OH WELL EXCEPT FOR MY AWESOME CREDENTIALS HERE

Ehh one bitchy presumptuous post deserves another (those being mine, and then yours, I’m trying to be conciliatory yet still cynical here OH GOD NOW I SOUND LIKE PITCHFORK). ANYWAY who is talking about art? You went on about puzzles and severe difficulty in your review, and your enjoyment of the aforementioned in this game. Chromatron is a series of puzzles that are severely difficult, minus everything I found unpleasant about the first few minutes of La Mulana, and I enjoyed it a lot. What’s the mismatch? I gather it’s got to do with La Mulana’s context, which apparently can be summed up in the statement that games used to be hard but then got easier but now are sometimes hard again. Uh? Art?

I’ve played Chromatron, and it was a very slight improvement on the very hackneyed laser chess theme. If Chromatron impressed you, it’s clear that you don’t know much about games as an artform.

You claim that the games medium isn’t complex enough… But you’re missing a huge amount of the complexity is there. Furthermore, if complexity is a prerequisite for critical analysis, then that would imply that we can never have an interesting discussion about early silent films, which are nothing if not simple.

An artform needs intelligent, understanding discussion not because it’s particularly complex, but because there is an absence of such discussion. If Pitchfork disappeared, there would still be a lot of critical analysis of music. But there is hardly any such discussion of games – not because they are non-complex, but because they are new.

Also, Penny Arcade, despite its shortcomings, is much better than this site. Y’all’s work has 70% of the pretentiousness of Pitchfork, and 1% of the breadth. Not to insult you too much, you’re good writers and you’re trying and all, but god, the games medium just isn’t complex enough yet to be saddled with a Pitchfork.

That works, if you assume that the average slashdot user is an ex-hardcore gamer. But although gamers exist in the slashdot crowd, it is also comprised of a very large number of

- HAM radio nerds
- mac nerds (who have obviously never played a game)
- math nerds
- chess nerds
- astronomy nerds
- cryptography nerds

Many of Slashdot’s core demographics would never do something as lowbrow and right-brained as playing a game.

In any case, as I suggested above, there’s no continuity between what a person wants and what a person would like.

Haven’t you ever craved a McDonalds hamburger, and then when you get one and bite into it you think ‘This is disgusting. I knew it would be disgusting. Why did I want this?’

Check out Slashdot sometime, their games coverage. By and large, they do not want the hardcore. They want something short but jampacked that they can fit in bite-sized chunks.

(and too post my godhand review, apparently!)