Happy Christmas

A little background information

In short, they were married... and I exist.

I came to birds through sound.

Generations of Porcupines

Your reaction is the characteristic one of your contra-suggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. You are like a porcupine. When the animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.

The Marvelous Miss Take, a Red Headed Robin Hood

Sometimes a video game is just a video game. And there's little else to say about it than that.

It helps, though, when that video game is also a good game.

The Marvelous Miss Take, a Red Headed Robin Hood

I can live with this.

What else can I say?
Everyone is gay.

But I hung on like death

Such waltzing was not easy.

Prettier than popsicles or peanut butter

Why don't you just admit that you're freaked out by my robot hand?

I kind of love everything about this. It's the simplicity of the central plot focus coupled with the overly complex and baroque quality of everything else on display here.

I'm tempted to apologize for admiring this and maybe it's just that I haven't slept much as usual, but I just admire the moxie of this little project.

The Moving Pixels Podcast Steps Over The Line

As always I've spent a lot of time this year playing games, a lot of League of Legends and a lot of small indie games. I've found myself largely moving away from the triple A space and looked to smaller more minimal things for the most part of late. I've played some good games and some games that want to be a lot more than they are--but weren't. However one of the best games that I played this year was a game that is a couple of years old, is something more like a triple A title, and that wants to be more than merely "a game." And it is more than that.

Spec Ops is an effort at creating something like a classic tragic narrative in a video game, something not generally possible in a medium where eternal life and growing more and more powerful and competent in order to "win" is usually the central goal. The game is able to define a tragic situation for the protagonist and implicate the player in the flawed nature of the game's "tragic hero." It's an awfully interesting and well executed experiment in game storytelling.

Since I was so take by the game and we hadn't discussed it in the past, we focused on it this week in lieu of some big Christmas sequel that is less experimental and is more of the same.

The Moving Pixels Podcast Steps Over The Line

I sometimes dream that I'm waking.

Terrible dream.