When I started playing "Space Marine" I knew very little about Games Workshop's Warhammer & Warhammer 40K products. Now I'm a pretty big old nerd, the kind of guy who watches "White And Nerdy" and embraces it as my personal theme song, so I was aware something called "Warhammer 40K" existed. Stuff with the label has been semi-ubiquitous in the comic book shops, sci-fi/fantasy specialty book stores and other geeky venues where I've wasted most of my disposable income. Once upon a time, I even played a game called "Warhammer Online". But my disinterest was so complete, nothing Warhammer 40K-related has ever appeared near the top of my list of Amazon recommends (except, of course, "Space Marine" itself). I had some vague notion that the 40K story backdrop was a cross between generic high fantasy and the "Pigs in Space" skits from the old Muppet Show.
During my first hour in "Space Marine" I realized that, (while the Orcs _are_ pretty hilarious) the "Guns of Navarone" storyline took itself way too seriously for Warhammer 40K be experienced only as simple comedy. I've been reading up on Warhammer 40K, both on the Wikipedia and http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/, so now I know a bit more than very little, consider myself an expert and feel entitled to rant at length.
Let's start with a TL;DR tangent about the concept of Ragnarok, the ancient Norse Doomsday myth. According to my garbled and distorted memories of old Thor comics from the 80s, the Vikings miniseries on History Channel and Bullfinch's Mythology, Ragnarok is the epic final battle that will precede the destruction of both Midgard (Earth) and Valhalla (Viking Heaven). The good guys (Odin, Thor, Luke Skywalker, Spongebob, etc...) and all the warriors gathered up by the Valkyries over the centuries will issue out of the mead halls and dive bars of Valhalla for one final glorious battle with the bad guys (Loki, Surtur the Fire Giant/Demon, Darth Sidious, Squidward, etc...) . The bad guys WILL THEN WIN and burn the world to cinders. Hopefully, a few of the good gods will manage to survive and create a gentler, kinder world to replace the old, but there doesn't really seem to be a solid guarantee.
What kind of people create such a mythology? What kind of fatalism must permeate a culture for it to generate a mythic cosmos where the bad gods ultimately triumph? What kind of warrior becomes a berserker believing that his reward for dying gloriously in battle will consist of preparing endlessly to fight in the final battle to preserve the world. ... on the losing side? Is it any wonder that Vikings managed to terrorize everyone from Byzantium to Baffin Island until long after Christian missionaries got their hooks in?
None of that really matters, of course. What's important to understand is that the mythic cosmology of Ragnarok has liberally influenced the entertainment-oriented cosmology of gaming Nerd-dom. Pen and paper RPG source guides, tabletop miniatures rulesets, and video game storylines have been borrowing and bending the concept of the tragic fight for a doomed world for decades now, and serving it back up to the nerd community with varying degrees of success.
The most commercially successful example (at the moment) is, of course, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Skyrim is a cold, icy land inhabited by a people knows as the Norse....err....the Nords. According to ancient Nord prophecy, the king of dragons, Alduin the World Eater, will someday, inevitably, return and destroy the world by bathing it in blood and fire. Then he'll eat it for good measure. With the sort of serendipity almost standard for video game openings, the day of Alduin's return coincides with the day the player finds himself about to be executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Inadvertently assisted by the World Eater, the player escapes the clutches of his captors and soon discovers he is one of (perhaps the last one of?) the legendary Dragonborn. High adventure and general video game mayhem and hijinks ensue.
While Alduin's creators obviously owe a debt to Tolkein's Smaug, they were also clearly familiar, at least on some level, with Jormungand, The World Serpent. Jormungand is one of the children of Loki, a great serpent wrapped around Midgard with his tail clutched in his teeth. Ragnarok will begin when his jaws release his tail. He is destined to be killed by Thor, but only _after_ poisoning the sky, then mortally wounding Thor himself, dooming all creation in the process. Alduin plays a similar role. His reemergence into the world signals the end times. The optimistic view among the (very few) historically-literate characters encountered by the player is that mankind's reign as master of the world is over. The most educated view is that the literal end of the world is in sight, and there is nothing to be done about it but cower in a hole.
Skyrim is a successful, mass-market video game, so naturally it fails to fully embrace the inherent pessimism and gloom required to truly capture the spirit of Ragnarok. The Dragonborn's job is to take the immovable, unbreakable doom set down by ancient prophecy, pick it up and bounce it over the horizon like a flubber-coated frisbee. When warned that he might stop the birth of a better world, The Dragonborn tells his ancient mentor "The next world can $%^&-ing take care of itself!" (My Dragonborn mentally inserts the expletive, anyway) The Dragonborn finds plenty of opportunity to acquire the physical and magical resources needed to vaporize the World Eater. In the end, its not even really that hard (unless the player heavily mods his game - Deadly Dragons and Dragon Combat Overhaul make the last fight a bit more epic). Skyrim invokes and embraces Ragnarok the way the seasonal goods aisle of a CVS or Walmart embraces zombies, witches and ghouls every October - figures of terror are turned into skimpy Halloween costumes for young women who want to upset their fathers, and molded candy for kids seeking to induldge their cravings for sweets.
This is not a criticism, mind you. I LOVE Skyrim. According to my too-embarrassing-to-be-revealed "hours played" number on Steam, I've spent more time running Skyrim on my PC than all other Steam games put together. And some of those other games have been played in the hundreds of hours. Inside every (male) video gamer is a five year old boy. Feelings of omnipotence and omni-importance apparently appeal to those five year old boys even more than candy. This is the approach of Skyrim to Doomsday. And it's completely typical of the approach to Ragnarok one finds in gaming.
The entire "Warhammer 40K" mythos boldly strikes off in exactly the opposite direction. From what I can tell, the Warhammer 40K source writers took the almost unbearably grim legend of Ragnorak, then excised all the cheery bits about the possible birth of a gentler world with a meat cleaver. The creators then appended images of Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic doom. After Doomsday, the galaxy will be overrun with semi-vampirical Chaos Gods, rival horrors inspired by the movie Alien, and trillions and trillions and trillions of greenskinned goofballs from a race of genetically engineered doomsday bio-weapons that look and act the way Tolkien's Orcs would if they appeared in a "Pigs in Space" skit scripted and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Mankind has an empire spread across a million worlds. But its a nasty, decaying empire where nobody knows how anything actually works, and everything is maintained by a combination of superstition, corruption and poorly understood photocopies of old "Popular Mechanics" articles. There _was_ a glorious, enlightened Golden Age thousands of years in the past (until it was wrecked by the irresponsible frolicking of Space Elves). And later there was a hopeful crusade thousands of years later that _almost_ fixed things. But the crusade failed and there is currently no long-term hope. Humanity's genetically and cybernetically enhanced defenders are fighting a holding action against the inevitable day the perimeter crumbles and genocide proceeds at the hands of tentacled horrors, goat-headed mutants and giant, green-skinned nosepickers from "The Hobbit". And the overwhelming majority of those defenders are half-crazed, bloodthirsty berserkers or suspicious, trigger-happy religious fanatics. Most of the rest are jaded, egotistical prima donnas one bounced paycheck away from shouting "I'm outta here" and defecting to the Chaos Lords. Humanity's best days are in the past, and the few other civilizations out there are in even worse shape. Maybe today, maybe ten-thousand years from now, one too many Space Marines will get their brains sucked out by multi-tentacled horrors, or get buried under a wave of Space Orcs, or simply lose their marbles, and mankind _will_ perish.
Obviously, its easy to milk this sort of thing this for laughs. And, especially with regard to anything Orc-related, Games Workshop and the subtribe of geek-dom that embraces all things "Warhammer" often does, especially when gaming. But it also provides the pathos needed for over-the-top, operatic drama, gothic tragedy and relentless action. A quick perusal on Amazon turns up well over a dozen Warhammer 40K novels, all of which appear to take the backdrop seriously instead of as an excuse to work in "Da red wunz go fasta" jokes.
"Space Marine" takes the tragic, operatic route with its storyline. The player avatar, Captain Titus, is a decent (genetically enhanced super)man, a fearless warrior struggling to protect the people of a world under siege, and to recover from disaster before military necessity compels his superiors to pull the plug and nuke everything (and everyone) from orbit. Mark Strong, the voice actor, deserves real credit for imbuing Titus with just the right balance of determination, humility and humor to really stand out as a heroic figure in a gaming genre filled with mock criminal sociopaths, ridiculous accents, Duke Nukem wannabes, and pseudo-soldiers doing their best imitation of George C. Scott's "Patton". Ditto for the poor, under-appreciated dialogue writer(s) (who, if even mentioned in the game's credits, is so far down the list I can't really be blamed for not finding the name).
"Space Marine" is an excellent game, but it still makes me sad. Very sad, in fact. The storyline embraces the grim ethos of Ragnarok. Where "Skyrim" offers me an escape from a (self-perceived) life of bumbling ineffectiveness and the slow physical decay of middle age, "Space Marine" seems to be more of a metaphor for that life. The Warhammer 40K backdrop is basically a tale of disaster and missed opportunities leading to an not-so-happy apogee. I wish I could say I don't ever view _my_ life that way, but that is probably the dominant internal narrative I now carry around. As it is with the "Empire of Man", I am increasingly aware my physical body is now doomed to slow decay, old-age and death. I might slow the process of entropy a little bit, if I make an effort to exercise and eat right, but ultimately I will only stave off the inevitable. Or maybe not even. I might just trade the risk of cancer and heart disease for musculoskeletal injuries and foodborne diseases. At least processed food will kill me slowly, right?
The game's economic history as a product doesn't cheer me up, either. The developer, Relic Entertainment, meticulously hand-crafted a game that remained true in its storyline, visual presentation and spirit to the nerdy little mythos from which it sprang, while still being great fun to play, even for someone like me who is not a fan of either "Warhammer" or 3D-shooters as genres. Despite appearing to do just about everything right, the developers were shackled to the publisher THQ when it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon after the game was published. "Space Marine" wound up orphaned, abandoned and dumped, quite prematurely, in a sort of virtual online bargain bin at Steam and Amazon, priced lower than a ghastly, universally reviled pile of shame like "Duke Nukem Forever". This is ultimately because a man can do everything right and STILL wind up flat on his back. And most of us don't manage to do everything right. That's one of the painful lessons a lot of us refuse to learn before middle age, but that becomes ever harder to deny as dents and dings pile up. And it may, of course, be the central point of the Ragnarok myth. I can almost hear Heimdal's Gjallarhorn ringing, warning Thor, Odin and all the mead-drunk viking ghosts of the approach of giants and the end of all things.
Heck, even the name of the protaganist, Titus, induces personal melancholia and a sense of doom. My favorite sitcom of all time was "Titus", probably the most gloomy sitcom ever made. Every episode opened and closed with Christopher Titus(**please PRETTY PLEASE see final note below**) delivering a monologue simultaneously grim and hilarious in black and white, in a bare room illuminated by a lightbulb he would turn off at the end, sometimes by unscrewing it. "Courage in the face of certain doom" pretty much summed up the collective attitude of the characters, loosely based on Christopher Titus own family, seeking to cope with their various personal and familial dysfunctions. The show was brilliant, hilarious, original, critically acclaimed and filled with the gothic spirit of "Warhammer 40K" or the Ragnarok. And naturally, not that many people watched and it was cancelled halfway through its third season. Titus was even the name of Rome's emperor when when Mt. Vesuvius blew up and covered all those poor people in Pompeii with ash. That has GOT to make the name Titus a pretty gloomy thing. If any Romans were swept up by the Valkyries and taken to Valhalla, their contingent on the fields of Ragnarok will be lead by someone named Titus.
Getting back to Ragnarok, Warhammer 40K, and their relationship to the meaning of everything, maybe it really is about middle age. Maybe the tale of Ragnarok is a good yarn to tell among warriors who know, that eventually they will die on the battlefield, or maybe worse, live past their prime. Either way, death and doom will come. The original Ragnarok myth contains seeds of hope focused on a potential future after the old hands are gone. And that seems to resonate with the growing sense of creeping age, too. I hope for a better life for my kids. And I haven't even needed to go off to war (outside the world of video games, natch) to want that life to be peaceful and free of strife (other than the virtual & 3D rendered sort).
Once again, I'm tired and a little sad, so that's all for now. I suppose at some point I'm obligated to actually discuss the game itself rather than using its existence as a flagpole to run up the dirty laundry of my psyche. But that can wait until tomorrow.
Final Note on Christopher Titus: I could rant and rave about how Christopher Titus is the funniest man alive, but that would take too much time away from plowing through my unplayed Steam Library and ranting about how these games are the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Instead I will end with a plea for everyone who loves Star Wars, or enjoys comedy, or was a teenager ~1980, or who just has six minutes to kill to watch I was a teenage Darth Vader. Christopher Titus is a very funny man. And that monologue is nerd gold.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Sunday, January 5, 2014
"Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine" or "Grandson, I am disappoint."
I dropped Warhammer 40,000:Space Marine into my Steam shopping cart on Jul 2, 2012. I spent $29.97 for a purchase that included a version of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II(Complete Pack version, whatever that is....) and Dawn of War II: Retribution - Complete DLC Bundle. I have no idea whether I bought these games as a unified bundle or dropped them all in the shopping cart separately, but I suspect the former. To be honest, I am still not entirely clear on whether "Warhammer 40,000:Dawn of War II" and "Dawn of War II: Retribution" are actually different games. (I suppose I'll find out, if this project lasts long enough....)
Why did I buy it? I wish I could say with any certainty. My memory is very foggy. But I believe at some point before this I overheard a conversation on the Lunchbox Bandits Ventrilo server among people who had recently played Retribution. It sounded like they had enjoyed it. When something that looked like Retribution's complete DLC version turned up on Steam for sale (probably bundled with the other two games) I sort of remembered that conversation even though it was days or months later. So I probably intended to purchase Retribution and "Space Marine" arrived as a sort of add-on.
"Space Marine" then sat unplayed and uninstalled in my inventory for 18 months. It shared this fate with the other two 40K games purchased in the same transaction. Unlike the others though, "Space Marine" occasionally induced pangs of mild guilt. Every so often, the game would be prominently displayed for sale on Steam, along with its Metacritic rating of 74, reminding me that I had wasted money on what was probably a perfectly decent game. Worse, Amazon kept recommending the game to me, which was at least a tell-tale sign that it was the sort of game I might actually enjoy playing. The relief from knowing Amazon had yet to obtain access to the contents of my Steam library only mildly compensated for the discomfort of being reminded that I payed for the right to play "Space Marine", but then had never actually bothered.
I occasionally felt as though the ghost of my ancient paternal grandfather was whispering "Waste not, want not..." and mumbling other incoherent, long-forgotten frugality-lauding aphorisms into my ear. In life, the man knew them all, and would recite them whenever remotely appropriate. Grampa was born in 1898, and lived for just over a century. He was in his mid-thirties when he lost his savings in the Great Depression and his forties when he worked in the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was 50 when the first transistor-based computer went online and over 70 when the Apollo Project put a man on the Moon. By the time I knew him as a child he was positively ancient, older than most men ever get to be. He lead an amazing life.
But by the time I was a young man I disliked him. And I knew the feeling was mutual because he had openly said so. Its not really worth going into the specifics, but in the Summer 1991 we had a huge falling out. He made it clear he thought I was both ungrateful and undeserving. And I decided I would never again attempt to gain his approval.
Over two decades later, more than a decade buried, Grandpa sits on my shoulder, giving me a hard time about "Space Marine". The feeling induced is simultaneously mournful, irritating and completely ridiculous.
So "Space Marine" was the perfect game with which to begin the long march through half-forgotten Steam fire sales and impulse buys. Perhaps more than any of its neglected kin, it induced the guilt which caused me to make this accursed resolution to begin with. I specifically had it in mind when I made the resolution.
Which of course, has nothing to do with how I picked the first game to spend an hour with. I looked at my Steam library, saw the number "105" under "All Games". Then I went to Random.org, put in the numbers 1 and 105 and got the number 37. Counting down the list turned up "FTL: Faster Than Light" which I HAD played (4 hours according to Steam) the same day I purchased it. So I tried again. Game number 97 turned out to be "Space Marine". Just the sort of Cosmic Irony that makes it difficult to believe the universe has no creator or that this creator has no sense of humor.
Now I'm tired and sad. More thoughts on "Space Marine" next time.
Why did I buy it? I wish I could say with any certainty. My memory is very foggy. But I believe at some point before this I overheard a conversation on the Lunchbox Bandits Ventrilo server among people who had recently played Retribution. It sounded like they had enjoyed it. When something that looked like Retribution's complete DLC version turned up on Steam for sale (probably bundled with the other two games) I sort of remembered that conversation even though it was days or months later. So I probably intended to purchase Retribution and "Space Marine" arrived as a sort of add-on.
"Space Marine" then sat unplayed and uninstalled in my inventory for 18 months. It shared this fate with the other two 40K games purchased in the same transaction. Unlike the others though, "Space Marine" occasionally induced pangs of mild guilt. Every so often, the game would be prominently displayed for sale on Steam, along with its Metacritic rating of 74, reminding me that I had wasted money on what was probably a perfectly decent game. Worse, Amazon kept recommending the game to me, which was at least a tell-tale sign that it was the sort of game I might actually enjoy playing. The relief from knowing Amazon had yet to obtain access to the contents of my Steam library only mildly compensated for the discomfort of being reminded that I payed for the right to play "Space Marine", but then had never actually bothered.
I occasionally felt as though the ghost of my ancient paternal grandfather was whispering "Waste not, want not..." and mumbling other incoherent, long-forgotten frugality-lauding aphorisms into my ear. In life, the man knew them all, and would recite them whenever remotely appropriate. Grampa was born in 1898, and lived for just over a century. He was in his mid-thirties when he lost his savings in the Great Depression and his forties when he worked in the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was 50 when the first transistor-based computer went online and over 70 when the Apollo Project put a man on the Moon. By the time I knew him as a child he was positively ancient, older than most men ever get to be. He lead an amazing life.
But by the time I was a young man I disliked him. And I knew the feeling was mutual because he had openly said so. Its not really worth going into the specifics, but in the Summer 1991 we had a huge falling out. He made it clear he thought I was both ungrateful and undeserving. And I decided I would never again attempt to gain his approval.
Over two decades later, more than a decade buried, Grandpa sits on my shoulder, giving me a hard time about "Space Marine". The feeling induced is simultaneously mournful, irritating and completely ridiculous.
So "Space Marine" was the perfect game with which to begin the long march through half-forgotten Steam fire sales and impulse buys. Perhaps more than any of its neglected kin, it induced the guilt which caused me to make this accursed resolution to begin with. I specifically had it in mind when I made the resolution.
Which of course, has nothing to do with how I picked the first game to spend an hour with. I looked at my Steam library, saw the number "105" under "All Games". Then I went to Random.org, put in the numbers 1 and 105 and got the number 37. Counting down the list turned up "FTL: Faster Than Light" which I HAD played (4 hours according to Steam) the same day I purchased it. So I tried again. Game number 97 turned out to be "Space Marine". Just the sort of Cosmic Irony that makes it difficult to believe the universe has no creator or that this creator has no sense of humor.
Now I'm tired and sad. More thoughts on "Space Marine" next time.
"About the title of this blog" or "Happy New Year!"
Like a lot of other people since the Babylonian Empire was a going concern, I've been in the habit of making several New Years Resolutions every year. And, like a lot of other people since the era clay tablets represented the best available storage medium and communication mechanism, I don't even remember having made them a few months later, let alone actually succeed at any of them.
This year I decided to do something different. I created a fairly short, entirely mental list of tiny goals I was reasonably sure I could keep, such as "Nag my daughter harder about going to Karate lessons and finishing her book reports ahead of time" or "Get the mini-poodle a haircut before one of the Siamese's claws gets hopelessly snagged in his fur again".
But I did set one semi-big, pain-in-the-posterior goal. No, No. It was not, "I will start an unread blog long after that fad had peaked and doing so has become an indication of how out-of-touch I am."
It was "I will not buy another Steam game, no matter what it's price, until I have played every Steam game I have ever purchased for AT LEAST ONE HOUR. That may seem like it belonged on the list of tiny, easily-kept resolutions. But I have discovered over the past few days it is going to be a little bit more difficult than I originally thought.
First, when I actually examined my Steam library a few days ago, I began to realize out that the commitment was a bit bigger than I had realized. I appear to have 105 games in my Steam library, half of which have never been installed, let alone played. Apparently, I made a 60-70 hour time commitment, not the 10-20 hour commitment that could be completed over a long weekend. 60-70 hours is more like a full-blown New Years Resolution such as "exercise 3 hours a week" or "repair and refinish the deck". Those are the kind of resolutions that usually fail. Trying to avoid failure was the entire point of assembling a list of tiny resolutions.
The second issue is that some of these games are...ummm.....uh, well, to be blunt: I just do NOT want to spend an hour playing them. Some appear to be awful or unpleasant to play. I find myself hitting the "play" button and wondering a few minutes later, "Why was this game made?" Sometimes I look at the title or go to the game's community page and find myself wondering "Why the #$%^ did I buy this?" And I've already found that I just cannot bring myself to start playing one game in particular, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the game itself, but because of an odd personal neurosis.
The third issue is, perversely enough, that some of these games are extraordinarily difficult to turn off after just one hour. Some are difficult to stop playing after a few afternoons. They are a joy to play. They tickle parts of my gamer psyche the way a fine meal seduces a gourmand, maybe the way a piece of sushi from Sukiyabashi Jiro appeals to a connoisseur. (Or maybe just the way a jar of meth appeals to an addict....) But games are a lot more time-consuming than food. When a game tells a good story, the gameplay and graphics are terrific, the tone and feel, the balance of humor, or seriousness, or both, come together just so , its easy to spend dozens, apparently even THOUSANDS (coff coff Skyrim) of hours playing. If I start lingering over one or two, I'll never get through them all before some unbelievable offer appears on Steam and overcomes my pathetically small reserves of self-discipline. Hence, failure becomes almost inevitable.
None of that, of course, answers the question "Why a blog?"
I guess I've kind of wanted to start a diary, or journal, or blog, for a long time. But a diary always seemed too feminine(**Please read note at end before commenting**), a journal too self-indulgent and/or neurotic, and a blog seemed to require an actual theme of some sort besides "stuff I want to rant about". Various advice I've read the last few years about starting a blog uniformly advises newbie bloggers to write about things they care about passionately. I do care about video games (even if I'm not sure its a "passionate" sort of caring), but I've always felt as though there were enough decent blogs about video games already, and I had nothing original to say, at least that anyone might be interested in...
...until a few days into this unplayed-Steam-purchases project. I cannot recall stumbling over something like this before online, which means it will be original, at least to me. I admit I'd actually be mildly surprised if nobody anywhere has ever done anything like this before. But since I do not really expect anyone to read this blog anyway, my personal, entirely subjective perspective is the one that's important.
And contrast to the "got-nothing-original-to-say" feeling I had previously, I also feel like I cannot STFU about my thoughts and feelings while playing some of these games. I've been chewing off the ears of my wife and daughter about these games the way a coin collector with Asperger syndrome talks about the various aesthetic qualities of the different images on the backs of the various state-themed quarters. Perhaps that's a valid functional test for being "passionate": Does one feel compelled to keep ranting long after its obvious everyone else has stopped listening?
Sooooooooooo, I guess this blog is an effort to make life a little easier for my wife and daughter. Living with me is enough of a trial all ready without being trapped with a ranting, half-crazed, obnoxiously loquacious video gamer every time we drive to Baker's Square for breakfast. This should provide a better outlet for ranting.
My focus is going to be completely narcissistic. I come here not to provide criticism or reviews of these almost forgotten games. Anyone can find a dozen reviews of the least-played flop ever coded with a quick Amazon or Google search. Who needs more of that?
No. This is going to be primarily a series of rants about my entirely subjective emotional experience playing through different games. I'll describe my feelings not just about the games themselves, but also such widely varying topics as my purchase decision and the broader thoughts about the game as a product of our civilization . (Question: Is a video game a product of our civilization as a whole, or more properly thought of as a product of the semi-overlapping subcultures of developers and gamers?)
Like all hopeful but somewhat realistic new bloggers in my age category, I also expect to go off on utterly unrelated tangents such as the latest "Gungam Style" parody, struggles to raise my children, growing misgivings about the state of youth today, and complaints about the latest flu strain. But it will mostly be about how I feel about different games I'm pretty sure I should have never purchased from Steam.
**Note about diaries as "too feminine":
I aware this sort of statement is an example of male chauvinism, sexism, anti-feminism. etc.... and am mildly ashamed of it in consequence. But the statement that "a diary seemed too feminine" is a completely accurate description of my internal, completely subjective emotional response to the idea of keeping a personal diary. At some point in childhood I apparently internalized an "Archie Bunker"-like persona that never fails to cause intense, shame-inducing psychic earthquakes if I even consider doing "girly stuff" like playing with dolls, wearing dresses, buying comfortable underwear or keeping a diary. Why keeping a diary is on his list of taboo "girly" activities is as unclear and shrouded in personal mystery as his origin. But "diary" is definitely on his list of things I am not permitted to do without shame. And Archie (for want of a better name) is too deeply rooted in the dark core of my subconscious for me to really get rid of him. So if it bothers you, feel free to leave a hateful comment. But don't expect much in the way of either soliciting an apology from or inducing any sort of enlightenment in the author.
My focus is going to be completely narcissistic. I come here not to provide criticism or reviews of these almost forgotten games. Anyone can find a dozen reviews of the least-played flop ever coded with a quick Amazon or Google search. Who needs more of that?
No. This is going to be primarily a series of rants about my entirely subjective emotional experience playing through different games. I'll describe my feelings not just about the games themselves, but also such widely varying topics as my purchase decision and the broader thoughts about the game as a product of our civilization . (Question: Is a video game a product of our civilization as a whole, or more properly thought of as a product of the semi-overlapping subcultures of developers and gamers?)
Like all hopeful but somewhat realistic new bloggers in my age category, I also expect to go off on utterly unrelated tangents such as the latest "Gungam Style" parody, struggles to raise my children, growing misgivings about the state of youth today, and complaints about the latest flu strain. But it will mostly be about how I feel about different games I'm pretty sure I should have never purchased from Steam.
**Note about diaries as "too feminine":
I aware this sort of statement is an example of male chauvinism, sexism, anti-feminism. etc.... and am mildly ashamed of it in consequence. But the statement that "a diary seemed too feminine" is a completely accurate description of my internal, completely subjective emotional response to the idea of keeping a personal diary. At some point in childhood I apparently internalized an "Archie Bunker"-like persona that never fails to cause intense, shame-inducing psychic earthquakes if I even consider doing "girly stuff" like playing with dolls, wearing dresses, buying comfortable underwear or keeping a diary. Why keeping a diary is on his list of taboo "girly" activities is as unclear and shrouded in personal mystery as his origin. But "diary" is definitely on his list of things I am not permitted to do without shame. And Archie (for want of a better name) is too deeply rooted in the dark core of my subconscious for me to really get rid of him. So if it bothers you, feel free to leave a hateful comment. But don't expect much in the way of either soliciting an apology from or inducing any sort of enlightenment in the author.
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