Posted by Chris Ward at 2:38 PM Jun 10, 2008
Every couple of years, I find myself hunting down this incredible game again online (which is now, wow, 8 years old), and I finally got to put it's lessons to use last night. It's called THE NEGOTIATOR, and it's the most darkly hilarious Flash game of all time—a weird and crudely rendered sociology RPG where you're forced to deal with a homeless man who demands $200. Kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure with winos and death. And, just like all encounters with hobos, the wrong responses get you killed with a bottle. This is all preceeded by my favorite line and cutscene ever: "You're a heartless bastard, and you deserve what's coming to you." Well, he's right you know.
Hit the jump to see how the actual encounter went down, just before I called my video game skills to action and turned a Homless RPG into an actual Homeless LARP!
And If you guessed "this somehow involves the Indiana Jones Whopper," you are correct, and are probably part of Stalin's psychic army.
Read more "Homeless LARP: "You're..." >>
Posted by Nate Patrin at 2:15 PM May 16, 2008
I know we're right about at the point where a significant critical mass is brewing against Grand Theft Auto IV, and not just the usual Moral Guardian bullshit: there's the requisite anti-hype backlash traversing the internet, one that is likely to fall in terms of sheer irrepressible "I am Rowdy Roddy Piper and I just put on the Ray-Bans" defiance somewhere between the great Strokes fiasco of 2001 and the loathing any baseball fan outside the New England area is developing towards the post-World Champion Red Sox. So I'll try not to play up how big of a geek I am for GTA IV, since that might mean I'm on the take, part of some corrupt video game review cabal that hands out 10s like candy to undeserving subjects and conspires against the success of cult classics like God Hand. Or something. In all fairness, I tend to have a soft spot for big sprawling ambitious kinda-flawed pop-cult-crazy epic games like this, which is why my two candidates for Game of the Year so far are GTA IV and No More Heroes. (Though it remains to be seen how Fallout 3, this year's potential king of big sprawling ambition, pans out.)
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Posted by Nate Patrin at 12:48 PM Apr 07, 2008
Things happen for a reason. In most traditional narrative media, whether dramatic or comedic, certain constructs are in place that play on an audience's pre-conceived expectations, and are there to build tension and release, create empathy with or antipathy towards a character, and generally denote what sort of genre the work belongs to. These are known as "tropes," the basic building blocks of storytelling, and once video games started advancing past paddle-vs.-ball conflicts and into the realm of real characters with motivations (even if said motivation is "make a delicious hamburger"), they developed a whole set of their own.
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