Seeing Wolf Gnards ask (but fail to answer) the question as to how long Bill Murray spends trapped in Groundhog Day, I was reminded how great this film is. Regardless of whether you watch it for the quality of Bill Murray's performance, or to remind yourself how punchable Andy MacDowell's face is, or even for the implied buddhist allegory, there can be no disputing that it is a work of genius.
In other "what I saw online this week" news, take a look at the Fat Princess game soon to be released on the PS3. Seems very promising- I hope they pull it off.
Search This Blog
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Monday, 15 June 2009
What I Saw on the net this Week - Part 2
I have a feeling this will become one of those "regular" features that doesn't make it past its second outing, but for the moment I'm putting a brave face on things and saying that these links from the past week are worth taking a little time to look at:
For sale: Secret network of tunnels 100ft under London - If I was a multi-millionaire, I'd say it was cheap at twice the price (which may help explain why I'm not already a multi-millionaire). You'll notice from the date of the article that this is far from breaking news, but as far as I can make out from the old Google-o-matic, no buyer has yet been announced. Anyone want to lend me some money?
Lucid Dreams - My fascination with this Wikipedia article probably has a lot to do with having just watched the surprisingly excellent Waking Life, which you should rush off and watch now if you haven't already. Does anyone want to help me become an omnipotent God in my dreams?
Little Wheel - The most beautiful Flash game yet? Make sure your speakers are turned on if you don't want to miss the brilliant Lounge Jazz, which along with the art-style, plays such a huge part in making it the little wonder that it is. But can anyone say they finished it without help from the built-in walkthrough?
For sale: Secret network of tunnels 100ft under London - If I was a multi-millionaire, I'd say it was cheap at twice the price (which may help explain why I'm not already a multi-millionaire). You'll notice from the date of the article that this is far from breaking news, but as far as I can make out from the old Google-o-matic, no buyer has yet been announced. Anyone want to lend me some money?
Lucid Dreams - My fascination with this Wikipedia article probably has a lot to do with having just watched the surprisingly excellent Waking Life, which you should rush off and watch now if you haven't already. Does anyone want to help me become an omnipotent God in my dreams?
Little Wheel - The most beautiful Flash game yet? Make sure your speakers are turned on if you don't want to miss the brilliant Lounge Jazz, which along with the art-style, plays such a huge part in making it the little wonder that it is. But can anyone say they finished it without help from the built-in walkthrough?
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Metal Gear Solid - The 9th Best Game Ever Made
Before Metal Gear Solid, the idea that videogames should imitate films had been totally discredited. “Interactive movies” had been tried in the early 90s on the 3DO, Jaguar and PC, but nearly all had been commercial and critical failures (the 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria being notable exceptions). They were supposed to combine the best narrative elements of film with the dynamism of videogames, but in fact only brought together sub-B-movie actors with horribly frustrating and limited “gameplay”.
After publishers got bored of throwing good money after bad, “Full Motion Video” or FMV sequences were used sparingly, simply book-ending the sections where the player had more control. So in the likes of Resident Evil, Command & Conquer and Final Fantasy VII, you’d get a quick slice of completely non-interactive film or animation to rapidly advance the plot, between much longer sections where you’d be playing the game. It worked well enough for all those (hugely popular and critically acclaimed) games, but there was nonetheless a jarring disconnect between the plot and game segments. Watching the story unfold would often serve only to make the player think about the game they could be playing if it weren’t for constraints on processing and graphics capabilities, and it would feel disappointing to return to controlling a jerkily animated and less powerful version of the character you’d just seen acting far more smoothly and realistically in high-end 3D graphics.
Hideo Kojima, the director of Metal Gear Solid, was among the first to realise that plot exposition could be done better within a game engine. He saw that he could quickly and easily experiment with camera positions in a way that would make a director of even the highest-budget Hollywood film envious; and this was crucial for the story he wanted to tell (in which players would at times be asked to sit and listen to characters with names like “Revolver Ocelot” talk about the difficulties they had in childhood). Playing Metal Gear Solid today, it still strikes you how well the non-playable action sequences are put together, the quick cutting and unusual camera angles helping to maintain interest in an often ludicrous plot. This simply wouldn’t have been possible in the glossy but inflexible medium of FMV.
So good, they made it twice
Yet there are many who’ll be reluctant to celebrate the way Metal Gear Solid blazed a trail for narrative-heavy games. There’ll be nearly as many who think it’s preposterous for a game steeped in paranoid conspiracy theories and adolescent fantasies to demand the patience from its players to watch cut-scenes that frequently last over twenty minutes. And there will be still others who think that Kojima is a pretentious idiot, a man inflicting scarcely interactive games on the world because he never realised his true dream of becoming a director in the film industry. Yet those who think this way lose sight of how pioneering his first Playstation game was, not just in the way it told its story, but crucially, in the way it asked you to play.
MGS genuinely provided the “Tactical Stealth Espionage Action” it promised on the box, and on consoles at least, no-one had seen anything like it (err, at least not since the first Metal Gear games on the NES -Ed). The idea that it was to better to sneak around a difficult situation than to rush into it head-first would have been dismissed as boring by most developers, who had overlooked the potential to create tension and suspense from asking players to avoid conflict. Yet the slower paced, risk-assessment play was often more thrilling than a thousand polygonal explosions, and who doesn’t fondly remember hiding in a cardboard box, hoping and praying that this time the guards wouldn’t stop to ask, “huh?! Who put that there?”
And hiding in boxes was just the beginning of the left-field thinking. “I can read your mind! I KNOW you like soccer!” Psycho Mantis would tell you, when he discovered your ISS Pro 98 save game on your memory card. He’d then infuriatingly read your every move while you tried to defeat him- using his “psychic powers” to counter each button press at the moment it was made. Then after he pounded away at you and you were moments from death, a member of your support team would call and say, “Snake! I got it! Plug your controller into the player 2 port! It’s the only way you’ll be able to circumvent his mind control!”
This brings us to the paragraph where I should probably write about Metal Gear Solid as the pinnacle of post-modernism, except I don’t particularly want to get bogged down in that. Tim Rogers has already written enough on the subject to satisfy even the most pretentious of wannabe videogame academics, and in truth, he’s done it better than I ever could. Yet regardless of whether applying artistic terminology to games turns you on or off, there’s no denying that Metal Gear Solid used unusual techniques to blur the line between the player and the game in a way that hadn’t been done before, and set an agenda that the likes of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and even Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts would later build upon with great success.
Yet the art-house interpretation is really just a distraction, a shiny looking cherry atop of what it is that truly makes MGS great: the ride it takes you on. You don’t sit back pontificating over whether or not they just “broke the fourth wall” as you play it; you hang onto the edge of your seat, bouncing up and down with anticipation to find out what will happen next to Snake and his cohort of treacherous companions. Like a DVD boxset of 24, it begs you to consume it in as few sittings as possible, and there can be little doubt that thousands upon thousands of people must have been lured into rushing through it in one glorious indulgent weekend. Yes, the videogame world we now live in has become saturated with games that have dull stories and tedious “stealth gameplay”; but don't allow Metal Gear's legacy to impede your judgement of the game. This is Kojima's masterpiece, one which he himself hasn't been able to match since, and no game since has been able to grip so strongly and consistently from start to finish.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
What I saw on the net this week
I told you I wanted to be like Kieron Gillen- so now I'm ripping off his Sunday round up on Rock Paper Shotgun wholesale. And who knows? At this rate, I might start managing more than four updates each month.
Why Project Natal will do for pop what Rock Band did for 'proper music' - Pop Justice getting excited about an E3 announcement? Things have changed a lot in the past two years.
Valve On L4D2: “Trust Us A Little Bit” - Doug Lombardi tries to calm down the sensitive Valve fans who ran for their pitchforks the moment they heard Left 4 Dead 2 would be coming out only a year after the original.
Top 10 Worst Fanboys - Everyone loves a list, don't they? The writing on Old Wizard is maybe a little clunky and unpolished (look who's talking! - Ed) and its writers aren't as funny as they think they are, but there are some decent observations to be found among the hit-and-miss humour.
Google Wave: A Complete Guide - I'm still not quite sure what it will all mean, but seems like it'll be big. And to think I've only just got my head around Twitter...
Gender Benders: Who's Really Who? - An old Stuart Campbell article from Total PC Gaming, talking about sex and videogame taxonomy. Sort of. Reminds me I really should cough up the £2/month subscription fee for full access to the rest of his website.
Why Project Natal will do for pop what Rock Band did for 'proper music' - Pop Justice getting excited about an E3 announcement? Things have changed a lot in the past two years.
Valve On L4D2: “Trust Us A Little Bit” - Doug Lombardi tries to calm down the sensitive Valve fans who ran for their pitchforks the moment they heard Left 4 Dead 2 would be coming out only a year after the original.
Top 10 Worst Fanboys - Everyone loves a list, don't they? The writing on Old Wizard is maybe a little clunky and unpolished (look who's talking! - Ed) and its writers aren't as funny as they think they are, but there are some decent observations to be found among the hit-and-miss humour.
Google Wave: A Complete Guide - I'm still not quite sure what it will all mean, but seems like it'll be big. And to think I've only just got my head around Twitter...
Gender Benders: Who's Really Who? - An old Stuart Campbell article from Total PC Gaming, talking about sex and videogame taxonomy. Sort of. Reminds me I really should cough up the £2/month subscription fee for full access to the rest of his website.
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Project Natal
Wow! Project Natal. It's incredibly exciting. It's like looking into the future. It's like Tom Cruise waving his hands about on the Star Trek holodeck while munching on virtual candy floss he stole from a Tamagotchi baby.
Yeah, I don't know what that means either, but here's the promotional video in case you missed it:
The most important part of that trailer is right at the start, where it says "product vision: actual features and functionality may vary". In other words, it's a load of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. And aside from the technological difficulties, I don't imagine Microsoft encouraging young kids to try karate kicks in their living rooms after the trouble Nintendo had with just their wrist straps.
Far more interesting is the feedback coming from those journalists who actually managed to try out the technology. Giving Time magazine the exclusive first look at the Wii did wonders for Nintendo, so it was no great surprise to see Microsoft pulling exactly the same trick. They will undoubtedly be pleased with the write-up, and even just the headline "Microsoft Whacks the Wii" must have put a big smile on Bill Gates' face.
The specialist press seem equally impressed. Here's the mostly trustworthy Ellie Gibson, giving Microsoft some quotes they'll love while writing for Eurogamer:
"There's no denying this technology works."
"Even an ancient game seems new and fresh when you graph Project Natal on top."
"In fact, I don't realise quite how much I'm getting into it until I hear [a Microsoft employee] warning a bloke behind me to stand back."
Now, perhaps it's because I've been playing too much Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games recently, but the whole throwing myself around to play a game thing isn't the part of Project Natal that gets my juices flowing. For me, Peter Molyneux's prototype character Milo is the most intriguing thing of all, even if poor old Pete sounds even more deranged than usual while introducing it:
Now, Peter Molyneux is the king of the over-statement, and you'd have to be very naive not to realise that a lot of that conversation was scripted. Yet Milo talked to a load of journalists too, and while he wasn't so good at answering questions, his ability to read the emotional intonations of someone speaking, intentionally make and lose eye contact, and repeat back a name he's just been told in his own voice is impressive. You might worry what kind of creepy world we'll be living in when people are making friends with their xbox, but as forums all over the videogame world were quick to realise, at the very least this could be an exciting new era for pornography.
Yeah, I don't know what that means either, but here's the promotional video in case you missed it:
The most important part of that trailer is right at the start, where it says "product vision: actual features and functionality may vary". In other words, it's a load of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. And aside from the technological difficulties, I don't imagine Microsoft encouraging young kids to try karate kicks in their living rooms after the trouble Nintendo had with just their wrist straps.
Far more interesting is the feedback coming from those journalists who actually managed to try out the technology. Giving Time magazine the exclusive first look at the Wii did wonders for Nintendo, so it was no great surprise to see Microsoft pulling exactly the same trick. They will undoubtedly be pleased with the write-up, and even just the headline "Microsoft Whacks the Wii" must have put a big smile on Bill Gates' face.
The specialist press seem equally impressed. Here's the mostly trustworthy Ellie Gibson, giving Microsoft some quotes they'll love while writing for Eurogamer:
"There's no denying this technology works."
"Even an ancient game seems new and fresh when you graph Project Natal on top."
"In fact, I don't realise quite how much I'm getting into it until I hear [a Microsoft employee] warning a bloke behind me to stand back."
Now, perhaps it's because I've been playing too much Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games recently, but the whole throwing myself around to play a game thing isn't the part of Project Natal that gets my juices flowing. For me, Peter Molyneux's prototype character Milo is the most intriguing thing of all, even if poor old Pete sounds even more deranged than usual while introducing it:
Now, Peter Molyneux is the king of the over-statement, and you'd have to be very naive not to realise that a lot of that conversation was scripted. Yet Milo talked to a load of journalists too, and while he wasn't so good at answering questions, his ability to read the emotional intonations of someone speaking, intentionally make and lose eye contact, and repeat back a name he's just been told in his own voice is impressive. You might worry what kind of creepy world we'll be living in when people are making friends with their xbox, but as forums all over the videogame world were quick to realise, at the very least this could be an exciting new era for pornography.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)