Review Times

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:22:57 -0400

It seems awfully presumptuous to name your movie The GREAT Gatsby. I mean, the jokes just write themselves! “It’s more like the MEDIOCRE Gatsby, assholes!” “The Great Gatsby? Pfft. Try the SHIT Gatsby! Assholes!”

Wait, what? This is based on a classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Oh.

Well, that comes as a shock, both to me and Baz Luhrmann, if his latest film is anything to go by. The Great Gatsby is, in nearly all senses, something I would categorize as a “mild disaster,” but of the hypnotically watchable kind that seemingly only the gonzo sensibilities of Luhrmann is able to pull off. And even given that I was more than familiar with Luhrmann’s oeuvre, having grappled with my theoretically enjoyment mixed with actual bafflement at his previous work, I wasn’t quite prepared for this.

Let’s start with the easiest target, which is The Great Gatsby’s quality as an actual adaptation of Fitzgerald’s most cherished work. Suffice to say, walking into a Luhrmann literary adaptation and expecting anything resembling the tone or the depth of the original is a fool’s errand. The man is all about taking supposedly sacrosanct texts and eras and blowing them up in almost cartoonish ways. This is, again, something I theoretically agree with, especially given that this is his second attempt at taking canonical high school literature and attempting to craft it for the sensibilities of that teenaged target audience. So I’m not one to get in a tizzy over the fact that an adaptation of a relatively staid, if surprisingly cutting classic novel relies so frequently on 3D visual flash, a Jay-Z/Lana del Rey/Gotye soundtrack, or somewhat plasticky CGI (what it does to the mise en scene… now that’s another story). This is an attempt to re-imagine Gatsby as a YOLO icon, and while that makes the 26-year-old me barf, it’s not the worst thing to attempt to get teenagers through the door and to have them begin to grapple with some of the source text’s headier themes.

The problem, though, is that The Great Gatsby film and The Great Gatsby book hardly align. Sure, the essential themes are there, embedded in the source material - the incisive look at social class, the deflation of the “roaring ’20s” myth of eternal opulence which is incredibly resonant in our “let’s pretend everything is AMAZING!” present-day attitude towards, you know, the downfall of society - but they feel like they’re there almost by accident; like Luhrmann is, for instance, making commentary on the uncommented-upon racial tensions simply by virtue of liking Jay-Z and occasionally casting some black actors.

In essence, the film feels dichotomous in a wholly unsatisfying way. The two films that Luhrmann is interested in making - a post-modern celebration of 1920s aesthetics, blasted out at the screen in 3D; a tragic, epic love story - are neither suited for the source material. There’s a way to take those two movies and make them into something meaningful and entertaining (which the movie happens to be, at least in fits and spurts), but there’s no way to reconcile either of them with The Great Gatsby novel, in that it’s simply not a tragic love story, and focusing on Gatsby’s and Daisy’s love as an uncommented-upon thing (and giving Gatsby elements of a tragic, romantic hero seeming just plain wrong, given that Fitzgerald is just as critical of Gatsby’s ambition as he is of the Buchanans’ overwhelming ostentation) just seems wrong.

So the film is bad Fitzgerald, but that was almost a given, considering just how surface-level and spectacle-y Luhrmann is when making a film. But as with Romeo + Juliet, and especially as with Moulin Rouge! (still his best film, perhaps because its setup is designed for non-stop spectacle), assessing a Luhrmann film does to some degree come down to the quality of that spectacle.

And The Great Gatsby is, unfortunately, bad spectacle too. It’s more than the plastic sheen of the frequent CGI, or the sometimes headache-inducing 3D - it’s that the film has no idea what it wants to be. The party scenes in the beginning are fun and beautifully designed by Baz Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, but they rest uncomfortably against the scenes where Luhrmann settles down and simply wants to tell the story - these sequences, while certainly less exhausting and not as full of genuine What the Fuck moments, is nowhere near as fun. It’s like Luhrmann wanted to jam together the kinetic energy of Moulin Rouge, the literary pretensions of Romeo + Juliet and the sweeping epic-ness of Australia, and ending up making a hash of all of them in the process (although this film is at least better than Australia, thank Christ).

The film could have been saved by some precise acting that understood the novel in a way that Luhrmann didn’t, but that’s not the case here. Our nominal protagonist and the main “audience surrogate” is Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carroway, who is undoubtedly the worst actor in the film. I generally like Maguire, but his bland, soulless performance makes a blank slate character even more egregious, and his monotone narration (coupled with the dumb-ass idea of having sentences from the novel pop up on the screen IN 3D!!) nearly sinks the film at times. Thankfully, Carey Mulligan’s Daisy (a much fuller and richer performance than is suggested on the page, given that Daisy could very easily turn into a nigh-misogynistic use of a female character as a symbol for ambition) is at least interesting, if still a little bit shitty. And Leonardo DiCaprio… well, what to say. He’s at least doing the very best he can with the way the character is written in the script, but his Gatsby is effectively in a whole different universe from the hollow shell at the centre of the novel, and he has a tough time hitting the sweet spot between Luhrmann’s insistence on hamming it up and the inner life of an actual character. I don’t know what to think about Leo, but I think he was OK?

None of this is to say that I wasn’t in a lot of ways captivated by the film. I mean, it IS still The Great Gatsby, all things considered, with the added bonus of some vintage bat-shittery from Baz Luhrmann. But even given my general appreciation of over the top spectacle, there’s no denying that The Great Gatsby is, as my girlfriend likes to put it, a straight-up hot mess.

State of the Union with Stephen Keating: Simulations

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:35:00 -0400

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.

So what would we consider to be a simulation then? Something which attempts to accurately recreate an experience. As an example, Mount and Blade is a good simulation of a medieval discourse between bandits, between lords and knights, between retainers and servants, between the effects of loyalty and betrayal. It’s not perfect, but it does attempt to create a discourse between the player and the game which is one of accuracy to a specified experience which puts the player in the role of a person who makes decisions with a discourse towards, potentially, other players, but also towards an artificial intelligence which takes many factors into account. The same can be said for games like the Total War series, but again, less so, due to it casting a wider net on simulation. The larger the net cast, typically, the farther you get from a simulation. The reason for this is due to abstraction from the player’s actions and their effects. Effectively, when we are made less aware of our actions, the more disconnected we become from the experience, and the results of what we do in a videogame. We naturally distance ourselves from actions we perform, especially when they negatively affect others. Pilots in a war feel considerably less responsible for their actions in the war than soldiers on the ground. A person who kills with a sword feels considerably more connected to their actions than someone who kills with a bow. The closer we get to an experience, the more it affects us.

Perhaps the most accurate simulations at the moment are those on a much smaller scale. I would present here Facade and Animal Crossing. Facade is an interesting simulation of a conversation, but due to its design, it is a fairly flawed discourse, given that the player is forced into a conflict from the beginning and thus is effectively being asked to game the system and take a side with an objective (help person A or B, reject the other). Part of this is due to the nature of the AI being rather blind at the natural flow of a conversation, part of it is that the conversation isn’t limited enough to create a discourse which seems markedly human. As a result, if we are to get into a discourse of human conversation, at the moment we likely have to rely on the choose your adventure style of Visual Novels. Unfortunately, most of these are poorly written, or are written for a purpose which mostly revolves around the player getting something. This is a problematic way to write a story, as stories often have little or nothing to do with ownership. But the player, by being invoked as the controller, expects some sense of ownership. This comes to a problem of rhetoric, and also a fundamental problem with what the player, when they play a game, defines themselves as.

So, the question then becomes, do we a play a game for an experience, or do we play a game for power and control? Here I would present Animal Crossing as an interesting intersection on such a discourse. Animal Crossing is effectively a simulation of house management. You make things, you use tools, you get letters and discuss things with your neighbors. The conversations aren’t typically based in meta-reasoning or rhetoric, but ironically enough this is actually closer to life than most conversations seen in videogames. After all, when was the last time you had a conversation with your neighbor about the meaning of action and discourse or strange powers? Most of the time, the discussions revolve around simple subjects (particularly the weather or sports, oftentimes work). You might talk about politics or taxes or philosophy with close friends, but those more generally surrounding you often have simple conversations and create simple friendships. A friendship takes time to cultivate and isn’t typically built over the course of a few short hours, which is what most videogames try to establish. The result is that Animal Crossing tends to emulate reality partially by accident, but in so doing creates the potential for a meaningful discourse on living life in a town.

And this is the problem I see with most talk about simulations. They aren’t talking about A House in California, or Hyperbound, or Proteus, they’re talking about Sim City or Civilization. These games aren’t simulations, they’re games which are mostly concerned with systems management. How do I optimize growth with the stats I have? How do I prevent war so I can advance our city towards winning the game with science? These are the questions these games ask. They don’t ask us to interact with our environment without a win state, and I have a hard time seeing anything as a simulation that exists with a win state, especially those with simple win states (which is to say that binary win-states are farther away from simulations). The goal in a simulation is to enjoy an experience, not to own a situation of power which advances your control. And there is a lot of rhetorical power in videogames which put you in a position of power, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t about experience, they’re about goals. It’s fairly easy to give a person a goal and tell them to achieve it, but a game with fewer absolutes is closer to a simulation in my mind.

Matthew: This was super interesting to read, mainly because you clearly know a lot more about this than I do. Haha.

I think it’s really interesting that you bring up Animal Crossing, since this is the game that prompted my question in the first place. To the degree that any games can purport to be simulations, it’s interesting that a game so whimsical can do so many interesting things in the realm of “simulation.” I also agree that games with simple win-states do, in a lot of ways, undo the simple charms of simulations - games like Civilization give the appearance of being a simulation by sheer virtue of the complexity of its statistical systems, systems which do indeed make the games feel “more real” in a lot of people’s eyes.

Stephen: See, but the thing is that it’s not even by virtue of their complexity, because for all the complexity created by Sim City, it’s mostly a result of simple things interacting in complex ways (and for some reason Gandhi’s always a warlord - it’s an interesting alternate dimension). To some extent, I feel like most of what games do best is represent possibility spaces, and that videogames allow for an infinite exploration of such spaces. What’s rather troubling is that all the stuff, simulated or not, tends to move towards commonality, towards what we already know and are aware of. It makes it difficult for games to have commentary on… perhaps more whimsical considerations (and I would put first-person shooters as they exist now in the whimsical category, because if they can’t be considered toys, the conversation goes somewhere much darker). Videogames, through all their computational aesthetics, are about the nature of ideas - they exist in a language which is entirely built on an idea (this is how we think computers should think and therefore they think like we think they should think), and the idea is often being missed for virtualization, for the desire to simulate our currently oppressive reality more aggressively. I find it strange that it’s also what seems to be supported in the videogame industry at large. Actually, thinking on that I don’t find it strange at all, I shouldn’t be surprised that corporate interests would be stifling to the exploration of ideas.

Matthew: This is perhaps the problem with the label of simulation, at least as it exists in the public gamer consciousness - maybe a more accurate term would be “verisimilitude.” Something like Proteus, a game that I too share a deep affection for, is in a lot of ways just a simple representation that doesn’t have a lot of ties to “the real world,” but its simple, gentle rhythms are so advanced over what passes as a game world these days that it ends up feeling like a real geography. Same goes for any of gaming’s other brilliant worlds; something like Deadly Premonition is warped beyond belief, but its unhurried pace and its attention to detail ends up making it feel real.

It’s strange, and I’m now taking this in a completely different direction than I first intended, but the idea of intentional verisimilitude in video games is often an idea shoved in where it really doesn’t belong. I’m not talking about things like sports games, which, outside of a few games like (oddly enough) Tiger Woods on the Wii, have very little to do with the actual sports they simulate outside of APPEARING to possess the same patterns and flow. Instead, I’m thinking of something like Skyrim, a game that was celebrated for its vast world that allowed the player to “do anything.” However, by eliminating those tacit video game “rules,” the game rests in this weird purgatory between “pure video game” and “simulation.” Skyrim, and the Elder Scrolls series in general, WANTS to move towards a pure representation of the things that you can do in real life - buy property, live a life, commit atrocious acts if that floats your boat, etc. But by presenting a world pretty much without restrictions, one that looks and feels “real” a lot of the time, it’s oddly enough its unreality that ends up sticking out. It’s as if the quasi-simulation aspects of the game distance the player from the experience rather than bringing him or her closer to it.

Stephen: Well, it’s sort of like making an argument without wrestling with the other side(s) of the argument. Skyrim-esque games tend to mimic reality now because it fits their image. Morrowind is probably the closest a world exploration game (maybe Star Wars Galaxies before the patch?) got to realizing its own reality, but it was mostly because, as with many of those older games, combat was awkward and difficult to build around. So you had to create a system which could create interesting conflict without it, and a lot of that happened through writing. The internal politics of a given Morrowind game is extraordinarily complex, even if it’s just a result of simple actions and reactions from the system. Even so, what will indeed stand out are the times when the game moves outside what it’s doing to present the player with something, the trophy of victory maybe being the most damning problem of game design.

Matthew: I think that the idea that complexity brings a video game closer to reality is often a fallacy, in that those complex elements are just as removed from “reality” as the simple ones. I’m fascinated by games like the series of train management simulations that were very popular when I was living in Germany; ditto for sports management simulations. But it’s not their verisimilitude that I’m drawn to, it’s the fact that these games are able to get away with such drastically different gameplay systems than I’m used to playing with. It’s the diversity that they bring to what is slowly (outside of a handful of independent developers) becoming a homogeneous gaming landscape. Are Seaman or Aero Porter “simulations,” per se? I guess they are, even if they don’t simulate anything that you can do in real life. I’m not concerned with that though - I just appreciate Yoot Saito’s attempts at doing something so very different from running, jumping, or gunning. Yet when a Call of Duty or Battlefield comes along, with its hyper-realistic graphics and bloodcurdling sound effects, the fact that neither game captures nor cares for capturing the horrifying essence of war, instead presenting something “fun,” I’m immediately turned off by how close these games are to reality, and yet so very, very far away.

Stephen: By the same token, what you do in Tokyo Jungle isn’t something anyone will ever be able to do in real life, but it does attempt to create an ecosystem which builds on its own concept of reality. Animals grow, live, and die and they do this in a way that we understand as animal. There’s no perfect definition of simulation, but at the same time, I think there is a lot less commonality with what people traditionally see as simulations which often aren’t, and those games which often aren’t considered as simulations but probably are. This becomes especially true if you come from the standpoint of an outsider looking in.

Parents watching their kids kill monsters in ever more horrendous ways just looks like the person designing the game is simulating murder. Which they aren’t really, at least not in the manner in which a game considers murder. There’s a larger problem at the core of this, and a big part of it is that a videogame’s rhetoric is confusing as fuck - murder doesn’t mean murder, kill doesn’t mean kill, kidnap doesn’t mean kidnap, assault doesn’t mean assault - the whole terminology of English gets caught up in the way in which a computer thinks about action. We use these terms as way of rationalizing (not justifying) actions, but all of the things we’re doing are set by a computer’s definition of winning. So murder is winning, assault is winning, destruction is winning. The computer doesn’t differentiate. We do, certainly, but when you make those sorts of binary connections via design (kill a person to win), you’re going to get some raised eyebrows.

A lot of what simulations do is contextualize binaries. Even if you’re “winning” winning may only be a short term thing or not something which the player is even allowed to absolutely have (MMOs probably being the most salient example). Even if you kill a boss, you and everyone else know you’re not killing it, there’s even an imagined terminology which simply refers to it as progressing through a dungeon. You’re not winning, you’re not killing, you’re just progressing. And that’s probably a good definition of a game that’s closer to a simulation. One where you can’t win, you can simply move forward. I think that’s actually rather liberating game design, because when a player isn’t constrained by what they must do (or what they should be doing), there’s a lot more space for exploring interactivity. Which, yes, means that the experience may be less guided as a result, but it’s also much more fulfilling to have the player discover something.

Ian Bogost had this interesting example of the problems of capitalism and how it represents itself in Animal Crossing. His son had a problem while playing the game, and what was his problem? He had too much stuff and too much debt to actually be able to store and appreciate all the stuff he had. It’s a uniquely capitalistic problem, where the difficulties of managing money and using that money responsibly clashed with one another. And the funny thing is, that although this was a problem presented in Animal Crossing, it has more real world parallels and politics than most games. And in that sense, it’s likely a far more real simulation than most people would ever be willing to admit. It’s also somewhat ironic, that a product of capitalism would also be a sharp critique of it.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008)

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:34:36 -0400

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.)

Dollhouse: Season 2 (2010)

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:53:42 -0400

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.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1 (1997)

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:33:00 -0400

“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.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:08:42 -0400

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 Awakening (2013)

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:13:19 -0400

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.

Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando (2003)

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:36:41 -0400

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.

Dollhouse: Season 1 (2009)

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:25:00 -0400

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.

State of the Union Vol. 2: Video Game Preservation

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:39:00 -0400

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.

I mean, a lot of my favourite video game experiences have come through emulation. I’ll admit that. But the experience of playing a video game, ESPECIALLY classic games on old Nintendo systems (which, if you know anything about me at all, is entirely My Jam), cannot be replicated through other physical form factors. A Link to the Past might be the same game on your laptop or through the Wii Virtual Console as it was in 1992, but it really isn’t. Really good video games, in my estimation, are combinations between the virtual experience on the screen and the specific, intended physical experience.

I’m actually not against the idea of having our past resold to us in various forms. I mean, as a staunch defender of the Criterion Collection, for instance, a really good re-release is just fine, and the idea of paying for something that we already bought decades ago isn’t the slap in the face that it is for so many other people. It’s the same thing with the Beatles Remasters from a couple of years ago - you almost never heard anyone saying, “well, why are they releasing these? I’ve already HEARD the Beatles!” But so many of these are just shoddy, and do not capture the experience that existed when we first played them. THAT, to me, is the major difference: listening to those Beatles remasters brought the Beatles into the modern age in a way that made them sound as vital today as they did in the 60s. Most video game releases, though, are not lavished with the same care and attention.

Stephen: My biggest problem with videogame preservation relates to asset collection and preservation. I can, within a few hours, preserve and download an entire website, and then remake that website, in its entirety, on another server. The same is true of movies, music, books… but the same cannot be said for videogames. Videogames are remarkably complex, I will give them that. However, videogames are also a digital media by nature, which means they exist to be reproduced even more than all these other formats which have a physical media which is far more discretely attached. It is a unique irony that videogames, the most digital of all the media we have, are also the hardest to preserve digitally.

And this isn’t by accident. Since the very beginning of games, game designers and developers were trying to prevent dissemination and distribution of games. These things really came to a head during the late 90s, early 2000s, where stuff like Starforce literally implanted malware which could directly modify your computer, just so it could be sure that a CD was inside your disc drive, to play a videogame. I’m not going to say that other media didn’t do certain things to protect themselves, but it has never been more insane nor repugnant as videogames, especially those in the modern era with the current trend towards always online videogames. Digital information exists to be shared, as with every form of information, and the harder you push against the end-user, the harder they will push back. The most recent example I can think of is how Assassin’s Creed 2 used a DRM technique which required authentication from a server in order to play it. Want to know what hackers did? They actually made servers that would artificially authenticate the videogame for you. The idea that somehow stuff like always-on DRM is an actual solution is entirely a fantasy of the game industry, mythologized by apologists who have the benefit of always having an internet connection.

I think what some of these people miss is the grander question in a greater, potentially future narrative. It’s already difficult enough with DRM and other forms of videogame controls to get games working properly. But let me ask you a question: is the “web” always going to stay the same? Technology is something which continues to evolve and grow, so what certainty do we have that TCP/IP protocols are going to be the same in the future, and may not change to accommodate faster connections in the future? See, this creates an interesting conundrum if you code something like a protocol which requires a web connection which requires TCP/IP in order to function. If the original author with the original code doesn’t update this in the future, the videogame may simply be unplayable due to poor future planning. This is why Microsoft spends tens of billions of dollars every year making their operating system more backwards compatible. People tend to miss that poor future planning is extraordinarily expensive, and not only that, that by having DRM, you can actually delete your legacy from future conversations by making your software unplayable or inaccessible.

The problem with emulation has everything to do with representation, rather than functionality. It is relatively easy to make a videogame from an old system functional. It is far more difficult, and far more time-consuming, to make an old system functional. byuu spent nearly a decade making an SNES emulator that was actually representative of what an actual SNES does. It also requires exponentially more processing power than those emulators which make SNES videogames functional. And this will be true of making emulators in the future representative. We may be keeping up with Moore’s law for now (the theory that processing power will continue to exponentially increase), but there’s no guarantee in the future. Quite recently there was even fear that this wouldn’t happen, and it was only really managed by doing things which allowed them to play with the definition of what Moore’s law meant.

There is also the problem of physicality. An SNES controller and the system feels different. It has a different textuality than playing it on an emulator with a wired X-Box 360 controller. The game you are playing might be the same, but the game you are touching, feeling, extending yourself into is different. It is not just about a time period, it is about how the feeling of these things is attached to individuals by hardware. It is not about nostalgia, nor about going back to a simpler time or exploring a videogame in a different context. It is dismissing the context entirely in favor of one which is often functional, rather than representative. Yes, these pieces of hardware will eventually break down, and at that point that textuality will be lost forever, and that is a shame, especially when we know that companies like Nintendo keep these design documents and are definitely able and capable of releasing them again. Just as with the criterion collection, I am still somewhat shocked that companies like Nintendo, from time-to-time, don’t re-release their old systems with their own set of “Criterion Collection” videogames.

Matthew: Obviously, this all stems from the fact that the past is simultaneously constantly mined for influence (and often, a kind of sickly-sweet “retro charm” that has hopefully run its course) and wholesale ignored by the broader “video game industry.” I mean, there is often NO attempt at curating and preserving games, and even less effort in making things even just a couple of years old readily available for people to experience. The ties between technology and the misguided belief in ever-rising production values and ever more “immersive” experiences mean that retro gaming stores are, at best, curious outliers in the video gaming spectrum. The history of this medium shouldn’t just be there for strip-mining, it should be there so that we have a fundamental base to work from. I mean, how many JRPGs, to use a random genre, forget that the genre actually hit its highest creative peak in the mid-90s? I’d say most, if not all of them, and the same goes for most other genres. The saying that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” sadly, isn’t so true for video games - we’re just doomed to forget it, period.

Stephen: To change the subject a bit, to something I mentioned earlier, there is also the real problem of asset preservation. I can backup a website, as I said earlier, but a videogame has a far more storied and succinct history, which is often lost. Videogames have rich collections of texts, art, music, and the creation of these pieces is amalgamated into what is eventually a final videogame product. But sharing these assets, sharing these ideas is also a great way to create future ideas as well as considerations for current design problems. As you said, history is a lesson, and unless we are willing to share that lesson, we cannot hope to learn, nor inspire very much. Designers and developers must at least take a historical interest in their creations, as due to a complete lack of preservation-oriented thought, stuff from less than a few years ago is lost entirely, including music, art, texts, code, and any other assets which may go into the complex process that is a videogame. There are entire industries built alongside movies, musics, books, and other media which are dedicated to its preservation, and yet this hasn’t happened for videogames yet. The movie industry lost decades of their history as a result of this, and books have had their Library of Alexandria. We should take greater care with our creations, and be willing and able to look on our past as fondly as our present and potential future.

Part of the larger social dissonance of today is entirely a result of our deletion of the past, despite having the greatest tool yet created for preserving it.

No (2012)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:06:57 -0400

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.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:33:00 -0400

Oz the Great and Powerful is one of the best, most entertaining, fundamentally flawed films that I’ve ever seen. There’s no getting around it: the world needed a Wizard of Oz prequel like I need to get punched in the teeth (which, hopefully, I don’t need to happen at all), and this is coming from someone who self-identifies as a Wizard of Oz nut.

That classic, classic film is so thematically rich, so tonally complete, so completely wonderful in and of itself that there’s really not a lot to be gained from an “origin story,” especially one that differentiates itself from its classic forebear through a series of ever-dumber-seeming ideas. Replacing the wonder of the original, with its lavish sets, amazing costumes and groundbreaking practical effects, for the cold, calculated hyperreality of the most expensive CGI that money can buy, combined with jarringly “ultrahip” casting choices, pretty much doomed Oz the Great and Powerful to languish in the shadows of its forebear.

That’s unfair though. This Oz was never going to be a speck on the ass of the Wizard of Oz - but then again, that’s true of most popcorn films. Taking the (generally) sorry state of modern blockbuster films for granted - the proclivity towards 3D “spectacle,” the endless fascination with plasticene landscapes that have long gone past their “best used by date” (oh, about 1993 if you’re asking me), the constant re-working of classic cinema and literature - Oz is about the best that could be expected from that particular strain of filmmaking.

Part of that - scratch that, ALL of that - comes from Sam Raimi, the pre-eminent blockbuster showman currently working. Now, there’s some irony in hiring one of the world’s best practical effects craftsmen to make an Avatar-esque reimagining of the world of Oz (but that’s a bridge we crossed with Spider-Man all the way back in 2002, and the visual kinks have mostly been worked out by now), but garsh-darnit, it just works.

There’s a real airy breeziness to the film, a surprisingly “fuck it” attitude to everything. James Franco doesn’t really need to carry the film on his back because the character doesn’t really matter. Oh sure, casting someone like Nathan Fillion or a similar slick huckster would have worked better than Franco, but like most parts of the movie, it feels like Raimi and his crew have thrown a whole lot of money at what is essentially a lark.

The film opens in the boxy 1.33:1 classic aspect ratio, in black and white - and in 3D, a major misstep, but one that Disney seems to think was necessary. The two-bit magician Oz (Franco) has just finished fleecing some Kansas rubes, along with his assistant (Zach Braff), when he gets sucked up into a tornado and deposited in the land of Oz (and the anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio and digital colours and increased focal depth and the swooning Danny Elfman score all do their best to try to recreate the similar moment in the Wizard of Oz - and Raimi knows from classic cinema - but we’re firmly in “just slightly above XBox 360” land here, which doesn’t inspire the same level of wonder and majesty as it would have in the 1930s).

When we get to Oz, yes, there’s a story of good and evil (and good and evil withces) and betrayals and Mila Kunis in a ghastly hat and Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz chewing up the scenery, but I’d be arsed if any of it actually mattered in any tangible way. There are attempts to fuse the same sort of “Oz as a reflection of real-life issues” thematics to the film as existed in the Wizard of Oz, but done so much more poorly that it hardly counts.

No, the main attraction here is to have Franco’s deliciously noxious character (the problems are in the portrayal, not in the character as written) make his way through the candy-coloured visuals of Oz, gaming the system to his own ends, and this is ridiculously enjoyable. Sure, the look of the film is less than inspiring, but the moments where Raimi is let off his leash (specifically in the “dark forest” segment) are unbridled fun. In the plot and in Raimi’s treatment of it, there’s a real sense of the powerful amounts of fun that cinema can create, and despite the film’s flaws, it’s infectious.

Judged on its actual merits, Oz the Great and Powerful shouldn’t hang together at all. Outside of a few characters (namely Weisz, Williams and Braff), nearly every character is horribly miscast. The story is entirely predictable and, outside of its presentation, almost rote. The look of the film… OK, that could have been improved, objectively - it’s TOO clean, TOO digital. But that’s missing the point: Raimi has succeeded in spending a lot of Disney’s money on something that’s both heavily indebted to classic cinema and full of his requisite impish humour. And it’s crowd pleasing as all heck. Excoriating the film for its failures seems almost abusive for a film this enjoyable to watch.

Bioshock: Infinite (2013)

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:26:13 -0400

“Quality” is a difficult thing to determine, especially as it applies to art. In terms of products, it’s very easy: how much effort was put into this product? How much does it satisfy the requirements of the product? How much value am I getting?

As a straight-up product - a term that video game “critics” the world over (I swear I won’t turn this into a polemic about the sorry state of video game criticism; I did that yesterday, after all!) are trying to get away from, by the way - Bioshock: Infinite is certainly a valuable product. The world that it creates, a floating White City is, independently of how it’s actually used in the game, a marvel of video game architecture. As far as first-person shooters go, it’s about as thoughtful and engaging and engrossing as that genre gets.

But wait - calling first-person shooters a “genre” has always befuddled me. Seemingly ANY genre can get turned into a first-person shooter: all you have to do is throw endless waves of enemy mooks at the player, and I’m sure you could turn Sleepless in Seattle into a runnin’ and gunnin’ corridor shooter. And that’s ultimately Bioshock: Infinite’s fatal flaw, the thing that will forever taint it in my mind: it cannot reconcile the game it is and the game it wants to be.

Theoretically, Bioshock: Infinite is an examination of the American psyche, a barely-veiled disgust for “the lesser” wrapped up in a veneer of patriotism and celebrations of “constitutional rights.” The floating city of Columbia - only one of the many, many leaps of faith that have to be taken in this story that reveals itself as being a whole lot more timey-wimey than it at first seems - is a temple to not only the post-Civil War race issues in America, but also an indictment of Tea Party-esque values.

This is set up in the opening hours of Bioshock: Infinite - or at least, in the parts before you get a gun - in a pretty methodical way. I mean, yes, the racism and the xenophobia of Columbia is pretty much right on the surface, and I don’t think that Ken Levine was particularly “bold” to explore an idea that has been investigated in far greater depth in very nearly every other medium (though few fuse it so successfully with science-fiction tropes), but it certainly creates an intriguing atmosphere, even if that atmosphere doesn’t hold up so well under closer scrutiny. Why are there kinetoscopes dotting floating islands that seem to be operating using far more advanced technology than even our current society understands? Well, Bioshock: Infinite isn’t all that interested in creating a world that hangs together all that well, instead favouring atmosphere over everything else.

The game seems like it’s telling one story, but it’s actually telling three, and the juxtapositions between them are jarring and less than well-constructed, to say the least. The first story, of a prophet with megalomaniacal impulses of racial purity and literal separation between himself and the rest of America, is probably the most successful, even as it retreads the story, atmosphere and setup for the original Bioshock almost verbatim. The second, of a popular uprising called the Vox Populi, which is later demonstrated to be a pretty facade for warmongering tyrants, is an unmitigated disaster: brought up only long enough to criticize the Occupy Wall Street movement, destabilize the idea that Bioshock: Infinite has a definitive political statement to make besides that “authority figures can’t be trusted” (thanks, diary entry from an angst-ridden fifteen-year-old boy!), and to, of course, provide even more differently-coloured mooks for you to gun down, the Vox Populi segment is downright embarrassing for the game’s storytelling.

And finally, there’s the emotional throughline, the story that so many critics suggest the player should concentrate entirely on - the story of Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth. You, of course, play as Booker, a character who has the POTENTIAL to be interesting, save for the fact that he’s yet another gruff-voiced, taciturn tough guy (despite some late-game histrionics to suggest depth to his character - which, in narrative terms, make less and less sense the more you think about it - he’s pretty much the ideal first-person shooter blank slate that the legions of Masculinity and Testosterone Identifying Shooter Dudes can pretend to be; the kind of “frat boys” that Levine himself was attempting to entice). The idea through most of the game is that you are reclaiming Elizabeth, a supernatural gamine who accompanies you through most of the game, and alternates between “pissed off,” “unnaturally helpful and wish-fullfilment-y” (she can scrounge up ammo, health, and money for you, and using her “tear” ability, can teleport objects that can be used in combat situations - the latter ability makes up a significant amount of the narrative, though you’d think that in gameplay terms, if she can teleport in anything, why doesn’t she ever teleport in anything that’s actually interesting? Like, why not drop, say, the Great Pyramids on some enemies?), and throughout the ending, “ethereal and unknowable.”

This storyline relies on a whole lot of plot twists and reliance on the internal consistency of the fantasy elements of the game - elements which, as I’ve alluded to before, feel awfully contrived. The idea of parallel universes isn’t a bad one - it’s a long-explored sci-fi idea that has been rarely mined for gaming purposes - but the problem comes down to perspective.

I don’t want a game that spells everything out for the gamer, mark my words. But it feels to me less like Bioshock: Infinite is being cleverly coy about its plot and thematic machinations, and more like they’re being hidden, with hopes that the various plot twists will seem “deep” in some bizarre way. To me, they don’t. The late-game reveal about the nature of Comstock and DeWitt, even as it’s hinted at throughout the entire game, felt like an opportunity for a plot twist, not a well-integrated plot move. Because of the first-person perspective - and in a lot of ways, this really is one of the better uses of that idea, from a literary perspective, of an “unreliable narrator” and the pitfalls of that limited perspective in terms of reliability - the game gets away with a lot of truly shoddy writing that wouldn’t stick in most other cases.

Characters aren’t really characters - they’re ideologies at the service of characters (at least, until they disappear completely from the narrative for no good reason). The fundamentals of “why?” and “how?” are left obtuse and unknowable. The internal consistency of this world - namely, where the hundreds, if not thousands, of people that you gun down actually come from; or even something as simple as the “vigors,” which are basically bottled superpowers, and how they fit into this world (they don’t by the way - they’re just Bioshock’s plasmids given a different name, and no logical coherence within the game world) - never comes together, no matter how much the intentionally vague and ethereal ending makes it seem like, retroactively, that 95% of the game’s running time should have been better because of it (not the way it wraps up the story, necessarily, just the way that that story is told).

In all honesty, I’ve skirted around the issue enough. Games are a different beast from films. The great Roger Ebert, a better critic in his medium than any video game critic, myself included, could ever hope to be, evaluated films on the basis of what they did within their given structures. He was no great fan of horror films, but he could recognize when a horror film did something exceedingly well or offered a new take on an old, hoary idea.

First-person shooters, though, are another matter entirely. They are a pernicious, demoralizing (at least, for people like myself, who often feel like they’re on the fringe of this “industry”) element of modern video games. The idea of structuring the actual gameplay element of a video game around shooting people is almost never going to work. A game can only be as good as its concept allows it to be in this case, because the “genre” is always going to bring it down.

There’s nothing more to be learned about Columbia by combing every inch. There’s no alternate paths, no “sequence breaking” (even as the game so clearly wants to be Metroid Prime in the construction of its world, it could never have a hope of so clearly transcending its genre) - you’re on an inexorable path forward to murder. And so while the narrative has all these grand ambitions of exploring multiple universes, of investigating the interplay between ideology and humanity, even of what being a human means within constantly shifting identities, it cannot overcome one single problem: shooting guns is boring as all fuck. Shooting is as dumb as all fuck. And spending hours - literal HOURS - shooting and maiming and killing all of these ill-defined enemies, with requisite founts of blood (with no winking Kill Bill-esque Tarantino-isms to balance it out, either - this is very earnest killing we’re talking about here) makes the game’s ability to explore its potentially interesting ideas a moot point.

The story, the world (one where it’s supposedly a large city in the sky, which would suggest, again, a sort of Metroid Prime approach of having a legitimate geography and the occasional backtracking, is instead just another straightforward, “roller coaster ride” corridor shooter, one that doesn’t even have a map), and most of all the ideas are just window dressing. I’m often loathe to quote Sarah Palin, but her ideas about lipstick on a pig ring true here. It seems, to me, that Bioshock: Infinite is somehow even worse than a game that is truly braindead, like Call of Duty - Levine should know better. He’s clearly a thoughtful dude. But every interesting idea here is, fundamentally, at the service of something hollow, something totally braindead, and those ideas about xenophobia and the whole history of America and rubbing the noses of “frat boys” in the horrors that America was complicit in are just simple features - features that set apart Bioshock: Infinite from other products of the same sort.

If I were to sum Bioshock: Infinite up, it would be that someone, somewhere, believes that if you got a truly great historical novel, or a fascinating philosophy article or the like, and you got to shoot people while you read it, that THAT would make that book more interesting. For anyone who is just a little more thoughtful than that, Infinite isn’t going to hold a lot of value, as a product, and especially as a piece of art.

State of the Union Tuesdays with Stephen Keating

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:58:13 -0400

Hi friends! I’m starting a new feature to this blog, wherein pal and old Vigigames contributor Stephen Keating and I engage in a series of back-and-forth letters on a topic of current interest in video games. This week: why no one wants to talk seriously about video games.

Matthew: Hey Stephen! I was actually delving into the Et Tu, Gamer? articles recently, and came to the realization that, hot damn, why are there so few video gaming critics who actually understand and delve deeply into the fundamentals of video gaming like Stephen does? (But I guess most video game critics/”journalists” consider themselves “part of the industry” which is a thousand kinds of stupid).

Stephen: I can tell you why people don’t create a critical discourse for videogames, but it’s pretty depressing. It’s because there are no real critics of videogames. Everyone, for perhaps a decade or more now, is paid to feign enjoyment (I suppose Nintendo Power is really where it started, so if we consider them it’s more than two decades now). There is no critical discourse because critical discourse involves not being a third arm of the publishers, and if you’re being paid to write for a company paid for by publishers, you can be damn sure there won’t be anything negative written about the people paying your bills.

Effectively, it’s a separation that hasn’t happened (and may never happen) in videogame criticism. Movie critics aren’t paid by movie makers, and thus they don’t need to sell a movie. They can say it’s shit, and they’ll still get paid at the end of the day. This doesn’t exist in videogames. Critical distance is entirely absent, and the videogame industry seems entirely complicit in such absence. If you want to know why few people take videogames seriously, it’s because the industry itself refuses seriousness. If you’re a corporate shill, who’s going to take you seriously?

Matthew: Yeah, that’s essentially what I think too. If I’m in a less cynical mood, I would think that part of that cheerleading is a holdover from a time when video games needed exactly that to be considered more than simply toys (as if they’re anything but more complicated toys now - and I still hold out that the best games know that they are only that and nothing more). But I also think that it’s time for the cheerleading to stop.

Have you picked up Bioshock: Infinite yet? I know you were no fan of the first game, and while at the time I thought it was about as good as first-person shooters could possibly get, I now don’t believe that there is such a thing. How can people be praising Bioshock: Infinite (and side note, is that not the worst and most cumbersome and most illogical video game name of all time?) for its “intellectual” components (which are almost entirely non-interactive, and are explored in far more depth by many, many films, books, even visual art) when, at the same time, you are doing some of the dumbest things possible in a video game? WHERE ARE ALL THOSE ENEMIES COMING FROM? I mean, jesus, I think I would rather play a video game that is simply about where and how all of these disposable mooks come from that are so willing to be gunned down! Seriously, though, I cannot believe that there doesn’t seem to be more than one dissenting voice on this game (the only one I’ve found is John Teti at the Gameological Society), which more and more is reinforcing my ideas that there is no critical distance to be easily found in video games “criticism,” period. Very, very few people are actually discussing the “meat” of the game, or are calling out for just how braindead it is behind its villains shouting vaguely “controversial” things while you shoot guns at them for fucking ever.

Stephen: Yes, part of it is the legacy of cheerleading, which is hard to break. Part of it is that now, most magazines and other forms of entertainment news relating to videogames are owned by the corporations who make videogames! I mean, the very idea that we are calling the people journalists or writers or critics when they are paid by the people who make the games is entirely ridiculous! That’s not criticism or journalism! You’re part of the PR now!

As for Bioshock Infinite, I played some previews of it at various junkets, but as for playing the whole thing, no, I’ve never done that. I don’t really want to play these ultraviolent games anymore. Like, a Dark Souls (though Dark Souls is actually challenging—I haven’t once played a first-person shooter, ESPECIALLY the campaign portion, where I felt even remotely challenged) every year or so is fine, but there is literally nothing being put out by the big games industry that is anything more than garbage. And I really mean it. Nintendo is the closest thing to producing quality that has wide appeal, and part of the reason they have wide appeal is because they want to make games that are fun, not games that make you feel like an awful human being for playing them. Yeah, Mario’s got some problems with stuff like Damsels in Distress and other tropes that it could easily grow up out of, but other than that, the games they make tend to be challenging and interesting.

What’s more, there are SO many games out there that challenge the convention that, “hey, you’re just here to have fun.” No, seriously, FUCK YOU industry for thinking that games like Hyperbound and Yume Nikki have no right to exist. That roller coaster rides are all I want out of something I enjoy. I don’t want a media which I enjoy to be, always and forever, made by eternal 15 year-olds, whose unrepentant love of power fantasies offers nothing to ANYONE, even themselves. I’m tired of an industry that cares about money. I’m tired that this big messed up concept of videogames being an INDUSTRY is important. There is a music industry, there is a movie industry, there is a publishing industry, but it’s funny, you know? People don’t tend to focus on the industry side of it in those industries. They tend to focus on the books, and the movies, and the music. Wonder why that is, when they put out shit books and shit movies and shit music, that they focus on the artists and directors of those projects, and not the INDUSTRY. Don’t get me wrong, there is criticism of those industries, and you should hear about it. But there is also a HELL of a lot of criticism going on with regards to the things those industries put out, and not just a banal fallback to “well it’s the INDUSTRY’S fault.”

Consumers of other media with wide appeal aren’t nearly so stupid as to think that it’s all the fault of the industry that they like shit. They aren’t nearly so stupid as to believe that the only thing a media industry can put out is The Avengers when they can also put out Pulp Fiction. And you see, that’s the problem with the game industry. An insular stupidity that is so completely removed from reality as to boggle the mind. A refusal to see that buying SHIT is going get you more SHIT. And that the consumer, not the INDUSTRY is partially responsible for that. And that consumer outcry matters with regards to what we get. The movie critics are not silent in their role, they are able to speak for themselves, and speak out against abuse when they see it happening, and speak out about a movie being shit, and not get attacked and sent death threats. That’s the insanity we’re dealing with in the videogame industry. When you have an industry that will send people DEATH THREATS because of criticism, you are either a group of supremely stupid people, or entirely, unabashedly insane.

And I do in fact mean, insane. Because that is not a sane reaction to criticism, to a person attempting to move an industry forward through their criticism, just as Roger Ebert did for movies. No, the videogame industry, the people who criticize the industry, and the people who sell the industry, must lack sanity. Because that is the only explanation other than them collectively being sociopaths, which is much worse, because at least an insane person may not intend to harm other people through their actions. A sociopath is volitional in their inability to care for others. I would like to think that people are not volitional when they are sending death threats to people. I would like to think that their intentions are not to indeed threaten them, but simply made out of a narrow inability to see others as people. But to be honest? There is deep-seeded fear that this is not in fact the case… and if the industry is indeed run by sociopaths… do sane people honestly want to be a part of it? Because I sure don’t.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2013)

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:16:09 -0400

The prosaic and the magical are at constant war in Level-5’s long-awaited Studio Ghibli jam Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, just as it seems that the design philosophies of Level-5’s RPG department has gone to battle with the light “whimsy-touched-with-melancholy” of Studio Ghibli.

Released earlier this year on the PS3, Studio Ghibli’s first forays into video gaming is, as should be abundantly obvious, a sight to behold. Honestly, when we saw the unveiling of the PS4 a couple of months back, I was actually flabbergasted at what this new machine could possibly do that the PS3 can’t already do. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we already have Ni no Kuni - what more do people want?

This is a gorgeous, and I mean, hot damn, an “I’ve never seen anything like it kind of gorgeous”, making Ni no Kuni one of the very best arguments for games taking place in 3D space that I’ve ever seen. The level of detail is extraordinary; the character designs are fantastic and are essayed into this world wonderfully; the environments are evocative and rich (even if they are still a little bit straightforward, albeit not the extent of, say, Final Fantasy XIII). Ni no Kuni gets an instant recommendation for not only allowing the player entrance into a fully interactive Studio Ghibli world (replete with an absolutely majestic score from Joe Hisaishi, who, as it turns out, is one of only a handful of Ghibli “bigwigs” who make an appearance on this game - most of it has seemingly been farmed out to younger staffers, which makes sense given Hayao Miyazaki’s noted dislike of video gaming in general), but for being one of the most aesthetically complete games that I’ve ever seen. Look again at your average Unreal Engine 3 (or 4!) game in a few years time, and they will look horribly dated with their ill-advised attempts at “realism.” Look to games like The Wind Waker or Ni no Kuni, and you’ll have games that have stood the test of time, even within the realm of 3D gaming.

The “skin” of Ni no Kuni is all Studio Ghibli, including a melancholic setup for the game’s adventure: you play as Oliver, a recent orphan, who journeys into the titular-if-the-game-was-translated “other world” with his newly-awakened doll companion Drippy (who, in the English localization, is a Welshman with a bit of a short temper), a rich fantasy world of magic and unbelievably adorable “monsters” and cats as kings and cows as queens and an evil wizard named Shadar who’s trying to destroy the hearts of every citizen of the other world and a magic book (a “feelie” in Japan, but digitally recreated here) that fills itself up when Oliver stays at an inn and an ultimate big bad (the white witch of the title) and tragic backstories and, mostly, unfettered whimsy. Oh, yeah, and a girl wizard named Esther who can catch monsters Pokemon style, and a pig-masked emperor named Marcassin, and a roguish bandit named Swaine with a secret past come along for the ride. And sky pirates. And a dragon.

Writing it all down like that, Ni no Kuni seems like it should be a slam dunk. The “other world” itself is so delightfully “gee whiz” and the setup - a thinly-veiled metaphor for the grieving process and for the power of escapist fantasy - is meaningfully explored. But, as with most Level-5 RPGs that I’ve played where they haven’t had, say, a Yuji Horii standing over them, the company cannot resist resorting to gameplay contrivance to drive the game forward.

Level-5 (and company founder/game director Akihiro Hino in particular) seems to believe that if you have enough “stuff” in your game, it doesn’t matter what the quality of that stuff is, exactly. The game world, so exquisitely designed (and bringing back, for once, the RPG overworld, something that has been sorely lacking in JRPGs since, oh, Final Fantasy X all the way back in 2001), is indeed full of incident and full of quirky characters and situations, and truth be told, simply getting to see these characters and places is almost worth it - but very few characters, outside of Oliver in the early going and late-game investigations of Shadar and the White Witch, are given any level of depth. They’re all just a collection of easily-definable “tics” or simple expressions of whimsy or exuberance, which is charming at first but gets increasingly grating as the game goes on. The characters spend SO much time talking about the plot that their own motivations and desires are pushed aside, and when that plot is so clearly an extended metaphor (and one where the stakes are raised VERY late in the game - this is a game with some major pacing issues), it gets grating, quickly.

That’s not to say the whole game is a slog, of course. Even if the game wasn’t as ridiculously well-presented as it is, the battle system and the Pokemon-esque monster catching would be time well spent (at least, within the realm of JRPG conventions). The battling is a mixture of menu-based combat and Tales of…-style action, and if it is at first slightly cumbersome, it becomes an intriguingly deep mixture of strategy and timing that is probably the best, newfangled approximation of the old “action gauge” standby. The monster catching is cribbed entirely from Pokemon, but getting to have direct control over your “familiars” (as they’re called here) gives it a new feeling overall. The sheer amount of time you can spend catching monsters, leveling them up, evolving them, and crafting the perfect team is mind-boggling.

Other than those borrowed, if still pleasurable joys, and the simple wonder of exploring Ni no Kuni’s world, what you’re actually tasked with doing most of the time comes down to one simple word: chores. The game doesn’t even try to hide it: 90% of your “quests” are simple fetch quests that involve either getting something for someone, or retrieving the “broken pieces of their heart” and returning them. Symbolically, a nice gesture, but in gameplay terms, this just means running between NPCs ad nauseam. The game at least rewards the player for taking on these missions with new powerups, rather than simply money or items (though you get those too), but the occasional steep spikes in difficulty require either a dedication to grinding it out or doing these less than inspiring tasks, which is really a decision that no gamer should have to make.

Even the dungeon design, gorgeous as it is, is pretty dull - running straight through, collecting things from chests, engaging in extremely simple puzzles, fighting bosses; it’s very old-school, which is good, and it’s not significantly different from most JRPGs, but somehow, by bringing the camera right behind Oliver, these dungeons feel claustrophobic and uninspiring (not in a good way, either).

Still, I think you’d have to be a real curmudgeon to not get some enjoyment out of the game. Ni no Kuni’s worst sins are that it relies on decades of video game contrivance to propel its gameplay forward. I of course wish that Level-5 was a little bit more adventurous - that they were able to match the presentational polish with the same attention to story and incident. You can’t get away from how goddamned wonderful the game is, though, even when Level-5 is trying their darndest.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:24:28 -0400

Nine years later, and Spider-Man 2 is still the best superhero movie ever made. There’s a whole lot of qualifiers to that statement (The Dark Knight, for instance, might be the best movie ever made that also happens to incidentally be a superhero movie, and we open up a whole ‘nother can of beans if we include any film based on a comic book or a graphic novel, in which case Persepolis says hello), but that’s still quite the achievement for a genre that has become so dangerously oversaturated in the last decade or so - since, in fact, Spider-Man Classic came out in 2002.

Everything is firing on all cylinders. Sam Raimi, on his second blockbuster-budget outing, seems to have a firmer grasp of how to incorporate his low-rent practical-effects-driven aesthetic within a summer CGI tentpole film (there’s an extended Frankenstein/Evil Dead mashup/homage that warmed my heart to no end). The acting across the board, from Tobey Maguire’s surprisingly soulful performance of Peter Parker to J.K. Simmons’ hilariously scenery-chewing J. Jonah Jameson, even to James Franco’s Harry Osborn, are all top-notch. The new additions, like Alfred Molina’s tragic Dr. Octavius, work wonderfully (Molina is especially adept at navigating the many nuances of his character, first as an ambitious yet kind-hearted scientist and then, of course, as a megalomaniacal villain of the first order). Perhaps most surprisingly, the writing has taken a massive leap forward - I’m going to credit my main man Michael Chabon for working this script into something meaningful in between the multiple feats of derring-do.

Indeed, this is much more of the story of Peter Parker than it is Spider-Man, and that’s the way it should be, especially given how dodgy the early-2000s CG is in the film (Spider-Man himself is a vast improvement, but still appears weightless and plasticine; Doc Ock’s arms are fantastic across the board, though). The film gains a lot of goodwill by assuming that the audience is on board with Peter Parker’s origin story (one wishes that The Amazing Spider-Man would have started from the same place as this one, but alas) and simply running with it.

Peter is in a bit of turmoil, albeit of a decidedly small-scale sort. Simply put, despite his many talents, he’s having a difficult time balancing life as Peter and life as Spider-Man, and seemingly failing on both accounts. His personal life is a shambles, with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) marrying an anonymously handsome astronaut (and son of J. Jonah Jameson), his classes falling by the wayside, and his shitty pizza delivery job going nowhere. And to top it off, he’s losing his superpowers at random.

This leads to a genuine crisis of conscience - does he give up being Spider-Man and focus on himself for a change, or does he step up and face the new threat posed by Doc Ock? Obviously, we know the answer to this, given the series reiteration of “great power/responsibility” and all that jazz (as well as the existence of a Spider-Man 3 that isn’t just Peter Parker in a downward spiral of depression and ennui), but in the moment, the film makes this internal conflict seem real.

And in terms of the external conflict - between Spider-Man, Doc Ock and the City of New York (oh, and throw in Harry Osborn for good measure) - this is a marked improvement over Spider-Man in every single way. The film is certainly more serious in its storytelling and almost literary ambitions, but the action and the way it’s constructed by Raimi has a Saturday morning cartoon feel, which is very much to the film’s benefits. It’s easy to lose sight of in the post-Christopher Nolan years, but superhero movies did once have that same sense of “gee golly” wonder and cartoon logic that makes reading Golden Age comic books so much fun, and with such a passionate and knowledgeable director behind the camera, you get a real sense that the Spider-Man property isn’t being used simply out of box office necessity - instead, everything is treated with the exact right tone, the exact correct approach.

Indeed, what truly sets Spider-Man 2 apart from most superhero movies, and even most movies based on comic books, is that Spider-Man 2 effectively captures the essence of reading a comic book. When you read a really good, classic comic book, especially by the inimitable Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, you’re not really thinking about grand personal tragedy, or even about how comic book heroes are about the closest thing we have to a modern mythology; instead, you get wrapped up in that sense of wonder and amazement, that sense that you are an excitable twelve-year-old kid again. The fact that Spider-Man 2 captures that essence while also providing such a readily identifiable and well-written plot at the same time makes it extraordinary.

Simply put, there are very few overtly “fun” movies that are as well-crafted and enjoyable to watch as Spider-Man 2. Yes, the psychology isn’t seriously delved into, and yes, the film paints its themes broadly, with crowd-pleasing action sequences and gentle humour, but isn’t that essentially what we want from our entertainments? I love a deep, well-made movie, but sometimes, the best big budget entertainment can be somehow even more impressive, especially given the climate that that particular “genre” has seen recently.

Vigigame Week: Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (2008)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:17:01 -0400

It’s twice the Vigigame insanity here at Review Times today! Here’s how it works: I’ve taken the Nintendo Power list of the 285 best games for Nintendo systems (along with, for some reason, IGN’s list of the 100 best PS2 games, for variety) and chucked them into a randomizer. Then I’m going to play a game per day this week for as long as I can before writing a review of it. Today’s second game: Ninja Gaiden: A Shoehorned-in Reference to this Being On the DS.

Five years doesn’t seem like a very long time ago. I remember 2008 with shocking clarity. Somehow, I just know that a game like Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword would have seemed a lot more impressive then than it does now. It’s rare for video games to seem at once so innovative and now so very, very old-fashioned as this one. Again, only FIVE YEARS AGO.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword is a kind of “interquel” between Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2, released for the DS. Team Ninja head Tomonobu Itagaki apparently wanted to make a Ninja Gaiden game that anyone could play, forgoing the usual complex mechanics and brutal difficulty for something a lot more accessible.

On the DS, this involves not only using the stylus for very nearly every thing you do (moving, slashing with your sword, throwing throwing stars, using secret “ninpo” techniques, jumping - in fact, the only thing you don’t do with the stylus is block), but also turning the DS on its side in its “book format.”

On the one hand, there’s something inherently charming about this sort of control scheme now. I have a 3DS sitting right next to me, and while there have been more than a few cracking good games on that system, there’s almost none that actually utilize the system in such crazy ways as was somewhat common on the DS. It’s hard to imagine - in fact, impossible to imagine, since it can’t be done - a game where you turn the 3DS on its side and use touch controls only.

In reality, if Dragon Sword was being developed today, there’s almost no chance it would be on a Nintendo system at all, unless it was a lot more traditionally controlled. With the exception of its fairly prodigious length (about 8 - 10 hours) and its attempts at telling… some kind of story (which, as someone who has never played a Ninja Gaiden barring the NES ones, I had no idea what was going on, except to say that it was presented as being very Medieval and Important), this is basically an iOS game.

Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily - in fact, touch controls can and have been used to fantastic effect on both the DS and iOS platforms. However, this is an attempt to marry touch controls to what is, all things told, a fairly traditional beat-em-up, and the results are less than engaging.

It’s actually not even the fact that it’s touchscreen controls being used here. They work really well. It’s that the game is just too shallow to be enjoyed for any lengthy period of time. The game is essentially “move from one area, kill all the enemies, move to another area, kill more enemies, learn a new skill, use it, kill more enemies.” I guess if you were more invested in the story than I was, this wouldn’t be such a bad thing, since the “kill the enemies” part is relatively entertaining, if not exactly mind-blowing. It’s just too repetitive with not enough pay-off.

It is, however, gorgeously presented. This is one of the most beautiful DS games I’ve ever seen, as Team Ninja wisely understands the limitations of the system and works with them. The game feels a little bit like a vintage PSX game (in a good way) in that it uses pre-rendered backgrounds in addition to 3D modeled avatars. This works really well because, if you’ve ever seen a fully-3D DS game… yikes. Instead, the focus is put on the animation and the overall aesthetics of the game, which are really rather lovely.

Still, I think that things have changed since 2008. It’s not enough, at least for me, for a game to simply “work.” There has to be something beyond that. There’s nothing wrong per se with Ninja Gaiden DS, but there’s nothing really inspiring about it either.

Vigigame Week: Ico (2001)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:10:28 -0400

It’s Vigigame Week on Review Times! Here’s how it works: I’ve taken the Nintendo Power list of the 285 best games for Nintendo systems (along with, for some reason, IGN’s list of the 100 best PS2 games, for variety) and chucked them into a randomizer. Then I’m going to play a game per day this week for as long as I can before writing a review of it. Today’s game: Ico.

I doubt I’m blowing anyone’s mind when I say that Ico is a very, very good game. Very good games (and games with VERY long development times - Ico, for instance, is a six hour game to play that took FOUR YEARS to make) are about the only thing that Team ICO makes. In just about every way that matters to me personally, Ico nails these elements of game design in a beautiful, harmonious way.

The thing is, though, I just finished playing this game not twenty minutes ago, and at the end of it all, I just feel… cold? Like somehow, this emotional connection that the game seems so expertly designed to engender (and which was so masterfully done in Team ICO’s other game, Shadow of the Colossus) just didn’t happen for me.

I don’t want this review to come across as being negative. In pretty much every way that matters, Ico is a goddamned masterpiece. The minimalist aesthetics, here taken further even than in SotC, are gorgeous and aching, creating a real sense of tonal completion that very few video games are able to get to. The isolated, lonely castle that is Ico’s setting is one of the very best creations in all of video gaming, brilliant enough to inspire some of the very best video game designers working today (including Eiji Aonuma and Jordan Mechner, for starters). The sense of exploration, the stress-inducing tension that comes from the smallest things (letting your partner’s hand slip, or miscalculating a jump) - all of these things are absolutely brilliant.

The game, in its idiosyncratically oblique way, tells the story of Ico, a young boy who has been cast out of his village for the “sin” of being born with horns on his head. Exiles are apparently left to fend for themselves in a giant, seemingly empty castle - but Ico breaks free. While trying escape, he meets a ghostly girl named Yorda, and though neither of them can understand the other, they form a bond that goes beyond language, allowing them to escape from the clutches of Yorda’s mother, the youth-coveting Queen.

A fairly standard setup, delivered in a completely un-standard way, Ico is proof of the effectiveness of leaving game stories up to the imagination of the player. The “subtractive design” that Fumito Ueda and his team used for all aspects of the game is felt most keenly here in this mysterious, slightly dark fairy tale, one that would certainly feel rote told any other way, but here feels revelatory.

In gameplay terms, Ico’s inspirations feel at once obvious and nonexistent. The jumping mechanics (probably one of the least-successful parts of the game, at least from a “I don’t want to be so goddamned frustrated” perspective) and animations are straight out of old-school Prince of Persia, and the overall aesthetic is somewhat indebted to The Legend of Zelda, but there’s a misty, ethereal quality to everything that is entirely unique to Ico.

And as much as I love those aforementioned games, none of them maintain such a cohesive, simplified design. Everything from the combat (intentionally clumsy - you ARE a twelve-year-old boy, after all) to the partner mechanics, even to the save points (couches, where you and Yorda sit to catch your breath) are designed to create this mysterious bond between player and on-screen avatars.

Maybe I’m a curmudgeon, but that connection just didn’t quite come through for me, even as I could see the way that the game was trying to create it and could respect the impetus behind it. See, the issue is with Yorda herself. There’s a button reserved on the PS2 controller for calling Yorda over, for holding her by the hand and taking her to the various parts of the castle, so that you can get through it together and avoid the shadow monsters attempting to swallow her up. In terms of avoiding the pitfalls of AI scripting in “escort missions,” I completely understand the design decisions. But from a feminist perspective, Yorda is kind of a disaster.

She embodies nearly every element of the damsel in distress trope, with no attempts (a la, say, Skyward Sword) to subvert it. Yorda is literally incapable of fending for herself, or even to make decisions for herself. She’s less an independent character and more of an extension of Ico, and it’s that complete lack of awareness within the character that took me out of the central relationship. It doesn’t matter how sweet, childlike and innocent the relationship is between Ico and Yorda - when Yorda can’t think for herself or do anything herself and has absolutely no agency whatsoever, that’s problematic, even if it results in some pretty interesting gameplay implications. Ico is asking you to “protect” a female character who has been reduced to an automaton, and everything in my body says that that’s fundamentally wrong.

That’s an unfortunate aftertaste to have in a game that is, in every way except for conceptually (and, OK, the mechanics occasionally leave something to be desired, especially in jumping situations), an artistic slam dunk. A game this far ahead of nearly everything else that has been made in the last, oh, twelve years shouldn’t be brought down by something so backwards. And yet, here we are.

Vigigame Week: Luigi's Mansion (2001)

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:56:23 -0400

Folks, you have no idea how happy I was when, through the power of my randomizer, this game floated up near the top. I’d never before played the Gamecube’s at-first-misunderstood-now-fondly-remembered-enough-to-make-a-3DS-sequel launch title Luigi’s Mansion, and with Dark Moon having just come out, it worked out serendipitously that this should be the next game that I’d be playing for this series.

A console’s launch is a tough burden to bear. Pre-Wii, launch titles on Nintendo systems were as much about introducing the concept of the system while simultaneously answering everyone’s burning question: what is this new hardware going to mean for Mario? Before the Gamecube came out, Mario accompanied every single launch: the groundbreaking Super Mario Bros. on the NES, the perfection of 2D Mario with the flat-out masterpiece Super Mario World, the brave new world of 3D with Super Mario 64 - those are tough acts for any video game to follow. (Perhaps the reason why the Wii U has been struggling a little out of the gates is because its Mario game does almost nothing new - but that’s neither here nor there).

Luigi’s Mansion, the first real game to star Mario’s brother, is a charming, silly little adventure that in no way lives up to that trio of perfect system sellers. But that’s an awful lot for our friend in green to be burdened with, isn’t it? Forget that this is a launch title for a second, and all of a sudden the unreasonable expectations placed on Luigi seem as daft as they really are. This is a game quite unlike anything else that Nintendo had made before, and it should be celebrated for its successes rather than being slagged off for not being a Mario game.

It isn’t a Mario game! Luigi’s Mansion is quite a different beast altogether. Take away the ghost-catching and add in a more forefronted story (side note: even though there isn’t much of a story to the game, Luigi’s Mansion proves definitively that Nintendo are really masters of purely visual storytelling anyways) and you’d have something that largely resembles the output of LucasArts’ point-and-click division in their heyday. Something so radically different from Mario’s brand of running and jumping doesn’t really even deserve to be compared to that, even if the game does star one half of the Mario Bros.

The thing that stands out, even above the absolutely swell gameplay, is the mansion itself - the haunted house that you comb your way through is a masterpiece of video game design. Sure, the mansion (and the whole game, really) is indebted to Scooby-Doo, but there’s a real love of old horror tropes going on here, and the sheer variety from room to room, and the clear attention to detail in every single area is astonishing, and not just for a Gamecube game.

Luigi’s Mansion tasks you with going from room to room, solving a puzzle or two within each one, and catching ghosts, using a gloriously tactile combination of button presses (to hit the ghosts with your flashlight) and analog stick waggling (to rope in the ghosts, like a fishing line). I’ve played the most recent Ghostbusters game, and despite the exact same formula, Nintendo got there first and did it better. There’s a nice rhythm dictated by this formula, and even though your interactions are incredibly simple for the most part (the most complicated the game gets is by throwing the ability to shoot different elements - ice, water and fire - at you), Nintendo has a surfeit of ideas that tweak this just enough so that it never gets stale.

A large part of this has to do with the personalities of the ghosts themselves, and it’s here that the game feels most classic-adventure-y. Every ghost has a distinct behaviour pattern, which requires close attention not only to how they’re acting, but also their likes and dislikes (things you can discover by taking a picture of them through the hilarious “Game Boy Horror”). These larger ghosts are kind of like puzzles and kind of like boss fights, and they’re always a blast to figure out. One might have you ruffling a ghost’s hair to disrupt their mirror-bound narcissism; another involves playing every musical instrument in a room before being assaulted by flying music books. It’s always a hoot.

But the thing is, the game just… ends. It’s short, and that’s always been its legacy. Honestly, a tightly-wound five or six hour game might not have been the worst thing in the world, except that there is an unfortunate amount of padding. The “hunt in every room for the fifty scattered Boos” quest, replete with interruptions from the slightly-annoying Professor E. Gadd, gets old real quick, and for all of the charms of the mansion itself, having such frequent, meandering backtracking makes that charm disappear in a hurry. Luigi’s Mansion, minus the fat, would make for a perfect downloadable title in this era, but at the time of the Gamecube’s release, paying $50 for a game that is padded out even at five hours is a little bit nauseating to think about (thankfully, it’s now like $10 at most used video game stores).

Still, warts and all, this is a wholly original sort of game, the kind of bold experiment that few game companies would be willing to try with a console launch (and maybe most wouldn’t do the same as Nintendo, considering that the Gamecube is one of the worst-selling mainstream consoles in history). In the face of the Super Mario Worlds and the Wii Sports and the Twilight Princesses of the world, Luigi’s Mansion might seem like a slight lark, a throwaway that even Nintendo kind of forgot existed until recently, but that would be denying the wonderful whimsicality of the game itself. Luigi’s Mansion almost deserves to be divested from that context entirely and taken on its own terms - it’s certainly a lot more fun in that light.

Vigigame Week: Contra (1988)

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:15:16 -0400

I have no real basis upon which to make this kind of formulation, but Contra + the Konami Code (the most famous cheat code in the world and the only real reason why this port of the game is thought of before the graphically superior arcade version) seems to me like the great great grandfather of the current gaming industry. Maybe that’s a broad statement to make, but think about it this way: Contra is a fucking ass balls hard game, one whose arcade roots are always visible. It’s the sort of game where if your NES had a coin slot and the ability for those coins to get teleported to Konami, that would be happening.

But turn on the Konami Code, and all of a sudden you’ve got an enjoyable action romp. Maybe an enjoyable action romp that lasts for like half an hour, but enjoyable nonetheless. Playing with the Konami Code, Contra feels like an 8-bit, sidescrolling, run-and-gun version of the sort of action games that have been predominant for years. You die, and you get picked up not a few feet from where you were slain. You lose your powerups, but hell, you’re still going to get to the end probably - you have 99 lives! Is that really any different from the brainless shoot and spawn shooters that have flooded (and oversaturated) the market in the last few years?

Well, yes, actually. Outside of Shinji Mikami’s massive Contra fan-letter in Vanquish, there are few games that involve shooting dudes (in the NES version, aliens) that are as enjoyable as Contra. Partially, that’s due to mechanics - the eight-direction shooting is fun to this day - but it also has to do with straight-up simplicity. A modern shooter uses complex controls and realistic blood effects and what have you to accomplish something that is, at the end of the day, as balls-out dumb as Contra. The difference is that Contra makes no apologies for it (nor should it have to - its dumbness is both an asset and something that has clearly been influenced by its context. It’s basically Rambo meets Aliens, after all). Its enemies could be anything, and you could be shooting anything, and it would still be fun.

I feel like I’m having a hard time establishing the appeal of Contra, other than constantly reiterating that it’s dumb. It’s more than that - it’s fun. That’s a common word that’s used all out of proportion with video games, but it actually applies here. I think it’s because of the game’s innocence. Sure, it’s a lot more gritty than something like the just-released Super Mario Bros. 2, but it’s emphatically not grim. It’s just a run from left-to-right, shoot everything in sight sort of game, before those sorts of descriptors signified a trite, boring, possibly offensive sort of game. Maybe Contra is the grandfather of our current era, but with its awesome chiptune soundtrack, fun gameplay and completely guileless braindead nature, it’s clear that grandpa is way cooler than his grandsons.