Category:Misc. Games
Choosing to Check Out: Player Choice in The Stanley Parable
In videogames, with some extremely limited exception, you have no real freedom.
Every choice you are permitted to make – save for exploits and glitches – is afforded to you by the developer of the game. The Stanley Parable is pretty much entirely about this concept.
Blitzkrieg In My Bed
On Halloween night in Bully, the clock (which usually limits your boyish hi-jinx to 2:00 AM in-game at which point you will pass out where you stand) is disabled, giving you free-roam of the school until you start “Halloween” the mission. If you try to go to bed, as you can any other day after 7:00 PM, you will find that Gary has already taken up residence in it.
Ring Around the Rebrand
So after I wrote that last post, I got a curious and decided I wanted to compare the Mystique versions of their games to the PlayAround ones. But strangely, even when you download it with Gigolo as per the PlayAround cart pair and no matter where you download it from, Bachelor Party always has Mystique branding. I wanted to know if this was an oversight in production or if everyone just redistributes the one copy of the ROM so I went a-lookin’.
I never found the answer to that particular question, but I did find another interesting theory.
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For Her Pleasure: An Egalitarian Approach to Pornographic Videogames
An acquaintance of mine recently put together a list of games hacked to have playable female characters in response to this article about the erasure of female game developers hacking games to have female heroes in reporting of stories about fathers doing so for their daughters. Obviously playable female characters are a rarity even today, but in thinking about this, I was reminded of a certain company who went out of their way to give women their turn at the controller.
What’s funny about this, though, is this company made nothing but pornographic Atari 2600 games.
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The Clear Line: The Player and Their Acts
When I was a kid, my parents would complain that I talked about games “as if they were real”. At the time, I didn’t understand why they’d think that. Obviously Super Mario World was not real and I had never, to my knowledge, implied that it was. I think what it is though is that, in talking about one’s experience in a game, you refer to the things you do.
There’s always been this talk about immersion and how gamers can’t tell reality from imagination. That we get submerged in games and, somehow, cannot decipher where the narrative of the game ends and where our own interaction begins. That in playing Super Mario, I am him and he is me.
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Hotline Vice City
I started in on Hotline Miami yesterday. And now that I have, I feel I can state this without any presumption.
On the game’s webpage, there’s more than one testimonial blurb about how this is the game Rockstar always “thinks” they are making in Grand Theft Auto. I am sure they only mean that in the most joking of ways, but I think it bears talking about. If you are familiar with both GTA (specifically Vice City) and Hotline Miami, it is impossible not to think of one at the sight of the other.
But Hotline Miami and Vice City are very different games. They do different things.
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Dallas 13… Offline.
I think everyone has that one character whose ending pisses them off. A character whose plot conclusion is just fkn wat or else just completely unfair.
For me, Dallas 13 this character.
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