Games

Habemus PS3…

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… and a stomach bug brought home from Egypt. All in glorious HD.

So why have I, a stalwart PC gamer (with a PS2 obtained originally for entirely academic purposes, I swear!), got myself one of those newfangled PS3 Slims? Two reasons, really: 1) Blu-rays and 2) The Last Guardian. Obviously I had more reasons than that, but they’re the main ones.

1) When we originally got digital TV, I was told that our connection was fast enough for HD channels. And yes, it was pretty glorious (in a nerdy way) to be able to record and watch both volumes of Kill Bill in high-def. Even boring old football (that’s “soccer” for y’all yanks out there) just popped off the screen in a way that made it watchable. For five minutes. At most. But you could see every blade of grass, and every pore on people’s faces! (Makes you feel all Walt Whitmanesque…)

But then our digital connection was downgraded. Why? They couldn’t tell; in fact, they were pretty mystified why I’d been told to begin with that the connection was fast enough. Guess I imagined all those red pixels in Kill Bill…

In any case, yesterday we watched our first complete Blu-ray disk, Sunshine. To paraphrase another brainy sci-fi flick, “My god, it is full of details.” While I still have problems with the film’s ending, this visually stunning film becomes doubly so in HD. Almost makes you want to dive into the sun yourself… in a good way.

(If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of DVD vs. Blu-ray, check out this YouTube video. Make sure to watch it in HQ though.)

2) This one is a bit more esoteric, perhaps. Two of my favourite games on the PS2 are called ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, and they may just be the main reasons why I got the PS2 to begin with. I was writing a paper on games as art (Et tu, Roger?), and both of these seemed to fit the bill, combining subtle storytelling, beautiful art direction and gameplay in ways that few other games have managed. The developer’s new project is called The Last Colossus, and the trailers definitely have left me more than curious:

Games and art – no Roger Ebert, though

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Don’t worry – I’m not going to write another boring essay on whether games can be art. Instead I wanted to leave you with two videos; I’ll be away on holiday for a week, with no internet access or indeed computers. So, to make sure you don’t get completely bored, here’s a plug for a new adventure game called Machinarium. I don’t know much about the game, but the art direction is absolutely gorgeous. Check out the trailer:

Also worth having a look at are the developer Amanita Design’s earlier games, Samorost and the creatively named Samorost 2, both playable online.

Samorost

Samorost 2 (demo version)

Enjoy, and see you next week!

Psychotic dentists, mutated lungfish and a turtle named Mr. Pokeylope

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You may already have gathered this, but in case you haven’t I have a confession to make. It’s one of my dirty little secrets.

I re-read books. And not only that: I also re-watch films. And, horror of horrors, I re-play games. Old games that have fewer pixels than Dick Cheney has had ethical thoughts. Games that require an hour or two of fiddling with Windows, downloading fan patches and editing game code in order to work on a 21st century operating system.

Of course I don’t replay any and every game I’ve ever played. Your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter is unlikely to get much of a repeat performance with me, unless it’s got that certain je ne sais quoi and is called Half-Life 2, I guess. (Or No One Lives Forever, or Call of Duty 2. For some reason, though, I didn’t even properly finish Doom 3 once.) Just like the films and books I enjoy more than once, some games are so good at telling a story and pulling you into their world, whether this is because of the gameplay or the writing, that I can’t resist revisiting them.

Psychonauts is definitely one of those games. It’s one of the most inventive, best written video games I know, and funny to boot. It’s also one of those rare cases where the gameplay itself is fun but not all that special – but once you combine it with everything else, the game becomes that oldest of chestnuts: more than the sum of its parts.

It’s the sheer exuberant imagination of the minds the game visualises: the paranoid delusions of the Milkman Conspiracy (and its wonderfully off-the-wall G-Men), the monster-movie inspired Lungfishopolis, the many other minds that form the basis for the game’s level. And the often inspired voice work is still among the most perfect in the videogame industry.

Differently from many of the other classic games I replay (or hope to, if I ever find the time), Psychonauts is still available (there’s no need to get it for lots of dough on eBay), namely on Steam. I don’t often do such blatant plugs on my blog, but this game is worth it.

Et In Blogosphere Ego

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Yup, I’m back. You may not have known that I was gone… but I was. Two weeks of holidays, baby, and sorely needed ones as well.

What’s happened in the meantime? Well… I saw and enjoyed a play by Beckett. In spite of a major in English Literature, I always felt that Beckett’s plays were too long by half – and I still think so. Yes, the length (and resulting tedium) are part of the point, but I’ve always prefered his short plays to Endgame, or Waiting for Godot for that matter. What can make the latter much more enjoyable, though? Good actors, or to be more precise, Magneto and Professor X. Or Jean-Luc Picard and Gandalf. Those two godfathers of the English stage made the play more than worthwhile.

Still, though, too long by 'alf!

Less enjoyable, though, was the current London production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Yes, I compound my iconoclasm as a Beckett-disliking EngLit major by prefering the derivative Stoppard to the originator. Take that, SDH! Arcadia is one of my favourite plays, a wonderful blend of wit, intellect and heart. I fell in love with the play when I saw a fantastic amateur production done by a German student drama group.

So, with a play like this and a professional cast and crew, what could go wrong?

Well, mainly one thing: whether it’s the director’s fault or the actors’, they got the one central relationship of the play – between Thomasina, precocious 19th century teenage genious and Septimus, her tutor – wrong with a spectacularly wrong-headed interpretation of Thomasina (and a very mediocre Septimus). As a result, the production didn’t even begin to have the heart it needs to balance its cerebral qualities. If there is no ongoing flirtation and attraction between the two, one that Septimus is hardly aware of, then the final scene between them falls flat.

And fall flat it did. Having taught the play, I was constantly aware of what it could be and what the production failed to make of it. It had some strengths, mainly in the present-day comedy of academia and in a fairly strong Bernard Nightingale. (Oh, I wish though that I’d been around for the play’s original production, with actors such as Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.) But without the heart, Arcadia is rendered flat and unengaging, rayless and pathless.

Okay, that’s enough for now. One thing, though, before I’m off: thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun, a computer game blog, I stumbled upon this story which has nothing to do with computer games and everything with sweetness and sadness and John Hughes. Well worth reading, unless anything even approaching sentimentality makes you come out in a rash.

I like strong women

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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.

Veronica & Co.

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 gratification… oh, and braaaaains!

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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.

Digital poignancy – the lives of the homeless (now in Simlish!)

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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:

Down and out in Sim City

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.

Out of control, and liking it

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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 treatise on 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…

Fruit flies like a banana

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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!

Not dead yet!

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Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones!

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!