So I strolled into Best Buy today, as I often do, on my lunch break and walked, as I often do, down the game aisle. I rarely buy anything except an occasional Xbox 360 peripheral - I favor importing these days, precisely because of stuff like this:
This masterpiece deserves a spot in fine art history right alongside constipated Ico and crab Mega Man. I'm surprised and pleased that somebody actually thought to bring this over, but god dammit. Have we really not moved beyond this yet?
I saw that in Best Buy when I was looking around myself. But it would appear you and I were eying two different things entirely - I thought "oh hey Blokus, I remember that game, it was pretty inventive - but this screams shovelware..." You, on the other hand, probably noticed the subtitle.
In fact, I didn't even notice the subtitle until you pointed it out to me (and after I double-checked that it wasn't just some quick Photoshop). Huh. Maybe it wasn't quite as much shovelware as I thought - now it's shovelware with characters from some obscure PS2 game that GG! goes ga-ga for and I still have absolutely no understanding of (not owning anything PlayStation-related beyond a PS1 kind of caused that). I'm not 100% sure that's any better.
Whoa, what? Really? I saw this in GameStop the other day and immediately thought of Bumpy Trot, but the fact that the name "Blokus" was so prominently displayed on it turned me away from it without a second thought. I was expecting this, if anything.
The topic's title reminded me of the term 'contemporary art', which leads me to a mildly interesting anecdote- last year, I was attending this sort of Summer program thing at this art college in Boston. One of the two classes I was automatically assigned to was '3D Painting', which, ironically enough, didn't involve much painting at all! Instead, we spent most of our time constructing sculptures using strings, chicken wire, and other such assorted articles of trash. I don't think the instructor was very impressed by my drinking straw/toilet paper tube tower. I promptly switched to Figure Drawing, where I got to draw unshapely, elderly nudes for 8 hours at a time.
At the exhibition at the end of the program, I came across one delightful piece, which I can only assume hailed from the same class- right next to this elaborately designed, prize-worthy sculpture of a house was a pile of dirt with a single egg on it, nothing more. Me and my mother will never be able to live that down.
EDIT: I'm pretty sure I mentioned this somewhere before. Did I? Because, you know, it's just such an interesting anecdote.
Having never played Bumpy Trot, at first glance I thought that it was just a regular Blokus game, oddly subtitled Steambot Championship. The way the characters are presented here it looks like they could be replaced with just about anyone. It's like when you see a family on the cover of a board game. You don't really think about it too much.
Last edited by gr4yJ4Y on Mon Mar 31, 2008 7:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
