If you haven’t read
[this] article about Remember Me, do me a favor and please click that link.
It covers a lot of ground I treaded on in my review of the game (that’s up on my tumblr) in a much better fashion.
The author also raises several pretty profound points that I completely glossed over on my playthrough, especially in regards to Nilin’s journey being a spiritual one. I tend to gloss over religious allegory in basically everything (oops).
When I think of Remember Me though, I tend to get lost in imagining more games using concepts like memory as a balancing point for their content.
Cyberpunk fiction generally uses not only memory, but thought as its key point; even the most plodding of dystopian Cyberpunk fiction generally examines concepts about whether or not our thoughts can be evaluating of our humanity, or if that concept is tied more to what we remember or what we can give to the world. Much like comic books at the turn of the century, mostly this has to deal with that characters are used for in videogames. The industry tends to evaluate characters as if they were solitary in regards to the constructed narrative. As it is, analyzing not only a game but also how the entire world ties everything together, and what actions happening in it might ‘mean’ is kind of a recent trend in the world of games Journalism. That’s not to say it’s ‘new’ but I’d have to say smart journalism is only recently becoming more popular to write.
When it comes to Remember Me, the bottom line is mostly that it’s a neat, if completely misguided game. Even reflecting upon the game after reading that article – the game’s best points are still its nature as an almost interactive art gallery of console and computer processing power.
Maybe something like that will be important one day – which isn’t to say it is now, but maybe Remember Me is evocative of the type of ‘before their time’ games that get released on every console.
Can we be surprised that Remember Me – a title that wouldn’t necessarily be incredibly experimental
during the last few times periods of videogames might be the biggest example of it during this most recent console generation? Let’s not even get started on how many odd games came out during the PS2’s lifespan. With developers having focused more on market shares than any notion of experimentation, it’s still a wonder that the game was even released.
It covers a lot of ground I treaded on in my review of the game (that’s up on my tumblr) in a much better fashion.
The author also raises several pretty profound points that I completely glossed over on my playthrough, especially in regards to Nilin’s journey being a spiritual one. I tend to gloss over religious allegory in basically everything (oops).
When I think of Remember Me though, I tend to get lost in imagining more games using concepts like memory as a balancing point for their content.
Cyberpunk fiction generally uses not only memory, but thought as its key point; even the most plodding of dystopian Cyberpunk fiction generally examines concepts about whether or not our thoughts can be evaluating of our humanity, or if that concept is tied more to what we remember or what we can give to the world. Much like comic books at the turn of the century, mostly this has to deal with that characters are used for in videogames. The industry tends to evaluate characters as if they were solitary in regards to the constructed narrative. As it is, analyzing not only a game but also how the entire world ties everything together, and what actions happening in it might ‘mean’ is kind of a recent trend in the world of games Journalism. That’s not to say it’s ‘new’ but I’d have to say smart journalism is only recently becoming more popular to write.
When it comes to Remember Me, the bottom line is mostly that it’s a neat, if completely misguided game. Even reflecting upon the game after reading that article – the game’s best points are still its nature as an almost interactive art gallery of console and computer processing power.
Maybe something like that will be important one day – which isn’t to say it is now, but maybe Remember Me is evocative of the type of ‘before their time’ games that get released on every console.
Can we be surprised that Remember Me – a title that wouldn’t necessarily be incredibly experimental
during the last few times periods of videogames might be the biggest example of it during this most recent console generation? Let’s not even get started on how many odd games came out during the PS2’s lifespan. With developers having focused more on market shares than any notion of experimentation, it’s still a wonder that the game was even released.
No comments:
Post a Comment