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Mar. 8th, 2004
I also find it interesting that, in the cinematic cut-scenes, the characters aren't totally amoral; they have an organized criminal's sense of justice and loyality (or at least how it's usually depicted in fiction), loving and rewarding their friends even as they murder their enemies. The way they scoff at the laws and rights that maintain the civilization they enjoy makes them no friends of mine, but they're still more agreeable than the utterly psychopathic behavior that the game encourages the player to engage in during actual gameplay. Shrug.
That said, I've stopped reconciling why I sometimes enjoy the psycopathy so much, blowing off steam by plugging cops and running over old ladies, giving no thought to the little texture-mapped widows and orphans I'm apparently making. I've concluded that it's closer to a childish fascination for igniting ants or salting slugs than any sort of redirected desire to actually rampage through my city's streets with a flamethrower. Even though your innumerable victims in the game are shaped like people, they're actually not very human, compared to the polygon population of games like The Sims.
Vice City residents are very delicate, and you're always heavily armed, so killing them is a trivial act. People there respond to the sudden decapitation of their neighbor by running around in a panic for a while (or, if they're police, chasing you for a while) and then forgetting about it, to resume their aimless wandering. Sims are very diferent. You can't shoot them, but you can, say, suddenly delete all the doors and windows of the room they're in, and they'll wallow in their own bodily waste while starving to death, slowly, spending the whole time pleading with you, the player, to free them from their torment. If a Sim does die (either through this sort of cruelty or though some swifter domestic disaster), he's marked with a gravestone or urn, over which his friends and loved ones occasionally pause to weep. I have done the wall-in thing only once (when I realized it was possible), and felt so honestly terrible about it as soon as my poor guy started wailing that I had to stop. You couldn't ever convince me to do anything like that again.
Saturday: participated, along with most of jmac's Birthday Party, in a mini-puzzlehunt staged by
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tahnan and hosted by jadelennox and temvald. It was designed by one of the people who is designing next year's MIT hunt, so I'm very much looking forward to that now. We worked on it as two teams (one upstairs, one downstairs), and total work-time was maybe six hours, with both teams finishing at about the same time.This hunt contained twelve puzzles and a metapuzzle. I actually solved two or three puzzles by myself, and assisted with a couple more. (Two members of my sub-team also solved at least a puzzle apiece after they went on and on about how bad they were with puzzles.) Boy, this was so much more rewarding than January's hunt, in which saw me shifting letters and numbers and little paper triangles around for hours and hours and getting nowhere.
The mini-hunt, designed by "The" Dan Katz, is available from his webpage. It's the one called "Major Malfunction".
Sunday: Cleared a nine-footer. Gaaaah. (Got a D on DDRMAX2's "Breakdown" on Heavy.) Triggered the "ugh, heart exploding now" feeling that, I'm pleased to say, seven-footers no longer give me. (In fact, I can clear clear sevens and many eights pretty consistently, though rarely getting better than a B grade.)