Who knew it even had points? Maybe there’s a code to unlock them. Or maybe the first one had points? That’s been so long I don’t remember.
My wife does the rob-and-roll-the-hookers thing in GTA; I was pretty shocked the first time I saw her wailing on a streetwalker with a baseball bat. High-larious. That was mainly GTA III, though … when Vice City came along she took to killing senior citizens on the golf course as her preferred source of petty revenue. She’d whack 'em with their own golf clubs, three or four at a time like a golf-club samurai. {swoon!} In San Andreas she went after drug dealers (they had the most money and just stood there waiting to be shot) and in GTAIV I’m not sure she has a favorite. Nobody’s safe!
I’m mainly in it for the irresponsible driving/flying/boating and outrageous wrecking parts. Any hookers damaged in the process are incidental, not deliberate I’m sure I’ve winged a few with gasoline-soaked flaming shrapnel, though, especially in GTAIV …
I love how in Chinatown Wars they turned the hooker-abuse cliche around, though. That got a laugh for sure (plus: Chinatown Wars just rocked so hard in so many ways).
Back then, if you wanted an IF game you had to buy one; these days you open a browser and download one for free. Far more games are available to you these days than back in the 1980s so you don’t tend to have as much time to devote to each one as you did back then, thus giving the impression that back then you had more time to play games than you do now.
There’s also the added fact that back in the 1980s, IF was commercial. These days it’s free. You’re far more likely to stick with a game you’ve paid money for than one you got for free; give up on a commercial game because you dislike the parser, it’s buggy, there’s a maze, etc, and you’re out of pocket. There’s no real downside to giving up on a free game because it takes only a minute to download another.
David, that’s exactly what I was thinking of – not that you had more time to play games, but that you had more time for each individual game.
S. John, I guess it depends on the context, but I don’t think “nostalgia” is necessarily an accusation. Part of my horrified reaction to the 3D shooter remake of Combat is that another 3D shooter sounds kind of dull compared to the PvP simplicity of the original Combat, but I’ll freely confess that there’s a lot of nostalgia there too. And even if Infocom games are superior to Combat (which they are, I suppose, or maybe it’s a matter of taste), I also think nostalgia for them is natural and healthy. I have nostalgia for the Beatles because of all the time I spent listening to my parents’ Beatles records, but they’re also pretty good.
I know some of those: I’ve had an acquaintance refuse to watch North By Northwest because he was convinced it was going to be boring. I also know some who regard a B&W movie as inherently superior to color, and refuse to watch anything made after, say, the mid-fifties. Both groups are clearly doing it wrong, in my opinion. (There is something to the idea that old movies, like foreign movies, come to us with a bit of selection bias built in – we wouldn’t have even heard of them if they didn’t have at least some redeeming qualities – and so they are likelier to be good than a randomly-selected contemporary Hollywood film. But still.)
Here’s an article (via Making Light): theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspir … -arbitrage for those who are interested. The part that stood out most in my mind was this: “there is literally not enough celery root grown in the world for it to survive on the menu at McDonald’s.”
Hear, hear. An opinion worthy of its own t-shirt, bumpersticker and - dare I be the one to say what everyone else is thinking? - it’s own novelty sugar-free artificially-cinnamon-flavored adults-only gummi sculpture.*
I suppose that’s true, but only useful to the extent that we, as you say, randomly select our contemporary Hollywood films. I’d suppose the easy availability of things like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, rapid-fire electronic feedback from friends who know our movie tastes, and so on helps provide a compensatory real-time alternative to that selection bias.
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Up late working, all night, then all afternoon. Haven’t slept in quite a while. Indexing. Map graphics. Lines all swimmy. Marmoset?
it is excruciatingly boring! I really don’t like Hitchcock movies in general (most overrated director of all time?), but even he has made way better stuff
I wouldn’t say “excruciatingly boring” (though is kind of dull). But I just watched it about a year ago with my family and we spent much more time laughing at the constant, outrageous misogyny. Unlike other films of his, it has really not aged well.
It’s not all B&W, but Atomicagecinema.com might a good website to annoy your B&W-hating friends. Curl up with 'em and watch Them!, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Attack of the Giant Leeches, or maybe just Duck and Cover.
Augh, darnit, I shouldn’t take the bait, but curiosity has gotten the better of me. What do you find outrageously misogynistic in NxNW? (I’m certainly not saying there isn’t any, but I’d say it’s comparable to today’s mainstream cinema, at worst.)
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was pretty good, but my favorite in the “so bad its good” category is Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. A bunch of rich kids have a party in a mansion located next to a cemetery; after getting suitably intoxicated, they decide to wake up the inhabitants of the cemetery. The dead folks are not at all amused at having their repose disturbed.
Or maybe the first one had points? That’s been so long I don’t remember.
