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To Speak Natalie. v.
1. To speak another's idiosyncratic dialect of English.
2. To understand//appreciate who that person is.
Natalie Comfort of the Day
Seeing the Hills of Home.
I've never actually seen hills like home: grassy but studded with rocks, rising steeply against the horizon. This is the skyline that still feels like home.
Previous Comforts of the Day
. Driving Betsy
. Roleplaying
. Waltzing
. Requested Back and Shoulder Massages
. Getting Complimented on Your Dancing
. Hot Cider
. Singing
. Being Held
. Finger Jello
. Violins
. Unsolicited Back and Shoulder Massages
On Spirituality
"But I thought you agreed that Spirit was the good - the end of the whole process? I thought you religious people were all out for spirituality? Didn't we agree that God is a spirit? Don't you worship Him because He is pure spirit?"
"Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and good. There's nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit."
- C.S. Lewis
On Honor
In the late twentieth century, you couldn't seriously ask other people to think that you believed in
honor
and truth
and the purity of the body
the defense of women
the sanctity of true love
and all the rest of it.
But apparently, Andre really had believed it.
- Michael Crichton
On Duty
Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)
- Robert A. Heinlein
"A Woman's Question"
Do you know you have asked for the costliest thing
Ever made by the Hand above?
A woman's heart, a woman's life -
And a woman's wonderful love.
Do you know you have asked for this priceless thing
As a child might ask for a toy?
Demanding what others have died to win,
With the reckless dash of a boy.
You have written my lesson of duty out,
Manlike, you have questioned me.
Now stand at the bars of my woman's soul
Until I shall question thee.
You require your mutton shall always be hot,
Your socks and your shirt be whole;
I require your heart to be true as God's stars
And as pure as His heaven your soul.
You require a cook for your mutton and beef,
I require a far greater thing;
A seamstress you're wanting for socks and shirts -
I look for a man and a king.
A king for the beautiful realm called Home,
And a man that his Maker, God,
Shall look upon as He did on the first
And say: "It is very good."
I am fair and young, but the rose may fade
From this soft young cheek one day;
Will you love me then 'mid the falling leaves,
As you did 'mong the blossoms of May?
Is your heart an ocean so strong and true,
I may launch my all on its tide?
A loving woman finds heaven or hell
On the day she is made a bride.
I require all things that are grand and true,
All things that a man should be;
If you give this all, I would stake my life
To be all you demand of me.
If you cannot be this, a laundress and cook
You can hire and little to pay;
But a woman's heart and a woman's life
Are not to be won that way.
- Lena Lathrop
Fere. n. A companion, comrade, mate.
"Ballad of the Goodly Fere"
Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O' ships and the open sea.
When they came wi' a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
"First let these go!" quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Or I'll see ye damned," says he.
Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
"Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?" says he.
Oh we drunk his "Hale" in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o' men was he.
I ha' seen him drive a hundred men
Wi' a bundle o' cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.
They'ss no' get him a' in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.
If they think they ha' snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
"I'll go to the feast," quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Though I go to the gallows tree."
"Ye ha' seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead," says he,
"Ye shall see one thing to master all:
'Tis how a brave man dies on the tree."
A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.
He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o' Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea,
Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.
- Ezra Pound
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Tomb Raider: Underworld
Yesterday I played through the Tomb Raider: Underworld demo for the PC one and three-quarters times, and I thought I’d post some thoughts on it. I’m sure there are going to be plenty of reviews of the actual game posted in the next couple of days, but I’m not a reviewer and in any case, gleaning useful information from the miasma of ad-supported, score-bound reviews is like … well, trying to glean anything useful from anything that can be described with the word “miasma.”
The hour or so I spent with the TRU demo (edit: somewhat more time today) was the longest amount of time I’ve ever devoted to a Tomb Raider title, so I don’t really have much of a sense of the history and idiosyncrasies of the franchise. I mention that because I’ve seen some reviews that seem to criticise the game for being basically about … well, raiding tombs. This seems strange to me. I’m no expert, as I said, but I would have thought you criticise a Tomb Raider title for not raiding tombs (as was in fact the case with some earlier titles, as I understand it).
Speaking of things other reviews seem to criticize the game for, I’m not quite sure whether the people who objected to the camera were playing the same game I was. I had enough camera control that I felt in control at all times (in fact the camera control was one of the selling points for me in a way, see below), and the demo never pushed me into “leap of faith gameplay” territory (to quote Yahtzee). It came close once, early on, but I was always able to manipulate the camera in a reasonable way such that I could see what I needed to see figure out where I was going.
Where I was going was, of course, the major part of the gameplay. I classify Tomb Raider as a “movement puzzle” game, alongside such notable favorites of mine as the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia franchises. A “movement puzzle” game, as I use the term, is any game where the primary obstacle to the player is how to navigate the environment. There may be combat, but the main challenge and joy of the game is the environment itself and how the player moves around it. In the case of the Splinter Cell game (a Tom Clancy franchise involving the adventures of superspy Sam Fisher) the puzzle is how to navigate realistic environments without being seen, using an array of only slightly-larger-than-life acrobatics and gadgets. In the case of a Prince of Persia game, the puzzle is how to navigate fantastic environments using magical weapons and over-the-top, wire-fu acrobatics.
Tomb Raider falls somewhere in the middle. The ruins that Lara explores are more fantastic than realistic, but no more so than you might expect to find in Hollywood. And they were really gorgeous. I’ve read a couple reviews that mentioned moments that really make you say wow, and I have to admit that the first time I rounded a corner and saw the ruins I was headed towards I really did just stop and admire the view. It wasn’t just that the graphics were good; it was that somebody had planned that moment, had framed the shot, for no other reason than to say to the player, “This is where you are going. Isn’t it cool?” In a movement puzzle game I call that intelligent game design. I am playing the game to move around environments, after all. I appreciate knowing that the game designers know that.
Of course, I am also playing the game to move around environments in cool ways, and I must say that in that regard the Underworld demo was cooler than I expected. The actual range of movement was about what I expected—scaling walls, shimmying along ledges, action heroine leaps, balancing along narrow beams, swinging on poles, wall jumping, the usual sort of thing. What was unexpectedly cool was the way Lara did all that stuff. I was impressed and surprised by the depth of Lara’s animation. To give two examples, at one point I stopped on a staircase to look around. Ordinarily games don’t let you stop in between two steps on a stair, but as I was scanning my surroundings to see where I ought to go next, I noticed that Lara had one foot on the next stair up and was looking around as well. At another point, I was shimmying around a sharp corner, and the game let me pause, stretched precariously between the two faces of the rock I was cornering. The game was just full of little things like that that made the familiar process of acrobatic climbing unexpectedly cool to watch. From interviews I’ve seen the animation team is very proud of their work, and I would say they deserve to be. Ordinarily this isn’t the sort of thing that impresses me about a game, but again, this is a game I am playing in order to move around. The mere act of moving had better be cool.
As for the places I was asked to go—in other words, the actual level design—that was pretty cool too. It took me about an hour to get to the end of the demo the first time through. I felt suitably challenged during that time, and suitably badass climbing to, around, and through the ruins.
I also felt suitably badass during the two combats the demo gave me against Bengal tigers, which brings me to the subject of combat. First, the good. The tigers were faster than I was and I was not able to gun them down before they reached me. By itself that’s bad (but see below), but it did mean that I was forced to outmaneuver the tigers through my acrobatic prowess. Targeting was a non-issue; the game did that for me, which is just as well because I was spending just about every second dodging tigers in a pretty spectacular display of gunplay + tumbling. In other words, even the combat was really basically a movement puzzle, and it looked pretty much exactly how I wanted a fight with a tiger to look.
The bad—on the default settings it took an absurd number of 9mm rounds to put down a big cat. Thankfully the game includes a difficulty slider for how much health enemies have (and a separate one for how much damage Lara takes. Big kudos to Crystal Dynamics for separating those two features, which is the sort of very simple thing I’ve been saying game companies should do for years), so I think that will mostly solve that problem. Once I tuned the difficulty sliders to what I felt was more reasonable (less enemy health, more damage done to me), my weapons felt a lot better. Not realistic, but I’m okay if Tomb Raider is less than a simulation.
More perplexing is this question: while the wildlife fights felt well integrated mechanically, why was I fighting tigers to begin with? There was no indication I had stumbled into their lair or something, and in any case, tigers aren’t pack hunters. Oh, right, and remember the part where I was shooting the tigers? Other than the immediate motivation of trying to stay alive, the whole exercise felt kind of pointless. This goes back to not having played Tomb Raider games before. I gather it’s a convention of the franchise that Lara fights hostile wildlife. I can only imagine this is the result of some poor misguided soul back in the ‘90s who thought it was more acceptable to kill endangered species than human beings. As Ayudaren says, who could possibly have given that the thumbs up? At least with people you can shape a story so that the player feels that yes, these people need to die.
Fortunately, from what I gather, Crystal Dynamics has. In fact a major reason I bothered to pick up the demo in the first place is because I was excited about throwing Lara’s signature athleticism into the mix with some human opponents in environments other than ancient ruins. I can’t really comment on the story, of course, other than what everybody knows from the press—that Lara is looking for Mjolnir to access the underworld, and that all cultures’ afterlives are apparently the same, and I’m pretty sure the villainess from Tomb Raider: Legend (the Crystal Dynamics prequel to Underworld) is still alive. Which is all pretty standard fare for this genre of storytelling. The question is whether they handle the conventions and formulae adroitly or not, and that of course I can’t say from just the demo.
I can say that the voice acting I heard from the demo was surprisingly good. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with good writing, but it’s a positive sign. And of course it is valuable in its own right because, let’s face it, it’s Lara Croft. And if Lara is lame, then the game isn’t worth getting. Which brings us to the issue of Lara Croft.
First off, to get it out of the way, she looks good. We’ve come a long way since 1996, and Lara looks like a human being by now. A human being with large breasts, to be sure, but a human being with breasts. As opposed to, you know, a blow-up doll with melons.
I’ve never fully understood the fascination with Lara’s breasts, because as graphics capabilities have evolved it’s seemed clear to me that she has always intended to be an all-around attractive woman. She’s tough, independent-minded, smart, well educated, well bred, athletic, is comfortable with firearms, and generally solves problems using her brains instead of her body. In the quasi-mythic mindspace of a videogame, it doesn’t water down such a character for her to be pretty (and she is in this incarnation, to be sure). That would be like saying Achilles’ badassness is watered down by the fact that Athena helps him kill Hector, or that Hector didn’t really beat Patroclus because Apollo knocked him senseless first. It’s getting it all backwards. Really, there is nothing wrong or chauvinist with finding a character like that attractive, in the Natalian sense.
And she is attractive. If she wasn’t, to be honest, there’d be no game. Mechanically, Tomb Raider is a movement puzzle game, and Underworld looks like an attractive one to me. But that gets you to game theory. To move beyond game theory to game design, you need an awesomeness factor that turns the product into a brand. Lara Croft is what makes Tomb Raider awesome. But Lara Croft in a very expansive sense—the way she moves, what she moves in and around, why she’s doing it. And on those scores Underworld seems worth my money.Labels: games
posted by Natalie @
12:11 AM
0 comments
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Friday, November 21, 2008  |
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