Sci-fi tropes: Nanobots can't exist...

I've not had a lot of time to write a review of any of the games I've been playing but I did want to publish at least one article a month and so we're stuck with a simple post from the meanderings of my mind. (And now I'm late because I didn't manage to get this post done in time for the end of November! :) )

Take a look up there at the title. It's a little inflammatory and simplistic but it's also true. Let me summarise the point of this post neatly:

Nearly every depiction of nanobots in sci-fi and popular culture is incorrect. 

Post Thoughts: Grow Home

Grow Home has been a surprise to me. It's an indie (sort-of-though-not-really) produced title from Ubisoft with minimalist graphics and gameplay. However, this simple combination is very effective and serves to evoke pleasant memories of other games I've played. Part Super Mario, part Minecraft and part Pikmin, Grow Home tugs on all the right emotional centres in my brain...

Mid-Thoughts: Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

What's interesting is that this artwork is used for the loading screen of the game on the PS4 version (at least) but they cropped it so you can't see the wings.... so it looks like this dude has spirit armpit hair!

I loved the original Diablo. It was at a time when I didn't read game magazines and I'd never heard of it before my dad returned from Canada with a copy (huge box with plastic window and all!)... only to realise that our 486 with a floppy disk drive would not run it.

The game sat in its box for a few months while I poured over the manual, absorbing all the information that I could, until one day, at a PC fair, I made a faustian deal with my dad. We bought a pentium chip and accompanying motherboard (presumably also with compatible RAM but I forget all the details) with a CD-ROM drive and switched out the parts of the 486 using the same case without telling my mother.

I have no idea whether she ever knew about it or not but I was able to play Diablo without any hassles. I still have very fond memories of the game, its aesthetic and its replayability even though it took me a good while to understand how the game really worked since before that I'd mostly been playing Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and sidescrollers like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem.

Needless to say that I picked up Diablo 2 (and it's expansion) on day one of each release and played them for many hours with multiple characters. I just loved trying out new builds and Act 1 & 2 were my favourite out of them all.

I, like many people on the internet, did not take the reception of Diablo 3's change in tone and mechanics all that well. Sure, I didn't rant and rave about it like some extremists did but I did think that the design of WoW had crept into the franchise. At the time many people said this was being paranoid and just wanting dark game design.

I actually held off buying the game because there were plenty of other games to play (god knows how many!) and what with Blizzard's restrictive DRM, real names policy and other, in my opinion, SNAFUs I just didn't want to buy it on the PC.... So you can imagine I was happy when they announced the console versions. 

I didn't buy it when those were released because I thought that maybe my gaming tastes had changed in the intervening years and having read up on the way skills were implemented and how the story wasn't that great (according to other people) I figured I'd wait until the price came down.

Boring details finished!!

Social change vs becoming more responsible... vs the advertising world...

So, I'm old. Not so old I'm getting a retirement cheque any time soon but old enough to look back on things and see how those things have changed or turned out. So it's surprising for me to admit that things are getting pretty good for creators on the internet.

Okay, I'm sure there are plenty of creators struggling with stolen works and their (obviously valued) time and products being free-loaded by the likes of everyone and anyone... However, I feel that there is a slow change occurring in people's general perceptions and their conception of what it means to be a consumer.

Post Thoughts: Arkham Knight

I don't really think there's much to say to introduce one of the biggest and most successful game series in recent years. Arkham Knight was developed by the original team behind Arkham Asylum and City but not Origins. Some people decry Origins and City as being inferior to Asylum and I think they're right if you take it only from one perspective: Asylum was a very limited experience and as such provided a very self-contained and explanatory story and environment which an open-world game can not hope to achieve (at least not without significant investment and even larger teams of developers).

Think of it like this: Half Life 2 provides a certain kind of experience compared to Morrowind or GTA San Andreas. Knight exhibits this same behaviour when compared to Asylum - the world and experience is a little stretched and strained but it's still a fantastic game and story and I think that's the take-away message that'll bear out below.

What ya' gonna' do when he comes for you?