Just when my frustration at Firefly‘s premature cancellation was starting to abate:
Yesterday evening we watched the last episode of Veronica Mars. The series definitely went out on a very strong episode – but why did it have to go out to begin with? Okay, the answer is simple: not enough people were watching it. Don’t ask me what they were watching instead; probably some reality TV crap with barely one percent of the wit of Veronica Mars, not to mention the wonderful acting by the lead and the great supporting characters. I’ve said it before (somewhere) and I’ll say it again: the relationship between Veronica and Keith Mars is the best father-daughter relationship I’ve ever seen on TV.
Yes, there were weaker episodes, one of the banes of series that require 20+ episodes per season. Yes, season 2 was a muddled mess in terms of its overarching plot. And yes, Duncan Kane was largely a boring waste of space. But the main character was one of the funniest, strongest female characters this side of Joss Whedon’s work. And I don’t see anyone much having replaced her.
Talking of strong women: one of the games I’ve been playing lately, Mirror’s Edge, is one of the few A-list titles whose protagonist Faith is a woman – and, more unusually, the game is played from first-person perspective, so the mostly male players aren’t even invited to ogle Faith’s assets. (No Lara Croft, her.) The game takes the trendy sport Parkour as its main inspiration, but it’s much more than a gimmick – in fact, it’s perhaps the most exhilarating first-person game I’ve played. Mirror’s Edge is flawed, mainly in its humdrum plot and storytelling, but when it works, it works amazingly well. I’ll let the visuals speak for the game:
Geek affectation is annoying as hell. It’s as annoying as the person at a party who thinks that quoting Monty Python for hours, doing the voices and accents and all, counts as conversation. It’s as annoying as mistaking nostalgia for actual quality, and going on about how The Goonies deserves a sequel. It’s getting all hot and bothered about something because it’s got pirates or ninjas in it.
Or zombies. The shuffling undead are one of the hallmarks of geek affectation, as if there was something inherently fantastic about something just because it featured some walking corpses moaning forlornly for brains.
And yet, the latest book I’m reading is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. And I’m enjoying it a lot more than what I read before (some book by Bill Bryson about some English writer – hey, it was a present!). Thing is, World War Z is a much better read than it ought to be. It sounds like a cheap cash-in on one of the geek affectations du jour, even more so when you hear that it was written by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide (and, coincidentally, is Mel Brooks’ son).
WWZ takes an interesting approach: it’s written as a series of interviews with the survivors of the zombie apocalypse (hell of an apocalypse if there were survivors, if you ask me…). You’ve got a few dozen different characters telling their little part of the bigger picture: soldiers, politicians, scientists, civilians. There’s none of the expected “Will they make it?”, which means that Brooks can concentrate on effective vignettes and on providing a rich playground for our imagination.
For the largest part, the book’s vision of a world surviving, just barely, the rise and onslaught of the living dead is compelling because it is believable. There’s also the zombie genre’s staple smattering of social criticism. This is perhaps the book’s main weakness, though: when Brooks gets critical, he sometimes veers towards broad satire, at which point the narrating characters turn into stereotypes. And since the believability of the writing and its documentary style is its main asset, those sections break the fourth wall as Brooks winks at us, believing himself more witty than he is. Another, smaller weakness, is that there isn’t quite enough material for the 300+ pages – a shorter, leaner World War Z would have been a better World War Z. (That’s the big risk in catering to a specific audience (e.g. zombie geeks): veering into fan service.) Still, this is a zombie book that has bite and is surprisingly successful at gnawing into your cerebrum.
Again, this isn’t a proper blog entry so much as a heads-up for one of the more interesting game-based blogs out there. Meet Kev, a homeless, deranged Sim, and his daughter Alice:
Alice and Kev is an experiment in digital storytelling, and it’s surprisingly poignant, in addition to being funny and absurd. And it’s probably the best advertising for The Sims 3, even if that isn’t its primary purpose. Electronic Arts should be paying the guy.
For comparison, here’s one of the official trailers:
Picture courtesy of Alice and Kev by Robin Burkinshaw.
The Call of Duty games are prime examples of on-rail shooters done to perfection, with amazing production values. They’re not complex games, nor do they strive for realism: they’re the equivalent of a great 80’s action movie – Die Hard rather than some Van Damme or Seagal vehicle.
Call of Duty 4, subtitled Modern Warfare, was the first (and to date only) game in the series that didn’t take place in that most overused of scenarios, the Second World War. Instead, it tells a Tom Clancy-style story of Russian Ultra-Nationalists and, surprise, Middle Eastern terrorists. So far, so unoriginal.
What is fascinating, though, is this: in a genre that is usually about making the player feel like some super-hero with a gun and macho one-liners coming from his lips like so much testosterone-riddled drool much of the storytelling is about showing the player that he doesn’t actually have that much control over what is happening. In fact, two of the game’s most interesting scenes in a subtly subversive fashion give the player just enough control for him to realise that he’s powerless.
Consider the prologue, in which the president of a fictional Middle Eastern country is shoved into the back of a car, driven through his war-torn city, dragged in front of the apparent Big Meanie (who turns out to be a minor meanie, in fact) and shot in the head.
And you, the player, get to control the president. As far as he can be controlled: beaten and dragged by soldiers, he can barely move his head enough to glimpse scenes of loyalists being executed through the car’s windows. And whatever you do, the outcome is the same: gun pointed at your head, blam, black screen. It’s chilling and very, very effective. Clearly it’s also designed to make you hate the bad guys, but apart from this obvious aim it does throw in question the power-trip fantasy of first-person shooters.
The second scene is the one that every reviewer and most players remarked on. (If you’re planning to play the game without spoilers, DO STOP READING RIGHT NOW. In fact, STOP READING TWO PARAGRAPHS AGO! WHY ARE YOU STILL READING? IDIOT!) In it, you and your squad (platoon? team? posse? I’m afraid I don’t really know what the correct military term for “you and the guys with you” is…) have just rescued a downed pilot from the bad guys and you fly off in an army chopper – when a nuke goes off. You watch as the shockwave races towards you, crushing the helicopters behind you. There’s no way you can outrun it.
After you crash, the game gives you control of your character. He’s alive, just barely, having survived the crash. You stumble out of the wreck of the helicopter and look around at the devastation, your heart beating in your ears. In the distance you see the mushroom cloud. Obviously you don’t perceive the radiation, but you know it’s there. But you’re the player! You’re in a shooter! Surely there must be a way to make it out of there!
And then you die, perhaps of radiation, perhaps of your injuries. It doesn’t matter. You have a minute or two of stumbling around and then you die.
The game doesn’t have the ambition or the guts – or the stupidity – to end on your lack of control over the situation. Later on, as a different character, you do stop nuclear missiles from destroying half of the Eastern Seaboard (although you do that using a computer rather than an automatic weapon). And at the very end, you’re given the chance to kill the main bad guy who’s behind it all in a fairly heroic scene (although one with an interestingly bitter tinge).
Clearly Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter, not a treatiseon the powerlessness of the soldier. Clearly you want to give the player the feeling that he’s the hero. But it’s still interesting, in a game that is almost the perfect representative of its genre, that you get this subversive, and in this highly effective, streak… Sneaking it past the player that for all of his heroic fantasising, he’s not in control. Just don’t let him find out…
It’s been… way too long. Ages. What’s my excuse? Work. Too much of it.
Yes, I know – it’s a feeble excuse, but it’s the only one I’ve got. Sorry.
However, you’ve all been on my mind… or rather, the blog has. Every one or two days I’d think, “Hmm… I should write about this.” And then nothing would come of it. Okay, admittedly, it’s not as if I was at work 24/7 – but the combination of lots of things to organise (after all, I had to bring five young climate activists to the inaugural meeting of Kofi Annan’s new organisation – no pressure!) with lack of sleep doesn’t exactly make for diligent blogging. In any case, I am deeply sorry about being so silent for the longest time.
So, what sort of things did I feel like blogging about?
The EURO 08 and the woes of having high-definition digital television and the only things on are football and tennis. (You can count the grains of sand!)
The latest Hellboy collection, which I enjoyed quite a bit. And the Hellboy 2 trailers – Guilhermy goodness!
House of Leaves – postmodern horror or horrifically postmodern?
I, Robot – there are some films that aren’t even worthwhile when you can watch them for free…
Team Fortress 2 – but then, everyone’s already blogged about TF2, so I’d only out myself as perennially late.
In any case, I’ll leave you with an impression of the latter. Great fun if you need to blow off some steam. (For gamer nerds: no, that pun wasn’t intended.) Never before has carnage been such family-friendly fun!
Rumours of this blog’s demise are exaggerated and way premature. (Keith up there knows how it feels…) I’m just very busy with the move, added to which I’m off to Dubai for a couple of days, for work. If given the choice, I’d rather not go right now, since I’ve still got lots of packing to do… but I guess at least I’ll have a couple of days of warm weather, which will make for a nice change from what I can see when I look out the window right now. So, more will follow, it might just take a couple of days/weeks.
But to keep you happy for a moment, here’s a little video. Enjoy!
You’ve probably all noticed that my blog updates have become somewhat infrequent, at least compared to the beginning, where I’d hammer out an entry a day. Don’t worry, this is just a momentary slump (I hope); things are somewhat stressful at the moment, and I don’t get to watch or read as much as I’d like. Even when I do find the time, I’m usually somewhat too tired to appreciate films, series and books as much as I’d want to.
That’s where gaming comes in. I can be as tired as I want, yet I can still get some enjoyment out of Guitar Hero (where I’ve graduated to Hard mode, meaning that I’ve now got five fretting buttons to contend with!) or Splinter Cell. Or I could be “enjoying” Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
CoC: DCotE (doncha love acronyms?) is one of the creepiest games I’ve played since… well, since Thief 3 and that Holy Grail of computer game horror, the Cradle. I’m not particularly informed when it comes to H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, but for those of you who know even less, Cthulhu is this cheerful fellow:
(Any similarities to a certain crustacean Doctor are purely coincidental.)
The game has a couple of easy scares (boo! decomposing corpse!), but by and large it works with more subtle techniques: half-glimpsed horrors and whispers in the dark. Slowly going insane is as much of a threat in this game as things that go bump in the night. The game starts with the protagonist cuts his stay at an insane asylum short by hanging himself – what follows essentially is a long, drawn-out flashback – an odd way to motivate players to progress: “Just one more level and I can hang myself! Yay!” For the first two, three hours of gameplay you don’t even have any weapons, which makes for an original twist on the genre: for once, the solution to all your problems isn’t unloading a gun in some gilled horror’s face.
And the game has what is possibly the best chase sequence I’ve ever seen or played. You’re woken up in the middle of the night as a couple of shady guys (with serious throat problems, from the sound of it) try to break into your room to turn you into chowder. Your only option is to run, bolting doors behind you or blocking them with wardrobes and the like. Then, a bracing escape via the rooftops while you’re being shot at… and don’t even look down, because otherwise you’ll find out just how Jimmy Stewart felt in that classic Hitchcock movie about a guy with vertigo. I think it was called… “The Man Who Was Afraid of Heights”.
Many gamers are looking for one semi-mythic, intangible quality in games: immersion. It’s basically the ineffable property of making you forget that you’re sitting in front of a computer screen or TV, grasping a gamepad or a mouse, and feel that you’re really there. But, let’s face it, even with the most immersive games you never feel like you’re a mute MIT graduate saving the world with a gun in one hand and a crowbar in the other, or a cyber-ninja special operative infiltrating terrorist strongholds or a Persian prince able to run along steep walls and turn back time. There are worlds between playing FIFA 08 and actually kicking a football – there’s little to no comparison between pressing X or O and propelling a leather ball towards the enemy goal with your foot. Possibly the only game that offers near-absolute immersion is computerised chess, because as if you’re, like, really playing chess!
Okay, enough sarcasm – what I’m getting at is this: there are few games that make you believe you’re really doing what your on-screen avatar is doing. Fair enough, really; there are limits to how much I’d want to believe I’m being shot at by alien armies while killer zombies are trying to chew my frontal lobe. And I definitely don’t want to believe I’m actually playing football at Wembley Stadium.
There is a game (or several games, by now) that gives you a fairly convincing illusion that you’re actually doing the thing you’re playing, and that game is called Guitar Hero. I’ve had it for a while, but I’ve only recently started to play it again. And it’s great fun. Looked at objectively, it should be a humiliating experience: you stand there holding a plastic toy shaped like a Gibson guitar, pressing colour buttons and strumming a white bar in sync with popular rock songs. You’re as close to rock stardom as Third French Lord in an amateur production of Henry V is from saying, “And I would like to thank the Academy…”
But, hell, if it isn’t fun… And it does a great job of making you feel like you’re playing complex solos, totally rocking the place, dude! The game mainly works because the rock songs used make for surprisingly good videogame levels. So far, I’ve only made it to the second of four difficulty levels with any success – I’m only using four of the five fret buttons, which means that my hands are in for some pretty bad strain. But the choice of songs is almost perfect: Guitar Hero has everything from ’70s glam rock to ’80s cheese rock (is that a term? it should be!) to 21st century alternative rock. And since I don’t really listen to the radio, it’s this game that has introduced me to the following eminently cool song:
However, there’s a further turn of the screw to my geek joy. I’m very much an old-school gamer – I played games on machines that are practically Etch-a-Sketches compared to a five-year old mobile phone. My first slice of nerd heaven was a Commodore 64, a name that still brings on a hush of awe in the right crowd. The C-64 has been defunct for decades, yet there are insane people still working with them… and this is where I don’t care just how nerdy and geeky I sound, but the following is just distilled nostalgic coolness:
Yesterday evening the internet conspired to conspire against me. Hotmail didn’t work, nor did WordPress. I wanted to write and post an update, knowing that the huddled masses were waiting for a few well-placed words of wisdom on movies or video games or something equally relevant to our daily lives. But no – technology decided that it’s Lent, so perhaps a techno-fast was in order.
Anyway, it’s working again now. Aren’t you all relieved? I know I am.
So, what have I been up to? Not much in terms of movies and TV. But I’ve started playing Bioshock, one of the best-reviewed titles of 2007. Can’t say I’ve played much of it so far, but I’m definitely intrigued by its thematic ambitiousness and its art deco aesthetics. And it’s got one of the best starting sequences I’ve ever played. More on Bioshock is likely to follow, but for now, enjoy this video clip:
Well, for once I won’t write about last night’s episode of Lost (titled “Catch-22”). Why? Because it wasn’t very interesting – but neither was it so horrible that I have to share my eye-gouging terror with the world (and the Keira Knightley fans who may want to eviscerate me after yesterday’s entry… Just kidding!).
So, instead let me regale you with my current PC gaming choices: Colin McRae DIRT (which I’ve mentioned here before) and Thief: Deadly Shadows. The latter is a game that I originally played when it came out, but now, two computers and three videocards later, it runs much, much smoother than it ever did. However, the game bears sad witness to who I really am: someone who gets a kick out of skulking in the shadows, waiting for people to pass, and then hit them over the head with a blackjack and rob them blind.
Yup, that’s me. I prefer crouching in the darkness and waiting, and then knocking out my enemies. With almost any shooter game, if I have the option to put my opponents to sleep, that’s what I’ll do. There are few things as satisfying in a game as a totally non-lethal headshot with a tranquiliser dart and then dragging the motionless body behind a wall or some rocks… and then waiting for the guy’s buddy to turn up, looking for his mate – and do it all over again.
Now, as far as DIRT is concerned… I’m not bad at it. Not totally bad, at least. But sometimes… well, sometimes my driving looks pretty much like this – and (moving) pictures say a lot more than words in this case:
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 