I've been delving into the limits of my talent for procrastination, but I think I'll try to end that experiment: From this day forth, I'll try to post once a day. I have contemplated getting back in by goading Skeptico's recent troll, Peter Pan, but I'll ask for some input before I invite him. Ryan seems to think I struck one of his nerves (though, of course, that perception doesn't prove anything by itself), and I'm curious if I could force him to concede even the tiniest things.Of course, troll roasting is just one possibility. I'll be thinking of other stuff to post:
1. New Doggerel entries. There's no shortage of cliches used to support bad logic. I'll try to get back to some regularity.
2. Gaming stuff: I've had some fun during my procrastination experiments. A few items: Master of Orion 2 (haven't tried any multiplayer, yet.), Metroid: Other M, and Minecraft.
3. New series concept: Denialist Doublethink. There are a lot of woos who say one thing, yet act as if they believe the opposite. It'll probably start out with heavy focus on alties.
8 comments:
It's very hard to do that. And it pays to have a buffer. Good luck.
Yeah, as someone who's been doing the dailyblog thing on one blog for nigh on a hundred days now, I'll second what Mad Engineering said. I'm doing all right, but I'm working on a two-day buffer right now, down from 20 at one point. Make sure you bank some posts for awhile.
Master of Orion 2: great game! What races do you prefer to play with? What sort of tactics do you like?
I've played custom races 99.9% of the time, keeping it fairly simple. I've kind of settled on using Democracy and +10 Spying.
I think you cornered him into having to admit his position could be wrong even though his woo mind wouldn't allow him to think it.
I guess that probably pissed him off.
But that dude could've been poe-ing hardcore.
Metroid: Other M...
Hmm...
On the one hand, the gameplay is actually pretty fun and an interesting take.
On the other hand... the characterization of Samus... The pain...
I can give people a lot of slack when it comes to a story, it takes a lot to really cross a line with me. I've loved pretty much every Zelda game I've played, and I'm one of the few people who actually really liked Final Fantasy 8.
However...
Samus is really just the biggest wimp ever now. The sexism is thick in this game, and that's coming from someone who doesn't mind Princess Peach's status as eternal damsel in distress. I don't expect a grizzled space marine, but if I hadn't played the previous Metroid games, I'd have thought I was dealing with a soldier on her first mission, not someone who's saved the galaxy on 6 separate occasions. Her bizarre obsession with Adam, who I had thought from Fusion was someone Samus had more disagreements with than anything, also comes across weirdly.
The gameplay though... that's the only thing that saves it. If I could just skip the story entirely and invent something in my own head, I'd be a lot happier. As it stands, the only way I've thought of to save this game's story is retconning it into "she's a clone" territory. Yeah, we're dealing with an imperfect clone specially mentally molded to be controlled, and in a later game she'll find that out and we'll be switching between this more technological Samus and a more organic "Fusion Suit" version that's the real one.
Honestly expecting a non-sexist take on Samus from Team Ninja was pretty unrealistic... A shame though...
The people making Metroid games these days need to realize that Metroid doesn't need nearly the level of story they're putting into it. In fact, Metroid needs exactly enough story to get Samus to wherever she is for this game, and that's it. It doesn't need any in-game story, and the slow accretion of more and more story in the midst of Metroid games is making them worse over time.
The sexism doesn't help, I'm sure.
Thing is, I actually enjoyed the storytelling of the Prime games. Well, mainly the first one. There the story was like any other collectable, a secret to find and gather, and the world was made richer for it. The second one had a similar feel, though actually talking to a living benevolent creature was somewhat unexpected. The third one? I think there were too many space marines running around, and the game would have been better without them all. Still, it was enjoyable like the first two once I pushed past that, and at least the storytelling was decent.
Metroid Fusion's story actually had one unfortunate consequence. So many sections of the world were arbitrarily cut off for storyline reasons, government restrictions, rather than gameplay reasons. Still, it was sparse and actually interesting. Zero Mission's story allowed more freedom of exploration, and it was still done pretty well. I think it struck a good balance, though Prime 1 still has the best balance to me.
This one though... ugh... It did everything wrong that it could do. It doesn't help that the current master of Metroid lore has stated in interviews that this was his official attempt to "fix" misconceptions and "lock in" who Samus is supposed to be. If that's true, that means that it's not JUST a Team Ninja issue. It's an issue that goes to the core of what a Metroid game is, and future entries will suffer us all the same terrible sexism and annoying characterizations this one introduced. No "it was a clone" salvation stories, or sweeping the story under the rug as unofficial here.
A shame, Nintendo has a pretty good track record with this stuff.
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