Can a work of art be objectively good or bad?
It is a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Some people say that all art criticism is subjective. Nothing is objectively good or bad. It all comes down to subjective preference.
Others say that art can be objectively measured. Personal opinions can be removed from the discussion and a hard number can be assigned to works of art according to quality.
The 1960s TV show Thunderbirds fascinated me as a child. Though it first aired long before I was born, and I have long since grown up, Thunderbirds still resonates with me in a way other sci-fi shows do not. There are many reasons: the machines, music, suspense, heroism, special effects. But above all this, it is Thunderbirds’ optimism for the future of humanity and its endorsement of an ambitious pursuit of technological progress that distinguishes it from sci-fi of recent decades and imbues it with a lasting appeal that persists to this day.
It is an inevitable fact of the universe that every kid who watches Thunderbirds is seized by an overwhelming desire to possess replicas of the five Thunderbirds and pod vehicles.
Thunderbirds is about an organisation called International Rescue and their efforts to save people from disasters with a fleet of ingenious machines. The story is set in the near future from a 1960s perspective, where everything has a charming retrofuturistic aesthetic. There are five flagship machines—the Thunderbirds—plus a fleet of smaller machines that Thunderbird 2 carries in its cargo pods.
Jaime Griesmer’s “30 seconds of fun” quote still holds true.
Jaime Griesmer was a designer for Halo 1 and 2. His job was to tune many of the mechanics in both games. He worked on the weapons, vehicles, characters, AI, controls, camera, multiplayer, single-player difficulty, “all the stuff [he] called ‘sandbox gameplay'”.
In an interview for Halo 1, he said his famous statement: “In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.”
I love video game factions for the same reason sports fans love their teams despite their team not winning a match for decades. There is something strangely energising about being part of a greater whole, immersing yourself in a crowd and allowing yourself to be carried along with the current.
GTA 6 will be the third game in GTA’s HD universe. Liberty City and Southern San Andreas (which I’ll just call Los Santos for convenience) are the latest and more detailed reimaginings of the same cities Rockstar has done twice before. With remastered textures and GTA 6’s cutting edge graphical tech, Liberty City and Los Santos would not seem out of place alongside GTA 6’s Vice City.
Rockstar has not confirmed any plans to combine all these maps into one world—but there are clues that they’re at least thinking about it.
GTA 5’s Los Santos is one of the biggest and most detailed maps in gaming. In the annals of video game maps, Los Santos is one of the best.
Despite this, I’ve never loved it. In fact, GTA 5’s Los Santos is my least favourite map in the mainline series since its transition to 3D.
I’ve talked about one of the reasons why the map disappoints me in my analysis of the map’s actual vs perceived size. Another issue, one that has bothered me since 2013, is that the map feels ’empty’.
One of the reasons why many Battlefield fans still consider Bad Company 2 their favourite multiplayer game in the series is its atmosphere.
By atmosphere, I mean the game’s general mood—the emotions it usually conveys through sound, visuals, gameplay, and story.
Bad Company 2’s multiplayer doesn’t have any explicit story and I have written about its gameplay elsewhere, so this post will mainly cover sound and visuals.
San Andreas’ map was revolutionary. It was detailed, full of character, and, of course, it was huge. Expectations were high for what would come next. If Rockstar could create a map like San Andreas on the PS2, what could they do in the future with better hardware, more manpower, and more money?
What they did do was somewhat unexpected. GTA 4 and 5’s maps were much more detailed than their PS2 predecessors. They both had strong and distinctive tones. But in terms of scale, GTA 4 was smaller, and GTA 5—though technically larger—felt smaller to many GTA fans.