Is Ceremony the Lounge's Shakespeare?
- Thread starter Kairi Zaide
- Start date
Mantis
I am a doctah
Wee Baby Seamus
Yo, Goober, where's the meat?
I don't know about the Lounge, but he's the Kit Marlowe to Stray Wasp's Shakespeare over on the soccer board.
izzy
go
Kairi Zaide
Unforgiven
i would like everyone here to have access to the story Ceres wrote ; unfortunately this will remain on Hammy unless he decides otherwise!!
Mantis
I am a doctah
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 385,043
- 30,539
Deficient Mode
Registered User
- Mar 25, 2011
- 60,348
- 2,397
Ahh but Shakespeare outlived Marlowe by 30 years, and Stray Wasp has like Marlowe disappeared from the forum entirely without posting in over a year (hopefully not due to any real life complication). Meanwhile Ceremony keeps on.
tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
CycloneLaunch
...
Pretty disrespectful those who are voting no. He's also the Bard of the Geek Emporium with his ridiculously long game reviews
One of HF's finest posters
One of HF's finest posters
CycloneLaunch
...
It's hard to implement long-form writing in the lounge, we struggle to comprehend any post longer than two sentences.
Ceremony
How I choose to feel is how I am
- Jun 8, 2012
- 114,281
- 17,340
Pretty disrespectful those who are voting no. He's also the Bard of the Geek Emporium with his ridiculously long game reviews
One of HF's finest posters
Deficient Mode
Registered User
- Mar 25, 2011
- 60,348
- 2,397
I recently finished watching Breaking Bad
Last Thursday, to be precise. Upon doing so I obviously went looking for a thread on my chief means of entertainment discussion, HFBoards, to read up on the opinions of names I recognise and leave my own. Sadly, unlike The Wire's thread which devolved into debate on the show and on various topics relating to the show, all the threads were relative GDTs of when it first aired. And they're all closed. And all hideously congratulatory.
So, if you will now indulge me, I will at great length attempt to explain why Breaking Bad is such a truly horrific television creation, and how the praise lavished on it by so many is so mis-placed and unjustified.
As far as my frame of reference regarding TV shows goes, it's quite limited. Off the top of my head the only things qualifying as "drama" I've ever watched that contained any continuous storylines there's this, The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad and (as of Friday,) The Sopranos. As such my ability to objectively view and judge what I see is hindered in that I compare what I see to what little I've seen, and what I've enjoyed. I will come to the rating comparisons to such shows later, but I want to try and view Breaking Bad on its own terms as much as possible. Then I can add in the killer blow of outlining how it is so brutally inferior to The Wire by every measure possible.
Going into Breaking Bad I had a very vague idea of what it was about. Man is diagnosed with cancer, man cooks meth to pay for cancer treatment. That summed up pretty much all I knew about it. Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up all that happens in it. Something that occurred to me as I was about halfway through it, very little actually happens in episodes. From what I read on here some people found problems with the pacing of the show, I never did, in the immediacy of watching it. Thinking about it afterwards is what created my problem, as the realisation that I was seeing something easily surmised in a few sentences dawned on me.
Really, the shallowness of the whole thing is my first problem. There's what, ten characters in this that have any serious effect on anything? Walter, Skyler, Walter Jr., Gus, Mike, Jesse, Saul, Hank, Marie. Even then they can all broadly be grouped together as serving the same purpose. The Whites, the Schraders, then all the drug people. There's so few characters and such overlap between them and their social circles that they all sort of meld into one, becoming extremely uninteresting. Now, a small cast is fine, that isn't a problem in itself. You could call it a focus of... well, focus. The viewer's focus. This show is about 'these' people so we will see all of 'these' people. The problem comes when the people you are depicting are little more than extreme parodies, caricatures, of the emotions that they feel. Like a sitcom that's been on too long from the very start of this show any pretence of subtlety is abandoned to make the characters fit into very rigidly defined roles. This is fine if any of them were to show any sort of meaningful development as the show goes on but, they don't.
Before you say Walter does, no, he doesn't. The only development he experiences is getting worse, becoming more of a self-absorbed ********. In the beginning there is some justification for his actions. He wants to cook meth to get money for his treatment, to keep his family cared for when he inevitably dies, great. About the most honourable variety of drug dealing there is. Except we quickly learn that the true motivation goes beyond the cancer, that for years a festering resentment at everything in the world built up to lead him to where he was. An undoubtedly brilliant chemistry mind, his chance at fame and riches was squandered by his family. His son being born meant he had to abandon his plans for his company to provide for his family. Now admittedly here there is an irony in that he does eventually get to put his ability and his intelligence to work to provide for his family, only on a brutally illegal and immoral way, and after he's guaranteed to die. With this in mind, he's still a clown. When he teams up with Jesse there's a very strict duality put in place marking the two of them as opposites - Walter as the reasoned, logical thinking operator and Jesse as the immature, emotional moron. Except, Walter's rage completely belies all of this. When he blows up Tuco's joint, when he punched that tissue dispenser, when he's faced with some problem he can't immediately formulate a solution to and goes into a mad rage, when he eventually goes on the run and then phones Skyler and calls her all the names under the sun, his adorable I AM THE DANGER speech which seems to have struck the hearts of so many, it never ends. Then there's the other side where he just goes full sociopath. Watching Jane die. Poisoning the kid Brock. Telling Jesse about both of these. Forcing his son to get drunk and vomit everywhere. Making Jesse kill Gale to save his own ass. I understand that the escalation of Walter's antics show how far he gets sucked into the world he's in, but there comes a point where you just watch the culmination of this man's actions existing in him and find yourself failing to justify anything he does. There are ways to achieve his goals in the meth business without the pettiness, the spite, the brutality of what he does. Any belief I had in his motivation being good for what he did vanished when he watched Jane die. Not that I thought her especially important or special, that was the first time I did remember him doing something deliberately to **** over and manipulate someone he needed. Without Jesse, he has no in to the meth business, no channel of making money. And here he is, repaying Jesse by making him even more subservient to him. The legitimacy of Walter's character, literally the character that he assumes, is particularly unbelievable. As mentioned, his "I AM THE DANGER" moment and any others where he's bragging to Skyler about how big and dangerous he is are quickly undermined by someone much more dangerous than he is making him **** himself. Again, this is probably deliberate to undermine him and show how truly out of control of his surroundings he is, but it's never done effectively enough to make me feel any sympathy or empathy for what he goes through, and just makes him look like a dick.
What truly encapsulates how bad Walter is as a character however comes when he kills Mike. Admittedly, him crying on the phone to Skyler while acting the hard man is a close second but in killing Mike, all of Walter's extremely wooden character traits are exposed. Mike tells him pretty much every accurate complaint I have about Walter and his actions. Mike, in the midst of being about to leave with all his ends tied up, a free out of this world, a secure future for his granddaughter, officially better than Walter since he is both achieving what Walter wants (and can't get) and is able to beat Walter in a fight, tells Walter what he doesn't want to admit. Walter's rage then immediately rears its head as he kills Mike in the same cowardly way he did everything else described. He literally flounces off like a petulant child, his "I'll show you I will!!!" actions being compounded as he kills his superior with no thought. His façade of being the calm, the logical = shattered.
Handily, this sort of contradiction is where we can also see where Breaking Bad fails in its ability to depict believable or engaging characters or events. Aside from the contradictions between the character's detailed tropes and their executed tropes, in the very last episode, it still tries to reinforce these. As Jesse leaves the Nazi compound (and by the way, who the **** where these lunatics? Christ. But more on the complete waste of time that was S5 later) he starts screaming as his car speeds up, wildly celebrating as he's free. Cue immediate cut to Walter close up, silent, and still. Yes, Jesse was the wild one and Walter the calm. That's why Jesse, when they split the first time, managed to get his life into some sort of deranged order, and put his accumulated knowledge to use, while Walter went the path of Wile E. Coyote and came up with increasingly mad schemes to solve his problems, ending with blowing up Gus and Senor Ding Dong. The point here is, it's ********. The depictions the show gives us, forces upon us, of these characters, are false. They're wrong. Everything they do, everything that happens as a result of what they do, contradicts what they're supposed to be. This is the mark of something which is bad.
Now, regarding character development, for such a centralised show, there really isn't much. Consider Marie. We see early on that she's a kleptomaniac, she has a past of stealing things and is apparently incapable of handling it. Yet, as soon as it appears, it's gone. Fine, she's not the focus of the show, but why have this character who's going to play an important role in the whole thing with this massively defining trait and offer no justification for it? Same goes with Hank. When he gets shot and becomes bedridden and cranky I think "ah, we'll see what really makes him tick here." He shouts at his wife (their relationship was much more interesting than Walter/Skyler) and buys some loads of rocks. Then from one episode to the next he goes from needing help and rails to walk five feet to being able to go places on his own. Nothing else offered. Great. What's the deal with the rocks? Even as he buys them we don't see him doing anything in detail with them, he just has loads of them. Then when he can walk again, there's no mention of them anymore. Then consider Jesse, post-rehab. He shaves his head and starts living in something resembling a scene from Caligula. He starts throwing money around - literally. Then it all goes away. No explanation, no justification shown for it. It doesn't affect him as a character, it doesn't develop him in any way. Why is it there? Why should I care? The only good recurring thing with Jesse is his strange allure to vulnerable children, which in his own child-like way seems to be an attempt at redeeming himself for the failures in his own life. But then, these never take any sort of precedence, and playing video games with a kid once isn't really a positive development for anyone involved. In terms of effective character development there's what I mentioned with Walter and his scientific background, Gus is quite good as we see why he got into the meth business but them aside, all the main characters as we see their growth, it's a pisspoor explanation of how these pisspoor characters got to where they are. Fitting, I suppose.
When Breaking Bad was originally shown and was at the height of its fame I tried to ignore it as much as possible. I didn't care, I wasn't watching it, and was annoyed at people talking about it. What did manage to permeate my defense however was a name. Skyler. And a common sentiment, that she was some sort of female dog. This was something that stuck with me as I watched, waiting for it to manifest itself. Except... it never did. At all. Skyler White is the only redeeming quality about Breaking Bad, the only thing to exist with a shred of realism, to act with any reason, to emerge with any dignity. While to begin with she seems... busy-bodied, it's not surprising. Walter is an atrocious liar, whenever he gave it "I do not have a second cellphone!" or similar I imagined Joey Tribbiani talking about raccoons. I can't blame her, for her reactions to him then. Then when she finds out her husband is cooking and distributing meth? With her sister married to a DEA agent? What exactly is she supposed to do in this situation, with one vulnerable child existing and another along shortly? Some sort of morality has to exist in this world to offset the complete dearth of it elsewhere, yet Skyler gets castigated by the entire internet because she doesn't go along with her husband? I don't blame her at all. Even as she gets sucked in and starts to go along with Walter and the stuff he does (oh hey who remembers the bit when Walter practically sexually assaults his heavily pregnant wife after cooking some drugs that was cool) she remains trying to encase it in some sort of legitimacy. The irony is that for all his protestations that he did it for his family (and remember, the show ends with definitive proof that he didn't, he did it for himself), Walter isn't the family member who acts in the best interests of his family. Skyler is. She attempts to protect her children, always. She attempts to protect herself, both of these from her husband and from the people he so insists he is bigger than, but isn't. I think as far as sympathetic characters in Breaking Bad go there's a hierarchy of Skyler, Mike, Saul (oh and speaking of Saul, why on earth does he have a spinoff? yawn) and that she should be the only one who could be considered as acting regularly with any sort of clear or justifiable reason.
Incidentally, I did enjoy how Walter's cancer and his means of dealing with it drove Skyler to take up smoking again - his means of dealing with his disease made his wife more vulnerable to it. A nice metaphor for a horrible event.
And to add to that, just briefly, in terms of cinematography, woof. Yawn. I know it essentially takes place in the desert and there's not much to include in shots there unless you're filming a Western, but there's just nothing. And when there is, such as Walter and Skyler's last conversation where we see Skyler's new life (the big wood-effect pillar in her ****** apartment) first shield Walter as Marie's on the phone, then exist as a barrier between them (as she sits chain smoking), it could count as subtle if it didn't take up half the ****ing screen. I would love to be able to dissect the visuals of the show to a greater extent but I can't do that on one watch, and I don't plan another. All I'll add is that the flashbacks scenes being filtered in what could best be described as ****-yellow was bizarre.
I know I said I didn't want to compare Breaking Bad to shows I've seen but if in its praise and its ratings it's being compared to The Wire, I have to step in. I am by no means an expert on The Wire, but I believe that everything bad I'm describing about Breaking Bad, The Wire does well. But what The Wire has to go along with its drugs and the people involved in drugs is consequence. We see social commentary stemming from the drugs, which ups the emotional involvement of the show and shows a much deeper level of relatable consequence of what happens. This in turn highlights another aspect in which Breaking Bad is severely lacking. From what I can best recall, Walter makes an accumulated amount in excess of $83,000,000 from cooking meth. Now, consider the assorted costs that go along taking out the amount of money he can make and truly realise how much money is in the meth business. Consider then how far reaching into society the meth he cooks is - hell by the end it spans three separate continents. When is this ever seen on screen? I can think of three notable things showing the drugs involved - the scene early on when Jesse gets robbed by the couple on crack that ends with the guy having a cash machine dropped on his head, we see real squalor there. We see lots of what the people who peddle the drugs do and how dangerous that side is, but for all of Walter's millions and the hardship it causes him and those close to him, what about the hundreds of thousands he exploits for his own gain? The show and the characters in it live in a self-contained, myopic world that only serves to expose the afore-mentioned shallowness. They carry out actions which have severe consequences for themselves, but we only ever see exactly that. This just makes the whole thing and all the people in it seem even more distant, and unbelievable. Admittedly however this allows the story to exist and progress quite comfortably. Despite Walter's tens of millions of drug money it seems the only drug police in the entire state is Walter's brother in law, who can only investigate things when Walter is there (Walter crashing his car on the way to the laundry is second only to Mike's death in my rage moments list). There is no way someone as emotional and as uncontrolled as Walter could have existed in the meth business for as long as he did without police interference. All of this is irrelevant anyway was if this were real, Gus would have had him killed about halfway through S3. The main focus of the show, the central element which motivates all the characters and allows them to exist happens completely devoid of any link to any tangible reality that the viewer will try and reconcile it with. The only effect I can recall Walter's empire having on the community at large is him being responsible for the plane crash. He lets Jane die, her dad lets the plane crash happen - disaster. Even then, the crash exists in small glimpses at the beginnings of episodes. The blue ribbons that people wear, none of the Whites wear them. The only person I can recall wearing one for any length of time is Saul, and even then once it's gone, it's... gone. Such of the show exists in the immediacy of what is going on it becomes hard to see the whole thing as something worthwhile and dampens the perception of any tangible development of anyone or anything that may exist within it - although there is very little of it to speak of anyway.
While I don't know Breaking Bad well enough to go into as much detail as I'd like (more detail than it deserves or that it contains itself), I'd like to think I've done my feelings some justice. I'm not sure the rage is properly communicated, although I'm also not sure that the rage has been fully cultivated. Like I said, I'm not planning a second viewing any time soon to consolidate that. When I've hit submit I'll no doubt remember something else I wanted to say but by then it'll be too late. It also has to be said that I don't believe my analytical powers or my oratory powers are what they once were. What I can sum up with is simple - Breaking Bad is not worthy of the praise it deserves. Its attempt at drama, at a need to compel the viewer to watch from episode to episode fails with its ludicrous plots, its paper thin characters, it's tedious. Tedious is about as kind a word as I can think for it. Contrived perhaps another. In fact, contrived is a nice thing to leave you with - at the end of S4, Walter is free. He literally sums it up, telling Skyler "I won." He's out. He has a good amount of money, he's free, he's safe, his family's safe... and he jumps back in. There is no need for the events of S5 to exist. Contrived, absurd, ********.
If that wasn't enough to truly sum up the show, consider this. Hank discovers that Walter is behind everything while he is s()itting on the toilet. Leaves of Grass my ass, indeed.
Last Thursday, to be precise. Upon doing so I obviously went looking for a thread on my chief means of entertainment discussion, HFBoards, to read up on the opinions of names I recognise and leave my own. Sadly, unlike The Wire's thread which devolved into debate on the show and on various topics relating to the show, all the threads were relative GDTs of when it first aired. And they're all closed. And all hideously congratulatory.
So, if you will now indulge me, I will at great length attempt to explain why Breaking Bad is such a truly horrific television creation, and how the praise lavished on it by so many is so mis-placed and unjustified.
As far as my frame of reference regarding TV shows goes, it's quite limited. Off the top of my head the only things qualifying as "drama" I've ever watched that contained any continuous storylines there's this, The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad and (as of Friday,) The Sopranos. As such my ability to objectively view and judge what I see is hindered in that I compare what I see to what little I've seen, and what I've enjoyed. I will come to the rating comparisons to such shows later, but I want to try and view Breaking Bad on its own terms as much as possible. Then I can add in the killer blow of outlining how it is so brutally inferior to The Wire by every measure possible.
Going into Breaking Bad I had a very vague idea of what it was about. Man is diagnosed with cancer, man cooks meth to pay for cancer treatment. That summed up pretty much all I knew about it. Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up all that happens in it. Something that occurred to me as I was about halfway through it, very little actually happens in episodes. From what I read on here some people found problems with the pacing of the show, I never did, in the immediacy of watching it. Thinking about it afterwards is what created my problem, as the realisation that I was seeing something easily surmised in a few sentences dawned on me.
Really, the shallowness of the whole thing is my first problem. There's what, ten characters in this that have any serious effect on anything? Walter, Skyler, Walter Jr., Gus, Mike, Jesse, Saul, Hank, Marie. Even then they can all broadly be grouped together as serving the same purpose. The Whites, the Schraders, then all the drug people. There's so few characters and such overlap between them and their social circles that they all sort of meld into one, becoming extremely uninteresting. Now, a small cast is fine, that isn't a problem in itself. You could call it a focus of... well, focus. The viewer's focus. This show is about 'these' people so we will see all of 'these' people. The problem comes when the people you are depicting are little more than extreme parodies, caricatures, of the emotions that they feel. Like a sitcom that's been on too long from the very start of this show any pretence of subtlety is abandoned to make the characters fit into very rigidly defined roles. This is fine if any of them were to show any sort of meaningful development as the show goes on but, they don't.
Before you say Walter does, no, he doesn't. The only development he experiences is getting worse, becoming more of a self-absorbed ********. In the beginning there is some justification for his actions. He wants to cook meth to get money for his treatment, to keep his family cared for when he inevitably dies, great. About the most honourable variety of drug dealing there is. Except we quickly learn that the true motivation goes beyond the cancer, that for years a festering resentment at everything in the world built up to lead him to where he was. An undoubtedly brilliant chemistry mind, his chance at fame and riches was squandered by his family. His son being born meant he had to abandon his plans for his company to provide for his family. Now admittedly here there is an irony in that he does eventually get to put his ability and his intelligence to work to provide for his family, only on a brutally illegal and immoral way, and after he's guaranteed to die. With this in mind, he's still a clown. When he teams up with Jesse there's a very strict duality put in place marking the two of them as opposites - Walter as the reasoned, logical thinking operator and Jesse as the immature, emotional moron. Except, Walter's rage completely belies all of this. When he blows up Tuco's joint, when he punched that tissue dispenser, when he's faced with some problem he can't immediately formulate a solution to and goes into a mad rage, when he eventually goes on the run and then phones Skyler and calls her all the names under the sun, his adorable I AM THE DANGER speech which seems to have struck the hearts of so many, it never ends. Then there's the other side where he just goes full sociopath. Watching Jane die. Poisoning the kid Brock. Telling Jesse about both of these. Forcing his son to get drunk and vomit everywhere. Making Jesse kill Gale to save his own ass. I understand that the escalation of Walter's antics show how far he gets sucked into the world he's in, but there comes a point where you just watch the culmination of this man's actions existing in him and find yourself failing to justify anything he does. There are ways to achieve his goals in the meth business without the pettiness, the spite, the brutality of what he does. Any belief I had in his motivation being good for what he did vanished when he watched Jane die. Not that I thought her especially important or special, that was the first time I did remember him doing something deliberately to **** over and manipulate someone he needed. Without Jesse, he has no in to the meth business, no channel of making money. And here he is, repaying Jesse by making him even more subservient to him. The legitimacy of Walter's character, literally the character that he assumes, is particularly unbelievable. As mentioned, his "I AM THE DANGER" moment and any others where he's bragging to Skyler about how big and dangerous he is are quickly undermined by someone much more dangerous than he is making him **** himself. Again, this is probably deliberate to undermine him and show how truly out of control of his surroundings he is, but it's never done effectively enough to make me feel any sympathy or empathy for what he goes through, and just makes him look like a dick.
What truly encapsulates how bad Walter is as a character however comes when he kills Mike. Admittedly, him crying on the phone to Skyler while acting the hard man is a close second but in killing Mike, all of Walter's extremely wooden character traits are exposed. Mike tells him pretty much every accurate complaint I have about Walter and his actions. Mike, in the midst of being about to leave with all his ends tied up, a free out of this world, a secure future for his granddaughter, officially better than Walter since he is both achieving what Walter wants (and can't get) and is able to beat Walter in a fight, tells Walter what he doesn't want to admit. Walter's rage then immediately rears its head as he kills Mike in the same cowardly way he did everything else described. He literally flounces off like a petulant child, his "I'll show you I will!!!" actions being compounded as he kills his superior with no thought. His façade of being the calm, the logical = shattered.
Handily, this sort of contradiction is where we can also see where Breaking Bad fails in its ability to depict believable or engaging characters or events. Aside from the contradictions between the character's detailed tropes and their executed tropes, in the very last episode, it still tries to reinforce these. As Jesse leaves the Nazi compound (and by the way, who the **** where these lunatics? Christ. But more on the complete waste of time that was S5 later) he starts screaming as his car speeds up, wildly celebrating as he's free. Cue immediate cut to Walter close up, silent, and still. Yes, Jesse was the wild one and Walter the calm. That's why Jesse, when they split the first time, managed to get his life into some sort of deranged order, and put his accumulated knowledge to use, while Walter went the path of Wile E. Coyote and came up with increasingly mad schemes to solve his problems, ending with blowing up Gus and Senor Ding Dong. The point here is, it's ********. The depictions the show gives us, forces upon us, of these characters, are false. They're wrong. Everything they do, everything that happens as a result of what they do, contradicts what they're supposed to be. This is the mark of something which is bad.
Now, regarding character development, for such a centralised show, there really isn't much. Consider Marie. We see early on that she's a kleptomaniac, she has a past of stealing things and is apparently incapable of handling it. Yet, as soon as it appears, it's gone. Fine, she's not the focus of the show, but why have this character who's going to play an important role in the whole thing with this massively defining trait and offer no justification for it? Same goes with Hank. When he gets shot and becomes bedridden and cranky I think "ah, we'll see what really makes him tick here." He shouts at his wife (their relationship was much more interesting than Walter/Skyler) and buys some loads of rocks. Then from one episode to the next he goes from needing help and rails to walk five feet to being able to go places on his own. Nothing else offered. Great. What's the deal with the rocks? Even as he buys them we don't see him doing anything in detail with them, he just has loads of them. Then when he can walk again, there's no mention of them anymore. Then consider Jesse, post-rehab. He shaves his head and starts living in something resembling a scene from Caligula. He starts throwing money around - literally. Then it all goes away. No explanation, no justification shown for it. It doesn't affect him as a character, it doesn't develop him in any way. Why is it there? Why should I care? The only good recurring thing with Jesse is his strange allure to vulnerable children, which in his own child-like way seems to be an attempt at redeeming himself for the failures in his own life. But then, these never take any sort of precedence, and playing video games with a kid once isn't really a positive development for anyone involved. In terms of effective character development there's what I mentioned with Walter and his scientific background, Gus is quite good as we see why he got into the meth business but them aside, all the main characters as we see their growth, it's a pisspoor explanation of how these pisspoor characters got to where they are. Fitting, I suppose.
When Breaking Bad was originally shown and was at the height of its fame I tried to ignore it as much as possible. I didn't care, I wasn't watching it, and was annoyed at people talking about it. What did manage to permeate my defense however was a name. Skyler. And a common sentiment, that she was some sort of female dog. This was something that stuck with me as I watched, waiting for it to manifest itself. Except... it never did. At all. Skyler White is the only redeeming quality about Breaking Bad, the only thing to exist with a shred of realism, to act with any reason, to emerge with any dignity. While to begin with she seems... busy-bodied, it's not surprising. Walter is an atrocious liar, whenever he gave it "I do not have a second cellphone!" or similar I imagined Joey Tribbiani talking about raccoons. I can't blame her, for her reactions to him then. Then when she finds out her husband is cooking and distributing meth? With her sister married to a DEA agent? What exactly is she supposed to do in this situation, with one vulnerable child existing and another along shortly? Some sort of morality has to exist in this world to offset the complete dearth of it elsewhere, yet Skyler gets castigated by the entire internet because she doesn't go along with her husband? I don't blame her at all. Even as she gets sucked in and starts to go along with Walter and the stuff he does (oh hey who remembers the bit when Walter practically sexually assaults his heavily pregnant wife after cooking some drugs that was cool) she remains trying to encase it in some sort of legitimacy. The irony is that for all his protestations that he did it for his family (and remember, the show ends with definitive proof that he didn't, he did it for himself), Walter isn't the family member who acts in the best interests of his family. Skyler is. She attempts to protect her children, always. She attempts to protect herself, both of these from her husband and from the people he so insists he is bigger than, but isn't. I think as far as sympathetic characters in Breaking Bad go there's a hierarchy of Skyler, Mike, Saul (oh and speaking of Saul, why on earth does he have a spinoff? yawn) and that she should be the only one who could be considered as acting regularly with any sort of clear or justifiable reason.
Incidentally, I did enjoy how Walter's cancer and his means of dealing with it drove Skyler to take up smoking again - his means of dealing with his disease made his wife more vulnerable to it. A nice metaphor for a horrible event.
And to add to that, just briefly, in terms of cinematography, woof. Yawn. I know it essentially takes place in the desert and there's not much to include in shots there unless you're filming a Western, but there's just nothing. And when there is, such as Walter and Skyler's last conversation where we see Skyler's new life (the big wood-effect pillar in her ****** apartment) first shield Walter as Marie's on the phone, then exist as a barrier between them (as she sits chain smoking), it could count as subtle if it didn't take up half the ****ing screen. I would love to be able to dissect the visuals of the show to a greater extent but I can't do that on one watch, and I don't plan another. All I'll add is that the flashbacks scenes being filtered in what could best be described as ****-yellow was bizarre.
I know I said I didn't want to compare Breaking Bad to shows I've seen but if in its praise and its ratings it's being compared to The Wire, I have to step in. I am by no means an expert on The Wire, but I believe that everything bad I'm describing about Breaking Bad, The Wire does well. But what The Wire has to go along with its drugs and the people involved in drugs is consequence. We see social commentary stemming from the drugs, which ups the emotional involvement of the show and shows a much deeper level of relatable consequence of what happens. This in turn highlights another aspect in which Breaking Bad is severely lacking. From what I can best recall, Walter makes an accumulated amount in excess of $83,000,000 from cooking meth. Now, consider the assorted costs that go along taking out the amount of money he can make and truly realise how much money is in the meth business. Consider then how far reaching into society the meth he cooks is - hell by the end it spans three separate continents. When is this ever seen on screen? I can think of three notable things showing the drugs involved - the scene early on when Jesse gets robbed by the couple on crack that ends with the guy having a cash machine dropped on his head, we see real squalor there. We see lots of what the people who peddle the drugs do and how dangerous that side is, but for all of Walter's millions and the hardship it causes him and those close to him, what about the hundreds of thousands he exploits for his own gain? The show and the characters in it live in a self-contained, myopic world that only serves to expose the afore-mentioned shallowness. They carry out actions which have severe consequences for themselves, but we only ever see exactly that. This just makes the whole thing and all the people in it seem even more distant, and unbelievable. Admittedly however this allows the story to exist and progress quite comfortably. Despite Walter's tens of millions of drug money it seems the only drug police in the entire state is Walter's brother in law, who can only investigate things when Walter is there (Walter crashing his car on the way to the laundry is second only to Mike's death in my rage moments list). There is no way someone as emotional and as uncontrolled as Walter could have existed in the meth business for as long as he did without police interference. All of this is irrelevant anyway was if this were real, Gus would have had him killed about halfway through S3. The main focus of the show, the central element which motivates all the characters and allows them to exist happens completely devoid of any link to any tangible reality that the viewer will try and reconcile it with. The only effect I can recall Walter's empire having on the community at large is him being responsible for the plane crash. He lets Jane die, her dad lets the plane crash happen - disaster. Even then, the crash exists in small glimpses at the beginnings of episodes. The blue ribbons that people wear, none of the Whites wear them. The only person I can recall wearing one for any length of time is Saul, and even then once it's gone, it's... gone. Such of the show exists in the immediacy of what is going on it becomes hard to see the whole thing as something worthwhile and dampens the perception of any tangible development of anyone or anything that may exist within it - although there is very little of it to speak of anyway.
While I don't know Breaking Bad well enough to go into as much detail as I'd like (more detail than it deserves or that it contains itself), I'd like to think I've done my feelings some justice. I'm not sure the rage is properly communicated, although I'm also not sure that the rage has been fully cultivated. Like I said, I'm not planning a second viewing any time soon to consolidate that. When I've hit submit I'll no doubt remember something else I wanted to say but by then it'll be too late. It also has to be said that I don't believe my analytical powers or my oratory powers are what they once were. What I can sum up with is simple - Breaking Bad is not worthy of the praise it deserves. Its attempt at drama, at a need to compel the viewer to watch from episode to episode fails with its ludicrous plots, its paper thin characters, it's tedious. Tedious is about as kind a word as I can think for it. Contrived perhaps another. In fact, contrived is a nice thing to leave you with - at the end of S4, Walter is free. He literally sums it up, telling Skyler "I won." He's out. He has a good amount of money, he's free, he's safe, his family's safe... and he jumps back in. There is no need for the events of S5 to exist. Contrived, absurd, ********.
If that wasn't enough to truly sum up the show, consider this. Hank discovers that Walter is behind everything while he is s()itting on the toilet. Leaves of Grass my ass, indeed.
Kairi Zaide
Unforgiven
Mirror's Edge (PS3, 2008)
The following will not be coherent. It will not be reasonable, it won't make a lot of sense. There's a chance most of it will be content not related to the game at all, or at least nothing you could take from it if you've played it. I assume most of what I'm going to write will be cathartic. I'm effectively going to try and review the game three times, for reasons which probably won't become apparent.
I remember buying this game. I bought it in 2008 after Christmas and I'm pretty certain it's the first case of me ever being ID'd when buying something. It's a 16+, and really as I think about this it's kind of bizarre that this is the case. You get shot at. There's a bit of swearing. That's it. Years later in the same shop I wasn't ID'd when buying GTA V. Years after that I was ID'd when buying GTA San Andreas. Perhaps I'm getting younger in my old age.
I have no idea what my first impressions of this game were. Playing it again, and playing through it in one go as I did on Sunday I can remember feelings evoked by parts of. By images, by the atmosphere in certain places. I have a tendency to get very angry at games that I find frustrating and this one made me bite a controller once. When you don't really know how to play a game to its fullest potential there are areas which although simple cause untold problems. I can't climb this fence. She's not jumping high enough and I've now been shot for the twentieth time in a game where the enemies seem vastly unsuited to the gameplay. I'm sure being sixteen had nothing to do with this.
Mirror's Edge, if you're unfamiliar, is a game centred around the concept of free-running, or parkour. In a brilliantly designed city of angular whites and colours a shadowy totalitarian regime of some sort runs everything. You, Faith, are one of a group of Runners, the only means of communication open to people who want to live outside this ordered rule. You carry messages by running across and through buildings, living, as Faith puts it herself, on the Mirror's Edge. The game itself, the story, is centred around a criminal consipracy to kill a prospective mayoral candidate promising change, dragging Faith and her family (of course, her sister's a cop) deeper and deeper into a web of lies and danger.
Now that the sales pitch is over, here's why I like the story. It's simple. There are ten missions in the game and they all follow somewhat sensibly with one another. On reflection the characterisation is quite thin but for the people who're involved for any extended length of time there's enough. The fact too that the City you are in is both secluded and all-encompassing helps make up for any shortcomings in the characters. It itself is one, its facades and advertising (Your 5 a Day in a Can!) being enough on its own for you to want to challenge, to corrupt, to overcome. It's actually interesting to see how the city is created and made to feel like a city when there's effectively no exploration of it. Some years ago I posted a review of a turn-based game called Frozen Synapse Prime and I remember in between the missions of that it showed you an overview of a city of some sort and the locations you were going to fight in. In the chapter select menu of Mirror's Edge it does a similar thing which shows the size of the place you're in. Every level features some landmark in the distance you have to reach which helps flesh out the setting too. It also helps with regards to gameplay, since you now know there's a way across the rooftops to where you're going.
Playing through it again, now, with my eyes there are some oddities. Some months ago I was walking home from the city centre and taking a new route I saw something I hadn't seen before. Hills. Glasgow is based predominately on hills but I had never been able to properly appreciate the outside of the urban area, so when you're seeing this hilariously steep street fall away for several hundred yards and seeing ground miles away which you know is taller than you are, it's quite sobering. The same too can be found in Mirror's Edge's tutorial level. There's a gap between some of the buildings from where you start the Playground Three time trial. In a game where there's this constant railing against something so controlling yet so seemingly connected and transient as a city, a reminder of the outside world isn't to be cast aside. The same too can be found in the last level and the ending credits when you see an overhead view of the city scape at night, seeing just how far it reaches. It's entrancing. I've always had a fondness for the clean design of things in the City too. It's surprising how few of the buildings have windows. But then the bold colour designs of every area, it's something I've never come across. The colour red is a central motif since it fulfills the role of "runner vision," which on the easier difficulties highlights potential paths for you to take when you're running. But then near enough every building and interior has some striking colour design of its own, so things never feel washed out. Of course, the blinding whites and its coloured accents help create the sense of the City being something monolithic and all-encompassing, while the amount of alleys and back ways you have to go through shows how all of these can be undermined. Very clever.
When I played this game first I really identified with this. The sense of rebellion against a seemingly perfect yet unexplained, unknowable foe. Something which seems inescapable and inevitable. My struggle to find a way through this ending with the theme song crooning I'm still alive over the end credits in an angelic voice. The music in the game is actually very good too, most of the background music is based off of that song Still Alive and it combines with the colours and the designs to create a really distinctive atmosphere. To interject my own experience for a moment, I always found listening to Get Ready by New Order to be a complimentary experience. Not in the way some clowns will tell you to listen to Pink Floyd while watching The Wizard of Oz, there's just certain songs and certain areas which go together. Songs like Turn My Way, Vicious Streak and Primitive Notion are surely terrible, yet they, the album and this game are forever linked in my mind. I won't embarrass myself any further by quoting any of the lyrics but I had to include it. The fact that the cover is a greyscale image of a woman in tattered clothes holding a camcorder in front of her face doesn't have any influence. Neither does the big red bar across the front of the picture, a recurring image in different colours through the rest of the liner notes. Fortunately in game the music stands up for itself, you know, if you're weird and don't like New Order. In the sections where it's unavoidable to be hectic it's more upbeat, in the calm it takes a back seat. I think the music in a game like this could have gone very badly but it isn't the case. I think in mission 7 or 8 there's a piece in the background which sounds a bit strange but the rest all fits perfectly. It strikes the right balance between being complimentary and standing out, and this along with the art design helps create an unforgettable experience.
I realise I'm starting (or have been the whole time) to sound like a thirteen year old with a dictionary trying to write a sales pitch so we'll go seamlessly from all of the surroundings and their effect on the atmosphere to surely the most important one, the gameplay. Mirror's Edge is in first person. And in some people, playing a first person game where the person is running, where you hear breath and see arms and legs flashing in and out of focus in front of you, this game causes illness. Feelings of nausea. I would dearly love to see someone experience this. I don't get it. I really don't and I'm not trying to sound smug or anything, it's just something I can't imagine. Now, I mentioned earlier about this game causing damage to my controllers. I can't really talk about the gameplay 8 years detached so I'll try and keep it simple. Although this game is centred around parkour, the concept of free-running and joining run to jump to run and so on, and while this is undoubtedly the best way to play and enjoy the game, there's lots of fiddly bits. There's lots of bits where cheating is the best option. Most recently I did have to play it a first time again and I recalled my earlier frustrations. For the most part my ability to play games had improved to the extent where I didn't have too many problems though. I'm trying to think of the best way to describe playing this for the first time. You play it... natrually. As if you yourself are doing the running, where there's an uncertainty which isn't helped by the runner vision making things flash red because you know if you jump off one box at speed you'll inevitably have to try and find the next one right away to keep that speed. You don't, you slow down, it becomes harder to go on.
On the one hand this does wonders for immersion. On the other hand, it's infuriating. And then, once you've played the time trials and watched hours of youtube videos as I have you never play the game the same way. And that's gone. But I'll come to that later. In addition to the free running the game, as I mentioned at the start, has guns. Imagine being 5'7 and weighing 110 pounds. Imagine being that size and running at 16 miles per hour. Now imagine running towards a guy wearing metal plating. Who's about 6'6. Who's firing a light machine gun at you. The bullets are hitting you. Now because you're running at full speed you can jump, kick him in the face and slap him a few more times and knock him out. Hmm. Yeah. For the amount of enemies with guns the game puts in front of you, for the trophy even for completing the game without firing a gun at all, it never quite seems to know what to do with them. Thequickest and safest way through all the levels (because of course, the gun mechanics are largely terrible and you're slowed down when you have a gun putting you at even more risk) is to just run at full speed ignoring everything trying to stop you. I feel as if guns were included to normalise the game in some way, to make it more marketable. Certainly the fact they're so bad discourages their use and encourages a 'purer' play style but they're still there, and the enemies seem incongruous with every other part of the game. Maybe that's the point, and it's you, the runners, who are out of place. Or supposed to be. It just makes you want to fight harder.
An aside here, I just remembered one section of the game where you have to break through some buildings to get to a lift and away from some cops. In a small part of an alleyway there's a tree. I've just realised it's the only time there's anything organic in the whole game. There's even a bird singing, the only non-human living thing. When I took the time to stop and notice this it really compounded how much the City had attempted to crush all forms of independent life. By including it in a spot where you're running at full speed and likely to miss it the moment is enhanced when you do realise it's there.
Now, I mentioned time trials. Coming to this many years after it came out, there's DLC, and I include that here. The time trials are mostly sections of the story levels with a time limit attached. The DLC levels are new and based heavily on the themes of block colours and geometric shapes. They're all quite visually stunning. I'm sure you can find some pictures. The thing with the time trials though is that you have to know how to play the game quickly. You have to be able to side jump boost, which involves you jumping sideways then turning to face forward, making you run at full speed immediately after starting. Other things like wall runs, coil jumps and even just aiming jumps to land on the right platform, these all become much more important. And if I thought I couldn't play the game when I was young, oh. I had no idea. Trying to play the game quickly just makes you worse at it. Yet although the concept of the time trials, and the full chapter speedruns which thankfully have much more forgiving time limits, is based around speed and efficiency of movement playing the game in such a way where this is your main priority doesn't seem right. It makes you feel too detached from the surroundings. And since I rather like the surroundings I suppose I don't enjoy this sensation.
And so, that attitude to playing the game is what eventually led to the change in my understanding of the game itself I've been alluding to. When you know how to play it, you don't play it as you any more. I can't play it as someone exploring, feeling their way across roofs or through vents or up rooms. I instinctively turn and try to go full speed. I was better at side jump boosting when playing the game than I ever was in a timed setting, annoyingly. But that's how I play it now, and how I would play it if I were to go back to it eight years from now. No matter how long, I'd pick it up and it would become instantly famililar. Is this a bad thing? It contradicts a lot of my memories of the game. Important memories. Not to the extent that I can't have those memories any more or that they're replaced. I don't think they ever will be. In my final playthrough I did try to play it the old way. With that same attitude and to an extent, it worked. I'm just thankful that I now know how to approach the bits which enraged me so much in the past. Being able to look where you're going to jump to while wall-running for instance, that's a big help. And I should add that the DLC time trial levels do add a significant challenge to the game, which is nice. For all its faults the actual mechanics of the game are quite solid, and putting them fully to the test is fun. Even if only one attempt in a hundred seems to work.
Posting about Mirror's Edge like this is a strange thing. If you're reading it now, soon after I've posted it then you've ever played the game and can understand at least some of what I'm talking about or you never will. If you never have you'd be horrified by the game. For all I've said about the art and the design, it's ugly. Graphically it's really shown up, and I haven't even got a PS4. I also forgot how annoying it was to see LOADING LEVEL show up on screen while I sit around waiting for the game to allow me to play it. Maybe the sequel fixes what problems I have, I don't know. I'm sure you'll find out soon. Will it evoke the same feelings in me as this one did, as it still does? Well by definition it can't, since the reasons for me identifying with the game and its content so strongly are long gone from my life. But I'm glad I played it when I did. And I'm glad I finally went back to finish it and beat all of it.
The following will not be coherent. It will not be reasonable, it won't make a lot of sense. There's a chance most of it will be content not related to the game at all, or at least nothing you could take from it if you've played it. I assume most of what I'm going to write will be cathartic. I'm effectively going to try and review the game three times, for reasons which probably won't become apparent.
I remember buying this game. I bought it in 2008 after Christmas and I'm pretty certain it's the first case of me ever being ID'd when buying something. It's a 16+, and really as I think about this it's kind of bizarre that this is the case. You get shot at. There's a bit of swearing. That's it. Years later in the same shop I wasn't ID'd when buying GTA V. Years after that I was ID'd when buying GTA San Andreas. Perhaps I'm getting younger in my old age.
I have no idea what my first impressions of this game were. Playing it again, and playing through it in one go as I did on Sunday I can remember feelings evoked by parts of. By images, by the atmosphere in certain places. I have a tendency to get very angry at games that I find frustrating and this one made me bite a controller once. When you don't really know how to play a game to its fullest potential there are areas which although simple cause untold problems. I can't climb this fence. She's not jumping high enough and I've now been shot for the twentieth time in a game where the enemies seem vastly unsuited to the gameplay. I'm sure being sixteen had nothing to do with this.
Mirror's Edge, if you're unfamiliar, is a game centred around the concept of free-running, or parkour. In a brilliantly designed city of angular whites and colours a shadowy totalitarian regime of some sort runs everything. You, Faith, are one of a group of Runners, the only means of communication open to people who want to live outside this ordered rule. You carry messages by running across and through buildings, living, as Faith puts it herself, on the Mirror's Edge. The game itself, the story, is centred around a criminal consipracy to kill a prospective mayoral candidate promising change, dragging Faith and her family (of course, her sister's a cop) deeper and deeper into a web of lies and danger.
Now that the sales pitch is over, here's why I like the story. It's simple. There are ten missions in the game and they all follow somewhat sensibly with one another. On reflection the characterisation is quite thin but for the people who're involved for any extended length of time there's enough. The fact too that the City you are in is both secluded and all-encompassing helps make up for any shortcomings in the characters. It itself is one, its facades and advertising (Your 5 a Day in a Can!) being enough on its own for you to want to challenge, to corrupt, to overcome. It's actually interesting to see how the city is created and made to feel like a city when there's effectively no exploration of it. Some years ago I posted a review of a turn-based game called Frozen Synapse Prime and I remember in between the missions of that it showed you an overview of a city of some sort and the locations you were going to fight in. In the chapter select menu of Mirror's Edge it does a similar thing which shows the size of the place you're in. Every level features some landmark in the distance you have to reach which helps flesh out the setting too. It also helps with regards to gameplay, since you now know there's a way across the rooftops to where you're going.
Playing through it again, now, with my eyes there are some oddities. Some months ago I was walking home from the city centre and taking a new route I saw something I hadn't seen before. Hills. Glasgow is based predominately on hills but I had never been able to properly appreciate the outside of the urban area, so when you're seeing this hilariously steep street fall away for several hundred yards and seeing ground miles away which you know is taller than you are, it's quite sobering. The same too can be found in Mirror's Edge's tutorial level. There's a gap between some of the buildings from where you start the Playground Three time trial. In a game where there's this constant railing against something so controlling yet so seemingly connected and transient as a city, a reminder of the outside world isn't to be cast aside. The same too can be found in the last level and the ending credits when you see an overhead view of the city scape at night, seeing just how far it reaches. It's entrancing. I've always had a fondness for the clean design of things in the City too. It's surprising how few of the buildings have windows. But then the bold colour designs of every area, it's something I've never come across. The colour red is a central motif since it fulfills the role of "runner vision," which on the easier difficulties highlights potential paths for you to take when you're running. But then near enough every building and interior has some striking colour design of its own, so things never feel washed out. Of course, the blinding whites and its coloured accents help create the sense of the City being something monolithic and all-encompassing, while the amount of alleys and back ways you have to go through shows how all of these can be undermined. Very clever.
When I played this game first I really identified with this. The sense of rebellion against a seemingly perfect yet unexplained, unknowable foe. Something which seems inescapable and inevitable. My struggle to find a way through this ending with the theme song crooning I'm still alive over the end credits in an angelic voice. The music in the game is actually very good too, most of the background music is based off of that song Still Alive and it combines with the colours and the designs to create a really distinctive atmosphere. To interject my own experience for a moment, I always found listening to Get Ready by New Order to be a complimentary experience. Not in the way some clowns will tell you to listen to Pink Floyd while watching The Wizard of Oz, there's just certain songs and certain areas which go together. Songs like Turn My Way, Vicious Streak and Primitive Notion are surely terrible, yet they, the album and this game are forever linked in my mind. I won't embarrass myself any further by quoting any of the lyrics but I had to include it. The fact that the cover is a greyscale image of a woman in tattered clothes holding a camcorder in front of her face doesn't have any influence. Neither does the big red bar across the front of the picture, a recurring image in different colours through the rest of the liner notes. Fortunately in game the music stands up for itself, you know, if you're weird and don't like New Order. In the sections where it's unavoidable to be hectic it's more upbeat, in the calm it takes a back seat. I think the music in a game like this could have gone very badly but it isn't the case. I think in mission 7 or 8 there's a piece in the background which sounds a bit strange but the rest all fits perfectly. It strikes the right balance between being complimentary and standing out, and this along with the art design helps create an unforgettable experience.
I realise I'm starting (or have been the whole time) to sound like a thirteen year old with a dictionary trying to write a sales pitch so we'll go seamlessly from all of the surroundings and their effect on the atmosphere to surely the most important one, the gameplay. Mirror's Edge is in first person. And in some people, playing a first person game where the person is running, where you hear breath and see arms and legs flashing in and out of focus in front of you, this game causes illness. Feelings of nausea. I would dearly love to see someone experience this. I don't get it. I really don't and I'm not trying to sound smug or anything, it's just something I can't imagine. Now, I mentioned earlier about this game causing damage to my controllers. I can't really talk about the gameplay 8 years detached so I'll try and keep it simple. Although this game is centred around parkour, the concept of free-running and joining run to jump to run and so on, and while this is undoubtedly the best way to play and enjoy the game, there's lots of fiddly bits. There's lots of bits where cheating is the best option. Most recently I did have to play it a first time again and I recalled my earlier frustrations. For the most part my ability to play games had improved to the extent where I didn't have too many problems though. I'm trying to think of the best way to describe playing this for the first time. You play it... natrually. As if you yourself are doing the running, where there's an uncertainty which isn't helped by the runner vision making things flash red because you know if you jump off one box at speed you'll inevitably have to try and find the next one right away to keep that speed. You don't, you slow down, it becomes harder to go on.
On the one hand this does wonders for immersion. On the other hand, it's infuriating. And then, once you've played the time trials and watched hours of youtube videos as I have you never play the game the same way. And that's gone. But I'll come to that later. In addition to the free running the game, as I mentioned at the start, has guns. Imagine being 5'7 and weighing 110 pounds. Imagine being that size and running at 16 miles per hour. Now imagine running towards a guy wearing metal plating. Who's about 6'6. Who's firing a light machine gun at you. The bullets are hitting you. Now because you're running at full speed you can jump, kick him in the face and slap him a few more times and knock him out. Hmm. Yeah. For the amount of enemies with guns the game puts in front of you, for the trophy even for completing the game without firing a gun at all, it never quite seems to know what to do with them. Thequickest and safest way through all the levels (because of course, the gun mechanics are largely terrible and you're slowed down when you have a gun putting you at even more risk) is to just run at full speed ignoring everything trying to stop you. I feel as if guns were included to normalise the game in some way, to make it more marketable. Certainly the fact they're so bad discourages their use and encourages a 'purer' play style but they're still there, and the enemies seem incongruous with every other part of the game. Maybe that's the point, and it's you, the runners, who are out of place. Or supposed to be. It just makes you want to fight harder.
An aside here, I just remembered one section of the game where you have to break through some buildings to get to a lift and away from some cops. In a small part of an alleyway there's a tree. I've just realised it's the only time there's anything organic in the whole game. There's even a bird singing, the only non-human living thing. When I took the time to stop and notice this it really compounded how much the City had attempted to crush all forms of independent life. By including it in a spot where you're running at full speed and likely to miss it the moment is enhanced when you do realise it's there.
Now, I mentioned time trials. Coming to this many years after it came out, there's DLC, and I include that here. The time trials are mostly sections of the story levels with a time limit attached. The DLC levels are new and based heavily on the themes of block colours and geometric shapes. They're all quite visually stunning. I'm sure you can find some pictures. The thing with the time trials though is that you have to know how to play the game quickly. You have to be able to side jump boost, which involves you jumping sideways then turning to face forward, making you run at full speed immediately after starting. Other things like wall runs, coil jumps and even just aiming jumps to land on the right platform, these all become much more important. And if I thought I couldn't play the game when I was young, oh. I had no idea. Trying to play the game quickly just makes you worse at it. Yet although the concept of the time trials, and the full chapter speedruns which thankfully have much more forgiving time limits, is based around speed and efficiency of movement playing the game in such a way where this is your main priority doesn't seem right. It makes you feel too detached from the surroundings. And since I rather like the surroundings I suppose I don't enjoy this sensation.
And so, that attitude to playing the game is what eventually led to the change in my understanding of the game itself I've been alluding to. When you know how to play it, you don't play it as you any more. I can't play it as someone exploring, feeling their way across roofs or through vents or up rooms. I instinctively turn and try to go full speed. I was better at side jump boosting when playing the game than I ever was in a timed setting, annoyingly. But that's how I play it now, and how I would play it if I were to go back to it eight years from now. No matter how long, I'd pick it up and it would become instantly famililar. Is this a bad thing? It contradicts a lot of my memories of the game. Important memories. Not to the extent that I can't have those memories any more or that they're replaced. I don't think they ever will be. In my final playthrough I did try to play it the old way. With that same attitude and to an extent, it worked. I'm just thankful that I now know how to approach the bits which enraged me so much in the past. Being able to look where you're going to jump to while wall-running for instance, that's a big help. And I should add that the DLC time trial levels do add a significant challenge to the game, which is nice. For all its faults the actual mechanics of the game are quite solid, and putting them fully to the test is fun. Even if only one attempt in a hundred seems to work.
Posting about Mirror's Edge like this is a strange thing. If you're reading it now, soon after I've posted it then you've ever played the game and can understand at least some of what I'm talking about or you never will. If you never have you'd be horrified by the game. For all I've said about the art and the design, it's ugly. Graphically it's really shown up, and I haven't even got a PS4. I also forgot how annoying it was to see LOADING LEVEL show up on screen while I sit around waiting for the game to allow me to play it. Maybe the sequel fixes what problems I have, I don't know. I'm sure you'll find out soon. Will it evoke the same feelings in me as this one did, as it still does? Well by definition it can't, since the reasons for me identifying with the game and its content so strongly are long gone from my life. But I'm glad I played it when I did. And I'm glad I finally went back to finish it and beat all of it.
Mantis
I am a doctah
Thats why he is the Shia LeBeouf. He tries so hard to be different and just comes off sounding dumb.
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 385,043
- 30,539
Siamese Dream
Registered User
Kairi Zaide
Unforgiven
irunthepeg
Board man gets paid
Hansen
tyler motte simp
in the sense that he is not a single entity but rather a conglomerate of faceless writers under a single alias?
perhaps
perhaps
Siamese Dream
Registered User
She is insufferable because of her scrambles for relevance via retconning her life's work. Harry Potter is something which is obviously transcendent and has already inspired one generation - of which I am part - and she should be commended for this. The problem here is that the internet, specifically the weird fandoms it cultivates, appears to have given her a much greater sense of smug self-importance than she is actually entitled to. A much greater sense of smug self-importance than a fortune of hundreds of millions of pounds ever did, which is extremely worrying of itself. I don't know if it's out of a pitiable need to remain relevant that she's continually said this and that of various characters and her universe and expanded them or created entirely new entities, but she has done, and I know you have posted frequently about this yourself. Scrambling for relevance has scarcely been so relevant or applicable. If anything I think it speaks to a tremendous amount of self-doubt in her as a writer, which is both unfathomable given her aforementioned success and infuriating. I read the books. I adored them. I wanted to read because of them. Because of them, as they left your keyboard and my local Asda for a fiver at launch. I think I've got three first editions as a result, some local charity shop will have a field day when I die. But I digress. I don't want to know what you have to say of things you wrote about years ago just because it's been years since you wrote about them. Have some conviction in your creation, and lay off the pretence of you being some sort of all-knowing condescending mother hen to the sort of children that are now my age who're still waiting on their Hogwarts letter. It's unedifying.
Regarding her political affiliations, well, I don't honestly care. There have been plenty of artists throughout history who were able to create great things while being utter bellpieces. There have been plenty of artists fitting this description whose efforts I enjoy. There will be many more I discover in my life, many who probably aren't even born right now. Possibly the most all-encompassing portrait of humanity I have ever read was written by a man who became so vehemently anti-Semitic that the Nazis said he was counter-productive to their propaganda. If you create something I can separate from your politics, I'll appreciate it for what it is. If you can't, but it's still good, I can still appreciate it. Even if I were to return to Harry Potter now knowing how reprehensible I find Rowling as a person (and because I have come to this conclusion at the most developed point of my life/psyche it supersedes everything I've ever thought before, obviously) I would read the books and the books alone, considering nothing of the person who spawned them. That she's a servile, clueless SLab supporting lackey with a twitter account and a rabid fanbase, wouldn't matter. What does rankle somewhat with this in mind is her near flawless ability to continually play the victim. You don't read Scottish papers, it's as if she's got a line direct to the Daily Record to generate some sort of ROWLING SUFFERS CYBERNAT ABUSE headline whenever someone tweets (indirectly - I'd look up the story of the guy who was actually hounded by a reporter for a tweet he made about her which didn't mention her directly) something mean about her. This rings somewhat hollow given the spectacular amounts of money she has, the permanent legacy she's left on western civilisation, pretty much... everything she has in her completely made life. She still is able to complain in the most passive aggressive way possible about people being mean to her on the internet, enabled by people who self-identify as "Potterheads." If that isn't reason enough to find someone insufferable, well, I don't know what is.
Regarding her political affiliations, well, I don't honestly care. There have been plenty of artists throughout history who were able to create great things while being utter bellpieces. There have been plenty of artists fitting this description whose efforts I enjoy. There will be many more I discover in my life, many who probably aren't even born right now. Possibly the most all-encompassing portrait of humanity I have ever read was written by a man who became so vehemently anti-Semitic that the Nazis said he was counter-productive to their propaganda. If you create something I can separate from your politics, I'll appreciate it for what it is. If you can't, but it's still good, I can still appreciate it. Even if I were to return to Harry Potter now knowing how reprehensible I find Rowling as a person (and because I have come to this conclusion at the most developed point of my life/psyche it supersedes everything I've ever thought before, obviously) I would read the books and the books alone, considering nothing of the person who spawned them. That she's a servile, clueless SLab supporting lackey with a twitter account and a rabid fanbase, wouldn't matter. What does rankle somewhat with this in mind is her near flawless ability to continually play the victim. You don't read Scottish papers, it's as if she's got a line direct to the Daily Record to generate some sort of ROWLING SUFFERS CYBERNAT ABUSE headline whenever someone tweets (indirectly - I'd look up the story of the guy who was actually hounded by a reporter for a tweet he made about her which didn't mention her directly) something mean about her. This rings somewhat hollow given the spectacular amounts of money she has, the permanent legacy she's left on western civilisation, pretty much... everything she has in her completely made life. She still is able to complain in the most passive aggressive way possible about people being mean to her on the internet, enabled by people who self-identify as "Potterheads." If that isn't reason enough to find someone insufferable, well, I don't know what is.
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