An enjoyably weird moment of synchronicity. As those of you who follow me on Twitter already know, I woke up yesterday morning and was immediately assaulted by the image of the giant vagina bicycle taxi. (Protip - the comments are the best part of the link).
Shortly thereafter, on the way to work, I encountered this:
Who knows. Maybe it’s just Gina’s van.
So, what have I been doing for the past week?
In what can only be described as a perhaps inevitably ironic turn of events, immediately after posting my snarky item about how I had no intention of buying or playing Grand Theft Auto IV, the editor-in-chief of a game magazine informed me that he was sending me a copy to review.
So, I’ve been playing the hell out of GTA IV. You’ll see my real review in PTD in a few weeks, but I’ll say up front that the game has surprised me in more than a few ways.
Damn it.
The Celtics finally lost a playoff game at home tonight, even with Ray Allen finally showing up. Why did they do this? They couldn’t defend the Pistons. Why couldn’t they? Well, because Detroit actually has a lot of different offensive sets rather than just playing a two on five pick and roll game. Therefore, I apologize to them for my earlier outburst. I guess I was wrong.
Note: I was probably unfair to the Lakers and the Spurs too.
As something of a test, we’ve set up a web forum, here. If you’re a regular reader, please consider registering and trying it out.
We’re not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there’s enough of a community that’s interested in using it. The choice is yours.
One of the strangest games you’ve probably never played is Princess Maker. Ostensibly a parenthood simulator, Princess Maker is yet another male attempt to define, categorize, understand, objectify, and, ultimately, dominate teenage girls: reduce a girl to a finite state machine that can be told what to do, and command her to become the ideal woman. Make the right decisions, and your “daughter” will become a princess, or perhaps, if she’s Jewish, a doctor. Make the wrong decisions, and she works as a tavern wench or whore.
The psychosexual aspect of this is, needless to say, fascinating (you should see some of the pictures I decided to not embed as representing Princess Maker) but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Rather, I want to talk about the mechanics of the game: at its heart, Princess Maker is a scheduling game. There are so many days in a month, there are countless potential activities, and you can bully your adopted daughter into engaging in just 2 activities per month. Those activities will increase or decrease her abilities, or her stress (or, of course, her weight). The core of the game is deciding how she spends her time.
In Japan, the game is one of the forebears of the Hentai game. In these games, you schedule a protagonist’s time, engage in some branching dialogue, and inevitably your character has sex with 5 or so girls (or boys) along the way (SomethingAwful’s Rich Kyanka nicknames one game’s girls as “Smarty”, “Sporty”, “Youngy”, “Angryy”, and “Sicky”. These five will be in every hentai game. You’ll see.)
Hentai games never really took off in a big way in the United States, which I think is proof that perhaps things here aren’t quite as bad as they could be. But using scheduling as a game mechanic is something that American game developers have been trying recently, in a different setting: rock band games. (more…)
Today a short basketball rumination and tutorial. With the Celtics in a serious playoff run for the first time since I was in college (yes, they made the East Finals in 2002, but that doesn’t count because even if they won they’d have been crushed by the Spurs or whoever) I’ve been watching some NBA basketball on TV lately. One thing I have come to realize is that I’m really tired of watching the pick and roll.
I was a bit skeptical of Mass Effect so I didn’t pick it up until I found it at the Exchange at something of a discount. I called Pete, “Is Mass Effect worth $40?”. He said he thought it was. I’m not going to say he’s a liar. Reasonable people can disagree about these things. I thought that the experience started out slow, had a slow middle, and ended, well, slow.
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Everyone has their favorite pans. Mine are restaurant-style aluminum non-stick pans. I’ve used these for years, generally just buying another one when the coating on whichever one I had started to go south. The pans are durable (except for the coatings) and perfect for lazy people like me who don’t like cleaning frying pans. They are also really good for cooking eggs. Always important.
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It’s a rule of this weblog that we don’t post bare “Hey, look at this” links. I’m breaking that rule for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) story of a man who introduced his ailing mother to Animal Crossing.
I think the major conundrum when describing GTAIV is the conflict between the intrinsic and extrinsic narratives in the game. For the purpose of this note, the extrinsic narrative is the one that the player has no control over: backmatter, non-interactive cut-scenes, the story that is imposed by the authors from on high. The intrinsic narrative (also usually called the emergent) is the one that the player imposes on the system, the text he creates through his own interaction with this virtual playground. (more…)
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