Tag Archive for 'artistic overanalysis'

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The Sims 3: More Awesome Than Before, More Annoying Than Ever

Let me begin by saying this: The Sims 3 is just as fun and addictive as the very first. It manages to recapture the magic I felt playing it for the first time on February 8th, 2000, my birthday, and four days after its release. The sense of surprise that a game about real life could be fun, the thrill of discovering little details in the gameplay you hadn’t noticed, and the realization of Will Wright‘s genius that made him my personal hero until the day I played Spore. It’s a feeling that I felt was missing from The Sims 2, which just didn’t hook me like the original managed to do, despite having some welcome visual upgrades. I can safely say that The Sims 3 has caused me to fall in love with the series all over again, and is likely to hook a lot of “core” gamers who have disliked The Sims for years. I recommend everyone even remotely interested should buy it right now.

With that said, I will now elaborate on all the things that infuriate me about the game, some new to The Sims 3, and some with roots that go all the way back to the very first game. There are plenty of reviews, like this one, this other one, and this third one from mainstream game journalists, which detail the wonderful experiences you can have with this game, so this is not going to be one of them. Instead, I am going to rant and rave about every tiny little problem the game has simply because someone has to.

My gripes come in three categories: problems with the structure of the new “living world” gameplay, small components that are (still) inexplicably missing or broken, and the fact that EA’s push for Sims 3 machinima has completely missed the point.
Look! I'm reacting to The Sims 3 in The Sims 3! Ha ha..it's hilarious, right? Right? Please don't hate me...
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Lazy Author Hates Cellphones For Making Derivative Clichés Implausible

New York Times columnist Matt Richtel whines in his latest editorial that setting fiction in the cellphone-and-Internet era makes coming up with good stories sooooo haaaaard:

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage.
[...]
I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Oh, poor pitiful you, Mr. Richtel. Your entire toolbox of tired plot devices that have been done to death is ruined, forcing you to come up with new and interesting ideas. How awful. At this rate, TV producers won’t be able to have computers make sci-fi beeping noises when someone uses Photoshop. Soon you’ll have to write thrillers where characters die because their partner’s iPhone “fixed” an important “typo.” Or romantic comedies where a woman gets angry at her husband because he can’t explain what he was really doing last night with her best friend in 140 characters, minus her Twitter name. It would be terrible!

For the record, on the off chance that Mr. Richtel’s cubicle is five feet away from my mother’s, I don’t actually think he’s a lazy, whiny hack, and I’m just coming off that way to appeal to the Gawker readers. The column makes some interesting points and brings up some valid issues, though it doesn’t seem to discuss many solutions to them other than “blow up the cellphone tower.” In this day and age, where everyone is always connected, that’s the kind of plot device that people can’t relate to.

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Why Do Animated Movies Have $180 Million Budgets?

Perhaps I’m uneducated in the ancient Hollywood art of Unit Production Management, but it’s baffling to me that WALL-E had a budget of $180 million. Yes, it was a gigantic Hollywood production, but consider the fact that all of its visuals were made by pressing buttons and waiting for the images to appear. Well, it was more complicated than that sounds, but that’s basically what they did.

So what exactly cost so much money? Without access to Pixar’s financial records, I’ll take a few guesses. But the short answer is that they’re spending way more money than they need to.
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Nintendo R&D Meeting – A “Femto-Length” Film

I decided that I wanted to experiment with making a movie with a complete three-act structure lasting somewhere around 15 seconds. In extremely technical terms, I definitely achieved that goal, but most people will just see this as random. That’s fine with me.

Anyway, here’s a 15 second movie depicting Nintendo employees as people with D-Pads for heads:

If you’d like to see it in HD without full-screening it or if you’re reading this on a “mobile device,” check it out on YouTube.

I call this a “femto-length” film because it’s astronomically shorter than a “short film,” and the “femto-” prefix is smaller than both “nano-” and “pico-”. So yeah, that’s REALLY small. Not quite as small as “yocto-“, but this movie isn’t quite that pointlessly short.

Maybe it’ll catch on. Maybe not. But if it doesn’t, I’ll cry.

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Gameplay Format – Because Video Game Writers Need To Go On Strike Too

I was looking for a decent way to write a script for a video game but found nothing. So I decided to create my own.

I call it “gameplay format,” because if a screenplay is a movie script, a “gameplay” should be a game script. Now, “gameplay” is already used to describe the experience of playing a game. That’s precisely why I called this format a “gameplay,” because it describes exactly that.

In filmmaking, screenwriters aren’t supposed to talk about shots or blocking or directing all that much; at most, they make minor suggestions. The screenwriter’s job is to describe the action. Why not give the “gamewriter” the same job — talk about what happens when the player’s character does what, and leave things like controls and programming to the designer and programmer?

I decided to try creating a format based on a screenplay, and I’m writing a surreal dystopian comedy/thriller game to test it out. It will be called “Status Quo”. But I want to make sure I’m on the right track as far as it being readable by humans.

I will say two things: I envision this as a 2D sidescroller simply because I can’t program or model in 3D to save my life, and centered underlined text is a “level heading”. If I have to say anything else, then this format isn’t easy enough to read, and I have failed. MISERABLY.

So, please let me know if this is comprehensible, and whether I can improve it (the format, not the game necessarily). Without further ado, after the jump, level one of “Status Quo”:

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