Sarcasmancy

Thrones at Play

2011-08-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

How about a little mood music?

I know it’s a little late to be jumping on The Game of Thrones hype train. The first season of the HBO series has come and gone, and the recent release of A Dance with Dragons has ended George R.R. Martin’s 5 year publishing drought. The wait wasn’t all that awful for me, seeing how I only started the series this last spring, and I had to fight a bit to finish A Feast for Crows (more on that below). But after having spent literally thousands of pages in the world of Westeros, I feel compelled to share a few observations about the series.

These covers are nice and all, but I prefer the solid colors and

simple imagery of the paperbacks.

As much as I love meta-level jokes and snarky self-awareness, it is extremely refreshing to read fantasy fiction that plays things straight. Yes, there is something of the post-modern in Martin’s multiple POVs, his willingness to kill off characters permanently, and his recent experiment with concurrent chronologies, but he never feels the need to gloat about how clever he’s being. Even though the plot is ponderous and labyrinthine, he lets his characters carry the tale. The pacing is slow at times. Glacial even, seeing how winter is just now arriving in Westeros even though the series is supposedly more than half over. But the political alliances are intriguing, intelligent and natural.

This is in large part thanks to Martin’s sparing use of magic. Even more than in Middle Earth, magic is a subtle and ugly force whose existence is doubtful and denied by most of the world. There is no established social class of wizards, no ostentatious fire and lightning based combat, and very little in the way of spell-casting rules for fans to analyze and play with. But there is magic. We’ve got an army of walking dead stalking the frozen north; a red sorceress who does some deeply disturbing things with fire, shadows and her vagina; dragons born from petrified eggs through dark and bloody rituals; and people who can psychically inhabit the bodies of animals. There is also the seasonal hook to consider: summers and winters last decades in the world of Westeros. But this later feature isn’t regarded as magick so much as an ugly, hard fact of life. All of Martin’s magick is rooted in physicality however, and even though the fantastic elements of the story escalate with every book, the world still feels credible and medieval.

Much has been made of Martin’s willingness to kill off major characters, but I think the best and cruelest aspect of his writing is his eagerness to maim, damage and otherwise irrevocably change his characters. Spoilers up to Storm of Swords follow, so those who have yet to read the books probably want to skip this paragraph. Still with me? Okay! Bran’s paralysis is the first and most obvious example. As he is presented at the beginning of the story, Bran is kind of bland and boring. He’s likeable enough to pass muster as the hero of a coming of age novel, but you’ve seen all that before elsewhere. After he suffers from a broken back that deprives him of his dreams of knighthood though, he becomes someone completely different. A character you have never encountered before in the epic fantasy tradition. Tyrion is another example. He starts out “damaged” by his dwarfhood and only gets more damaged as the series progresses. But the single most intriguing transformation in the series so far is when Jaime Lannister loses his sword hand. A man who has resolved everything with violence and cruelty is forced to walk a less impulsive, introspective path, and consequently, he goes from being a complete monster into a compelling and at times even likable character.

The series as a whole is superb, but it does have its high and low points. The first book, Game of Thrones, is great, introducing the central conspiracies and characters and moving things forward at a fairly rapid clip. It’s a good enough book to justify at least two sequels, and it establishes Martin as major force in Fantasy fiction. Does he live up to oft-marketed title of “The American Tolkien”? I would say “hell, yes!” but then again, I was never terribly taken with Tolkien. I respect the foundation he has laid, his poetical abilities and his masterful use of folklore, but I also had to struggle a bit to get through Middle Earth. Getting back on track, Clash of Kings, the second book in the Song of Ice and Fire, introduces more magic into Martin’s world, and for that I am willing to forgive it almost anything. That said, it does indulges in lots of plotting, politicking and characterization. Even though castles are sacked and people are displaced, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was mostly a build-up book. Fortunately, all that set-up pays off in A Storm of Swords. It seems to reach it's climax in the middle, but things keep escalating with a string of death, betrayal and salvation.

This is the high point of the series in my opinion. You'll laugh, you'll cringe,

you'll feel like you're reading a much shorter novel.

A Feast for Crows deserves its own paragraph, because it fails in an interesting way. On the one hand, it features consistently good writing like the rest of the series. But after the excitement and revelations of Storm, it is an absolute chore to get through. Instead of writing about the characters you have come to loathe and love, Martin introduces a whole menagerie of asshats that have only been mentioned in passing, if at all. Meanwhile, many of the best-loved characters are left on the cutting room floor. The justification for this is that those better loved characters will be covered in A Dance of Dragons, which is supposed to occur semi-concurrently with Feast. I was vaguely offended that my favorite characters had been replaced by obscure and frankly, boring newcomers, and while there is something to be said for Martin’s willingness to take risks this late in an established series, the divide contributes little to the over-all story. Re-reading chapters that we experienced through Sam through Jon contributes very little to the overall story. Then again, I haven’t finished reading Dance yet, so maybe I should withhold judgment until I have.

As far as the TV series is concerned, it is the best adaptation of a long running fantasy series I have seen. Admittedly, that’s not saying much, seeing how the only thing I have to measure it against is Syfy’s awful adaptation of The Dresden Files, but for the most part, the series seems to be in the hands of people who actually care about it. Yes, the extra sex scenes are a bit ridiculous, seeing how the books have their fair share to begin with and the ramped up violence seems equally unnecessary. I imagine there is some sinister committee that has worked out a specific boobs and decapitation quota for each season to snag as many viewers as possible, but considering the books have their fair share of exploitive violence and sexuality already it leaves something of a foul aftertaste in the mouth. I’m willing to forgive them however because the quality of the plotting and dialog is preserved handsomely, and more importantly, 99% of the characters have been cast perfectly. My only complaints are superficial and ultimately sexist: Caitlyn seems a decade older than I imagined her, Cersei isn’t a jaw-dropping Helen of Troy-esque beauty, and Shay is less of a flirt than she is written in the books. So I guess I’m not much better than the sinister committee who is trying to shoehorn in as much extra sex as possible.

My only other gripe, and this is really picking nits, is that the armor and weaponry of the series do not live up to their printed counterparts. Martin’s descriptions of lamented plate mail, valyrian steel and sculpted pauldrons made me think of the ridiculously ostentatious armor sets in World of Warcraft. Admittedly, such things work better on pen and paper, (or in cartoonish polygons) than they do on screen, where actors actually have to wear the stuff and make themselves seem remotely credible while delivering their lines.

So is Game of Thrones for you? If you’re into dark fantasy, conniving politics and compelling characters, the answer is an emphatic yes. If not, I honestly don’t know what you’re doing with your life. As to whether you should read the books or watch the show, I would say both are worth your time, providing you have time enough to spare. If not however, this is one of those rare occasions where HBO’s offerings won’t lead you too far astray from the printed word. So watch the show or the buy the books, but don’t let yourself miss out on Martin’s masterpiece.

Off The Record, On The QT and Very Hush Hush

2011-06-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

If I had to pick a quote to sum up the present state of hardcore gaming, I’d have to go with an old Philip Marlowe line: “Seems there are so many guns around town lately and so few brains.” Don’t get me wrong sweetheart, I enjoy a good cross-hair simulator as much as the next Tom, Dick or Harry, but it’s nice to see a game take on problems that can’t be solved with bullets for a change. Bioware’s branching narratives flirt with that sort of thing through dialog trees that feature options for intimidation and diplomacy, but at the end of the day, you’re picking lines from a list. There’s not much game there.

Funny that the box art's pallet is so vibrant and high-contrast when the game actually features a very muted color scheme. You can even play it in black and white.

Enter Rockstar and Team Bondi's LA Noire. In addition to snooping around crime scenes through a dolled-up point and click adventure interface, you must also interview a menagerie of shady suspects, shaken victims, and snarky witnesses. Almost everybody you meet will lie to you at least once, forcing you to read their facial expressions and leverage the evidence you’ve gathered to call them out on their bullshit. At the same time, they’ll tell you the truth when it suits their interests, and doubting them when they are on the level can be as damaging to your case as believing every little detail they feed you. The system isn’t perfect. The characters’ mo-capped facial expressions are impressively detailed, but they are also fairly bombastic. Excessive blinking. Shifty glances from side to side. Long pauses. Yet, despite these obvious tells, it is very difficult to strike a distinction between a vague, untrustworthy answer (which you should “Doubt”) and an out-and-out lie (which you must contradict with the right evidence).

All the same, seeing gameplay that relies on communication and deception is fresh and gratifying. This is a system that rewards situational awareness, logical analysis, and purposeful, involved play. The feedback system is also unobtrusive and subtle; you get a intriguing jazz flourish when you make the right call, and a melancholy jazz flourish when you screw up. On paper that sounds kind of dumb, but in practice its amazing. Imagine if Zelda's "item get" music went through puberty, dialed things down a couple notches and became all suave and sexy. The satisfaction and frustration of cracking a tough case is intrinsically rewarding and rewarding to the narrative. Developers take note: I'd like to see more stuff like this, please.

Admittedly, every case in the game involves more familiar Rockstar staples as well; car chases, fisticuffs and shootouts. The systems for these mechanics are all solid enough, but they feel somewhat simplified compared to their presence in GTA, Bully, and RDR, respectively. But the balance between nuanced, narrative-rich puzzle-solving and hardboiled action makes for a well-rounded, satisfying experience,

I have to point out, you've seen most of LA Noire's ideas elsewhere. Phoenix Wright features dialog-driven puzzles where you have to consult evidence to catch liars. Assassin’s Creed features a similar eavesdropping mechanic. Heavy Rain did the crime scene investigation thing (and the CSI games too I imagine, but has anybody actually played those?). But LA Noire blends each of these little features in a way that makes you feel like you’re acting out an episode of Dragnet if it were done up with modern-day Hollywood production values. One stand-out moment in the early part of the game has you eavesdropping on a suspect’s phone conversation by sitting in a booth and pretending to read a newspaper. It’s a scene you’ve seen in dozens of movies and shows, but its implementation in the game is wonderfully organic. It is an experience I would describe as “cinematic,” but not in the over-scripted (COD), non-interactive (MGS) sense; you do stuff that makes you feel like Joe Friday or Philip Marlowe.

In many senses, Noire delivers on the lofty (some might say pretentious) “Interactive Narrative” promises that Heavy Rain presented and promptly failed to deliver on. The writing is sharper and more sophisticated with a complicated frame narrative, a number of self-contained episodic missions, and an over-arching plot in the vein of LA Confidential; the film which was clearly Rockstar and Team Bondi's most prominent influence in crafting their dark 40’s take on the City of Angels. Just as the Uncharted series tries its hardest to make players feel like Indiana Jones, Noire wants you to step into the shoes of Ed Exley, and it partners you up with characters cut from the same cloth as Bud White and Jack Vincennes to boot. I might be outing myself as a James Elroy fanboy, but it was a role I was thrilled to inhabit.

My biggest criticism against the game is sort of false importance of interrogations. Even if you misread multiple key witnesses multiple times, the game will let you limp through the case to completion. You will receive lower rankings, but your character will still be rapidly promoted to move the story along. If you lose a firefight, or fail to tail a suspect successfully though, it’s game over. The former is understandable, seeing how your character would be dead or crippled if you lose, but if I can fuck up an interrogation without serious repercussion, I ought to be able to botch tailing somebody and try again later. The ideal solution of course, would be if the course of your investigation accurately reflected your performance. What happens if you fail to catch the bad guys repeatedly? Maybe you get stuck stopping street crimes until the force takes you seriously again. I don't really mean to advocate reputation grinding in a very focused and engaging experience, but it would be interesting if you could not only be a crooked cop, but an honestly bad one as well, and have to deal with the consequences that entails.

If you are a big Grand Theft Auto fan, this game may not necessarily scratch your itch. You can drive like an asshole (god knows I do), but you can't go around picking up hookers and knee-capping people with a shotgun. It's a lot more restrained than Red Dead Redemption, or even Bully. But it's also more different and exciting. A popular criticism of RDR was that it was essentially "Grand Theft Horse." It's an assessment that strikes me as a little unfair, since the natural setting (complete with wild flowers and demonic cougars and wild horses that can be broken in) contributed a hell of a lot to the mood and tone of the title. That same brilliant world-building is on display here, but there is more legitimately new stuff to do thanks to interrogations and investigations. So yeah. Five stars, A+, and all that jazz. Give it a try.

Gunpowder Dragons

2011-05-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Once again, I must apologize for the long drought of posts. The leisure time I used to devote to Sarcasmancy has gone towards weekly entertainment reviews for The Technique. There is also less leisure time to go around. Graduate school is hard work, but it is unlike a job in that you are never off the clock. There is this implicit pressure to be constantly refining your bullshit, or researching for your thesis, or practicing the skills that you have supposedly mastered after two one-hour lab sessions. At least that’s been my experience of it. But you didn’t come here for whining and excuses. No, I imagine you want commentary, witticisms and what passes for insight on nerd-friendly fiction. I’m rusty, but I will do my best to satisfy.

Busy as I’ve been, I managed to read a lot quality modern fantasy throughout the past two semesters. After wrapping up Strange & Norrell and The Road, I devoured Naomi Novak’s Temeraire series (up to Tongues of Serpents). Like all good alternate-history fiction, the series centers on a simple but potent hypothetical: What if the Napoleonic Wars were fought with dragons? More specifically, what if the French and the Brits had aerial corps where soldiers rode dragons like bombers, with nothing but courage and leather straps keeping them on board?

An admirable cover, though Temeraire looks a little more spindly than I suspected.

Dragon is a tricky meat to prepare. It is the chicken of fantasy writing. There are a billion and one different ways to cook and serve it, but everyone has had it so often that they think they’ve had them all before. You have got to serve it up with something savory and exotic for it to really sink in and stand out. Primitive gun powder is just such a seasoning. It obliterates the familiar dynamic of knights in shining armor and maidens fair, and gives mankind a weapon that can match—but not yet easily over-power— flying fire-breathing serpents with armored scales.

“Yes, yes,” you say, haughty and impatient “but what of the writing?!” Naomi Novak is a strong author. Her language is faithful to the period, but much plainer and more readily readable than Strange and Norrell. Her main strength is making these big, fanciful creatures feel plausible and conceptually tangible. Usually dragons are beings of incredible, ludicrous power, or fairly straightforward monsters in need of a good slaying, and in either case they are loosely defined creatures filled-in with amorphous magic. Novak presents readers with several discrete classes of dragons with several different yet distinctive abilities. Yes, some of them can breathe fire or spit acid, but they can also bleed and tire and get sick and hungry. In fact, Novak’s dragons’ most fanciful ability is their capacity for human speech.

The implications of an animal that can coherently speak a human language are huge, and fortunately, they are not lost on Novak. While the intelligence of dragons varies greatly from breed to breed, they are generally quite intelligent and the series seriously grapples with issues of draconic rights. The series’ titular dragon is particularly bright and extremely passionate about bettering the social station of his race. The captains and admiralty often jokingly refer to Temeraire as “that Jacobin dragon,” and accuse him of fomenting radical sentiments amongst the British Aerial Corps.

Then again, the Corps is quite radical for the time itself. Certain breeds of dragons conveniently demand female captains, giving Novak an excellent pretense to include strong-willed independent women in her Napoleonic period piece. Much of the first book deals with Captain William Lawrence’s uneasy transition from the stiff regulations of the Navy to the atypical informality of the Corps.

The high point of the series.

Even though the series is primarily focused on the Napoleonic wars, it spends a surprisingly small proportion of time in England and Fance. The second book sees Lawrence and Temeraire off to China, and the third book details their return through West Asia and Eastern Europe, only for the fourth book to pack them off to Africa. The fifth book is a something of a treat as it brings the series back home and features battles fought in occupied Britain, but then book six takes place in Australia. The globe-trot is a mixed bag. I think Throne of Jade’s trip to China was brilliant and perhaps the high point of the series, using the radically different dynamic between humans and dragons to emphasize the real-world cultural differences between Britain and the east. Black Powder War’s whirlwind tour of Turkey and Prussia felt rushed and ill-defined however. Empire of Ivory is even worse as it manages to make Africa seem blandly primitive by focusing on the evils of slavery, and introducing a number of characters who simply die off without making any kind of significant impact. These grievances aired, I have to give Novak props for finding a formula that makes each book different and shows off her world-building talents in the process.

The books lend themselves to quick reading, so you may want to pick up

the Omnibus like I did.

If you are a fantasy fan who also enjoys action packed period pieces like Horatio Hornblower and Master & Commander, this series was written for you. I also suspect that my fellow gamers will get a lot of mileage out of this series. Naomi Novak worked on Neverwinter Nights, and her fight sequences and varied classes of dragons are clearly informed by RPG conventions. Long story short, if you like the sorts of things I write about on this blog, you’ll want to give His Majesty’s Dragon a try.

Walking The Road

2011-02-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sad to admit The Road is the only book I've read by Cormac McCarthy as of yet, so I don't know what to make of the claim that it is his most accessible book. The words come easily from the page without being overly simple, and the story will hold you until you finish it, even though the situation is bleak and the image is dark. If I had to boil it's Pulitzer winning tale down to a trite, writerly bullet point, it is that you only need one strong relationship to carry a book; you only need one strong relationship to carry humanity.

Accessible as it is, the book is challenging. At least, I was challenged by it. I am used to more superficiality in my fiction. More lighthearted relationships and more artificial situations, especially where Science Fiction is concerned. I crave it like high fructose corn-syrup. Getting a story that is as real and as raw as The Road is jarring. The utter lack of adornment, down to the absence of punctuation, makes for a powerful presentation, and it emphasizes McCarthy's greatest strength: the gravity of his details. Each word has a weight that grounds you by reminding you of the mortality of the situation, or of the relationship at stake. His descriptions are poetic at times, but never florid and rarely excessive. He allows each event of the narrative to speak for itself. The necessity of self-defense, of mercy, of recovering from sickness and showing kindness to a stranger.

This is a cover that does its book justice. You can't even see the black background against the site. If you squint, you can make out McCarthy's faded name above the title though.

The core of the book is the father's love for his son. The concept of "carrying the fire," keeping humanity alive in a world that can longer sustain it, is almost incidental. Most popular post-apocalyptic fiction romanticizes the setting and uses it as an excuse for an almost fanciful feudalism. The world is too lean for governments, but somehow civilization endures. Pockets of people cultivate things, while others scavenge and others still cannibalize and pillage. There is no hope of cultivation in McCarthy's world. The ground is barren, the sun is blotted by ash, and all the animals are dead. The father is not grooming his son to be a hero, he is teaching him to remain a person, so he can die as a person. There is an important hope here, but it's a sad kind of hope. The hope of dying human as opposed to leaving the world a better place.

As you might expect, the book is not about happy endings. The fact that the book ends hopefully at all feels a little like an obligation. After such a horrifying journey, readers are desperate for some redemptive truth, and I imagine McCarthy was, too. If the father died and left the boy alone, the journey would seem meaningless, or worse yet punitive. At the same time, the father has to die to make the story complete. If the father and the son settled down somewhere, if they remained at the safe-house they found for instance, their growth would stop. If the book has a message, it is that we all have to keep moving, regardless of how difficult it is, despite the fact that we all reach a common destination. It isn't didactic. It isn't preachy. But it does have a lesson to be learned.

And here's the cover of my copy. It loses a lot with the laudatory quotes.

The story is incredibly simple, and it is simply told, and the message too is simple. If you can write as well as McCarthy, you don't need to get complicated. Even if I could write as well as McCarthy, I will never be able to tell a story like this, though. I would be too concerned with who the man was before the world died. I would need to address the apocalypse. I could not resist the urge to build cardboard civilizations, to cast the shadows of whatever war caused the catastrophe, and to anthropomorphize this ashen world. These things don't belong in McCarthy's tale though. They aren't real enough.

The Dark Side of the Barre

2011-01-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

This is an expanded edition of the review of Black Swan I wrote for The Technique, though the original never got published on account of school being cancelled for the first week due to 8 inches of snow and ice. I'm actually glad I get to post it here, because I have more to say about this movie than most. Actually, it did get published on the Technique's website, which you should totally visit so I don't get in trouble for posting this extended edition here. Have mercy editorial powers that be!

A simple enough poster, but it does a good job of balancing between pretty and scary.

Black Swan is modern day re-telling of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet, Swan Lake. Rather than a tragically beautiful, tale of lost true love however, the film offers a frightening and at times hideous look at the obsessive, self-destructive side of ballet.

For those who don’t know the fairy tale, a princess named Odette is cursed by the evil magician Von Rothbart to spend her days as a swan and regain her human form at night. The enchantment can only be undone by true love, and while she successfully wins the heart of the handsome Prince Siegfried, he is seduced away by Rothbart’s daughter, a black swan princess named Odile. Deprived of the true love that gave Odette her life back, she kills herself. When the ballet is performed, it is traditional for the same ballerina to dance both the roles of Odette and Odile. Thus, the dancer must be able to convey both a demure, pure-hearted maiden and an aggressive, lusty temptress.

The film translates the tail to the modern day, following a young ballerina named Nina, played by Portman, who is a dancer in New York City Ballet (NYCB). After spending years in the corpse de ballet, she is given the opportunity to dance the swan princess, though the director of NYCB feels that Nina is only capable of dancing the vulnerable and innocent White Swan. She is a technical perfectionist, but her movements are repressed and inexpressive. Vincent Cassell does an admirably creepy performance as Thomas, the creative director of NYCB who tries to draw out Nina’s inner-Black-Swan and serves as the film’s Von Rothbart. While there is no obvious equivalent to Siegfried, there is a another ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, who is both a bitter rival and an object of desire to Nina. As Nina struggles to get in touch with her dark side, she begins to suffer from strange rashes and dreams, and things take a turn for the surreal.

As a former ballet dancer I loved the movie, mainly because it is does a brilliant job of showing off the ugly, and downright scary side of an otherwise beautiful art-form in a compelling fashion. All the major psychoses of classical dance are touched upon, if only superficially, from bulimia, to nervous itches and nail-biting, to the terror that is a “stage mom.” Barbara Hershey gives a strong performance as Nina’s possessive, domineering mother, who was once a ballerina herself and now lives vicariously through her daughter. This is a real, and all-too-common phenomena in the world of dance that lay audiences may not appreciate. Indeed, deprived of the context of experience, Nina's exaggerated mommy issues can seem ham-handed and excessive.

Nina's turbulent relationship with Lily may seem equally absurd, though it is again very accurate when taken as a broad symbol of relationships in the ballet world. Lily offers care and concern for Nina in a way that deliberately damages her. She presents herself as a friend who Nina can confide in, when really she is only trying to draw out and exacerbate the stresses Nina is trying to fight. She tells the director that she is worried about Nina's health under the pretense of concern, only to erode the director's faith in Nina's ability to handle the role. Nina is intimidated by her strong personality and enraged by her machinations, but as evidenced by her attraction to the director, she is also drawn to people that try to control her, and as a result, Lily becomes an object of lust as well as scorn.

The film touches on the horrible fickleness and ephemerality of success in ballet by means of Beth McIntyre, played by Winona Ryder. Beth is the former prima ballerina whose pointe shoes Nina is stepping into. Nina idolizes Beth to the point of obsession manifested through kleptomania. Admittedly, this is the most tenuously developed thread of the film, but the horrible accident that Beth suffers parallels the catastrophic career ending injuries that are a constant danger in ballet. The fact that Beth's career ends before her accident, which may or may not have been self-inflicted, drives home the message of the movie: ballerinas live and die by their opportunities to dance.

For the most part, the film is paced quite well and keeps the tension high by jumping between Nina’s interactions with this damaged cast of characters. Black Swan is not flawless however, and there are a few moments toward the end where the film goes off the rails and scenes that should be horrifying come across as silly instead, like Nina's final confrontation with Beth. A few clichés abound as well. Sex and drugs are invoked as obvious symbols of Nina’s descent into black-swandom. In fact, things don't really go to hell until Nina has an orgasm. Yes, it's an ancient, anachronistic trope, but seeing how this is the retelling of a cautionary fairy tale about innocence and sexuality, it is not merely appropriate but essential for the story.

Those seeking a romantic story with beautiful dancing would be better served by saving money to see a live ballet performance. Much has been made of the training Portman had to endure to prepare herself for her role, and while it’s clear she knows her way around a barre, the scenes she dances herself are not technically impressive or terribly difficult, which is amusing because Nina is supposed to have flawless technique.

Speaking from personal experience and the other dancers I have talked to, those who have a background in ballet seem to enjoy the film more than those who don’t; provided that they go in looking for a gripping story rather than impressive footwork. That having been said, the film is titillating, surreal and tense enough to entertain audiences with little interest in dance. I also have to stress that this movie is by no means a chick-flick. If anything, it is more akin to a supernatural horror film. To all guys who balk at the thought of watching a ballet movie, there is racy lesbian encounter between Portman and Kunis to consider.

All in all, Black Swan is a compelling film that explores the dualities that exist between dancers and the roles they suffer for, and the ramifications of pursuing perfection.

Darkness > Black

2011-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a good long while since I wrote about anime, and I think it's high time to break the dry-spell. Enter Darker Than Black: Kuro No Keiyakusha; a series that is strange, stylish, and surprising, brought to you by Bones. Admittedly, this is old news for the torrent hunting, fan-subbing anime aficionados of today's youth; the series came out in Japan in 2007 which makes it positively ancient by internet reckoning, but I happened to encounter the series via Netflix instant viewing. So if you too enjoy the manifold benefits of Netflix, you could be watching the entire series right now instead of reading this. But would you want to?

I would love to see a serious graphic designer's response to the show's title font.

Contrary to what the title implies, the show isn't terribly dark. I mean, yes, it is about emotionless, super-powered hitmen (hit people?), so there's lots of killing and blood, but there's a surprising amount of levity as well, and all of the main characters are presented sympathetically. If you are a general fan of anime, or of Studio Bones' work in particular, you'll find plenty to love here. If you're on the fence, maybe a more detailed synopsis is in order.

The series is set in the near future or an alternate present where the world is recovering from a strange catastrophe that occurred ten years ago. Two massive structures have appeared on the Earth's surface: Heaven's Gate in South America, (which has subsequently vanished), and Hell's Gate just outside of Tokyo. During this time, the stars in the night sky have winked out, and been replaced by new, "false stars." Each of these stars corresponds to a person with a supernatural ability; though unlike your usual super heroes, these individuals have to pay a price to use their power. This price can range from consuming certain foods or drinks, to obsessive compulsive quirks like stacking stones or composing awful poetry, to raw self-mutilation. These individuals, dubbed Contractors, have completely rational and logical minds. So, free from the burdens of conscience, these individuals frequently turn to a life of crime, or sell their services as wet-work men for a number of shadowy organizations. And because these super-powered individuals would undoubtedly upset the natural order of things paranoid governmental types and scheming scientists strive to keep Contractors' existence a secret.

Admittedly, the premise is extremely complicated and convoluted, but the show does a good job of pacing its exposition and keeping you rooted in the present moment. Each of the four main characters have episodes that develop their individual histories and personalities which are interspersed with episodes developing the over-arching plot. There are even a few comic relief episodes starring an idiot detective and his otaku teenage secretary thrown in, that are genuinely and disarmingly funny. The closest referent I can think of is Cowboy Bebop, even though the narrative tone and visual style are completely different, and the soundtrack, save for the show's openings, are terribly forgettable.

I think the thing I like most about Darker than Black is that it manages to take many familiar manga tropes (people with super-powers, talking cats, a brooding hero wearing a clumsy facade) and make something original out of them. I'm also a sucker for shows that display intense, complex world-building. The contractors each correspond to number star in a messier catalog, and their activity is tracked by their contracts. Nothing ever really comes of this, short of giving the police a heads up as to when stuff is going down, but it's a neat concept. And the contracts themselves are a stroke of genius. They afford single episode villains personality, which is delightfully ironic considering Contractors are supposed to be unfeeling tools of war.

Another refreshing thing about Darker Than Black is that it doesn't preach at it's audience, or rely on endless "shipping" and churning to carry the plot. At first the characters are cold and without personality, but relationships do eventually arise in the series and their poignancy is pleasantly startling. There is a little bit of hackneyed philosophizing pertaining to the nature of rational thought versus emotional attachment and sentimentality, but for the most part the show just gives you interesting fights, conspiratorial intrigue and amusing characters.

To give you a brief rundown of the main cast, we have Hei, the titular Black Contractor, who makes bipolar swings between being an impossible bad-ass who can control lightning, and an unassuming dweeb named Lee Shinshun. Next up is Yin, who is remarkably similar to Rei Ayanami, and capable of sensing other Contractors. We also have Huang, an ugly, hard-bitten man with a heart of gold, (or maybe pyrite?) who can't stand the Contractors he works with. And last but not least, we have my favorite character: Mao. An acerbic computer hacker trapped in a cat's body.

Front and center we have Hei, off to the right is Mao, and to the left is Yin and Haung.

Like many other anime, the show's greatest flaw is it's artificiality. We have an overly complex premise that waxes fanciful and science-fictional, characters who are defined either by their lack of emotion or their broadly drawn personalities, and sin of all sins, the whole thing wraps up with a "WTF Anime!?" endings that flirts with apotheosis only to end up in bed with the absurd. Still, I can't help but wonder how a show a like this would fair if it was given a wider audience and a bigger advertising budget. Considering the huge following for shows like Lost and Heroes (just pretend they stopped after season 1), I think shows with more speculative premises have a lot of promise.

Long story short, if you dislike other anime, you may not find much to like here. If you are a fan of anime and you haven't seen Darker than Black, you're in for a good time.

Not One Sparrow Shall Fall...

2010-12-23T14:22:00.000-08:00

You may not know Mary Doria Russell, or her book The Sparrow. It was released in 1996 and it received strong reviews and a few rewards, but its mix of heavy theology, deep tragedy and science fiction doesn’t lend itself to a wide readership. If you are a person who is fascinated by questions of faith and encounters with extra-terrestrial life, I can’t recommend the book highly enough. The closest cultural reference I can think of is the film Contact, except that the ending makes more sense and it ends like an Italian Opera. I’m really not spoiling anything; at least, no more than Russell spoils herself.

A humble, muted cover, but it does a good job of announcing the Novel's theological nature.

The book progresses along two narratives and they both revolve around the life of Emilio Sandoz. The first begins in 2059 introduces Sandoz as a man who has been mentally and physically broken by his journey to another world. The second thread begins in 2019, and gives us the history leading up to said mission, and eventually, choice details from the mission itself. As you would expect, these two threads alternate, with a cadre of priests trying to tease details out of the tortured Sandoz. It’s interesting to note that in the readers guide included in my copy, Russell acknowledges the hardest part of writing the story was the pacing, which I think is the novel’s greatest weakness, but more on that in a bit.

The greatest strength of the novel is Russell’s varied experiences in science, anthropology and biology. It’s a pleasure to read books written by intelligent people, particularly when those intelligent people are willing to grapple with lots of different issues in the same book. Despite having a vocabulary that includes words like “australopithecine,” Russell’s prose is aggressively readable and usually quite clean. She is not a wordsmith by trade however, and that is evident in a few descriptions that come across as bombastic while others are rather unclear, but on the whole the book is very accessible. I also liked the fact that Russell doesn’t over-emphasize the fantastic technology used in her book. She strikes a nice balance between existing technology, like SETI satellite arrays to speculative stuff like AI vultures and mass driver propulsion systems. Technobabble rarely, if ever, takes a front seat in the narrative, allowing readers to focus on the interpersonal, and inter-species issues that arise from the book.

Russell’s most fascinating thought experiment is the idea of dual sentient habitation. Rakhat is inhabited by two intelligent species of animals; the Runa, peaceful but simple minded herbivores, and the Jana’ata, cunning, carnivorous creatures who have successfully domesticated the more plentiful Runa. Inventing a planet with just one new species is an impressive feat of world building; doing two at once is extremely impressive. Russell also demonstrates the world she developed impressively by giving us access to the alien’s perspectives on a couple occasions.

The heart of the book lies with the humans though. Emilio Sandoz is intelligent, conflicted, charming and passionate, and he goes through several appreciable stages of change throughout the novel. The leading lady, Sofia Mendes, is one of the best modern female characters you will find outside of Stieg Larson’s Millennium Trilogy. Another interesting revelation the reader’s guide revealed, is that Emilio and Sofia were “their own characters” while Russell borrowed the voices of real people for many of the other characters. I initially liked Anne, a character Russell implies is based on herself, but she becomes steadily less interesting as the plot progressed. Other characters had their share of faults as well. DW and George weren’t flat, but blandly affable, and many of the other characters on the mission essentially serve as Red Shirts; dying to demonstrate the dangers of the hostile world. In the present day story arc, John Candotti, Sandoz’s advocate and friend, steals the show, along with Father Voelker, a poisonous prick of a character.

Despite the successes of characters and her dual species thought experiment, Russell falls short in her goal to explore the idea of first contact with a foreign culture given the benefit of hindsight. The missionaries to Rakhat take very few precautions regarding disease and infection as they interact with the Runa. Another issue that makes the book feel rather dated is that none of the bright, forward ever considers the possibility of large scale human colonization on Rakhat. Given the dire-straights of our current ecological situations, such considerations would be inescapable. These issues are never addressed in any great detail, and the novel dates itself as a result.

As I mentioned earlier, my biggest problem with the novel is the pacing, particularly toward the end of the novel, though discussing why will involve a long list of spoilers. Russell kills Anne and DW in one sudden, swift stroke and while their deaths are handled carefully and given some pause for reflection, the plot defenestrates itself as far as pacing is concerned. Everybody else except Sandoz is killed off as a campaign of widespread infanticide sweeps across the planet. Russell doesn’t give the reader any time to come to grips with the deaths of Sofia and Jimmy, which strikes me as a cop-out, given how emotionally complicated their relationship with Sandoz was. Russell is just getting warmed up though. Immediately after the genocide, Sandoz is tortured to the point of losing the use of his hands, and brutally raped. Finally, because all that isn’t enough, he accidentally kills one of the alien children he had befriended. He is then sent back to Earth alone. Which invites a problematic, question: If Sandoz had lost the use of his hands, how the hell did he feed himself during the several years he was flying back home?

That’s the only obvious logical fallacy the book suffers from, though seeing how this is a book about Jesuits flying to an alien world before anybody else, there are a couple moments in the plot that taxed my suspension of disbelief. The book actually tries to turn these long odds to its advantage by having characters reflect upon spiritual significance of the improbability of their situation. It’s a gambit that half pays off. Judging from the title, which is a reference to Matthew 10:29-31, the book seems to imply that God is at work in the novel. Russell never comes out and says it, in fact, she seems to imply that Sandoz may not believe in God at the end of his experiences, or that he may believe in God and hate him. Readers get no firm theological explanation for the travesties that Sandoz suffers, but I think that's one of the strengths of the book. That’s essentially the point of the novel; to raise questions about faith, and make the reader realize there is no easy answer where religion is concerned. I like a book that asks questions rather than forcing answers down the reader’s throat, especially when the book is a work of science fiction, and the answers to questions are loaded with dogma.

If you’re the type who doesn’t mind a little God, or even the possibility of little God in your science fiction, give The Sparrow a read. I have yet to read the sequel, but if I do, I'll let you know if its any good.

Strange Magic

2010-11-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

It's terribly hard to talk about magic and books without bringing up The Boy Who Lived, especially if the book in question is British. I'm especially guilty of this. I mean, look for godsakes! I've gone and brought him up before I could even tell you what other book I'm talking about. For shame! Bad writer. No Biscuit. Anyway, there is magic to be found in Britain beyond Hogwarts, as proved by Susanna Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

It is a rightly celebrated book that's been out for a few years now, and while it's not nearly as accessible and inherently joyful as Rowling's septology, it is also more Literary. Therefore you can read it and then tell people you read it, and then feel smug about yourself even though it's a book about magic and that sort of thing is generally not something you're supposed to be proud of reading. Think of it as the opposite pole on the fantasy spectrum from Twilight: A grownup book for earnest readers who appreciate complicated characters, nuanced relationships and smart prose.

This is a fine cover. It was enough to get me curious about the book and once I read the jacket, I knew I had to read the rest.

The book is also very much a period piece. A Victorian period piece set amidst the Napoleonic Wars no less; a scenario some might consider the 'periodest' of period pieces. Consequently, the writing is not streamlined to suit the modern tastes of text messaging and net slang. The stilted properness of the era feels like it has been slightly exaggerated to poke fun at itself. Clarke has more in common with Austen and Dickens than Rowling, Lewis or Carroll. The book is thoroughly contemporary in it's fusion of society and magic, however, a trend that currently dominates the fantasy genre. There is also a wink of meta-fiction in Clarke's writing. The entire book is riddled with footnotes referencing a vast corpus of magical scholarship and history that Clarke has dreamed up. Many of these footnotes are short stories unto themselves; brief fairy tales of the old school with archetypal characters in need of harsh social lessons.

So what is the damn book about? Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell of course. Two men who have been destined to bring magic back to England. The practice of magic is deeply ingrained in the history of Clarke's England, but recently, actual practical magic has all but departed in Britain, leaving a bunch of pompous old men practicing "magic theory." Enter Mr. Norrell, a neurotic, highly introverted man who stuns the world by doing actual magic. Later on in the story (further along than I would have preferred in fact, we meet Johnathan Strange), a romantic, mercurial young man who takes up magic on a whim, and ends up as Norrell's apprentice. The book details both magicians' efforts in the Napoleonic Wars, and the strains of their social relationship caused by differing opinions on magical practice. There is also a scheming fairy who must be overcome, distressed damsels in need of rescuing, and several human antagonists of varying degrees of despicableness.

The book is in part, a comedy of manners. We have well-intentioned oafs, ill-fated everymen, scheming control freaks, sharp tongued servants, superficial rakes, saintly wives and flawed husbands. One of my writing teachers once told me that dialog is as much about what characters hear as it is what they say, and that is extremely evident in Clarke's writing. Miscommunication, both supernatural and mundane, pervades the book. There are segments of the book, particularly at the beginning of the narrative, where the pompous social interactions feel quaint and not quite as clever as they are supposed to be. At times, the book moves at a tediously deliberate pace, and there were some passages where I was desperate for Clarke to just get over herself and get to the point.

The point being the magic, of course. Clarke's haunting scenery and her magical phenomena are equally wonderful to read. Spoilers are sprinkled throughout this paragraph, so you may want to skip it. We have ships made of rain, ornate fences that have turned rosy with rust, chilling ruins of the fairy realm and comical geographic juggling. There is very little in the way of combative magic in the book however, even amidst the war, which on the one hand is tremendously refreshing, but also somewhat disappointing. We never get to see a magical duel between the titular magicians, which struck me as a tremendous lost opportunity. Their reconciliation is also too abrupt, and I think it skirts some of the personal issues that played a hand in their separation. I'm not saying that Norrell is in love with Strange, and that he felt betrayed on both a personal and intimate level, or that Strange blames Norrell for the death of his wife and trying to control him and English magical society in its entirety... no wait, that's exactly what I am saying. There is a lot of fascinating subtext that gets no real resolution. The brief glimpse we get of the enigmatic Raven King is suitably climactic but it's also a terrible tease, as we are no wiser of his intentions or motivations.

The Man With Thistle-down Hair is an awesome antagonist.

The fact that the book uses illustrations, albeit sparingly, is a nice touch, and one that I heartily approve of. I was surprised to learn, via Wikipedia, that some reviewers found them to be overly sentimental and inappropriate. I'm all for mixing text and images, especially since illustrations were a fairly big deal during the narrative's time period, and given that contemporary society is increasingly visual, I don't see how their addition is a anything less than an awesome move. It's a fusion of past and present tastes and Portia Rosenberg's are pretty damn good.

So, do I agree with Neil Gaiman's assessment that it is "Unquestionably the finest English novel of the Fantastic written in the past 70 years?" No. At least, not without some tricky qualifiers. If we are invoking 'finest' in the sense of Fine Arts and use "English novel" to refer to a specific novel of exceptional Englishness, then yes, perhaps. Clarke's prose are tremendously more complicated than Rowling's and her characters are more subtle and complex. And Anglo-files will be in heaven with the book's Victorian pomp. I have to say that I prefer Potter's saga however. Up until the very end of Strange and Norrell, there is very little urgency to Clarke's prose. Things simply happen, or don't happen, and it is frequently hard to appreciate what is at stake in the grand scheme of things.

That said, I can't wait for the sequel, and I'm glad I didn't read this right as it was released in 2004. Given that the first novel took 10 years to write, I'm not holding my breath for the follow up, or for the film adaptation that is supposedly in the works. Seeing how it's going to be a long wait, you might as well snatch up Strange and Norrell now. It'll keep your mind warm throughout the long winter.

Redeeming Dead

2010-10-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

Death is a fairly pedestrian experience in most modern video games. It's like waiting at a stop light. It's a delay or an annoyance at most, but it doesn't really cost you anything. Saves and checkpoints can be reloaded. More lives can be obtained. Dying is a mere hiccup in the emergent narrative of your play session. In most cases, failed attempts aren't even addressed by the game's given narrative. Mario will inevitably beat bowser. Nathan Drake never really dies. That time you used your face as a catcher's mitt for a Bullet Bill? Those leaps of unfounded faith? Your brilliant idea to charge the a platoon of fortified enemies? Don't sweat it slick. They were bad dreams. Outtakes. Omake. Life is cheap, so waste it as you see fit.

That's part of the charm of video games, obviously. Real-life is much stingier with second chances, and it's incredibly liberating to be able to leap off the highest cliff you can find without fear of consequences. But there's also a helluva lot to be said for games that allow you to die an appreciable death. A meaningful defeat that gives you cause to pause and reflect on what just happened is an incredibly valuable experience. It's also hard as hell to balance. If you make losing too costly, players won't have the will to start over. Make it too mild and... actually, many players don't seem to mind at all, hence the recent trend of games that mitigate the cost of death, or do away with it altogether. But it's a sore absence if you ask me. So today, I'd like to take a moment to address games that redeem the value of death in play, either by having it significantly influence mechanics, giving it appreciable narrative gravity, or just doing something interesting with it. Mega spoilers abound, so take caution.

Now this here is how you do a Western, I tell you wut. Hats off to them Rockstar boys.

Red Dead Redemption is a game I've been meaning to talk about for some time. The most frequent indictment brought against RDR is that it is simply GTA with horses and this is largely true. When friends asked me what the biggest difference was between RDR and GTA4, I said it was the way horses control versus cars. It was an off the cuff the answer, and looking back I realize that "the environment" would have been a better answer. The frontier Rockstar presents you with is the most impressive digital landscape I've yet encountered, and it is teaming with flora and fauna that you can interact with. At some point in the game, you will be killed by a cougar. Wolves will attack you in packs. You will hunt bears and skin them. You will pick wild flowers and herbs and sell them to buy bullets and whatever. The extent to which you interact with these elements is still mostly elective however, similar to GTA's Taxi/Police/Ambulance mini-games. There are a few missions where you hunt plants and animals toward the end of the game, but the vast majority of the game has you completing missions by riding horses and shooting fools, similar to the way you drive cars and shoot fools in Liberty City.

So what does this have to do with death? Nothing. I just wanted to talk mechanics for a little bit. The game does do something interesting with death, however.

After hundreds of shoot-outs, fetch-quests, horse-chases and other decidedly western trials, John Marston meets his end at the hands of the US Army in the final mission. Some context is necessary to appreciate the significance of this death. Marston is an ex-gangster who has been pressed into tracking down his former gang members by the US Government who is holding his family hostage as collateral. You complete this task about three quarters into the game at which point you are reunited with your family. The last few missions have Marston simply acting as a husband and a father. John's son Jack, is particularly ambivalent toward his father. He realizes that his father did not leave him out of choice, but he also struggles with abandonment issues and does not know the full details of his father's past or his service to the government. The game has you reconcile John with his gentler, slightly bookish son. After John dies protecting his family, the game allows you to continue playing in it's world, as traditional of RockStar titles, but you continue to play as Jack instead of John.

By continuing your father's legacy, the legacy of the character you have played throughout the entire game, the values of the old west are validated, and John's questionable life is redeemed through Jack. Video games rarely consider what happens after a character dies. Usually, they simply imply that evil wins and justice is not served. The fact that Red Dead Redemption goes farther, is refreshing and interesting. That said, Marston's ultimate demise doesn't cut as sharply as it could, seeing how you will have likely seen him die several dozen times before his canonical death.

Reach offers solid gunplay and good times online,

but it could do more with its premise.

Another recent game that nearly does death justice is Reach. It's not quite as poignant or novel as RDR, which is a much longer, more emotionally involved affair, but you do adopt the role of a marine fighting in a military campaign doomed to failure. Reach is by no means the first title to put you in this position, but it's still fairly fresh territory for video games, and watching your squad mates die one by one, until you are finally left to your own last stand makes for a novel experience. More can be done with this premise however. Halo has never been a series for subtlety or ambivalence. It's monotonous rhetoric of duty, teamwork and sacrifice has always reached propagandistic proportions, and the game never once has Noble Team question their orders or consider their own chances. But showing the losing side of a battle, where even when you win the game, the good guys lose, is an interesting jumping off point for future titles to tackle.

This is a great game and you should buy it.

As I implied at the beginning of this post, death is used most impressively when it gives players cause to pause and reflect. To that purpose, few titles are as effective as Minecraft. When you die, you drop all of your items, and you only have a few minutes to collect your belongings. "That sounds like corpse running," you might point out. Very good. It is corpse running. But unlike the corpse runs of MMO's where reclaiming your belongings is a forgone conclusion and running back to your body is just a hassle, you very often won't be able to retrieve your lost goods in Minecraft. Loss is painful and consequential. It makes you think twice and weigh risk against reward. The game also introduces Creepers; easily the vilest new video-game of the last decade: hissing, walking bombs that can destroy your house as well as your body. What is valuable about having your house blown up you ask? Like the rest of Minecraft, a minimalistic gem of a game, the risk of death scales to your aspirations in play. The deeper you dig, the more you stand to gain. The deeper you go though, the harder it is to reach the surface and reclaim your loot. The grander your architectural schemes, the longer the shadows cast by Creepers. When you succeed, the triumph is not at all artificial or forced, but organic.

Finally, an oldie but a goody that I've been looking for a long time. Planescape: Torment, recently resurrected and available for purchase from Good Ol' Games. I'm not too far into the campaign yet, but I've played enough to tell you that it is superbly written. The game was created at the end of a magical era, where people still used written description to supplement game narratives, as opposed to relying solely on graphics and cinematics. As for how the game handles death, it marries your ability to come back to life with the narrative: you play as an accursed soul caught in limbo who cannot die or return to life as you know it. From what I have gathered so far, your ultimate goal may be to die once and for all; a fascinating quest to say the least.

I know there are hundreds of titles that handle death in innovative, inspiring ways which I have not addressed here. There are even several recent titles that deserve to be examined, Demon Souls being chief among them. But I won't weigh in on a title I haven't played yet, and this was never intended to be a comprehensive list of any sort. If you have ideas of games that work with death in interesting ways however, I would love to hear them. My thesis may work along similar lines. I realize this update has been a long time coming. Hopefully the length compensates for it somewhat. I'll try to have something on Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell up before October is out, but I make no promises. Check back soon!

Been Busy!

2010-10-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

I realize it's been a good long while since I've posted dear readers, and I do apologize for the lapse. Turns out graduate school is harder than college (go figure) and staying on top of everything has occupied almost all of my attention. I have found time to keep reviewing videogames however! I have been writing for Georgia Tech's school paper, The Technique, and if you are so inclined you can read my take on Civ V, Reach, and Monday Night Combat. Just this morning, I finished writing about the indie smash-hit Minecraft, (tl;dr: buy it) but it probably won't be posted until Friday. Something to look forward to.

Actually, given the season, the picture is surprisingly appropriate.

If you simply can't wait, there are a couple of my academic projects you can check out. I will be posting on Georgia Tech's Newsgames blog periodically and my first article examining the decline of the editorial cartoon should be up for reads soon. I've also started an affair with Wordpress in the form of Speculative Technology & Designs, a blog chiefly concerned with Nanotechnology that should demonstrate what I am learning about digital media and design. Turns out this site is all kinds of ugly!

That said, I am absolutely not abandoning Sarcasmancy. I will endeavor to post something up here at least once a month! I'll be weighing in on Red Dead Redemption, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and possibly Plainscape: Torment soon, so please be patient a little longer and thank you for your readership. You sustain me!

A Shotgun, A Zerg And You

2010-09-07T19:54:00.000-07:00

A little while ago I quipped that "Blizzard got Firefly in my Starcraft and I couldn't be happier." The truth though, is that you can always be happier, especially if you're both cynical and optimistic, and while Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is an excellent title, it could do even more with it's country-western mash-in. But before I start in on the narrative, I want to repeat, the first installment of Starcraft II is an excellent piece of videogame. Even if you don't plan on partaking of the game's robust multi-player component, the single-player campaign is a parade of finely crafted, uniquely challenging missions that boasts surprising replay value.

Each mission in the campaign has a unique hook that prevents it from being a typical game of Starcraft. Waves of fire or tides of lava will force you to move your base from point A to point B. Swarms of zombified marines will besiege your base come eventide, forcing you to hunt their lairs during the day. In one mission, you must intercept shipping routes and rob trains (which, to my eye, is the pinnacle of this sci-fi western strategy concoction, but more on that later). These variations keep the campaign fresh and many of them beg second playthroughs.

To further replay value, you accumulate limited funds and research points throughout the campaign which can be allocated to purchase and upgrade troops in various ways. There are also several points in the narrative when you are forced to take sides in disputes between two opposing characters, resulting in two unique missions and two unique narrative outcomes. One decision determines which special unit you will have access to, and another affects which enemies you will face in a later mission. At long last, a strategy videogame that let's you make meaningful tactical decisions in your virtual crusade This is a feature that could stand to be played up a lot more in Heart of the Swarm, though I have to wonder how that sort of diplomacy will translate to the Zerg campaign.

I assume the multiplayer is good because people treat it like a fucking sport, but I can't really comment on it because I haven't touched it yet. WoW aside, the prospect of PVP in Blizzard games kind of terrifies me. I don't have the lightning quick reflexes, or the patience to memorize hotkeys and stats for each unit in the Terran, Zerg and Protoss hierarchies. I would not last five minutes in a campaign. Or worse, I would provide my opponent with just enough interest for him to bat m around the map for twenty minutes while an audience of thousands looks on with scornful cackling. Yeah. That's how it works right? Maybe I'm making it worse. An old penny-arcade comic comes to mind, but I can't seem to find it. I might take a stab at it provided I find a friend to tutor me, but harsh memories of DotA (admittedly, not a real Blizzard game) and Warcraft III are enough to steer me clear for now. I'm not here for the bloodsport anyway.

No sir, I enlisted to follow the trials and travails of James Raynor and his raiders. That said, I haven't read any of the extraneous fiction available to flesh out the game's universe. I didn't even pay particularly close attention to the narrative of the first game. I did however, develop considerable respect for Blizzard as storyteller during my tenure as a WoW-addict, specifically when I was taking hits of Litch, and I wanted to see where they were gonna go with their return to the RTS format.

In brief, the storyline for the first installment of a planned trilogy is good, and the smartest move Blizz makes is tapping into the same creative leylines that Joss Whedon channeled to create Firefly. It's a space-western right down to the twangy soundtrack and cowboy dialog, and it helps Starcraft II curb it's harshest artistic criticism; that it's nothing more than a Warhammer clone. That said, it accomplishes this feet via another imitation. James Raynor is conflicted, moody and lovable, but not as compelling as Malcolm Reynolds. Despite his folksy phrases, Jim lacks the humble and at times bumbling, charm that made Mal so fresh. Raynor comes off as a bit too heroic, and heroically flat. The supporting cast is similarly likable-but-bland, lacking the complicated relationships that made Serenity's crew so damn exciting to be around. One of the problems is that the plot is a bit too grand for it's own good. Raynor's civil war baggage and lady problems, two tried-and-true staples of the western genre, are handled quite well, but the practical aspects of his revolution, the down-to-earth, everyday concerns that Firefly made so damn compelling, are shortchanged.

Among the supporting cast, Tychus Findlay easily steals the show.

Desperation, particularly as precipitated by scarcity of resources, is an essential theme of The Western. That seems like it would make a natural fit with the resource obsessed strategy genre, yet I never got the sense that Raynor and his crew were ever scraping. Yeah, they plunder tech from The Dominion, but I never got the sense that they were worried about having a warm meal, or that they wouldn't have enough minerals to fuel their flagship. You have to make some hard calls when it comes deciding between that last mercenary contract or upgrading your infantry, but the fact is, you've got extra money to spend. The train job mission is a step toward scarcity, in spirit and aesthetic, but most of the other missions, fun as they are to play, provide players with a glut of resources that diminish The Western's characteristic leanness.

And leanness isn't the only thing lost. For a game obsessed with details by play-style, the narrative seems to gloss over a lot of logistics that have a lot of dramatic (and game-play) potential. How does Raynor hide his raiders from The Dominion? How do the mercenary troops get along with the raiders? The funny thing is, Blizzard has proven themselves brilliant at filling in these world-building gaps, time and again through the tiny quests in World of Warcraft. I can't help but wonder how they might have more effectively translated that world-building to Starcraft II.

I'm not saying that Starcraft II should aspire to be Firefly: The Game, or that it should be World of Starcraft. It shouldn't. I'm not even saying that Starcraft II fails as a story-telling game. It doesn't. As game narratives go, it's a real winner. But it could be even better, and I hope Blizzard continues to push the envelope in the next two installments.

The Dragon Age Blues

2010-08-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, there has been an smörgåsbord of triple-A video games over the past year, and I have commented on relatively few of them. Assassins Creed 2 and Dragon Age came and went without comment. Heavy Rain and Allan Wake, the sort of narrative-driven titles I relish, arrived sans discussion. Even the exquisite Red Dead Redemption, which people have hailed as a triumph of Literature, Literature with a capital "L" Literature, remains unexamined. And now there is also StarCraft II to consider. Rest assured, I still plan to discuss these titles in detail, but I have been too busy trying to play through them that I haven't had much time to write.

Applying to graduate school, finishing college, getting married, moving across the country, and starting graduate school have kept me busy, but the games themselves constitute considerable time-investments. I have a backlog of roughly ten titles. Each of them off anywhere from 40 to 80 hours of gameplay, excluding any applicable multiplayer components. This tells you several I am (A) very spoiled and (B) very unfocused, but the very fact that I refer to the games I am currently playing as a backlog, says something about the modern videogame: They are digestible artifacts; things to be consumed and completed rather than relaxing methods of passing the time.

In short, it is the difference between playing table-tennis (Pong) and reading War and Peace (The Witcher). This transformation has blurred the lines between leisure object, and laborious objective. This is especially true if you play a game while following a guide to try and wring out all of its secrets and sidequests, or if you find the title to be exceedingly challenging. This environment of purposeful, highly structured play and frequent frustration can transform play into chore. Such is my relationship with Bioware's Dragon Age for the PC.

Behold the best written game of 2009. Pity that accessing the narrative can be such a chore.

The game is brilliant written. It wins my vote for best-written title of 2009 hands-down. Ferelden is a world of splendid squalor, caked with dirt and dried blood, besieged by demons and despots, and filled with a number of truly fascinating thought-experiments. For example, "What if the catholic church believed that god had turned his back on creation?" (Answer: Catholic Nihilists. There may be nothing scarier.) Then there's also the whole "using drugs to control magic users" thing which is a concept I hold dear to my thoroughly medicated heart. Best of all, the game manages to be both dark and tragic without succumbing to the sort of absurdist nihilism that is evident in many other games with mature narratives. Rockstar, I'm talking about you. The characters are also a lot of fun, and their histories are much richer than the cast of Mass Effect.

Accessing this excellent narrative though, can be a real slog at times. Truth be told, I'm not great at video games. I have this uncanny ability to find every possible pitfall, dead end, and failed strategy before making progress. This is a unique gift (read: personal problem) and I realize that. At the same time, I've played a lot of videogames of every kind, and I can usually cut through a game's "Easy Mode" without much trouble. Not so in Dragon Age. The first boss took an embarrassing number of attempts, and I have had to get into the habit of saving before every fight to avoid serious backtracking. My wife, who has played fewer videogames has had even more difficulty with the title. The fighting system isn't broken, or unpolished, (though it feels bit a dated), just punitively challenging. It bears mentioning that I'm playing the PC version, which I have heard is the hardest permutation of the game, so those looking for lighter fair may want to check out the console releases.

In any event, frequent death and backtracking in a game with a narrative of 80+ hours (with a variety of unique 6 hour opening sequences to choose from) makes play a daunting proposition. It requires the same sort of commitment as going to the gym everyday, or reading a seriously challenging text. And like reading a challenging text, a strange sort of Stockholm Syndrome comes into play. After spending so much time with a game, you tell yourself you're in love with it. Oh yes, there may be genuine affection in play, even genuine love, but like a battered wife, you excuse the game's punitive challenge and mind-numbing repetition as a part of the 'epic experience.' This is not a condition that is inherent, or exclusive to videogames mind you. Hell, I would argue that many 'Literary Classics' are guilty of similar long-winded self importance, and many of the people who claim to enjoy them are merely justifying their time investment.

This topic came up in a conversation I had with fellow graduate student and all-around good guy Chris DeLeon. Chris runs HobbyGameDev.com where he regularly writes articles designed to help aspiring game designers. He's also Vegan. It wouldn't surprise me if I learned he found homes for orphaned diabetic kittens in his spare time. Anyway, he recently published a post about short videogame design, where he writes "Videogames used to be light on content due to limitations of technology...The latest and increasingly dominant limitation now seems to be consumer time and attention." I am inclined to agree. Now that I am ostensibly an adult, finding time (and mullah) to invest in my habit has become a lot harder. This has led me to the dubious practice of buying games used, but even worse, it has also caused me to buy games that I will never finish. The industry's $60 price point is particularly egregious because, it's a lot of cash and I'll feel cheated if I don't get my money's worth, but at the same time, finding time for 60 to 80 hours of gameplay isn't exactly easy. Given those constraints, it's easy to see why iPhone and downloadable titles are seeing so much success. Chris' article lists a number of indie titles that make good on the promise of brief play in various ways.

On a related note, Donut Games' Cat Physics is another excellent free title for iDevices.

One base that isn't covered however, is narrative. Brief, aggressively affordable games are great, but I have yet to encounter an iPhone game with an engrossing story. Some titles may qualify as digital poetry, but narrative seems to be reserved for bigger budget console releases. I know that there are some episodic, downloadable games like the Sam and Max franchise, but for the videogame industry at large, mature, meaningful storytelling is shackled to big budgets and long-hours. I never believed that you need impressive graphics or a high page count to tell a good tale, and I like to think that someday soon, the short story game will have its day.

At the same time, I don't think long-form games will ever go out of fashion altogether. But given the tremendous success of casual controllers, I think we might start seeing play systems that allow people to access the later chapters of a game's narrative more easily. I don't mean to advocate the Mario Party approach to game design where everybody wins all the time; games must be challenging if they are going to be meaningful. But I know there is a market for game narratives outside of hardcore, gamers. I actually have a professor who is actually looking for somebody to play Red Dead Redemption so she can watch.

Over the next few days, I'm going to attempt to address a few of the titles I mentioned at the beginning of the article, but depending how grad school develops, I may get swamped. In any event, I will also be writing a review of Monday Night Combat for Technique, Georgia Tech's school paper, and I believe it will be available online. If so, I'll be sure to Tweet the link. Thanks for reading!

Scott Pilgrim Vs. His Movie

2010-08-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

In our hype-saturated world, it's a rare thing for a movie to exceed the promise of its marketing material. Even rarer is the adaptation that manages to eclipse it's source material. This is especially true of videogame films where the compelling ruled worlds of source material are rendered through tedious exposition (rather than exploration and experimentation). Comic-books movies have faired much better. Hell, they've been doing pretty damn well for a while now, but most fans will agree that something is lost in the jump to the silver screen. Snyder's take on Watchman was faithful but uninspired, save for it's ultraviolence. Iron Man 2 was a good time but all the subplots and cameos left it feeling cluttered. Kick-Ass struck a strong balance between surreal, sometimes controversial violence, and nerdy self-deprecating humor, but its satire felt a bit sharper on the ink.

I expected Scott Pilgrim would suffer similarly. I knew that Edgar Wright nailed the visual style from the moment I watched (and obsessively re-watched) the trailer, but I was worried about the leading man (you are forever George-Michael to me Michael Cera) and the challenge of compressing 6 graphic novels with about 20 characters into 2 hours. Wright not only captures the soul of the comic, he distills it and refines it. He gives it a 1-up, a fire-flower and a starman all at once. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is not only a brilliant comic adaptation, but a brilliant example of how to bring video games to the movies. Bryan Lee O'Malley's opus is a romance first and foremost, but it is also positively saturated with videogame references, and his take on Toronto is twisted by gamic logic. People throw fireballs, produce weapons out of thin air and take shortcuts through alternate dimensions. Ninjas, Psychic Vegans and robots abound. People erupt into showers of coins when they are defeated. Wright gets the game and he plays it well.

This poster is awesome! Why don't they use this one instead of that other dweeby one?

Spoiler alert; specific examples follow: The film opens with an 16-Bit take on the Universal screen, complete with a digitized soundtrack. Immediately thereafter, you are greeted by a familiar melody from the Legend of Zelda. Beloved, nostalgia inducing sound effects from my Super Nintendo youth punctuate conversations and character interactions. Text occasionally adorns the screen, dividing the film into chapters and visual effects illustrate sound effects and music. This super-imposition of visual sound effects and iconic imagery on normal cinematography not only enhances the light-hearted absurd humor of the movie, it leads to a sort of augmented-reality presentation that is prefect for our time: we are surrounded by reoccurring icons and sounds in every day life. This is especially true of videogamers and cyber-jockeys and cell-phone junkies. This is the sort of stuff that makes a videogame movie.

There are a few moments where the thing starts to feel like the Wachowski Brother's Speed Racer; the screen splits apart to show closeups of several characters simultaneously, or the background fades to abstraction behind characters before they pull off 'special moves.' But unlike Speed Racer, these anime aesthetics are grounded in fresh characters and meaningful relationships.

Speaking of characters and meaningful relationships, the casting and acting are great. The entire cast glows with the sort of enthusiasm that says "I'm happy to be a part of this." Kieran Culkin steals the show as Wallace Wells (though in the comics, I always imagined he was Asian), though Aubrey Plaza's Julie Powers gives him a serious run for his money. Anna Kendrick is great as Stacy Pilgrim and I wish she had more screen time (though it honestly wouldn't fit with the story). The Sex Bob-Ombs all look and sound exactly like I would have imagined them. I still think Wright could have done better than Michael Cera for the lead (When he scowls or puts on his 'game face' it looks like he's pouting and he's still a bit too mopey and awkward), but the truth is, he also could have done much worse. There are a few moments where he's spot on. Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes Ramona Flowers seem much warmer and more appealing than she was in the comic without sacrificing the character's mystique. Ellen Wong also does an admirable job with Knives Chou, and I plan to keep an eye on her in the future.

The aforementioned dweeby poster.

The plot moves absurdly fast. Not quite 'Gilmore Girls dialogue' fast, but a lot of stuff happens and it happens fast. Again, the pace is pixel perfect for generation net. I can't help but wonder how older audiences would react to the film. Parents may or may not get it. Grandma might have a seizure. The pace is essential for fitting everything in however. I also applaud the edits made to the plot. In the books, (particularly in the second half of the season and the last book in particular), there are times where it feels like Scott is just drifting and O'Malley is killing time. To be honest, the last volume of the book, (released a few weeks ago) felt like a rather sloppy ending. The movie has a much cleaner finish, and the battle of the bands subplot adds some more structure to the narrative. All in all, both the books and the movie are worthy of your time, but for the first time in a long time, I have to say that the movie is better.

Part of me wants more. These characters, and the world they inhabit are just too damn fun. But the story is finished, O'Malley is finished with it, and I worry about what might happen if we try to push this forward. In any event, you should definitely give Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World a watch at your earliest convenience. It's an absolute blast.

Here's Hoping for a Little More Persona-ality

2010-07-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

On August 1st, I will be heading east to settle in the Deep South, where I shall remain for two years, learning the mysterious Kung-Fu of the digital media scholar. Videogames will be the primary focus of my studies, though I suspect that I will have very little time to game and blog once the program actually commences, and I've tried to fit in as much gaming as possible in the past few weeks. Red Dead Redemption, Alien Swarm, Alan Wake, and Transformers War for Cybertron have all consumed considerable hours and you can expect to read about some of them soon, but two 'last-gen' titles have staked the greatest claim on my time: Persona 3 Portable, and Persona 4.

Awesome anime cover. It's also worth noting that the game includes a free soundtrack CD. Admittedly, most of the soundtrack is maddeningly repetitive, but it gradually wears you down to the point that you find yourself humming the tunes as you go about your day.

While Square-Enix may hold Japan's best recognized role-playing franchises, Atlus' Persona series, the most popular chapter of their Shin Megami Tensei multiverse, is the best example of the J-RPG genre, combining typical turn-based battling and world-saving with high-school dating and social drama. It's a recipe ripe for parody, but the two go together kind of like gin and tonic; a taste not everybody will appreciate, but those who do will keep on drinking till the wee hours of the morning. "So it's a game for alcoholics?" you ask, with a wry smile dripping down your face. "No smartass!" I exclaim, pounding my fist on the table. "It's a game about relationships! Whether or not relationships lead to drinking is up to you. Wino."

Persona is the most character driven series I've ever played. Not all of the characters tremendously deep, but conversing with characters and developing meaningful connections with them is the bread and butter of the series. Each potential character-relationship represents one of twelve tarot-card themed Arcana. Each of these arcana represents a division of supernatural entities called "Persona" that your characters can summon to magic and kick-ass in battle. In order to unlock more of these supernatural entities, you need to become closer to the people who represent that arcana. This little set up is referred to as the social link system, and it transforms socializing into an essential aspect of developing your character, which is really quite poetic when you think about it.

Unlike the one-shot character quests that are typical to Bioware RPGs (IE; Mass Effect 2's Loyalty Missions), you establish relationships with other characters in Persona over a period of months. Both titles gradually occur over the course of an academic school year, and each character you can hang out with has their own weekly schedule. Budgeting your time to try and fit everyone in is a huge part of the game. Word to the wise? On your first play-through, don't try to max out every social link, even if you have a guide. There are just too damn many things to keep track of, and it can turn the gameplay into a chore. Completionists need not fear, both games have New Game+ systems that will let you carry over your social link progress from prior attempts, (Though to get one special persona in P3, you really do have to max everything and everybody on your first time through. Much luck).The number of embedded narratives packed into this game are staggering, and while a few characters are obnoxious (Kenji and Bebe from P3, Ai from P4) most of them are quite likable and some are very endearing (if you feel nothing for P4's Nanako you have no soul).

The thing that I would love to see other games emulate is the gradual sense of progress in forming character relationships. I'm not saying that every game should follow Persona's daily routine model (which is not without it's faults), but the emphasis on communicating with characters' and tactfully solving their problems with something other than gunfire, magic and martial arts is incredibly refreshing. So yes, more of that please.

This is the recently released third version of Persona 3 and it is definitely the one you want to pick up; provided you have a PSP. It features two distinctive campaigns depending on which gender you pick as well as the expansion of the original game. The only thing sacrificed are moving character sprites as you walk around school and the mall.

At the same time, it would awesome to see Persona take a page from Mass Effect 2's book where dialogue interaction is concerned. Most conversations essentially boil down to you picking among three or four dialog options in hopes of making the person you're talking to like you better. I think it would be awesome to have a few social links where you debate, argue, or even mock people instead of acting nice all the goddamn time. I don't want to see a Paragon/Renegade dialectic, but I do want a few more 'colorful' dialog and interaction options. There are several cases where the game gives you the option to be a complete ass, but you find yourself playing nice to advance the link, which really feels like a missed opportunity for fun and diversity.

This brings me to my biggest complaint about Persona, which is that while the games are supposedly about developing your individual character, the narrative skews towards repression and conformity at every turn. They are about being successful and popular in high school. P4 even defines a Persona as "The mask used to overcome life's hardships." All the while, I can't help but wonder, "why wear a mask at all?" Yes, there are certain times in life where you need to put on a pretty face and say the nice thing instead of the true thing. Most of us get our fill of that in real-life. One of the great joys of playing videogames is that they let you break free from all the rules and complications of real life. There has to be some middle ground between overcoming every obstacle with superior firepower and being a model student. The shonen trope of "fighting to protect my nakama" comes on really strong and runs very thick in both P3 and P4.

Another aspect of Perona's social link system that could use some work is having relationships affect the course of the story in more profound ways. Right now, both games have been arranged so you can be everybody's best friend if you play your cards right. I think it would be cool if being a friend to some people meant getting shit-listed by others, as that's how things tend to work out in real life. It may not please perfectionists, but it would greatly increase the game's replay value.

Speaking of value, it's a tough call as to which game is the better experience. Persona 3 Portable is the third version of Persona 3 Atlus has released, and each iteration has added hours of play time to an already considerable quest. In terms of tone, P3 is the more serious narrative. The characters are chiefly concerned with discovering the secrets behind mysterious monsters called Shadows that emerge during 'the dark hour', a hidden hour of the day that appears at midnight when most of the worlds inhabitants turn into coffins. Persona 4 is set in the same universe, though the narratives don't noticeably overlap. Persona 4's main story , has the main characters wandering into strange worlds through the television to solve a string of bizarre murders in the rural town of Inaba and it features a giant stuffed mascot character. So.. its a little harder to swallow in terms of seriousness. That said, I found the characters to be generally much more interesting and likable than P3's cast. Honestly, both titles are worth playing, but if you're having trouble deciding, go with P3P. It's always possible Atlus will make a portable version of P4.

All in all, Persona is weird little series (like the vast majority of titles from the Shin Megami Tensei brand), but it is extremely engrossing and it has a lot of charm. If you're a fan of Japanese videogames (particularly RPGs and Dating Sims), I can't recommend it highly enough.

Dreams, Madness and Obsession

2010-07-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

Inception is an amazing spectacle. It is the most impressive, visually arresting experience Hollywood has produced since The Matrix. Cities warp, bend and crumble into the ocean. Bullets fly and cars chase only to be outclassed by runaway freight trains. An elevator rises and descends through the tormented echoes of a man's sundered family life. The roles and performances are palpably calculated, but convincing and at moments, genuinely moving. It is the stuff dreams are made of, but Inception is not a movie about dreams. Dreams are the set-up, the backdrop, the pretense, but as Stephen Totillo suggests in his review of the film, Inception is about virtual realities; virtual realities so immersive and convincing, that ‘video games should be jealous.’ This is both a good and a bad thing.

The issues associated with virtual realities, particularly those realities that are so convincing that they can be considered alternate realities, need to be addressed. People are already getting lost in fantasy worlds, obsessing over virtual possessions and personas. This movie will help people understand how we get lost and why we don’t want to be found. More importantly, this film will help people appreciate the profound, if tragic beauty, in surrendering oneself to another world. As Totillo suggests in his review, this film is a clear representation of the joys of virtual reality: wondrous new frontiers to explore with strange new rules to master. God help us all if we actually learn how to develop this tech. That would be the end of it for me, I can promise you.

At the same time, dreams have a hell of a lot more to offer than the rigidly ruled framework of Nolan’s film allows, as anyone who read Sandman well-knows. My subconscious hosts far greater horrors than throngs of orderly, humanoid projections. The idea that peoples’ intellectual property conveniently congeals in safes and vaults is also a missed opportunity; ideas themselves can be labyrinthine dungeons that people wade through. Secrets can be monsters themselves, as the film half-illustrates through Mal. Everything is a bit too clear-cut for the movie to actually be about dreams. But it’s perfect for obsession.

On Facebook I butted into a friend’s discussion about the movie, chiefly, whether it was about madness or not. Again, I would argue that the film is too organized for most manners of madness, but it is perfect for obsession; a madness forged from focus and getting lost in relentless routine. Leonardo Decaprio’s Tom Cobb is an obsessed man. His presentation of ideas as parasites is compelling, but the sort of cancerous ever-growing idea he describes specifically pertains to the ideas we obsess over, like stories, memories and what could have been or what may yet be.

I suspect that Nolan obsessed over Inception himself. The complexity of the final job sequence feels like something that was tweaked, adjusted and edited endlessly. Little logistic issues haunt the film in hindsight. Why do we end up in the dream world Cobb created if we’re in another person’s dream? If base-dreamer is ‘kicked’ out of one level, why don’t the others automatically join him or get lost in subconscious limbo permanently? None of these little questions amount to an actual hole in the plot, but the degree of engineering involved with the exposition leaves the whole film feeling a bit more mechanical than it should.

In many ways, Inception feels like it was meant for something bigger than a single movie. I wanted more time to digest the ideas in play. I wanted to see more of this technology and its possibilities. I wanted to see more of the characters as well. It would be fun to explore the thieves’ various histories, or even see if there's an actual relationship behind that kiss between Joseph Gordon Levitt and Ellen Paige. That said, I do not want to see Inception 2 in theatres three summers hence. There is no way to follow up from the film’s ending without destroying it.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with anecdote about how obsession. After seeing the movie, my friends and I were hanging out in the theater lobby, discussing the intricacies of the plot when this guy walked up to our circle and started standing there in a way that screamed "I have an opinion about the movie that I need to share." He asked what we liked about the movie. I applauded the effects, the plotting and it's use of rules. He politely acknowledged my praise and proceeded to tell us that the film stole his intellectual property, citing it's use of the number 528 in relation to music. He was Doctor Horowitz of 528love.com. Never heard of him? He promises you will (though I left his site unlinked for a reason).

Apparently, 528 is the magical musical frequency of love, one of the nine cardinal frequencies of the universe. He went on to claim that Inception was a brilliant piece of propaganda by multinational corporations owned by evil tyrants like Rupert Murdock (an evil tyrant to be sure, but one who is completely unrelated to Inception). All this from three numbers which appeared in the movie three times at most. Horowitz was so utterly taken with this concept that it completely totalized the movie. He couldn't see anything else but his frequency and its conspiracies. It was an unsettling experience. Maybe it's because I was so close to grasping the truth that those evil multinationals have been repressing all these years, but I suspect it was because I was confronted with raw fanaticism. Not the sort that has been has been cultivated throughout the years by dogma and religion, but the kind that springs up unbidden.

It was a surreal ending to an already surreal experience, and oddly ironic that an obsessed man should decry intellectual property theft in a movie about an obsessed intellectual property thief.

Very Superstitious

2010-07-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

Let's have a chat about Supernatural! But before we get started, may I recommend some funky mood music?

Title card to season 5. So far I've only seen seasons 1-3

Those of you who brought up on Buffy and Angel may be jonesing for a show with magic, monsters and mayhem. Nothing that will scratch your itch better than Supernatural. It has one of those elegantly simple, impossibly promising premises: two brothers travel across america and hunt monsters from classic folklore. Sam and Dean Winchester are more conventional heroes than what you'll find in the Whedonverse and their relationship stays in familiar emotional territory, but they've got a dynamic that could charm the dry off a desert. I think Jensen Ackles is a better actor than Jared Padalecki, though I prefer Sam's character to Dean's.

Fangirlish preferences aside, the show really shines where lore is concerned. The winchester boys run through a gauntlet of unique ghouls and ghosts, especially in the first season and series creator Eric Kripke does an admirable job of modernizing the spooks while keeping them faithful to their roots. There are no sparkling vampires here. Ghosts are banished with shotguns loaded with rocksalt, demons are bound with magic circles and dark rituals are invoked at crossroads. A few episodes tap into some truly unique folklore, like faith healers, Djinns and Lucid dreaming. The show follows a mystery formula but it has a little more variety than typical detective shows. That said, the monster of the week format makes for disposable supporting characters and very few real relationships. The few supporting characters that do endure from one episode to the next are mostly likable, but the show also adhere to some troubling Hollywood conventions, especially where minorities and women are concerned.

The first season of supernatural is a parade of distressing damsels; women who cannot fight the bad guys, or at least cannot fight them without the boys help. Okay sure, this trend is so common that it barely bears comment and it makes sense that these normal women don't know how to fight the forces of darkness. When the show finally introduces strong female characters, like the headstrong aspiring hunter Jo, she still needs the boy's protection. Worse yet are Bela Talbot and Ruby; a duplicitous self-serving thief and a demon turned good respectively. The implications are absolutely medieval: Women are only powerful when they are deceptive, or when they draw power from the devil. Then there's the dying black guy syndrome to consider: so far I've seen three seasons of supernatural, and there have been three reoccurring black characters. All of them are antagonists of some sort or another, well-intending or not, and they all end up dead. I don't want the writers to throw in characters for the sake of pandering to political correctness, but you'd think they could have one woman who doesn't draw her power from darkness and deceit and one black guy who doesn't die.

The show's over-arching plot is conventional but fairly well-written, gradually altering the brother's objectives and introducing new sources of tension in their relationship. As I mentioned, I haven't seen season four and five, but seasons one through three maintain a consistent level of quality, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for some other shows. All in all, Supernatural is the best and worst about television formula writing. The conventions are easy to digest, entertaining, and charming, but also fairly shallow and at times insensitive.

Fullmetal Finale

2010-07-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

Now that it has finally drawn to a close, I can definitively say that Fullmetal Alchemist is the best manga I have ever read. For those who have never heard of it, the comic series' follows two brothers who attempt to revive their dead mother using the art of alchemy. Their spell goes horribly wrong, and Ed, the elder brother ends up loosing his arm and his leg, while the Al younger brother loses his entire body. Ed manages to save his brother by attaching his soul to a suit of armor, and he replaces his lost limbs with robotic prostheses. The two set out to find the Philosophers Stone to recover their lost bodies. While the series' successes can't be attributed to any single element, I believe the most refreshing thing about the series is it's occidental quality; both in terms of aesthetics and narrative structure.

Edward and Alphonse Elric.

Coming from a westerner, I realize that probably seems incredibly arrogant. I'm not trying to say that all manga should strive to follow the conventions of Western fiction but there are certain elements of manga storytelling, and Shonen in particular, that are down-right hackneyed. Most Shonen heroes have no motivation beyond, "I must become stronger so I can protect those dear to me!" The hero gains enough strength to defeat whatever evil that is threatening his beloved comrades, only to run into a bigger and badder beast later on. I can't help but wonder what these school age superheroes would do with their lives if the bad guys ever stopped bothering them.This eternal dissatisfaction with oneself is extremely appealing to adolescents, who really do have to defeat waves of school work while navigating their hormones and the fucked up social conventions that dominate high school, but what do you do when you're done fighting? Shonen rarely attempts to answer those questions.

Fullmetal Alchemist's characters all have hopes and dreams beyond defeating the bad guys. Admittedly, the bad guys themselves are flat, seeing how they're all based on the seven deadly sins. But considering that the villains are homunculi; artificial humans created by alchemy, their unidimensionality is actually quite logical. And series creator Hiromu Arakawa does a brilliant job of personifying Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Pride, Wrath and Envy in compelling ways that make them threatening and loathsome.

The other welcome westernization in Fullmetal Alchemist is the ending. Anime and Manga conclusions tend to feature incoherent plot twists, pathetic anticlimaxes, or an explosive, mind-fuck apotheosis. It's partially an East vs. West thing (the emphasis over there being on the journey as opposed to the destination) and it's partially a symptom of the grueling work ethic that defines Japanese culture. Sometimes, creators simply snap from the pressure, as was the case with Evangelion's original ending, which is so horrible it's hilarious. Then again, the "good" ending of Evangelion involves the birth of at least one god and the whole of humanity exploding into puddles of orange juice. This is pretty much par for the course as fas as anime endings go. The obvious explanation is that each of these endings are cultural echoes of what happened to Hiroshima, but knowing that does little to clarify what the hell is happening to the characters you have been following for 26 episodes.

More frequently, especially when it comes to anime adaptations of ongoing manga, artists have to cobble together an ending for a series that has only just begun. This was the case with the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime, where the artists had Ed take a trip to Nazi Germany out of nowhere.

Fortunately, the recently released conclusion of the manga is everything fans could hope for. It's comprehensive, creative, moving at times, and while it lays the main adventure to rest and ties up the important subplots, it also gives readers a good idea of how the characters will live out their lives now that they have vanquished the ultimate evil. There are some over-the top moments in the final fight, but the plot moves too fast to take itself too seriously. That's another thing I love about the series; it is not mellow-dramatic or over-wrought. The plot earns whatever emotional response it desires from it's readers with compelling events. There is very little introspective whining and none of the dramatic posturing that plagues series like Dragon Ball, Bleach and Naruto.

Behold the self-portrait of a genius mangaka. I can't wait for Hiromu Arakawa 's next manga!

That said, Fullmetal Alchemist is still very much a manga. The story has a European aesthetic but the art style is very Japanese. The humor is visual and situational as opposed to sarcastic and cynical. While the pacing of the fights are much more visceral and realistic than most manga, the violence is very highly stylized and at times so complicated that it warrants considerable exposition. If you have the slightest interest in manga, consider Fullmetal Alchemist a must read. Or if you're pressed for time, watch the new anime series, titled Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which faithfully follows the plot of the manga at the expense of some abridgment. You can get started here now!

Witchering Hours

2010-06-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

At the end of my last post, I hinted at my weariness of Bioware's binary approach to narration and character building: Paragon vs. Renegade, Sith vs. Jedi, Light Path vs. Dark Path (am I the only one who remembers Jade Empire?). Dragon Age is a welcome departure from such dichotomies, though your companions' and their approval of you produces a similar sort of judgment system. Don't get me wrong, I love the game (I'll be writing on it soon) and I love Bioware, but I think CDProjekt beat them to the punch where dark, morally ambiguous fantasy is concerned. I am referring of course to their excellent first effort, The Witcher: Enhanced Edition.

I love icons and symbols, and The Witcher's badge is a mean piece of work.

The source material, Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski's series of novels by the same name, is rich and ripe for a videogame adaptation. Both the books and the game are centered around The Witcher Geralt of Rivia. And what is a Witcher you ask? They are mutant white-haired badasses who get high on toxic alchemy and hunt beasts that go bump in the night. Theirs is a grim and grimy world fraught with feudal greed and supernatural peril. The game does a good job of transmuting this ugliness into a refreshing aesthetic; the world is convincingly and authentically dark, as opposed to being bombastically violent and sexualized.

I am only in the beginning of the game's massive 80+ hour quest, but the writing so far has been superb, and the story telling has been intriguingly receptive to interpretation. An example at the cost of a minor spoiler: In the first chapter, you are confronted by a lynch mob that blames a witch for summoning a hellhound that haunts their town. It is up to you to determine whether she is guilty, (and she is a scheming, feisty, seductive thing), or if the townspeople summoned the creature with their own misdeeds. After you make your call, you live with the consequences. There is no definitive truth revealed after the fact, no slider creeping toward saintliness or descending into antipathy, no "Morrigan disapproves." The game is about interpreting situations as opposed to making obvious moral judgment calls.

Now this is what a badass looks like. Haggard, scarred, but graceful as well, and positively lousy with sharp things. I mean, he's got a huge hook just hanging out on his belt!

The gameplay itself is also admirable, if awkwardly situated between third-person action and traditional western role playing tactics. The combat, even in the enhanced edition, seems like it would really glisten if it had just a little bit longer in the kiln, but I still prefer it to the often tedious, micromanaged tactics of Dragon Age and Neverwinter. The progression system is particularly praiseworthy; a blend of Final Fantasy X's sphere grid and Diablo II's skill trees. Each level up is an opportunity for customization and gaining multiple new powers. The game's alchemy system is also a nice addition, as it really reinforces the ritualistic, "Eye of Newt" approach to magic, while applying another layer of strategy and preparation to combat. I even found the game's "trading card" approach to sexual conquest to be an amusing tongue-in-cheek commentary on videogame romances. No, really. It's certainly no more crass than Mass Effect's Paramour achievements.

Speaking of collectibles, the enhanced edition includes a bounty of bonus loot: a music CD, a making-of DVD, and my favorites; a short story and a map of the fantasy world. They don't often make 'em like that anymore kids, I tell you what. My hopes are high for the sequel, though truth be told, I don't think I'll be able to complete the first game's sprawling campaign before it hits. There's no question of whether you'll be getting enough bang for your buck here though. If you want fantasy action that isn't afraid of gray areas, give ol' Geralt a try. You won't be disappointed.

Bioware used Sequel! It's Super (Mass) Effective!

2010-06-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a hell of a long time since I wrote a videogame review. Let's fix that right now! My playing habits for the last academic year have been largely dominated by two little words: Mass Effect.

Note the strong blue hues of this poster, and how they compare to the reds of the sequel. Color coding series might be trite, but it's a trend I approve of.

The first game in the series was a deeply flawed experience. I can't think of a more underwhelming opening to a videogame than puttering around on through The Citadel, gathering evidence of Saren's bad behavior. In addition to the pacing issues, the combat system was ambitious (squad based shooting + RPG action!) but deeply flawed (gunplay was simultaneously silted and detached) and buggy to boot (I got stuck in prone position during the Matriarch Benezia fight: twice). The inventory system was sloppy and required constant attention. Despite these complaints, the game grew on me like mold on a raspberry. I liked the characters and the writing, which while very conventional, was sharp. I also liked how each alien race seemed to personify certain philosophical doctrines.

For example, the Asari, an 'all female' race of blue skinned psychics capable of reproducing with any other race via mental coitus, can be thought of as the ultimate feminists. In contrast, the brutish Krogans who consider headbutts to be a normal part of conversation, are perfect avatars for the adolescent male Id. The migrant Quarians who have been driven from their home world by their own robotic slaves, could be considered Space Jews, for lack of a more politically correct term. Throughout your journey, you amass a staggering body of information on these various races and their cultures in the games codex. Players can safely ignore all these little logistic details, but I was delighted to learn how Element Zero actually works.

All in all Mass Effect ended up being a fun experience overall. But it really doesn't hold a candle to it's sequel. The game literally opens with a bang and while the plot remains faithful to familiar sci-fi conventions, it is far more engaging than it's forerunner because you are repeatedly confronted by the consequences of your decisions. Did you threaten the eternally annoying Conrad Verner with a gun? Nice shootin', Tex. He'll be running around the sequel pretending to be the Goddamn batman. I would have liked to see some of your decisions, like the fate of the council, to have some appreciable influence on the way the plot unfolds, but running into familiar faces (and a few people you will have inevitably forgotten) has a certain charm.

Mass Effect 2 is one of the most successful videogame sequels I have ever played.

More significantly, Bioware made good on the unrealized gameplay promises of their first game. Mass Effect 2 successfully marries squad based third-person shooting to RPG strategy and abilities. While it lacks the verticality of modern 3rd person titles, ME2's gunplay feels tight and satisfying, if a little less visceral than 'dedicated' shooting and action titles. The over-involved inventory system has been replaced with a system centered around buying, 'researching' and upgrading. Gone are the hated mako sections, (though there is DLC available involving a jet Hovercraft that are similar and more fun). The most important upgrade is undoubtedly the addition of quick time events that allow you to act or interfere with cut-scenes in ways that have meaningful effects on the story. Usually, these events boil down to left clicking or right clicking to behave like a Paragon (fluffy diplomat) or a Renegade (borderline psychotic hard-ass). As tired as I am of this binary approach to character growth, this system makes conversations and other non-combative exchanges far more involving than in previous titles.

ME2 is not without it's faults, however. While the sequel never suffers from the monotonous pacing that plagued the first game, it does feel rigidly formulaic at times, particularly during the Loyalty Missions; side-quests that are supposed to deepen and characterize Shepard's supporting crew. Some missions, like Tali's, are quite inventive and they do an admirable job of expanding both the world and its characters. Others, like Jacob's, seem to prove that the writers had no idea what to do with certain characters. The most criminal aspect of the loyalty missions however, is that the third member of your squad turns into a mute, irrelevant mannequin. The game will tease you with potential tension between crew members, but they could do so much more with this in-fighting. It would also be interesting to see romance bud between somebody other than Shepard and his female crew members. Maybe Tali and Garrus could have a thing, only for it to adversely affect their performance during missions? Just a little food for thought.

Given that Mass Effect 2 was received with nearly universal critical acclaim, it will be interesting to see if Bioware plays things safe in act three, or if they continue to push the envelope with innovation. Most videogame companies strongly abide by the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought. I'm still hoping they'll surprise me again.

A Gamer Romance

2010-06-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Scott Pilgrim in a freshman seminar on comic books. Somebody brought in volumes 1 & 2 as examples of Indie Comic books, and I remember randomly flipping to a page where a guy died and turned into an item box containing a Mithril Skateboard which tragically goes to waste because the main character didn't pick skateboard proficiency in the fifth grade. Somebody prodded me to pass the book along, but I had seen enough. I was in love. But I was also younger and dumber and more easily distracted, so it took four more years and an awesome movie trailer before I actually remembered to buy the damn books and give them a read.

This is what volume one (of five) looks like. Most major booksellers will be stocking them to cash-in on the movie buzz.

At first, I intended to read the books and write about them after seeing the movie, but after devouring all five volumes in three days, I decided the comic merited a post of its own. The series taps directly into the casually violent, attention-deficient energy of the gamer subculture and blends it with the lyrical awkwardness of the hipsters. The main character is a proud underachiever and the bassist of a humble bedroom band, yet there is also a sort of soft elitism in play thanks to the staggering number of obscure videogame references; I'm not talking about "Big Bang Theory" name-droppings either; most of them are clever gags that you can only appreciate if you've played the titles in question. In addition to all that, the series displays the same sort of brilliant self-awareness and self-deprecation that was evident in Arrested Development. All these elements blend beautifully to make a beverage that does not only feel fresh, but long over-due.

Despite all of its absurd post modernity, the series' premise is remarkably simple and romantic: Scott Pilgrim must defeat Ramona Flower's Seven Evil Exes to pursue a real relationship. She is literally the woman of his dreams, as she uses extra-dimensional shortcuts, or "subspace highways" that pass through Scott's subconscious. This concept of subspace is not only a nice nod at Super Mario Bros. 2, but a fitting metaphor for the internet's role in online dating. Social networking sites map out the geography of social anxiety. When you're crushing on somebody, you Facebook-stalk them and you are stalked in turn by their status updates; haunting pieces of minutiae from a life you're not actually a privy to. I don't think Brian Lee O'Malley ever intended to get all allegorical with Pilgrim; the books seem far too humble for that. But they can work on multiple levels. The concept of fighting the fast to pursue the present is old as dirt, but stylized video-gamic violence puts a unique twist on things.

Word around the interwebs is that the final chapter in Scott's saga will be out on July 20th. It can't come soon enough.

The characters really sell the stories though. Scott is wonderfully flawed but totally endearing. Ramona...well actually, Ramona's character is kind of weak, but Wallace Wells (Scott's gay roomie/guru), Kim Pine (Scott's sardonic Ex-girlfriend/drummer) and the evil exes (psychic vegan douchebags, chubby half-ninja lesbians and surprisingly nice skateboarders turn superstars) are all incredible. They are people you want to spend time with. Honestly, I'm a little bit nervous about the movie's casting. While the visual style looks incredible, Cera seems a bit too wimpy and reserved to play Scott and I was also disappointed at the decision to go with a Caucasian Wallace Wells. The side scrolling beat'em up based on the books however, looks incredible. It will be interesting to see how things turn out. Look for my review on the movie and game later this summer!

On Prince of Persia and The Problem with Videogame Movie Adaptations

2010-06-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

Videogames and Hollywood share an unfortunate history. The 1993 film adaptation of Super Mario Bros, with it’s uncharacteristically dark interpretation of the game’s whimsical Mushroom Kingdom, set a trend of videogame film failures that continues to this day. Mario’s failure was followed by hasty adaptations of the popular fighting game series, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. The early aught’s adaptations of the popular Tomb Raider and Resident Evil franchises saw bigger budgets and larger returns, but failed to rise above mediocrity. Hopes and expectations were at an all time high for Hollywood’s most recent videogame venture, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. According to movie-rating aggregation site Rottentomatoes.com, Prince constitutes “…A substantial improvement over most video game adaptations,” even though it holds a meager ranking of 39% positive reviews. With a budget of $200 million and experienced talent such as Jerry Bruckheimer, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Sir Ben Kingsley, one cannot help but wonder where things went wrong.

It must be noted that videogame adaptations of movies suffer from a similar lack in quality. For gamers, it is all but a forgone conclusion that titles released alongside summer blockbusters and holiday season epics will be shovelware: under-developed, derivative software that is designed to capitalize on the film’s hype. By and large, gamers ignore these cheap cash-ins. Sometimes a quality release will be overlooked because it is a licensed property, as was the case with the cult classic, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, the videogame prequel to the 2004 science fiction film The Chronicles of Riddick. Fittingly enough, the new Prince of Persia game released alongside the feature film has met with lukewarm reviews.

Gamers have a much harder time ignoring poor film adaptations of their favorite franchises however. This is partially due to the fact that gamers are, amongst other things, extremely passionate fans. After witnessing an atrocious trilogy of videogame adaptations, videogamers created an online petition to try to convince German filmmaker Uwe Boll to stop making videogame related movies altogether. There is much more than nostalgia at stake when a game is adapted for the silver screen, however. A videogame’s debut on the silver screen is its introduction to the public at large. It opens the experience of that videogame’s fictional universe to people who have never played videogames before. If an adaptation is shallow, bombastic and incoherent, it reflects poorly on that specific title, and the videogame medium as a whole, reinforcing the popular beliefs that games are unsophisticated and juvenile.

But is this portrayal of videogame narratives inaccurate? In her article, “Why You Will Never Be Happy With Video Game Films,” videogaming journalist Leigh Alexander suggests that the primary problem with videogame movies are videogame narratives. Alexander begins by her discussion with an examination of Resident Evil: Degeneration, a computer animated, direct-to-disc short film based on the popular game franchise. Unlike Paul Anderson’s trilogy of live-action movies based on the popular game series, Degeneration was developed by series’ creators Capcom, and set within the same continuity as the videogames. While Paul Anderson attempted to explain and contextualize the zombie virus that wreaks havoc in the videogame in his films, Degeneration does away with exposition altogether in favor of action. Alexander suggests that fans of the videogames will likely be more receptive to Degeneration, despite its narrative incoherence, because it is truer to their experience of the games than Anderson’s live-action films.
Alexander concedes, “Perhaps to an extent; unfamiliar with the language of games, films often mistranslate a title's appeal.”

This does not appear to be what happened with the movie adaptation of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, however. On the contrary, the film’s creators seem well aware of the fact that they are batting against the odds with their adaptation. Jordan Mechner, creator of the 2003 hit video game on which the movie is based, worked closely with executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer to capture the feel of the game. In an interview with the popular videogame news blog Kotaku, screen writer Doug Miro also professed Bruckheimer’s respect for the source material, and stated, “It still hasn't been proven that a game movie can be done. The perception is that it can't." Miro is hopeful that Prince would turn the tide for videogame movies, just as X-men and Spider-man opened the floodgates to comic-book adaptations.

Being somewhat jaded by previous adaptations, I was pleasantly surprised by the film’s familiarity and respect for its source material. Subtle details such as costuming and set design were immaculately reproduced. There was a great deal of skepticism about the decision to cast Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular prince, but his acrobatic heroics and wry wit accurately captured the spirit of the game’s protagonist. The filmmakers clearly interpreted the game’s charm faithfully and accurately. Yet the movie was not nearly as engaging as the game it was based on. What went wrong?

Alexander’s article presents one possible explanation; “The dominant problem [with videogame films], though, is that the narratives of games are unfortunately not nearly as sophisticated, intelligent, affecting or entertaining as we think they are.” There is no denying the simplicity of the average videogame narratives. Their characters tend to be archetypical, and their plots fall into familiar patterns. But Alexander’s phrasing captures an important detail: Gamers genuinely perceive their experiences in games to be complex, rich narratives.

Jesper Juul examines the unique difficulties of translating narratives between different media in his article “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narrative.” To clarify what is being translated, Juul uses Seymour Chatman’s model to divide narrative into Discourse (the telling of the story) and Story. The latter constituent is further divided into Existents (characters, settings, objects) and Events.

Discourse	Story
	Existents	Events
Narrative

Juul uses the example of Atari’s 1983 Star Wars arcade game to demonstrate how these narrative building blocks can be rearranged and garbled in the shift from a non-interactive media to an interactive one. The arcade game is solely based on ‘the death star’ sequence of Star Wars: A New Hope, with the player assuming control of a virtual X-wing fighter. There is no Darth Vader or Han Solo. No Tatooine or Millenium Falcon. Any contextual knowledge of the Galatic Empire and the Rebel Alliance is contingent on the arcade cabinet’s art and the player’s knowledge of the film. In addition to excising these crucial existents from the story, the arcade game offers outcomes that directly betray the events of the movie; the player can fail to blow up the Death Star, loosing the game. If the player succeeds in destroying the Death Star, a second one will appear, also betraying the events of the first movie, (though it is amusing to note that the threat of the death star is revived in Return of the Jedi). Clearly, the components of story are subject to warping and fragmentation in the transition from movie to games.

It must be said that Juul’s example is something of a strawman; videogame technology has come a long way since Atari arcade machines, and modern examples of the form are much more capable of telling complicated narratives. Eidos’ and LucasArt’s Lego Star Wars series follows the events of the films quite faithfully (albeit through the filter of Legos). Juul does acknowledge the emergence of “cut-scenes” in games, non-interactive sequences where the player must watch instead of play, but he over-emphasizes their relationship to Existents and Events. I would argue that this mixed presentation is a discursive decision. Alternating between “non-interactive” narration and the capacity for play creates a very complicated relationship between audience and “text.”

Jull acknowledges that his model fails to account for the avant-garde. Movie-watching can be an interactive, discursive experience. Scenes may be interpreted in a variety ways and craft may be analyzed and appreciated on many levels. I would even argue that choosing to simply “receive” the given visual narrative at face value, constitutes a meaningful interpretative decision. Obviously, in videogames the prevalence of interactivity is much more pronounced. The vast majority of ‘the narrative’ will not progress unless you play, (unlike film) and this strongly influences players’ relationships with the game and its characters. Even though the game’s frame narrative is fictitious, the player’s interactions with the game’s rules; his losses and his victories; are real.

I believe this complicated interaction accounts for player’s deep narrative investment in games. Repeatedly experiencing, and eventually overcoming failure over the course of a narrative makes the quest unpredictable and exciting. It creates a second order narratological system, not unlike the second order semiological system Roland Barthes’ uses to describe the mythological. Each isolated victory and defeat in play, carried out in accordance with the game’s ‘text;’ the language established by it’s rules, graphics, and control interfaces can be likened to a single completed story. The sum total of these stories creates the gamers experience with the game as a whole. As with Barthes’ model, I present the following spacialization is only a metaphor:

Discourse (game text)			Story (game text)
Discourse (game play)	Story (Game play)
	Existents	Events	Existents	Events
(game play) Narrative
Narrative (game text)

When a gametext is transferred to a movie, writers not only need to flesh out the simplistic, conventional characters that currently define the videogame genre; they must also create a more structured, faster paced experience. My greatest complaint concerning the Prince of Persia film is that the fabled Dagger of Time; a weapon with the power to rewind time; sees very little use in the actual movie. In the videogame, players must use the daggers rewinding mechanic frequently to undo botched jumps and fights. It was a revolutionary mechanic for videogames, because it situated a players’ ability to come back from the dead within the narrative context of the game. Contrary to Juul’s assertion that “Game’s are almost always chronological,” I would argue that the stories of videogames are inherently circular. To experience them is to replay them, time and again, exploring their various permutations. Movies are experienced in a single narrative line, regardless of whether the chronology of their plot is shuffled or not.

I suspect that videogame movies will become more successful when their uni-directional narratives start to leverage the circular discourse of gameplay. It is interesting to note that these types of gamic trends are already surfacing in non-videogame movies. Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland features a number of these visual motifs that evoke a videogame feel, including richly stylized violence and a number of “rules” for survival that are represented by colorful icons, reminiscent of “achievement” graphics. One scene even depicts a “zombie killer of the week,” a wink at online scoreboards for multiplayer games. More recently, these trends were evident in Kick-Ass, which featured elaborately choreographed violence, an intense first-person shooting sequence, and a murderous child-hero. The trailer of the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is rife with videogame graphics and sound effects. As a gamer, it is gratifying to see these motifs and patterns migrate to the mainstream, and I look forward to the day that Hollywood does a videogame adaptation justice.

Will The Real Tony Stark Please Stand Up?

2010-05-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

I hate to play the hipster-douche card, but I liked Iron Man before he got all popular. Then again, I liked him after he got popular too. Hell, I even like the sequel. I can understand why the critics are underwhelmed by Iron Man 2. The concept isn't new and shiny. The plot isn't quite as sleek as the first one. There is no timely political subtext to the sequel, as there was with the first film. These are all valid complaints. But Charlie Jane Anders' chief complaint of the movie, that The Villain of Iron Man 2 is Tony Stark bothers the hell out of me. He says it like it's a bad thing. Worse yet, he says it like it's a surprising thing.

Marvel knows how to make a good movie poster.

Iron Man has always been the asshole superhero. At least, from what I've read of him. Tony Stark is Bruce Wayne minus the baggage and repression, plus narcissism and a drinking problem. The first film is somewhat misleading, because it presents him as a reformed asshole. A genius arms merchant who develops a conscious along with his awesome suit of armor. In Iron Man 2, Stark is the rock star who has checked out of rehab and into a bar. It is truly the role Robert Downey Jr. was born to play. It's not role-model material, but frankly, our superheroes haven't been role-models for a while now. Dark Knight, Kick-Ass, and Watchmen have all explored the ugly side of being a superhero, and after getting a good look at that blood and grit, I don't see how we could go back to the golden age portrayal of heroes as shining paragons of morality. Much luck to the people trying to make Captain America happen.

One does have to wonder why we like these new, not-exactly-nice-guy heroes. It's not a bad boy thing. Well, maybe it is with the rough justice of Batman and Wolverine. But I think we buy into cocky jerks like Dr. House and Tony Stark for a different reason. In Iron Man 2, Tony's 'reckless' behavior is thinly justified by a soon-to-be terminal case of blood poisoning. I never once thought "Poor Tony!" or "Oh No! Will he make it?" though. On the contrary, I thought "He's Tony Fucking Stark. He'll invent a brand new kind of blood if he has to." And that's why I like such characters. They are aware of their own super-heoric abilities. They're the anecdote to poseury and politically correctness. The antithesis to incompetent sweet-talkers like Sam Rockwell's villain, Justin Hammer.

The suits really are pretty enough to sell the movie by themselves.

All the same, Iron Man 2 is not a high source of moral fiber. It's about as good for you as high-fructose corn syrup, but it's just as delicious. Don Cheadle is a huge upgrade over Terrence Howard, and it's a shame he didn't get more screen-time. His tongue in cheek introduction is excellent. Scarlet Johanson is incredibly hot as Black Widow, and her fight scene is almost on par with the mania that was Kick-Ass's Hit-Girl, though much less violent, as you would expect. Paltrow is still endearing as the anachronistic House Wife/Secretary, Pepper Pots. Mickey Rourke is great as Ivan Vanko, AKA Whiplash, though his climactic battle with Iron Man wraps up a little too quick, just like the Iron Monger fight in the original Iron Man. Samuel L Jackson is always a fun presence, but his Nick Fury cameo feels more than a little bit forced given how much else there was going on with the plot.

After repeatedly hearing "It's not as good as the first one," I had an absolute blast with Iron Man 2. The repartee runs witty, the action scenes are cool-looking and rife with explosions, and the plot feels fairly polished despite it's busyness. If you are a comic book fan, it'll be an excellent time. As is the case with the vast majority of the films I discuss here, I wouldn't recommend bringing grandma. Summer blockbusters are off to a good start.

Mythologies of Violence in The Modern Video Game

2010-05-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on twitter, I recently started reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies for a class I'm taking on Popular Culture, and it's a text after my own heart. Rather than droning on about his ideas through pages and pages of recondite abstraction, Barthes approached philosophy by analyzing various elements of French bourgeois society (covering everything from soap to striptease) and discussing their associated cultural connotations, or Mythologies. Essentially, he did what I do here, only with more class, sophistication and academic merit. He was French after all.

While I pretty much leave you to draw your own conclusions about my analyses, Barthes' concludes his book with a comprehensive essay called "Myth Today," where he makes the case that myth is a language. A language of languages in fact. Using Saussure's semiological concepts of the signified, signifier and the sign, Barthes presents myth as a system where the sign of language becomes a signifier in and of itself. Honestly, it's a hell of a lot easier to understand if you look at the picture:

The nifty thing about myth and it's recursive structure is that it allows for an infinite chain of self-reference. Objects can exist simultaneously as objects and discourse on themselves. A similar sort of recursion; this 'object existing as an action' phenomena, is present in video games. Games exist as a composite of predefined computer programming, graphical design and computer hardware, but they also exist as dynamic processes; realized through dynamic exchanges between player and computer. Games and myth share this capacity for metaphorical recursion. Given this similarity, I thought it would be particularly fascinating to briefly analyze the mythologies and myth-making processes associated with modern videogames.

Most of the Mythologies surrounding video games pertain to violence, which is unsurprising as the vast majority of video games are essentially platforms for virtual violence. Like Barthes, I am generalizing. In fact, I am speaking even more broadly, as I am describing the trends of an entire medium. That said, I believe the chief mythology of modern videogames is the presentation of violence as an acceptable solution to almost every problem. This is particularly prevalent in fighting and shooting games, where players' abilities to interact with the virtual world are exclusively limited to movement and acts of violence.

More mythical videogame lessons, linked from Movieposter.com. I also consulted IGN's list of 101 things we've learned from videogames.

Even when the player's control over his avatar is suspended, violence dominates the narrative.I can't think of a better scene to illustrate my point than this scene from Gears of War 2. After spending years searching for his wife, Maria, Dom finds her a broken, tortured husk of a human. He looks to his comrade in arms, Marcus, who tells him gravely, "It's okay" and just as little Travis squeezes the trigger on Old Yeller, Dom kills his ruined wife. Now, I realize that some wounds never heal, and that mercy comes in many harsh forms, but I think the phrase "It's okay" and the action "shooting your tortured wife dead" should never co-habit, even on the battlefield. But that's most video games for you. Could you turn Maria's tedious psychiatric evaluation into a game? If you could, would it sell better than blasting aliens with assault rifles?

Even titles from studios like Bioware that emphasize diplomacy and negotiation regularly throw players into situations where violence is the only recourse. Violence is a means of wish fulfillment. It's a simple, and for my part, tremendously gratifying solution to a lot of problems. But in real life, violence is rarely so clean and convenient. There is a myriad of lesser mythologies that support the central myth of violence as a solution. When you kill or destroy things in a games, they disappear or transform into something useful. Many games are arranged to ensure that a fair fight is in order; balancing your avatar's might with an onslaught of weaker foes just waiting to be brought to justice. Perhaps most important of all, life and death are things of little consequence in video games. Life is a thing which is not only objectively quantifiable, through gauges and extra lives, but a thing that is commoditized.

Consequently, I would argue that the modern video game promotes a visually-idealized abstraction of violence rather than real violence. The virtual cruelty they present is endlessly creative (if brutal), but it is also sanitized and inconsequential. In games like World of Warcraft that force players to kill X amount of Y enemies to receive rewards, mass murder becomes mundane, and indeed, even tiring. Competitive Multiplayer games are a step closer to actual combat, but even in those virtual death matches, the goal is abstracted to a numerical goal; players must gain more points than their opponent. Just as Barthes asserts that French striptease is more a sport than an actual sexual act, I would argue that games are more sporting than they are violent. In a certain sense, they co-opt the imagery violence as a convenient and compelling short-hand for adversity. Somebody would have to be an absolute maniac to take the bombastic mythologies of video game violence seriously; not that I think it hasn't happened before or that it isn't impossible.

Unlike the socially accepted mythologies Barthes discusses, many videogamers are well aware of the mythologies they are buying into. One does not attempt to double jump after playing Mario. Or if they do, they spend a couple weeks recovering from their injuries and never attempt to do it again. By and large, I would assert that gamers are consciously aware of the mythologies they buy into while playing games. Some of the subtler mythologies, like the hyper-masculinization of protagonists, or the sexual-objectification of female characters, or the commodifying habit of trying to accrue more points will inevitably rub-off on players' behavior, though those myths are pervasive in modern society as well. The myths of violence and behavior however are generally appreciated as part of the game's rules and not rules of reality. As a result, these violent mythologies occupy an even deeper semiological rank than the one Barthes' presents: They are myths that are conscious of their own mythological context.

Life After Hogwarts

2010-04-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the only one who misses Hogwarts. Horrible epilogue be damned, I wanted to know what happened after Harry and company 'graduated' and went on with their lives. In fact, I think the reason that so many readers were pissed off by Rowling's implied "happily ever after" is that we knew there was more growing up to be done. What happens after you finish your fantastic adolescent journey and find yourself faced with the less magickal world of adult responsibility? What happens when people with godlike powers start getting drunk and screwing other non-adults wielding godlike power? If you've had these questions, boy do I have a book for you.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is a work of astonishing, and thoroughly refreshing cynicism in the fantasy coming of age genre. There is hope at its heart, and a thin thread of optimism underlying the narrative, but the pervading tone is sullen and its message is intended to be sobering. Despite my inevitable Harry Potter comparison, Lewis' Narnia series is a stronger influence than Rowling, but the book addresses issues that haunt both series and others like them. In fact, it presents a bold but compelling thesis about the deficiencies of fantastic coming of age novels: Fondness for fantasy ultimately stems from a dissatisfaction with the world we are given, and by extension, people who yearn for magical power are not merely harmless escapists, but those who are determined to warp and change the world beyond normal means. Like I said: cynical.

Harry Potter was occasionally very sad, but I never found it truly heartbreaking. All things considered, death is a fairly neat and clean fate for a character, especially when it is construed as 'noble' or 'heroic.' Grossman is crueler to his characters. He has them make the sort of mistakes that haunt and scar you for life. The book may not be more honest than other fantasy novels, because I believe there are important truths to be found in those sunnier texts, but Lev Grossman is certainly wields his truth more aggressively. And frankly, I think that is what I love most about his prose. Every word is edged with a type of tension, or grim humor. Even the celebratory scenes are tempered by recklessness and risk; this sense that things could get very bad and very out of control at the drop of a dime.

Stolen from xkcd.

In addition to being a criticism of genre, The Magicians is a serious critique on modern society as well. Grossman's fictional Magician class is a wonderful metaphor for over-privileged, self-interested, upper-middle class America. Main character Quentin Coldwater is a genius living a charmed life that grows more enchanted with every passing second. Yet he is unhappy and unsatisfied, even when he is accepted into Brakebills (think Hogwarts on the coast of the Hudson River) and he starts to master the awesome powers of magic. Even when he finds a place with the powerful "Physical Kids" clique. He can't escape the feeling that he was meant for something bigger and better, like the adventures in the Fillory and Further books he read while growing up.

I want to write more, but I don't want to give anything away. Honestly, I think the book's website and jacket give away too much of the plot. It's solid gold. Though to be honest, a disclaimer is in order. I am a 22-year-old, soon-to-be college graduate with a borderline Peter-pan complex. This book was written for me. Your millage may vary. But if you're a fan of Potter, or Narnia, or D&D, or World of Warcraft, or anything along those lines, you should pick up The Magicians.

Sick Ass

2010-04-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

From the moment I saw my first Kick-Ass trailer on YouTube, I was hooked. It's one of those incredibly promising premises I wish I had thought up myself: An average high school boy decides to become a real-life superhero. And that's it. The kid has no super powers, no traumatic past to fuel his efforts, or billionaire fortune to finance . Just a desire to do good by beating up bad-guys. It's a funnier, more realistic, and less political approach to the Watchmen concept, and like that other masked vigilante epic, Kick-Ass was adapted from a comic book by the same name. But is the movie any good? Absolutely. It is hilarious, visually stunning and entertaining throughout. But it's also more than a little disturbing.

Kudos to whoever came up with the paint spatter motif for the posters.

Staying true to the trend set by Watchmen, Kick-Ass is ridiculously violent, but unlike that other masked vigilante movie, there is a deeper meaning to the uncompromising blood-shed; it essentially allows the movie to function as a sort of cautionary tale. It answers the main character's question "Why has nobody tried to be a superhero before?" People do not dress and fight crime because they would be beaten, shot at and gutted. Even more importantly, the vigilante would be forced to inflict the same death sentences on his prey. It is Batman's no-kill rule that allows him to remain appealing despite the brutal nature of his justice. It's also the most fantastic aspect about his character. Kick-Ass essentially calls bullshit on Batman, and shows people just how bloody being a superhero would be.

At the same time, Kick-Ass pushes the boundaries of aestheticized violence and popular taste. There are two brilliantly choreographed fight scenes in the same vein as The Matrix's seminal lobby shoot out that convincingly present mass murder as something balletic and beautiful. The hook is, both of these massacres, and another intense first-person-shooting scene, are performed by an 11 year-old-girl, acted by a 13 year-old-actress. Hit-Girl is the boldest, most horrifying incarnation of the Child Soldier archetype I have yet to encounter, and yet I couldn't help but cheer as she butchered drug dealers and scum bags with ropes, knifes, guns and swords. Her attacks were simply too creative, and too cleanly executed to not admire, especially when her skills are contrasted against the bumbling titular hero, who spends most of his time in-costume getting beaten up.

There she is, Big Daddy's little murderer.

Even more unsettling than Hit-Girl's actual fight scenes are her training scenes. In what might be his best role since Matchstick Men, Nicholas Cage plays a profoundly disturbed Ex-Cop turned costumed vigilante dubbed Big Daddy; think Batman with guns and a murderous daughter instead of Robin. He buys her daughter butterfly knives for her birthday, drills her on her crime-related factoids, and trains her how to take a gunshot with a bullet-proof vest. Even though the movie has the decency to point out the truly sick nature of his revenge scheme, the outcome of the story seems to condone his heinous training, leaving a truly immoral aftertaste in the brain.

At the same time, there is more to the movie's message. Dave Lizewski is a truly likable main character, and his super-heroic coming of ages covers topical bases like becoming an Internet celebrity and trying to woo a girl despite rumors of being gay. The movie also lambastes a number of familiar superhero tropes, like rescuing lost cats and talking like a pompous douchebag. The catch is, the ugly, unfunny violence is as much a part of the social commentary and as the simple laughs.

I haven't read the Kick-Ass comics yet, but after watching the movie I fully intend to. I've found that comics are often a more comfortable medium for digesting violence than film, though I understand that they are every bit as violent as the film.

The tag-line is certainly accurate as far as the movie is concerned.

If you are a fan of Superhero flicks, consider Kick-Ass required viewing. Don't take Grandma or the parents though. They may find the violence hard to swallow. Hell, you might too.

Men Who Hate Women

2010-03-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

...is the original title of Steig Larson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and it suits the book much better. Then again, a title suggesting blatant misogyny is a hard sell, so it's easy to see why the publishers changed it to a more buzz-worthy title. Buzz is still worth something with books, which is one of the reasons I cherish the medium. Games, movies and TV all enjoy million dollar advertising budgets that effectively obliterate the boundaries between buzz and corporate hype. Throw enough commercials and billboards up and people will inevitably talk about your thing, if only to bitch about how over-exposed it is. There is a little of that in literature, but when lots of people talk about a book, particularly the first book in a series, or if you find yourself repeatedly running into people reading said book, chances are it's worth a read. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.

Kudos to whoever came up with this cover. It's vibrant and slightly punkish but respectable.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is definitely worth reading, but it's not without it's faults. It's difficult to sum up the premise with a neat one line summary, but the book is a locked-room murder mystery that fleas from conventional characters, situations and plot structures. These are good things, but it takes Larson a long damn time to get to the main story, and the first few chapters are packed with exposition about a financial journalism subplot that bookends the main mystery, and when we do reach the main mystery, there is even more exposition to set it up. Later on, there is even more exposition about legal guardianship in Sweden. His explanations are clear and they make sense, but they need more editing in accordance with the old "less telling, more showing" maxim.

Along similar lines, the two tangentially related plot threads take a long time to intertwine. We know main characters Mikhail Bloomkist and Lisbeth Salander will eventually end up working together from the moment each character is introduced, but they don't team up until the last quarter of the narrative. Consequently, throughout the book I found myself waiting for Larson to get to the point. The constant switching back and forth between perspectives derailed the narrative momentum of the mystery, resulting in an investigation that was remarkably laid-back, low-key and not terribly suspenseful until the end. There may very well be subtleties in play that I am too impatient to notice, but the pacing frustrated me frequently.

A prettier cover, but much more conventional. The girl doesn't look like the titular heroine either.

It's the characters that really make the story. Mikhail Bloomkist is a charming, intelligent everyman with a uniquely complicated history. In addition to being a disgraced, famous financial journalist, he is a divorced father, an editor, an occasional lover to his magazine's co-owner, and a former soldier, currently working as an informal private eye/biographer. The titular dragon tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander, is the real crown jewel of the piece, however. She is a laconic, blunt and rebellious hacker/researcher who has been declared incompetent by the government due to her repeated run-ins with the law, and her refusal to emotionally connect with anybody. My greatest complaint of the story is not that so much time is spent in exposition, but that the exposition robs us of time we could be spending with Salander as she hacks computers and takes out bullies with her own brutal brand of justice. Incredibly enough, the secondary and tertiary characters in the novel are comparably well-developed to the main duo. The supporting cast is uniquely likable and believably flawed, while the villains are sick, repellent fucks.

Larson's gift for characterization extends to an ability to create meticulously complicated interpersonal relationships for his characters. Every interaction in the book, from casual business negotiation to rape is credible and realistic. It must be noted that this work has been translated from Swedish to English, and while some credit must be given to translator Steven Murray, the fact that these exchanges can emerge from translation so handsomely is a testament to Larson's ability to convey genuine human emotion.

I don't want to delve too deeply into the specifics of the plot here, seeing how it's a murder mystery, but as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the original Swedish title of the book is a more accurate portrayal of the novel. The plot accurately portrays the lingering evils of misogyny in society without belaboring the point, and Lisbeth Salander is a sober and compelling modern feminist.

All in all, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a rewarding experience, if a bit slow at times. I haven't seen the Swedish movie adaptation, but I have it on good authority that it is a good watch with dead-on casting. It's also playing in artsy theaters now, so give it a watch if I have intrigued you and you don't like books. In the interest of full disclosure, foreign films frequently contain subtitles, so you may still have to do some reading.

Hurts So Good

2010-03-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is more than an awful pun. The Hurt Locker is an excruciating film, but it is excruciating for all the right reasons. I'm not a big fan of Kafka, but I heard a quote from him a couple years back that's been kicking around ever since; "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?" There's a lot to be said for stories (and movies) that let us dream and remove us from reality. Hell, it's the sort of fiction I am more inclined to produce myself, but by and large, I have found that the stories which wound, stab and bludgeon us tend to make more of an impression on our lives. Case in point: The Hurt Locker.

There are three movie posters in this post, but only this one is any good. The other two are make it look like a generic action flick and feature broad, bland tag-lines that have next to nothing to do with the film.

For those who don't know, the movie is about an army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq nearing the end of it's rotation. Even though it is currently being marketed as an action affair (read my rant in the poster captions), it is a much more cerebral experience. Whereas the modern action film is all about constant movement, Hurt Locker is about waiting. The explosion does not receive as much emphasis as the bomb that has not yet gone off. When firearms are drawn, they usually result in standoffs as opposed to firefights, and the most compelling exchange of firearms is a protracted sniper duel in the desert. Each of these scenes are overlaid with other sources of abstract tension. I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I make no promises. Proceed with caution.

The film begins with the death of the EOD squad leader, and the arrival of his replacement, an experienced army ranger with an apparent death wish. Even before the team goes on their first mission together, we have a huge knot of emotional tension in play. The youngest member of the unit is wracked with guilt over the death of his commanding squad leader, and the middle member of the squad has a rather curt introduction with the new squad leader. Their first deployment together is a haunting echo of the prior squad leader's death, but whereas the last squad leader died despite being cautious and cooperative with his squad, the veteran ranger is reckless, non-communicative and unbelievably cocky. But he survives, and disarms a frightening number of bombs in the process. This victory obliterates traditional moral paradigms. It is unfair that the last commander died when he played by the book, and it is unfair that some cocky son of a bitch swaggers up like a hero and comes out on top even though he places his squad at risk. This unfairness is one of the wounds Hurt Locker inflicts on it's audiences.

"You'll know when you're in it." Really? Is this the best the marketing department could come up with? Worse yet, the poster emphasizes guns and explosions as opposed to the bombs themselves.

Admittedly, unfairness in war is hardly fresh territory. It is the films' decision based approach to unfairness in war that is compelling. Each mission in the movie confronts viewers with the no-right answer situations soldiers h face on the battlefield. Do you shoot that Iraqi holding a cellphone? He might be dialing in the bomb your squad mate is disarming. Or maybe he doesn't have a cellphone at all. Your squad leader has led you into a firefight, and you think you see movement. You ask what to do, and he tells you "Be smart. Make a good decision." These scenarios serve as richter scale, charting the jagged line between figuring shit out for yourself and doing as you are told. Having never served in the military, it would be absurd and offensive for me to speculate about what that sort of life is like, but from what I've read and heard from people who have served, The Hurt Locker seems to accurately capture the dynamics of that life. War is about working together by yourself. It is about waiting, and knowing when you can't afford to wait any longer.

For me, the most compelling scene in the movie--your cue to skip this paragraph if you intend to see the film-- was not the sniper battle, or any of the bomb diffusion sequences, but a scene in the cereal aisle of a supermarket. Our Angel of Death army ranger stands before the candy colored sprawl of boxes, at a loss for which box he should pick up. That was the point at which the movie thrust the knife home for me. Two seconds ago, we were in Iraq, cutting bomb wires and now cereal. There is no patriotic swell of music, or some lofty speech about how the sacrifices made have all been noble and good; just a man and cereal.

"War is a Drug." This is a slightly better tag-line, but drug imagery has no explicit presence in the film. The metaphor is accurate, but its brevity makes it sound simple and cheap-witted. Some movies don't need soundbites to succeed.

Hurt Locker isn't an easy movie to watch but it is gripping, deeply effective and very timely. I love Netflix--it is to movies what TiVo is to the TV-- but you really should see this film in theaters. As far as suspenseful atmospheres go, it's hard to beat a dark stadium and an inescapably large screen. Hopefully it's well-deserved Oscar for Best Picture will give it some legs in extended release theaters.

(My Adventures with) "My Adventures with Machinima"

2010-03-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote an article for my Introduction to Literary Journalism class titled "My Adventures with Machinima." If you scroll down a couple paragraphs, you can find the third, post-final draft of it, right here on this very web page! As you may surmise from the quoted section of the title, it deals with machinima. Don't know what machinima is? Awesome. Consider it as if it were written just for you, gift-wrapped on a silver platter and garnished with gold-bullion! But first, please indulge me in a bit of meta-fictional wool-gathering.

I don't really know what to call what I do here, but I now know it isn't Literary Journalism. That is a craft that requires more physicality than I can offer, and a greater ability to relate one reality to a broader communal reality; the finding of universal truths in particular truths. I've learned that I tend to deal better with finding universal truths in fabricated realms, relating non-realities to reality. The story I wanted to tell with this article is one such narrative.

Internet cultures, such as bloggers, gamers and youtube viewers, are shaped by the absence of physical community. While journalists must link physical action to text, the two are already linked for us. Text and action exist on the same plane. They are unified and inextricable. Their intersection is our home. The story I wanted to tell about machinima was one of physical homelessness. Of finding a way to communicate with communities that are only half-there. Of making real movies with virtual objects. A story that demonstrates how physicality and physical journalism falls short in a post-paper communities.

But I had other obligations. I had to demonstrate that I could do 'literary journalism' effectively and report facts along with scenic imagery rooted in physical detail. I had to explain an art-form in its infancy, born from another very new art-form that is still scarcely recognized as such. To my young and inexperienced voice, these agendas tell opposing stories, and the narrative I conceived was lost. Maybe I'll come back to it someday when I can do it justice. Maybe I'll turn to the drink. In the meantime, here it is:

My Adventures with machinima

By Hank Whitson

I sit at my computer, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as cybernetic soldiers in brightly colored body armor exchange witty dialogue and occasional bursts of gunfire.For the past hour and twenty minutes, I have been watching seasons one and two of Red vs. Blue, a wildly successful machinima series from Rooster Teeth productions made using the Halo series of videogames. I shouldn’t be sitting and staring. I have papers to write and tests to study for, but each episode is only four to five minutes long. Seven at tops. What’s the harm of one more? I click the link to the next episode, Radar Love, and become viewer number 467,796. I’m lucky my melted brain isn’t dribbling down my chin.

The word machinima, a portmanteau of ‘Machine’ and ‘Cinema,’ is still too young for Merriam-Webster and Oxford English. It can be pronounced “Mah-shin-ee-ma” or “machine-ee-ma,” and like ‘film,’ it can refer to an individual movie or an entire craft of movie-making. The recently established Academy of machinima Arts and Sciences defines it as “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.” In machinima, the virtual worlds of videogames serve as sets, the game characters are actors, and the graphic models for weapons and objects serve as props. The medium combines aspects of filmmaking, such as cinematography and film editing, with aspects of computer animation and game development, such as 3D model designing and computer programming.

I first heard the term in 2007 when I was playing World of Warcraft (WoW), a popular online game. While I had fun watching the fan-made movies on Youtube, I never paid machinima much attention until I read Alexander Galloway’s book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, which mentions machinima as a part of an artistic movement referred to as ‘Countergaming.’ According to Galloway, countergaming changes the way people interact with electronic games by modifying or completely repurposing videogame software. I found Galloway’s book last spring as a part of an independent study course examining the relationship between narrative structure and gameplay systems. I was thrilled by his concept of countergaming, not only because I thought it was insightful, but because it was an aspect of gaming—a whole artistic movement no-less—that I was completely unfamiliar with. Given my interest in the relationship between storytelling and play, machinima seemed like the best angle to examine the countergaming movement. I had no idea I was setting out to profile a movement that only half-exists.

Most machinimatographers do not think of themselves as countergamers. Indeed, I have yet to find anymore than a handful of people aside from Galloway who use the term ‘countergaming.’ machinima does repurpose videogame software in a way that radically alters people’s relationship with videogames, however. A machinima-film is completely non-interactive, or at least as non-interactive as television or cinema. Those who watch machinima are no longer relating to the game as players, but as viewers. At the same time, the act of machinima-making forces users to interact with the videogame program from an entirely new perspective. Machinimatographers use the virtual world of the videogame as movie set rather than a platform for play, and as such, they are occasionally required to adjust the parameters of the games’ program. Furthermore, they must use a second computer program to record the footage they create. After the footage has been created, they must use a number of other computer programs such as audio editing software and special effects programs to produce the movie.

From the beginning, machinima has had a sense of humor. Even though machinimatographers typically do not set out to change videogames with their films, as per Galloway’s countergaming movement, machinima have parodied the videogames’ they are based on from the beginning. The consensus among bloggers, online encyclopedias, and machinima makers is that machinima started in 1996 with “Diary of a Camper.” Diary is a one and a half-minute movie created by a group called The Rangers, using footage from id Software’s Quake, a seminal first-person-shooting (FPS) computer game. The movie portrays a group of soldiers gathered in a virtual cistern. The squads’ leader commands two members of his team to go check out another portion of the level through the in-game text chat, which appears in the upper left corner of the screen. The two soldiers comply, only to be blown away by another soldier who had been laying in wait. Such behavior is generally regarded as poor sportsmanship, and in videogame slang players who practice it are derogatorily referred to as ‘campers.’ After the other members of the squad arrive and avenge their fallen comrade, they comment that the camper seemed familiar. In closing, the commander states that he was John Romero, the father of the FPS genre, and the creator of Quake. From the start, machinima has served as source of humor and commentary on the videogaming community as a whole.

Ironically, the machinima community itself is incredibly fragmented. As an art-form founded in virtual space that films action in virtual space, machinima has no physical forum or home. Machinimatographers do not congregate at cafes, bookstores or theatres, but at web forums, blogs, and Youtube. This online atmosphere is tremendously decentralized and cliquish. In a lengthy blog post examining the world of machinima circa 2007, Hugh ‘Nomad’ Hancock of machinimafordummies.com writes, “There is no machinima community.” Hancock laments how easy it is for machinima pieces to get lost amongst the sea of video available on the internet. When there are millions of video’s on Youtube alone, carving out an audience for your five minute flick is a daunting prospect indeed. Hancock goes on to explain that machinimatographers have splintered into groups surrounding specific videogames and video-capture programs. This is understandable considering the complexity associated with modern videogame systems. As machinimatographers refine specific filming techniques for a particular game, those techniques tend to become less applicable to other games based on different play-systems.

In the absence of a central forum to inquire about machinima, I decided to try and find machinima-makers on a local level. I learned that UCI offered a class on machinima about four years ago that was taught by associate professor of film and media, Peter Krapp. I had spoken to Krapp earlier in relation to my research on games, and when I asked him for advice about whom to speak to, he referred me to Nathaniel Pope and Ian Beckman, two former graduate-students who had created machinima for his class and continued to work in the field. I wrote emails to Nate and Ian, requesting interviews and inquiring if I might have a chance to watch them work with machinima. Both men agreed to be interviewed, though they mentioned that they live out of town, and stated that they weren’t working on any machinima projects at the present time. Unfortunately, geography and scheduling conflicts prevented me from arranging physical interviews with Nathan and Ian, though the incorporeal nature of our correspondence seemed appropriate for the digitized, decentralized machinima community.

I exchanged a few emails with Nathan Pope before reaching him over the phone. He had a young, enthusiastic voice and began by telling me he was glad to help a fellow Anteater and a friend of Peter’s. I learned that he first got involved with machinima through Prof. Krapp’s class while pursuing a film major, and that he had added minors in Economics and French. He now works with Xfire, a company specializing in video-capture for videogames. In a gaming context, video-capture specifically refers to digitally recording gameplay footage. Just as filmmaking is only one function of filming, machinima is only one potential use of video-capture. It is an essential tool for bug-testers, and game-designers as well as machinimatographers.

Nate explained the fundamentals of making machinima to me. As with traditional film, the project generally begins with writing a scenario and a rough script. Next, the team will do video-capture, collecting the raw footage that will be edited together to create a movie. It should be noted that footage in machinima does not necessarily conform to behavior that is typical in play. Projects set in first-person shooting games, for example, may not feature any use of guns or weapons. In Rooster-Teeth’s Red vs. Blue series for instance, most footage shows characters speaking to each other. Depending on the type of video-capture program being used, one person may not need to play the part of a camera-man; moving around the other characters and recording their interaction from a first-person perspective. The members of the machinima-making teams who control recorded characters are generally referred to as puppeteers rather actors, since very little in the way of traditional acting is done during this stage of filmmaking.

The next step is the editing process. This entails piecing together the collected video-capture footage, though most of the ‘acting’ that occurs in machinima is also a form of editing. Most machinima narratives are driven by dialogue, which is relayed through voice recordings that are dubbed over the video-captured footage. Nate mentioned that measuring the duration of a scene to correspond to scripted voice acting could be very difficult, and that amateur machinimatographers frequently overshoot or undershoot their scenes; a problem his group ran into while making machinima in class.

One key advantage machinima has over more traditional forms of filmmaking is a very low cost of production. “For a thousand bucks, you’re machinima ready. For ten thousand, you’re professional,” Nate said. The tools you purchase; a powerful computer with top of the line video editing software and a copy of whatever game will serve as your template, can be used to make an entire series of films, whereas traditional films have to hire actors, and build actors for every feature film. Nate also noted that it is much easier to make machinima with small groups of people. He said the average crew for machinima-making is about three to four people.

Nate had a lot to say about the relationship between videogames and machinima: “You can take machinima and appropriate it for whatever you like to do, but it is also an extension of your gaming experience. It extends your experience of play beyond the act of play. It frees the act of gaming for the masses.” As a gamer who has tried and miserably failed to explain complicated videogames to non-gamers on more than one occasion, I can appreciate the value of ‘freeing the act of play.’ Many videogames have some truly fantastic artwork, and the gaming industry has reached a point where it is putting out some truly admirable fiction as well. At times it saddens me to think that some people will never experience that art and those narratives because they are not experienced enough with gaming controls and rules of play. I would never suggest that machinima serve as an absolute substitute for playing videogames as some of their stories can only be appreciated through play, but I believe machinima movies are an excellent form to demonstrate how far videogames have come since Pong.

Getting in touch with Ian Beckman was a bit of challenge, and it’s no surprise why: he’s a busy guy. After trading emails and a failed attempt at talking over MSN, I ended up emailing him my questions, and he responded promptly with links to two other interviews about his work for Machinima.com, his participation in various film festivals, and his machinima series, Azerothian Super Villains. Ian has worked with a variety of different media, including Flash animation, live-action filming, and according to his interview at MMOwned.com, he got his start doing stop-motion animation with Legos.

Ian had many insights to share about the production of machinima. When I asked him what goes into making a typical machinima, he responded “Writing is incredibly important because you have only a certain amount of things you are able to do. If you want your characters in Warcraft to mimic The Ghostbusters for example, prepare for a lot of work ahead of you.” Designing situations that accommodate game engines can be a challenge even with an engine as complicated and robust as World of Warcraft. He also expressed his preference for ‘compositing’ machinima, as opposed to directing multiple players over ventrilo—a chat program designed for use in multiplayer games. By using this composite method of machinima-making, Ian doesn’t need to depend on other players to act as his camera men or actors. He noted that players tended to be impatient, and explained: “I save my directing for the voice actors because they’re the ones that really bring life into stiff characters that often repeat animation.”

When I commented that the most popular series in machinima tended to be comedies, Ian responded “I think machinima lends itself to comedies only because you know you’re watching a videogame. It’s just unbelievable, you know?” I do. The current level of graphics and virtual behavior available to film-makers is still extremely limited. Characters in World of Warcraft are capable of laughing, dancing, waving, sobbing, sitting and laying-down animations, but the game’s code currently does not allow for actions that involve other players, aside from combat. It’s incredibly difficult to create dramatic tension when you can’t show your characters hugging each other or shaking hands.

Incredible difficulty isn’t enough to deter a passionate machinimatographer, however. Ian referred me to Martin Falch’s one-and-a-half hour epic, “Tales of The Past III.” The films’ opening sequence, a full scale war between WoW’s two main factions is definitely dramatic. An armored cavalry thunders across a volcanic wasteland. Green-skinned orcs and trolls cross swords with humans, elves and dwarves. It’s the stuff of Tolkiens’ dreams. Yet when the commanders of each faction address their troops, they use identical arm-waving animations to rally them into battle. There is a poetic irony to be appreciated in this similarity between mortal enemies, but it is only evident to those who are familiar with WoW lore. The movie’s main narrative is even less accessible, as it is based on a specific sword that ties into the game’s lore. The writing didn’t do the film any favors either. I try to watch the film as if I was a first time viewer, who knows nothing about the land of Azeroth or The Scarlet crusade, and I find myself cringing at every close-up. The characters’ faces are expressionless save for a blinking ‘effect’ that looks like it was engineered in Microsoft paint. Throughout the experience, Nathan’s comment about drama and machinima kept echoing in my head: “A lot of machinima is humor-based. It’s easier with comedy. Drama can feel contrived.”

One of the best examples of contrived videogame drama is actually a product of Hollywood. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, one of the earliest big-budget adaptations of a major videogame property, was universally panned for the limited dramatic range of its nearly photorealistic computer-generated cast. Computer generated imagery (CGI) has come a long way since the release of The Spirits Within back in 2001, however. The tremendous fiscal and critical success of CGI-heavy films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Avatar seem to suggest that graphical animation is dramatically viable and tremendously profitable.

It is also interesting to note that Heavy Rain, a title Playstation 3 title marketed as an ‘interactive movie’ as opposed to a typical videogame, was released on February 23rd of this year to great critical acclaim. Other games have earned distinction and created controversy with their liberal use of non-interactive in-game movies or ‘cut-scenes.’ Some players welcome the sequences, feeling that the sequences help tell more complicated and engrossing stories, while others complain that they break up the flow of the action and hinder the gaming experience. Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots has been a particularly divisive title for featuring over nine hours of cut-scenes.

This developing trend of cinematic videogames and the enduring presence of CGI in Hollywood may turn people with machinima skills into a wanted commodity for the game and movie industries. In many ways, machinima is the ideal hobby for young filmmakers looking to build a portfolio and gain experience. As Nate and Ian both noted, it is easy and relatively inexpensive compared to traditional filming. It also provides experience with digital technology as well as the major areas of traditional film-design, such as writing, shooting, and editing.

I was curious to know how videogaming companies felt about their games being repurposed to make movies. The videogame industry places great emphasis on intellectual property (IP) cultivation, or developing fictional universes that can act as marketable franchises. Big publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard treat every new game title as a potential franchise-starter, and they defend their copyrights fiercely. If a fan makes an inappropriate video using gameplay featuring an iconic character, like Mario for example, it could potentially mislead and offend would-be buyers. When I contacted Blizzard’s press department by email requesting an interview, they very tactfully explained that they did not have the time to speak to college students doing profiles, and wished me the best of luck with my project.

The last question I asked Ian Beckman was “Do you think playing and knowing about videogames was important for enjoying machinima?” His response surprised me. “Definitely. I know a lot of people who have interest in something like Azerothian Super Villains and still think it has something to do with Warcraft. In my series, I aim to keep the comedy strictly to the characters, so everyone can enjoy them. The name of the game is mass appeal.” I would have thought a machinima master like Ian would be ready to champion his art-form, and proclaim that it was perfectly capable of standing on its own merit. But the truth is most machinima films are about the videogames they are based on. Appreciating their humor requires a familiarity with the terms and context of play. In conclusion, Ian write “It’s unfortunate people haven’t given machinima that much of a chance yet to shine on it’s own accord.”

My adventures with machinima have given me lots of laughs, and I believe that the medium does have a lot of potential. As gaming and online video continue to grow in popularity, I suspect machinima makers will grow in importance and popularity. At the same time, I think there are plenty of machinima that can be enjoyed by a broad audience right now.

To test my theory and help machinima get some exposure, I decide to share one of my favorite movies with my family. My mom and dad gather around the family computer as I pull up Youtube and type in the phrase “Why are we here?” The first episode of Red vs. Blue pops up third on a long-list of movies. I click on the picture and turn up the volume. The movie opens with a slow pan up the side of a building, revealing two robotic looking soldiers standing side by side on the roof. One soldier is in yellow armor, and the other is in red.

“Hey” the soldier in red asks.
“Yeah?” the yellow soldier responds.
“You ever wonder why we’re here?”
“It’s one of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a god watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I dunno man, but it keeps me up at night.”

The camera cuts back and forth between the soldiers without a word, creating the perfect visual representation of an awkward pause. Mom giggles, and Dad is wearing a smirk.

“What?! I meant why are we out here in this canyon?” Red asks
“Oh. Uh…Yeah.” Yellow manages sheepishly.
“What was all that stuff about god?”
“Uh. Hmm… nothing?”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.”

The exchange is minimalistic. Both soldiers face each-other, with their heads tilting ever-so-slightly in rhythm with the dialogue. Their orange-visored helmets betray no emotion, giving the lines a deadpan delivery. My parents are already laughing loud-enough that some of the dialogue is obscured.

“Seriously though, as far as I can tell it’s just a boxed canyon in the middle of nowhere with no way in or out.” Red says.
“Mm-hmm,” Yellow affirms
“The only reason we have a red base here, is because they have a blue base there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here… Even if we were to pull out today, and they were to come take our base? They would have two bases in a box canyon. Whoop-de-fuckin-do.”

The crowd went wild. The remaining two minutes of the episode enjoyed continuous laughter and giggles. You don’t need to be a videogamer to appreciate the absurdity of color-coded aggression. In fact, it’s the sort of non-logic a gamer never notices in the act of play. Asking why you’re shooting at the bad guys or trying to steal their flag from their base would be like asking why one heads to the end-zone in football. Machinima provides a bridge between the world of gaming and the world of narrative. It can fill in the gaps of gaming logic, and address issues in videogaming culture as well. Machinima-making offers dedicated fans a whole new way to experience their favorite titles and the work they produce provides the rest of us with a good laugh.

The Animatrix: Halo Edition!

2010-03-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

I've never been a huge fan of the Halo series. I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the games in the main trilogy, passed on ODST and Wars, and while I am intrigued by Reach, I am not waiting on baited breath for its launch. Overall, the series is the poster child of super big-budget videogame design: enjoyable if not terribly innovative game design, pleasing music and artwork, and a conventional but incredibly detailed story. That same spirit pervades Halo: Legends, an anime styled collection of short films in the fine nerd art meets cross-marketing spirit of The Animatrix.

From Wikipedia

Given gamers' flagging interest in the Halo series after the conclusion of the main trilogy, and the Xbox 360's less than stellar sales in Japan, playing the animation compilation card is a predictable move for Microsoft. Fortunately, they spend the money to do the trend right, hiring well known anime studios like Bones, Production I.G. and Toei Animation to do what they do best. A pity the narratives don't measure up to the quality of the animation.

Looking to accessorize your new Mjolner armor? Nothing says "Death to the Covenant!" like a little teddy bear cellphone keychain . Pic was swiped from Kotaku.

To be perfectly honest, Legends is a largely forgettable experience. Origins parts I and II are a nice primer for Halo virgins and those who didn't pay close attention to the story in the games. It is also where Legends overlaps most prominently with the Animatrix template. It does for Halo what The Second Renaissance (also divided into parts one and two) did for The Matrix franchise. The Duel, which Mike Fahey hails (link under the pic) as "Far and away the best short of the DVD", is a unique and impressive visual experience that tells an utterly hackneyed tale of bushido honor and loyalty. I was similarly unimpressed with The Package, a CGI romp that shows the Spartans kicking ass with vehicles that didn't exist in the game, who save (spoiler alert?) some scientist I was supposed to recognize but didn't.

Homecoming is perhaps the most promising story in the collection, giving a grim and fascinating glimpse at how the Spartan II recruiting campaign works. It isn't a cheerer upper, but few in the collection are. Take Prototype for example; a story about a squad leader with a gift for leading his squad to their doom. Contrary to Fahey, I rather liked that one. Again I disagree with Fahey on The Babysitter, which I felt was one of the best pieces in the package. While the Samus Aran style twist may not have blown any minds, it tells a unique tale about tensions within the ranks of the UNSC army and it comes to a legitimately poignant close.

No, that is not Master Chief, but yes, that thing does Shoop Whoops.

Not everything is all ass kicking and seriousness however. In fact, my personal favorite is "Odd One Out," a totally bizarre parody of the Halo Universe staring Spartan 1337. Yes, I know '1337 speak' is supposed to be old hat and unfunny by now, but it dovetails nicely with the feature's absurd nature which is an incredible refreshing presence in the somber halo universe. If it has been a while since you've watched something and had an emphatic "What the fuck?" at the end, you would be hard pressed to do better than this short, which features kung-fu fighting kids raised by an AI, dinosaurs, an idiot spartan hero, rainbow laser beams, and a motherly AI.

The tale confirmed a long held suspicion about Halo's universe: it would be infinitely more endearing and entertaining if it had a better sense of humor. Not the only humor of quick quips and snide remarks--don't get me wrong, I like quippery and snideness--but the ability to look absolutely foolish. So many new franchises, especially in the world of video gaming, are utterly desperate to be treated as grown-up art form. I can understand this desperation. I can even sympathize with it. Videogames are growing up and it's time people recognize it. That respect does not lie in melodrama, gore and swearing, but in the ability to laugh at ones self.

How The West Was Fun

2010-02-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

I've picked up a lot of party traditions in college and playing Bang! is definitely one of my favorites. Even, or perhaps especially, in this modern climate of electronic gaming, it is one of the best multiplayer investments you can make. Rock Band and Smash Bros. are a helluva lotta fun, but with larger gatherings, the four player limit strains your ability to entertain. Bang! is an excellent backup plan, and in my opinion, an essential addition to any gamer nerd's library of traditional (read: non-electronic) titles.

The game is basically a card driven variation of the game Mafia featuring basic role-playing elements like health, items, character roles and abilities. Each game features three basic factions: The Sheriff and his Vices, who want to purge the town of undesirables, the Outlaws aiming to take over the town by killing the lawmen, and the Renegade who must be the last man standing in order to win. Only the Sheriff's identity is public however, resulting in many cases of mistaken identity and hilarious alliances. In addition to the four different roles that determine players' agendas, each player draws a character card that has a special power, allowing them to draw more cards, or use cards in special ways. The rest of the deck consists of permanent equipment cards (guns and horses) which you lay down in front of you, and instant action cards (shooting, dodging, stealing cards) which you hold in your hand. The game's first expansion, Dodge City, is fairly essential as it introduces the Renegade role and semi-permanent single-use equipment cards. People tend to ignore the second two expansions which introduce condition cards that change the terms of play for one round.

pic taken from RPG.net and found through google
Here's a basic setup to give you an idea of what the game is like. Absent are the semi-permanant equipment cards of Dodge City and the Condition cards of High Noon and Fistful of Cards.

It sounds complicated, and it is, but it's much easier to explain, set-up and learn than something like Catan, or even Monopoly for that matter. Munchkin, another nerd favorite, tends to involve less guile and more negotiation, up until the end game when everybody starts screwing each other over. In Bang! you can run some truly impressive cons and screw people over without intending to, all in one match, sometimes with the same action. Word to the wise: flat out stating your role tends to make the game harder and less fun. By outing yourself as an outlaw, you provide other more cunning outlaws with a sacrificial lamb. All they have to do to look like good guys is shoot you dead. The exception to this rule is to claim to be the vice. No matter what you actually are, you want to look like the vice to the Sheriff. In fact, it's become something of an unspoken rule with my group. "I'm the vice!" "No, I'm the vice!" etc.

I'm not gonna lie here; one of the reasons Bang! is a favorite is that in addition to providing players with an endless stream of awful puns, it makes a 'bang-up' drinking game (see what I mean about the puns?). The most obvious drinking variation is to have players drink whenever their characters do; in game, you recover health by downing beers, tequila and canteens. It's a serviceable rule-set, but rather uninspired and a bit dry for my tastes. I say take a swig of brew whenever somebody hits you or after failing to hit somebody else, and if you're really feeling manly, take a shot of something harder whenever using a recovery item! Disclaimer: This is actually fucking terrible advice. Trust me, I tried it. Shot of sodium rich soy sauce + gulps of dehydrating alcohol = painful hangover. Just stick to tequila. Or Juice.

Pic taken from myfairgames.com ; as usual, found through google

Despite a couple odd tweaks, The Bullet is definitely the edition you want. It has all the expansions, a couple of extra characters with ridiculous but fun powers, a sweet-looking bullet case, and a so-cheesy-it's-awesome Sheriff's Badge.

Some less alcoholic house rules that have proven fun are playing with two character powers at once (though some combinations are prohibited for balance reasons) and The Dual Schofield Rule, which states that a player may equip 2 Schofields and shoot at two different targets once in one turn. Normally, players can only shoot once in a turn, and they can only equip one gun. The rule sprang up after we watched the new 3:10 to Yuma and saw Charlie Prince waste about a hundred people with a pair of Schofields. It's the perfect house rule since it can only be implemented in rare circumstances, and it has a greater impact on style than substance. Other rule changes we use involve using the older versions of certain cards; as mentioned in the picture above, certain features were tweaked slightly in The Bullet edition of the game, including Ragtime being mistakenly misprinted as a "Shoot any player" card instead of a "Steal from any player" card, and a couple of character's lives being adjusted.

All in all, I cannot recommend Bang! highly enough since it's the sort of game almost everybody can enjoy, and at ~ $40 for The Bullet Edition, you'd be hard pressed to find a finer bargain. So git along, giddy up and have a gun fight or few. You won't be disappointed. In closing, some mood music.

The Summer Effect

2010-02-12T14:38:00.000-08:00

This last Thursday, one of my best friends came over to my apartment and presented me with a choice: Watch 500 Days of Summer for the first time or watch Zombie Land again. For most guys, this is a no-brainer. Through the twisted magic of monogamy, (with my fiancee, not my friend) we ended up settling on the former. Here's the shocking part: It was the right choice. I don't mean to say it is a better movie than Zombie Land on the whole, such a thing borderlines blasphemy and is difficult to fathom, but it is an excellent enough film that you should see it at least once, regardless of who you are, even when presented with other fine options of entertainment. In fact, I would go so far as to call it the best romance since Love Actually.

It's a damn good movie, but the aesthetic is so Indie it stings at times.

Each scene or couple of scenes are excerpted days from a romance, all shuffled and played out of order in a way that is far more powerful than a traditional telling. Just like love actually interviews numerous different narratives of love together, Summer presents readers with a number of shifting currents at work in the relationship. This cutting allows the movie to tell a much deeper and far more honest love story than Hollywood's Meg Ryan meets Tom Hanks model. It even sets it apart from other Indie boy meets girl stories. Though, before proceeding, it may be prudent to provide a brief explanation of what I mean by indie.

In the beginning, the phrase stood for Independent Music, meaning music that was not published by a major record label. Hipsters, the metric unit of the indie subculture, will claim that said music is independently published because it's too cool or sophisticated for us mere sheeple to appreciate. Translation: not enough people would want to buy the music to motivate a major record label to sell it. That's a broad statement and a crude summary of the politics in play behind the music, but it's a useful enough explanation to help you understand where the greater Indie aesthetic is coming from. Like many counter-cultures it is a rejection of the mainstream, and it's particular interest lies where commercialism and artistic taste intersect, particularly where music is concerned. Like many other counter cultures however, the demographic has been identified (2o something college grads) and the market has been branded, and there is a specific sort of fiction and a specific style of dress associated with the aesthetic. One can consider the indie movement as the baroque movement of the post .com period, and Hipsters celebrate their awkwardness through ironic self-deprecation.

500 Days of Summer is that sort of movie; a celebration of being strange, and of not putting up with consumerism's exploitative bullshit. As such, it can come across as preachy in a roundabout way, but like most things indie, the hipster self-deprecation mutes it's own activism. Psychologists and pop cultural scholars scratching their heads over where a social movement comes into it's own should take a look at Summer just to see how everything conforms to this movement. Everything in the movie from the wardrobe, to the soundtrack, to the little animations that separate each day in the relationship, to the lead Zoey Deschanel's alluring yet awkward good looks is all decidedly 'Indien.'

Pic swiped from Starpulse via Google. Here she just looks pretty. The awkward comes through in the trailer however.

So how does all this awkwardness tie in to the plot? Aside from shuffling the chronology, the story flips the dynamics of boy meeting girl. Tom is the "new" sort of boy, the kind of leading man that would give Hemingway another excuse to drink. He falls for girls hard, talks about his feelings with his friends, and cares about his appearance enough to feel insecure about it. Meanwhile, the titular Summer is an old-fashioned guy. She is non-committal fiercely sexual, and very guarded about her emotions. This gender-reversal is nothing new, but the delivery here is nuanced and authentic to the times we live in.

If you're a person like me, who has come to despise Hollywood's formulaic approach to romance, or a person like either of the movies protagonists, you will love it. Fans of more conventional fair will probably enjoy it too because there is real, legitimate romance happening here. It may even be an sobering experience of sorts. So if you're searching for a movie to watch this valentide, give 500 Days of Summer a shot.

The Face of Things to Come

2010-01-28T16:32:00.000-08:00

Facade is the most important videogame that most gamers have never heard of- if it is in fact a videogame at all. It's the face of things to come; the place videogaming will go when it outgrows it's core demographic (18-35 year old males) and ventures beyond Bioware and Bethesda's combat-driven realms of fantasy.

Meet Trip and Grace, your hosts for the evening

So what is Facade? To put it simply, it's a 'watch a marriage falling apart simulator.' You play as a friend of Grace and Trips, a couple you set up in college. The game begins with Trip inviting you over via answering machine message, and after picking a name and gender, you arrive at their apartment where the harsh tones of an argument are escaping the front door. Trip lets you in, retreats to the kitchen to retrieve Grace (more hushed aggression), and you all exchange pleasantries. Where things go from there is up to you. The two trade passive-aggressive remarks over drinks that grow increasingly less passive, ask for your frank opinion with leading questions to spite each other, and react to whatever else you elect to say or do. In addition to typing out dialogue, you can kiss or hug both characters, sip drinks and pick up the hideous sculptures that adorn the couple's apartment.

The AI's text recognition is better than you would expect provided you stick to suggested path of topics: drinks, interior-decoration, and careers will almost inevitably pop up, though all roads lead back to Grace and Trip's characters. Trip turns out to be a manipulative, waspy, superficial asshole, while Grace is insecure, frigid and hypercritical; fresh faces in a medium populated by cliches, though neither character is particularly likable. If you sit and speak only when necessary, watching the evening take it's course, you're in for a rather trying exchange; this may not be a typical videogame, but the violence the form is known for is still present. It's just mediated through incrimination and accusations instead of fisticuffs and gunfire. And true to form, said violence is also vastly more enjoyable when you participate in it as opposed to just watching things fall apart.

Blunt crudeness and belligerence will get you thrown out; on my second play-through I greeted Trip with an insult and he slammed the door in my face before the evening could get underway. But if you play Iago and subtly play off their reactions and assertions the evening is much more fun: a kiss here, a disagreement there, followed by a perfectly innocent inquiry about their sex-life... oh it's a fun night. It offers the domesticated, matured equivalent of the illicit glee one derives from tearing through Liberty City with a machine gun and a Humvee.

Of course, one could also play towards reconciling the arguing couple. As the happy ending available, one might look at it as implied goal of the game. Unsurprisingly, it is also the most difficult outcome to achieve, and I have yet to accomplish it. This is partially because I don't think they deserve a happily ever after, and partially due to shoddy controls. Trip and Grace frequently speak at the same time, so clarifying the recipient of your replies can be frustrating and difficult. Just as hardcore gamers tend to scorn casual titles that trade accessibility for precision, I found myself wishing for a more structured conversation system. Then again, conversations in real life don't adhere to strict frameworks, and trying to impose them may stifle the experience, which is already rather stunted by the limitations of AI. More reliable rule sets and inputs must be determined before Facade can be considered a successful gaming experience.

Blatantly stolen (via google) from The Atlantic's article on the game. Please don't sue me!

Then again, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern weren't setting out to create a gaming experience, but an Interactive story. The download for Facade is hosted at InteractiveStory.net as opposed to Facadegame.net, and on Wikipedia, it is listed as Facade (interactive story) as opposed to Facade (game). Then again, they also entered the game in Slamdance and the Independent Game Festival as a contestant, suggesting that they don't mind their creation be regarded as a videogame. But rather than trotting out the weary old query "What is a game?" and turning down the interesting, but over-emphasized narratology vs. ludology line of inquiry, I'm interested in exploring how Mateas and Stern could have succeeded at telling a better story with Facade.

I believe that Interactive Fiction is unique and significant enough as a medium to stand apart from videogames and drama, but Facade doesn't make that argument. It borrows a problem, perhaps the most serious problem, from videogame narratives: the main character is a looking-glass. You can pick a name and a gender, but these choices have no influence on your presence in the story. Aside from the tidbit that you introduced Grace and Trip, your relationship to them, and your involvement in the narrative is completely incidental. In order for interactive narratives to grow, developers need to escape this idea of the 'window character'. The screen is our window; the avatar must be our vehicle.

One way to do this would be to take a page from Bioware and allow the character to choose from a number of different histories relating to Trip and Grace. Maybe you're Trips boss, or Grace's ex-boyfriend turned platonic friend. Maybe you did introduce the two of them back in college, but if that's the case, let the player decide how that first meeting went down. Could he already see the seeds of dissent that have now blossomed into bitter fruit? These decisions may make the game more linear, but they will also provide the player, or reader/actor, with context to make the experience meaningful.

Another possibility for engaging the player would be to place the operator outside of virtual world altogether, giving them a directorial position like the godlike control one has in The SIMs. Rather than determining the player's actions, you could mediate the character's interactions interactions by planting memories in their heads to control the flow of conversation. Or you could adjust factors like room temperature and the weather outside to affect the general mood of the preceding. Finally, you could flesh out the characters' desires and histories as you go along, making the narrative increasingly cohesive or convoluted as you please.

Facade isn't important for what it is, but for the ideas it represents. It's a jumping off point both in terms of subject matter and form for what will come, or rather, what is now arriving.

Charting New Territory

2010-01-10T16:16:00.001-08:00

I held out against the appeal of owning a PS3 for a long time. This was fairly easy in the beginning, seeing how there was no appeal for a good long while. Things got a little harder when MGS 4 and Little Big Planet were released, though a host of much-touted but sorely disappointing titles (anybody remember Lair? or the one that should have been called Goddess of War?) were enough to sober me. I heard that Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, was a good enough game, and that the Ratchet and Clank series was still going strong, warming me back up to the idea of PS3 ownership, though I wasn't swayed until I heard the praise for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

I think Uncharted is a pretty cool guy, eh seeks Cintamani Stone and doesn't afraid of anything.

In a world where journalism and marketing hype are not only indiscernible but treated interchangeably, the value of high praise has pretty much dissolved. There are a few phrases that still command some attention however and "Best Game I Ever Played" is one of them. I heard it applied to Uncharted 2 more than once. Now, that's not a bridge I'm willing to jump off of, but I will say Uncharted 2 won my vote for best game of 2009 (against some stiff competition), and that it is the most cinematically pleasing video game I have played thus far.

Now my use of "cinematically" is problematic for a couple reasons. First of all, it is not actually a word, and secondly, when a game is described as cinematic, it generally means that there uses lots of cut-scenes; narrative videos that transform operators into an audience as opposed to players. Many 'cinematic games' tell excellent stories, but they also have the obnoxious habit of seizing control of players right before they get to do something incredible. That is never a problem in Uncharted 2. Rather, the game employs cinematic techniques in gameplay to excellent effect (Reader beware, spoilers ensue henceforth.)

The coolest moments of the game, the ones that make you hold your breath and exhale an emphatic "Holy mackerel!" when they pass, all exist within the context of play. Building collapsing in the middle of a firefight? The firefight continues as the world slides apart beneath you. Hero decides to carry a wounded comrade to safety as villains chase you with machine guns and rocket launchers? All you. Chase scene with Jeeps in the Himalayas? "Let me guess: you drive the jeep?" No. Because you have done that in other games and doing it again is considerably less incredible than jumping from jeep to jeep while sniping at tires and bad guys. Playing Uncharted 2 is the closest most of us will ever get to living Indiana Jones' life. Until Uncharted 3 anyway.

In addition to letting players take part in the action, there are host of cinematic touches that don't actually change the gameplay so much as they surprise the player. That may not sound like much, but when you remember that video games as a medium are dominated by explosive imagery and constant movement, visually surprising a gamer is an impressive feat indeed, and Naughty Dog pulls it off consistently throughout the narrative. They do this by employing time tested cinematic techniques that have yet to arrive in video games. You'll be walking through a hushed frozen cavern, and part of the foreground will turn out to be a monster; a surprise in a game that has been devoid of the supernatural thus far. Another example is when you manage to escape a tank by going onto a mountainous ledge, only for the tank to suddenly start to go over the wall and think better of it. In text, these sound like cheap, "Gotcha" moments and they may be; but in play, such direction makes for an exhilarating experience.

The content of the narrative itself may not be groundbreaking, but the quality of the writing and voice acting that delivers it is superb. There is more chemistry between Nathan Drake and each one of the lovely heroines than there is in most modern adventure movies, let alone most video games. How people can still be transfixed by 'characters' like Bayonetta when there are personalities like Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer boggles my mind a bit. Leather, long legs and boobs are awesome, but there are other ways to be appealing, and indeed sexy, in video games. I am similarly perplexed by the antiquated trend of the mute hero in adventure games. I can understand the case for "immersability" in a role-playing context (though I tend to disagree with it), and Link has a long standing laconic legacy so he gets a reprieve, I can't imagine another action/adventure scenario that would benefit from a lack of speech. After enjoying Nathan Drake's wit and charm, taciturn protagonists seem woefully under-realized. Then again, this is another issue entirely; one deserving it's own discussion.

In conclusion Uncharted 2 is an incredible game right down to the details. The graphics are lush with details and pop off the screen with color, the sound effects are spot on and the music swells with the same majesty as John Williams scores. Just listen to this theme! Even stripped of this presentation and the narrative, you have an incredibly tight 3rd person shooter featuring positively effervescent freedom of movement. You read that right: your ability to climb, hang and jump from almost everything in the environment bubbles with possibility. If games like Gears of War and MW2 didn't feel dated before, they should now. Uncharted 2's multiplayer may not offer as many guns and brutal methods of execution as those other titles, but it is more balanced and mobile, which to my mind, equates to greater variety in play.

Long story short: If you have a PS3 you should do yourself a favor and play through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It is the best video game of 2009.

A MMOdern Day Fairytale

2009-12-28T12:48:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas fellow smart asses! I have no gold, frankincense or myrrh to give, and while I could beat on a drum for you, the ba-rum-pum-pum-pum thing wears thin real quick. Instead, I offer you a review/plot analysis/rant on Avatar, the decade's final blockbuster epic.

This poster looks awesome. Why haven't I seen it anywhere?

When I first heard the film's title some time last summer, I didn't like it. I don't have anything against the word avatar; on the contrary, I think it's a brilliant shred of language. I was put off because James Cameron apparently pilfered it from the excellent animated series by the same name. To my mind, the cartoon was there first, and it's upcoming movie adaptation was better deserving of the title. Besides, seeing how it will be suffering from the directorship of M. Night Shyamalan, it will need all the advertising cache it can get. My opinion of the flick did not improve when I heard about it's universes nomenclature from a friend working on the films advertising. The moon is called Pandora? Really, the most hackneyed mythological reference in science fiction, again? Okay, whatever... but Unobtanium!? Human's are searching for something called un-ob-fucking-tanium? I assume that's supposed to be cute, but it just sounds moronic. There isn't a bus short enough for it to ride on. I understand that you are a visionary Mr. Cameron, but you hired a linguist to help you invent an entire language for the Na'vi, so why not spend five minutes with a writer and see if you can come up with a name that's just a touch sharper?

[Inhale. Exhale. /rant]

Despite my hostilities, Avatar won me over. It is a good movie, and you will most likely have fun if you go see it. You will probably enjoy it even if you don't typically like Sci-fi, because James Cameron is a master of making things that most people like. Even if you found Titanic to be trite and over-long, Avatar is still a spectacle well-worth watching for it's technical brilliance. The movie's ill-named moon has been meticulously rendered, and it's ecology has been populated with flora and fauna that make George Lucas' offerings look like the set pieces for a particularly cheap episode of SG-1. Even Lord of the Ring's Gollum, who exorcised the embarrassing shade of Jar-Jar Binks and proved that CGI characters could be emotionally compelling, seems terribly dated when compared to the Na'vi. There was never a moment in the movie where the illusion fell apart, and I found myself wondering what the mo-cap or voice actors behind the curtain actually looked like. As far as my brain cared, the actors really were big blue cat people. The movie dazzles easily even if you don't spring for the Real3D experience, though the extra $4 or $5 really does make an appreciable difference. For those of you who are wondering where life after HD will take us, this seems a likely path.

There's a story here too, of course, and it is a serviceable scaffold for the brilliant spectacle. It's very easy to figure out who you are supposed to cheer for, and the components of the plot are very familiar. I have heard it compared to Ferngully by a number of people, which surprises me because: (A) I had no idea so many people remember Ferngully and, (B) from a narrative perspective the parallels are almost dead-on. An average joe is magically transported to a naturalistic society where he falls in love with a beautiful woman and together they fight to protect it from evil humans and giant bulldozers. Don't let Avatar's sci-fi trappings fool you. Both films are fairy tales, but what Ferngully accomplishes with pixie dust, Avatar does with an idealized concept of online gaming.

In case you forgot what it looked like. I know I did.

The film's title refers to technology that allows researchers to mentally control biological avatars (created from human and na'vi DNA) to explore Pandora. Humans cannot wander Pandora as they please, you see, because it's very air is poisonous. This establishes a dynamic to similar to online games which are themselves, fantastic worlds that cannot be explored without a surrogate body. The crucial difference, is that Pandora is physically real, as is the Avatar driver's experience of it. Jake Sully, Avatar's aforementioned Average Joe, is a paraplegic ex-marine, and using his Avatar magically gives him back the use of his legs. This is an idealized reversal of a user's typical experience with MMO's, wherein players must give up their physicality to gain the mystical abilities of virtual reality, though the rest of the gaming parallels carry strong. Jake is chosen to learn the ways of the Na'vi; a process that handsomely mirrors leveling up in online gaming. He must learn to speak the local language, hunt the forest's various monsters, and master the Na'vi's magical ability to connect with animals. This last ability bears particular similarity to World of Warcrafts mount system. In fact, a key turning point in the movie entails capturing one's epic flying mount as seen below:

And not one gold paid for it. Hax.

I don't mean to imply that James Cameron intended to make a movie about playing MMOs, but the themes at work certainly cater to the desires of the WoW demographic. In this movie, withdrawing from human society to live in a fantasy world is not only plausible, but noble. Humanity is the bad guy on Pandora, and it's respective avatars are Mr. Corporate Greed and General Texas. Sure, there are good humans, like the nerdy scientists who developed the avatar project to promote cultural exchange and understanding, and Cameron is sure to include one gold-hearted fighter pilot so audiences know he doesn't think all soldiers are bad, but they are all on the Na'vi's side; the right side. Now, I'm no stranger to plots with clear-cut (read: over-simplified) good guys and bad guys where violence is the only solution, but for some reason, it's presence in Avatar bothers me more than usual. As long as the movie is, and it is looong, the climactic battle ending feels too abrupt and easy. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Cameron stretched the story out over the course of a couple sequels rather than cramming everything into one sitting. I have no doubt that we'll be back to Pandora, though I'm not sure where the franchise will go from here.

Despite those gripes, Avatar is an excellent piece of cinema, and an important victory for big budget film-making in this age of economic dreary. You should give it a watch when you have the chance, because it really is the sort of movie best experienced on the big-screen.

Dresden'd for Greatness

2009-12-08T23:19:00.000-08:00

About two years ago, I was perusing the Sci-fi/Fantas section in a local bookstore when a description caught my eye; "Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer staring Phillip Marlowe." I may have been aware that the quoted book's title was Small Favor, though I didn't devote much attention to the cover, or who wrote it. The statement crackled with such potential that I snatched up the hardcover, and proceeded to the checkout, only dimly aware of the possibility that I was stumbling into the latest installment of a long running series. If somebody told me I was about to start on Book Ten of the Dresden Files, I may have tried to start at the beginning. A glad thing I didn't know any better. It was one of the best impulse buys of my life. Starting out late didn't hamper my enjoyment of the earlier books in the series, in fact, knowing what was in store made me more charitable toward Jim Butcher during his "warm up period."

The first two books are enjoyable enough, but things really start to pick up here.

Needless to say, the book delivered on the promise of Entertainment Weekly's one liner. The Dresden Files are a helluva lot of fun. The series isn't for everybody; grandma probably won't get it, and fans of "higher literature" including Tolkien devotees will probably look down upon it as low-brow genre fiction. I've even heard people, or at least internet people, refer to it as the Y-chromosomes' answer to Twilight. There is a shred of accuracy to this statement, insofar as the books are clearly written for a male audience, just as Twilight is obviously written for women folk, but the parallels stop there. Unlike Meyer, Butcher can write. The pacing is fast, the plotting starts out serviceable and gets increasingly tighter as the series continues, and the characters, while archetypal, are memorable and believably developed. And most importantly, Butcher doesn't take himself, his protagonist, or his series too seriously. On the contrary, self-deprecation runs high in the Dresden Files. Each book has an element or two which rib's the fantasy genre in one way or another, be by featuring a Billy Goat's Gruff as an antagonist, or a subplot involving a pack of teenage LARPers who gain the ability to turn into were-wolves.

If you do not find this even a little bit awesome, The Dresden Files is probably not for you. Also: seek medical attention.

Despite the fantastic trappings and occasional absurdity of the situations, the action in the Dresden Files is typically driven by very real issues; chiefly, responsibility and relationships. I don't mean the spider-man sort of responsibility about using your powers for good either. There is a bit of that here and there, but usually, the books are concerned with the responsibilities of us mere mortals: sticking to your principals as much as practicality will allow, asking for help despite putting other people out or putting them in danger. These are universals, even if they are broadly drawn, and the fantastic elements of the narrative make them far more interesting and enjoyable than they are in real life.

DOING IT WRONG

Not everything that is Dresden Files is golden however. The Syfy channel (or Sci-fi Channel back at the time of productions) mangles the original series something fierce. Some people liked it well enough, though it tried my tolerance with rather weak writing, and a host of totally unnecessary departures from the source material. Harry Dresden wears a leather jacket as opposed to his signature duster, negating the wild-westish aesthetic of the series. His wizard's staff is now a hockey stick; was this modernization supposed to make him seem hipper some how? Bob, the wisecracking, randy skull that serves as Harry's sidekick is anthropomorphized as a British dandy, and not the good kind like you want. Karen Murphy is now inexplicably a mother. Michael, and the rest of the carpenter family are completely absent. There's really only one way to sum up my feelings about these changes. But like I said, some people really dug it, and it's on Hulu, so you might as well give it a go if you're interested.

The books however, are definitely a must for modern fantasy fans. If you've completed your term at Hogwarts and are wondering where to head next, spending some time in the windy city with Harry Dresden would be a good call.

The Best of All Possible Batmen

2009-11-25T01:10:00.000-08:00

You don't need to be The World's Greatest Detective to figure out I'm major Batman fan, but in case my extensive review of The Dark Knight didn't tip you off, I have words to share about Arkham Asylum.

The title of this post might be slightly exaggerated but it gives you a pretty good idea of my opinion about the game. Activision has finally done Bats justice vis-à-vis videogames, halting a dreary, drown-out parade of fail. Their outing (which I experienced via the 360) presents players with the brilliant voice acting of the 90's animated series (which, in my opinion, captures Batman and Joker at their best), the brutal brooding aesthetics of Frank Miller (the only aspect of Miller meriting imitation in my opinion), and the encyclopedic depth of Batman's comic legacy, realized through references, homages, and an impressive character dossier.

Of course, the most important aspect of the game is that it plays like Batman should. The "Freeform Combat" system presents players with the frenetic pacing of the rhythm-action genre in the form of fisticuffs. Conceptually, fights entail frenzied matches of Rock, Paper, Scissors (or Strike, Stun, Dodge) with an emphasis on stringing together long combos to unlock more powerful techniques. It's a much smarter and much more satisfying approach to brawling than typical licensed fair, and even though I happen to be no damn good at it (my combo counter usually peters out at about 8), it's thoroughly enjoyable.

In addition to Zonking and Biffing, (invoked here as old school sound effects; not sexual euphemisms) you also have a utility belt chock full of wonderful toys at your disposal. Batman's signature grapnel gun breaths new life into the hackneyed sneaking trope by allowing you to zip from perch to perch (for some strange reason, the asylum is lousy with indoor gargoyles) to get the drop on fools, as opposed to hiding in boxes or crawling around for five minutes to find the right hiding spot. This is the preferred method for taking out punks with guns, and the only way to navigate situations where thugs have been instructed to kill hostages at the first of Batman. These strategic sequences of cat and mouse, or bat and rats, play more like a strategy or puzzle game than a stealth-action affair, and they truly capture the spirit of Gotham's avenging angel.

My only gameplay gripe, because I've gotta have one, is that the experience feels a little over-engineered at times. You occasionally run into convenient excuses as to why you can't use a gadget, or find yourself forced to clear a room in a very specific way, but I can't stay mad at the game. The very fact that it bothers to explain itself is essentially a good quality, and it's engineering almost always works in the service of variety as opposed to tedium. All the same, I can't help but long for a freer game based on the same model, like an open-ended affair in Gotham.

Lesser oversights include the omission of Shirley Walker's spine-chillingly excellent Batman theme, and the complete absence of Robin. Oracle and Jim Gordan make for good company, but it would have been nice to see at least one of Bruce Wayne's many wards put in an appearence. This is not Christopher Nolan's realistic universe, and therefore there is no excuse to exclude a boy wonder. At the same time, I'm happy to see that the game pays no attention to Batman RIP or Battle for The Cowl. Don't get me wrong, Bruce Wayne has had a hell of a long run, and I can see how killing him off could breathe new life into the Batman mythos, but I'm happy that we got a game that captures him in his prime.

To close on a related tangent, those who are disappointed, or hopelessly confused by the way DC handled the Death of Batman may find some solace in Neil Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?. Then again, you might just be more confused. The story (which is, in typical Gaiman fashion, a collection of stories) stands in 'the gutter' between Batman RIP, Final Crisis, and Battle for Cowl, and offers a brief, metafictional look at Bruce Wayne as Batman that is moving and appropriate, if a little sentimental for modern tastes. It is simultaneously an epitaph for his Era, and an indication of what is to come in terms of comic story-telling.

Dingos Frisky and Chicken Robotic

2009-11-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a stretch since I've talked about animation, what with the abrupt, inexplicable suspension of my Japan's Finest! segment (don't worry, it will be back when you are least prepared for it) and it occurred to me that I never discussed any western animation, which is quite criminal really. Disney and The Simpsons are the obvious points of departure and for that reason, they will be ignored outright. Instead, I would like to discuss [adult swim], a network whose quirky line-up has found particular favor with the internet generations.

I was initially drawn to the network for it's anime, "dubbed down" though it was (quit scoffing you little weaboo brats! we didn't have torrents or crunchyroll.com back then) and I was only dimly aware of the network's original shows. It seems like most people felt the same, because the network really started to gain popularity when it became a refugee camp for prime time toons that more conservative networks had cancelled. Over the years, [as] has continued to develop it's own bizzaire brand of programming, and while most of it is incoherent, mind-scarring, crap, it has produced several gems. Among these, you are probably most familiar with Seth Green and Matthew Senreich's Emmy-winning stop-motion cavalcade...

In many ways, Robot Chicken is the natural evolution of Saturday Night Live. It's a sketch-based show, ripe with amusing nonsense and pop-cultural parodies, but faster paced, cheaper to produce, and funnier (by current comparison anyway) than it's predecessor. Fast and cheap may not necessarily sound like appealing adjectives, but if a sketch bombs in SNL, you get to wait five minutes for the damn thing to play out, while the average chicky robot sketch clocks in at around 30 seconds. You're on to the next joke before you can decide whether you liked the last one or not. I will concede that a certain degree of physical comedy is lost in the transition from actor to action figure, though (sadly) it's less than you might expect. Also, GI Joes typically have less trouble with the booze and drugs. Hey-oh!

It's also clear that Seth Green learned a thing or few from Seth McFarlan while working on Family Guy; specifically, how to play to your demographic with relevant pop-cultural references. Each episode of Robot Chicken balances it's satires of the now (300, Resident Evil, Mario Kart) with parodies of the late 80s and early 90s (Rainbow Bright, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers). Even more importantly, Green and Senreich have a gift for locking on to the embarrassing or absurd aspect of those things you used to love and viciously ridiculing them. The internet generations live in a perpetual state of iteration; we constantly destroy who we are to become somebody new. Perpetually. Indefinitely.

This cynical "anti-nostalgia" was present from the founding of [adult swim] in programs like The Brak Show, Sealab 2021, and Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law, which revive and twist classic cartoons like so many sons wished back to life by a gnarled monkey paw (too obscure? ah what the hell, we'll go with it). These early efforts pale before The Venture Brothers, however.

The show is parody of Johnny Quest and the Hardy Boys. It's a simple premise, one that sounds like it could be very easily exhausted in a single sitting. Indeed, one of the episodes of Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law entails a custody battle between Race Bannon and Dr. Quest for Johnny and Hadji. It was a funny enough episode, but you knew every joke before it happened. Venture Brothers is admittedly starting to show some strain in its 4th season, but it had 3 seasons of solid gold and it's still mostly enjoyable because it simultaneously sustains the absurd dynamics of it's source material while mocking itself with modern cynicism.

The titular brothers, Hank and Dean Venture both behave as if they were still in cartoon's Hanna-Barbera era (lolrhyme). Hank is an impulsive idiot who idolizes batman and Dean is a neurotic simpering milquetoast. Their father, Rusty Venture, a former "boy adventurer" himself, is not only cirminally negligent but borderline evil, yet he is rendered oddly sympathetic through a severe inferiority complex and his general haplessness. Brock Samson, the family's former-secret agent bodyguard, strikes an endearing balance between housewife and homocidal maniac, and the cast is rounded out by a number of delightful supporting characters like Doctor Orpheus, Molotov Cocktease and Henry Killinger.

Two Big Dysfunctionals

Perhaps the most innovative twist of the venture universe is the institutional relationship between heroes and villains. The Guild of Calamitous Intent assigns each villain a hero or team to antagonize, or "arch", as an arch nemesis. Both hero and villain must adhere to a convoluted code of conduct in their mutual aggression that lampoons the hackneyed conventions of the good and evil dynamic. The absurdities of the code prevent either party from ever accomplishing anything, allowing the show to capture the mundane spirit of everyday frustrations while remaining true to the laughable formula of action-adventure cartoons. In fact, it's interesting to note that the aforementioned strain evident in the show's most recent season stems from the fact that static characters are finally starting to change. As much as the internet generation loves changing themselves, they tend to abhor change in the familiar.

The final show I'd like to talk about is a personal favorite.

How to describe Frisky Dingo? Well, to begin with, the title has nothing to do with the plot. Like Venture Bros, the absurdity of the good and evil dynamic is central to the show, and it is captured through the unusual relationship between Killface, a verbose hulking super villain trying to raise funds for his doomsday device (see below), and Xander Crews, a millionaire playboy/superhero/impossible douche bag.

To accommodate bankrupt attention-spans like mine, each episode is a bite-sized 15 minutes, but like bonbons, they are best enjoyed when many are consumed in a single sitting. For all it's apparent (and actual) nonsense, there are some impressive narrative circles and a lot of running gags to be enjoyed.

Falling Short of Vertigo

2009-10-23T01:34:00.001-07:00

Mirror's Edge was a uniquely frustrating experience for me. I’m well aware the game was out last year and as such, nobody in the video gaming world officially gives a shit about it anymore, but Johnny-come-late posts aren’t exactly a rare occurrence here, so kindly deal, or write an angry email.

As a concept, the game glowed with the sort of innovative potential that makes game-design nerds like myself salivate with potential. You play as a spunky rebel named Faith, subverting an Orwellian police-state by delivering illegal messages to various rebel factions throughout a sprawling city. The gameplay is based around free-running, the purest mix of movement and awesome this side of ballet. The story is penned by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of the much-loved Terry Pratchett. The art-style was also really fresh; the nameless metropolis is primarily rendered in sterile, spotless white, and detailed with impossibly bold, jump-off-the-screen shades of blue, tangerine, green and yellow. Best of all, the experience would be brought to us by a EA; one of the big boys, meaning (to my idealistic mind) that all of these ideas would be backed by deep pockets, major man power, and an advertising campaign which would not allow the title to go overlooked. If Mirror's Edge did well, it would be a major battle won in favor of risk-taking game design.

A great deal of my disappointment stems from a fundamental misinterpretation of the game's intention. I half-hoped, half-believed, that the gameplay would be based on a relay-race sort of model. When violence inevitably arose, I imagined it would consist of evasion and fluid attacks that leveraged your improvisational mastery of the environment. Now that I write it all out, it seems like I was hoping for a modern, more realistic take in Sonic, but there was more to it than that. I was hoping for a game that could, and would, evoke vertigo in the player. An electronic experience that would make my stomach lurch as I pitched my character off buildings.

Veritgo is a big deal to because it is one of the four major types of play; the one that has seen the least representation in video games. It's not terribly surprising, seeing how video gaming is almost always a sedentary (read: lazy-ass) activity, but if a game could inspire that level of physical exhiliration and disorientation, it would be a major breakthrough. We would be closer to making games that captured the visceral thrill of roller costers, hang-gliding, and bungee jumping; types of play based solely on physiological sensation. Some audiences were affected by Mirror's Edge, but I was not among them. Maybe it played differently on PC, though I suspect that the sort of physical experience I crave is inherently rooted in physical movement, which really isn't such a bad limitation; especially if one considers the physical possibilities that exist for videogames beyond the valley of silly plastic peripherals, though that is a subject for another post altogether.

Ripped from IGN. How would you know if I didn't tell you?

Anyway, although it is understandable that Mirror's Edge fell short of my lofty vertigo inducing ideal, the game also failed to satisfy a host of more reasonable expectations. At every corner, the game purports to be about "freedom of movement" and "breaking the mold" while simultaneously dictating how I should play it. It told me when I had to fight the badguys, what moves I should use to fight them, and which path I needed to take through the deceptively large levels. In fact, the levels are large enough for you to get lost in them, but since exploration is not on the agenda, getting lost means getting stuck or dying. Through some diabolical paradox, the game manages to be infuriatingly vague despite it's dictatorial model; The "runner vision" system which promised to guide me with red highlighting is later subverted by arbitrarily red interiors, and you also have an insipid talking head barking vague orders like "Get to the mall!" Meanwhile, helicopter gunships and rent-a-cops pepper your ass with lead. Worst of all, once you finally recognize which path the game has charted for you, and which move from your repertoire it wants you to use to get there, you can attempt the prescribed maneuver fifteen times and plummet to your doom, only to inexplicably succeed on the sixteenth try, with no appreciable variation. It's this kind of bullshit that sends me into apoplectic, controller smashing fits of rage. Lewis Black would be proud, but my spouse was not pleased.

In addition to forestalled dreams and out-right frustrations, Mirror's Edge also has lots of good ideas that don't quite fly, like the controls. Instead of an antiquated, "Press X to Jump, Hold Y to Dash" set-up, you get a "One Button Per Body Part" config that is similar to Assassin's Creed. I am a big fan of these contextually sensitive control schemes, but many of the predetermined button choices are terrible. Bumper buttons, the slightly retarded brother of trigger buttons, don't see much use outside of shooting games because they are kind of awkward. Assigning jumping actions to the left bumper, the least used button on the Xbox controller, in a game where you must constantly jump feels, plainly wrong.

At this point, I've waded knee deep into the realm of personal gripes, so I think I'll call it a day. Mirrors Edge has a lot of potential, and it certainly put a lot of interesting ideas about Vertigo in video gaming into my head, but in my book, it misses the mark. It'll be interesting to see what EA will do with the sequel, though I think I'll watch from a safe distance.

The Cure for The Common Gore Flick

2009-10-18T16:47:00.001-07:00

Paranormal Activity is a good horror movie.

It is the best horror movie I've seen since The Ring, and it's scares did not only quench my thirst for terror, but restored my faith in the Horror genre. My faith in general is a rather withered and neglected organ, and the section of it dedicated to horror movies has grown particularly coarse and scarred thanks to Hollywood's recent offerings: uninspired remakes and torture porn. If you like sadistic, visceral scenes of mutilation, you do not only want another movie, you want a different website. Or rather, I want you to go to a different website. Now.

Torture porn fans are grossly unwelcome here because as far as I am concerned, their fetish flicks are the cancer that is killing Horror. Sadistic violence and gore certainly have a place in the genre, but I believe they are best administered in doses that have been carefully measured to provoke as much fear as possible. When violence and gore are taken to excess, we are no longer dealing with Horror, but it's daffy little brother, Camp, which I would argue is a sub-genre in and of itself. Planet Terror and Evil Dead are not Horror films for example, because they do not only invoke humor through horror, but prioritize humor above horror. There may be a few quick scares and gross-out moments, but on the whole the tone is light.

In torture porn, Brutality is the exaggerated element that brings us outside Horror's typical boundaries. The violence can be very innovative (the subgenre's sole virtue), but it is designed to invoke revulsion and disgust rather than fear. There is something of value in fear. It provides a test of ones' mental mettle that makes one aware of the presumptions which support his sense of security and how he copes when said presumptions are challenged. Put simply, it is coming to terms with uncertainty and the unknown. Disgust, by contrast, is the recognition of something that is familiar but unpleasant, and conquering one's sense of disgust simply means putting up with its unpleasantness. The difference between the two processes can be crudely illustrated by exploring a dark cave vs. learning to enjoy the smell of dogshit. I don't like the smell of dogshit, and I'm fine with not liking it. It's dogshit. There is no nutrition or rewarding stimulation to be derived from it, much like Hostel and any SAW title with a roman numeral in it.

Which brings me back to Paranormal Activity, a film at the opposite end of Horror's spectrum. It was made on a budget of nothing, with a cast of nobody, and it still manages to instill curiosity and fear in a delightfuly vicious cycle.

As you may have heard, the film follows a young couple who have recently moved in together, only to be bothered by things- or thing- going bump in the night, and the entire affair is presented as if it were declassified footage of a real-life incident, inevitably begging comparisons to The Blair Witch Project. I trust you good people to parse out the similarities between these two handy-cam horror shows for yourselves, though Paranormal Activity improves on it's predecessor in a number of subtle ways; most notably, it's use of stationary camera work. Almost all of the scary stuff goes down at night while the couple is asleep and we watch them atop a tri-pod in the corner of their bedroom. It may not sound like much, but the immobile perspective shifts our role from mere 'voyeur' to 'prisoner', or even 'victim'. We are not only forced to watch, but forced to watch from a fixed perspective. This sort of immobility creates the perfect climate for claustrophobia to fester and dread to take root in audiences.

Another substantial area of improvement is that the characters are very aware of the camera at all times, and they make you aware of the camera's presence too. In Blair Witch, I frequently found myself wondering, "Why is this being shot?" or "Who is controlling the camera?" and in PA, such queries are never an issue. Most scenes begin with a brief explanation of what we are watching, or about to be watching, and give way to either scares or an interlude between the couple. These interludes run the gamut from mundane and mildly humorous to wrenching shouting matches where we can feel the young lovers' union breaking apart like a limb that is slowly, but insistently being bent against its joint. The initial tension exists within the camera itself, as the young belle is exasperated by her beau's desire to film her at all times. This conflict is the emotional core of the movie, and one gets a clear impression that even if the haunting were to suddenly cease, the young couple would have a few demons yet to face.

And at the expense of a mild spoiler, I will tell you that this is a movie about demons as opposed to a movie about a haunted house. Fortunately, it is a very good movie about demons. In fact I would go so far as to declare Paranormal Activity the natural heir to The Exorcist's dark lineage. You'll have to pardon my purple prose; that film made an impression on me which has yet to fade, despite countless re-watchings and horrendous sequels. The thing that links both movies is not their similar subject matter, or even their sense of claustrophobia, but the way they draw from deep-seated belief to instill fear. There is an impressive legacy of fear surrounding the concept of possession that reflects something primal in human nature. By tapping into that heritage, the superficial details of the haunting gain the rumbling momentum and cold impact of a snowball that has been rolled down a glacier.

Having extolled such high praise, I must confess that I wanted a little more from Paranormal Activity. Ever since the original Exorcist scarred me as a child, I have been waiting for another film to surpass it. This film held such promise, as did The Ring before it, but it did not escalate quite enough to seal the deal. Once again, you will need to excuse my personal fascination, and keep in mind, I have already met people who found PA far more terrifying than The Exorcist. If your looking for a scare this Halloween Season, why not give it a watch and make up your own mind?

Bound for the Attic?

2009-10-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

I fear Joss Whedon will soon be known as "That guy who makes shows that could have been great." Apparently, Fox is pulling Dollhouse from its November lineup in favor of House and Bones re-runs. Even more worrisome is the news that it will be aired in two hour blocks upon its return. For FOX, it is a product that has reached its expiration date, and now they desperately clear their stock before it stinks up the storehouse. Somehow this just doesn't cover it.

To be fair, Dollhouse didn't make things easy on itself. To begin with, the show is inherently hard to market. Describing it's premise is a task which is probably better left to Wikipedia, but essentially, it's about a shady organization (guess what it's called!) that rents out programmable people (Actives or Dolls as you please) to cater to the fantasies of the rich, well-connected and over-privileged. Our heroine, is Echo, a Doll played by Eliza Dushku who has a nasty knack for remembering the fabricated personalities and engagements she's supposed to forget.

At it's best, the show is an intelligent exploration of exploitation with some truly fresh sci-fi elements to drive the plot. At it's worse, it's an over-complicated version of The Pretender, at least from a weekly story-telling perspective: The early episodes of the first season saw Dushku trying on outlandish outfits and disposable personas to navigate canned TV perils. Guy who hires Dolls to live out his Most Dangerous Game fantasy? Check. Stuck-up super-star in need of a bodyguard and a lesson on being yourself? Check. Ironically, I think these throw-away scenarios might have been Whedon's attempt at simplifying things for general audiences. Unfortunately, they were still far too confusing for general audiences, and too stilted for his normally stalwart fanbase. By the time the show arrived at truly interesting questions and scenarios ("Can dead people's personalities be imprinted on Actives to get life after death?" "Yes!" "Wow! Altered Carbon much?") almost everybody had lost interest.

The very thing that makes the show so interesting is the thing that makes it so challenging to watch: It strains audiences' abilities to empathize. Whedon's casting and characterization is brilliant as always, but everyone has serious relatability issues. When unprogrammed, the Dolls are amusingly vapid and vulnerable, which is good for a few quick laughs, but quick to wear thin as well. Their programmed presonalities are engaging enough, but too short-lived to get attached. That being said, both Victor and Sierra, the other main dolls aside from Echo, are played brilliantly by Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachan, who you probably haven't even heard of before now.

The people who run the Dollhouse are also a real mixed bag. The Dollhouse's resident mind fabricator, Topher, is clever, nerdy and at times disarmingly vulnerable, but he's also obnoxiously conceited and detached from the people whose heads he fucks with for a living . British Boss Lady Adelle is deliciously dry and cold in a curiously endearing way, but she's also the head of an organization that rents people out for everything from sex, to manslaughter, to really dedicated daycare. Head of Security Boyd and disgraced FBI agent Paul Ballard bring some boy scoutly heroics to the mix, but both are administered in controlled doses to prevent them from stealing the show from Echo.

On the subject of Echo; I was skeptical at first as to whether Dushku would be able to carry the show, and while she has given a few trully exceptional performances (like her recent stint as a mother for rent) I'm still a bit ambivilant about her character. Some of her roles seem to bleed together in ways that make it difficult to tell if she is intentionally blending personas (which would be consistent with the shows plot) or if it's just less-than-stellar acting. Furthermore, while Echo's persistent memory affords her a more stable personality than the other dolls, the personality which emerges is that of a perfect doll, or actress. I'm a huge fan of metafiction and the ironies in play here are still a bit much for me to swallow.

Meet the Dollhouse! From left to right we have Ballard, Victor, Echo, Sierra, Topher, Adelle and Boyd. And yes, every doll is named after a character in the NATO alphabet. So far!

Given all it's inherent challenges, I was fairly certain that Whedon couldn't do anything to sell the show to the kind of viewership FOX was expecting without completely compromising its plot. But then a friend invited me to watch one of the unaired episodes exclusive to the Season 1 DVD, an episode titlted Epitaph One. From what I understand, it was intended to serve as the series de facto ending in case of cancellation, and it does a beautiful job of validating all the characters' grim predictions that the Dollhouse could very easily be the downfall of mankind. Those of you who have not seen the episode but intend to would do well to skip the next three paragraphs, and the general point of this post.

In the episode, we have fastfowarded ten years into the future, and find ourselves faced with a world that has been utterly ravaged by Dollhouse technology. Somehow imprinting signals were unleashed through cellphone signals: everybody who picked up was implanted with a homicidal Doll, and everybody who didn't suddenly found themselves facing off with said doll army. In a way, that scenario is simpler by far than the plot of the first season. You've got a nice, fairly clean binary opposition (the dolls and the people controlling them vs. the survivors), with plenty of opportunity to blur the lines and uncover the mystery of what happened.

If it was up to me to launch my brilliant new show, I'd open with this edgy ruined hell-scape to show people what was at stake, and fill in the blanks as I went along. I'm the sort that sits back and spends a good half hour speculating about stuff with friends and even I was blown away by how fucked up things were, though given the situation presented, the aftermath seemed completely appropriate. As for flashbacking, what better environment could a writer ask for than a world where you can download a person's entire being into a flashdrive?

There are obvious virtues to Whedon's subtler, more gradual approach to the story pf course. We grow increasingly attached to the show's characters as fissures creep through western society, right under our noses. We watch the technology push further and further, breaking boundaries that seem so innocent at the time. If anything, I am a sucker for brilliant plotting. But sadly, most folks aren't patient enough to watch a five year plan unfold. Hell, if Robot Chicken and Family Guy are any evidence, five minutes of continuity is pushing ones' luck. I love both those shows, don't get me wrong, but it saddens me to think that longer term, serialized story-telling is loosing it's place in television.

In conclusion, if you are a Browncoat who was turned off by Dollhouse's early offerings, come back and give it another look, preferably guided by a friend who knows the show well enough to take you through the good stuff. It may already be too late to launch a fan campaign strong enough to save the show, but trying never hurt anything. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to be late for my Treatment.

Rule 32

2009-10-03T13:04:00.001-07:00

Nerd flicks have been dominating the box office for a couple of years now. The influence of comic books, fantasy trilogies and video games has been rising at a meteoric rate. But on October 2nd, 2009, pop-corn nerd cinema reached a new zenith with Zombieland.

When I first saw the trailer, I remember thinking "this looks pretty awesome, but I probably just saw all the best parts." If you clicked the link, you may find yourself haunted by similar reservations. But fear not; there is a lot more funny to be found in these post apocalyptic wastes. And I am not an easy laugh. Like most people, society has conditioned me to produce a courtesy-laugh with a very low humor threshold for the sake of politeness. Sadly I frequently fall back on it even when I'm watching movies. But this is not real laughter. It is a real-life 'lol' that is more a recognition of attempted humor than a genuine display of mirth. By contrast, this movie has several legitimate ROFL moments. In fact, no fake, truth here to follow: Zombieland is not merely hilarious, but one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time.

Then again, this movie was designed with people like me in mind, and it was perfectly calibrated to ensure total domination over my demographic. It's clear that Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese have played a lot of video games, and I'm not just talking about zombie blastin' fare like L4D- although the influence of that title is clear, and the film will do the sequel's sales figures a big favor. The influence of Max Brook's Zombie Survival Guide is also apparent, as main character Columbus rattles off a list of zombie surviving maxims simply referred to as "The Rules." Interestingly, these rules are not only narrated, but they pop up on screen whenever applied or applicable, in a comparable manner to the visual motifs of a video games. One gag, (which was sadly surrendered by in one of the trailers), takes this concept even further, referencing a "Zombie Killer of the Week", complete with a flashy, 'achievement unlocked' looking icon.

In case you've been wondering, this post is named after rule 32 for Zombieland which simply advises that one "Enjoy the little things." It's the kind of trite advice which normally pisses me off, because I've always felt there is an urge for compliance and complacency buried beneath the optimism of those truisms. Suggesting one satisfy himself with 'little things' seems to imply that going after big things would be too much trouble. Of course, my suspicions led me to completely disregard the whole "enjoy" part of the equation, so I miss the point entirely. Zombieland helps remind people like me that the difference between living and un-living is enjoying vs. surviving life. I know it sounds pithy, but the gleeful cringe-inducing semi-campy violence involved delivers the movie from preciousness.

From right to left we have Columbus, Wichita, Little Rock and Tallahassee

From a technical perspective, the movie doesn't break any ground, which is perfectly fine because it doesn't aspire to. The music is mostly familiar, forgettable rock, and the effects are sufficiently bloody. The performances were very enjoyable, though given that every character in the film is a stock character of one kind or another, it was mostly a matter of good casting. That being said, I'm glad that Jesse Eisenberg was chosen to play 'the nerdy sensitive guy' instead of Michael Cerra, and Woody Harrelson makes a hell of a psychotic cowboy. Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine fame didn't get much in the way of screen time as 'the cute kid' and Emma Stone meets the right balance between hot and bitch. It's the 'surprise guest' who really steals the show though, but giving him away would be a spoiler punishable by death. As time goes on, the secret will get harder to keep though, so I recommend you get to a theatre post haste. And bring friends. It's that kind of movie.

They Come in Squalor!

2009-10-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

I think enough time has finally passed for me to give District 9 a good talking about without having to worry about catastrophic spoilers. Of course, if you have not seen it yet but you still intend to, do that before reading what I have to say, as the plot will be divulged, and dissected in detail henceforth.

District 9's premise, "what if Aliens came to Earth, not in war or peace, but poverty and desperation?" can be thought of as a return to classic sci-fi form, insofar that it is less concerned with the fantastic trappings of its own genre (laser gunfire, warp drives, paradoxes) , and more concerned with the scenario's social implications. The psuedo-documentary format is a brilliant frame for such examinations, because examining humanity is what documentaries do. We do eventually arrive at flashy firefights, foreign biology and space travel tropes as well, resulting in an intringuing, unique experience. Some critics, whose names I have made a point of not remembering, have complained that the film is simply a mishmash of old and familiar sci-fi tropes, and is therefore not original. Though honestly, if amalgamations cannot be considered original, Homer's a hack, Shakespeare's a schmuck and... you can see where I'm going with this.

The film opens with a collage of interviews and handy cam footage which informs us that an alien ship arrived in the skies of Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982, and ever since, the area has been inhabitted by a populous of alien aliens (Guffaw!) referred to as the Prawns, presumably because Cthulhu-Grasshoppers takes too long to say. An insidious PMC known as Multi-National United (MNU) has seized control of the situation, and it quickly becomes apparent that one of their lackeys, a Wikus van der Merwe, is going to be our main character and he's about as likeable as a wet pair of good shoes; he is boringly average, socially awkward and naive in an way that is simutaneously obnoxious and pitiable, but you aren't going to throw him out because there's good there.
If you think this is heavy-handed, you should check out the promotional website.

Things start to shift gears when Wikus gets sprayed with an alien chemical that (spoiler alert, last chance to turn back) gradually transforms him into a Prawn. Although it may not be all that original as hooks go, the twist works excellently as a plot device because it serves as the narrative's fulcrum, providing a convincing bridge for the disparate switch from docudrama to action thriller. Wikus' metamorphosis begins with his right arm, conveniently allowing him to use the alien weaponry coveted by tribalistic african gangsters and the scheming executives of MNU. All Wikus wants to do is go home to his loving new wife who is inconveniently the daughter of MNU's evil CEO. Since MNU is on high alert and anxious to sell Wikus to the military, he has to turn to the aliens to cure his condition. Carnage and gunfights ensue; the bloodiest seen since Watchman.

Yet District 9's sensationalized gore serves a purpose beyond the superficial: It establishes an atmosphere of intense brutality, which is quite appropriate for a movie set in a politically tense, refugee environment. Documentary fans may argue that the horrors of starvation, subjugation and degradation are brutal enough, and that watching people erupt into showers meat when blasted by lightning cannons only trivializes those subtler, truer horrors, and they may have a point. It's obvious that Blomkamp opted for "totally awesome" instead of social commentary in the final sequence where we see Wikus commandeer an alien battle mech and lays waste to scores of MNU soldiers. Then again, when Wikus is forced to fire a lightning cannon at a hooded, handcuffed prawn, it provokes sorrow and revulsion as opposed to stylized admiration.

That compromise between meaningful social examination and manic spectacle best describes my feelings toward District 9. It is engaging, both emotionally and intellectually, but part of me has to wonder what would have happened if things continued on at their slower initial pace. To a certain extent, it seems like we got to watch the fused halves of two seperate movies. I suspect that a big part of this has to do with the fact that Blomkamp was working on a budget of almost nothing; a condition that, when paired with passion and vision, produces truly remarkable things.
Truth be told, I'm worried about how the inevitable sequel (please come up with something more creative than District 10), will fare with a bigger budget and more press.

Rehabilitating House

2009-09-23T14:43:00.001-07:00

House has been my favorite TV show since I started watching it in it's second season. I've since gone back and watched the first season on DVD, and it is one of the few shows on television of which I have seen every episode. Although smartest in the first three seasons, when its modern day Sherloc Doc's shock-value was still fresh, the show remains one of the sharpest things on TV, weathering both an unexpected depature and the 2007-8 writer's strike; a black maelstrom that profoundly fucked up other shows.

I cannot deny that the weekly medical mysteries have grown considerably less memorable and intriguing with each passing season, but the show soldiers on by virtue of its excellent plotting: Every season, the writers throw in a story developments or characters who complicate existing character relationships, tweaking the formula just enough to keep things interesting. Despite its callous exterior, House M.D. is at heart, a soap opera, and most of these story-arcs entail perilous romances between characters. Every once in a while, the show uses something other than sexual tension to reinvent itself however, producing some voraciously watchable story arcs. I favored the arcs featuring antagonists Michael Tritter and Vogler over the maybe romances with Cameron and Stacy. My personal favorite arc might have been the season 3 finale which saw House firing his entire team and segued into medical internship survivor.

In my humble yet paradoxically loud and insistent opinion, Season Five was the show's darkest hour. Wilson's drawn-out estrangement from House was unrealistically reconciled in a single episode, Kal Penn's sudden departure left a gaping wound in the team's dynamics, and sin of all sins, the writers pushed House' flirtatious non-relationship with Cuddy towards something approaching a legitimate romance. It's obvious that they'll wind up together in the end, but once we get there -surprise- it's the end! Or at least it'd better be. The last thing I want to see is House and Cuddy work through a season of romantic minutiae. Consequently I've come to regard the pairing as the speed-boat pulling House towards a shark jump. While it pains me to admit it, the show may already be air born.

Shore and Co. seem to be aware of this impending danger as they are taking a huge risk with this new season by having House's character explore the one area he never dared venture before: mental stability. The season premiere restored my faith in the show by managing to believably portray House's rehabilitation as a drug addict and a human being. Making a character do a one eighty like that after five years of story telling is a hell of a feat. Doing it in the space of two hours is nothing short of incredible. The premiere also introduced the clever, tremendously likable shrink Nolan and Lydia; an intriguing, alternative love interest for House, though we have been led to believe that she has already left his life forever. Given the show's maxim (Everybody Lies), I'm remaining skeptical, but I have some hope for House yet.

A Game Worth Ten Thousand Words

2009-09-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for Scribblenauts for a long time; basically since I first heard about it. For those who haven't heard, it's a DS Game where you can create whatever you want by just writing it. Need to cross a gap? Write "wings" and attach them to your character, or write "Helicopter" hop in and take off. Enemies to deal with? Sure you can summon any firearm, explosive or melee weapon that fits your fancy but that's such small, primitive thinking. Summon a Ninja, or a hoard of robot zombies, or a Cthulhu to do your bidding for you. Conjure a cloud of lightning and fry them up Storm style. Or just drop a kitchen sink on them repeatedly.

I can't remember the last time I read an advertising tag-line that seemed so appropriate.

What I have said may not have piqued your interest. You may be laughing at me now, scoffing that only nerds get excited about playing games were words are your primary weapon. I will concede that using words to exert physical change on the surrounding world is a fantasy almost every nerd has had at some point in their life, (and the basis for 9 out of 10 magick systems) but I assure you, this is a game for everybody who likes creativity. You don't need a terribly broad vocabulary to go wild. You can try to see how many puzzles you can solve using only ninjas (my count is only 5 so far, but I'm optimistic I'll hit at least 10), or explosives. Or you can see how many puzzles can be solved sans-violence. Believe me when I say this is the most creative game in a long time, and easily the most important video game, design-wise, since Braid.

The core game follows your basic "Find the star to clear the level" formula and there are a number of different themed worlds, each with eleven Action levels and eleven Puzzle levels. In the puzzle stages, the star item, here called a Starite, is invisible until you fulfill a condition, like creating an appropriate object (instruments for a band), reuniting something or somebody (gathering flowers into a basket), or performing some kind of action (knocking over a stack of bottles balanced on a table). As far as I've played, the puzzle levels tend to be much easier than the action levels, where the starite is present and awaiting retrieval from the start, but surrounded by all kinds of hazards and traps, including those which can actually destroy the Starite itself, in which case, you fail. What results is a delightfully refreshing take on action and puzzle solving in video games. If you use a crate to solve a puzzle in Scribblenauts, you have nobody to blame but your self.

The lexicon isn't perfect. Naughty stuff, like racial slurs, drugs, alcohol, and sexual material are all taboo, because this is a title intended for everybody. This is no great disappointment, but true wordsmiths will manage to find a few other holes in their playthrough. So far, the game has failed to provide me with greaves and a taser. I can understand a lack of archaic leg armor, but a taser? Really? Then again, the game shows an intimate familiarity with gaming and internet memes, so the omission might be a show of solidarity for... That Guy. Sadly, the game adheres to copyright law out of necessity, which means you won't be able to summon anybody from the eclectic bunch below.

Found on Kotaku, who found it on Tiny Cartridge. My Personal Favorites are Conan O'Brian, Tobias Funke, and Travis Touchdown.

Really, Scribblenauts has only one real flaw, but it is a doozy: All of the action in Scribblenauts is performed on the touch screen with the DS' stylus. Even this isn't so much a flaw as a stylistic choice, since most non-videogamers find touch controls to be far more intuitive and accessible than button inputs. Unfortunately, this set up also suffers from a severe lack of precision. Sometimes, like when you are trying to attach a defibrillator to a comatose creature, or glue a dingo to a baby, (these are entirely hypothetical examples mind you) the item you are fiddling with will 'go red' because it is illegally overlapping with something else. When this happens, your character, Maxwell, will occasionally attempt to trot over to wherever you are pointing, heedless of whatever harm may be in the way, because the stylus also controls his movement. Other times you may try to get him to move, like when avoiding a murderous spring-heeled Jack, and he will just stand there and pull a stupid face. The touch screen is certainly ideal for spelling words and placing or combining items in the play field, but I would have preferred a more traditional set up for movement (D-Pad to run, 'A' to Jump, B to use an item). Apparently my complaints conform to the wikipedia standard (bottom sentence of the third paragraph). How appallingly normal of me.

So in closing, if you have a DS, you should own Scribblenauts as well, awkward controls be damned. It's $30 you won't regret. If you buy it and fail to have fun with it, later this week I will post a list of winning word/item combinations on Biased Video Gamer Blog to help show you how it's done.

Still Lost Among the Dunes

2009-09-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

Let's head back to Arrakis shall we? There was very little in the way of literary analysis on the first book of Dune, mostly because I have very little to say about it beyond "this book is so cool and you should read it." To address that deficiancy, this post will analyze both the second and third books in the original dune sextology, and it will also be absolutely saturated with spoilers, so consider yourself forewarned. Last I left off, I was broaching a discussion of Children of Dune, having completely skipped over the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. This was not intentional, though frankly there isn't much to say about the second novel.

Unlike Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Batman, Dune lost some of it's rich complexity when translated to Lego.

I read Dune Messiah in the fall of last year, just a couple months after reading Dune, and it struck me as little more than an extended epilogue to the story which hand already unfolded. It didn't introduce any terribly compelling new characters or convincing threats (Sorry Scytale, you just aren't as cool as your name suggests). Herbert did introduce Ghola cloning technology to the series, but left the concept rather under-explored. That being said, the story does bring added closure to the original, and it brings it very well, beggining with the backlash to Paul's assendency and continuing on to his tragic fate.

I say Children of Dune is a proper sequel, because it runs counter to the first two books in almost every way. The energy dedicated to exploring Paul's ability to predict the future has been redistributed to his children's genetic total recall. Paul's heroic decision to die a mortal death and avert intergalactic Jihad is reconstrued as an act of selfish cowardice. It is revealed that Paul didn't even die at all when he walked off into the desert. Even though the plot twist initially excited me, (for it's hard not to get excited about characters coming back from the dead), I was it left me sad later on, because it's the sort of inorganic story telling Herbert never resorted to in his earlier novels. Admittedly, he does soften the effect of this revelation by repeatedly foreshadowing it and repeatedly stressing that Paul has become a different character, but it still feels like some sort of cheap trick.

Sadly, this is not the most preposterous plot point in Children of Dune. Characters who have been well established as intelligent and wise suddenly suffer from attacks of idiocy, only to display mind boggling insight moments later. Lady Jessica is a prime example. Even though Leto II (Paul's son and the new protagonist) makes her look like an idiot fool in conversation, she somehow mannaged to see past his elaborate feign death and trap him in the desert, even though he is presient and she is not. More messily developed characters like Alia and Duncan (or the Ghola formerly known as Hayt) spiral out of control destroying the few consistent threads of personality which had been previously established. These gaping holes in logic and continuity detract from the wonderfully density Herbert's world displayed in the first book. Even though we have lots of plots twisting around eachother and tangling together like sound trout, they never quite form a worm, or a god-emperor for that matter.

Fortunately, Herbert's philosophical musings remain poetic and potent, and conceptually he continues to engage. I resonate with the book's central message, assuming I correctly understand it to be the sentiment that people are far too eager to submit themselves to the will of heredity. At the same time the Golden Path, Leto II's infallible plan to ensure the survival of the human race, strikes me as an inherently evil concept because it is contingent upon the idea that man must submit to the rule of a single godly tyrant. Indeed, Paul deliberately avoided such a path in the first book for the same reason. Leto denounces this is cowardice, since Paul created a universe that looked for divine justice by becoming a messiah, only to deprive it of such guidence. While I'm willing to concede that Paul's suicide may not have been the best decision for his empire, Leto never provides a convincing explanation as to why tyranny is a better alternative.

In fact, the end of Children of Dune serves as a dark reflection of the original novel's conclusion; the main character storms into his enemies lair, laying waste to all resistance, and coerces the survivors into submission, though for some reason when Leto did it, I felt like evil had won. I think my primariy problem is a lack of motivation. Paul was finally attaining retribution against the Harkonens who had killed his father and brutalized the people of Arrakis, while Leto (who didn't feel human even before merging with worms) is simply killing his demented aunt. The fact that he claimed his sister for a wife and whored her out to his cousin doesn't sit well with me either.

On the pluse side, Leto is primed to be a brilliant villian in God Emperor of Dune, though I think it will be a good long while before I head back to Arrakis.

Lost Among the Dunes

2009-09-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

Despite my love for science fiction, I am not really all that well-read in the genre, especially where the classical authors are concerned. This is not due to deliberate omission as much as culture diffusion and osmotic pressure. The ideas put fourth by Asimov, Wells and Heinlein, concepts like time travel and interstellar empires, have already seeped into the cultural conscious and attained a familiarity which I cannot help but take for granted, so I feel little compulsion to read the original source material. I realize this historical indifference is the mark of a foolish young man, but I'm wise enough to be in no hurry to grow older. Fortunately, I have friends and family who are wise and insistent enough to get me to read classic sci-fi.

Such was the case with Frank Herbert's Dune, a novel I now refer to as The Lord of the Rings of science fiction. Like many off-the-cuff descriptions, my comparison serves as a point of reference more than anything else: Both works share the same staggering scale; epics which establish fictional universes whose detailed histories exert genuine gravity on readers. Yet the actual structure of Dune's mythology bears a greater resemblance to Middle-Earth than to that of Asimov's Foundation, though now that I write it, Dune might be better summed up as the middle ground between those two novels.

The most impressive thing about Dune, the thing which elevates it above Tolkien in my opinion, is that it is as dense as it is broad and deep. Yes, Herbert gives you rich detailed lore, and poems, but rather than forcing it into long chapters about walking, riding or hiking, he presents them as footnotes before each chapter so they don't become insuferable tangents which swallow the story's momentum. The first novel Dune novel feels like a complete trilogy in and of itself, as it follows young Paul Atreides journey from prince of Caladan, to rebel leader, to religious figure and emperor of the intergalactic Empirium. Over the course of that journey, Herbert delves into heady topics of ecology, religion, sociology to develop the distinctive culture of intriguing factions like the semi-nomadic, religiously fantic, worm-riding Fremen warriors and the scheming Bene Gesserit, who resemble ruler-cracking mother superiors schooled in Jedi mind tricks and yoga, mixed with a dash of dominatrix for good measure. Among these colorful factions we find unforgetable characters such as Stilgar, the wise warrior-priest cheiftan, the treacherous yet sympathetic Wellington Yueh, and my personal favorite, Gurney Halleck the silver-tongued bardic assassin. All these disparate elements blend against the amazing backdrop of the desert planet Arrakis whose unique ecology is the sole producer of the life-prolonging precience enhancing spice, Melange. Also, gaint god-worms of death.

The sci-fi concepts which guide Dune's story are as intriguing and densely presented as the story itself. Classic sci-fi tropes like laser weapons, force fields, and faster than light travel are all present and accounted for, and they are accompanied by other fantastic technology such as Ornithropters (aircrafts that fly by flapping their wings like birds) and water-recycling suits. These are mere set pieces however. The details of such technology pales in comparison to Herbert's exploration of concepts like hypnotic suggestion, evolution and presience; things which literally change the dynamic of what it means to be human. He takes a mystical approach to these concepts, much like how somebody from the eighteenth century might address cellphones, rather than a highschool science teacher trying to establish hard rules.

Herbert's books aren't any poorer for the omissions. On the contrary, they remain readable. Trying to sort through that sort of intellectual detritus in addition to navigating all the disparate philosophies and politics at work would merely exhaust readers: an important lesson I repeatedly fail to remember when working on my own fiction. Whenever the plot particulars points in a story get difficult (a character is being difficult, I forget where I'm going with something, etc.) I preoccupy myself with the grand questions of the fictional universe said story takes place in. Last week this led to wikipedia binge on quantum physics that led me to look at the universe as a perpetually splintering thread of possibility. Interestingly, I was reading Children of Dune at the time (the inspiration for this post), and I found both my thread concept, and the mind numbing confusion surrounding it reflected in Leto II's struggle with pressience and past lives. I'm still not sure if my life was imitating art or merely being fucked up by it.

Anyway, I think this is a suitable stopping point for today. I'll continue with Dune Messiah and Children of Dune next time. Expect more in the way of actual lit criticism.

Inglorious Basterdry

2009-08-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

I can't really tell if I am really a fan of Quentin Tarantino.

Mostly it's a matter of connotation. He is a cult figure and as such, his fandom has certain cult-like qualities, including a level of devotion I cannot attest to. This devotion does not necessarily constitute unquestionable love and approval of his works, but rather an intense level of interest and auxiliary knowledge. Seeing movies are merely the tip of the cult iceberg, or better yet, they are the coke bottles that fall from the sky around which the fandoms form. The bulk of the cult experience lies in learning the lore of the filmmaker and the process which creates his movies. Their inspirations, references; all the little stuff casual audiences miss. I can't claim to that level of familiarity for Tarantino, even though I have seen Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Til Dawn, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and now Inglorious Basterds as well.

Consequently, I'm not sure I can say I am fan of Tarantino even when convoluted cult implications aren't an issue. I don't want to tell you that Basterds is a bad movie, because it isn't. It is extremely entertaining and mostly enjoyable while you watch it. But somewhere between the credits and the drive home, the experience knotted and twisted in my stomach, crystallizing into a bezoar that squelched up all the joy from my watching, and reminded me of everything that annoys me about the writer-director-auteur. And yet, the film has changed on me again; there is a sick brilliance to the whiplash the movie induces. It brings crass, violent pulp to a higher level while simultaneously sinking to new lows of tremendous vileness.

To be completely fair, my biggest complaint with Inglorious Basterds is a personal gripe: The actual film did not reflect the film I saw in the commercials and wanted to see in theaters: a faster paced, less poignaint, more character driven affair. After I saw the real thing, what I wanted became much clearer to me: a Magnificent Seven or even anime styled approach to the Basterds roster, with each member of the ensemble having a distinct over-the-top personality and combat speciality that would play off the others. There were hints of that movie in the one I saw, but somewhere along the lines, the Basterds team of about ten got whittled down to three personalities: Donny 'The Bear Jew' Donnowitz (Eli Roth); who kills nazis with a baseball bat, Hugo Stiglitz; a German officer turned Nazi killing psychopath, and Aldo Raine; the loud-mouthed, scalp-collecting, Tennessean leader of the Basterds, who is brilliantly played by Brad Pitt. Simply listening to him talk is a treat, and his lines are easily the best in the movie. The rest of the Basterds are entirely forgettable.

The movie has some other good characters, but only Christopher Waltz's Hans Landa "The Jewhunter" feels like he belongs in the same story, serving as the only adversary who feels adequately evil for the Basterd's brutality. Hitler seems more like a fussy man-child than an evil tyrant, while the rest of the upper Third Reich only get cameos. While Waltz does an excellent job at making Landa look menacing, his character's chilling presence does not stem from a unique personality or style (as is the case with truly memorable villains like Anton Chigur, Sephiroth, Darth Vader and The Joker) but rather from a series of impossibly tense yet ridiculously drawn out conversations. The film's opening scene, a confrontation between Landa and a dairy farmer hiding Jews under his floor boards; is a prime example. Tarantino stretches five minutes worth of dialogue into what feels like fifteen minutes with all sorts of artsy cuts and turns of phrase that aren't so much clever (no 'Royales with Cheese' or 'was that a miracle?'-caliber chats to be had here) as they are obnoxiously passive-aggressive ("Mind if I have a glass of milk?" "Mind if I smoke my pipe?" "Mind if I ask you eighty questions to which I already know the answer?"). It is effective at cultivating suspense, but I also got so impatient waiting for the climax that I started to get bored.

The entire film, which is divided into five chapters, follows a similar dramatic arc. Rather than focusing on the exploits and personalities of the Basterds, the movie builds toward a climatic showdown at the premiere of the German propaganda film 'pride of a nation.' This subplot is centered around the revenge of Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) , a Jewish girl who escaped Landa's massacre of her family in the opening scene. Sometime after the deployment of the Basterds she has become a theater owner in Paris, and while changing the letters on the marquis one evening, she catches the eye of Schutze Fredrick Zoller; a young german war hero who just happens to be the star of the forthcoming propaganda film "A Nation's Pride." Hoping to score points with Shoshanna, Fredrick convinces propaganda minister Goebles to host the premiere at her theatre. From there, the movie details Shoshanna's and the Basterds independent plots to use the premiere as an ambush against the Nazi high command.

Both of these plots run concurrently to each other well enough, but I kept waiting for them to intersect, and for me that moment never happened. I was watching two entertaining, but very different movies. Melanie Laurent does a wonderful job of bringing real emotional force to Shoshanna's vengeful ambitions; so much so that it feels a bit too serious for the Basterd's brutal antics. On the plus side, Shoshanna may be the best female character Tarantino has ever rendered. But the emotional solemness of her revenge-turned tragic romance made it difficult for me to take the film as lightly as I'd like to. Diane Kruger also gives a noteworthy performance as Birdget Von Hammersmark, a turn-coat kraut movie-star who helps the Basterds get into the premiere, and fits right in with the film I expected; A superficial creature who speaks in slightly exaggerated German, seamlessly shifts gears between cunning, cruelty and charm, and shows up at the German premiere in a high healed leg cast.

Interestingly, the only common thread between these two different films represented by these two different women are little details reminiscent of fairy tails. Symbolic items like lost shows and glasses of milk, acts of medieval violence like bludgeoning and scalping, and ill-fated romances where both parties are beauty and beast. Yet these little subplots and details and minutiae driven dialogue produce an experience that feels thoroughly fussed about and fucked with. It is obvious that Tarantino does not want his self-proclaimed masterpiece to be summed up by a single emotion or trite moral message, but he seems so wary of such a fate that he fights against any interpretation at all save for his own. Ultimately, we are watching a mind consume itself with grandiose ambition through the lens of fiction.

In conclusion, I'm still not completely sure about how feel about Inglorious Basterds. It a holy grail for cult fans; a puzzle begging to be picked apart, argued about and reassembled endlessly. Casual audiences with a taste for blood and violence may also enjoy themselves if they can turn off their mental and emotional compasses, for they will not have the energy to navigate the maze of strange implication embedded within the narrative. If you are a casual fan of Tarantino's films, you owe it to yourself to check it out, Just don't hold it against me if you feel dirty afterwords.

Japan's Finest! Space Cowboys and Hiphop Samurai!

2009-07-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

Howdy Amigos. As promised last time, we're heading back to the Old West in space via the Far East on Earth. Our mission? To examine one of the finest anime ever produced: Cowboy Bebop. If you get tired of my palaverin' on about intergalactic cowboying, just click the links to the awesome tunes, and check out the amusing embedded video (!). If you make it all the way to the end, I have some words about the hip-hop swordplay of Samurai Champloo too. If that don't satisfy, I dunno what to tell ya, there's just no pleasing some folk.

Premise-wise, Cowboy Bebop probably sounds very similar to Firefly. In both cases you've got a crew of lovable misfits drifting around a loosely policed galaxy looking for enough work to pay the repair bills and keep food on the table. The Bebop's Crew is smaller, and they work as bounty hunters (called "Cowboys" in the series) instead of outlaws, but the real distinction between the two shows is a matter of style. While Firefly is solely a western within it's sci-fi trappings, Bebop is by turns, a Hong Kong Kung-Fu flick, a film noir, and a Jazz Odyssey.

In fact, it's the music that makes the show. Series director Shinchiro Watanabe is as renowned for awesome music as Joss Whedon is for witty dialogue, and Yoko Kanno, who might be considered the John Williams of anime, penned the score. Listening to the opening and closing themes will do your ears good and give you a feel for the general poles of the show (funky and frenetic vs. soulful melancholy) , but there is so much more to hear before you can really appreciate the incredible range of the soundtrack (and what I've linked here just tips the 'berg). Musicality is a general theme for the show, with episodes referred to as sessions and named after record titles or various pieces of music.

Meet the cast and crew of the Bebop. From left to right we've got ex-cop Jet Black, ex-triad Spike Spiegal, femme fatale Faye Valentine, crazy girl Ed, and Ein the data dog.

The eclectic nature of the music reflects on the quality of the writing. There is the eastern emphasis on the journey as opposed to the ending, but unlike so many other anime and manga, the narrative does come to a coherent and decisive conclusion. There aren't any plot holes either, at least, not in the sense of incoherence, though it does suffer from cavernous blind spots which move beyond titillation and into exasperation; a distinction I measure by the moment viewers stop thinking "I wonder what happened there..." and start wondering "Did the writers even bother?" In this case, I am referring to the "main plot" of the series that focuses on Spike's history with the criminal element and his missing lady-love Julia. What little we learn of it is compelling enough to move you along with the story, but when looking back at it you can't help feel that something significant was left unsaid. Part of the problem may be that I love the enigmatic (if shallow) main bad-ass, Vicious too much; possibly because he reminds me of another ruthless, effiminate silver-haired swordsmen.

Before bidding a fair well to space westerns for the foreseeable future, I must acknowledge that Cowboy Bebop is not the only anime to do space cowboys, and some may dispute my claim that it does them best; namely Trigun fans. I'd be lying if I tried to tell you I enjoyed Trigun as much as Bebop, but before you decide to nail me to your cosplayed crucifix cannons (officially my strangest alliteration ever), allow me to qualify my decision: Trigun is a better Western, but a worse Space Western because the space aspect of the show is restricted to just a couple of episodes. Mostly it's just Vash The Stampede wandering around a barren desert planet, shooting at folk without killing them, devouring doughnuts and shouting "Love and Peace!". In case you ever wondered who would win a shoot out between Vash and Spike, allow me to present you with the following hypothetical:

For those wondering why the Japanese have such a yen (or should I say Zen?) for Westerns, the simple answer is that they are trying to get back at John Sturges for stealing the plot of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to make The Magnificent Seven. Feeble jokes aside, our romanticization of the gunslinger parallels Japan's treatment of Samurai, and I believe it accounts for much of the cross cultural genre bending.

Interestingly enough, Shichiro Watanabe's other genre blending masterpiece is about swordsman in the Edo period; Samurai Champloo. As I mentioned earlier, Watanabe is renown for musical shows, and Champloo happens to be Hip-hop flavored, which means it's about as historically accurate as Cowboy Bebop is historically predictive. Fortunately, it's also just as entertaining, and frequently entertaining in the same ways. Once again, we've got a two guy one girl set up, (though we've ditched the dog and the kid who were included in Bebop to lighten up the show's blueszy atmosphere) and we follow the trio through a trail of odd jobs as they seek out "The Samurai who Smells of Sunflowers". Unlike Bebop, the story telling is completely rooted in the eastern school of the journey, with the plot mounting up to a final duel between the two guys that never ends up happening.

Jin, Mugen and Fuu, just chillin'

Yoko Kanno doesn't come around again, presumbly because hip hop ain't her thang, but the music continues to impress anyway, and in closing, I present you with this link to Samurai Champloo's closing theme. Til next time, See You Space Cowboy.

My Kind of Folk

2009-07-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

Even though I love the arcane trappings of magic and the raw symbolic power that pervades the fantasy genre, I am a science fiction man at heart. The reason is very simple really. While Fantasy draws its power from heritage and whimsy, Science Fiction is all about addressing change and exploring possibility. Essentially, one is nostalgic and the other is forward thinking.
So consider yourself forewarned: When Nerdmagedon commences, and battle lines are drawn to determine whether sci-fi or fantasy shall reign supreme, I will stand tall beside the Klingons, Jedi and Cylons against the elves, dragons and fairies.

Believe it or not this post was not inspired by Comicon, which I still have yet to attend. Rather, it stems from the sci-fi genre-bender binge I've been on the whole summer. I'm currently reading a tech-noire with heavy military undertones, playing a space survival horror game, and on the weekends, I get together with friends to re-watch the finest Space Western the world has to yet to see: Joss Whedon's Firefly.

Depending on who you are, that may sound like small praise or blasphemous hyperbole. The space western is still a pretty young sub-genre of science fiction, but what's there is good stuff. The earliest and most prominent example I am aware of is Star Wars, and while the work is too broad to be wholly classified as western, there is no doubt in my mind that it's lawless, frontier atmosphere is what allowed it to stand apart from Star Trek's universe, whose federation of planets seems insufferably tame and preachy by comparison. Another fine piece of fiction to work with the space cowboy concept is the anime Cowboy Bebop, which I shall discuss in detail next post.

The thing that sets Firefly above the above-mentioned series, is that it is a western first and foremost, with just a little bit of science fiction thrown in for flavor. Almost every character in the cast is based on a classic western archetype. You've got the wise old preacher, the hooker with heart of gold, the crass and crude mercenary brawler, the fancy doctor, and the confederates (Browncoats) who have turned to outlawin' following their defeat in the Civil War (The Unification). The only recurring characters who break the theme are crazy psychic girl, perky mechanic girl, and sarcastic ship pilot. Even the reavers (!), the series reoccurring bogeymen, conform to the old western stereotypes of Indians, in that they are also people, though frightening violent people who have a tendency for scalping and cannot be communicated with.

Now, I love a good western as much as the next sumbitch, but I couldn't rightly tell you that it's one of my favorite genres. By and large, there tends to be a little too much talk of land for my tastes and the folksy atmosphere, where men are supposed to be strong creatures of few words well versed in farming, firearms, and mechanics is hardly hospitable to my nerdy nature and suburban upbringing. The patriotic undertones and lack of cultural diversity also tend to bother me. Seeing how I am an average sample of Whedon's fan base, it is easy to see how he had trouble marketing this series and why Fox decided to pull the plug. Like most other people, I only discovered the show after it had been canceled, and realized that the sci-fi elements addressed all my country western anxieties.

Setting the series in a spaceship, as opposed to a town or a farm gives the series a sense of home (which is essential for the Western) without rendering it sedentary. To inject some cultural diversity into the mix, Whedon sprinkles Chinese throughout the script and refers to his personal take on the evil galactic empire as The Sino-Asian Alliance, acknowledging China and America as the two superpowers most likely to seize control over human society. The cast also has more color than typical American television, let alone a typical western, featuring two black actors, and a Brazilian as well. The real thing which translates the folksiness of Firefly into something nerds can appreciate however is the dialogue. Whedon manages to unite the witticisms of nerd culture with folksome earthiness by relying on plainspoken wit and blunt understatement instead of references to folklore and pop culture.

Interestingly, Serenity, the film intended to serve as the possible salvation/wrap up for Firefly, switches gear's from the television series' western tone to a full on Sci-fi adventure. The western influence and folksy language lingers, but the plot moves away from bank heists, cattle raids and shootouts to encoded messages, insidious viruses, and the mysterious ambitions of the nefarious alliance. Laser weapons start popping up in a world that had only been armed with traditional guns. That was actually the thing that tipped me off to the genre switch.Normally, I would link Picard at this point, but I can see the reasoning behind the toneshift. The movie was a last ditch effort to try and draw in a broader audience for the show, so it needed to be easy to market, and since people are skeptical of stories they can't fit a familiar label to, Whedon decided to give it a more traditional Sci-fi flavor.

All in all it seems like a forgivable evil since the movie is still engaging and enjoyable. If you haven't seen any of Firefly yet, I recommend you rent or buy Serenity, and if you like that, pick up the the show on DVD. I really don't know how much it will set you back, but it's the sort of show that you can watch again and again, picking up new things each time, and the episodes are fairly self-contained, making them great to share with friends.

To those Firefly fans who have not picked up the comic books, I would heartily encourage you to do that as well, regardless of how you felt about the movie. Both series (Better Days and Those Left Behind) take place before the movie and hold true to that original western tone while sewing up a few loose ends. There is nothing particularly ground-breaking in either story, but the dialogue is entertaining and the artstyle is detailed and faithful to the show. Finally, for those of you who are hungering to hear about a certain enigmatic preacher's past, word has it that a lil series called A Shepard's Tale is in the works. It is slightly worriesome that said word came mid 2007 with a projected release date of late 2008, but the announcement came from Ron Glass (with Whedon's permission), so there is still hope yet.

Dumbledore Dies

2009-07-15T03:35:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday I did the "wait out in line for the midnight opening with your friends" thing with Harry Potter and The Half-blood Prince. I really did try to think of a more tasteful title for this post but nothing else seemed to have the same punch. Normally I try to be much more respectful with regards to spoilers, but if you couldn't see it coming from book 1, you could use a glass of cold water in the face. Also, the book came out like four years ago, so I think we're well past the moratorium on this one.

Anyway, I was curious to see how this movie would turn out, as the book struck me as the weakest thread in Rowling's tapestry. As the next-to-last installment in a long-running series, it had a lot of set up to do. Consequently, the pace of the plot was very similar to a climbing roller-coaster. Normally that slow ascension fills one with a delightful anticipatory anxiety, but since I knew I would be waiting at the top of that dramatic hill for another year or few before I would actually be able to take that plunge, the climb was boring and frustrating, especially after the thrill-ride that was Order of the Phoenix, my personal favorite book in the series. Most of this lengthy setup was focused on shipping, which is actually a very important undercurrent in the Harry Potter universe. In the preceding books however, all the affections and potential pairings are buried in the adolescent anticipation of what could be. Rowling lays it all to bare in this book, and frankly it fell short of expectations.

The romantic centerpiece of the series is not actually Harry and Ginny, but Hermione and Ron, because they have provided readers with the long-running, pins and needles anticipation necessary for fans to really care about the romance. Keep in mind, caring is not the same thing as approving. I know a great many fans wanted to see Harry and Hermione together, and others still were hoping for Snape and Hermione. Nobody really seems to like Ron, and I think this book is a large reason as to why. An exorbitant amount of text is spent describing his obnoxious relationship with Lavender Brown, and after about the fifth instance it stops being cringe-some humor and just becomes cringe-some. Harry's affection for Ginny is also disappointing because of the abrupt way it manifests. Even though we might have seen it coming from The Chamber of Secrets, it's difficult to be invested in their coupling because their courtship was so brief and unremarkable. At the same time, we could see it coming so it's not surprising either.

The movies have done a better job of foreshadowing Ginny's interest in Harry, though their coupling still leaves a lot desired. All of the directors can't seem to decide whether they want Ginny to be a Shy Violet or a fire-starter (which is how she came across in the book) and Daniel Radcliffe has better chemistry with Emma Watson and Evanna Lynch (who is, as Rowling herself stated, perfect as Luna) than he does with Bonnie Wright. As I said though, Ron and Ginny are the romantic heart of the film and their sixth book courtship is much more pleasing on the silver screen. Lavender Brown is every ounce the humorous annoyance she was in the text without being completely overwhelming. Emma Watson does some brilliant acting and really manages to seem heartbroken over Rupert Grint's Ron, even though her best scenes are still opposite Radcliffe. I was also impressed with how suggestive the movie managed to make the coupling. While the books always gave me the impression that nothing beyond snogging took place in the Halls of Hogwarts, the movie tells another story. I realize this design decision was probably motivated by the success of Twilight (which is just... Well you know), but sex is part of the teenage equation nowdays and it's nice to see people acknowledging it.

Aside from all the romance, the slow pace of the book is much improved by the movie. You may recall the book opened with a the former Minister of Magic describing the horrors of Voldemort to Britain's new Prime Minister. I found this endlessly annoying, because I really wanted to see all the delicious chaos being described rather than receiving a second hand account of it. The movie indulges me, beginning with the flight of three Death Eaters who tear through London and destroy a bridge. Now that's the way you get a story going! That danger does a lot to hold the story over to its conclusion, considering the threats interspersed throughout the plot are considerably toned down in comparison to those in preceding volumes.

This is one of the slickest movie posters I have seen in a longtime. Note the reflection in the glasses.

Returning to my titular spoiler, I'd like to briefly discuss the death of Dumbledore. Even though you can see it coming a mile off, its the sort of loss that still hurts. In some ways, the inevitability of it is the worst part, because the death of a grandfatherly figure acts as a mirror for such deaths which have yet to touch our own lives. Once one recognizes this emotional mirror however, it is harder to be affected by the emotions it's lens is intended to convey, which may account for I was so callous and indifferent to the conclusion of the sixth book. Yet the movie showed me another symbolic aspect of Dumbledore's passing that I failed to grasp through the text: the grandfatherly headmaster's passing is also commentary on martyrdom.

The sequence in Voldemort's cave where Dumbledore drinks the poison potion is analogous to Socrates death, save that Harry is forced to force-feed his mentor, where as Socrates drinks his hemloc freely. Both men drink for "The Greater Good," but while Plato's ancient account emphasizes Socrates' supposedly selfless sacrifice, Harry's involvement calls attention to the selfishness of dying on your own terms. I realize that Dumbledore doesn't actually perish until Snape shoots him, but the connotations of this scene are far from accidental. First, the entire sequence takes place in a shadowed cave which is an inherently allegorical setting, and the pair must use a boat (which has a clearly stygian design in the movie) to reach the island containing the potion. Finally, the regretful nature of Dumbledore's final request "Once again I must ask too much of you, Harry" recalls the title of Plato's account of Socrate's death: Apology. In hindsight, I feel foolish that it too me this long to recognize this parallel, but it is an excellent example of just how literary Rowling's writing is. This scene invites readers to reconsider Snape's involvement with Dumbledore's death as well; an examination that is absolutely crucial for a full appreciation of the series. While it is fairly obvious that Snape is a good guy despite his apparent alliance with the Death Eaters, its hard to appreciate just how noble his actions are. Killing someone you love, even if it is there wish and they have a good reason for it, is an act which sheers the soul, quite literally in the Harry Potter universe, as is explained earlier in the film.

My chief complaint with the movie is that Harry's misguided attempt to duel Snape and avenge Dumbledore's death is thoroughly abridged. Much like Dumbledore, he teaches Harry to the end by preventing him from using Unforgivable Curses and casually brushing aside his offense to demonstrate just how much stronger Harry needs to become if he hopes to defeat Voldemort. Minor grousing aside, the movie tells a good story and tells it well. The special effects in this series always impress, the music doesn't really deviate from past scores (which is a good thing), and there are some really funny laughs to be had. 'Til Next Time.

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good!

2009-07-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

As a child of the late 80's, I grew up amidst a host of truly awesome cartoon and toy franchises; many of which are currently seeing revivals as summer blockbusters. My all time favorite was born from a blockbusters however; While other beloved franchises have been eroded by a number of disappointing sequels and lame revivals almost everything Ghostbusters is golden. Case in point: Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

I know what you gamers out there are thinking. I thought it myself when I heard a title was in the works. For those who didn't think anything because they don't play video games, don't worry, I will explain.

Video game adaptations typically fail due to a fatal flaw: corporations view videogames as mere merchandise as opposed to vehicles for story telling, and the effort required to market merchandise is much less than the effort required to craft compelling stories or gameplay. TVTropes goes into the issue in much greater detail, and any skeptics out there can be easily cured by playing pretty much any videogame based on a summer blockbuster release. Admittedly, there are lots of fine Star Wars games out there, and a couple of decent Lord of the Rings titles as well, but a handful of exceptions in a sea of licensed realeses hardly makes for a good track reccord. Games based on the Transformers movies are prime examples. Hah! you get it? Cause Optimus Prime is... *cough* moving on.

I was pleasantly surprised to find favorable reviews of Ghostbusters: The Video Game around the net, and given my fondness for the series, I decided to give it a rent from Gamefly (a service I heartily recommend by the way as it has allowed me to experience a number of titles this summer in a reasonably economic fashion). The reason this post missed deadline is because I felt compelled to keep playing the game to provide you with a thoroughly researched account of it. I can now tell you, with absolute confidence: Ghostbusters has set the standard for every video game adaptation to follow.

Not only did the developers get the original ghostbusters (Murray, Ackroid, Ramis and Hudson) to reprise their roles with excellent voice acting, Ramis and Ackroid even worked on the script for the game. Wikipedia says they 'doctored' it, but based on the quality, I'm willing to wager their contributions went way beyond simple adjustments. The script truly captures the humorous spirit of the original movies (while at the same time implementing bits and pieces from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, like a semi-domesticated Slimer). The music is also classic Ghostbusters, and I'm not just talking about the Ray Parker Jr. Son g, (though thats there too of course), but the charmingly quirky mood music as well. Hell, they even got Annie Potts to reprise her role as snarky yet lovable Janine!! The only ingredients missing are Rick Moranis' Louis Tully and Sigourney Weaver's character Dana Berret. Dana is most sorely missed, as Ilyssa Shepard, the new object of Venkman's philandering, is a boring and flat substitute.

All the same, this game is the Ghostbuster's sequel fans have been waiting for. If the third movie (now reportedly in production!) actually gets made, it should be cannonically regarded as Ghostbusters 4. The Game also fits in well with The Real Ghostbusters, which I only just realized had 147 episodes (a hell of a run for an animated kids' show!). Since the game is it set in modern day, it seems to shove Ghostbusters: Extreme out of the cannon. While this saddens me, it's the cut which makes the most sense; even though it was a decent incarnation of the franchise, at least in my book, the attitude-rich approach of Ghostbusters Extreme seemed to alienate it from the humor of its predecessors, which is where Ghostbusters: TVG truly shines.

It grasps the humor of its fore-runners through the gameplay, which is legitimately fun in its own right. Each level has a bunch of cursed artifacts and ghosts which you can scan using a PKE meter. Once you scan a ghost, a humorous entry about its nature or history is added to your Spirit Guide, and all the artifacts you scan gradually start to clutter up the firehouse as you progress through the camapaign. Even the game's Achievement System has a sense of humor. In addition to the standard "Clear this level at this difficulty!" or "kill X number of enemies!" objectives, each level has a humorous secret achievement. The funniest of these is called "Kosher" and it has you blasting the ham off a buffet table for a bar mitvah when you crash the grand ballroom at the sedgewick hotel (you remember, the original hotel from the first movie?)

Beyond that, there's the actual ghost busting, which is thoroughly enjoyable. You yourself take on the role of a rookie Ghostbuster who is referred to in game as "The Kid," "Sport" "Scooter" "Champ" and a slew of other thoroughly demeaning yet somehow endearing nicknames, and you serve as something of a guinea pig for Egan's new inventions. You've got all the classic equipment from protonpacks and neutrino wands (which you use for blasting) to nuon traps (for err, trapping) , along with some pretty slick new gear. My personal favorite is the slime-thrower, which fires positively charged slime to clog dimensional rifts, free possessed people, uncover invisible objects, and tether objects together. This last application seems to have the making for a "fun with physics game" in and of itself, as a double-ended tether that stretches its targets together has a surprising number of applications.

I have not played any of the multiplayer yet, but I intend to. And in the interest of making sure this title gets as much well-deserved publicity as possible, I will be writing an article on the multiplayer of Ghostbusters: The Video Game sometime this weekend for Biased Video Gamer Blog. So be sure to look for that in your near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend you check out the game for yourself, even you don't consider yourself a gamer. And if for some horrible reason you have not seen both ghostbusters movies, do that. Or else, to paraphrase the gangster from the in-game message machine in the Ghostbusters firehouse (most obscure reference ever), "something sudden and blunt may befall your legs." and that would be a real shame.