Watch me suck at the wonderful roguelike rhythm game “Crypt of the Necrodancer”:
Month: November 2014
-
Crypt of the Necrodancer
-
The Special Need
Hey dudes and dudettes,
I know none of you will ever go see a documentary. But if you do, go watch “the special need”. It’s launching the 11th of December in Germany and having seen it, I can wholeheartedly say it’s brilliant!
Info!
-
German TV
Here’s an interesting article I found on German TV.
I’m just going to leave that there and silently back out of the room.
-
Mia goes LA
Hey everyone!
Or everyone from L.A. who wants to see Mia, some other Belgian shorts, hear directors talk, and drink a Belgian beer.
Your wish has just been granted.
You lucky dog you.
-
Losing Sleep
So I’ve got this zit. It’s on my head, precisely where my hair parts. It’s swollen so much I can’t sleep comfortably anymore, no matter how I lie. I feel like I’m pregnant with a disgusting mucus baby.
When I was a teenager, my mom used to give me 20 francs (half a euro) for five minutes of zit-pinching. These five minutes usually occurred when I was on a particularly tough boss in a nasty video game, so I got annoyed fast.
But boy, after my fifth consecutive zit-induced bad night rest, I would give her 20 francs to get rid of this thing.
So basically I need a time machine I guess?
-
Gentleman
You can never be too polite! Like the guy currently standing in front of me at the Lidl cash register, who is saying sorry in advance by buying a single tulip with his sixpack of cheap beer.
-
Hear that? That was the sound of the fourth wall breaking.
I’ve never really been a fan of the Call of Duty games. It’s not gamer snobism (after all, I still play WoW after nearly ten years) – I’m just not really invested in realistic shooters. The stories never really seemed to click with me, just like war movies don’t click. Yet the newest game in the CoD franchise did something I find very interesting.
This fascinates me beyond belief. How could anyone think this was going to work? I mean, the idea is right – press button, get emotionally invested – but the execution is just laughably bad. The whole trick of writing a moving story is never telling your audience it’s moving at all. Stories are emotional manipulation, sure, but you don’t want the audience to realize that. Suspense of disbelief, people!
Imagine watching the Lion King (and I’m taking this example precisely because the movie already borders laying bare its extreme means of manipulation). Mufasa dies. Simba cries. Violins play, the choir sings some notes in flat.
Then, suddenly, one of the wildebeasts halt and goes “Whoa, dude, your dad is totally dead, that’s like, super sad.”
Sure, you think of these things when you’re writing a screenplay. You know you’re going to manipulate the audience to the moon and back. In fact, these are usually the moments I find first, because they supply the emotional grounding for a project. But if you’re any bit decent at telling stories, you’ll be subtle about it.
Narration in video games is taking baby steps. I mean, there’s games like Bastion or Braid, who try to use the medium to tell adequate stories, and I think we’re really going places. But then there’s sequences like this – sequences in productions that cost so, so, so much money. Sequences that fall flat because they break universal narrative rules that have been around for millenia in the dumbest manner possible.
Hey, at least we learned something, right?
(P.S.: Giantbomb did a great piece on this – clickie!)
