GraniteM

I understand that this looks like a pretty good setup for a Final Destination movie.

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Phil Spector produced some of the best music of the twentieth century, including one of a handful of bearable Christmas albums in existence. Also he's a fucking murderer. So... bit of a mixed bag, there.

GraniteM @lemmy.world 2天前

I kind of think that Lovecraft was doing about the least-worst thing he could with his absolutely massive trove of neuroses and phobias, which definitely included racism and xenophobia.

He was convinced that the universe was chaotic and horrifying and that the only thing we could hold on to for stability was racial purity, and that's pretty fucked up, but he turned those feelings into spooky stories about interdimensional space monsters, which is certainly a lot better than writing political tracts or trying to convince everyone that the Armenians are actually to blame for all of our problems.

Therapy would have been even better, but writing spooky stories was better than some of the very real alternatives that other people were exploring in the 19-teens and twenties.

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GraniteM @lemmy.world 3天前

Why does "young" Brett already look like an alcoholic in his late fifties?

GraniteM @lemmy.world 4天前

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GraniteM @lemmy.world 4天前

This was sent out by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

Goddammit, I thought that this was deliberately prompted to be as fucked up as possible as a parody of bad AI.

GraniteM @lemmy.world 4天前

"Liberal Activist Judge Poisons Local GOP Office"

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GraniteM @lemmy.world 4天前

Hades is a great example of this. You start out as the son of Hades, lord of the underworld. You want to escape his realm, so you try to fight your way out. Along the way, you will die and fail, and you just get sent back down to your father's house, and he gives you a bit of a hard time about how weak and ineffectual you are.

The plot unfolds as you interact with various gods and other figures in the underworld, over the course of your many attempts. Saving and reloading isn't really a thing, as such, but the plot continues to unfold, even as you die over and over over and over.

Edit:

This is a great time for me to rave about how much I love the storytelling in Hades. In a book or in a totally linear game, the story looks like this:

You start at the beginning, you proceed directly to the end. You have no choices in how the plot progresses. This is fine in a book, and I'm sure there are some games where it works okay, too.

Most games with "choices" go like this:

You might make a few choices, but a lot of them either end in a false ending or take you right back to the ending that the writers planned all along. It can give the illusion of meaningful choice, but it can also start to feel hollow once you see where the railroad tracks are.

Hades works like this:

All of the characters in the game (and there are a lot of them) have their own linear plot that is unfolding as you play the game, and you are learning about any one of them at any given time. You don't have many meaningful choices to make, but it still reads as a very compelling plot because all of your interactions deepen your relationship with each character in turn. It saves us all from the fake choices that a lot of games stick us with. It's genius.