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Overclocked: Race to the Bottom

2011-06-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another installment of Overclocked, in which I, your humble blogger, think too hard about things for your amusement.

Today I'd like to talk about the direction Pop Culture is taking. Without getting into too much detail, I work in a setting where I'm frequently subjected to radio stations that play whatever crap is currently most popular. Typically, this boils down to the same dozen or so songs repeated six or seven times each during the course of a day.

In retrospect, I can say I took some perverse amusement watching Rihanna, Britney Spears and Katy Perry racing to the bottom of the cultural barrel in the following timeline:

Rihanna releases Rude Boy, a song about rough sex. No euphemism either, though it's explicitness is muted (I like it when you pull my hair/I like it when you touch me there)

Britney Spears, not to be outdone, releases 3, a song about threesomes. Again, this is not veiled with innuendo. The song is explicit and obvious about what's going on.

Rihanna, affronted by this tired, played out performers' attempt to upstage her on the brazen promiscuity front, releases S&M, a song that features the lyrics "Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me."

And, as if to make sure nobody should doubt her cred, she takes these two songs and goes on a tour that features Chris Brown.

Katy Perry, who must have been watching this scuffle with great amusement, trumps all of them, then releases "Extraterrestrial," a song about something that rhymes with pentacle grape, and is again not hiding behind euphemism. It features the lines "You're an alien/you're just too far in/it's supernatural" and a male voice saying "I'm 'a disrobe you/then I'm 'a probe you/ I abducted you/ so I tell you what to do/ I tell you what to do."

Rihanna seems to have taken her defeat in stride, and is taking the "I never wanted to win in the first place" attitude. I say that because her latest song, Man Down, sounds an awful lot like the work of a woman who is trying to disown the reputation for writing two songs about enjoying getting roughed up in the bedroom, and then going on tour to sing the songs with an ex boyfriend who beat her up.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the song has all the trappings of attempting to be deep, without actually being deep.

Man Down is, at it's core, a ripoff of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody that is flavored with, and I'm completely serious here, The Little Drummer Boy.

No, seriously. The refrain literally goes:

Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Man down.

The basic gist of the song is a woman telling her mother that she killed a man, in public, over a minor disagreement and feels really bad about being having to hide from the law.

Which is where I point out that at least Freddy Mercury's take on this theme was that he'd done it, and would have to face some consequences.

One of the bars in the song that sees a lot of repetition is:

I didn't mean to hurt him
Could've been somebody's son
and I took his heart when
I pulled out that gun

So... if you didn't mean to hurt him, maybe you shouldn't have pulled a gun on him. Just sayin'.

I know, I know. Hindsight and all that.

Also, what is this "could've been somebody's son" nonsense? Every man is somebody's son. It's not like he sprang from the ground fully grown and ready to disagree with Rihanna about a subject she was touchy enough to kill over.

Just because he's made up doesn't mean that your narrative doesn't have to make sense.

Then again, perhaps I expect to much, because another line that sees a lot of repetition is this:

Mama, I just shot a man down
In central station
In front of a big old crowd

So maybe if she's dumb enough to shoot a man dead in front of a crowd of people, maybe we can't assume she's smart enough to know where babies come from. I guess there's some continuity there.

Speaking of repetition, there's a whole lot of that going on. The song lyrics read like an essay by a high school student who can't quite figure out how to fill up a hundred words, so she starts repeating herself. But she repeats herself inartfully, with bars like:

Look, I never thought I'd do it
Never thought I'd do it
Never thought I'd do it, oh gosh
What ever happened to me
Ever happened to me, ever happened to me
Why did I pull the trigger
Pull the trigger, pull the trigger, boom
And end a (racial epithet redacted) end a (racial epithet redacted) life so soon
When me pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull it 'pon you
Somebody tell me what I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do

Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Me say wah man down (A weh me say)
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
When me went downtown

'Cause now I am a criminal, criminal, criminal
Oh lord have mercy now I am a criminal

So, is she a criminal? Because she's being so damn coy about it that I can't tell.

Lyrically, the song is obviously a train wreck, but it does provide some insight into the pop culture mindset. You see, most people working in pop culture as entertainers; singers, actors and the like; tend to be very high on gun control (among other things). When you write songs, you write songs you think people will connect with. You strive to achieve universal understanding.

If you're writing this song, you're idea of the universal experience is that if you have a "simple altercation" (as the lyric in the song describes it) and you have a gun, you will end up shooting somebody. Either you believe this, or you believe it will ring true with a majority of your fans. Art is truth, even bad art.

Seen in this light, it's no wonder Hollywood types want to clamp down on gun ownership. If you think that most people can identify with a mindset that would take an argument and resolve it with a hail of gunfire if only you had the weapons available, then naturally you think that human beings are too dangerous to be trusted with weapons.

I don't know how the song would have played out if Rihanna's character hadn't owned a gun. Presumably she would have reasoned with him, since the volatile addition of a firearm clearly destroyed her ability to foresee consequences for bad behavior.

Or maybe she would have just pushed him in front of a train, but that wouldn't have been a cautionary tale, since nobody thinks we should ban trains. (Some people want them to be privately run, but despite what you might have heard that's not the same thing.)

Most likely, though, she just never would have written the song at all.

Which is probably the best argument for disarmament that I can think of.

Late to the Party Reviews: Borderlands

2011-03-30T03:43:00.000-07:00

So apparently I have a thing for mercenaries.

My favorite web-comic is Schlock Mercenary; my two favorite TV shows (The A Team and Firefly) are about mercenaries; and almost every video game I’ve ever played the hell out of has featured mercenaries.

Like Mercenaries 2, for example. I played through that game voraciously, going so far as to find every hidden tool box twice (one at the end of my first playthrough, and then again at the beginning of my second playthrough).

Recently I finished up the plain vanilla, unexpanded edition of Borderlands. I completed the main story, in search of buried treasure, and every single side quest available. Even the arena battles, which were gobs of fun playing after beating the game, as I had leveled up well beyond the requirement for those missions, and I simply dominated the arenas.

I’m not sure why the mercenary theme works for me so well. I suspect it probably has to do with being a way to incorporate an arcade mentality into a story based game. Arcade games are all about blowing things up for points. That’s basically what a mercenary does, except his points are hard currency.

But enough about my pathologies. We’re here to review a year old game, gosh darnit, and that’s what we’re going to do!

Borderlands is a First Person Shooter with RPG trappings. Specifically, MMORPG trappings. The world is wide open, you get quests from people with giant exclamation points over their heads, and most of those quests involve killing quantity X of mob Y. The game even features multiplayer to encourage partying up with other players, but I don’t care about that so I won’t be writing about it. Suffice it to say that it’s there if you want it, and my understanding is that it is functional.

There is a story to Borderlands, but it serves little purpose than to keep you moving through various areas of the world, killing progressively more difficult mobs. The story has something to do with an ancient alien vault that allegedly contains vast wealth. Naturally, your character wants it. Because treasure is money, and mercenaries like money.

There are four characters to choose from representing different classes: There’s the Soldier (aka The Mario), the Siren (a rogue), the Hunter (a hunter) and Brick (the tank.) Each character has his or her own special ability. The Soldier can throw down an automated turret that provides suppressing fire and cover. The Siren can “phase walk” which is a fancy way of saying she can become invisible and sneak behind her enemies. The Hunter has a familiar that can be deployed to kill enemies. Finally, Brick can go into a berserk mode where he regains health and can punch anything to death.

I played as Brick, because Brick was the closest I could come to playing as Jayne Cobb, and I think a game featuring Jayne Cobb as a main character would be smashing. Literally.

Each of these abilities can be buffed and upgraded with skill points as the character levels up, which is another RPG trope that found its way into the land of FPS’s.

The main point of the game, though, is loot. There is a lot of loot in this game. It’s like Diablo but with FPS controls. You kill a mob, it drops loot. Even if it’s an alien coyote, it drops loot. Even if you kick a pile of alien coyote poop, it drops loot. (The in-game explanation is that the alien coyotes are indiscriminate about what they eat, and because the environment is so harsh they can eat things like weapons and money without suffering ill effects, aside from gunshot wounds from the loot-happy merc that really wants a purple healing shield.)

Loot is color coded by rarity, but not necessarily by quality. I finished the game using largely green and white weapons, which are the most common. Playing the game “right” would require me to use blue or purple weapons, but none of the blue or purple weapons I found had the stats I wanted (High accuracy, high damage, moderate rate of fire and I don’t care about reload speed.) Anyway, when you play as Brick, weapons matter less than how you spend your skill points. Why? Because Brick’s fists can be the most effective weapons in the game.

And I can say that honestly and literally. I carried a pack of alien weapons, rocket launchers of various types, and hard-hitting sniper rifles into the final boss battle with the critter I like to call the ginormous fanged space weegina. (Whether that design was deliberate or not, I think folks at Gearbox have some issues with the lady-types) How did I beat it? I ran up to it and kept punching it until it fell on me and crashed the game.

Clearly, I was playing it wrong. I reloaded my save file and beat the boss “right” using a combination of rockets, machine gun fire and grenades, and I defeated the boss again, but without the crash.

There are two things I have to say about my overall impressions of this game: 1) It was well worth the $30 I paid for it and 2) I have no plans to trade it in.

I plan to revisit the Borderlands someday, when there isn’t so much going on and I feel like investing a lot of hours into another character (or more likely I’ll just play Brick again.) For now it will occupy a space on my shelf I’ve dedicated to games I plan to replay eventually, next to Bioshock and Batman Arkham Asylum.

Lone is an aesthetic choice

2011-03-26T03:40:00.000-07:00

I’m back! Sort of. Well, not really at all. We’ve had an unannounced format change here at Free Toy Inside. I’m no longer updating every week on Wednesdays. I’m now updating whenever I have something interesting to talk about.

Because my life was stressful enough without tacking on a superfluous weekly deadline on top of everything else. It’s not like you’re paying me to not read this (do I look like the New York Times to you?).

Today, though, I’d like to talk to a topic that’s been on my mind and in my wifely conversations of late: The subject of introversion and introverts.

You see, I am an introvert. And I mean that. In my experience, most people who self-identify as introverts are not actual introverts. They are in reality shy, or socially inept. This is the equivalent of calling yourself a gay man because you have been rejected by a lot of women. Just because you’re bad at being a heterosexual doesn’t mean you’re actually a homosexual. And just because you’re bad at social situations doesn’t mean you get to call yourself an introvert.

This isn’t to say that introverts aren’t bad at social interactions. For my part I happen to be pretty bad at them. I read body language about as well as a cockroach reads Braille: I know something is there, because there are all these bumps in my way, but if you ask me to make sense of it I’d just as soon go around and avoid it altogether.

But that doesn’t make me an introvert. My wife is an introvert too, and she’s very good at relating to other people. This is why I tend to let her do most of the talking at parties, while I go play with the kids. (Thanks dear!)

Furthermore, I’ve know plenty of extroverts who love social situations but just aren’t very good at negotiating them. They love parties, and being around people, but they have a hard time talking to people they don’t already know or getting invited anywhere.

So introversion has nothing to do with social acumen, and it’s not synonymous with being shy. Introversion is a predisposition for solitude. If given the choice between going out drinking with friends or staying at home with a bag of microwave popcorn and a book, the introvert will choose the book. Every time. We are not alone or lonely. We are Lone, like BatManuel.

I don’t fault people for misunderstanding this. Our society and culture are dominated by extroverts. A movie or TV show featuring the person choosing to stay home and read instead of a raucous night on the town is invariably shown to be a broken or damaged person. Someone who needs to be extracted from some hypothetical shell to become the beautiful, fun-loving person that everyone supposedly wants to be. The extrovert naturally wants to help make this happen, because they don’t see how anyone could possibly be happy reading on a Saturday night when they could be out reenacting the movie Go.

This is why a lot of people who self-identify as introverts are not actually introverts. They want someone to pull them out of their shells. They want to take off their glasses and become Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That. They are, in reality, inept extroverts using the term “introvert” as a code for “somebody come buy me a little red dress and take me to a party,” because they know other extroverts will want to “fix” the introvert.

Well I’m here to tell you that I don’t want to be “fixed,” because I’m not broken. I don’t want to go out to a bar with you, but don’t take it personal. I don’t want to go with anybody. Why? Because it’s exhausting.

The fundamental difference between an introvert and an extrovert is where they draw their mental energy. If you get jazzed up from being out and about with people, doing things with people, and having conversations with people, or if you feel tired, restless, or uncomfortable being alone with your own thoughts, then guess what: You get your energy from other people, and you are an extrovert. If you leave a social situation feeling drained or exhausted, or if you feel energized or refreshed staying home and doing things that allow you to plumb your own thoughts, then you get your energy from within and you are an introvert. It’s really simple.

It can be difficult being an actual introvert. By its nature, society is a social construct. It is a loose organization of people, bound together for safety and convenience. As such, interpersonal interactions are a requirement. To the extrovert, that’s a feature, not a bug. But to the introvert it’s a chore and a half.

Like any chore, a person looks to doing as little of it as possible. After all, nobody goes through their cupboards looking for glasses to spit in so they can wash extra dishes. So, too, the introvert likes to avoid extraneous conversation.

Small talk is often the first to go, as it is exceptionally difficult for the introvert and, from his perspective, a waste of energy. Why would you talk to someone if you didn’t have something to say? You might as well move all of your furniture, then move it back exactly where it was. At least then you’d get some exercise out of it.

But since the extrovert cannot understand this sentiment; any more than the introvert can understand why the extrovert wants to make small talk; the introvert comes across as snooty.

“What? You’re too good to talk to me?” Says the extrovert.

“Who are you? Why are you talking to me?” Replies the introvert.

This can limit the career options of introverts, because a fair amount of glad-handing and schmoozing is required to obtain and keep a job. Even in stereotypically antisocial professions like engineering, there’s always someone in the organization who will try to boost morale by inviting everyone to a party, and if you don’t go you look bad. (Again the extrovert asks: “Are you too good to hang out with us?”). Fortunately it’s fairly simple, if not exactly easy, to fake extroversion. You smile, you let people talk about themselves and nod or laugh at appropriate times, pretend to care about professional sports, that sort of thing. I don’t recommend index cards with useful phrases on them, but if that will help you out, then go for it. Use the small ones, and write big. You don’t want to have to switch to reading glasses during a conversation. And when in doubt, if you live in New England, ask them what they think of someone named “Bellicheck” and agree with them vehemently. I don’t know who he is, but a lot of people seem to care about him.

Oh, and for the love of G-d don’t give anyone your honest opinion about anything. I actually lost out on a job interview once because I admitted that I prefer the coolness of fall to the heat of summer. True story.

Once you’ve made your appearance and stayed the requisite time, it’s time to make your escape. In this digital age, bailing from a social situation has never been easier. Simply set your phone’s alarm for an unusual time (12 after the hour, or 26 minutes to the hour) and pretend you’ve gotten an urgent text message or phone call that needs attending to. Resist the urge to elaborate: liars usually talk too much, and people know it. Just say something about how sorry you are, but you have to leave. Then get your coat and get the heck out of Dodge. Then go home and get back to that book you were trying to read. You’ll probably want to go to bed early. I know I always do.

I Dig It

2010-10-21T02:21:00.000-07:00

So, I’ve been playing Minecraft.

That’s one of those statements that require elaboration. Like “So, I got married” or “So, I spent the weekend fighting ninjas.” Sprung without elaboration or background, it is a statement that elicits a frown and a reply like “You’re doing what, now?”

The easiest place to start would be to tell you that Minecraft is a game, but that would be inaccurate. Minecraft is not a game in the classic sense. There’s no victory condition, very little penalty for failure, and no objective means of tallying up any sort of score or progress. So it’s a game in the sense that World of Warcraft is a game, only much less so (WoW has levels, after all.) A more apt comparison would be Dwarf Fortress, but if you haven’t heard of Minecraft chances are good you haven’t heard of Dwarf Fortress either so that comparison is largely useless.

An even more apt comparison would be Second Life, except that A) I don’t wish to insult Minecraft or its audience and B) as near as I can tell there is no way to craft an animated barrage of floating penises.

Minecraft is largely the work of one man, known as Notch to the web. Notch lives in Sweden and had a dream. His dream, and I’m only extrapolating from what I know of his work here, was to create an expansive world in which players can create almost anything they can conceive of with an intuitive set of in-system tools, which can be downloaded in less than one minute.

He also had a dream to get paid while he was developing it. So he had the brilliant idea to allow users to preorder the game in exchange for unfettered access to the Alpha releases of the game. At last count, he had something like 30,000 pre-orders. At ten euros (that’s about $14 in real money*) a pop. So this dude has raked in over a quarter of a million dollars for something that hasn’t even hit Beta yet.

The truly wondrous thing is that, if Minecraft never makes it to release; or even Beta; it’s still a steal at twice the price.

When you first load into Minecraft, it generates the world you’ll be playing with. From scratch. So your experience in Minecraft’s expansive multiverse will be similar but never the same as anyone else’s experience. Sure, there will be mining and crafting, and you’ll probably encounter trees and the occasional pig or cow, but the world will be unique.

Minecraft doesn’t really have an objective, because it’s not really a game. The closest thing there is to an objective is to survive the night. See, at any difficulty level above the lowest (“Peaceful”) the night is when the monsters come out. There are spiders, skeletal archers, and exploding zombies. And they’re all trying to kill you. You’re only defense is the ability to dig holes, and use whatever you dig out of the holes to make walls and other items.

That’s where the mining comes in. You dig a lot in Minecraft. You can dig in dirt, or in sand. You can even dig in rock, but to do that effectively you’ll need tools. And that’s where the Craft part comes in. Your inventory screen has a section for combining items into four slots in a two by two grid. This is mostly useless, but you can use it to make a workbench, which has a three by three grid and is the most useful thing in the game. With the workbench you can built tools (like shovels, picks and axes) weapons (swords, bows and arrows) or any number of other things (armor, boxes, bowls, carts, ladders, etc, etc, etc.) With the tools, you can get more and better materials with which to make more and better tools, weapons or miscellany.

The craft system is simple and elegant. Using the materials at your disposal, draw what you’re trying to make on the grid. If you’re good at pixel art; or even if you’re just really lucky; the item you’ve crafted will appear in the output window and can be added to your inventory. Some items can be crafted from different materials, and there’s no penalty for experimentation aside from the fact that night may fall while you’re trying to figure out how to use cow hide to make a pair of boots and an exploding zombie might sneak up on you.

To support this level of freedom, the graphics took one for the team. The entire world is made of cubes that are a meter on a side and painted with some fairly low resolution textures. Anything not vegetable or mineral is made of smaller cubes, but not very many (your own character model, which you can view in the inventory screen and can hit a function key to view in the world, appears to be made of fewer than a dozen polygons total). This has a way of adding to the charm, though, as it evokes the old Build Engine days, only without the ugly sprite based populace and casual misogyny.

Needless to say, this isn’t a game for graphics whores.

Survival is quite easy. All you need are walls surrounding you, and a ceiling above you if the walls aren’t tall enough. You can do this in any way you want. The easiest is to dig into the side of a mountain, hollow it out and set up shop there (don’t forget to build a door). But you can build a castle from scratch if the spirit moves you. The level of elaboration and opulence for your palace is limited only by the amount of time you’re willing to put into gathering materials to make it.

Minecraft is, at its core, about exploration. Because the world is procedurally generated every time you start a new world, new nooks and crannies are never in short supply. You can pick a direction and go in it almost without limit, but the real exploration comes from underground. Delve deeply and greedily, and you’ll find caverns, underground lakes and rivers, lava flows and the occasional skeleton archer, zombie or spider.

I haven’t encountered any Balrogs yet, but when I do you’ll know, because the outburst of glee will be audible from Mars.

There is also a multiplayer mode, where you can participate in the kinds of communities that sprout organically when systems like this are put in place to support them. I haven’t tried the multiplayer yet, but I’ve heard it works well except for the fact that there are no monsters at night, but that is, according to the developer, coming soon. Remember, this is only an alpha build.

I could go on about Minecraft, but the more I say the more secrets I ruin. Figuring out how to make items without help is one of the great things about Minecraft. If you have ten euros to spend, I can’t recommend Minecraft highly enough. You’ll get a great experience, and support the quintessential indie developer.

Plus, if you do it now, you’ll get to tell everyone that you got into Minecraft before it got all mainstream and popular. Remember, the game is only in Alpha now. By release, it could be a collectible card game.

*I keed! I keed!

Flying Time

2010-10-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

You probably didn’t notice last week I missed a post. I have both a good excuse and a good reason.

The excuse is that I had surgery on Tuesday, which rendered me temporarily unable to lift my laptop and therefore unable to do any computer stuff that required a keyboard.

The reason, however, is that my wife and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary last week. So please forgive me if I get a little maudlin and introspective for today.

Eight years ago, I had it all. I had a very lucrative engineering position doing work I found enjoyable with a boss that went out of his way to shield me from the Dilbert Zone meetings and falderal that keeps engineers from doing anything useful in a given week. I had a good paycheck, no debt (I paid my student loans and car loans off early), an obscenely cheap apartment, and culinary tastes that trended toward Kraft macaroni and meatloaf. That meant I had a lot of disposable income to throw around, and I did. I accumulated action figures, video games, and indulged in high-barrier-to-entry hobbies like playing the banjo, target shooting and paintballing.

With my obscenely cheap apartment, I had no need of roommates, so I didn’t have to clean unless the mess made me angry. Which is how I found out why they called it spring cleaning. If you’re only going to vacuum once a year, do it when the weather’s warm enough to open the windows.

My weekend evenings consisted of watching DVDs of movies on a large television while eating chicken wings with homemade sauce (which I will pit against any restaurant that claims to serve “buffalo wings” that is not located within twenty miles of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo.).

I was living the dream. Why wasn’t I happy?

Seven years ago, I found out why. Thanks to the power of the internet , I met a lovely young woman who knew all about Ents and loved the movie UHF. She made me the happiest I’d even been in my life.

Six years ago, I asked her to marry me, and she made me the happiest man on the face of the earth.

Five years ago, we’d accumulated some ridiculous wedding planning stories, and still managed to have a wedding that was perfect for us: Guests come, see us get married, walk ten yards to the reception hall, eat some truly excellent hors douevres, talk a little, laugh a little, have some cake, and leave by five PM.

Party reptiles we are not.

We honeymooned in Nashville, where I got to play an actual honest to goodness Gibson banjo (which would have cost over four grand if I’d damaged it with my new and unfamiliar wedding ring) and we ate at the Waffle House every day.

Four years ago, we learned that my job was moving about twenty miles north, which meant that my wife and I had to find a new, not so obscenely cheap apartment closer to work. We moved everything ourselves; furniture and all; on the nastiest, coldest, rainiest day of the winter. Down two flights of stairs, and up three. We filled a 16 foot Budget truck three times.

Three years ago, we were blessed with our first child. A daughter, as strong willed and full of life as one would expect given my wife’s and my respective family histories. She was, and remains, one of the most delightful children ever conceived. I’d say I’m proud of her except I don’t want to insult her via gross understatement.

Two years ago, I got laid off from my lucrative engineering job, leaving me free to help tend to my pregnant wife when I wasn’t beating the pavement trying to find someone who would hire me.

One year ago, I had a new job, a new mortgage payment, and also a bouncing baby boy. As a father, it was nice to have an heir to the family name. As a geek, I was thrilled to have a tank for our guild. Because good lord, that boy is a tank.
This year, our anniversary was less eventful, which is a blessing of its own when you’ve had a decade like we’ve just had. I look forward to many more uneventful days with my family. The family I couldn’t have even imagined eight years ago, in the life that I didn’t even know I wanted eight years ago.

Eight years ago, I had it all. Today, I have everything.

I’d say that’s more than a fair trade.

Earworm Parade

2010-09-29T02:27:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks I’ve spent a great deal of time working in an environment with a soundtrack selected by people much younger and hipper than I am. The end result is a series of earworm infestations that have not quite led me to question my own sanity (that ship has long sailed) but rather has led me to random thoughts, which I have decided to share with you. Aren’t you lucky?

I don’t know the names or artists on most of the songs I’m hearing all day, so my references will mainly be to lyrics. If you listen to FM 107.1 in the Boston area, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

*So what is a “shorty,” exactly? I don’t know, but apparently one is on fire on the dance floor. And this “shorty” can also pop and lock like birthday cake.

*The aforementioned “shorty” is also apparently cool, like fire. Which must be no mean feat, or at least no meaning.

*Ah, Justin Bieber. Jailbait for soccer moms, and just the latest aural assault perpetuated by Canada.

*Seriously. Justin Bieber, Celine Dionne, Jim Carey, Mike Meyers; it’s like Canada’s chief export is “annoying.”

*Speaking of annoying, I feel greatly cheated. Eminem was supposed to be retired, dammit.

*There was a time when I thought Eminem was a violent misogynist worthy of scorn. After hearing his latest, I can only muster pity. This is his experience with love? This is what he thinks love is like? That’s just sad.

*Oh look, it’s been twenty minutes. I guess it’s time for someone to call 911 because another “shorty” fire is burning on the dance floor. Ooh whoa.

*So… are all of Kesha’s (sorry; Ke$ha’s) songs about drugs?

*Lady Gaga: She’s like a new wave Madonna, but with talent.

*Gaga also offers a hint to keeping your songs from being overplayed: get every single one of them on the radio at once. That way the DJ won’t have to play the same song six times a day.

*Did you know there’s a She-Wolf in the closet? I keep mine in the garage, myself. She’s not house trained.

*Wait a minute, who let Lady Antebellum in here?

*And the next song features a guy playing a Ukelele and referencing Mr. Mister? Did someone change the station and not tell me?

*Oh good. “Shorty” fire burning on the dance floor again. Much better, or at least more consistent. This station must have a pack-a-day “shorty” habit.

*Always remember: If you can’t sing, just add a Klaxon siren to your song. Klaxon: It’s the new cowbell.

*Seriously, working security at a Ke$ha concert must be a freakin’ nightmare. How can a song like “Take it off” not result in a riot if her fans are half as drug addled as her songs?

*What happened to Julio Iglesias’ son? He used to sing sultry Latin love songs, now he’s singing techno and sampling Lionel Richie.

*”Don’t stop baby, don’t stop baby! I’ve got my balls in a vi-i-ice!”

*Oh good, another “shorty” fire. Did you know the guy who sings this song has done songs for the new Electric Company? According to that song, he used to be a shorty. Which just confuses me more.

* And another “shorty” song, but this one’s different. Apparently this one is like Dy-No-Mite.

*Need a wish right now? Me too. I’m wishing someone would change the station. But my wish doesn’t require a 747.

*Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus: The latest steel-cage match between former Disney tween idols who realize there’s a whole market of perverted old men who can’t wait until one or the other of them turns 18. The winner will be on the cover of Cosmo in about a year. The loser will be on the cover of Playboy in about a decade.

*So let me get this straight: Someone took an awesome, if overplayed Daft Punk song, slowed it down, set rap lyrics to it, and… created a new song that wasn’t nearly as awesome but only took half as long to become overplayed? Well done!

*A song that features the refrain from Madonna’s San Pedro, which includes sampled Michael Jackson tracks. Finally, some originality!

*If your cell phone is so loud that it can interrupt you while dancing at a club, your ringer is too loud.

*Strong bad was right: Anyone who uses “La la’s” in place of legit lyrics is definitely in the bottom ten.

*And no, you don’t get irony points if you sing about being “sick and tired of all the la la la la” before launching into a chorus consisting of nothing but “la la’s.”

*Setting a Rascall Flatts song to a techno beat has the same comedic value of setting a Kid Rock song to a polka beat, with the sole exception being that the latter is at least intentionally funny.

*Maybe hips don’t lie, but I have it on good authority that butts are not so trustworthy, and they tend to do most of the talking.

*Oh, now I get what a “shorty” is. Apparently, a “shorty” is like a melody in your head that goes “la la la la” every day. Thanks for clearing that up.

So that’s what I’ve learned from listening to top 40 hits. I now know that a “shorty” is a highly flammable, if not explosive, MP3 player that goes “la la la la.” I’ve also learned that I prefer my iPod full of songs at least five years old (the last album I bought was in 2005.)

I’ve also learned that pretty much all you have to do to make it to the top forty is to include the words “mister DJ” in your lyrics somewhere, because every third song on the radio seems to specifically address him.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have to go find some rapid-release Tylenol.

We Represent the Mob-Grinding Guild, the Mob-Grinding Guild, the Mob-Grinding Guild

2010-09-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

So recently I’ve been touting the virtues of Rio Grande. But what about other publishers? Where’s the love for, for example, Steve Jackson Games?

Well, funny you should ask, dear reader. Because I just happen to have in my pocket a deck of cards from Steve Jackson Games. That game is Munchkin.

Munchkin is almost more of a genre than a game. I say that because the original Munchkin, or as I like to call it Munchkin Classic, is accompanied on store shelves by several different cosmetically different versions that use the exact same game mechanics.

Munchkin Classic, for example, takes place in a high fantasy setting; humans, hobbits, orcs and elves fighting with elegant if primitive weapons and slaying dragons. Then there’s Star Munchkin, which takes the same mechanics but uses clichés from Gene Roddenberry instead of J.R.R. Tolkien. If that wasn’t enough, there’s Spy Munchkin (which uses Ian Fleming clichés), Cowboy Munchkin (Sergio Leone clichés) and Pirate Munchkin (which has something to do with killing ninjas)

The mechanics for each set are virtually identical to each other, to the point where you can mix and match sets to have a Sci Fi Western game if that’s what you want to do. You might think that this would wreck the setting, but the text on the cards and in the manual is so goofy and funny that you’ll never wonder why an orc would have a cyborg sidekick with a sixshooter.

The game itself is all about loot and level grinding, so it might as well be called Diablo or WoW. Each player starts the game as a level 1 human with no class (don’t blame me for that joke; It’s in the manual) and no weapons. During the course of the game you may acquire a race or class, and you’ll probably get some weapons. These can be played during your turn to give your character attributes, abilities or combat modifiers.

On your turn, you kick open a door by drawing a card from the pile of cards with doors on the back, and turning it face up. If it’s a monster, you must either fight or run. If it’s an item, you can add it to your hand or play it to give yourself a boost. Anything else (curse, etc), follow the instructions on the card. If you did not draw a monster, you may “loot the room” by drawing another door card. If you pick a monster card at this point, you may add it to your hand to be used later.

The fighting mechanic is simple math. The monster card has a level on it. You take your level, add any combat modifiers from the weapons, class and race cards you might have in play, then use any spells, curses or affects in your hand that might give you an advantage. If after all that, your number is higher than the monster’s level, you win.

If you have the higher number, you go up as many levels as the monster card says to go up and draw as many “loot” cards (from the pile of cards with treasure on the back) as the monster card says you get. The game ends when a given player gets to level ten.

Of course, without interaction from other players, this game might as well be a solo D&D campaign, and that’s just sad. So, just to keep it lively, other players are allowed to help the active player or the monster by casting buffs or other affect cards.

An example might be illustrative:

Herman is currently a level 2 human. He currently has boots that give him a +2 combat modifier, armor that gives him +1, and a hammer that gives him +3. He “kicks down a door” to find a level 4 slime monster, against whom his character is weak (-2 modifier) because his character race is a dwarf and the slime gets stuck in his beard. With the modifiers, his number is 6 to the slime monster’s four. However, Bobby has a card that gives the slime monster a buff of +2, and he plays it making the match 6 against 6. A tie equals losing in Munchkin, so Herman must run, play an effect card, or get someone to help him. Fortunately, Zoe has a curse card that will make bring the slime monster down three levels, and she agrees to play it if Herman shares the loot he would draw if he beat the monster (2 cards for the purposes of this example). Herman agrees, and Zoe and he both reap the benefits of a tag team kill. Herman goes up a level, and they both get one loot card apiece.

As you might imagine, the game can get very cutthroat. Players in the lead tend to get ganged up on by pretty much everyone at the table, and there really isn’t any such thing as a friendly game of Munchkin. Fortunately, the humor leavens the tactics quite a bit, so much that being robbed of victory by a well (or poorly, depending upon whose turn it is) wandering monster card doesn’t sting because of the manner in which it kills you.

Not that playing a card that nobody knows you have which happens to completely nullify that monster isn’t darn satisfying.

For some reason there is a fair amount of haterade pointed at Munchkin by people who play other card and board games. I’m not sure why. It might be the fact that victory can be stolen from a player so quickly and often. I can see where this would chafe at more competitive board and tabletop gamers. The game does lean heavily on the luck of the draw, but there are some tactical decisions that can make or break you. (Pro Tip: If you’re trying to gain a level by playing a monster against yourself, don’t pick one that approaches three fourths of your level. Your opponents will buff the living crap out of that thing, especially if you’re in the lead. Ask me how I know.) If you’re looking for a game where your fate doesn’t depend on the people you’re playing with not being jerks then you’re going to have a hard time finding a game to play.

It might also be overexposure. There are dozens of Munchkin variants, and something like eight expansion decks for the original Munchkin (one of which I received free at Pax from someone at Steve Jackson Games, so take this review for what it is: glowing praise bought incredibly cheaply. You other video and board game developers take note). Some people don’t like things that break out of the niche market to achieve wider success. In the music world, these people are called hipsters. In the gaming world, they’re just called nerds.

But if you are not the gaming equivalent of a hipster, and you have a whole $25 to spare, I can honestly recommend Munchkin or any of the variants thereof. It plays quickly, even with just two players, and you’re sure to get at least a chuckle out of a given session.

And if you don’t… well, just remember this: I am much more likely to review a product well if I receive it or some part of it for free. At least I’m honest with you.

Hi! I'm the Internet, and I'm Gere to Suck The Joy Out Of Your Life

2010-09-15T02:41:00.000-07:00

It must be frustrating to be Joss Whedon.

I'm watching The Dollhouse, season 1, on DVD with my wife. We just finished episode 5 the night before this writing, and we're enjoying it immensely. The internet, in particular forums and people like this guy, feel extremely differently.

As near as I can figure it from reading old forum posts-- which is something, dear reader, you should never ever do-- there are four stages of Whedon Fandom that repeat indefinitely.

1) Anticipation. "OMG! There's a new Joss Whedon TV series coming out! It's got a quirky, offbeat take on an old genre and an actress that will probably spawn an internet fetish subculture! I'm so excited! I hope the network gives this one a chance for a change."

2) Consternation. "Hey! This isn't the show I was expecting at all. It's like Whedon can't even read my mind or something. I'm going to stop watching it until it gets better."

3) Vindication. "That new Whedon show was cancelled? Well, I can't say I'm surprised based on the three episodes of it I watched before declaring it utter crap."

4) Indignation. "OMG! I'm watching this Joss Whedon TV show on DVD and it's so incredibly awesome! I can't believe the stupid networks cancelled it so soon."

... and proceed to step 1.

When your core fanbase is like that, what chance do you have for commercial success? They'll love your show to death as long as you're not making new episodes, or as long as you don't dare to make something that might appeal to someone besides the niche market (LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR SELLOUT BULLCRAP!).

And then if someone genuinely likes some of your work, other of your so-called fans jump down their throats for being a fanboy with no taste. Some people even write comics about it.

(To be fair, Dollhouse is a show that plays better (for me, anyway) on DVD than it would on TV. These episodes dripped out one week at a time would have me losing my patience rather quickly. I felt the same way about The Pretender. The multitudinous threads and weaves were just too much for me to keep track of if I could only get a carefully restricted glimpse of the loom once a week. But give me the ability to devour two, three, four episdes at a time and the show becomes pure brilliance.)

If you love something, or like it or even find it mildly tolerable, the internet is not your friend. That's because it's full of joyless people who think they'll feel better about themselves if they tear down stuff that other people like.

It has been my goal on this site to be the opposite of that person. You'll note that most of my reviews are positive, and I try to talk about things that I like and why I like them rather than going off on rants about why such-and-such is so awful. I hope to be a tonic for anyone sick of the legions of trolls who angrily type badly spelled rants about how some beautiful model is, in actuality, objectively ugly and disgusting because they say so.

Or anyone who posts comments after Youtube videos. Here's another handy internet survival tip: Never read youtube comments. I can't prove it, but I believe they actually suck brain cells out through your eyeballs.

That may be a losing battle, but when you're a fan of Joss Whedon you get kind of used to those.

It's a cliche', but happiness is a choice. You can accept the way things are, and maybe find some enjoyment there, or you can forever lament how things are not, and be an internet troll. I oversimplify, but that's another feature of the internet that I don't have as much of a problem with.

Well, I'm enjoying Dollhouse, and I have right from episode 1. I understand why it was cancelled, and I suspect it has less to do with Fox's mishandling (though I wouldn't doubt that as a factor) and more to do with a certain segment of a certain writer's fanbase being unpleasable, or at least acting that way on internet forums.

Because, seriously, if you can watch the first five episodes of Dollhouse and come to the conclusion that Elizu Dushku can't act, you're standards are un-meetable.

Quite Taken

2010-09-08T02:25:00.000-07:00

Every so often, rarer than ever these days, a newly released movie will grab my attention and make me think “Gee whillikers. I’d sure like to see that in theatres.” Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore. Having two kids under four, and nobody you’d trust to babysit even if you were the type of parent inclined to let someone else raise your child for you, means that movie theatres are off limits. The last movie I saw in a theatre was Hot Fuzz, seen shortly before my daughter was born.

And I don’t truck with the kinds of parents who bring young children to R rated movies just because they feel entitled to retain some aspect of their previous, non-parenthood life. And yes, I am referring to you; the lady who brought her four year old in a stroller to see Snakes on a Plane. You’re a parent now. Suck it up and act like one.

Missing out on the theatre experience isn’t really a problem for me. I’m anti-social by nature (please note the user comment section on this blog. There isn’t one. And it’s not because I don’t like you, it’s just that I don’t care what you think.). Movie theatres are infested with people, which is a strike against them to me. It’s also expensive. Matinees go for seven bucks these days, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but $14 (you think I’d leave my wife at home to see a movie?) for a one-shot experience is kind of steep when a patient person can wait a few months and pay $20 for the DVD and have the movie to watch on his own terms as many times as I like, and if I don’t like it I can turn it around and resell it on Ebay or Amazon to recoup some of the purchase price.

Anyway, that long winded introduction was my way of giving you enough backstory to understand why I bought Taken, starring Liam Neeson, on DVD without having seen it before. The trailer caught my attention back when it first came out in theatres, and it gave me goose pimples.

The basic plot is laid out right there: Retired spook embarks on a quest to find his kidnapped daughter. That would have been enough to sell me on several levels: I’m a father, I like action movies, and I’m impressed by the novelty of making the CIA the good guys for a change.

So the premise had me sold. What about the execution? It’s even better. First off, let me be blunt and point out that Liam Neeson is one of the best actors currently working in Hollywood today. He and Ed Harris are two actors that have really earned the right to call themselves actors. They’re not flashy, and they tend not to win as many Oscars as they probably deserve, but never once do you see them in a movie and fail to believe them in their respective roles. Neeson flawlessly conveys not only the urgency that the character must feel, but also the supreme confidence that the character has in his ability to get this job done. There is no failure for this man. You get the impression that he has done all this a thousand times before when the stakes for him personally were considerably lower.

Another thing that struck me about the movie is how true it rings. I admit I don’t have any real knowledge of the sorts of things Neeson does in this movie. But there is one name I trust above all others to give me an accurate account of how such things are done, and that name is Marcinko. I have read every book ever written by the Sharkman of the Delta, and every action sequence in Taken feels like it was informed by all of them. The violence is quick, decisive and brutal. Fights are never fair, and the gunplay seems to have been directed by someone who’s actually held a gun in his lifetime. There is no drawn out give and take, no banter, and no mercy. Even the car chases feel like how a real one would play out.

In fact, the only “no you didn’t” moment in the movie comes early on, when the hero uses what appears to be a magical photo printing kiosk to identify an accomplice to his daughter’s kidnapping by finding his reflection in a picture taken by a cell phone. If only my photo kiosks had a magical “enhance” button, I wouldn’t need to upgrade from my 1 Megapixel camera. I could just use the software to “enhance” my pictures until they looked like 10 Megapixels, or since it’s magic I might as well go whole hog and say infinity-pixels. (They actually have these, incidentally. They’re called 35mm cameras.)

The main thing about Taken, though, is how un-Hollywood the movie feels. The main character is a former CIA spook, and his friends are also former CIA spooks. And they are, to a man, good men. They are good men who know how and when to do horrible things. The most surprising bit of it, though, is there is no distraught hand-wringing about it. Yes, the main character conducts some fairly brutal interrogations. But by the time all is said and done, it’s clear he was doing right. Without going so far as to say the end justifies the means, the movie makes it clear that when bad things are happening and the chips are down, you want a man like this in your corner.

It’s also pretty clear that the writer and director had absolutely no concerns about how this movie would play overseas. Contrast with your blockbusters like G.I. Joe, which changed G.I. Joe into some kind of NATO on steroids solely for international marketing reasons. Without spoiling too much, the primary villains are Albanian human traffickers that seem to be ripped from the headlines. The French authorities in Taken are corrupt, incompetent or both. This is not a movie intended to ingratiate itself to the continental crowd.

Another really surprising, perhaps the most surprising and un-Hollywood aspect of the movie is the main character’s daughter. Not just in how well written she is; probably one of the more well rounded, accurate 17 year olds you’ll see in a movie; but in a particular peculiarity of hers that I won’t mention for the sake of spoiler reduction. Suffice it to say that a trait that is not highly valued among Hollywood types turns out to literally save her life.

Taken is an intense, well written and well acted thriller. I heartily recommend it to anyone who like the Jason Bourne style of spy-thriller, but who is tired of the standard genre tropes.

Nation Building for Fun and Profit

2010-09-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

Last week I introduced some of you to the concept of the Board Game for Grownups, courtesy of Rio Grande’s Bohnanza. Bohnanza is a card game, but a good way to wet your toes in the waters that ultimately flow from GenCon every year.

But what about board games? Well, Rio Grande has you covered on that front as well. And since I foreshadowed the existence of a “gateway board game” last week, I might as well fulfill that. So this week I’ll be discussing Carcassonne.

That’s pronounced “Car” (as in automobile) “Cass” (as in Mama) “Own” (as in pwn).

It’s easier to play than to say, or spell for that matter. For two to five players. Each player selects a set of colored tokens that represent their people. There are ENTER NUMBER HERE cardboard tiles in the box, one of which is the starter tile (identified by the inverted palette printing on its back). The remaining tiles are placed face down in an easy to reach location off to the side in a loose pile, not a stack (it would reach the ceiling if you tried to stack them anyway.)

On a player’s turn, he or she must select a tile from the pile and try to place it adjacent to any tiles already on the board. This is where the skill comes in, because you can’t just place a tile any old where. All four sides of the tile have to match whatever surrounds it. If there’s a road in the middle of one side, it has to line up to another road. Likewise, a castle wall or green field must touch a castle wall or green field. So it’s kind of like four-sided dominoes.

Now, if it were just four-sided dominoes, it probably wouldn’t sell very well (we can’t all replicate the fabulous success of Tri-dominoes, after all). So Carcassonne mixes it up a bit by allowing the active player to claim a feature on the tile provided it’s not already claimed by extension from another tile.

For example, let’s say Herman draws a tile that starts a road (roads start or end at intersections, small towns, and castle gates). Three sides of his tile match green fields, which makes this one fairly easy to place. He places the tile down in such a way that the only side adjacent to existing tiles is a green field. He now has the choice of claiming either the road or the field. However, Bobby, in the previous turn, had placed a green field tile and placed a marker down to claim that field as his own. Bobby’s field was extended by Herman’s tile, so Herman cannot claim the field. Instead he claims the road.

Points are tallied by counting up the number of tiles that comprise completed features, and more is better. If the road Herman began in his turn is completed on the next turn by Zoe who drew a tile with a road on one side and castle walls on the other three sides and wanted to prevent Herman from being able to claim points for a big long road, then Herman must collect his marker and add the score (score for a road times number of tiles) to his own score.

Play continues until the tiles run out or no tiles can be legally placed.

There are some specialty scoring rules for contingencies, such as what if two players end up “owning” the same feature on the map, but for the most part that’s it. The rules for a given turn can be summed up on an index card with plenty of room leftover for doodles of Zoe in a chainmail bikini riding a dragon that’s eating that stupid boyfriend of hers who doesn’t even like board games and doesn’t treat her anywhere near as well as she deserves.

Not that Herman ever thought of her like that or anything.

As a gateway into board gaming, this one is crackijuana. It gets you in the door of the board gaming shop, so you know where to get the harder stuff, and is easy to get addicted to. I first played it at Pax East 2010, where I was about to leave but bumped into some fellow Employed Gamers and asked if I could join in on a game. It was enough fun that I bought it to play with my wife, who didn’t need to be convinced to try a board game but had never tried any of the European style games that tend to have simpler rules but more complex strategies than the Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers games.

Much of the game is left to the player to do. The board needn’t be square, so if you can’t find a good place to put a tile, you can put it on the border of the map as it currently exists. Finishing someone else’s map feature can be profitable for you, even if you can’t claim anything, because it might shrink how big their feature can get, thus limiting the points they get. The number of each kind of tile is listed in the instruction manual, so you can gauge how likely it would be that you get a certain kind of tile before you commit to a new feature. And remember, just because you have a big castle doesn’t mean you’ll finish it before the end of the game, when the points for unfinished features are tallied and you find your score will not be as high as if you finished a slightly smaller castle when you had the chance.

If you thought board games were all about Monopoly and Pop-O-Matic Trouble, then consider branching out a bit. And if you’re looking to branch out, you can’t go far wrong with Carcassonne. But be forewarned: The game is very fun, and comes with a brochure advertising other games from Rio Grande.

Because hey, that crackijuana isn’t going to sell itself.

Do You Know Beans?

2010-08-25T03:02:00.000-07:00

So, when you think of card games what do you think of? Poker? Hearts? Blackjack?

How about bean farming?

Bohnanza is a card game from Rio Grande games (makers of Carcassonne and Dominion, which if you didn’t already know who Rio Grande Games was you likely wouldn’t know either of those games either). It’s a rummy-game, which contrary to what I thought when the shop owner told me it was a rummy game, does not involve getting drunk even a little. Although it’s not prohibited, so scotch-monsters take note.

The game revolves around the planting and selling of different varieties of beans. Coffee Beans, soy beans, wax beans, chili beans, and assorted other kinds all come into play with varying levels of frequency (Cocoa beans have only four cards in the deck, while coffee beans have over 20) and all with their own amusing visual pun illustrations.

The instruction manual was initially daunting; over seven pages for one deck of cards. But once you get into the flow of the game, it’s pretty simple. Basically, you start with a hand of five cards, and you have two “bean fields” on the table. You can plant as many of one kind of bean in each field as you want, but you can only plant one kind of bean in a field at a time. Each turn has four phases.

1) Planting. The player must take the first card in his hand and plant it in one of the two bean fields. The player may plant the second card if desired, but is not required to do so. Cards must be played in the order they are received, so no shuffling your hand around to put beans of the same variety next to each other. If you drew a red bean, followed by a green bean, followed by a wax bean, followed by a coffee bean, followed by a cocoa bean at the beginning of the game you must plant the cocoa bean and you may plant the coffee bean.

2) Trading. The player draws to cards from the deck face up. These two cards must be planted somewhere, and it’s up to the player to decide if he or she wants to plant them, or to trade them to an opposing player for something s/he does want to plant. The active player may also opt to donate unwanted cards to a player, or to offer cards in his or her own hand to get an opposing player to accept the unwanted card. All cards received in this phase of the game must be planted immediately regardless of whether they are received by the active player or not.

For example: On Herman’s first turn, he plants a coffee bean in one field and a red bean in another field. He draws two cards, a red bean and a cocoa bean. He takes the red bean and plants it with his other red bean, but he has a coffee bean in his hand lined up for his next turn, so he has to find a way to get rid of the cocoa bean. Bobby, on the other side of the table, happens to have a cocoa bean two cards in from the front of his deck, and no beans planted yet. One of those leading cards is a coffee bean. So Bobby and Herman agree to trade Bobby’s coffee bean for Herman’s cocoa bean. Bobby plants the cocoa bean in an open field, and Herman plants the coffee bean with his other coffee bean.

Who made out best in that trade is up to the luck of the draw, and whatever strategy Bobby and Herman were respectively playing.

3) Harvesting. This is optional, and may be done at any time during the turn, but now is the time to do it if you want to, rather than when you have to. To harvest a bean field you count the number of beans in it and read the card to see how many coins you get in exchange for the number of beans you have. Some varieties of bean, for example, net you one coin for two cards, two coins for four cards, three coins for seven cards and four coins for 10 cards. Turn over the number of cards that correspond to the number of coins you get for harvesting the field (all cards have beans on one side and a coin icon on the other) and place the remaining cards face up into the discard pile.

4) Drawing. Finally, the player draws three cards and places them into the back of his or her hand in the order they were drawn.

Trading may be done at any time during the game, provided the active player is one of the trading parties. Harvesting may be done at any time.

The game continues until the entire deck of cards has been exhausted three times (when you run out of cards, shuffle and draw from the discard pile). Score is tabulated by counting up the number of cards in your coin pile.

The game is heavily luck based, but you can bypass a lot if you’re good at wheeling and dealing. But even then a bad draw can totally derail whatever plans you had made

There’s also an element of “press your luck” games, in that you get more coins for larger harvests of beans, but holding out to fill a field with soy beans, though attractive statistically given the number of soy bean cards in the deck, means losing out on planting other beans that aren’t as prolific but have higher profit margins. The ability to trade in coins for an extra bean field lessens the risk here, but if you don’t do it early in the game you won’t recoup the cost of the extra field.

The Missus and I played a modified version of the rules for two players (basically, you only go through the deck once) and it was good fun. I imagine that playing with four players could get very interesting, but the two player experience is by no means gimped as it may be in other European-style board and card games that tend to be designed for three players or more.

I can also envision this as being a good game to play cutthroat, though in the interest of keeping the peace at home I will be suppressing that particular tendency in myself.

If you happen by a small, independent board and card game shop and have any interest in dipping your toe in the waters of games that tend to rely more heavily on strategy than luck, Bohnanza is a good place to start. A lot of people will recommend Carcassonne for just that purpose, and I don’t disagree in the slightest. But Bohnanza prices out at around twenty bucks, while most of Rio Grande’s other releases go for fifty or more. Bohnanza is a good, low cost way to get started.

No Post This week either

2010-08-11T03:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks. I've had no time to write anything. I have a few posts sitting in my thumb drive, but haven't even had time to polish them up for you.

We'll be back on track eventually.

No post this week

2010-08-04T02:07:00.000-07:00

I've been crazy busy, and haven't had time to write anything.

Apologies.

What’s In My Ipod? Beelzebub in the Peach State edition.

2010-07-28T02:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Free Toy Inside, bringing you the best memes of five years ago since 2008!

Today I’m going to have a look at what’s in my iPod. Sure, it’s an old meme. But I have an old iPod so it’s okay.

How old is it? It’s so old that it’s one of the early “Windows Only” models.

It’s so old that the irreplaceable battery will play music for a grand total of four minutes to a full charge.

It’s so old it doesn’t even work in those nifty iPod-docks that allow you to play your iPod music through real stereo speakers because it doesn’t charge off of USB power.

It’s so old that I can remember thinking how impossibly huge 10GB of storage was.

I keep it because it still works for what I use it for (listening to music and podcasts in my car) and because I could buy a lot of other, more useful stuff with the $300 it would cost me to upgrade to a new device that does the same thing. (Incidentally, I take the same attitude toward clothes. I am currently wearing a pair of shoes that are older than my daughter, and a pair of socks that are older than my relationship with my wife. I’ve been politely asked not to discuss the age of my underwear in public forums.)

In other words, I make the iconic “Cheap New England Yankee” look like a particularly profligate inebriated sea-farer.

Most of my music collection fits on my iPod with plenty of room leftover for a few weeks’ worth of Gamers with Jobs conference calls. I keep a pretty wide spread of music in it. I’d call it eclectic if I thought eclectic was descriptive enough of a collection that includes Metallica, Garth Brooks and Bela Fleck on the same playlists.

But, as I am no hipster, I see no reason to harp on the matter any further. Instead, I’d like to share with you an artist I’ve selected from my collection and talk about him for a spell.

Most of you are probably acquainted with the Charlie Daniels Band. During America’s brief infatuation with large belt buckles and cowboy hats back in the early 1980s, Charlie Daniels was known for a little song called ”The Devil Went Down To Georgia.” After that he faded out and went away.

Except nobody told him he faded away. Between 1971 and 2007, he released about 30 albums, and he continues to tour to this day. In the early part of the first decade of this century, I got the chance to see him in concert. He played a two hour set and didn’t do two songs from the same album (unless you count A Decade of Hits, which features his top songs from the 1970s including “The Devil Went Down To Georgia”). He plays the fiddle, the guitar and the banjo, and his discography includes country, rock, folk, gospel and blues.

The Charlie Daniels’ Band is the Beatles of country music, if not from a popularity standpoint then certainly from an innovation and influence standpoint. Their ability to seamlessly merge multiple musical genres into a single song or album borders on the chameleonic. The song “Sure Beat’s Picking Cotton” boasts that the CDB is “Rock and Roll and Blues and Country, all rolled into one.” Except it’s not a boast, because it’s not boasting if it’s true. From one song to the next you might not quite believe they’re from the same band, but at the same time you would. The CDB encapsulates everything that’s great from the history of American music without being derivative or me-too-ish.

The CDB boasts of wide influence as well. Bands that have been directly mentored by Daniels include Lynrd Skynrd and Travis Tritt. Bands whose style is to some degree derivative of Daniels’ include Montgomery Gentry among many others.

If the only CDB song you know is “The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” you have done yourself a serious disservice. It would be like going to a fine Italian restaurant and ordering spaghetti and meatballs because everybody’s heard of that and tried it at least once. Devil is a great song, if overplayed, but there’s so much more there to enjoy that you truly miss out on something extraordinary if you stop there.

Years ago, back when the music TV stations played music, VH1 had a series called “Storytellers” which featured bands telling stories through songs, or telling the stories behind songs. It always puzzled me that Charlie Daniels was never on that show, because some of his best songs are stories told to music. Moving beyond Devil, songs like “Willie Jones” or “Stroker Ace,” or “Midnight Train” all tell specific stories about people, some of which are suitable to be made into movies (indeed, Stroker Ace was made into a movie featuring Burt Reynolds). Some of his songs, like “Old Rock ‘n’ Roller” or “Renegade” are mildly autobiographical. Still others, while lacking a linear narrative, still paint a vivid picture of a world (“Honky Tonk Avenue”)

As a storyteller, Daniels doesn’t stop with the music. He penned a book of short stories that inspired or inspired by some of his songs (the ubiquitous Devil, and “Honky Tonk Avenue”), as well as some that had nothing to do with his songs (Me and Deke). I bought a copy from the Charlie Daniels Museum in Nashville Tennessee when I went there for a conference, and read the entire thing while waiting in the airport for six hours because I had misjudged how long it would take me to clear security.

Of course, he’s not limited to the role of wandering minstrel and balladeer. The Charlie Daniel’s lexicon includes such country staples as the love song (“How Much I Love You,” “What My Baby Sees In Me”) the breakup song (“Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye,” “Hey Mr. DJ”), the celebration of country culture (“Twang Factor,” “What This World Needs is a Few More Rednecks”) and even the occasional polemic (“In America,” “Ain’t No Rag”)

Charlie Daniels is the artist whose discography I would bring with me in the hypothetical “desert island” scenario in which you imagine being stuck listening to one artist for the rest of your life. After nearly thirty years listening to him, I’m nowhere near being done and I will surely continue listening long into the years to come.

This Won't End Well

2010-07-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

It probably has something to do with expectations. You spend years of your life following their stories, talking about what happened with like minded people. You might even buy merchandise relating to them. But in the end they’ll probably break your heart.

I’m writing, of course, about TV shows. You carve out an hour or two every week to follow the exploits of a set of characters. You develop opinions about their personality flaws. And though you may be unaware of it, you have an idea of how you want everything to turn out for everyone.

Especially if the story is serialized or continuous in any way. Ending a sitcom where the only thing tying one season to the next is the inevitable clip show they roll out when everyone wants to take a long weekend isn’t so difficult. You just play clips of the more poignant moments and pull away in a long helicopter shot while a guy in a mustache drives away on a motorcycle to a depressing version of the show’s theme song.

But in this modern world of multi-threaded story arcs, a satisfying close to a popular series is hard to come by.

This is on my mind for a couple of reasons. One of which is the fact that Lost is coming to a close and people won’t shut up about it. Given the buzz around it, I think it’s highly unlikely that whatever the ending is will please anyone. I’ve never even seen the show, and I’m pretty sure whatever the ending is going to piss me off; because the only ending I want out of a show like that is “the people who deserve to get home safely do, and the people who don’t get their comeuppance.” This sort of ending is routinely condemned by people who think they are too smart to enjoy a happy ending.

It is those people that I fear will ruin the other reason why I’m thinking about series finales: The final season of Monk is out on DVD.

Now, I don’t have cable, so my ability to keep up with Tony Shaloub’s defective detective is gated by my ability to buy and watch the episodes on DVD. As a result, I’m not even halfway through season 7 yet, though I must say that season 7 started weakly but has improved in the second disc.

I don’t know how Monk ends, and I’m sort of afraid to find out. I want him to find Trudy’s killer and have some peace, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on that happening. Why? Because I have too much experience with shows that get ruined by people who think they’re too smart to enjoy a happy ending.

Consider Quantum Leap. I loved that show. Watched it religiously every week, and whenever it was on in syndication. It’s a show that manages to hold up pretty well with age, and Scott Bakula remains one of my favorite actors. But I won’t buy season 5 on DVD, and among the myriad reasons why not is I’m pissed off at the writers for screwing Sam. The final episode ends with a text on a black screen informing the viewer that Sam never makes it home.

So what we have here is not only mean spirited writers, but also lazy writers. Mean sprited, lazy writers who think they’re impossibly clever.

This is a similar affliction that plagued the writers for The Sopranos, which is another show I haven’t seen but whose ending frosted my cupcakes enough to make me not care if I ever do see it. The writers for The Sopranos were obviously trying to one-up the writers of Quantum Leap on all counts. Not only were they more mean spirited (nothing changed for Sam either, but at least he continued leaping around making the world better), but they were even lazier (at least Sam got a line of text against his black screen ending.) And from reading interviews, I’m certain they think they were even more impossibly clever than the writers of Quantum Leap.

You can almost hear them gloating. “Look at me! I added more pointless ugliness to the world. Aren’t I a hip, happening dude?”

You know, when Del Lord ended a three stooges short by fading to black at a seemingly random place in the script, he never claimed to be making profound commentary on the nature of comedic storytelling. He just ran out of film but still had to show something for the time he billed the studio. Somehow I can respect that more.

I don’t hold grudges about shows that were prematurely cancelled. The Pretender ended on a cliffhanger, and I don’t blame the writers for that. I do fault them for writing unsatisfying conclusions to the saga of Jarod in the subsequent Pretender movies, but at least they were trying to tie up loose ends. There were just too many loose ends to tie up, so we got some garbage about how the Centre is actually a cult that believes in a prophecy laid out in an ancient book that claims a kid named Jarod will be their downfall. And there are ghosts or something. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. I’ll take an honest failure to make a good ending over someone who tried to tell you you’re an idiot if you don’t like the fact that he made a bad ending on purpose. Sometimes intentions matter.

Getting back to Monk, I’m concerned that the writers may be too wrapped up in their own cleverness to give Adrian Monk a fitting sendoff. Why? In the episode “Mr. Monk Falls in Love” in season seven, Monk finally starts to progress and let Trudy’s death go. He even takes off his wedding ring. In the end, he brings the murderer of the episode into custody, vindicating the object of his affection while condemning her mother. The woman spurns Adrian over this, telling him to go back to his wife, knowing full well that Adrian’s wife was killed by a car bomb.

I doubt the ability of a writer who would write an episode like that to put a firm resolution on the series as a whole. Am I in for another black screen with white text informing me that Adrian never finds Trudy’s killer?

Now that I would bet a nickel on.

I am not going to title this post with a lame Wii pun. That would be beneath Mii.

2010-07-14T02:30:00.000-07:00

So, as of this writing it’s been about two weeks since Nintendo’s fabulously successful console made its first appearance in my home. Wii’ve accumulated five virtual console games (Starfox 64, A Link to the Past, Super MarioKart, F-Zero and Super Dodgeball) and a handful of Wii games that were in the ten to thirty dollar range. So I figured, why not give Yuu my impressions?

So, here is our initial Wii-brary.

A Boy and His Blob. An update to the charming and utterly incomprehensible game initially released on the NES. This isn’t so much a sequel as it is a reboot, or Wiiboot if you can handle another Wii related pun. (If you can’t this is apt to be one looooong post for Yuu.) This time, instead of a large world to traverse and a limited number of blob-transforming jellybeans to traverse it with, the game is broken up into individual levels. Also, you are given a palette of jellybeans but no limit on how many you use, at least not in the first few levels (this is an impressions post, not a review). The new BahB also doesn’t require you to learn what each jellybean does at first. The menu from which you select your bean shows you what the jellybean in question does. These changes collude to put the game more squarely in the realm of the puzzle genre, rather than an adventure with puzzle elements. The new art style is beautiful, proving that you don’t need a thousand dollars worth of graphical accelerators to make something look good. The game uses the nunchuck and wiimote, but doesn’t try to shoehorn wii motion movements, and the player is free to use the classic controller if hii was gullible enough to buy one like wii were. The Missus loved the original, and while this one isn’t proving to be her new favorite, the $15 price point is hard to resist. Even when the puzzles become annoying and frustrating later on, I’m confident the game will be worth the price.

Cooking Mama: Cook Off When the Missus traded in her DS, she paused lovingly at Cooking Mama before putting it into the shopping bag for the trip to Gamestop. Cooking Mama on the DS was one of those games she liked so much she bought the sequel (Cooking Mama 2) and the spin off (Gardening Mama). Something of a chef herself, she enjoyed the concept and most of the execution (the controls tended to be a bit fiddly and occasionally unresponsive) of the Cooking Mama series on the DS. So when we got the Wii, it only seemed fair to pick up a Cooking Mama game. The controls seem to be just as fiddly, and Mama can be hard to understand (Is she saying “you’re not trying?” Or is it “Donut Flying?” Perhaps “Bow knot Tying?” Am I doing well when she says that? Who knows?). But played head-to-head, this game looks to be a fun diversion for those nights when the missus and I want to play something together, but don’t feel like chopping wood. Which brings us to:

Go Play Lumberjacks I’m a lumberjack. I’m okay. I wave my Wii-mote ‘round all day. I chop some wood; I throw an axe, and climb with Ninja Lumberjacks.

(He’s a lumberjack, he’s okay. He waves his wii-mote ‘round all day. He chops some wood, he throws an axe, and climbs with Ninja Lumberjacks)

Okay, that’s enough of that. I don’t want to get sued, though I am certain John Cleese’s testimony in the trial would be delightful. Go Play Lumberjacks is apparently part of a series of Go Play games. I wouldn’t know. All I do know is that I like watching the lumberjack competition on ESPN when I can do it, and this game features a hot-saw competition.

There are four basic types of games: Sawing, chopping, axe-throwing and water. The manual sawing games can be tiresome (shake your wiimote faster than anyone else in the room! For a minute and a half!), and I haven’t unlocked all the water games yet…

Oh yeah, did I mention that this is one of those games that makes you work to unlock content you paid for? Yeah, it’s one of those.

…but on the whole the game is fun. Recommended for anyone who can’t decide which minigame collection to buy next.

Raving Rabids: TV The franchise that reminded us how cool Rayman was returns for another installment, this one uses the Wii Balance Board and features jokes that are guaranteed to become dated within five years.

Or did you think references to American Chopper would age well?

But all that’s okay, because the games are fun on their own merits, and the implementation of the Wii Balance Board is almost novel enough to justify the game’s claim to be the first Wii game you can play with your butt.

Rabids Go Home And just in case you couldn’t get enough of the screaming rabids, Ubisoft delivers a standalone adventure game featuring them. For those of you who think “rabid” equals “minigame,” allow me to disabuse you. Rabids go Home is a story based game similar to Katamari Damacy in that the plot revolves vaguely around planets and the gameplay involves you collecting a lot of random junk. In RGH, the rabids decide they want to go to the moon. But they can’t reach it, so they decide to build a mountain of junk so tall it lets them climb there. You play a pair of rabids, one driving a shopping cart and another riding in it, who are tasked with careening through levels stealing as much stuff as you can.

It’s fun and the trademark wacky rabid humor is there in spades from the moment you boot the game and your Wii informs you that a rabid has been detected in your Wiimote, and you’re given a camera inside the wiimote that shows him getting smacked around as you shake, rattle, spin and press buttons on your wiimote. This sequence alone is worth the price of the game.

Walk it OutDo you like walking for health, but hate the fact that the weather is only suitable for it for half the year? Do you not mind a rhythm game with obtuse beat detection? Can you handle an excessively perky “coach” telling you how great you’re doing?

If the answer to those questions is yes, then look no further than Walk it Out, a piece of Wii Software that allows up to two players to walk around a virtual town with no time limit, no objective, and no plot.

Note that I said “Software.” Because this is not a game. There is no victory condition, no way to lose, and the only “score” is used to buy items scattered around the town. See, the town is not built up yet. It has roads, but no buildings. So it’s kind of like the I-90 once you get west of the Hudson river, except with fewer trees. With points you can buy thinks like trees, buildings, street lights and new songs to listen to while you’re “walking.”

To earn points, you step in time with the music. You can use the Wii balance board, or the wiimote and nunchuck, or the Dance-Dance-Revolution pad you thought would be so much fun but never play with because the step detection stinks and there was only one game for it.

It’s actually a pretty neat concept. Those of you who’ve had gym memberships know that the most effective, but the most boring part of any workout is the time you spend on the elliptical, or treadmill, or stationary bike. Well, if you have any of those things in your house, you can plant them in front of the TV and use Walk it Out to make believe you’re actually outside and walking around when in reality the weather is too nasty to do it. You’ll have to endure an impossibly perky coach who interrupts you periodically and is, like, so totally amazed at, like, how amazing you’re doing, ‘n stuff. You can swap her out for a male coach, but I haven’t been brave enough to try him out yet because I’m afraid he’ll be even worse than her. It’s a double standard, but perkiness is annoying but tolerable in a girl. Not so much with the tolerable on a boy.

The only problem with the implementation here is the beat detection. Where the game thinks the downbeat of the song is doesn’t always match where I think the downbeat of the song is, but then I’m a middle-class white dude who is less than a decade from being middle aged, so maybe that’s my fault. I highly recommend setting the step detection to easy, and selecting the option that doesn’t cost you points if you miss any steps.

Wii Play Unlike everyone else who bought this game, I didn’t buy the version with the Wiimote bundled in. I already have three wiimotes—should that be thriimotes?—and a fourth would just be superfluous until my son is old enough to stand on his own. So we bought Wii Play used without the controller primarily because it had 9-ball in it. I’m not sure why they went with 9-ball when 8-ball is what most people think of when they think of pool (unless they’re British, in which case they think of snooker, which is like 8 ball except the balls don’t have numbers and there are approximately six thousand of them on the table at any given time), but 9-ball is still fun and the implementation is good enough considering I wouldn’t really want to pay for a standalone billiard game for the Wii.

The real strength of the game is in the Tank game, though. If you had an Atari 2600, you had Combat. And if you had Combat and at least one friend, you probably spent a lot of time playing tank pong. Wii Play features a very similar game here, with tanks that fire shells that ricochet off of walls until they collide with a target or get tired and fall down. The Wii version also allows the player to lay mines, which sounds cool but seems to be largely useless against AI opponents.

There aren’t many games in Wii Play, but the ones that are in there are well executed, and for ten bucks (which is how much it would cost to get this game with a Wiimote if you take out the cost of a Wiimote) it’s worth it. Sure, they’re like flash games. But you can’t play flash games by waving your arms around like a dummy while your friends and family also wave their arms around like competitive dummies, can you?

Wii Fit I’ve mentioned the Wii balance board in a few of the game impressions above. The reason I did so is that we picked up Wii Fit when we bought the Wii.

Wii Fit is surprisingly robust as a piece of training software. A lot of the exercises necessarily focus on core training, since core training is all about balance and balance is what the Wii Balance board is good at measuring. But the addition of several step aerobics variations, a decent list of strength training exercises that don’t actually focus on core strength, and a good roster of yoga poses cement Wii Fit as a piece of software that will actually help people get in shape.

I’m as surprised as you are. How much exercise could a person get standing in one place and leaning in different directions. The answer is a surprising amount. I’ve been doing it every day for almost a month (as of the writing of this post) and not only am I pleased to stick with it, I feel like I’m actually getting in better shape. I’ll never make myself into Arnold Schwarzenegger with the Wii Fit board (unless you buy eight of them and teach yourself to juggle them), but I can stay active and make sure my pants fit. And that’s really what most people want out of exercise anyway, right

Cap the Haterade: Through Rain and Sleet and Snow

2010-07-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

And we introduce a new genre of post here at Free Toy Inside: a discussion of things that are unjustly maligned by critics and consumers alike. In this space you will find a defense of things that are popular to hate on. Be that movies, music, video games, books, or any old thing that comes to my mind.

Why? Because some things just don’t deserve the hate. Some things do, of course. Illinois Nazis, for example, are fully deserving of the hate that gets lobbed their way. But some things are hated on for no other reason than it is fun or hip to do so.

Well, consider this a curative for people who’ve spent too much time on SomethingAwful.com.

In my first installment, I’ll tackle a target that should probably be defended by a better writer, or a worse one. But since good writers don’t like The Postman, and bad writers are too busy trying to write screenplays for people who hate The Postman, then it must necessarily fall to me.

Ambitious? Friend, you’re looking at a man who beat the original Contra on the NES with one life. Challenge would be my middle name if fate and genetics hadn’t conspired to make my middle name “Slammin’” .

Let’s get this out of the way first: The Postman is a decent movie. Does it have flaws? Sure. It suffers from Costner syndrome, first of all, which is an affliction that forces every movie directed by Kevin Costner must be as epic and sweeping as Dances with Wolves, or at least take three hours to watch. Seriously, every move Costner’s ever been in should have had an intermission or a more merciless editor.

The Postman also features Costner’s typical ham-fisted message delivery (WAR IS HELL, DAMMIT!)

But at the end of the day, the stories tend to be good and the delivery, though long, is entertaining. Costner’s style is a throwback to older moviemaking, when movies were more apt to be character studies and the plots tended to be too complicated to sum up in a sentence. I suspect this is why they aren’t more popular, since most modern movies cater to the ever shrinking attention spans of viewers brought up on music videos. If you get bored watching something where the camera doesn’t do a zip-cut every three seconds, an establishing shot consisting of Kevin Costner and a mule walking through the ruins of civilization will probably put you to sleep.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, and I’ll wager that most of the people who hate the movie never have, The Postman is the story of a postapocalyptic drifter without a name who gets conscripted by an army of white supremacists that terrorize the remaining settlements of Western America known as The Holnists. He escapes, taking refuge from a storm in a mail delivery truck that contains the corpse of a pre-war mailman and bags of mail. He runs a scam where he claims to be a mailman from the re-established United States Government, charged with getting the lines of communication flowing for the northwest coastal states, in exchange for food and shelter. The con quickly melts away and he starts actually executing the duties of a mail carrier, along with the help of a lot of young members of the settlements he visits who are looking for any kind of hope for the future.

But hope is dangerous, and the settlements touched by the Postman begin to resist the brutal Holnist army, which responds by hunting down mail carriers and anyone who gives them refuge. And this is where you might consider the main plot to start. From here, the timeline of the movie spans something like a year or more, as can be seen through the changing of the seasons.

The leader of the Holnist army, and the movie’s chief villain, other than despair, is a former copy machine salesman turned general named Bethlehem. Now, the Postman is based on a book I haven’t read, so I can’t tell you if there’s any significance to that other than it enables aspiring political cartoonists in the movie to circulate fliers with the phrase “O Little Mind of Bethlehem” on them. Having taken a turn at writing a novel (I’m about two thirds of the way through it, and haven’t had the time to work on it for ten years) I wouldn’t doubt that the author named the character to get one good joke out of it, because I’ve done it myself.

Bethlehem is insane, but the nature of his mental disorder isn’t explored to any great degree. Narcissism and megalomania are two of his defining traits, to be sure, but he’s not the cardboard villain that you might expect from a movie featuring a heroic mailman fighting a white supremacist. At one point the general is shown painting a self portrait using a hand mirror, and he angrily demands that his subject stop moving. It’s a throwaway scene, shown through a door that’s literally closing on the camera. But it gives insight into the kind of man Bethlehem is, and lends some depth beyond the “racist = bad” motif that a shorter movie would have settled for. As a result, the character feels human. A vile, brutally despicable human, but still human with motivations that the audience can understand, if not agree with. I don’t say he’s the gold standard for villain writing, but I do say that he is proof that it’s possible to make a villain three-dimensional without making him sympathetic in any conceivable way. As a viewer, I don’t need to believe what he believes; I just need to believe that he believes it.

That’s a major theme of The Postman: Believing in something. Believing in something can cause a revolution, and the war between two revolutions is the main conflict of The Postman.

Boiled down, there are two types of revolutionaries: The Eager and the Reluctant. Eager Revolutionaries, like Bethlehem in this movie, like to talk about how revolutionary they are. They talk about the revolution they’re working for, and how amazing the world will be once their revolution starts turning. These are the kinds of revolutionaries that tend to kill a lot of people and get their pictures on Tee-shirts, because they’re really good at self promoting but not so good at building a world anyone wants to actually live in.

The Reluctant revolutionaries are the ones like The Postman in this movie. They’re not in it for fame, or to remake the world in their own image. They just do things that make sense to them. These kinds of revolutionaries tend to get beat up more, and they don’t to get their pictures on shirts, but their impact on the world is in general more profound and usually for the better.

Bethlehem wants the power that The Postman accumulates in this movie, and has been working for it since the war broke out. His problem, like many Eager Revolutionaries, is that he doesn’t know how to acquire that power except through fear. So he threatens everyone. He threatens to kill members of his army who disagree with him. He threatens to kill civilians who disobey him. This gives him a feeling of power, because people stand aside from him and do what he says, but that power is illusory. And this is thrown into sharp relief when The Postman starts delivering mail.

The Postman has more power over the people in the settlements than Bethlehem could ask for. In one visit, he burns off much of the fear that Bethlehem had instilled in the general populace. They’re still aware they can’t fight him and his army, but he’s no longer the invincible monster that must be placated with offerings. The scenes in which Bethlehem’s power crumbles even as he tightens his grasp on it are among the more satisfying scenes ever committed to film.

In the end, it’s a good story with good characters that concerns itself with that universal human need: Hope. I’ll never understand the antipathy toward it.

Psyche Out

2010-06-30T02:28:00.000-07:00

Like every gamer on the internet, I like to flatter myself with the belief that I’m somehow immune to hype. It’s all about the game, not the marketing budget or the buzz. I make my decisions deliberately, doing my research, parsing the reviews, and judging by the gameplay footage what will be my next purchase.

Yeah. And I also keep a pair of fairy wings in my closet that I wear for my night job giving little children quarters in exchange for their lost teeth. I use the teeth to build castles for my wife and children to live in.

Seriously. Right now I have a finished basement with a floor tiled entirely with incisors. But getting enough wisdom teeth to build the bookshelves in the library has been a cast iron bastard.

No, I’m susceptible to hype just like every other person walking the planet, or flying above it. I’m particularly vulnerable to small, viral campaigns that spread largely through word-of-mouth. These sorts of campaigns are designed to appeal to the nerd in me, which likes feeling clever because he’s heard of something that a lot of other people haven’t. Like a ring that makes me invisible, even if I only use it to catch fish.

This is not my best feature. It has led to many wasted dollars in my storied past as a gamer. Too many games that I fell for the hype, bought and then put down after putting in an honest, rigorous effort to like a game that I was, at best, lukewarm on because I desperately wanted the promise of the hype to be true.

Because I went to the trouble to preorder the damn game, and it’s going to be good!

This is almost universal to me: Any game that I care enough to pre-order cannot possibly be good enough to be worth preordering.

But so it came to pass that I pre-ordered and paid full price for 3D Dot Game Heroes on the PS3. As a gamer who started gaming in Atari’s halcyon days, and who came of age in the era of Zelda and Mario, the retro-goodness held some appeal. Especially since I had just finished Darksiders, which was alleged to be as derivative of Zelda as a game could be while still featuring entrails. Hungry for more adventuring and block puzzles, I took a look at the gameplay footage for 3D Dot Game Heroes with lust in my heart. When my wife heard that reviewers the web over were comparing the game favorably to A Link to the Past, she stopped short of demanding we buy the game, but did make a heartfelt appeal that nudged me over the edge.

But this was a quirky Japanese title by Atlas. Finding it in stores could prove problematic. But, wonder of wonders, a Gamestop exists right on my route home from work! I could preorder it and make it a DAY ONE PURCHASE!

And that’s exactly what I did. And it’s forty dollars that I wish I had back.

It’s not so much that 3DDGH is a bad game. It’s just not a particularly good game. My wife, on the other hand, would firmly disagree with that. A Link to the Past is one of her very favorite games of all time. To this very day. In fact, the very first downloadable game we bought on the Wii was A Link to the Past. So her devotion to Link’s third adventure in America is not to be questioned. From her perspective, the fact that anyone would mention 3DDGH and LttP in the same breath, let alone compare the former favorably to the latter, creates a burning rage of the sort that grounds flights out of Europe.

And I don’t just make that analogy because her ancestry is of the Norse persuasion.

To put it another way, She played Link to the Past. Link to the Past was a favorite of hers. 3D Dot Game Heroes is no Link to the Past.

It would be apt to draw comparisons and contrasts between 3DDGH and another game that was compared to Zelda games: Darksiders.

Darksiders was a game that was shamelessly derivative, but it was still its own game. Sure, it was stealing ideas from the Zelda series, but those were gameplay ideas. And it didn’t steal them in a direct, bit-for-bit kind of way, rather it stole the high-level concept and chiseled out something unique.

3D Dot Game Heroes, on the other hand, is not derivative. It’s a carbon copy. Except the carbon is old and has been used to the point where there’s almost no carbon left on it.

It is an old saying that good artists borrow, while great artists steal (Pablo Picasso allegedly said it, though it may have been apocryphal). Atlas seems to have misunderstood the meaning of this old saw. Taking another person’s work and slapping your name on it is not the kind of stealing that the proverbial Great Artist engages in.

When Vigil stole Zelda ideas for Darksiders, they still built their own game. 3D Dot Game Heroes feels like somebody got hold of the developer tools used to make the original Zelda and made a new game. Except they didn’t have the spark that gave Zelda’s game design its kick, so we wind up with a game that kind of looks like a Zelda game if you squint hard enough, but plays more like one of those Zelda knockoffs that couldn’t get Nintendo’s seal of approval and was therefore released by Tengen’s incompetent sister company.

It’s kind of like watching Kermit the Frog today. Steve Whitmire is trying desperately to remind everyone how much they love Jim Henson, but ultimately he doesn’t have the same soul. Kermit ceases to be Kermit, and he becomes just a sock puppet with ping pong eyes. Because Steve Whitmire, though talented, is not Jim Henson, and Kermit was only Kermit because Jim Henson made him Kermit.

The kicker is if they hadn’t struck out to build a game that reminded you of how much you liked Zelda, they could have made a good game. I played through the first three dungeons before giving up on the game, and not once did I feel like Atlas put any effort into making the game interesting in and of itself. Instead of “Oh, they did this kind of puzzle. Cool,” It was “Oh, this puzzle type was so much better done in Zelda. Sigh.”

That about sums up 3DDGH for me: I spent more time sighing than smiling. I don’t finish games like that anymore. Life is too short to spend it being bored by a video game.

How to Get A Free Wii

2010-06-23T02:22:00.000-07:00

The first thing you need to do is have two kids. And they have to have been born between 2004 and 2009. So you’ll probably need a time machine. Which means you’ll want to get in touch with some Libyans that hang out in Hill Valley…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Recently, The Missus and I bought a Wii, thus invalidating my theory that the Wii never actually existed.

Backstory on that joke: My only-half-joking theory was that the Wii was actually just a clever marketing campaign for a nonexistent product designed to create the ultimate in artificial scarcity (what’s scarcer than a product that doesn’t exist?) and drive Nintendo’s stock price through the roof. Anyone who claimed to actually have a Wii was in truth a guerilla marketer employed by Nintendo to fool people into thinking the Wii was an acual product.

That may have been the case three years ago, but today the Wii actually does exist, and we have one.

And we didn’t pay a thin dime for it.

If you want to replicate our success, you have to go back to 2004 and conceive a child.

Why? Because if you have a child in the infant-to-toddler range, chances are you bought baby Tylenol. And as you should be aware, baby Tylenol has been recalled for nebulous reasons that certainly don’t warrant a class action suit. Nope. Not at all.

But the makers of Tylenol will reimburse you the cost of any baby Tylenol you’ve purchased prior to the recall. That reimbursement netted us $60 cash money.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. $60 doesn’t buy a Wii. It barely buys a controller for the Wii. So where did the rest of the money come from?

Well, that leads to the second thing you need to do: Wait for Gamestop to have a sale in which they offer you an additional 50% on all trades. Under that condition, you want to dig out any systems you haven’t used in a year or more (in my case, a PSP and a GBA), and every game you own for them (25 and 14, respectively). You also have to have a wife that will do the same (in her case a DS and about a dozen games)

If you do that right, you will have enough cash and store credit to buy a Wii, an extra Wii-motion-plus controller, an extra nunchuk, two classic controllers, a Wii Fit Plus bundle, $40 in Nintendo Space Bucks, and an 8GB SD card (from Sandisk, not Nintendo. Just because it’s free money doesn’t mean I’m going to be stupid with it)

You’ll note that this doesn’t include any games. That is, as you Wii owners out there know, because there aren’t any.

Well, that’s hyperbolic, sort of. It’s widely understood that the Wii is not a system for Gamers. The Wii is a Family System, capital F capital S. That means games that we can play as a family. So single player games are pretty much out, which is fine because A) they don’t make many good ones anyway and B) I already have a system that is superior to the Wii in the Single Player library (the PS3). Basically, if two or more players can’t play at the same time, it’s probably not a game we’ll consider for the Wii.

Of course, I’ve heard that the new Mario games are more cooperative. Unfortunately, my experience with Super Mario Sunshine and Paper Mario for the Gamecube completely and utterly soured me on Mario games made after Nintendo moved to optical over solid state media. There are only so many times you can kick me in the balls before I stop spreading my knees.

So while we will probably be picking up games like Elebits and Raving Rabids, there won’t be a lot of first-person-shooting or platform-jumping.

There will, however, be lots of Zelda, a Link to the Past-ing and F-Zero racing, as well as some Starfox 64-ing, because Starfox 64 was the pinnacle of the brand. And we have a number of games for the Gamecube that I’m sure the kids will enjoy once they’re old enough.

For now, while waiting for the kids to get old enough to play, my wife and I are enjoying having Bowling night without the rented shoes.

Navel Gaming

2010-06-16T02:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, it’s another video game article. This one will be more philosophical in nature.

I have spoken on the types of gamers in the past, but what makes a gamer? Why, it’s someone who plays games of course, you trite nitwit. True enough, dear reader, true enough.

But what makes something a game?

Oh G-d! Not another one of those articles! Now I bet he’s going to open with a dictionary entry!

Quiet, you.

So, Merriam Webster’s (GAH! I KNEW IT!) defines game four different ways, two of which are pertinent to this discussion:

1 a: Activity engaged in for diversion or amusement

3 a: A physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other.

I’m aware that a number of you out there might dispute the above definitions; particularly number 1; but I’m taking these as the accepted definitions of the word Game, in particular because these two definitions are what people who don’t necessarily call themselves gamers think of when they hear or use the term game.

Also, the rules I’m about to lay out, to steal a bit from the late George Carlin, are my rules. I make them up. If you don’t like them, you’re free to think I’m an idiot. If you follow me on twitter, I’m sure you already do.

Anyway, from the above definitions we can derive two fundamental rules of what makes something an actual game.

First, a game is fun. Or, at least, it’s intended to be fun. If you claim to be designing a game and making it fun isn’t one of your goals, then you are not making a game.

It’s very important to make this distinction, because a developer can intend for a game to be fun, but fail. It’s still a game, just not a good one. Plus, it we don’t make this distinction, then MS Word can call itself a game, and nobody wants that. It may be a puzzle to figure out how the heck you’re supposed to do anything (or, more likely, how to make it NOT do something), but it was definitely not designed to be fun.

If your goal in making your “game” is to challenge people’s ideas about what makes a game, then you’re not making a game.

I know of “games” that were specifically designed to not be fun, but to make a statement, or force the user to think about something. While that may be interesting to a certain type of person who is not me, it’s not a game. You can make a game educational and even thought-provoking, but if you’re not also trying to make it fun, then you’re not making a game.

And remember, that’s my rule. I made it up.

The second rule, derived from definition number 2 from Merriam Webster:

Games have a clearly delineated difference between failure and success.

If you’ll never see a “game over” screen, you’re not playing a game; you’re playing with a toy. Toys have their merit, and I’ll be the first to defend them, but toys and games are related in the sense that poems and limericks are related. One is a subset of the other, carved out by having rules that do not apply to the larger group.

But even if you have a “game over” screen, if winning and losing share the same outcome (from a narrative perspective), then you’re not playing a game either.

So sorry, Gravity Bone, you are not a game.

If you’ve played Gravity Bone, you either love it or hate it. But either way, you’re not allowed to call it a game, and here’s why: (SPOILER ALERT)

At the end of the game, you encounter the big-bad. You give chase across rooftops, and when you finally catch up to the big-bad you get shot and you fall off of the building to your death. While that may be interesting storytelling, it is not materially different from what happens if you simply miss a jump while pursuing the big bad. Either way your character plummets to his death. The only difference between victory and failure is that you get to try again if you fail, and you get a cutscene if you succeed. But since you already know the ending, I don’t know why you’d bother. Just jump off the first ledge you see and call it a speed run.

Another example of something that’s not a game is Noby Noby boy on the Playstation Network. It largely satisfies rule number one in that it’s amusing enough, but there is no hard objective to meet, no condition for victory or failure. Noby Noby Boy is a toy that keeps track of certain statistics while you’re playing with it.

I know this post will irk some people, because it sounds like I’m passing a value judgment. I’d like to stress that I’m not saying that Noby Noby Boy (or Gravity Bone) is a bad example of whatever it is. I’m not even saying I don’t like it (well, in Gravity Bone’s case I am saying I don’t like it, because I don’t). All I’m saying is it’s not a game.

I can see where some people might make that mistake, because typically when someone says “that’s not X” it means they don’t like whatever they’re describing. Like when someone points at a toilet and says “that’s not art.” What they really mean is they don’t like Duchamp or the Dadaism. Well, that’s not what I’m doing. And I can prove it.

If I were just saying that anything I didn’t like wasn’t a game, I’d condemn Braid as not being a game because Jonathan Blow was so hot to challenge our preconceptions about gaming. Well, he certainly made some pretentious crap, but he still made a game, and my perceptions of him and his game can’t change that.

I’m not going to speak about whether games are, or can be, Art with a Capital A. That is a subject for another post that I am not qualified to write, though you wait and see if that stops me.

Overclocked Episode 2: Rapture, human nature, and which one Andrew Ryan was wrong about.

2010-06-09T02:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the second irregular installment of Overclocked, in which I go off the deep end and think too hard about something in the hopes that my tortured musings will entertain you. Kind of like Christians in Rome, except the lions are all figurative and live in my head.

Lately I’ve been playing Bioshock 2, which takes place sometime after the game that Ken Levine conceived and sometime before the series ceases to be a profitable brand. The two games have more than Big Daddies and creepy little girls with glowing eyes in common. Both games are skewering one political viewpoint while a significant number of players of the game think they’re skewering a different ones.

In Bioshock the first, the message most people took from the game (at least as far as I can judge by reading reviews) is that capitalism = bad. In fact, the message of the first one is that objectivism doesn’t work as a form of government. I can understand the misconception. At its core, free market capitalism is about letting entities sort out the best way of doing things for themselves with minimal supervision, and that people who earn money should be allowed to keep it. There is common ground there, but the difference is that free marketers favor a system by which property rights can be enforced. This gets back to the whole “keeping what you earn” thing, because there are more people than just government officials who look at your money and think “that belongs to me!”

The objectivist doesn’t agree. To the objectivist, you are entitled to keep only what you can keep. If someone with a bigger gun than yours comes along, well then your money belongs to him now. Unless he falls into some kind of repetitive pattern where he exposes a weak point for you to exploit every third attack. But since life isn’t a Zelda game, that’s not very likely.

The problem with most objectivists is that they don’t even recognize the possibility that someone with a bigger gun would try to take your stuff. Thus, the problem of objectivism is not that objectivism is objectively wrong, but that objectivists are incurably optimistic about human nature. They don’t think out the consequences of their own policies under the immutable fact that human beings are nasty, wicked creatures who will do what benefits them in the easiest way possible unless someone or something stops them from doing so. That’s why societies have laws and constabularies.

This blindness that objectivists have for the unscrupulous is precisely why Atlus caught Andrew Ryan so off guard in Rapture. To Ryan, he had created a true utopia, in which everyone was free to explore their own full potential in the absence of stifling laws or cultural mores. It simply never occurred to him that anyone would want to run the place for his own gain. Just like it never occurred to him that it might be a bad idea to let people give themselves super powers by freebasing sea slugs. What they do with their bodies isn’t his business, right?

Bioshock 2 is likewise likely to be misunderstood. I expect people will take it as a shot at Christianity, when in fact it’s about fascism.

Yes, yes. Feel free to pat yourself on the back. I’m sure you’re the first person clever enough to think “what’s the difference” to the above sentence. Good for you.

Fascism usually starts where you have a disproportionate amount of losers in a society. I don’t mean losers in the forty-seven-years-old-and-his-mom-still-picks-his-clothes-for-him sense, but in the actual I-tried-to-open-a-business-and-lost-my-shirt kind of way. When you get a lot of society’s losers in one place, you get at least one person who sees those losers and realizes that there is power in numbers. That person will then take up the cause of the downtrodden and offer them something they want, or think they want. Chances are they don’t even believe what they’re peddling; they’re just trying to get power.

For Sophia Lamb, she saw that people were missing G-d. Ryan, being the secular humanist and objectivist libertarian that he was, saw religion as a hindrance to the greatness of man. So long as you believe in a power greater than your own, and adhere to artificial laws handed down from some musty old book, then you can never be truly free. Or so Ryan would argue. So naturally, religion was discouraged in Rapture. And bibles are the only books to be banned.

The interesting thing about Bioshock 2 is that it changes the meaning of some of what the player saw in the first game. The first game featured smuggler’s crates full of bibles, and the introduction of the spider splicers had them spouting pseudo scripture instead of the usual incoherent ramblings the player had come to expect from splicers. This was to be taken as hypocrisy on Ryan’s part; the great champion of freedom in all things taking the decidedly totalitarian step of banning literature as subversive. In the context of Bioshock 2, we see that Ryan wasn’t simply preventing people from reading the good book, but was defending Rapture from the fascistic rumblings of Sophia Lamb.

This is made clear in the audio logs, in which Ryan voices his disapproval of Lamb’s coordination of artistic activities in Dionysus Park. He explicitly says that he disapproves, but as it’s Lamb’s property, he has nothing to say about it. But he adds ominously that he will take a sledgehammer to the place if his investigation of Lamb confirms his suspicions.

This exposes Ryan not as the megalomaniac we first took him for in the first game, but as a tragically deluded figure who truly believed his vision would be best for everyone, and was trying to defend the nature of Rapture against elements who would turn it into another totalitarian state.

Lamb, however, is the prototypical power-grabbing fascist aspiring to dictatordom. She uses high flown rhetoric about unity (in Lamb’s case, the buzz word is Family, but it might as well have been Worker, Proletariat, or any of a hundred terms that real-world fascists use to claim they speak for the people) to whip up support for her agenda, but she’s certainly not above strong-arming the odd surrogate mother into giving up a child if it benefits her. Lamb’s own transgressions against the family are forgivable, even laudable, because her only real principle is that of the attainment of power. Because, like any fascist, she believes that everything would be beer and skittles if only she ran everything.

Ryan was actually trying something new. Something that had never been tried before. But it didn’t work out, because people are people. Lamb is just rehashing the ideas and tactics of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joe Stalin and Che Guevara. That never works either, for much the same reason.

Which is kind of fitting, when you think about it. What could be more appropriate to a sequel than a villain that cranks out the same old rhetoric hoping that it will work this time?

Late to the Party Reviews: Darksiders

2010-06-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

They say when you’re looking for a mate, you should find someone who is strong in areas you’re weak, and vice versa. That way you can bolster each other and provide support during difficult times. In that spirit, it’s worth noting that my wife is a big fan of Zelda games, while I am not.

It’s all about temperament, really. She’s more of a How gamer, while I’m more of a What gamer. Puzzles are her thing. But she doesn’t have the experience I have driving dual analog sticks, so modern Zelda-type games are more difficult for her.

But Modern Zelda type games are good for us to collaborate on. She can help guide me on the puzzle solving, which I’m weak on, and I can mow down enemies and complete jumping puzzles, which she is weak on. I drive, she navigates.

Just like in the car, but with less angry grumbling about the fact that nobody in New England knows how to make or hang a street sign.

This is how we came to be in possession of a copy of Darksiders for the PS3. Too much combat for my wife’s tastes, but too much puzzle solving and block moving for mine, Darksiders is a game that neither of us would have picked up on our own. But together, as a team, it’s several flavors of excellent.

The plot revolves around War, one of the 4 fabled horsemen of the Apocalypse. He is summoned to oversee the apocalypse and maintain the balance between the forces of heaven and hell. Of course, he’s not supposed to be alone. But he is. Being the dutiful type, War sets about his work while presuming that Plague took a sick day, Famine is at lunch and Pestilence is having his house tented.

Slackers.

It turns out that the apocalypse wasn’t supposed to happen, and the other horsemen were never summoned, and weren’t just holding out for better pension benefits after all. The world of humankind is destroyed, the balance is out of whack, and everyone is blaming War.

Now stripped of most of his powers, and his horse, War convinces the Council, aka the powers that be, to grant him passage to Earth so that he might find out what happened and bring the responsible parties to justice.

Thus, we are thrown headlong into a conspiracy that involves angel and demon alike.

The game is structured like your typical Zelda game, or so I’m told by the Missus, who has played the typical Zelda games. You set out on your quest, only to find that the guy who knows where you need to go wants you to collect three things for him. So you do, only to find that you need to collect seven more things to access the place that the guy who wanted three things told you to go. You will face bosses that are so confident in their own power that they store the only weapon that can kill them in a crate right next to the entrance of their home. Also you find currency and health if you open chests or hit chickens with your sword.

Well, just kidding about the chickens. This game his giant bugs and bats instead, and they attack you back.

The game has been criticized for being derivative of other games. There is some merit to that: The best way to describe the game is to say it’s Legend of Zelda with God of War’s combat and World of Warcraft’s art style (also known as the Never-mess-with-a-man-who’s-fists-are-larger-than-his-head-and-has-white-hair school of design), with some puzzle elements from Portal (you actually get a gun that shoots orange and blue portals at one point in the game)

But let’s be honest here: If you make a game that gets favorably compared to Legend of Zelda, God of War, World of Warcraft and Portal all in the same sentence, I can’t think of logic tortured enough to conclude that the end product is a bad game. It’s like complaining that a pizza has sausage, pepperoni, meat balls and peppers on it. Sure, you’ve enjoyed all of those things before. But now here they all are in one place, with a tasty crust, homemade sauce and three kinds of cheese.

You might as well criticize a Swiss army knife for being too useful, or criticize John Ford for making too many movies with John Wayne in them. The very question is absurd.

The game features a good blend of puzzles and action. The twitch gamer in me that took years to make its peace with the death of the arcade didn’t get bored, while at the same time the puzzle gamer in my wife who finds it tedious to watch me mow down enemy after enemy with an over-compensatory sword didn’t lose interest in helping me figure out how to go about bouncing an energy beam off of six mirrors by slowing down time and lighting a torch with a boomerang in order to get the energy beam into a portal that sends it to a kind of mystical capacitor that stores energy beams until a path to another mystical capacitor is made.

And no, I’m not kidding. Except it might have been seven mirrors.

The controls took some getting used to, I’m not ashamed to admit, but it works well considering how much the game lets you do. This is a game that would have been made for the PC ten years ago, and probably would work on the PC today if there were any money in that niche market of Triple-A-PC-Games-that-are-not-developed-by-Valve. (Send hate mail to…). On the console, I occasionally found myself wishing for a Nostromo or an updated version of the old Atari Jaguar controller, because twelve buttons and two analog sticks barely covers everything you need in order to play Darksiders effectively.

Basic combat and puzzle solving is straightforward enough (X to jump, Square to attack, circle to grab), but when you get into spots where you’re fighting off legions of hard-to-kill mini-boss type enemies who are being aided by easier to kill run-of-the-mill enemies and you have to summon your chaos form, or use a rage-based ability (that’s right, you have both a chaos meter and a rage meter, which enable you to do different things) while blocking, dodging and figuring out which alternate weapon would be most efficacious in dispatching the hordes of enemies, it’s really easy to accidentally summon your horse or use a health potion before you actually need it.

As with any game that tries to go 3D with a third-person perspective, the camera sometimes gets in your way. For the most part it’s no problem at all, and it works better than a good 80 to 90 percent of the third person action game cameras out there. But there is this boss fight against a critter that can teleport, and who does so quickly and often, where I died a number of times just because the camera whipping around the keep him in view was so disorienting.

But these are minor quibbles. The complexity of the controls is mitigated by the fact that the game eases you into your abilities with a nice, gentle learning curve. By the time you need to do anything really complicated, you’re pretty close to the end of the game. And while a few of the bosses are frustrating (there is one that involves using portals to jump on his back, but the portals only work if you stand very still and hope you don’t get hit by the boss’ unblockable, almost undodgeable attacks) most of them are challenging without being cheap. The final boss in particular was a good example. Without getting into spoiler territory, I was out of health potions and darn dear dead when I struck the final, triumphant blow.

And yes, it was an actual attack. Each boss fight, as with the rest of Darksiders in general, is refreshingly free of quicktime events. The worst offenses in this category involve a few minor “tap circle as fast as you can” instances, and the “press circle to finish him” moves. But since circle is mapped to a context-sensitive grab move anyway, those moves don’t really count as QTEs.

I would heartily recommend Darksiders to anyone who has a bit of the puzzle-gamer in them. For my part, even though I had to marry my puzzle gamer, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I eagerly await the sequel that the ending so blatantly set up.

Worth 55 out of 60 dollars, for those of you who must apply a number to everything.

Acquiring the Taste.

2010-05-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

“Give it a chance. If you can get past it, you’ll really enjoy yourself.”

I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. It is the argument that people who enjoy something use to persuade people with different tastes that those tastes are wrong. Most recently in reference to Final Fantasy XIII. I am frequently told that once I get past the hokey characters, or the fact that you have to read a novella buried in the options menu to know what’s going on, or the thirty-plus hour long tutorial, that the game is really awesome. All I have to do is really commit myself to liking it.

I heard it a lot with Bayonetta too. I was told that once I got past the misogyny, and the ‘shroom enhance storyline, and the borderline pr0n presentation of the magical stripper that is the protagonist, that the game was a lot of fun.

I am generally skeptical of this sort of argument. Usually it means “I don’t have a problem with (element X, Y or Z) and therefore nobody else should either.” Which is bunk. (Though I must admit I’m not wholly innocent of doing the same thing myself, but at least I admit that the things I like aren’t necessarily any good, they’re just things that I like)

Other times it means that the game caters to an acquired taste, or that it is an acquired taste all unto itself. Like Coffee. Nobody likes the taste of coffee. But they’re told by other people who drink coffee how awesome it is and so they force themselves to drink it until they like it. All you have to do is get over the bitterness (or mask it by adding things to it until it ceases to be coffee) and the fact that you won’t be able to face the morning without it after a while.

Which seems like a colossal waste of money to me. Putting aside the health issues attendant to caffeine dependency, a small coffee (sorry; “tall” coffee) at Starbucks is between two and four dollars? Let’s say I made myself like coffee enough to drink one of those per day. That’s up to $28 per week if I go on weekends. I could buy a new video game every other week of the year for any system on the money some people spend to drink something they didn’t like in the first place.

Oysters are the same thing as far as I’m concerned. They look like the product of what doctors call a “productive cough,” yet people spend a lot of money forcing themselves to eat them in spite of how they look. Oh I’m sure they’re delicious, if I could just get past the fact that they look and feel like refrigerated mucus from an 80 year old man with bronchitis.

Bringing it back to video games, consider MMORPGs. Everyone I’ve ever heard talk about one holds two opinions about them: 1) Grinding sucks and 2) MMORPGs are really fun and worth the time. Now, this is a gross oversimplification because there’s more to an MMORPG than just grinding. There are, for example, raids which are social grinds, which sounds really fun until you realize the only person playing WoW that looks like Felicia Day is Felicia Day, and she’s not in your guild, at which point it just sounds like you’re doing a Phreak dance with Peter Jackson.

And let that mental image be a lesson to all of you who had ungentlemanly thoughts about Felicia Day.

But forgetting that, there are two ways to reconcile the two opinions. Well, three if you allow me to dust off my Abnormal Psychology textbook from college, but let’s ignore that one. The first is that the game has some appeal to the fans that transcends the grind (which is to say, they can get over the grinding) or that they’ve acquired the taste for the game in spite of the grind. Either one is a perfectly valid reason to play and spend money on a WoW account, but they both involve work that I’m not willing to dump into my hobby.

As a husband and father with a new house to maintain, I don’t have time to waste forcing myself to like something I don’t like. Of course, I realize that nobody is telling me I have to. Still, it’s frustrating when one voices an opinion about a given thing only to be told that if only I could get past the thing I don’t like, I would really like the thing.

It’s kind of like telling a die-hard Star Wars fan that if only he could get past the writing and direction of George Lucas, Episodes One, Two and Three are really quite fun. You can say it. You might even believe it. But you’re not going to convince the Star Wars fan.

And why would you try?

Movies you’ve never heard of 4: Clue

2010-05-19T02:53:00.000-07:00

And continuing in our special election year series of farces, I offer for your consideration Clue.

Based on the venerable board game, Clue features an ensemble cast that includes Martin Mull (Col. Mustard), Christopher Lloyd (Professor Plum), Madeline Kahn (Ms. White), Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Peacock), Michael McKean (Mr. Green), Lesley Ann Warren (Miss Scarlet), Tim Curry as Wadsworth the Butler and Lee Ving as Mr. Boddy.

I don’t know about you, but I never miss a Lee Ving picture.

With a cast like that, you almost don’t need a plot. Which is good, because Clue almost doesn’t have one. The movie basically plays out like a particularly good session of the game. The board is set up, the characters are introduced, the murder happens, and everyone wanders from room to room trying to figure out whodunit. A little more meat is hung on the skeletal premise to keep the viewer interested, but only just enough to set up the action. The butler (Tim Curry) has summoned everyone to his master’s (Mr. Boddy’s) mansion where it is revealed that Mr. Boddy has been blackmailing everyone with various secrets.

This results in Mr. Boddy’s death. Following the murder, the characters all try to figure out who did it. They all had means, motive and opportunity, and there were no witnesses. So they search the house looking for clues that might point to someone, whether that be one of them or some mysterious third party that nobody has seen yet.

Through the course of the movie, the characters will discover another six murders, bringing the total mortality rate to six. And no, that’s not a typo, nor did I forget how to do math. To tell you more, however, would spoil the endings.

Again, that’s not a typo. Long before Peter Jackson became synonymous with denouement infinitum, Clue shipped to theatres with several endings. Reportedly, moviegoers were asked before the denouement who they think did it, and the most popular answer was shown. The VHS edition of the movie showed each ending in sequence prefaced with a title card saying something like “That’s how it might have happened. But how about this?” The VHS version selected one version as the canonical ending, and it is entertaining in spite of the fact that there’s no way the canonical ending could have played out that way given what was shown in the previous reels.

And yes, I do complain about plot inconsistencies and continuity errors in the farcical telling of a story inspired by a board game. It’s what I do. I would likewise grumble at the pivotal role of zoning violations in a movie based on Carcassonne.

The DVD of the movie offers the viewer multiple options, ranging from seeing the VHS release to being treated to a random ending with each viewing.

For a movie based on a board game, there is a remarkable amount of fan service. All of the murder weapons from the game make an appearance, and all of them are used at some point. The floor plan of the mansion’s ground floor matches the board game exactly, right down to the secret passages connecting rooms on the corners. The canonical ending even closes the movie with the classic “X did it. In the Y. With the Z,” phrasing that just about everybody uses when they play the game.

Where the movie really shines, however, is in the acting. You don’t put together a cast like this one and fail to get something decent, and the quality of the writing only adds to it. Tim Curry is his usual flavor of awesome, and Christopher Lloyd plays what is quite possibly the most “normal” character he’s ever played. Of course, Madeline Kahn is superb, as she always was. It was a tremendous loss to Hollywood when she died.

There really isn’t much more to say about Clue that wouldn’t spoil the experience of seeing it for the first time. While it was originally released in 1985, it’s aged well; largely due to the fact that it’s a period piece. The humor has a good blend of puns, sight gags and slap stick, and it’s largely appropriate for all audiences, murder aside.

Knowing How To Pick 'Em

2010-05-13T02:51:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the tardiness of this post. I lost track of how long my queue of posts was and didn't get around to posting yesterday as scheduled.

I have objectively bad taste in video game consoles. Name a console generation, and I probably bought the wrong system during it. And if I didn’t buy the wrong system, I bought at the wrong time.

It’s not that I am unhappy with the system I bought at any given time. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have enjoyed thoroughly the libraries I’ve amassed on every console system I’ve ever purchased, and I’ve never regretted not getting a system for more than a handful of games. That’s subjective, and in subjective terms I have chosen well. My needs were met, my tastes satisfied.

But if we look at things through the cruelly scientific lens of math, I have a long history of picking losers.

Let’s start at the beginning. I got the 2600 shortly before the American Video Game Crash of the 1980s, also known as Atari’s comeuppance for greenlighting E.T. (which, incidentally, I owned and beat). Good taste in systems, from a market share standpoint, but poor, poor timing.

In spite of the loss of software support, I continued playing my 60+ title library until well into the 1980s. When the Famicon came to American shores as the Nintendo Entertainment System, I was still playing Pitfall and Moonsweeper. I procured a Nintendo Entertainment System, only to learn less than a month later that the Super NES was due out in less than a year. Nintendo’s promises to maintain support for the NES rang hollow.

Again, good taste, bad timing.

My next console wasn’t, in fact, a console. It was a handheld. Sega’s handheld; The Game Gear. And here is where we start to see my tastes in systems deteriorate. Given the choice between the Game Boy and the Game Gear, I bought the Game Gear. With my own money. That I saved for months on a $5 per week allowance.

And I didn’t even buy the system bundled with Sonic the Hedgehog, because I wanted Mortal Kombat. Which didn’t even have my favorite character (Kano).

I carried on with my Game Gear and NES until College, at which point I decided it was time to upgrade. So I did.

You want to know what I bought? An Atari Jaguar.

That’s right. And I went whole hog on it too. I even bought a custom fitted foam insulated suitcase for carrying it to and from college. Heck, I even bought a second one so my father and I could play Doom deathmatch.

I still maintain that Alien Versus Predator on the Jaguar is one of the better sprite-based FPS games I’ve ever played. And yes, I did enjoy Zuma, gosh darnit!

I won’t defend Double Dragon V, though. That game was just terrible. It was a crap sandwich with poop mustard and a turd instead of a pickle.

After about two years of that, I rented a Nintendo 64 and was so impressed that I bought one of those. Yep. Given the choice between a Playstation and a Nintendo 64, I went with the 64. Because Solid State was the Wave of the Future!

When I graduated college, I graduated to one of those new fangled optical game systems. That’s right; I traded in my N64 and bought Sega’s Dreamcast.

(Sighs wistfully)

Sega died in the early 21st century, followed by my Dreamcast, by which point Sony’s Playstation 2 had been on the market long enough to ferret out the bugs that cropped up after launch, because 21st century console developers think that Early Adopter = Beta Tester.

With the Xbox and Gamecube coming out soon, I opted for the Playstation 2. For once I picked the winner of a generation. Was the streak broken? Oh, I think you can guess the answer to that.

In 2003… or was it 2004? I can’t remember… I decided to supplement my library with a handheld system. The DS had been freshly released, so naturally I bought… a Game Boy Advance. Within what felt like a month, the only purchasable titles for the GBA were used.

In 2005, after getting married, my wife and I took some money we’d received as a wedding gift and bought (drumroll please!) a Gamecube!

In 2006 I decided, once again, that I could be happy with only a handheld system instead of a proper console. And what handheld do you think I picked when faced with the choice of the DS and the PSP? That’s right, I bought the PSP.

And I will state and defend as necessary that Every Extend Extra is a vastly underrated game, and that Chile Con Carnage is the best implementation of a third person shooter on a portable system.

The fiction that I could be satisfied with a handheld system was broken in a few short years, and in 2008 I bought a Playstation 3, which we can all agree is the loser of the current generation’s console war. I can hear some of you grumbling out there, but look at the NPD numbers. Third place in a field of three = loser. It’s true in Mario Kart, it’s true in life.

Now, I’d like to reiterate that I’ve never been unhappy with a system I’ve purchased. I’ve had fun playing the games on every one, and the only system that didn’t outlive its usefulness was the Dreamcast, which suffered an optical drive failure shortly after Sega announced they’d no longer support the system. My NES still works, and both of my Jaguars are still functional. My PS2 is, thankfully, still in working order because it’s the only system that runs my two favorite games of all time: God Hand and Gungrave Overdose. My Game Gear will be a gift to my children when they’re old enough to handle a handheld system, and my kids will be cutting their gamer’s teeth with the GameCube library I’ve stockpiled.

So from my perspective, I’ve chosen wisely. The point of this post isn’t to lament how horrible my choices have been, but rather to ponder whatever quality it is I possess that puts me so firmly outside the mainstream of gamerdom.

It’s not like I don’t do my research. Before I commit money to a system, I look at the current library and the upcoming releases to see if there’s anything that makes me really want to sit up and take notice. Back before the internet, I would read gamer magazines. Later I would go to IGN until their editorial choices cheesed me off enough to swear them off for good (seriously, I won’t even read FAQs that show up in google searches at IGN. If the only walkthrough for a game I’m having trouble with is on IGN, I’ll just figure it out myself) and I wound up at Gamespot, followed by Metacritic. I’ll hit Amazon to see what’s out, what’s cheap, and what’s coming. I’ll read forums and news sites to see how people fare with the console of their choice (one of the factors in my decision to buy a Nintendo 64 over a PS1 was the fact that I’d heard about a lot of optical drive failures on the PS1 and decided that solid state was the way to go).

So I do all that work, and I still end up choosing wrong. Why?

The reflexive answer is to say that the majority of people are idiots. After all, the majority of people didn’t watch Firefly. The majority of people didn’t play God Hand. The majority of people have never read a Discworld novel.

But I’m not the sort to call someone an idiot for disagreeing with me about aesthetics. And even if I were, the question only shifts from being “why am I different?” to “Why is everyone else so stupid?” That’s rhetorically comforting, but doesn’t get me any closer to an answer.

My wife has noted that I do have a stubborn tendency to do what makes sense to me in spite of any obstacles it throws in my path. In high school, I wore a fanny pack to keep my pencils and calculator in because I didn’t want them getting lost or broken in my bookbag. This opened me up to a lot of abuse, but I didn’t stop wearing it because it was functional and served my needs. This is pretty much the same thing, except nobody’s using rubber bands to shoot paper clips at my head. The only social ostracism I face now is the fact that nobody in the forums I frequent talk about the PS3 versions of a game that came out on multiple platforms. I can live with that.

Maybe it can’t be explained. Maybe my tastes are just wired different. After all, I seem to be the only person in America who thinks Seinfeld is vastly overrated, and try as I might I could never bring myself to enjoy The X-Files. The list of significant cultural milestones that I personally can’t stand is quite long. Why should gaming be any different?

Indeed, it isn’t. Even on the more accepted, successful systems in my history, my game library is less than well known. My two favorite games for the PS3 (God Hand and Gungrave Overdose) were not well received critically, and hit the bargain bin within months of launch. Nobody bought them, nobody played them, and nobody liked them. Except me.

And then, when the creative mind behind God Hand comes out with something that achieves some critical and commercial success, it’s Bayonetta: A game that I won’t have in my house for reasons that; in the interest of keeping the no-controversy promise from my inaugural post; I won’t go into in this post.

So my contrarianism seems boundless. I don’t think I’ll figure it out here, now that I’m over 1600 words into it. Maybe I read too much Calvin and Hobbes as a kid (the philosophers, not the comics). Maybe I read too much Calvin and Hobbes (the comic). Maybe my mother was frightened by a conformist when she was pregnant with me. Whatever the case, I seem to be doomed by my own predilections to pick the losers of any given console generation.

Savvy shoppers will want to take note of what system catches my fancy in the next generation, and but their competitor. You’re likely to be guaranteed years of solid software support.

The Battle of All Time

2010-05-05T02:32:00.000-07:00

I would like to take this opportunity to formally thank Wizards of the Coast for purchasing the rights to Hasbro’s light miniatures war game, Heroscape. You have done the world a great service by saving an excellent little board game from the ravages of garage sales and online auction houses.

Well, perhaps I should have put the word “little” in quotes, because Heroscape is anything but little. I daresay it is nothing less than Epic in scale. 29mm scale, to be precise.

To those of you who think only of Monopoly when you think of board games, let me edumacate you a little bit. There is an enormous world of board games out there that have nothing to do with advancing a small pewter tophat around a square board in an allegory of the great depression. Some of these board games transcend the board, and become “tabletop games.” The difference between a board game and a tabletop game is subtle, but I think it has something to do with whether the game can be contained on a single board or must spill out over as much horizontal area as possible. Also, tabletop games tend to be a few orders of magnitude more expensive.

A well known, at least among geeks, example of this is the Warhammer series. Warhammer (and Warhammer 40k, which is like Warhammer except the Orcs ride motorcycles) is a miniatures based war game played out on enormous custom tables in the backs of stores filled with gawky, bespectacled teenagers and large men with neckbeards who smell of cheetohs.

I’m allowed to say that because I was once a gawky, bespectacled teenager and today I am just gawky and bespectacled.

Warhammer is, as they say, hardcore. There are enormous books filled with the lore of the Warhammer universe that players must at least be familiar with (my understanding is that deciding what army to buy based on the politics of the universe is a game unto itself), and the rulebooks appear to be sold by the pound. The miniature soldiers, elves and orcs used in the game come in plastic and white metal and must be sanded, assembled and painted before use. Or, at least, sanded and assembled, but if you walk into a shop named after an obscure Lord of the Rings character with an army of identical unpainted night goblins, you should prepare to be mocked. I recommend either A) being phenomenally good at the game or B) answering any insults or snickers with tremendously obscure or even fabricated references to the Silmarillion, which nearly everyone who’s read the Lord of the Rings trilogy owns but has not actually read.

This kind of thing is how geeks determine who is alpha.

Warhammer is played not on a board, but on a table. Movement is measured with a ruler instead of a grid, and attacks are determined by line of sight (the more enterprising use a laser pointer to determine if their soldier can see their opponents’ soldiers through the miniature terrain).

Heroscape is less hardcore. First off, the miniatures all come pre-painted. The game is played on plastic hex tiles that can be stacked and interlocked in nearly any configuration. Trees and rocks come in the game master set, which can be supplemented with expansion kits that have different types of terrain and structures. (I currently have two of the original master sets, and one of every subsequent one. My terrain tiles and features overflow an 18 gallon tote even when neatly stacked).

These modular tiles and terrain features like plastic trees or rocks are more than just cosmetic. Different types of terrain have different attributes that affords certain advantages or disadvantages. Attacking or defending from an elevated position gives the player an advantage in combat. Water tiles reduce movement, and lava tiles are instant death unless you’re playing as a fire-based creature. Trees, rocks and buildings provide cover and obstacles for units that can’t fly.

The armies of Heroscape are more eclectic than that of the Warhammer universes. (Amusing side note: Heroscape and Warhammer trip Word’s spelling checker, but it has no problem pluralizing universe. The only explanation I can think of for Microsoft’s acceptance of universal parallelism is that project Natal is actually used to co-opt unsuspecting victims in alternate dimensions, and the goofy movements you perform in game cause this victim to send Microsoft all of his money.)

Where was I? Oh yes, the armies. Heroscape features five different flags to march your army under. Each army has a theme, but the warriors in these armies are taken from across dimensional boundaries. The conceit of the game is that some rift in the space-time continuum has pulled together all of these warriors from across various times and universes. This is a thin veneer of plot provided only to explain why colonial minutemen are waging battle against gorillas with cybernetic implants and miniguns.

The gorillas tend to win a lot, which is why it’s a good idea for the minutemen to have an ice dragon and a wizard on their side.

Like terrain, armies can be expanded with add-on kits that come either in packs of basic units (have as many of this unit as you want) or in unique hero units (each game can only field one of these). Basic units are broken down into single, powerful soldiers or three to four weaker soldiers. For example, one unit card for the Lawful Evil army (Utgar) might have a single troll, three orcish archers, or four zombies. Unique heroes tend to be single soldiers with names.

Each unit has some basic abilities spelled out on the corresponding card: One for defense, one for attack, one for range, and one for movement. Range and movement are measured in hex tiles—a given character can attack from X number of hexes away, and can walk up to Y number of squares per turn. The attack and defense attributes call out the number of battle dice your character throws when attacking or defending. Attack dice are six sided dice with skulls to represent attacks, shields to represent defenses, and blank faces to represent how unlucky you are at dice games. When one player attacks, he or she rolls the number of dice called out on his card for attacks, and the opponent rolls the number of dice allotted for defense. Attacker counts the number of skulls rolled, while the defender counts the number of shields. Whoever has the bigger number wins.

Each unit also has a special attack or ability that lends some depth to the strategy. These will be spelled out on the card associated with that unit. Abilities range from the ability to fly for characters with wings or jetpacks, to the ability to influence units within a radius of the main unit, to a different kind of attack with its own range and attack ratings.

Samurai warriors, for example, have a special ability called Counterstrike, which means that if a unit standing adjacent to the samurai attacks, the samurai will bitch about lag issues and question the heterosexuality of whatever weapon you’re using.

Well, no. Actually, the samurai will roll defense as normal but counts every extraneous shield he rolls as an unblockable attack on his opponent. So if a troll with three hit points attacks and rolls two skulls, but the samurai rolls five shields, then the troll is dead.

A note for casual players: Fielding an army of all samurai warriors is a real dick move, and it will annoy your wife. Not that I have personal experience with this or anything.

The master set comes with instructions for building a few different battlefields and some scenarios to play out on them, but you can build anything you want. And if you have enough expansion sets, you really can build almost anything, and half the fun is coming up with a map and thinking of a scenario for it. The brilliance of Heroscape is not in the rote last-man-standing deathmatches, but in the more creative house-rule scenarios. For example, using the castle expansion set and a set of lava tiles in addition to the main master set, the Missus and I created a scenario based on the siege of the black gates in Return of the King. A wall stretched across one side of the battlefield, while the good-guy units were scattered across the battlefield as my wife saw fit. I had one unit card of three fast but weak marrow warriors, and the stipulation that I could not attack with them. My goal was to get one of my soldiers across the battlefield to the gate of the castle. If I could do that, the gate would open and a flood of powerful evil units positioned behind the wall would be alerted to the presence of the good-guy units and attack them. My wife’s goal was either to A) stop the scouts from getting to the gate or B) defeat the horde that would flood out of the gates if the scouts made it through.

I designed that scenario worried that the game would be too heavily skewed toward the good-guys, and that the game would be over in a nunce. Little did I suspect that I would actually get one scout through and that the ensuing battle would be so epic.

But don’t be daunted. The developers of the game have designed it to be accessible. There are two sets of rules included with the game: A basic set and a master set. The master rules use hit points, special abilities and has a round system for determining how long a game goes (there’s also a marker system for selecting which units will move in which order during a given turn, and a system of “glyphs” that can be put on spaces to confer special powers to whoever steps on them, but I’ve never used either in my games). The Basic set drops everything but the basic movement and attack rules, so a successful attack automatically kills the defender rather than wounding. This not only allows for less experienced players to dampen their pedal extremities, but it also makes for some frenetic games.

If you’re looking for a new board game, but are bored (see what I did there?) with typical Parker Brothers fare, Heroscape might be a game for you. Especially if you’re the type of person who’s cast covetous glances at games like Space Hulk at your local board game and geek shop, but didn’t want to pony up the $90-plus dollars to give it a try or herniate yourself carrying it to the checkout line.

This is not to say that Heroscape can’t cost $90. I have spent $150 on master sets alone, not to mention the tile expansion sets (Forest, glacier, lava and jungle) at $15+ each, or unit expansions starting at $10. But Heroscape uses the crack dealer method of pricing: your first master set will only cost you $30.

I recommend trying to find the original Rise of the Valkyrie master set, if you can find it. If not, the current D&D themed set is perfectly fine, even if the included scenarios are a little thin (though to be fair you can download new scenarios at playDnD.com)

Overclocked Episode 1: Country and Strong Women

2010-04-28T02:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Overclocked! A new feature for Free Toy Inside, in which I (the author) think too hard about a given subject in an attempt to ruin for myself and everyone else. It’s a bit like Yahtzee’s zero punctuation review, but instead of quick-tongued lambasting and humorous scatological references, I’ll be making earnest philosophical arguments that will hopefully be self parodying enough to keep you entertained.

This week I’d like to discuss the song Before He Cheats, by “country” singer Carrie Underwood.

I hear this song frequently, because it’s played on the radio station that’s piped into the production line and engineering labs at my work. Also, I’m a country fan and this song was unavoidable for a few months back when it first came out. It’s not country, but more on that later. The song is about a supposedly wronged woman who exerts her revenge by destroying her boyfriend/husband’s truck. The description of the damage wrought is described in gleeful, almost pornographic detail. The listener is intended to revel in the destruction and to applaud the singer for being one tough cookie. All of these premises are questionable.

First off, I’d like to address the lack of empirical evidence that the singer provides the listener as justification for her vandalizing rampage. Let’s consider the first line.

Right now, he’s probably slow dancing with some bleached-blonde tramp and she’s probably getting frisky.

I added emphasis over the key words in this line: probably. Right off the bat, the singer is telling us that she doesn’t even know for sure that her husband/boyfriend is actually cheating on her. Every wrong thing that the man allegedly does in the song is prefaced by the word “probably.”

Given the extent of the vandalism that the singer believes is justified based on speculation, one can only wonder what she would have done to the man she were certain of his perfidy. But we don’t know he’s actually cheating. Indeed, we don’t even know if he’s in the bar.

Now, it would of course be ridiculous to expect any significant backstory in a song. But generally wronged-woman songs are more resolute in their assertions of wrongdoing. If the singer is unsure about the activities of her allegedly wayward man, how are we to assume anything she says about him is true? How do we know he didn’t lend his car to a friend to impress the woman she imagines so vividly in the bar? How do we even know there is a woman at all? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that her man is drinking beer and shooting pool with the guys?

The singer doesn’t tell us she saw him doing anything. She tells us what she imagines him doing because she saw his car in a parking lot that it presumably shouldn’t have been in. And even that assertion is tenuous, because we don’t know why he’s not supposed to be there.

As the listener, we honestly don’t even know that he knows they’re in a relationship. Given her unhinged state of mind (in which she destroys a car based on speculation of wrongdoing) it would not be out of bounds to assume that she’s some sort of dangerous stalker.

Next, I’d like to speak to the affront to the tradition of the strong woman/wronged woman theme that has been part of country music since the days of Patsy Cline. “Before He Cheats” does not carry on that tradition. In fact, I would argue that the singer represented in the song is a very weak specimen of womanhood indeed. And here’s why:

First off, when she envisions what kind of woman her wayward man may or may not be seducing, she immediately bypasses the high road and goes straight to cattiness. In the following two lines, we see her creating a straw-woman to be the object of her man’s desire that is an affront to her, presumably more authentic, brand of womanhood:

Right now he’s probably buying her some fruity little drink ‘cause she can’t shoot whiskey

And

Right now she’s probably up singing some white-trash version of Shania karaoke.

Here we see classism and elitism. The first line quoted above is the female equivalent of saying her competitor has a small penis. It’s ugly, and it doesn’t show the singer as a strong woman. It exposes her, rather, as petty and insecure.

The second line is kind of a one-two punch of sorts. Both calling her alleged opponent white-trash while implying that she’s not even woman enough to like real country music, as if that’s what Ms. Underwood were peddling here. Shania Twain has long been criticized among country fans for being too pop-ish, and her music has many of the same trappings of pseudo-strong grrl power cheerleading that Ms. Underwood’s has. So not only is the singer being classist, but also hypocritical.

This is not to say that the wronged woman (if indeed she be wronged) has no call to criticize the Other Woman. But given the context here, the insults are too petty to be considered anything that would come from a position of strength. This is pure lashing-out. She created this specter of a woman entirely for the purposes of feeling superior to it.

Likewise the singer’s actions against her allegedly cheating man show weakness, not strength. This is petty, “you-hurt-me-so-now-I’m-going-to-hurt-you” stuff, and is a break from the kind of “It’s a Little Too Late” attitude that the likes of Tanya Tucker embody.

Consider the “retribution” that is described in the refrain:

I dug my key into the side
Of his pretty little souped up four wheel drive.
Carved my name into his leather seats.
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights
Slashed a hole in all four tires
Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.

These are not the actions of a strong woman. These are the actions of a woman who doesn’t value herself enough to believe that she can hurt her man just by leaving. She lacks confidence in her own worth, and perhaps even fears there is some justification for her man’s alleged actions. When Reba McIntire sings about walking out, you know that she believes that’s the worst possible thing she can do to her man. Not only does she realize that a cheating man isn’t worth her time, but she realizes that depriving him of her very presence is the ultimate insult.

Not so with Carrie Underwood in this song. She doesn’t believe that her absence is stern punishment, so she vandalizes a thing. She believes herself to be worth less than the truck, or at the very least she believes that her man values her less than the truck.

This brings us back to the earlier point: Why does she imagine her man is cheating on her without evidence? Did she not look because she’s afraid to know the truth? Does she secretly fear that her man’s low valuation of her in comparison to the truck is somehow valid?

I would postulate that she’s not mad that he is cheating on her, but rather she’s mad because she thinks it might be her fault.

There are two reasons why she would create this fantasy of adultery based on simply seeing her man’s truck in a bar parking lot. The first is that she doesn’t trust him. The second is that she doesn’t have confidence in herself to keep him from going astray. In either case, she isn’t really mad at him, but at herself.

In the first case, she would be mad because she stayed with him even though she didn’t trust him to not do what she accuses him of. In the second case, she’s mad because she couldn’t keep him at home.

Either one explains everything. The attack on the truck, lauded by the shallow as a victory for the strong woman, is actually very self destructive. She carved her own name into the seat of the car. Did she not expect the law to get involved? Did she expect “He was probably cheating on me in that bar” to be enough justification for a jury to vindicate her? Did she expect the owner of the truck to say “Gosh, you’re right. I was really being a tool,” when faced with the vandalism?

Given her obviously unhinged state, it’s possible. But she would have been arrested, punished, and would become the fabled “psycho ex girlfriend” to the alleged cheater. The truck can be repaired or replaced, but now she has a criminal record to follow her around everywhere. Do you suppose, the next day when the anger and whatever liquor she may have been drinking have worn off and the policeman is showing her a picture of her name carved into a leather seat that she thinks it was worth it?

If she does, that doesn’t make her a strong woman. It makes her a psychopath.

The woman portrayed in “Before He Cheats” is nobody to be celebrated. It is the snarling bluster of a wounded animal, lashing out pathetically at whatever target is easiest in the hopes that other observers will mistake it for strength and leave her alone.

Movies You’ve Never Heard Of 3: The Man Who Knew Too Little

2010-04-21T02:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the third installment of an ongoing series that involves me trying to expose you, my reader (Hi Dad!) to movies that have heretofore been only of interest to me. Today we take a look at one of Bill Murray’s lesser known comedies: The Man Who Knew Too Little.

In keeping with the theme of the year, The Man Who Knew Too Little (hereafter TMWKTL because I’m too lazy to copy and paste the title every time it comes up) is on the farcical side of the comedy field. The plot involves a buffoonish, out of work actor (Bill Murray) who has traveled to Great Britain to surprise is expatriate brother on the anniversary of his birth. The problem is that his brother has an important business meeting with some German clients, and can’t celebrate right away.

The brother, feeling bad about the whole thing, buys Bill Murray tickets to a special show called “The Theatre of Life” which takes place in the streets of London, and makes the theatre-goer the main character of the play. He promises to meet up with Bill Murray after the show so they can smoke some celebratory cigars before midnight.

The show is supposed to start when Bill Murray answers a public phone, from which he will get his instructions as to where to go and what the scene will be. All in character. Of course, this particular phone just happens to be located at a dead-drop, and when Bill Murray answers the phone he inadvertently gets instructions intended for an international assassin.

And thus begins a string of miscommunications and misunderstandings that will bring the world to the brink of a new Cold War.

Overall, the theme is similar to those old Popeye shorts in which Popeye chases after Sweet Pea as he crawls through a construction site completely oblivious to the danger he’s in. The ignorance of his situation is what gives Bill Murray’s character the edge that lets him cheat death and remain a step ahead of the ever growing roster of spies, spooks, and assassins that keep coming after him.

The brilliance is in the execution. Bill Murray is one of the best comic actors in Hollywood on his worst day; even the unwatchable Broken Flowers featured an excellent performance by Murray; and this movie represents one of his better days. His timing is flawless, and his deliveries typically spot on. And in case you thought he could only do his wry, snarky schtick, he pulls off some physical comedy as well. Particularly impressive is the Russian folk-dance number at the movie’s climax.

And it’s not just Murray. Alfred Molina, man of a thousand accents, delivers a hilarious performance as a retired KGB assassin know only as The Butcher. The Butcher is called out of retirement to put an end to this rogue operative (is he MI5? CIA? NSA?) who is gumming up the works so thoroughly.

I won’t spoil the plot any further than I already have. Chances are good that you’ll be able to catch this movie on TNT some afternoon, but I recommend renting or buying it. If you like silly, you won’t be disappointed.

Heck, it’s worth it just for the car-chase scene.

Getting to Know Me

2010-04-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

I’m really pushing the limits, this time. The accelerator is all the way down. The RPMs are pegged. I couldn’t get any more power out of her if I wanted it.

My palms sweat with the knowledge that my lead isn’t anywhere near big enough. I can see the runner up in my rear view mirror. There’s one more turn before the checkered flag. I ease off the throttle, feather the handbrake and try to slide into the turn without losing too much speed.

My outside wheels leave the pavement, dropping my speed. My quarterpanel barely grazes the guardrail. My opponent zips by me as if he were on a slot-car track. I take the silver.

Again.

I fail to stifle the urge to curse a blue streak while I successfully quash the desire to smash the controller, the console, and the developers responsible for the game into a fine powder. This would be the tenth time I lost on that track. Today. I’ll give it a half dozen more tries before shutting the console down in disgust, but I’ll never come closer to winning the race than I did just now.

In a week, I’ll try again and do worse than today’s worst run because my muscles will have forgotten the skills that got me to that race in the first place.

At some point during this cycle of defeat and rage my wife will ask a question for which I have no answer:

Why do you play these again?

It’s not completely rhetorical, but it’s close. As a gamer herself, she knows the answer to why we play games is enjoyment. But it’s clear that I’m not enjoying the experience now, so why am I bothering?

It’s not like I have this much trouble with other genres. I’m not the best FPS player in the world, but I can hold my own in any single player game out there on normal difficulty. I can handle any platformer out there that I take an interest in, and I used to be almost competitive at fighting games. Beat-em-ups and Shoot-em-ups were my mother’s milk as a gamer, and the infinite permutations of Final Fight and Raiden cost me more quarters than I care to admit.

The racing genre, however, is beyond my skill. Oh, I’m fine early on, but later, when the cars become fast and the AI becomes omnipotent, at my best I still lose every race. No matter how many times I drive a given track, no matter how I try to learn the ins and outs of cornering, no matter how good I think I do on a course, I still take second place at best.

As a wiser robot than I will say, second place is just a fancy word for losing.

So why do I bother with racing games. Well, the short answer is that I don’t anymore.

It was not an easy decision to make. I’m an all or nothing kind of guy (that’s the Danny Rhebus way, after all). To admit that I’m not good at a particular kind of game was tantamount to an admission of being a bad gamer in general. I didn’t want to be one of those ghettoized players that play only Madden sequels or Call of Duty games and pretend that makes them “hardcore gamers.” No sir, if I was going to call myself a gamer of any sort, I had to be good at everything.

This is, I think you’ll agree, a perfectly ridiculous way of viewing the world. In the first place, my ability to enjoy Dwarf Fortress in all its ascii goodness already puts the lie to the notion that I would become one of those bizarre Gamestop denizens with the hair products and expensive girlfriends that bought an Xbox 360 to play Halo 3 but wouldn’t know Gordon Freeman if he walked up to them and broke their noses with a crowbar.

(It’s guys like you that are the reason why we have a billion GTA and God of War clones but no sequel to God Hand. Why don’t you go impregnate your girlfriend and stop wrecking up my hobby? Jerk.)

In the second place, it’s not like I hate all racing games. I love the Burnout series, or as I call it “The Racing Game For People Who Hate Racing Games.”

But all this is besides the point, which I actually do have. And that point is this: It’s okay to not like certain genres. [em] It’s even okay to not like them if you’re not good at them.[/em]

This might be a controversial conclusion for some. In a former stage of development, I would have berated myself for chickening out. After all, who wants to be the guy who only plays games he’s good at?

Well, I do. Sort of. It’s not that I don’t want a challenge, or can’t handle one. It’s just that, as a father of two with a new house to worry about, I don’t have a lot of time to invest in any given game. It’s just sensible to say that any game that takes too long to get to the enjoyable stage is off my list. I’m not going to drive that track over and over again until I finally master it to the point where driving it is enjoyable for me. I’d much rather spend that time in a shooter blowing things and bad guys up in a world where the rechargeable health bar or a steady supply of health packs that mean I don’t have to play the game perfectly to progress and have a good time.

So yeah, I’ll stick with genres that I have a proficiency in. Fortunately for me, that means the only ones that are on the outs are racing games and RTS games. And if that makes some people think I’m less of a man, well, I can live with that. I’d rather be happy knowing my limits than angry trying to live up to someone elses.

And that racing game from the intro? That’s long gone. I traded it in on something fun. I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of regret at having let the game beat me. But only a twinge.

One Hundred Percent Completion!

2010-04-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

Like many geeks, I like to collect things. Particularly cool or unique things.

I started small, collecting bottle caps that I found in the street while traversing my neighborhood via bicycle. I put them between the spokes of my wheels because I liked how they spun, and I cared not a whit for the additional drag they contributed.

Like others in my generation, I collected action figures and video games. My He-Man collection was unparalleled, and I had over sixty games for my Atari 2600—including E.T, which I not only played but beat.

Later, when I started to have money of my own, I set into collecting comic books. I have a collection of good-to-mint Sgt. Rock comic books that I’m quite proud of, the crown jewel of which is the first episode ever of Sgt. Rock, after they renamed Our Army At War after the most popular character. I bought it at a comic book convention for $0.50 from a vendor who was too busy with his X-men issues and fifty reboots of The Punisher to check the Overstreet guide, which would have told him to move the decimal to the right by two places.

I also have the complete set of Toxic Avenger comics in mint condition. The series lasted exactly one story arc, and didn’t finish out a full year, maxing out at eleven issues. Issue 10 was a bear to find, let me tell you, but I have them all.

Still later, out on my own with disposable income, I continued to collect video games and other things. Notable among them is a complete set of imported Japanese Evangelion action figures. They’re apparently part of an Anime series, but I bought them because they were cool—each figure boasting over 17 points of articulation, with interchangeable heads and hands to accommodate the different weapon loadouts that come with each figure. They’re the first action figures I’ve ever owned that could be placed into a proper Weaver stance, or configured to fire a sniper rifle while prone.

Most recently I’ve gotten over an obsession with a Hasbro property (now owned by Wizards of the Coast) known as Heroscape. For those not in the know, Heroscape is a light miniatures wargame played out on a fully 3-D map broken up into hexagonal tiles. Like any good miniatures based wargame, the core set can be expanded upon with new units and new tile sets.

For nearly two years I was obsessed with this game. My wife and I would play regular weekly games, and I bought nearly every expansion set I could lay my hands on. At last count, I have four core master sets (2 Rise of the Valkyrie, and one each of the Swarm of the Marro and Marvel Heroes sets) and one copy of each of the supplemental tile sets, including the ice, lava, forest and castle kits.

I also have figures. Boy, howdy, do I have figures. Not only do I have dozens of the basic unit expansion packs, but I also have several Hero unit sets, and I’m pretty sure I have every extra large unit they made for the game before WOTC bought the rights to it.

Recently, WOTC released a special Dungeons and Dragons themed master set. I am having a very difficult time resisting it.

This is typical of the Collector Geek, which I daresay is most geeks. Every geek collects something, be it books, movies, toys, or even just trivia knowledge. I’m sure those who are outside this particular Venn diagram would suggest some Freudian motive pertaining to the lack of lovin’ that geeks are assumed to get. The problem with this straw man is the fact that I continued to be a collector after meeting my wife, and was in fact enabled by her on the Heroscape obsession.

She understands the drive, because she’s something of the collector too. Her latest obsession is Pokemon cards. On Christmas eve we had one Pokemon card. It came in a happy meal. Today we have seven or eight decks of them. We’ve split them up according to which powers we like, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to consistently kick my butt because I opted for electric and fire Pokemon, while she went for plant and water Pokemon. (At the time we were divvying up the cards, neither of us was aware of the dominating nature of trees in the Pokemon universe. She just thought Turtwig was cute.)

The funny thing is that we haven’t played Pokemon but one time since getting the new cards. The only game we have played was with the training deck that I bought my wife for Christmas. Likewise, we haven’t played Heroscape since my daughter was born, but we have continued to accumulate units and terrain for it.

I think with these sorts of games, the game itself is almost secondary. The real appeal is the meta-game. Finding that level 2 pokemon so you have a bridge between a level 1 and a level 3 that are already in your deck but useless. Finding that discontinued expansion set of Heroscape dudes featuring colonial minutemen and werewolves. These are things that drive the collector. It’s not the having, or the using, it’s the acquisition. Marketers know this, and that’s why the collectible card game is so insidious as a product. The comparison with crack has been made and worn out, but it is apt.

I’m not sure why this is, exactly. I could say that it represented a flaw in our psyches that resulted in trying to fill a void in our souls with tiny plastic dudes carrying swords, also known as the “Why Didn’t You Love Me, Daddy?” explanation. Or I could say it was a manifestation of our own fear of growing up into mature adults, so we hide from father time under a mountain of Star Trek action figures. I could even say that we’re victims of a crass and materialistic society, but since we’re geeks and not women we buy fun stuff instead of shoes. (Oooh, I’d be getting some email about that one if I had any readers!)

But I prefer; and remember, I’m speaking for all geeks here; to think of it as a kind of self-improvement regimen. Whatever a person is, they usually want to be better at it. Jocks want to be better jocks, so they work out. Homemakers want to be better homemakers, so they watch Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Pretty people want to be prettier, so they buy makeup and trendy clothing and pay doctors gobs of money to prevent gravity for pulling on their floppy bits.

Well, geeks just want to be better geeks, so we strive to become bigger and better geeks. And what better way to accomplish that than by amassing the biggest collection of fill-in-the-blank ever? Remember, being a geek is all about being passionate about something. The more Star Trek toys, or Pokemon cards, or bootleg episodes of Reboot on DVD you have, the more evidence of your passion you have, and the bigger geek you are.

Even more than the amount of paraphernalia you amass, it’s important to have stories surrounding getting it. This is why midnight releases are so popular with a certain kind of geek. Sure, they could have downloaded it from Steam over night and had it ready to play when they woke up in the morning. But where’s the drama in that? Where’s the narrative? The camaraderie? Anyone can go order the special edition of Bioshock 2 from Amazon and wait for the backorder to be filled. But a true fan will camp out overnight at Best Buy (because pre-orders are fo suckas) and fight some dork in a Big Daddy costume to get the last copy with the useless vinyl LP of the soundtrack and the rolled up posters that they try to pass off as art by calling them lithographs. (Side note: Lithography is a technical term describing a method of applying ink to paper commonly used in the poster industry. Like Giclee—which is a French word that means “inkjet printer”-- Lithograph is a word used by good marketers to convince people that they’re buying something fancier than they are. So the next time someone brags over his special edition lithographs, feel free to marvel over the original artist’s ability to press Control and P simultaneously.)

Because the quality or usefulness of the pack-ins that come with a special edition of a game are immaterial. The point is that you’re a big enough geek to pay twice the cost of the game you want to play just to prove your love of the game to the world.

Granted, this is just one example, and not every geek is into Special Edition games. Though I have yet to meet a geek who didn’t like special editions of DVDs. I, myself, have no fewer than three different versions of Army of Darkness on DVD, and I’ve watched all of them (the theatrical release remains my favorite). And I’ve been coveting the special edition of Serenity since it came out, though I can’t justify buying it now that I have a mortgage and two kids.

Well, I could say more about the topic, but I’ve gone pretty far off the rails and I’m already over 1500 words, and nobody wants to read my blog as it is. Next week, something else.

Three PAX a day

2010-03-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

My wife is awesome.

This point cannot be stressed enough. When PAX came to the east coast, my wife offered-- offered, mind you, as in "Took the Initiative"-- to take the kids to visit her mother for the weekend so I could spend the entire weekend geeking out in Boston.

Such a woman comes around once in a generation, and she married me. You have no idea how happy that makes me.

For those of you not in the know, PAX is the Penny Arcade Exposition. It's run by the guys who write the venerable comic strip, which is kind of a big deal. I have an on-again-off-again relationship with the strip. I'll read it for a while, and then they'll write a comic that pisses me off enough to stop reading it for a few months, but then I'll check back and they'll have something funny enough that I'll read the backlog again.

Anyway, PAX was a West Coast phenomenon for a long time, but they announced "baby PAX" would be coming to Boston sometime last year.

The last convention I'd been to was back in the early 1990s. I saw Jimmy Doohan at a Star Trek convention in Albany with my folks. (He signed my copy of Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, and seemed like a pretty cool dude.) It was a pretty small affair, just one big room at a hotel.

PAX, on the other hand, is freakin' massive. Even PAX east, which was supposed to be a miniature version of PAX, was big. It took up three floors of Hynes Convention Center in Boston, and was big enough that after three days of wandering the floor, I was still getting lost.

What follows is my report from all three days, as written on Sunday night after the convention ended.

FRIDAY

GAH! Had to work late, and I already missed Wil Wheaton's key note speech because PAX started at 2PM on Friday. I also got lost on the way to the hotel.

The weekend was not off to a stellar start.

When I got to the hotel I found out they were out of rooms, and in order to honor my reservation they had to upgrade me to a suite... at no charge. Things were looking up.

After checking in I beat feet for Lir's Irish pub, which was where I had arranged to meet some people from a gaming forum that I'm a member of called Gamers with Jobs. I reserved space for about 20. 45 showed up. We took over the bar.

I met a bunch of nice people, and had my first beer in about four years. A pint of Guinness, that I didn't even have to buy for myself. Things were really looking up.

We hung out until around 9PM, at which point those of us who remained at the bar hit the convention to see what there was to see. I wound up playing a card game called Space Munchkin until 1 in the morning with one of the gamers from the bar, a random forum goer, and a dude who looked a whole lot like the male Captain Hammer groupie in Dr. Horrible (I don't think it was him, but I couldn't man up enough to ask)

By the way, Space Munchkin is hilarious, and if you're a fan of card games I recommend it. It's cutthroat as all heck, though, so try to keep it friendly.

SATURDAY

After that, I hit my suite (glee!) and watched a show called "Supernatural" which was pretty gruesome considering it's a cable network show. Fell asleep afterward and woke up at 6AM because A) I'm a morning person and B) I kids usually wake up by then so I'm conditioned to wake up before 7 anyway. Got up, felt like pancakes and thought for sure there was an iHop on Boylston street, but there wasn't so I got donuts instead.

It was 8AM when I got in line, which had extended out into the Prudential center mall by then, and the convention wasn't even due to open until 10AM. I got in the line for the Expo hall, which would feature a bunch of game companies presenting their wares.

As I waited in line, they announced the Joystiq breakfast, which I was under the impression you needed an invitation for so I didn't go. I found out later that I could have hung out with some dudes from Gamers with Jobs (including minor celebrity Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch, who I met at Lir's the night before and found him to be a genuinely nice person.)

(It was Saturday that I discovered that most of conventioneering was spent waiting in line. I waited in line to get into the convention. Then I waited in line to go to a panel (hosted by minor celebrity Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch), then I waited in line to get into another panel (hosted by the same guy. I'm not a stalker, honest) I waited in line to try video games, then I waited in line to collect a "prize" that I won from Intel for wearing an Intel advertising button (it turned out to be a pen with an LED flasher circuit in it.) Then I waited in line to try some video games in the free-play console room.)

When the doors opened I made my way to one of the theatres to see a panel about machinima. I don’t really know anything about machinima, and have never made machinima, but I like saying “machinima” and I found the concept of someone making cartoons by recording what happens in a game and editing it together is fascinating to that part of me that wants to make things but knows it will never actually happen.

After that I spent a bit of time browsing the floors and trying to find people I’d met the night before.

Before I knew it, it was both lunchtime and time to get in line for a panel on the Death of Print as it pertains to gaming journalism, which included Julian Rabbit Murdoch. I had good reason to be stalking him at this point, as he left some items at the previous evening’s meet-up, and I wanted to return them. Plus, he’s dreamy. I popped out of the convention hall to grab a sack lunch from Trader Joes, because they’re turkey club wraps are a) delicious and b) cheaper than anything I was likely to find within the convention hall. I returned to find that the line stretched on for hundreds of people. I happened to secure a spot in line with some fellow Gamers with Jobs , where we discussed the iPad and compared it to a Kindle, which someone standing near us in line happened to have and let us look at. I must say, the screen is quite impressive, but I still have my old Luddite reservations about reading books one something that needs batteries. Say what you want about paperbacks, a flight attendant will never instruct you to stop reading one so the pilot can land the plane.

The panel was interesting. If you wanted to set it to music, you could call it Internet Killed the Magazine Star or something perhaps a bit cleverer if you were smarter. The banter amongst the panelists was good, and everyone was in good spirits in spite of the fact that they were a bunch of writers talking about how one venue for them to sell their work was going away.

Later I got to check out the expo hall. There were some interesting games on display. A lot of downloadable games for the Xbox, including updates of Snake (Snake 360) and Warlord (Gravitronix). A new multiplayer game called APB that basically takes Cops and Robbers into the digital age with an open city that lets you steal cars as a crook or commandeer them as a cop. I didn't get a chance to try it, but the demo looked interesting.

Another XBLA game called Monday Night Combat had a big presence. My impressions of it was that they took Quake Arena, added all the classes from Team Fortress 2 (mixing the genders up a bit) and added cheerleaders in skimpy outfits.

It will likely sell millions of copies.

After that I attended the other Julian Murdoch panel (again, totally not a stalker) on podcasting for PR. The panel featured such giants of the video game podcastosphere as Jeff Green, Sean Elliot, Ken Levine (!) and Microsoft's Major Nelson.

Highlight of the panel: During the Question and Answer section a woman purporting to be working for Sony Online Entertainment asked a panel featuring people who work for EA and Microsoft for advice. They were very diplomatic and told her to swing by after the panel, but I doubt she got much out of them.

After that, I probably ended up passing up the chance to have dinner with some gamers with jobs alums because I wanted to be sure to say high to my wife and kids before it was their (my kids) bedtime and my phone was out of charge from twittering all day.

Then I had dinner, and found my way to the freeplay console rooms where I finally got to try Rock Band 2 (I suck at drums) and Beatles Rock Band. I also saved myself twenty bucks by trying Brutal Legend and realizing that, funny though it may be, has elements of two-- count 'em!-- genres that I hate: Racing games and Real Time Strategy games. Around the fifth time I failed the "drive the kegs of beer to the beach without them blowing up" mission, I realized I would spend a lot of time frustrated at the game.

I turned in on the early side on Saturday, getting to bed just before midnight.

SUNDAY

For the final day of PAX, all I really wanted to do was hit the "Pitch Your Game Idea" panel and maybe do some freeplay. (Gosh, that sounds like a drug reference, doesn't it? Hey man, you know where I can score some freeplay? )

I wound up attending the Blamimations panel, which was entertaining but served to remind me of why I don't read PvP anymore. Afterward, I got to the mic to pitch my idea only to have it shut down before I finished for legal reasons (they thought licensing would be a problem for a game about The Tick). Sigh.

I left shortly after my idea was rejected because I didn't want to see the prizes that people with better ideas than I had would win. Because I'm all bitter and stuff.

I went back out into the expo floor to see if the lines would be shorter on Sunday. My intention was to hit up the Skate 3 booth, which was having a contest where you could win a free skateboard deck if you scored over 70,000 points in the equivalent of Burnout's crash mode. The line wrapped around the booth and appeared to be devouring itself like a serpent, so I decided I didn't really need a skateboard deck and moved along. I did get a chance to try Snake360 and 'Splosion Man, which is not a new game but is from a studio that is pitching new games. Splosion man is pretty fun, and if I had an Xbox 360 I'd consider picking it up. And I'm not only saying that because the guy running the booth was surprised that I'd never played the game before.

I had just about decided to go home, with a heavy heart, but then I ran into some of the Gamers With Jobs I'd met on Friday. They were off to play Carcassonne, which Julian Rabbit Murdoch (totally not a stalker!) frequently praises on the GWJ podcast. They let me in on a game, and I ate lunch while building a ginormous city. Came in dead last (in fact, the person who won had to leave halfway through the game), but I enjoyed playing.

Then, with a slightly heavier heart, I made my way out of the convention hall, pausing briefly at a vendor booth to note that they had some Epically Awesome Heroscape expansions that I heroically resisted buying because I have an entire dresser full of Heroscape characters, many of which I haven't actually even fielded in a game yet.

All told, it was two and a half days where I had a great deal of fun. Many thanks and kudos must go out to my wife, who made it possible.

I don't know if I'll ever make it to another PAX, but I don't know if another PAX would be quite the same. I'm left with some good memories, a few new friends, and some pictures of awesome cosplayers.

And that's epic win, as far as I'm concerned.

Have You Tried Turning it Off and On Again?

2010-03-24T02:27:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Britcom. You introduced the world to John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson. You spawned dozens of shows that spawned dozens of pale American imitations. I’ve long admired your writers for their sharp wit, dry humor, and complete fearlessness in the face of the PC police.

Only a comedy starring John Cleese could feature an incompetent bell-hop whose incompetence traced directly from his home country of Spain. When John Larroquett tried it here in the States, he had to make the bell-hop of ambiguous origin and it just didn’t work as well, even though he did exactly the same jokes.

The Britcom has long been the refuge of the geek. Monty Python is an old geek standby, and no geek worth his salt can’t spout off at least a dozen in-jokes pertaining to the speed of an unladen swallow, or the doggedness of the black knight.

Later, given the choice between Rowan Atkinson or Bob Saget, the discerning geek took Atkinson whenever possible.

Recently a new British comedy has entered the geek lexicon (or “geexicon” to take a bad meme and run with it). The I.T. Crowd.

I remember how I was first exposed to the I.T. Crowd. It was featured on a Danish blog that linked to funny videos and flash games. I clicked on a link I couldn’t read under a picture of a forlorn looking Irishman sitting under a desk, flanked by women’s legs. I assumed it was one of those amusing “commercials banned in America!” shows, so I gave it a look.

I was greeted by what was possibly the most rocking theme song I’ve ever heard. Following that came one of the funniest TV shows I’d seen in a very long time. For a brief period, all of the episodes from Season 1 were available on Google Video, and I downloaded all six of them. Then, once the DVD was released in region 1, I deleted those and bought a real copy. Thus, I was able to rationalize my pirate-like behavior by clinging to the argument that it’s not stealing if nobody wants to sell you a copy (NOTE: This logic only applies to digital copies. I do not feel justified in stealing a car that is no longer manufactured just because the manufacturer won’t sell it to me. I would, however, feel justified in downloading blueprints to build my own Tucker.) (FOOTNOTE TO NOTE: I bet you thought I was going to say “Delorean” didn’t you?)

The I.T. Crowd is the play-on-words title of a show about a pair of social pariahs that work in the I.T. department of a major corporation. Maurice Moss is the standard bespectacled nerd living with his mother. Roy is the slacker geek. Their world is shaken up when a feisty redhead bluffs her way into getting hired as the I.T. manager by the only person on the planet who knows less about computers than she does.

Together the trio (or quartet, if you count Richmond, the goth who lives in the server room) have standard misadventures pertaining to the foibles of their office and personal lives.

It’s really not very different from a dozen other office comedies, but there is a metric buttload (1 metric buttload = 1.10231 imperial buttloads) of geek humor. I enjoy just looking at the background of the I.T. office and trying to identify the various bits of geek culture sitting around. The first episode of Season 1 features L33T subtitles, although the rest of the episodes appear to have that feature broken. Also, the DVDs themselves are worth the purchase just for the menus.

That may sound weird, but the Menus for the I.T. Crowd DVDs are the best menus ever. Each season references a different era of video gaming. Season 1 is all Atari 2600, Coleco Vision and Vector Traced arcade graphics. Season 2 is all about the 8 and 16 bit console era, with the episode select screen reminiscent of the original Mortal Kombat character selection screen. Season 3, recently released to region 1, is all about flash games. The Special Features menu is a spectacularly well done reference to Grow Cube, which surprised me because I didn’t realize enough people knew about Grow Cube to make that joke work.

The Missus and I got ourselves season 3 on DVD for Valentine’s day, and as someone who was mildly disappointed in season 2 (in particular the unceremonious killing off of the company CEO and his subsequent replacement by his lecherous, idiot son), I have to say it’s come back with a vengeance. The Missus and I have watched the first four episodes, and we haven’t laughed so hard since we saw Knocked Up.

One of the episodes we saw last night involved Jen, the IT manager, being called on to give a speech about technology because she’d won employee of the month. Now, seeing as how she bluffed her way into the job, she doesn’t know anything about computers. So Moss and Roy, fed up with her swelled head at being named employee of the month, offer to write a speech for her. They even provide props: a black box with a blinking red light that they inform Jen is “The Internet.” Then they try to stifle their laughter as she prattles on to the crowd about this wondrous little box that does so much for everyone.

Sure, it’s an old plot device (trick the clueless speech-giver into embarrassing herself in front of an audience), but they throw some new twists in it to keep it fresh. I won’t tell you what twists, because it would ruin the fun.

Unless the series drops off a cliff in the last two episodes of season 3, I can wholeheartedly recommend the entire series to anyone who likes Geek Humor. It will be a worthwhile addition to your own repertoire of in jokes. I’ll get you started: 0 1 1 8 9 9 9…

Plus, after watching the season 1 episode The Haunting of Bill Krause, you’ll never be able to hear “Candle in the Wind” the same way again.

Down

2010-03-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

Well, everybody has to jump the shark sometime, right? The A-Team had Stockwell, MASH had Alan Alda as a director, Firefly had the entire fourth disc (The last four episodes have their moments, but let’s be honest: They’re not anywhere near as well written as the episodes on the previous discs. The Bounty Hunter and the Brothel villains were so 2 dimensional you could use them to split atoms and not initiate a nuclear event.).

And Pixar has Up. WARNING: THE FOLLOWING WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS.

Savvy credit-watchers will note that Up does not boast the involvement of John Lasseter at all, and Andrew Stanton or Brad Bird except in the role of “Executive Producers.” “Executive Producer” is a Hollywood term that means “I’ll give you some money and take the credit for your success, but I’m not doing any work.”

This is understandable. Lasseter, Stanton and Bird have been practically living in the studio since Toy Story. They have families, and they’ve made a pile of money. I don’t blame them one bit for wanting to spend more time with their kids. Unfortunately, like Jim Henson’s death, they took all the magic with them and what remained was only someone trying desperately to imitate what was uniquely inimitable.

Like all Pixar movies, Up is technically impressive. The visuals are stunning in some places, and the animation is exquisite (whoever researched the dogs earned his money.) Unlike Pixar movies, however, the writing leans too heavily on sight gags and shies away from character exploration almost entirely. It’s like a Dreamworks movie got lost and Pixar kidnapped it. (Hey-yoh!)

There are a lot of things wrong with the movie, but I think the fundamental problem is the lack of empathy. Every other Pixar movie has been the manifestation of some passion or affection that men like John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton or Brad Bird had for something. Toys and Finding Nemo were about their kids. Cars was about their parents. Ratatouille was about their own passion for creation. No matter what the movie, either Bird or Stanton (or both) were speaking through the main characters. It’s why the movies were so good, why the characters rang so true. They were honest.

The creative heads behind Up not only fail to empathize with the main character, they don’t even seem to like him at all. Let’s have a look at what happens to the main character through the course of the movie.

1) He meets the love of his life in a decrepit, run-down old house, and falls through the ceiling and breaks his arm. (They later buy the house and fix it up as a married couple)
2) He marries the love of his life, and they attempt to have children but an apparent miscarriage leaves her barren. (I say “apparent” because that scene is part of a musical montage of their relationship that takes up about 10 minutes of the first reel.)
3) During the musical montage, they decide to follow their childhood dreams by setting up a savings jar to go exploring, but on three occasions, they have to use the money in the savings jar to pay for emergencies.
4) During the musical montage, the main character buys plane tickets to the Amazon so they can fulfill their dreams of being explorers in their retirement.
5) But before he can present the tickets to her, she has a heart attack and dies. During the musical montage.
6) The neighborhood around the house he and his wife rebuilt from the ground has gone commercial. Surrounded by glass and steel monoliths, he is the last holdout and won’t sell to the developer.
7) A construction worker backs over his mailbox, which he and his wife hand painted during the musical montage, and though well meaning won’t let the old man repair it himself.
8) The old man gets evicted from his house after hitting the construction worker who wouldn’t let him have his mailbox over the head with his cane.
9) The old man flies his house to the Amazon, following the footsteps of the childhood hero he and his wife shared, and the reason why they wanted to explore the amazon in the first place.
10) Only it turns out that his childhood hero is a homicidal lunatic who sets his house on fire and subsequently tries to kill him.
So in the course of the movie, he loses his wife, his house, and his childhood hero. But it’s all okay because he helped a small, annoying kid rescue a large, annoying bird.

Furthermore, nobody in the movie listens to the main character or seems to care about him at all. The land developers won’t listen to him. The guys from the old folk’s home won’t listen to him. The annoying kid that accidentally tagged along on the trip to the Amazon won’t listen to him. His childhood hero won’t listen to him. The talking dog, who is the lone bright spot in the movie, won’t listen to him. The only person in the movie who gave a rat’s rear end what the main character thought about anything was killed off in the first ten minutes.

His character isn’t even well written. When we initially meet him, he’s shy. Almost timid. Under his wife’s influence, he’s happy. But after her death, he turns into cranky old coot stereotype number 7, Asner variant. Sure, his house is surrounded by skyscrapers and construction workers, but his transformation from mousey balloon vendor to crusty old fart is so sudden that I can’t help but wonder if the only contact the writers had with old people came from watching Abe Vigoda and Wolford Brimley movies. Memo to Pixar: Not every old person living alone is perpetually cranky.

And he’s not the only character who’s taken directly from the Saturday Morning TV School of Character Stereotypes. The other primary character is a chubby boy scout who is seeking his “helping the elderly” merit badge. He’s your standard annoying, wise-beyond-his-years preadolescent whose innocence will show the old man the error of his ways. At one point, the kid is talking about his estranged father (Aww! He lacks a father figure. And look! The main character lacks a son! I wonder where this is going…) he remarks that what he really remembers is the little, boring, everyday stuff that he did get to do, not the big, important stuff that he didn’t. That thud you hear is the message being delivered like a sack of tainted meat into a dumpster. Pardon me while I gag myself with a screwdriver.

The villains aren’t particularly fleshed out either. The land developer has no dialog, and exists primarily as a man with a cell phone who stands in for corporate soullessness (lessness… lessness… lessness.) I won’t harp on him, because he’s not really supposed to be a fleshed out villain, though I will point out that Pixar has done the Corporate Villain so much better in both Monster’s Inc and The Incredibles.

The other villain, which you could see coming from the start of the movie if you pay close enough attention, is the main character’s childhood hero. A celebrated explorer, he is disgraced when scientists dispute his findings of a seven foot tall bird that roams the remotest regions of the Amazon rainforest. He sets out for the rainforest, vowing to return only when he has positive proof that he’s not a liar. When we find him next, he is not merely bitter at his mistreatment at the hands of the press, but downright bat-guano insane. It is strongly intimated that he murdered any explorer/archaeologist/botanist who he ever encountered in the rainforest because he suspected them of trying to capture his bird and steal his glory.

The main problem with the villain is that the writers think that “bat-guano-insane” is a substitute for personality. Every other villain in a Pixar movie has had human motivations, and has been sympathetic to some degree. Even the Aussie dentist in Finding Nemo was more clueless than evil. This guy is just completely inhuman, and not in the “I believe what I was programmed to believe” way that the Wheel was in Wall-E. He’s just… one-dimensional. It’s like someone said “Oh, let’s just make him a hunter who kills people. That’s good enough, right?” and everyone just nodded.

The one character, or group of characters, that are well written and fully realized are the dogs. The villain has an enormous pack of dogs at his command, and he has outfitted them with collars that translate their thoughts into English. This opens up the inevitable “I would like that ball!” and “SQUIRREL!” jokes that actually work. They’re the only thing in the movie that does.

I’d be more willing to forgive the cardboard characters if the rest of the movie wasn’t taken whole cloth from the cliché factory as well. The whole denouement is so laughably derivative I would accuse it of being brilliant parody if they weren’t taking themselves so seriously. The villain sets the main character’s house on fire as a distraction, because the main character is defending the large bird. Seeing his whole life go up in flames, the old man rushes to extinguish the flames, leaving the villain open to waltz off with the bird. How the main character was supposed to stop the villain, who at the time was flanked by his army of vicious dogs and carrying a rifle that acts like a shotgun, isn’t discussed. But the annoying kid is very disappointed at the main character for just letting the bird go.

After the kid yells at the old man for acting like a human being instead of some paragon of selfless giving (+1), the old man reverts to full on grouch mode and takes his house to finish what he set out to do in the first place. And he does it, by jiminy. The house sets down right where he and his wife planned to build their retirement home.

But it’s all hollow. We know this, because as he puts the furniture back where it belongs and rehangs the pictures on the walls the score plays sad music, and the color scheme is just slightly muted, even the photograph of his wife seems to look down on him in disappointment. All that was missing was him looking at a mirror with a melancholy expression, only to turn away in disgust at what he had become. And quite frankly, I’m not altogether certain he didn’t. By this point in the movie my eyes were rolling so much I’m sure I missed some things.

When the kid shows up and steals some balloons so he can chase after the bird himself, the main character finally “gets it.” He expunges the house of everything inside, so the withering balloons could lift what remained skyward once more. The last we see of the furniture, as the house flies away, is his chair sitting neatly next to his wife’s chair on the ground as the triumphal music swells and eggs the old man onward and upward. (Yeah! You dump that old crappy symbol of the life you had with your wife. Forget her, it’s time to go save some kid you don’t know and a bird you don’t like!) He chases after the villain, who has captured the annoying child and left him tied to a chair and ready to drop from the loading dock of his blimp to the ground so many thousands of feet below. The villain and the main character have a climactic battle that employs a clumsy version of the “I threw my back out” joke that was so much better in The Incredibles. See, it’s funny because they’re both so old. Also old people smell like prunes.

Seriously. That’s how the dogs find him as he sneaks aboard the villain’s airship. They smell prunes. They couldn’t even spare the cash for some additional syllables and use the word “liniment.”

Needless to say, the kid is rescued. The villain was dispatched through the use of a high-fall the likes of which I haven’t seen since I watched every movie that ever came out between 1985 and 1999.

Finally, we’re treated to a scene where the annoying kids finally gets his helping the elderly merit badge, with the main character standing by his side because the kid’s father couldn’t be there (all together now: Awwww!) and then they go share ice cream and count different color cars, just like the kid used to do with his dad (and again: Awwwwww!) and apparently the court order remanding the old man to a home has been rescinded, or at least it’s unenforceable because he now lives in the villain’s airship.

Oh, and just to throw a bone to those of us who understood why it was important to the main character to keep a promise he made to his wife so many years ago, the last we see of the house, it just happened to land right where he wanted to put it. What a coincidence.

I suppose Up was an accurate enough title for the movie, given the infatuation with flight. But if they wanted to make it more accurate and a whole lot more descriptive they would have called it “Trite.”

That’s not something I ever thought I’d be able to say about a Pixar movie. Usually they come right up to the edge of being trite without actually falling off the precipice. This one just points the car at the edge of the cliff and lays down rubber.

I have more complaints, like about how this movie is a violent departure from Pixar’s classical themes about how nostalgia is a good and fundamentally human emotion, and the fact that it’s not only okay, but admirable that people have attachments to physical objects. Heck, if the people who made Up had done Cars, the residents of Radiator Springs would just pack up and move to California, because it’s just a road, right? Move on.

But I’m running long, so I won’t. In conclusion, I just want to say that I will no longer buy a Pixar movie on DVD just because Pixar did it. It was my last vestige of fanboy mentality, and Up snuffed it out. I don’t know whether I should be angry or grateful.

Movies You Never Heard Of 2: Oscar

2010-03-10T02:22:00.000-08:00

So this is number two in an ongoing series of movies you’ve probably never heard of, but are worth your time. At least, if you like the kind of movies I like, and if you didn’t you probably wouldn’t be reading this (Hi Dad!).

Oscar is a farcical comedy (remember: 2010’s theme is the Farce) that is similar to Waiting For Godot, in the sense that the titular character features prominently only by reference. Oscar is the chauffer for a notorious crime family during the prohibition era. Sylvester Stallone plays the head of that family, Angelo “Snaps” Provolone.

Yes, they named an Italian mobster after a cheese. It’s that kind of movie.

Provolone’s father is played by Kirk Douglas, who exhorts his son to give up his disgraceful gangster life and restore the family name. Being as how Grandpa Provolone is on his deathbed at the time, Snaps can hardly refuse. So, bootlegging is out, and banking is in. Snaps uses his considerable fortune to secure a seat on the board at a prominent bank.

The movie chronicles his first day as a legitimate businessman. And nothing is easy.

Snaps is married to the woman who played Emporer Ming’s daughter in Flash Gordon. The couple have a daughter played by Marisa Tomei, who is bound and determined to get out of her father’s stifling shadow and see the world. On this, the first day of Snaps’ legitimate career, she hatches a plot to escape: claim to have been impregnated by Oscar, the chauffer, who is conveniently away fighting the Huns in the Great War. (I’m allowed to say “Hun” because my great-grandparents; maternal and paternal; all came over from Germany in the early 1900s, just in time to be put right back on another boat back to Germany to fight the Kaiser.)

Meanwhile, the Provolone family accountant presents himself to Snaps with evidence that he had embezzled a sizeable sum of money during his tenure, and wishes to ransom it for the hand of Snaps’ daughter in marriage.

And, across town, a rival family gets suspicious of how quiet it’s been on Provolone’s side of town, and decides that now is the time to make a power play for control of the Provolone territory.

And thus begins a whirlwind of miscommunications, misunderstandings and misreadings that grow more frenetic and more confusing right to the very end of the picture, when everything gets tied up in a nice pink frilly bow.

The writing is excellent and snappy, and it’s probably one of the better farces to come out of Hollywood in the past twenty years, but what’s really notable are the cameo performances. Don Ameche plays a priest. Tim Curry plays an elocution coach brought in by Snaps to help him sound respectable. Harry Shearer (of Spinal Tap fame, as well as every Christopher Guest movie ever made) does a hilarious turn as one half of a pair of bickering tailors who beam with pride when their work is featured in a grisly newspaper photograph of a gangster’s demise. Finally, Red from That Seventies Show gives his all as a gruff Eliot Ness wannabe that is bent on exposing Snaps for the gangster he was.

And unlike most cameo-rich films, every single character is important to the plot. Like a butterfly in the Amazon that makes it rain in New York, the simplest actions of a humble servant can unleash a thunderstorm of antics. Especially Oscar, who appears at the last possible second and has exactly one line of dialogue in the entire movie.

Sylvester Stallone is wildly underappreciated as a writer, and as an actor. His performance in Oscar should have been Oscar worthy, but the academy doesn’t seem to realize how hard comedy is and too often mistakes aggressive mugging for talent. Seeing him, as Snaps, dealing with the ever mounting pile of things that threaten his death-bed promise to his father is a legitimate treat, and it’s definitely in my top ten funniest movies that I’ve ever seen list.

I won’t write anymore on the subject, because anything else I add will only ruin the fun. While Oscar does stand up to multiple viewings, nothing quite compares to seeing it for the first time and finding out what’s going to go wrong next.

So go borrow, rent or buy a copy of Oscar on DVD. You will not regret the expense.

Who, How, What, Where, When and sometimes Why?

2010-03-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

So I was sitting here wondering what to write about, since I have a moment to write something, and I decided: Oh, what the heck, let’s write about video games again.

Because that’ll never get old.

Today I thought I’d write about what I look for in a game. The short answer is: I want to blow stuff up for points. But that’s a little glib, and in spite of some very good advice I received from people I duped into reading this blog, I want to write more than that.

Besides that, it misses some points that I want to get out there, because I know I can’t be the only one who found Half Life 2: Episode 1 boring and frustrating in equal measures. I’ve since finished it, and as of this writing I am halfway through Episode 2, which I am enjoying much more than Episode 1. That discrepancy made me ponder games in general and how I interact with them. Furthermore, it gave me a really cool idea for another “TAXONOMY OF GAMERS” type article that are typically written either by people who think WASD is an acronym (Hint: It stands for Why Are you Scribing Dreck?) or by someone who is tired of the old “Hardcore” versus “Casual” dichotomy. Since I am neither of those things, I thought I’d try injecting some new blood into an old meme. Next week I’ll explore Rick Rolling.

Basically, my thoughts are this: There are six different kinds of gamers, and they each correlate to the six questions they claim to teach journalism students.

Who? The Who gamer is not a fan of modern pop music, and instead prefers rock operas about handicapped people who are really good at pinball.

Well, no. A Who-type gamer is the sort of gamer who is very into character development. “Who am I?” they ask of the game. To the Who-type gamer, the real draw of the game is being someone interesting while in game.

There are variants within this faction. Some Who-types prefer a highly defined, developed character. Others prefer the blank-slate avatar onto which they can be whoever they want to be. In this regard, the Who gamer can enjoy either a game like Dragon Age or a game like Fallout 3. It doesn’t really matter, since we’re not defining games as being “who-games,” but are rather defining gamers by motivations.

Who-types are also big on MMORPGs, for reasons that should be obvious. It’s not that they’re self-centered; it’s just that they are most interested in making an interesting character for themselves in the game world.

What? The What gamer is all about action. “What am I doing?” is the defining question of this type. This gamer is largely unconcerned with plot or character motivations. He (or she) just wants to jump in and start making things happen.

Games appealing to the What-type gamer involve beat-em-ups, shoot-em-ups, fighters, and first-person shooters that don’t involve a lot of gratuitous puzzle solving. The What-gamer is visceral, and doesn’t want to pause the action so he can figure out how a cantilever works.

No, we’re not talking about you, Half-Life 2 episode 1. Perish the thought.

If you’ve ever gotten frustrated at an FPS because you had to find a key on the other side of a level, or because you couldn’t figure out where you were supposed to go next, then you’re probably a What-type.

Where? A Where gamer comes into being by getting bitten by another where gamer, or by pissing of an old gypsy lady.

Ahem.

Actually, the where gamer is all about exploration. Figuring out where to go, or just wandering around the world to find interesting things and places is this gamer-type’s chief motivator. The where gamer is big on TACOs (Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects, a term coined in Anachronox that I have adopted in the hopes that it catches on) which are hidden cleverly and diabolically throughout a game environment.

You’ll never hear a Where-type gamer complain about the lack of a breadcrumb trail. The Where-type likes figuring out where he’s supposed to go next… within reason. At some point a game stops focusing on exploring the environment and just becomes poorly designed.

When? “Are we there yet?” asks the gamer type who is all about speed. The When-type gamer is big into racing games, timed challenges, speed runs and pretty much anything involving a stopwatch.

The guys you see posting youtube videos in which they beat Super Mario Brothers in four minutes are When-type gamers. I admire their borderline obsession with shaving milliseconds off of corners, but have never been able to master it.

Why? “Why am I doing this?” asks the Why-type, also known as the method-gamer by nobody but me because I just made that term up. Story is very important to the Why gamer, to the point where he’ll play something with mediocre gameplay just to get the story. Gamers who played Brutal Legend to completion are probably Why-types.

Interestingly, “why” is also the question non-why-types will ask why-types when they talk about finishing the latest Final Fantasy game. (If that doesn’t generate hate mail, I’ll try insulting Twilight fans. My device for ruling the world runs on Emo rage.)

How? (Offensive reference to aboriginal American greeting contemplated, but thought the better of) “How am I supposed to do that?” asks the gamer who loves puzzles. This gamer-type doesn’t need fancy graphics, or complicated stories, or even weapons. The How-type gamer only needs a simple mechanic or two, and a developer with a sadistic streak to make the mechanic interesting.

Gamers who like Portal, Crush and Tetris are of the How type.

RTS gamers fall into this category as well, since the RTS genre is basically a very complicated puzzle revolving around the mechanics of proper resource utilization.

Of course, nobody is going to fit neatly into one category, but just about everyone will be mostly one and occasionally none of the others.

For example, I am mostly a What-type gamer, with very little Where, When or How and virtually no When. Who and Why are interesting to me, but not obligatory. I’d much rather be blowing stuff up for an interesting reason than wandering around a world carefully constructed to be hard to navigate, or that obscures my objectives so I can’t find them.

Basically, my ideal game is Berzerk! on the Atari 2600. Everything else, with the possible exception of Contra, has been downhill but with prettier graphics.

Late to the party reviews: Batman: Arkham Asylum

2010-02-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

Once again we return to the well of video games. It’s a deep well, full of lots of thing. Now and then, I dip my bucket in it and come up with a winner.

I don’t really need to go deep into my history with the Dark Knight. Like most people my age, I saw the 1989 movie something like a hundred times, four of which in theaters. I read some of the comic book collections, followed the original animated series religiously, and owned a fair amount of batman related merchandise.

Batman has always had a pretty solid video game history. Back in the days when Nintendo’s seal of approval wasn’t placed mostly on games named after animals with “Z” appended to the end (Coming this fall! Marmosetz!), there were three NES Batman titles (Batman, Batman Returns and Batman: Return of the Joker) and they were all at least good, and if you omit Batman Returns they were very good. The appeal of playing a character who is such a raging bad-ass that he can get away with wearing his father’s Halloween costume to fight crime (as read in the Untold Origin of the Batman three issue mini-series) is not lost on me. Though as an electrical engineer by trade I do prefer Iron Man as a character, as he is basically Batman except he A) designs his own stuff and B) isn’t motivated primarily by Daddy issues.

But Iron Man is more or a tank than a ghost, and I don’t think anyone every crapped themselves because they didn’t know if Iron Man was in the room or not.

The rise of the Stealth Action Game in the past ten years or so, which effectively began with Metal Gear Solid on the PS1, seemed tailor made for a new Batman game, but none was forthcoming. I can’t honestly think of a Batman game that even came out of the PS2, let alone a stealth action game with Bob Kane’s iconic IP.

This is puzzling, until you play Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is clearly the Batman game everyone wanted to make but was unable to until Eidos got involved.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is just about the perfect Batman game. Indeed, I’d argue that it ranks among being a perfect game, full stop. There’s nothing wrong with it that I could point to and say “I wish they’d done that differently.” If ever a game deserved a perfect score, it’s this one.

This is bizarre for me to say. I have made a point in the past of stating that I tend to not like perfect tens. I’d rather a solid seven than a perfect ten. But every now and then exceptions crop up, and this is one of them.

Everything about the game is good. The story, the writing, the voice acting, the graphics, the combat, the stealth elements, the gadgets, and even the length: this game is just fun from top to bottom.

But let’s get into some details, because things I like in games may not be things you like in games.

First, let’s get the unimportant stuff out of the way first. The story, the writing and the voice acting are all top notch. Most of the cast of the original animated series are on staff (Kevin Conroy as Batman, Mark Hamil as the Joker), and the story feels like one of those animated movies they make when a cartoon series has been cancelled but the fans are still vocal enough to warrant a followup.

Basically, the Joker has taken over Arkham Asylum and has turned the inmates loose with one goal in mind: Kill Batman and plunder Gotham City.

In the course of the game, you’ll fight such rogues as Bane, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and, of course, the Joker. The Riddler is involved as well, but only insofar as he hacked your communications system and planted riddles for you to uncover all over the asylum with serve as the game’s TACOS (AKA Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects, a term coined in the game Anachronox which I have adopted for more widespread use).

The graphics are also excellent. Batman moves fluidly, as you’d expect, and the character design for the villains is excellent. The designers managed to capture the essence of the characters while still making them fresh and new. The only false note sounded is Harley Quinn’s new costume. She no longer looks like a harlequin, but has traded in her tights for a naughty nurse outfit. It works in the context of the game, however, and thinking about it I’m pretty sure the red and black checked leotard would have looked pretty silly. If Billy Zane as the Phantom taught us anything, it’s that Spandex doesn’t look good on anyone and what works in two dimensions doesn’t work anywhere else.

Now, on to the important stuff. The gameplay.

Everything in this game is fun to do. Whether it’s beating up a gang of thirty thugs single handed, or just exploring Arkham Island with your grappling hook and zipline, it’s clear the developers took their time to make sure everything the player does makes the player feel like Batman.

The combat here is especially good at making the player feel like Batman. At any given time, you might be facing a dozen or more thugs armed with melee weapons. Unlike most other brawlers, though, you don’t lock onto one guy and hit him until either he falls down or someone sneaks up behind you and punches you in the kidneys (Paging Final Fight. There’s a call for you in reception!). The combat in Batman: Arkham Asylum is all about fighting groups of dudes all at once, not one at a time.

Let me explain. Let’s say you’re surrounded. In a game like Final Fight, this would mean it’s time to ready another quarter. In Arkham Asylum, however, you punch the guy in front of you, move the analog stick back in the direction of a different thug and hit the punch button again. This causes Batman to spin around and either backhand or roundhouse kick the guy behind him. Move the joystick again while pressing attack and Batman will spin again and send a flying punch in the nose of yet another thug.

And that’s before he gets technical. Let’s say while Batman was punching that last guy, another thug was getting ready to hit Batman in the cowl with a baseball bat. Wavy lines appear over the armed thug’s head, and as the player that’s your cue to push the counter button. Batman will catch the bat, double the thug over with a punch in the gut and then proceed to knock the thug in the face with the bat.

By this point, your combo meter has probably charged to the point where you can do a special move, if you’ve purchase that particular upgrade, which can be used against that higher level thug who blocks all of your attacks. Hit two of the buttons and Batman will execute an unblockable and very painful looking attack that puts the higher level thug down permanently.

But if you don’t have that upgrade enabled, you can press the stun button, which causes Batman to fling his cape at the blocking thug, causing him to flinch and step back, which opens him up to a normal punch from Batman.

You know you’re done beating down a particular mob when you throw a punch and the camera zooms in and goes into slow motion. The thug will double over in pain, holding whatever part of him you just hit (usually the face) and fall unconscious to the floor. Then a flock of bats will appear out of nowhere and replenish your health bar.

Of course, sometimes the thugs are armed with more than baseball bats or tazers, and that’s when Batman has to be sneaky. The stealth in Batman: Arkham Asylum has been called “stealth light” by people who think planting a video game character in a dark corner and waiting ten minutes for the guards to change shifts is fun. There’s no visibility meter here, no hiding in shadows (except when fighting The Scarecrow, but more on that later) and no hiding unconscious bodies in lockers.

Stealth in Batman: Arkham Asylum is pure line-of-sight stealth. If a thug has a clear view of Batman, shadow or no, he sees him and starts shooting. Luckily, Arkham Asylum is replete with nooks, crannies, bottlenecks, air ducts and, of course, gargoyles.

Batman’s primary means of remaining hidden makes use of the fact that the artificial intelligence of gun-toting thugs is patterned after real world behavior of first person shooters. Namely, they don’t look up. If Batman has the need to get away from things, he can grapple up to a gargoyle and hide there pretty much indefinitely. The only exception takes place late in the game where the Joker has planted proximity mines on the gargoyles, such that if you climb on one the bomb goes off and alerts everyone to your whereabouts.

From the gargoyle you have a few attack options. My personal favorite is the inverted takedown (another option you have to purchase with experience points). If a thug walks directly under the gargoyle you’re sitting on, the press of a button makes Batman drop down, grab the thug, then immediately grapple back up and suspend the thug from the gargoyle by his feet.

I enjoyed doing that so much that at one point I went out of my way to hang one thug from each gargoyle in a room, until there was just one thug left and he was so scared he was firing bursts of automatic weapon fire into the dark at random intervals.

The thug mood is something you’ll want to keep track of while in the stealth sections. Batman has a heads-up-display in his cowl that’s called “detective mode.” Its primary function is to track evidence so you can follow the tracks left by whatever villain you’re trying to catch. As an added bonus, it allows you to detect bad guys through walls, and see how well armed they are, and what kind of emotional state they’re in. Before they know you’re there, the thugs will be calm. But once you take one of their numbers down, they become nervous. Their nervousness escalates the more of them you take down, until they become terrified.

Scaring the thugs, like everything else in the game, is very satisfying. They say an amusing variety of things for you to listen in on, from the cocky “No way Batman will come in here!” boasting to the petrified “Where is he? WHERE IS HE?!” when you’ve rendered a few of them unconscious.

Boss fights do a decent job of mixing things up. Most of the boss fights revolve around a sort of “one super thug and a few dozen smaller ones” motif. When you’re fighting Bane, for example, you’ll have to balance your time between watching for opportunities to do some damage to him and taking out or avoiding the mob of lesser thugs sent to distract you from the boss. I can appreciate this kind of boss battle, because it doesn’t stray too far from what you were already doing in the game, and in my estimation it’s what boss fights should be: More challenging versions of what you were already doing.

But like other action games, a number of the boss fights change either the controls or the camera angles on you. Poison Ivy, for example, has you battling (SPOILER ALERT!) an enormous plant, while the Scarecrow fights (yes, that’s fights, plural) are really more about evasion than anything else.

So let’s talk about the Scarecrow levels for a moment, because they are really high-points of the game for me. The first one in particular caught me so far off guard that they had my pulse pounding like I was actually infected with the Scarecrow’s gas.

Incidentally, for those of you playing on the Xbox 360, one of the Scarecrow segments involves the screen glitching out and the game seeming to crash as if it just broke your game system. Do not worry, and do not restart the game during this section. You haven’t red-ringed out. This is a case of the developers being sick bastards who know how to hit gamers where they live.

The Scarecrow levels involve Batman fighting his own demons inside his own head. The environment shifts and goes wonky, and a gigantic Scarecrow searches the area for Batman. If he sees you, it’s an instant kill so don’t let him see you. This is the only case in the game where staying in the shadows hides you, and the reason for that is the shadows are cast by obstacles to the Scarecrow’s line of sight.

The animation for these sequences is so good that even though you know the Scarecrow is on a repeating loop, you think he might look down at any moment and spot you. There’s a pattern, but the animation is so well done you think it’s unpredictable. My hat is off to the animators for this sequence.

Another thing I doff my hat for is the pacing and length. For me, finishing a game is, more often than not, an endurance test than something I really enjoy. Even Half Life 2 had me sick of being Gordon Freeman by the end, and I haven’t even played the episodes yet.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the ending snuck up on me. Not in the “Holy crap, you mean the final boss is The Joker?” sense. More in the “Wait, I’m already to the Joker?” sense. I hadn’t been playing to beat the game, or to see what happened in the story. I had been playing because I had been enjoying playing the game.

There are a few games that pull me in like that. Bioshock had a distinct lack of “WTF? Another level!?” Fallout 3’s ending, or should I say “ending,” would have snuck up on me if I hadn’t already heard about how short the main story campaign was. Portal’s ending kind of snuck up on me as well. I don’t recall ever once wishing I was done with a Cloverleaf game; seeing as how I’ve played both God Hand and Viewtiful Joe more than once in a row without even turning off the console between the ending credits and the opening level.

Whether these games were actually short (Portal is, what, a five hour game?) or just felt short (My first character in Fallout 3 has over 100 hours logged. There should be an achievement for that) they all share the common theme of having gameplay that is so fun or at least interesting that I enjoyed the game from top to bottom.

That is a rare enough feeling for me, and I’m glad I got the chance to experience it, and I know I’ll be experiencing it again in the future.

Have you noticed I only write reviews of things I like? That’s because it’s my blog, and I’m not going to voluntarily slog through something I hate just to write about it. If I happen to play something that I hate enough to write something interesting, I may write about it, but I’d much rather be positive right now. There’s enough to complain about without me adding my $0.01 after taxes.

Next up: T.J. Hooker

2010-02-17T03:00:00.000-08:00

So it has been brought to my attention that they have made a movie out of The A Team. I’m not really surprised by this. In the first place, I knew a movie was in the works as far back as 1998, when I heard that Stephen Cannell had rejected the current script and was doing a rewrite.

That gave me hope, since Cannell created the iconic four mercenaries and their van. But as the years went by with no word, I gave up. Then they made a G.I. Joe movie in which The Great American Hero was converted to a multilateral international force at the disposal of the United Nations, and my disappointment turned to elation.

If they could wreck G.I. Joe, who knew what they’d be willing to do to the A Team? It was a question I didn’t care to contemplate.

The other reason I’m not surprised that Hollywood made an A-Team movie is that Hollywood hasn’t had an original idea since Jim Henson died. While the first decade of the 21st century may have been a banner year for geekly movie fans, it wasn’t exactly bursting at the seams with new intellectual properties. The biggest movie event of the decade was based on a series of novels written by a man fresh out of the trenches of world war one, for crying out loud.

The A-Team falls squarely into my generational strata, along with Transformers and G.I. Joe. Hollywood isn’t run by idiots, and they know they can’t bring us to theaters with good stories they don’t have, so they’ll push the nostalgia button and cash in on fond childhood memories

(Note: The sole exception to the rule of Hollywood’s brain freeze is Pixar Studios, who I am convinced could make a movie about anthropomorphic shopping carts and still capture the hearts of American audiences.)

Will the A Team Movie be any good? I have no idea. The preview trailer I saw this morning (which would be a couple of weeks before you’re reading this, because I write my posts in advance and queue them up so as to avoid any pretense to relevance) looked promising, but as the gang at the Control Point podcast have pointed out: Trailers exist to get you into the theater, not to help you enjoy being there.

Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to leveraging old television IPs into new movies. They either change too much, or they forget why the show was interesting in the first place and be true to a mistaken notion of the spirit of the show.

After doing due diligence, if I still want to see the movie I’ll probably enjoy it more than most people. I’m probably one of three people in the world who enjoyed the Transformers movie, in spite of the fact that they borrowed props from Hellraiser and cast two people clearly in their thirties as high school students. If the A Team movie is at least as good as that, then I’ll be happy.

It’s already better cast than Transformers, though the presence of Jessica Biel casts a bit of a pall over the whole thing (all I can say is she’d better be Tanya, because I don’t think she has the gravitas to pull off Amy). According to IMDB, Stephen Cannel was involved in the writing, and if he maintained any kind of creative control we’ll probably get something good out of it.

I love it when a plan comes together. The question remains, however, will this movie be the cinematic equivalent of Hannibal’s half-pincer movement.

And if you remember what episode that’s from, you’re almost as big an A-Team geek as I am.

Movies you’ve never heard of 1: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

2010-02-10T03:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the inaugural (my third inaugural post on this blog! Let’s hear it for defining terms down!) edition of what I hope to become a series about obscure movies that I have in my DVD library.

Today’s movie has roots on Broadway and ancient Rome, and a title that will take you more than a breath to say. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers and Michael Crawford.

The main character, played by Zero Mostel, is Sudelous (Latin for “false face”), a slave in a less fashionable suburb of Rome. He spends all of his time dodging his slavely duties and conniving to scam enough money together to buy his freedom.

His owner is Hero, played by Michael Crawford’s stunning teeth. Hero is the son of Sennex (Latin for Old Man), a good natured if clueless man who is hopelessly whipped by his domineering wife. Hero also happens to be the character around which the plot revolves.

Neighbor to Sennex and his family is Marcus Likus, a “simple tradesman” who trades in female slaves and is played by Phil Silvers.

There are other characters, who I’ll introduce as we come to them, but these are the main players.

As I mentioned, the story revolves around Hero. Cooped up in his home with his tutor, Hero has fallen desperately in love with a woman he’s seen through his bedroom window in the house of Marcus Likus. To now, Hero has been kept panting on a short leash by his mother. However, today his mother and father are traveling to see his maternal grandmother on the occasion of her 106th birthday. His mother leaves him in the charge of Hysterium, the chief slave of the house of Sennex. Hero is to be kept far from the house of Likus, on pain of death for poor Hysterium.

Naturally, Hero immediately disregards his parents’ wishes and enlists the help of Sudelous to help him secure the woman of his dreams. Sudelous crafts a cunning plan: He will pose as a recently freed man, purchase the courtesan that has captured his owner’s heart, and deliver her to his arms. In return, Hero promises to free Sudelous for real.

And if you think it’s going to be that easy, you’ve never seen a farce before.

Rather than spoil the rest of the plot for you, I’ll just note that in the course of the movie there will be fights with gladiators, a high speed chariot chase, waterskiing, a fake funeral and Buster Keaton. That’s right; Buster Keaton brings his trademarked death-defying deadpan to the table as an old, legally blind man returned after years of searching for his children who were stolen in infancy by pirates. Is he important to the plot? Perhaps. My lips are sealed on that particular spoiler.

Why should you care? Well, if you weren’t already intrigued by the gladiators and chariot chases, it’s got Zero Mostel. Pretty much anything featuring him is worth watching. The songs are catchy, if a bit un-PC for modern ears, but when the main thrust of the plot is a love story between a slaveowner and a courtesan, a song like “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” rates pretty low on the well-I-never-meter.

There’s a lot of good humor in the movie, but you have to be able to appreciate a good farce. I’m a person who eats a good farce up, and you can be sure that other farces will be forthcoming in the Movies You’ve Never Heard Of section. (It is an election year, after all.)

In the end, I think the best explanation of why you should rent, buy or borrow this movie is summed up in the opening song:

Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone! A comedy tonight!
Something appealing, something appalling, something for everyone! A comedy tonight!
Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns!
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!
Old situations, new complications.
Nothing portentous or polite.
Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!

Every word of that is completely true. Do check it out.

Courage is being scared to death, and saddling up anyway.

2010-02-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

As I’ve mentioned in a previous installment, my history with the Duke goes back almost as far as I do. Dear Old Dad is probably John Wayne’s biggest fan; so big he’s even seen The Conqueror, a movie so bad it literally killed John Wayne. (Seriously. They shot it in an irradiated location and The Duke got cancer from it. When I use the word “literally” it is not merely hyperbolic posturing. I use the words that mean what they say.) Back when I was still waking up several times a night to eat, my father would soothe me with John Wayne Presents the War Movie on late night TV.

I was quite literally raised on The Duke. He was as big a part of my childhood as anything. As such, I learned some valuable life lessons that have served me well. And since this is my blog, I’ll pass them on so that future generations can google them more simply.

1) Never take more oaths than you can keep. (The Searchers)

2) If someone’s out of line, tell them. Then warn them. Then belt them. (North to Alaska)

3) Always do what’s right, and if you can’t do it legal and honest, do it illegal and dishonest. (The Comancheros)

4) Despite your best efforts, your kids will probably grow up to be just like you. (Hellfighters)

5) There is such a thing as too much gun, but no such thing as too many. (True Grit)

6) Don’t let anybody tell you how to take care of your family. (Trouble Along the Way)

7) You may catch more flies with honey, but you make better Marines with a frequent boot to the arse. (The Sands of Iwo Jima)

8) Don’t court women half your age. It’s unseemly. (Rio Lobo)

9) When the chips are down, don’t underestimate the power of an old cripple. (Rio Bravo)

10) If you can’t sing, hire someone younger and better looking than you to do it in your movies. Your fans will thank you. (Rio Bravo, North to Alaska)

11) Maureen O’Hara is awesome. (Big Jake, The Quiet Man, McLintock!)

12) A man can only stand so much needling at the hands of a woman. (The Quiet Man, McLintock!)

13) Money is a miserable thing to fight over. (The Quiet Man)

14) Coddling someone will just make him fall apart in small pieces. (Rio Bravo)

15) Let your reputation precede you. It may save you some trouble later on (El Dorado)

16) If you can’t shoot, just admit it and buy a shotgun. (El Dorado)

17) Never underestimate the power of a withering look. (Rio Bravo)

18) Don’t wear clothes fancier than you can work in. (The Comancheros.)

19) Outcasts deserve common courtesy too. (Stagecoach)

20) Being a nuisance to people with high opinions of themselves is always fun.(Stagecoach, McLintock!, The Comancheros, North to Alaska)

21) Put in a fair day’s work; earn a fair day’s wage. (McLintock!)

22) Love makes a man funny. In more ways than one. (North to Alaska)

23) If you don’t know what else to do, tell the truth. (McLintock!)

24) Understand your enemy’s rules and use them to your advantage. You’ll be a more formidable opponent. (The Searchers)

25) Accept that there are things you can’t do and times you can’t do them—even when the consequences are dire. (The Comancheros, The Searchers)

26) People will only push you as far as they think you’ll move. Don’t move. (Cahill Texas Ranger)

27) Always remember two things: Windage and Elevation. (The Undefeated)

28) Go after what you want, and make it your own. (The Quiet Man)

29) A gun that’s unloaded and cocked isn’t of much use to anyone. (True Grit)

30) Don’t be wronged, insulted or laid a hand on. Don’t do these things to other people and expect the same of them. (The Shootist)

31) Sorry doesn’t get it done. (Rio Bravo)

That’s not all, by a long shot. But that’s all I can point a finger to and connect with a specific movie. There are overarching lessons that span the Duke’s whole film career. Lessons about duty, honor, sacrifice and the manly virtues that I just can’t envision Shia Lebouf encapsulating.

Well, that’s all for this week. Tune in next time when I’ll have a post that probably has nothing to do with this one.

Time Marches On.

2010-01-27T03:00:00.000-08:00

You know, I’m getting old. This isn’t a complaint, exactly, especially considering the alternative, but it’s still true. I’m in my 30s, which is actually a good age to be. Old enough to know better, but not so old you really have to care.

Still, every now and then something crops up to remind me that I’m no spring chicken anymore.

Like movies, for example. One of my favorite comedies of recent vintage is Knocked Up. The plot is about a stoner loser who lucks into a one-night-stand with an E! network anchor that results in a baby. They try to make a go of it, and the differences between their personalities make watching them do so amusing.

Incidentally, the previous sentence is a prime example of how a Vulcan would describe a sitcom.

Anyway, in the movie there is a scene where the pregnant woman and her stoner baby-daddy are at a restaurant with her sister and brother-in-law. The stoner baby-daddy makes a reference to Doc Brown and his time machine. The pregnant woman responds that she has no idea who Doc Brown is.

I remarked to my wife, snickering, “OMG. She hasn’t seen Back to the Future? LOLZ!”

Because I often speak L33T to my wife. When you have kids, you learn to communicate quickly and efficiently.

My wife then pointed out to me that the actress on screen (Katherine Heigel, incidentally) was in her early 20s, which means she was probably born in 1989, which was four years after Back to the Future was released to theatres.

To say I was nonplussed would be untrue, as profanity still counts as speech. A cultural keystone from my formative years is not only irrelevant, but unknown to today’s college students.

It’s not like I should be surprised at this, however. It’s not like it’s the first time such a thing has happened. A few years back Dear Old Dad mentioned to me that one of his high school students didn’t know what The A-Team was.

That, dear readers, just makes me want to cry. It’s bad enough to live in a world without George Peppard in it, but to see what is; in my opinion; one of the finest examples of television forgotten is just heartbreaking. The A-Team was such a big part of my youth that to ask “What’s the A-Team” is akin to asking “What’s air?”

But enough maudlin self indulgence. Let’s get to the point. And the point is this: A list of awesome things that today’s high school graduates are too young to know about.

1) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember Back to the Future.
2) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember Captain Kangaroo
3) Today’s High School Graduates have never lived in a world with Jim Henson in it. (If that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is)
4) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember The A-Team
5) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember when Will Smith was a rapper.
6) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to know what “STOP! HAMMERTIME!” means.
7) Today’s High School Graduates have likely never seen an Atari 2600, 5200 or 7800.
8) Today’s High School Graduates have never seen Mr. Wizard on TV.
9) Today’s High School Graduates have always had internet access. True, it was AOL, but I’m pretty sure that still counts.
10) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember a world before Half Life changed the FPS genre forever.
11) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember a world before Doom made the FPS genre exist.
12) Today’s High School Graduates have never lived in a world without a Final Fantasy game.
13) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember video arcades, or at least video arcades before the days of Dance Dance Revolution and fourteen billion ways to play rigged games for tickets.
14) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember Quantum Leap.
15) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember AutoMan.
16) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember Tron, or understand why it’s relevant to video games in any way.
17) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to know Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds, or any other actors who existed before the mustache became a registered trademark of homosexuality.
18) Today’s High School Graduates probably saw The Phantom Menace before they saw A New Hope. And if they did, their parents should be brought up on charges of abuse.
19) Today’s High School Graduates have never lived in a world where Klingons were the bad guys.
20) Today’s High School Graduates have never seen Pac-Man outside of a cell phone or retro game compilation. And they’ve never heard the song “Pac Man Fever” either.
21) Today’s High School Graduates have always had Super Mario games.
22) Today’s High School Graduates have always had Metroid games.
23) Today’s High School Graduates have always had Zelda games.
24) Today’s High School Graduates have always had Mega Man games.
25) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to know why it’s clever that Lou Ferrigno was in both of the Incredible Hulk movies to come out in the 21st century.
26) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember back when Dr. Horrible was Dr. Houser.
27) Today’s High School Graduates have never had to inflate a sneaker.
28) Today’s High School Graduates think Elmo has always been on Sesame Street.
29) Today’s High School Graduates think the Strawberry Shortcake cartoon is new.
30) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember a time before Pokemon.
31) Today’s High School Graduates have always had cell phones that fit in your pocket.
32) Today’s High School Graduates are too young to remember a time before DVDs.
33) Today’s High School Graduates have probably never played Wing Commander.
34) Today’s High School Graduates have never been exposed to the horrors of Laserdisc video games.
35) Today’s High School Graduates have never known a time when MTV played music videos (Hey-oh!)
36) Today’s High School Graduates think Rick Astley wrote that song for the internet meme.
37) Today’s High School Graduates think They Might Be Giants are children’s artists.

And there you have it. Does that make you feel old? Well, I’ve got news for you: You’re even older now.

And now you’re even older.

And now you’re older still.

HEY YOU GUYS!

2010-01-20T03:28:00.000-08:00

In a previous installment of FTI, I informed you that we bought a new television. We also bought an amplified antenna for it so my wife wouldn’t have to constantly change DVDs for our daughter while feeding our son.

Our daughter watches a lot of television. And you know what? I don’t care what you think. I’m on record as stating that TV itself isn’t an evil. It’s what you let your kid watch, not how much of it. Or, at least, it doesn’t matter how much TV the kid watches if the kid remains active and engaged while the TV is on. Sitting slack jawed on the couch = bad. Running in circles whilst playing with wooden puzzles and trying to match the dance steps of the characters on screen = no problems at all.

But the question remains: What’s good television? Well, I’ve had an opportunity to observe some modern children’s programming, and I have a handy-dandy guide for you! Don’t you feel special?

It’s a Big Big World. A giant sloth named Snook acts as a guide through the world of natural science. It’s all puppet based, and the puppets are exquisite. More than once I found myself wondering how the puppets work.
Why you should show it to your kids: The colorful world, the wonderful music, but most of all the excellent writing. Characters are not sanitized for your child’s protection. Any given character is apt to be stubborn, petty, vain, ignorant or just plain grumpy. They’re not always role models, but they provide object lessons. They model the behavior that your child should work to avoid well, but without making the characters vile or abhorrent.
Why you might give it a miss: Newer episodes went all Elmo on us and delivered a mildly obnoxious character with a squeaky voice. My wife informs me that they’ve also done away with Oko, an old, vaguely Asian howler monkey who practices Tai Chi and dispenses wisdom to the young characters. Seriously, Oko is awesome and if they’re going to boot him from the show, I’ll stick with DVDs of old episodes.

Bear in the Big Blue House A giant bear teaches children about living in polite society. From the post-Henson Jim Henson Workshop.
Why you should show it to your kids: It’s not for nothing that this show won a ton of awards back when it was on. It’s a fun show with likeable characters that teaches about life and living. At least the early seasons do, but since it’s only watchable on DVD, you get to pick which episodes you show your kids so it’s all good. Also, Doc Hog is an absolute riot.
Why you might give it a miss: The songs are a little uneven. There’s a gospel song about words that seems out of place; especially when Bear bellows “hallelujah” for no apparent reason. Also, the characters aren’t as well written as they might be. Treelo is annoying (though, typically, the young child’s favorite) and Ojo falls into the “We only have one girl, so she can’t be flawed or interesting in any way otherwise we’ll get sued” trap.

Curious George. The monkey made famous for sniffing ether and getting high comes to the small screen to teach kids exactly the opposite lesson that he should have learned in the books. I.E. That curiosity is always good thing. And it’s not a wrong lesson, exactly, except when George starts playing with idle construction equipment to retrieve a ten dollar bill that fell into a hole.
Why you should show it to your kids: George and the Man In The Yellow Hat have lots of adventures and sort of learn about stuff. I say sort of, because the lessons can sometimes seem to be tacked on to the action after the fact. They reinforce the lessons between stories with segments involving live kids putting the lesson of the episode into practice. Also, George is voiced by Frank Welker. Sold!
Why you might give it a miss: While each live-action segment is always prefaced with the statement “George is a monkey, so he can do things you and I can’t do,” I’m not so sure about the whole “follow your curiosity no matter what” vibe the show gives off. The original books made it clear that George got into real trouble following his curious nature. The show… not so much. Fortunately, the George of the TV show is a wiser monkey than the one in the books, and he tends to not destroy as much property.

Sid the Science Kid. A frightening abomination of a child meets up with other frightening abominations and apparently teaches kids about science and stuff. I’ve never been able to figure out what exactly they teach, because my daughter bursts into fearful tears whenever the show comes on.
Why you should show it to your kids: You can practice your quick-draw remote skills by changing the channel as quickly as possible whenever Sid shows his hideous, misshapen head.
Why you might give it a miss: Seriously, the characters on that show are freaking terrifying.

Zula Patrol: Space Aliens teach about science from their space ship while battling grumpy aliens who want to litter and stuff.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are cute, and the stories are interesting enough for adults to not lose their minds watching. The science lessons are a little more blunt and instruct-y than other shows, but the antics surrounding the lessons are entertaining.
Why you might give it a miss: The characters can be annoying if you’re in a certain frame of mind, particularly the pilot who seems to voiced by a woman trying to swallow a ping pong ball while high on blow after attending the James Kirk school of overemoting (note to actors: Only William Shatner is awesome enough to get away with acting like William Shatner. The rest of you are just overacting.) The theme song is an earworm to rival all others.

Electric Company: Who knew? They brought back the Electric Company. Now it’s a much more narrative driven show with a story interspersed between the old “Ssss,” “Tuff,” “Stuff” routines. The new Electric Company are high-school superheroes whose powers revolve around learning and stuff. They can throw balls of words, unscramble scrambled words, and play back overheard words. Basically, there’s a lot of do about words. Their foes are called “the Pranksters” and they consist of people with the opposite powers (scrambling words, etc).
Why you should show it to your kids: Two words: Danny Rhebus. You need more words? Okay, but I won’t explain Danny Rhebus. He must be observed first hand to be appreciated. The pacing is well done, and the storylines are corny but so earnest you won’t care. Also, there’s this dude who does beatbox that must have had bionic lips installed or something because he’s amazing.
Why you might give it a miss: The show went in the hip-hop direction, so there’s a lot of rapping about words. Also, two of the four members of the Electric Company (who are in high school, I must remind you) appear to be in their mid thirties, so I’m not sure why we should trust what they say about spelling.

Miss B.G.: Grammar school aged girl attempts to climb the social ladder with a series of schemes that usually involve misbehaving and then lying about it. It’s narrated by the girl; named B.G.; in the style of the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The show is 3D computer animated, but cheaply done. The character models for the kids are okay, but the adults are comical. Every grown woman in the show—even the high school girls—are built like Barbie after working with Pam Anderson’s plastic surgeon. Seriously. You see those coming around the corner, you’ve got time to comb your hair.
Why you should show it to your kids: The show teaches about consequences and about how doing the right thing immediately can make things easier in the long run. B.G. has a little brother who is cute, and his pet hamster is even cuter.
Why you might give it a miss: Watching the show, you can’t help but wonder why B.G. goes to such lengths to impress her friends. They’re all such jerks. Of course, she’s no prize herself, so I guess it evens out.

Cyber Chase: Three normal kids go into their computer and try to protect the benevolent MotherBoard from the notorious Hacker. Teaches about science, critical thinking and problem solving.
Why you should show it to your kids: It features the voice talents of Christopher Lloyd and Gilbert Gottfried. Lloyd plays the evil Hacker, while Gottfried plays the kids’ sidekick and helper while providing sarcastic commentary. Neither actor is phoning it in, particularly Lloyd who really seems into it. The kids in the show approach everything very scientifically, explaining in full detail their thought processes in a way that make Basil Exposition look like a deaf mute.
Why you might give it a miss: Memo to kids: When a (cyber)volcano is erupting about to engulf you in (cyber)lava, this is not the time to whip our your (cyber) notebooks and (cyber) pencils and draw blueprints of what you’re going to build to escape the eruption out of (cyber) logs that just happen to be lying about, and it’s certainly not necessary to provide a fully dimensioned (cyber) drawing with (cyber)units in (cyber) feet. Oh, and by the way, they’re in a computer. Can you tell by my judicious, reserved use of the word cyber to describe every freakin’ thing under the (cyber) sun?

Rescue Heroes: Hey! It’s G.I. Joe without any of the stuff that made G.I. Joe interesting! Basically, it’s an advertisement for a line of toys that replaced Husky Helpers because someone took offense at burly construction workers being called “husky.”
Why you should show it to your kids: The show features exaggerated versions of real-life heroes (policemen, firemen, etc) saving imperiled people from some of the slowest moving natural disasters in the world. The segments teaching about emergency preparedness are informative. It helps you to realize why the action genre usually involves people shooting at each other.
Why you might give it a miss: The show is boring as heck. There’s never any real tension, because you and I both know that nobody’s ever going to get hurt. And don’t think the kids watching don’t know that. This show just serves as a reminder of how neutered we are as a society that we can’t show our children heroes unless the thing the heroes are “fighting” is the weather.

Jane and the Dragon: Another CGI show! This one is set in a pseudo-Arthurian version of England that has dragons living in it. The main character (Jane) is a young girl who wants to be a knight.

All together now: “You Go Girl!”

Jane’s best friend is a dragon named Dragon. He’s wry, sarcastic—everything you’d expect from a friendly version of something with no natural predators. The shows generally revolve around using teamwork, trying your best, and not being a major tool.
Why you should show it to your kids: Despite the premise, the show uses a light touch with the GRRL POWAR!!!! Stuff. Jane wants to be a knight, but it’s not the focus of her every waking moment and in practice she just comes across as tomboyish. The animation is reasonably well done, if obviously motion-captured, and the stories feature a good balance of action and wit to keep kids and adults interested.
Why you might give it a miss: Some of the character models look… wrong somehow. Your kid may not like the dragon much—kids can be scared of unexpected things. If you’re not big on Renaissance festivals, you might skip this one since the whole show feels like an animated LARP session. Other than that, the show is a pretty good bet.

Word World!: Cartoon animals made out of letters learn about spelling and reading by literally building things out of letters. Want a spaceship? Spell the word “Spaceship” out of the letters that litter the landscape in Word World. The economy in that place must be seriously messed up, seeing as how easy making M-O-N-E-Y would be.
Why you should show it to your kids: The character design is simply brilliant. Making a frog out of the letters F-R-O-G couldn’t have been done before CG animation became this cheap and easy. The stories are pretty good, and as a way to teach about spelling and what words actually mean, it’s very well done. Sure, they can only do nouns, but there are a lot of nouns.
Why you might give it a miss: The show features dozens of characters and three voice actors: One for the girl characters and the rest for the boy characters. So if you don’t like, for example, Ant’s voice, you’re probably not going to like Duck’s, Dog’s or Monkey’s voices either. Also, Sheep appears to be doing a bad impersonation of William F. Buckley, Jr. because she says “uh” every 1.5 words.

Peep and the Big Wide World: A newly hatched chicken named Peep learns about how the world works, at least from a physical standpoint, along with his friends a baby robin (named Chirp) and a baby duck (named Quack). The show features lessons about simple science, like where shadows come from and how levers work, and a goodly amount of humor to soften to schooling.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are simple and colorful, and are likely to appeal to younger viewers. Once the kids get older, they can enjoy the in-between segments that feature real live kids employing the lessons of the previous episode. For example, an episode about flowing water will be followed by a segment where kids play with water. The characters act like real kids, being at times curious, cranky, petty, or just self-centered. Also, Quack is a laugh riot. Seriously, get the DVDs for your kids and watch it just for Quack. He’s awesome.
Why you might give it a miss: There is no reason to miss this. You can watch free episodes daily on the website, and the DVDs come in three packs. It’s just a good, kid friendly show.

Bob the Builder: The man from whom a sitting US President stole a slogan works hard every day to keep his little town in good repair. Bob and his crew of anthropomorphic construction equipment (Lofty the crane, Muck the frontloader, Dizzy the cement mixer, Scoop the backhoe and Rolly the steamroller) build things, fix things, and generally learn about teamwork and hard work.
Why you should show it to your kids: The characters are well designed, as they should be since the show is basically an advertisement for a line of toys. Bob has a can-do attitude that borders on derangement, but he models a good work ethic, and that’s a good thing. Any show that instills in our youth the value of a good general contractor gets a thumbs up from this commentator. You can’t all be astronauts.
Why you might give it a miss: Depending on how recent the episode your watching is, the voice acting might be grating (When Greg Proops joined the cast as Bob, all of the other actors spontaneously became British). Most of the episodes are pretty similar: Bob starts working on something, and he gets called to work on something else, then he goes back to finish what he started earlier. Occasionally, Spud (a living scarecrow) tries to help and messes something up, causing Travis (a tractor) to have a panic attack and giving Bob and the crew more work. This happens once every 1.25 episodes.

So there you have it. A guide to children's programming.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have more research to do for the followup to this post. That national average for time spent in front of the TV isn't going to bring itself up.

Late to the Party Reviews: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

2010-01-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

Like virtually none of my peers, I was raised on John Wayne movies. Dear Old Dad is probably the Duke’s greatest fan. In the wee hours of the night, when I was just an mewling wet ball of need and remained inconsolable regardless of how many bottles, diapers or pacifiers I was presented with, Dear Old Dad turned on the TV and found John Wayne Presents: The War Movie. I was immediately calmed, so the story goes (I was kind of young at the time) and thus my status as a John Wayne Fan was cemented from an early age. I was raised on El Dorado, McLintock and The Comancheros. (Indeed, it is told that, when preparing to slide down a slide, my two year old self would bellow “Charge Mon-soor!” before riding down.)

When our first was born, those late inconsolable evenings were soothed in like fashion. North to Alaska, The Comancheros, Rio Bravo. These are movies that I soothed my daughter to sleep with when acid reflux made her cry.

If I wasn’t a fan of The Duke before, believe me I would be now.

In later years, I would go see westerns in the theatres. My father won tickets to the local premier of Unforgiven. When Tombstone came out, we were all over it; and I maintain to this day that Tombstone is the finest western ever made that didn’t have John Wayne in it. My father and I even went to see Wyatt Earp, which was Kevin Costner’s failed attempt to make a movie as awesome as Tombstone. (He knew he failed too—Tombstone was released by a small studio because Costner got the bigger studios to drop it so it wouldn’t provide so much competition).

So my history with the American Western goes way back. Way back before I was born, in fact. As you can imagine, the dearth of western based video games cuts me deeply. I’ll try just about anything with a cowboy hat on it (well, except Damnation. I still read reviews, after all.) I owned Outlaw on the Atari 2600. I’ve played Outlaws on the PC. I’ve played Mad Dog McCree in arcades. I’ve even owned Red Dead Revolver for the PS2. For the most part (Outlaw and Outlaws being two exceptions), they all disappointed.

I’m not sure why the Western is so hard to pull off in video games. I suspect it has something to do with the lack of variety in the environment. Designers of western games almost always fall back on the dusty, half-abandoned town with maybe a foray into a monument valley type environment. That’s a whole lot of brown, and there are only so many brothels/saloons/general stores a player is willing to tolerate.

The problem here is the games are almost always based on the works of Sergio Leone. Sure, we all love The Man with No Name and a Fistful of Dollars, but there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on there, from an environment standpoint. The movies basically all use the same caricature of the American West as a backdrop. At the end of the day, that makes a serviceable demo, but not a full game.

An antidote might be to watch The Searchers. In that movie, the Duke’s quest to recover his stolen nieces spans snowy mountainous regions, desert flats, monument valley, and yes, the odd dusty town. It’s rare to see a pine tree; or indeed any kind of living tree at all; in a western game. Let alone a snowflake.

This is where Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood does something right. While the game spends a fair amount of time in dusty towns, the environments your characters will venture through include wheat farms, mining camps, mountainous regions, a monument-valley-esque region, and lush pine forests. At one point you even get to blow up a dam and ride down a river in a canoe whilst being pursued by American Aboriginals.

The enemies are likewise varied. A lot of western games shy away from injun fighting. Call of Juarez: BiB gets around the PC objections by having the whooping aboriginals motivated by being rivals to a tribe that you’re working with. You’ll also spend a little time fighting the war between the states; wearing grey, if you can believe it. The main characters are Confederate soldiers who desert to defend their family farm in Georgia as General Sherman makes his famous ride to the sea. The result of your desertion come back to haunt you years after Lee turned in his sword, and any qualms you have about shooting Billy Yanks should be salved by the fact you also get to shoot Johnny Rebs later in the game. Oh, and while you’re at it, you get to fight Mexican bandits.

So I think Call of Juarez does a serviceable job if cheesing off just about everybody, from a stereotype standpoint.

And while we’re on the topic of variety, I should mention the variety of weapons. In the game, you get to play as one of two brothers, each with his own style of combat. Ray, on the one hand, is brash and impetuous. He can dual wield revolvers, or hold a revolver in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other, or use a long gun (rifle or shotgun). Ray’s brother, Thomas, takes a more measured approach. He only wields one weapon at a time, and while his brother might kick in a door and shoot everybody before they can stand up, he would rather find a good vantage point and pick the inhabitants of the room one by one. Be that with his revolver, his rifle, his throwing knife, or his bow. He also carries a lariat that can be used to scale buildings to get the drop on his foes. Throughout the game you’ll have the opportunity to replace the weapons in your inventory, either picking up new versions of what you already have, or buying better quality versions of them at a store. Weapons come in a variety of grades, from Rusty (not so good) to Superb (take out a hummingbird’s eye at thirty paces) and there are different versions of each. You have, for example, your standard revolver, your ranger (longer barrel, longer range) your quickshooter (lower accuracy, fast firing and reloading) your hybrid (sixshooter with a shotgun built in—and yes, they really made those) and your Derringer. For long guns you have your rifle, your sniper rifle (again, they did have them in those days) your shotgun and your sawed off shotgun.

Oh, and I should mention that you will have the opportunity to fire any and all of these weapons from horseback in the middle portion of the game. Horseback controls are handled rather like they were in Oblivion, only better. And if that means nothing to you, I don’t really have the patience to describe it better. (EDIT: Oh all right, Steering and movement are handled with one stick, looking is handled with the other so you can shoot the guy next to you without your horse trying to run through him.)

Also, you can ride your horse to death, so go easy on the spurs. You’ll rarely need to go anywhere at a full gallop.

The plot centers around three brothers: Ray, Thomas and William. William is a preacher who is trying unsuccessfully to save his brothers’ wayward souls. After their mother dies and General Sherman burns their family farm, Ray and Thomas vow to rebuild. But years later, not much progress has been made and the brothers are outlaws. They hear of a legend that tells of an ancient city buried underground and full of enough treasure to buy all of Georgia, let alone the family farm. So a prospecting they go, where Ray and Thomas share an uneasy truce regarding a woman. On the way they’ll fight bandits, aboriginals and their old commanding officer who refused to lay down his sword after the war and vowed to hang the deserters he believes cost the south the war.

I won’t spoil it more than that, but a lot of people get shot and/or blown up on the way.

The gameplay itself is your basic first person shooter. Nothing done wrong, but not a lot of standout moments. Unless you count the quickdraw boss battles. Which you really shouldn’t, because while they are interesting they aren’t all that fun. Basically, you and your foe circle each other, the camera stationed to keep your right hand and the revolver on your right hip in the foreground and your opponent in the background. With the left analog stick, you move your character’s right hand. When you hear a bell, move your hand to the revolver and shoot when the crosshair reticule moves over your opponent and turns red.

On paper it sounds good. In practice, your character’s hand moves too sluggishly and you’ll find yourself dying. A lot. Eventually you’ll catch a lucky break and take down your opponent, but this minigame really serves to break the illusion of your character as a western bad-a** outlaw.

Other than that, though, the game is a lot of fun. It’s unremarkable in a lot of ways, but the environments are well crafted, the hit detection is spot on, and all of the weapons feel exactly as powerful as they should given the technology of the era.

You won’t get the feeling you’re playing a John Wayne movie. But a game will never capture that, and I will beat anyone who tries it.

That includes you, Bethesda.

Yeah, I saw what you did with Dick Marcinko. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Wrapping up the decade.

2010-01-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

So, 2010 is upon us. We just figured out how to refer to what year it was in shorthand (sadly, “oh 9” beat out “ought 9”) and now we have to figure out how to refer to the teen years of the current millennium.

My vote is for the “oh’s” to continue. So I christen the new year “Oh 10.”

A whole lot of crap went down, didn’t it? The United States suffered the biggest sneak attack since 1941, and today there sits in the white house a black president.

I wonder what science fiction writers will do now to indicate that the future is a bizarre, far flung place outside the realm of our experience? I'm going to go with Jewish lesbian.

But enough politics. This was a momentous decade for geek culture. We may not have flying cars, or crazy red-eyed computers that break and try to kill us (oh… wait.), but we got a lot of great stuff with in-jokes a plenty. So let’s have a look at what the first decade of 2000 brought The Geek.

1) Firefly and Serenity. Sure, it only lasted one season, but the affect on the geekiverse was massive. Joss Whedon made a space western with actual horses, and managed to remember that sound doesn’t travel in space.

2) And while we’re on the topic of Mr. Whedon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog came out during a writers’ strike and completely blew our socks off. Plus, Ben Edlund finally got to use Bad Horse in something. Everybody wins!

3) Felicia Day. The Guild, Dr. Horrible, and Sears all discovered Ms. Day at the same time. ‘Nuff said.

4) Comic Book Movies. The first decade of the 21st century was very good to comic book fans. We got a watchable Superman movie, two good Spiderman movies and a third one that’s watchable if you skip the ending, two good X-men movies, two solid Incredible Hulk movies, two watchable Hellboy (of all franchises) movies, a decent Ghost Rider movie, and a really good Iron Man movie, two excellent Batman reboots and two Frank Miller originals in Sin City and Thermopylae. If you like comic book movies, this has been a good decade.

5) Speaking of Movies, I simply cannot let the passage of the Lord of the Rings movies go buy uncommented. Peter Jackson took a rich and complex world and brought it to the silver screen in a way that, honestly, I didn’t think possible. I went to see the first movie fully expecting it to stink, but it didn’t. Not only didn’t it stink, it was awesome. The movie trilogy is proof that a good book-to-film translation is possible; it just takes someone who’s invested in the core material. On behalf of geeks everywhere, I must say: thank you, Mr. Jackson.

6) Television shows. In the last ten years there has been a surprising amount of good television. House M.D., Monk, Chuck, Mythbusters, the aforementioned Firefly. And that’s just the stuff I’ve watched. The last ten years have also seen the establishment of the “Reality Show” which, for good or for ill, is now part of the cultural landscape. Or wasteland, depending upon your perspective.

7) Video Games. This has been the Mother Lode of all decades. Nostalgia for the 1990s (aka: the decade of a thousand side-scrolling-platformers) notwithstanding, let’s just consider what this decade has brought us. First off, we’ve seen EA go from being a blight on the industry to the friend of gamers, while Activision has won the title of corporate succubus and convenient target for corporate haterade in the gaming forum community. We’ve seen the creation of new and phenomenal intellectual properties (Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge, Mass Effect, Far Cry, God Hand, God of War, Sins of a Solar Empire, Dead Space, Portal, the Pixeljunk series, Katamari Damacy) and the competent and loving continuation of old franchises (New Super Mario Brothers, Sam and Max, Fallout 3, Tekken 4 and 5, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, GTA 3, all the new Zelda and Metroid games) and some truly excellent uses of existing IPs from other media (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Spiderman 2, Ghostbusters). This decade has shown us that the independent developer can do wonderful things (Sins of a Solar Empire, Dwarf Fortress, Runman, Audiosurf). We’ve seen the resurrection of forgotten genres with the return of Sam and Max and the Monkey Island reboot. We’ve seen the merging of multiple genres, mostly with RPGs (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Borderlands) but also with RTS games (Brutal Legend). We’ve learned that it’s possible to have games where you can go anywhere and do almost anything (GTA3, Red Faction: Guerilla, Far Cry 2 and pretty much every open world game out there). We’ve even become rock stars in the comfort of our own living rooms (Guitar Hero and Rock Band). And if that weren’t enough, we’ve learned to play games on two screens (DS), with a stylus (DS, iPhone) and they’ve finally tapped the potential of the Power Glove… sorta (Wii). Sadly, not all the news has been good. We’ve also learned that console games can and will need patches, and the DRM isn’t just something PC gamers have to deal with. We’ve also learned that most of the people you’ll meet playing online console games are not the sort of people you want to, you know, meet. Taken as a whole, though, a positive decade.

8) Three Words: World Of Warcraft. This one is so big it deserves its own slot in the list. Since 2004, WoW has amassed millions of subscribers, making the MMORPG such a staple of gaming that nobody even calls them MMORPGs. They’re just MMOs. In fact, Wow has become so big that I am willing to bet that you’re surprised it only came out in 2004. Fess up: you thought it was older than that, didn’t you?

9) Lemon Demon. So let’s follow up something that everyone has heard of with something that almost nobody has heard of. Neil Cicerega started his musical career in 2003 under the name Trapezoid. Following some dustup over copyright infringement and who came first, he changed the name of his one-man band to Lemon Demon. Boasting influence from multiple sources, notably among them They Might Be Giants, I remain convinced that young Mr. Cicerega is a genius. An actual, “I could get into Mensa if I wanted to” genius. I have no proof, but I would gladly bet money on it. His lyrics are delightfully clever and he has a bizarre knack for poking fun at things in such a way that he really shouldn’t be insightful enough to do. The song “White Bread Boyfriend” is a prime example—nobody who began his musical career in high school should be able to write something that bitingly satirical. Likewise “Geeks in Love,” which I suggest you Google immediately, reveals an old soul while still retaining a healthy dollop of whimsy. And while you’re Googling, look up “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.” You won’t regret it.

10) Schlock Mercenary. And speaking of obscure things that cropped up this decade, Schlock Mercenary started up in 2001 and hasn’t missed an update since. I’ve already written about that, however, and you should go read my earlier thoughts on the webcomic.

11) And do you think I could possibly forget to mention that the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released in this decade? I have a copy of the books (Player’s guide, DM’s Guide and Monster Manual) sitting in my bookshelf awaiting the day when my daughter and son are old enough to participate in a quest. Having no experience with the previous editions, I can’t tell you what’s different. What I do know is that, from a beginner’s perspective, 4th edition is very accessible, and the books are just a good read even if you’re not planning on playing anytime soon.

And that’s just a taste of what happened back in the first decade of the 21st century. Imagine what I could have written if I’d have taken the time to do any research at all!

Of course, the most important thing that happened in this decade, from the perspective of the author, is finding, marrying, having children and buying a house with The Missus. We met in 2003 thanks to the power of the internet, and have been inseparable pretty much ever since. We got married in the fall of 2005 wearing Converse all-stars (mine were formal black, hers were pink). Our first child was born in 2007, and our second was born in 2009. Who knows what wonders the next two years may bring us? I look forward to sharing that adventure, and the rest of my days, with her.

That two geeks from different states can find each other, fall in love, get married, start a family and put down roots in the space of ten years is truly the wonder of the decade.

The Christmas Post

2009-12-30T03:00:00.000-08:00

Author’s Note: Yes, I realize this post should have happened on the 23rd. The problem was sheer absent mindedness. I had queued up some posts to make sure that the blog was updated without interruption, not realizing that the queue overlapped Christmas. So instead of a post about Christmas, you got a post about Felicia Day.

And you’re complaining?

The hallway is dim in the early morning light. It’s just a little past seven in the morning, and the forecast called for rain. There’s a strange flickering in the living room. It’s colorful, but quiet and regular. Not at all like the glow of the usual morning cartoons.

She steps out of her room, a little bleary but smiling ear to ear. She doesn’t know it’s Christmas, she just knows that she’s awake and both Mommy and Daddy are in their pajamas, which means Daddy is staying home all day. This morning is a little unusual, because Mommy changed her in her room instead of the living room where the diapers are kept. But that’s okay, because it means she can go straight for the kitchen for breakfast, which she always tries to do but is always cut off by one parent or the other to change the diaper she’d been wearing all night.

Breakfast is pancakes, bananas and Reese’s peanut butter cup cereal. Her favorite. She eats each course in order, happy to finally be sitting at the table like a big girl instead of her high chair. As she eats, she looks across the table at her infant brother, who Daddy is feeding. He’s looking at Daddy, watching Daddy eat his own breakfast and wondering why everyone gets to eat brown gooey things but him.

He is, after all, almost three months old. He could totally handle cinnamon rolls.

After the last Reesey puff is deliberately crunched and swallowed, Daddy brushes her teeth and says something about going to the living room.

Who is this “Santa” and why should she care what he brought?

She holds Mommy’s hand as she walks down the hall she’s walked dozens of times before. Breakfast is over, that means it’s time for cartoons. The strange string of festive lights gives her pause, and she hesitates at the threshold. On the shelf sits a tiny tree, no more than a foot high, which was all that Mommy and Daddy had time to unpack and decorate. It wasn’t there when she went to bed.

The seven foot artificial tree sits sullenly in the basement, biding his time. Next year, he tells himself. Next year will be mine.

With some mild coaxing, she steps into the living room, and she sees it. Under the tree sit a menagerie of Fisher Price Little People animals, along with a purple SUV, a farm and a Noah’s Ark. If she remembers that she was given them when she was too young for them, and they were then packed away for a year, she doesn’t let on. Instead she sets upon them, smiling even broader than before, if that’s possible. She picks up each individual figure, regards it, and puts it into a line that has an order only she understands.

Then comes the box of puzzles. Another gift from last Christmas, and she’s thrilled to see them. She enlists Daddy’s help to slide the puzzles out, and she immediately takes out all the pieces, puts them in a pile on the floor, and then gets to putting them back into the puzzles.

Puzzles have ever been her favorite.

Then comes the truly new. Sliceable fruits and vegetables held together with Velcro ™. Mommy and Daddy palmed the little wooden knife that comes with the set, which is technically for an older child, but she doesn’t notice or care. She takes apart each item and lines the pieces up.

Last, comes the wrapped presents. Four large boxes, each part of a set, containing playsets of licensed PBS characters from the show It’s A Big Big World. There’s Snook’s treehouse, Madge’s library, Smooch and Winslow’s bedroom and Birdette’s nest. Mommy struggles with the packaging, muttering unpleasant things about the lineage of whoever thought a plastic treehouse needed eleven billion twist ties.

Seriously, it’s a child’s toy with maybe three moving parts, not a working model of a hadron supercollider.

She waits impatiently, but is tempered by the other goodies spread out under the miniature tree. Finally Mommy frees the molded Snook figure, and hands it to her. She’s thrilled.

While she’s playing with her bounty, Mommy and Daddy present a few gifts to her infant brother. He gets a Bumbo chair, which seems to amuse him and alarm him at the same time. It also enrages him if he’s left in it for too long, but such is the life of a three month old. He also is given an Ugly Doll (Jeero), and it’s the first thing he ever grabs and snuggles with his own hands. Well, he grabs it and smashes it into his face, which sort of looks like snuggling provided you spot him to make sure he hasn’t blocked off all the air to his face.

Mommy and Daddy then exchange gifts with each other. Daddy gives Mommy the new Professor Layton game for the DS. Mommy gives Daddy the latest Schlock Mercenary book.

It’s a light Christmas, but she doesn’t know that yet. All she knows is the living room is awash in fun stuff, and that Mommy and Daddy are both home to play with her. She couldn’t be happier.

After the presents are unwrapped and the paper bagged up and set aside, Mommy and Daddy put in some DVDs. They’re not the usual DVDs. The first one involves an orange cat that eats a lot. She likes him. The second features a kid with a big round head who looks a lot like Caillou, but isn’t as annoying or boring and has a fun dog. One has a kid in glasses who wants a rifle for Christmas. The rifle bears a striking resemblance to one that Grandpa brought with him to give to her when she was first born, but she doesn’t know that yet. Another one involves a tall man in yellow tights getting hit by cars and singing a lot. He’s funny. Later, she falls asleep on the couch while Mommy shows Daddy “It’s A Wonderful Life” for the first time ever.

Yes, really. Daddy is surprised to find that he likes it, even if he’s disappointed that Potter didn’t get his.

That night, after she toddles off to bed, Mommy and Daddy open the presents that they bought themselves with money they’d received earlier. Mommy gets a Pokemon Training Deck, which has enough cards to play a short game with half a deck, or to build a beginner’s deck. Mommy and Daddy try a game, in which they have some fun and manage to misinterpret enough of the rules that they’ll have to start from scratch next time they play.

Daddy gets Batman Arkham Asylum for the PS3. After they play Pokemon, Daddy fires up the PS3 and installs the downloaded content he’s had on his hard drive for months in anticipation of getting this game. It’s better than the demo.

The next day, Mommy leaves the house in the morning to do some grocery shopping and comes back with two additional theme decks for Pokemon, as well as a number of booster packs. In addition, she buys Katamari Forever and Eat Lead; The Return of Matt Hazard for the PS3 as well as Cooking Mama 3 for the DS, which Mommy didn’t even know was out. This finishes off the Christmas money they each got this year, and gives them both a queue of games that should last them for months given how little time there is for gaming with a toddler and an infant.

Mommy and Daddy are big geeks, but so far she doesn’t care. She’s just happy that everybody’s home.

Later that afternoon, she is asleep and Daddy gets a phone call from Grandma and Grandpa. They won’t be able to visit as they had planned, because Grandpa has a cold and the weather is going to make the three hour drive too difficult. Grandma and Grandpa tell Mommy and Daddy to go ahead and have a second Christmas Morning without them. While she sleeps, Mommy goes to the basement and gets the presents from Grandma and Grandpa.

When she wakes up, the room is full of colorful boxes again. She’s starting to get what this means. Grandma and Grandpa got her books. Her favorite thing in the world, except for puzzles, and maybe even above them. Two board books that appear to be made of MDF (Grandma and Grandpa are no fools), a lift-the-flap book, and a bundle of Sesame Street “magazines.” The next morning, on getting out of bed, she will immediately make for the living room couch and look at the magazines one at a time.

Mommy and Daddy got mostly clothes, which they seem to like quite a lot but she can’t imagine why. She’ll understand when she’s older and has to pay for her own clothes, but that’s a long ways off.

And that’s it for Christmas this year. She doesn’t even know the word yet, but next year she will.

I’m already looking forward to it.

World of EverHammer

2009-12-23T03:32:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this by stating that I have never played World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online or Maple Story.

I’ll pause while those of you who know what I’m talking about recover from having thrown up in your mouths at that last juxtaposition.

Back? Good. I tried FreeRealms for approximately two hours in total and didn’t see the appeal. My wife and I played around with Toontown Online for about as long as it took to realize that there wasn’t much to do if you weren’t willing to upgrade to a paid membership. I have even, I’m ashamed to admit, installed Second Life on my laptop before I remembered that Second Life was developed as a kind of honey trap for griefers and perverts to keep them from intruding on real games.

So my MMO experience is essentially nil. I know enough of the jargon to fake my way through a conversation with someone who has a WOW subscription. (“So, how about those instances, eh? Those goldfarmers sure stink.)

So I’m not what you could call the target market for Felicia Day’s web show The Guild.

If you haven’t heard of Felicia Day, you have no business reading a geek-centric blog. I bid you good day sir.

If you haven’t heard of The Guild, I couldn’t say I’d blame you. The only reason I heard about it was because “Julian” Rabbit “Murdoch” interviewed Felicia Day in the aftermath of the googlebomb that Joss Whedon threw at us with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog. They discussed this webshow that she’d been producing, which was how Whedon found her to fill the role of Penny in HMDSAW.

The Guild is a show about a group of highly dysfunctional people who are members of a guild in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that bears a striking, if not actionable, resemblance to World of Warcraft. The group is a cross section of the kinds of people who get obsessed with MMOs: There’s your fussy, 40 year old loser, your snarky power leveler, your faux confident teenager, your sheltered late bloomer, your bad mother and your mousy redhead with self esteem issues. Apart, they’re a bunch of losers without friends. Together, they’re a bunch of losers without friends known as the Knights of Good.

The drama of the show stems from the fact that a catalyzing event thrust the nature of their relationships with each other into meatspace. Not one of them knows how to deal with people in the real world, though each of them fails to deal with people in their own way. Vork, for example, is a shutin while Tinkerballa is a user. Their interactions with each other are the reason you want to keep watching.

Felicia Day writes the show, and it’s clear that there’s a little bit of Codex in her. She’s clearly had dealings with all of the characters she’s created, though I’m sure (I hope?) the characters on the show are exaggerated for comic effect. (If Clara is based on a real person, someone should call child services immediately.)

As I said, I’m not the target market for the show. To me, Aggro is something farmers do and a mob is something that involves Marlon Brando and Italian American stereotypes. But the show has appeal to the wider geek market; and not just because Felicia Day has become kind of a nerd sex symbol (Sure, she’s attainable. Just not by you.) My wife, for example, knows less about MMORPGs than I do, and my lack of EXP with the genre is clearly evidenced by the fact that I’m the only person who still appends the RPG to the MMO when writing about them. She has become hooked on the show, and is eagerly awaiting the next free episode drop.

And there’s a bit of a rub. Having devoured the last two seasons and been consistently pleased with the writing, I’m not entirely sure I like where the season 3 storyline is going. This season’s Big Boss, the Axis of Anarchy, just makes me want to put my fist through a wall every time I see them. From the moment they cut in front of the KOG at Gamestop, I wanted to personally curb stomp every last one of them.

Maybe games do make you violent. Or maybe it’s just that I was bullied as a kid and have less than zero tolerance for bullies. I don’t just want them stopped; I want them obliterated and their lines striken from the face of the earth. (Let that be a warning to anyone harassing my son or daughter ten years from now.)

And that was my reaction to them after just the first episode. Their transgressions have only escalated in the ensuing episodes. My wife and I have seen up through Episode 7 (Coping and stuff), and with so few episodes left in the season I am concerned. To date, Felicia Day’s writing has shown none of the trappings of the Sci-Fi channel nihilism that insists on putting sympathetic characters through the nine circles of hell only to flush them down Lucifer’s toilet to live in a kind of sub-hell where all demon offal coagulates to form the tenth through eighteenth circles of hell . However, I fail to see how sufficient justice can be rendered to the Axis of Anarchy to satisfy me. To simply destroy their status as a guild would be inadequate. The Knights of Good would have to take everything they hold dear, kill them, take a dump on everything they held dear, and have the befouled items delivered via singing telegram to the grieving families during the funeral. Then the harm the Axis of Anarchy has rendered unto the Knights of Good and countless other fictional characters in the fictional history of the AoA might begin to be atoned for.

I don’t think the Knights of Good have it in them. My lone hope is Tinkerballa.

UPDATE

Okay, so we watched the rest of the season. I won't spoil the ending, but I suppose it worked out okay.

No, the KoG didn't kill the AoA, take a dump on their computers, then send their computers to the funeral via singing telegram, but I didn't really expect that anyway.

I eagerly await season four, and I'm putting season 1 and 2 on DVD in my Amazon cart to be saved for until I have spare money to buy frivolous things (owning a new house is expensive)

Greg’s 2000” TV

2009-12-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

So as regular readers may have surmised from my last post, we’re moving. I learned many things about myself while moving all of our worldly belongings from the third floor of an apartment building with no elevator to the basement and garage of our new ranch-style home. Mostly they’re lessons like “I don’t like carrying heavy crap” and “I really don’t like carrying heavy crap down stairs” and variants of that.

But I’m not going to talk about that this post. What I am going to talk about is my bitchin’ boss new TV set.

During the course of the move, I had to disconnect and reconnect and disconnect again the cables connecting my DVD player to my old TV. My old TV is a 27” Sharp CRT. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I bought it in 2002 or thereabouts, and it has served me well. But when I disconnected the RCA cables from the back of the set, one of the connectors (the yellow one—you know, the video input) pulled out.

It still works, but I took that as a sign to make this the secondary TV, relegated to the basement and dedicated to the PS2 , Gamecube and other assorted obsolete consoles (YAY! Somewhere to hook my Jaguar up again!). With digital broadcast a federally mandated reality, it was time to upgrade the primary set. And boy howdy, did we upgrade.

The first thing you need to understand is that our living room is enormous. It’s a good ten paces from the place where the TV is to the nearest place where someone can sit to watch it. In a situation like that, it’s time to go big. Fortunately, big TVs are on sale these days because retailers are desperate to sell anything in a down economy. So I moseyed on down to Best Buy and picked up a 42” plasma screen. Yes, it’s HD: 720p. The reason I bought 720p is because 1080i is much more expensive and I have doubts about the capability of the human eye to really tell the difference, even at 42 inches.

Plus, I’ve spent the last few years playing PS3 games on a classic cathode ray tube television; and not even a flat-screen CRT. No matter which resolution I chose, the difference was going to blow my socks off, so why spend the extra money?

Since I mentioned the PS3, I might as well mention that I bought an HDMI cable to use with it. The lads at Best Buy recommend a cable that costs $60. I bought one that cost $30 and it’s gorgeous. So a word to the savvy media customer: When it comes to cables, copper is pretty much copper. Don’t waste your money on premium cables.

I also sprang for an antenna so my wife could take advantage of the new broadcast choices afforded by the digital era. We get about a dozen channels, most of them variants of PBS, which means we can watch the annual pledge drive on seven channels instead of just the one.

We’re still using our old, SD DVD player, and the picture looks fine to me. At last count, I have something like 420 movies and TV shows in my DVD collection, and if you think I’m scrapping that for blue-ray you’re crazier than my hair when I got up this morning.

I would like to take a moment to talk about TV stands, because finding a decent one was more trouble than it should have been. First off, who the heck decided that it was a good idea to make the shelf you’re putting a heavy, expensive piece of electronics on out of glass? How does the design meeting for something like that go?

Johnson: So, we want to design a stand that people can put TV sets on. They typically weigh 50 to 100 pounds, and cost a lot of money. What’s a good, sturdy material that can take a lot of weight?

Schwarz: I dunno, wood?

Johnson: Schwarz, get out. You’ve been warned about your flippancy. This company isn’t made of money. Do you think wood grows on trees?

Butterbin: How about glass?

Johnson: Butterbin, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all quarter. Glass is a fine, sturdy material that hardly ever breaks when large amounts of force are applied to it. Build the shelf out of glass. Just don’t forget to focus the support beams into as small an area as possible. I don’t know what PSI means, but more of it must be better. Okay gang, get to work. I’m going to lunch!

I imagine it went something like that.

The other thing I’d like to know is why the bases are all so short. This isn’t a universal condition, but at my house we have small children. As a result, we cordon off large, heavy, expensive things like televisions with baby gates like the Superyard. The problem is that the Superyard is 24 inches tall. Most TV stands on the market (that don’t cost more than the TV, at any rate) are 22 to 24 inches tall. That means that you’re likely to have the lower portion of your screen obscured by the baby gate. At least if you plan on sitting down while you’re watching TV, which I’m pretty sure nobody ever does.

Yes, we could mount the TV to the wall, but that requires finding a stud, and that would require finding a stud finder that actually works, which I don’t believe exists. Plus, if you decide to move the TV, it’s much easier to move a cabinet than to remount a wall bracket. And anyway, who wants to look up to see a TV screen? You know who mounts TVs up on a wall? Emergency rooms. Do you want your living room to feel like an emergency room? Me neither.

That minor aggravation is, however, well worth enduring for the ability to finally read the text in Fallout 3. I imagine it’s a completely different game when you can read the on-screen instructions.

It was a platformer, right?

Movin’ Out. IIIIIIIIIIIIIII’MMM Movin’ Out!

2009-12-09T03:30:00.000-08:00

In a previous installment of this blog, I discussed the process of buying a house. Well, once you’ve bought the house, now you have to move into it. You have several options.

The obvious choice is to hire movers. They can even be contracted to pack your things for you so you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to load a tape gun. The downside is that you’re hiring large men you don’t know who probably make too little money for the amount of work they’re doing, so you’re irreplaceable antique curio shelf might arrive at your new home in more pieces than a bookshelf from Ikea, but without the handy allen wrench to put it back together.

If you’re hiring movers, you want a binding estimate, not an hourly rate. A binding estimate is when someone comes to your current place, looks at all of the stuff you want to move, and gives you a sheet of paper that has the words “shall not exceed” written on it somewhere. The number at the bottom of that sheet is the number you pay. Period. Hourly rate means the movers come to your house and charge you based on how long it takes to move everything.

If you’re a lunatic, you can move everything yourself. This requires a number of understanding friends or family members who can help you. If you don’t have local family, and are a social misfit, it means you’re going to be lifting an awful lot of boxes.

There are three ways to move everything yourself.

1) You can load up your car and make fourteen thousand trips back and forth. This works if you’re moving within the same town or neighborhood. Not so much if you’re moving across the state. Rule of thumb: If it takes more than 10 minutes to drive to your new place, you need a bigger truck.

2) You can rent a truck. This is by far the most common method of self moving. Each moving company is different (Budget, for example, tends to be operated by businesslike people, while Uhaul appears to be owned and operated by a grue) but the basic process for renting a truck is pretty much always the same: First, you reserve a truck in the size that you want. Second, you arrive at the lot and find out they don’t have any of that size, so you rent a different size.

We rented a truck from a rental company that rhymes with “Aragorn.” We asked for a 16 foot truck, and they gave us a 25 foot truck. I have never driven anything that large in my life, and I knocked over at least three buildings and several old growth trees in the process of learning to back that thing up. Which brings us to an important point about renting a truck:

Insurance. Is. Not. Optional.

People will tell you that your insurance covers damages and all that other stuff. These people are idiots. Yes, your insurance does cover you in the event of an accident. But then your premiums go up, and you have to spend half your day on a phone trying to convince your insurance company that you have coverage for whatever they’re denying you coverage for. If you buy the rental agency insurance, as long as you can walk away from the scene of the accident, it’s not your problem.

So take my advice: get full coverage not only for the truck you’re renting, but also for liability. It’s only a fraction of the cost of the rental, and it makes your life so much easier if you do have a problem.

3) The third way of moving yourself is to rent something called a POD. PODS are relatively new innovations. Basically, somebody comes to your house with what looks like a moving truck. Only instead of loading up your stuff into the truck and driving away, they leave the back of the truck in your driveway. You can load it at your leisure, have it picked up and delivered whenever you want (except Sundays, because what kind of freak tries to move on a weekend) and driving it isn’t your problem.

The downside of renting a POD is the fact that you can’t really trust anything fragile to it, because you’re not driving it and the crane that lifts the pod back onto the truck isn’t the most elegant device you’ve ever seen.

Finally, if you’re made of money, you can just throw out all your old stuff and start over from scratch at the new place. This has the benefit of being extremely low hassle, but eating spaghetti-Os with your fingers directly from the can while you’re waiting for the new microwave to be delivered gets old very quickly.

You can also do a combination of these methods. For example, because my wife and I are social misfits with no family nearby that can be expected to carry heavy things down four flights of stairs; we couldn’t do a pure self move. So we hired movers (with a binding estimate) to move anything that required two people to lift (EG: our couch). Then we rented a POD to carry non-fragile, non-essential things. Finally, we rented trucks for two weekends. The first, aforementioned 25 foot truck, took all of our essential, gotta-have-it-in-the-house-now stuff. The second was a 10 foot truck rented to take care of the leftovers that weren’t gotten by the 25 foot truck.

As of the writing of this post, we’re done. It took four weeks of intensive lifting and stair climbing (my backside will never be this firm again—seriously; you could bounce a quarter off me), but it’s done.

Now for the unpacking. I predict we’ll be done somewhere around Christmas.

In the year 2014.

How to buy a house in 25 steps!

2009-11-04T04:15:00.000-08:00

In August of this year I started a new job. In September, my wife gave birth to our second child. So naturally, my wife and I decided to buy a house in October.

Because, hey, our lives weren’t already complicated enough.

For the past couple of months, my wife and I have been spending our Saturdays looking at other people’s houses and trying to decide which one to buy. We made four offers. One of them was outright rejected, another was ignored, and the other two were accepted. The first of the two that were accepted fell through because of legal reasons having to do with large pills and lots of water.

No, wait. That’s prostate. The problem with the offer was probate law. My mistake, though it’s understandable. Both problems are painful but would be largely preventable with some common sense.

If you’re reading this, it means we’ve closed on the other offer that was accepted and we’re in the process of moving into our new home. If you’re not reading it, it’s because we got screwed over by a combination of bankers, realtors and lawyers. Or because you don’t visit this blog. Either way, I’m pissed off.

But assuming that you are reading this, I’d like to share some of the lessons I learned while shopping for a house. First off, you should know what the steps are to buying a house, because nobody in the whole process; not the lawyers, not the bankers, and sure as heck not the realtors; is going to tell you. So here are the steps to buying a house:

1) Find a house you like. You think this is the hard part, but it’s not.
1A) While you’re looking for a house, get a preapproval letter from a bank saying that you can afford to buy a house. It’s a worthless scrap of paper that will be of no use to you ever, but seller’s agents like to see them.
2) Make an offer on the house you like.
3) Wait for somebody to acknowledge that you offered them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large wooden box. Sign and initial two more offer letters because the seller let the first two expire.
4) Find out that the seller thinks there weren’t enough thousands of dollars in your offer to purchase his large wooden box that he doesn’t want anymore.
5) Make a counteroffer on the house.
6) Get a verbal acceptance that means precisely jack.
7) Sign and initial at least three additional offer letters saying exactly the same thing but with different expiration dates because the seller dragged his feet on signing the one he said he accepted.
8) Hire a home inspector to make sure you still want to buy the house.
9) Take the home inspection results and make a new offer on the house because at least some of those thousands of dollars you offered were based on the assumption that the roof wouldn’t cave in on you during the first winter.
10) Repeat steps 3 through 7 until you arrive at a price and set of conditions in which nobody is really happy but everyone just wants to be done with it. This is called compromising.
11) Get a lawyer to draft a Purchase and Sale agreement that won’t be acceptable to either you or the seller.
12) Apply for a mortgage loan and pray that the bank says yes in time for the closing date on the draft of the purchase and sale agreement.
13) Review and make changes to the purchase and sale agreement because the lawyer put in some language requiring you to perform the rite of Ash Kaban in the nude every solstice or forfeit the house and any equity to the lawyers.
You think I’m kidding.
14) Review and make changes to the changes that the sellers made while you were making changes to your draft.
15) Hold a gun to the seller’s agent’s head until he or she takes the agreement that you and the sellers came to and gets an actual, you know, signature on it.
16) Have the house appraised so the bank will loan you the money to buy it, and hope that the bank thinks it’s worth the money you think it is.
17) Provide the same employment and bank information to another person at the same bank you applied for the mortgage loan at because bankers don’t trust other bankers either.
18) Buy homeowners insurance. You will be allowed to think that someone else deals with this until it’s almost too late to do it.
19) Wait around thinking everything is lined up and squared away.
20) Receive a letter from the lawyers informing you that you need to do something that involves spending a lot of money to do something you didn’t know you needed to do, but probably involves either something to do with the title, or something to do with “points.”
21) Wait around hoping everything is lined up and squared away.
22) Do your “final walkthrough” to make sure the sellers didn’t take the light fixtures or toilets.
23) Get a call from the lawyers telling you how big of a check to bring to the closing ceremony.
24) Sign away most of your life’s savings and a large chunk of your income for the next few decades in exchange for a large wooden box.
25) Move into the wooden box and live there.

That’s a lot, and I’m probably missing some steps. And yet nobody will tell you what you have to do until it’s almost too late to do it. No other industry could survive by taking so much money and providing so little information about the actual product.

And that's it for this week. Next week, maybe a post!

On Fatherhood

2009-10-14T02:55:00.000-07:00

The reason you haven’t been hearing from me for the past couple of weeks is because I became a father. Again.

Our first was born just over two years ago, and she’s a pistol. Born of two families notorious for mule-headedness, and a Taurus to boot. She is not a child that responds well to inflexible parenting. You can guide her, but if you push she pushes back. Hard. It is a trait that will serve her well in the world, which is why the Missus and I are taking pains not to quash it.

Being a first time parent is a weird thing. You don’t know any of the rules, and I mean any of them. Whatever advice your parents have to offer is likely to be useless because your kid is not going to be the same kind of kid you were.

So you read books. If you’re lucky, you find a book that was written by someone who raised your kid. If not? Well, you can always use it to prop that short leg on the coffee table.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Most of the books out there will have some nugget of usefulness buried amongst the inaccurate generalizations and accusations of borderline abuse if you fail to follow the book to. The. Letter.

But for the most part, you’re on your own out there with a new kid and no clue what to do. Well, I have some advice for you new parents out there that should apply no matter what your kid is like.

1) First things first. As long as mother and child are safe and healthy after the birth, you did it right.

You would not believe some of the claptrap out there about birthing babies. There are, honest to goodness, people who believe that what happens during the birth determines how the child’s entire life will play out. If you get an epidural, if you don’t nurse the child within 10 minutes of birth (more on this later), if your doctor’s name is Karl with a K, these are things that will ruin your child’s entire life! And heaven help you if the kid is born breech! He’ll be destined to read magazines back to front and he’ll learn to walk before he crawls. It’s a nightmare.

Well, I’m about to shock you here: That’s all crap. Whether you have a natural birth or a planned C-section, as long as your wife and child are happy and healthy then you did it right. What matters is how the kid does while he’s in the world, not how he entered it. Sure, if the mother resents how the baby was born that can have an effect on the kid as he grows up, but that has nothing to do with the birth and everything with the mother being neurotic. So if you want to have a happy, healthy kid, don’t be neurotic!

2) You are your child’s parent. Nobody else is.

Everybody will feel compelled to offer advice, and in many cases judge you based on the choices you make. The internet is full of people who will equate any choice you make as a parent to abuse. Examples? I have many, but here are just two:

The first is the whole circumcision issue, which came up with our second child, him being a boy and all. I won’t tell you what we decided, because my boy’s wang-doodle isn’t your business, but I will say that there is a sizeable contingent of people out there that think any choice you make on this issue is abuse. You chose to circumcise? You mutilated your kid. You didn’t circumcise? Well, you just increased your kid’s chances of getting wang cancer.

Good job!

The second has to do with Breast Feeding. Let’s just say La Leche League isn’t known among non-believers as “The Milk Nazis” for nothing. Heaven help you if one of them finds out you so much as looked at a store-bought pacifier, let alone gave one to your child. If you’ve never heard the phrase “nipple confusion,” prepare yourself to become sick of it.

If you formula feed your child, don’t tell any of your hippie friends. If you’re lucky, they’ll just give you the hairy eyeball and privately accuse you of being an idiot. If you’re not lucky, they’ll lecture you about things like lipids and antibodies and corporate greed. They’ll also refer you to websites that allegedly back up these claims.

I can’t really point to a counter example in this case. Parents who formula feed tend to not be militant proselytizers about it. To my knowledge, there is no website dedicated to the wonders of Similac other than Similac’s corporate site.

Well, I’ll shock you again: If you’re kid is eating well and growing, you’re doing it right. Use breastmilk, use formula, do a combination of the two. Your responsibility is to feed the kid, not please a bunch of retired wet-nurses with hairy armpits.

I won’t get into the whole vaccination issue, because I believe that anyone who would put their kids at risk of getting polio because they think a preservative that hasn’t been used in ten years is causing an uptick in a disorder that’s occurred in the past five years is a stark raving idiot. There, I’ve used up my controversy quota for the year. In 2010, I’ll talk about texting while driving.

3) Babies cry. As new parents, it’s hard to wrap our brains around this. A newborn baby has no concept of proportion, and will cry with exactly the same intensity no matter whether he hasn’t eaten in an hour, or if he’s got his foot caught in a bear trap.

Now, as a good parent, you have all the bear traps locked up in a closet with your rifles and blowguns, so you know that he hasn’t gotten caught in a bear trap. That means he hasn’t eaten in an hour. Don’t panic. Feed him. If it takes you a few minutes to prepare to feed him, that’s okay. The baby doesn’t know it’s okay, but it’s okay.

Also, if you think your newborn is loud, give him a year to develop his lungs. Infants are not loud. Toddlers are loud. You might not realize that until you’ve had both at the same time, but it’s the truth.

Oh, and a side note: People without kids will think you are a bad parent if your kid cries in public. I’d lay odds that you were among them before you had kids. They are not idiots, merely ignorant. If your kid cries in public, do not panic because of what other people might think.

This is especially true if you’re a father all alone in a Walmart with a one-year-old in full tantrum mode while your wife goes to get a shopping cart. Chances are good that at least one of the onlookers has already dialed 911 into their cell phones and fully prepared to call in an amber alert.

Not that this ever happened to me or anything.

You can mitigate this by not panicking, and by having your wife leave the diaper bag with you when she goes to the cart corral. Kidnappers don’t wear oversized purses with half-empty baby bottles sticking out of them. But if she took the diaper bag with her, remember that you are the dad, and anyone who doesn’t think so can go jump in a lake.

4) Old people at Target will give you advice on child rearing. Some of it will be useful. Some of it less so.

Among the useful advice “You can’t overfeed them.” This is sage advice that came down from a great-grandmotherly type person who we encountered at, you guessed it, Target. We had fed her an amount that we thought was appropriate for her age, but she was still fussing. The old lady came up to us, very nicely, and said “Oh just feed her! You can’t overfeed a baby.” So we fed her, and sure enough she calmed right down. Guess what: Babies are like real people. They only eat as much as they’re hungry for.

Some of the less useful advice is of the “Oh, kids need germs” variety. This typically comes from men who have kids that are grown and out of the house, and don’t remember what it’s like to deal with a sick baby. I think it has something to do with hazing new parents. “I suffered, so you now must suffer.” Well, if you want to clean your kid’s hands after he touched the garbage can outside the Walmart, you go ahead and clean them. I recommend Sani-wipes, which are alcohol wipes that are designed to be used on little hands.

5) TV is not the devil, but the wiggles are his harbingers. People who call themselves experts like the say that TV makes kids fat and stupid. The way I see it, the only problem with a kid watching some TV is the kind of programming parents make them watch. Heck, if I started to watch Barney or, heaven help us, the BooBahs every day, I’d be fat and stupid too. But there is plenty of quality programming out there that will engage your child and not make her fat or stupid.

My daughter watches a fair amount of TV. Probably more than she should. But here’s the thing, she’s engaged by the programs we show her, and she learns things from them. For example, she loves the They Might Be Giants educational DVDs, and I’m pretty convinced that she learned to count from watching “Here Come the 123s.” She’s two, not super verbal, but can count to six. Just don’t ask her to do it, because she won’t. As I said, stubborn parents and a Taurus to boot. This is not a child who performs on cue.

I should add that she doesn’t just sit on her diapered rear end and watch the screen passively. She plays with her toys, dances when music she likes comes on and sings along with the lyrics she knows (Hearing her sing “Go for G” from “Here Come the ABCs” will make your heart melt.). She also laughs when something funny happens, which is such a joyful sound that I can’t see the arguments for why we should deny her it.

Another helpful thing in our situation is that we don’t have cable or rabbit ears. Just a DVD player. That means no commercials, and we can mix up what she’s watching from day to day. It also means that we have a portable DVD player for the car, which is an invention that makes me want to kiss whoever invented it full on the mouth.

This is not to say you should use your TV as a live-in babysitter. That would be wrong. But if you sit with your kids and watch TV with them, and if your kids seem legitimately engaged by what they’re seeing, then I don’t see a problem.

And that will do it for this week’s post. I’m traveling on business this week, so there might not be a blog post waiting for you next Wednesday. I’ll try to write something extra awesome for the following week.

No post this week either

2009-10-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

I know I risk alienating my loyal readers-- both of you-- but once again there will be no post this week.

My daughter, not to be outdone by my wife going into labor, caught a stomach bug on Sunday and as of this writing (Tuesday night) has just recovered. I'll have some interesting things to say in the future, but not this week.

No post this week

2009-09-30T02:34:00.000-07:00

No post this week, my loyal readers. The Missus just had our second child last night, and I don't have the time right now to write anything amusing.

Perhaps next week will I will have something for you.

Savant so good

2009-09-23T02:30:00.000-07:00

When you look at a DVD collection as extensive as my own, you can’t help but notice patterns and trends here and there. For example, you’ll notice that my comic book movie section (yes, I categorize my movies by genre, and yes I have enough movies based on comic books to make a whole subgenre) has a whole lot of Incredible Hulk movies. You’ll also notice that I like Star Trek enough to own the complete series of TOS, TNG, DS9, all six original series movies, and all four Next Generation movies, but not enough to own Voyager or Enterprise on DVD.

Just because I’m a rabid Star Trek geek doesn’t mean I lack standards, for goodness sake.

If you turn your attention to my TV on DVD collection, you’ll notice another trend: I have a thing for savants. Especially dysfunctional savants. Monk, The Pretender, House, Nero Wolfe, Due South—my DVD collection is loaded up with people who have borderline superpowers when it comes to perception and intelligence. But that superpower never comes without a price, and that’s where the dysfunctional part comes in.

Adrian Monk is nearly crippled by OCD. Gregory House is literally crippled, as well as emotionally detached from everyone. Nero Wolfe is a voluntary agoraphobe. Jarod is trying to recapture a stolen childhood, and Constable Benton Frasier is Canadian.

The protagonists of these shows are virtually incapable of functioning in normal society. So they function abnormally, and society has to deal with them. Some make it easy on society, like Constable Frasier. Others make it harder, like Gregory House. The unifying theme is that they’re so good at what they do that society bends around them.

This is, I think, power fantasy for nerds and geeks alike. When a person usually thinks of power fantasies, they look at anime like DragonBall Z, in which steroid-addled monkey-men turn bright yellow and kill everything in a three mile radius except the one thing they were trying to kill in the first place. But power fantasies are not the exclusive domain of pre-teen boys without strong father figures. They’re for everybody, but everyone’s is different.

Nerds and geeks share at least one thing in common, and that’s practicality. Sure, it would be nice to be able to throw planet-destroying fireballs that fail to kill your enemies, but honestly how much would you be able to use such a skill in a given week? On the other hand, you can be smart all day long. So when you speak of geek/nerd power fantasies, you have to think of Henry Kissinger and remember that Knowledge is Power. That’s why heroes like Jarod appeal to us. He’s like a superhero, but his power is that he reads really fast. If that were the power granted to an X-man, Stan Lee himself would appear in his introductory issue (Ultimate X-Men #426: Enter THE READER!) to kill him on the splash page, because it’s really lame to draw someone who’s good at studying.

If you’re a geek or a nerd, your supreme career goal is to be so good at your job that you don’t have to be pretend to like your coworkers. Admit it. That’s why so many of you go into IT. You’re already good at it, and everyone else stinks at it. You don’t have to be nice to that idiot who disabled the firewall so he could send an executable file to himself and left the door open for the server to get crashed by a DNS worm.

Look at him, sitting there. He doesn’t even know what he did wrong.

Jerk.

So we really get into characters like Dr. House, who never met a person he couldn’t insult, or Nero Wolfe, who can berate high ranking public officials for interrupting him while he tends his orchids. These are men who are so good at what they do that they get to make up their own rules.

The most interesting part is that the thing that makes each of these geek heroes a social misfit is the very thing that makes them effective. That’s something that is never explicitly acknowledged by the writers, and is frequently misunderstood by the other characters inhabiting their worlds.

House’s coworkers are constantly haranguing him to be nicer, to be more humane, more normal. The thing they don’t realize is the thing that makes House is so insufferable is also what makes him so effective. If he were to become more like Wilson or, heaven forbid, Cameron then he would cease to be House, and he wouldn’t be able to separate himself from his patients enough to make the kinds of decisions that save their lives. It’s a game for him because he couldn’t win if it weren’t.

Likewise with Nero Wolfe. He never leaves his house, or at least very rarely, and when he does he makes a point of making sure everything is as he wants it. Why is that? Because his brain is a precision machine working at a very high speed. A little friction and the thought process flies apart.

And consider Monk, who is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. He catches criminals that nobody else could catch because he is so anal retentive that little, niggling details that nobody else even sees stand out to him like seven foot tall talking bananas would stand out if ever such a horrifying thing existed.

So getting back to our IT professionals, the thing that makes them socially awkward is the very thing that makes them good at their jobs: If they had friends they wouldn’t be so good at fixing computers.

By the way, I don’t mean to pick on IT guys. I’m just trying to pick a real world example that jibes best with this superhero-by-way-of-knowledge motif that I’m discussing. And make no mistake about it: The kinds of things IT guys do strike awe into the hearts of people who are paying attention. It’s just that not enough people pay attention, and a whole generation of people have grown up not having to know what “10 HOME” means because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have turned computers into something that any nitwit with a few hundred dollars can use.

At least, they can use it until their first BSOD, at which point they probably buy a new computer.

Jerks.

Don't beat the bell curve, join it.

2009-09-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I hate Mega Man.

There, I’ve said it. There’s no taking it back. I hate Mega Man. I hate his little 3-credit-card jumps (a term coined by my father, to describe the height to which he could be expected to jump: Three stacked credit cards). I hate the fact that he has to tackle enemies in a specific order, but they don’t tell you which order. I hate that death sends you all the way back to the start.

I’m also none too fond of Warcraft 3. I hate the fact that they spend the first few levels teaching you how to build bases and develop resources, and then send you out into the world with a scout, a tank and an archer and tell you to kill everyone else on the map.

Devil May Cry 4? Bleugh. Why does the main character carry a nerf gun around to do battle with mystical demon hordes? Honestly, the game should have been called “Devil May Shoot, but it won’t do a damn bit of good.”

And don’t get me started on The Sims. Oh, Mr. Wright, may I please have a game where I have to tell my character to pee, make him wash his hands, and also spend 75% of the time waiting for him to finish working or sleeping so I can interact with him? Why yes, yes I can. But why would I? Why would anyone?

What do these games have in common? Four words, or at least three words but one of them comes up twice: Ten out of Ten.

Game scores don’t get much love, and there is some merit to the hate. Every video gamer brings a unique perspective, a unique set of experiences that frame his or her gaming experience and affect how that reviewer views a given game. How do you legitimately take all that emotional baggage and boil it down to a fraction of ten?

Well, if you’re Eidos, you buy large amounts of ad space and make the reviewer give you the score you want. But what about everyone else?

It’s preposterous, really. You can’t take something as subjective as personal opinion and convert it to something as unforgiving and objective as math. It’s like if someone asks you how you’re doing and you answer “3.”

Nonetheless, review scores are very useful tools if you understand how to interpret them. The thing to remember is that you need to calibrate the scale in such a way that you understand what a given number means to you, personally.

Take me, for example. When I see a game review with a score between nine and ten (out of ten), I realize that I’m probably not going to like that game. It took a lot of years, and a lot of wasted money, but I finally figured that out when Warcraft 3 came out. I had played other RTS games at that point, and I wasn’t overly fond of any of them. But the reviews surrounding Warcraft 3 made me wonder if there was something about this game that was different from those other ones.

So I bought it. Then I played it. And then I uninstalled it. Then I tried to trade it in at Gamestop, only to find they weren’t accepting PC games anymore. Then I gave it to a friend. He hasn’t emailed me in a while. I hope he doesn’t hate me now.

To me, a ten-out-of-ten review score means “People who are not you will like this. Move along.”

There are exceptions, of course. I played the heck out of Fallout 3, for example. And I found Bioshock as fun and interesting as other people said I would. But a good 90% of games that earn 90% or better are games that I just don’t like. You might think that makes me some kind of jaded, impossible to please jerk; the sort of guy who goes to an All You Can Eat Buffet and complains about the size of the plates. But such is not the case. I’m actually very easy to please from a video game perspective. All I really want is to blow stuff up for points.

Consider five of my most favorite games from the last ten years:
Mercenaries 2 (PS3)
Spiderman 2 (PS2)
Chile Con Carnage (PSP)
God Hand (PS2)
Gungrave: Overdose (PS2).
What we see from that list, other than the fact that I’m an insufferable Sony fanboy, is that none of those games broke the 7 out of 10 mark (NOTE: I’m using gamespot’s scale here). Or, if they did, only barely. None of them approached eight out of ten. I could list another dozen games that I played the heck out of that got mediocre reviews at best. I can count on one hand the number of critically acclaimed blockbusters that I got more enjoyment than annoyance out of.

The term I like to apply to myself is “B-minus gamer.” I like games that would earn a C or a B-minus if they were graded on a letter scale instead of a numeric scale. Just like my weather, I prefer my game review scores in the mid sixties to low seventies.

This has upsides and downsides. On the downside, I miss out on a lot of the New Hotness, because whatever game has people soiling themselves is a game that I know I probably won’t like. Occasionally a high-rated title will catch my fancy, and I’ll make sure I do a whole lot of research before plunking down any money. Fortunately, there are great forum sites like Gamers with Jobs where I can get multiple perspectives and temper the hype a bit. I bought Sins of a Solar Empire primarily because the GWJ podcast crew spent something like two solid months raving about the game in the “Games You Can Play Right Now” segment of the podcast (and Mr. Borges, if you’re reading this, you are the filthiest enabler of them all when it comes to this one) and I have been very happy with the purchase, even if I haven’t yet summoned the courage to try a solo comp-stomp against the AI set above Average. (My failure to engage in battle against other humans has more to do with my schedule than fear. I’m simply not available to play when other people I’d be interested in playing with are. And now that the Entrenchment expansion has dropped, I’ll never get to a point where I could be competitive anyway)

Likewise, I bought Plants Versus Zombies for the same reason. As someone who likes tower defense games, but only the simple ones, PvZ scratches an itch that games like Desktop Tower Defense (INSERT LINK HERE) only sort of scratch. Desktop tower defense is too easy for me on easy, and not easy enough on medium. PvZ is just right. Plus, there’s nut bowling.

The upside of being a B-minus gamer is the fact that I get a lot of value for my gaming dollar. Every game I’ve bought that was rated between six and seven has seen more play than all of the 9-out-of-10 games I’ve ever played combined (with the possible exception of Fallout 3, which is obscenely large.) I played Gungrave: Overdose from start to finish six times in a row before I started thinking about playing other games again. And I didn’t even use the alternate characters. I beat God Hand twice in one day, and only stopped playing it the third time through because I had to eat and go to work.

And the thing is that 6-out-of-10 games are cheap, because they see price drops way before 9-out-of-10 games do. Ratchet And Clank, Tools of Destruction was still an unconscionable $60 on Amazon in December 2008, yet when I played it and beat it I couldn’t trade it in fast enough. I spent a good seventy percent of that game just being annoyed at it, and I only beat it because I kept waiting for it to get as good as everyone told me it would get. What did I get? A freaking (SPOILER ALERT!) cliffhanger!

Meanwhile, I just got Ghostbusters and Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood for only about $20 more than it would cost to get Ratchet and Clank brand new, and I’ll probably enjoy them more than I enjoyed R&C:ToD.

In fact, I’ll go you one better. I got more fun out of playing the Iron Man movie tie-in than I did playing R&C:ToD, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Ripping the turrets off of tanks, then flying up into the air to catch incoming missiles and throw them at helicopters never, ever gets old. Even if Robert Downey Junior delivers his lines like he’s reading a phone book.

In addition to the value, there is a lot more selection out there if you actually prefer games that rank between six and seven on the ten point scale. There are only a dozen 9-and-up titles per year, but the market is saturated with average games. If you can enjoy a moderately well done licensed game (like Ghost Rider on the PSP), or a workmanlike beat-em-up (Like Vikings on the PS3 or Xbox360) then you have a whole lot of games to choose from.

I’m not sure why the B-minus games fit me so well. It might be that I can’t stand hype. Maybe it’s because the flaws in B-minus games are more thoroughly examined in the text of the reviews than the highly rated ones. For example, the stability issues present Knights of the Old Republic were barely touched upon in all the glowing reviews I read, yet the game ran so poorly on my computer (which I bought almost a year after the game was initially released, and met the tech requirements) that I was able to convince Best Buy to give me a refund for an open PC game. True story.

How a game that runs like a slide show on a PC that’s newer than the game due to known driver issues that the developer failed to fix in the gold edition of the game can get as high a score as KOTOR did, I have absolutely no clue. If the game had rated more poorly, perhaps someone would have discussed the horrible stability and bugginess of the game. But even the folks at SomethingAwful.com (warning: NSFW) congratulated Bioware on making the first Star Wars game since Tie Fighter that didn’t stink.

Incidentally, I’m running Sins of a Solar Empire on the PC that KOTOR wouldn’t run on, and it runs smooth as glass even when the fleets of ships start exploding and my Novalith Cannons start demolishing enemy homeworlds.

But I digress. Another possibility for why I prefer B-minus games is fact that my expectations for B-minus games are lower. Instead of being disappointed because that “perfect” game wasn’t so perfect, I end up being pleasantly surprised by the little game that could. There’s a lot to be said for reducing your expectations.

This is not the same as lowering your standards, by the way. Lowering your standards means you can’t tell the difference between filet minon and a pile of fresh monkey poop. Reducing your expectations just means you aren’t disappointed when you specifically order fresh monkey poop and fail to get filet minon by mistake. It’s the same principle behind enjoying Michael Bay movies. I can still enjoy something by Alfred Hitchcock, but the fact that I don’t expect Michael Bay to be Alfred Hitchcock means I can walk out of Transformers completely satisfied with the experience.

At any rate, that’s how I game. Give me something that critics think is average at best, and I’ll be happy as a pig in excrement. But once you start telling me a game is the greatest thing since silicon wafers, and I’ll probably just go back to playing Chile Con Carnage

Paul Blart Deserves Your Respect

2009-09-09T03:52:00.000-07:00

The action movie is something if a dying art these days. The golden era of one man in the wrong place at the wrong time taking out an army of terrorists using only his wits and the environment is largely a relic of the 1980s. Today’s action movies tend to fall into two categories: Espionage thriller and superhero movie.

The espionage thriller has your Jason Bournes, your James Bonds, and your Vantage Points. Typically the hero is someone who spends the first part of the story thinking he’s working for the good guys, then changing his mind and dealing with the repercussions.

The superhero movies are self explanatory, but this is a blog and I’ve got to fill pixels dadgummit! Your typical superhero movie is an origin retelling, a reboot, or a thoroughly disappointing conclusion to a trilogy. (If Disney buying Marvel means they could go back and make Spiderman 3 not suck, I’d be all for it.) These can be good movies, but they are not pure action movies in the Chuck Norris/Arnold Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis mold.

Oh, sure, we occasionally get a video game movie which comes close to being a real action movie; Max Payne springs to mind; but frankly I find it hard to take anything seriously if it contains Marky Mark AND Mila Kunis above the title on the marquis. Ms. Kunis has her charms, but whoever made the decision to cast her as Mona Sax when Andrea Parker is out stalking the wild needs to have his head examined by a proctologist. He can go right after whatever nitwit decided to make such a gritty, noir inspired game into a movie rated PG.

But for the most part, the action movie is gone. There is hope, however, and it came from an unexpected place: Great Britain. The wheels for this started turning back in the wee years of the 21st century, when Simon Pegg got together with some friends and produced Shawn of the Dead. Speaking as someone who doesn’t even like zombie movies, I have to say I enjoyed the heck out of that one. But that’s not an action movie, so why bring it up? Well, because a few years after Shawn killed zombies by throwing LP record albums at them, Simon Pegg returned with the same team to do for action movies what Shawn of the Dead did for zombie movies: Hot Fuzz.

Hot Fuzz was not as well received as Shawn of the Dead. The most frequent complaint was that it wasn’t spoof-y enough, and that by the end it turned into your typical action movie shootout. I was puzzled by this response. After all, Shawn of the Dead eventually devolved into your standard Zombie movie just in time for the climactic battle. But then I realized that the critics don’t actually like action movies, and the underlying fault they found with Hot Fuzz was that it wasn’t mean enough in poking fun at the genre. The problem was, at the end of the day, that the movie was a loving spoof. Just like Shawn of the Dead was a loving spoof. Action movies deserve scorn, and Hot Fuzz didn’t scorn them. For those of us who love the action movie, though, Hot Fuzz was a breath of fresh air.

And now we end the history lesson five hundred and sixty four words in. But as a dear friend of my father once said, it’s important you should know these things. And yes, I did actually count the words.

Kevin James has carried on the torch lit by Simon Pegg with Hot Fuzz. He co-wrote and starred in an underappreciated gem of a movie called Paul Blart: Mall Cop. The story is pure 1980’s action movie: Dedicated mall security guard (excuse me, security officer) winds up the only free denizen of a mall taken hostage by a well armed and well prepared band of thugs on Black Friday. He has only his wits, his knowledge of the mall, and his Segway to fight back with. The odds are stacked against him, and he very nearly skips the scene undetected, except that the woman he’s harboring a major crush on is among the hostages.

Now, every great action hero must have a liability that will nearly cost him victory and must be overcome. McClane was barefoot in a glass tower. Dalton had a checkered past that would come back to haunt him. Riggs was suicidal and unstable.

Blart is hypoglycemic, which means he has to keep his blood sugar up or he passes out.

This is where the comedy comes in, and some of it doesn’t work so well. The most notable example is an embarrassing scene in which Paul Blart gets his clock cleaned by a gargantuan woman in a Victoria’s Secret store. But such painful moments are few, which is a blessing given the recent trend in “sucks to be you” comedy wherein an otherwise likable character is humiliated repeatedly to the amusement of mean people in the audience.

For the most part, however, the comedy fires on all cylinders. Physical comedy is hard to do well, and Kevin James is very good at it. Much sport is made of his stature, but like another brilliant, heavyset film comedian, he is surprisingly agile and light on his feet. I don’t, however, envy him the bruises he must have gone home with every day, as he clearly did a number of his own stunts.

The setting also provides much of the humor. While malls are no stranger to action movies (let’s not forget that nearly every movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made has at least one scene where a mall gets trashed) Kevin James was able to wring a lot of comedy out of setting an action movie in one. The scene where Paul Blart emerges from a ball pit like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now alone is worth the price of admission.

As I mentioned, the story is pure action hero fare. One man against an army who’s better equipped, better prepared, and quite frankly in better shape than he is. But in the end, a cool head and an intricate knowledge of the terrain defeat youth and skill. Once the fat jokes have all been spent, and the Segway ceases to be an object of ridicule and morphs into an implement of justice, all that remains is the action movie. Our hero crawls through ventilation ducts, uses toy robots from The Sharper Image to misdirect his foes, and eventually blows up an entire Rainforest Café (after a brilliant homage to Predator) in his efforts to take out the bad guys and rescue the woman of his dreams.

But will he succeed? Will he stop the bad guys and get the girl?

Well I’m sure as heck not going to tell you. Go watch the movie. It’s only $5 at blockbuster, and most of you have Netflix accounts already. Put it in your queue. You won’t regret it.

I'm not in love with Joss Whedon, but I do want to have his babies

2009-09-02T02:27:00.000-07:00

I feel I would somehow be remiss in maintaining a blog about geekly pleasures if I did not take the time to say a few words of sickening praise for Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon is the man behind such television phenomenon as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and, more recently, the Dollhouse.

I haven't seen the Dollhouse, so for all I know Mr. Whedon has lost his touch. But I just got done watching the commentary for Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Weblog on DVD (It's ten bucks, people. A trip to Starbucks costs more than that.) so I'll assume he hasn't.

I will admit, however, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer never grabbed me. I've seen a few episodes here and there, and while the charms of Ms. Gellar are not completely wasted upon me (though I do wish she'd eat something, for goodness sake) I wasn't able to get into it. This is not a knock on the show-- I can most assuredly respect anyone so praised for his dialog that goes ahead and makes an episode where absolutely nobody talks. And anyway, Buffy has been lavished with praise enough to make anything I'd add even if I were a fan redundant.

No, what I'd like to talk about is Whedon.

The man is certainly passionate about what he does, or at the very least he does an excellent job conveying passion in interviews and making-of documentaries. But what is the root of his appeal? It's certainly not universal, but among geeks Whedon is a king. Why is that?

The obvious answer is his dialogue. Whedon is frequently praised for writing "real' characters. His dialogue rings true to his fanbase. The problem with that explanation is that Whedon's dialogue is not realistic. Not even a little.

Consider this excerpt from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, hereafter referred to simply as Dr. Horrible because I'm too lazy to type in the rest of the title:

Penny: Unexpected. He’s a really good looking guy, and I thought he was kinda cheesy at first...

Billy: Trust your instincts.

Penny: But, he turned out to be totally sweet. Sometimes people are layered like that. there’s something totally different underneath than what’s on the surface.

Billy: And sometimes there’s a third, even deeper level and that one is the same as the top surface one.

Penny: Huh?

Billy: Like with pie…

Or this exerpt from Firely:

Kaylee: I'd sure love to find a brand new
compression coil for the steamer.

Mal: And I'd like to be king of all
Londinum and wear a shiny hat. Just
get us some passengers. Them as can
pay, all right?

Kaylee: Compression coil busts, we're
drifting...

Mal: Best not bust it, then.

People don't talk like this. Not even in fantasy worlds where cattle rustlers fly spaceships, or nerds build freeze rays in their basements to impress quiet redheads at the laundromat.

I submit that Joss Whedon does not right realistic dialogue. So why does he get praised for doing so? The reason is that, while he doesn't write things people would actually say, he writes what people wish they actually said.

Whedon's writing is too sharp, and that's the appeal. He appeals to geeks, and as geeks we like to feel clever. But, as geeks, we tend to trip over our own tongues more often than not. If I had a nickle for every time I thought of a biting retort to a disparaging comment while laying in bed hours later, I would be the king of all Londonium and wear a shiny hat.

Whedon fulfills that fantasy for us. He puts the biting retort in the character's mouth right there in the heat of the moment, sometimes even a little before and one character will interrupt another character with something snarky or clever or both.

People think they want to be like Mal or Jayne. Actually, they want to be like Wash.

That's why some people love him and some people hate him. If you're not a person who was ever at a loss for words, or if you're satisfied with how characters on other shows or movies handle the situations the writers present, you're not going to get the appeal. But if you've ever wished you'd thought of saying something, or if you'd wished you had the guts to say something you did think of, then Whedon's characters are going to ring true to you.

Another thing Whedon's got going for him the the uncanny ability to write nuanced archetypes. A nuanced archetype is like one of those people who don't get enough air. Yet Whedon writes them. I'm not entirely sure how.

Take Jayne, for example. Jayne is probably the least complicated character on Firefly. He's big, strong, not overly bright but cunning. He's a bit too confident in be abilities of his guns to get him out of trouble that his mouth causes, but there's good reason there. He is, first and foremost, a mercenary, but he's loyal to people he respects. In the hands of a different writer, Jayne would be a cardboard cutout. Just a big, muscular brute O-D'ing on testosterone and cordite.

But he's not. He's sentimental, just about different things-- Vera, for example.

He's less complex than Mal, but he's not all that different from him. He's Ajax to Mal's Achilles (Yep, I went to the Iliad and compared Whedon to Homer), which is to say he has all of Mal's core qualities, just boiled down a bit more. Mal is more subtle than Jayne, and more rational. He's also more dangerous to have as an enemy, though you wouldn't necessarily get that from your first meeting. That's why Mal is the captain, and Jayne is the muscle-- even if Jayne doesn't necessarily understand why.

Another thing that makes Whedon’s work so watchable (and rewatchable) is the themes he hits on. The most frequent theme is the person who wants something that he can’t have. Buffy wants to be done with vampire hunting. Dr. Horrible wants Penny. Malcolm Reynolds wants to be left alone. The stories revolving around those characters show them striving toward that goal, and usually failing.

The failure wouldn’t be interesting except for the reason behind it. Whedon, as I mentioned, deals in archetypes. The thing about archetypes is that they can’t change, and the only thing that would help the hero get what he (or she) wants is to change who they are. Buffy can’t walk away from vampire slaying, because she is the vampire slayer. Even if she could turn her back on it, it would just come back and bite her from behind (Yeah, bad pun. No, not sorry). Mal will never be left alone, because he’s too honorable; he won’t walk away from situations that he could wash his hands of, because walking away would be wrong, so he ends up hopelessly outclassed in a sword fight to preserve the honor of a woman he makes a point of calling a whore. Dr. Horrible can’t have Penny, because he is the villain, and villains don’t get the girl.

Whedon’s heroes don’t get what they want because they’re too busy getting what they need. That’s something I think everyone can identify with.

Next week's etymology lesson: Irony!

2009-08-26T03:17:00.000-07:00

I actually recall how I found out about it a few years back. At the time I owned an iMac. This was back when Apple was making products in colors other than white in order to highlight its differences from Microsoft’s ubiquity. (“Look! Have you ever seen a computer shaped like a fishbowl and painted candy apple red? No! And you never will again!”)

Well, let me pause here for a moment and briefly discuss my fruit-related computer history. I was an apple diaper baby. When I was a lad, we had Apple IIEs in our public schools, and my father; who was a public school teacher; took the computer from his classroom home during the summer so it wouldn’t get stolen. That’s right peeps; I am the product of inner city public schools. We had gangs and on-campus stabbings and everything. And that was just the girls!

Anyway, where was I? Oh right. So my earliest experience with a computer was the Apple IIE, followed by the Apple IIGS. After the IIGS, the two town high schools where I grew up were merged into one high school on the posher side of town, and the computer lab was expanded beyond a single machine, so it no longer made sense to bring a computer home over the summer. So my father bought a computer for the house: A Macintosh LCII with 80MB of hard drive space. I distinctly remember the salesman telling my father that we’d never be able to fill it up, and I can’t help but chuckle when I consider that I could back –up that hard drive 100 times on a USB drive I bought for $30 at BJs.

When I moved out on my own, I carried on the Apple tradition. I bought myself an iMac in candy apple red, or as Mac aficionados would say “F-you Micro$oft red.” I continued to delude myself into thinking that Macs were easier to use than Windows machines until I met my wife in 2003, who had very little experience with modern operating systems (her last computer having been a Colecovision). She tried out my old iMac (I had converted over to a Windows laptop so I could work from home) and proceeded to curse a blue streak at it. You see, the Mac operating system was trying to be helpful, and it kept trying to do things to help my wife do what the computer thought she was trying to do. The only problem was that she didn’t want to do what the computer was telling her she wanted to do, and she had to figure out workarounds to get the computer to take her word for it that she really did want that document to look how it looked.

So I don’t use Macs anymore. I think of them the same way I think of AOL’s online service: They work really hard to develop tools to get around the roadblocks that they themselves built into the operating system just so they can advertise how easy their products are to use.

Anyway, so at the time I was still a Mac Guy, except I knew how to shave my face and neck and regularly laundered my clothes. As such, during my lunch break I would visit websites related to Mac-related gaming, because Mac or No, I will always be a gamer. This one particular site pointed me to a webcomic about a group of college student who used Macs to game and create artwork titled “Mac Hall,” which is now defunct (the original artist is now doing a webcomic called “Three Panel Soul” which I recommend). That webcomic was on keenspot, which was a kind of portal to a list of other webcomics. I remember browsing through the list of webcomics on the list, and seeing something called “Schlock Mercenary.”

And here we finally get to the point.

Schlock Mercenary is a webcomic about a carbo-silicate amorphous alien with an appetite for violence (and anything else he can catch) and a BH209 plasma cannon that has destroyed whole spaceships. In episode 1 of the comic strip, he signs up for a mercenary company known as Tagon’s Toughs by threatening the recruiter with incineration if he doesn’t reconsider the company’s “humans only” recruiting rule.
It turns out it was really more of a guideline than a rule.

From there, we follow the alien; named Schlock; and the crew of Tagon’s Toughs through a series of adventures that include (really) hostile corporate takeovers, patent violations, and a war against a race of beings made of dark matter that nearly destroys the known universe. The comic has been running without interruption for over nine years, which is particularly impressive for a webcomic. What’s even more impressive is the fact that the stories, the jokes, and even the art have only gotten better in that time. Webcomics do not exactly have a reputation for excellence, and while the early years of Schlock Mercenary were not particularly well drawn, they were always funny. And I mean really funny, as in “I must clean the soda I was drinking off of my keyboard because it shot out of my nose, and it hurt like crazy but I still couldn’t stop laughing” funny.

What’s even funnier than the comic itself are the notes that follow some strips. Schlock Mercenary takes place in the distant future, when faster-than-light travel has been achieved and duct tape has been redesigned such that it can actually be used to seal duct work (really ). A lot can happen in a thousand years, and the author brings the reader up to speed on events pertaining to the happenings in that days strip. Sometimes it’s a history lesson, sometimes a science lesson, sometimes a computer programming lesson about how the Trinary unIT replaced the Binary unIT as the basic programming structure, and the affects that had on sexual diversity in the workplace among computer scientists.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, the storylines are huge: literally measured in relativistic units. A given story arc will span months, if not a year, building and building and building to a conclusion that is probably going to result in something very large getting exploded. To give you an idea of how large, at one point someone blows up a Dyson Sphere, and it wasn’t even integral to the story arc.

It’s not always funny, though. The author is no stranger to pathos, and more than one sympathetic character have been snuffed out in the course of the action—we are talking about a troop of mercenaries, after all. But even when long standing characters leave the strip, it doesn’t feel like a cheap way for the author to keep the reader interested; unlike some extremely powerful DC characters that shall remain SuperNameless. Further, ever October the author indulges in a month of darker fare titled “Schlocktoberfest” during which there are fewer jokes and more tension. The mix of humor, action and suspense keep the comic feeling vibrant and new even after nine years of following the same characters.
The comics are also available in dead-tree form. I own all but the most recent book (The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance; a reference to a joke from the series regarding a napoleonic race of koalazoids and the names they give their warships) because they have become a Christmas tradition at my household. If you like the strip online, I heartily recommend buying the books. Not only is it nice to read the comic somewhere other than a monitor, but the books include exclusive bonus stories that delve a little deeper into the origins of the series’ namesake.

If you can handle the crude art, go back to day one of Schlock Mercenary and watch how the art, humor and characters evolve. You can also use the archive navigation screen to pick a story arc that sounds interesting, which might be a good option if you want to start where the art is prettier. The author-recommended place to start is Under New Management. I say “author recommended” because that was the first story arc to get published in book form. The first few months of Schlock Mercenary were actually the second or third book to get printed, and as with Firefly I can see why he went that way, even if I prefer watching the story from the beginning.

The bottom line is that if you’re a sci-fi fan, you need to be reading this web comic. If you’re a military humor fan, you need to be reading this comic. If you’re a comic fan, you need to be reading this web comic. If you’re a… well, let’s just say you need to be reading this web comic.

So go read it. Go ahead. I’ll be back next week with some other morsel of geekitude for you.

Books on DVD: The Color of Magic

2009-08-19T03:02:00.000-07:00

Translating a book into a movie is akin to walking a tightrope. On the one hand, you're taking an intellectual property that has an established following, so you have to please them. But if you want to be successful, you also have to please the people who've never heard of the book.

There are a couple of tacks to take in pursuit of this. If you're Disney, you buy the IP, keep the title and the character names and write a movie without reading the book. Have you ever read Bedknob and Broomstick? 101 Dalmations? The Rescuers? The movies have virtually nothing to do with the books, but it doesn't really matter because the target market will see the movie before it reads the book, and in that case it's the book that gets criticized for being "wrong."

If you're target market is older, but less geekly, you can buy a potboiler thriller from three summers back by Michael Crichton or John Grisham that a ton of people read, but very few people remember, and make a movie that has the same characters, strikes the same basic themes but is basically a totally different movie. The quitiessential example of this is The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy. The book is about how the world gets to the brink of nuclear war because of palestinian terrorists trying to destroy Israel. The movie is about... neo-nazis.

The really hard movies to make are geek favorites. In those cases, the core audience hasn't just read the book, but in many cases has committed passages to memory and has probably cosplayed (WARNING: Google "cosplay" only with safesearch enabled) as a character from it.

There are three successful ways of making geek favorites. The J.K. Rowling method is to hold the movies to exacting standards of fidelity, resulting in a movie that is extremely true to the book and probably a little unweildy. Non-geeks will lambast you for being slavish.

The Goldman (Author of The Princess Bride, you philistines) method is to make a movie that strikes all the same themes, but stands alone as a property all its own. The movie becomes a complement to the book, something that fans will get more out of than the average theatre-goer, but still remains a good movie in its own right.

The Tolkien-Jackson Method is to be as true to the books as possible, but not truer. Sure, you will be savaged by hardcore fans for omitting Tom Bombadil from your movie and screwing up the characterizations of Faramir and Denethor, but you will win an oscar, make gobs of money, and ruin Elijah Wood's career the way George Lucas did for Mark Hamil, so on balance it comes out positive.

If you've been in a BJs wholesale club, or if you have the same kind of history I have at Amazon.com, you might have noticed that there is a DVD out called "The Color of Magic," and sure enough it's a film translation of Terry Pratchet's first discworld novel.

Well, technically it's a translation of his first two discworld novels, as it includes not just The Color of Magic but also The Light Fantastic.

For those of you unfamiliar, shame on you! The Discworld series is a series of novels that take place on a world where magic, not science, is king. To give you an example of just how supreme magic is, the world is an enormous flat disc that sits on the back of four enormous elephants that walk around in circles on the back of a turtle that enormous would only begin to describe.

Like I said, magic.

The easiest way to describe it is Terry Pratchet doing for the fantasy genre what Douglas Adams did for the science fiction genre. If you haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy either, I don't really understand what you're doing on this site. But suffice it to say, it's comedy. And british comedy at that.

The story of The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic revolve around two primary characters: Rincewind, a failed wizard who can't remember any spell but one and doesn't even know what that spell does; and Twoflower, a tourist from a faraway land that thinks all that magic business is very romantic and quaint.

Twoflower gets himself and Rincewind into all sorts of trouble, and they get wrapped up in a plot that ends up saving the discworld from destruction. I won't go into too much detail about the story at this point, but be forewarned that there be spoilers ahead, as I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has read the books.

The movie is cast exceptionally well. Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee from LOTR) is Twoflower the tourist. Tim Curry (who needs no introduction) plays Trymon, a very ambitious wizard who literally kills his way up the wizardly corporate ladder. David Jason, the voice of Dangermouse and Count Duckula, plays Rincewind. Jeremy Irons (Die Hard 3's Simon Gruber) plays the Patrician to perfection. Finally, Christopher Lee himself lends his voice as Death.

As a movie, it only sort of works. A lot of the humor in Pratchett's novels come from the narrator's descriptions of how things work on the disc. This movie keeps narration to a minimum, and while that's very wise from a moviemaking perspective, it kind of robs the movie of some of its magic. We never get the descriptions of how light moves through a world with a strong magical field (answer: very slowly), for example.

The chief problem is that the movie assumes you've read the books. If you haven't read the books, you'll only sort of know what's going on. Why does Twoflower, an insurance salesman, pronounce "insurance" so affectedly? Why is there a trunk that can walk and eat people following Twoflower about? Why does Death personally show up to claim dying wizards, and why does he keep hanging around Rincewind? They never really explain any of it, and if you haven't read the books you just have to take it on faith that what you're seeing is funny, which rarely works.

There are some differences and omissions that were probably necessary but made me unhappy. One of the funniest sequences in the books is when Rincewind meets the clan of rock trolls and fulfills an ancient prophecy that reads "Rincewind will come looking for mushrooms. Do not bite him." They did include Old Grandpa; a troll the size of a mountain; but his introduction is ineffective without the inclusion of other rock trolls (which can be very small), and the sequence where he wakes up is technically impressive enough that it only highlights the fact that they intentionally wrote the other trolls; which they were clearly capable of rendering; out of the story.

The fact that they omitted some visual gags but still kept in the "in-sewer-ants" and "din-chewers" jokes is head scratching, because using phoenetic equivalent spellings for "insurance" and "dentures" only works if you're reading it. Twoflower is supposed to be explaining these terms to people who've never heard them before and have no concept of what they are. Instead, he sounds like he spontaneously shed 100 IQ points mid-sentence.

Personally, I would have much rather they'd included the Hydrophobes than heard a bunch of people say "in sewer ants."

But let's focus on the good aspects, because it's not a bad movie, just a flawed film adaptation. Cohen the Barbarian does make an appearance and the scenes that involve him are fairly true to the book. Being able to actually see the 90 year old barbarian cutting a swath through younger warriors without serious trouble is a treat, and hearing him complain that he hates "shoop" because he hasn't got any teeth left made me smile. Further, like the rest of the cast they found a superlative actor to play him.

Twoflower's sapient pearwood trunk is created through the magic of computer animation, and it looks almost exactly how I pictured it. I wish they had focused on it as much in the movie as Pratchett did in the books, because the descriptions in the books were very funny.

The Color of Magic is $10 at BJs, and if you're a fan of the books I don't really see how you can pass it up. It strikes the major themes as well as can be expected, and it does a good job visualizing a world where light moves very slowly. It's just a pity that they didn't choose what was included and what wasn't with more care.

But then what do I know? Terry Pratchet himself signed off on the script, or so says the credits. I'm just some guy with a blog that nobody reads.

Late to the Party Reviews: Infamous

2009-08-12T03:01:00.000-07:00

Well, it's that time of the week again already. How time flies.

This week I'll be taking a look at Infamous, or if you read the box and insist on being faithful to marketing foolishness inFAMOUS. I do not insist on being faithful to people who misuse capslock, so hereafter I shall type the title of the game as if it were a normal proper noun.

Infamous is video game available only on the PS3. Like all PS3 exclusives, a typical reviewer must be cautious about what he or she says because the legion of PS3 fanboys who are grateful to be able to play something that cannot be had on a rival system will send emails using only capslock and various ways to imply the reviewer has had an inappropriate relationship with a barnyard animal, his own mother, or both.

You see, PS3 fanboys tend to have chips on their shoulders, because they picked the loser in this generation's console wars but they don't want to admit it. As someone who owns only Sony products this gaming generation (PS3 and a PSP, thank you very much) I am enamored of my platforms of choice, but I have no illusions about NPD numbers. Face it, guys: Sony places third in a field of three. That's a fancy word for losing.

Anyway, the fact that the PS3 is this generation's loser doesn't change the fact that there are still a lot of good games to be played on it. Infamous is among them, though it is not without flaws.

For those of you who are also late to the party, let me recap: Infamous is the story of Cole McGrath, a delivery boy who gets electrically charged super powers when a package he delivers blows up and annihilates a large portion of the city. It soon becomes clear that some big things are brewing, and Cole is up to his ionized backside in trouble.

The game borrows liberally from Grand Theft Auto III. It's open world on a city that consists of three islands that unlock as you complete story-related missions. There are side missions littered throughout the landscape, as well as pockets of thugs for you to fight if you just want to get into some quick action. As with every other open world game in the known universe, there are a few hundred Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects (or TACOs, a term used in the JRPG Anachronox which I have adopted) called "blast shards" which grant Cole additional energy to use his more impressive powers.

The developers tried to set this game apart from other open-world games in a few ways. First, Cole is a very agile delivery boy. He can climb just about anything that has a handhold (except chain link fences). The explanation for this is that he "got into urban exploration a few years ago." He says it once the first time he ventures into the sewers, and it totally explains how his climbing abilities are rivaled only by Spiderman.

Ahem.

The other way the developers tried to set Infamous apart is with the morality system. As Cole, you're allowed to play as a hero, or as a villain-ish character. I say villain-ish because the game doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you play the evil path, particularly if you do a lot of side missions, which you kind of have to do.

For example, if you're playing the Evil Path, you will be asked to blow up cops and steal things from other residents of the city. Then you'll be asked to help a doctor establish a new clinic, and protect a bus carrying medical supplies. Blowing up cops and setting up clinics are both optional missions, but you need experience points to buy new powers and upgrades, and if you don't do all of the side missions you won't be able to fully upgrade for the final boss.

The main differences between the "good" and "evil" path are in the powers that you get to wield. As the hero, Cole gets powers that enable him to do precise damage to villains without hurting bystanders and to live-capture enemies for the police to collect. As the villain, Cole gets cool red lightning, and his powers tend to be more explodey.

The powers are completely tied up in your moral fiber, so don't think you'll be able to play through as a grey jedi. Upgrades to your abilities only appear when you've reached a certain level of fame or notoriety (Guardian, Champion and Hero on the good side, Thug, Outlaw and Infamous on the evil side) and you can't use Infamous powers if you're only ranked as an Outlaw, or Hero powers if you're only ranked Champion. When you max out your karma in one direction or the other, you get an ability that temporarily grants you unlimited energy-- so there's no incentive to be a little bit good if you're playing evil, or vice versa.

A lot of reviewers have complained at the implementation of the karmic system, and I can't say I wholly blame them. I've never had a problem with binary moral systems in games-- Fallout 3 had a binary system, and I thought it worked well for the most part. But Infamous is on the sloppy side and a lot of the choices don't make sense. The choice isn't "Cole does what he thinks is right" versus "Cole looks out for number one" which is how the world really works. The choice is always "Cole does what the game tells you is right" versus "Cole acts like a total a-hole."

A good example comes up early, so I have no qualms about spoiling it: Cole is in the sewers and he finds a man guarding a gate. The man believes the bad-guys are holding his wife hostage and will kill her if he opens the gate for anyone but them. His wife, you earlier discovered, has already been killed. At this time the player is presented with a moral choice:

The good choice is to tell him that his wife is already dead and that he doesn't have to guard the gate anymore.

The evil choice is to kill the guy.

I know. Tough call, right?

The other problem with the karma system is that it doesn't really change the story in any meaningful way. If you play the good path, your girlfriend is nicer to you (for about five minutes) and people don't throw rocks at you as you walk down the street but the main story arc is identical to the "evil" path. Most of the side missions don't even change, as I mentioned earlier, so you're still establishing medical clinics and getting the trains running on time no matter which moral path you take.

But when you strip away that moral system, you're still left with a darn good game. The controls are tight, the combat is fun; once you get the hang of figuring out where the snipers are (hint: don't stand in one place and try to figure out where the bullets that are hitting you in the head are coming from. You'll die a lot.) and the story is pretty good if you play the hero.

The controls take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of holding the R1 button whenever you want to shoot something the combat flows pretty smoothly. If you're quick enough on the draw, you can reflect missiles back at the guys who shot them at you, which is always fun. The sheer variety in the powers Cole wields makes for some good fun-- whether playing as the hero or the villain he has a standard shot, sniper shot, grenade and missile launcher equivalents, as well as the totally awesome "summon a continuous lightning arc and steer it around" power which is sadly useless against any game bosses but will clear out enemy vehicles like nobody's business.

Just climbing around the city is a ton of fun. The controls in this respect are very forgiving, and the only way I missed a jump was when I was trying too hard to make it. Cole is almost magnetic for handholds, which is great for some of the jumping puzzles but admittedly annoying if you're trying to get across a crowded roof in a hurry. The "drop down" button could have used some tweaking, because while it's occasionally useful to push the button and drop down the the next lower handhold, usually what I want to do is drop the the ground, and the drop-down button doesn't allow for that. But on the whole, I'd say the maneuvering mechanics work very well.

One of the things I really like about the game is the TACO system. Usually, players are told there are X number of collectible objects on the map and left to fend for themselves. In Infamous, the player can use radar which will alert the player to the presence of blast shards if they are within range on the mini-map. Using this system I've collected 320 out of 350 shards without resorting to online FAQs, which I did when I played Mercenaries 2.

Overall, I'd say Infamous is definitely worth playing. My recommendation is to play through as the hero first, because the story makes more sense, and then decide if you want to play the evil path. On the whole, I'm glad I did both, but I don't think I would have if I'd played the evil path first. It's clear where the developers want you to go, and there's no reason not to. You'll have a better experience if you don't fight it.

In conclusion, the only honest way to give a game a score is to decide whether it's worth the price you'll pay for it. As with any opinion, this is subject to personal taste, but unlike arbitrary grades it has the benefit of using a practical unit of measure. So, if you see Infamous, what price tag is worth paying?

Well, I paid full price ($60) and I feel like I got my money's worth. It's a solid $60, an excellent $50 game, and a must-buy at $40 or below.

Grading Movies

2009-08-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to Free Toy Inside. This week we'll be discussing movies, because a geek doesn't thrive on video games alone. Somtimes you just don't want to have to be the one who pushes the story forward, but you don't want to have to use your imagination either; and so instead of reaching for a book, you reach for a DVD.

And let me be perfectly clear: There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Well, unless you're watching the wrong kind of movie, in which case: shame on you.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

In the world of Hollywood, there are several grades of movies. I don't mean the ratings-- PG, R, NC-17, DNPGDNCTHDDNUACSTM (Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars, Do Not Under Any Circumstances See This Movie) No, I mean grades. Like with beef (nature's Tofu) there are multiple grades of movie depending upon what kind of cow it came from.

Starting out, we have the "good" grade, which is the filet minon of movie grades. In other words, it's movies critics love, but ordinary moviegoers tend to scratch their heads at. Anything directed by Stanley Kubric, for example. These movies win the most oscars. Million Dollar Baby, for example, would qualify as a "good movie." You can usually, but not always, spot a "good" or "fine" movie by the fact that it is critically acclaimed, but does shite at the box office.

This isn't a hard and fast rule, however. Shawshank Redemption would be an example of the "good" grade movie, and that movie is very watchable. I think it has something to do with the ending. Good movies tend not to have happy endings, for the same reason the books they make you read in high school tend not to have happy endings. I'm not sure why. It must have something to do with suffering for art. The artist did, and now it's your turn.

Next down the line, there's the "bad good movie."A bad good movie is a good movie that just doesn't work. These movies can also win oscars, but have happier endings. "Gladiator" was a bad good movie, in that it had all the pretensions of oscar bait, but appealed too much to the groundlings. For my part, I loved every minute of it.

Again, this isn't a hard and fast rule-- Gladiator did win an Oscar, after all. (Though you might recall a lot of critics bawling about how they bought the award.)

Other such movies are Rocky and Rocky II, Cinderella Man, and The Incredibles. These movies are usually, but not always, less critically acclaimed than "good" movies, but do really well at the box office. They are the barbecue of movies-- the meat my not be of the best quality, but if it's done right it's probably better than 90% of what you've eaten in the past year.

Below the bad good movie, is the "okay" movie. Okay movies are the ones most people watch and buy on DVD. They tend to get mixed reviews, get unremarkable numbers (but profitable), and their watchability is largely subject to taste. It is within this region that your standard summer blockbuster and your standard chick-flick both reside, living in relative harmony. The "Okay" movie is the movie that you think should win the oscar, but doesn't, so it wins the People's Choice award instead. In other words, it's the hamburger of movies-- tasty and satisfying but kind of insubstantial for seven dollars. (I'm looking at you, Applebees.)

Movies of this caliber include Transformers, Die Hard 1 and 2, and The Rundown.

Now here's where things get interesting. Once you go down a grade from "okay" movies, you're in the minus world-- a world of bad movies. But, like good movies, there are some graduations. Of course, there's the "bad" grade (anything featuring Barbara Streissand), not to be confused with the "BaaaaaAAAAD!" grade (anything featuring Samuel L. Jackson). Bad movies are usually panned by critics, and do bubkus at the box office. For examples, see (or rather, don't see) Howard the Duck, Snakes on a Plane, Star Trek 1 and 5, and any Star Wars movie made after 1980. Bad movies are the lips and hooves of the movie world-- stuff they make oscar meyer bologna out of. In other words, consumable if you're in the mood but liable to leave you queasy afterward.

But the really interesting grade is what comes between Bad and Okay; The Good Bad Movie. If we're sticking with the meat comparison, the good bad movie is the kind of meat they make really good sausages and hot dogs out of.

The Good Bad movie, sometimes called the "B" movie, is the opposite of a Bad Good Movie. Nothing in the movie should work; the script, the acting, the story, the directing; nothing. But, somehow, it all comes together into something that's just darn fun to watch. Usually, this grade is mislabled "camp" but camp is a genre, not a movie grade. Camp is a what you get when you try to make a bad movie on purpose (This excludes anything by Uwe Boll, because making bad movies on purpose for artistic reasons is differnt from making bad movies on purpose for tax reasons). The result can be a good movie (Pulp Fiction) or a bad movie (Kill Bill, Mars Attacks) or anywhere in between. But just calling something "camp" does not tell you what it's grade is, nor does it give you an excuse for having made a bad movie.

The main difference between a good bad movie and camp is the nature of how a person enjoys it. If you enjoy the movie ironically, in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-isn't-this-stupid way, then it's camp. If you enjoy the movie honestly, inspite of it's flaws rather than because of them, then it's a good bad movie.A good example of a movie that is both "Camp" and a good bad movie is Evil Dead 2. Good bad movies tend to slip through the cracks. They don't last long in theatres, they are rarely reviewed well, and their box office performance is spotty at best. They tend to have decent opening weekends, followed by two weeks of kilo-dollar returns, then consignment to the $15 bin at your local Best Buy. Good bad movies include Red Dawn, Spaced Invaders, and Bubble Boy.

This may seem like an awful lot of verbiage to describe something that most people understand inherently, but I am writing a geek entertainment blog after all. Anyway, I personally own 412 movies and TV series (each series counts as 1 title, by the way) on DVD that run the gamut from good to bad. I have them organized in a spreadsheet so by title, genre, sub-genre and three principle actors. It helps me pick what movie I want to see, because browsing over 400 titles in a shelf gets unwieldy-- even if they are alphabetized by genre.

Yes, I have some nerd in me as well as geek. Surprised?

You got Geek on my Nerd! You got Nerd on my Geek!

2009-07-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Salutations, readers. This week we'll be delving a bit into the world of Geekhood, and how it differs from Nerddom.

I find that a lot of people still don't quite get the difference between geeks and nerds. As someone who is both, this tends to dissolve my particulate. Part of the problem is that popular culture; you know, those folks who wouldn't touch a geek with a ten meter cattle prod; tends to conflate the two.

So let's try to make things clear, shall we?

The most succinct differentiation between the two terms I've heard comes courtesy of James at Geek loves Nerd. He said that a nerd is a smart person, while a geek is a person who is passionate about some hobby. While this has the benefit of being pithy, it's flawed. First off, not all smart people are nerds. It's how you go about being smart that makes you a nerd. Second, geeks can be nerdy and nerds can be geeky, and this definition doesn't really allow for that.

But it's a good starting point. And with that in mind, here are a few fundamental differences between geeks and nerds.

1) Geeks don't care if they're popular, nerds do.

I think this is the main distinction. Geeks tend to seek out other geeks of their own type and build a community that way. They're niche, and they like it that way, because it's possible to have all those in-jokes that non-geeks find so insufferable.

Nerds, on the other hand, yearn for popularity. They want to be the cool kids, or at least accepted by the cool kids. The movie Revenge of the Nerds is actually a fairly accurate depiction of this mindset. Victory was not claimed because the jocks left the nerds to their own devices, it was achieved by supplanting the jocks' station on campus (except for Gilbert. That guy's got some geek in him.)

(Oh, and Booger is not a nerd. Nor is he a geek. He's just a slob who loves being a slob.)

Take video gaming, for example (we'll be returning to this theme, so buckle up). Every so often, video gamers on internet forums will talk about how video games are becoming more "mainstream," and how great that is. By "mainstream" they usually mean "people won't look at you funny when they find out you like World of Warcraft."

This is, in my opinion, nerd talk.

There are usually dissenters in this discussion, and those people tend to worry about game developers catering to the lowest common denominator, which would make Activision the gold standard of video game development.

This is geek talk. And not just the part where they know that Activision is the devil and say so as if everyone else does too.

Now, this makes geeks sound insular and unwilling to share their hobbies, which are usually nerd qualities (as we'll see in a moment).

The difference is in what the gamer in question is worried about. The nerd worries about how other people will view him. The geek worries about how the inclusion of other people will affect his hobby.

In case you were wondering, I fall into the geek category on this one. I have an example too. Last week I was at the mall with The Missus and The Little One for some rainy-day exercise (the Little One likes walking around the malls and looking at the skylights). I took a few laps with the Little One around the food court while The Missus attended to some pregnant lady business and I spotted three people eating Pizzeria Regina. Two of them were well muscled guys with spiky hair, sunglasses that cost more than I used to make in a week, and t-shirts with the sleeves ripped off. The girl was a slender blonde who had obviously spent a lot of money on clothes that would make her look as much as possible like Paris Hilton. On the floor next to one of the guys was a Gamestop bag.

I didn't ask what they bought, but I'd be willing to bet that 1) it had the numbers "360" on it somewhere and 2) it wasn't Fable 2. This is the face of the mainstream gamer, and this is who game companies will aim their big budgets at.

If I thought for one second that they had a game like Katamari Damacy or Disgaea in that bag, I would be thrilled, because that would have meant that they came to gaming. But I suspect gaming will move more to them than they will move to it. And that makes me a saaaaaad paaaaandaaaaa.

2) Nerds hoard their knowledge, geeks share it.

Indeed, it's hard to stop a geek from sharing knowledge of whatever he has invested himself in.

Nerds tend to treat their knowledge like comic books: The more copies other people own, the less the copy you own is worth. So they tend to jealously guard their knowledge so they can impress themselves with how smart they are.

A geek will be so thrilled you're interested in her hobby that she'll teach you whatever you want to learn about it. My lovely wife is, among other things, a yarn geek. She loves to crochet, and knit, and felt (bet you didn't even know felt could be a verb, did you?) and just about anything else you can do with wool. Since I've known her she's taught at least two people to crochet when they asked her, going so far as to photocopy sections of a book she owns that is no longer in print so they can have access to the same resources she does.

A nerd would look at that attitude with vague horror. How will she break the curve? How will she win at Trivial Pursuit? How will she lord her unique knowledge over her lessers if she just goes around... sharing it.

Well, the truth is that geeks love to share knowledge and spread the gospel of the geek, or Geekspel, to whoever will accept it.

Just the other day I listed some of the things that make me a geek to my wife, who already knows full well of those things, but I just can't turn down an opportunity to tell the world.

That list, incidentally, is: I own and have read cover-to-cover the Star Trek Encyclopedia, I have a textbook on Klingon and two teach-yourself-Klingon audio cassettes (Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon, in case you were wondering), I have a box full of unusual Star Trek merchandise still sealed in the blister packs (a Harry Mudd action figure, an Orion Slave Girl action figure, and a Talosian action figure to name three), I read The Nitpickers Guide to the Next Generation and made notes in it explaining why his nitpicks weren't errors but did in fact work within the Star Trek universe, and the crown jewel of my collection: a copy of Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise signed by James Doohan!

Mind you, that's just the stuff that makes me a Star Trek geek. And it's not even all of the stuff that makes me a Star Trek Geek, let alone the stuff that makes me a geek in general.

You can't stop a geek from proving his or her geek cred. Right now I'm restraining myself from listing a hundred other things that make me a geek (I have owned no fewer than 12 video game consoles in my life, and I still own 9 of those... stop it!).

Nerds aren't so much into that. A nerd may enjoy telling people about his advanced degrees in astrophysics. He may even get all snippy when you call him Mr. Herman Schwarz instead of Dr. Herman Schwarz. (I can just hear him whining "My name is Jeremy Withstadt! I don't know any Herman Schwarz!"). But try to get him to teach you anything about Astrophysics? You can count the seconds on one hand before he tells you it's too complicated for the likes of you. He don't want you to understand Astrophysics. He went to graduate school, for crying out loud. If you want to learn it, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars and a decade of your life doing it like he did.

3) Nerds are judgemental.

For a group of people who stand well outside of what's consider "normal" in society, nerds spend an awful lot of energy calling people "weird."

Take the subject of LARPing...

Well, let me explain LARPing a little first:

LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. Basically, take Dungeons and Dragons, take it out of the dining room and into the woods, add costumes and foam weapons, and go nuts. It's basically paintball for people who like to say words like "thou" and "smite."

Now, if you've never heard of it before just now, you have one of two reactions:

If you said to yourself "Jeez, some people are so weird." then you're a nerd.

If you said to yourself "Wow! That sounds cool!" then you're a geek.

You don't necessarily have to want to try LARPing to be a geek. You just have to acknowledge that it sounds interesting to someone who isn't necessarily you.

Of course, there are lines to this line of thinking. Furries, (Warning! DO NOT GOOGLE Alert!) for example are and will remain scary freaks no matter how geeky you are.

So there you have it. Three fundamental differences that make nerds and geeks different animals. I haven't yet decided on next week's topic, but it may have something to do with my mint condition issue of Sgt. Rock #1, or my complete set of Toxic Avenger comic books and the arduous journey to acquire issue #10.

If you're very lucky, I might write it in Klingon.