A few minutes in the Adventure Game Studio, and we’re well and ready to go! Or, I might be going a bit flat.
The news today was that Fire Emblem: Awakening had cracked the top 100 for both the PS3 and Xbox 360. Though I’m sure there’d been many of you who’d rather not look at their lifeless eyes, this was a big one, and you need to be in the game for protecting the world from past, present, and future.
I turned it off for a moment, and slowly considered whether I should write that off. Back in my day, I would have read all sorts of fun sci fi, horror, action pop, and RPG articles; the day had come and gone. But… well, it was never a good day; more than half the games I looked at simply ran and stalled. Instead of staring at the screen, I looked at the users of the site, looking for a sound.
The developers on the site were fools, but we all knew it! It was a rounder than a hole in the night sky, with the constant rumbling of beatniks, the occasional quiet ticking of the clock, once or twice on the podcast or chat, and the occasional episodic cataloging and reexploration, but it wasn’t just the graphics and the written content. They’d put in a hellofic amount of effort on this.
“It’s-”
“This is my story,” the voice cut in, “Now read this.” Sure, some things can certainly be told read-first-and-run-here. But listen intently, and you'll listen to the story not as a static verse, but as a scratch. Finally, it took me to start thinking, though. Maybe these guys were writing fictionalized games, and therefore everything was just like it was out in the real world. Maybe the world was a bit drastically different, and somehow, these stories was a bit of a letdown.
I sat there, and started typing. It ended up being quite the thing to say, because we had writers and game developers on the site, blah, blah, blah. We were all singing the same songs, and both teams were chapping each other, and we were all getting mad. We were all gonna go off record for a little bit, until the whole gamejam came back around and everyone finally had something to say or do on the site. Most was a rumor or rumor or tabloid piece about mysterious brominance and one time, the old guy’d started texting funny people from work. I never were around to hear that mystery stuff, but it was something that had happened, and I didn’t appreciate it.
We had those writers. You could read them all, there were so many great stories around that were two-dimensional plot holes, retreads of whole series. It turned into a game jam. They were always railing against the Paperworld Wars and the Plasma Age, arguing about if Taylor Goes to the Pollensaur, but these guys were staunchly stuck in the Middle Ages. They were always gonna take things up as far as they could, don’t dare take breaks, over-haul the older articles, if they even even worked. It was all the same shit. There were 12,000 people that participated in a cramfest in the space of three days, every single one of them literally churning and moaning as if their voices sounded out of time.
Even the top-ranked up-and-coming people, the SCP veterans, were too scared to say shit, they just kept on updating themselves all the time. They barely acted real on the site anymore. This is what the community was for, this is what we were. We were just supposed to keep up with the godawful nonsense; it wasn’t our one and only. There were faint sounds of talons, too, but the grammar was perfect around the basic concepts. Those fell into place quickly, like lines creeping in, like ground falling, like people walking in circles. It was all the same shit.
The series went into overdrive, and finally died, because the people who had helped each other out like We Hold The Portals, if they even existed, wanted to do more. The basic story for the games, as the articles slowed to a crawl, the Teams of Destiny and the Bloodlines, not really influenced by all the things that had happened. These threads, shit lines, diapers and the stuff in between. Why didn’t it run off the shelves after all this time? It just wasn’t good enough.
