Hi there Guys and Gals!
First things first I have to apologise for my long absence as I've recently started a new job. Funnily enough it becomes exceedingly difficult to write a blog about my thoughts and opinions whilst gaming, when I don't have enough time to actually game.
So, As this is a fairly serious topic in the world of gaming I'm not going to joke about, at all....
HA! Had you going for a second there!
So, Have you ever been on the outside of a group looking in? The experience can be daunting cant it? It's a position that as gamers, quite a lot of us struggle with. This is because as we dedicate our lives to games, its very easy to become introverted. Seeing as our computers, consoles, chess boards, paints, dice (which ever takes your fancy, delete as appropriate) naturally reside within the cosy confines of our own homes. Now this doesn't make us bad people, or unsociable, or any other word along those lines including the stigma attached to them, in fact, I have had the pleasure to know some great people whom spend their entire lives confined to there own home due to agoraphobia. It does however supplement that clique nature that naturally forms in the presence of groups of Homo Sapiens. It's something we have to be very careful to avoid.
I've recently had the chance to start a new game. What's this got to do with the rather long winded and preachy paragraph above? Well, for that I have to make a confession. I only played a few minutes of Borderlands, and I HATED it. I know what your going to say, "But Matt! if you didn't play it how can you judge it!" All I have to say to that is some games really don't hit the spot, everyone's got one game they don't like for no reason what so ever and Borderlands is mine. However, I recently started a game of Borderlands 2 on the advice of a good friend and long time gamer, Vralka. And no! don't say another word! I know what your thinking (Psychic blog author powers ACTIVATE). I'm generally quite trusting when someone tells me that I should try a new game or a new book etc. So I followed my friends advice and downloaded it on the Xbox live market place. Review to follow when ever I get the time to actually finish the game.
It's very rare nowadays that a gamer gets the opportunity to actually play a game with no idea of the back story, characters, mechanics... Heck I'm even having to learn the controls! I'm telling you right now its a fantastic new experience and if you ever get the chance to play a sequel to that game that you just hated for no reason, do it! Now I'm running out of time on my now vicious schedule so I'm going to sign off here, all I'm going to say is keep your mind open, take a break and go out with friends you may have met online, you never know you might actually like them! If you ever get the chance, introduce someone into a game, whether they be an old hat at the newest art or if there the greenest blade of grass out there! It doesn't matter! that's the beauty of gaming, we all enjoy it! This is the basis of our society, now Go! Go gamers and share your opinions with the world!
Matt
(Proudly standing on a soap box and gaming till the government remove me!)
P.S. If your a fan of Minecraft (who isn't!) go check out Vralka's YouTube page, because he's awesome. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/user/vralka or just click his name on this page.
Sunday, 27 October 2013
Saturday, 24 August 2013
The Dead Walk
to the sweet shop and back, who would of guessed that zombies had a sweet tooth?
On a more serious note I've been playing the episodic Walking Dead game. The one with Lee and Clem. I'm very pleased to report that even on a second play through the game hasn't lost any of the emotional and moral impact that so enticed me to play in the first place. In my humble opinion that has to do with the system of moral choices made by the player during the game and it's inspired me to talk about a rather thorny topic in gaming, which is often left un-tackled.
I'll probably go into more detail about Lee in a future post but for now, lets just say you rescue a young girl called Clementine (or Clem for short) from her zombified babysitter and set out across the country to try and help find her parents, who where on holiday, in savannah, a major city, now populated by the dead... yeah you can probably see where I'm going with this. Along the way you have to help Clem and your group cope with everything that happens along the way, this includes both moral and physical crises, including lack of food, looting for survival, drinking, killing, and a whole load of zombies. In the last episode of the game you have to even have to confront your own mortality, as you get bitten searching for Clem, who has been abducted. This then leads you on to the most terrible yet most gripping series of moral choices I've ever had to make in a game. Do everything possible to survive, so that you can find Clem (and look like an armless murderer in the process) or leave Clem in the arms of her abductor and hope that she has a better life. This choice is thrust on us at every single opportunity, and the courage it must have taken for the developers to put it in is staggering.
On a more serious note I've been playing the episodic Walking Dead game. The one with Lee and Clem. I'm very pleased to report that even on a second play through the game hasn't lost any of the emotional and moral impact that so enticed me to play in the first place. In my humble opinion that has to do with the system of moral choices made by the player during the game and it's inspired me to talk about a rather thorny topic in gaming, which is often left un-tackled.
As always when I analyse any game or games in this depth there is a massive:
With this particular game however I'm going to have to add two additional warnings. You're experience of the game may be different and this is going to contain mature themes, including images from the TV show The Walking Dead, so if your squeamish, stop reading here.
So, lets talk about death
In the TV series, The Walking Dead, there is an interestingly contradictory view about death. It is shown by the way the group deal with their dead, burning walkers but burying members of their own group (and later others) regardless of whether they have been bitten or not. This is such an emotional line in the sand for the TV series that it actually comes to blows very early on in the series after a raid on the survivor's camp. This is a rather difficult position to be in because it forces us to think about our humanity, after all, zombies where human at one point.
 |
| "We don't burn them! We bury them!" |
So the question is, where do we loose our humanity? In opposition to this Daryl takes on the practical view of the world they now inhabit. All dead things are a potential threat, if we bury them we just give them an opportunity to come back, so we burn them. It's a harsh view but you can see the morbid logic behind it. Finally, we get Rick's view, and like any good leader, its a compromise between morality and practicality. Later on in the series, the group is raided a second time, this time in slightly different circumstances (This isn't a blow by blow account, go watch the program!) where during the clean up operation Rick says "We bury the ones we love and burn the rest". To me this seems like an excellent compromise for him to make. It stops his group focusing on the nitty gritty of what is human and what isn't, which may be slightly boring for us a viewer, but for the group as survivors, its absolutely essential.
I'm going to let you side with whom ever you want to in this situation as everyone is going to have their own conflicting viewpoint and I don't particularly want to start World War 3 in this blog. All I will say is this. Death affects us all, the closer the death the more it hurts. The Walking Dead series is so well loved by its fans due to the closeness we feel to the characters and the pain we feel when they inevitably die. I say a huge Bravo! to The Walking Dead franchise for tackling issues in this manner.
Now your probably wondering why I'm prattling on about the TV series on a blog about thoughts and opinions whilst gaming. Well if you've hung on this far you will see that there is usually some method in my madness (ok slightly more madness than method but you catch the drift). The TV series is an excellent counterpoint as to why videogames are so different from film or books or pictures etc.
I'm just going to give you one last big warning to get out now if you don't want me to ruin the game for you, because it WILL ruin the first play through for you.
In The Walking Dead game you play the part of Lee (Say hi Lee!) in his final days. That's more or less the gist of game, its not obvious throughout the storyline but you are going to die. Full Stop. End of Story. Dead.
I'll probably go into more detail about Lee in a future post but for now, lets just say you rescue a young girl called Clementine (or Clem for short) from her zombified babysitter and set out across the country to try and help find her parents, who where on holiday, in savannah, a major city, now populated by the dead... yeah you can probably see where I'm going with this. Along the way you have to help Clem and your group cope with everything that happens along the way, this includes both moral and physical crises, including lack of food, looting for survival, drinking, killing, and a whole load of zombies. In the last episode of the game you have to even have to confront your own mortality, as you get bitten searching for Clem, who has been abducted. This then leads you on to the most terrible yet most gripping series of moral choices I've ever had to make in a game. Do everything possible to survive, so that you can find Clem (and look like an armless murderer in the process) or leave Clem in the arms of her abductor and hope that she has a better life. This choice is thrust on us at every single opportunity, and the courage it must have taken for the developers to put it in is staggering.
But back to the point, the reason I rabbited on about the TV series before the game was to show the interesting counterpoint created between the two. In traditional media you have to be convinced by the program. The director will use clever cameral angles to help everything feel real, awesome special effects are used to the point where we don't really even need sets anymore (still, sets do rule!), in books authors even go so far as to use the first person, in an attempt to make you feel like the character's decisions are your decision. However, all this pales in comparison to gaming, where the character's decisions ARE your decisions, especially in a game like the walking dead.
So, what are your opinions on the matter? Is death an appropriate thing to discuss through games, should art be left to painters and film producers? How awesome where The Walking Dead games
Share your opinions in the comments section!
Matt
(Bluuurgh.. Braaaains...)
PS. Im sorry for the late post guys! As you can imagine I wanted to think long and hard about this one, normal service should resume presently
PS. Im sorry for the late post guys! As you can imagine I wanted to think long and hard about this one, normal service should resume presently
Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Results Aquired, New Target.. Resits Aquired. Fire!
Hiya Guys and Gals!
I'm afraid you'll have to endure another brief hiatus as exam re-takes are coming up next month and I have revision to do!
However there is some good news! I've decided to start blogging on a once-a-month schedule, which means I'll post at least once a month, on the first Saturday of the month! Now that doesn't mean I'll only be doing one post per month, far from it in fact, I'm still going to run this as a "if I have a good idea" blog, I just want to add some regularity to the site
For now, here's an awesome picture of my favourite video game character, Songbird. Enjoy!
Ta Ta for now!
Matt.
I'm afraid you'll have to endure another brief hiatus as exam re-takes are coming up next month and I have revision to do!
However there is some good news! I've decided to start blogging on a once-a-month schedule, which means I'll post at least once a month, on the first Saturday of the month! Now that doesn't mean I'll only be doing one post per month, far from it in fact, I'm still going to run this as a "if I have a good idea" blog, I just want to add some regularity to the site
For now, here's an awesome picture of my favourite video game character, Songbird. Enjoy!
Ta Ta for now!
Matt.
Saturday, 8 June 2013
And Now, The End is Near
And so I face, the final curtain.
You may be wondering what the iconic Frank Sinatra song "My Way" has to do with a blog about gaming, besides from being a fun and informative way to start off quite a cool little topic (ok, its only semi informative). Today, I'm going to be talking about protagonists, characters and the classic epic story arc seen in so many of our beloved interactive story telling experiences.
As with any post that reviels story arcs and plots and other stuff like that, here is a massive
You may be wondering what the iconic Frank Sinatra song "My Way" has to do with a blog about gaming, besides from being a fun and informative way to start off quite a cool little topic (ok, its only semi informative). Today, I'm going to be talking about protagonists, characters and the classic epic story arc seen in so many of our beloved interactive story telling experiences.
As with any post that reviels story arcs and plots and other stuff like that, here is a massive
You have been warned!
 |
| The UNSC Pillar of Autumn, on its way to be "thrown into conflict" |
So what exactly is the classic epic story arc? Well pull up a chair and a decent cuppa, because it's a long story. Most modern day video games follow a system called The Three Act Structure, it follows a set of guides that layout what should and should not happen to the protagonist of the story. Act 1 introduces us to the characters and begins to scratch the surface of their personality, but crucially must always end in some form of tragedy/incident/battle/explosion delete as appropriate, that throws the main character (or in the case of video games, the player) into conflict. For anyone who has played Halo: Combat Evolved, the introductory sequence on the Pillar of Autumn when we are introduced to Master Chief and Cortana would be a good example of a first act, and the crashing into the planet in flames and screams would be a good example of an event throwing the min character into conflict, literally in this case. Act 2 is all about the main character leveling up. Yup. It's that simple, the main character ranks up in some way or another, until they have the power to take on the big bad guys that somehow managed to evade them in the first act (my personal favorite is the obligatory cheesy rocky training montage). Act 3 is even simpler, it's the big fight, the boss match, the duel to the death, pour duello a la mort swiftly followed by a happy ending.
That's the Three Act Structure, however if we want to make a classic epic story arc, sometimes also referred to as a Greek epic, we have to make one or two tiny additions. First off, no happy ending. The hero MUST die. Full Stop. End of story, literally. It's a classic moment from film, TV and games that we've seen a thousand times, after defeating the bad guy, the hero quietly succumbs to his wounds leaving us with an artfully shot image of his eyes flickering shut for the last time. It rarely ever happens like that in real life of course, but what the hay! Its a story! Secondly, there is a much larger emphasis on the second act than there is on any of the other. An epic is about the journey, the struggle for power to defeat the obligatory bad guy and save the world. A great example of this is the Lord of the Rings films, the inclusion of the hobbit films, shows that a good epic story arc doesn't even have to be delivered in chronological order for it to be worth watching. But I digress.
 |
| The Choice of Death. Note that here, there is no choice to live. |
What originally got me thinking about this topic was an a thought I had in the kitchen whilst making my lunch. I was standing next to the microwave, waiting for my sausages to defrost and letting my mind wander when suddenly I thought "You know what, I really miss Commander Shepard".
It's been a while now since the release of the final instillation in the mass effect trilogy, and I seem to be one of a very small minority of people, who considered the original ending to be excellent. However, the point still stands. I feel the almost primal need to play the Mass Effect games again, as I'm now being denied the release of a new game. My question is why? Why do some characters grip us and tug on our heart strings, to the point where we wont let them go, and yet others fade into the background? One small answer to this question may be simply that some characters are named, and others we give names. It would certainly explain why I feel more of an epic attachment to Commander Shepard than to my Skyrim character.
My follow up thoughts will follow sometime later in the month, as always I welcome your opinions on the topic, just pop them in the comments section!
Matt.
(Die you piece of shoddy Geth machinery!)
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
And so I'm back! From outer Space!
I just walked in to find you here with my blog all on your face!
Hi guys! just wanted to say that normal service shall return ASAP as my exams are now over and done with (fingers crossed!) and to reward my loyal followers whom have stuck with me over the winter season of the planet Blogsphere I shall give you all a treat! However you have to finish reading first!
To answer the few comments I received whilst on my brief hiatus, first of all thanks to everyone who left a nice comment, and second, I centre myself before writing by playing the game that I'm going to be discussing whilst drinking a warm cup of tea (English Breakfast Tea to our American visitors) usually PG-Tips, milk and two sugars. I like my traditions and I like my tea, so they both go hand in hand.
Now, for the treat! For any of my readers that play BattleField 3 I've just set up a server and you're all invited to join! It's called The Beef Team (after my Xbox 360 gamer tag UpstairsBeef, feel free to drop me a message!) and it will have our T and O banner on it just for you guys! spread the word!
As per usual, any questions, comments or just thoughts and opinions, feel free to jot them down in the comments! I do try to read them all, promise!
Here's looking at you! (through a LSW battle sight from on top of a building and holding a C4 detonator)
Matt.
P.S. (Boom)
Hi guys! just wanted to say that normal service shall return ASAP as my exams are now over and done with (fingers crossed!) and to reward my loyal followers whom have stuck with me over the winter season of the planet Blogsphere I shall give you all a treat! However you have to finish reading first!
To answer the few comments I received whilst on my brief hiatus, first of all thanks to everyone who left a nice comment, and second, I centre myself before writing by playing the game that I'm going to be discussing whilst drinking a warm cup of tea (English Breakfast Tea to our American visitors) usually PG-Tips, milk and two sugars. I like my traditions and I like my tea, so they both go hand in hand.
Now, for the treat! For any of my readers that play BattleField 3 I've just set up a server and you're all invited to join! It's called The Beef Team (after my Xbox 360 gamer tag UpstairsBeef, feel free to drop me a message!) and it will have our T and O banner on it just for you guys! spread the word!
As per usual, any questions, comments or just thoughts and opinions, feel free to jot them down in the comments! I do try to read them all, promise!
Here's looking at you! (through a LSW battle sight from on top of a building and holding a C4 detonator)
Matt.
P.S. (Boom)
Monday, 13 May 2013
Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry!
Heya guys and gals
Just posting to let you all know that more reviews are coming soon, however my exams are 2 weeks away and I really need to revise more :(
Please stay tuned! I promise I will post some new content eventually (maybe.)
Matt.
(Sorry!)
Just posting to let you all know that more reviews are coming soon, however my exams are 2 weeks away and I really need to revise more :(
Please stay tuned! I promise I will post some new content eventually (maybe.)
Matt.
(Sorry!)
Monday, 6 May 2013
Normal service shall resume momentarily...
Hey Guys and Gals!
So, I was wondering through my emails today (time goes pretty slow with no Xbox to play) and I stumbled onto a whole load of comments left in the past few days by people who have read my blog.
There where a lot of comments and questions and hopefully, whilst I'm waiting for a new controller to grace my post-box, I shall answer some of these!
First things first, I am in no way an experience blogger, I'm still wrestling with the website and mostly I feel that the reason my blog is running fast is that I haven't started using any of the more complex functions. If you're interested I've been blogging since 28th of April 2013, which is a total of exactly one week. If your still wanting my opinion on how to run a successful blog, then my one key tip is come up with original, intellectual, interesting posts, then share it with everyone!
As to whether its difficult to run a blog or not, I have to say in my grand total of 7 days experience, no! I'm managing to fit it in between university, job hunting, gaming, volunteering and learning to fly. Just let the content talk for it's self and when you're writing/gaming/filming/recording (delete as appropriate) have a sit down, with a clear mind, and think what you really want to say.
Lastly, please feel free to share my blog where ever you can!
Thank you for all the wonderful comments, they where a massive pick-me-up on a fairly bad day
Keep all the opinions coming!
Matt.
(mmmmm.... tasty, tasty opinions)
So, I was wondering through my emails today (time goes pretty slow with no Xbox to play) and I stumbled onto a whole load of comments left in the past few days by people who have read my blog.
There where a lot of comments and questions and hopefully, whilst I'm waiting for a new controller to grace my post-box, I shall answer some of these!
First things first, I am in no way an experience blogger, I'm still wrestling with the website and mostly I feel that the reason my blog is running fast is that I haven't started using any of the more complex functions. If you're interested I've been blogging since 28th of April 2013, which is a total of exactly one week. If your still wanting my opinion on how to run a successful blog, then my one key tip is come up with original, intellectual, interesting posts, then share it with everyone!
As to whether its difficult to run a blog or not, I have to say in my grand total of 7 days experience, no! I'm managing to fit it in between university, job hunting, gaming, volunteering and learning to fly. Just let the content talk for it's self and when you're writing/gaming/filming/recording (delete as appropriate) have a sit down, with a clear mind, and think what you really want to say.
Lastly, please feel free to share my blog where ever you can!
Thank you for all the wonderful comments, they where a massive pick-me-up on a fairly bad day
Keep all the opinions coming!
Matt.
(mmmmm.... tasty, tasty opinions)
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