A Sign of Greatness

This morning, I heard a perfect distillation of with LittleBIGPlanet may be a game for the ages. I heard a phrase emanating from the basement/multimedia grotto, repeated over and over with overwhelming joy. It was its own source of excitement and a perfect balm to the kind of frustration that usually requires emptying the grotto of all youthful life and hosing down of the furnishings.

The phrase: “Wait! I have an idea!!” It shall save us all.

PS-Second most frequent phrase: “Quit slapping me!!” That may be indicative of something else, but I choose to ignore it for now.

A New Kind of Warning

All games carry a mandatory seizure warning for epileptics. LittleBIGPlant has driven home to me the need for a new warning for a much more common problem: An OCD Alert. “Warning: this game may prove fatal for anyone suffuring from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

Not that it would have dissuaded me from buying it, but at least I’d have had a fighting chance. I’ve always been a bit susceptible to collection games, but this one seems to tap directly into whatever fold in my brain compels me to play the same level repeatedly to get that one last sticker. Doomed.

Liberty City Dispatch

Been lightly playing GTAIV for a few days now, but it has begun to affect my behavior in troubling ways. 

I can barely contain…the urge to talk in an Eastern European accent and have completely lost control of impulse to call everyone “Cousin!”

Flaming Tires and The Involuntary Guffaw

I just took a quick read of Clive Thompson’s mediation on the beauty of destruction (in, specifically, Burnout Paradise), and I instantly knew exactly what he was talking about. Back in the dark days when having a PS3 meant either watching Milla Jovovich’ Ultraviolet or playing Resistance Fall of Man, along came Motorstorm. Though it hardly delivered the system from its humiliating netherworld, it offered exactly the visceral thrill Thompson describes. From my youngest offspring to my parents, men and women alike, anyone present when I (very, very badly) played this game sounded a thundering howl of laughter as my vehicle careened off a cliff at absurd speed, gracefully disintegrating (in slo-mo, of course) into burning spare parts. Like Thompson, I’m not entirely convinced this is mere adolescent fixation or (the even more facile) typical male fetishization of violence. There is a beauty here, working on a very basic and subconscious level. For me, it’s the same response I’ve had whenever I’ve been faced with something truly, divinely beautiful: involuntary and wildly inappropriate laughter.