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Home of the world's largest jailbait
31 May 09 | 19:38 | Posted by:
Man, Square's pulling out all the pandering stops for
Final Fantasy XIII. It was bad enough that Lightning is a female version of Cloud so fans can finally explore their man-crushes on Cloud through fan art and fanfic without feeling all
weird about it. But now there's this:
It's not enough to have the series' requisite jailbait chick accounted for on the left, there. Oh, no -- now they've gone and made her 100 feet tall, too, presumably to pull in the macrophile audience.
If the vore-friendly Pandemonium summon shows up at some point, I'm out of here.
category: games | forums |
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Collective obsession
30 May 09 | 19:59 | Posted by: Azar
Gotta catch ‘em all. It seems so innocuous, doesn’t it? There are lots of these little Pokémon fellas, and your challenge is to grab each and every one. But no, it’s not quite that innocent. Nintendo’s catchphrase invokes a youthful enthusiasm by deliberately tapping into the psychology behind game design, a never-ending, insidious cycle of collection and reward that we wholly by into with no reservations. Practically every game on the market entices us with collectable coins that lead to secret unlockables, or trophies to chart our progress -- something to tap into that unconscious addiction to collect ‘em all.
And now, for the first time in years, I’ve found myself falling victim to the same phenomenon outside the digital realm. Gone are the days when I’d thumb quarter after quarter into hungry arcade machines, blowing weeks of allowance money in exchange for wads of yellow tickets that could be exchanged for cheap plastic prizes. I wised up to that scam, although I suppose it wasn’t all bad -- I still have a couple nice Dave & Busters drinking glasses half a dozen years later.
Yet the itch to collect remains. Nintendo has me utterly bent to their will thanks to the new Club Nintendo, which finally seems to have given up crashing for days at a time. At first, I thought “Register games, get prizes. What’s not to like?” Now I know better. It’s just a clever way to pull me into buying more games. I’ve managed to resist the pull of their normal rewards -- my hard-earned coins seem to have an intrinsic value greater than a White Nintendo DS Card Case (though it
is pretty sexy). But membership rankings? A quantitative measurement of my collecting skills up to this point, reinforced by a mysterious reward to be delivered only once a year?
They’ve got me. How can I be content as a lowly Gold member when
Platinum lurks just around the corner? I can’t, of course. Looks like I have another Nintendo game to buy before the end of June.
category: games | forums |
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I dunno about this
29 May 09 | 22:06 | Posted by:
Today my new business cards arrived. Once I got past the shock of seeing the 1UP logo sharing billing with UGO's, I had to deal with a second (and far more terrifying) realization: in a fit of rash madness, I asked them to add the URL to the
Retronauts Twitter to the card. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in the cold light of reality there's a truly unnerving sensation that comes from seeing something so transient permanently imprinted to your own identity. I have to hand one of these to Shigeru Miyamoto in a few days, and brother, is he gonna laugh. Well, he won't, because he's the most genteel game developer I've ever met, but I'll see the disappointment in his eyes, and
I'll know.
On the plus side, though:
hey! EGM. It makes me a little sad to see the magazine return knowing I won't be contributing to it in any capacity this time around, but that's definitely outweighed by the whole "Hey! EGM" aspect of it. Besides, I already have my
placebo replacement.
And speaking of Retronauts, I'm sure most people who read this site also follow the
blog... although it's sort of difficult to find from the main page of 1UP at the moment, so maybe not. For whatever reason -- maybe relief from having the
Quarterly out of the way, or perhaps an adrenaline rush of fear as I hurtle toward the assured death that is E3 -- I feel like my Retronauts posts this week were really, really good. Unusually good. If you've missed them, please give them a read:
Aaand it's about time for me to head off to E3. Wish me luck.
category: blog, games | forums |
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Another project complete
28 May 09 | 23:08 | Posted by:
I received a few final copies of
GameSpite Quarterly #1 in the mail today. That's very exciting! Now I can send them out to people I owe them to, such as our noble copy editor. And coinciding with their arrival, the last of the inscribed hardcover copies of
Year One, Vol. 1 went in the mail
yesterday -- well, all but a couple of books heading to international destinations, for which I needed customs forms. Those'll be mailed out tomorrow. And that will be another onerous burden off my shoulders.
Dear friends, if you ever see me volunteer to do something as completely boneheaded as draw four or five dozen unique cartoons or illustrations in a batch of books, please slap me and prevent me from committing to it. Because I am clearly a moron who has no sense of time management or self-preservation. Having said that... if you happen to be a recipient of one of those hardcover books, please
be kind enough to post the artwork in this Talking Time thread so I have a permanent record of my folly.
Once I get back from E3, I'll be motoring along to my
next site project, which is the next site supporter gift. It's been almost six months already! Yeesh. I've already begun reading for inspiration, though. I've powered through both Jeff Smith's
Bone and the complete
Narbonic, so my brain is in proper working order. Hopefully.
category: blog, gamespite | forums |
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The worst kind of onion
28 May 09 | 11:32 | Posted by:
Graffiti is fascinating. Nowhere else, except maybe in a particularly awful breed of webcomic, will you see so many random English words mashed together for comedic (?) effect. Like so:
Despite the promise of info, I was unable to determine what, if anything, a "butt onion" is supposed to be. But the images that sprang to my mind, unbidden, have been disturbing me all morning. So I share it with you in the hopes that, like an annoying tune that gets stuck in your head, my passing it along will plague
your mind with visions of butt onions and purge them from my own.
category: blog | forums |
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Add to Queue 90: Bring da ruckus
27 May 09 | 08:33 | Posted by: vsrobot
Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #90 | May 24, 2009
True Romance is my favorite Tarantino movie. Sure, he didn't direct it. In fact, is one of only two screenplays he's ever written that he hasn't also directed -- the other being the execrable Oliver Stone-directed
Natural Born Killers -- and Tony Scott's direction adds a glossy sheen that sometimes seems out of place for the material, especially knowing what we know now about Tarantino's style.
Certainly,
True Romance would have had more shots of lady's feet if Tarantino had been able to direct his own script.
The movie, for the uninitiated, is about Christian Slater's character, Clarence Worley. Worley is the Tarantino analogue in this piece: he works in a comic book store and is obsessed with kung fu movies. For his birthday, his boss at the comic shop hires Alabama Whitman, an escort, to show him a good time, and they promptly fall in love with each other. When Worley goes to tell Alabama's pimp (an unrecognizable Gary Oldman) that she is quitting the business, it starts a sequence of events that ends with the young couple in possession of a large amount of cocaine and on the run from both the cops and the mob.
Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer and Brad Pitt also contribute short but memorable roles, and quite a bit of Tarantino's trademark dialog is very much present in the film.
True Romance was my introduction to Tarantino, and the wish-fulfillment that is the character of Clarence Worley (comic and film geek who gets the girl and stands up to the mob) made a big impression on my 14-year-old self.
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So fresh (fresh), inviting
26 May 09 | 22:27 | Posted by:
I like a lot of things about King of Noodles, the little Chinese noodle shop that opened recently near my apartment. The noodles, for one -- they're about three feet long and handmade, served in what might be the finest broth on earth. I like that the owners barely know a word of English but are so proud of said handmade noodles that they halting insist new customers watch the tiny woman in the back as she pulls and stretch the dough by hand. I like that the fried tofu is utterly amazing, if a bit heavy on the salt. But I think my favorite thing is that the menu -- with the usual inexpert English translation serving more as a general guide to the printed hanzi than as a source of information about the food itself -- lists the appetizers section as "freshest little dishes." This, of course, conjures up the image of a plate of dumplings making lascivious comments to passersby.
Needless to say, this place is quickly becoming my favorite hole in the wall.
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Essential cinema 1: Luc Besson
26 May 09 | 10:22 | Posted by: vsrobot
Last week saw the home video release of
Taken. Luc Besson acted as producer and co-writer on the film, which quickly established itself as a surprise hit. These days, Besson mainly writes and produces film, despite his illustrious career as a director. He's also written and produced a wide array of action films, including the
Transporter series,
Kiss of the Dragon,
Unleashed, and
District B13, among others. Still, outside of
Taken, Besson's work behind the camera tends to be far more celebrated than the films he has produced.
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GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 2
25 May 09 | 06:38 | Posted by:
Sure, you can buy
GameSpite Quarterly 1 with
real cash money now, but I get it: this is the Internet. We're all cheapskates who think we deserve access to the fruits of others' labor for no money. Who am I to fight a generation's sense of entitlement? And so the online publication of the issue marches on at the exciting new rate of four articles per week. It's funny to think I was worried that moving to print would cause the online content to slow down; turns out we have twice as much content to post as in previous issues.
A Tiny Star is Born: Game Boy Arrives
The magazine, you'll notice from the index, is arranged chronologically and divided into chapters that cover specific (if rather loosely-defined) eras of the Game Boy's life. Each chapter has an intro piece that sets the context for the subsequent game reviews. It's all very orderly! It's also slightly redundant, but what can ya do. This segment covers 1989-1990: the Game Boy's birth.
Tetris
Tetris's life is so symbiotically bonded to the Game Boy's that it seems almost unnecessary to cover the topic. But then we'd have this weird gap in the magazine that would make people wonder how we could have overlooked something so basic. Fortunately, Calories Man managed to take a new and different angle on this most well-worn of topics. An impressive feat.
Super Mario Land
We talked about Super Mario Land on Retronauts a few weeks ago, and the general consensus is that the game has become a victim of revisionist groupthink. If you were a gamer in 1989, you were pretty damn pumped about the prospect of Mario on the go -- and as Kat explains, it's only through the cynical lens of hindsight that this adventure disappoints.
The Castlevania Adventure
The Castlevania Adventure, on the other hand... that one kinda sucked even back then. Mr. Nomali has registered his protest at my parsing of the name (it's more properly "Castlevania: The Adventure"), but in my book referring to it by its proper name is endorsing it with a degree of validation that it doesn't deserve.
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Now printing: GameSpite Quarterly #1
24 May 09 | 10:00 | Posted by:
The pages are proofed, the corrections are made, the files are uploaded, and I fear I can no longer contain my enthusiasm:
GameSpite Quarterly #1 is
go. Of course, it's been a month since I announced it and I had hoped to have it live a week ago. And the content is already a
going concern here on the site. But now you can hold a physical copy in your withered, mortal hands. I hear tell people like physical media, even in this Internet age.
The magazine -- although, really, it's more of a journal -- is available in both a
standard paperback edition for $12 and a
special hardcover edition for $36. The only difference between the two editions is that the latter has an additional 30 pages of content (which will make its way onto the site, same as all the other articles) and a much nicer, more durable cover. I've opted for the "imagewrap" cover, which binds the cover image to the hard backing rather than printing it on a flimsy, easily-damaged dust jacket. It costs a dollar more, but I figured what the heck; if someone's buying the more expensive edition, they're clearly more concerned with permanence than economics and won't mind putting down an extra buck for a copy that won't end up tattered after a couple of reads.
The final page count is 160 pages standard edition, 190 page special edition. I'm quite satisfied that the standard edition is as cheap as one could possibly expect; it's a print-on-demand, ad-free, grassroots publication on high-quality paper. These days most mass-market pocket-sized paperbacks sell for $8, and a 5"x8" paperback like this usually sells for twice that. The publications I used as my inspirations, Japan's
Continue and, to a lesser degree,
McSweeny's, sell for $10 and $40 respectively. Granted,
Continue has full color on half the pages, but it also has ads and a presumably larger print run. All things considered, I feel like we were able to put together a quality book, crammed with content, for a competitive price.
The old-fashioned approach to getting gaming journalism into print may be doomed in America, but perhaps the single upside to the death of great magazines like
EGM is that it's opened the door for smaller, niche creations like this. There's certainly room for work far less niche-oriented than this, to be honest, but I went to great lengths to make sure this book wasn't taking away content or time from the work I do at my day job; someone without those concerns to worry about could easily create a self-published magazine whose content would more closely resemble that of standard gaming publications. You know: previews and reviews and interviews about current things, rather than personal recollections about a 20-year-old portable system.
Anyway, a listing of the full contents of the book (and what text has been published online so far) are available on
its index page, and you can order either edition from
GameSpite's Blurb page. We're aiming to have the next issue ready at the end of August, but in the meantime I intend to enjoy having more time to write for the blog here again. I've missed you lovable little scamps.
category: games, gamespite | forums |
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California über alles
23 May 09 | 22:30 | Posted by: vsrobot
A few days ago GameSpite alum Kat Bailey shared a link to
this excellent article in the Economist in
her Twitter feed. For those not familiar with the current events in the great state Kat and I live in, please take a few moments to read through the article to give you context about how truly boned our state is.
As our state implodes, seemingly circling a drain that our leaders are incapable of extricating us from, it's nice to know that our political leaders have their priorities in check. Education, law enforcement, fire control and other services are facing crippling cuts, but as a state we apparently have the resources to go after video games! This despite the fact that video game legislation has been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional and the video game industry already has a ratings system in place.
Now Attorney General Jerry Brown is in the news, offering shock-value quotes and tired legislation, petitioning to get the United State Supreme Court to rule on a law criminalizing the sale of "violent" video games to minors. This same law has been struck down twice already since it was signed into law in 2005. As a citizen of California, I am not happy that our governor and attorney general are wasting resources we can't spare trying to parent other peoples' children. As long as we're throwing money away trying to illegally mandate parenting decisions, maybe we can assign a mandatory government issued nanny to all families, and ensure that all parenting decisions made by Californians meet with their approval?.
Brown has been quoted as saying, "California's children are exposed every day to video games that glamorize killing sprees, torture and sexual assault." And those are just the video games based on or inspired by our Governor's film career! Somehow I doubt even if California is successful in banning the sale of violent video games to minors, they will take the logical next step and criminalize R-rated movies such as
Predator or
Commando.
Guys, stop tilting at windmills. What we actually need you to work on is fixing our broken state. We need a functioning state government a whole hell of a lot more than we need to throw more money away on lawyers' fees.
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Every game is someone's favorite
23 May 09 | 12:12 | Posted by:
I made a disparaging remark about
Mega Man 4 in my most recent post. This was, of course, a bad idea, because it led to a partial derailment which involved several MM4 fans standing and angrily shaking their text-based fists at me. Someone suggested I pick on
Mega Man 5 instead, which would be a sensible choice but for the fact that I've already
done that -- last year, in
a paean to Mega Man 9. Turns out
that particular chapter of the series has even more staunch defenders than its predecessor, and most of the discussions about that article around the web ended up degenerating into silly arguments about why the whole piece was invalidated by my criticism of MM5. Who would have imagined?
Left: MM4, purportedly the best game ever; right: MM5, also purportedly the best game ever.
I suppose I could take the time to enumerate in detail my dislikes of each one -- how MM4 ruined the need for subweapons (the series' central mechanic!) by adding the charge shot, how MM5 felt uninspired and by-the-numbers -- but what's the point? They're not terrible games by any means, just lackluster entries in a great series... at least, in my opinion. But other people clearly feel differently. Maybe they have fond childhood memories of MM4 or 5 from having been introduced to the series or the NES or gaming in general with those entries. Maybe they have sentimental attachments to events or people that they associate with the games. Or maybe they simply see something in either (or both) that eludes me. Whatever the case, I'm way past the point of telling people their tastes are wrong.
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Chronic difficulty
22 May 09 | 15:57 | Posted by: calorie_mate
Valkyria Chronicles is a good game, as has already
been mentioned a few times 'round these parts. Yet, one aspect of the doesn't seem to be netting much attention around the Internet: its difficulty. Or rather, it's
lack of difficulty.
To put it bluntly, Valkyria may be good, but it isn’t very difficult. Sure, some strategy is involved, and you need to know when and how to use your soldiers or they’ll be killed off, but otherwise a Game Over is a rare occurrence. Considering that so many strategy RPGs -- I’m looking at you,
Tactics Ogre -- have a reputation for being horribly difficult, this is not a bad thing at all! The impressive thing about it, though, is that while Valkyria mirrors the recent development trend of making a game accessible so that more players can see all the content, it does so in a way that doesn’t rob the player of all challenge (and thus, the feeling of accomplishment videogames do so well when that challenge is overcome).
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The home stretch
20 May 09 | 23:27 | Posted by:
I figured today would be a total loss when I woke up feeling like someone had punched the back of my throat with a barbed-wire glove. But, I stayed home and rested and dabbled in podcast editing and rested some more, and by the end of the day I felt pretty OK! So I decided to take the plunge tonight and try to finish off the final wave of copy edits to
GameSpite Quarterly #1. Mission: accomplished.
I've become more and more embarrassed about
GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1's complete lack of copy editing as the link circulates more about the Internet. The book was never supposed to sell more than a few dozen copies; certainly I didn't expect it to elicit as much attention as it has. I would have read it over a bit more carefully if I'd known that anyone outside of this site's readership would ever care. As with so many things about that first book, though, I've been forced to chalk it up as a learning experience, a mistake that won't be repeated. For the first issue of the quarterly magazine, I've completed
two copy edit passes: one by me in a rough, misshapen proof copy of the book (see above: the cover printing is mis-sized, as you can tell by the way the text bleeds beyond the edges), and one by volunteer Patrick Carr, who wanted to hone his copy edit skillz. Um, I mean, skills.
I'm thoroughly confident in the results. So confident, in fact, that a few minutes ago I uploaded the book and ordered a few copies for myself. However! The book is not yet ready for public dissemination, because (1) I'm still putting the finishing touches on the bonus content for the hardcover edition, and (2) I have vowed to get the last few hardback copies of
Year One, Vol. 1 in the mail before I accept orders for the new book. Yeah. They're still not all in the mail. It's kind of embarrassing. But with this issue completed, my weeknights and weekends will again be slightly more free, so I can get back to
all my other obligations. Maybe one of these days I'll even try to enjoy some free time, who knows.
Anyway, the end is in sight, and I'm pretty happy about it. A lot of people put a lot of effort into this thing, and the results are
much better than the previous book. Think of this as
Mega Man 2 to the previous volume's
Mega Man. Don't worry, I'm going to try to put the kibosh on the parallels before we hit the equivalent of
Mega Man 4.
Sorry if I have been going on about this thing too much. It's basically all I've been doing with my spare time these past few weeks, so I don't have much else to write about. Um... howsabout that E3, huh? Yep.
category: gamespite | forums |
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Episode One ten years later, part 3: A long time ago...
19 May 09 | 20:35 | Posted by: vsrobot
"For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times... before the Empire." -
Obi-Wan Kenobi,
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Seemingly every single article written on the prequels prior to their release included a variation on the theme of technology finally catching up Lucas' imagination, and watching the movie it doesn't seem like hyperbole. Naboo is gorgeous -- the forests, the plains, the underwater cities and classical architecture are a feast for the senses. Coruscant, the capital planet named by Timothy Zahn in his Thrawn trilogy and glimpsed briefly in the Special Edition version of
Return of the Jedi, is the city-planet I always imagined reading while expanded universe books.
More important than the technology employed in the filming is the fact that this prequel trilogy takes place immediately prior to the downfall of the Jedi. By the time of
A New Hope, the Jedi are remembered as disciples of a hokey religion (and no match for a good blaster). The prequels were George Lucas' opportunity to show us what the Jedi Order was really all about, and
The Phantom Menace is the only film out of the six to show Jedi at the height of their powers, fulfilling their mandate as guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. In the second film, we see a Jedi council that is both arrogant and blind. Their arrogance makes them discount the possibility of a Sith Lord controlling the senate, even after fallen Jedi Count Dooku explicitly tells them that this is precisely the state of thing; they're blinded by self-importance to the plots and schemes swirling around them. Nothing exemplifies the arrogance of the Jedi Order more than when Obi-Wan Kenobi goes to the library at the Jedi Temple and is told by the chief librarian that if something isn't cataloged in the Jedi Temple archives, it simply doesn't exist.
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Add to Queue 89: Cash rules everything around me
18 May 09 | 22:21 | Posted by: vsrobot
Media | A2Q Archives | Follow me on Twitter | A2Q #89 | May 19, 2009
The Machinist is a well-known film, but mostly because of the insane amount of dedication Christian Bale showed for the role. If you've seen any of the trailers of promotional stills, you realize how much weight Bale lost to portray the lead character, Trevor Reznik (in a small nod to the screenwriters favorite band Nine Inch Nails). The Christian Bale that stars in this movie is unrecognizable as the same man who starred in
Equilibrium and
American Psycho, and looking at his gaunt, 120lb frame it is unbelievable that the next film he shot was
Batman Begins. There is a rumor that the producers of the Batman reboot lost their minds when Bale showed up early in the preproduction process looking so unlike a superhero.
Christian Bale's physical transformation for the role of Reznik has overshadowed the movie itself, which is director Brad Anderson's follow up to the cult classic
Session 9 and seems similar, at least at first. Reznik is an insomniac factory worker who claims he hasn't slept for a year. He is haunted by a man who he thinks means him harm, but no one else believe exists. Someone is leaving inscrutable messages on post-it notes in his apartment which seem more and more sinister. The story of the film follows Reznik as he uncovers the truth behind the strange things that are happening to him -- a truth that the audience senses he might not want to hear.
The movie is obviously being released on BD to try and get some spillover from
Terminator: Salvation, but I think fans of "action hero" Bale might be shocked to see him in this film. Although, if the rumors are true about how incredibly dark the new
Terminator is, it might end up being an excellent choice for a double-feature after all.
Another tie-in you might consider is that Brad Anderson directed four episodes of the first season of
Fringe, including the excellent finale. While
Session 9 is a ghost story and
The Machinist is something else, something I don't want to spoil, I still think that
Fringe and Brad Anderson are a match made in heaven.
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GameSpite Quarterly #1, part 1
18 May 09 | 07:33 | Posted by:
The press and copy edit proofs for
GameSpite Quarterly #1 should be arriving soon -- probably tomorrow or Wednesday. That means we're nearing the finish line for this first project. I'm trying to not to go overboard with status updates, because tiny little milestones are less exciting to observers than they are to me... although my free time has been so consumed by getting this thing together that I haven't had time to write much else around here. So it goes. I suppose if you want to keep fully abreast of "the haps" (as the kids say), you can follow my
Twitter feed, although be warned that most of what I post there involves what I'm eating for dinner or other such trivia you couldn't possibly care about unless you're planning to stalk me, kill me, and live in my skin. In which case you're probably already following me.
Dot-Matrix Green: Game Boy's Prehistory
Our Game Boy-centric issue breaks the system's history into distinct eras, with each period of the system's life standing as its own chapter. And each chapter begins with a narrative thread that gives a little background on the state of the industry at the time to help contextualize the game reviews. Very tidy and organized. Anyway, today's piece is about the dark times: life before Game Boy.
Atari Lynx: The Tortoise and the Hare
Ben Langberg writes about the system that by all rights should have conquered Game Boy without breaking a sweat... but didn't. And he writes about Atari's Lynx from a rare perspective: that of a former devotee, though one without a zealous chip on his shoulder. Like WWI vets, Lynx fans such as Ben are a dying breed and should be cherished as precious historical commodities.
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One step forwards, quick-turn, two steps back
17 May 09 | 22:40 | Posted by: Azar
I played Resident Evil 4 for the first time about a year after its release in January 2005. And in early 2006, I was still utterly floored by how damn good it was. That year couldn't diminish the impact of the immaculate presentation, exhilarating combat, extensive weapon system, or lengthy quest. Admittedly, I never cared much for survival horror as a genre, so I was eager to see Resident Evil stray from its roots and delve deeper into no-holds-barred gunplay. A few facets of the previous games remained, and movement still felt constrained for an action game. But compared to the Resident Evil of old, it was easy to give the controls a pass and embrace them as a step in the right direction.
I'm not quite so late to the Resident Evil party, this time around -- it's only been a couple months since Resident Evil 5 made its global debut. Around that same time I wrote a post about how much I love co-op in videogames. And after devoting most of the past week to Resident Evil 5, I'm pretty darn sad to realize that just about every aspect of the game falls short of the lofty bar its predecessor set 4 years ago, in part due to the focus on cooperative gameplay. I’ve even spent 99% of my play time with another human being backing me up -- relying on the AI would’ve made things much worse.
The cooperative bent isn’t responsible for all of the game’s shortcomings, though -- the expense of next-gen development certainly plays a factor. Still, it’s hard not to wish for Resident Evil 4, but with two people. In comparison, Resident Evil 5 is shorter (considerably!), simpler (boring loot, nonexistent puzzles), and blander (Irving’s no match for Salazar).
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Confessions of a videogame sociopath
16 May 09 | 23:02 | Posted by: vsrobot
I had a bit of a epiphany recently. While listening to someone describe the emotional impact they felt after the death of Aerith in
Final Fantasy VII, I realized I was completely unable to relate. This started me thinking, and my train of thoughts eventually led to the revelation that I've never been impacted emotionally by any video game, ever.
The thing is, I'm a crier. I cry when I watch movies. I cry when I read books. Sometimes I've been brought to tears by a really well-made movie trailer or commercial. I sob at the end of
The Iron Giant every damn time. So why don't I care when a character in a videogame dies?
I think I play videogames differently than the people who cite Aerith dying as a pivotal moment in their life. I'm barely immersed -- video games are often something I do while multitasking. I listen to audiobooks or podcasts while I work through single-player games. I usually skip cutscenes -- although I've made exceptions for games whose narrative interested me in some way.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and
Metal Gear Solid 4 were two games I played partly because of the narrative, and both feature moments that were intended to be heart-wrenching... yet they left me cold.
Why doesn't game narrative affect me the way other kinds of storytelling do? Is it the interactive aspect? Is it the fact that I'm bad at games, and by the time a character "dies" in a cutscene, they've died at my own hands over and over due to my inept play, thus desensitizing me to the idea? Maybe it's a side effect of the uncanny valley, the fact that no matter how realistic the CG is in gaming, it's not yet close enough to real life to stop being slightly creepy.
Or is the problem that game stories just suck? Maybe. But I haven't given up on games as a possible source for narrative. Looking forward to the release of
Heavy Rain, hearing about how seriously the developers are taking the narrative, I'm intrigued and plan on checking it out. Maybe this will the game that shatters my heart of glass? Until then, I'll be over here, sobbing over this long-distance phone company commercial.
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Episode One ten years later part 2 - hype
15 May 09 | 17:33 | Posted by: vsrobot
A lot of movie marketing uses the word "anticipated." which always strikes me as curious. Movies are often anticipated simply because they have strong marketing behind them, so claims of a movie being "most anticipated" are something of a closed loop.
However, when people called
Episode One one of, if not the, most anticipated movies of all time, it wasn't hyperbole.
As I
mentioned before,
Star Wars had been slowly ramping up in the 13 years since
Return of the Jedi. The release of the Special Editions brought Star Wars back into mainstream pop culture. Parents were taking their families see the movies they cared about when they were kids, and rediscovered their love for the saga by seeing it through the eyes of their own kids.
Star Wars was once again something that families were sharing together. Children newly introduced to the saga were clamoring for toys of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, and their parents were telling them stories of what it was like seeing
Empire for the first time, not believing that Darth Vader could possibly be Luke's father. The saga was relevant to a new generation, and was being rediscovered by the generation that grew up with them.
It was
this environment in which
Episode One was announced.
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Getting in the spirit of things
14 May 09 | 20:15 | Posted by: Azar
If you read GameSpite, chances are you're just as hot and bothered about the approaching release of GameSpite Quarterly #1 as I am. A few weeks ago, articles for the upcoming publication were pouring in and a veritable boatload of awesome Game Boy games were being covered in loving detail. Sadly (perhaps even
tragically) I never owned an original GameBoy, so I missed out on most of these treasures. But when I bought a Game Boy Advance a year or so after its launch, I had the good sense to snatch up
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX, along with the
Oracles duology. I lost
Ages and
Seasons somewhere along the line over the past half-decade, and who knows where that old Game Boy Advance is now. Somehow, though, I managed to hold onto Link's Awakening, and the Quarterly hubub had me itching for some old school Zelda goodness.
Too bad the DS Lite can't play Game Boy Color games. Yeah, I tried putting the cartridge in facing
both ways before coming to my senses and realizing I was staring into the ugly face of limited backwards compatibility. But I was determined to play Link's Awakening. After grappling over what system to buy, I ended up going for the classic Color -- an SP would've certainly been easier on the eyes, but harder on the wallet. I'm already afraid I may have opened the floodgates -- now that I own a Game Boy Color, it's hard to resist scouring the web for all the portable gems I never played. I may have to discover firsthand what's so great about
Donkey Kong '94. And I never did give Wario his due... man, what have I gotten myself into?
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Balance of Terror
13 May 09 | 21:55 | Posted by:
I recently watched the first season of the original
Star Trek for the first time ever. It was sort of weird to realize that the local Fox affiliate that had licensed
Trek back when I was into the whole franchise a blazillion years ago was seemingly terrified of the prospect of delving further back into the archives than the second season, but yeah -- the whole box set was entire new to me, besides of course what I knew of the old episodes via reputation. Because there really were some legendary shows in that first season, groundbreaking television that shaped and influenced an entire genre. Of the nearly thirty episodes from that year, though, the one that most impressed me was "Balance of Terror."
"Balance" is best known as the debut of the Romulans, and that's a pretty good legacy to have. Romulans are a lot more interesting as enemies than the more familiar Klingons, because they're less one-dimensional. On the contrary, part of what makes them so unusual -- especially in their debut -- is how much they resemble Spock's noble, self-controlled race in all but demeanor. The most striking resemblance in "Balance," though, isn't within the characters but rather in the plot and structure of the episode itself.
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Add to Queue 88: Red Matter
11 May 09 | 21:55 | Posted by: vsrobot
Media | A2Q Archives | The Author on Twitter | A2Q #88 | May 12, 2009
Here is an action movie for cinema post-Jason Bourne. Arnold, Sly, and Jean-Claude were fine in their day -- but how awesome is it that our current action stars include names like Matt Damon, Liam Neeson, Christian Bale? Liam's performance gives what could be a bog-standard "man tears up criminal underworld to avenge and/or rescue family member" action film some weight. Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex-spook who has retired to try and make up for the time he lost with his family while he was out doing secret agent stuff. While it might be too late to reconcile with his wife, Mills' attempts to connect with his daughter are tender and heartwarming. He reluctantly agrees to sign off on her going overseas to France, and his worst fears are realized when she is kidnapped. Diving back into his old life, his contacts tell him that the people who likely have his daughter are notorious for selling women into sexual slavery. Hearing that, we hope that he was good at his job.
Turns out, he was
really good at his job.
Mills' in France, desperate to find his daughter, willing to tear the entire country down around him to achieve his objective is enthralling. Here is a man who will stop at nothing, who will not hesitate to burn any bridge, exploit any friendship, or break any rule in his quest. It is mesmerizing to watch. Any fan of what Matt Damon achieved in the character of Jason Bourne should not miss Liam Neeson's darker take on the post-Bond secret agent in
Taken.
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GameSpite Quarterly #1 Intro
11 May 09 | 07:37 | Posted by:
I should probably figure out if I want to call the
current issue of the site GameSpite Quarterly #1 or Issue 14. Technically, they're one and the same, but I should probably strive for something akin to consistency around here to make it less of a headache for you guys.
Start-Up Chime: An Introduction
Now that our first issue is off for a proof print, it's time to begin posting the content online. Yes, this means that technically paid content is running for free weeks before you can actually purchase it. Yes, that's a terrible business model. Fortunately, GameSpite isn't a business. Besides, this is just another warm-up exercise; the real content starts showing up
next Monday.
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Don't sloppy that copy
10 May 09 | 13:16 | Posted by:
What you see here is a PDF of a sample page from
GameSpite Quarterly #1. The magazine (more a journal, really) is proofed, laid out, uploaded, and PDF'ed. A preliminary copy is being published so's I can ensure the fonts look right and the cover art is sized correctly, and once it's back I'll do one final copy edit pass, make any necessary corrections, and set it live for buyin'. This is, of course, terribly satisfying. In a month of weekends, we've put together a 160-page publication that, I feel, isn't too shabby. Niche, sure; simple, definitely. But still, if it does OK for itself, it'll be an encouraging sign that there's still a demand for print publications about gaming, provided you can find a viable model for them. I doubt $10-dollar-plus books about Game Boy is
the model to change the world, but it's
a model, and I think it could be a modest success. Since none of us are intending to make our living with this, of course, we can settle for "modest."
The final price for the book will be $12 per copy, plus whatever shipping costs at checkout (that'll vary by country and speed, of course). There's been a fair amount of demand for a hardcover version, so we'll be making a premium-priced hardback available for those who are interested. To help justify the additional cost, I'll be including a handful of extra articles in the hardcover -- though of course as with everything in the Quarterly, those will be making their way onto the site eventually. The bonus material is simply a little extra thank-you to those with sufficient enthusiasm to want a nicer version of the magazine, because I certainly won't be doing the hand inscriptions ever again. As I've said before: we've learned
many lessons from the first book. Painful lessons.
So anyway, expect to see more details in about, oh, 10 days.
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So hey
09 May 09 | 12:16 | Posted by:
The movie was pretty good!
The big surprise of the night, though? I let myself be cajoled into making our theatre outing a double-header with
X-Men Origins, and it turned out not to be as terrible as I expected. Granted, I figured it would suck through a straw, but instead it was a slightly above-average Big Dumb Superhero Flick. Better than
X-Men III and
Spider-man 3, that's for damn sure. I definitely didn't expect my X-Men comics habit circa the Jim Lee reboot era would come in so handy, but having pored over the Larry Hama
Wolverine comics back in the day I recognized an awful lot of the side characters and plot developments. So that was a pleasant 90-minute diversion.
Trek, though, was the movie I had hoped
The Phantom Menace would be -- a fun, energetic, lighthearted revitalization of something that meant the world to me as a kid. I guess ten years late is better than never. Sometimes I wonder if I work with old video games in a desperate bid to recapture the sense of enthusiasm and enjoyment I felt about silly, meaningless things when I was young; for two hours last night, I had that feeling again.
Of course, the illusion of my teenage years won't be complete until I track down an
Enterprise model and sloppily assemble and paint it in my haste to have a display of the greatest sci-fi craft ever. For more authenticity, I should be more awkward around girls, too, but I don't think Cat would necessarily appreciate that. So I'll stick with the model project for now. I wonder if there are any Hobby Lobbies in San Francisco?
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Across the universe
08 May 09 | 11:54 | Posted by:
I don't find myself becoming excited for much in the way of media releases these days, be it books or movies or games or albums or what have you. But
Star Trek seems to be the exception to the rule. Not that it surprises me -- I've been waiting for this movie for 20 years or so. I had the poor timing to become a
Trek fan right after
Star Trek IV, which meant that all my anticipation built up to...
Star Trek V. And the first season of
The Next Generation. Oy. Nicholas Meyer had the good grace to make sure
The Undiscovered Country was a worthy send-off for the classic crew, but then
Generations went and crapped that up, too.
I seem to have pretty bad luck with fandom, frequently getting into something just before it goes sour. I turned into a prog rock maniac in the early '90s, getting into bands like Yes and Genesis and Rush and Emerson Lake & Palmer right before their dire early '90s "right, let's bang one out for some easy money" releases. Yes's
Union is definitely the
Star Trek V of prog rock. Maybe that's why I've ended up writing most about games -- having grown up right alongside the medium, I've been able to jump onto great franchises on the ground floor. Like the bands and movies I've enjoyed, the likes of
Castlevania and
Mega Man have seen better days... but I was
there for those better days, and as a result I don't feel like someone who arrived at the party right as the DJ quit playing and the food ran out.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the new film -- which I'll be catching tonight, and probably a few times down the road -- because it's being almost universally hailed for achieving the seemingly impossible task of being a good general-audiences work while working for
Trek nerds as well. Crazy, right? It's like that episode where Captain Kirk brokered peace between the guys who were half-white, half-black and their rivals who were half-black, half-white. Or maybe not. All I know is that I'm ashamed for even writing that.
Which begs the real question: how well does the movie work for people who really love
Trek, but have the good grace to be embarrassed about it? I
suspect it's going to make us the happiest of all.
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The indie bookstore I pass every day
07 May 09 | 17:35 | Posted by: vsrobot
In the strip center where I work, an independent bookstore recently opened. It makes me feel bad.
I'd like to support indie booksellers -- owning your own bookstore sounds like a dream job -- but they don't carry anything I'm interested in. The front window has had a perpetual
Twilight Saga display since they opened. I guess I could ask them to order me a book, but there's no way they can offer the speed and price that Amazon does for book deliveries.
Like any good bookworm, I love the feel and smell of bound paper, but I don't have room for the books I already own. Now I wait for an eBook version to appear of any book I want to read, and thanks to Project Gutenberg I have access to thousands of public domain classics. As our media have increasingly moved towards digital distribution, I have experienced extended spells of schadenfruede watching the record industry self-destruct.
Thinking about a future without bookstores just makes me sad. I guess sacrifices will have to be made as our culture makes the slow, painful transition to digital distribution. Still, I'm going to miss browsing the stacks of books at a well-stocked used bookstore much more than I've ever missed being able to go to a record store.
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The best birthday present
06 May 09 | 16:30 | Posted by:
Thanks to the mysterious HessianD, who
posted this completely great drawing to commemorate the site's more-or-less-tenth anniversary today. It is, of course, Rorita in the classic A-Ko pose which every anime schoolgirl is contractually obligated to express at some point or another: running to school, chomping a piece of toast(yfrog) as a hasty breakfast because she's late for class.
I believe the word you're looking for here is "sublime."
Like link banners, gift art is another old-school Internet tradition I'm sad to see fade away. I can't think of a more appropriate way to commemorate the anniversary.
Previously by HessianD:
Awesome,
Doubleplus awesome
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Add to Queue 87: The curious case of shiny vampires
05 May 09 | 22:27 | Posted by: vsrobot
Media | A2Q Archives | The Author on Twitter | A2Q #87 | May 5, 2009
David Fincher is an incredibly talented director of cinema. Coming from the world of music videos, Fincher had an ignoble start in features with the much maligned
Alien 3. Since then, we've learned just how much the studio meddled with the film, and most Fincher devotees don't consider the theatrical release reflective of what Fincher's vision for the film actually was. Still, if all he was known for were a terrible
Alien sequel, no one would discuss his work today with any reverence. Luckily, his next movie put him on the radar of film fans the world over;
Se7en was helped by a solid premise and even better actors, but it was Fincher's technical mastery behind the lens that elevated it to instant-classic status.
His next film,
The Game, disappointed more than a few people who were looking for more of the same. Fincher wasn't eager to rehash him work, though, but
The Game has come to be well-regarded -- even if it's not held on quite as high a pedestal as some of his other works. He followed it up with an incredibly divisive film that didn't make much of a splash at the box office. Still,
Fight Club had an enormous impact on pop culture. Working from Chuck Palahniuk's incredible novel, Fincher brought to screen an adaptation of the novel that reinforced its themes and, to my mind, improved them -- the film's Tyler Durden does a better job of getting across his anarchic philosophy than the same character in the book. Fincher's deft hand with the material made it easier for me to identify with both the narrator and Durden for the first half of the film, which made seeing how far Tyler ended up taking things that much more effective.
Next came the thriller
Panic Room, a decent ride that's ultimately unremarkable outside of how it's shot -- unusual for Fincher, and quite a contrast from his next work.
Zodiac is the true story behind the still unsolved case of the Zodiac killer, and while it doesn't necessarily work as a traditional crime genre film -- the lack of real closure on the crimes something you probably couldn't get away with if you were making a fictional film -- it does work incredibly well as a character study of the people whose lives were indelibly touched by the events portrayed.
Fincher is a filmmaker whose work is always interesting regardless of his subject matter. So... why haven't I taken the time to see
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? I've had several opportunities to see the film but let them all slip past. Fincher has had a strong partnership with Brad Putt, and I'm confident that
Button is well-made and features strong performances. I'll probably see the movie now that is on Blu-ray, but the fact is that the trailers did nothing for me. Worse, some critics compared the movie to
Forrest Gump, a movie I detest. In other words, it's a film I'm only going to watch because of the director. Were a different name attached to the film, I'd pass it over without hesitation.
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#FF6666, ten years later
05 May 09 | 07:42 | Posted by:
So it's been about a decade since the first
Star Wars prequel arrived and promptly failed to live up to that amazing teaser trailer we all watched a few dozen times in anticipation of the movie, but something
even more important happened ten years ago today: this site launched. Well, technically, I started the site sometime in 1996, but it was a pitiful little thing on GeoCities that I could barely even update sometimes thanks to GeoCities' terrible servers. After a couple years of that, I decided that maybe I enjoyed this webmastering thing enough to pay a little money to put the site on a more reliable server.
It was money, server space, and time enthusiastically wasted.
We've managed to wrangle it into something interesting over the years -- right about the time I started pretending that toastyfrog.com doesn't work -- but at the start it was pretty dang worthless. It was loaded with dumb game reviews intended to annoy fans, a Lunar "strategy guide" which was mostly a lot of stupid jokes, and assorted media coverage. Worse, for some reason I decided the site's visuals should be a riff on Japanese comic magazines like
Shounen Jump, which I can only assume I thought was a good idea because frogs...
jump. Yeah, I dunno. Anyway, I wanted the site to have the same hyperactive design as the magazines it was named for, but since the web didn't easily let people plaster their sites with all kinds of dense, glaring Japanese text, I settled for using eye-searing colors and random (sloppy) bits of katakana instead, hoping it would all sort of average out. In retrospect, it was a colossal failure, because it was a clumsy attempt at a visual joke that no one else knew I was trying to make. And thus the tone of the site was irrevocably set!
On the plus side, I'm still pretty happy with the obligatory link banners. Remember banners? I kinda miss 'em, truth be told.
And just think, if anyone else had bothered writing about the
Chrono Cross demo when it arrived in Japan, this site would have eventually died in obscurity because the GIA wouldn't have bothered linking to it. Man, no wonder people hate that game.
Anyway, thanks for continuing to subject yourselves to this prattle. The millions of unique daily visits this site has received in that ten years -- currently about 3,000 per day on average -- continues to surprise me. I gotta say, though, if I'm still doing this in ten years I'm going to be a little worried about myself.
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A half-dollar's worth of fun
04 May 09 | 22:36 | Posted by: vsrobot
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is an irredeemably dumb game. The story line -- multi-platinum pop star murders his way through a warzone in order to reclaim a jewel-encrusted skull -- is either brilliantly ironic or the product of a mind so feeble, so sheltered, and so surrounded by yes-men that this concept makes perfect sense to them.
The music in the game is awful. I'm a fan of hip-hop, but not this pablum. I actually played through the vast majority of the game listening to a three-hour-long gaming podcast, actually preferring to hear game journalists drunkenly argue about subjects that don't really interest me to the in-game sound. If this game were a radio station, I would be very tempted drive my car into oncoming traffic just to make the pain stop.
The mechanics are a pastiche of game design clichés. The game plays like a bastard hybridizaton of Bizarre Creations'
The Club and Epic's
Gears of War, featuring third-person, cover-based combat with a point meter that rewards you for chaining your kills together. As you play, you collect money that you can use to buy new melee moves, new guns, or most impressively, new taunts. Yes, one of the rewards is new curses for Fiddy to yell at people when you push the button specifically assigned to Fiddy cursing. Besides money, you can also collect posters. Since I spent the entire game skipping every cut-scene and tutorial, with the sound turned almost all the way down, I have no idea if there's any reason to collect the posters. The game does have co-op play, if you can admit to your friends that you have it. If you do, you can play as FIddy while a buddy takes on one of the members of G-Unit who doesn't have his own brand of Vitamin Water, like DJ Whoo Kid.
I don't like this game, but I had a lot of fun playing it. I decided to try it after Justin McElroy from Joystiq.com described the fact that in the short driving sections, you can jump your vehicle off of a wooden ramp, which then explodes. In slow motion. For no reason other than it's awesome to watch your car jump an exploding ramp. The whole game seems put together without regards to whether or not any given decision might make sense, but how "bad-ass" it would be. I don't like the story, the characters, the art, or the music -- items that the game's publisher were probably hoping would be the key selling points -- but I thought the mechanics were very satisfying. Seeing my points increase exponentially as I'm rushing forward at great velocity, shooting people in the face along the way, never grew old for me. Keep this game far away from anyone looking to justify a "games are art" thesis, as it'll crush their spirit. However, if you can overlook everything terrible about this game, you'll find a pretty fun ride. Like a Michael Bay movie, it might be dumb as a box of rocks, but if you can turn your brain off you can have a good time.
The third-person shooter is becoming as clichéd and boring as the FPS has been since about two years after
Doom was released. However, the fast paced Blood on the Sand is a fun way to kill four or five hours, and it's worth a rental -- assuming your gaming tastes can accommodate the occasional murder simulator.
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Inside GameSpite Quarterly #1
04 May 09 | 10:11 | Posted by:
Hi, kids. Contrary to appearances, I'm neither dead nor have I abandoned this site to let Levi turn it into The Unofficial
Star Wars Homepage (although Timothy Zahn's books
are good sci-fi that has held up through the years quite nicely). I've just been otherwise occupied, having spent the past few days writing a few text pieces to fill in some gaps in the magazine, assembling the last bits of artwork (thanks to David Motowylak for coming through with a
Bionic Commando box shot), and copy editing the results. In fact, that's
all I did over the weekend. Currently I'm about 3/5 of the way through the copy editing process, which is slow going. I just don't have the stamina to proofread this much content in one sitting, I fear. My back and neck are killing me from being hunched over my laptop for two days solid, and my brain's in a bit of a state, too.
But anyway! Now that everything's sorted out and in the final stretch, I've put together this issue's
landing page/table of contents so's you can get a sense of what's being covered and how it's being organized. I'm sorry to say that I took a rather prosaic approach to the history of Game Boy and broke it up pretty much chronologically, with each major section prefaced by a brief historical overview before delving into the individual game breakdowns (and looks at the competition, too).
As you can see, moving to a quarterly format doesn't mean we're publishing less content -- this book is three months of material being printed up in one go. In fact, I think the numbers work out to a slight surplus:
GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 devoted about 300 pages to six months of online material, and this issue is 160 pages -- but the material is more compact this time around since I've used a smaller typeface and a more space-conscious title layout for each individual contribution.
Assuming I can devote a couple of hours to copy editing each night this week, I expect to submit the content for a proof no later than Saturday, and I should have the proof back and double-checked no later than two weeks after that. I realize I could just go straight from initial copy edit to general publication, but there's no real hurry on this besides my eagerness to have the book in my hands and see the final fruits of our labor. I think we can afford to take a couple of weeks to weed out any glitches or errors and make sure everyone is getting the best possible product for their money.
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Episode One ten years later, part 1: the dark times
03 May 09 | 20:23 | Posted by: vsrobot
May 19, 1999 was a day long anticipated. The lines started months in advance. The marketing was pervasive and overwhelming -- it would have been impossible for anyone
not to know that
Star Wars was back.
Of course, for some of us,
Star Wars never left. After
Return of the Jedi debuted in 1983, there wasn't a whole lot going in the world of
Star Wars. If you wanted to revisit the Galaxy Far, Far Away, your options were limited. Kids who grew up in that era probably remember the two live-action ewok TV movies and the
Ewoks and
Droids cartoons.
Droids was especially notable, because the voice of C-3PO for the animated series was performed by the same actor from the movies, Anthony Daniels. In addition to the cartoons, you could also hope for the occasional theatrical rerelease of the films. Eventually, of course, the movies came to home video and could be watched whenever the urge struck.
Still, they were only three films.
Star Wars as a franchise seemingly went into hibernation after the aforementioned cartoons finished their relatively brief television runs. Only gamers kept the home fires burning: the pen-and-paper role-playing game saw the release of many successful books and supplements (some of the most creative
Star Wars work of the '80s, in fact), and there was the perpetual, ubiquitous videogame presence -- but for the most part, the franchise had left mainstream pop culture behind, or perhaps had been left behind. There wasn't much in the way of new comics, books, or file, to absorb. It was a dark time to be a
Star Wars fan.
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Gaming in the flu world order
01 May 09 | 05:41 | Posted by: vsrobot
Please, game developers: stop including multiplayer modes in your games. Haven't you been watching the news?
We're all gonna die! Well, most of us, anyway. After the bird-pigs infect us all with their super-flu, only the hardiest of us are going to survive. There will likely be little infrastructure left, and certainly no more Internet. Those of us who live are going to need games to play, and
Call of Duty 4 isn't going to cut it.
When I'm walking the empty highways, dodging cannibals and feral flu-mutants, multiplayer games are going to be useless. As I raid the abandoned farmhouses for fuel to generate a little electricity for the HDTV I've got strapped to my back, games with a strong single-player focus are going to be worth their weight in pre-aporkalypse gold. When I'm trading a few berries I managed to steal from a dead man's pockets for a new game, all those co-op and multiplayer bullet-points are going to be quickly passed over in search of games with hours of solo player to distract me from the horrifying reality of FluMerica.
I guess there might still be some use for all those multiplayer games. Maybe I can snap the DVD-ROMs in half and use the pointy edge as a shiv against some cannibal trying to gnaw on my delicious, flu-resistant innards.
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