too human snapshot

360 Too Human? Too Melodramatic Demo Mini-Review | Games Are Evil: Console and Portable Gaming Magazine
Which brings me to the storyline/plot/world. A good sf RPG adventure game has a good story or world. This world is just WAY too melodramatic for my taste. Ok, cool, I get the whole “based on Norse mythology” thing, but it’s laid on with a trowel. The visual design is stunningly next-gen, and all shiny and textured. They should have stopped with that. To add on horribly melodramatic, over-serious dialogue spoken like it’s being read for a dress rehearsal of a stage-play was just too much. The Valkyrie that comes down when a player is killed was cool, but then to have to waste an entire non-skippable cut-scene just to have someone say, “She’s a Valkyrie, come to take Thorisson to Valhalla” in the loud stage reading voice killed the fun and immersive-ness I crave in a RPG. Go try out Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed for comparison.

Man, it’s kind of cool to quote myself. Lookit there, blockquoted ME.

Anyway, sorry for the slowdown here, but I think this is a great opportunity to do some journalism, and to get my name out there as a writer/blogger.

Game - ho!

The current decade is characterized by security anxieties writ large, a socially conservative culture of retreat from liberalism, and a strong anti-feminist backlash. Our popular media, far from being the bastions of liberal values that conservatives say they are, are actually belwethers of popular culture, amplifying, reinforcing, and reflecting our culture’s normative values back at us the silver screen. What they’re showing this decade is really rather disturbing if you happen to agree with the core feminist ideological belief that women are real people too, not just baby factories and sex objects.

TV has always been bad — a hypothetical alien trying to make deductions about humanity by watching our TV signals would conclude that our normal gender ratio is four males to each female, and that’s just for starters! — but of late, the messages coming at us out of the mass media are nothing short of toxic. If movies and TV objectified people of colour the way they do women, the only reasonable conclusion one could draw would be that a concerted propaganda campaign was under way to return us to the unquestioned institutional racism of the 1950s.