New York City Comic Con starts tomorrow, and Evade Gismo's gonna be right here in the thick of it with Camilla d'Errico!
Bright & Teal at Booth 215 in the Block !
Keep eyes peeled here and on Instagram as we chronicle, firsthand, the world-renowned nerd fiesta that is NYCC. There's gonna be an Adventure Time panel, Masashi Kishimoto's gonna be there, and there's even a few gaming panels over the weekend, too - see ya'll there!
Clearly, with games as large and involved as they are now, us older folks must pick and choose what to play and when- very carefully or else end up with an incredible museum of untouched Relics. Unfortunately, the idealist in most of us is merely a high pitched 'urkelish' voice that we stamp out so we can continue purchasing games well never-ever finish. Have any of you ever played a game for 10 minutes just because you bought it and, maybe, feel guilty for not ever experiencing someone else's hard work that you paid for?
These choices can become strangely overwhelming. Buying the thing is the easy part. Getting excited about playing them is also the easy part. Scheduling in the time is the quasi challenging adulty part i don't think ill ever fully master. But choosing something from the expanding library, well, it can be a bit of a motherfucker. Just the other night i had a half bottle of Whisky and some designated game time. I was ready to zone out and play something for a few hours. That didn't happen. In fact not much happened at all. I got the 'fear' you see. The enormous amount of choice before me caused a mental 'GAME OVER' for me before i even picked something out to play. Distantly i swear i heard a slide whistle being slowly drawn out foir me and my sad attempt. I went through the backlog out loud. By myself. Which i seem to do often now.
This would not make me a happy man
In this case, on this particular evening i chose non-wisely.
"Metal Gear!?- Yeah, i'm only 10 main missions in. I should catch up a bit..Quiets boobs are awesome. WTF was Kojima thinking?...maybe..."
"Witcher 3?!- SURE! wait....where was i? I'm only 25 hrs in, i should really put in some time here. Nurture it a bit. Give it some attention But then ill run out of money or my sword will break or ill get distracted and start doing shit in the forest.......aw fuck it."
"Dont Starve Together?!- TOTALLY! Such an adorably charming little game, and my Bro just put a new computer together maybe i should call him? "In an hour you can play!? Sure ill just play something else while i wait....maybe."
"Heroes of the Storm!?- Haven't really go into this yet, I've heard great things, like its a lazy mans DOTA. Built by the actual company that inspired it. Cool, i have not the time nor the patience to DOTA. But wait maybe i should finish....."
"Wolfenstein- Its been a while hasn't it Wolfy? Now where was i here, almost at the end. Right. The hard part and the reason i let you sit on the shelf for too long. Kind of like..."
"Hotline Miami 2- Hrm. Well- i don't know if i'm up for a super unforgiving, intense game. But a friend suggested 'Pillars of Eternity.' Oh shit, 50 bucks! Man, well maybe...But thats another time sink. Oh my bro just got back to me. He can't play."
Aaaaaand now i'm lost and somehow very confused.
So over about 2 hours i didn't play anything for a variety of different reasons. Something I've notice recently, and its not only to do with games, is the incredible, unfathomable amount of choices we have now for any given item. If your shopping for mustard and your indecisive i pity you. There's like 50 different kinds of mustard out there! Usually i notice my wife trying to make an entree choice at a restaurant. We no longer visit the cheesecake factory for this very reason. She'll spend most of our time there reading through the bible of food and choose nothing. Or choose something thats just 'ok' and spend her meal feeling disappointed that she's missing out on everything else. It's a sickness, you see. A fear of missing out or 'FOMO' which is a real thing that tends to creep on me with online games. I guess I was so worried about missing out on one particular experience that i chose exactly nothing to play. Under acute circumstances this is was a profound wake up call. PICK A GAME AND SHUT THE FUCK UP TRISTAN.
At any given time I have about 12 games i really want to play. I'll complete maybe 6 games a year. So mostly i'm biding my time until the next great game with arbitrary titles i have very little interest in. Out of pure habit i suppose. Maybe my friends are playing something online so ill jump in just for the social aspect and get a few laughs out of it (which is vital). But time is a fickle bitch and the best revenge, seemingly, is to get vigilant and only choose the games we really are interested in.
I think when i'm truly at my happiest with a game is when I've waited for a great one player experience to come out and just sit on the couch (still the best place to play games) and really tuck into it and see it through till the end; when the disk doesn't leave the console until its finished. All that's important is that i get an enjoyable experience as a return for hours invested regardless of what could have been or what i could be playing instead.
I no longer find myself hunting for what i want to play. The more games we play the more defined our tastes become. That could be said for anything we spend quality time with. I know i love being scared, the methods may be cheap sometimes but i feel like i get my monies worth if my systolic blood pressure maintains a steady 150. I love a great story and atmosphere above all else. I'll dabble in online competitive gaming but i find i soon become frustrated and consumed with self doubt quite quickly. And the time involved to become better is just a chore for me now. I gravitate towards a certain type of game, so i read and research release dates for titles and publishers i respect and make very rudimentary plans about what order what game should be played in. If i have a choice of 5 games to play right now ill go straight for what i know and like vs something completely new. Which now that i think about it creates a very boring image of myself.
First world problems right!? So choose wisely my friends, time is an diminishing investment. Don't settle for the mundane, be productive and challenge yourself until that next game you want comes out. Then call in sick, ignore your wife and have a drink, heck, have 2.
If we can all just admit this illness is effecting all of us in some way then we can begin the healing process...hopefully with hardcore drugs
Recess was over but this boy was not to be seen sitting in his usual place at the back of the class. He was sitting to be sure, but at hazardous altitude, stuck in a variety of different ways and at the mercy of his own tenacity. "I shouldn't have had that extra juice box" he thought as he built up the courage to extricate himself from this predicament.
The statue was famous in grade school. We all called it the elephant; all cement grey and sort of the same shape but designed to be abstract. About 15 ft tall and half as wide. You were famous if you could climb to the top of it and sit in the place where the ear should have been, a god damn hero child. No easy feat by any means. It took months of practice and lazer focus; even then any witnessed failed attempts got you a schoolyard sentence of a few days of merciless ridicule.
Yeah, I was a kid once. I wore my dirty pants and skinned knees as my badge of honor, like a prison tattoo on my face. I walked into that classroom bloody and accomplished with my head high and got detention. As I served my time that afternoon I had a moment to reflect on how I finally managed to mount the elephant. Were there different routes? Could I have done it in a complete recess period with no juice box? Could I have done it without fucking up my pants and having to use Marco Winkles stained gym shorts from lost and found?
See, Metal Gear is my elephant statue.I diagnosed myself with Acute Proficiency Sickness (A.P.S.) when Metal Gear Sold came out in 1998. In fact my APS ebbs and flows with the tide of every Metal Gear release, lying dormant and incubating for years until its inevitable return. I played the game, loved the game and watched the entire end credits out of respect and used the time to reflect on my seemingy flawless performance. The credits ended and I got my rating. "Capybara! The fuck?! Like a giant Guinea Pig? I guess somewhere during the play through I managed to tranquilize my own ego. I felt numb. I never got caught, nobody saw me. How many rations did I use again? Maybe I shot a guard with a bullet instead of a tranquilizer but shit dude, that's war! What does Capibara even mean? I'm not fucking doing that again," he said as he promptly started a new game.
I didn't feel right. The second play through was brutal. I would do the beginning part where Snake has to sneak into the first facility to rescue the DARPA chief dozens of times. I would get caught, the alarm would go off- 'start' - 'restart mission.' If I got into the facility and someone heard me I would restart. Fuck, if I got to the DARPA chief and nothing happened I would still restart if it didn't feel perfect. Hobby turned to obsession very quickly. Back then you didn't really know how well you did until the end of the game. The internet was a novelty still in those days, back then determination and perseverance usually did the trick. Anytime I thought I heard a guard say something I would restart out of fear of lack of proficiency. See. I was sick.
Metal Gear Solid V came out Tuesday and I've been playing it as often as my adult life will allow. When your wife catches you gaming when you know you should be doing some adult shit and you keep playing, that's when you know you’ve relapsed hard. I was completely invested after the hospital sequence. It all came back to me at once though after the first main mission was complete. I got a B grade. Grrrrr. My sweaty thumb hovered over the redo mission option and I'm ashamed to say I pressed it. What would a Capybara do? I did it again and got an A...sadly. Still not good enough. So I sat there in my man cave and had a bit of an epiphany. It's never good enough, it's not Metal Gears fault and hiding under a cardboard box wont solve this.
The Metal Gear Solid series raised me in a way. I'm quite meticulous with tasks in my life, I tend to take missions like going to the grocery store as a challenge. All items acquired rank S achieved! (You're not even playing the entire game! - J.) And I always crawl to pickup claymores on my way to work. And I always save my cardboard boxes just in case. No matter how I played the game I felt compelled to proficiency at the cost of enjoyment. Other games have captured the same spirit, the Hitman series comes to mind, but none of those games captured me at such an early age.
That margin between enjoyment and a challenge can be so muddled that even the mighty Capybara could lie to itself. The other day as I stared at my mission stats screen at the end of a relatively difficult mission I caught myself laughing out loud. At the top left of the screen I saw a ‘restart mission’ penalty. We are now penalized for restarting a mission. A Metal Gear Miracle.
My Christmas came in September this year and it took a few sit downs until it dawned on me. In MGSV the main missions are ranked but all the side missions are not. Kojima you dawg you! You beautiful Daimond Dog. So now, finally, I can blow shit up, run around pumping 80's tunes through my Walkman? Call an airstrike on a fool just because I feel he’s in my way? And I'm not graded? Thank you! A thousand times thank you. That mechanic alone was all I needed to get healthy again.
I think what compelled me to play better was a feeling that the game was watching me play. Judging me. And I liked the game so I felt I had to do well to prove something to the game but also myself. I believe all we're really searching for is some sort of affirmation for our accomplishments, in any possible fucking way we can get it. I’ll settle for a Capybara any day.
MGS series creator Hideo Kojima shows a rare instance of human affection for creative partner Guillermo del Toro.
Welcome to the first edition of Throwback Thursday, where we cherry-pick our very earliest gaming memories for the sweet, sweet nostalgia.
The earliest memories I can recall of playing a video-game must have been around 1994 -- a combination of The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, 3-D Dinosaur Adventure, and The Seventh Guest. I was four years old at the time and mostly illiterate, but I do remember clicking through these intricate adventures just for the thrill of some kind of reaction or change from the game. I vaguely recall we had a console or two in the house by that time, but my brothers were usually using them, so I resorted to bothering my parents to boot up these weird PC games for me.
Since Myst and Seventh Guest had this habit of scaring the living shit out of me from one second to the next (the first person perspective - particularly in dark and abandoned buildings - creeps out children, go figure!) and the beloved 3-D Dinosaur Adventure barely constituted a game, I didn't spend nearly as much time with them as with Monkey Island. That game charmed me in a way that has followed me ever since, as much in terms of gaming education as in terms of humor and wit.
Even though the CD version with soundtrack came out in '92 we still had the game on floppydisk and the startup screen would play the wicked reggae theme music through the soundcard, rather than as a .wav file through the external speakers. If this doesn't tingle your spine then you must not have one:
So that plays. And then you're this dorky guy in a white shirt talking to some old dude by a fire. At the bottom of the screen there's a bunch of green verbs, next to your inventory in purple, and your cursor is a flashing white crosshair. By clicking on parts of the screen, your character (Guybrush Threepwood) will move there; by clicking the green verbs before clicking on the play area, your character will attempt to do the verb to that thing.
My first videogame hero was a coward, layabout, liar, cheat, thief, critic, and certified insult-swordsman.
Mechanically, the game is a matter of collecting and combining inventory items, as well as negotiating dialogue trees with other characters, in order to solve puzzles which advance the story. The overarching plot sounds typical: an undead dread pirate kidnaps the governor-princess of Melee Island, and the boy who loves her must come to her rescue. But the adventures in the game itself are way more hilarious and involve rubber-chickens, a no-handed two-hooked failed hotelier; resolving a crew mutiny with an explosive Grog of breath mints, gunpowder, and fine wine; and navigating the bowels of hell by threatening a sentient skull for directions through threats and insults. See...hilarious! The Secret of Monkey Island is above all a highly successful work of comedy, similar to the best part of an evening of improv theatre, motivating you to play just for the reward of further jokes and oddities.
Of course all this high-brow humour was lost on me as a child. I would literally click around until the screen changed and consider that a success. I actually got pretty far through trial-and-error, attempting to use each action and item on each interactable thing until something happened. Today i tried to use my cucumber on a locked door. This diligent trial-and-error method would develop into a core gaming skill - particularly well-demonstrated in the Monkey Island series, where puzzles are often so quirky and obscure that you'd have no other way of solving them.
I do remember coming back to it a bit later and was able to more fully explore the game, though much of the comedy continued to go way over my head. Very similar to my love of The Simpsons as a child. I would even call Secret of Monkey Island, The Simpsons of PC Gaming.
As I child I was half-oblivious, half too-blown-away-by-meta-humour-to-understand, to this blatantly parodic tie-in.
I've come back time and again to both these series as my brain has 'matured,' and while each series has strained a bit under the weight of forced continuation, I have deeply enjoyed coming back to these familiar stories and unraveling the deeper stuff going on under the surface.
But that insult fighting though. I remember re-enacting the first scene with the swashbuckler on the schoolground at recess. Clang, clang, clang "My handkerchief will wipe up your blood!' Clang, clang, clang "So you got that job as a janitor after all?' Just the idea of that is still fantastic and so innovative. I remember taking a trip to mexico and was on the beach one clear night staring out into the water at a small island. I had one of those real life ---> videogame flash backs, you know what im talking about and remembered this image. Still, whenever i think of videogames i only see the word as synonymous with the Monkey island start screen.
It's an extremely rare affair (great name for a band btw) that anything decent or worth mentioning in film-land should come out of Canada. Sure we invented Basketball, the walkie-talkie, amplitude modulation, the fog horn, Hockey and coincidentally the Jock Strap. But its seldom heard that we would have the wits about us to produce a film that we might actually be proud of. An NO, the guy who made 'Hobo with a Shotgun' had nothing to do with this one. Its from first time director/ writers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. The trailer is spot on, as so many trailers are no these days. It gives you just enough and leaves you wanting more. It's an art form all on its own and is executed perfectly here. A catchy 80's synth soundtrack by LE MATOS punctuates a serious low budget Grindhouse feel. The Villain you may recognize as the one and only Michael Ironside who had some interesting things to say about the Turbo Kid movie. If it gets the seal of approval from old Mike ya know its quality!
An exerpt from a 'Den Geek' interview with Michael Ironside
"So I read the script. I liked it a lot. I get about three or four jobs offered to me a week. Most of them are not very well written, and maybe half of them are not even financed, but if they have my name on it, then maybe they can get in the door somewhere and get financed. This one was different. I choose now based on the writing, first. Then, on the personalities of the storytellers, and then whether or not they are flexible enough to take input, because that was their first feature film, and I had done about 240 films, you know, at that time. I’m not bragging. I like to work."
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