FerretBrain - Recent Comments

You can see the most recently posted comments here, 8 at a time; or, if you prefer, we've got a news feed...

Robinson L on Fuck Off, Feist at 18:00 on 02-12-2013 - link Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest "#1 theme" reflects any sort of hierarchy of importance, just that that is the number of the (pretty distinctive) theme which this article introduced. (It also reflects how far back in the site's history this series stretches.)
Arthur B on Look Upon My Pigs, Ye Mighty, and Despair at 10:57 on 02-12-2013 - link
I'm actually a little surprised you liked this, Arthur.

I love that you started this comment in this way because it reads like I am a bad schoolboy and you are a stern headmaster expressing disappointment at my choice of reading material. ;)

The problem is that when you make that the primary goal of the game, it destroys the illusion that the game world is an authorless one, that your observations are your own.

I don't think the game world here was meant to feel authorless, though; it's quite clearly supposed to be a time and a place that Oswald has forcefully stamped his own will on. Likewise, I think it's important to presenting a character study of Mandus to offer observations that clearly emanate from him (such as the diary fragments and his journal).

There were the clichés; when I found Mandus' secret passages, my first thought was "oh boy, a Victorian lord who is a mountain of repressed sexual hunger! What a bold and controversial creation in this, the year of our fucking Lord Two Thousand And Mother-Fucking-Thirteen!!!.

I think that's a cliché that has a significant role, though; it's an early revelation before we even really get to the piggies which is useful in conveying something of what Mandus is actually like, rather than the way he presents himself in the diary fragments (which ISTR allude to the peeping tom nonsense but dresses it up in such romantic terms - and, in particular, fails to note where Mandus is actually observing his bathing ladyfriend from, which rather changes the tone of the thing when you actually discover the one-way mirror).

Re: porcine apocalypse/Tronpig: you say "goofy", I say "delirious". I think the game offers a very deliberate spiral from "edge of realistic" to "completely illucid" which I quite like.

But the worst thing, the thing that still sticks in my craw a month on, is that fact that all of the greatest horrors of the game, the butchery of the London populace and the murder of Oswald's sons, are not conveyed through visuals, but through fucking. notes.

Nope, sorry, this I actually can't chalk down to a difference of opinion. You don't actually get a visual here of Mandus plunging a knife into his kids' hearts or him turning human beings into sausages, but neither do you actually watch James smothering Mary in Silent Hill 2; what you do get here is a plethora of minor details which when you add them up allude directly to those things. The various blink-and-you'll-miss-them hallucinations of the children, the reconstruction of the Temple and the heart-extraction, the cages on the beds which is the first really creepy thing you note, these aren't accidents but direct allusions to what's going on with Mandus which seem weird and out of place when you first see them and take on a horrible context once you've put everything together. (Hell, the conveyor belt sequence manages to combine the reduction of human beings to products in an assembly line, the betrayal of the kids, and the forging of the pigs into one single image).

I was spending most of my time trying to fit the game into what I knew of the cycles of civilization and mythology, modernity and the reactions to it, and various conceptions of the apocalypse.

Honestly didn't get that, though possibly that's because I tend not to believe in the whole "cycles" thing.

mostly because Hamnesia did not seem to have any opinion of the apocalypse beyond an intensely bourgeois fear of the whole business, manifesting in an ardent desire to repress the whole thing and get life back to normal as fast as possible.

I think you are ascribing to TCR an attitude which the game actually overtly and directly ascribes to Mandus. Manifesting an "intensely bourgeois fear of the whole business" is the sum total of the point; Mandus is the fucking bourgeoisie and everything he does from Mexico onwards is a specific manifestation of precisely that ardent desire, the central irony being that by fleeing from one apocalypse he ends up crafting an even worse one.

I'd also like to mention that if Oswald's sons could return from the Somme and take a tour through their father's machine, I think the two of them would be very unimpressed.

I don't get what you're driving at here. Is it that the machine isn't much like the Somme? That's true, but neither was Dachau.
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Look Upon My Pigs, Ye Mighty, and Despair at 02:00 on 02-12-2013 - link I'm actually a little surprised you liked this, Arthur. I played it back in October, and I started out with high hopes, but as I went on I just got more and more...irritated with the whole thing. I was trying to put together something to express my opinion, but it didn't really work out, so I'll hit the high points.

I think the first thing that set me against the game was TCR's narrative voice. I've always said I've preferred gawping at the scenery to dealing with gameplay, but I've been forced to reassess my opinions. When I play games, I like to keep my hands busy with the shooting or the base deployment while my mind and eyes wander, take in the scenery, and form my own associations. With Hamnesia, all that gameplay has been stripped to the bone, leaving nothing but the observation and contemplation. The problem is that when you make that the primary goal of the game, it destroys the illusion that the game world is an authorless one, that your observations are your own. I began to feel like all of Mandus' diary notes and narration were TCR's way of lecturing their story to me, and if there's one thing I cannot stand any more, it's lectures.

To make it worse, everything TCR did caused me to lose confidence in their abilities. There were the clichés; when I found Mandus' secret passages, my first thought was "oh boy, a Victorian lord who is a mountain of repressed sexual hunger! What a bold and controversial creation in this, the year of our fucking Lord Two Thousand And Mother-Fucking-Thirteen!!!. There was the stuff I thought was just goofy, like Tronpig and the whole porcine apocalypse setpiece.

But the worst thing, the thing that still sticks in my craw a month on, is that fact that all of the greatest horrors of the game, the butchery of the London populace and the murder of Oswald's sons, are not conveyed through visuals, but through fucking. notes. Given that this is a video game, a visual medium, this is inexcusable. Quite frankly, it strikes me as artistic cowardice. In Silent Hill 2, when they wanted to show James' sexual frustration, they didn't leave notes; they had a muscly butcher monster make sweet Christian love to a diseased vagina with legs! In Rule of Rose, they had a lot of notes alluded to the organized bullying at the orphanage, but they also had a cutscene where a leering fat girl shoves a rat on a stick into Jennifer's face. If you want to shock me, use an image, put it on the screen! Use the eye, bypass the brain, and hit the soul! Otherwise you're just wasting both our times.

I must admit, though, I never thought to connect Mandus' great design with robber-baron capitalism. I was spending most of my time trying to fit the game into what I knew of the cycles of civilization and mythology, modernity and the reactions to it, and various conceptions of the apocalypse. I've had a lot of trouble, partially because I was so unengaged with the material, but mostly because Hamnesia did not seem to have any opinion of the apocalypse beyond an intensely bourgeois fear of the whole business, manifesting in an ardent desire to repress the whole thing and get life back to normal as fast as possible. To be frank, that's a sentiment I can pick off any newsstand. I don't want to know why it was bad; I want to know why people thought it was good, and the game wasn't all that interested in telling me.

I'd also like to mention that if Oswald's sons could return from the Somme and take a tour through their father's machine, I think the two of them would be very unimpressed.

Still, I must thank TCR for one thing: they convinced me that I would have to be a fool to spend actual money on the Stanley Parable remake.
Arthur B on Fuck Off, Feist at 22:40 on 30-11-2013 - link Ah, there's no special planning or order of precedence behind that numbering, it's just the order the themes were added to the system. ;)
Robinson L on Fuck Off, Feist at 22:39 on 30-11-2013 - link I meant the theme which is presently labeled #1 in the site's numbering system, like so, whereas "books" is theme #7, (not to mention a lot more generic).
Arthur B on Fuck Off, Feist at 16:41 on 30-11-2013 - link
the introduction of the site's #1 theme

What, "Books"? Pretty sure there's earlier stuff on that than this...
Robinson L on Fuck Off, Feist at 15:15 on 30-11-2013 - link Huh, what a disappointingly (but, by your accounts of Magician's End) fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to the FerretWar saga.

Not that I blame you for pulling out when you had to, Arthur. Still, six years, seven reviews, the introduction of the site's #1 theme ... what a journey it's been.
Robinson L on Babylon 3 1/2 at 15:06 on 30-11-2013 - link
Abigail: it strikes me as a story that plays into reactionary fears about feminism - if women's lib goes on, men will be locked up in harems, etc.

Oh, huh. It's been a couple years since I've seen it, but the commentary I have seen around Angel One has taken the view that the makers of the episode were well-intentioned, just horribly incompetent. At least two have brought up Riker's summation speech about how equality between the sexes is an evolutionary inevitability (showcasing Next Gen's charmingly wrongheaded understanding of evolution) as something which they read as well-meaning, but should have been given to one of the female characters.

But it's probably not worth revisiting to try to figure out what the hell they were trying to say.

« last 8 - next 8 »