felis_ultharus

So in my continuing series of reviews, I thought I'd tackle Bioshock, the anti-Ayn-Rand video game.

The short review: brilliant. I mean, I would've played anything that allows me throw lightning bolts and bees at well-dressed Objectivists. But it also had a brilliant story, and (dare I say it for a game?) cinematography. It has a very Orson Welles feel to it. An anti-Atlas Shrugged meets Citizen Kane, 20,000 leagues under the sea.

( Review continues, with mild spoilers only. )

So, yeah - nearly perfect. I'm looking forward to the sequel. I hope the anti-Objectivist stuff continues, though I've barred friends from spoiling it for me. So who knows? Maybe the archvillain will be Alan Greenspan? He did his part in crashing the world economy with Ayn Rand as his co-pilot, so if anyone deserves to be covered in psychically-generated bees, 'twould be him.

On a completely note, here's the best use of stop-animation ever - the last 14 billion years, summarized. Ray Harryhausen, eat your heart out. This must've taken a decade to produce:

It's been a chaotic week, so I've had no chance to post since our Yule party, and we had a pretty good turnout.

rougemacabre got me a game called Martian Fluxx, which is very strange and a lot of fun. From montrealais I got some excellent books, as well as some decent clothes. jenjoou got me Mass Effect, which I've heard great things about and I'm looking forward to as soon as I've got a new motherboard for my desktop computer. maidenofirisa got me a Shin Megami Tensei game, which is the series I've been playing now, and really enjoying. And archdiva brought his stories, which are always a wonderful gift. Thank you to all ^_^

I was going to review Shadow Hearts: Covenant in this space, but I've got to call a taxi in five minutes to make my flight to Victoria. Maybe next time. But to the Montreal crowd, I hope you have a good holiday, and we have to get together when after I get home - January 3rd this time. See you soon!

So I really have to send off my short story and poetry on Wednesday - Thursday at the latest - for the CBC literary awards. The short story needs a lot of work especially, though the poetry's almost ready to go.

And I'm still working on all the material that has to accompany my novel to the publisher.

So naturally my brain shuts off tonight, and I'm internet-surfing. And not even useful, good stuff like answering e-mail, or reading well-thought-out blogs and articles.

Tonight's interesting fact: the makers of the Silent Hill horror franchise are not only returning to psychological horror, they claim their new game builds a psychological profile of you and adjusts the story and characters accordingly, presumably for maximum horror.

(Frightening and not-worksafe trailer here.)

I'll believe it when I see it. But if they do pull it off, it'll be the scariest in the series, if for no other reason than that it'll mean something as low-tech as the PS2 can understand a human being and react accordingly. This is Turing test material right here.

I've worked overtime the last two weeks at my main job and my occasional moonlighting job, so I've been largely absent from the internet. I haven't even signed on to Facebook in a week.

Yesterday, I took a day to just relax. I worked on my second novel -- I'll be finished version one today, but at 50 pages (100 novel-sized pages) much too short, and there's a lot that can be expanded upon.

I also played Persona 3. I'm far from finished it, but some initial thoughts:

• The main character is an emo kid who gains his powers by shooting himself in the head repeatedly. In other words, it's basically the band Franz Ferdinand done as a video game.
  
  
• The combat system is based on Jungian psychoanalysis. Which is as surreal as it sounds, but it really works, and I'm just glad it's not based on Freudian psychoanalysis. I'm not sure what that would mean, though I imagine the swords and guns would be very big.
  
  
• You build up your personae to fight the shadows through social interaction in daily life. This includes a friendship simulator that's a close cousin of the dating sims that are popular in Japan, but never make it out here. And it's good as far as it goes -- it seems to be teaching the younger portion of the audience how to be a supportive friend without encouraging your friends in self-destructive or outright stupid behaviour -- but I'm not sure I'd want kids taking away life lessons from a game in which you repeatedly shoot yourself in the head.
  
  
• At night, the main character's school transforms into a nightmare tower that spews hellspawn and becomes the site of some truly horrific violence. In other words, a pretty standard high school experience, except for the "at night" part.
  
  
• In many ways, it's a wonderful throwback to the old Sierra games, where conversation and intelligence -- rather than button-mashing -- determined victory. We rarely make games like that in North America now. I also appreciate the turn-based combat. It's an excellent game so far, and I'm really enjoying it.

Today I'm going to work on getting this apartment clean. I've been pretty lazy about it for the last few weeks, but seeing as I goofed off yesterday, I really have no excuse.

I'm bored and unable to focus on editing, which means being unable to focus on anything else since my attention span collapses on any day I haven't worked on my writing.

( video games, art, and Mideast war )

Meanwhile, for the anime group -- jenjoou and I were talking about getting together either Tuesday or the weekend of next week. Would that work for everyone?

I've been getting a lot done -- with my writing and other things. I've got a rough draft of the short story I'm sending out next week already put together, and now begins a rigorous editing process.

It's a good thing real life has been going well, because my entertainment has taken a turn for the disturbing. See, I don't like to switch novels or switch video games when I'm in the middle of one, and I made the mistake of reading Oryx and Crake at the same time as playing the horror game Silent hill 4.

Oryx and Crake really is the most frightening kind of "what if" -- not the "what if the bomb is dropped?" or "what if we opened a portal to another dimension," but just "what if we simply just keep doing what we're doing." At first it seemed pretty lacklustre, but now it's become pure Atwood, and I have to keep stopping to digest the more brutal passages before I move on to the next.

She's brilliant though. I'd like to splice her vision and psychological understanding with Heather O'Neill's style. The resulting writer would be able to re-write all of creation with her words.

And Silent Hill 4 is most disturbing of the series of that series of video games. Not because of walls that bleed angry spirits, or the post-apocalyptic empty urban landscapes, or the undefined fleshy things that slither through those landscapes. It's because the only place of safety in it is a locked, sentient room which gradually becomes more and more hostile to you the more the game progresses -- its air becomes toxic, and the room decays, and the atmosphere itself injures you.

The idea of having no place of safety, and no home to return to, is scarier to me than all the gore-encrusted prisons and hospitals that are a mainstay of the series. I honestly don't know if I can finish this game.

I'm struggling with a particularly delicate part of the massive edit, and so I'm sort f mired down at about 70% of the way through. This might take awhile -- I'll probably be hammering out the same four pages repeatedly over a period of several days. They are newer work, so I expected they'd take longer, and it's hard to get the tone and dialogue precise.

In between these works, I've mostly been playing Psychonauts. For those who haven't heard of it, it's about a kid at a boot camp for psychic soldiers who can project themselves into other people's minds. It takes place mostly in the deep subconsciouses of some pretty eccentric characters.

The game is hilarious -- instead of the usual adventure-game treasure chests, you're sorting through emotional baggage. You power up with positive mental health, fend off inner censors who try to suppress you, and battle other people's personal demons. Every once in a while, you get a look at their embarrassing dark secrets or buried memories. The dialogue is flawless.

A small taste from early on in the game (although I happen to like Tiffany lamps):

I've been violently ill for most of the past couple of days. Today, I'm propped up at work thanks to the power of Dimetapp.

On the other hand, being on the verge of delirious does mean a lot of the teachers' paperwork almost makes sense.

I never got a chance to thank everyone here for coming to my party, and for the wonderful gifts -- mostly books and manga, and none of it I've read. Also, décor -- "lj user="matt_mcl"> got me a gorgeous stained-glass window display, and em_fish a lovely stauette.

There is also Star Ocean, though I am not sure yet if I should thank maidenofirisa and rougemacabre for such a dangerously addictive game ^_^

I was an absolute zombie yesterday -- I wasn't feeling well, and lack of sleep finally caught up to me. I slept for about 14 hours. I can't remember the last time I did that.

Today I've been taking it easy -- a lot of writing, some reading, but little else.

Replaying Final Fantasy Tactics again. The poaching sidequest is one of those aspects of their pop culture that has me wondering about the Japanese.

I mean, it starts off normally enough -- the object is to collect and breed creatures that fight for you. Fair enough -- seems to be an attempt to jump on the Pokémon bandwagon.

But then they have you flay your creatures alive and trade their pelts for items. This is particularly disturbing, as several of the species are clearly sentient. Both the goblins and piscodaemons wear clothes, for instance, when you find them in the wild.

On the scale of disturbing Japanese pop culture, I think that one has to be high.

Yesterday not only broke the record for snowfall in Montreal on December 3, it actually doubled the record. It's a blizzard out there, and quite beautiful ^_^

I've spent these past couple of days quietly indoors for the most part, though I have been out in it a few times. I've been working on more poetry, and a fourth short story (after re-writing my first).

I also beat Dirge of Cerberus, which is -- well, not the most homoerotic video game out there, but makes the top ten thanks to a single scene after the second-to-last battle. Someone should probably have told Squaresoft the slashiness in those shooting games was supposed to stay subtext. Everybody's supposed to pretend that the big men pumping their big guns isn't supposed to have any hidden meaning.

I wonder if that's part of why the game got such bad reviews? Their target audience they were aiming for out here is mostly straight, male, and nervous, after all.