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.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Savant so good
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Don't beat the bell curve, join it.
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
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
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Paul Blart Deserves Your Respect
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
I'm not in love with Joss Whedon, but I do want to have his babies
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:
Or this exerpt from Firely:
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Next week's etymology lesson: Irony!
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Books on DVD: The Color of Magic
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.
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.
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