PierreMenard
ok so obviously its on me for trying this. what was I expecting. fuck me right.
2013
Lots of reviews on this simultaneously praise the story and writing as a step forward for video games while acknowledging that that same story and writing may be exposed as somewhat weak by the TV adaptation via HBO. And that seems revealing to me, it seems to speak volumes. The quality of the game that is universally agreed to be the most enduring pales in comparison when held up to like, anything else remotely decent. And shit no one is even saying it might seem weak compared to The Wire or The Sopranos; no, people are seemingly worried about comparisons to fucking Game of Thrones or some shit. Because even next to GoT, maybe, the weaknesses of TLOU stand out.
I have not played more than two hours of this game. I enjoyed the walking sim more than the stealth combat, and while I don't know that I observed enough of the story and writing to weigh in, it seemed fine enough. But I think any game where the "story and writing" operate in the cinematic mode will necessarily fall short when compared to actual cinematic things. Better to focus on the whole, video game part, imo.
I have not played more than two hours of this game. I enjoyed the walking sim more than the stealth combat, and while I don't know that I observed enough of the story and writing to weigh in, it seemed fine enough. But I think any game where the "story and writing" operate in the cinematic mode will necessarily fall short when compared to actual cinematic things. Better to focus on the whole, video game part, imo.
2022
ok so the humor here is pretty bad but at least the main guy behind it hasn't ever done domestic violence
2021
For some reason I often confuse this game with "Neom," the Saudi-Arabian concept city that has yet to be constructed along a 110-mile long by 200 yard wide strip of desert for seemingly no reason other than to flaunt wealth, spark innovation, and tempt fate. Toem doesn't really do any of those things, it's just a short and sweet indie photo game.
I thought hard about buying this game. I'd played Modern Warfare 2 about a decade ago, the first time it came out. MW2 the first go around was my formative online shooter experience; partying up with the boys to go get called slurs and shit after a long day of high school, figuring out the care package glitch and how dumb commando was; MW2 The First was a great time. Pretty dogshit game, but well-suited for a bunch of adolescent layabouts to amuse themselves with.
So because of all that I was thinking about buying MW2 again this year, at least until I saw the pricetag. Seventy fucking dollars? For real? After years of the OG MW2 with friends, moving on eventually to BLOPS, I'd kinda been burnt out on COD games. They just rerelease the same shit every year but with more confusing UIs and shuffled perk and equipment systems so you don't know what the best builds are at launch. When BLOPS 2 (or 3, I forget which) dropped I figured, ah time to move on. Not worth the $60. But now the new one is $70?? What the fuck??
Well, I have no self respect, so I bought it. And whaddaya know, its the same shit! Luckily, they've added a whole bunch of new features to the custom classes this go around, like unnecessary scroll wheels, and increasing the number of gun attachments a hundredfold. No silly "stock" for you, no sir, your gun will have 50 different types of stocks. That's progress, baby.
At the end of the day this game is, its COD. uh. No big surprise there. They've been doing this shit forever, no sign of stopping soon. Whatever.
So because of all that I was thinking about buying MW2 again this year, at least until I saw the pricetag. Seventy fucking dollars? For real? After years of the OG MW2 with friends, moving on eventually to BLOPS, I'd kinda been burnt out on COD games. They just rerelease the same shit every year but with more confusing UIs and shuffled perk and equipment systems so you don't know what the best builds are at launch. When BLOPS 2 (or 3, I forget which) dropped I figured, ah time to move on. Not worth the $60. But now the new one is $70?? What the fuck??
Well, I have no self respect, so I bought it. And whaddaya know, its the same shit! Luckily, they've added a whole bunch of new features to the custom classes this go around, like unnecessary scroll wheels, and increasing the number of gun attachments a hundredfold. No silly "stock" for you, no sir, your gun will have 50 different types of stocks. That's progress, baby.
At the end of the day this game is, its COD. uh. No big surprise there. They've been doing this shit forever, no sign of stopping soon. Whatever.
2012
Philip Guedalla informs us that the novel The Approach to al-Mu'tasim by the Bombay barrister Mir Bahadur Ali ’is a rather uneasy combination of those Islamic allegories which never fail to impress their own translators, and of that brand of detective story which inevitably outdoes even Dr Watson and heightens the horror of human life as it is found in the most respectable boarding-houses of Brighton.' Before him, Mr Cecil Roberts had blasted Bahadur's book for ’its unaccountable double influence of Wilkie Collins and of the famed twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar' - a simple enough observation which Guedalla merely parrots, though in an angrier jargon. Essentially, both reviewers are in agreement, pointing out the book's detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism. This hybridization may lead us to suspect a certain kinship with Chesterton; we shall presently find out, however, that no such affinity exists.
The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu'tasim appeared in Bombay towards the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu'tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission - perhaps merciful - of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am drawn to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.
Its central figure - whose name we are never told - is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in the Islamic faith of his fathers, but, on the tenth night of the moon of Muharram, he finds himself in the midst of a civil disorder between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and prayers. The great paper canopies of the Muslim procession force their way through the heathen mob. A hail of Hindu bricks hurtles down from a roof terrace. A knife sinks into a belly. Someone - Muslim? Hindu? - dies and is trampled on. Three thousand men are fighting - stick against revolver, obscenity against curse, God the Indivisible against the many gods. Instinctively, the student freethinker joins in the battle. With his bare hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. The Government police - mounted, thunderous, and barely awake - intervene, dealing out impartial lashes. The student flees, almost under the legs of the horses, heading for the farthest ends of town. He crosses two sets of railway lines, or the same lines twice. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden at one corner of which rises a circular tower. 'A lean and evil mob of mooncoloured hounds' lunges at him from the black rose-bushes. Pursued, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder - two or three rungs are missing - and on the flat roof, which has a dark pit in the middle, comes upon a squalid man in a squatting position, urinating vigorously by the light of the moon. The man confides to him that his profession is stealing gold teeth from the white-shrouded corpses that the Parsees leave on the roof of the tower. He says a number of other vile things and mentions, in passing, that fourteen nights have lapsed since he last cleansed himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with obvious anger of a band of horse thieves from Gujarat, 'eaters of dogs and lizards - men, in short, as abominable as the two of us’. Day is dawning. In the sky is a low flight of well-fed vultures. The student, in utter exhaustion, lies down to sleep. When he wakes up, the sun is high overhead and the thief is gone. Gone also are a couple of Trichinopoly cigars and a few silver rupees. Shaken by the events of the night before, the student decides to lose himself somewhere within the bounds of India. He knows he has shown himself capable of killing an infidel, but not of knowing with certainty whether the Muslim is more justified in his beliefs than the infidel. The mention of Gujarat haunts him, as does the name of a malka-sansi (a woman belonging to a caste of thieves) from Palanpur, many times favoured by the curses and hatred of the despoiler of corpses. He reasons that the anger of a man so thoroughly vile is in itself a kind of praise. He resolves - though rather hopelessly - to find her. He prays and sets out slowly and deliberately on his long journey. So ends the novel’s second chapter.
It is hardly possible to outline here the involved adventures that befall him in the remaining nineteen. There is a baffling pullulation of dramatis personae, to say nothing of a biography that seems to exhaust the range of the human spirit (running from infamy to mathematical speculation) or of a pilgrimage that covers the vast geography of India. The story begun in Bombay moves on into the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers for an evening and a night before the stone gates of Bikaner, tells of the death of a blind astrologer in a Benares sewer; the hero becomes involved in a conspiracy in a mazelike palace in Katmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua Bazaar in Calcutta, sees the day born out of the sea from a law office in Madras, sees evenings die in the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancore, falters and kills in Indapur. The adventure closes its orbit of miles and years back in Bombay itself just a few yards away from the garden of the 'mooncoloured hounds’. The underlying plot is this: a man, the fugitive student freethinker we already know, falls among the lowest class of people and, in a kind of contest of evil-doing, takes up their ways. All at once, with the wonder and terror of Robinson Crusoe upon discovering the footprint of a man in the sand, he becomes aware of a sudden brief change in that world of ruthlessness - a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence in one of his loathsome companions. 'It was as though a stranger, a third and more subtle person, had entered into the conversation.' The hero knows that the scoundrel he is talking to is quite incapable of this unexpected turn; he therefore deduces that the man is echoing someone else, a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at the mysterious conclusion that 'somewhere on earth is a man from whom this light emanates; somewhere on earth a man exists who is equal to this light.’ The student decides to spend his life in search of him.
The story's outline is now plain: the tireless search for a human soul through the barely perceptible reflections cast by this soul in others - at first, the faint trace of a smile or of a word; in the end, the multiple branching splendours of reason, imagination, and righteousness. The nearer to al-Mu'tasim the men he examines are, the greater is their share of the divine, though it is understood that they are but mirrors. A mathematical analogy may be helpful here. Bahadur's teeming novel is an ascendant progression whose last term is the foreshadowed 'man called al-Mu'tasim'. Al-Mu'tasim's immediate predecessor is a Persian bookseller, an exceptionally happy, courteous man; the one before him, a saint. Finally, after many years, the student comes to a corridor 'at whose end is a door and a cheap beaded curtain, and behind the curtain a shining light'. The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice - the unimaginable voice of al-Mu'tasim - invites him in. The student parts the curtain and steps forward. At this point, the novel ends.
If I am not mistaken, the proper handling of such a plot places the writer under two obligations. One, to abound richly in prophetic touches; the other, to make us feel that the person foreshadowed by these touches is more than a mere convention or phantom. Bahadur fulfils the first; how far he achieves the second, I wonder. In other words, the unheard and unseen al-Mu'tasim should leave us with the impression of a real character, not of a clutter of insipid superlatives. In the 1932 version, there are few supernatural touches; 'the man called al-Mu'tasim' is obviously a symbol, though he is not devoid of personal traits. Unfortunately, this literary good conduct did not last. In the 1934 version - the one I have read - the novel descends into allegory. Al-Mu'tasim is God, and the hero's various wanderings are in some way the journey of a soul on its ascending steps towards the divine union. There are a few regrettable details: a black Jew from Cochin speaks of al-Mu'tasim as having dark skin; a Christian describes him standing on a height with his arms spread open; a Red lama recalls him seated 'like that figure I modelled in yak butter and worshipped in the monastery of Tachilhunpo'. These statements seem to suggest a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind. In my opinion, the idea is not greatly exciting. I will not say the same of another idea - the hint that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone of Someone above him (or Someone simply indispensable and equal), and so on to the End (or, rather, Endlessness) of Time, or perhaps cyclically. Al-Mu'tasim (the name of that eighth Abbasid caliph who was victorious in eight battles, fathered eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and ruled for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days) means etymologically 'The Seeker after Help'. In the 1932 version, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim justified well enough the difficulty of finding him. The later version gives way to the quaint theology I have just mentioned. In the twentieth chapter, words attributed by the Persian bookseller to al-Mu'tasim are, perhaps, the mere heightening of others spoken by the hero; this and other hidden analogies may stand for the identity of the Seeker with the Sought. They may also stand for an influence of Man on the Divinity. Another chapter hints that al-Mu'tasim is the Hindu the student believes he has killed. Mir Bahadur Ali, as we have seen, cannot refrain from the grossest temptation of art - that of being a genius.
On reading over these pages, I fear I have not called sufficient attention to the book's many virtues. They include a number of fine distinctions. For example, a conversation in chapter nineteen in which one of the speakers, who is a friend of al-Mu'tasim, avoids pointing out the other man's sophisms 'in order not to be obviously in the right'.
-
It is considered admirable nowadays for a modern book to have its roots in an ancient one, since nobody (as Dr Johnson said) likes to owe anything to his contemporaries. The many but superficial contacts between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to receive - I shall never know why - the hare-brained admiration of critics. The points of contact between Bahadur's novel and the celebrated Parliament of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar have awakened the no less mysterious approval of London and even of Allahabad and Calcutta. As far as I can judge, the points of contact between the two works are not many. Other sources are present. Some inquisitor has listed certain analogies between the novel's opening scene and Kipling's story 'On the City Wall'. Bahadur admits this but argues that it would be highly abnormal if two descriptions of the tenth night of Muharram were quite unlike each other. Eliot, more to the point, is reminded of the seventy cantos of the unfinished allegory The Faerie Queene, in which the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear even once - a fault previously noted by Richard William Church (Spenser, 1879). With due humility, I suggest a possible remote forerunner, the Jerusalem Cabbalist Isaac Luria, who in the sixteenth century advanced the notion that the soul of an ancestor or a teacher may, in order to comfort or instruct him, enter into the soul of someone who has suffered misfortune. Ibbür is the name given to this variety of metempsychosis.
In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan's sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him out. They know that the king's name means 'thirty birds'; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that rings the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll of the rest. Thirty, purified by suffering, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also posits a divine extension of the principle of identity: 'All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.') The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton's Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith's study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).
The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu'tasim appeared in Bombay towards the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu'tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission - perhaps merciful - of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am drawn to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.
Its central figure - whose name we are never told - is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in the Islamic faith of his fathers, but, on the tenth night of the moon of Muharram, he finds himself in the midst of a civil disorder between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and prayers. The great paper canopies of the Muslim procession force their way through the heathen mob. A hail of Hindu bricks hurtles down from a roof terrace. A knife sinks into a belly. Someone - Muslim? Hindu? - dies and is trampled on. Three thousand men are fighting - stick against revolver, obscenity against curse, God the Indivisible against the many gods. Instinctively, the student freethinker joins in the battle. With his bare hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. The Government police - mounted, thunderous, and barely awake - intervene, dealing out impartial lashes. The student flees, almost under the legs of the horses, heading for the farthest ends of town. He crosses two sets of railway lines, or the same lines twice. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden at one corner of which rises a circular tower. 'A lean and evil mob of mooncoloured hounds' lunges at him from the black rose-bushes. Pursued, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder - two or three rungs are missing - and on the flat roof, which has a dark pit in the middle, comes upon a squalid man in a squatting position, urinating vigorously by the light of the moon. The man confides to him that his profession is stealing gold teeth from the white-shrouded corpses that the Parsees leave on the roof of the tower. He says a number of other vile things and mentions, in passing, that fourteen nights have lapsed since he last cleansed himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with obvious anger of a band of horse thieves from Gujarat, 'eaters of dogs and lizards - men, in short, as abominable as the two of us’. Day is dawning. In the sky is a low flight of well-fed vultures. The student, in utter exhaustion, lies down to sleep. When he wakes up, the sun is high overhead and the thief is gone. Gone also are a couple of Trichinopoly cigars and a few silver rupees. Shaken by the events of the night before, the student decides to lose himself somewhere within the bounds of India. He knows he has shown himself capable of killing an infidel, but not of knowing with certainty whether the Muslim is more justified in his beliefs than the infidel. The mention of Gujarat haunts him, as does the name of a malka-sansi (a woman belonging to a caste of thieves) from Palanpur, many times favoured by the curses and hatred of the despoiler of corpses. He reasons that the anger of a man so thoroughly vile is in itself a kind of praise. He resolves - though rather hopelessly - to find her. He prays and sets out slowly and deliberately on his long journey. So ends the novel’s second chapter.
It is hardly possible to outline here the involved adventures that befall him in the remaining nineteen. There is a baffling pullulation of dramatis personae, to say nothing of a biography that seems to exhaust the range of the human spirit (running from infamy to mathematical speculation) or of a pilgrimage that covers the vast geography of India. The story begun in Bombay moves on into the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers for an evening and a night before the stone gates of Bikaner, tells of the death of a blind astrologer in a Benares sewer; the hero becomes involved in a conspiracy in a mazelike palace in Katmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua Bazaar in Calcutta, sees the day born out of the sea from a law office in Madras, sees evenings die in the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancore, falters and kills in Indapur. The adventure closes its orbit of miles and years back in Bombay itself just a few yards away from the garden of the 'mooncoloured hounds’. The underlying plot is this: a man, the fugitive student freethinker we already know, falls among the lowest class of people and, in a kind of contest of evil-doing, takes up their ways. All at once, with the wonder and terror of Robinson Crusoe upon discovering the footprint of a man in the sand, he becomes aware of a sudden brief change in that world of ruthlessness - a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence in one of his loathsome companions. 'It was as though a stranger, a third and more subtle person, had entered into the conversation.' The hero knows that the scoundrel he is talking to is quite incapable of this unexpected turn; he therefore deduces that the man is echoing someone else, a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at the mysterious conclusion that 'somewhere on earth is a man from whom this light emanates; somewhere on earth a man exists who is equal to this light.’ The student decides to spend his life in search of him.
The story's outline is now plain: the tireless search for a human soul through the barely perceptible reflections cast by this soul in others - at first, the faint trace of a smile or of a word; in the end, the multiple branching splendours of reason, imagination, and righteousness. The nearer to al-Mu'tasim the men he examines are, the greater is their share of the divine, though it is understood that they are but mirrors. A mathematical analogy may be helpful here. Bahadur's teeming novel is an ascendant progression whose last term is the foreshadowed 'man called al-Mu'tasim'. Al-Mu'tasim's immediate predecessor is a Persian bookseller, an exceptionally happy, courteous man; the one before him, a saint. Finally, after many years, the student comes to a corridor 'at whose end is a door and a cheap beaded curtain, and behind the curtain a shining light'. The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice - the unimaginable voice of al-Mu'tasim - invites him in. The student parts the curtain and steps forward. At this point, the novel ends.
If I am not mistaken, the proper handling of such a plot places the writer under two obligations. One, to abound richly in prophetic touches; the other, to make us feel that the person foreshadowed by these touches is more than a mere convention or phantom. Bahadur fulfils the first; how far he achieves the second, I wonder. In other words, the unheard and unseen al-Mu'tasim should leave us with the impression of a real character, not of a clutter of insipid superlatives. In the 1932 version, there are few supernatural touches; 'the man called al-Mu'tasim' is obviously a symbol, though he is not devoid of personal traits. Unfortunately, this literary good conduct did not last. In the 1934 version - the one I have read - the novel descends into allegory. Al-Mu'tasim is God, and the hero's various wanderings are in some way the journey of a soul on its ascending steps towards the divine union. There are a few regrettable details: a black Jew from Cochin speaks of al-Mu'tasim as having dark skin; a Christian describes him standing on a height with his arms spread open; a Red lama recalls him seated 'like that figure I modelled in yak butter and worshipped in the monastery of Tachilhunpo'. These statements seem to suggest a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind. In my opinion, the idea is not greatly exciting. I will not say the same of another idea - the hint that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone of Someone above him (or Someone simply indispensable and equal), and so on to the End (or, rather, Endlessness) of Time, or perhaps cyclically. Al-Mu'tasim (the name of that eighth Abbasid caliph who was victorious in eight battles, fathered eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and ruled for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days) means etymologically 'The Seeker after Help'. In the 1932 version, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim justified well enough the difficulty of finding him. The later version gives way to the quaint theology I have just mentioned. In the twentieth chapter, words attributed by the Persian bookseller to al-Mu'tasim are, perhaps, the mere heightening of others spoken by the hero; this and other hidden analogies may stand for the identity of the Seeker with the Sought. They may also stand for an influence of Man on the Divinity. Another chapter hints that al-Mu'tasim is the Hindu the student believes he has killed. Mir Bahadur Ali, as we have seen, cannot refrain from the grossest temptation of art - that of being a genius.
On reading over these pages, I fear I have not called sufficient attention to the book's many virtues. They include a number of fine distinctions. For example, a conversation in chapter nineteen in which one of the speakers, who is a friend of al-Mu'tasim, avoids pointing out the other man's sophisms 'in order not to be obviously in the right'.
-
It is considered admirable nowadays for a modern book to have its roots in an ancient one, since nobody (as Dr Johnson said) likes to owe anything to his contemporaries. The many but superficial contacts between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to receive - I shall never know why - the hare-brained admiration of critics. The points of contact between Bahadur's novel and the celebrated Parliament of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar have awakened the no less mysterious approval of London and even of Allahabad and Calcutta. As far as I can judge, the points of contact between the two works are not many. Other sources are present. Some inquisitor has listed certain analogies between the novel's opening scene and Kipling's story 'On the City Wall'. Bahadur admits this but argues that it would be highly abnormal if two descriptions of the tenth night of Muharram were quite unlike each other. Eliot, more to the point, is reminded of the seventy cantos of the unfinished allegory The Faerie Queene, in which the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear even once - a fault previously noted by Richard William Church (Spenser, 1879). With due humility, I suggest a possible remote forerunner, the Jerusalem Cabbalist Isaac Luria, who in the sixteenth century advanced the notion that the soul of an ancestor or a teacher may, in order to comfort or instruct him, enter into the soul of someone who has suffered misfortune. Ibbür is the name given to this variety of metempsychosis.
In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan's sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him out. They know that the king's name means 'thirty birds'; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that rings the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll of the rest. Thirty, purified by suffering, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also posits a divine extension of the principle of identity: 'All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.') The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton's Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith's study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).
2022
I think its OK to cheat at video games. Probably not chess (#magnusisinnocent) or other competitive ones, but like, I think if you're stuck on a puzzle, and you've given it the old college try, I think there's nothing wrong with googling "spoderman how do i shot web" every once in a while. If you're legitimately stuck, what else are you going to do otherwise? Just drop the game? That's dumb.
I tried really hard not to cheat at Tunic. Really hard. I did succumb, a few times, and a few more times than that, I tried to succumb and just look up the answer but I failed to phrase it right and didn't find anything out. What's cool about Tunic is that it plays into the impulse of looking stuff up by giving you that nice old Manual. Making you find that manual, piece by piece--you have to literally build your understanding of the game page by page. Once you've got it all together, you can figure out what questions you're really asking.
Tunic sells itself as a Zelda or Soulslike; moreso than those it is a Fezlike, but even more than that this game is a Flower, Sun, and Rain-like. The game doesn't really begin until you are reading through the manual, back and forth, digging for secrets. I don't really have any idea what any of the lore in this game meant, or what any of the weird runic language is saying; what I do know is that I beat this game, and what it means to do that. And figuring that out ruled. The puzzles in this game are labyrinths, and what a joy it is to walk them.
I tried really hard not to cheat at Tunic. Really hard. I did succumb, a few times, and a few more times than that, I tried to succumb and just look up the answer but I failed to phrase it right and didn't find anything out. What's cool about Tunic is that it plays into the impulse of looking stuff up by giving you that nice old Manual. Making you find that manual, piece by piece--you have to literally build your understanding of the game page by page. Once you've got it all together, you can figure out what questions you're really asking.
Tunic sells itself as a Zelda or Soulslike; moreso than those it is a Fezlike, but even more than that this game is a Flower, Sun, and Rain-like. The game doesn't really begin until you are reading through the manual, back and forth, digging for secrets. I don't really have any idea what any of the lore in this game meant, or what any of the weird runic language is saying; what I do know is that I beat this game, and what it means to do that. And figuring that out ruled. The puzzles in this game are labyrinths, and what a joy it is to walk them.
2022
Played this through and had a grand old time. Really loved the little puzzles and the slow progression as you got more of the manual. Many will point to the Fez and the Zelda here but few if any have pointed to the Flower, Sun, and Rain!
I finished this game yesterday, and today I took another crack at some puzzles I'd gleaned a hint or two from at the end of.the game. And FUCK, that just lead me to a bigger mystery and I'm not sure I have it in me. I'd love to, it looks so cool, but damn. Wonderful little game.
I finished this game yesterday, and today I took another crack at some puzzles I'd gleaned a hint or two from at the end of.the game. And FUCK, that just lead me to a bigger mystery and I'm not sure I have it in me. I'd love to, it looks so cool, but damn. Wonderful little game.
2014
VVVVVV is a 2010 puzzle-platform game created by Terry Cavanagh. In the game, the player controls Captain Viridian, who must rescue their spacecrew after a teleporter malfunction caused them to be separated in Dimension VVVVVV. The gameplay is characterized by the inability of the player to jump, instead opting on controlling the direction of gravity, causing the player to fall upwards or downwards.[8] The game consists of more than 400 individual rooms, and also supports the creation of user-created levels.
The game was built in Adobe Flash and released on January 11, 2010, for Microsoft Windows and OS X. The game was ported to C++ by Simon Roth in 2011,[9] and released as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #3. The port to C++ allowed the porting of the game to other platforms such as Linux, Pandora, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch.
The game was built in Adobe Flash and released on January 11, 2010, for Microsoft Windows and OS X. The game was ported to C++ by Simon Roth in 2011,[9] and released as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #3. The port to C++ allowed the porting of the game to other platforms such as Linux, Pandora, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch.
A nice little look at what could have been a good game. It's not bad. There are great low-poly visuals, despite for the most part lazy monster design that is admittedly papered over well by some text logs. The text logs and narrative might be cool for people who are into science fiction. I found the Coleridge references unsatisfying to put it generously. There's a split ending thing that is much cooler in concept than in execution.
I think I want to like this game more than I actually do. Again, it's not bad. That's probably as good as it is though. But it's like, you really feel some personality went into this; some nerd who played too much DOOM and Super Metroid and Half Life in high school got into the lab and really took a crack at something. How no one has done rocket jumping in a metroidvania before or since this game is unclear to me. It's fun, if unpolished and fleeting.
I think I want to like this game more than I actually do. Again, it's not bad. That's probably as good as it is though. But it's like, you really feel some personality went into this; some nerd who played too much DOOM and Super Metroid and Half Life in high school got into the lab and really took a crack at something. How no one has done rocket jumping in a metroidvania before or since this game is unclear to me. It's fun, if unpolished and fleeting.
2017
Ooooo yeah baby! This rocks! Normal FPSs, boring FPSs, scale difficult along the axes of enemy and projectile placement; value will be given to a quick-thinking player who can skillfully and quickly dispatch enemies without exposing themselves to too much danger. Midnight Ultra says FUCK that bullshit, video game difficulty should be a question of "what the fuck am I looking at? is this a wall or open space?" It's gritty, and ugly, and hard to look at; the gameplay doesn't have the same abrasiveness as the visuals (luckily), but it moves along quickly and stays interesting. Sucks that melee is broken aside from fireball (which is not melee, right, kinda dumb.)
MU has this great edge to it; Itch games generally are rough but this one in particular is like a nice pumice stone you can use to exfoliate out whatever bullshit gaming caluses you've built up by playing bland, boring bullshit.
MU has this great edge to it; Itch games generally are rough but this one in particular is like a nice pumice stone you can use to exfoliate out whatever bullshit gaming caluses you've built up by playing bland, boring bullshit.
2008
The time has come, and I need to change my underwear! I never figured out why Nero revs his sword sometimes. I understand left trigger did something with it, but it was always unclear to me. The game wasn't too bad without it, but I wonder what I missed.
There's only one real issue I ever have with the good Devil May Cry games. Other than like, being a scrub. The games seem to revolve around being replayed: they're relatively short; you receive scores you should improve; you'll unlock new difficulties and characters; you're penalized for not being able to do levels in one go. And that rocks, but I'm not always read to run back into it afterwards, I feel like I miss out on content. And that's on me of course, but still. Some games will lock lore behind this kind of stuff; that doesn't work here. Really, the gameplay should be enough. Ah, well.
There's only one real issue I ever have with the good Devil May Cry games. Other than like, being a scrub. The games seem to revolve around being replayed: they're relatively short; you receive scores you should improve; you'll unlock new difficulties and characters; you're penalized for not being able to do levels in one go. And that rocks, but I'm not always read to run back into it afterwards, I feel like I miss out on content. And that's on me of course, but still. Some games will lock lore behind this kind of stuff; that doesn't work here. Really, the gameplay should be enough. Ah, well.
2022
What a huge waste of time. For the player. For the devs. For the artists who designed the assets that make the world feel alive and detailed. What was the point of any of it? Why did they do all of this work, just to make a pretty mediocre easy-mode adventure game? It's frustrating. Couldn't they have worked on a nice little short film instead? Compete with Pixar for once? There's a ton of high quality stuff here! Stray tells a nice story about a lost cat and its adventures in a robot world; you go off and do favors for people as you find your footing, gaining a robot companion named B-12 along the way. The whole time I played it I was annoyed that there was not a jump button.
The lost cat, having slipped away from its companions and down into a dank, mysterious, walled city, has the obvious goal of getting out, of going "Outside." See there's a group of robots in that city known as "The Outsiders," the cat allies with these Outsiders and works in concert with them to develop the technology to get Out. Along the way you learn a little bit about the world you've found yourself in. There are comical story beats where your cat-activity of scratching up the furniture uncovers a secret, that kind of thing. The cat, though a little uncanny (I played on PS4), is convincingly charming if you're a sucker for that kind of stuff. It'll curl up into a ball at some spots, especially one, and you can see they're trying to go for the internet cat love thing. And it's well done, they deserve it.
But so why a video game? You don't need this to be a video game to get all of that. There's some stuff I haven't mentioned--Zergs, a jail segment, some minor stealth elements--that benefit a bit from the videogame format. There's a tension you just can't get to from a movie. But everything else, the world navigation, the "platforming," it is so easy it may as well play itself. This game is functionally a walking simulator, except instead of walking as a person you walk as a cat. Now walking simulators are not bad in and of themselves, I like quite a few of them myself, but realizing you're playing one when you wanted a platformer is disappointing. And even moreso, realizing how much the game would rock as a platformer dissapoints even harder. A lot of the game's navigation is about jumping on stuff, but you can only jump on stuff once there's a button prompt. This creates a disconnect--in a traditional platformer you'll learn your jump range, how high you can go, movement tricks--in this one there's nothing to learn, just look at where the green circle appears.
Does that kind of strict control sound cat-like? What do you know about cats. What are the like, known, essential traits of cats. Cats are known as being fickle or stubborn, they don't often do what you'd like them to do. They're agile, and fast, though occasionally goofy. The internet thinks they're adorable and is obsessed with 'em. They're great subjects for platformers, although it hasn't been done as often as you'd think. Good platformers enable quick, agile movement, and cats are--to some degree--thought of as being quick and agile. Super Mario 3D World and Rain World are probably the biggest examples of cat-based video gaming, the latter featuring a "slugcat" with really tight platforming. Rain World really immerses you in the feeling of being a slugcat. The controls are tight and difficult, and you look dumb when you mess up. The world is mean and unfair, and you feel on a deep level where you are on the food chain. It's might not be fair to compare Rain World and Stray too closely, they're clearly going for different things.
But both games decided to make the focus of their game a cat. A slugcat, in one, sure, but the choice of subject is interesting here. There is a sharp difference in approach and intention. Rain World wanted to put you in the shoes of the slugcat, to set up through its mechanics a kind of grammar to navigate its world. It's a simulator, to some degree. Though, it's worth pointing out that Rain World can be prohibitively difficult, to its detriment, and that Stray kind of exists at the other end of a spectrum here; Stray can be annoyingly easy, to its detriment.
That is all to say that Stray is not a simulator. Stray tells you a story and puts you on an audiovisual adventure. It's gorgeous, and kind of fun, and even has a little gameplay here and there. But on a mechanical level its boring, and maybe even a little lazy sometimes. And it's dumb to focus a "talk to guy do favor for him" game on a cat. People will play this game because its a cat doing cat stuff, and shit brother that's why I played it too. But on the whole. Eh.
The lost cat, having slipped away from its companions and down into a dank, mysterious, walled city, has the obvious goal of getting out, of going "Outside." See there's a group of robots in that city known as "The Outsiders," the cat allies with these Outsiders and works in concert with them to develop the technology to get Out. Along the way you learn a little bit about the world you've found yourself in. There are comical story beats where your cat-activity of scratching up the furniture uncovers a secret, that kind of thing. The cat, though a little uncanny (I played on PS4), is convincingly charming if you're a sucker for that kind of stuff. It'll curl up into a ball at some spots, especially one, and you can see they're trying to go for the internet cat love thing. And it's well done, they deserve it.
But so why a video game? You don't need this to be a video game to get all of that. There's some stuff I haven't mentioned--Zergs, a jail segment, some minor stealth elements--that benefit a bit from the videogame format. There's a tension you just can't get to from a movie. But everything else, the world navigation, the "platforming," it is so easy it may as well play itself. This game is functionally a walking simulator, except instead of walking as a person you walk as a cat. Now walking simulators are not bad in and of themselves, I like quite a few of them myself, but realizing you're playing one when you wanted a platformer is disappointing. And even moreso, realizing how much the game would rock as a platformer dissapoints even harder. A lot of the game's navigation is about jumping on stuff, but you can only jump on stuff once there's a button prompt. This creates a disconnect--in a traditional platformer you'll learn your jump range, how high you can go, movement tricks--in this one there's nothing to learn, just look at where the green circle appears.
Does that kind of strict control sound cat-like? What do you know about cats. What are the like, known, essential traits of cats. Cats are known as being fickle or stubborn, they don't often do what you'd like them to do. They're agile, and fast, though occasionally goofy. The internet thinks they're adorable and is obsessed with 'em. They're great subjects for platformers, although it hasn't been done as often as you'd think. Good platformers enable quick, agile movement, and cats are--to some degree--thought of as being quick and agile. Super Mario 3D World and Rain World are probably the biggest examples of cat-based video gaming, the latter featuring a "slugcat" with really tight platforming. Rain World really immerses you in the feeling of being a slugcat. The controls are tight and difficult, and you look dumb when you mess up. The world is mean and unfair, and you feel on a deep level where you are on the food chain. It's might not be fair to compare Rain World and Stray too closely, they're clearly going for different things.
But both games decided to make the focus of their game a cat. A slugcat, in one, sure, but the choice of subject is interesting here. There is a sharp difference in approach and intention. Rain World wanted to put you in the shoes of the slugcat, to set up through its mechanics a kind of grammar to navigate its world. It's a simulator, to some degree. Though, it's worth pointing out that Rain World can be prohibitively difficult, to its detriment, and that Stray kind of exists at the other end of a spectrum here; Stray can be annoyingly easy, to its detriment.
That is all to say that Stray is not a simulator. Stray tells you a story and puts you on an audiovisual adventure. It's gorgeous, and kind of fun, and even has a little gameplay here and there. But on a mechanical level its boring, and maybe even a little lazy sometimes. And it's dumb to focus a "talk to guy do favor for him" game on a cat. People will play this game because its a cat doing cat stuff, and shit brother that's why I played it too. But on the whole. Eh.
This is a short and sweet little remake of the original (outdated and now difficult to play) Metroid, and although pleasant and charming would be on the whole entirely forgettable if not for the recent release of Metroid Dread. Dread's EMMI sections feel hugely reminiscent of the Zero Suit segments towards the end of this game, except, the EMMI segments are somehow worse. I mean c'mon, the Zero Suit segments aren't very good either, but how can they fail to imrpove on em? Mind-boggling. Whatever. "Nintendo fails to improve on a beloved classic game with their modern titles" is not a ground-breaking criticism.
Don't ever let them grumkle your scrunkies. That's what my father told me on his deathbed, as the last of the poop drained from his bowels and the infection completed the ravaging of his body. Around this time—I was five years old, maybe older—I played Banjo Kazooie for the first time. It was magical. I don't know how to describe it, and I don't think I have anything interesting or meaningful to say about it. Frankly, it was a little bland.
The first thing I think of when I think about video games are the colors. Hundreds of them. Like, high hundreds of them, even. Think something like three hundred. Maybe even a few more than that. It's a lot of colors. And Banjo Kazooie has more than most. Banjos are normally just kind of black and white I guess, so that's two colors. But then kazoos are made for little kids, so that's a whole bunch more. Anyway the game was colorful is what I'm saying. It looked nice.
It's perhaps my first meaningful memory of art: the deep, murky hues that the N64 was restricted to, pallete-wise; the uncanny lighting and camera angles. The deeply-felt sense of risk in moments of tight platforming and high-stakes combat, contrasted by safe areas and rest spots. Something about the acrobatic exploration of the world felt as a metaphor for the internal mental and physical, and even emotional, development I experienced in this tumultuous time. Each jump and somersault performed reflected some deeper and more meaningful somersault in my own life; adolescent yearnings and angst, anxiety over trajectory and status, personal style and flair; the more I aged and the further I went from the death of my dry-colon'd father the more the game felt like it was playing me than the other way around.
On that first, humid, meaningful summer, as I searched for squiblies with Banjo (and Kazooie, of course, in tow), the words of my shitless father echoed through my memory, and I think for the very first time I discovered something true about both myself and the world at large. But what was it really, is it still true? Would I trade that for a father, and would he trade that to finally get some shit in his ass once more? These questions, and more I found, if they were not answered by Banjo, Banjo provided a framework to discover their answers. And at the end of the day, all we have are our answers.
Well. As my father would have told you: our answers, and our scrunkies.
The first thing I think of when I think about video games are the colors. Hundreds of them. Like, high hundreds of them, even. Think something like three hundred. Maybe even a few more than that. It's a lot of colors. And Banjo Kazooie has more than most. Banjos are normally just kind of black and white I guess, so that's two colors. But then kazoos are made for little kids, so that's a whole bunch more. Anyway the game was colorful is what I'm saying. It looked nice.
It's perhaps my first meaningful memory of art: the deep, murky hues that the N64 was restricted to, pallete-wise; the uncanny lighting and camera angles. The deeply-felt sense of risk in moments of tight platforming and high-stakes combat, contrasted by safe areas and rest spots. Something about the acrobatic exploration of the world felt as a metaphor for the internal mental and physical, and even emotional, development I experienced in this tumultuous time. Each jump and somersault performed reflected some deeper and more meaningful somersault in my own life; adolescent yearnings and angst, anxiety over trajectory and status, personal style and flair; the more I aged and the further I went from the death of my dry-colon'd father the more the game felt like it was playing me than the other way around.
On that first, humid, meaningful summer, as I searched for squiblies with Banjo (and Kazooie, of course, in tow), the words of my shitless father echoed through my memory, and I think for the very first time I discovered something true about both myself and the world at large. But what was it really, is it still true? Would I trade that for a father, and would he trade that to finally get some shit in his ass once more? These questions, and more I found, if they were not answered by Banjo, Banjo provided a framework to discover their answers. And at the end of the day, all we have are our answers.
Well. As my father would have told you: our answers, and our scrunkies.