Month: August 2013

Cave in cave out

Playing The Cave. It’s cool and terrible at the same time. I like the concept, Ron is always good at telling stories and creating characters. But for the rest…

I don’t understand how moving characters can feel so meh when it’s the main thing you do. Their animation is weird, something feels like they run at 15 fps when water effects are sumptuous and feel like they’re real. It’s the biggest problem with a lot of games today: look good if not fantastic, feel not so good. Shader effects are top notch but basic movements are generic.

There’s a lot of going up and down. A lot. I can tell that designers worked hard to minimize this aspect through levels but it still feels really tedious sometimes.

Where I thought it would be kind of charming is with audio and it wasn’t. Just exactly what I pointed out, it’s technically clean but nothing really matters or stays in your mind, things fade in fade out in the background, no theme or mini melody you can sing under the shower, everything is about voice over. It feels cold, which kind of works with the title The Cave but hell I don’t know, it’s just not satisfying to me. The experience is missing something in the sound department. It could be so much cooler.

I don’t know if game developers realize that a lot of people are waiting for sales because plenty of games are kinda cool but are also kinda not clean cut enough to be bought at full prize. Even if I know that The Cave is still a pretty big game that required a lot of work and people involved. Making games is also pretty ungrateful.

Might replay in a year for another run. Next, Antichamber.

Me Myself&I

No more growth

Speaking of innovation, change and economics, I watched this video talking about the end of growth and how we have been more than lucky for the past 60 years.

Now people often say that we will find more growth but like Robert Gordon, I don’t really see anything coming close to the revolutions we’ve got. People forget that innovation takes quite a while to spread out and being optimum. Look at computers, invented decades ago and on which we’re still surfing the future with.

But soon it will be over (look at how Intel struggles like crazy to innovate now compared to the 90s). Don’t get me wrong innovation is here and we need it but to me expansion, the race, the sprint is over at least for a long while. The marathon has started and as humans the idea is not to being twice as rich as the previous generation, we they did that. It’s to optimize and scale being twice as efficient than our parents with computers, recycling, biking and making no babies for example.

Now we need to fix stuff in the West.

For instance the toilet like I pointed out, definitely demands innovation. Which would require complete rewiring of thousands of kms of pipes and lines, rebuilding an entire system for every single city. Not a lot of innovation but, that’s some work! Would it make the economy grow? I don’t think so. When you fix something, you don’t really create as much value as creating this something in the first place. Jobs? Who would want in 2035 to work under the ground in the poop to make the world a better place anyway? Not a lot of people.

In the West, things are only going to slowly decay, because of all the problems Robert Gordon speaks about. I don’t really see how it would get better, hoping I’m wrong.

Countries who didn’t profited the second industrial revolution of the past century though, if they’re patient, will be able to get the best of current innovation and build their societies around it. If we haven’t already screw them over, the West acting like a giant poisonous octopus around the world (hello, patents)…

Me Myself&I

That’s the difference

It’s weird, on one side I see a black man getting shot at by the people supposed to protect him for no reason in the US, a black minister being thrown bananas at in Europe.

On the other side I see a white man getting death treats on Twitter over a game he made and talks abuse. He quits.

On the other other side, I see a woman getting up to 50 rape treats an hour, for 12 hours. She’s not quitting.

So you white dudes have barely started to feel the level of hostility that women and people of color are used to. And you don’t like it. And you quit.

We can’t. *wink*

Also everyone, please: chill the fuck out.