Glieuaeiel's DJ

Horse and Lava (8:45)

I sit down to play a game I haven't played in a while. I don't mean to play for very long, but when I finish the first level, I'm intrigued enough to play the next one, as well. I don't remember exactly how it goes, and it seems like it will have distinctly different game mechanics than the previous one.

It involves riding a horse around a 3D landscape. If you fall too far, your horse lands on all four feet and just stands there, but the screen fades to black and you start again from the place you fell. I guess they didn't want to make a horse death animation, in case it traumatized the little kids that play the game. Anyway, I manage to climb down a cliff into a red, rocky canyon crisscrossed by streams of lava. I don't think I was supposed to come down this way, but I complete the objective and then find my way out of the canyon by the way I was supposed to enter. Jumping over the streams of lava takes precise timing, and you can feel the heat of it at your back. I keep expecting some difficult enemies to appear, but they never do.

At the mouth of the canyon, three ghostly ancestral figures rise out of the sandy ground. They declare that since I have succeeded in my objective, they will allow me to do one final task to gain their assistance. We start to travel together across the sands, then the scene fades to black and reappears again at the beginning of the next level. My character laughs and tells his horse that he can't come, this time, because of the nature of the task. So it looks like I'll be doing this level on foot. Well, that's different enough that maybe I should try this level, too. I try out the controls for walking around on foot, because I'm not really used to them.

Unethical (8:45)

This game has a top-down view similar to Heroes III. I'm currently being told how the two nations I'm looking at have been unfairly put upon because of their small size. In fact, on the map, each "nation" has a grand total of two buildings. It's an example of that tendency in video games to compress the world. Right now, one of those buildings is being robbed of all its valuables, because the nation doesn't have enough guards to patrol it. My parents send me over to grab some of the loot.

The interior of the building is covered in rolls of coins. When you click on a coin, it disappears, revealing some of the floor underneath. One of the first structures I reveal is one of those ones that enhances your stats when you visit it. That makes me feel a bit better, since it seems I was intended to visit this place. I hear some of the high officials of this nation discussing the robbery. I'm not sure where they are, and I'm not sure why they're not coming in to find me if they know it's going on. I feel bad for them, though. I take my loot and go back home.

My family starts doing stuff with the loot, and suddenly I become utterly convinced that this was unethical. We didn't need this stuff. At the very least we could have left it for some other, needier people to steal. I try to explain this to my parents, but they don't agree. I try to take inventory of some of the loot to prove it to them. Most of what I took was coins, so probably 99.9% of the value of the loot came from that. But we also took a lot of food, so I try to sort it in order to get some kind of handle on how much excess value we took. It takes some time to get everything together. The whole time, I'm just feeling a sort of righteous anger at my family. I get through to them, a little bit, but I still need to gather up all of the candy we took. My family all start eating Starburst and--to my incredulity--dropping the wrappers on the driveway. Littering, on top of theft? I yell at them a bit and then start peeling the wrappers off of the ground (they're wet). There are way too many wrappers here for them all to have been dropped in the last few minutes. They must have made a habit of this over months.

Soon after, some cars pull up at the bottom of the driveway. Law enforcement, probably. I'm happy they're here, even if it means I might get in trouble for being involved.

Oops (8:45)

Birgitte walks onto a bus and announces herself. She has brownish skin. There's a big man standing on the bus with his arm around a girl with blackish skin. It is understood that this man is Gaidal Cain, so he must've mis-identified this other woman as the one he was destined to be with. Oops. He look sheepish. Stepping away from the other girl, he attempts a suave introduction of himself to Birgitte.

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