Caltrops - Reviews

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by Monty Cantsin 07/24/2004, 3:23pm PDT

Senor Barborito wrote:

a) I forgot you probably haven't played Morrowind yet. If you haven't, Monty and I are both fans

Yeah. Especially if you just bought a new system. Morrowind is like justification in a box. This is a game that basically just won't play on last year's machine and the excessive technical requirements are not gratuitous, they really are the heart of the game. This game is all about wandering through an immense, continuous world and coming across these incredible vistas. Actually, it's all about shoplifting, but the incredible vistas along the way, I'm telling you, you'll feel like Caspar David Friedrich meets Winona Ryder. It seriously doesn't matter whether you make a dashing, muscle-bound swashbuckler or an arrogant, palsied mage (like me) you're going to be role-playing a thief. Because gold is the global economy that everything else, including skills and magic, plugs into, and because every single object in this massive world basically has a magical, fence-o-matic UPC sticker on it, and because it's easy and fun. You might as well take a sharpie and write YOINK on your spacebar, cause that's what you're going to be doing for the next 80 hours, and somehow I never get tired of it. Like GTA's nihilistic car door thunk, the greedy little sussurup that happens when you hoover an object into your Morrowind inventory is the sound of a primal urge having its back scratched. Did I mention the weather? Did I mention the skies? The architecture?

Did I mention that you could easily spend a leisurely afternoon or ten browsing used bookstores, looking for the good books, the ones that give you a little zing? Are there people who actually read these books? I mean, they have multiple pages and words and stuff, did some game developer actually write them? I'm frightened to find out. This is a game where you feel like the possibility space is so large there's absolutely no way you could ever exhaust it and so you kind of relax and don't try. I guess the world is stretched pretty thin if you examine it up close, but there are enough corners with enough significant detail that for all practical purposes it's infinite. Several times I've wandered past some interesting looking thing and thought "should I check that out?" knowing that it was quite possible that I would never come back to this particular spot, knowing that this thing might end up being boring but it could also turn out cool, and that there were a thousand other boring or cool things to check out instead, and I would have to pick because I would never be able to check them all out. I like that feeling.

For some reason this game grabbed me in a way that GTA never did. I always admired GTA, I understood why it was great and important and all that, but somehow it never totally pulled me in, and I sort of envied people who got yoinked into that world. On a conscious level I understand that pretend elves and dragons are theoretically more gay than pretend handguns and motorcycles, but goddamn if this giant sprawling fairyland hasn't got me by the balls.

As a skeptic of graphics-obsessed, freedom-fantasy, go anywhere, do anything, it's up to you, total 360 degree sensurround simulation game design ideology, I was ready to hate this game but it turns out I love it. I'm still basically anti holodeck-as-manifest-destiny but my platform is going to have to evolve to accomodate my new schedule of standing on a lonely hilltop with a burlap loot bag, watching slackjawed as the two moons of Morrowind creep across my star spangled monitor. As a big fan of self-correction, maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about it.

Also, Astral Tournament.

/mc