Author Archive
I must have been 8 or 9, spending genuinely unhealthy amounts of time playing Metroid, Metroid II and Super Metroid, when I heard through the elementary school grapevine that SAMUS WAS A GIRL. What? Did I miss something? Samus has monster shoulders! Samus kills things constantly! Samus has NOTHING in common with the women I know!
I have been eagerly watching pre-release material for your game, and am excited to play it! Unfortunately, I feel that it is my responsibility to inform you that you seem to be confused about some of the basics of astronomy and, indeed, the very nature of space itself.
There seems to be near unanimous consensus that Bioshock 1 and 2 are comments on the fiction and theories of Ayn Rand – and especially those in her colossal treatise thinly disguised as the novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s partially true: Bioshock is a counterargument to Rand, but only within the boundaries established by Atlas Shrugged. It might be a critique, but it’s not a very good one.
The new Writer in Residence at the Toronto Reference Library is one of my favorites, the one and only Karl Schroeder. Karl will be speaking at the Toronto Reference library this coming Monday Febuary 1 from 1:30 to 3:30. Come by to hear Karl speak, learn about upcoming events happening at the fantastic Merril Collection (the best library in the world, I'm convinced), and say hi to myself and some of the other staff from LittleBoBeep. Karl's most recent book, Ventus, is a fantastic exploration of a high-technology future where an errant terraforming experiment turns Ventus into a proving ground for the semantics of artificial intelligence. Check out a review of the book.
In a convulsion-inducing metascapade of blue boobies and G.I. Georgeous, Everyone has completely lost it over avatar. And I mean lost it in the picket-fence-frontal -lobotomy sense, the rule-34 sense (oh yes it's out there, no I will not link it), and the every-meme-has-already-done-it sense. Last week it progressed to the point that the only person left who didn't like the movie was the Pope. Or, more accurately, the Pope's press office, which thought the film lacked substance and was a boiled down plot-substrate that just didn't have backbone, much less depth of character or a Meryl Streep cameo. Everybody agreed, but nobody cared.
I find deep satisfaction in the recent (ish) trend away from realism in video games. Specifically, high-quality, realistic depictions of fundamentally surreal elements – where 8-bit pixellation and posterization are enshrined in gleaming high-color environments. Let me explain. Start with a gorilla. A real, five-thousand-pound senator dripping chunks of banana and trying to pick lice [...]
On the advice of a good friend I spent last night reading Peter Watt's recent novel Blindsight. It was GREAT. Whiplash-and-flash scifi that is, at its core, the best that the genre can be: brilliantly speculative. Extrapolation, prediction, and what if: Peter Watts proves himself brilliantly fluent in building worlds of possible outcomes that dont seem that far away at all. Since this article contains a few mild spoilers, take a couple of hours and read the story online here. Watts wins two internets for making the whole thing available free online! Or, support the guy and buy a paper version. By creating a foreign world that is alien both in aesthetics and in epistemology, Watts boils plot into a single, viscous question: what is sentience good for? The answers that he provides are unvarnished and insightful, and while they are not always completely original (what is these days), they offer one of the most accessable in unique perspectives on humanity that I have read. His conclusions are unforgettably powerful, and have had me second guessing my own actions ever since.
In real live news today, an Australian mother called the police after her son refused to stop playing grand Theft Auto 4. Apparently the cops arrived around 4 am and told both the child and parent to chill out and go to bed. If my mother had her way, more than thirty minutes of screens would be a felony. But have courage little man! One day you will have your own apartment, television, and disposable income, and NOT EVEN THE POLICE will be able to stop you from playing GTA4 at 2:30 AM.
AN OPEN LETTER TO SANTA, FROM THERESA AND THE DWELLERS OF VAULT 13 Dear Santa, Let me start by telling you that the dwellers of Vault 13 are dissapointed. We don't have many chances to celebrate down here, and pretty much our only two holidays are Christmas and Halloween. The latter has been getting progressively worse since we ran out of booze, and the only thing people can think to dress up as is mutants. Headless mutants, giant mutants, major chest wound mutants ... except of course for Lyle, who still thinks it's funny to dress in drag and hit on me. So you can understand why Christmas means alot to us.
Increasingly, videogames are striving to imitate the unexplored worlds of human imagination — from barely-probed ocean depths to the stalward nebulae and distant stars of space simulations. The accuracy of recent attempts, however, is remained as far from the mark asd early scifi pulp magazines. More often than not, the ocean depths and voids of space are filled with life, pirates, battles, and immidiacy — immitations that do not depict the true nature of these depths: cold, lonely, enormous and terribly hostile. It's hard to communicate the experience of deep sea diving, or to imagine space flight. A few haunting releases — like Wholfin's video of an underwater squid birth — offer us clues.
Movie poster-inspiring name aside, Captain Forever is a classic 2-d shooter (imagine asteroids) with a twist. All of the ships in the game are built from a simple set of modular blocks, like Lego or the International Space Station. if a ship's command module is destroyed before all of its modules are trashed, the surviving pieces crumble into space, and can be picked up and added to your own.
