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Me hope momma be proud. Me grow big for to smash good guys.
Running across water, I must be arrogant, blue Jesus, infinite Easter with 99 lives (God cheats all the time, so why can’t I?)
Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, famously argued that objects of art, with the advent of film, lost the aura of being the direct, unique, and original products of an artist. By following templates, music and film pushed art into a mode of mechanized reproduction; the original became just a model for the production of copies...
Video games occupy a rare and incredible position in culture. They are a relatively new medium that is just beginning to attain a level of almost universal saturation. They are also being made by people with highly developed artistic sensibilities, raising powerful and important questions about their relationship to art. In the recent TEDx talk at USC, Kellee Santiago defends the thesis that video games are art. She does this, perhaps somewhat weakly, by employing an easy Wikipedia definition that states:
Of all the classic games I’ve featured in this series, 3 in Three is the one that holds up the best. It is hard to imagine how modern technology could improve this delightful little puzzle game one iota. Each puzzle is clever and satisfying; each little cut scene is snappy and smart. Even the graphics [...]
Getting a laugh is not the same as being funny, just as getting applause does not mean you have created something great. Yet in our increasingly end-based consumer culture, these distinctions are beginning to blur as never before.
We can cite their names like the holy litany of computer role-playing games: Baldur's Gate I and II, Planescape: Torment, and (to a lesser extent) Icewind Dale I & II. They are all unified by the now dated, but once sacrosanct Infinity Engine, which I love like my own future hypothetical child. They, alongside Fallout 1 and 2, are the greatest gifts Black Isle Studios gave to posterity.
When I was a kid, saying “damn it” would get my mouth washed out with soap. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because Bart said “hell.”
Cheat codes have a way of getting around; the good ones rarely stay hidden for very long. Nearly all old-school gamers know how to play Metroid with a clothing-optional Samus Aran, and the Konami code is more widely known than the Hammurabi code. Still, some cheat codes are not as well known as others.
"Dude, you totally just Starcrafted my ammo; I am so gonna Mario your mom," says one gamer to another, by way of insult, and thus with a proverbial mesotron rifle places the last, gleaming bolt of missile energy into the exposed forehead of "linguistic integrity". You don't have to be an Oxbridge Grammarian with a pipe permanently glued to your upper lip and whose definition of a "good night with a lady" is an intimate fireside read of Austin to have your forelocks raised in pre-emptive worry about the State of Things...
So Borderlands is alright, if you like wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland literally teeming with alien monsters who haemorrhage weapons and ammunition, legions of bandits hurling their bodies onto the barrels of your guns, and a non-existent story whose entire purpose is to propel you ineluctably on to a final confrontation with a giant Lovecraftian beast reminiscent of Cthulhu.
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.
