Xmas Updates

Brent and I bought each other co-operative videogames for Christmas.

I think that's really adorable.

Updates

We've got a hard drive failure, and I've currently got it slaved and copying to an external to reboot a new internal arriving from Western Digital (hopefully) by the end of the week.

After that, some restructuring. I'm getting rid of most of my things. DVDs and books and comics are all on the chopping block as I weed the clutter out of my life. So many things, comics especially, I purchase only to read or view once, and then they sit on a shelf or in a box taking up space. The stack grows by the day and contains tons of trade paperbacks and DVDs right now. If there's something of mine you want, let me know. I'll probably let it go.

The reason for all of this is because I simply own too much. I want to reduce my possessions to two cardboard boxes for easy storage. This will make travel a lot easier, and will, more importantly, make the idea of buying more things seem abhorrent. In turn, I'll theoretically be saving more money, and have a much more minimalistic living space.


To clarify:

The previous comic I posted was a Rainbow Six Vegas reference, by the way. Wherein a Mexican paramilitary group invades Vegas and you're part of an international terrorist-hunting taskforce that has to take them out. But we decided it would be more fun to think of what Bill O'Reilly's fantasies would be playing that game. That, combined with a lack of context make it seem like the main character is racist. I would propose that isn't so. He's merely a warhawk. Which may be equally sad.

Uncomfortable Conversatons Vol. 2,173

He's not really racist folks, honest. He thinks some Sith are just as nice as white folks, granted they keep to themselves and don't use their Force powers in public, where decent God-fearing Americans could see them.

Tuesday News Day

All comics are cross-posted on the website www.poorlydrawnshark.com, just launched by my friend Dave Moss. I'm not sure when they go live, as I'm alternating weeks, but this is going to be my new regularly updated project for awhile - a comic every other week. You'll notice that most of them star Corey Hudson and myself.



I hope you enjoy them - I'll be posting a round-up of comics already released (most of them already on this blog) and a round-up of my favorite Elephant Words pieces I finished. I wrote on the site for a year, and have over 52 short stories, some of which I'm really proud of.

Never Google These Terms

Click to the immediate right of the panel to advance.

Those of you who don't get this are the lucky ones. The rest of us envy the dead.

Mirror's Edge

I'm running through an office building, frantically pounding up the staircase. I burst out of the fire exit only door, labeled to discourage its use, and as my eyes adjust to the overwhelming brightness that is the sky that high up, I see a man with a gun. He's already drawn it and it's pointed at me, and he's close enough he won't miss.

I can hear my heart beating in my ears, and I act out of instinct, pushing him backwards over the railing. We're at least 15 stories up.

This incident happens in the first third of Mirror's Edge, and is not a scripted event. Unable to control my panic, I send a man, likely one who has a family, and is working a low-wage security job to buy medicine for them as news reports on every screen trumpet the arrival of a new strain of bird flu to the city, to his death. From then on, I am haunted.

Mirror's Edge plays like a first-person shooter, but may be the first game in that genre (if it is even in that genre, as it plays more like a platformer wearing an FPS skin) that not only allows, but encourages you to be a pacifist. You don't start equipped with a gun. If you want one, you can get up close and personal with somebody aiming one at your face and take it from them. Naturally, this is dangerous, not to mention time-consuming, both liable to get you killed in a world that you need to keep moving through at breakneck speed. Even if you do take a weapon, pointing and firing costs precious seconds, and it's often best to just throw it away.

How many other games depend on you taking weapons away from people and then not using them? Aside from sports games, which are still all about domination, since when has a game not required murder? Since when has escape and freedom been such a crucial part of play?

I resolve at that moment not to kill anyone else for the rest of the game. It makes the game more difficult at times, easier at others, but it forces me to consider every action. In Call of Duty, I don't even track my ammo, spraying it at enemies without any consideration of what it's doing. Rainbow Six Vegas forces me to conserve my ammo, and stands apart from the crowd as less a war-game and more an accurate simulation of the horrors of being shot by small pieces of metal traveling at high velocities. Both of them still require murder. Even Mario demands I headstomp Goombas.

Non-puzzle games aside, what other games have you seen this trend in? Is the idea of domination so entrenched in the concept of play that this is almost a fluke? Does that explain the low-sales on one of the most innovative and challenging games of last year?

The Aftermath

Learned a valuable lesson about using an image URL that's locked behind a specific account on a website. Apologies to everybody who saw a broken photo.

Click for larger rendering of the time LeDonne and I killed and ate two peace-loving crustaceans.