Comments on: The Sunday Papers

By: Santiago

Santiago — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:31:48 +0000

I believe the best that was done in mixing narrative with gaming is in Braid, where you get to experience the narrator’s realizations about personal evolution through the actual game mechanics. The end scene, when all comes together, could not be better narrated in any way other than through the game mechanics themselves. It was a masterpiece and something completely novel for me.

Second place would go to Passage for the same reason, in this case making the sense of loss physically tangible (it did make me cry), but there was no actual game there.

I think the marriage between games and narrative takes place at a much lower level in the mind than in books and movies and the potential is tremendous, but mainly uncharted territory yet.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:41:52 +0000

As someone somewhere has said, the ‘Show, don’t tell’ rule in films is superceded by ‘Do, don’t show’ in games. That’s for the interactive element, at least. I think the ‘Show, don’t tell’ rule still applies for narrative-driven games.

By: ...hmm...

...hmm... — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:58:17 +0000

that is a very sweary song

By: Serondal

Serondal — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:12:22 +0000

I forwarded the story to my dad who doesn’t read this kind of blog ect. He is about 20 times more emotional then me he is probably going to be rubbish for a week after reading this LOL. luckily he’s retired and he has time to waste so spending a few days crying non-stop won’t hurt him to bad.

I cry a bit when I accidently kill a dwarf baby in Dwarf Fotress so you can imagine how easy it is to make him cry! :P

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:59:41 +0000

Serondal: Yeah, it totally got me too and I don’t even have kids.

By: Serondal

Serondal — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:57:08 +0000

Wow, the Pixar story had me crying like a 4 year old girl at work. I hope none of my co-workers saw me :P It is a sweet story but at the same time brings up a lot of fears I have as a father of 2 young kids. I can’t help but put myself in those parents shoes and imagine what it would be like if my daughter was dieing.

The kid is pretty strong though, she was ready to die and everything. Very surprising little girl indeed. It amazes me that Pixar would do something like that, very hart warming in times like those we find ourselves living in when credit card companies can’t even find it in theri heart to remove a 25 dollar late fee for a starving family.

By: Sonicgoo

Sonicgoo — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:37:01 +0000

I believe the response to Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more” is Venturi’s “Less is a bore”.

By: Rath

Rath — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:17:48 +0000

Re: Windows 7
I’ve just read this on the wiki article about it;

“A new version of Virtual PC, Windows Virtual PC Beta is available for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. It allows multiple Windows environments, including Windows XP Mode, to run on the same machine, requiring the use of Intel VT-x or AMD-V. Windows XP Mode runs Windows XP in a virtual machine and redirects displayed applications running in Windows XP to the Windows 7 desktop. Furthermore Windows 7 supports to mount a virtual hard disk (VHD) as a normal data storage, and the bootloader delivered with Windows 7 can boot the Windows system from a VHD. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) of Windows 7 is also enhanced to support real-time multimedia application including video playback and 3D games. That means the Direct X 10 can be used in a remote desktop environment.”

Sounds good to me, apart fom it not being available on the lesser editions.

By: Sinnerman

Sinnerman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:02:54 +0000

Less is more isn’t really that good a phrase. Maybe it could be said that ICO is designed in a very Japanese Wabi-sabi way while Fallout 3 most definitely isn’t.

By: Howard

Howard — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:05:39 +0000

@ Frye
Thank you. Another person of good sense at last =)
The main thing I noticed about Vista is that I just don’t crash anymore. XP was up and down lock a bloody yo-yo, especially when playing games. At least Vista can recover from a driver failure and drop you back to your desktop unlike XP that just sits there, locked solid, staring at you in confusion.

All that said I have high hopes for Win7. M$ seem to have actually listened to feedback and are for once making some smart moves. Of course it could all crash and burn on the day of release but we’ll see. In the meantime I just have to ignore people who froth inexplicably about it without having any knowledge of why it is supposedly good or bad. Ignorance and technology are such a fun combination…

By: Frye

Frye — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:56:31 +0000

@Howard: You are absolutely right about the unfair treatment of Vista. Never listen to gamers when it comes to judging an OS. They confuse a 2 percent drop in framerate with a bad operating system. Completely ignoring its superior behavior on multicore systems (by splitting up bits of the OS into more processes), the neat precaching (so you use that 4G of ram finally), even little things like automatic defrag when your pc goes idle. More services running IS NOT necessarily a bad thing. I’m getting a little tired sometimes explaining to customers that their nephew who likes Crysis knows shit. I know this is a gamer’s blog but even for us gamers calling Vista BAD is just silly.

By: Web Design Forums

Web Design Forums — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:28:17 +0000

lol @ kieron gillien. nice article. nice read.