Lovey-Dovey all the time
Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah \
Some call me the gangster of love
If someone was calling you a sex-pest, would you brag about it in a song?
This is one of the better books about the history and theory of video games. Deadly that he's offering it for free. #
This is one of the better books about the history and theory of video games. Deadly that he's offering it for free. #
Portal
Christ, it’s hard to talk about Portal.
Let’s start with the easy stuff: it appears on Half-Life 2’s “Orange Box” package, which includes Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Compared to these huge, important games, Portal appears to almost be an afterthought. A goofy experiment to pad out the whole package and make it seem more appealing (as if Half Life 2 needs to be made more appealing).
The whole idea of the Portal is deceptively simple. You’ve got a gun that shoots two portals. You go in one portal, you come out the other. Now, armed with your portal gun and a healthy dose of lateral thinking, you have to make your way to the end of the level. And although it looks like a first person shooter, even including such cliched FPS conventions as crates and gun turrets, this is no first person shooter. It’s a puzzle game. It’s fucking Sudoku. Sudoku crossed with that movie, “Cube“. Some fiendish puzzles that do have a logical answer.
And that’s what makes talking about portal so hard: that’s about all you can say about Portal without ruining it. The things you want to say - the things that made the game so incredible - those things are best left as surprises. I’ve read reviews full of SPOILARZ, revealing everything about the game and these reviews still didn’t make the game sound half as interesting as it actually is.
So, rather than waste a bunch of bandwidth on a self-sabotaging review, here’s the important things about the game, in bullet-point form
- A near-perfect difficulty curve. You’re gradually introduced to every concept in the game.
- Amazing story, beautifully written. Hard to believe that a short, 3-hour puzzle game can have a story as good as, say, BioShock, but it’s true. And so funny, too.
- Great replayability. Once you’re done, you’re challenged to play through the levels again using as few portals or taking as few steps as possible.
- Fascinating developer commentary. I know that all the games on the Orange Box have this ‘developer commentary’ option, but Portal’s was truly revealing.
- Hilarious, beautiful song for the credits - the only time I’ve willingly sat through a game’s credits (except when it was worth gamer points). Frustratingly prolific Jonathan Coulton (he of Code Monkey fame) wrote the song that plays over the final credits. There are videos of the song on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to them because the song is full of SPOILARZ. But he wrote about his involvement with the game on his site, and that’s worth reading too.
- Worth the price of the Orange Box by itself
Ouch. The next-gen format wars just got even more confusing. #
On Mosquitoes
Evolution is a funny thing.
Take sharks for example. A few million years of evolution and you end up with a perfect, efficient killing machines. As Richard Dreyfuss explains in Jaws, all a shark does is eat, swim and make little baby sharks. They’re top of the food chain. Don’t believe me? Wait until Al Gore gets done melting the polar ice caps and the global sea level has risen a few feet, we’re then we’re going to have to give this whole food chain thing a whole load of thought. And just when we manage to claw our way back to the top - that’s when evolution will take sharks to the next level. They’ll start breathing fire or something.
On the other end of the evolutionary spectrum, you have the humble mosquito which seemes to have spent the last few million years evolving into perfect, efficient annoying machines. By Christ, how can one little insect cause so much trouble? They’re the obnoxious asshole of the insect world. They’re small and fast, which makes them almost impossible to see. They’re also the most relentless hunters since Predator 2 - they will, under no circumstances, give up once they’ve got a goo for your blood. But worst of all, there’s that fucking noise.
Why, in the name of all that is holy, did they develop that high-pitched whine? To use the Predator analogy again, this is like the Predator strapping a fucking siren and an enormous flopping day-glo dildo to himself. Can anyone explain to me mosquitoes make so much noise? It’s not that all mosquitoes make this noise, only the females. (Incidentally, it’s only the females that suck your blood, proving the good doctor’s theory that “bitches ain’t shit but hoez and tricks” is a universal constant.)
Here’s my theory as to why the mosquitoes make that noise: because they can. If I were a mosquito and I’d just snuck into someone’s room and sucked their blood while they were sleeping, I would absolutely buzz past their ear to wake them up and fuck up their sleep for the rest of the night. I would do this because I’m a total asshole.
One of these days, I’m going to record the noise of a mosquito flying and slow it down. Know what I think it’s going to sound like? Laughter.
Pricks.
This is mainly a self-reminder to get my lazy ass up to this - loads of documents, scripts, costumes and models from Kubrick's movies. Main interests are the model of HAL (nerdgasm!) and the Zeiss lens used to shoot Barry Lyndon by candlelight #
