Reviews and Moments

Reviews and Moments

So, yeah, uh, reviews?

I’d like to let you all in on a fun secret; yesterdays post was meant to be about viral marketing. I started the post off with a somewhat vague description of Amnesia because I just wanted to briefly describe it before going on to talk about their online marketing campaign working in conjunction with the guys over at Valve. The only thing is Amnesia happens to be really, really good and thus I was about three or four paragraphs into that post before I realized it had more or less become a review. The cool side is if you put it next to my three pages worth of insulting Homefront it actually looks like I’ve managed to do a couple write ups for games, and actually produced them close enough to their release that they’re still relevant. This means in the future I’m actually going to bother tagging my posts and who knows; maybe we’ll get some extra views from that stuff. I’d like to say I’m finally following through on the promise of making game reviews (movies too if you count Hobo with a Shotgun), but frankly it’s been entirely accidental. I type when I want to about what I want to, it just happens to occasionally be about cool stuff. Kind of makes me wish we bothered to maintain that site we made eons ago designed specifically for both reviews and blogging. Ah well.

Abrupt topic change.

Now I’d like to talk about moments. It’s a hypothetical discussion with a hypothetical audience. I’m not talking perfect moments here, just those uniquely satisfying ones that come along every now and then. I’d like to share a couple examples and if we had anyone who reads this sort of stuff they could post theirs in the comments. Of course we don’t, so this is mildly pointless, but it does give me an excuse to ramble.

The first one to give you some degree of framing is a place where I find I can relax, almost better than anywhere else. It’s at a book store called Chapters near where I work. In there they have a Starbucks coffee place hooked into the store itself. The combination was a stroke of brilliance in my opinion. They’ve surrounded the adjoining entrance with comfy chairs and couches on either side and allow customers to pick and choose where to sit. I occasionally go there on lunches when at work and just buy whatever hot expensive chocolaty beverage strikes my fancy that day and sit down to read a book. Sometimes I go on to buy the book if it left a favorable impression, others times I don’t – the book store doesn’t mind; they know they’ll get their business another day. The place is often filled with a dozen or more people with either books or laptops, all quietly enjoying themselves in whatever world they’re currently inhabiting. The feeling I get is like a break room for life. A moment when you can sit back fully free of obligations and relax, devoid of concerns or worries.

A second moment comes from a nearby forest from where I live. It’s on the outskirts of the town and stretches out for several kilometers. The forest has a number of paths through it, but when I go I tend to stay off them. I’ve been in there with friends or walking the dog enough times that I’m never worried about getting lost. That isn’t to say the forest is small by any stretch of the imagination, really. It has gently rolling hills in it and it's an old forest, which cuts out the noise and sight of anything further than a hundred yards away. You can spend the better part of a day doing a loop of it and never see a house, car or person. The situation in particular is when I go alone, with or without the dog. Since I avoid the few trails I can get a real sense of being on my own, regardless of how close civilization may be. It’s in times like that I seem to have the most interesting ideas come to me. I can get a period of reflection and peace that urges them out. I’ve even noticed that when I do take friends our discussions tend to be wide ranging and have more depth than other times. On a personal note it’s those times I’m most prone to introspection, and re-examining why I’m who I am.

They’re just a couple of havens I’ve found in the life, not that mine is particularly troubling. You sometimes need a break from even the most mundane of lives. Its here I’d invite other people to share a similar place or experience, though as I said; I don’t think we have enough (read; any) audience to support that. Still, the invitation stands to any who’d care to. 

Amnesia, the Dark Descent

I’d like to start this off by introducing you to perhaps the most horrifying game I’ve ever had the odd pleasure of playing; Amnesia the Dark Descent. It’s a survival horror game that’s managed to have the biggest impact on me yet in terms of real fear. I’m not talking cat scares – shock horror – either. This is the sort of deep-set panic inducing fear that comes from a lovely combination of sound, level, and light design that creates an oppressing atmosphere. Lots of people are spooked by loud noises and something springing out at you; it’s just natural. But that sort of fear alone is easily over come; it doesn’t stick with us. We can feel apprehension if we’re expecting it to happen but if that’s all they put into their horror it’s going to start feeling repetitive and cheap quite shortly.

The game runs in what I’ll simplify massively by calling a haunted house. There’s a lot of back story and Lovecraftian themes I could get into that they used, but all you really need to know for the context is that you’re in a big spooky mansion you can’t leave for plot reasons and there’s a variety of horrible monsters in here. And boy does Amnesia use those monsters to good effect. It’s not that’s there’s tons of them with particularly terrifying design or anything (not to say any of them are pretty to look at, least of all sprinting at you down a shadowy corridor), but rather in when and how they put them in the game. They’re rare, but not so much that you really ever end up feeling safe. It’s a ratio of actual-terrible-monster to merely terrible background noises that keeps players on their toes.

The noises of the monsters (or things that sound like new monsters you’ve not seen yet) are omnipresent and probably the best part of their sound design. A notable recent example I saw in their new downloadable expansion pack was a scene where you as the protagonist had to crawl through stone air ducts. Shortly after you enter them you begin to hear sounds coming from behind you which quickly elevate into distant but ever nearing roars. Roars that actually make the character whimper and screen shake as they shudder. This combined with the previous room being another one of their oppressively dark gloomy chambers and the knowledge that there was a monster looking for them earlier quite literally led to a near panic of the player at the keyboard. The obviously intentional claustrophobic design of the air-ducts in question was a marvelous piece of game design, and certainly a more terrifying experience than you’re liable to get from any recent movie I could name.

I think the best part about that scene was the fact that on a later play through we actually checked out the tunnels. Nothing is attacking you. It’s one hundred percent atmosphere and it does its job wonderful. Even equipped with the knowledge nothing was about to murder me I felt tense in the segment, always wondering if we might have made a poor call and that the monster might just be slow to get going. This is only exasperated when you realize there’s yet another chase scene later in the expansion (and several in the initial release) where a horrible murderous monster is pursuing you, and it’s only your frantic slamming of doors behind you and full out sprinting that keeps you alive. It’s one thing to watch an actor scramble through a scary house in a movie; it’s something else entirely when you’re put in their shoes.

Another facet of the design was that the expansion, meant to be a short half an hour run through game, only lets you have one life. If you die at any point in the game the whole thing shuts down. There’s absolutely no saving and if you want to try again you begin at the very start. It’s basically just upping what’s at stake; not only will you be terrified when you die, you’ll also lose all your progress. Honestly I don’t think it’d work in any longer of a game, but given the relative shortness of the expansion giving the player a sense of real loss when they die works nicely.

Really, the best way I can sum it up is that if you like your horror and you haven’t bought amnesia yet; go do it, it’s only $10. It’s great, it’s terrifying and when you finish it you’ll love it just as soon as you change your pants.

Prophetic ramblings

I’ve come to the conclusion I’m horrible at making posts on days when I’m stuck at home. Maybe it’s something about having a routine that gets the typing juices going. Of course, there always was a quiet time when I got home in which I unwound from the day before. Filling it with the clickity-clack of blogging seems right. Though I must admit a contributing factor to this could be the lack of real updates on things. I have to get people together before I’m liable to do anything with them, and finding those rare days the schedules align is more difficult than you might imagine. We’re still running through exam time at college and university, so several of my friends have been swamped. I’ve been lounging around sipping scotch and smoking cigars, but that’s because I enjoy the luxury of working full time sans school this semester.

The situation is due for a reversal however. Once these exams pass merrily on by, most of my previously occupied friends will be picking up jobs of some description and probably end up with a lot more free time than I have. I suppose we’ll all sip scotch those days, just I’ll do it slightly rarer and with slightly more expensive bottles.

I’d like to give a bunch of good news on upcoming videos, but honestly even if we could get the damn audio to work we’ve run into more problems. Coordinating the schedules of three or four people is hard; doing it for eight or nine is nigh impossible. Frankly it’s actually hard even finding that many people who consider getting hit in the head with a sword something worth showing up for. Couple this with the April living up to its reputation and all but flooding us every couple days making outdoor activities a hit or miss even if you do get everything else to work and… Well, we’re having trouble. I feel assured we’ll get something on video eventually and upload it to the much unused you-tube account, but when is anyone’s guess.

Anyways, since I don’t have anything like real news to present to you today I’m going to take a lovely drive down another mad tangent; for Andrew Had A Bizarre Thought. Oh, only if we had a show of some sort with segments, I could have an intro people would skip and everything. This time it was actually about prophecy, or rather the fact the cynicism has gotten to such a point that there are literally no possible ways for prophecy to be taken seriously anymore. The gist of it is that we’ve now had access to so many mad prophets down the centuries that it’s impossible to notice should one of them, by some cosmic impossibility, be really telling the truth.

Take it as a bit of thought experiment; even if we had records of some unfortunate mad man making a bunch of statements in the past about what doom’s about to unfold and they began to happen in a more or less perfectly accurate way to the predictions; what are the odds we’d get a majority believing in the validity of any other statements from said person? I can tell you with reasonable confidence that the answer is no. We’ve had the scenario occur before where people have, if only by random chance, foretold the future to a remarkable degree of success (Remarkable being a handful of accurate guesses here). Now of course we didn’t believe they were really prophetic, and the logic we use to dismiss them is that if enough people make guesses like this some one’s bound to get lucky eventually. It doesn’t prove they can see the future at all, really.

That’s where I had my bizarre thought. Prophecies are one of the few things out there where even perfect 100% success rate would be utterly meaningless to the majority of people. Casual disbelief of this sort of thing isn’t only the readily accepted option to pick, but actually the only expected one. Fanciful ideas have no place in the real world, regardless of how well they hold up under inspection.

Now I’d like to include the disclaimer that while this does sound like it’d be somehow tied in with or attributed to a discussion on religion, it wasn’t. Though the context could be used in such an argument, that’s not the source this came from at all. I’m actually pulling it from a documentary on the Discovery Channel (Do channels get italics? Oh, whatever) concerning the notes left behind by Leonardo DaVinci. Even with all the supporting evidence they pumped out for his various predictions I didn’t believe it in the least, and realized I pretty much never would. Cue argument with other viewers.

It does make me sort of wonder if we might have missed some one down the years who knew something. I suspect not, but isn’t that the basis of my original argument? Still, at the end, a bizarre thought.

Technical difficulties

Our second bout with audio equipment took place last night. The results were less than amazing. The goal of the night was to get our video equipment supplemented by a much better microphone so that the vlogs we intended to do wouldn’t sound like they were taken in an aquarium. This time we couldn’t quite manage to appease whatever faction of technowizards controls our video equipment and it utterly rejected all of our attempts. We shall try again sometime in the future – or, hey, maybe just say to hell with audio quality and make the videos anyways.

The night wasn’t a complete loss however; in the absence of a vlog we recorded a pod-cast. The editing still isn’t done and that’ll have to wait until I have a night free to finish up, hopefully sometime soon. This one features a lot more of Trevor as we go through a game that he and Josh have designed. It’s just rolling into production now, so it’s at roughly the same stage of creation as Aird in the last pod-cast. Not that the timing is intentional or anything; it’s just a neat bit of trivia. This is how ideas take root, and their first steps on the road of creation. If I could make it a theme I would, but it’s somewhat difficult to find people to talk about their ideas when they’re still in the stage where they haven’t really told anyone yet.

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Now here’s where you should be reading a review about the Ipad2, done up properly now that I’ve been toying around with it for several days straight. Its run headlong into the same issue everything else does when I try to make work with friends over; distractions. I have material, a bizarre collection of thoughts and judgments about the nifty piece of tech and it’s all been dutifully written up on the device itself. But it stops at that; I haven’t formulated anything I’d consider a post. Frankly most of it was written in my attempts to practice typing on the damn thing and large tracts of the rest relate to more obscure technical aspect I’m concerned with. I’m starting to suspect I’m simply bad at reviewing things.

Though for this one product I’m not too terribly worried. I can give the thumbs up of approval to anyone who’s considering buying it and doesn’t already own an Ipad1. Any more in-depth review would be made solely for Mac fans, which while I’m not filled with the stereotypical PC owner hatred of; I simply don’t cater to. If any of them saw the review and stumbled into this site I can’t see myself producing any more content of that nature to satisfy them. I won’t be buying any other Mac products for a long time.

Still, I’m keeping a personal log of sorts on the Ipad, and if it ever grows to a decent length and I have a lazy day I may post that in place of a real post, dressing it up nicely and calling it a review. Despite my best efforts off days do happen every now and then in which I find myself starved for things to talk about. It’s a concept that would’ve staggered me a month ago – but then again, a great deal of my thoughts are revisiting old ideas and trying a new take on them. It’s not something that lends itself well to blogs, far too much of it would be me agreeing with myself and editing tiny details.

Oh, and before I sign off; spring is officially back, with all the wetness and warmth that such entails. We’ll be off into the wilderness soon, and I’m going to try and bring the video camera when we go. I’d make some sort of promise, but then we wouldn’t be allowed to have nice things anymore. Do try and cope.