AIMless: On Catherine (2011)

I played Catherine pretty soon after playing Emily is Away (which I wrote about here), and those are pretty interesting experiences back to back.  You could almost imagine Catherine being the continuation of the story of the protagonist from Emily is Away twelve years later, even though their mindsets are different.  But both games try to catalog relationships with the opposite sex from the male perspective, and neither are much interested in simply telling a tale of romance.

On True Detective Season 1

DVD Cover for True Detective Season 1 (Wikipedia)

We don't want to watch stories about good guys anymore. That's what it seems like, if we look at the popular, critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment. It's been happening for a while now, a corrosion of the line between good and evil on our screens. Superman's boring -- you can't write him interesting, you have to write around him -- but even Wolverine's standard fare now. We've gone beyond flawed protagonists, beyond every-man anti-heroes, and our pop culture seems to want to keep pushing further and further afield.  Now?  We're at Suicide Squad and Deadpool -- people that should be locked up, pychopaths, the criminally insane.  And that say nothing good about us, right?  Or that's how I think that slippery slope's supposed to go; someone else wrote something trying to plot a moral trajectory of our superhero films, so go look for that if you want.

But outside of the overloaded slate of superhero films – or, actually, as a cause of it -- movie studios are scared as hell, cluelessly groping around for what can even constitute a safe tentpole blockbuster anymore, and ending up with weird reboots and Apatow-y envelope-pushing comedies and lots of spies having to go off the grid. Television, meanwhile, – well, mainly HBO, and FX, and AMC -- seem suddenly enraptured with getting prestige, brooding, masculine, "adult" dramas greenlit at the moment.

HBO's True Detective is a good example of this.  The second season was apparently bad, and I'm not going to watch it, but the first season was highly acclaimed.  And it's so not-at-all interested in pushing a good guy on the viewer, but it even goes beyond that. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto is aggressively uninterested in making Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's characters relateable, or, really, any of the people on the show. There are moments interspersed to soften the blows, but not many, and they don't balance out with how the show makes sure to remind you how terrible human nature is. You might compare them to Walt from Breaking Bad if we're talking about unlikeable protagonists, but Breaking Bad was different: it wanted to make you root for him in the beginning, and it grounded his actions with a base of logic and conviction before slowly stripping away the rationalizations. True Detective doesn't reveal such an obvious throughline or arching purpose in its protagonists.

In Defense of Free to Wait Games

Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition, formerly of The Escapist) put out a review and also a video last year about a game called Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  Here's the review, and here's the video:

The Jimquisition - Free to Wait

Dungeon Keeper Mobile kicked up a bit of fuss when it was announced.  It was a mobile revival of a long dormant franchise that had its heyday in the 90s.  (Fun fact for those that don't know, Peter Molyneux worked on it).  And Electronic Arts decided to shamelessly cash in on that IP and they turned what was a strategic, well remembered PC game into a "free to play," "pay to win," "casual" game for mobile devices.  Or so the story goes.

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will.  I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games.  If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead.  But then these games aren't for me.

Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else.  That was the "gameplay."  Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process.  It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long.  It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.

And I'm going to try to defend them.