Review Times

Hi folks! This week, Stephen and I nominally discuss the possibilities to be found in video game simulations, and inevitably end up discussing the theory behind video games in general. Enjoy!(?)

Matthew: So the question I have for you this week: I’ve been thinking a lot about how video games have the ability to transport us to other worlds a lot of the time, but also how they are so often used as simulations of so many things - farming, sports, flying an airplane, etc. What do you think are the merits and/or drawbacks to “video gaming as simulation”?

Stephen: So, simulation…  I’m kind of half-asleep right now, but I do need to comment on this.

So, I think we first have to establish what we mean by simulation.  Personally I don’t think that most games are actual simulations at all, and the few that are simulations probably aren’t what most people actually talk about when they talk about simulations.  I think Sim City is one of the best examples.

So, Sim City isn’t a simulation.  It’s not to be mean to Will Wright, he’s a great game creator and has opinions that I respect very highly within the realm of developers who discuss their designs.  That said, I don’t really think it’s a simulation because it doesn’t actually simulate city management.  It simulates an imagined form of city management.  The reason I don’t generally consider it a simulation isn’t because it doesn’t simulate something, as all videogames do that much, but it doesn’t simulate managing a city.  The reality of city management is handled by many people all working at many different levels to manage an actual city which has a differing discourse depending on the time and social and cultural experiences within which it exists.  This is extremely difficult to simulate.  It’s a very wide discourse which isn’t really easy to simulate or put into a microcosm of experience, and if we are to do so, it problematizes something more fundamental to our understanding of an interactive experience.  If we are to say that Sim City is an accurate simulation, then we could argue that Call of Duty or Chivalry are accurate simulations as well.  We know they aren’t, but we often treat them as though they are.

Read More

Well, this unintentionally turned into a Joss Whedon blog pretty quickly. I apologize for that (well, not really - it is MY blog, after all). But the man knows exactly what pushes my buttons: witty, deep genre experiments are totally his and my jam, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog gets major points for being one of Whedon’s most purely enjoyable projects.

On a minute-to-influence ratio, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog probably has the highest ratio out there - at a scant 42 minutes, divided into three chunks, Dr. Horrible is about the length of your average television pilot despite, in reality, being a kind of mini-series. The entire emotional journey, while intentionally simplistic, fits into that brevity. And while I (and probably a good portion of Whedonites) could bemoan the extremely short running length of something so enjoyable, in its final state, Dr. Horrible is just lovely and near-perfect.

The conversation surrounding the show, at the time, had very little to do with what it was actually about, and more to do with its release. Filmed on a shoe-string budget in the summer of 2008, Dr. Horrible was filmed and released almost simultaneously to YouTube, getting big stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion to work essentially for free because of the drawn-out writer’s strike. While Dr. Horrible maybe didn’t usher in the digital era of TV shows like some optimistically futurist pundits thought it would, it’s still an early example of “webisodes” that doesn’t completely kill my soul.

The story and the themes are quite a bit more of a lark than most of Joss Whedon’s shows - there’s some periphery darkness to be sure (mostly in the kind-of-shocking final chapter), but for the most part this is just a simple, straightforward little tale. We follow the titular Dr. Horrible (Harris), a wannabe supervillain who dreams of “cleansing the Earth” - and yet, since this is Neil Patrick Harris we’re talking about here, his supervillain is ridiculously charming and likable, which makes sense given that we’re supposed to see Dr. Horrible as our “hero” and Captain Hammer (Fillion) as a fatuous, empty shell of a man, despite ACTUALLY being a hero. Yes, it’s a simple reversal of expected comic book tropes, but Harris and Fillion are perfect in selling the bluster and ridiculousness of their characters, and both actors are so charming that you just want to hang out with them.

The third component is Felicia Day’s character, Penny, a sweet homelessness advocate and object of affection for Dr. Horrible. In their scenes in the laundromat, where Dr. Horrible is just Billy, a dweeby, shy dork, Day and Harris have unbelievable chemistry; and later, when Captain Hammer has “stolen” Penny from Dr. Horrible, Fillion and Day have unbelievable chemistry - I don’t know, maybe Felicia Day has great chemistry with everyone.

It’s a little bit disheartening to have Whedon abandon his “action girl” staple in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but this is basically a low-stakes hangout comedy given the artificial stakes of a comic book show. So the point isn’t necessarily to break genre conventions so much as it is to celebrate them - and hey, what better way than to imagine an alternate universe where Buffy the Vampire Slayer was made up entirely of episodes like “Once More With Feeling”?

Yes, if the title wasn’t a dead giveaway, Dr. Horrible is a musical, and a pretty damned good one at that. Day and Harris obviously both have Broadway-ready pipes, and Fillion gives it the ol’ college try, and it’s all very sweet and fun, especially Fillion’s songs like “A Man’s Gotta Do” or the cast ensemble-montage “So They Say”. I mean, I guess if you don’t buy into the natural charisma of the actors, this could all come off as just too much showboating, but for my money, it fits the simplified aesthetic of the show entirely, and it is wonderful.

Actually, you know what? Criticism pretty much just gets set aside by me when I watch this wonderful little show. I just love it, OK? Don’t ask me to defend it on intellectual grounds, because it’s just so much fun and that’s all there is to it, chum.

(OK, if there was a criticism to be made, it’s that the “blog” conceit pretty much goes out the window after the first five minutes, which kind of sucks, because it gives NPH some great opportunities for improv. Alas.)

There’s no “dead period” with this season of Dollhouse - unlike the sputtering, network-interfering half-measures of the first half of the first season, season 2 just hits the ground running and doesn’t stop (at least, until a wholly misbegotten season finale that, thankfully, can be wholly ignored).

Gone are the “cases of the week,” which saw Eliza Dushku dressed up in ever more ridiculous costumes and asked to act way outside her comfort zone - instead, we have a TV show that operates using some of the most dense and, I’m sure at times for any wayward newcomers, wholly inscrutable serialization on network television. Given the advances in DVD and streaming technology, it makes season 2 a perfect stretch of episodes to binge watch, as they grow in momentum and depth the closer together you watch them.

The concept for season 2 is to move away from anything like a menacing “big bad” and to explore the depths of corruption in the Rossum Corporation, who are the up-to-this-point morally ambiguous mega-corporation behind the Dollhouses. The show audaciously plunges headfirst into exploring the depths of depravity that huge corporations can go to, turning our relatively familiar setting of the Dollhouse into exactly the creepy, horrifying place that season 1 went to such lengths in the early going to assuage us that it wasn’t. Finally, the show that Dollhouse always wanted to be comes to the forefront, and it’s a hugely ambitious setup for a network TV show, nevermind one with a surprise second season renewal.

There are, of course, bumps along the way, which we’ll get to, but I’d like to take a moment right now to gush about how fucking brilliant the cast is at this point, especially in their “fill in the backstory” episodes that play quite a bit like the best episodes of Lost. Special mention must be made for Dichen Lachmann’s standout episode “Belonging,” which, with its plot of a rich corporate overlord capturing a woman (in this case, Lachmann’s pre-active self, Priya) and forcing her to be his sex slave through the use of mind altering drugs, and then forcing her into a mental institution so that she could be further enslaved by the Dollhouse… I mean, whew, that is one seriously dark episode of television, about a million miles away from anything else Joss Whedon had done up to that point in terms of tone, and yet this show seems to only get better the darker it goes.

Other players step up to the bat as well. Adele’s shift to outright villainy is sold entirely on the strength of Olivia Williams; Echo, now freed from the constraints of basic imprinting and able to self-imprint, is finally in the wheelhouse of “badass ass-kicking” that Eliza Dushku does so well; Harry Lennix is as well-suited to this environment as ever, and his twist ending is fantastically played, even if it is a little rushed; Topher’s character, once a one-note joke character (not unlike Fran Kranz’s character in The Cabin in the Woods), faces a huge character arc that couldn’t have been played better by anyone involved; and good fucking god, can someone get Enver Gjokaj a movie or a TV show? Every single time he shows up on screen, it’s straight-up electric. Toss in Whedon regulars like Alexis Denisof, Summer Glau (totally amazing in this, by the way) and Amy Acker and you have a pretty damned great season of television.

In individual episodes, there are times where this feels like it might be Whedon’s strongest show - episodes like “The Attic” take the show into almost surreal territory while keeping everything grounded in the characters, and even nominal “case of the week” episodes like “Vows” are so much better than any of the first five episodes of the first season that it’s not even fair. And when the show does eventually dive headlong into pure serialization in its final few episodes, it’s a constant rush of revelations that is completely thrilling.

There’s no denying it, though - it’s almost too fast. Apparently Whedon and company wanted to try to fit in five seasons worth of plotting into two, making certain revelations almost comical in their heightened state (the penultimate episode is certainly exciting, but there’s really no reason why so many things would be happening in the same place with the same characters). Without the slower, darker episodes, these final few episodes might almost play as a parody of the impulse to throw cliffhanger after cliffhanger in shows like these, but thankfully the characters are still allowed to shine through all of the chaos.

Then there’s the last episode. A sequel to the brilliant “Epitaph One” should have been a slam-dunk, given that that first time-jump is still one of the best episodes of the whole show. Somehow, though, this jump ahead plays far sillier than the first one. The story relies on far too many “As you knows,” (as in, the characters will literally say “as you know” to other characters to provide frankly bald exposition) and the Mad Max-esque quality to Dollhouse’s future world is… misguided at best. Especially when you have Gjokaj’s Victor dressed up in such a fucking ridiculous costume and re-cast as a mournful “tech-head,” or you have characters using technobabble slang-speak like it’s totally natural, or you have Dushku overacting like a motherfucker, or you have Topher basically becoming the Saviour of Man through a deus ex machina that doesn’t even make sense in the context of a science-fiction show, giving the series a happy ending where it really, truly does not fit. All the Felicia Day in the world can’t save that.

Like I said, though, you can totally ignore it! It has no bearing on the ACTUAL story of the show, and while “The Hollow Men” has its ups-and-downs, it provides a far more coherent closing to the show than whatever the hell “Epitaph Two” is trying to do. Nonetheless, even though that episode leaves one hell of a bad aftertaste, it does little to dilute the frequent brilliance of Dollhouse, a show that really should have never been made on network TV in the first place and is kind of a small miracle just for existing. It’s maybe more uneven than almost any of Joss Whedon’s other shows, but that just means the highs are that much higher.

“Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a Chosen One. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers. She is the Slayer.”

After that swell blast of exposition, dumped over a montage of spooky images and, occasionally, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s face, we’re thrown right into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, quite possibly the most slavishly-followed cult TV series in history, one of the most influential shows in history, and the show that kicked off one Joss Whedon’s career in style.

It can be quite challenging to assess a series that made its critical name (fun fact: Buffy has been written about by more academics than any other TV show ever, even as other Whedon shows like Dollhouse probably deserve that distinction more) in the middle of its run. The temptation is to consider those early years as “the show finding its feet,” or even worse, that those early episodes were clearly always building towards the greatness that would come later.

In the case of Dollhouse, OK, yes, I can see that argument - the showrunners were forced into creating a simple “mystery of the week” format to appeal to Fox and to keep some sort of mainstream audience before diving headlong into serialization. The premise for that show always promised more. But Buffy is an entirely different case. While even season 1 is a major step up from the one-note gimmick that was the precursor Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (fun fact #2: the TV series treats the film as canon, but only if the film exists as it was originally written, not as it was when actually created - Whedon has essentially disavowed the 1992 film), the premise is still very simple and left that way somewhat intentionally. It doesn’t feel like Buffy set out to change the television landscape - in its first season, you can see that the show is doing exactly what it wants to do at that moment, before Whedon saw that the premise could be exploited for so much more.

In essence, season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a classic “monster-of-the-week meets master plot” sort of show. Nearly every episode, save one or two scattered here and there (the superlative “Angel” and the season finale come to mind, not coincidentally both written by Joss himself), can be watched and enjoyed as self-contained units. The show has unusually well-developed characters and often very fun situations, yes, but it only rarely shows itself as anything more than that in these early episodes.

The show indeed follows Buffy, the titular vampire slayer, as she moves from Los Angeles to seemingly-idyllic Sunnydale in southern California. There, she meets Xander (Nicholas Brendon), the wisecracking, socially awkward friend who is clearly supposed to stand in as the audience and creator avatar, much like Topher Brink in Dollhouse or Wash in Firefly. There’s also the shy, introverted computer whiz Willow (a fresh-faced Alyson Hannigan), the snooty, stuck-up Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and the most affecting character, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), the stuffy British librarian who also serves as Buffy’s “watcher,” creating that same “handler/active” bond that exists in Whedon’s later Dollhouse.

There’s a whole mess of other characters as well, from later-spin-off character, the brooding and mysterious vampire-with-a-soul Angel (David Boreanaz) to Buffy’s well-meaning but wholly ineffectual principal to her, um, well-meaning but wholly ineffectual mom. Honestly, the characters at this point are very enjoyable to spend an hour with, but they don’t yet get explored in the same way they would later on. Buffy is a Whedon action girl with quips and references, Xander is the sarcastic commenter on the proceedings, Angel is the temptation factor, etc., but they haven’t yet gone beyond this. And that’s OK! It is the first season, after all, and not every show comes out of the womb as fully-formed as, say, Veronica Mars (a show that was able to come out so fully-formed BECAUSE of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

As long as you simply watch to be entertained, and not to have your ideas about TV fundamentally altered or anything, Buffy’s first season is quite an enjoyable romp. The monsters of the week, while crude and brought to life with some truly atrocious special effects, are a lot of fun, especially in episodes like “Teacher’s Pet” or the hyena episode. The master plot featuring, um, The Master, has almost zero depth to it at all, outside of “the bad guys are bad because they’re the bad guys,” but the sheer campiness of it is still pretty enjoyable. And the relations between the characters, even in this gestating state, is great to watch. The core “Buffy/Xander/Willow” group has fantastic chemistry; Boreanaz brings smoldering intensity like no one else; and Head’s Giles character is instantly saved from being a boring cliche into one of the most enjoyable characters on the show. (Oh, and if you’re at all interested in legitimate ’90s anthropology, this show delivers in spades)

The thing that makes Buffy’s first season, despite its relative lack of ambition compared to later seasons, is that it’s still a cut above what it absolutely had to be. It’s still in the realm of “monster-of-the-week” shows, but it’s considerably better than most of them, even when there are bum episodes here and there. It’s a good foundation, is what I’m saying, as long as you have a tolerance for mostly by-the-numbers genre storytelling. If the first season of Buffy is all we had, rather than the seven season behemoth it would later become, it certainly wouldn’t be remembered to the same degree the series would now, but given the lunacy of that hypothetical, we can look back on it now as the solid base from which extraordinary things were built.

Damn you, Robert Downey Jr. Goddamn you, Shane Black. After the “diptych of relative disappointment” that was The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises (the latter is still a success in my books, though it’s definitely not up to the quality of either of its predecessors), I thought that maybe superhero fatigue would start to set in at the multiplexes - that the staggering popularity of this genre would begin to fade after movies that were just a little bit more creatively bankrupt than we deserve from our summer tentpoles. Yeah, I liked The Avengers a lot, and Iron Man (the original, not the bloated mess that was the second film) has the star and the concept to produce interesting results, but the increased corporatization of the superhero concept (along with an incredibly boring and staid-looking series of trailers for Iron Man 3) has left me ready for some new fad to come along and sweep up the world into its popcorn-y afterglow.

Instead, Iron Man 3 is pretty damned good, taking the franchise in a wildly different direction than I, at least, was expecting. The movie might be made with a minimum of style and the glossy look of the picture completely eliminates things like “directorial authorship,” but Shane Black (writing wunderkind of Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and, most recently, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fame) still has his stamp all over a film that just feels different from the kind of overbearing blandness that I had felt was beginning to creep into the superhero genre.

Despite appearing for all the world like Marvel was attempting to out-Nolan the Batman series, Iron Man 3 is considerably more out-and-out funny than most superhero movies of its size, moving from “action film with comedy bits” to a bonafide action-comedy, with very pleasing results. Yes, there are bits of comic book lunacy, like an injection that allows people to possess super-hot touch, and of course the very concept of the Iron Man suit is straight-up science fiction; but then you have Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle quipping like buddy cops, or Tony Stark hanging out with an incredibly well-cast and acted child actor, or a freaking gun-fight showdown at a shipyard, and Black’s writing and direction becomes crystal clear: this is an ’80s action comedy, brought forward to modern times and stuck inside the container of the most popular style of films at the moment. And for people who grew up loving exactly that kind of fluid blend of action and comedy, it is glorious, especially since Black knows his way around a hilarious phrase or two.

What’s perhaps most impressive about Iron Man 3 is just how twisty it is, not simply for the sake of being a puzzle-box kind of movie, but to give the narrative a shot of propulsion that was lacking even in The Avengers. Yes, there are dropped threads all over the place - Tony’s PTSD, post-Avengers, is brought up as a major plot point and basically forgotten about halfway through (it’s perhaps the only transparent attempt at artificially raising the stakes); the relationship between Tony and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is played almost as a screwball comedy, before Pepper is whisked away to be a basic damsel in distress (late-game histrionics do not change this overall feeling); Rebecca Hall, one of the greatest-living young actresses today, is given a thoroughly underbaked part to play; the same goes for Don Cheadle.

Yet the overall structure is still impressive, given that it sets up a menacing bad-guy mastermind of the Joker sort in Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin character, and then thoroughly deflates that possibility in hilarious ways. Like Paul Constant, I too think that doing the Mandarin as written on the page would have been hugely problematic - we hardly need a “yellow panic” character (played by Noted White Man Ben Kingsley), nevermind yet ANOTHER supervillain who is somehow three steps ahead of everybody at all times. Making Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian character the main bad guy brings a delightfully sleazy, slimy quality to the film, which is very much in line with its ’80s action comedy aesthetics, and makes for a much more interesting take on comic book villains than we’ve been getting recently.

Across the board, even in those small parts, this is an incredibly well-acted summer blockbuster, with best-in-show going to Kingsley in his first-terrifying-then-hilarious turn as the Mandarin, and of course Downey Jr., turning in perhaps his finest performance as Tony Stark. Note that I did not say Iron Man - Black wisely keeps Tony out of the Iron Man suit for most of the movie, which allows Downey Jr. to be as charming, as quippy, as funny and as moving as he can be. In fact, the movie has a surprising dearth of action for most of its runtime, which is ultimately to its benefit - this is a grounded, fun ride that doesn’t entirely rely on CGI vistas to sell its action, a real bonus in my books.

And when it comes time to blow shit up by throwing away Disney’s and Marvel’s money, hell, Black does it better than most. Some scenes are a little too digital - the helicopter attack on Stark’s mansion comes to mind - but mostly, he keeps the action clean and precise, a welcome reprieve from the mind-destroying mayhem that Iron Man 2 so callously tossed at the audience. The last forty-or-so minutes are nothing but action, action, action, but the film has more than earned it at that point.

I could honestly give zero shits about the film’s adherence to or destruction of Iron Man comic tropes and ideas - the film series has clearly been its own thing for awhile now, and anything that’s not just blind fanservice is a win in my books. Yeah, there are things that keep Iron Man 3 from that Spider-Man 2 echelon of comic book movies - Black is clearly not as interested in the mechanics of comic book storytelling to the degree that Sam Raimi was - but this is still a fun, largely idiosyncratic ride, and a pretty darned fantastic way to start the summer movie season.

Fire Emblem has long been my favourite video game series, ever since I first got my hands on Path of Radiance back in 2005. The series has sunk its claws into me with its insistence on tactical brilliance, its thorough and rigorous game design (the game is rightly championed for its ability to actually make death feel like something monumental, in a video game, leading me to question why Fire Emblem is among the only games doing this), its well-constructed worlds and characters, its nigh-Shakespearean (you know, in relative terms) plots… even though the gameplay and the story only kind of affect each other, there are few games that wrap me up so fully into the proceedings.

One thing that hasn’t been a hallmark of the Fire Emblem series, though, is presentation value. The games are, how can we put this nicely: “spartan.” Beyond representing the units and characters with simple sprites and static, anime-influenced illustrations, respectively, there has been very little done to go beyond only what is entirely necessary to get the point across in earlier Fire Emblem games.

Awakening, the latest entry in the series and an early contender for best 3DS game of all time, rectifies this. This is simply one of the most stunning-looking and sounding games I’ve ever played. The depth of the 3DS allows tiny dioramas to come alive in your hands; the dialogue and cutscenes now have the flair that befits the traditionally excellent Fire Emblem storytelling; the soundtrack, always a highlight in Fire Emblem games, is given the rousing symphonic treatment it deserves. Even if these things don’t change the core of the Fire Emblem experience in any significant way, they do show that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems are finally treating the series with the same level of panache and polish as Nintendo’s heavy hitters (and are reaping the sales rewards because of it, but that’s neither here nor there).

Outside of a few new features - namely, the ability to pair up your units in battle, which in essence pairs them up as a couple, which then allows boosts in statistics when they’re near each other and, if you play your cards right, eventual kids that, through the magic of time travel, you can then recruit later on (though it must be said that the heteronormativity on display here is a little bit galling); and an all-new “Casual” mode that eliminates the perma-death of earlier Fire Emblems (you’d be doing yourself a real disservice playing this way, though) - this is every bit a Fire Emblem game as we’ve come to know it. You get to create your own avatar this time around and ostensibly you play as that person, but the real star of the show is Chrom, the prince of a previously warlike country who has been thrust into a war on all sides, from the merely nefarious all the way up to the supernatural.

The characters are as lovable as ever, and there are some sufficiently satisfying twists and turns in the plot (rarely has the death of characters both playable and non-playable been used so well in video games), but it must be said that I, at least, didn’t find the plot as interesting or as radical as the Tellius saga, nor as intricate as Geneaology of the Holy War - it’s just kind of there, and a little bit reminiscent of The Sacred Stones if we’re being honest. Still, the draw is still the characters, who maybe have one or two chief “quirks” at the worst of times, but are still lovable and engaging throughout.

The meat of the Fire Emblem experience is the tactical, turn-based strategizing, which is as satisfying and solid as ever. The enemy AI, even on the Normal setting, is quite challenging, going after your weakest, your most drained, and your most isolated with ferocious aplomb. This is a common tactic of Nintendo’s: introduce a feature (in this case, Casual mode; in others, it’s the Super Guide) that allows accessibility for almost any gamer, and then ramp up the difficulty. I felt as though my acumen for this sort of thing must be slipping, because I lost A LOT of units through my playtime, but even when I was frustrated and depressed by the loss of so many digital friends, I soldiered on in the face of adversity, and it’s THAT feeling that makes any Fire Emblem special.

Maybe Awakening isn’t the absolute pinnacle of the series for me - as they say, your first is usually your best, regardless of its actual quality, and I doubt that I’ll ever be able to objectively overcome that - but there’s no point in even denying Awakening its title as one of the best games of the year, so far at least. Few games are as involving and meaningful as a Fire Emblem game - now we can add “stylish” and “polished” to that description as well.

Having played Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Sly Cooper and now Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, there’s a bit of a pattern starting to emerge for me in terms of how Sony’s stable of fifth- and sixth-generation mascots differ in pretty significant ways from Nintendo’s, despite sharing so much DNA. Yes, every one of these games is in some way indebted to Super Mario 64 (though that applies to most games in its wake), but there’s something intrinsically different from how Sucker Punch or Naughty Dog or in this case Insomniac has gone about translating the “mascot platformer” into something distinctly “Playstation-y.”

Part of it has to do with culture: these are very clearly Western games despite taking their influence from Shigeru Miyamoto’s creations. There’s a little bit less of the charming surreality of Mario or even Star Fox - everything is grounded in a world that operates on a general sense of internal consistency, with more spelled-out and forefronted plots and more clear connections between your actions and its relation to the plot. That’s to these games’ detriment, I think, since it takes away a lot of the feeling that anything could happen - that even the world itself is a labyrinthine mystery to unravel.

There’s no secret to unravel in Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, the second game in the prolific franchise. The game looks and plays a bit like a mashup of Metroid Prime (minus the isolation/darkness/sense of world building - mostly it feels like the early portions of Corruption, oddly enough, which came out four years after this game) and Star Fox Adventures, with a heavy emphasis on shooting any number of ludicrous weapons, the hallmark that sets this franchise apart from most.

There’s a cartoon logic to Ratchet and Clank that makes it hard to dislike, but there’s still something about the game’s attitude that rubs me the wrong way. Despite the improvement on Ratchet’s first-game baditude, the story, wonderfully inane as it is, just pops up too often, with too much assurance from the writers that, “no, no, this is HILARIOUS.” I can see being reasonably entertained if I was a bit younger, but there’s very little that had me laughing or even guffawing throughout the game’s eight-hour playtime. Honestly, the story - a relatively loopy tale about Bogons and Fizzwidgets and all other manner of campy science-fiction - is kind of fun to see to play out, but it’s not enough of anything to have the game keep returning to it so often.

Going Commando is by no means a bad game, I’d like that made plainly clear. There’s nothing wrong with it whatsoever, and in terms of its relatively mindless run-and-gun gameplay, it’s even reasonably entertaining at times. The animations are fluid, the wacky weapons are always pretty fun to play around with - and maybe most importantly, everything just works, even if the game isn’t exactly breaking any boundaries.

But there are obvious, even at times debilitating problems, things that, to me, will always keep the game (and indeed, it’s the same feeling I’ve had with those other aforementioned PS2 mascot platformers) from aspiring to the heights of Nintendo’s most bonafide classics. As it often is with these games, the problems come down to mechanics and design.

Discussing a game’s mechanics is about the least interesting part of a review for me - there’s so many more important topics that we could be discussing with video games, and inordinate attention to detail in the mechanics department often leads to brilliant video games being overlooked, or worse, games are kept in the “multimedia ghetto” because all we discuss are how they work as mere gizmos, playtime contraptions. But when they get in the way of meaningful enjoyment, especially when they get in the way for no real purpose other than they’re not quite as fine-tuned as they could be, that’s a problem. Honestly, it’s a little bit miraculous that Mario controlled so well in Super Mario 64, given that this was Nintendo’s first crack at 3D platforming. The fact that the camera didn’t disintegrate or that Mario still had his familiar speed and weight is one gaming’s unsung masterpieces. Honestly, if you’ve ever held an N64 controller in your hand and moved Mario around his Mushroom Kingdom sandbox, you can probably imagine that indelible feeling of controlling gaming’s pre-eminent figure in 3D space.

It is not so serendipitous in Going Commando.

The camera is mapped to the second stick, a common convention even by that point. The running is tied to the left analog stick - still not blowing any minds, I hope? But as in Super Mario 64, and unlike a great many third-person shooters today, those two things are not tied to each other, meaning that Ratchet can run in any direction he wants while the camera looks away, leaving aiming an impossible mess. This is also exacerbated by the fact that Ratchet’s running feels floaty, his jumping feels clunky, and his shooting feels, at times, arbitrary. I think that third-person shooters in general kind of suck, but the mechanics have to at least be a bit more workable than this if that’s the direction the developers want to go - otherwise, why did we transition so quickly out of the often-perfect 2D templates that we created on the SNES and Genesis? It’s  not broken and it’s often quite playable, but it does not encourage the same kind of undying love that Nintendo’s best mechanics seem to do effortlessly.

The more major issue, though, is design. Despite wisely opening up the game world to include many disparate planets and levels, and occasionally allowing for some Metroid-esque backtracking, Going Commando is pretty much just a straight-ahead corridor shooter with occasional platforming challenges. These are not the sorts of levels you go back to just to run through them again - they’re generally quite drab, straightforward, boring spaces. Yes, there are occasional minigames (including a pretty faithful Star Fox rip-off that is a lot of fun), but the central game rarely inspires, outside of those CRAAAAZY weapons that are always quite a bit of fun to try out.

Except! (and here’s the shitty part) - there are flashes of brilliance throughout Going Commando. Any sequence involving Clank, solo, is unlike anything else I’ve played, a kind of third-person Pikmin experience that combines shooting with real-time strategy in a really interesting way. A game based entirely around that would be brilliant, rather than the often pedestrian Ratchet segments - the blandness of the world seems to become a tertiary concern when what you’re doing isn’t so bland. And while I never got to try out the multiplayer, this sort of game seems ideal for multiplayer situations. Honestly, I bet there’s a good or even great game lurking in Ratchet and Clank’s shadows, and I never had an actively BAD time playing it. Like so many of those PS2 platformers, it just doesn’t have that creative spark to push it to the next level, but even middle of the road games can have their occasional charms.

I’m a huge Joss Whedon fan. I love how he takes genre tropes and makes them so much more intelligent than they have any right to be; I love how unrepentantly ”niche” his TV shows are, even when they have what should be crowd-pleasing tendencies (the fact that a breezy space opera like Firefly couldn’t make much of a dent outside of the Whedon “core” baffles my mind); heck, I even love how metatextual they all are, reusing so many of the same people in different contexts.

Dollhouse, though, is and always has been a bit of the forgotten show in Whedon’s pantheon. The things that I love it for - its intellectual rigor, its fascinating way of examining incredibly difficult subjects (on network television, no less!), and mostly, its pervasive darkness - are exactly what sets it against the rest of Whedon’s output with his fans. That’s not to say that Buffy or Angel or even Firefly didn’t have these things, but here, they’re built more into the fabric of the show.

Or they would be. I don’t know. It’s tough to talk about season 1 of Dollhouse without considering the context of the show at large. “Season 1.5” as I like to think of it, along with all of season 2, are absolutely masterful for fans of science-fiction, for fans of feminist takedowns of commonly accepted television tropes, for fans of TV shows that deconstruct the entire concept of TV shows (Dollhouse is as much about the act of acting as it is informed by feminist theory), and heck, for fans of extremely well-made, well-written, well-acted shows.

There’s a hurdle, though. Those first five episodes - they are rough. There’s no getting around it. Without the pedigree of Joss Whedon and without the potential for interesting developments later (potential that is, by and large, cashed in), these first five episodes could very well have turned off the viewing audience for Dollhouse (a show that, despite the, um, “best intentions” of Fox, was never going to be the mainstream procedural that they so clearly wanted it to be).

Their main problem is plainly obvious. The setup is fucking outstanding - the “Dollhouse” is an underground service that wipes people’s memories clean, only to have them be replaced with other memories that allow them to perform specialized tasks that would be too difficult for normal people (and yes, the show does investigate the essential ickiness of this scenario later on, as the concept of a Dollhouse full of primarily “hot” females does indeed seem like veritable prostitution). This raises a lot of interesting questions about the essential nature of human identity, of the role of the subjugated to the subjugators, it provides an interesting commentary on the shifting nature of working within television in the first place, and it allows its many talented actors to flex their acting muscles with every new challenge thrown their way.

The execution, though, at least in these first five episodes: oy vey. There’s very little interest in turning the focus inwards to the Dollhouse itself, nor to building any kind of continuity. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to build an interesting tapestry (of the sort we would see pulled off so masterfully in Dollhouse’s unexpected second season), Fox clearly saw the setup as an especially convoluted way to stick Eliza Dushku’s Echo character into a variety of cheesecake-producing scenarios, scenarios which could be easily contained in discrete, standard television procedural scenarios. Despite all of the potential instances where having an “Active” might lead to interesting results, or times when the Actives might turn into liabilities, or even looking at the fascinating staff of the Dollhouse itself (including perfectly cast members like Fran Kranz (the brilliant, neurotic, clearly creator-stand-in Topher Brink), Olivia Williams (as the head of the Dollhouse, Adelle Witt) and Harry Lennix (as Echo’s mysterious handler Boyd), we’re instead just watching another police hostage mission, albeit one with a moderately science-fiction sheen.

In these early episodes, true standouts like Enver Gjokaj’s Victor and Dichen Lachmann’s Sierra, or Whedon-regular Amy Acker’s Dr. Saunders are pushed to the side - this is the Eliza Dushku show only, and that’s unfortunate, as she’s easily the weakest link in the show (oh, she’s not bad by any stretch, and given what she has to work with here, Katherine Fucking Hepburn couldn’t make episodes like the one where she’s a pop star’s backup singer work). 

But then… something happens. Maybe Fox realized they weren’t going to have a Medium or a Ghost Whisperer or something, and Whedon was finally free to explore the show he actually wanted to make instead of a series of exceptionally poor “cases of the week.” With the introduction of Patton Oswalt’s character in “Man on the Street,” the show eventually began to realize its true potential. I was blown away by how fascinatingly raw and intelligent that episode was, and while it’s still a highlight of the show, it was really only the beginning. The show only expanded outwards from there, doing exactly what I just said those early episodes didn’t do.

So season 1 is uneven, but what first seasons aren’t? Yes, the show took a little while to find its feet, but it did find them, and it became glorious. So glorious, in fact, that the season finale - a weird, straight to DVD example - “Epitaph: One” is one of the best episodes that Whedon has been involved with on any of his shows. The show does become fascinated by its own mythology, but that mythology is fascinating, at least to me. Well-drawn characters acted as well as, say, Enver Gjokaj is capable of providing deserves the kind of show that Dollhouse turned out to be, and it’s a show that I would unhesitatingly recommend to any adventurous TV viewer. As long as you have the patience for those first few episodes, that is.

Hi again! Pal and old Vigigames contributor Stephen Keating and I are engaging in a series of back-and-forth letters on a topic of current interest in video games. This week: how messed up the preservation of old video games is.

Stephen: I think at some point we should chat about preservation and videogames, since it’s both surprising and horrendous.

Matthew: Honestly, the idea that video game preservation is so entropic… worries me. I mean, part of this is a lack of foresight from the original console makers. Even if you can find an NES kicking around, the idea that it’s going to simply not work at a certain point - and that ALL of them will stop working, unless you learn how to do some heavy-duty repair work - really sucks, and playing old games on a Retro DUO, while an OK stop-gap, still doesn’t prevent the fact that all video games on all forms of physical media will degrade over time, and there’s very little being done to preserve these experiences, outside of  emulation and piracy - not exactly ideal methods either.

Read More

There’s perhaps no more fundamentally strange movie-going experience than walking into No, Pablo Larrain’s third film about Chile and Augusto Pinochet, completely cold. For one, the film is going to be a complete whirlwind of new contexts to consider - I, in fact, knew far less about Chile and its history than I thought I did before I saw the film - but the main bit of cognitive dissonance comes in the first, oh, five minutes or so.

The credits for the film have been printed onto big pieces of paper that get flipped over. Presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and shot on low quality Betamax cameras, I thought that the film would use this stylistic quirk to establish its 1980s setting and then settle into something a little more familiarly high definition after that (there was a pre-credits warning of digital projection, after all). But no! The film maintains that same grimy aesthetic throughout. Anything lighter than a normal room gets blown out by the video quality; you can occasionally see the individual red, blue and green tints that make up the image; all in all, it looks authentically cheap and ’80s, as if No was a documentary produced as it was happening and just happened to be found now.

That’s really only the most surface level of reasons why No is so damned good. In a year where so many “prestige” pictures have attempted to capture some sort of truth through a “docu-cinema,” quasi-journalistic approach to exploring history, No succeeds far more than something like, say, Zero Dark Thirty or Argo by splitting the difference between those two films. It’s not a cinematic Rorschach test like Zero Dark Thirty (it wholly believes, even as it is somewhat critical of the same, that the marketing campaign to oust Pinochet was necessary), but it’s not a complete jerry-rigging of history like Argo either. Everything feels real, even when it’s not.

And in its central character, Rene Saaverda (played expertly by Gael Garcia Bernal), it is most definitely not real, mostly because Rene never actually existed. He’s completely likable, though, given a son and an ex-wife not because the screenwriters necessarily think that we’ll empathize with him more, but because that sort of person probably would have that sort of life. Early in the film, Rene is shown demonstrating his latest ad for Free-brand soda, and what initially comes across as a “look how ridiculous the ’80s were!” joke becomes a reference point throughout the film.

No is, on the one hand, a true to life exploration of the campaign to oust Pinochet from power. Under intense international scrutiny, Pinochet is forced to hold a plebiscite on his future presidency, with a simple “Yes” or “No” for another eight years. No one truly believes that Pinochet will actually lose, given his iron grip on the media and the national psyche of the country.

Saaverda, though, is approached by leaders from a variety of progressive (and, probably, Marxist/socialist/communist) forces to put together a flashy campaign that uses the techniques found in modern advertising, to put those mere fifteen minutes everyday to good use for the “No” campaign. And outside of the small-scale family drama that occasionally rises up in the film, No is completely about the process of imagining and then delivering these various advertisements, based not around the fiery passions of those who had been wronged by the Pinochet government, but around universal themes of hope and happiness. There may be some sort of subtle critique of the dumbing down of political discourse, or how ideas of real substance aren’t as “marketable” as platitudes (or even about the deleterious impact of making political advertisements and regular advertisements indistinguishable), but I think the film is, on the whole, a refreshingly pragmatic look at politics. Maybe it represents a downfall in political discourse, but on the other hand, it’s made clear that true criticism of the Pinochet government would have been shot down; and besides, if the 2008 presidential election in the states, or Jack Layton’s 2011 campaign here in Canada have shown, messages of positivity go a long way towards actually bringing people out to vote, rather than simply decreasing the overall number of voters through negative campaigning.

This is captured brilliantly by Larrain’s directing and script, both of which are scarily intelligent. This is a film about capital-I Ideas, but it doesn’t come across as a polemic. Instead, the film is just fleet and entertaining, a brilliant, almost “procedural” feel given to everything. Anchored by Bernal’s performance and the sheer delight of seeing these ’80s-era pieces of history (presented almost in documentary form) and most of all the tightness of the direction, No is one of the smartest and most entertaining films of 2012.