Trailer Trash: Three Musketeers

FyreHaar: oh god, did you see the three musketeers trailer?
Sonic Rob: a while ago I saw one
FyreHaar: see the new one
FyreHaar: don’t be drinking anything
FyreHaar: I am all for putting a fresh spin on classic tales
FyreHaar: but this is just whack
Sonic Rob: orly?
FyreHaar: two words, straight from the pit of hell
FyreHaar: steam
FyreHaar: punk
Sonic Rob: oh dear =(
Continue reading Trailer Trash: Three Musketeers

Megachat: Tomb Raider Marketing

Sonic Rob: god dammit
Sonic Rob: I just blew my nose so hard I farted
FyreHaar: damn
Sonic Rob: I am so skeeved out by this new Tomb Raider game
FyreHaar: por qua?
Sonic Rob: well, they say they want to give us a younger, vulnerable Lara Croft
Sonic Rob: so instead of a confident woman with huge tits being awesome
Sonic Rob: you have a scared woman with huge tits being wounded and chased around
Sonic Rob: they’ve disempowered her
Sonic Rob: it’s the beating her up that makes me feel worst
FyreHaar: this should be the story of her empowerment
FyreHaar: how she got tough
Sonic Rob: I don’t know what the game is like as a whole, but all of the preview coverage mentions her getting impaled, gutted, dropped off of high places
FyreHaar: gah!
Sonic Rob: see, you can look at it either way
Sonic Rob: is it about the journey to empowerment?
Sonic Rob: or about the status of fear and pain?
Sonic Rob: we know who she’ll become
Sonic Rob: so seeing her like this is like seeing her tied up
Sonic Rob: and cut
Sonic Rob: I’ve said it before: the preview coverage makes the game look like violent, degrading pornography without the sex
Sonic Rob: just the power over and degradation of an independent woman
FyreHaar: damnit
FyreHaar: this often happens with female empowerment story lines
FyreHaar: it’s like sucker punch
FyreHaar: it’s purportedly about how this woman will come to her strength
FyreHaar: but it’s really all about watching the degradation that requires her to become strong to survive.
Sonic Rob: sucker punch was about all you have is your ass
Continue reading Megachat: Tomb Raider Marketing

Chat Box

Sonic Rob: http://www.shacknews.com/article/68921/dawn-war-3-combines-dow1
FyreHaar: “Now Dawn of War III, either way, is going to have a much larger strategic component to it, more of a global battle going on with little tactical things, sort of MMO-like.”
FyreHaar: how do we feel about this statement?
FyreHaar: that is very DOWI actually
Sonic Rob: sounds like Dark Crusade to me
FyreHaar: indeed
FyreHaar: I liked in DOWI that the planet was going to shit
FyreHaar: you just had very discreet goals within the larger conflict
Sonic Rob: well, maybe they will do a thing in DoW 3 where the results of your games affect the flow of everyone on the server
Sonic Rob: kinda like in the Warhammer MMO
FyreHaar: oohhh
Sonic Rob: world PVP in an RTS
FyreHaar: whoa
Sonic Rob: but honestly, I’d wager they don’t have a line of code yet
Sonic Rob: there are many routes they could take
Continue reading Chat Box

What Does “Genre” Mean in Reference to Games?

In regard to this video from Extra Credits:

If someone asked you what “genre” of game Dawn of War is, what would you say? Would you call it a “Sci-fi game”? Or an “RTS”, or possibly a “strategy game”? The problematic disconnect here is that in non-participatory forms of entertainment, the metadata you have about the thing really just boil down to descriptions of the story’s structure, tropes, setting, and style. That’s where we get genre from.

In games you have often had only some or none of those traditional categories, so the data we’ve based “genre” upon have been information about how the game is played, whether in regard to perspective (FPS, third person), the sequence of play (turn-based, real-time), the type of thinking involved (strategy, tactical), the type of action that occurs (shooting, brawling, sports), and probably a dozen other axes of evaluation.

This is fine for Tetris, but has always made genre sort of a problem for games that have both stories and mechanics to describe under the rubric of “genre”, as illustrated in the example above. Admittedly, this isn’t a huge limitation in describing games over the last 25 years, since 95% of them have had stories that obviously fit into the sci-fi, action, or fantasy molds. But I have to wonder: if we had a better language than “genre” to encapsulate games, would it be easier to make high-profile games that embrace story idioms other than the big three? I’ve been enjoying LA Noire a great deal in spite of its dreadful shooting and driving, impossible interview mechanics, and psychopathically unlikable player character just because there’s no dragons and no spaceships in the story. There’s nothing inherently wrong with elves or space marines, but just to have a big-budget story without either is fantastically refreshing.

-ssr

Chat Box

FyreHaar: I think every person should be issued a copy of the first silverchair album on their 14th birthday
Sonic Rob: That was your personal soundtrack for a summer, wasn’t it?
Sonic Rob: while you were working in a library or something?
FyreHaar: OPS music department
FyreHaar: with Superunknown
FyreHaar: both of which I borrowed from you
Sonic Rob: oh man, Superunknown was a great one too
Sonic Rob: but that’s more for when you’re 16
FyreHaar: I was
FyreHaar: Like albums I’m going to surreptitiously load onto my child’s mp3 player
FyreHaar: so it’ll shuffle through them
FyreHaar: and then they’ll be like, what is this!!
Sonic Rob: you can play those albums up against your womb, and then later on when your kid hears them they’ll find them strangely comforting and familiar…
FyreHaar: ha!!
FyreHaar: totally
Sonic Rob: or they’ll be born deaf
FyreHaar: eep!

Chat Box: Fire and Forget

SonicRob: http://km-515.livejournal.com/746.html
SonicRob: haha, amazing

 

SonicRob: http://hauteslides.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Game-of-Thrones-Infographic-Full-Screen.png
SonicRob: handy

 

SonicRob: http://wonkette.com/445855/afa-christian-women-who-do-yoga-are-heathen-witches
SonicRob: LOLOL

 

SonicRob: http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2011/05/bending-of-future.html
SonicRob: whoa, crazy

 

SonicRob: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/135705721/crochet-vandals-do-graffiti-like-your-grandma
SonicRob: also insane

 

SonicRob: http://thog.org/thogmatic.php
SonicRob: omg best toy ever

 

SonicRob: http://bibrarian.posterous.com/freerunning-academy
SonicRob: ezio school

 

SonicRob: http://vimeo.com/9688132
SonicRob: whoa

………………………………….

FyreHaar: I have returned!!
SonicRob: wb
FyreHaar: oh, yarnbombing
FyreHaar: that’s a whole thing now
SonicRob: wtf?
SonicRob: oh yeah
SonicRob: the crochet thing
SonicRob: you are going through days of links that I fired at you and forgot
FyreHaar: yes
FyreHaar: most of them are pretty cool
SonicRob: I apparently thought so at the time

Chat Box

FyreHaar: is the typo in the schmead intentional?
SonicRob: no typos are intentional
SonicRob: what is it?
FyreHaar: is it a typo?
FyreHaar: “Typos, missing or redundant words, and other simple errors abound. In literally the first paragraph of The Bleeding Chalice the word “som” appears in place of “so,”. It’s distracting and detracts from the experience of reading the novels, to the point where I soend some passages wondering when the typo will appear rather than paying attention to the action.”
SonicRob: gah
FyreHaar: it’s sort of beautiful and I think you should leave it
FyreHaar: dude doesn’t know what plasma is?
FyreHaar: ffs
FyreHaar: it’s a tiny star
SonicRob: he thinks the guns shoot hot fluid
FyreHaar: it’s a tiny star cannon
SonicRob: he talks about it flowing and gooshing on things
FyreHaar: dumbass
FyreHaar: it’s burning
FyreHaar: lots and lots of burning

Cannonball Read #4 – The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. The book that gave a name to the problem with no name.

If you are a feminist or you agree with some of the principles of feminism (that women and men deserve equal opportunities and treatment) and you haven’t read this book you should. You should get ready to get mad. If you think we don’t need feminism anymore, or that we didn’t need it in the first place, you should read this book. Continue reading Cannonball Read #4 – The Feminine Mystique