{"id":21,"date":"2007-11-24T07:43:10","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T07:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/?p=21"},"modified":"2007-11-24T07:43:43","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T07:43:43","slug":"dying-too-often-in-mel-lastman-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/inspiration\/dying-too-often-in-mel-lastman-square.html","title":{"rendered":"Dying Too Often in Mel Lastman Square"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was pretty excited when I heard about a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.torontoconflict.com\/home.htm\">Half-Life 2 mod set in Toronto<\/a>. It actually tipped me into buying a new graphics card after having fried my old one a few months ago. Now that I&#8217;ve played it for an hour or so, I&#8217;m less excited. It&#8217;s really awesome that the George Brown students who made it completed it and got attention for it, and as an exercise I think it&#8217;s great: it&#8217;s hilarious to see the photorealistic shots of the subway and the bike rings. But I have two problems with it so far.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/subway_system_f0152.png\" alt=\"subway_system_f0152.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>On the micro level: but the first time we hear the word Toronto &#8212; ostensibly from a native who greets you as you teleport in &#8212; he pronounces both Ts. We pronounce it &#8220;torawno&#8221;. Kind of a big thing.<\/p>\n<p>On the macro level: What made Half-Life 2 great and distinct is that instead of a cookie-cutter North American city like a lot of shooters it&#8217;s set in a beautifully decaying European city. I love Toronto, but it&#8217;s a fairly boring city architecturally, so to make an visually interesting game here requires thinking beyond obvious landmarks. I&#8217;m all for people setting their work in their own regions, and God knows I got my share of attention for doing that with <a href=\"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/store\/#flyboy\">my first novel<\/a>, but Mel Lastman Square and Dundas Square are just not interesting places. They are recognizable to locals, and thus people are flattered and pleased, but they don&#8217;t stand on their own as game environments. I got pretty bored with dying in Mel Lastman Square, and I grew up in North York for crissake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was pretty excited when I heard about a Half-Life 2 mod set in Toronto. It actually tipped me into buying a new graphics card after having fried my old one a few months ago. Now that I&#8217;ve played it for an hour or so, I&#8217;m less excited. It&#8217;s really awesome that the George Brown [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nomediakings.org\/artsygames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}