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[girlofprey]

Up till 3am last night playing Blair Witch, after an adventure with finishing my dinner, and then updating my graphics driver so the 'black' screen wasn't actually a strobing green. Love PC gaming. Anyway. It was not great. I found out a few weeks ago it was by the same people who did Layers of Fear, and I never played Layers of Fear but I watched a Let's Play of it, and it appeared to be an incredibly boring story about manpain with a few jump scares thrown in, many of which were not scary. And that kind of made me less excited for Blair Witch. But I had hope, that was only one game they made, and they had the Blair Witch mythos to live up to. It started strong, and exploring the Blair Woods felt genuinely exciting. But then it very quickly turned into a game where they just used various bits of iconography from the film to tell a story about boring manpain. It was so much more about the main character they'd made up than it was about the Blair Witch, or the Blair Woods - but then paradoxically, despite being like "we'll never show the Blair Witch, we want her to remain mysterious!" they have her whispering in your ear almost constantly. About the main character's boring backstory. I mean, I didn't hate it, it was fine. But a real let-down. And so mechanical - like, they had a genuine part where you had to fix a machine, and the parts were in other bits of the map, so you had to go spookily collect parts to put a machine together to then operate it to clear a path. In a story like Blair Witch. The machine didn't even turn around and try to kill you at the end. They did a cool bit at the beginning with the witch/forest making you walk around in circles, but by the end they'd overdone it so much - in a way that was mostly about the main character's backstory - that it just got so boring, and was like "when will this end?". And then at the end I got the bad ending, because apparently when monsters attack you you aren't supposed to kill them even though you easily can. Also I did a couple of things that I didn't even realise were bad, I was just looking around for things to interact with because it's a video game and they put a bunch of collectibles in there, and then I got dragged into a cutscene. So defending yourself is bad and doing a bunch of things they don't explain are bad is bad, because violence. Which could have been cool? But I just didn't understand anything I was doing enough to see any meaning in it, and frankly the first monster I killed I killed by accident, because it's that easy to do. So I got the bad ending. But at least my dog lived, I guess. Love that dog.

I mean they didn't even throw any dead/ghost kids at you. In a Blair Witch story. For God's sake.

So those are my feelings on the Blair Witch game. It worked mostly fine and was pretty, but I would give it a 4/10. It was boring. The dude was so calm no matter what happened, and if that was supposed to be a mental illness thing it did not come off well.

Anyway. I bring you a slightly worse story now from the world of video games. If you all remember Gamergate, you may remember that a lot of it was kicked off by and focused on a woman named Zoe Quinn. Well, this week a man named Jeremy Soule, who was a composer on games like Skyrim, was accused of rape and harassment by an indie game maker, then of sexual misconduct by another woman. In a show of solidarity and wanting to get it out in the open, because the woman's account of her experience hit very close to home, Zoe Quinn shared a story about how she'd been sexually assaulted and then more or less imprisoned by another indie dev years ago, who then later threatened her visa and career if she told anyone about it. She mentioned the guy by name, and said that he'd had therapy and had later to come to her and apologised and she had forgiven him, and that she didn't want anything bad to happen to the guy with his friends or career or anything, she just wanted to say that it had happened and make it clear that this is a thing that happens in the game industry. The game company this guy worked for however, upon hearing this story, did cut ties with him and cancel a project they'd been working on with him. And now this guy has killed himself. And I don't wish suicide on anyone, no matter what they've done, genuinely. But all I can think about is all the shit that's going to get thrown at Zoe Quinn again. The story of the suicide is the top active story on the game news sites I look at, and the accusations of rape never were, and I don't even want to look at what the comments are. It's a cesspool at the best of times, to be honest. But she's been through enough, and she just wanted to stand by another woman and be honest about a terrible thing that had happened in her life, and it makes me so sad. Why are people scum?

The thing that really gets me about the people who are out to not believe a rape allegation are the ones who say a woman is only doing it for money. Like, I don't know what the department is that they think is mailing out cheques to women who accuse men of rape. That doesn't make any sense at all.

So. That's all very sad. And now Brexit. What I'm mostly annoyed by with the Brexit stuff is that they keep centring it around significant dates for me. The first date we were supposed to leave by was going to be March, and just a few days after my birthday. Then they were talking about postponing it to the end of June, which was my mother's birthday. The next big Brexit challenge they were saying would probably come on September 9th, which is my sister's birthday - we don't really do much for that given the circumstances, but still, we have enough to deal with. And now the date is supposed to be Halloween. One of my favourite holidays of the year. Pls just stop ruining our lives or get on with ruining our lives, and stop ruining my plans for everything.

This wasn't going to be a sad post, but here we are. I'm going to go back to playing Steve Harrington and Billy Hargrove in the Sims, and prepare them for when I make them WIZARDS, when Realm of Magic comes out.

Comments

[breyzyyin]

That stinks that the Blair Witch game wasn't very good. I remember being genuinely scared when I saw the original movie for the first time and was kind of hoping the game would be more like that experience. :/

~I feel so bad for Zoe Quinn because she's going to get so much undeserved stuff thrown her way just because she was trying to be supportive. My sister works freelance for a gaming site and she said the comments have been what you'd expect, which is awful because she's been through enough. It's terrible all of this happened at all. :(

~Orz, the Brexit stuff sounds bad all around, but to drag Halloween into it? That's just mean! I hope you'll still manage to have a good one. ♥

[girlofprey]

I don't know, you might find it scary? But it just felt like a lot, and most of it was to do with the main character, not the witch. I think that yeah, the Blair Witch was probably one of the scariest horror films in recent history, but the film wasn't all about the three kids' difficult backstories. I think the thing that sums the game up for me was that there are collectibles you find, and one of them is photographs of people standing facing the wall, with names on them. And I was thinking "what is this, who are these people, what is this to do with the plot?". And I noticed some of the names were very Polish-sounding - and then I remembered that the game studio might be Polish. And it was just the devs of the game, doing the Blair Witch pose. It was nothing to do with the plot, nothing to do with the game. Just the devs inserting themselves into the game, and into the Blair Witch iconography. And it was just like "...oh".

Yeah. On the sites I look at you sometimes see people arguing with the twats nowadays, so you always have hope there'll be people defending her, more people defending her than attacking her. And the thing is, she'll probably feel guilty about his death now anyway. She doesn't need anymore shit thrown at her. But I guess you can always count on the worst internet people to come out at a time like this.

In a way Halloween is a very appropriate time for it to happen, because it is a horrorshow. But it's still very inconvenient for me.