Archive for category Reid McCarter
Developing a Persona Part 2: The Daily Grind
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Reid McCarter on May 3, 2012
Life can often seem like a nasty, samsaric ritual. Almost every morning I wake up around 8am, take a shower, change the cat’s water, pour a cup of coffee and do the dishes before starting work. Every evening I take out my contacts, brush my teeth, wash my face and get into bed before falling asleep. These are the kind of things that we all just do and, for the most part, we do them mindlessly and automatically because they just have to be done.
Other parts of our day are usually far less predictable. Whether the spontaneity of a surprise phone call from an old friend or an email from a business client bears good or bad news, at the very least it colours our daily routines with the kind of random chance that makes life interesting (if not always enjoyable necessarily).
I play games — and I suspect a lot of people play games — because they also provide my days with that element of unpredictability. Taking part in an unfolding story or trying to win against a digital opponent makes for pretty engaging entertainment. Despite the fact that games, being constructs of cold hard programming, can only offer us a pre-set variety of outcomes (a variety that is always expanding as developers and technological engineers push the medium forward) they can give us a sense of being somewhere else, taking part in a world of chance — a world that can have more in common with the unpredictable parts of our days than the rote, habitual ones.
That isn’t always the case with Persona 3.
Killzone 2: War Sucks and War Games Suck Too
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on April 18, 2012
Killzone 2 exists in a strange place where the Michael Bay inspired bombast of Modern Warfare shares space with the gore-soaked dialectics of The Iliad. For all of its surface problems (and there are many), it is a game about shooting dudes that frequently attempts to impart something far different than the mindless jingoism of its brethren. Killzone 2 has a generic science-fiction plot — the “good guys” of the Interplanatary Strategic Alliance (ISA) are fighting a war against the “bad” Helghast army — but it is also a story about the futility of assigning values to combat fuelled by nationalism and historical injustice.
War is hell, it says, and not just for our team.
Developing a Persona Part 1: Time Management
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Reid McCarter on April 13, 2012
The Persona series is revered, the third and fourth entries to the series being particularly adored. A lot of platitudes are tossed around about these games, including (but not limited to) bold claims like their being “saviours of the Japanese role-playing game.” Obviously this warrants investigation so, about two months after buying a PlayStation Vita and playing three actual Vita games on it, I ended up downloading the PSP version of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3.
Now, a few hours in I’m willing to take a (self-inflicted gun)shot at trying to unpack just what it is that makes this game compelling to so many people.
Journey, Abstraction and the Invention of Language
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on March 28, 2012
I’ve spent the last five Christmas Eves having dinner with a table full of people speaking a language I don’t understand. My partner was born and raised in Canada, but her parents were born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, leaving several decades ago when the country was still under the thumb of the USSR. She, her brother and her cousins are (frustratingly, perfectly) multilingual while I only speak English fluently and can somewhat passably read and understand spoken French. At Christmas family gatherings with only two or three others who can’t speak/understand Polish it’s only natural that conversations eventually shift away from English. The older members of the family are most comfortable speaking in their first language after all and, especially after several bottles of wine and vodka have been emptied, their usual consideration for including everyone in every conversation starts to dissipate. The first year I came to the big Christmas Eve dinner I felt extremely awkward because of this. I imagine a lot of people surrounded by a language they don’t understand get to wondering what the hell is being said and, most anxiety-inducing of all, if they’re being talked about without understanding it.
The next year it seemed a bit better. I knew these people, had grown more comfortable drinking my wine and sort of drifting out when the conversations turned to Polish. The Christmas after that I barely noticed a thing and now, all these years and several failed attempts to learn the language (it is goddamned impenetrable, but I’ll keep trying until I die) later, I find that I can follow the gist of my in-laws’ Polish dialogue despite only recognizing a handful of words. It is possible to intuit the rhythm of a sentence, to understand how changes in tone and volume communicate a joke or sarcastic remark without a proper understanding of the complexities of the language. This is, I think, a common phenomenon. In lieu of properly interpreting a language, those regularly surrounded by it will at least learn to “feel” how it works.
By the end of two hours with Journey a similar thing had happened.
Communication Breakdown in Dragon Age: Origins
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on March 14, 2012
My first experience with a Bioware game was Dragon Age: Origins. At the time I didn’t know much of anything about the studio, what their “return to roots” project meant to people or, really, what I was getting into at all. I just read a lot of really good things about a game — namely, the amount of narrative choice it offered players — and thought it would be worth trying out. Now, having played two Mass Effects, two Fallouts and Skyrim, I’ve gone back into the first Dragon Age with, maybe, a bit more of an understanding of how to approach these kind of massively customizable RPGs (MCRPG?) and a better grasp on how to play off their shortcomings.
In short, I’ve learned how to communicate with a videogame by speaking its own language.
In Other Words: Mar. 2nd, 2012
Posted by digital love child in In Other Words, Reid McCarter on March 2, 2012
I spent this entire week reading articles on videogames so you didn’t have to. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea of the love that shows for you, you faceless audience? No?
Well, screw you too, and here are your articles.
In Other Words: Feb. 24, 2012
Posted by digital love child in In Other Words, Reid McCarter on February 24, 2012
Look, man, we can only do so much in a week. As hard as we try to give you frequent updates, filled with tasty reading treats, we’re just a small group of writers. That’s why Digital Love Child will be adding a new, weekly feature that highlights some of the best videogame criticism and/or reporting from other people.
Thus, the debut of In Other Words.
Renegade Ops or; Blowing Shit Up: The Game
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on February 15, 2012
Developers spend a lot of time trying to make things as pretty as possible in videogames and sometimes that effort kind of misses the point. While fantastic visuals are easy to talk about in a preview or review — and translate well to short promotional videos and screenshots — they aren’t nearly as important as how a game actually feels. So subjective, but so important, the minute details of play contribute much more to how enjoyable a title is than any breathtaking vista or lovingly animated character.
Describing how this works is difficult (unless, I suppose, you create your own critical vocabulary), but is well worth the effort. It’s also essential that critics of any stripe point out good examples of videogames that just plain feel good to play.
This, I think, is the best way to start talking about Renegade Ops.
What Kind of Adventure Can We Have Now?
Posted by digital love child in Articles, Reid McCarter on February 10, 2012
My Twitter feed this week has pretty much transformed into a Double Fine IV drip. Each day has given me a steady supply of information on the studio, first regarding Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson offering to fund a Psychonauts sequel, and second, a Kickstarter campaign designed to let users fund a new, traditional adventure game. While the former development is currently being hashed out in private (or may be dead? I don’t know), the latter has reached a very public conclusion less than a day after its appearance: Double Fine will be making an adventure game again.
All of this begs the question of what kind of place a new entry to the antiquated genre — even one developed by some of the masters of the form — would have in today’s climate?
Welcome to Erf: X-COM: UFO Defense
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Michael Campagnaro, Reid McCarter on January 30, 2012
Michael Campagnaro and I sat down to play an hour of X-COM: UFO Defense, the 1994 alien invasion cult classic for PC. The point of it was to kick off a Let’s Try to Understand series with a game that neither of us had played and know little about, but that has many devoted fans. Because X-COM is a unique brand of strategy and because it was designed 18 years ago, it seemed like a good choice. We strapped on our tinfoil hats and settled into our commander’s chairs in an attempt to fumble our way through saving the world, reconvening one hour later to talk out the trauma of intergalactic warfare as conducted by total newcomers.
