I run another blog on religion and digital culture, and it’s been poaching a lot of my posts on games recently. I’ve decided to post them here instead, and simply link to this blog over there.

A user on a gaming forum I frequent mentioned his preference of “Buddha Mode” mods over God Mode ones, the other day. Apparently the distinction is that, while God Mode makes the player immune to damage, Buddha Mode will reduce the player’s health to 0 or 1, but no further. I imagine this is so that low health effects such as red flashes or reduced movement remain, but the character doesn’t die.

The naming of this mode doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with me, as I don’t really imagine the Buddha as someone immortal but eternally suffering. To keep with the Buddhist metaphor, it might be more correct to call it Boddhisattva mode, as these beings have dedicated themselves to remaining in this realm of suffering until all have attained Nirvana. Gautama Buddha did stay around for a little bit after his own Enlightenment, but certainly not to that degree.

Jesus is famous for his “Turn the other cheek” ethos and, to some extent, his existence was defined by his suffering (or Passion, to use its archaic meaning). But he was also defined by a very real death, before his resurrection.

I figure that whoever came up with the first mod of this sort (the earliest reference to which I can find is for 2004′s Half-Life 2) simply couldn’t think of a better name than Buddha Mode.

Pitcure derived from:

During this site’s considerable downtime Blizzard (or should I say Activision Blizzard now?) announced Diablo III, the follow-up to Diablo (1996) and Diablo II (2000). Diablo allowed players to choose from 3 classes: Warrior, Rogue and Sorceror, and the Monk was added in the expansion Hellfire (1997), which also contributed the unlockable Barbarian and patch-added Bard. Diablo II offered 5 classes: Amazon, Barbarian, Necromancer, Sorceress and Paladin, as well as the Assassin and Druid with the expansion Lord of Destruction (2001). Diablo III has so far announced 4 out of its 5 classes: Barbarian, Witch Doctor, Wizard and now Monk.

The Diablo III monk description goes on about his lack of weapons, but the art clearly depicts him carrying a heavy staff. In Hellfire the monk similarly carried a staff, but it actually did less damage than his bare-handed strikes. It was mostly used to give him some crowd control ability. At least the Diablo wikia says so. I imagine there’s a similar mechanic at play in Diablo III.

I love game wikis. There was an article in Edge a few months back about the archiving and documentation of videogames and videogame culture, and how important wikis were to preserving this. Wikia seem to be the go-to place for gaming wikis now, and even our own TLJwiki has made the migration.

I’ve got nothing against game-based fan fiction, but the idea that there are 51 examples of it devoted to Tetris on fanfiction.net is just ridiculous. I know it’s not the official indicator of game-to-game fan-fic ratios, but still.

A friend and I went to see the Night in Fantasia: Symphonic Games Edition orchestral performance of video game scores the other night at Sydney Town Hall, having seen the Eminence orchestra at the Sydney Conservatorium last December for their “Passion“ performance. Eminence are a group of Con kids who are obviously avid video game and Anime fans, and state they established the ensemble to introduce gamers to the world of classical music. Their Passion show was a sampler of such work, including selections from both video game and Anime scores, as well as Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dance’ and Saint-Saëns’ ‘Danse Macabre’. Not being as avid a fan of Anime as some, I was particularly eager to see that they had split their popular Night in Fantasia show into dedicated games and Anime shows.

As with the Passion show several of the game scores featured were from Japanese games never unreleased in the Western world, let alone little old Australia. The organisers’ obvious fetish for performing music from the Chrono (Trigger) series may be due to an intention to educate us to virtues of the game, which is fine, but I’d say I’m not alone in the audience for wanting to hear music from the games they know and love performed by a large symphony. The popularity of their John Williams show alone is testament to their audiences’ love of something familiar. Even when the scores were from games familiar to Australians, often more obscure pieces were chosen (I don’t think I recognised a single part of their World of Warcraft medley).

This orchestra was much larger than the Con show, and featured a choir and use of the Town Hall pipe organ (*bliss!*) although, while I’m not sure how much of the concert hall is acoustic and how much is amplified, there seemed to a problem with the organ being drowned out by the other instruments. It was also nice to see a screen behind the orchestra that played clips from the games the scores were in. As with previous performances the evening’s guests included several video game composers from Japan, and this is possibly the source of my criticism. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s terrific that they’d come all the way out here and, in some cases, take part in performing their work; and the people from Eminence are hardly obscure fanboys. Their eminence (sorry, I couldn’t resist) has seen them chosen to perform the soundtrack to the new Anime series Romeo X Juliet.

The problem arises from the fact that their presence seems to dictate in part the choices for the set list. It seems almost as if in order to honour each guest 2 or 3 pieces of games they’ve worked on are performed and, when you’ve got 7 guests as there was the other night, that’s pretty much the whole show. As there was no pen on hand I didn’t get a chance to fill out a feedback form this time (yes, you can’t even escape them during a night at the symphony), but if I’d had the chance I’d have drawn attention to this. There’s also the fact that while they pretty much kept to what was on the original promotional poster, I’m sure I saw a newer one at Kinokuniya that claimed Matt Uelmen (of Diablo and Burning Crusade fame) was going to be present. He wasn’t. *sigh*

All in all I probably won’t be rushing out for tickets to the next Eminence night, although that has more to do with a lack of variety extending to things familiar to me than any question of quality. The orchestra is skilled and professional; they just might benefit from a little more variety. I hear it’s the spice of life.