Sweeney

 Posted by (Visited 6786 times)  Art, Watching  Tagged with: ,
May 172008
 

Sweeney Todd disposes of Pikachu

We watched Sweeney Todd tonight. The kids had my tablet PC in the room, so I grabbed it and doodled a bit. Then they got ahold of it. It was a bad end for one Pokemon who got the closest shave of his life, and perhaps ended up in a meat pie.

Was a bit disappointed that “More Meat Pies!” wasn’t in there. Or this lyric, which has stuck in my head ever since some of our friends in college staged this musical as their senior project.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd

He served a dark and a vengeful god

He shaved the faces of gentlemen

Who never thereafter were heard from again

We’d been telling the kids for weeks about those two bits, singing them over and over…

So, why can the kids watch this with us, but not GTA? Good question. Perhaps because Rockstar just isn’t Sondheim for me yet.

Flash makes its move

 Posted by (Visited 8519 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 152008
 

This happened days ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. It’s the Open Screen Project, which boils down to Adobe making a big move with Flash.

What did they do, and what does it mean?

  1. The file formats will be open. Anyone can write their own player on any device, for free.
  2. Their player is free too, to integrate wherever.
  3. The protocols are open too.

Here’s a few ways to think about this:

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Is Call of Duty 4 an MMO?

 Posted by (Visited 6646 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 152008
 

Rob Fahey has an editorial up on Eurogamer called “Genetically Modified Gaming” which makes the case that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is lifting the key elements of an MMO, and is in fact the most important MMO release of the year.

This definitely echoes things I have said in the past about the ways in which online gaming is taking over single-player gaming. After all, the CoD series has always been about strong single-player narrative despite its multiplayer component. With the latest installment, there’s lots of MMOish things like persistent character advancement snuck in there.

On the other hand, I think it is worth asking if this is really what we want:

Player retention and the science of addiction is being expanded upon in innovative, groundbreaking ways

Put that baldly, it’s rather disturbing. I don’t want my games to be about the science of addiction! There are a lot of other qualities brought to the table by virtual worlds, and to my mind, it’s these other qualities that are better.

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