Shotgun Blog: Five Things
January 26, 2010 You don't pray to a saint, you pray with a saint. You're asking the saint to pray for you. Praying to a saint would make that saint an icon, which isn't what saints are. Saints, having led particularly holy lives, are especially effective in their prayers and have certain specialties, which is why you choose a specific one of them to ask their aid and attention.
A tiny werewolf, which dwelled duplicitously inside the hide of a possum.I saw a dead possum in the road on the way to work. Something about the way its shapeless carcass lay in the road suggested that something else was previously inside it, and had shed its possum costume and gone about its buisness. A very small lycanthrope, perhaps.
Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting choices. When you make certain choices in most games, however, you preclude yourself from making other choices. Is part of a good game, then, deciding which choices you don't want to make, and using that information to inform the choices you do make, in a sort of prognosticative play? And is it possible to play by not playing, say, by choosing to "avoid all games of chance" or "stay out of the Molasses Swamp" by never entering Candyland?
My tepid romance with Dragon Age: Origins seems to be at its end. My interest fell off rapidly when I entered the Brown Kingdom of the Dwarves, whose undermountain kingdom (eight buildings you can enter) had ground to a halt, and only I could save it. Oh, how would these sixty dwarves, none of whom seem to have jobs, survive without my timely diplomacy? To tell the truth, I don't care.
I would love to read A Dance with Dragons.
Reader Comments (4)
The thing that makes Orzammar most heartbreaking in the context of Dragon Age is that you have to start making moral choices with no information and, frankly, no actual urgency. If PART of the problem of making a choice between the two representatives vying for the throne was that it had be done right now, then yeah, it would have been interesting. Then, even waiting too long or choosing not to get involved would be viable. Instead, that zone becomes contrived, offering a brittle veneer of political roleplaying over some truly boring MMO Style retrieval/placement quests.
I felt really steered to make the choice for the "good guy," even though I was playing a completely self-interested character. Lots of the dialogue for the "bad guy" supporters made them out to be just plain assholes, and people I didn't want to help. The choice wasn't populist versus tyrant, is was hippie versus dickhead.
This is one of my great frustrations with games that purport to offer moral choice. They don't actually offer a scale of moral outcomes. "You can do whatever you want, morally!" translates in most of the games that claim to offer it into "utter goody-goody" or "demented psychopath." I really wanted to make the choice that best suited my character's wants, and I had no information about the rewards. All I saw was the demeanor of the characters on both sides of the issue, so no one in their right mind would have picked the asshole candidate. All that dialogue tree offered was insults and derision.
I'm with you on A Dance with Dragons. What's it been, like 5 years? I'm going to have to go back and reread all the other books just to remember everything that's happened.
Couldn't agree more. As I continue my way through Dragon Age, I am realizing that there really isn't much of a choice at all. The choice of responses are so outrageous that I find myself laughing... How is that engaging? It isn't so much about making a carefully considered choice, but following the path that seems most plausible to the reality of the story. Not what I had in mind.
George Martin needs to stop going to every damn fantasy con in the known world, stay home, and finish the damn book...