played call of duty modern warfare 3, single-player mode. quite boring and repetitive! had some vaguely neat moments which were otherwise squandered by this feeling of unpleasant deja vu i got from roughly 99% of the things i was doing in the game.
got profoundly tired of the following two sections:
-break door down and kill people in next room in slow motion in order to save hostages
-something knocks the character semi-unconscious/otherwise helpless
this is literally how every single conflict in the game was resolved, and i can think of around ten examples of each of these methods being employed. at one point i think i had been able to convince myself that the call of duty games had some vaguely worthwhile method of storytelling-through-action, and i guess i'm far enough removed from the other modern warfare games that i don't really remember if they're guilty of the same deathly idiotic and repetitive methods that this game featured, but mw3 is probably one of the most stunningly moronic games i've played in a really long time. i'm not even really applying this to the sheer aims of the story or anything like that, as that was always deeply empty and unstimulating, i'm talking more about how the playthrough and what you physically do ultimately unravels the story. the game deliberately, knowingly, catches itself in this time-warp where every five minutes is a very, very slight variation of the previous five minutes.
i dunno, maybe i just got really goddamn tired of soap constantly almost dying and having to try to keep him alive for no knowable goddamn reason, as if he's REALLY anything more than some stupid goddamn dead-weight grunt, even though he proves that he's skilled only in crawling around on the ground and being a huge goddamn bullet magnet.
actually the part of the game where i did not just put down the controller and give up on the game but i probably SHOULD was when they "went for the throat" in their nauseating pseudo-controversial way by having a small child inexplicably blow up. kinda disappointed that i did not decide at that moment that this game had nothing to contribute to my life, because that should have been a major indicator that i was making a terrible mistake and allowing myself to perceive the thoughts of very empty people.
i dunno, just fucking stupid. i played black ops semi-recently and thought it was actually pretty neat, like it was one big goddamn homage to silly 70s government/war dramas(half expected dustin hoffman to be in it somewhere), just well-done enough not to be completely laughable. maybe that spoiled me or something, i don't know. just glad i borrowed these games rather than dishing out $60 for less than a half dozen hours of mindless exploding shit.
also i played tales of vesperia recently.
i am kinda torn on this game. it's got a really tragically stock story, stock gameplay, stock everything, but i couldn't really help but really get into this game and enjoy it, despite the fact that i really should know better. i never liked games from the tales series and figured this one would be the same, only playing it because a friend of mine left it at my house, but this game is really the complete opposite of virtually every game out there, getting the absolute most out of completely empty concepts.
had some fucking essay i was writing here about the relationship between the player and the narrative in jrpgs, but i'm not going to go into some internal debate here. basically i liked this game as much as i did because so much of what you do is really contextually relevant to the story, to the point where i found it rather involving despite it not having that much pure creative merit. so many games kinda push you away, fail to really carefully consider how the story becomes a major factor in the things you are physically going to be doing in the game, but tales of vesperia really embraces that relationship, keeps the context of the story very relevant almost at all times, although just loose enough that you can usually just go roam around somewhere if you feel like it. something like final fantasy 13 had this bad habit of failing to make a real compelling argument for why you were really doing what you were doing the vast majority of the time, and then not following through on any interesting potential conflicts that could have arose. this game, despite its internal creative failings, rarely shied away from dramatic conflict when the opportunity arose within its own parameters, and very carefully tied everything you do in the game to the story. you actually got the feeling that you were doing something or a part of something a lot of the time, not just senselessly grinding away for no apparent reason.
i'm not sure if this is really more some sense of nostalgia i felt for games that made an honest, deliberate effort to involve you actively in the storytelling aims of the story, but i felt like this was the right way for a game to try telling a story from a structural perspective.
i don't know if this really makes a lot of sense here, or if i'm just trying to justify a game that had such embarrassingly cliche elements. this isn't even a game i would really suggest to anybody either, except maybe those lost souls who have honestly convinced themselves that the psx rpgs were the all-time hightlight of the history of videogames. even then, if you've read this far, you're probably far too jaded for that. i'm probably just experiencing early onset senility.