Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Monday, September 20, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Light Sleeper meets National Lampoon's Vacation! I'm back, I think. I'm still feeling under the weather with whatever I got while Edi was away, and I'm at work hoping I can be awake and alert enough for the next ten hours to...crap, I dunno. To do it again tomorrow, I guess.I haven't updated because of said under-the-weather feeling, also because of video games, video games, video games. [Warning: overly long post about video games follows.] Edi snagged Way of the Samurai 2 from Hollywood Video last week (and this is how you know it's true love, everyone--not only does she put up with the video games, she actually went and got me them while I was sick) and, when returning that yesterday, Burnout3 was just going back on the shelves so I rented that: a very pleasant surprise considering the average time a game goes up on the shelves at Hollywood Video to the time I'm able to rent is, on average, about two months. WotS2 is a, what, samurai simulator? It's more of a samurai RPG, with a branching dramatic structure. (a.k.a., "choose your own adventure" gameplay) that's just generally lovely to look at, and very keen. Unlike cutesy Culdcept with its squeaky mouse-fart noises and Nintendo style graphics, Edi actually would watch me play WotS2 and comment on bits of the animation, or the clothing, or the colors: your samurai wanders through different areas of the town, doing chores (it's really Way of the Ronin 2) during different hours of the day and night and the locations are beautiful. There's a certain Groundhog Day element to it as you play in a town location over a period of days and there's only a number of days until the town festival where all bloody hell breaks loose. By the end of it, I had learned enough by playing, dying, starting over, lathering, rinsing, repeating, that the festival wasn't trauma-inducing and a whole new storyline (that didn't involve me being cut to ribbons by both yakuza and magistrates) opened up to me. And by that time, it was time to return the game. Lovely to look at, kind of a chore to play, Way of the Samurai 2 was a pleasant enough experience I don't feel particularly driven to complete: as sometimes is the case with Japanese games, perusal of the write-ups at Gamefaqs revealed tons of things to "master" I had no interest in mastering: pouring all your money into refining your blade continuously until it becomes "Mizzuini, the Master-Killer Demon Blade" is probably worth it for some people, but not for a lazy short-attention span feller like me. No sir. Teach me how to kill somebody with a single sword-stroke or move on! Burnout3 understands such short attention spans and rewards them gloriously: a racing game where the key to winning is making other cars crash, Burnout3 rewards you with new cars and areas for doing little more than turning on the Playstation 2. If Way of the Samurai 2 played like Burnout3, you'd get the Master-Killer Demon Blade in the first five minutes, and move right up the hyperbole scale from there. Edi also spent a certain amount of time watching this one, impressed with the beauty and the speed of sparks flying in slow motion off a wrecked Honda hurtling off the side of a cliff (I'm sure a certain amount of Honda-intolerance plays into it) and the game does its best to jam the game full of spectacle with lanes jammed so full with crashing cars, it's like looking at the single twitching backbone of a violent chitinous beast. It's the sort of video game you hope someone is savvy enough to show to J.G. Ballard because all you need is some sort of periphereal that vibrates your errogenous zone to climax with every collision and you've got one of his novels as mass-market video game. There is both a race mode and crash mode, and Burnout3 is a smart enough game that both modes have elements of the other, so that even when you're racing, you're slamming other vehicles off course and into explosive crashes, and even while you're in crash mode, you're racing to get to the right place and touch the right modifiers in time so that your hundred thousand dollars of property damage doubles or triples in value. Burnout3 does suffer from a few flaws; EA, in releasing the game (I think it was with another publisher that folded), has jammed it with a completely horrid soundtrack--post Blink 182 poser punk blaring from song to song. Even worse, EA revisits its EA Radio technique from SS3, so you've got a Carson Daly sound-a-like with a porn star name (Stryker, I think) yammering excitedly about the perfect condition for "Burners" to "deal up some damage." "I've got some buddies with the Department of Transportation who are wondering when you guys are really going to show us what you've got," Stryker exhorts before a Crash scenario, "so let's break out the wicked property damage, all right?" There's something about the EA radio approach I find a little chilling and, if I had a kid, I would be leery about them playing the game. It's one thing to make a game where people can do things that everyone knows are wrong--the GTA and Manhunt games come to mind, of course--but it's another thing to disguise causing the deaths of countless innocents as just another extreme sport complete with meathead soundtrack and product placement. There is no sense that there is anything "wrong" with what you're doing and that bothers me a lot. Or maybe, like those Blink-182 fuckers, the use of something subversive to so bald-facedly fill the corporate coffers bothers the shit out of me. If I want greed-induced ghastliness, I'll just watch those Sarah Jessica Parker/Lenny Kravitz Gap ads, thank you. Ugh. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:50 AM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
