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by Luv Mehta Two months have gone by since that last post! Work’s become even harder, this pandemic-stricken world has no change in its new status quo, and I’ve had a lot of trouble writing anything about any of the stories I’ve seen/played through.
But work’s winding down, and I finally have some time. I haven’t written anything but code in a very long while, so I wrote all of this in a span of two hours. So here’s a bunch of impressions of some media I’ve consumed, ranked in order of least to most enjoyed.
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The Deconstructive Brigade Of Star Wars - Comparing The Last Jedi To Its Analogue In Gaming31/12/2017 by Luv Mehta  So this little indie low-budget movie called Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, and fan reactions are… split, to say the least. It’s an incredibly risky movie that adds a lot of introspection and deconstruction to the series, calling into question the way the Force, the mythical space-magic that has been a mainstay of the series, has been treated, interpreted and taught across the whole saga. For better or for worse, this has ended up being exactly the kind of movie that the franchise needed - a risky installment that shakes up the whole series and invites discussion and analysis. There have been quite a lot of debates on the matter, and there are so many great takes that have been spawned that you can spend the whole day getting to know new perspectives on it. Through this article, I’m trying to do something different. Because all this deconstruction and introspection isn’t new to the Star Wars universe - it’s something gamers have experienced back in late 2004, when Obsidian developed and released Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords - a title that split fans to the core, in many of the same ways the current movie fandom has experienced right now. And I feel it might benefit to compare them both, seeing how the decisions they took are simultaneously critical of the central morality play of the series, and why these end up making for a stronger story. Mild spoilers for The Last Jedi follow, and I’ll do my best to avoid any spoilers for the Knights Of The Old Republic series (referred to as KOTOR afterwards for convenience). Because the analogy can be extended best to a Light Side playthrough of KOTOR II, I’ll primarily deal with the plot on that side. by Sucheto Nath What’s your idea of a free game? The quick way to answer that is ‘a stolen one’. If you said ‘hide and seek’, you’re the guy in the group chat that forwards fake news and pseudoscience. There is, however, such a thing as freeware. For some of us, that’s what we spent hours playing growing up, especially if we didn’t have a pirated copy of Grand Theft Auto. The muttering retreats of the internet are like the little street stalls in every old city. They’ve been there longer than the mall (read: Steam), and they will be fondly remembered by their frequenters. Sometimes, though, it pays to take a look around those little corners. Sometimes they give you something better than the new place. In December, 2008, a game called Spelunky was made by Derek Wu on – wait for it – Game Maker. (Game Maker was where we fooled around pretending to be game makers when we weren’t playing Age of Empires or Neopets). Have you seen the meme where Kanye is waiting for a joke to be over? If Indiana Jones is the joke, Spelunky is the punchline.  by Srijon Mukherjee  The fact that someone like me actually played and completed God Of War II isn’t a testament to how easy the game is - it’s a testament to how much I enjoyed playing it. I’m not a gamer in any sense of the word, and it’s not because of a lack of gaming skills, but more because I usually tend to abandon playing a game as soon as I’m stuck in a part for some time. This strange voice in my head whispers to me, comforting me, and assuring me that life is about moving on, and anyway, who needs that kind of pressure to perform in a fucking game? I know, a lot of you do, and yes, it’s not really pressure, but hey, my life, my escapist argument, okay? by Tarique Ejaz  Tekken is one of the pioneers of one-to-one combat gaming, along with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. However, over the years it has slowly and steadily consolidated its franchise with an ever growing fan base who find the allure of diverse fighting styles, taken mostly from those that are in action at present in the various parts of the world, seemingly irresistible. The thing about Tekken is that it is more than just a fighting game with a background story encompassing a set of central characters. It denotes a game that provides its other characters (supporting would be an unfair justification) the opportunity and space to contribute to the main theme of disputed bloodline but also add to the existing continuity of the series.
by Luv Mehta  You're in a mind. A dream, but it's not yours. You delve deep inside and traverse bizarre alien geometry, fighting off the projections of whoever's subconscious you're in. You open safes to look at their deepest hidden memories, and get to the heart of their deep-seated fear and anger to solve their problems, and in the process, fundamentally change the dreamer themselves. No, Psychonauts isn't Inception: The Game, released far before we were talking about dreams and cool stunts. It's much more inventive, much more imaginative, and much, much more fun. by Luv Mehta  We’ve got Star Trek, the ideal of human beings exploring the galaxy, and we’ve got Star Wars, a universe we could easily imagine ourselves living in. But let’s face it, even with the recent spate of movies, both these stories have already been created and experienced by previous generations. No matter when we watch them, no matter how timeless they are, they’re not really our stories, now, are they? Selfish to say, yes, but to watch a good story be created, and experience it taking hold of our imaginations even as we see them, is a wondrous, incomparable thing. We may have Harry Potter as a series of fantasy that shaped our lives, we may be watching history being made with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but which superlative and influential piece of work do science fiction fans of this generation have? Maybe Firefly? Fringe? In my humble opinion, it’s the Mass Effect series. |
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