Thursday , March 26 , 2009

    Posted by:

    Sarah

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Why no, I don't do silhouette panels when I'm feeling lazy. Why do you ask?

You know what, fuck you guys. I worked a ten-hour day today and STILL came home and did a comic. What have you done today?

~sjh

P.S. Love you guys really.

    Posted by:

    James

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She does love you guys. Really. She's just got a funny way of showing it.

Anyway, an article about the game that the guys are referencing can be found here. You've probably already divined my thoughts regarding it. I will concede that I have not actually played this game, and that I have made a snap judgment concerning its content. This snap judgment will probably be something I pay for later. The game may well have preprogrammed mechanisms to deal with the above-mentioned aspects of the Watchmen universe. There might be a flaccidity meter or whatever that decreases as your character engages in vigilante activity, and when it finally hits zero your in-game avatar can achieve an erection. Or there may be some elaborately-executed incentive to standing idly by as pregnant women get gunned down. I don't know. But my point is that it is highly unlikely.

The only aspect at which the game may succeed is in the area of moral absolutism, as most video games divvy up the world into two factions: the people you talk with who help you and are good, and the people who get in your way and must die who are evil. But since that is an expression of the medium itself, and not of the game, I don't really feel as though I can give the game credit.

I really do try to be even-handed about these kinds of things. I fully expected the film version of Watchmen to suck, but I waited to see it to make a final judgment, as I imagine Solomon would have done. Turned out the movie rocked on toast. It was a magnificent surprise. But there are some things I simply can't imagine working in any kind of satisfactory way, and a MMORPG derived from a story as character-centric as Watchmen is one of them.

-James