Gyromancer appears to be the work of a nefarious intellect, when the truth is substantially more beautiful: Gyromancer stands as proof of an interested, active, and present divinity, like spontaneous fermentation. Such indicators are rare, and when we find them we must cling to them, like hunks of bobbing wreckage.
Because those three days were so dense, memories from PAX are still decompressing and being presented to me with the urgency of the present moment. So vast (bordering on ridiculous) was this year's Exhibition Room that I was not able to see the entirety of it, particularly events which appeared and were gone, like the Brink demo. In what must seem a bizarre inversion, I felt confident skipping the Blizzard booth almost entirely, though it included such unerring projectiles as Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. They're the kind of games that require no explicatory link. For me, enthusiasm is in fixed supply, and represents an investment of self. That is why I utilized the "Bet" nomenclature when collating my list. I'll buy the aforementioned games, and most likely enjoy them, but there's really nothing for me to fantasize about. By comparison, Heavy Rain is the kind of game I would place a few chips on. It had but a single screen at the event, which strikes me as an injustice, but it's not an especially mainstream play.
Things that occur in games tend to be things which veer from the routine, just by definition. There are games which take mundane lives as their subject, The Sims stands out, but those lives are abstracted to a tremendous extent. Heavy Rain certainly has high drama, but not since Shenmue have I seen a game so obsessed with manifesting the actual world. Heavy Rain relies on "scenes" as a metaphor for progression instead of an explorable nineteen eighties Japan, sure. But in their almost romantic devotion to the ordinary, the commonplace, and the real, they are cousins.
The following is a public service announcement.
Releasing your Goddamned reviews for Uncharted 2 more than two weeks before the game's retail release goes past mean, vaults over cruel, and keeps running past the sign which indicates you've entered the realm of bastards.
(CW)TB out.
