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Well, very naughtily I purchased Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC a couple of weeks ago and naturally enough have been sucked into its dark vortex ever since. It's much busier than the earlier GTA games, having moved very gently towards an RPG rather than a semi-formless TPS. The earlier games tended to involve the traditional gaming cycle of: save; try mission; fail mission; reload; try mission; succeed; save; etc. but because you now have a large and explicit range of statistics to manage the above technique isn't too benefitial. You might fail a mission but, in doing so, have your marksmanship or driving skills upgraded meaning you're more likely to succeed next time - so long as you don't reload before trying again.
I had promised myself I'd play the game intensely only until I'd unlocked the State (at the start of the game you're restricted to a single city), but because of the added dimension of the character stats, the game is a lot trickier than before. And don't get me started on the territorial gang wars! Thus I find the end of the month fast approaching, and not a huge amount of work to show for it. Naughty Simon. Doesn't get a biscuit.
Luckily I can be self-deluded enough to consider my forray into mainstream gaming culture as research for a GRW article. The open plan, do anything aspect of GTA with the added mission playing, reminds me of the structure of text adventures - an explorable environment with sections (narrative and/or geographic) blocked off by puzzles. And with more games going for this sort of structure (with the increasingly successful online RPG games being perhaps the form at its most pure) I feel there's meat enough. What really fascinates me is the creation of a shared, known, but imaginary space, with GTA's cityscapes being fantastically potent in that they mimic familiar spaces and interactions. But I shan't shoot my bolt here. I've another article in mind, too, inspired by some work I've had at City Hall involving the books of condolence opened for the victims of the Thursday bombings.
I've slipped the release of GRW back another month, but will be doing a sizeable update to the website hopefully this weekend. I'm going to look at arranging mailing lists for readers and writers in the hopes that I can put them to use in widening our distribution and writing team. I've got in touch with a FlickR account holder who has an extensive collection of police mugshots for the cover of the new issue. And with an October release, the mag will be coming back on its second anniversary.
I've actually forgotten what updates are lined up for Hamilton's Brain. I've scribbled some stuff on Static that I'm not particularly happy with, and have further sketched out some ideas on One Hour Photo. Pieces just seems to get more and more difficult to write. Between my laziness and the sheer sadness of the central character I can hardly bring myself to sit down and write anything. I need to squeeze a bit more light into it, I think, otherwise the thing will be utterly unreadable. I'm going to be linking in my FlickR account and links page this month too. Trying to decide on what object to use as the FlickR link, though. All choices seem cliched. Or, worse still, difficult to model.
Recent and pending acquisitions - Eddie Izzard's Sexie and Circle which I've still not managed to see, and two Luke Smith albums which Amazon promise will take an absolute age to arrive. I'll tell you about Luke when they arrive, I think.
I had promised myself I'd play the game intensely only until I'd unlocked the State (at the start of the game you're restricted to a single city), but because of the added dimension of the character stats, the game is a lot trickier than before. And don't get me started on the territorial gang wars! Thus I find the end of the month fast approaching, and not a huge amount of work to show for it. Naughty Simon. Doesn't get a biscuit.
Luckily I can be self-deluded enough to consider my forray into mainstream gaming culture as research for a GRW article. The open plan, do anything aspect of GTA with the added mission playing, reminds me of the structure of text adventures - an explorable environment with sections (narrative and/or geographic) blocked off by puzzles. And with more games going for this sort of structure (with the increasingly successful online RPG games being perhaps the form at its most pure) I feel there's meat enough. What really fascinates me is the creation of a shared, known, but imaginary space, with GTA's cityscapes being fantastically potent in that they mimic familiar spaces and interactions. But I shan't shoot my bolt here. I've another article in mind, too, inspired by some work I've had at City Hall involving the books of condolence opened for the victims of the Thursday bombings.
I've slipped the release of GRW back another month, but will be doing a sizeable update to the website hopefully this weekend. I'm going to look at arranging mailing lists for readers and writers in the hopes that I can put them to use in widening our distribution and writing team. I've got in touch with a FlickR account holder who has an extensive collection of police mugshots for the cover of the new issue. And with an October release, the mag will be coming back on its second anniversary.
I've actually forgotten what updates are lined up for Hamilton's Brain. I've scribbled some stuff on Static that I'm not particularly happy with, and have further sketched out some ideas on One Hour Photo. Pieces just seems to get more and more difficult to write. Between my laziness and the sheer sadness of the central character I can hardly bring myself to sit down and write anything. I need to squeeze a bit more light into it, I think, otherwise the thing will be utterly unreadable. I'm going to be linking in my FlickR account and links page this month too. Trying to decide on what object to use as the FlickR link, though. All choices seem cliched. Or, worse still, difficult to model.
Recent and pending acquisitions - Eddie Izzard's Sexie and Circle which I've still not managed to see, and two Luke Smith albums which Amazon promise will take an absolute age to arrive. I'll tell you about Luke when they arrive, I think.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 10:42 am
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