You see, in the game itself, choosing the wrong answer leads to a painful, ignominious death, as you can see in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5eqLigNsmI They obviously playtested it, so there's no mismatches between right and wrong, although there are some wonky hitboxes in the game, but one level was about recognizing words from vocabulary groups, where the player has to choose the largest and smallest objects.
Most of these are pretty basic questions, which is the smallest, a snowflake, snowball or snowman? But then what if it asked for a snowSTORM? The game actually used thunderstorm and waterfall as objects, but how would you decide how large one of those is? Is it the area they cover? What would you choose as the largest, knowing if you picked wrong, a red spiky ball of death would materialize into thin air and kill you all killy like?! Now there's a brain game.
The level afterwards asked the player to pick two antonyms, words with opposite meanings, and picking any other word, of course, instantly kills you. When I saw the word Create, I immediately thought of Destroy which made me think of AF:C and by extension MARDEK. When I played this game all those years ago, I'd probably have classified Destroy as a bad word and Create as a good word, if I was that sort of kid and not the sort who'd not thought anything of it at all.
Nowadays, though, after spending time in the Alora Fane setting, I try to think up all these good things about Destruction and bad things about Creation, considering the former is a 'negative' sentiment and the latter 'positive', but as much as the human mind likes labeling, it also seems to like coming up with exceptions. Perhaps that explains why language is filled with rules and those rules have all these exceptions! And law! And society!! AND REALITY. Rayman Brain Games is a game about reality.
Really though, looking for things that betray initial impressions does seem to be a thing people do a lot, especially in fiction where averting stereotypes and such is like adding a twist, until the aversion itself becomes the stereotype. But even when the new stereotype is established, using the old stereotype seems to be a cliché. So then you have to really play around with a concept to make it into a twist, perhaps that's what keeps fiction so fresh?!
Anyway, yes, I suppose the relevant stereotype here is Destruction is Bad and Creation is Good, which of course makes me think of the old MARDEK with its whole Dark is Evil and Light is Good thing. While the former shows examples and aversions of the former, and I know I've wanted to mess around with it a lot in my quests, or at least in my imagination, the latter only seems to subvert the latter, despite stating Dark is not Evil. That seems to be a common thing, making 'good' things seem tainted seems more popular than making 'bad' things seem like they have some redeeming value?
Well, I suppose not exactly, there's enough grey areas in most media, but there does seem to be tons more PURE EVIL in fiction than PURE GOOD. Demons and whatnot are always just PURE EVIL, while angels and such are generally flawed if not downright overzealous and such. IT's always anges falling left and right, never any demons rising or whatever!! What, what do you mean a demon is a fallen angel, so it'd not make sense to have a risen fallen angel?! That does seem to be an obvious thing, you can always become tainted, but never untainted, it seems to be a one-way dealio, no matter how much you scrub yourself. Ohyes.
So I guess what I am getting at is that storms of red spiky deathballs create large destruction and causes the temperature to fall and not rise. Which is evil, EVILLLL!! Actually, the whole Death=Evil thing seems like another such weird thing to me which appeared in the old MARDEK with the Death God GALARIS being Evil even though he sounded like he was helping people through the whole afterlife process... But I could ramble on about that forever... SO I SHALL. AHAHA.
See, I recently actually saw a video of Disney's Hercules Action Game, a GOOD licensed game with a neat soundtrack and pretty much all things you'd want in a good game. Being based on the highly inaccurate Disney movie which doesn't seem very well-liked generally but I like because it has so much style, the villain, Hades, is, well, the villain, you see, comma, right? Which doesn't make sense, in the actual myths, Hades seems to be downright decent compared to the other gods, while it's Hera, the horrible wife of the horrible Zeus, who are his doting parents, which makes no sense since she was the actual antagonist! I get that they changed it, but why was it the Lord of the Underworld who has to be the villain? The god was actually in control of several afterlives, some good and some not so good, it seems like a rather lazy change. But that's fine since he's such an amazingly sleazy villain. Yes.
So that's that. I know about Hercules, yes. I actually translated some texts about Herakles in Greek class a bunch of years ago, about his works whatnot... Did you know one of his works was collecting the Golden Fleece? You know what other game also has a Golden Fleece?!
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| The Gongor. What do you mean "Gorgon?", it's the Gongor! |
I should probably stop now, but this is a blog about driving Corelis insane, of course, so I had to put it in there.
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