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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Joe McKay's top video game stuff of 2010
Minecraft
If you’ve ever said, “modern games are obsessed with graphics at the expense of innovative gameplay” and/or “sandbox games offer such promise yet never seem to really let you explore, interact and create in a fun way” then you must play minecraft. In fact, it’s about to come out of Alpha and go into Beta on the 20th which will mean a higher price so now is really the time.
You need to learn the basics (surviving your first night, finding coal and crafting) — http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki — but I’d recommend against watching too many youtube videos (there are zillions) and explore the game on your own. Seriously - dude - this game is “emergent gameplay” at its fucking best.
Survivor mode is the only way to play, btw. All other modes are for posers.
Limbo
You’ll need to be on the Xbox, and you’ll need to have the xBox Live, but if you have all that get a download of Limbo. It’s a puzzle based side scroller with real innovative level design. You will die, a lot, and there’s real comedy/horror when you do.
Red Dead Redemption
The West done right (mostly). Rockstar realized that in the end, story is what makes a good western not horses and guns. A story about redemption and revenge and stuff. It’s the first GTA game that I actually finished, and the first game with cut scenes that I never skipped. Second best video game of the year (although I didn’t play Reach, Left 4 Dead 2, Masse effect 2, Grand Tourismo, or the new Need for Speed, so I’m not exactly an authority).
Peggle on the iphone
I’m still not sold on the iphone as a gaming device, but peggle was pretty fun.
HAWP
Hey Ashley Whatcha Playing is a very clever video-cast about games by brother and sister duo Anthony and Ashly Burch.
If you need to watch just one try this. It doesn't require any video game knowledge to get the jokes.
TRON (original)
In anticipation of having my childhood candy coated and turned 3D, I watched the original TRON again. My thesis has been that a remake will be impossible because the original was actually a crappy movie and our love for it is based on geeky nostalgia not actual movie goodness. But I was wrong. TRON is great! (Apologies and a hat tip out to Marisa - you were right, I was wrong, don't get used to it). There’s some seriously weird stuff in this movie and it handles the virtual world shenanigans with tongue in cheek cleverness, and NOT the naive 80’s optimism I was remembering. It’s refreshing to see after all the super seriousness post-cyberpunk Matrix / dark City / Johnny Mnemonic stuff that came later. Plus the graphics have that "they will never be this good again" feel vector graphics give you. It's hard to describe, but you can bet the new one is going to be ugly in comparison.
| Anthony Easton's Twelve Events 2010: 1. The weird fleshy exuberance of Gustave Caillebotte's dead pigs, esp in a room full of late renoirs.  photo by Jerry 2. Rachel McRae's difficult absorption and wrestling with the aesthetic and social potential of the monumental.  Rachel McRae, I Always Arrive At These Things Too Late, at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects 3. Pae White's delicate balance between the traditional and the digial, in how she attempts to eff the ineffable, esp her witty and meta wall hanging wall hanging and the hauntingly moving smoke tapestry.  4.The graphic design of 70s gay porn, esp. Honcho and Drummer at the National Leather Archives  5. Johns' Catenary series (From the Lagoon, 2003). ( Often this series is talked about formally or even mathematically, and it does bring of elements out of the formal plane. But the catenary is also the muscle that raises the testicles, and in this late work, the limpness has a pathos, compounded by the grey tones and the funerary seriousness. In a post-Viagra age they are oddly brave. (The one I saw in Philly was in a room of about 7 Johns, and it was a very small room. Next to the piece was Painting with Two Balls. That said, Philly had more than its fair share of cock art)  6. Jeff Thomas and Shelley Niro, contemporary 6 Nations artists who respond to the history of colonial portraiture, in a show about the politics of representation—v funny and v smart. It was part of the National Portrait Gallery, and this proves how much of a loss that gallery was. 7. This 8. The collapsing of homo-social and homosexual boundaries, as a broad chest pushes against white cotton—in this painting by Eakins:  9. Super Cross!  10. El Antusi's Peak Mountain: at ROM. first thing--why this show isn't at the ago, and the ethnographic history of that is a problem, but this one peice, a group of mountains constructed out of the gold lids of peak canned milk, has everything. it is beautiful, and it is redemptive, and it is easy enough for a five yr old to say shiny (& one did), but it is also about how Ghana was once an empire of gold, and ghana was the place where gold was made from slaves--the push and pull of commerce, acculmated into carefully constructed piles of detritus, has an intensity that rises and falls, like an undertow, never breaking the surface. 
11. Ryman at Beacon, an entire 6 rooms of them, but my favorite was a set of creamy grey white works on paper in a room of dusky grey lite.  12. Will Munro: his show at Paul Petro was vital, his show at the AGO was perfunctory, but the night he died, as facebook and email fired up I wrote this in an email a week after he died: “i went to his impromptu memorial a few days ago, and will go to the dancing party next Wednesday the memorial was profoundly moving, because it was unstructured... there was talking, and hugging, chatting, and casualness--fireworks were lit, there were candles and flowers--the touching that occurred came from our collective mourning, the collection of bodies emerged from a deep and profound feeling....happens...  |
