Presented are four separate thoughts on video games and games writing that I’ve had percolating in my brain for the past year. Beware: These are rough thoughts, only loosely edited. Just to get them into writing.
Proteus is a beautiful little game, visually. It appeals directly to my love of low fidelity video game aesthetics, and even seems to anticipate the 90s videogame aesthetic revival that would hit several years after its release, with retro shooters like DUSK, or Devil Daggers. Unlike those recent games, Proteus uses its simple visual style to illustrate nothing more than a peaceful island, randomly generated for the player on every unique session. The game is composed of simple sprites transposed on simple polygons. Chunky pixelated textures cover every surface, allowing the game’s bold color choices to dominate. The style allows for some striking tableaus, like when the glaring red sun begins to set behind the figure of an obscure sculpture and the sky melts into vivid hues.
“Monroe’s mother had always been much better at starting things than finishing them. When she died, she left behind over 300 canvases, not one of them finished. Along with Monroe, who felt pretty unfinished himself. The orphanage allowed him to keep only one painting. And so he chose the unfinished swan that had always been his mother’s favorite. But that night he woke up to find the swan had disappeared. So he took his mother’s silver paintbrush, and followed the footprints into a little door he hadn’t seen before.”
if ( 1 + 1 == 1 ) { e8z = true; };
I can’t stop thinking about the Season 3 finale of The Office.
Ranking and reviewing this season was significantly more difficult than the last one. There were two clearly terrible episodes and two clearly great episodes that were simple to write about. But the majority of the season consists of five flawed episodes. Most of those five all have aspects to them that work, but also deep issues that inhibited my enjoyment of all of them. As a result, the specific placements on this list for spots #8 through #4 are less important than in the previous list.
It’s hard to know what to say about these games. Firstly, because they are so short. Gravity Bone, released in 2008, is completable in barely 10 minutes, and Thirty Flights of Loving, from 2012, is roughly the same length. Both of these tiny games are by Blendo Games, a development studio founded and run by Brendon Chung. Chung has collaborators on his projects, but his work and these games in particularly are largely one-man operations. These tiny, independently made experiences certainly have interesting things to say, but I don’t feel strongly compelled to write about them. These games speak for themselves very well, and given how short they are to play through, I would simply recommend anyone with even a passing interest give them a try.
I remember watching day-long marathons of original The Twilight Zone episodes on the Sci Fi Channel on hot summer days. The wild premises and shocking twists of nearly every episode made it endlessly enjoyable for binge-watching. Countless episodes are embedded deep into my brain. When most of the original show was dumped onto Netflix a while back, I watched through a random selection of episodes and was surprised at how many I still remembered.
Dear Esther began life as a 2008 mod for Half-Life 2. It was developed by thechineseroom, a development group based out of the University of Portsmouth and lead by Dan Pinchbeck, who was a professor working on his PhD at the time, studying narrative in virtual environments. On the ModDB site for thechineseroom, the platform by which the Dear Esther mod got distributed, Pinchbeck writes:
The past decade, roughly, has seen the emergence of a latent video game genre - the walking simulator.
At present, I really have no coherent thoughts on this film. It is a slow-simmering slew of images and icons, parsed out amidst confusing dialogue sessions between our main characters. I am unsure on how to approach this piece. Hopefully, through writing, I can digest this strange beast.
Eh. This was about as bad as I expected, but in some different ways than I would have thought.
The best way I can think to describe this movie is “close.” It gets very close to being the movie I want it to be, and that I feel the movie itself wants to be, at its heart. All the elements are there for a really affecting film, but the movie frequently loses focus, and drifts into somewhat lazy horror filmmaking, at the expense of the truly great aspects.