about 3 or 4, about 3 or 4 of them came through my door at night chattering on about some or some other thing but when they tried i mean the instant i heard that distinctive jangle i knew i had to take out my gun and shoot them poor bastards for trying to take my motorcycle keys
The conclusion is, if you don't find this game fun, you don't find people fun. Which is fair, but I definitely love sitting in the garden of a run-down bar at a measly nine in the evening, drinking really bad but really cold beer and being given free aspic by the yellow-bearded owner on the account of you and your friends' youthful vigor and then listening to his story about the time he had a foursome with three dutch girls at the 84 winter olympics (this is all true)
I like playing my video games more than reading them. When I need to read quality prose, I read books. For nonfiction, I prefer Bertrand Russell; As fiction, I prefer to read Jorge Luis Borges lately.
and for my non-spoilerless thoughts: i know it's supposed to be a metaphor for real world events that are so grim we actively choose not to talk about them, like world war 3 or present-day slavery, but the pale is one of the first things that get foreshadowed in the game, along with the ceramic armor and the rhetorical people wearing it you could be "one day" fighting. "if the ceramic armor pay-off (the tribunal) was this high quality, to the point it left me literally trembling and sick to my stomach", i thought, "what's the pale pay-off gonna look like?" and honestly? i thought everything in the game was pointing towards it. "the case is all i have", the numbers barrier, the pale's encroach far off in the future, kim mentioning sitting on benches "after the case". i was thinking. "ok, so after the case is over, harry will be left with nothing to do. what now? he walks the streets of martinaise, slowly searching for meaning, working through himself. i pictured a quest to just sit down on a bench, now with a brand now dialogue option to sit, indefinitely. you get some cutscene where you see the years pass, and the pale is now closer and faster than ever. remember how the pale breaks down even the most fundamental aspects of reality? i imagined the approach of the pale glitching out your interface, your items, the numbers on your screen, leading into wacky interactions like on baba is you, or when the mgs2 colonel ai gets all corrupted and you see the fake mission failed screen, the weird cutscenes, or something like that. maybe you get a look into harry's memories, et cetera. it just felt like the OBVIOUS conclusion to the game that it had always been leading to. i was incredibly disappointed not to see something like this happen. i couldn't help but feel underwhelmed to not see the aftermath of something so hush-hush suddenly becoming oh so real. i mean, mgs2 pulled it off on the ps2. i would have loved to see what could have been done today, even as awesome as the game still ended up being despite it.
to conclude: this is no lift yr skinny fists like antennas to heaven. it is merely slow riot for new zero kanada. which is, you know, still pretty good. nowhere near as good as i wanted it to be though.
Stopped reading there