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Comments
Gore and horror are not mutually exclusive.
I still have the first episode of another sitting in my hard drive. It's just that I know another will not satisfy my craving for metafictional procedurals.
Gore isn't horror in the same way wizards aren't fantasy. But gore certainly is an important element of a lot of horror.
When you say, a man was shot a couple streets from here, and people go watch it, that's gore. It's the context that makes it horror, like the man realized he had been shot and he was bleeding on the street, that's horror.
Corpse with no context is just gore.
Also, Go McNulty! Fuck you chain of command!
It's always good to know when people are converted to the ways of McNultism. I still think Bunk's better, though.
I'd argue that it depends entirely on the atmosphere of the scene. If I left a few corpses hanging from a lamp post with a few runes tatoo'd in their foreheads, that'd be somewhat creepy, in my opinion.
The atmosphere is part of the context.
what the fuck did i just watch
M.O.P. actually stands for Moe-Out Posse
So the good news is that my parents and me have decided to not pressure ourselves into getting me into college for this semester. The bad news is that it means I have a new deadline and I have no idea of how to approach it.
I feel bitchy.
I hate when that happens.
>dump wingbrodette off at home after party
>jokes that I probably won't go to sleep and end up watching porn
>half an hour of awkward discussion whether or not porn is worse than fantasizing about people you know
How do I always end up having conversations that are best confined to the internets?
> realising that, when you hang out with friends, you only ever hang out in the ramshackle corpses of abandoned old buildings
> ever
Given that winter is coming in a couple of months, and it's already getting cold at night, it would be nice to spend time somewhere with heating.
For some reason I read that as "It would be nice to do a Gypsy and spend time etc etc"
Cannot make myself work on this stupid paper to save my life, uuuugh
Abyss_Worm (from the last page)/Legionnaire,
Yeah, that's one of the main causes of the bystander effect. I think this kind of thing would be lessened if people remembered they are responsible for inaction as well as action.
Have you heard much about Duty to Rescue laws? From what I can tell, one of their goals is to penalize people for not helping out. I am not really sure if they are that extensive and/or effective though.
In any event, it looks like I will have to move to Minnesota some time relatively soon. I am going to miss some of the perks of living in Wisconsin (good quality dairy products, cows, every Packer game being on TV, etc.), but whatever.
^^^ "Doing a Gypsy" sounds like a euphemism for something.
Good luck with Minnesota, Louie.
I was just thinking about genre in general and came to a pretty obvious point that most of you have probably arrived at already. You know how genre is a powerful tool because a demographic knows they can find X, Y and Z qualities there -- it's like a safety net, elevating a piece of media in the eyes of its demographic because they can expect certain things and therefore not lose out, even if the work isn't that great.
A little while ago, Malk complained that almost all fantasy games were RPGs. Taking the above into account, it seems obvious why. People conflate narrative genre and mechanical genre easily, so the demographic for a particular narrative genre in games also becomes the demographic for a mechanical genre. It's interesting to see how adherence and lack of adherence can influence the quality of a game.
For instance, some fantasy games do themselves a disservice by too rigidly adherence to RPG protocols. But take a game like Dead Island, which is a decidedly non-scary game because of its Bordlerlands-like, RPG-meets-FPS action gameplay. Its mechanics didn't support the narrative, so the whole experience is damaged. Fantasy games get away with their adherence towards RPG mechanics, I think, because of the amount of abstraction possible within fantasy as a narrative genre. This isn't to say that fantasy games should continue to be almost strictly RPGs, but it's a thought on how we might have arrived here.
There are also reasonably many fantasy strategies, for some reason.
Probably the same reason -- strategy games are easy to abstract because they contain turn-based combat systems within themselves (among other factors).
If you look at the ever popular semi-real-time combat system for WRPGs, for instance, you might note that they're much like RTS combat but "scaled up" with more detail. There's a direct mechanical relationship between the two genres of fantasy games.
There have historically been a pretty large number of fantasy games in other genres. I guess it's less common now (at least for AAA games), but in the past there have been lots of beat-em-ups and platformers and shooters and even puzzle games with a fantasy theme, not to mention numerous adventure games and the like.
Though it is true that for the most part, fantasy seems to imply RPG.
Even in previous generations, many fantasy games were JRPGs. Also, fantasy games often follow the trends anyway -- you don't find many fantasy platformers today, but back in the day, there was The Lost Vikings (crossing over with sci-fi, I guess?). And the second Zelda game was a side-scroller (which also had RPG elements, funnily enough).
But most of the time, when you're speaking swords-and-sorcery, you can expect a standard set of RPG mechanics to go with the standard set of narrative elements and expectations.
There are always exceptions, but when something becomes an expectation, one has obviously hit some kind of demographic assumption. Narrative and mechanical memetics, I guess?
Been watching Hetalia over and over.
And I just started watching Kita e. (a.k.a Diamond Daydreams), which has the same director! Not that that means, well, anything, but... it's a bit of trivia or something, I guess.
Regarding Hetalia though... I've seen the first two seasons. I never ended up watching Hetalia World Series though. In any case, it was pretty funny, though my ability to enjoy it was limited slightly due to hearing these two girls talk about it all the time IRL. Though I suppose that wouldn't be the case if I were to watch it again now.
I just chewed the skins off of two popcorn kernels and stuck them together with my saliva. Now they won't come undone no matter how many times I drop them.
I guess that's the secret to a strong relationship? Corn and saliva?
Would you like to play Faerie Solitaire? Have a Steam account? Enter this giveaway at SteamGifts! http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/0XItL/faerie-solitaire
The developers of that game have been giving away keys for free left and right in anticipation of the release of Faerie Solitaire 2. Here comes twenty five thousand more keys.
You can join the steamgifts site if you have a Steam account. You start with some basic number of points, which you can spend to enter giveaways, which are offered by other Steam users and raffled out by the site. As other people post giveaways you get more points. There are a few rules, though, most importantly that you should only enter for stuff you want because you'll be required to activate it.
Also, Zelda is metroidvania, not RPG.
I don't really think it has much in common with Metroid or Castlevania, but in any case Alex was bringing it up as an example of a fantasy game, not as an RPG.
I know, and yes, it is fantasy.
As for the other issue, let's see: Zelda is a game where you explore a world in a non-linear path (doing lots of backtracking), as you find items/powerups/upgrades that allow you to access more places. Isn't that the gist of the Metroid and metroidvania Castlevania games?
He was talking about the second one. That one is an RPG.
^^ More or less, although Zelda games follow a path of increased linearity. Metroidvania games often use backtracking as a consistent necessity; backtracking is an element of not only acquiring items and upgrades, but opening new paths and allowing you to progress. Zelda games allow you to backtrack for the benefit of heart pieces and other acquisitions, but rarely is backtracking really needed unless you have to access a hub such as a town.
Metroidvanias also tend to have consistent, lonely worlds with very few allies, and these environments also tend to be very "local". They're seldom complete areas like Hyrule and more often represent a more literally limited area. Zelda games, on the other hand, have "sandbox" worlds.
In fact, that might be a good way to think about Zelda in combination with the Metroidvania elements. While they do have that backtracking and that item acquisition, their open worlds produce an experience that feels as though it has greater freedom.
When it comes to genre, I think we should describe games by the experiences they aim to produce. While Zelda games certainly have Metroidvania elements, they're very different in other respects. Metroidvanias are often about feeling claustrophobic, limited and against the world, flirting at times with horror. Zelda games don't aim for the same emotional feedback; they're games of high adventure with fencing, equestrian, archery and then you save the princess. They aim for a "can do" attitude at almost all times where Metroidvanias support an attitude of careful preparation and cautious progression.
While mechanics are the most important element of games, separating them from literature and film, they're not the only element we should judge genre on. After all, the game's narrative lends meaning to the mechanics and allows them to live in context. So while there are similar elements at play, I wouldn't say Zelda is a Metroidvania. It gives us a few of its elements without enforcing the experience Metroidvanias in general aim for.
Hey, Abyss! How accurate is this
Up to Episode 6 of Black Rock Shooter.
I have no idea what is happening.
^^It looks technically accurate in that it's saying "pollution is only harmful to stuff that's alive now, and not hypothetical stuff that could adapt to it over the next few centuries/milennia."
Which is true, but kinda missing the point.