Posts Tagged ‘Gaming’
There is nothing hypocritical in asking the question, "Are games frivolous?" The answer is obvious: of course they are. But so is every conceivable manifestation of human intellect that does not directly contribute to the so-called human weal. It might also be said of intelligence that it is the rarest of things. Consider the immense size of the universe and the incredible fortuitousness of the circumstances that gave rise to carbon based life here on Earth. It does not take much contemplation to see that any consideration of genius must inevitably become a memorialisation: all life is doomed from the most hopeful moment of inchoate birth to the ineluctable tragedy of death. Why then do we not gnash our teeth and bury our heads in the sand? Certainly we do none of this with regards to the many apocalyptic distractions of culture: but as beings of intellect, we are so rarely called to take heed of the incredible, artistic phenomena of the everyday business of entertainment.
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 [...]
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.
We have found them. We have fallen into their soulless demesnes. The fortunate have merely seen them from a distance; the unlucky have perished in their hollow spaces, vanished from view and lost even to memory. Only the scuff marks of unwary boots remain to mark their unnatural thresholds. I am referring to the Weird Places of video game lore. They are haunted, nightmarish places; they are unintentional, forgotten places; they are bleak, dreadful, and above all uncanny.
Wandering through the benighted wasteland of Bethesda Studios' Fallout 3, I am struck not so much by the oppressive quality of desolation, as I am by a strange ubiquity: everywhere I travel, littering the ground and filling containers of various types, including the many corpses of my enemies, are the innumerable leftover objects of an enormous and prolific industrial economy.
From the first moments of your existence, something registers as unmistakeably wrong: your eyes open to the blackness of space and you are alone. Then, yawning across the gulf of plangent time, a beeping hits your ears. It is a bitonal register, a dualistic dance, one part auspicious, the other nefarious. Up and down it goes, transmitting - what? Knowledge? Information? Light? None of these things. All you see now are the words: RAM CHECK OK! ROM CHECK FAIL!
