Foggy Monday

Well, it must have been a good weekend because I feel a little less than vigorous this morning. :)  A barbeque, three blocks of halloumi, sixty bottles of beer, several bottles of  vodka, some good friends, some Texas hold 'em, and some drunken debate; up until dawn. Perfect.

Some random thoughts.

• I finished GTA: San Andreas on Friday. I wasn't expecting to get there, but I guess going back every now and then had to eventually get me there. Enjoyed this so much more than Vice City (which annoyed me intensely), but mostly because of the entertaining virtual world. Anyone interested in an analysis of this as a play specification? Or a full analysis like the one for the katamari games several months ago?
• Russell T. Davies' Dr. Who consistently excels. What a rejuvination of a show (although whether one can enjoy it without having first experienced Dr. Who as a child is questionable). Writing for children is difficult enough; making the stories relevant and entertaining for adults at the same time is miraculous.
  
  This week, Stephen Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace". The show has always leveraged recent BBC costume dramas to make historical pieces (like the classic "Masque of Mandragora"), and this one was truly exceptional. Bravo.
  
  Next week, Tom MacRae attempts the practically insurmountable task of following in the footsteps of Terry Nation's "Genesis of the Daleks", one of the finest Dr. Who serials ever made, with a story based on the origins of the cybermen but shot in the style of a gritty urban political drama such as Alan Bleasdale's G.B.H. I for one am salivating in anxious anticipation.
• In case it is not apparent, I have finally fallen in love with Shadow of the Colossus, despite it's obsession with fiero. Hopefully, it will not also make me learn to hate it, as Ico did. Yorda was a compelling companion, but Agro is exceptional (despite some finicky context senstive mechanisms), and the colossi are even more beautiful than the castle in Ico. I remain sceptical that anything in the game's ending will change its play specification, however! :)
• Still haven't completed (NES) Metroid, although the number of missiles clogging up the Mother Brain's cortex grows with every week. Soon...
• Still playing with my structural specification ideas... a preliminary post will emerge at some point.

Alright, I have other things to attend to...  Take care!

Comments

[Duncan]

I agree whole-heartedly with you about the new Doctor Who. It is fully evident that Davies loves the Doctor Who universe, and stories, with his whole heart. As someone who is aware of the history and stories of Doctor Who, without actually having watched them, the new series is a brilliant view of the Doctor. I love the way that it delves a lot more into relationships and emotional context. It also gives a nice bit of Doctor backstory every once in a while.

I'm so hooked (and so is the wife, who is not normally a sci-fi fan). The Doctor Who Confidential episodes are well worth watching as well.

[Jack Monahan]

Members of my family often caught the old Dr. Who episodes broadcast on public television--I was a little too young to really catch the bulk of them, but the series has been so much fond background radiation for my adolescent appreciation for science fiction--despite such modest production values (which endear it further, of course), the series was so rife with now classic hallmarks. The Tardis, the Daleks... the list goes on.

I haven't caught any of the new Dr. Who just yet, but through the magic of the internets I'm sure catching up couldn't too terribly difficult. I've heard nothing but positive reviews.

[Patrick Dugan]

I'd really like to see what your take on a play spec is for GTA.

As for SotC, the anaylsis of what the ending does to the psychological conditions of a replay is worth consideration, its more of philosophical question than a theoretical one. I've got some ideas about the pyschosexual dynamics built into the "dressing" of the gameplay, and how this frames the relatively simple play of climbing and stabbing. Its good for a replay to see what sort of awareness comes. Its is primarily a puzzle game, a series of easy puzzles (exploration) paired with hard puzzles (the collossi); but framing that is a rhizome constituted by the relationship between the collossi, the "hero", the girl, the priests and Dormin.

After you kill a collossus, what is your impression of the inevitable black threads that hunt you down to unconsciousness? Functionally they're a discrete reset mechanism, but what role do they play in your mind?

[Chris]

Nice to see some Who-love out there. :) As for 'modest production values' - one episode in the old show has a sea monster made out of a sock puppet! Now that's what I call trusting in the audience's suspension of disbelief! :D

Regarding SotC: The way it feels to me is that each colossi is animated by a 'shadow soul'; when a colossus is slain, the assassin absorbs the soul of the colossus - with inevitably undesirable consequences sometime down the line. I quite enjoy the futile exercise of fleeing from these; one can occasionally survive quite a long time, if there's a convenient drop to escape down.

I'm not sure I would characterise it as a puzzle game, however; locating the colossi is chiefly methodical, not composed of discrete puzzles per se (although it certainly can feel like puzzle play when you are learning it). The only significant puzzles in the game (I have encountered) are working out the trick to each colossi; far and away the least interesting part of the play for me personally.

Anyway, we will doubtless talk more of this in the future. :)

[inw]

"The girl in the fireplace" was fantastic. Really really good. The trailer set me up to dislike it intensely, which perhaps just make me like it all the more.

{inw}

[Patrick]

I was using puzzles in the Koster's theory of fun sense, which is a broad sense of describing challenges as pattern recognition hurdles that engender the player towards a singular "mastery", even if the methods of mastery of plurilous. This is in contrast to a rhizomatic experience like Electroplankton, where you are negotiating with principles without explicit goals.

[Chris]

I had no idea you occasionally stopped by here, Ian; when I saw 'inw' my first thought was comment spam. Imagine my suprise. :)

[inw]

Fear not, I am often mistaken for comment spam...

{inw}