Child's Play
supplemental
I went to the child's play charity dinner in a tuxedo. I used olive oil in my hair to give it a softness, sheen, and cohesion which I highly recommend.
While there, I purchased a broken microwave.
So, above is the link including the letter they included in the hallowed object, and my own email reply to the letter effusing my nearly worrying lust for art, artists, and artistry. I was initially junk filtered, but a resend did the trick, and I got a response. But in the barren wastes of uncertainty which separated me from an oasis of liberation from my own morbid imagination Re: not getting any resopnse, I suffered a fanic attack. The kind of feeling of self doubt when the object seems to not want to even hear how much you admire them, let alone anything else like, say, your thoughts on their art. For reasons past understanding, game companies and companies with an internet presence (for instance, penny arcade) make it nearly impossible to contact live humans. This is because we internet people are plague bearers, and these companies, like the survivors in Left 4 Dead must move, back to back, shotguns pointed outwards, private phone numbers pointed inward, staving us off while moving to their goal--which is a safe room filled with money we provide when we consume their products.
I'm not bitter. Well, yes, I am bitter, but I am striving to appear as though I am not bitter, by taking the dubiously expeditious step of writing bitter things without prompting.
on the internet.
So I guess I prove their point?
In any case, the use of tools which are functionally not exactly games to get art into the consciousness of the, increasingly distracted, modern chimpanzee known as Mang (or womang--humangity) is something which I laud, but, nevertheless, escapes the attention of most of the so-called gamers, in the sense that they 'play' these things and then attempt to criticize them, as though they were games.
There's no point in criticizing Prince of Persia. You may as well criticize Rock band or guitar hero. Yes, certainly, saying something along the lines of 'it's frustrating that my RB 1 character doesn't persist into RB 2, and that I must pay some silly little licensing fee to rip my RB1 songs to my hd so I can play them on RB2 or, further, that when you get RB: AC - DC, you do not rip the songs at all, but put in a special code that comes in the package into xbox, fucking LIVE and then *DOWNLOAD* the shit you already have on the toddler sodomizing disc that's living in your filthy carrion drive, no doubt nuzzling the carcass of your other data, wondering if the sun has done enough work to break down the proteins in its husk, so that you can begin noisome pecking' makes some sense, since that is the kind of idiocy that the MPAA has driven us to. But to then say that, for instance, all you do in rock band is press buttons to make noise come out, is to be off the beaten path in levels of insanity. Nobody does that. If they have *anything* to say, it's that the songs on offer aren't the songs they want. Though, since every week they add new ones that are usually a mix of classics you love and rarified cooing you've never heard of before (Ever), it's only a matter of time until it's not worth bringing up.
Then why would you look at prince of persia, which is an elaborate reskinning of guitar hero, where, instead of a note, you receive as a reward the animation of an unbelievably spry swashbuckler defying gravity by running along a canyon wall for pushing some obvious and arbitrary button on a track of obvious inputs that fades away into the distance ahead, or, the sometimes funny and interesting dialogue of a woman who is clearly your better in every way, with the possible exception of shoes, and say that it is somehow too easy? As if ease has anything to do with it one way or the other. This is not a game. It is a meathook buried in your brain that is going to drag it out into the daylight long enough to see bright vivid environments, well articulated characters, and the occasional interesting line of dialogue, and then return it to the cavernous interior of your skull, there to dream in visions of the afterimages which were so recently burned upon it by the bright light of day.
Games are things like total annihilation/supreme commander or smash brothers/team fortress where your input affects the outcome. If the only difference between inputs is the speed with which all the content scrolls through the porthole of your HD tv, then it's not a game. It is a music box of demands that you must prong in order as a tool to collect your cooperation in consuming the art it offers.
Fallout 3 is just a fancy way to see an ant breath fire. Not to experience the life of someone facing the challenges of a post apocalyptic wasteland filled with mutant whores. Don't talk about it as if it's a 'game' that could stand 'iteration' and 'improvement'. That's not what it's for. It's for reinvigorating the world of public domain music.
And shadow of the colossus seems similar to prince of persia because neither of them are games. They're art delivery mechanisms with interactive hooks to capture your attention.
This is exactly why Roger Ebert is confused.
back to the news...