I don’t know what it is with the last 12 months or so but I’ve noticed a lot more of these horror survival games being released. Instead of a game placing you in a Fantasy Movie or an Action Movie, you are now the start in a psychological horror movie. You are our survivor and you’re now solving puzzles, running like hell and FREAKING THE FUCK OUT BECAUSE WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?
I mean let’s take a look at some of the titles being released. The big ones are Allan Wake and The Walking Dead. I suppose you can throw Amnesia in there as well. These are games where there is still combat involved but a lot more of puzzle solving, stealth and running are involved too. It provides a nice change to what you usually do in a game. Usually, if you have an enemy or a series of enemies, you smash through them with your M4A1 or your mighty magical war-hammer. You don’t turn off your torch and fucking leg it.
But that’s the kind of thing these new games are trying to promote. Less fighting and more running. Less frustrating and more frightening. Puzzles and little details too. It’s no longer a case of, proceed to objective A, kill enemies then look for the huge fucking neon sign which says ‘OBJECTIVE’ or the mini-map and quest tracker which say ‘Go to Red Rock and break 15 boxes of Plague Contagion!’. It’s more, listen to creepy music and noises, look for a key, use key to open a door and then find a way to turn to the power back on. ONLY THEN TO SEE THE FREAKY LITTLE GIRL WITH KNIVES FOR EYES.
These horror survival games kinda remind me of the original Half-Life. Now, the original Half-Life was one hell of a game. You spent your time alternating between two types of game-play; puzzle solving and shooting. You would shoot aliens for a little bit and then need to figure out how to cross the electrified water. Then they’d throw you a jumping puzzle. It was good though. Puzzles, fighting and jumping. Gordon Freeman is probably one of the few action heroes with a physics degree.
While these new games retain some of that Half-Life feel, a lot of them are now focused on stealth and turning your torch off. It’s more avoiding danger and finding a way out rather than finding your way to danger and blasting your way out.
Beyond the game-play differences there’s also the fact that many of these games are relying on Kickstarter projects and donations to get off the ground. Games like the SCP variants are some relatively freaky games and they’re free. The guy who knocked up the original SCP did in two days during lunch-breaks. It’s a staircase simulator but it’s still plenty freaky.
So, I’m stuck wondering why there’s this change to this genre because usually these things follow a pattern. But I guess maybe people just wanted something different, maybe they wanted to scare themselves a little.
Now, while I don’t deal overly well with scary stuff, at least not the incredibly gory stuff, these games provide a cool alternative to the wash of action games and make for some great Youtube Let’s Play vids.
On a side note, I really hope someone makes a sandboxy RPG from The Stand by Stephen King. Something about being a survivor in the post super-flu world catches my attention.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this movie. I kinda doubt it. It’s a strange one. A sort of complicated and yet simple series of unfortunate circumstances, coincidences and misinformation that leads to a lot of gunfire and dead people for nothing. It’s the kind of movie that at first glance you just discard as one of those half-cocked action films and you just disregard it and any potential intellectual value it has. Then if you watch it again, you look at it and start to think and start to realise that despite, perhaps because of, its complicated and convoluted plot, the camera work, the montage, the narrative, the acting and all of those film elements are actually rather well done and it’s the complete package that you need to look at.
It’s full of deep shit. It’s full of gunfire, blood and gore. it’s got some pretty funny lines in it. However, the big thing for me is just how it seems to just get darker and darker. Full of corruption and betrayal and all that kind of bullshit. Also the way it switches from character to character, changing stories and points of view. That’s great, I like that, it’s very Stephen King.The attention to detail too is very good, all the little parts which add up to make these characters.
The best part about that switch and swap of view point is the way you see the whole picture and watch the characters see only their slice of the pie. Someone gets shot and they all start making assumptions. There’s a type of tragic hilarity, a dark hilarity which is all rather enjoyable.
Anywho, long story short, I like this movie a lot and I think that despite it being 5 years old now and having what I presume is a crappy sequel, it has a really good story and the film elements do a great job of portraying that.
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Stephen King wrote his epic, his Lord of the Rings, his one series that would define his worth as an author and he wrote the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower, the nexus of all universes, the centre of all possibilities and the very reality of all worlds. To me, this series is a story which just inspires a lot of thought and it’s a series I love to death. It’s an epic tale of a gunslinger in an almost indescribable world and it just contains such an amazing story that you have to enjoy it.
Personally, the Dark Tower series is my favourite book series. It has the essential quest, Roland’s eternal search for the Dark Tower, it has the characters which draw you into their struggles and it has the story which is just encompassing and brilliant.To me that sums up books. All of them follow a central character as they fight through their struggles to reach their goal. Roland’s Dark Tower is much like all our ambitions, our one true goal in life, the very thing we would sacrifice all we love to have to gain it, that it draws the reader in.
I often have trouble putting to words why I enjoy things and the more I like something the less able I am to describe why. It’s kind of the opposite as to as how I am with things I hate. Anyway, the Dark Tower series is one of those things that I like so much I almost cannot reason why. There are few things/people that I like so much that I can’t find an explanation for. Very few. Anyway, I like the Dark Tower for its characters, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, for its central goal of the Dark Tower and for its creative design. It takes many different settings and times and combines them and all their related vernacular to create something different. It works in such a way that you are drawn to the quest.
In any case, I like the series, I like Stephen King’s work and I love the gunslinger’s saying:
“I do not aim with my hand for he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father; I aim with my eye.
I do not shoot with my hand for he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father; I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun for he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father; I kill with my heart.”
It’s such a focusing saying that I use it when I feel like I need to bring my thoughts together and to bring myself into focus. The Dark Tower is the perfect goal as it represents the infinite that we can all use it to describe our one true ambition. Our own personal Dark Tower. As for me, I’m yet to decide what my Tower will be but I have a feeling that I will reach it before the end.
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You get this a bit these days, primarily because every third movie is just a book or comic series put up on the big screen, but there’s this idea of being uncool to be cool. It’s really stupid, kind of like hipsters, people like to say they’re not “mainstream cool,” which tries to paint them as alternative, unique, non-conformists making their own way and styles. And that’s a fucking fallacy. They just tag onto whatever is left over. They’re ruining games for people now. They ruined books. If they ruin alcohol and skittles I’m going to have nothing left. Fucking bastards.
Anywho, reading books. I personally would rather read the book than watch the movie or at least read the book first because it just has so much more content and is a longer lasting experience. Also, for about the same price of going to see the film once with the necessary snacks, I can buy a fucking book which is then mine. I believe books just offer a better experience and definitely a more personal experience than a movie or film. Films have their place in the great scheme of things and it’s good to see film versions of different things and then try to see how they match up to the original version but they never really do. Also it’s easier to share a movie than it is to share a book.
The real issue is when the people who say “Reading is better,” just start up like elitist dumbasses with no consideration as to why they consider it to be a better experience and no consideration as to how they look like hipster-esque douches. There’s not much going on besides, “Derrrr reading is much better than watching a movie, derrr, retard,” there’s no reasoning. I agree that reading is better but for my reasons and also I think it’s just insulting to say you enjoy a particular fucking series of movies which based on books and then never read the books. The books were the original. It’s like listening to a Glee cover of a Beatles’ song and then just never listening to the Beatles’ version. You miss out on what it really was and you begin to warp your idea of the song. And the real problem is when people start arguing points about maybe the lore of something or what really happened and they use the movie version. I mean that’s retarded, like the whole “The snake that Harry meets in Philospher’s Stone is Nagini,” or whatever the fuck that snake is called. It’s not, that’s a dumb idea made by people who watched the movie and linked up the pictures of CGI snakes in the films and said “HEY THEY ARE SIMILAR THEREFORE THEY ARE THE SAME,” which makes just want to slap a ho.
That’s stupid, I mean it’s really stupid. First off, who fucking cares if the snakes are in fact one in the same? Does it make a difference? Nope. Then you have to consider the fact that the book was the original text and should override anything from the films. The movie is based from the books, not the other way around. Just like when something is based on a true story, the movie isn’t the trusted source, the original story is, the movie was tampered with. I mean look at two of Stephen King’s stories that were turned into movie, Cujo and The Mist. Both of their endings were changed and not just a little but a lot. They were pretty much opposites. In the book version of Cujo, the little boy dies and in the film he lives. In The Mist, the book ends with a little group of survivors left alone in a forever changed world, there’s nothing to say whether they would live or die and nothing about whether the conflicts were resolved. In the movie version, the main character has a gun with 5 shots and including himself, there’s six people. He performs mercy killings in a way only to discover that the good ol’ US armed forces had resolved the problem. Both shit endings but dramatically altered in the movie version.
The simple fact is that the book is only written by one person and the movie has more. The movie has the original author, then the writers who adapt it to a script and then the director who warps how things look and progress. So, the entire idea of films being even accurate versions of the story is full of shit. Then you come to the idea that experience of reading is better and this is very opinionated. Some people love reading, others hate it. Some people can see the words in their head, can see how it looks to them and how it evolves in their mind, others cannot make those pictures. So, for those that can’t make those pictures, the movie does it for them but it’s the director’s vision that they are seeing. So, for those that can see the pictures the words make, the two visions may not match up.
Then there’s content. In Harry Potter alone there’s like 20 different scenes from the book which make a difference to the story that are left out. Then there’s the shit they add, which distort the emotion of the scenes form being fatalistic and almost epic to fucking comedic relief material. They fail to emphasise the right parts of the story, miss the scenes people were actually looking for.
So, for those reasons, reading is better. You simply get more bang for your buck. Not to mention the fact that you get a closer experience. And for all those people that like to hide away and watch movies to retain a sense of loner style, books are probably the best way to remain a loner. They give you the idea of interacting with people when you’re not.
Even though I think reading is better than watching, I hate those fuckers who immediately discredit anyone who just watched the movies by saying “the books were better” or “You haven’t even read the books”. They can enjoy something without having gone back to the original source, sure it’s stupid to completely ignore the beginning of something and the original version of something if you enjoy it, it’s like denying a part of the history of it, but hey, at least they agree that the essential story is good.
This is all part of the reason I hate hipsters, emos, to a lesser extent goths and other people who conform together in their non-conformity. They fucking take things I enjoy and associate them with their own bullshit culture. They ruined the word, “mainstream,” fucking dismantled the idea of liking something long before it took off. I can’t say, “Yeah, I’ve liked the Elder Scrolls series for a long time, since about Morrowind and just now everyone is a fan of Skyrim. They just sorta jumped on the bandwagon, were won over by advertising and hype,” because if I do, I could be labelled a hipster. I can’t say I like reading because there’s fucking people WHO NEVER REALLY READ, who say “Yeah, I’m big into reading but that’s because I’m different to the majority of people,”.
So, fuck those people. Fuck them right off. They, much like the idiots who claim to like video games and have never finished one or those who say they’re trolls and the best they can do is just spam or invent really retarded ideas and wait for someone to tell them to fuck off before saying “TROLLD LOLOLOL”, have fucking found infinite ways to take things from sub-cultures to cobble it together to be uncool to be cool. Yeah, it’s that retarded, it doesn’t even make sense. It’s like a fucking paradox.
If you see a hipster, a retarded person who says they’re a gamer or a street preacher, tell them that you think they are stupid. Tell them the reasons and highlight exactly why they are disliked by all those save the members of that particular circle.
