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She has eaten The sandwich I brought from The lunch room and which almost certainly contained human flesh Forgive me I needed That ladder To progress
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Sep 8, 2018 03:08
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| # ¿ May 23, 2024 01:30 |
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Arrgh, on top of the "whine" typo (which is amazing), the wine fail on top of that is appalling! Sweet and dry are opposites, ffs, you can't say "this is sweet but some find it dry". And while there are multiple Cabernet varietals (and ways to make sweet and/or white wines from them), when people say "Cabernet" they usually mean Cabernet Sauvignon and specifically dry reds. Just like everything else it's addressed thus far, the game has no idea how wine works. We can't even make this Henry's fault, because they put the error in the mouth of the liquor store employee. It's a minor nitpick but I couldn't let it pass. I don't have a whole lot to say about the rest of this, except that I can't decide whether I dislike Henry or whoever wrote this game more. I had a huge effort-rant written at one point about rhyme in poetry (and what makes it work or not), but I didn't save it so thankfully you've all been spared that. Why not, I'll jump on the bandwagon and say give her the untested magic? drugs. What's the worst that could happen, she dies and no longer has to put up with Henry?
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Sep 13, 2018 17:36
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All right. Here goes nothing then. Let's see if I can remember all the points I wanted to hit before I lost what I'd written before. Let's preface this with a disclaimer: While I have written poetry for publication, I'm not a professional poet and I don't have formal training in poetry. I'm not an expert by any means and these are just my opinions. Poetry is a very subjective field and there are exceptions to everything. I think the biggest thing people miss about rhyme is that it's fundamentally a kind of structure (just like meter is). The most common failure mode with rhyme is to assume that it's enough by itself without paying attention to any other structural aspects of the poem; I personally don't think rhyme works unless it's used alongside structured meter (e.g. you want the rhymes to fall on the same beats relative to the rest of the line, ideally at places the reader would naturally pause or add emphasis). That's probably the hardest aspect to actually get right, also: it all needs to work holistically, and you need to think about how everything actually sounds. Thinking up rhyming pairs is a lot easier than putting together the contextual scaffolding needed to support them in an actual poem. (You may notice that I Fell From Grace definitely does not do this. Although it also keeps failing to even find rhymes, which is something else entirely.) Rhyming verse with a consistent cadence tends to feel deceptively natural, if anything (I think Dr Seuss is a good example of that) and is a lot harder to write than it looks, which is why so many people probably attempt it without any notion of what they're getting into. That said, I will admit that sometimes you can get away with intuition if you have a good ear for it (and are willing to do some trial and error), because ultimately we're concerned about how something sounds - you don't necessarily need to count syllables or iambs or whatever. It's also a bit of a problem, I think, that many people are taught to conflate rhyme with poetry (I don't know how universal it is, but especially at a young age all the poetry people encounter tends to be rhyming), and therefore to assume that if they throw rhymes into something it automatically becomes poetic and more meaningful somehow (whereas this actually makes you look like a pretentious poseur). Of course not all poetry needs structure (and some styles benefit a great deal from lack of structure), but once you've committed to using it, you need to apply it consistently or the effect is going to be deeply jarring and dissonant to the reader. I'll even concede that might be an effect you could want to create deliberately, but saying "there may be a good reason to break this rule if you know what you're doing" is often heard by people as "it's not a real rule so I can do whatever I want", so I'm reluctant to go too far in that direction. Once again, back to the game - it's made the worst possible decision here. Rhyming couplets could have worked as a structure if it stuck to it, but it can't be bothered to keep the line lengths even remotely consistent, and it keeps arbitrarily breaking this in longer text boxes (sometimes it just sticks an unrhyming line in there, sometimes it tries to do ABAB or ABAC but it can't decide on anything). There's no underlying reason for when it chooses to break the rules it's established for itself, so when it does it comes across as lazy. The interesting thing is that I actually think rhyming couplets could be a good structure to use, if we absolutely had to have a game with rhyming text. It's small and modular, so it fits within one text box and can work no matter what order you happen to see those text boxes in (which is good in an adventure game where you don't know when the player will click on what). And it's simple enough that it could be adjusted depending on the length of the text, or to account for characterisation etc (keep consistent length and meter within individual couplets, but vary it between them as needed) - I liked Nevileen's example of how this could have worked a few pages back. The other thing that's impossible not to notice with this game is that it keeps loving with syntax in order to force the rhymes - it really likes going from subject-verb-object (standard English syntax) to subject-object-verb (which sounds very unnatural most of the time). This can be a valid technique, but again, ultimately (to my mind) you want your text to be pronounceable and feel natural, so adding this kind of awkwardness is working against yourself and needs to be compensated for (and "I needed a rhyme" isn't a good enough reason, I think). Ironically, Shakespeare often used this kind of thing, but that doesn't help: people recognise that, and think you're trying to sound Shakespearean, which in a game like this especially is yet another way to come across as obnoxiously pretentious. I haven't even touched on slant rhyme yet; I think all I really want to say about it is that it's yet another case of "this is a thing that works if you do it intentionally, but is also often a go-to excuse for lazy people who don't want to put in the work". (Like flubbing the rhythm, it creates dissonance: you can use this for effect, and probably get away with it occasionally, but if you do it all the time all it means is you actually have no structure.) And yet so much of what this game has done doesn't even reach that point - foetus/poetess for instance is just a case of "I don't know how to pronounce words", and is just the most blatant example of that type here. Although I'll admit that I personally am not bothered by, e.g. "again"/"rain", because it's a valid pronunciation of the word. I don't know if I have an overarching point here, except that there are a lot of reasons what this game is doing doesn't work, and you can boil a lot of them down to "they set out to do something that's a lot harder than it looks, and didn't bother putting in any effort".
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Sep 13, 2018 18:58
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The wording is awkward, but I suppose It's a slight improvement to have it in prose But for LP's sake I think we should return To the rhyming mode: our eyeballs must burn That suffering fits the game's general aesthetic As Henry becomes more shamelessly pathetic (I wrote that before I'd finished reading the update, and started noticing a lot more of the awkwardness and typos. I do think this version is more palatable even despite that, but it's also less interesting to comment on, and it's clear this isn't the intended way to experience the game. I think we need to see maximum stupid. I appreciate you showing off the non-rhyming mode, but I'd prefer you switch back for the rest.) I don't know what else to say about this game, except this: Henry's such an rear end in a top hat, it fills me with rage So I'll cheer on Doris the anthropophage
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Sep 18, 2018 16:52
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Our protagonist Henry, what a guttersnipe He casually bludgeons men dead with a pipe If you asked why, he would insist It's better than paying his pharmacist
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Sep 21, 2018 07:10
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Bacter posted:that involves you allowing somebody to come to the house and rape Grace? To further your career somehow?? Nooooooooo thanks <- it's really bad Whaaaaat. No. No. What the gently caress is wrong with this game. Why.
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Sep 26, 2018 01:25
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 I don't know what to say. I wanted to write more doggerel-commentary, but the muses just aren't cooperating today. I can't say I saw this coming either, so... I guess that's something? What's real? What isn't real? Is this story actually trying to say anything? (Is it poking fun at itself, or maybe at the audience for putting up with it? "This rhyming text is awful and torturous and we knew that all along, ha ha, gotcha suckers!") In fairness to this game, I do think there are a few really interesting ideas hidden in the slop, and I think a good rewrite might be possible with enough work. It would be very difficult, and I think almost all of what's actually here would need to be thrown out, but in principle I think it's probably possible. It's thought-provoking for all the wrong reasons, but I guess it's still interesting to think about.
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Oct 5, 2018 19:28
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| # ¿ May 23, 2024 01:30 |
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So this happened in Vilkacis' Fire Emblem romhacks thread and I thought of you.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:29
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