Trying to stand, you stumble. Trying to think, your mind blurs. Inside your head is a whirlpool of half finished thoughts, inside your gut is a churning of dread. You've drunk so much you've forgotten why you started but the taste in your mouth reminds you of every drop. The pain you felt isn't gone, only replaced. Bile rising you avert your face, but in every direction there's another passenger. You see every glance as an accusation, every expression is one of disgust. You lean on the seat, the only escape is downwards and you take it, resting your head in the soft crook of your arm, forehead pressing against the cooling plastic. Finally, your eyes are sweetly hidden from passing gazes, finally safe, finally secure. And it's then you vomit up your lunch.
And it's then you hope that maybe nobody is looking at you now.
I kid you not, this is the description of the man in front of me on the train today. Well, the end part is, the beginning is pure conjecture.
It got me thinking, although not quite enough, as disturbingly all my mind wanted to think about was "Does that smell like Coq au vin?" (That's probably just the result of eating chicken, drinking wine, and letting it cook in your stomach for a couple of hours - wonderful). But it did get me thinking about what you can get away with on a train. This man just regurgitated the last 4 hours of his life onto the floor, and on that train, at that moment, he went instantly from just another nobody to that guy. Yeah, that guy who threw up on the train that time, you remember? Instant infamy. And then at the very next stop, he leaves the train, and with one step he becomes invisible again.
Everyone around him now has no idea what he's done, and everyone who knew is leaving.
With that one step he's born again, new and pure, his disgusting past already unknown, already beginning his new life.
And as the train pulls away, and I watch him sway gracefully towards a bench, I can't help but feel just a little jealous...
Monday 5 October 2009
Saturday 3 October 2009
Things that I just did that I have opinions on
Okay, so I just downloaded and played the demo of Brutal Legend, the second game by Double Fine Productions with the first being Psychonauts, so I already had pretty high expectations. Unfortunately the demo is only about 5 minutes long. And amazingly it is still freaking excellent in that little time. It has that hilarious, obscure, random humour and charm that is so rare now, because so many are so scared of shying away from proven genres and titles.
Double Fine have a history of releasing truly unique, interesting fun games that throw away any mainstream bullshit that ruins a lot of titles just trying to appeal to a few more people (I know that sounds wrong as they still only have 1 actual game, but they have mini games and comics as well!). More developers should take example from them and actually put some real effort into their work. For example, a decent story, decent writing, decent characters! Either the industry has just become incredibly fucking lazy, or they are really undervaluing/underestimating their consumer base. Oh hey, everyone loves World War 2, let's bring out a World War 2 game, and ours if different because we've got a wisecracking soldier, and a tortured soldier and a confident leader soldier, and Nazis! And everything is fucking brown.
I assume it's because they think people want "realism" but I'm not playing games to be real, they're supposed to take you away from reality. No one cares that you have some dust clouds that look more like real dust clouds when your characters are copy pasted from every cliched stereotype already produced. No one cares that your faces look and act like real people up close when on screen they're all so tiny and pass by so quickly that you can't make them out anyway. No one cares that those leaves move around pretty realistically when you're driving past at 50 miles an hour. We've reached a stage now where good graphics should be standard with any game, especially when there have been titles with shit graphics that are still incredible experiences. It's not about realism, it's about style. They shouldn't be able to get away with making rubbish.
Then again, we still buy their shit, so we only have ourselves to blame.
The other demo I just played was for WET, which I thought was going to be crap. Just another game who's selling point is that you're looking at the backside of some ridiculously attractive woman the whole game.
And this is true.
However! I actually found this a lot of fun. It's a really interesting blend of spaghetti western Hong Kong action cinema in a modern urban setting. Just full of over the top, stylised acrobatic violence bullet-time insanity that I thought had reached it's fun limit, and then burst into a crazy comic book noir tri-colour rage, which then goes into a Matrix inspired highway car chase where you start wall running off moving trucks and back flipping over exploding cars.
Was this realistic? No.
Was it fun? Yes.
Do you see where this is headed?
Probably not, this rant is getting a bit tired now. Anyway, the demo was a lot of fun with a main character who's level of baddassery is close to the Starbuck marker and the snippets they show make the other assassins out there look very interesting. For example: Some kind of cowboy renaissance-France musketeer. A blind albino woman called the Scorpion, which I can only assume is because she holds her dual sub machine guns above her head (not with her tail).
This game basically looks like Kill Bill meets John Woos Stranglehold, which is pretty great.
You know, if you're into that kind of thing.
Tune in next time where I start my list of "Things that annoy/amuse me" which I was going to do as a whole list, but I might make into a few longer installments. Just to really stretch out the little material that I have. Let's hope it doesn't rip.
Double Fine have a history of releasing truly unique, interesting fun games that throw away any mainstream bullshit that ruins a lot of titles just trying to appeal to a few more people (I know that sounds wrong as they still only have 1 actual game, but they have mini games and comics as well!). More developers should take example from them and actually put some real effort into their work. For example, a decent story, decent writing, decent characters! Either the industry has just become incredibly fucking lazy, or they are really undervaluing/underestimating their consumer base. Oh hey, everyone loves World War 2, let's bring out a World War 2 game, and ours if different because we've got a wisecracking soldier, and a tortured soldier and a confident leader soldier, and Nazis! And everything is fucking brown.
I assume it's because they think people want "realism" but I'm not playing games to be real, they're supposed to take you away from reality. No one cares that you have some dust clouds that look more like real dust clouds when your characters are copy pasted from every cliched stereotype already produced. No one cares that your faces look and act like real people up close when on screen they're all so tiny and pass by so quickly that you can't make them out anyway. No one cares that those leaves move around pretty realistically when you're driving past at 50 miles an hour. We've reached a stage now where good graphics should be standard with any game, especially when there have been titles with shit graphics that are still incredible experiences. It's not about realism, it's about style. They shouldn't be able to get away with making rubbish.
Then again, we still buy their shit, so we only have ourselves to blame.
The other demo I just played was for WET, which I thought was going to be crap. Just another game who's selling point is that you're looking at the backside of some ridiculously attractive woman the whole game.
And this is true.
However! I actually found this a lot of fun. It's a really interesting blend of spaghetti western Hong Kong action cinema in a modern urban setting. Just full of over the top, stylised acrobatic violence bullet-time insanity that I thought had reached it's fun limit, and then burst into a crazy comic book noir tri-colour rage, which then goes into a Matrix inspired highway car chase where you start wall running off moving trucks and back flipping over exploding cars.
Was this realistic? No.
Was it fun? Yes.
Do you see where this is headed?
Probably not, this rant is getting a bit tired now. Anyway, the demo was a lot of fun with a main character who's level of baddassery is close to the Starbuck marker and the snippets they show make the other assassins out there look very interesting. For example: Some kind of cowboy renaissance-France musketeer. A blind albino woman called the Scorpion, which I can only assume is because she holds her dual sub machine guns above her head (not with her tail).
This game basically looks like Kill Bill meets John Woos Stranglehold, which is pretty great.
You know, if you're into that kind of thing.
Tune in next time where I start my list of "Things that annoy/amuse me" which I was going to do as a whole list, but I might make into a few longer installments. Just to really stretch out the little material that I have. Let's hope it doesn't rip.
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