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The Bard
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Posts posted by The Bard
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The most unexpected thing ever is that Ground Zeroes is actually really fucking good, it's making me very excited for Phantom Pain. If only that hack Sutherland wasn't in it. What's even his pedigree? 24, which is one of the worst shows I've ever seen. It's actually kind of making me hate the character because every time he opens his mouth, I hear Sutherland's dickthroat voice.
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Was wondering why you weren't saying anything. Should have just invited me to party chat.
Not sure why it wasn't working though, I was chatting with Map just fine.
Were you and Map partied up? Been trying to abuse my fireteam today as well but nobody can hear anything.
I like this game. Feels like Borderlands but the shooting feels better. The versus multiplayer is kind of shit though.
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Am I missing something or is there actually no proximity voice chat in the game? Been yelling at @Daft for like half an hour.
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I'll be playing this in a bit, it's taking forever to download. Are any of you going to be on in about half an hour?
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Hmmmm Ok...I personally still think a nicer way to put it would have been to mention what you mean...taken on it's own that sentence does the situation a disservice. It's disingenuous to just make such a statement to my mind. It clearly took a huge toll on all of them, personally still enjoyed the Bombcast and now they have new staff it's certainly different but still a fun listen.
Dude, he was just some guy from halfway across the world that I didn't know personally. Forgive me for not being too emotionally moved by him dying. I think it's weird you're reading active disrespect into a slightly flippant comment, and also find it weird that you're defending some sort of right to have his death represented in a way that would be more fitting for a friend or someone you know personally. Did you go on forums and complain about people being irreverent when Michael Jackson or Nelson Mandella died?
The point of the post was that the Bombcast didn't have the same energy as it did before, so I stopped listening.
Also I don't understand how you can stand listening to The Geekbox, Higgins and Fitch are the most outrageously thick people I've ever listened to.
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Yeah but MRod's roles are such caricatures. Just putting a woman in a position that you would expect a man to occupy is a bit of a trite gesture if you don't also back it up with other things that try to depict a female experience. As for Samus, it didn't really matter that she was a woman in the games - I guess you could argue with the slight exception of the baby Metroid imprinting on her - and in that sense it's completely immaterial whether she's a man or a woman or a robot. Except for when they start putting her in a skin suit so you can see her titties.
So, yeah, I guess in a sense she does capture a female experience in the sense that that part of her identity exists almost entirely for sweaty nerds to cop a look at her ass in the Smash Bros. pause screen.
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Not to bring up an old shitty game, but Killzone has to be one of the worst games I've played in the last five years. So so bad
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Jeez I'd hardly call the sad passing away of someone as a "gate"...
Right. But he died, and then the Bombcast got boring. That's pretty much the extent of how I feel about it so it would be disingenuous of me to write about it in woebegone terms.
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Point taken about just the fact of saying a character is a woman has an effect on the way you think about the character. I think the point that I'm trying to make is that Samus being a woman is neither here nor there, it's completely meaningless. She could be a robot for all it matters.
Although I don't really believe that Samus being an enduring character is either true, or is the case because of the character itself. I think if you have any sort of attachment to Samus it's because of the quality of the games she's appeared in, and their enduring appeal compared to Doom and Contra, which don't really have any sort of emotional ambiance to begin with. The only attachment I have to Samus comes from the worlds she typically finds herself in more than anything else.
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The first one worked, thanks a bunch!
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Woo PS4 just arrived, does anyone have a spare Destiny beta key they could hook me up with?
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I am doing a philosophy degree.
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I was really just saying that it's a bit wankish to suggest that Samus being a "woman" really means anything in the Metroid games in the same way that thinking that saying Mario is an Italian plumber means anything. Historically it was nothing more than a dude-looks-like-a-lady inversion, and recently it's become a way to get some TnA into Smash Bros. The way to go about empowering women isn't to deny that there are any differences between men and women, but to distinguish between is and aught.
Is there a physiological/cultural difference between dudes and chicks? Yes. Aught we to treat women as social inferiors because they don't tend to have a predilection for shooting space aliens? No.
Shoehorning women into traditionally male gender roles is boring, tacky and meaningless.
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Gotta play some Smash the night before brah : peace:
Dude you just want an excuse to slap down your gigantic smash wang. I'm fucking awful at it. We gotta do SF3 as well. I've got two arcade sticks and a thesaurus full of abuse.
Hopefully @Dyson can make it too.
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Last year was the first year since the meets started that I didn't come. Going to make it count double this time.
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Xenobiology, if you will.
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Not to be one of those annoying people, but just because.
No, not at all. You're definitely a more specific kind of annoying person. A strong contender for the heavyweight annoyance crown.
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True.
I can't believe they're still teaching Barthes. But take a look at the Valve developer commentaries, and you can see that they're very consciously trying to develop a "syntagm," of play in the same way that Barthes talked about trying to find the rules of narrative grammar. Games are so complicated that I feel as if you kind of need to have some sort of reductionist framework set out, that describes how to make narrative work in games because without it we're going to keep getting Call of Duty single player campaigns out the fucking wazoo.
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@dwarf gourami
Lots of great ideas, I can't even keep them all in my head at once so I'm just going to respond to some at random. Also it's weird how I think in almost the exact same terminology.
I like that you use the distinction between texts that present their morality in a didactic way where you'll have an expository passage and then an authorial passage doing the interpretive work for you, with texts in which there's an interpretive flexibility, so any conclusions you come to are the result of the way in which narrative events have been arranged, as a jumping off point to talk about videogames. That's not to say that there aren't examples of the first kind that aren't good pieces of literature, but I feel as if anything that's explicitly didactic also tends to be inert because its conclusions are immediately given instead of interpretively acquired. Which is also completely the sense I get from games that don't try to find a native narrative voice for the medium and instead rely on this already given melange of elements taken from film, or book or other linear media. By that I mean specifically cut scenes, or games where you have to pause to read a codex entry to explain something about the world to you. In contrast to those kinds of games I feel like you have, closer to what you (I think) are looking towards, which is stuff like Half Life 2, where agency is never taken away from you, but narrative events are pieces of environmental storytelling that are triggered by you walking in the room, and which you don't have the ability to affect. The silent protagonist aspects have a part in it too; Gordon doesn't have anything to say, any feelings to share about the events that occur, but he's constantly interrogated by his surrounded cast, emotions are conferred upon him, antagonists question his motives ("Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not"), and all of it is pretty much done with the tacit admission on the part of the authorial voice, that yes, Gordon is a cipher being invested with the agency of the player for whom this experience is unfolding. Of course, HL2 isn't exactly what you'd call a “pure” narrative experience – in order for it to work, you're disallowed from exercising the very agency the rest of the game inculcates; you can't shoot a narrative participant in the head, for example.
There are two types of storytelling that I feel games have the potential to do well. One is observational, almost theatrical storytelling like you were talking about; something is happening in the environment, and like a sculpture, you have the ability to apprehend it from a variety of angles, without being able to participate in it. The other is systemic, emergent storytelling, the sort that comes out of you doing something that is accommodated by the system of rules the game's set up, and was just you responding to a situation that occurred, within the spectrum of agency conferred on you. Like, I don't know, riding a bike down a hill in BF4, using the crest on the other side as a launching pad, and rocket launching a helicopter. Unscripted things that happen. I sort of think systemic storytelling has the opportunity to be the equivalent of poetry to videogames, where the storytellers take one simple theme or idea, and try to express it as a system of mechanical rules.
Your final idea, wondering if games can pull off addressing mundane aspects of life, well you get one type of answer just in the profusion of military shooters, and other types of extreme, over the top experiences that “gamers,” seem to want. And I'm pretty sure that's a result of the lack of artistic sophistication of the medium, and its inability to properly embed you in the world that you supposedly have agency in. The strange thing is that when you talk about the artistic constraints of a medium, you don't normally have to consider technological constraints in the way you have to with games (or not as much – you could make the argument that Cloverfield, for example, is a narrative experience that couldn't have been pulled off in the sixties). I just think that there are aspects of the way our brains are organised, that were always going to feel a sense of emotional detachment from videogame worlds, specifically because it does try to make us think we're actually embedded in them. But in order for that to be convincing, there's a whole spectrum of cognitive elements aside from the visual that are detached from the experience. Maybe virtual reality will the qualitative difference that'll allow us to experience mundane situations, where our depth perception, sense of balance and environmental sound are all synchronised, making us feel engaged without the need to have extreme shit happening on screen all the time.
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@Jonnas I never played Tag Tournament so I shouldn't comment on that, but as for Tekken 6, the extent to which the change in the movesets would annoy you really depends on your play style and who you play with. My two main characters, Paul and Heihachi had some of their best launches changed, arbitrarily so that instead of having an upward force, they had a downward force. Also, it seemed slower, and the moves were more telegraphed, to the point that you could tell what was coming several seconds before the move impacted.
On the whole it was a step down. I never read anything about it though, so I don't really know what other people's problems with it might have been.
Also yes, Tekken 3 was absolutely mind blowing graphically when it came out.
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I find it funny the amount of people that don't realise how completely irrelevant it is that Samus is somehow nominally a "woman" even though in actuality she's a paper thin cipher performing completely male gender roles and has nothing about her that marks her out as a woman through the entirety of her games, except the x-ray visions of her in her underwear every time you hit zero health. So, yeah, a woman, but only the most exploitative way you can think of.
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I wonder if any of the fighting game community were actually consulted during the making of Tekken 6. All of the character's characteristic movesets were fucked beyond belief and the camera was too low and close, as if it was trying to pull some sort of grim Kubrick look.
Tekken 5 was the series at its peak, but I really don't want to play the same game again with better tit physics, I'd rather they re-evaluate the sort of juggling heavy win scenarios that it traditionally incentivised, while keeping the majority of the movesets the same.
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@dwarf gourami Can I see that pioneering gaming article?
PlayStation 4 Console Discussion
in Other Consoles
Posted
I've been waiting for something like this. Most Metal Gear games are too long for me to take my time and enjoy myself, the first thing that's on my mind is finishing it for the main narrative, so I'll only end up doing each scenario one or two different ways. With this I'm totally going to play it a dozen times with different rules; don't get seen, don't kill anyone, kill everyone, use only the AA guns etc.
Hoping that Phantom Pain looks a bit more "next gen," because you can tell that there were some constraints put on this with it being a cross gen game.