Confusing media roundup: Grand Theft Auto IV, Halcyon, Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!

Because I’ve been watching and playing a lot of stuff, but splitting thoughts into three individual posts would be exhausting.

Halcyon (in addition to being a really good book by Casey Morell) is an iPad game by Zach Gage (of Ridiculous Fishing fame) and therefore probably isn’t that interesting to about 90% of my readership. (Maybe I’m wrong - maybe you all have iPads. I’ve never done any research.)

It’s a curious title, though - the gameplay is visually unassuming and aggressively repetitive, but a combination of stunning soundscapes and a slightly meditative tone put it in the same group as games like Super Hexagon - aggressively addictive without relying on microtransactions and powerups (I’m looking at you, brilliant-but-otherwise-infuriating Jetpack Joyride). Basically, how arcade games should be, but for some reason aren’t anymore.

Chuunibyou was one of those shows I shouldn’t really have liked. It’s cutesy, has a few too many upskirt shots for a show about a group of young teenagers and deals with a phenomenon I’m not too familiar with (so-called “8th-grade syndrome”, where the sufferers generally act like fantasy characters and engage in delusional activities okay it’s basically LARPing as a way of life).

But it’s weird - although it stays along the line of genuinely funny but a little bit trite for a few episodes, things take a turn about halfway through and cast the show in a whole new light. The humour isn’t lost when it’s grappling with bigger issues, but it lends the whole thing a sense of humanity I didn’t quite expect. It’s funny - I think the reason I feel like anime as a medium hasn’t yet won me over is because of my total lack of exposure prior to a few months ago, because so far there hasn’t been one show (or film) I’ve disliked. I have a couple in mind for the next on my list (either Shin Sekai Yori, which looks interesting in a oh-woah-this-subject-matter-is-different sense, and Revolutionary Girl Utena, which apparently left a huge impression on Arden so my hunch is that it’s probably pretty good).

That leaves Grand Theft Auto IV, which… well. It’s such a videogame. Filled to the teeth with lazy misogyny, characterisation that ignores gameplay and a story that’s less engaging than Captain Picard’s junkie meltdown, but still fun because the radio stations are funny and the open world (despite a shitty PC port) feels palpably alive.

My one complaint about Saints Row: The Third (a far superior game in most respects) is that the world at times feels a little cut-and-pasted, the suburbs punctuated by things that don’t really fit in for the sake of cost-cutting. It’s fine - SR3’s priority is fun rather than coherency, and it delivers bucketfuls on that front - but Liberty City feels aggressively real. Now that I’ve completed the story, I’m having fun just wandering around and seeing what I discover. I’ve been throwing myself off tall buildings a lot. Not sure what that says about me (or the game). It’s made me want to get Grand Theft Auto V when it comes out, blaze through the story as fast as possible, and revel in what’s left. There is enough here to excuse the awful shittiness the writers left at the front door.