There are worse reasons than Christmas for a lack of compelling content. The fake holiday I hated the most was E3. For those who were blissfully unaware, the Electronics Entertainment Expo was a week long festival attended by anyone who had ever thought about making a video game. Each entrant would bring videotapes of what they thought their videogame would be like, assuming they had unlimited cash and technology from the future. If the entrant had any money left over from outsourcing their video footage, they would hire a scantily clad woman to stand beside a cardboard fort. During E3, every website that had ever been connected to videogames would alter its format to only talk about E3's hypothetical game experience. This lack of real content would continue for another week afterwards, or two if the reader was really lucky.
I put this in the past tense because E3 has finally died, for unspecified reasons. Expect two to three years of glorious silence before a new media-glomming exposition takes its place.
Christmas might have more of an impact on the web, but at least the reader is expecting this... and if they're lucky, their content providers have too. In case you're desperate, I've taken the liberty of adding Marketplace to the Tolerable Podcasts section. It puts Narraptor to sleep, but I love it for reasons obscured by my mysterious past.
Otherwise, there are always books if you're desperate for content. I suggest grabbing a random mystery with a decent title, and we can all enjoy being underwhelmed together. My latest choice was The Water Clock. As with most mysteries that lack a gimmicked main character, the inside of the book jacket desperately spoils plot points in a desperate attempt to hook you. This one was notable for revealing that the main character's investigations will solve a mystery from his own tragic past. The actual contents of the book give no clue that this is the case, until the last four pages. Also, the title itself is a spoiler, and yet has virtually nothing to do with the book.
Now that I think about it, that's a rather impressive trick.
2 comments:
A comment about the Halo 3 link I provided: Like with Halo 1 and 2, the trailer promises gameplay focused on pausing dramatically and gazing at the vast enemy forces bent on your destruction. I expect that Halo 3 will be as much of a disappointment to fans of hesitation-based shooters as the two before it.
The Marketplace link has been fixed.
Post a Comment