dead space (*)
a review of
dead space
a videogame published by electronic arts
released in november 2008 for the microsoft xbox 360 and the sony playstation 3 computer entertainment systems
score: 
(out of four)
Dead Space is an interactive cinematic experience about depressed, frustrated kleptomaniacs stomping corpses in zero gravity. The main character is a schlub who serves as a crew member on a ship that is going to rescue another ship that suddenly stopped talking to other ships. In a radical departure from “the norm” as regards video game character design, the main character stands with terrible posture. His knuckles dip below his knees. We never get a chance to see him without his shirt, though he probably has a beer gut. He could be standing this way because his suit is heavy. That’d be one way to explain it. His boots must weigh four hundred pounds. Anything he stomps on explodes.
We accidentally left our hidden porn camera on while playing this game for six straight hours; if one were to edit those six hours of footage into a feature-length film, about an hour and fifteen minutes of that would probably be the hero guy (think “Excitebike Rider: The Movie: The Game”) stomping on corpses. The man has no prejudice: he will stomp an alien monster’s corpse as soon as he will stomp a dead human soldier’s corpse, as soon he he will stomp a scientist’s corpse, as soon as he will stomp a doctor’s corpse. The man belongs to a rag-tag band of space-hoppers who are going to this distant starship because it is broken and they are repair-people. As he sits on the bridge of his home ship, osmosing a mission briefing and listening to a distress call from a woman he might know in the imaginary real world, it is perhaps not possible for him not to be rubbing his proverbial hands together and daydreaming about stomping him some flesh and bones. He’s probably literally thinking: “Man, I hope there are some dead people in there.” It’s said that the art team of Dead Space researched photographs of car-crash and train-wreck victims in order to achieve a command of the accent of death; we wonder if the game designers didn’t do similar research, like, maybe by visiting actual car-crash sites and jumping up and down joyfully on the dead bodies while wearing football cleats.
It’s not your fault if the guy in the TV is stomping so many innocent corpses, either. The game designers of Dead Space want you to stomp the corpses. The evidence of this is that you are able to stomp corpses, by pressing the R trigger. Usually in an Xbox 360 game, the R trigger fires your gun. In Dead Space, you have a gun. The game designers of Dead Space obviously consider corpse-stomping more important than gun-firing. Dismembering corpses by stomping them on their articulation joints is so important to the game that the box art shows a detached hand floating in zero gravity.
The “function” of the R-trigger stomp is to stomp corpses, though also to stomp on boxes (which look like original Xboxes), releasing the goods inside. The stomp is a sudden joyful frictive movement. The character steps back, like his aft leg is nailed to the floor, lifts his foreleg like a sumo, and brings it down like a hatchet. The screen shakes a precise few degrees one direction, then the other. The controller thumps like a tennis racket handle the moment of a serve.
However, the nature of the camera is such that you never really feel like you’re stomping the box so much as you’re stomping the ground a few inches to the left or the right of the box. What was perhaps a clever little nod to Super Mario Bros. (jump up to hit blocks) now becomes little more than a Cause For Hunger. Box fragments disappear after boxes are stomped. Corpses do not. In fact, you can stomp a corpse roughly in the middle of the arm, and now his arm will be detached and kickable. Kicking the arm requires little more than walking in its general direction. Watch it flip and flop and fly and possibly get stuck for a few twitchy, glitchy, hilarious seconds to the front of your character’s suit.
It’s like, one of the bread-subsisters on the design team must have taken some time away from his dinner roll to hoot in the direction of a colleague: this technology we are using, sir, it allows limbs to be broken off at specified articulation points! Maybe we can make the character stomp corpses? The colleague, then, calling his colleague “sir” because he was confused which of them was in charge of the other, did not stop for a second to think that maybe his colleague was a serial killer or a pedophile, possibly because being able to stomp a corpse seemed like a good idea to him as well. Eventually, someone got the idea for corpses to occasionally turn into alien freakmonsters, meaning that the player, fearful of his life meter dropping below danger level again, will start obsessively stomping corpses both because of the joy and because of the vague sense of security it brings. In fact, stomping corpses might actually not help the player complete the game. There might, however, exist an Achievement and a Trophy for every player vigilant enough to leave no corpse unstomped.
So yeah, this is a videogame. It takes place in a ruined environment that once housed human life (BioShock), features an over-the-shoulder third-person camera perspective (Resident Evil 4, Gears of War), a hero wearing a power suit complete with a helmet (Metroid), a gravity / telekinesis gun (System Shock 2, Half-Life 2, Psi-Ops, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed), slow-moving grotesque monsters (Resident Evil) who happen to be aliens (Gears of War), bleeds in back-story snippets via “Audio Logs” recovered from kleptomaniacally scouring the environment (BioShock), and frequently asks players to solve puzzles (Zelda, Metroid) to advance. Eventually, the bad guy is revealed to be a poster Muslim (Fox News), and the walls start growing flesh, hair, and teeth (Silent Hill). Atop this heap of identitylessness Dead Space drops
1. A decently realized atmosphere
2. A Tetris-gun
3. Enemies that die when you shoot their limbs off
#1 owes perhaps thousands of royalty dollars to the film “Event Horizon” (right down to the sound design). #2 (in that your gun fires rectangular bursts and can be held either horizontally or vertically to cut off different enemy limbs) is only cute until you realize it is not necessary. #3 was most likely concocted by the whiteboard itself, after the designers scribbled “Resident Evil 4: Zombies: Human-shaped person-things: They have arms, legs, torsos, and heads: sometimes their heads turn into tentacle beast-monsters when you shoot them in the head”. All signs currently point to “innovation” in the games industry being defined as “giving the player a reason to shoot something other than his humanoid opponent’s head”. In Dead Space, it’s the legs or the arms. Since legs and arms might be hard to shoot off, precisely, the developers have made one of the key features of the alien monster-creatures that they have numerous superfluous appendages growing out of their necks and/or rectums.
Dead Space certainly looks nice enough, really, for it to secure funding and make money, though ultimately the evidence of an inferiority complex between the game designers and the artists becomes impossible to ignore. Simply put, the game design does not exist. (The art, on the other hand, does.)
One of the first abilities you learn in Dead Space allows you to slow down time. Not all time, though, just time as it relates to one object. Does that sound cool? Maybe it is. Put that in a PowerPoint and EA Producer Man will probably slap five dollars on the table right there and tell you to buy him a Chai Latte and keep the change.
In Dead Space, you find the time-slowing down thing on the ground literally three feet away from a door that is opening and closing at roughly the speed of sound. Pick it up and someone tells you: “That’s a Stasis Module. You can use it to slow down time! Try using it on that fucking psychotic door right in front of you.” Then, a tutorial message pops up, telling you to aim your gun with the L bumper and shoot the Stasis Module with one of the face buttons. Then a second window tells you that this is the only way to slow down this door. Try walking through the door, and your character gets cut in half. Okay. Use the Stasis Module, and the door slows down. Now you can walk through it.
Up the stairs and down the hall, there’s a “puzzle”. A computer panel tells you to “manually attach the arms to initiate repair”. Okay. You press the lever on the left side of the room. One of the arms shoots out and connects to something. Press the lever on the other side of the room (look out for the monster lurking in the shadows!) and the second arm shoots out, grabs a thing, and then shoots back a second later. You have to touch the computer panel while the second arm is attached.
Have you thought of the solution? Of course, you have to shoot the second arm with your Stasis Module and then press the lever; it’ll now take ten seconds to get to the Thing it needs to repair. You can enjoy a little walk up to the panel.
What a tenuous, weird puzzle. Later in the game, you get the gravity gun thing, which lets you pick up boxes and shit. The very first “puzzle” involving the gravity gun — sorry, “Kinesis Module” — requires you to lift up a box and move it out of a hallway. While we understand that the main character’s boots are heavy, this is still kind of stupid. Pick up the box and YAY, the box hovers in front of your character. This would be exciting if we weren’t already spoiled by the experience of having used a remote control to turn the TV off from the next room, using a mirror, to our big brother’s horror, at age nine.
Seriously, if you’re going to put telekinesis into your videogame, try making a Powerpoint presentation to lay out the reasons, first. If your list of “reasons” is merely a list of titles of games that have telekinesis in them, maybe you’re doing something wrong. The chubby, Dorito-huffing human beings playing your game are already experiencing a telekinetic-like joy of moving around a real-like imaginary human being inside their television. Try making that imaginary person interesting before you think about giving him the ability to hover boxes over his head. Really. And if you’re going to give him telekinesis, make the whole game about telekinesis, and make it interesting. Before we know it, “telekinesis ability” is going to be a feature listed right there on the back of the box alongside “Rated ‘M’ For Mature” and “720p High-definition”.
Every once in a while, you’ll stop in a room, get all the way to the door, rotate in place several times, and wonder why no enemies are screaming at you with bile dripping out of their jaws yet. Then you realize that There’s Probably A Puzzle In This Room. You scan your surroundings for levers that can be flipped. You survey what happens — door opens, platform moves — when you press the switch. Now you consider, are you going to slow something down, or move something around? Eventually, the game is giving you super-fast-moving elevators with switches across the room and — we shit you not — ultra-heavy boxes obstructing the elevator entrance. The solution to this little brain teaser is to use your telekinesis shit to pick up the ultra-heavy boxes and then shoot the platform with the slowdown gun. Then flip the switch. This is no joke. One mid-game puzzle has a moving platform with a wall in the middle of it: it must be slowed down, ridden, and then boarded again on the opposite side.
Now it’s time for a counterpoint: the game’s scenario flows decently enough. You don’t know what happened on this ship, though hey, flesh is growing on the walls and there are freaks to shoot and corpses to stomp. Your ship is destroyed in the hangar bay, meaning you can’t simply throw up your hands, sigh, and go back home. You’d think that the story would write itself: get to the bridge and use the radio to call for help! The writers take it one step further, fabricating nice enough excuses for the player to traipse to the far reaches of the ship. Like, in one chapter, there’s a meteor shower coming. The auto-firing turret is offline! Get there and operate it manually until your tech guy can get it up and running again. You make the journey, and play a minigame.
Eventually, though, the context evaporates. Missions merely become a case of Something Going Wrong (example: oxygen depleting) and your hero needing to access a room at the end of a long, remote corridor and Press The Context-Sensitive Button (A button on Xbox 360, X button on PlayStation 3) to perform some “task” (example: mixing together chemical ingredients for some virus-killing serum). At one point, your commanding officer literally tells you, “I don’t know what you did, though it sure saved us”. That about sums it up. We feel exactly the same way.
Upon reaching this point of sympathy, we would like to suggest a better way for Dead Space‘s design team to handle the puzzle layouts for the sequel: The Puzzle Button. (B button for Xbox 360, Circle Button for PlayStation 3.) For god’s sake, you already have a Health Button (X button for Xbox 360, Square Button for PlayStation 3), and the in-game tutorial even calls it that, capital letters and all. Anyway, when you walk into a room and the exit is not immediately visible, press the Puzzle Button and the main character will walk to the nearest computer terminal and begin banging on keys for six straight real-time minutes, occasionally heaving a sigh. Then, the door opens.
There will, of course, be an enemy freak-monster on the other side of the door. He will burst into the room, foaming at the mouth. You will shoot him, and then enter a hallway with several Puzzle Terminals and several monsters. Eventually, there’s a boss.
Oh, look, we’ve walked right into the section of this review where we will dissect Dead Space‘s level design. Our hypothesis is that we’re not going to like Dead Space‘s level design very much.
How did Dead Space‘s level designers get hired? What did they write on their resumes? “Game development: ten years of experience developing independent games”, where “independent games” means “counting to one hundred while scrubbing public toilets to stave off insanity”? Or worse — maybe they wrote Dungeons and Dragons modules. When Dead Space‘s level design isn’t biting you on the ankle, it’s punching you in the crotch. We’ve been over the so-called puzzles, and even presented a solution for the problem they pose, so let’s talk about enemy placement: it’s terrible. When you need someone to arrange the flowers at your wedding, don’t call Dead Space‘s level designers. Every other room you walk into, you’ll see a flickering light at the end of a corridor; as you near the entrance of the corridor, an enemy will walk across an intersection, accompanied with an orchestra’s reaction to the conductor’s being taken out by a sniper. You dip into the hallway with the teabag of your character’s body, and not a split-second later, you hear an orchestra’s reaction to the concertmaster’s sudden and nonchalant stomping of the conductor’s dead body. An enemy has materialized behind you! He is stabbing you in the back with his tentacle arm things! Turn around and you’ll see that the enemy who had just crossed your path has now turned around and is wheeling toward you. We reloaded a save conveniently located just a room before such a scenario, and were careful to walk into it backward. The corners of the entrance vestibule were clear; we dipped into the hallway; the music cue landed; an enemy literally appeared out of thin air right in front of our eyes. We giggled like the living room’s atmosphere was ninety percent nitrous oxide (disclaimer: it was). We tried to count how many times this happened in six hours of play, and ran out of fingers. More often than not, the enemy walking down the intersection in hallways was originating from an extraordinarily shallow dead end. Usually said “dead end” was merely an indentation of four feet at the end of a hallway. What was this guy doing before we came in the room? Just standing there? Taking a smoke break? Wouldn’t it be more tactically advantageous for him to wait there until we approach? Of course, that would miss the opportunity for “horror”. Again, we recall that the graphic designers of Dead Space looked at photographs of car crash victims to perfect the gruesome appearance of the monsters. Maybe that’s a sign of something wrong. If you have to go out of your way to look Actual Death in the eye, maybe you’re just not cut out to do horror. The best masters of horror were, by all accounts, genuinely, innately disturbed people. Ian Curtis of Joy Division, for example, was just some schlub factory worker. He didn’t need to actually commit suicide in order to sing about committing suicide. No, he committed suicide afterward. Et cetera.
The makers of Dead Space probably asked themselves, numerous times during development, “Is this a horror game — or an action game?” Producers might tell you that a game cannot be both. It has to be more one than the other. Many horror game fans will bleat that terrible controls are the whole point of games like Resident Evil, that the slow, sloth-like, tank-like rotation of your character contributes to the atmosphere. We say to hell with that; we recognize that Silent Hill 2 sucks on a mechanical level in spite of its expertly crafted atmosphere, and we hypothesize that none of the fans would have complained if it had actually been fun to play. To Dead Space‘s credit, its designers seem to hold the same opinion — that a horror game can perhaps have fine-tuned action. It’s simply unfortunate that it can manage to make neither the horror nor the action first-class.
Instead of going into great detail on what we mean, let’s just make fun of some of the level design. Three times in the first few acts of the game we stand helpless and watch someone be mauled by an alien freak monster on the other side of a bullet-proof glass window (like the first Big Daddy scene in BioShock). Also, thrice, we are treated to the “surprise” of an alien suddenly shunting a tentacle into elevator doors after they’ve closed. If we were making this game, we’d make it so that alien tentacles jabbed through every elevator door, sometimes inexplicably, even while the elevator was moving between floors, just so we could guffaw like baboons every god damned day when he hit up internet forums and see that no one seems to notice.
The very first Action Challenge in the game requires you — weaponless — to run from a stampeding alien. It chases you down a sloping hallway. An elevator stands, open, at the end of the hall. You run into the elevator, turn around, and press the button. The elevator doors slam shut. The alien jams his tentacles into the door. The doors open partway. The alien sticks his head in. The door slams on the alien’s head. The alien dies. You think: Whew! Close one!
Now let’s try running down the hall, jumping into the elevator, turning around, and not pressing the button. Just stand there, looking down the hall. The alien will literally run right up to the doors, stop, look at you, and then turn around. Come out of the elevator, and the enemy will turn around and chase you again. If any of the developers of Dead Space are reading this, please email us with the subject line “re: first elevator in dead space” and the message text “You’re not supposed to do that!” Please wait patiently for our reply — it takes us a while. We promise that you will never forget the five words we choose to employ in our response.
Moving right along, let’s talk about zombies. Why does every other game have to be about zombies? We’re going to lay down the secret here, in the interest of Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter. The truth is that zombies are the Zero Enemy. They are Drone Zero. They are humanoid in shape — like a target at a shooting gallery! — and slow-moving — as in “the opposite of fast-moving”. Game designers very seldom consider the enemies the player is going to battle at the planning stages. Normally, they are considering how many guns the hero will have access to (or, if they’re in Japan, what the hero’s hair is going to look like). (Game designers must make terrible lovers.) When drafting the minute specifications of each gun, the only requirement for the game designer is that the guns be satisfying to fire into a moving, humanoid target. Nearly every this-gen action shooting game made thus far has most likely started development with the enemy drones as shambling humanoids that don’t fight back, their mere touch being deadly to the game designer’s test avatar. The goal is to make the mere firing of the gun exciting, innovative, or even novel. When you play a game like Gears of War 2, however, you get the very distinct sense that the enemy drones were intended from the start to equal the player characters in weapon handling and mobility. With every other game, the main focus of the enemy design seems to be that they look “scary”, or “cool”, or “despicable”. You want shooting the enemy to be some kind of cathartic moment, whether the decision to pull the trigger carries any weight or not (it never does: it’s always “kill or be killed”, after all).
In a good game, you can’t tell that all the enemy drones were initially zombies, because the designers cut all the zombieness out and give the enemies unique patterns, weapons, and appearances. A stellar (and ridiculous) example would be the original Super Mario Bros., where the most common enemies are the Goombas, who are different from the hero because they move from right to left while he moves from left to right. Mario can kill Goombas by stomping them. Goombas can kill Mario by touching him from the front. We can imagine that, when Super Mario Bros.‘s first few levels were transformed from graph-paper to playable, the Goombas were the only enemy. It took actual ingenuity for someone to come up with the Koopas, who, when stomped, retreat into a shell, which can then be kicked so that it bounces frantically and deadly between two stationary objects. (Actually, seeing as how Koopas were kind of present in Mario Bros., this argument might be flawed. Just bear with us for the sake of hypotheticality.)
If Dead Space‘s designers had made Super Mario Bros., the enemy roster would consist of Goombas, Goombas With Shit Growing Out Of Their Heads, Goombas With Tons of Shit Growing Out Of Their Heads, Large Goombas With Shit Growing Out Of Their Heads, and Large Goombas With Tons of Shit Growing Out Of Their Heads.
It’s like, it’s obvious that they started with a zombie drone, just as it’s obvious that the designers of Resident Evil 4 started with a zombie. However, the designers of Resident Evil 4 felt a little creative, and decided to make their zombies unfamiliar: gray, gaunt South Americans with demonic voices and superhuman leaping capacity. Turbo-Zombies, is what they were. Dead Space is obviously a love-letter to Resident Evil 4 penned by a budding Star Trek fanfiction author, as evidenced in the game’s exuberant one-upping of Resident Evil 4‘s “don’t shoot the head” mechanic. So how was this game planned? It kind of hurts to think about it. They started with zombies, yeah. Then someone wrote on the whiteboard “headshots = no”. So we’ve got enemies that you can’t shoot in the head. They also happen to be zombies. In a change from Resident Evil 4, where you could shoot the guys in the chest to kill them, Dead Space contrives this nonsense wherein you have to shoot the enemies in the limbs. As we’ve stated above, the designers implemented this gimmick with a tiny hesitation. In order to illustrate to the player that he should shoot the enemies’ limbs and not their heads or any other part,
1. The enemies have huge, elongated, plentiful, exaggerated, constantly flapping, undulating limbs
2. On the wall above the workbench containing the first weapon in the game, the words “CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS” is written (Portal) in blood with very clean handwriting (you look at the dead scientist on the floor, ask “Did you write that, jerk?” and then stomp him in the middle of the thigh, cutting his leg off)
3. Upon picking up the first weapon, a tutorial message pops up: “WEAPONS: Use LB to aim, and press RB to fire. (Press B to continue).” Press B, to continue, and the next tutorial pops up: “Shoot the enemies in the limbs to kill them more quickly.”
4. Walk down the hall and a monster appears. Your superior begins talking in your ear: “Isaac [your hero's name is Isaac]! Shooting them in the head doesn’t seem to work! Aim for their limbs!” Isn’t our superior supposedly waiting for us in some comfortable safe room? Was he even carrying a gun?
5. An hour later, after we’ve shot and killed maybe a hundred freakmonsters, our superior reminds us: “Isaac! Are you being sure to shoot them in the limbs?”
6. Another hour later, we pick up an “audio log” (BioShock) lying in the middle of the hall. It’s the frantic voice of a scientist. “They’re everywhere! We’ve been shooting them in the limbs, and it seems to be working!”
A week after this game’s release, a group of game designers on the other side of the globe conversed in a big stinking huddle: “Maybe we should have a type of enemy with long arms. You know. You’d have to shoot him in the arms to kill him.” A man with acne that resembles mild leprosy took a very deep breath through his mouth. “We’d have to preempt that with maybe five or six tutorials, you reckon?” “Five or six would be about right.”
So, in summary, Dead Space is Space Zombies that cannot be killed by headshots. In order to kill them, you have to shoot some part of them that isn’t their head. The part of them that must be shot in order to kill them is their limbs. Regular arms and legs are too small to be shot at, so the enemies in Dead Space have dozens of huge long flapping superfluous appendages. Shoot two to kill an enemy. Since requiring the player to think outside the box like this might be construed as “difficult”, the game designers have seen fit to give the enemies in Dead Space no actual methods of attacking aside from getting close to the player and flapping their needless appendages at him, causing damage. How much of the game was developed and playable before EA Producer Man finished his chai latte and proclaimed something “missing”, we might not ever know, though we know that it was most certainly after this point that the game designers decided to add “fun” touches like The Gun That Slows Enemies Down (programmers must have had to work overtime to make every enemy marginally faster), a Chase Scene were your character can be slowed down by Glue On The Ground, and Several Dozen Rooms Filled With Tiles That Kill: Step In Them And You Die. Sure, Super Mario Bros. had bottomless pits, though the visual weight of falling into them, and disappearing without fanfare off the bottom of the screen was so poetic. In Dead Space, there’s no elevation. You step on a floor tile with white Air Lines streaming vertically out of it, and your body explodes. So you start walking through every stage as slowly as possible. You even walk through every stage backward, so as to not be surprised, so as not to die, so as to not have to endure that god damned loading screen, which, believe us, is a sight scarier than any nurse (Silent Hill) committing suicide behind bulletproof glass (BioShock, Dead Space).
In conclusion, Dead Space is Zombies in Space. However, they’re not just any zombies — they’re interesting zombies. The big question is Who The Fuck Says We Have To Make Zombies “Interesting”? Can’t we give up on zombies, already?
Dead Space most likely secured funding because it looked good graphically and because it promised pseudo-innovative things like the zero gravity segments, which are too few and too ham-fisted to really make a difference. The best way to summarize the zero gravity segments is to say that the solution is always painfully obvious — it will always involve one of the two Puzzle Buttons — and that the only reason to fail is because you get bored. One zero gravity segment sees you plodding slowly across a long stretch of the space station as asteroids fall intermittently. Whenever the asteroids start falling, you have to stop to take cover behind a Jutting Rectangular Thing. The only way to die here is to be an idiot or to be bored. If you’re an idiot, it’s because you’ve never played Gears of War, and thus do not realize that any Rectangular Thing higher than a game hero’s shoulder is impervious to anything. If you’re bored, you try to go too much farther than you can in the interval of time during which the asteroids are not falling. This elevates the segment to about as much fun as a boss in Dynasty Warriors, where all you have to do is run in circles, hit him in the back when he does his big slow attack, and then run around in circles again, waiting for him to do that attack again. If you have the steely nerves of a Chinese Warrior Poet, you’ll refrain from trying to get two hits at a time. However, if you are playing videogames and not, say, meditating in the name of peace, chances are you’re not patient, so out with the healing potions! This is as fun as playing “Red Light, Green Light” by yourself in a dark room (possibly while lying down in bed with your eyes closed).
Now for the positives:
At one point in Dead Space, an alien monster grabs the hero by the leg and drags him down a corridor. We yawned for precisely fifteen seconds before we accidentally touched the right analog stick and realized that we could still aim our gun. So we shot the fucker! That was kind of cool — a Progressive Quick Timer Event, if you will. Good job, Dead Space!
Thus concludes the positives. Did you know: some retards can tie their own shoes?
You might be expecting us to, at this point, salute the in-game User Interface. We are torn, however. We’re going to stay on the safe side and just write the User Interface off as contrarian trash. For the uninitiated reader (sup dad) we will explain that the UI is represented as something with an actual concrete existence in the world of the game. Video game staples like “life meter” (a gauge representing the amount of health the player character has remaining) and “inventory management menu” are represented with logical in-game-world counterparts. The life meter is especially “clever” — made up of LEDs running down the spinal column of the main character’s suit. The inventory management screen, when opened, appears as a hologram projecting out of a lens on the main character’s wrist. These two things were huge “Talking Points” that marketers most likely decided to pump up when they realized that talking about the actual contents of the game might not have been a great idea.
Once you get down to the particulars of the “newsworthy” UI, however, you’re either groaning or you aren’t getting enough oxygen. Why have a life meter at all? Isn’t the current vogue to not have a life meter? Aren’t we trying to represent player health through more subtle visual / animation cues such as painful limps or the screen desaturation effect in Uncharted?
And why can’t the hero just, you know, have his health regenerate automatically? Why have the Health Button at all? If his suit is high-tech enough to assess his health and present a visual readout to any person standing behind him, why can’t it automatically utilize health recovery items just as the wearer’s health dips below a certain point? This is a very serious question. If someone had asked it of the game designers midway into Dead Space‘s development, they would have frozen up, and answered: “Because that would break the game”. Not if you break the game yourselves, first!
Also, by making the character’s inventory a “part of the game world”, you are only further hammering the subliminal question of where in the hell the guy is keeping all of these trinkets. Whenever he picks up an item, we don’t even see him touch it with his hands. There’s just that huge blustery stomp, a quick crouch, and then a sterile icon appearing in the center of the screen, telling us what we just picked up. Under these circumstances, who, really, gives a standing shit that the menu looks like a hologram shooting out of the guy’s suit? It’s a cute gesture, guys, and it was probably thought up with dreams of games’ finally being celebrated as Real Art, though when you get right down to the execution, it’s just another god damned Thing In a Videogame. We realize that DARPA recently made a tank powered by a Windows PC and remote-controllable with an Xbox 360 controller, and yeah, that’s fuckin’ meta as hell, though we don’t reckon that any clever PDA engineers are going to take a crack at game-like inventory management menus for real people any time soon. If you want to do something clever, one-up that recent (terrible) Alone in the Dark game (1/2
), which used the character’s jacket pockets as a menu — give us a huge, Australian-style hiking backpack with a zillion pockets, where it’s fucking impossible to find anything, and let the analog sticks control our right and left hands. Make the menu into a game, not just something in a game. Or else lose it entirely.
So yeah, on top of this, we will now complain about the in-game store: can we not sell guns in a “store” on board a ship that also has a “clinic”? A “clinic” is a sign that the people making this videogame and/or writing its story had some concept of the environment in which the story happens as being a place where characters representing “people” live and work, meaning that they get sick and/or hurt here as well. Why would the crew members of a military vessel need to pay money for guns? Seriously?
That Dead Space‘s game designers saw fit to make an item inventory menu that looks like it’s part of the game world is one thing. That you obtain new weapons by finding “schematics” which make new guns “available” at the store terminals is just videogamey enough to knock the cute menus back down two rungs on the entertainment ladder. Tone-wise, Dead Space is like what would happen if the producers who made “Super Mario Bros.: The Movie: This Ain’t No Game” somehow made a movie out of Super Metroid and then commissioned EA to make a game out of it. For all its inspiration, though, it’s a little ham-handed. You’d like to think that — in a perfect world — people with inspirations take the best bits of the things that inspire them. The makers of Dead Space, more often than not, take the bits of their inspiration which would be immediately easiest to implement. Where Super Metroid would place ceremonial importance on the archeological uncovering of a new power suit, Dead Space takes the easier inspiration from Resident Evil 4 and/or BioShock, and lets you buy one from a vending machine. Et cetera. One point we won’t bother getting into is how at least Resident Evil 4 contextualized the weapon merchant by making him Mysterious As Hell, and making it possible to kill him and make it so that he never comes back and you are screwed if you want new weapons. Also, in Dead Space, you can sell guns to vending machines. No wonder this vessel fell prey to the alien threat — all the men on board probably sold their standard issue firearms to fuel their poker / hooker / porn binges.
We’re almost done.
Here’s a paragraph we wrote while woozy with the rush of a hundred pushups. We’re going to present it as a blockquote:
The sound design in Dead Space is of the most fantastic production quality. More games need this attention to detail. The music, on the other hand, while certainly recorded using expensive equipment and talented people’s time, happens to quite coincidentally always sound like either an air-conditioner having an orgasm or an earthquake swallowing an orchestra.
Actually, we’re not sure what else to say. Maybe it’s worth pointing out that we didn’t finish Dead Space. We got to what we thought was the end, at which point we had acquired a drill-bit-firing gun that can kill enemies with one shot to the chest, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole limb-cutting gimmick. It’s a modern game design tragedy, and it happens too often: eventually, a game has to kill its own gimmick in the name of its level designers’ incapacity for thinking of anything “new” or even “different”. Eventually, the game was so much of the same thing over and over again — the same plodding, humorless, gamefuneral-like tone, punctuated only by “hilarious” advertisements (BioShock) for meme-things like “Science!” (Portal) on the walls — that when it started to try something “different” it was vaguely shudder-worthy, and we walked away to avoid losing face. Having walked away allows us to, of course, think fondly of the parts of the game we never got to play. To wit:
The final boss of Dead Space may or may not be David Bowie in a business suit, nonchalantly tempting the player: “You go right on and keep trying to shoot me love, I’ll be teleporting“. He then teleports — to the left, to the right — as you shoot him and Space Fire spreads like spilled orange juice. You cannot win. This could be the end of the game — we wouldn’t know because we didn’t play it that far. We liked it at the beginning — with space, and pretty twinkling stars. We liked the cold steel of the abandoned space station. Then the game showed us an alien killing an innocent person behind glass, while we stand and watch, unable to help. Then it did that three more times. Environmental snippets present a story for the gleaning: something about people researching mutation. Eventually, the walls started growing flesh. As the game’s story was apparently written by nine-year-olds who’d just seen “Event Horizon” and didn’t realize that the language the “Jurassic Park” guy was speaking in That One Scene was Latin and not some alien tongue, we figure that any explanation for flesh on the walls we can come up with is probably as good as if not better than theirs. We feel exactly the same way just about every time we do anything in Dead Space. The developers must have felt the same way as well.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1925
Fantastic review, as always.
Whatever happened to the podcast?
December 2nd, 2008 at 2358
thanks for the praise! the more people praise us, the less inspired we are to stop writing reviews
as for the podcast: it’s a possibility that charles hartley, our ultra-talented podcast reader, got a job
we will pretend that it was his work on action button dot net (ABDN) that got him the job
we are still careful to imagine his voice as we write every one of these reviews, at any rate
December 3rd, 2008 at 018
I keep bumping into Event Horizon references lately. The way people have been referencing it, it’s almost as if it was a good movie. Which it wasn’t.
December 3rd, 2008 at 027
Also, yeah, good review. Confirmed a number of my own suspicions, unfortunately. I’d have liked this to have been a good game.
December 3rd, 2008 at 155
I remember seeing this game presented at E3 and my knee-jerk evaluation was that “kill enemies by shooting their limbs” and “navigate your inventory with a 14-foot wide hologram” were stupid ideas. Does this mean I “get” ActionButton or does it just mean I merely posses some common sense?
December 3rd, 2008 at 214
kinto: a little bit of both, maybe!
December 3rd, 2008 at 339
I love how one of the developers said in an interview they implemented the holographic menu “because [he'd] hit the pause button” during a scary scene to regain his composure. With the in-game menu, he said, you can’t do that!
Unless you hit Start. Which will pause the game for you.
Also: can’t we just put System Shock 2 to rest already? Jesus!
Finally: this game felt like a Resident Evil 4 expansion pack — RE4: IN SPACE! (echo) — where they renamed the Medium difficulty “Hard mode.” I can’t imagine this game on Easy…the aliens must throw confetti at you and tickle your ear with a feather.
December 3rd, 2008 at 614
Wondering if the Korean-farmed “anime” “movie” based on this game might actually be better than its source material!
December 3rd, 2008 at 939
Based on some stuff I read… yeah, actually.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1147
more games need to rip off the future from back to the future 2.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1241
I would appreciate the reviewer’s thought(s) about the zombie/alien that could not be “killed” as a game concept. Is it just a gimmick or what if they built an entire game where you are introduced to a single enemy, given a chemistry set, the keys to an armory, and an english/zombie dictionary and must spent the rest of the game figuring out how to defeat it?
December 3rd, 2008 at 1334
Tim, your discussion of Zombies means you need to play Left 4 Dead. And not on an XBox.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1346
the zombies in left 4 dead are not interesting, either
they’re just zombies that run really fast.
not dissing left 4 dead or anything; it’s fun and all.
it’s just that fuckin’ zombies are fuckin’ zombies.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1518
didn’t read the review yet, but great review!!!
don’t stop!
December 3rd, 2008 at 1701
okay read it. great review!
December 3rd, 2008 at 1707
Soft Baked -
While I was watching my friend play “Dead Space” I had that same notion. Why not just make one well designed character rather then repetitive mindless crazies. Why are enemies so destructible in games? Enemies are so easy to kill off in that game and far too repetitive. I would rather have one character/antagonist that I interact with and learn more about as the game progresses.
In my happy dream world this game would be well designed. Instead it just looks good. I wish the game was just an adventure title rather then a crappy action game. If you could turn of your com. systems whenever you wanted to and just walk the ship alone and find your way around in silence.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1819
Great review, this website is a gem. Dead Space proves that it is actually impossible to base a 10 hour game around cheap shocks. ‘Downtime’ should be 2 hours of silence so when a screaming puking mutant bastard blasts out of a cupboard you genuinely and completely fucking cack your pants.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1858
that could be a lovely idea for a horror game — call it “A MILLION CUPBOARDS” with the post-colon subtitle “(one monster)”
and you’re just walking down a hallway lined with a million cupboards, armed with a gun loaded with one bullet
it takes ten hours to get to the end of the hallway
a monster is going to jump out of one of the cupboards
you do not know which one
will you be able to shoot it, when it does???????????
December 4th, 2008 at 137
No, the L4D zombies are not particularly “interesting;” what they are is perfect, such that no other game ever, ever, ever has to use zombies again (except Dead Rising 2 ok). Now every time someone makes a new Dead Space (RE5 lol) you can say People! Stop! Left 4 Dead already did it better than you! Back to the drawing board, chucklefuck.
December 4th, 2008 at 333
“…didn’t realize that the language the “Jurassic Park” guy was speaking in That One Xcene was Latin and not some alien tongue…” Man, great review until the “Xcene.” All at once, it lost all credibility due to that one typo… unless “Xcene” is alien tongue and I just don’t understand.
December 4th, 2008 at 358
hey,
is a tidy aphorism for anything in place of the menu.
December 4th, 2008 at 644
Great review! Another successful deconstruction of core game mechanics and design from abdn. Probably should have finished the game before reviewing it, but it’s hard for me to stick to that principle for games rather than movies, with games being so arduous and long sometimes…
By the way, I laughed out loud at this line:
“as you near the entrance of the corridor, an enemy will walk across an intersection, accompanied with an orchestra’s reaction to the conductor’s being taken out by a sniper.”
p.s. Who wrote this review? Does “Action Button Dot Net” basically just mean Tim Rogers (Dot Net)?
December 4th, 2008 at 1118
[15:33] Neil: If it is Eden kudos to her for not being infuriating this time.
December 4th, 2008 at 1954
You adequately explained (or expounded) every reason why I don’t like this game, and even gave me a few reasons more. As always, it was a good read. Thanks.
December 4th, 2008 at 2055
Any takers on what the five words might be?
December 4th, 2008 at 2218
Don’t play into his hands like that; it’s unseemly.
December 5th, 2008 at 221
same to you cuba; tim’s hands are ‘fuckin’ meta as hell.’
December 5th, 2008 at 1610
tim so obviously wrote this.
December 5th, 2008 at 2052
Just grabbing a few random sentences…
“Seriously, if you’re going to put telekinesis into your videogame, try making a Powerpoint presentation to lay out the reasons, first. If your list of “reasons” is merely a list of titles of games that have telekinesis in them, maybe you’re doing something wrong.”
One of Tim’s newer trademarks is presenting a real life game design strategy as a joke to point out how ridiculous it is (usually something involving spreadsheets, whiteboards, and mini-maps), so yeah, this has to be Tim.
December 6th, 2008 at 004
Tim or anyone else play “Alien Resurrection”? The developers made that so game so insanely hard that upon the instant of seeing an Alien you would instantly shit yourself, then die , fuck man that game was hard as nails. But although i never got past the first few levels it was a far closer experience to being on that ship with those fuckers coming after you.
Highly recomended, stick it on a psp or somthing, has an interesting development history also. Needs a good write up in my opinion. Complete one off.
December 6th, 2008 at 022
From somebody who gets it but dont like it
“Thank god my friend bought it *cough*idiot*cough*. It’s your basic shooter, its also scary and tense. SINCE YOU CAN DIE FROM A COUPLE F%#@ING HITS!”
“Enclosing: Dont play this game… it uh gives you aids… yeah. The challenge of the game is way to hard. You will never beat this game without cheats, even if you do. NO ONE WILL BELIEVE YOU! Just please, dont buy it… i nearly killed myself after playing this game…”
lol
December 6th, 2008 at 938
The final boss isn’t Bowie, but he/she/it does initiate one of those neat drag you by the leg “Progressive Quick Timer Events”–guess the designers realized that really was their only ace in the hole.
And speaking of Dynasty Warriors, both big boss battles in Dead Space must be won exactly the same way you beat a boss a DW: strafe, strafe, strafe, fire, repeat. There’s a lot of bush league stuff in here for such a slick-looking game.
December 6th, 2008 at 1524
The “progressive QTE” thing reminds me of Out of this World.
December 7th, 2008 at 1348
This game is a good start for progressive QTE, but I think they should take it even further. Like for example, not only can you still free-aim during a QTE, but also, all of the other functions of the game work, as well. So for example, you’re on a platform that’s about to fall over, right? So instead of jamming the X button as fast as you can, you just hit the jump button before the platform falls over. Or say a monster attacks you. Instead of slamming the O button, you draw your weapon, aim, and shoot him in the face. With the right designer, this could provide an unparalleled interactive experience.
December 9th, 2008 at 415
How about a horror game where the aliens/badguys/whatever raped the shit out of you? That’s never been done before, right?
December 9th, 2008 at 459
Gears Of War doesn’t have any aliens in it, and neither does Resistance
December 9th, 2008 at 2359
After the aliens rape you, you have to get to the space medic before the alien babies pop out of your stomach. The medic is in clear view, but it’s a two hour walk because your guy moves like he’s just been buttfucked by a gang of horse-cocked aliens. There are no challenges along the way, it’s just a two hour walk of shame. The final cutscene has the doctor giving you stitches, anti-alien-baby medicine, and a colostomy bag, and then the Xbox 360 version goes *BLOOP!* Achievement “Pregnancy Terminator” Unlocked (150G).
December 13th, 2008 at 1332
@slop101: How about a horror game where the aliens/badguys/whatever raped the shit out of you? That’s never been done before, right?
It is implied in Haunting Ground that at least one of the antagonists does this.
December 15th, 2008 at 832
Left trigger is aim, right trigger is shoot.
WTF Tim? Goddamn.
December 21st, 2008 at 2254
After the aliens rape you, you could just stand there for a whole 9 months instead. Nothing would happen.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1525
Then you cut to the credits, as abruptly as possible. No closing fanfare or gentle dissolve. Just boom, “A game by (Whoever)”.
December 30th, 2008 at 918
I would love to see a review of Metroid Fusion up here.
December 30th, 2008 at 919
^because I have no clue where it falls in terms of ABDN’s philosophy. Well, I haven’t really thought about it enough anyways.^
It’s an amazing game in my opinion, however.
December 30th, 2008 at 939
I feel the same way about Iji (google it; it’s free!). I THINK that, if Tim reviewed it, he’d rave about almost the entire game but then knock a star off for a few really tiny (but nonetheless very… confusing, and silly IMHO) design choices. Someone should start a betting pool on Tim’s reviews.
December 30th, 2008 at 1756
Some over-unders on the games of 2008 to get us started:
Mirror’s Edge **
Braid ***
World of Goo **1/2
Resistance 2 *
Fallout 3 *1/2
December 31st, 2008 at 651
No way, Mirror’s Edge would get a Goddamn zero. If Tim can see how Super Mario Bros’ base thrill can be an analogy of parkour then Mirror’s Edge’s utter joylessness would be staring at him in the face like a (crosseyed) deer in headlights.
December 31st, 2008 at 1901
yeah mirrors edge seems really backwards to me.
January 1st, 2009 at 516
Guess that’s an UNDER then.
January 13th, 2009 at 925
Valkyria Chronicles = GOTY 2008.
Has ABDN gone the way of OMM (i.e. still here, still kind of awesome, but never to be updated again?)
January 13th, 2009 at 933
nope! reviews are coming. please stay tuned.
January 13th, 2009 at 1651
Can’t wait to see what reviews are coming. Are you going to give us hints about what’s next, eh?
January 15th, 2009 at 1528
i think tim might want to keep his a secret, but i’ve one for castlevania (last one, forever — i promise~!) and another for metroid.
January 16th, 2009 at 637
One of y’all should review the TI-83 Phoenix. My bet: 3 stars.
January 29th, 2009 at 338
I love that idea. I never played it much myself (I had a SUPER SQUARE TI-86 instead), but I watched other people log so many hours on that thing.
January 29th, 2009 at 405
It’s almost been 2 months, I’m starting to get withdrawal symptoms.
January 29th, 2009 at 2100
A friend told me something interesting a few days ago: he said the more he played Dead Space, the more he became convinced the game’s title was evocative of how much disc space the game has wasted the world over, and that the game was inert. While I was waiting in line to rent it, this fat guy wearing a very small t-shirt and glasses tapped me on the shoulder and proceeded to explain to me how terrifying the game was. Man oh man, if I had any kind of foresight at that moment, I would have laughed at him.
January 30th, 2009 at 914
excellent reading as always. My comment is a worthless nit-pick. You called out BioShock for the Audio Logs but heck you collected logs in Metroid Prime back in 02. The fact that they’re audio logs in BioShock shouldn’t mean anything. I was considering being upset about this oversight but a) I saw plenty callouts to Metroid elsewhere and b) it’s not that big a deal.
Keep up the good work. I think I’ll pass on this game. I was only moderately interested to start with.
January 30th, 2009 at 1911
But in Metroid Prime, the logs you find are presented in a much different context and manner than Dead Space. The difference isn’t just aural or textual. I thought the audio logs were more reminiscent of Doom 3, myself.
February 2nd, 2009 at 704
I just realized that Mother 3 also lets you sell things to vending machines.
February 2nd, 2009 at 1204
Exactly! You just now realized it! And so did I, for that matter, after reading your post. If you’re gonna do something silly, do it in such an unobtrusive, subtle manner that the player doesn’t realize its silliness until months later.
Also, Bioshock attempted to be all “OMG realistic!,” whereas Mother 3 is a fantasy world and if in fact you sell things to vending machines in said fantasy world then more power to them, right?
February 2nd, 2009 at 1315
What was so bad about the forums that they had to be removed? All discussion for the last two months has taken place in the commentary of a terribly mediocre game.
Also!
http://kotaku.com/people/108/posts/
Too bad we only got one episode of “Let’s read Famitsu with us!”
February 3rd, 2009 at 1215
“Playing it is like doing your taxes on the moon — both in that numbers bombard you constantly while you float and spin helplessly in zero gravity, and in the slightly pathetic feeling that you’ve come to some fantastic, far-off place to sit in the pod and think about your life back on earth while the rest of the astronauts take a spin on the lunar rover.”
That’s not just an analogy, that’s the LAST analogy. It’s so perfect that there is no point in anybody ever writing another one ever again.
Also, the mention of sponsoring your fighter made me think it’d be hilarious to play a game like Godhand where your character has to select a corporate sponsor. One of them might be a power up maker, but everytime you drink one, your guy turns to the camera and gives a big, dopey, vulnerable smile.
February 3rd, 2009 at 1406
(From the Dissidia review I just reread, BTW)
February 4th, 2009 at 1134
“What was so bad about the forums that they had to be removed? All discussion for the last two months has taken place in the commentary of a terribly mediocre game.”
The forums were taken offline because Tim often does things half-assedly. To create a forum that is interesting and fun to read takes a lot of effort, applied consistently over a long period of time. Tim didn’t have the attention span for that, so he adopted the cop-out that is comments. What you are witnessing now are the consequences of that cop-out.
February 4th, 2009 at 2048
The maintenance and day-to-day runnings of a fascist dictatorship are fairly exhausting. I mean more than you’d think really. I’m talking big time fatigue, headache, insomnia, day time sleepyness, dry eyes and runny nose here.
February 4th, 2009 at 2121
“The maintenance and day-to-day runnings of a fascist dictatorship are fairly exhausting.”
Indeed they are. And the more ruthless the dictatorship the more exhausting it is to maintain it. Ask the chief editor of any serious publication.
But that’s the price you have to pay for quality. Nothing good comes free in this world.
February 5th, 2009 at 021
Absolutely. Often when I am creating a medium of open discussion and free expression of ideas, the first thing I do is consult various chief editors of serious publications, for their much needed knowledge of target markets, demographics and making sure Frank keeps the restroom clean to maintain office morale are critical. Though I admit many a time I have come close to mistaking a frivolous publication for a serious one.
February 5th, 2009 at 909
Although i do agree with icy to a large degree, i do like the people who frequent, so why cant we have some facility to disscuss. It at least added to the atmosphere of the place even if the talk was largely nonsensical.
I could post on icycalms FRENCH MODERNIST website. But thats beside the point.
February 5th, 2009 at 911
Although i would most likely be banned in an instant
February 5th, 2009 at 1220
“medium of open discussion and free expression of ideas”
This is what happens to “mediums of open discussion and free expression of ideas”:
“That mental vacuity and barrenness of soul to which I have alluded, is responsible for another misfortune. When men of the better class form a society for promoting some noble or ideal aim, the result almost always is that the innumerable mob of humanity comes crowding in too, as it always does everywhere, like vermin—their object being to try and get rid of boredom, or some other defect of their nature; and anything that will effect that, they seize upon at once, without the slightest discrimination. Some of them will slip into that society, or push themselves in, and then either soon destroy it altogether, or alter it so much that in the end it comes to have a purpose the exact opposite of that which it had at first.”
–Arthur Schopenhauer
This is exactly what happened with IC, which, because of its openness and “we don’t ban anyone — we’ll take even monkeys” mentality turned into a shithole, to the point where even its owner would not deign to post in it. Then one day he decided to clean it up, and — surprise surprise — the only way to do that was to start banning people, and KEEP banning people. And it is now a reasonably decent gaming message board.
“Open discussion” and “free expression of ideas” are idealistic stupidities. In practice, intelligent people always regulate who they talk to, and forums are no different in this respect than coffee-shop conversations or domestic gatherings. If you allow just anyone in, you might as well be having a meeting with the rabble in a homeless shelter.
February 5th, 2009 at 1247
love the use of schopenhauer quotes when referring to internet videogame websites.
February 5th, 2009 at 1400
Yeah, me too. Seeing as videogames are the most important scientific field in which humanity is currently engaged, nothing is more fitting for the writers of a videogame website than a thorough understanding of philosophy. Schopenhauer and videogames go hand in hand. Now try explaining that to anyone else. I am at least thankful that a few people like you understand it, so that I am not entirely alone.
February 5th, 2009 at 2040
You are an epic troll, I actually thought you were serious for a full 5 seconds!
February 6th, 2009 at 441
“I actually thought”
That’s where you went wrong.
February 6th, 2009 at 734
Clever!
So you genuinely believe videogames are more important an area of scientific research than medicine? How fascinatingly retarded!
February 6th, 2009 at 809
Obviously a thorough understanding of philosophy is never more useful than when you’re sealed off from all the monkeys and homeless rabble and left surrounded by only like-minded imitations to get all philisophical with and so forth.
February 6th, 2009 at 1736
“So you genuinely believe videogames are more important an area of scientific research than medicine? How fascinatingly retarded!”
Medicine is passe. We now know that immortality is something undesirable. Of course by “we” I mean the philosophers, not random games-playing monkeys.
February 6th, 2009 at 2059
I think that the above raises two points of interest:
1. Parker’s comment on like-minded imitations: Philosophy is impossible in that atmosphere, as it is only through dialogue and debate that we can discover our own positions, beliefs, and barebone assumptions of reality. In order for this to be truly fruitful, opposition (and especially thoughtful, insightful opposition) is necessary. Furthermore, philosophy that seperates itself wholly from “the rest” of reality is only fooling itself.
2. Medicine, importance, etc.: I don’t know about much of anything, but I do think that it is foolhardy to continue to strive for longer life no matter the consequences, especially whether or not that life is worth living. It seems as though a very great pressure is placed on people to continue living, whether or not it is a grind. There is a great need to make sure life is worth living, to make a “game theory” that is optimal, that is worth playing. The connection to video games is tenuous at best, I’ll admit, but that may be due to the poor examples of it we see manifested in the world, and not an adequate representative of the limits of expressive capacity within the medium itself.
Perhaps video games can help people live better lives.
Perhaps they are nothing more than wanton tomfoolery.
Through discussion of these topics, hopefully, we can each sleep a little better at night.
February 6th, 2009 at 2300
Medicine has more to do with quality of life than length, and video games aren’t a field of scientific research, but that’s beside the point.
Without medicine, I’d have lost my left arm and I’d be unable to play video games, but without video games, what would I need my left arm for? I jerk off with the right.
February 7th, 2009 at 237
…I use both hands when cooking.
February 7th, 2009 at 247
I once had a friend with one arm. I got him a wok for his birthday. It came with a stand, so he could just set it over the stove and use his remaining hand to stir fry.
February 7th, 2009 at 2125
Medicine’s goal is to abolish suffering — physical and psychological (both of which come down to the same thing in the end). A world without diseases of all kinds would be just as insipid as one without death; death, after all, being the ultimate disease.
I have talked about this in my forum, in connection with AI, another human project as ultimately insane as that of medicine:
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2502
A lot can be said on the subject, but really, a couple of paragraphs should be all that’s needed if one is intelligent enough. Here, have some:
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not – that one endures.”
“You want, if possible – and there is no more insane “if possible” – to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible – that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?”
“I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.”
February 8th, 2009 at 305
Good to see you doing your part.
February 8th, 2009 at 619
I too almost lost my left arm. If it were not for medicine i would never have become a concept artist. And would never have striven to improve and eliminate the wretched design in video games.
By the laws of nature compassion and pity would cease to exist if it were not there to further the species advancement. As would suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment and indignities. Medicine is human compassion manifest. Not a means towards “wellbeing” and if it is, then so is war.
Can we have the forum back now please?
February 8th, 2009 at 655
“War is the father of all things.” – Heraclitus.
lol.
February 8th, 2009 at 657
I’m tempted to call bullshit on the philosopher who wrote those comments icy, but as i understand it he wants things to be so very bleak that brightness will become desirable. Manifest as progress and advancement, which could also be the pursuit of wellbeing.
“If it could be described in words, i wouldn’t paint”
“If it could be described in paint, i wouldn’t play piano”
“If it could be described in piano, i wouldn’t write”
Language is so, so very limited that i pity every philosopher who has ever lived and their hopelessly futile pursuit of truth within confines that represent a spectral fraction of human reasoning. This is the precise reason philosophers have and always will remain eternally tormented and lost.
Regards
February 8th, 2009 at 800
Do you mean to subdue philosophers with the very tools they use in their “futile pursuit of truth”?
Regards!
February 8th, 2009 at 810
“i pity every philosopher who has ever lived and their hopelessly futile pursuit of truth within confines that represent a spectral fraction of human reasoning.”
what a fuckin dumb thing to say
February 8th, 2009 at 919
“what a fuckin dumb thing to say”
Agreed, momentary lapse in the last two words of the quoted line.
i do however feel they are operating with a spectral fraction of communication. That the pursuit of philosophy is fatally hampered and handicapped by text. That textual philosophy is operating in a tiny little “box” that they absolutely categorically refuse to leave.
Pitiful simpletons.
February 8th, 2009 at 950
Do you mean to subdue philosophers with the very tools they use in their “futile pursuit of truth”?
Sir you make a strong and valid point
One has to go beyond
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh2dxZebpIw&feature=related
And beyond
http://www.monetalia.com/paintings/large/monet-impression-sunrise.jpg
February 8th, 2009 at 1035
Human suffering builds character. Now what is character good for if not improving the quality of your own life and the lives of those you care about? What good is pain if it doesn’t teach you to avoid pain?
February 8th, 2009 at 1752
What’s funny about you linking Wagner is the fact that Nietzsche was the philosopher icycalm was quoting. If I recall correctly, Nietzsche and Wagner used to be friends before they had a falling out over something. Could it have been… opposing viewpoints?!
February 9th, 2009 at 022
Wagner was a romantic who, even though he began by opposing Christianity, ended up going over to it in the end. Nietzsche started out as a romantic as well, but eventually renounced romanticism — and of course despised Christianity from the beginning. So that was the source of their disagreement.
“Human suffering builds character. Now what is character good for if not improving the quality of your own life and the lives of those you care about?”
Yes, YOUR OWN life, and the lives of those YOU CARE ABOUT. Not the lives of EVERYONE. And besides to improve the quality of your life you must NECESSARILY worsen those of others. This is what the will to power is all about, which is the essence of the universe.
“What good is pain if it doesn’t teach you to avoid pain?”
The point is not to avoid pain — since if you always strive to avoid pain you will never do anything worth doing — the point is to get good at inflicting it on others. — Not those you care about, of course, but OTHERS, as in remote, distant others.
As for panther’s comments — they are retarded. ‘Nough said.
February 9th, 2009 at 035
“to improve the quality of your life you must NECESSARILY worsen those of others, etc. will to power blah blah blah.”
Y’know, just ’cause a dead German dude says something doesn’t mean that it’s true. I love how people cite philosophy as factual information, as if it’s been proven or something.
February 9th, 2009 at 059
Tim, I would ACTUALLY read your pisstake essay about MGS2 AND fully agree with it if it meant ABDN was updated with something other than philosophy majors talking bullshit.
Please?
February 9th, 2009 at 339
“Y’know, just ’cause a dead German dude says something doesn’t mean that it’s true.”
No, I think it does. I think everything that dead German dudes said was true. Dead British dudes, on the other hand — that’s another matter. Dead British dudes were full of shit, man.
“I love how people cite philosophy as factual information, as if it’s been proven or something.”
Nothing can be proved in this world, not even scientific theories — let alone philosophy. Everyone should know this by now — it is a well understood fact of epistemology. So there’s no point of talking about proofs here. When I cite someone I do it with the intention of helping. Of course not everyone can be helped, but that is the beauty of the entire concept “help”. If everyone could be helped, people like me would very quickly lose all interest in helping anyone.
February 9th, 2009 at 729
“Nothing can be proven, etc.” Y’know, somehow I knew you were going to say that. But you sure seem to spend a lot of words trying to prove to people that you’re right. Now, I know that you’re kinda just putting up an act, but at least be consistent!
Besides, I very much disagree with that concept in general. I mean, obviously MOST things can’t be proven, but many things can. Take math, for example. 2+2=4 in Base 10. Assuming an understanding of Base 10, that statement can be proven true.
Agreed about Dead British Dudes, though
, although I consider the relatively recently-dead British dude Douglas Adams to put most so-called “philosophers” to shame.
February 9th, 2009 at 752
Nice pissing match going on here
Yeah well I’m British AND can piss all the way to France! HA
February 9th, 2009 at 1015
“I mean, obviously MOST things can’t be proven, but many things can. Take math, for example. 2+2=4 in Base 10. Assuming an understanding of Base 10, that statement can be proven true.”
This is silly. You seem out of your depth here, which of course is why icy keeps coming back again and again, cackling. The best way to deal with him is how I do it, with vague insults. Don’t “engage” him in conversation. It only makes the both of you look foolish.
February 9th, 2009 at 1122
I’m not trying to out-philosophize BS him or anything. I’m just saying that the whole “nothing is certain” mentality that so many intellectuals have adopted is very silly indeed. Now, “very few things are certain” I could get behind, but that’s just not as catchy, is it? And yeah, I really didn’t plan on arguing with him or anything, I just had to get that out ’cause a friend of mine has gotten to be a really pretentious philosophizing prick recently and he’s always spouting that same phrase. So I guess icy just hit a nerve; sorry about that.
But what’s silly about it? I’m not saying 2+2=4 has contains any philosophical truth or anything. I’m just trying to say that “nothing is certain” is kinda silly.
February 9th, 2009 at 1200
Pissing match aside. It cannot be argued that what he writes and quotes makes a lot of sense so i wouldn’t let personal matters get in the way of learning and understanding.
When designing/drawing/painting etc I have found it of great help to listen to the work of Wagner or Bach, to study a painting by Sargent or Sorolla to read a novel by Tugenev or Dostoevsky. Even at times trying to understand an elegant equation.
Reading Nietzsche, understanding simple truths is immensely challenging and important yet to much of it and i would literally no longer be able to do my job, that I’m sure. Icys work helps with that.
Some things will never be quantified, and thats the central problem facing philosophy in my opinion. An artist cannot afford to quantify it all, a philosopher cannot afford not to.
Well at least thats my opinion.
February 9th, 2009 at 1220
Your final opinion is a very good one, if I may be allowed to quantify it. But one must be sure not to confuse philosophical consistency with fact. In reality, Philosophy–like many other intellectual pursuits–is much more a game than an actual pursuit of truth. Just because one “wins” the game does not mean one has discovered truth.
I have yet to read Turgenev, for some reason… any suggestions?
But why must understanding simple truths be so challenging? Reality is not so complicated as Nietzsche would have us believe. And why do we listen to him, again? I’m sorry, but… I’ve read Nietzsche and DO, in fact, understand him, but why is it that anyone who disagrees with him is instantly ignorant and foolish?
February 9th, 2009 at 1554
“Nothing can be proven, etc.” Y’know, somehow I knew you were going to say that. But you sure seem to spend a lot of words trying to prove to people that you’re right. Now, I know that you’re kinda just putting up an act, but at least be consistent!”
It only SEEMS to you that I am trying to prove that I am right because you are stupid. You can’t even get to the point of understanding what you are reading, because if you could you would have understood that, as I said, I am only trying to help those who can be helped, and not prove anything to anyone. The desire for proof is something to be encountered only in the lower humans. The higher ones don’t need to be COMPELLED to accept something (which is what the desire for proof is). They can see with their own eyes — and when you can see something with your very own eyes, you have no use for proofs and refutations.
“I mean, obviously MOST things can’t be proven, but many things can.”
The only things that can be proven are the ones not worth bothering with (i.e. the fictions of logic, in which mathematics belong).
“although I consider the relatively recently-dead British dude Douglas Adams to put most so-called “philosophers” to shame.”
That’s because you’re stupid, and hence find the stupid ramblings of a comedian more homogeneous to your mind than the profound theories of a philosopher.
“I’m just saying that the whole “nothing is certain” mentality that so many intellectuals have adopted is very silly indeed.”
All profound insights seem silly to the simple-minded.
“Now, “very few things are certain” I could get behind”
Yes, you could get behind that because it is a stupid proposition, and hence homogeneous to your stupid way of thinking. Whereas the truth, that nothing is certain, and nothing CAN be certain, since if something were certain the universe could not function, is too hard for you to grasp, hence your calling it “silly”.
“But why must understanding simple truths be so challenging?”
It’s not. It only SEEMS challenging to the feebleminded.
“Reality is not so complicated as Nietzsche would have us believe.”
He never said that it’s complicated.
” And why do we listen to him, again?”
You don’t. That’s why you are stupid, and will always remain so.
“I’m sorry, but… I’ve read Nietzsche and DO, in fact, understand him”
lol
“but why is it that anyone who disagrees with him is instantly ignorant and foolish?”
The problem is not that you disagree. The problem is that your reasons for doing so are either ignorant or nonsensical. You are attempting to disagree with propositions which it is clear that you cannot even begin to understand. There is today no argument among scientists or philosophers on whether anything can be proved or not, for example, and yet you still have no idea why this is so. You are still pulling in the other directions, like a dumb mule who does things by instinct, completely devoid of any shred of intellectual capacity. All this is due to your ignorance of the specifics of the matters which you are trying to discuss. So yes. It’s no wonder that everything you say ends up being stupid.
February 9th, 2009 at 2247
I have yet to read Turgenev, for some reason… any suggestions?
Ive not read a huge amount of his stuff, but the novella Faust is outstanding. Also the russian film Stalker, is prehaphs the most amazing film ive ever seen.
February 9th, 2009 at 2248
As is father and sons
February 10th, 2009 at 501
That post goes in the icycalm hall of fame.
February 10th, 2009 at 505
I told you he’d be back to hand you your ass, man.
February 10th, 2009 at 603
oh, i was wondering why there were so many comments all of a sudden.
February 10th, 2009 at 700
@CubaLibre: Yeah, I knew he would, too (though how, exactly, did he hand my ass to me? Insults != ass-handing). The knowledge that nothing I say will matter to his obviously-enlightened mind has prevented me from bothering many times in the past; Idunno why I felt compelled this time. My bad.
But ANYWAY… I’d still like to ask you (Cuba) why my statement from before was “silly.” Not to be defensive or anything; no, I actually do enjoy being taught/corrected/whatever by intelligent, SANE people. If it was, in fact, silly, then I’d like to know why.
Icy, I do have one more thing to ask you, and please actually answer my question because I’m genuinely intrigued. What exactly do you mean by “if something were certain the universe could not function?” I’d really like to hear a response other than “it’s obvious, stupid!”
February 10th, 2009 at 941
Insofar as anything in philosophy is “settled,” it’s pretty well-settled that, epistemologically, there’s no such thing as “objectivity” and therefore no way to determine “truth,” if what we mean by “truth” is something close to its common, divine definition as something objectively correct or objectively in existence regardless of any subjective defects in perception. What’s silly is claiming that a little logical system, like mathematics, somehow defeats this proposition, since all the assumptions underlying mathematics are subject to this same deconstruction. It’s true (lol) that within the system things can be “objectively” proven according to the system’s rules, but there’s nothing “objectively true” about those rules themselves. Logic can’t supply its own premises, etc.
Scientists (and Indiana Jones) will freely admit this if you ask them, saying they look for facts, not truth. We leave that truth stuff to you philosophers, they chuckle. Like assholes.
The point isn’t that icy is better than you for knowing this when you don’t. (This is where he will disagree with me.) The point is that he clearly knows more than you do in this field and when you “argue” with him about it you’re just opening up this sham of a second half of a comment thread to more of his bombast. Comedy is your defense because, despite what icy may think, it has access to profundity just as well as epistemeology.
February 10th, 2009 at 1257
This batch of comments speaks more to the level of global unemployment more than any economic indicator.
February 10th, 2009 at 1306
“…you are stupid.”
“I am only trying to help those who can be helped, and not prove anything to anyone.” – this is pretty funny in light of all this
“…only in the lower humans.”
“The only things that can be proven are the ones not worth bothering with (i.e. the fictions of logic, in which mathematics belong).” – heh heh
“That’s because you’re stupid, and hence find the stupid ramblings of a comedian more homogeneous to your mind than the profound theories of a philosopher.” – this is particularly priceless
“All profound insights seem silly to the simple-minded.” – behold his profundity!
“…stupid proposition, and hence homogeneous to your stupid way of thinking.”
“…too hard for you to grasp, hence your calling it ‘silly’.”
“It only SEEMS challenging to the feebleminded.”
“…you are stupid, and will always remain so.”
“…either ignorant or nonsensical.”
“…it is clear that you cannot even begin to understand.”
“…like a dumb mule who does things by instinct, completely devoid of any shred of intellectual capacity…”
“…ignorance…”
“…stupid…”
very philosophical, alex.
February 10th, 2009 at 1409
There seems to be some confusion regarding truth, provability, closed systems and such like. To say that there are infinitely many prime numbers is to say that it is true there are infinitely many prime numbers (otherwise there would not be, yeah). To prove this, that is to show that it is true, we use a system, Peano arithmetic, and if anyone wants to “deconstruct” that, hey, knock yourself out, I don’t mind.
I myself was baffled by the sudden appearance of Nietzsche’s oracular tchotchkes. These bite-sized morsels of written kitsch seem to be, by those who force them into any conversation, articles of faith as unshakeable as the marriage of a nun to Christ. So I bopped on over to insomnia dot ac and all confusion melted away when I saw one of Pauline Kael’s stenchier excrescenses at the head of the page. Talk about trying to inflict pain!
PS By the way, can actionbutton dot net get back to games, or is it defunct?
February 10th, 2009 at 1516
Tim’s just lazy. (“Busy”. Well, busy.) It’ll be updated eventually.
February 10th, 2009 at 1746
“Icy, I do have one more thing to ask you, and please actually answer my question because I’m genuinely intrigued. What exactly do you mean by “if something were certain the universe could not function?” I’d really like to hear a response other than “it’s obvious, stupid!”
Not that there’s any danger of you understanding it, but perhaps someone else reading this might:
If something (apart from from the fictions of logic) could be proved, it would mean that, ultimately, an action would have to have no consequences. Think of it as someone taking a photograph as evidence for what he wants to prove. In this universe, it is impossible to take a photograph of something without fundamentally altering that something (see quantum mechanics). So every time you attempt to prove something, you end up only “proving” something ELSE, which you yourself in fact constructed. Trying to isolate the object of your study is an exercise in futility, and the more you analyze, the more you increase the resolution of your sampling, the more you approach the limits of quantum mechanics, which in the last resort stipulates that the observer is entirely responsible for creating that which he observes.
Now a universe that did NOT operate in this way, a universe in which actions, or at least certain actions, would not have immediate and universe-wide repercussions, so that things in that universe could actually BE PHOTOGRAPHED, and thus theories proven, is to us incomprehensible. To put it another way, a universe in which every action did NOT ultimately affect everything else contained within it, would not have given rise to beings like us who’d turn around and wonder why it is that nothing can be proved. It would be a universe of objectivity, of love and hatred, of freedom and slavery, of power and weakness, of good and evil — an insipid dualistic universe, filled with sovereign antithetical values that at no point connected with or touched each other. It would be the universe of the Christians, the scientists, the common people, the democrats, the uneducated and miseducated, the college students, the journalists and the politicians — it would, in other words, be exactly the universe which the rabble fantasizes that it currently lives in.
And it would, of course, not be capable of functioning at all, and therefore of existing.
More details on this here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0qmYjhS0Tl8C
And in my upcoming book.
February 10th, 2009 at 1749
“very philosophical, alex.”
It is indeed. I am glad someone noticed. The greatest philosophers have always also been the most rude.
February 10th, 2009 at 1757
“Comedy is your defense”
Indeed. Comedy is the stupid man’s defense. It has always been.
February 10th, 2009 at 2314
UNFUNNY comedy is a tool of the stupid. Good comedy (ie, comedy that makes you laugh) is an incredibly devastating weapon that neither you or I have proven capable of wielding (Though I give you points for trying harder than I am).
February 10th, 2009 at 2337
“Good comedy (ie, comedy that makes you laugh) is an incredibly devastating weapon that neither you or I have proven capable of wielding”
The only reason it is “incredibly devastating” is because people are stupid, and will rather follow the funnyman, the clown, who doesn’t make sense, than the philosopher who does (because they can’t understand him).
It’s not that humor is bad, of course — humor is awesome. There are, after all, “heights of the soul from which even tragedy seems comic”. But the point is that, in order to laugh like a clever man, you must laugh AFTER you have understood whatever it is you are examining. If you laugh before, your laughter is only a defense mechanism covering your stupidity.
Also, your definition of good comedy is stupid:
“Good comedy (ie, comedy that makes you laugh)”
Makes WHO laugh, moron? It all depends on the “who”. If he is is an idiot then the comedy is crap. If he is an intelligent person it is good. But the difference between idiots and intelligent people is that the latter understand how the world works, whereas the former do not. So, in the last resort, the best comedian is the one who can make the philosophers laugh — in the last resort, the best laughs always come from the jokes the philosophers make. And we observe this by reading Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Baudrillard. There are no greater laughs to be had in this world than those that arise from their pages. The problem with people like you, then, is that you have no hope of understanding what these people say, and therefore no hope of laughing with their jokes. So in the end you are confined to the lower comedians, those on TV, comic books, the movies, and the like. Hence the Douglas Adams comment earlier on.
Also!
“(Though I give you points for trying harder than I am).”
You are in no position to “give” me points for anything. You are BELOW me, so the only thing you can do is RECEIVE points from me, whenever I am inclined to give you some. This state of affairs also follows from the way the world works.
February 11th, 2009 at 007
I said “Comedy that makes you laugh”. And I was talking to you. Comedy that makes you laugh is good for you. It’s a very simple concept. Comedy that makes Bill laugh is good for Bill. Comedy that makes me laugh is good for me. Comedy that makes YOU laugh is good for YOU. Moron.
Good comedy has to expose weaknesses that we (the royal we, not you and I, though you and I are included) weren’t yet aware of. If I’m not making you laugh, it’s because I have nothing to teach you.
I won’t comment on the rest because it’s a very, very weak attempt at baiting, written in a state of anger and using unprovoked hostility as a guard for insecurity (and I didn’t bother reading hardly any of it), but I thought I would clear up the part of my own comment that you misunderstood, for your sake (yes your sake, not for the sake of people in general). Even though, to be fair, it was your fault that you misunderstood it, and not mine, but I don’t mind helping you (Icy) out a little here and there.
February 11th, 2009 at 015
And, apologies to everyone for feeding more fuel to the flametard.
February 11th, 2009 at 030
“I don’t mind helping you (Icy) out a little here and there.”
Again, because of how the universe works, is impossible for you to help me with anything. I am the one who needs to help you here again. This, for example, misses the point entirely:
“Comedy that makes YOU laugh is good for YOU.”
It may be good in a medical/physical sense, but not in an intellectual sense. When the joke is stupid, and it is directed against something profound (as is the case with many retarded jokes directed my way, for example), then they prevent the stupid person from becoming less stupid. With the help of the clown, the stupid person laughs at the profound idea and gives it no more thought. Thus we come to have people like you, Spiffy, CubaLibre, et al. who know nothing about anything, yet who exist in a state of continual self-satisfaction with their stupidity, with the help of shallow-pate funnymen and the reassurance of the crowd’s laughter, which is responsible for the “devastating” effect you mentioned before.
“But one should not be too much in the right if one wants to have the laughers on one’s own side…”
February 11th, 2009 at 041
The trick is to make him post ten times as much as you.
February 11th, 2009 at 043
“UNFUNNY comedy is a tool of the stupid.”
“With the help of the clown, the stupid person laughs at the profound idea and gives it no more thought.”
Way to say what I just said right after I said it. I guess this proves I did have something to teach you, but I’ll go ahead and let you pretend you figured it out for yourself.
February 11th, 2009 at 046
Damn, his last comment was only about as long as my last comment! We’ll call it a draw, I suppose, unless….
February 11th, 2009 at 126
“UNFUNNY comedy is a tool of the stupid.”
There is no such thing as “unfunny”. To the stupid person, it is really, genuinely funny. He is not pretending to be amused by it.
And at no point did you state anything even remotely resembling what I am stating. I am sure you’d like for that to have happened, but, like I said, because of the structure of the universe, it is impossible.
February 11th, 2009 at 137
Gilbert’s last comment- 65 Words
IcyCalm’s last comment- 72 Words
Shit, you win, but only because of the ten to one handicap we give you and only because I’m being a sport and not counting total word count. Good game.
February 11th, 2009 at 143
See, this is what I am talking about. Your post is clearly meant to be funny, and I am sure it appears so to you and other monkey-men who think like you, but to anyone above that level it just looks pathetic.
QED.
February 11th, 2009 at 158
My comments aren’t meant to be funny. The only source of amusement to be had on this thread is your consistent inability to retain any sense of composure or express yourself clearly. I’ve only been trying to instigate you further to keep you going so we have something to laugh at until another review goes up, like a cat toying with a mouse until it either sputters out and dies, or something more interesting catches the cat’s eye… And it just did. My Xbox GT is bobossum if anyone wants to play some Team Fortress 2 right now.
February 11th, 2009 at 200
“Again, because of how the universe works, is impossible for you to help me with anything.”
Mentally, sure. But if you were getting gang-raped in an alley and Gilbert just happened to walk by, wouldn’t you request his assistance?
February 11th, 2009 at 204
I don’t mean to sound like a bitch, but I would be a bit too much of a pussy to try and save a guy from a gang rape.
Maybe a one on one rape, and ONLY if it was clear that it was a rape happening, and ONLY if it looked like me and the victim could take the guy if we work together.
February 11th, 2009 at 216
At least you’re honest.
February 11th, 2009 at 224
I harbor the same silly heroic fantasies that any healthy male does, but suicide by gangrape doesn’t really figure much into my daydreams.
February 11th, 2009 at 236
“Mentally, sure. But if you were getting gang-raped in an alley and Gilbert just happened to walk by, wouldn’t you request his assistance?”
He answered this for me. See this is the thing about weakness. There is no difference between mental and physical weakness, in the end — those who are mentally weak are also, ultimately, physically so. The mind/body duality ultimately breaks down.
“I’ve only been trying to instigate you further to keep you going so we have something to laugh at”
I know, that’s what I said. Monkey-men laughing at concepts they have no hope of understanding, BECAUSE they have no hope of understanding them.
February 11th, 2009 at 252
I have a blue belt in Shorin Ryu Karate and I can lift my fattest friends with ease, but let’s look at the odds.
On one side we have you and me, and you are bleeding internally, so you’re not going to be any help in the fight.
On the other side, we have a gang of four or five rapists audacious enough to grab a full grown man and take turns “putting him to the sword”.
Wouldn’t it, in fact, be the more intelligent option to call 911 and then go hide? Wouldn’t you have a better chance at salvation if I took such a course of action? Come on, think these things through, will ya? It’s not like I want to see you get gang raped, but a man’s got to know his limitations. You should be thanking me for calling the police, not demanding that I do a blind rush and get us BOTH gang raped.
What good is philosophy if it renders you incapable of thinking your way out of a gang rape situation?
February 11th, 2009 at 255
I would never BE in a gang rape situation in the first place. I am always PACKING HEAT, if you know what I mean. TWO kinds of HEAT in fact. The only kind of gang rape situation I’d ever be involved in would be the kind which I would instigate.
February 11th, 2009 at 302
Yeah you’d instigate it, what with that flirty dress of yours.
February 11th, 2009 at 308
Very funny, Gilbert, like all your other jokes. Hold on to that dayjob, buddy, whatever else you do.
February 11th, 2009 at 320
“It is indeed. I am glad someone noticed. The greatest philosophers have always also been the most rude.”
yes, and quoting schopenhauer whilst throwing stones at the “monkey-man” certainly makes you one of the greatest.
how about some philosophy of your own, big boy? surely you don’t think philosophy has remained effectively stagnant since 1860?
February 11th, 2009 at 359
“The only kind of gang rape situation I’d ever be involved in would be the kind which I would instigate.”
wow.
February 11th, 2009 at 444
“how about some philosophy of your own, big boy? surely you don’t think philosophy has remained effectively stagnant since 1860?”
1888, to be precise.
February 11th, 2009 at 448
Also, this:
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewforum.php?f=16
For more philosophy of “my own” you’ll have to wait until my books get published. A couple of months for the first, and another six or so for the second.
February 11th, 2009 at 535
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2496&sid=893e85ae4806f0f1ef521f411c164d67
“lol”
the very first one i clicked on (magically) contained mostly insults. halfway down that page? you guessed it, a schopenhauer quote.
keep on truckin’ down that lonely road, whiz kid.
February 11th, 2009 at 540
i also suppose your superintelligent brain might be able to illuminate a problem i’m having!
what is the probability that any single http://forum.insomnia.ac/ thread, clicked at random, contains both savage insults (too subjective, dumbass) and at least one schopenhauer quote?
just wondering if it was a COMPLETE FLUKE or not.
February 11th, 2009 at 612
No idea what you are talking about. That subforum I linked contains the most profound insights into the nature of videogames that are currently available on this planet. The only things that can surpass them are my upcoming books. The rest is silence.
February 11th, 2009 at 631
Use Kinkos. Staples always tries to charge you for the copies they fucked up.
February 11th, 2009 at 634
icycalm the unsurpassable, then?
February 11th, 2009 at 1018
so yeah, dead space.
mmhmm.
February 11th, 2009 at 1054
I don’t understand why people continually get their feathers ruffled by icy. How much can you take?!
At the end of the day, he’s got things to say about games. They’re almost always ignored though! Just chill out, if you can!
Also, Icy: If philosophy has been stagnant since 1888, then what does that say about Baudrillard?
February 11th, 2009 at 1123
they’re almost always ignored because of his refusal to listen or have a level headed conversation with another person with a different opinion. or the conversation would boil down to, “you’re a moron. i win.”
he makes great points, and clearly knows what he’s talking about, but it’s hard to take that away considering his attitude.
February 11th, 2009 at 1128
If only the stupid masses laugh at the funnyman clown and the intellectuals laugh at comedy related to the profound, that makes sense, where does that put people who laugh at both? Social interaction is just acting, so to judge someone’s understanding and “human level” (alex is up there, according to him – that’s not a slight btw, so don’t take it as such) based on them laughing at something “stupid”may not be the best idea. It’s often judging their act than the actor. People have different priorities – some are concerned with philosophy, with applying their ideals to their actions and life, and some just try to be what they consider practical to live in harmony with the world and avoid conflict. Not everyone is concerned with the hypocrisy of their actions and ideals, not everyone lives for a cause, some live for themselves, or others. And many try to balance, which of course is where things get especially tricky.
February 11th, 2009 at 1153
i wasn’t condemning alex for having those traits, nor implying him unintelligent (if anything, the opposite, because i DO believe him to be intelligent). icycalm does indeed have interesting things to say about games. unfortunately, his rationality skills are much more often put to use deconstructing other’s thoughts in an ultimately unproductive manner, rather than constructing original ideas of his own.
perhaps he’s saving all his good ideas for his books, which he implies will go down in the annals of intelligent discourse on videogames. however, this being a substantial claim, substantial evidence is required. this is not to say that i am judging him for refusing to conform to my standards of “well-rounded” intellegience (although, unavoidably, i am), particularly his lack of sufficiently substantial evidence (i.e. his “work”) for claims of all-time greatness among intellectuals, but that i find his estimations of his own intellectual worth to be, in all likelihood, (to an observer) highly exaggerated. what i find interesting is the time he (apparently) spends responding to so-called “monkey-men” and refuting their arguments in gloriously insulting detail. it is not a stretch to say that this is a form of dysrationalia, or using above-average intellect for laughably inefficient results.
this undermines his incessant claims of intellectual superiority, especially considering he seems blissfully unaware of it.
his response of course, would be along the lines of “i am not trying to prove anything” and perhaps, that his claims would be justified by future events, e.g. the publishing of his book.
i’ll hold my breath, i suppose, for that.
(there is also the claim that substantial evidence exists, and i have not sought it out dilligently enough. in that case, i’d love to be linked to that and proven wrong. i have no interest in holding low-probability viewpoints and maintaining them, against reason, as fact.)
February 11th, 2009 at 1331
i think he just does this to have some fun… after all, for him it’s either morons or solitude, and i’m sure he has plenty of the latter.
February 12th, 2009 at 624
Yeah yeah, all stop bitching and whining and lets actually get on to something worthwhile for christ sakes. Can you imagine such a conversation in a class
Question. I’m working on a deeper understanding of aesthetics, I’ve been to Wikepedia as you do and it gives a long list containing possibly retarded “philosophers”
Who do you guys recommend i go for, considering the type of stuff i wish to apply it too (computer games) is often set in fictional time periods, other planets, higher degrees of violence, both western and Asian audiences etc
Any suggestions/thoughts?
February 12th, 2009 at 801
I don’t think you’re going to find what you are looking for in books.
February 13th, 2009 at 1125
Hi panther…
what’s “deeper understanding of aesthetics”? I assume you’re not looking for a definition of the word aesthetics, so, can you put it into context?
ALTERNATIVE VERSION OF ABOVE TEXT:
Define X! Define what it is you seek!
What’s it supposed to DO for you, that sexy aesthetic? Make a crowd puke, make a girl say, “Cute!”, make a man go, “Huzzah!”, make The American Teenage Boy yell, “Gay!”, or what?
That would be my first thought. Because, especially in such dangerous waters as this conversation here, context is important. Ya know, you can’t just apply the workings of the illusive quantum to, well, anything else! — for example. That’s, — like the gay fashion designers of our time would say, — a no-go.
Suggestion1: Approach things scientifically.
Suggestion2: Think about it in a purpose-driven way.
Concretely: Ask, “Which stimulus does what to whom?”
Is that what you’re going for?
February 13th, 2009 at 1303
What the hell?
I think you… just won. Something.
February 14th, 2009 at 134
I think you’re going to learn more about art through studying art and art criticism than you will through philosophy.
Roger Ebert is more helpful to reaching that understanding than any other writer outside of fiction (and if Icy is the only known example of the Ubermensch, I’ll go ahead and include Nietzsche in the fiction category, maybe even Great fiction. The imagination on that guy! NYUK NYUK NYUK!).
February 14th, 2009 at 622
As far as education is concerned, I’d recommend Dostoevsky and Paul Auster. They’re both wonderful authors in their own right, of course, but they’re particularly good to study, as well.
February 14th, 2009 at 1345
Hi sn
what’s “deeper understanding of aesthetics”? I assume you’re not looking for a definition of the word aesthetics, so, can you put it into context?”
You know, initially yes! in fact. I know it was quite a vague possibly even a non- question to be honest, but with all the talk about philosophers i figured hey aesthetics! Find me a philosopher to help me help myself. Essentially i wanted to understand exactly how an aesthetic will come into being. I have to cater to many varied tastes, as well as pursue my own.
On a related note, I’ve always been an avid admirer of both the work of Yoshitaka Amano and the metal gear solid concept artist (sorry cant remember his name, theres a few) yet detest the typical inbred, anime character style.
The two artists share a similar aesthetic. On the surface brush pens, but dig a little deeper and they were both into something called Ukiyo-e “pop” which is the result of a strong western influence in Japan. Yeah maybe i want some of that sexy aesthetic right there, not aping something personal of thiers but hitting the source of the aesthetic and mixing it up with impressionism and other tastes and tendencies i have. For example i hate androgyny, cant stand the whole idea of it. Yet Japan!
Take beloved Tim (even icy likes him yikes). The man has been immersed in Japanese culture, his tastes have evolved, transfigured and ultimately become manifest in the form of hair products and wacko screechy music. I favorably regard him as a true journalistic original.
Your suggestions hit the nail on the head. Nice one.
February 14th, 2009 at 1355
I totally agree with you; Amano and Shinkawa (the MGS guy) are both wonderful artists. I think Shinkawa makes the better character designs from a practical standpoint, so his characters are adapted to the games with minimal alteration. Amano’s work, however, is utterly gorgeous and beautiful in its own right, both the characters and environments, but he’s never really been accurately adapted into 3-d (and probably never really could be), and even the 2-d games had to take liberties.
February 14th, 2009 at 1408
Gilbertsmith..
“I think you’re going to learn more about art through studying art and art criticism than you will through philosophy”
lol, i do indeed realize that abject need. It is however amazing what you DONT learn at university, if anything university taught me the importance of its irrelevance, of the need to find ones own way. I consider it as nothing more than a tick on a CV, a very expensive tick! but still worthwhile. I see philosophy as an aid to help me do so. A supplementary entity.
Yeah i might check out some reviews from him. I’ve heard his name flung around a-lot. Wonder if he looked at stalker, that would be interesting.
Cheers!
February 14th, 2009 at 1441
Spiffyness…
Yeah was flicking through the MGS art books at work today, the guy is insanely good. Good to see some love here, they both really knew what they were doing from an aesthetics standpoint. Very appealing artists with nice taste:)
I think Amano’s style can be effectively translated, very difficult however. i Agree with you at the fact the guys insane visions have never been truly communicated in games. They just don’t GET it, they want to appeal to the west yet time after time they insist on countless stupid belt buckles, stupid spiky hair and shitty androgynous characters. Its fucking retarded. Theres a-lot of old school Squaresoft fans around, just not in Japan it would appear. I think personally the subtle western influence has been transcended with surface, pandering, aping, and just general shitty design fundamentals to be perfectly honest. No idea why.
Regarding Dostoevsky. Hehe i actually bought crime and punishment with a blank cover with the intention of drawing on it after i had finished reading. Never did get round to reading much of it. Thats about to change
Gotta love the Russian stuff. Nice Anglo/German influence in the books of that time. Read Turgenevs faust, its really very short and should undoubtedly be on the net somewhere.
February 14th, 2009 at 1527
Btw Does anyone know of a good source to get art books/making of books out of japan?. I checked ebay for the metal gear solid art books i was reading today. And fucking Jesus Christ are they expensive, worth pointing out they are printed at an amazing quality level, multiple paper types and plastics per book. Very in depth, Just wonderful insightful things.
Any game/film concept art book fans here?, the Japanese ones are unquestionably the best physical quality, as are the pens, pencils, markers, models, glue up kits, graphics tablets, game box sets, etc etc etc etc .
If i ever go there i will, save up some peas, take the most giant of suitcases and go totally fucking shopping crazy. The other night i actually DREAMED about it how fucking shallow can one get.
And another thighdjfjkshfkjsdhfhfkjshfkjshit……..rambling:(
February 14th, 2009 at 1529
DREAMING ABOUT FUCKING SHOPPING!!!!!!
February 14th, 2009 at 1532
Yoji Shinkawa is an admirer of Amano’s, as well as a big fan of Frank Miller (making him one of the few left ever since The Spirit and All Star Batman and Robin). They both do an excellent job at putting forth something more in the feel and less in the specifics, which can sometimes be a lot more helpful in the end.
I feel like recommending Albert Camus, the only philosopher I ever really felt was incredibly sharp about art (despite never really addressing it directly), but I hate the idea of prescribing literature to people.
…Except for Roger Ebert, who is the best art critic period. Even when he’s wrong, witnessing his wrongness can be pretty educational.
And yeah, something I like about Tim’s strange sense of style is that it seems self evidently self aware of the very ridiculousness of wearing flashy designer clothes, a gorgeous woman’s hairstyle, and playing screechy, bluesy noise rock. It’s like Robocop, which recognizes itself as ridiculous, and recognizes that ridiculous and awesome are not mutually exclusive, but in fact, complement each other very well. Tim’s Ninja Gaiden review a few entries down is as much a commentary about Guitar Wolf as it is about his own sensibilities.
February 14th, 2009 at 1625
I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that “ridiculous and awesome… compliment each other very well.” Case in point: How To Kill a Mockingbird. Have you ever watched that flash? Lemme try to find a linky…
February 14th, 2009 at 2009
I was researching some upcoming games and this product feature list from Ninja Blade made me think of Tim’s article on retarded battle acronyms in JRPG’s being listed on the back of the box, next to the 720p. They have quick-time events listed TWICE! Make sure to reread that last bullet point a few times over!
Product Features
* Unique Ninja abilities
* Variety of weapons, tools and “Ninjutsu” – specialized Ninja
* Interactive quick-time events
* All 3D gaming maps are based directly from the actual skyscrapers and building tops in modern day Tokyo
* Quick reflexes will be rewarded as players interact with controller buttons as directed on screen during intense battles
February 14th, 2009 at 2054
It also essentially has “ninja abilities” listed twice, assuming the ninja in question learnt those abilities from the study of ninjutsu.
I wonder when the day will come that all game designers everywhere will realise that quick-timer events are as objectively retarded as those 1940s movies that experimented with showing multiple possible endings. Just think, grown men the world over are being paid tens of thousands of dollars to come up with electronic Simon-says over and over and over.
February 14th, 2009 at 2205
The only thing on there that isn’t listed twice is inarguably not a feature. It’s basically “Game takes place somewhere”.
Actually, everything on there is inarguably not a feature.
February 14th, 2009 at 2239
So can we expect an update soon? It’s been 2 months already.
Come to think of it, I wonder how well the reviews I sent went down…
February 15th, 2009 at 059
Hi guys
I did a google picture search for both Yoshitaka Amano and Yoji Shinkawa, to remind me of their styles. I kept both tabs open and flipped through a few search pages worth of their art, trying to associate them with other artists.
First of all, I saw some Gustav Klimt in Amano’s work. Could be that, panther, your mentioning of Ukiyo-e got me thinking in that direction — Ukiyo-e led me to Van Gogh, Van Gogh was Dutch and so my thoughts were circling around Europe. (Back to Vincent Van Gogh later…) I opened another tab, picture searching for Gustav Klimt and discovered the slightest similarity. There’s this use of somewhat unhealthy looking gold-like colors and of unsettling patterns. At least I personally find Klimt and Amano unsettling. They’re fractured and chaotic. Amano more in the background and in the way he adorns his characters, yet not in the way he draws the characters themselves. They are smooth and clean.
This led me to Vagabond and Slam Dunk creator Takehiko Inoue. His style is super-clean yet never sterile — look at how rugged he draws swordsman Miyamoto Musashi — like a mix between a Romanian macho (MGS2‘s Vamp?) and, well, a Japanese macho, I guess. It’s almost too much testosterone and it’s actually very close to the look of Yoji Shinkawa’s artwork for Solid Snake. The most important thing to me though is how Takehiko Inoue draws women’s faces. It’s amazing and I’ve never seen anything like it. Interestingly enough, the internet seems oblivious to those drawings. I know them because Vagabond is one of the rare mangas that I used to follow for a short while. I only own a couple of Vagabond, Rurouni Kenshin, GTO and Golden Boy mangas (if the rats in the attic didn’t eat them yet, that is). Oh yeah, and all issues of Berserk (no icy), which is the only manga I follow right now. So yeah, anybody interested in Inoue’s smoothest, cleanest drawings actually has to flip through some of his Vagabond manga.
What connects Takehiko Inoue to Yoji Shinkawa though is not smoothness; it’s chaos and speed. The wild hair swept up in the wind, the blood and black ink for Inoue, abstract shadows and detail for Shinkawa (hair also, yeah).
Now’s the time to mention that I only know of Van Gogh’s connection to Ukiyo-e because I’ve transcribed an interview for Gamasutra in which Brandon Sheffield mentioned Ryutaro Nonaka’s Van Gogh t-shirt, which he apparently wore to the interview (I couldn’t see it, just hear it (was a loud t-shirt)); Brandon then mentioned that he’s been to a Van Gogh exhibition — somewhere in Europe, — which detailed the Ukiyo-e influence.
Ryutaro Nonaka is the producer of SEGA’s graphics wonder Valkyria Chronicles.
The things you can do with conscious knowledge, huh. Once you know what makes a style you can even make an Xbox 360 draw it. Just like every music teacher can make any man play something that sounds like the blues in just one day of learning how to play the guitar. Some people out there know precisely what makes the blues.
Matter of fact, I’ve seen a doctor cut open a chronically depressed woman’s skull and apply electric current to her brain through a device which he controlled by remote control – by turning a little knob; he turned it, she cried. (Nowadays people can be fully conscious (very relative expression) while groups of (disgustingly) greenly-dressed people cut them open.) The doctor changed the placement of the device on the brain and turned the knob again – she laughed hysterically. That’s closer to the original intent of the device plus remote, to enable people to care for her children without constant thoughts of suicide every day; making her cry was only a display for the camera team. I admit it’s kind of more funny to make a woman cry for no reason than to make her laugh out of the blue. Kinda more tragic. Doctors have read them Greeks. After the operation people asked the woman – the woman which now holds her happiness completely in her own hands – what had happened during the operation, when she cried back then. She said she “felt sad all of a sudden.”
Huh.
The things you can do once you know which thing does what exactly; then machines can draw, then people can be happy; just twist the knob.
Man, I really should give this text some links to the paintings that I was referring to. I can’t be bother now though. Do google picture searches y’all! Maybe we can make some of this discussion into a select button thread; then we can post pictures, define a genre of similar game visuals and have panther design a videogame for us based on our understanding of aesthetics.
Also: Videogame boxes made the word “feature“ lose its meaning to me. Ain’t features something like “subtitles in English and Korean”, “digital video output in 720p”, etc.? “Printed on recycled paper” for books? Are plot-twists features? Should you list them as such? Etc.
I have in the past dreamed that someone released a rock and roll inspired novel with only a “tracklist” on the back – the 10 or so chapters of the book. (No one ever did, as far as I know.) Now, a novel with painfully stupid shit like “12pt Font Size” listed as a “feature”… Or: “Critical thinking will be rewarded as readers interact with book pages as directed by sequential numbers at the bottom during intense depictions”…
February 15th, 2009 at 119
I might have gotten Ryutaro Nonaka mixed up with Shuntaro Tanaka, the director of Valkyria Chronicles. I’m not sure though.
February 15th, 2009 at 835
ebert is probably the best movie critic, but i disagree that he’s the best art (all-encompassing) critic.
February 15th, 2009 at 1211
panther, re aesthetics, first off play games, really look at them and listen to them. I reckon you already do this. Shooting games tend to inspire their creators — why, I don’t know. The R-Types, Darius Gaiden, Psyvariar 2. Play Dead Rising.
For reasons that aren’t at all clear to me, many people think games are informed by film more than any other medium. There is surprisingly little on film worth reading. Nevertheless, what’s out there is indispensible. Gary Indiana’s essays on Schroeder, Bresson, Fassbinder, Cronenberg, and others I’m forgetting at the moment are exceptional. Read Renata Adler’s vivisection on Pauline Kael, “Perils of Pauline,” a model of clarity (and an explanation of why so much writing on film is worthless). Steven Shaviro’s essay on “Southland Tales” is especially important with respect to sound and what film is like in our post-YouTube age. Great great films are everywhere, as you already know.
Read Aristotle’s Physics, or a good essay on Aristotle’s Physics. Category errors, my friend, are your enemies.
Thinking about aesthetics will of course lead you out of aesthetics and as our civilization descends into barbarism I would pay particular attention to Arendt. Consider the difference between violence and brutality, which leads directly back to videogames, so many of which feature outrageous levels of violence (and some, even, I would argue, brutality). Maybe read some Sartre.
February 15th, 2009 at 1508
OH! You should read House of Leaves, too. It’s a wonderful novel, and you could learn a lot about film from it. I know technically it’s kinda satirical, but satire often teaches more than truth, don’t you think? The uber-literal depictions of setting and mood might help you a lot.
February 24th, 2009 at 1416
I think Ebert enjoys far too much joyless smugness(American Beauty, Crash, The Wrestler, Traffic, A Beautiful Mind, etc. etc.) to really be the best film critic. Every years end Hollywood releases the same tireless series of “important” pictures, and every year he falls for them.
I pick Armond White. He may be overtly contrarian simply to prove a point, but at least he’ll never call Juno his picture of the year.
February 25th, 2009 at 010
Oh, I guess I should say that in re: to the initial comment on Ebert, he is, indeed, useful in the same way a kindergarten teacher is useful. Have to learn to see and construct sentences before you can start to take them apart and analyze them.
February 25th, 2009 at 903
I totally agree about the “joyless smugness” movies. Every year, there are the so-called “Oscar movies,” and if you’re not an “Oscar movie” you never win anything. But it’s not like “normal” movies are mere entertainment and Oscar movies are art; no, Oscar movies are just really serious, pretentious entertainment. I’m generalizing, of course. Roger Ebert is great as a resource, but not as a teacher. His reviews are always very useful to get the gist of a movie and decide whether I want to see it or not, but that’s about it.
February 25th, 2009 at 1008
His reviews are good as reviews. You know his tastes and can contrast them to yours and guess pretty accurately how much you’ll like a movie. And yeah, he does have a weakness for Oscarbait, but you know Oscarbait when you see it, and can safely ignore his reviews in such cases.
I think that whether or not you agree with a writer has little to do with admiring them, though. I don’t look to any writer as a teacher, and I don’t want to read a review just to nod my head and be happy someone sees it my way… That can be entertaining, but it’s not challenging and it doesn’t facilitate growth. You can only learn through understanding things for yourself, not through taking the work of someone else as a “lesson plan”, and coming to understand when and why Roger Ebert is right and wrong has been helpful for me in developing a deeper overall understanding of art.
Case in point, all Icy has done in the 150 posts above is misquote Nietzsche, and has he said anything of substance or sincerely conversed with anyone here? Do you think he has an original idea in his head, or even understands the source material he’s mangling? If he understood it, I doubt he would treat it like Dogma (and if he understood it, he’d know that Nietzsche’s unborn audience was a theoretical concept, and not a prediction of Icy’s own birth). It’s impossible to agree with anyone else 100% unless you have no ability to think for yourself or even understand what they’re saying in the first place. I don’t read Ebert’s reviews, I argue with them. What you can learn from a writer has as much do with their flaws as their strengths.
February 25th, 2009 at 1407
gilbert, don’t you think icy’s articles are interesting? i mean, articles like “on complexity, depth, and skill” or “the arcade culture?”
do those not constitute “original ideas?”
did you not read the schopenhauer essay “on thinking for oneself?” If you did, I hardly think you could accuse him of not “understanding things for himself.” Or maybe he is a serious hypocrite (not likely, considering his renowned consistency)?
Do you honestly think he is “mangling” Nietzsche, or are you just flustered by his abrasive conduct?
February 25th, 2009 at 1639
It’s a little of both, and maybe I’ll give his articles a try someday, but all that’s really relevant to me right now is the way he behaves here. In the context of these comments threads, he’s a disruptive troll who is misquoting Nietzsche and making absolutely no sense when he tries to say something original, such as his commentary on humor.
Maybe I’ll give his articles a try someday, but whether or not he’s a good writer won’t change the fact that he’s a troll, and what he contributes to these discussions here is less than worthless.
February 25th, 2009 at 1647
And anyways, life is too short. I don’t care what insights a person might have into video games, if they suck as a human being, the only use they have to me is as someone to joke about gangrape with.
February 27th, 2009 at 1106
So…Street Fighter 4?
February 27th, 2009 at 1126
Grar, I wish my Box wasn’t borked so I could play that… how is it? It sure looks nice enough, and I’ve heard it’s well-balanced. But of course balance only makes a fighter fair, not necessarily interesting or fun.
February 27th, 2009 at 1343
Well there’s the rub. It looks incredible if you have an HD TV but otherwise it’s basically just SSF2T with a remixed super system, and some random extra characters.
My main annoyance is the way the Revenge Meter (which powers Ultra Combos) seems to charge really fast compared to the Super Meter, which fuels the weaker Super Combos and charges slowly. It’s sort of the 3rd Strike equivalent of if Ryu’s Shin Shoryuken continued to do heavy damage but ran off the short Denjin Hadouken meter…while the Denjin continued to be relatively weak but ran off a long meter that took forever to charge.
Also most characters use the same move for their Ultra and Super combos, which tends to cut down on variety and worst…as a result of the above meter quirks Akuma can spam 2-3 Raging Demons in 1 round.
All in all if you compare it to SF Alpha 1 or SF3: New Generation instead of Alpha 3 or 3rd Strike, it comes out above par. However, I’d say it’s got plenty of room for improvement and it won’t be till Super SF4 X 3rd Impact Turbo Champion Edition that it hangs with the best titles in the SF series.
February 27th, 2009 at 1422
I still haven’t even tried the demo. I started out with a raging hard on at the first gorgeous screen shots, and then my dick went limper and limper with every new piece of news on the game.
Oddly, if it were being sold as a remake of Street Fighter II (which is what it seems to be), I would actually be a little more excited about it. I still hate on the people who look at all the insane characters in SF3, and then just choose Chun Li or Ken every single round.
March 1st, 2009 at 301
>
None of them will land, though, so that doesn’t end up meaning a whole lot.
>
Not really! It carries over almost all of SF3′s systems. It’s more like SF3: 4th Clash wherein they top Third Strike’s pandering re: adding Akuma and Chun-Li to the point of just adding every SF2 character back in and forgoing the choice of which super you want to use.
It’s pretty good though, guys.
March 1st, 2009 at 417
Huh. It really fucked what I was trying to quote there.
Just throw these in: “as a result of the above meter quirks Akuma can spam 2-3 Raging Demons in 1 round.”
and
“Oddly, if it were being sold as a remake of Street Fighter II (which is what it seems to be)”
March 1st, 2009 at 2144
It’s almost been 3 entire months without an update.
March 3rd, 2009 at 449
‘sup!
March 8th, 2009 at 652
Take your pick:
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b97/GnaM/junk/TheThirdStikeyall.jpg
http://bayimg.com/image/eanfoaabn.jpg
Regular or extra crispy?
March 12th, 2009 at 827
Whoa, I meant to reply to this like 3 weeks ago and then forgot.
As re: Ebert, again, and criticism in general. I think critics can be teachers in a sense. At least, the good ones can. Presumably they have studied their respective mediums with great intent and can provide, hopefully, more astute opinions than Joe Regular. Growing up my mom owned probably 1200 movies on VHS. Literal walls covered with them. So, of course, I watched a lot of movies and loved a lot of movies and wanted to write and direct and make movies. But, like my mom, I had no eye for what really made a movie good and what made one not good. I discovered film criticism(through Ebert) and it helped open my eyes.
As with anything, you bring your own beliefs and ideas of what an art form should and should not be, so agreement is definitely not what I’m interested in when it comes to criticism. Insight is the real value, which, unfortunately is hard to come by in movie criticism(and game, and probably any kind these days). People read critics to agree with them and feel smart about themselves. So people with true singular perspective are shunned while genial folk like Ebert, who is in no way an incompetent writer nor an unsmart person — he’s simply too forgiving of mediocrity and prone to superficial interpretation, are allowed to keep their ever-shrinking newspaper jobs because they provide what the people want.
It’s a sad state of affairs, which is why I’m thankful for the internet, and the more insightful, interesting and often criminally unpaid perspective it provides. Without it I might still be one of those guys who thinks American Beauty is the greatest American motion picture of the ’90s. What a joyless asshole I was in 1999.
March 12th, 2009 at 1705
the correct answer to the question of best american film of the 90s is, uhh, fargo?
March 16th, 2009 at 2357
Yes. You are absolutely correct.
That sorta sounds like sarcasm but it’s not! Fargo is almost baffingly great. Even by the standard of other Coen movies.
March 25th, 2009 at 1203
I’d say it’s a toss-up with Unforgiven.
May 17th, 2009 at 1222
Holy crud. I read a review like this, and the only reason I can see for you hating each and every aspect of the game so much is that maybe you just don’t like video games.
But then I see the GoW2 review – did the same guy do both reviews, or separate? Because whoever reviewed Dead Space should do a GoW2 review, and it’s bound to get a 1 star.
“You use the d-pad to change weapons. Haven’t we seen this before?”
“You can hit a button to reload faster and if you time it right, you get a damage bonus. FF8 gunblade anyone?”
“You can take cover behind things. I’ve been taking cover since the NES days!”
Seriously. Whoever wrote this Dead Space review either HATES gaming, or was having a high flow day.
Either way, it had some hilarious moments, and it was worthwhile because of that.
May 17th, 2009 at 1441
yesterday a psychotic old woman was standing outside my apartment building with toothpaste all over her face, making bizarre hand gestures. she was trying to tell me something! it was probably not something happy or congratulatory.
i take pride in my ability to very efficiently ignore the criticism, constructive or not, of psychos, because they are more often than not very dirty and very ugly.
you ask if this review and the god of war 2 review are written by “the same guy”, and that’s where i stop reading!
i have deduced that you are, in addition to retarded, also a psycho and very ugly! you also probably have something disgusting all over your face!
i’d ban your IP right now if it was that simple! however, that would require me to mess around with computer stuff and i’d really rather just eat my lunch.
May 17th, 2009 at 2201
hours later i read the rest of your comment!
you complimented me in the last sentence!
maybe i should mention to you that the hilariousness was the entire point of this review.
you should have seen my face while i was writing it!
May 18th, 2009 at 034
Cool.
And I meant Gears of War 2, not God of War 2. That’s why there was talk of reloading/taking cover. Noob.
May 18th, 2009 at 459
fkken owned . ….
May 26th, 2009 at 431
lol
May 26th, 2009 at 432
also fyi the accepted abbreviation for gears of war 2 is “gears 2″.
August 6th, 2009 at 137
Posting 8 months late in an epic ‘thread’!
“as you near the entrance of the corridor, an enemy will walk across an intersection, accompanied with an orchestra’s reaction to the conductor’s being taken out by a sniper.”
It needs to go on public record that the above is the single most important chunk of words in the history of verbal communication.
Have you ever heard Brad Neely? Heard him talk, I mean? He needs to read that sentence aloud, if for no other reason than to complete the Circle of Life(tm).
October 19th, 2009 at 208
Posting 10 months late in an epic thread!
Whoever wrote this review is dead wrong! Dead Space is one of the best action games of it’s generation.
November 16th, 2009 at 1714
WTF Dozer
…
Your opinion is forever void (to me, at least) for that last sentence.
December 8th, 2009 at 028
Bohoo, my opinion is void to some random nobody who I never even knew existed, what am I going to do with my life?
Grow the fuck up!
December 13th, 2009 at 1130
People got issues on here, srsly.
Also, irony.
December 21st, 2009 at 242
Lol, now this idiot doesn’t even know who or what he’s talking about…
December 22nd, 2009 at 103
I do. Bye now.