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Monday, July 09, 2007
MEAT GRINDER
Madvillain
Madvillainy
Stone's Throw : 2004
[Buy It]
GAME THEORY
The Roots
Game Theory
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]
IN THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH YOU WILL BE A MONSTER
Shining
Grindstone
Rune Grammaphon : 2007
[Buy It]
North Carolina isn't known for its balmy summers, and today is no exception. It's too hot to play outside and definitely too hot to think about music. I think I'm going to fritter away the afternoon with my favorite time-suck, Kingdom of Loathing, a free, online parody RPG that's like World of Warcraft without the silky framerates (stick figures, in fact), but with way more willfully bad puns and blantant absurdity. The real genius of KoL is that it works on two levels: it's a hilarious parody of more serious online games and of fantasy gaming conventions, but it's also wicked addictive in its own right.
Just as in real MMORPGs, the collection of loot has a self-sustaining logic. Eventually, you don't even care what you might do with the "filthy dread sack" you can steal, with perseverence, from a "business hippy" - you simply know that it exists in the game world, and you therefore need to have it. The point and click gameplay is immaculately simple, and the brisk cycle of incentive and reward, however meaningless, is engaging and soothing. KoL tickles my retro gaming fetish at a time when new games are so wildly complex that I usually prefer reading about them in magazines, just to keep an eye on where the technology is going (and going so quickly, toward realms of viable virtual reality a la Second Life), to actually playing them. The only downside to KoL is that you're allotted a certain number of adventures per day, and once you run out, you can't play again until the server resets late at night, no matter how close you were to nabbing those "dope tires" for your Meat Car. In the meantime, there's always Zork.Labels: brian, games
posted by Brian
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