aderack: Someone just wrote to Ebert to complain that he’s never very positive toward videogames in his reviews. He gave a list of a few unconventional masterpiece movies and asked if there were any games that have as much to say as them. I wrote back to him to say no, for the most part.
aderack: Though I did explain that there’s a lot of potential here. It’s just, the medium ain’t going anywhere right now.
aderack: I advised he be a little more sympathetic to a confused young medium, even though he probably need not play anything for ten or twenty years.
Shep: Mike and I were talking earlier about something Ebert said. Basically that, “As long as there are great movies I haven’t watched and great books I haven’t read, I shall continue to not be able to find the time to play video games.”
Shep: Same thing we said — that there was a point where there weren’t any movies worth watching as long as you had books left to explore.
aderack: Most books are crap, too.
aderack: I’m two pages from finishing All the President’s Men. All the time I wished I were editor. Or at least copy editor.
Shep: Right, but at least Ebert’s point was that there are truly great books in the way there aren’t really truly great video games.
aderack: That is so.
aderack: Even the best books have problems, though.
aderack: I guess that’s part of their humanity.
ajutla: “I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.”
ajutla: I’m not sure that I could name five videogames that I would put there.
ajutla: I could say that the best videogames “take advantage of” the “nature of” the “medium.”
ajutla: But that’s….that’s kind of what all videogames should do.
ajutla: They don’t, right now, is the thing, so when we find a game that does, we say, “yes, look, a masterpiece.”
aderack: That’s what I said.
aderack: That most videogames aren’t even competent videogames. To ask that they actually say something of human merit — well, that’s tantamount to heresy in some circles.
aderack: On that note.
aderack: And that’s why people love the SNES so much. Competent videogames!
aderack: Nintendo makes games that have all the pieces in the right places! Amazing!
ajutla: There’s that, too.
ajutla: And…PeaceMaker?
ajutla: This?
ajutla: That’s heavy-handed as fuck.
ajutla: Which is…probably the other problem with what people cite as The Great Videogames.
aderack: I also told him that he’d been recommended two good games and one that was… open to debate.
ajutla: I haven’t played Wanda yet. I don’t know much about it.
ajutla: Toups told me something about how sometimes you have to find the “trick” to taking out one of the colossi.
ajutla: That sounds kind of like Ico.
ajutla: You have to look around and be like, “okay, where is Fumito Ueda’s hand, and where is it trying to push me?”
aderack: It’s infuriating in the same sense that if you don’t do exactly what you’re supposed to, you can’t progress.
aderack: I apparently am right near the end of Ico, but have missed that lever in the top level of Channelwood, if you dig.
ajutla: Oh, yeah.
ajutla: I never finished Ico either.
aderack: Same thing going on with Wanda, which is unfortunate because if you ignore the FUCKING colossi, the game is so wondrous.
aderack: I just spent an hour exploring to no end.
aderack: Going places with no purpose to them. The game has lots of touches with no purpose and leaves a lot up to your own interpretation. Much like Zelda 1.
aderack: Then you get to the colossi, which demand you go choonk-choonk-choonk. They remind you: this is a videogame, and it has to be played THIS way.
aderack: The world itself has a lot to say, though again nothing that Zelda didn’t. It’s just more eloquent about it.
ajutla: So, identical to Ico, mostly.
aderack: Right. Less infuriating than Ico, because there’s the overworld.
aderack: There’s only the one element that exists to torment you and remind you you’re playing a videogame.
aderack: It’s one of the two major elements. And I guess the conflict between the two is kind of important. You can wander forever; eventually you need to get back to work, though.
aderack: The VIDEOGAME isn’t much fun. It is work. The world is great.
ajutla: Grand Theft Auto III is kind of like this.
aderack: That’s true.
aderack: They are similar in this regard. Hadn’t noticed this.
aderack: They are very similar!
aderack: There are some great elements to the colossi, of course. The humanity to them is tangible, and you really feel like you’re doing something massive and important and violent, on a scale you’ve never felt in another videogame. If they weren’t such… videogame moments, they would be great.
aderack: What’s probably most infuriating is that if you don’t do exactly what you’re intended to do, the game keeps yelling at you, flashing a big hint in the center of the screen, blotting out your character and distracting you.
ajutla: What, really?
aderack: Yes.
aderack: If that weren’t there, maybe spending some time studying the colossi and working something out would be more feasible.
aderack: As it is, the game is constantly rushing you.
aderack: It made me want to kick things.
ajutla: I almost bought the game. Then I figured I’d wait for Dragon Quest VIII instead. My copy of that is at home! And I’m not!
aderack: You’ll learn more from Wanda. You’ll like Dragon Quest more!
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