I just took a shower, which, unfortunately, usually involves thinking about things, though these thoughts most commonly include questioning which hole is the smelliest.
Being a huge nerd, I couldn’t stop thinking about my last post and how pompous Alex Ward is. I don’t talk much shit on this blog, so allow me this brief reprieve from niceties. His analogies are hyperbole at its most extreme, because it’s absurd to compare non-interactive media to video games in that way.
The reason that you “beat” a game, as opposed to a book, is because you apply your skill and effort to passing the tasks set forth by the developers. You don’t “beat” a movie because there aren’t any options. Sure, if I could choose a path that leads to victory in Cannibal Holocaust, then I would most definitely say that I “beat” it. But that’s not what movies are.
Most apparent, under all of the bitching over semantics, is an artist’s frustrated insistence that no one “got” their message or grasped their story. While I did like Black a lot, the reason that everyone wants to skip the cutscenes is not, as Ward implies, because they do not like to be told a story during gameplay. The root of the game’s storytelling evil is the fact that it is conveyed through terrible, no-budget cinemas that any Larry, Moe or Curly could have filmed if they had expensive HD equipment and a 5×5 room with a hanging light.
He nailed it himself when he facetiously likened it to a Sega CD game. Sorry, Alex, but no one wants to read a message that’s scribbled in doo-doo, unless it foretells of the apocalypse or huge savings.
subhumanzoids 