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Somebody once told me an interesting fact about Homer's poetry, and I'm now going to abuse it in a shameless fashion to kick off a short feature regarding a battle-racer that I've been playing all morning.Here we go. You know those descriptive epithets you get in The Odyssey and The Iliad? The way that the seas are wine dark or that the ships are hollow? Those epithets are there because Homer's stuff was never written down. These huge poems were recited from memory, and there was often a degree of fudging involved. While the story never changed, the performer might recite the lines a little differently each time. The epithets were handy because they offered the performer different syllable counts, and they could be swapped in and out on the fly to make sure the meter always stayed consistent. Sometimes, then, the ships were hollow. Sometimes they were dark hulled. this wasn't about getting across a theme or a specific mood, it was just fleet-footed work to make sure the whole thing would scan properly.
Anyway, I thought about this while playing The Next Penelope, the latest game from Aurelien Regard. I thought about the way that ad-libbing can be made to add a little excitement to proceedings without damaging the overall finesse. The Next Penelope gives you a lot of options as you race around its top-down tracks, sighing through chicanes and dodging enemies, but it never seems scrappy. You can always make it scan.
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