The Queue: The Black Parade

My son is home for school break and singing all his favorites at top volume all day long. He’s discovered early 00s pop punk, and also he spends a lot of time in my office, so every article I write, I have to be very careful not to include lyrics unintentionally.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions, and we’ll carry on.

It varies, by a lot. If a work is intended to just tell the story, that the plot and characters themselves is what the book is supposed to be about, I’m a lot less forgiving of certain actions. For instance, in Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister could never surmount the action he undertook in literally the first chapter, where he nonchalantly attempted to murder a child. Of course, that series deals in a certain type of realism, so he’s never truly punished for that action, specifically, and goes on to live a morally gray little life and influence the events of the rest of the series. But when they’re making him out to be a morally gray dude doing good things, man, you cannot surmount child murder as a moral foible, and especially because it doesn’t really have a purpose beyond plot in the grand scheme of things.

However, conversely, I think there’s plenty of room for a protagonist to be a terrible human being if what we’re after is more in the subtext, or if the characters themselves are a part of a bigger point. Victor Frankenstein, for instance, is an arrogant fool who does terrible things in service of delving the mysteries of science — but that’s the whole point. The book is small-a about Victor and the series of events he catalyzes, but it’s capital-a About the consequences of man playing God at his own whim, just because he can, and the fallout of that. It’s About souls and science, and Victor being a whiny irresponsible little jerkwad is a big part of that About. He’s the classic byronic hero, and we all know how I love internationally renowned f-kboy Lord Byron, but his being an unlikeable dillweed is important.

An argument could be made that part of the point of Game of Thrones is the core conceit — you win or you die. That is, either you become an untouchable royal (like child murderer Jaime) or you see the consequences of your actions (you know, eventually, by being deposed or disgraced). But there are enough characters to showcase that conceit without trying to make me “well but he was nice to Brienne this one time” overlook the child murder.

This is a tough one for me to answer because I tend to flip that around. While there are some game types and settings and elements which are catnip for me, when something is an ick it’s pretty categorically an ick. I will play games that have some degree of platforming, but platforming and jump puzzle games just leave me cold, period. They make me so freaking anxious, and have even when it was like, you play Mario or you play nothing. Now that I’m spoiled for choice, platformers can get in the bin.

Little Nightmares is a very cute-slash-creepy game, though I can see that it might end up plaguing your sleep. However, yeah, the most common gaming nightmare I’ve had is just Tetris. It’s a documented phenomena, where when you play a lot of games with puzzle or ordering elements like Tetris, it ends up in your dreams, and it’s so common it’s called The Tetris Effect. Your brain uses sleep to figure out problems and reorder your neurons to more effectively solve those problems, and so when you get heavily into Tetris you start having Tetris dreams.

Something tells me I’m about to have some Tetris dreams after typing Tetris this many times.

There are a lot of them, unsurprisingly. I played through a couple demos I’d been hearing buzz about already, and no surprise, they’ve all been pretty good so far. Crescent County is a standout, as a witchy driving game. I also had a lot of fun with Discounty. The demo for Date Everything also just went live, but I’m saving that one for the release. How could it be bad, anyway?

The one which was completely new to me that really stuck out was Relooted. From the gameplay to the narrative concept it is brilliant — it’s a heist game with a tactics feel, but it’s really a reverse heist game. You’re stealing artifacts from museums in order to forcibly repatriate them, and it uses real artifacts that are still in the hands of museums today.