The Witness

Finally got around to starting the Witness yesterday. So far I like the game art style, which is a refreshing change from the gritty realism that most games are trying for these days. It's bright, colourful, creative and has some great level design for exploration and discovery. Everything is different and new when I reach it. The puzzle design is interesting too in that it gives you the basics at the beginning, but after that, you're on your own for figuring out how each of the maze puzzles work and relate to the environment around them. A lot of the puzzles build on one another, and some include elements of other areas while other count on you to translate visual information to new places. The one problem I have is I'm not a very visual person and have a lot of trouble transforming objects visually inside my head. I can remember scenes and pictures pretty well, but ask me to flip it or imagine an invisible object/picture/path and my brain just implodes. For instance, right now I can see the image of one of the line paths I found on a hexagonal pillar inside my head, but I would have a lot of trouble translating that image onto another object or applying it somewhere else.

One thing I could do without is the inclusion of random quotes and videos. There are various hidden recordings of a man and a woman quoting various great minds and thinkers (mostly Albert Einstein tbh), which is interesting, but super distracting. They really should have been included as text files vs audio recordings as they go on FOREVER. They all seem to be linking together based on theme, but it's kind of a vague over-arching theme, especially since you can essentially go anywhere you want on the island at any time providing there isn't a puzzle barrier in your way. When I activate them, I try to listen, but I want to move the game along, so I wander around, but I need to wait until they are done speaking before I can comment or interact with anything. It's not that the game doesn't let you...it's that I find it very hard to focus on listening and understanding the quotes at the same time as completing a puzzle. If these were text items, I could read them a lot faster and get the general sense of meaning.

I'm very much an auditory learner, which is why I talk through problems most of the time. I learn best through stories because I'm really interested in listening to them. When it's a smattering of quotes linked together by theme rather than narrative...I just don't really care. It's all interesting and deserves contemplation, but this is a game where the visuals are telling more of a story than the actual audio quotes are, and quite frankly I don't think they're needed. Perhaps I'm not seeing the bigger picture yet, but so far it comes off as pretentious and bloated, while the rest of the game is so clean and builds upon itself. The visuals tell me more of the story and the mystery of the island I'm on, which is all I really care about. I didn't start this game to be lectured in philosophy. I started this game because I heard it was more narrative driven and that there would be an over-arching story to accompany the elements I discover while playing. If I learn philosophical or scientific principles through the story's narration, even better, but I don't need random thematically linked quotes to enrich my gaming experience.

The best part of this game is that it's mildly unsettling. It's just a variety of abandoned environments with vague hints that someone is actively living there (freshly sliced apples, pillows, drawings). There are also other random hidden things like a carving in the water of a woman with chicken feet, or the little statue of a dog that scared the shit out of me (I'm still a little embarrassed about that one). THAT is the narrative and mystery I'm looking for, not a bunch of random quotes.

So good game so far. I'm recording it and will likely put it in the puzzle game section of my channel page when I'm done. It won't be an official release though I think. I'll leave it unlisted as I think it'll be for specific audiences.

Orange Yoghurt

Not sure when I uploaded some PoE videos, but thank you past Cheryl for looking after future Cheryl. I realized I hadn't posted anything in...a few...days? It was a busy week last week. Lost dodgeball (and Mel stole my sweater by accident so thankfully it wasn't -21C still), won bowling, and witnessed/heard about 3 car incidents.

Car incident 1: Friend was in accident where she was t-boned. Both she and her baby are fine.

Car incident 2: Friend who lives like 2 mins away ended up in front of me the other morning and I watched him spin out on some sketchy ice. He ended up facing the wrong way, but he managed to avoid hitting everything aside from the curb.

Car incident 3: Dude backed over where a stop sign used to be at the entrance of a parking lot of a restaurant we were at (the sign had already been hit by someone and was cleared off the road into the ditch) and it caught something on the bottom of his car and ripped it off. We watched him drive away with it dragging under his car.

Unrelated to the car, in that same restaurant we overheard the table next to us say "yeah there was a fist-fight in the McDonalds parking lot, so we decided to come here instead."

Spring is here, which means one major thing: Stuff That Happens in the Park is likely to return as a series. Events so far have been street racers crashing through the park (three major ones so far), creepy singing swing lady, the confused lost people who thought turning around in the middle of a narrow one-way street was a good idea and burst one of their tires, people screaming about Pokemon at 1am, people screaming at each other in general at 1am, and (while it wasn't exactly in the park) someone taking a shit in one of our cars. Personally, if I can make it through the summer without losing my laundry or having a bird fly into my car, I'll consider it a win.

I just realized I don't think I told anyone about the bird incident. Happened when I was loading up my computer to go to Shauna's to record RE7. I went back inside for the bag of cables and the keyboard and came back to the car to see a bird fly at me from the INSIDE OF THE CAR. I left the door open and I guess a bird flew in there. First thing I did was yell that there was a bird in my car in an outraged tone, then I threw open all the doors so it could fly out.

I sometimes wonder what the neighbours think...

Also, proof I am a giant loser: I was delighted when I found orange flavoured lactose free yoghurt and IT WAS ON SALE. I was happy enough that breaking into tears in the dairy aisle was a possibility (hard to believe, but it didn't actually happen). Orange lactose free yoghurt. People this is huge. I would stock up, but it goes bad after like a month and a half. Also freaked out over cherry coke and the blackberry gingerale that tastes like cotton candy.

I sometimes wonder what other grocery shoppers think...

Been on an Imagine Dragons binge lately. It happened after I got stuck in a Mumford and Sons vortex on YouTube and needed a means to escape the twangy screams.

The Fall
Warriors
Believer

Ummm oh yeah and the last thing is I was letting my dog outside at 3am the other night, heard a series of explosions a few blocks over and what I thought were muffled screams at first. Listened a bit longer and they were coyotes that were upset with the exploding noises.

I focus on random bs from my life this week cause I really have no news about any projects.

Stuffed Birds and Magic Hovercrafts

Had an interesting weekend...though I was mostly sick for the duration. I got a little downtime at least on Friday and my puppy, thankfully, slept most of the day. Made for an interesting, over-hyper evening, but at least I had some help after 5pm. Saturday was spent mostly moving my grandparents into a senior's residence. They were still in their old house, but my grandfather was having trouble keeping up with all the house and garden work since my grandma can't really help with it anymore.

What I've learned from moving them is that my grandparents own a lot of weird shit. From various ceramic figurines to a FREAKING STUFFED PHEASANT. Yes. An actual, taxidermy pheasant. It was staring at me from the backseat of my car.

 

My cousin kept saying we should attach it to my car as a hood ornament. Instead my grandpa wanted to mount it above his door in the hallway of his new place. Thankfully, for everyone involved, it does not fit above the door. It's currently on top of a cabinet, surveying the living room area. The thing is, I had forgotten about this thing, but I knew about it. I remember as a kid I kept randomly encountering it various locations in their basement. 

In my grandparents' inventory as well was a life-sized ceramic dog (a poodle of some sort), a weird statue of two kissing naked people, another bird decoration which was not taxidermy (I think it was made of plastic or something), five half-full maxwell/kirkland coffee tins, three separate containers of other assorted nuts, a medical condition/symptom book from 1985, a Bible that was given to my great great grandfather in 1840 when he left England to go to Canada (which is pretty damn cool and has a record of births and deaths in the family in the back), a safe that's about the size of my forearm and weighs twice as much as me (or at least it seemed that way), a coat of arms with two actual swords in it, a bunch of certificates belonging to my grandfather (I assume for all the secret societies he's involved with), a giant mystery trunk belonging to my grandfather (that was from when he was kicked out at age 18 to travel to Calgary and work with CP Rail), yoghurt from September of last year (which I'm pleased to say did not arrive at its intended destination and took a permanent detour into the trash), a lot of Jesus books and cassette tapes (for whoever remembers what a cassette tape is), and some really hilariously awkward childhood photos of my cousins, my brother and myself (most of the awkward ones are me, naturally...the ones with braces are GOLD). 

It was also really hilarious watching my father try to back a moving truck onto their driveway for five minutes. He hit the snowbank twice and got stuck on the ice. He doesn't know, but he had an audience of about six people...i.e. everyone who showed up to help move. I thought to record it too late and ended up with a useless 10 second video. 

So after a lot of angry muttering from my cousins about my uncle's "supervising," a lot of confusion about some dirty old sleeping bags (which turns out were just to cushion furniture), chasing Lauren with the pheasant and contemplating the scariest place to put it, watching my father try to park a moving van in a restaurant parking lot, Lauren fixing my terrible decorating skills, trying to figure out which plates were for eating and which ones were decorative, avoiding about 10 crashes with the awful trollies available for furniture, having crazy heart palpitations from the cold medicine I took (I have issues with acetaminophen and no, I still don't know how to pronounce it), running across a parking lot in -21C weather with no gloves carrying two bed rods, and hearing about carrying the glass cabinet up the driveway of slippery doom, we got them all moved in. 

So hovercrafts. Played some more Sonic 2006 yesterday after like...a month or two of not touching it. I got very angry with Shadow and the bloody sand waves. What I did discover, by accident, is if you hammer the X button when you get airborne in Shadow's hovercraft, you can fly across the map (but only in straight lines...steering is not an option). I got into some interesting positions because of this. You can actually fly to the finish line from the start if you desired, only the game requires you to jump through some arbitrary hoops to activate the door at the end.

Pillars of Eternity and Resident Evil 7 should continue to go up over the next week. I think I have other things ready, but my brain is fried and I can't remember anything beyond hovercrafts and stuffed pheasants. 

IT'S FINALLY OVER

I could cry. Over two years, and Evil Within is finally, FINALLY, finished. I have it all edited and uploaded (need to publish still), and now it is primed for deletion. Over two years this game has been struggled through and sitting on the backlog. It was fun at times to edit, but manually resyncing all that audio nearly killed it. I think after I suffered through that I should be able to manage finishing Bioshock Infinite.

I will be doing a proper send-off to the game. I have a plan, and it will probably be a lot less epic than I picture it in my head. Honestly, I'd light it on fire if I could, but it's digital and lives in Shauna's Steam library and I don't think she'd appreciate her laptop being on fire.

Speaking of Shauna, she has a lot of videos for her Dragon Age 1 LP if you're interested. It lives here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol1t2XaHD2k&list=PLIKU-yiuEWNybafHXm6ARqcKEHY2s4PAg

I should probably tell her the deleted video is still sitting in the playlist...

So now I just have SOMA, VTM, Bioshock Infinite, Gauntlet, Dungeon Siege Revival, War for the Overworld, Dishonored 2, Resident Evil 7 and Sonic 2006 to work my way through! Not to mention the RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, Extra Life and 2k videos.

Crap that's still a lot.

How do I get myself in these messes?