Occupy Oakland Stages General Strike, Seems Pretty Effective.

It is my natural inclination to treat all protests as something that I’m far far too cool to bother with. Pish-tosh all these hippies pretending they’re changing the world. I’ll change the world right when I get around to it thank you very much.

But man, the Occupy protests have at the least changed the conversation, and sometimes they’re just straight-up impressive. Like when Oakland staged a General Strike yesterday and had a pretty impressive turnout.

Though the guy in the video, Cenk Uygur from the Young Turks, is occasionally silly. “We might see a Malcom X before a Martin Luther King”, as though Malcom X was fucking Magneto. I get his point about this being a protest that is fundamentally angry about the state of the world, but man do I hate that silly wink wink nod nod maybe we’re violent shit. The Tea Party did that almost to the exclusion of all other conversation, and it annoys me because it blocks out real discussion. “Oh we’re so angry we might… wellllll you know *wiiiiink*” followed by hurried denials that anyone meant anything by it because oh no no that would be uncouth and obviously we wouldn’t we just wanted to you know create the impression but it was a joke!

Just, if you’re going to light shit on fire say so and if you aren’t don’t use the hint that you may as a bargaining chip. It does nothing for you to play let’s pretend and it muddies the waters when you do want to calmly discuss policy changes.

But anyway that’s just this one talkative dude, the protest is pretty amazing to watch. I especially like the bit with the bank security guards cheering on the protesters.

Bastion is Great, Buy It After The Steam Sale Ends.

Bastion is such a danged excellent experience, I recommend you pay more than $7.50 for it. In fact, not only should wait until you have the opportunity to pay $15, you should send Supergiant games an extra $5 to thank them.

Briefly, Bastion is a beautifully rendered dungeon crawl/action-RPG. Less briefly, Bastion tells the story of a young man who wakes up to find the world has shattered around him in the night and sets out to put everything back together. He’s guided… well, you’re guided, by the voice of an old man telling the story of how he does it. The narrative conceit, added late in the development apparently, works amazingly well. You’re gently guided to the right paths, you get commentary on your actions that can be pithy or surprisingly touching. There are also some very well done bits where the old man can only tell you what he thinks may have happened, which is a nice way of turning the previously omniscient narrator into a portion of the story.

Bastion is a triumph of form over function. It’s a game type I’ve played dozens if not hundreds of times before. You walk, you smack, you gather, you build. But with an astoundingly deft touch, the writing and art direction manages to make you care so much more than you expect in a game like this. It comes, appropriately, in both big and little pieces. The beautiful painted landscapes that rise out of nothing to meet you as you run, the spare lines of text that hint at a society you wish you could have seen in full flower, the way the narrator seems ashamed of the fact that he needs to send a kid to do the dirty work, the distant music from a time you’re trying to bring back. All of these pieces of design lift what could have been a standard slogging kill-fest into something simultaeously melancholy and heartening.

This is one of the few games where the compulsion toward completionism that I tend to feel regardless carried some emotional weight. I wasn’t making sure I had all the upgrade structures, I was putting back the pieces of a shattered world so that a hard-working kid could finally rest. I wasn’t getting achievements, I was paying tribute to the people that would be forgotten without me. Its a game with few characters, but it makes you feel for all of them. Including the beasts you need to kill to make your way in the world. It’s not mawkish or sentimental, either. It just presents you with a situation that is unfortunate and too few options to fix it.

Through these touches Bastion achieves one of the best game narratives I’ve seen, using subtle strokes to tell a story bigger than the part you play in it.

The best recommendation I can give is that immediately upon finishing it, I wanted to wipe my memory and start again from the beginning. Hell, it’s got a newgame+, I may do just that.

Buy Bastion at Half Off!

Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle! Lots of Games! Super Frigging Cheap! Geeeet It!

So, hey. Humble goddamn BUNDLE. We all know what this means.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Buy this fucking thing. It’s $anything. It’s $anything. Don’t think about it, don’t hem and haw about how maybe you can’t afford any amount of money greater than or equal to $0.01.

At first, it was just a copy of Frozen Synapse (an excellent game, retailing for over $20 right now).

They then added a copy of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, 5 more games. NOW IT HAS SPACECHEM. Do you understand? SpaceChem. The World’s Best Puzzle Game.

GEEEET THIS. Goddamn it I’m starting to hate you just because I can tell you’re reading this sentence instead of getting it. I hate you so much you agh I hate you. Buy it.

Free! Free Game Today!

I don’t even know what to tell you, a cute little Roguelike with pretty graphics is free today for no discernible reason! Go here and check it out immediately!

It’s free so I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but here’s a trailer!

La Belle et le Petit Prince

Now, first of all, let me start this off by saying that I love Beauty and the Beast. It’s always been one of my favourite Disney movies, and is probably going to remain one for a good long time. The characters are lovely, the music (both songs and background variety) is amazing and vibrant, the Beast’s animation team and Robby Benson do an astounding job of making him a truly compelling character. I even like the annoying kid character, and they usually drive me nuts.

But.

Well, I was watching Paw’s review of it the other day, and that inspired me to watch the movie again for the first time in years, and I noticed something that’s just completely shaken my entire concept of the Disney classic. It happens early on, and so fortunately doesn’t require me to summarize the entire film in order to get there. For the benefit of those of you who either have managed to live your entire lives without seeing the movie or, more likely, just don’t remember the specifics of a movie you haven’t seen since you were kids, I’ll let Wikipedia cover the necessary basics:

An enchantress disguised as an old beggar woman offers a young prince a rose in exchange for a night’s shelter. When he turns her away, she punishes him by transforming him into an uglyBeast and turning his servants into furniture and other household items. She gives him a magic mirror that will enable him to view faraway events, and she gives him the rose, which will bloom until his twenty-first birthday. He must love and be loved in return before all the rose’s petals have fallen off, or he will remain a Beast forever.

Ten years later, a young, beautiful woman known as Belle comes along …

And the story continues, la la la. Poor inventor’s father gets in trouble, Belle rescues him, Stockholm Syndrome sets in and is in turn replaced by the afore-required true love. We have conflict, and pouffy gold dresses, and the Mob Song which remains one of my favourite Disney songs of all time, and we all go home happy.

There’s just one little problem, and it mostly has to do with math.

Addictiveness Will Kill Games

So hey! Gaming! Oh man, isn’t it cool how everyone basically plays games now? Even Grandma knows the Book of a Thousand Faces has some jingly-jangly things on it you can entertain yourself with. It’s like your hobby has “gone viral” or “mainstream” or “maybe now people will listen to my Starcraft stories”.

And it’s really a good thing. I’m a fan of it! It’s a form of entertainment with a lot to give and not enough people treated it seriously. If only 5% of the population watched films, we’d be poorer for it. So yes! Everyone should get their hands on a game and give it a shot. And, also, I’d love it if each and every game they tried playing weren’t a payload specifically designed to destroy their life and finances, finally leeching the calcium from their bones and rolling back, bloated with the life-force of what used to be a human being, to sinister men who make their beds in the acute angles of reality.

There is a focus, unambiguous and unashamed, on making games “addictive”. It’s used as metaphor, a buzzword because hahaha games aren’t a real drug wiiiiink get it we just mean make it like it’s a horrible destructive worthless thing designed to promote self-harm. And to an extent, that’s true. Chemical addiction hits harder and more often. But that doesn’t mean that non-physical addictions don’t exist. Ask someone who lost their kid’s college fund gambling if they felt fully cognizant at the time. The point is, as terribly fearmongering as “mom leaves kid in car to play WoW” and the like are, it’s fundamentally a bad thing to be focused more on exploiting customers via addiction than producing a fine product.

And that’s where we are. Zynga is a success. It’s not the devil, no. Their shitty facebook games aren’t hurting people. But then, they aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to exploit well-studied psychological triggers in order to transfer money from people to Zynga.

Other people have followed eagerly, including major established developers. The actual game has been identified as a barely-necessary middleman, something to be created in as spare a manner as possible, in order that people get hooked on the transference of money out of their pockets. Many modern game developers have stated implicitly that they would be delighted if they could simply avoid the messy business of actually crafting a game, and get on with tapping into the spines of unwary consumers. If “Dragon Age Legends” sold more copies than Dragon Age 2, you’d never see a full game from EA again.

Yes, it’s nice that people are playing games, and it’s nice that games are breaking into previously untapped demographics. Yay for a broader culture, maybe we’ll all learn something.

But for fucks sake, people playing Farmville shouldn’t be playing that when something like Anno 1404 is on the market. I know I know, it isn’t browser based, it’s not free, there’s a learning curve… all valid issues. But the thing is they shouldn’t be playing something more substantial in order to receive some sort of cultural cachet from me. They should be playing something more substantial because at least the people who created that tried to give them something. It’s not the difference between seeing Rashomon and seeing Transformers so much as it is the difference between seeing Rashomon and getting shanked in the ankle.

The people making these shit little money-sinks do not like you. Yes, you can still find their products fun. But that is an accident, one they hope to correct in the future.

God damn I hope no one paid $99 for that fucking Dragon Age Facebook game.

Here’s an interesting piece from an industry insider that spurred this post to a large extent. He does get a little bit wanky and verbose, so feel free to skip everything after the first page.

It’s Expensive to Live in Hollywood

So this is a piece of music I expected to hate: It’s a self-indulgent song about the place every musician thinks is interesting!

But, no it’s actually a pretty good bit of a thing, have a listen to it.

I am going to check out his other stuff. Won’t you?

Why Can’t Games Scare Us?

More silly than terrifying. Especially the 40th time.

Horror games are pretty tense right? You’re sprinting through the ruin pursued by Elder Things that are nipping at your heels  if the portal closes the world will be plunged into a dark only the Old Things survive, and they will sup on our souls for eternity! Super freaky.

Until…

Until you die. Or get stuck. The moment you hit “escape”, load a previous save, or are thrown back to a checkpoint. Even games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which recommend special care be taken to enjoy them in the proper spooky environment (lights dimmed, headphones, etc.) are palpably straining not to kill the player. Because the moment you die that atmospheric scramble through the ancient ruin becomes an exercise in getting from A to B.

Scary games have a unique advantage: interactivity. Other media has to collapse possibility into a single event quickly. The chase scene begins, and with each second it becomes more definite that this will not be the death of the protagonist. A game allows you to shoulder that burden and removes the feeling of certainty. Maybe this is how it ends.

Games also come with a unique disadvantage: gameplay. The fact is, there’s nothing inherently terrifying about interacting with a computer. No matter how effective the setting, you’re still interacting in an understandable, even comforting manner. Death loses the power to frighten when you consider something “a game”. You die dozens of times in Mario and manage to soldier on without wetting your pants. As a gamer, your inclination is to figure out what’s best and do it. Games, even bleak ones, still offer you this comforting goal. Kill the zombies, escape the city.

So how do we maximize the terror that comes from interactivity while minimizing the comfort factor? Focus less on scary settings and more on scary, unfamiliar gameplay elements. Failure needs to be more than a quick trip across the Styx. And yet, only a few games explore the idea of drawing terror out of gameplay.

The Void is a scary game not because of how difficult it is to survive, but because of how impossible it is to do right. What’s brilliant about Void  is instead of placing you in a comfortably deadly situation with simple goals, it threatens you with being unable to ever understand the world well enough to make things better. You watch as every decision you make ruins another corner of the world because you are simply unable to put a puzzle together correctly.

Eversion takes a different tack. The gameplay is simple sidescrolling. But it introduces slipping into different dimensions or “Everting” to solve puzzles. As you progress through the game, “Everting” takes you to more discomfiting places. It uses your drive to finish the game as a way of forcing you to open that creepy door to the basement, so to speak.

Games shouldn’t scare us by aping movies. They should scare us in ways that only they can, because they can do it better.

Hey. What’s Up With That Hawken Game?

Hawken! You know it, you love it you goddamnit you don’t remember a fucking thing about Hawken do you.

This is how it always is. I leave for a minute or two weeks and you start forgetting about the things that Matter. Things like an awesome independent developer Unreal Development Kit game that looks amazingly, almost rudely great. It’s a multiplayer-focused first person shooter that puts you in the seat of a giant man-shaped robot bristling with weaponry.

From what I’ve been able to gather from trailers and the website, it’s looking to be less of a stolid, engineering-focused MechWarrior, and more like something out of the Japanese quick-jumping mech variety, just from a first person perspective. Which is great! Because I loved the unfortunately named S.L.A.I for the PS2, a game to which Hawken is looking pretty intensely similar. Quick matches of simple but interesting mechs composed of a moderately varied pool of parts.

On display in the video are a few very neat weapon layouts, with the standard many-missles, one-missle, strong-gun, weak-fast-gun, and so on. It also shows what looks like a call-in/kill-streak mechanic of some sort, with a massive flying fortress dropping some pain on a few players. If you’ve got a quick eye, you may notice the “cloak” mechanic, when the video’s protagonist shuts down all inessential systems and drops off the map in order to confuse another player as well as avoid some heat-seeking missiles.

So far, almost nothing is know about this game except that they are using dark rituals to make fucking amazing environment detail with nothing but two people working on the game. Check out the video and begin salivating procedures!

You Can Ask Captain America Stuff

Good news! You can ask the Sentinel of Liberty about just any dang thing you please!

But really, mostly you can make the same tired fucking gay jokes the internet loves to make about everything. Hahaha [fictional character] and [fictional character] getting together would be soooo cute hahaha gay people woah.

Anyways! That shouldn’t detract that the artist is amazing and the pictures tend to be pretty witty while maintaining the character fiction. Really, I’m amazed there aren’t official Marvel/DC things like this.