Not So Random Links 20/3/09
20 Mar
“It’s the difference between Uwe Boll and David Lynch. Most computer games deserve Uwe Boll to make movies of them. How many games are worthy of David Lynch?”
After a prolonged session with The Path yesterday, it’s a topic that is sitting rather worryingly atop of my mindspace right now.
I didn’t especially like The Path, sadly not for any of the reasons Tale Of Tales would be especially comfortable with, more that it’s unfortunately more Torchwood than David Lynch and quite an embarrassing piece of “adult” work.
Or to use a non television analogy – it’s Uwe Boll does Red Riding Hood.
I sat through most of it either boggled at the tedium of the deliberately broken control scheme, wondering how many vagaries would be used to excuse it (my favourite comes from an RPS discussion I was present in: “it challenges you to break free of the gameplay mainstream titles have conditioned you to” – erm, whut?), in awe of the amount of bugs (they’re all deliberate I’m informed – I assume that means that ToT wanted you to get stuck in the scenery as part of their design) and rolled my eyes a fair bit at how wholly predictable the thing was.
Basically, I went in expecting a mature handling of adult themes, a refreshing Lynchian journey through the Red Riding Hood themes in a nice goth wrapper and I got something broken as an interactive work, filled with kludgily handled movie tropes and a decidedly adolescent rewrite of a fairy tale.
Conversely, I found the (now controversial) Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble to be literate, mature and really quite sublime. Ah well, you can’t win them all.
“Intense, satisfying, synaesthesiac shooting action that you’ll return to again and again in search of ever higher scores.”
But you already own it by now, right?
If not – get over there and unleash the moths from your wallet.
The Most Beautiful Community Game Yet? Hands On With Paws
“I was trying to wrack my brains as to what the game reminded me of and it eventually dawned on me that it doesn’t really remind me of another computer game, it reminds me of the sheer unabashed fun that you used to find from the simplest things in the playground”
Linking to myself isn’t something I’d normally indulge in here, but given the cluster of crap that’s come out over the months since the Xbox 360 Community Games launch it’s nice to get my hands on something that makes the service truly worthwhile.
It’s not alone, of course, we ran through a Top 10 for Think! sites last year – unfortunately until recently, that Top 10 wouldn’t really have changed in any noticeable way since it was published.
Flower and WiiWare’s Woeful Wilting
“Hmmm. Well, next time you’re home visiting Mom and me, download this to our Wii.”
Touching again on the subject of maturity in games, I guess, but an interesting take on both PSN and WiiWare and why Nintendo’s offering isn’t achieving all it should.
An Open Letter To Game Developers (via OneSwitch)
“For some, games are a reason to live and to learn to live again. And it’s absolutely urgent that we all learn this.”
No comments from me, just read and learn.
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