I just finished Ico on PS2, and needed something else to fill my time in the near future, as Old Lady Gravy is going out of town for a week to help an ill friend and she’s taking Young Lady Gravy and Old Lady Gravy, Jr. with her. So I hatched a plan…
I loved the Matrix movies YEAH FUCK IT I SAID IT - loved 'em.
So I dl’d The Matrix Online from Direct2Drive.
Who wants to collect 10 yeti furs and then 10 thick yeti furs and then 10 mangy thick yet furs for Rumplehumple in Everlook I ask you? Especially when I could be collecting 10 pairs of agent sunglasses, then 10 pairs of super-agent sunglasses, then 10 pairs of mirrored agent sunglasses for the Merovingian. It’s agonna pwn, I say, straight up pwn. I can’t wait to get started tonight!
Come back , WoW promises not to hit you again, it was just a big misunderstanding. Besides, you can reroll on Skywall where I’ve found a guild that raids in Pacific Time (though it is Alliance & you were Horde as I recall). Ony tonight at 7:30…
What would rather me say? Mildly entertaining? Yet somehow it could have been more. And it’s shortcoming are merely game features they decided to leave out so they could make more money from an expansion.
Roger that! I want to. Just gotta get through some of my other PS2 backlog first.
Ico was pretty neat. I loved the grainy, hair-on-the-film, shaky handheld camera look of the cutscenes. I understand that the PAL version had an option to run the entire game in that kind of grainy, sepia-tone video mode if you wanted. The tweaky camera and controls got in the way at times, but other than that it was really a pleasurable experience. Why aren’t there more games like that (in English, anyway)?
But the Matrix Online? I cancelled my subscription today. Is there any time when that motherfucker ISN’T crashing?
My stab at this is that it’s because it takes an extraordinary combination of authorial voice, storytelling, and creative control, with all three not getting in the way of the actual gameplay.
Trying hard to tell a story or express an “artistic vision” tends to fuck up games. I think it works really well in Ico and Sotc because its minimalistic, consistent and original. It reminded me of exploring a ruined abbey in the woods when I was a kid: cool as all hell, but the weight of the past all around me whispering in my ears.
My sinking feeling is that there just aren’t a lot of people designing games in the west who have steeped themselves in the kind of material. To make SOTC, you’d have to have gone through obsessions with late medieval buttress technology, the Yorkshire Dales, Mayan inscripted art, old testament biblical exegesis, and so on. I think in the west, people like that tend to get steered elsewhere: Japan just seems to love eclectic weirdness in its game designers.