the people you should listen to, not those filthy commenters down there. How could they possibly have anything worthwhile to say?
The self-applauding sentiment inherent to the phrase seems so obviously deserving of derision that I’m surprised it needs pointing out; but it seems many deploying the phrase have their heads so far up their own intestinal tracts that they’ve become accustomed to the smell of their own shit. If only they would pull their heads out, they might find that there is a fertile field of others’ shit out there too. (I fear I was carried away by a turn of phrase and have taken this metaphor a little too far.)
Well, let us leave the sewerage department for the moment. These would-be aristocrats of the Internet make another mistake: they attempt to justify their commentatist polemic with attempted rational argument. They start with broad generalisations, that comments are useless reactions, not considered argument. They use ludicrous examples (I found a wonderful specimen just the other day: “When Leonardo da Vinci painted the ‘Mona Lisa’, after all, he didn’t leave a blank bit at the bottom”). And they finally shore up that rickety structure by dusting off the long-discredited anonymity argument.
Of course, I don’t at all mean to defend the deluge of thoughtless wittering that occurs wherever people communicate—whether in neckties around a punch-bowl, or beneath an entertaining YouTube video, or even in the blog posts of all those well-educated, literate twats—and I doubt even the authors of most comments would consider their efforts worthy of permanent preservation; but if the Internet is good at anything, it is perpetuating all that happens on it. The horde of reaction-seeking trolls deduced this long ago, and use it to their advantage when leaving useless, provocative comments. But the subtlest dress up in the suits and ties of the commentatists, and post as one of them.
(Comments are closed for this article)
I shift into a random vehicle, a red sports car of some kind. I’m interrupting a conversation: the girlfriend of the driver I’m possessing is declaring that nothing in the city scares her. I take that as a personal challenge.
I hit the accelerator and touch the handbrake, drifting the car sideways down the winding road. She yawns exaggeratedly. I swerve into oncoming traffic, barely missing a large truck. That doesn’t even merit a response. I have to step up my game.
I see a car transporter truck ahead, with its ramp down. Floor it, shove in a boost to reach 150 miles an hour, and take the ramp at an angle for a high corkscrew. The car is flying through the air, upside-down, and she says one word:
“Lame.”
I laugh aloud.
This game has a truckload of incidental dialogue. I’ve psychically commandeered hundreds of cars while playing it, and although not every car has a passenger (and hence dialogue), a good many do. I’ve heard dozens of these short conversations, and not run into any duplicates yet. And each has more lines of unique dialogue as you drive recklessly, get chased by the cops, lose the cops, or just obliterate your car against a wall. The scenarios are diverse and creative:
Two gangsters in a stolen car, desperate to avoid police attention.
An octogenarian woman, whose suddenly reckless driving frightens her daughter in the passenger seat.
A blind passenger who thinks a demon has just possessed the driver.
While in a high-speed pursuit, a cop reveals to her partner that she is transsexual.
Keep in mind that these are all incidental: they form part of no mission, but occur as you shift into random cars. The creativity and humour in the writing added greatly to my enjoyment of the game.
Via @brainpickings:
I’m amazed that I can watch video from 1901 on YouTube. That’s one hundred and ten years old!
Oh look, it’s erotic in nature. Well, it’s meant to be titillating at least. Undergarments in 1901 were rather more substantial than many complete outfits these days.
You have to sit through a copyright notice at the start of the video. Worse: a copyright and patent notice.
“Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn’t a story medium, they should go write books or make films. Many artists think that games are about attention to graphical details and in extension to proving how ambitious they are. They should go make art. No, games are about mechanics, they are about feedback, and that is something that programmers provide.”
I want a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus. You are a pilgrim riding a grey horse, and you travel to the site where each colossus in turn. You gaze in awe at their majestic bones merging into the Earth, and you remember. That’s all.