Anyway some thoughts on the blockbuster drugs on hard drive:

Skyrim is the latest open world game to conform to our expectations of a video game. It’s narrative is deep, I counted at least 4 fantasy novels contained with in and ones actions determine what’s leveled up in the game, hence if you punch a lot like Robbaz you end up an unarmed badass, If you go to the mage’s college like me you end up with high level destruction spells and invisibility. Skyrim’s major flaw, in my eyes, might be it’s realism. My husband for instance runs everyday from my home in Whiterun to his work south of Windhelm a distance several days in the making in game time, hence he is rarely home. The game is full of wholes that make the fiction less convincing, and writing that can be at times pathetic, but what it excels at around level 20 is a sense of genuine empowerment. Your dragonborn becomes a kinda god, able to take out dragons in a few bounds, cast spells in some cases infinitely and other acts of remarkable… questing. This is what Skyrim really is, an ego trip. The mechanics aren’t really that fun, Fable and the up coming Kingdoms of Amalur appear to be working towards a more satisfying sense of combat. The Assassin’s Creed games have made traversing a city into a virtual parkour.Yet, the game eventually takes you in, and you buy it. You obey allegiances to military fronts, make deals with devils and werewolves, and the variety of spells and means of taking people down are varied, in one city I have an eternal bounty on my head due to a glitch, so I simply leveled up frenzy and make the guards fight themselves instead of me and then I go about town. What the game excels at is the idea of shaping yourself, you becomes a fully centric being full of capability, but from most of the videos I’ve seen the the daedric armour and heavy weapons seem to be the norm. At one point I googled about domesticating animals and found a forum of women playing through the game, but my little khajit mage and her argonian husband appear to be abnormalities in the geography of Skyrim’s possibilities (the game does try to power down mages apparently). Anyway, it’s a full trip and I’m grinding a few more levels before I don a wedding dress and wreath, enchant them up to their full potential and ride the back of a dragon to the final battle. All of which sounds exciting, but by this point it seems inane.

Saint’s Row the Third is another open world game which I actually snagged here in Thailand and then registered on steam. The above video about gets the possibility of the game. Saint’s Row the third isn’t about becoming the way Skyrim is, rather it’s about lugging bullets in a comic world. I think it’s funny at times, but over all kinda bland in terms of gameplay. Again Robbaz proves his worth as a gamer Big Barbara rules.

Prom Week
Prom Week is a small little flash game made by folks at a university in California. It is a dating sim… kinda. You click on one character to make them the active conversationalist and then you click on another character to make them the recipient. Now, the above two games were made with multi-million dollar budgets, took years and huge staffs to make, but Prom Week nailed in one sitting what all those games lack: manipulation. In Prom Week you have a set goal, such as getting someone to go out with you. In the tutorial this is quite easy, but in the free form mode it’s quite hard. In the first game you simply click on the favoured boy and flirt with him, he flirts back and mission accomplished. You have a set amount of time to wonder through dialogue bubbles and find the right words of the job, it actually bears a similarity with Skyrim in this regard, in one mission in Skyrim for instance I had to convince a monk to come back to a cave with me so my guests could eat him. I failed to persuade him so in the end I had to bribe him. Prom Week takes this basic idea to a higher level. You see you can click on anyone and get them to talk to anyone else. Hence if you make friends with person A then person A might be able to help patch things up with person B. You could never have healed such a social wound on your own. But hey that’s not what makes Prom Week great, it’s this: it makes simple social interaction into a slightly tense and engaging war. Getting folks to do what you want is hard, but where Skyrim and Saint’s Row the Third rarely make an emotional impact, I really wanted to make peace with my estranged friend and save my boyfriend some drama on prom night. The game in other words realizes that simple decisions and petty rivalries are perfectly suitable plot devices. Not once in Skyrim did the orb threatening the mage’s college make me rush to do anything, in fact the absence of a timer for missions in Skyrim can lead to absurd situations such as completing a totally different quest line while another quest’s apocalypse looms. Prom Week (granted I’ve only played one story and a free form game) is a much more open game with situations you actually might care about. If it can be used a model for future open world games, we might see some progress.

Rage
This one actually kinda took me by surprise, the introduction to Rage is awful. The voice acting, even the graphics, seem sub par. John Goodman is quite nice as the local sheriff, but the story begins implausibly. Here’s the thing though, the game is actually ok after awhile. It hasn’t grown on me the way Skyrim has, but for a teenage apocalyptic fantasy full of beer and auto parts it has some charms.

I hate to say this, but I don’t have anything deep to say about these games, and that might be the lesson about these games. The spectacle of gaming is our society’s sistine chapel. We are slowly building towards a realism in computer graphics that will startle the mind with its possibilities, but if I can draw anything from these games its that perspective isn’t important for these folks (prom week is an exception to this). These aren’t game of consideration, but rather of action. No Hamlets all Fortenbras. At that’s what makes this last game all the more disturbing.

Battlefield 3 is the winner of this year’s movement forward in graphics. The game constructs a body directly out of Cronenburg. Our protagonist has eyes full of lens flare and dirt clogs. His vision is news footage eyes, youtube queries, Iranian protest videos compacted into phones and tweeted, these are the eyes of warfare, at least how we depict it today: subvert and a delivered behind the backs of Government regulations. He has illicit camera eyes as if the video drome replaced his eyes with the cam corders of war correspondents. Horror films are made from such troupes, yet we never see this abonimation, instead his remarkably beautiful eyes are the windows into a game which keeps the enemy at sniper scope, you almost never come upon the enemy hand on hand, you never hear about the children in the Iranian school you storm neither does the game provide much information about their lives. These are Iraqis in Storm Trooper gear, we never even get to see their smiles. Field after field of middle eastern soldiers flood your vision and you gun them down in unrivaled fashion while the spectacle of having filmic vision seduces the eye. Imagine for a second if you had a machine that made arguments into flesh, now imagine the politics of Bush era America dipped in chrome and slightly photo shopped, that’s what Battlefield 3 is. The game makes a compelling case for war fare in the middle east through some clever optics and a means of making soldiers into storm troopers. Going to war is fucking cool in this game, and even though it tries to subvert the authorities behind this madness through some terrorist subplots and dick investigators it still compels in the idea of violence as a right of a man.

War was in the 1960s an old instrument with honorable intentions. We fought the Nazis, ya know a good old fashioned war. Battlefield 3 is the future of military progoganda, not because it justifies war, but because it justifies the culture of the military and dips the war machine in nanomites and other hardware. Conflict is a natural extension of technology in this game. It lingers on the peripheries, we realize that conflict is a deep seated fantasy, one that we actively seek, but the problem with this game is the way it links it to the contemporary. It is such a fine veil between Iraq and Iran in this game that the game ends up making a case for Iraq as war dream as a fantasy necessary and unavoidable.

One of the developers for Harmonix has recently commented on the absence of political messages in video games. Hollywood is full of agendas, gay marriage, racial inclusion, environmental concerns, but games are for the most part the last respite for politics that would not pass elsewhere. Would Collette, the flustered and aggravated mage of restoration make it in a hollywood film? No, her role is riveted with sexisms and bigotries. Would Bulletstorm’s excessive potty mouthed juvenilisms touch down on a global scale? No, the company knows its audience and that is primarily males ranging from 16 to 40. These games are in many ways gendered, and in that exclusion they allow for republican throw downs, misogynist readings, and other matters not suitable for prime time. Even the extremity of their violence is a hallmark of the lack of regulation on them.

Tobacco is one of the world’s most addictive drugs. It didn’t start out that way. Tobacco 200 years ago didn’t contain enough nicotine to make it dependent (over 4mg is required in a small number of doses). But the drug was never regulated, it has uses. It’s easy to store, easy to transport, and once introduced into a native population it acts as a kinda crowd control. We don’t experience nicotine as a drug, it’s not thought of in the same terms as cocaine or morphine, even though the later substances are less addictive. The major problem is that it is an outlet that (and I am a major addict) find it hard to imagine the world with out. Nicotine is a necessary manifestation of the death drive, it allows us to kill ourselves slowly and with self-loathing to boot. Video Games obviously contain moral messages that go beyond the norm of what is acceptable in any other medium even pornography. But when introduced to the public, they allow for a private expression of politics and emotions that are rarely let out. While some of this might be healthy (I do believe we need an outlet for rage… just not maybe the game rage…) this little sewer in which we’re allowed to piss all the unspeakables of politics is becoming a tad to wide, and video game publishers could do with a little liberalism in there games. After all Dubois is as close as we’ve gotten to a transgender character although Cicero in Skyrim is another example too:

but what I see in video games is a primarily an expression of either Japanese or American patriarchal conservative values. Contrary to what that developer from Harmonix might say, games have plenty of politics in them, it’s just that they preach the same biases that make up the everyday, it’s perhaps due to the immersion the form provides that we don’t demand of games the same cleverness and depth of investigation found in other art forms. Games are a sewer of the right wing, and like nicotine they provide certain authorities with power, the same ones that refuse to regulate them.

p.s. loved Deep Far back in the day, especially the mutant cow… and Dubois. BTW Dubois is actually a better effeminate “male” than Cicero is.

Left 4 Dead 2
When the first left 4 dead came out i played i believe one level in it and was stunned, left 4 dead 2 I like the characters more, but the game itself is annoying. I don’t see any reason to play this game and I’m glad I only paid 6.99 for it.

Rock of Ages
I loved Zeno Clash, but Ace Team’s second game is a little less addictive than the last. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still awesome, it’s just not as great as Zeno Clash was.

Assassin’s Creed 2
I finished Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood before any of the other games, so playing through Assassin’s Creed 2 is a little surprising, from the introduction of Ezio to the linkage between the templar’s futuristic modern day hide out to the van the third game begins in, but what surprises is more the disconnect between satisfying mechanic, say free running and the story, or the way the game seems to make the correct sacrifice valuing fun over narrative sensibility, after all sitting down at a bench shouldn’t keep guards from finding you if they know what you look like or the way the Assassin’s all end up in identical uniforms walking through town as announcing, “Hey I’m an Assassin.” The animus doesn’t quite work, genetic memorys? It seems like quantum effects would be a better sci-fi premise, alternative timelines? entanglement? But the games do entice me to finish missions wether climbing the highest towers or killing the simplest merchants.

On another note the pc, long the bed of easily copyable games, has become a bastion of the indie game scene. Steam games apparently make up a larger part of many companies’ income than xbox live and other games. The freedom of the pc is being copied by the console, but the habits of the pc gamer are more align with the desires of the indie dev than the marketplaces put up by Sony and Nintendo. The PC still fosters the dream of the next self made million dollar game. Dota, Portal, Team Fortress, these are all examples of the pc’s mobility, the way a couple of kids in a cyber cafe can be big time designers in a moment. What the Ps3 lacks is the ability to empower its users to mod the games already on it. The crytek3 engine has been taking up my time, I love making islands in it and stuff like that. I’m a tad sleep deprived.

See yall later.
and Hey Darren!!! I hope you’re doing ok.

Anyway, returning to phi phi I explain that I am registered, but haven’t dived in 18 years. I remember that my junior open water license had expired, there was some test I was supposed to take, but the instructor says that it just turns over into a regular license. She looks in the database and then comes up to me and asks my middle name. She puts in the middle name and searches, it was in 1991 she says. I make vague promises and the next day go snorkeling. Snorkeling leads to the story of the magical travel agent and a Chinese woman studying in Singapore who has never wore a bikini before. She has a trucker hat and we spend most of the day together. At the end of the day the boat stops to watch the sunset on the water. I jump out and lay in the waves, the sun is like one great funnel coming towards me, and is better in the waves than in the boat. A British man on the boat assures me diving is the best part of koh phi phi, when we get back I plunk the money down on diving after getting an ok from my doctor my dad. I had already looked up equalization and practiced it snorkeling. The resources on the web mean a simple term can become a world of advice. I can’t figure out how to use the back of the rdp. I fill in my scuba review test and then have second thoughts and call the dive shop to cancel. the shop is closed. In the morning, with a good amount of conviction, I decide to walk up and cancel my scuba review. I eat breakfast and mill around and then at 7 make my way to the dive shop, everyone is nice and friendly. I am taken over to my dive master who is gregarious and gracious. My dive mates are all women who seem to be further ahead in the game of life, but not necessarily in age. We go out to the boat off to the reef and after some review into the water. Diving is exhilarating, the wild life functions as it’s own cosmopolitan metropolis, our entrance into which is thankfully ignored, fish don’t fear humans yet. I drink tons of water and don’t smoke to clear my sinuses. I have no problem equalizing, in fact after a day practicing, I appear to be mastering it. I do bump the other divers, grind off of coral, and other wise make an ass of myself, but over all it is a really good time. I also use a lot of air.

It is strange what heals childhood trauma. How much a little mistake can add up to something bigger. I faced scorn at making a simple mistake in my teens, I was convinced as of 48 hours ago that diving was something I was physically incapable of, rather it was simply that in my instruction in a pool equalization simply never came up. Hence a simple talent became a physical disability in the mythology of childhood, a scar only I could see. Diving became like snorkeling, a simple absurd past time we primates shouldn’t crave, but do.

The promenade around the house had worn down into the sea and low waves crashed over the beach. A group of kids out in the bay played with nurse sharks as she passed row after row of faded brick houses. Eventually she found the door, but as she expected someone else lived there. The couple at the house were quite nice, she sat down with a seven foot tall basketball star and her husband a smallish engineer at the local motorcycle repair place. The two had never seen or heard of the target, they did however know the former occupant and after a few coffees, she retreated to the street with a new address in hand.

The car the UN gave her broke down after a few days, she walked on foot and then waited at car share sites till she had trekked half the island. The house was instantly noticeable as a slum dwelling. Kids ran around outside while inside hundreds of children managed web servers. Kids poured out of closets, some at ten wasted with the onsets of HIV. She quietly spoke to a few kids around the house, they rushed up with trinkets, little island momentos, she bought a few. Inside the house she could see them sorting emails, working through excel sheets, and working on ad copy, at ten years old a few of the girls could speak English better than she could. Groups of children sat around typing on ancient keyboards, long since dilapidated, her own roll of smart phone sitting in her pocket began to beep. She pulled it out and answered a few calls, then she showed the boss where she was, the government would be by in a few days. She took a few of the ones that could speak English by the hand and led them out of the house. She told them to tell the others that their parents wouldn’t be coming home, but they needed to stay there until the UN people come. She also asked about the man, one of the kids managed to draw him, the usual suspect, she clicked a copy to hq.

Infinity blade
This one took me by surprise. Chair, a European developer, has genuinely crafted a fever dream of knights and ogres. The game itself is an addictive take on punch out, but it’s the fact that you can complete the game in minutes that makes it stand out, this game’s weird surrealist narrative hints at a world far more horrible than our own, a past you don’t want to be there. It’s really the feeling of grotesque that makes it absorbing and worth the replay. Have submitted to the demon king, but have never bested him.

Jenga hd
Rocks. Love it. It’s so awesome to be able to play Jenga on the go. The pass play feature is also essential.

Spider-man hd
Is surprisingly pretty good for what looks like a ps2 game with a virtual analog stick. The controls work rather well and the game is fun, the only problem is the games mechanics stagnate quickly,i found myself annoyed with the combat after awhile, but does go to show the iPad can present a pretty good brawler.

Final fantasy 3
The graphics aren’t as good as the ps one premiere game, but this remake of the original final fantasy isn’t bad either, the controls are amazing and navigating the games many submenus is easy. Really liking it so far, the instant save feature also helps cuz I like to just pop it up and battle a few times on the bus.

Gears
This one really impressed me, the difficultly is amazing, I love how hard I had to work to finish the last levels. The graphics are also really good and the mechanics are just great. I love all the ways the team thought of making ball rolling into a platformer. This really goes to show what the iPad can do is about the only game I recommend you play on the iPad.

Storm in a teacup
Was recommended by kotaku, sucks. Don’t like it.

#sworcery
Is really hyped, but didn’t get into it yet. An impressive feat of indie programming, but didn’t really buy it.

Dream:scape
Man did this disappoint. Has a good story, good acting, well done cgi, but just doesn’t grab me.

Coin drop
Not an angry birds clone, rather an angry birds spiritual successor, I found the graphics a little trite, those sprites need to move, but really enjoyed what is basically a kinds reverse pin ball with coins. Fun and fairly long for 0.99 game, but no where near the birds in terms of length.

ImaginaryR
Have not finished this, but I like what square Enix has done with the comic book manga format. The games are fun, although a little simple, the little interactions are good, but I just enjoyed the experience in general.

Is it just me or is it just having the money for publicity that seems to matter in if your game makes it or not category?

I do. I also remember a little irc server, set up on the back of a bank’s mainframe, or what the dude claimed was a discarded unix server from a bank, to get on it you just had to know. I was kinda lucky at that time because I was in the rom scene so I had an fserve serving up rooms which i played in slow motion on an ancient Macintosh. It could manage super nes rooms with a little effort. I don’t think my teenage brain ever registered rom hacking as illegal, neither did it occur to me that flash rom carts were just now coming-out and folks were downloading game boy games to game boys, puerto rican sys ops were flirting with 14 year old girls, and we head no idea what the names on the channel that owned the server were up to. Joining the servers other channel was an experience in waiting as the seemingly always on nicks stood there in silence like the arbiters of a kafka story, working their way to some goal far away from the social scene. If you started joking you could stay. Those chatrooms disappeared for me after high school. Computers moved on, games became isos and burnable (I ruined a ps one with an ancient soldiering iron and a mod chip one summer while my mom lived with “friends” between houses) I got einhander to work with out a mod chip and was elated as was I by that square Enix fighting game that I absolutely loved for some reason. My mom’s temporary house came with a big tv and all those lights from square’s games still impress me. The world was abuzz with the dawn glow of the Internet age, anything was piratable, napster and gnutella were downloading music, my college Internet connection introduced me to high speed connections, content was free and piling down the internets like lemmings in the sea. I had video games up to my knees, sega Saturn, dreamcast, psx, neo geo Roms, I played darkstalkers alone in my dorm room, I got a slim sony viao and broke it in a matter of days. The iPod came, and I had music, never used iTunes, I left college, I moved in alone to an apartment. I went broke, I ended up in Asia. That’s when I found the chatrooms again.

The slow decline of life to the everyday is something we all dread. Life doesn’t begin till you’re forty, the Chinese say. My life at thirty was depressing in the extreme, but at least I had made it to semi-stability. That’s when the most ludicrous idea occurred to me, to make video games. I began by starting up my programming lessons again and learning ruby, this naturally lead to JavaScript, to processing, to flash, back to JavaScript, through a little python, back to android sdks aka java, and then today porting a flash project over to ruby. I posted on a million forums and then I ended up in chatrooms. And then the developer conferences, Denver, San Francisco, Shanghai. I met similar illusioned human beings at all of them. In San Francisco at Gdc I was hanging out with two devs from a Chinese mobile phone company when one of them decided to show me something. The dev said he found a room around the corner. We went down one of those paths and out into that city, the tangle of knots impenetrable to security cam, the place where bodies go to disappear, and somewhere on the router we were way back in the metropolis in the part where the chat rooms and the casinos become one. I remember a bar where sys ops went to trade python commands, and another where the Lulz were said to hold unions meetings, but then I saw it, hovering over in space, that impossible feel, the way the ops stood, like marble statues with funny names, and I understood I had been taken back to that room, somehow we had walked into he past the year of the emu when games became physically decoupled from their packages and the companies fought them instead of making them available. It was surreal to see all those games incorporable again, like finding your grandmother’s soul in the attic. We had come from the year of the eshop and arrived at the backbone of internet’s commerce, the first transmission of immaterial goods, lifted from the cardboard and plastic of their origins. Ok I was lying, I couldn’t see the games,but in the room 10 names sat in marble silence. And the Dev said, we found it like this 30 years ago. The silence in the room was startlingly, tangible, the way a white screen worked, and that’s how I learned about the Internet. My best friend , my buddy of twenty years, always there with me.

Well that’s how I remember hackers ending.