"What's wrong with Prey?," he asked
Jul. 26th, 2008 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsPrey so far has been okay. Not too spectacular but not a waste of my time. It's a little alarming when I shut the game off and go back to the OS to see that my poor little computer has reached 95C again, but I was warned when I bought it that it was prone to heat problems because it has two cores and an overpowered GPU.
I just finished the chapter entitled "All Fall Down," and I have to say that there's one thing about Prey that annoys me. In Doom 3, when you're walking through the Mars base, there is a moment where you're confronted with the ghost of a sobbing child, and her voice leads you into a very dark and bloody place, eventually winding up in the middle of a great, close-in firefight.
In Prey, in contrast, the big battle of "All Fall Down" starts in a room where you hear an off-key and ragged variant of "Pop Goes the Weasel." On the walls written with blood in a childlike scrawl are things like "Wanna come in and play?" and "Nobody will play with me." The lighting is low, and you sometimes here incoherent girlish whispers. In the middle of the room is a platform. Medical and ammo are scattered in corners.
In this genre, this set-up means only one thing: horror-tinted boss fight. Which is fine. The authors of Doom 3 trust you to figure that all out when you start working your way through the civilian communications center.
The authors of Prey, in contrast, do not trust you to be smart enough. Instead, they make your character say stupid stuff like "This is creeping me out," and "This is not good."
We know that, you morons. Why they have to inform us twice, I don't know.
The title, by the way, comes from a longstanding debate in the literary community: is it insulting to the reader to write "he asked" rather than "he said" after a question mark? The question mark already clearly indicates a question, so why inform the reader twice?
I just finished the chapter entitled "All Fall Down," and I have to say that there's one thing about Prey that annoys me. In Doom 3, when you're walking through the Mars base, there is a moment where you're confronted with the ghost of a sobbing child, and her voice leads you into a very dark and bloody place, eventually winding up in the middle of a great, close-in firefight.
In Prey, in contrast, the big battle of "All Fall Down" starts in a room where you hear an off-key and ragged variant of "Pop Goes the Weasel." On the walls written with blood in a childlike scrawl are things like "Wanna come in and play?" and "Nobody will play with me." The lighting is low, and you sometimes here incoherent girlish whispers. In the middle of the room is a platform. Medical and ammo are scattered in corners.
In this genre, this set-up means only one thing: horror-tinted boss fight. Which is fine. The authors of Doom 3 trust you to figure that all out when you start working your way through the civilian communications center.
The authors of Prey, in contrast, do not trust you to be smart enough. Instead, they make your character say stupid stuff like "This is creeping me out," and "This is not good."
We know that, you morons. Why they have to inform us twice, I don't know.
The title, by the way, comes from a longstanding debate in the literary community: is it insulting to the reader to write "he asked" rather than "he said" after a question mark? The question mark already clearly indicates a question, so why inform the reader twice?
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Said-Bookisms
Date: 2008-07-26 08:20 pm (UTC)