Games

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Only you can prevent forest fires!

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Matt’s been spending some more time in virtual worlds, in particular a digital version of 1980s Wyoming, spotting fires. He wrote about his experience here – which should go well with the Firewatch trailer.

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They create worlds: Firewatch

Matt1 Comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

A lot of gaming is about power fantasies. Okay, perhaps most of us don’t fantasise about being a mustachioed plumber jumping on the backs of turtles or about manoeuvring oddly-shaped blocks in order to form lines, but the clichés are still true a lot of the time: you play in order to become a fantasy hero with a big sword or a soldier with a big rifle or a space warrior with a big raygun. These games can be tremendous fun (and not all power fantasies are as Freudian in nature), but the longer I’ve played games, the less they’re the ones that pull me in most. There are other fantasies (no, not that kind – at least not in this post!): games that let me exist in places where I could never be in real life. For me, it’s one of the main draws of the Assassin’s Creed games: not that they let me become a super stealth assassin with some cool threads and hidden blades, but that they let me explore revolutionary Paris or Victorian London or Ptolemaic Egypt.

And sometimes the fantasies are much more mundane – but fulfilling them is no less fascinating. I mean, how many of us have had the opportunity to become a fire lookout in a North American national park?

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They create worlds: Return of the Obra Dinn

Matt1 Comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

There are certain experiences that would only be possible in video games – or perhaps in some medium that doesn’t even exist yet. In view of my woeful ignorance of this unknown future medium, I will come out and say that Return of the Obra Dinn could only exist as a game, in more respects than just one. And in the process, it is a wonderful example of how video games can be entirely unique and different.

And that’s before we even get to the – ah, but that would be a spoiler.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #85: Give My Regards To Broad Street

Alan Kuhl Graham2 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

When I was young I bought my pop music on Cassette. If you made a bit of money on your birthday you could head to the shops and buy yourself an album. (If you’d really cleaned up with the relatives you could get two.) The only vinyl player we had in the house was very much off-limits to the children, mainly the domain of curious spoken word affairs that the grown-ups found funny. Although they had covers that tended to give me nightmares.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #84: Why Indy 3 single-handedly ended my gaming career

samlinder3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Matt’s confession in last week’s post about the scores of digital characters killed in his gaming career so far made me wonder about why I had never become a gamer myself. It wasn’t that video and computer games weren’t available in the late ’80s and ’90s (friends of our family were GameBoy addicts, for example) or that our family were somehow technological hermits (my grandfather had introduced us to his AMIGA Commodore by 1987 – game discs included). I also got off to a good start when our parents bought us a brand new computer for Christmas in 1994 and I was able to get my hands on fresh gaming content.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Music and moonlight and love and… monsters?

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Sometimes a director can be on a wavelength too different from your own, and such differences may be irreconcilable. Will Matt ever learn to love Olivier Assayas, or will Irma Vep (1996) be as good as it gets for him?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #83: Talking and killing

Matt3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I made my first kill before the age of 10. By the time I was a teenager, I must have killed hundreds. By the time I reached the age of 20, I expect the number was somewhere in the five-digit range, at least. And I suspect that the same is true for so many people these days, at least in the west – because murder is just a click away.

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They create worlds: Tunic

Matt3 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

There are video games that strive to recreate the real world in one way or another: the Grand Theft Auto series, for instance, which satirises modern America in many respects, but in others it has been pushing for a more and more intricate, realistic representation of the urban everyday of New York or Los Angeles; or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, where a Shropshire village in the 1980s constitutes the naturalistic setting for a cosy apocalypse that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Wyndham novel; or Dirt Rally 2.0 and its rally courses that have struck fear into the heart of this gamer without ever leaving the realm of the real.

Then there are games that create realities distinctly different from our own everyday reality. The likes of Paper Beast, which puts the player inside a virtual world with its own rules and its own forms of life coming to an end, or Device 6, which thrives on the kind of worldbuilding that is possible only with the written word, or Fez, combining the two- and the three-dimensional in ways that wouldn’t be possible outside the virtual spaces inside a computer’s memory.

Tunic is firmly in the latter camp, but that doesn’t make the world it evokes any less impressive.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Pirates and the Art of Monkey Maintenance

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

While the Criterion Collection is basically catnip for a certain kind of film lover, not every Criterion film is an unreserved triumph, and while there are things to like about Czechoslovak New Wave fairytale Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Matt wasn’t altogether enchanted. (What you’ll find isn’t so much a trailer as an introduction to the film that Criterion put together. Trust me: I’ve looked at the trailer that’s available, and you don’t want to see that one.)

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They create worlds: Dirt Rally 2.0

Matt2 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Every now and then, I will play a horror game. Not often, since I don’t regularly feel the need to be scared, and because so many horror games will mainly run on atmosphere and jump scares, the latter of which I’m not particularly interested in, regardless of the medium. Still, every now and then, I want to be scared. I want to feel dread at being in a place that clearly doesn’t want me there. That is vast and uncaring, and if it is out to get me, that’s just because I am so small and insignificant, yet foolhardy enough to venture there and therefore it’s all my fault. The danger to me is incidental. I went to the dark place, so anything that happens to me while I’m there is entirely on me.

And when I’m there, I suspect that the words I will hear are “Turn, one left, don’t cut.”

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