…or, to be more exact, the most stressing week of my working life (at least so far) didn’t manage to kill me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad though, since it did lead to some, uhm, weird results. Like this. I guess going so close to insanity brought out the artist in me…
…I really appreciate your visits on my site. I really do. But I’d be a lot happier if you didn’t end up here while looking for a porn video called “Italian Marianna Pigtails”.
Also, may the gods of the Universe bless Akismet. Best. Plugin. Ever.
I’d have never imagined that the death of someone famous would have left me so heartbroken. Sad, yes. Sorry, yes. But not like this. When my boyfriend told me “Richard Wright is dead” the blow was so unexpected that it took me a few seconds to realize what he was talking about.
I can’t say I’ll be listening to his music more often, it would be a bit difficult. Pink Floyd have been a big constant of my life’s soundtrack since I was very young.
So, well, goodbye Richard. I hope you’re someplace nice now, wherever it is.
I haven’t updated the blog in ages, I know. And I feel guilty. Really. But vacations, connection problems, work and plain and simple laziness have kept me away for a while. But I still love you, my little website, don’t worry.
So, I’m going to have three really busy weeks. I’m having my very first press tour ever on the same day as the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Yay. Then the week after that I’m seeing a couple dozen doctors (nothing tragic), and on the 27th and 28th I’ll be at the yearly “The First Place’s Let’s All Meet At Someone’s Place, Play Videogames And Show How Unfit For Survival We Are” super-duper-cool event.
And now I’d better go finish Crisis Core. Which is really a shame when Spore is still sitting on my shelf and giving me the Big-Puppy-Eyes look, but work is work. But I got the Galactic Edition, dammit.
It was my 26th birthday yesterday. And, apart from a few presents (including an Eeepc!), it was a very bad day. I couldn’t sleep because the bastards at the dancing thing near here seem to think that everyone likes loud latino music at 1am, I worked until 8pm (darn deadly deadline), had pea soup for dinner and, well, I basically didn’t celebrate at all. So I’m going to celebrate tomorrow. I still don’t know how, I’ve never been good at these things. But I will celebrate, oh yes. Lots of celebration.
Friend and regular contributor to WinGiochi Antonio “1con 0f s1n” Francese contacted me earlier this afternoon, and gave me a link to Dear Esther, a quite… curious Half-Life 2 mod. And for this I’ll never be thankful enough, since Dear Esther is easily one of the most interesting things I’ve ever played.
Dear Esther is not exactly a game, since there’s no interaction to speak of. It’s more a sort of experiment in storytelling. It basically has the player explore a mysterious (and beautiful, in a gloomy, grey-brown-and-green way) island, scattered with symbols like chemical formulas and strange schematics, maybe electronic circuit diagrams, written on the stone and, for some reason, a golden spiral drawn in the sand. Reaching certain locations and landmarks triggers audio fragments of a letter to a woman named Esther. And that’s all. No shooting, no missions, no bald space marines, no “Don’t die on me, Bubba” *.
Dear Esther is purely about narration. But very little is actually said about the story and the characters. In fact, there are no characters at all, only the guy who tells the story and some mysterious shadow you follow but never reach. Other people are mentioned but never seen. The mod is a very unusual experience for a gamer. While offering no challenge and basically no action except for walking, looking around and occasionally jumping and being extremely slow paced (although it can be finished in about the time it takes to read a short story), it offers the same strong emotions as the best videogames on the market, if not more. And since each narrative fragment is randomly selected among three possible files, I’m guaranteed to return to the mysterious island, to find out more about the story or just to experience the same emotions again.
*On a completely unrelated note, has anyone else noticed how it’s always the black soldier the one who dies in a very heroic and very foolish way? No, seriously.
One of the things that depresses me most about my job is that, being slightly younger than my colleagues, I seem to have missed lots of cool games. When someone comes up with “Hey, remember [insert more or less obscure arcade game here]?” all I can do is try not to look too stupid while I figure out what the hell they’re talking about, knowing that they probably played it when I was still learning how to eat solid food.
Oh, there were arcades when I was old enough to play, but in the town where I grew up they were mostly a place for boys. My schoolmates would go there, play “revolutionary” 1990s games, laugh and boldly shout their first, innocent swearwords, usually very vague insults about each other’s mother, like “your mom does this and that”, or simply long “battles” of “your mom!” “no, your mom!”. But if a girl would put her foot in there an icy, embarrassing (and probably embarrassed) silence would fall, and they’d wait for the intruder to go away before they’d start having fun again.
Still, I can’t remember when or where, but I did play Space Invaders at least once, when I was very, very young, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the funny little pixel creatures moving in a tight phalanx on the screen. And today, when I finally put my hands on Space Invaders Extreme, I already knew what to do.
Shoot them mercilessly.
And I know that, when I’ll manage to clear all stages, I’ll look at my boyfriend, smile and say:
“Tony?”
“Mh?”
“Your mom.”
The temperature here has been going up and up and up for the past few days, I don’t know exactly since I don’t watch TV but I bet it was at least 40°C at noon, an unpleasant reminder of how close to Africa I am. I’m tired, lazy and useless and can’t do anything that doesn’t involve a chair, a big glass of orange juice and swearing at everyone and everything in five kilometres’ radius for no reason. I’m like Terry Pratchett’s trolls. Keep me at a decent temperature (about 18-20°C) and my brain might have a chance to work. But with this heat, I’m guaranteed to throw things at people.
But what I hate the most is that I can’t play videogames. I finished Mass Effect in a week and loved everything about it, except perhaps Kaidan and Liara (duuuuuull, I’m going to pick a male character next time), but now I’ve been stuck at three quarters of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines for three days. It’s not that I don’t like it. I love it, it’s a great game. Bugfest, but a great game. I like the setting, the characters, the story, the crazy dialogues I get as a Malkavian, and I’m very curious about the ending. But when I try to play I can’t resist for more than five minutes. And then I get homicidal because of some random clipping or a bug, roar at the screen and quit.
I’d get myself an air conditioner, but I have very strong opinions about energy saving (nothing to do with money, mind). Maybe I should quit my job and move to Norway. But cold winters have a very bad effect on me.
Ok, apparently there’s something wrong with my mail address (the one from the site). I can send e-mail, but can’t receive it. I’ll try to have the issue fixed. In the meantime, if you tried to contact me in the past couple of weeks or so, please forward your messages here. Thanks!
It’s here. It’s mine. Ok, ok, I know it’s a conversion and half the world has already played it on Xbox 360, but do I care? No, of course I don’t, because I’m an evil, smelly PC gamer and RPG fanatic who’s been patiently waiting for months to see it on The One And Only Platform (or at least, the only one she owns, and no, I’m not buying a console until they’ll make them smaller and more versatile, so there. And no, PC isn’t dead. No it isn’t. Go play a random Itagaki game, stare at the bouncy polygonal boobs and leave me alone, for Christ’s sake, I’m sick and tired to hear/read the same things over and over again). Mass Effect is here, and it’s mine. All mine. Muahahahaha.
Expect more on this later. If it’s good. If you hear a distant roar, it wasn’t.
