Skeptical Cat was very skeptical about dictating anymore posts for this website. Some say people who put words on the Interwebz have lots of money, but like Skeptical Cat’s Dad always used to say “Money don’t put mice on the table, mice put mice on the table!”
Then Skeptical Cat heard that this was about a new Resident Evil film and that there would be catnip and decided posting was a noble cause.
Despite repeated attempts to lighten my workload and appease attention deficit, I’ve never successfully produced a one sentence review. If I had, I believe Hudson’s horror Wii title, Calling would earn “the not-so-bad game that should have been great but was likely going to be so-so and finally ends up dipping more toward terrible with a fleeting few sparks of creativity worth noting.”
After a short and lagging introduction about a website where people can speak with the dead, known as “the Black Page”, Calling drops players into a darkened room with a first person perspective and plenty of space for optimism about the experience to follow. That first-person Wii perspective is the most ideal setup for a horror game to date, the player forced to sit with more attention and focus than usual while aiming the WiiMote, ripe for the attacks of designers suddenly in possession of a more captive audience.
That controller determined position also forces the idea that playing horror is very different from simply watching it, with the player no longer a passive observer of another person’s misfortunes, challenged to push themselves forward even while knowing the game is out to get them as they move ahead.
When Skeptical Cat woke to check his email and learned about Gmail’s vowel shortage, he decided to go back to bed and play videogames all day. But Skeptical Cat does want to give a paw to a few of his favorite stories from the day.
Skeptical Cat declares Ecco: Water Wars 2 the greatest expansion of a Sega franchise since Sonic R.
Skeptical Cat is pleased and purring to see that a year’s worth of work and excessive amounts of cash have resulted in the most stunning and stylish version of 4ColorRebellion to date.
Skeptical Cat believes that Koticku is actually a really smart investment over Activision’s previous strategy of buying Editor’s from smaller sites all year round.
Skeptical Cat is surprised that Aksys Games would try to announce actual news today, but still thinks $49.99 for an LE Deathsmiles set is sweet – though he still wants an arcade stick.
Skeptical Cat feels that Alan Wake Wars is funny in theory…
Skeptical Cat would pay to see IGN’s Halo movie, but would still not read IGN for free.
Skeptical Cat would pay much more to see onemoreuser’s Law Abiding Engineer.
Skeptical Cat thanks Google’s latest translator for making this post possible.
When Muramasa released last year, I understood why some criticized the game for not offering more to collect, find, and simply “do” while running through the crafted backdrops Vanillaware paints with a level of detail and skill worthy of history’s artistic masters. I didn’t agree with any of those people, but I grasped the complaints of those that weren’t drawn into the real depth of that living-breathing world just beneath the digital brush strokes of painted splendor those same people saw as the game’s central draw.
When it comes to Fragile, I can already hear a similar chorus not so thoroughly impressed with the way the furnishings of the apocalypse are offered on the Wii. Part of me enjoys a ruined world full of junk to collect and strange personalities to catalog – the world of Fallout does make for good stories from the road.
And yet, Fragile is carving a path that allows me to justifiably use the word unique for once, exploring a neglected aspect attached to the end of civilization – the immense and chilling isolation that leaves stray animals to inherit the earth.
It seems I missed a lazy Sunday post or two. I’m half certain that isn’t a very big deal because I don’t know why anyone would read them, but rather than self-loathing over that fact, the absence owes simply to the fact that we’ve happened to be busy with weekend events this month.
Luckily I found time to scowl at a few things while drinking my coffee this morning, and we can now return to our regularly scheduled programming – wherein my first question of the day is “What’s the deal with Vanquish?”
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d like to think a screenshot could merit at least half that many – but when it comes to images for Vanquish lately, I’ve tried my best and only come up with seven.
I really, really want to believe that this isn’t a generic “me too cause we can do it better but probably won’t” kinda thing – I’ll be sincerely shocked if that’s what releases in the end, but Platinum, you gotta give me more to work with here.
And yet there are games of more immediate concern.
That damn Michael Tucker has derailed my entire day by posting a link to that very fine read, Less Talk, More Rock. I’ve read it eight times now while consuming coffee and having a short twitter back-and-forth with @the1console about it.
At this point I’ve emerged with a few thoughts, aside from a small bout of jealously over not having written it myself.
So let’s talk about the role of words and language within videogames, because that’s what reading the post so many times got me thinking about. And before I start, I’ll stress that I don’t feel the article implies that designers should abandon language within gaming, it simply got me thinking about the way language has been treated within gaming – which to date is very poorly and owing almost entirely to the way the industry has treated language as a tool rather than an additional artistic form of expression.
Superbrothers on the language of videogames:
A project starts with an idea, a vision, something that is hard to define, something kind of magic and amazing. This is step 1. This is gold. This is beautiful. You can’t yet see the details, but you have a sense for thing you want to make, and hopefully you’re swept away by it.
Usually in the creative process, the next step — step 2 — is to think about the project intellectually, to talk about it, to look at it from various angles, to plan it out, maybe to second guess it or to problem solve it, maybe reconsider it a bit. This is the talk.
The next step, step 3, is to actually make this thing, to get down to it. This is the rock. And we like to think that the process goes from 1 to 2 to 3.
This, they say, is not how things always are, thus sometimes you must rock before talking.
via: Drawn!
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