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egypturnashTonight I got to see two demos on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lediva's XBox360 that were from two opposite corners of video games. Bioshock and Space Giraffe.
Bioshock struck me as lovingly polished, the work of some people who've been making first-person shooters for a couple of decades. A lot of craft and love went into it. it is a fucking gorgeous piece of work, a pinnacle of realistic visual styling in the realm of the FPS. But unfortunately, it's still.. a first-person shooter. One that's sitting in the same place for me that GTA3 is: too damn close to reality, and all you have is a hurt button. The only interactions that seem to be available are 'avoid' and 'destroy'. And the loving detail of blood soaking into a corpse as you beat on it with your wrench makes it pretty clear which one the game is about. Ugh. Really off-putting. Then the demo ends with a trailer for the many ways the full game has to kill people.
Space Giraffe, on the other hand, is probably just as off-putting to someone raised on FPSs. But to me, it's pretty much the essence of video games. Turn off the mind and fall into a void of pretty colors and sounds. Stuff blows up but it's completely abstracted: weird shapes turning into pixel showers, to the accompaniment of a echoing electro-chunk or a 'moo'. When you die, a phone rings. I still don't know why, but it made me giggle every time and really not mind that I died. It doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes perfect sense. And damn, is it pretty. Screenshots do it no justice. Space Giraffe is also a lovingly polished piece of work from someone who's been turning out their style of games for quite some time.
If I'd already sunk the $300 into an XBox360, I'd be much more likely to give Jeff and Giles five bucks for Space Giraffe than to give the many people atLooking GlassIrrational 2K Boston fifty bucks for Bioshock. There's probably many more man-hours per dollar in Bioshock but ugh, I dunno if I could even play through it once. The moment it started throwing lovingly-rendered blood everywhere it really lost me. I'd get a lot more play time out of SG, that's for sure. Hell, if it was possible, I'd give him five bucks right now for a download of SG I could keep somewhere, and load onto a 360 when they're available cheap and used because they're last year's machine. Bioshock? Maybe I'll get an abandonware copy in a half a decade like I did with 'System Shock 2'. If there's a 'let's not simulate every drop of blood soaking into the carpet' patch.
If you have a 360 and like the kind of games I tend to point to, go download that Space Giraffe demo (if you haven't already) and give it a few goes. Maybe ten - I only played it a couple of times, and could barely begin to see the overlapping rhythms of the game. It's subtle.
lediva's XBox360 that were from two opposite corners of video games. Bioshock and Space Giraffe.Bioshock struck me as lovingly polished, the work of some people who've been making first-person shooters for a couple of decades. A lot of craft and love went into it. it is a fucking gorgeous piece of work, a pinnacle of realistic visual styling in the realm of the FPS. But unfortunately, it's still.. a first-person shooter. One that's sitting in the same place for me that GTA3 is: too damn close to reality, and all you have is a hurt button. The only interactions that seem to be available are 'avoid' and 'destroy'. And the loving detail of blood soaking into a corpse as you beat on it with your wrench makes it pretty clear which one the game is about. Ugh. Really off-putting. Then the demo ends with a trailer for the many ways the full game has to kill people.
Space Giraffe, on the other hand, is probably just as off-putting to someone raised on FPSs. But to me, it's pretty much the essence of video games. Turn off the mind and fall into a void of pretty colors and sounds. Stuff blows up but it's completely abstracted: weird shapes turning into pixel showers, to the accompaniment of a echoing electro-chunk or a 'moo'. When you die, a phone rings. I still don't know why, but it made me giggle every time and really not mind that I died. It doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes perfect sense. And damn, is it pretty. Screenshots do it no justice. Space Giraffe is also a lovingly polished piece of work from someone who's been turning out their style of games for quite some time.
If I'd already sunk the $300 into an XBox360, I'd be much more likely to give Jeff and Giles five bucks for Space Giraffe than to give the many people at
If you have a 360 and like the kind of games I tend to point to, go download that Space Giraffe demo (if you haven't already) and give it a few goes. Maybe ten - I only played it a couple of times, and could barely begin to see the overlapping rhythms of the game. It's subtle.
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Date: 2007-09-04 08:19 pm (UTC)But if you want an example of a more revolutionary, less-violent FP game, that game is Thief. If you play it on Expert, the victory conditions specfically state that you can't kill anyone, and in some levels you're not even allowed to knock anyone out. It's hardly an FPS, since the only shooting you do is with arrows, and on expert that consists of shooting noisemaker arrows to distract guards, and water arrows to douse torches. But it does take the FPS model and flip it upside down, where the goal is to acieve your objectives completely unnoticed.
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Date: 2007-09-04 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-04 11:14 pm (UTC)(I envy anyone playing Thief for the first time, there are moments in the Thief games that are really not duplicated anywhere else in gaming)