From Tikkun Kelim: ( http://s3nt.com/b24 )Sometimes I wonder how everyone can speak so easily on these online spaces. I feel tremendous weight with every word as though my life depends upon revealing and not revealing just the right things. Like peering into palantir and having to brush past some flaming disembodied eyeball that feels like an angry old woman giving you the evil eye, but 1000 times more potent.
"No. That's perfectly normal paranoia. Everybody in the universe gets that."
- Slartibartfast
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
If
From Tikkun Kelim: ( http://s3nt.com/b24 )If there were such a thing as magic, and one had, for whatever reason, decided to do "evil" magic, I think the best way to go about it would probably be to convince people that any resistance they faced (as a result of the aforementioned Dr. Fu Manchu) was a test from their (insert higher power/self/pantheon) and that it was their duty to (be stoic in the face of said event/learn from it/et cetera) instead of actually learning to use magic to respond.
Monday, June 16, 2008
MGS 4
Even having never played this particular franchise, I was pretty impressed. Admittedly, I played on easy, and often would get through a round of frantic hiding and sneaking, only to find myself feeling stuck and unsure right before the level end where there was no conflict. The constant sense of awareness and the need to be alert to everything in your environment is palpable in a way I've not experienced in other games, and I really enjoyed the nuances of crawling, sniping, using tranquilizer darts and figuring out the right weapon for the right situation.
The octo-camo allows you to adjust your camoflauge automatically based on immediate conditions. Your camo rating affects how likely you are to be seen, and seems to have links to your stress levels as well. There are three primary stats, Health, Psyche and Stress (which shows up on the battlefield). Health works in the standard way, but Psyche is different and somewhat interesting. Psyche measures your will, in a sense, and it even comes into play during cut scenes. When Snake is told bad news, his Psyche meter will often drop by a quarter during the cut scene. When you realize that losing all of your Psyche can end your game also, it provides an approximation of the drop in the pit of your stomach that you or I might feel when hearing bad news. Stress is there to enforce the "stealth" aspect of the game, as it goes up continuously during prolonged battles. There are ways to reduce stress, such as a Playboy magazine, a psychologist who will talk to you via your codec, and an iPod for listening to soothing music, but none of them are effective enough to make it easy to just "run and gun" this game.
One of the primary things that I enjoyed was the fact that the cut-scenes would often blend directly into an action sequence - with the life meters and other indicators popping up on the screen as your turn to act came up. The movies that were interspersed with the rendered cutscenes were also a nice touch - very surreal and worthy of the subject matter. The storylines of the main characters were exquisite, providing an excellent conclusion to an epic saga. Specifically the back-stories for the four boss characters were pretty lame though, which baffles me, because they could have just as easily left the back-stories out altogether. Just as a note, if you don't like intricate stories and cut scenes, you probably won't like this game. There's enough gameplay that you could probably pretend that it's a generic third-person shooter and just skip the story, then move to the online portion, but it seems like a waste to me.
Technologically speaking, this game had gorgeous graphics, and tight mechanics. I didn't see a hiccup during the whole game. One factor that I haven't seen mentioned a lot that really helped immerse me in the game's story was the ability to listen to the codec messages that are sent during gameplay into a bluetooth headset. While the cut-scene codec messages are still on-screen, it's during gameplay that I want the immersion factor to be high, and this really helped with that.
Overall, I'd say this is one of the first video game storylines that has engaged me in this way since Final Fantasy X. I was shocked to find a story that interested me this much outside of my typical RPG genre, but the surprise was not unwelcome. I have now added it to the list of franchises and gameplay styles that I am willing to play.
The octo-camo allows you to adjust your camoflauge automatically based on immediate conditions. Your camo rating affects how likely you are to be seen, and seems to have links to your stress levels as well. There are three primary stats, Health, Psyche and Stress (which shows up on the battlefield). Health works in the standard way, but Psyche is different and somewhat interesting. Psyche measures your will, in a sense, and it even comes into play during cut scenes. When Snake is told bad news, his Psyche meter will often drop by a quarter during the cut scene. When you realize that losing all of your Psyche can end your game also, it provides an approximation of the drop in the pit of your stomach that you or I might feel when hearing bad news. Stress is there to enforce the "stealth" aspect of the game, as it goes up continuously during prolonged battles. There are ways to reduce stress, such as a Playboy magazine, a psychologist who will talk to you via your codec, and an iPod for listening to soothing music, but none of them are effective enough to make it easy to just "run and gun" this game.
One of the primary things that I enjoyed was the fact that the cut-scenes would often blend directly into an action sequence - with the life meters and other indicators popping up on the screen as your turn to act came up. The movies that were interspersed with the rendered cutscenes were also a nice touch - very surreal and worthy of the subject matter. The storylines of the main characters were exquisite, providing an excellent conclusion to an epic saga. Specifically the back-stories for the four boss characters were pretty lame though, which baffles me, because they could have just as easily left the back-stories out altogether. Just as a note, if you don't like intricate stories and cut scenes, you probably won't like this game. There's enough gameplay that you could probably pretend that it's a generic third-person shooter and just skip the story, then move to the online portion, but it seems like a waste to me.
Technologically speaking, this game had gorgeous graphics, and tight mechanics. I didn't see a hiccup during the whole game. One factor that I haven't seen mentioned a lot that really helped immerse me in the game's story was the ability to listen to the codec messages that are sent during gameplay into a bluetooth headset. While the cut-scene codec messages are still on-screen, it's during gameplay that I want the immersion factor to be high, and this really helped with that.
Overall, I'd say this is one of the first video game storylines that has engaged me in this way since Final Fantasy X. I was shocked to find a story that interested me this much outside of my typical RPG genre, but the surprise was not unwelcome. I have now added it to the list of franchises and gameplay styles that I am willing to play.
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