RoguePenguin

Actually, the Harry Potter movie was called “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” but I was on a roll with colons there and didn’t want to break it.

Erm.

Anyway, much in the vein of the video game reviews I just posted, these are just quick reviews of my recent Netflix watchings.

Blood: The Last Vampire

The story here actually comes from an anime movie with the same name that was released way back in the early 2000s.  Apparently it was adapted into a live action film by… er, either a Hollywood studio who employed Korean actors, or a Korean studio who got Hollywood backing.  Either way, this movie was relatively big budget, all things considered.  The money could probably have been better spent elsewhere.

The story, in case you don’t want to wikipedia it, is that Saya is a vampire hunter and is, herself, a bit of a vampire as well.  In classic vampire hunter tradition, she is not quite a vampire, having been born like a regular girl and growing up to be a teenager before her vampire powers kicked in.  In this world, Vampires don’t fear the light or holy water, as they do in typical western myths.  Instead, vampires are sort of like demons or monsters who walk in the form of humans but are actually larger and more grotesque creatures.  Anyway, Saya is hunting the vampire who killed her mentor and has come to a US Air Force Base located in Tokyo, Japan just after World War II.  There she tries to blend in as a student (she looks, and will eternally look, like a teenager due to her heritage) but that goes to hell almost as soon as it’s conceived as a plan.  She saves a classmate there who becomes intrigued by Saya and follows her unwittingly into danger.  From there the story changes into a chase scene with people trying to kill Saya while she tries to simultaneously not die and keep her hanger-on from not dying as well until they find the vampire Saya was looking for.

The movie clearly loved fight scenes and so many are in this film that it’s surprising there is any space left over for story.  There is copious wire work and lots and lots of very, very bad CGI.  Saya herself is very impressive and it’s clear she’s doing a lot of her stunts without the benefit of Matrix-style CGI.  Still, the fights drag on WAAAAAY too long and by the time Saya DOES find the Vampire she’s looking for, I no longer really cared.

Not a terrifically good movie even if all you’re looking for is fight scenes, but a decent adaptation of the anime version (which I saw back when it was released and didn’t really enjoy either).

Conclusion: D+

Terminator: Salvation

I like this series in general, and proudly count myself among those who enjoyed Terminator 3 and felt it was an excellent addition to the franchise.  So I had good feelings coming into this film, despite it being directed by the retardedly-named “McG”. As it turns out, this movie is not as good as Terminator 3, though it does put in a decent effort only to be tragically hobbled by a need to put in a thousand references to Terminator 1 and 2.

The movie is well made, with excellent effects (including a fully CGI version of Arnold Schwarzenegger that looked completely lifelike), but the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the grand scheme of things.

First, one of the major plots of this film is that Skynet has identified and is targeting a young Kyle Reece and John Connor is desperate to save him since he’s his “father.”

Why?  No part of that fits the established cannon.  How would Skynet even know Reece is John’s father? That happened long before Skynet existed, and John’s true father is absolutely not written in any record since he was a time traveller from the future.  How would he have gotten this information (let alone a scan of his face, which is what is used to identify him) unless John himself typed it into a computer and told people?  He lived off-the-grid between T2 and T3 according to canon, why would he have even mentioned his father to anyone on the record?

Furthermore, the Kyle Reece that was John’s father came from a future where the war had already been won and was based on technology that had evolved from the early 90’s view of computers.  Skynet was a machine back then, not software.  THAT Reece’s timeline is clearly not the same as the one we’re seeing now.  Therefore, nothing that occurs in THIS timeline can affect John’s status as a leader of the resistance.

Finally, John should already know this.  Now, I get he may have some lingering familial feelings for the father he never met, but the Kyle in this movie is a teenager!  There is nothing he’s going to get from this Kyle that could ever compare to growing up without a father.

This is the first Terminator film that doesn’t involve time travel and, surprisingly, everything falls apart without it.  Skynet’s plans only really work with the benefit of hindsight.  Their proactive actions fail to make any sense unless they’ve seen the previous Terminator films and knew how these things go.

Despite all the above, though, I enjoyed the movie for the spectacle of it.  And for Marcus (played by the Avatar himself, Sam Worthington) who puts in a compelling story of a man who finds out he is less than human and must live with the consequence.  Too bad he shared screentime with John Connor.

Conclusion: C

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

There’s no point in talking about story here, either you’ve read the books or you don’t care about this film.  What I am going to mention is the traits that make a good adaptation.

You cannot translate a book word-for-word into script and shoot it.  It is simply not going to result in something watchable (see: DaVinci Code and Harry Potter 1).  You have to change it.  Sometimes, you have to change whole sections of it or even throw out every bit of dialog in favor of something new.

This film doesn’t quite eject the entire book’s dialog, but it does give it a new structure to exist in and spends a lot of time building atmosphere with unspoken set pieces.  Hogwarts has gotten darker and darker with each incarnation of this film series and the viewing experience has only improved because of it.  This movie spends a lot of time away from Hogwarts, though, and the small towns, dark cities, and expansive caverns continue the bleak set design effectively.

Not everything made it from book to screen, but I think the essence of it is there.  I didn’t particularly care for this book and put off reading it until just before the last book in the series came out.  This movie, however, is quite good, and I would gladly watch it again if given the opportunity.

Conclusion: B+

Not much fanfare to speak of here, just wanted to get my final opinions on a couple of games I had mentioned briefly before and have recently completed.

Assassin’s Creed II

I got into this a little in my Best of 2009 post yesterday but, briefly, this game is a major improvement over the previous edition in the series, despite appearing quite similar.  The story is much more intriguing to me as well.  As much as there was to digest philosophically about Altair’s quest in AC1, ultimately, the lack of an initial connection between targets made the game seem a little disjointed.  Yes, he was picking off Templars during the Crusades, but that is just setting, the characters themselves were not very intriguing.

AC2, in comparison, makes the fight personal. It’s about revenge for Ezio and tradition for his family.  The targets are all connected to the framing of Ezio’s immediate family and slowly the scope of the story grows to bring the Piece of Eden back from the first game to give it a bit of cross-time relevance.  Then the ending…. well, the ending probably wins in the battle of all time story twists and cliffhangers.  M. Night Shyamalan should probably take lessons here.

All in all, very enjoyable, and the missions were very varied, which was much appreciated compared to the same three missions over and over again in AC1.  I can’t wait until AC3 comes out, though we’ll have to put up with this gaiden game coming out later in 2010 that is really just an expansion pack of assassin jobs that Ezio completes but isn’t really arc-relevant.

Bayonetta

Not much changed from my first impression to my last, to tell you the truth.  The story never coherently forms, at least to the point that anyone would ever care.  Bayonetta never becomes more interesting than her character design.  The combat continues to feel smooth and is really, really fun.  This is probably the pinnacle of gameplay design when it comes to these games.  If the next DMC doesn’t take it’s cues from this game I’ll be astonished.

So, fully recommended for a very pretty, very smooth, fighting game.  Completely NOT recommended if you like any sort of story.

…

That’s it right now for completed games.  Mass Effect 2 is currently in the 360 queue and already shaping up to be one of the better games I’ve ever played.

I hadn’t forgotten, though I have been a bit busy lately.  Just like last year, I’ve compiled a listing of all the video games (for any platform) that I’ve played in 2009 more or less to completion.  It’s a much shorter list, for a variety of reasons I’ve already discussed in the past six months or so.  But, anyway, here’s the rankings and a short explanation afterwords:

2009 Video Games Ranked:

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3)
2. Assassins Creed II (360)
3. inFamous (PS3)
4. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (360)
5. House of the Dead: Overkill (Wii)
6. Monkey’s Island Special Edition (XBLV)
7. The Beatles: Rock Band (360)
8. Star Ocean: The Last Hope (360)
9. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (XBLV)

Okay, it’s a MUCH smaller list than last year, and even then I’m cheating a little bit.  I haven’t yet completed Star Ocean or Assassins Creed II yet, but I’ve gotten far enough into those games to know my opinion on them.  Also, I technically played a bit of Tom Clancy’s HAWX, Uncharted 2, and Modern Warfare 2, but not really enough time that I feel comfortable ranking against the games in the above list.

So, 2009 was absolutely the year of the blockbuster.  Apart from Galactrix, Monkey’s Island, and House of the Dead, all of those games were intended to be AAA titles for their publishers (even Star Ocean, to a minor extent), and for the most part those games succeeded in their endeavors.  Batman, of course, is more or less the de facto victor of 2009 to the extent that there is an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for Arkham Asylum for the game with the highest average review score.  So it’s hard to question that…

And to be fair, the game deserves it. It was way fun to play and not at all poor in the story department.  There have been a number of favorable write ups that have dissected the game, including an article about it by my favorite video game critic (here), so there is plenty reasons to choose from as to why everyone liked it.  Personally, I can’t deny that part of my love of this game has to do with the involvement of Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, and Arleen Sorkin as Joker, Batman, and Harley respectively.  The game development team showed a lot of respect to the existing legacy of good Batman adaptations by using these voice actors and I have to give them full credit for doing so.

But also, Arkham Asylum does an excellent job of blending gameplay limitations into story ones.  Clearly the producer of this game didn’t want to render all of Gotham, but why would Batman give up his endless patrols of ‘His City’ even for one night?  Of course, because there’s a breakout at Arkham Asylum.  Game development limitation has now been superseded by a plot-based one.  Additionally, and this is just a personal thing regarding the previous Batman adaptations, this Batman didn’t just pull crap out of his utility belt at odd times.  There are several points in the game where Batman proves himself to be very, very well prepared, but not to absurdity.  New equipment in the game is recovered from his Batcave, or assembled using parts left by enemy characters.  This reduces instances of ’shark repellent spray’, but also gives credit to Batman’s ingenuity, something that is inseparable from the character these days.

I think the only way to make a better game at this point is to make the next one focused entirely on detective work while by day balancing a major WayneTech merger with an unscrupulous company as Bruce Wayne.

Um, by ‘better game’ here I’m referring to a better game for me.  I’m quite well aware most people do not share my tastes.

Moving along, Assassins Creed II has got a great story, and they have done an excellent job making me care about Ezio as a character, much more so than Altiar (From AC1).  Furthermore, the refinements in gameplay (which are minor in the grand scheme of things) make the game much more fluid, even if I had initially complained about it similarity to it’s predecessor.  There are few twists the game throws at you as you progress that surprised me and my opinion of the game grew from there.

An aside has to be made here for the copious usage of Italian in this game.  The first Assassin’s Creed did not have a whole lot of Arabic, Turkish, Greek, or whatever was period appropriate in 1191 Jerusalem. But it didn’t really seem out of place, the game was clearly starring an English speaking man so everything needed to be translated for him anyway, why not for the audience as well?  AC2, however, decided to put in a bunch of Italian, for atmosphere, I suppose.  The flimsy explanation is that the translator on the Animus is a little finicky.  Truth be told, though, it DOES actually add a lot to the atmosphere, especially since it seems people slip into Italian most frequently when they are pissed off.  By default, as well, the game simply leaves the Italian untranslated and leaves the player to figure it out by context.  This is, in my opinion, awesome.  Why not make the player think a bit more when they play?  Why not remind the US that there are other languages out there that people know?  Of course, you can turn on subtitles in the game, which will provide a translation for the brief bits of Italian, but still, setting the default to no-subtitles?  Very classy.  We need developers to treat their players like thinking adults more often.

The next few games in the list were fun but not really remarkable.  inFamous was a lot of fun but started to drag a bit towards the end.  Once you max out your ethics bar, there really isn’t as much incentive to do the missions unless you’re a completionist.  I’m not, so towards the end of the game I just gave up on the side quests and focused on the story missions.  I don’t feel I missed out on much.

Ghostbusters was, unfortunately, not much more than it seemed on the box.  I know the original cast and crew were involved in making this game, and theoretically that should have made it closer to a ’spiritual sequel’ to the movies than any adaptation could have been, but in the end it felt sort of hollow.  I think film makers need to focus on making films and let the video game writing be done by professionals.  The story in this game was little more than a ‘best hits’ compilation with a very large number of jokes that fell entirely too flat.  It was fun to PLAY, on the other hand, and the story wasn’t objectionable, just somewhat dull, so on the whole it actually rates higher than most games I play.

House of the Dead was surprisingly fun, given the series had gotten a little played towards the end of the numbered games.  This one swaps out the X-Files-like horror supernatural elements for a direct parody of Blaxsploitation films.  Incredibly, it works.  Very, very well.  Who knew the two genres were just begging to be blended?

Monkey’s Island was just a re-release really with better graphics and sound.  It was great to relive the glory days of adventuring gaming, though, so I let this one sneak onto my 2009 list.  Rock Band is Rock Band.  Adding a bunch of Beatles songs doesn’t change it very much for me.

Finally, Star Ocean and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix.  Both of these games involve the pretense of a story about space exploration, but end up getting dragged down by their own combat systems.  At least Galactrix is really only a thinly veiled Bejeweled game with the twist of a 6-sided board instead of a 4-sided one.  Star Ocean has fewer excuses.

It’s really a shame, because Star Ocean always was taking riffs from Star Trek, and while it was somewhat obvious in the past, it was at least charmingly done.  This game, though, seems to want to give up the old Star Trek references in favor of crafting some sort of Star Wars / BSG feel, except with painfully bad Japanese humor.  Seriously, Japan, this stuff is not funny.  Ever wonder why all the highest grossing movies in your country come from America?  Its because you ruin all your good premises with terrible, terrible humor.

I honestly want to say more about Star Ocean but this franchise is essentially dead according to SquareEnix, so, I’m not entirely positive its worth the breath.

So, that’s it.  2009 in a nutshell. Some great games, some mediocre games, and a few kinda bad ones.  I’d be depressed if 2010 hasn’t ALREADY given us Bayonetta and Mass Effect 2, games that single-handedly have surpassed everything in 2009 in my mind.  The future is bright.

Truth be told, I use this site more as a diversion during work than for anything else more legitimate.  Which mostly explains why posts have been scarce these past two or three weeks.  With end of year activities and some front loaded 2010 work I have, I just have been too busy to even take a full lunch, let alone write up some more content for this website.  Looking forward, I don’t think I’ll have much opportunity to change that until at least mid February.  I’ll see if I can fill in some of it during the weekends.

Anyway.  There was some behind the scenes goings on here that were largely transparent unless you happened to visit the site during the upgrade.  Apparently WordPress 2.9 requires a version of MySQL 4.x that GoDaddy’s hosting service doesn’t provide so we had to do a sudden upgrade of everything over to MySQL 5.x in order to maintain parity with WordPress’s updates.  I wish I could say this resulted in additional functionality for the site but, honestly, recent updates have just been series of small tweaks and bug fixes, so don’t expect anything dramatic resulting from that.

On the other hand, this site is looking a little bland, isn’t it?  I spent some time customizing the site to the extent that the theme would allow me to, but at this point, it’s still just basic borders and solid color backgrounds.  And that preview box at the top of the page.  I liked that idea back when I put Arras theme on this site, but now it sort of seems pointless.  I think I may just disable it to help the site be less of a system hog when it’s loaded, especially how mobile phones is becoming a very popular platform for web browsing.

My plan is to spend a couple hours this weekend improving the appearance of this site, though I’ve had that plan before and didn’t follow through with it.  Mostly its because I don’t have a lot of free time anymore that isn’t spent cooking, cleaning, or taking care of my son.  He’s a bit of a time sink, to be honest, and I only really get contiguous periods of time to myself after about 11pm at night.  Or even later, in the case of last night.

Otherwise I haven’t made much progress in anything since about January.  No time for drawing, writing, or … well, anything other than picking  up and playing a video game for about an hour before I crash from exhaustion.

Maybe things will improve when my kid needs less constant care, but I think that doesn’t happen until they turn 18.

I’ve been playing Bayonetta this week.  So far, it’s pretty fun.  I’m a little hesitant to pick up ‘Devil May Cry’ style games because I simply don’t have the commitment to hone my skills to a razor sharp edge to beat the later levels of such games.  Fortunately, Bayonetta is a little more forgiving in this regard.  Also, having a ‘dodge’ button that gets you out of 90% of all trouble just by pressing it is excellent.  Add to that ‘Witch Time’, which activates whenever you dodge at the last second, and I’ve been getting some excellent training in avoiding getting hit.  Hopefully this will sustain me in later levels when the difficulty naturally ramps up.

The story in this game is near incomprehensible.  Bayonetta is an ‘Umbra Witch’, whatever that means.  There is talk of her being the ‘last’ but there’s clearly another one flying around.  Bayonetta as a ‘character’ is completely non-existent at this point in the game (Chapter V).  Oh, she spends a great deal of time talking, but almost all of it is entirely pointless posturing and “Aren’t I awesome?” statements.  There is literally nothing at all compelling about her.  The slimy mafia man she hangs out with is a more adequately drawn character, if entirely off-putting.  Yes, Bayonetta suffers amnesia, and that’s going to steal a bit of an opportunity for characterization, but she should still have a personality, instead of… well, whatever it is she has in this game.  Bravado, I suppose.

Ballsy is another way of putting it.  Though I think the developers were hoping to aim player focus a little higher than that.

Yeah, she’s all cheesecake, and it’s all plainly intentional, but that’s nothing new.  It’s surprising how much more attention this gets than it should.  Sure, Bayonetta is completely preposterous: her legs are too long, her waist too thin, her boobs … well, they’re just large, really, but not impossibly so.  The thing is, Rodin is also preposterous with his massive muscles, sharpened jaw, and equally disproportionate body.  Even the slimy mafia guy is a little too circular to be moving around like he does.  Nobody seems to have a problem with ridiculous men in video games, only curvatious women.

I’ve only got this game on a rental, so there’s a pretty firm deadline in place here.  I’ll see if I can finish it before time runs out.

…

I haven’t written anything in a few days.

…

I’m coming up blank though.

…

I’ve gotten into a weird point in my life where I feel guilty whenever I devote time to any of my hobbies.  Mostly because I’ve got too many.  And mostly because SOME of them are a little more pressing than others.

Mostly it’s just the game vs. my original work (novel/never-forever) vs. my fanfiction.  I have a strong desire to do all three and I get bouts of inspiration for the trio, but any time I work on one I feel guilty about not working on the other two.

Ah well.

…

Hmm, I better turn this around into something meaningful.

I’ve never talked much about the fanfic I read, as opposed to write.  This is mostly because I don’t read nearly as much as I write, which I’m told is a bad thing for authors.  They say the best writer is a very avid reader, but I’m simply not.  (I’ve always felt a little bit guilty about THAT too.)  Occasionally, though, I dip into the fanfic archives and read a few things for fun.  I read more fandoms than I write, of course, but typically in related areas as I usually find out about fanfic works through other author’s I’ve talked to.

One writer I’ve frequently read over the last two years is Chris Dee.  I’m told that Chris is female, so I guess Chris is short for Christine?  Or perhaps the whole thing is pseudonym, but that’s irrelevant.  Chris is the author of the long-running ‘Cat-Tales’ fanfic series, which has over 50 independent stories in it as of today.  The premise of the series is that it is set in the DC comics universe, and involves what is ostensibly a plausible romance between Catwoman and Batman.

Now, I’m not really a big comics guy in general. I enjoy the animated adaptations, but I really don’t like the rigamarole in collecting and keeping comic books, so I often just ignore it entirely.  But I’m more than passingly familiar with the universe thanks to both the aformentioned animated series and the glorious Wikipedia.  Cat-Tales doesn’t expect more from you than that, honestly.  There are many references to No Man’s Land, which coincidentally I HAVE read, but they’re easily identifiable and explained in the context of the story, so it’s not required reading.

What is required, however, is a good sense of humor, because these stories, which try to be serious as much as possible, are still very funny.  They’re funny in the same way the movie Galaxy Quest is funny to Star Trek fans.  Because these stories clearly are affectionate towards the DC Universe, but, at the same time, can’t ignore that a lot of what goes on in those comics is pretty silly and worthy of being made fun of.

The stories are largely told through the perspective of Catwoman being more or less suddenly exposed to the hidden secrets of the ‘Bat Family’ and finding the whole thing laughably over-the-top.  She pokes fun at Batman’s obsessive seriousness, the ‘facade’ he put over his Bruce Wayne persona, and the way he has no idea how much his sidekicks put up with his attitude rather than admire it.

It’s great fun and the writing is better than average when it comes to fanfiction.  I recommend it for any Batman fan as, for all the jokes and silliness sometimes, it does indeed treat the source material with respect.  Characters change during the course of the work but never on a whim, and never without a lot of resistence.  This isn’t a matter of a fanfic author coming in an fixing what she sees as the ‘problems’ of every character.  No, Chris clearly realizes that everything that makes the comics great are the interplay of lots of problems that are inherent to those characters’ being.  Instead, we see people changing in plausible ways, finding reasons to downplay some tendencies and having difficulty, and characters ignoring problems until they can’t be ignored anymore.

It’s all very human, and I think that’s why I like it.  Too often the comic book versions of Batman, Superman, and whoever, they all become larger than life, or evolve into impossible caricatures  of themselves.  This fanfic series brings them back down to being humans who aspire to greatness and, as humans do, fumble a bit along the way and laugh at themselves for the mistakes they make.

Cat Tales is available to read here.

How exactly do you surprise people with a move that’s been telegraphed over a year in advance?

It was way back in 2008, I believe, that it came to light that David Tennant would not be returning to play the Doctor after the end of the Specials.  That’s a whole year of anticipating how the Doctor would meet this end, working out all of the possibilities, thinking about everything he’s done between that announcement at the End and how it might affect his departure, and a lot of waiting.  With a such a legacy behind him, Tennant’s departure would have to be epic, stirring, moving, and all those other words critics use to describe things they’re supposed to like but can’t be bothered to articulate with concrete examples.

So what did they do?  Well, first they took every wild guess about who might be the ultimate ‘killer’ and give them a plausible opportunity to do the Doctor in.  It worked, I have to say, as I expected him to get the axe nearly every time it happened.  Of course, none of the plausible culprits were ultimately the one to do him in, because, in the end, it was the Doctor himself that did it.

I’m not sure if that’s a cop-out or if it was thematically important.

See, Nine — my favorite — went the same way.  At the end of the 2005 series, Rose becomes possessed by the Time Vortex and the Doctor chooses to remove it from her by using himself as the conduit.  This causes irreparable damage and he dies and regenerates into Ten.  It was a powerful moment, because he downplayed it.  He didn’t want to let her know what was happening, so he hid it until he regenerated.  You could see him dying, and yet he wasn’t sad, he was proud, because he found a spark, magic in the human race that he had been so down on for that whole series.  When he said “The Great and Bountiful Human Empire” all those times in the series, it wasn’t hard to hear a bit of sarcasm in his voice.  Like he was saying, “Yeah, they think they’re so great, but they’re just specks of dust in the cosmos.”  So him, watching Rose, a normal human, do an extraordinary thing to save his life, it was important to him.  SHE was important to him, and it was an easy choice to give his life to extend hers.  He did it without hesitation.

Now, here, at the end of Ten’s run, we see him filled with dread.  The last few specials have set him up as lonely, depressed, and angry.  The prophecy of his end has filled his mind with demons to escape from and he became, in a way, a coward.  Fearful of his own death, and desperate to escape or at least flip off Death when it comes.

But when he hears Wilford knock four times, when he realizes that this is the moment, that it won’t be an enemy getting the better of himself, that it isn’t the end of all things that will be the end of him, but no, that time, fate, and destiny is forcing him to commit suicide to save another human, what does he do?

He throws a tantrum.  He knocks things off of tables.  He complains to fate and to Wilford for conspiring against him.  He laments the better things he could be doing with his life other than dying.

That hardly seems like character growth.

And yet, maybe it is.  Because Nine was the lone survivor of the Time War, he was practically looking for death. Maybe when he saw Rose filled with the Time Vortex, he was relieved.  “This,” he could have thought, “is my escape. I can finally end my existence and still seem like a hero.”  He didn’t hesitate because death was not anything he cared about anymore.  He wanted to be dead.

Now, Ten, on the other hand, wants to stay.  He’s found in himself a reason to live, to carry on.  That’s sort of admirable in a way.  Someone who’s life is filled with such misery and depression, that he could still want to live on, that there is still adventure to be had for the time traveller, it’s a great testament to glory of life.

The rest of the episode is melancholy after Ten receives his death blow.  Thanks to dramatic flair, his regeneration is still a ways off, so he takes the opportunity to get his “Reward” as he says.  He goes off and meets all his companions again.  Not to talk, but to give them a small gift of convenience before delivering a lonely nod and vanish into the mists.  Not much of a reward, I would say.  Yes, he did build himself a family, but it was a family he kept at arms length, a family that he wouldn’t give a proper goodbye to because he was too scared of speaking to them.

Eventually, he returns to his TARDIS, and says “I don’t want to go” before regenerating.  His last whimper for a Doctor whose life was filled with excitement and bravery.  What does this say about the Doctor?  That for all his heroic bravado he can’t look Death square in the eye without flinching?  Who WAS Ten, in the end?  He always seemed so magnificent as he traipsed around and solved problems, but was it all an act?  Was this really who he was behind the mask?

It was touching, the end of this Special, but I’m not terribly pleased.  We have a new Doctor now, though, Matt Smith (man, what a boring name), and a new showrunner now that Russell Davies has departed, so there is hope.  What will the new show bring?  What kind of Doctor will be born from the quiet cries of his predecessor?

Series 5 begins this Spring.

Merry Christmas!

Well, I’m a few days late on that statement, but, as it turns out, when I’m not at work, I’m not really inclined to be on my computer that much, so I don’t get the opportunity to blog much.  I have been doing things, of course, and I have some stored up opinions to dish out, but I’ll get to them later, probably in the first week of the new year.

I do want to talk about Doctor Who right now, however, because, well, if you follow the series, you know that the actor who plays The Doctor is going to be leaving the show on the New Years Day episode.  Since that is part two, and the part that aired on Christmas Day is part one, I figure I should stick in my prognostications now, before the end comes.

They say you never forget your first Doctor.  Since there have been 10 incarnations of the Doctor since the show began, there have been lots of opinions over the years as to who is the best or worst or most fashionable Doctor.  My first doctor was number Nine, Christopher Eccleson (who is now unfortunately better known as Sinestro, from the recent GI Joe film), and I can’t help but draw comparisons to that Doctor when I think of Tennant, number Ten who is departing on the first day of the new year.  I liked Nine quite a bit, actually, and I do perhaps rank him above Ten in my memory, but that honestly could be the result of him not outstaying his welcome.  Nine only lasted one season, twelve episodes in all, because he was the designated sacrifice to introduce the new Doctor Who audience to the concept of regenerations.

Nine was very angry, as it was, because it was either him or his predecessor (Paul McGann, who had an even shorter life of only one movie) who activated the weapon to end the Time War, killing all the other Time Lords and (supposedly) the Daleks.  He knew he was it, the last of his kind, and that due to the nature of the time war, nobody would even remember the Time Lords ever existed, save for those who knew the Doctor himself.  Nine was rather irritated with humans when he appeared, but despite that, he continued his tradition of taking on a human companion, Rose.  She smoothed harsh attitude in the end such that, by the time Nine became Ten, he was definitely less angry.

But only on the surface.  Ten wore broad smiles, dressed snappily, and talked friendly with almost everyone he met.  On the surface, he was everyones pal.  But on the inside, as was frequently exposed, he was still angry, just not at the world anymore.  He was angry at himself.

So here we are, at the end of Ten’s run, and he’s still very, very angry with himself.  The next doctor, who was announced to be Matt Smith, is young, perhaps the youngest the Doctor has ever been.  Which raises the question: If at the end of Ten’s life he regenerates into someone so young and innocent, what is happening to him when he dies and what does he want his new life to be?

It’s not canonically established that the Doctor has much control over his regenerations, but it seems implied that recently when the Doctor regenerates, he turns into someone who is influenced by his environment and those around him.  Nine was angry, but as he was dying he was thinking about his companion, Rose.  He was, in fact, dying because he metaphorically took a bullet intended for her.  Then came Ten, who turned out to be just the kind of person who could fall in love with Rose.

Then, of course, Rose is permanently separated from him and Ten ends up adrift, with nobody to focus on except himself and his quietly simmering self hate.

At the end of Ten’s life, we find him alone again, having had several companions since Rose left him and all of them ending up being torn away from him when he didn’t expect it.  He’s done with it, he tells everyone, because it hurts too much to see them leave each time.  But instead, in the four specials this year, we’ve seen him grow more and more despondent.  His grief getting worse each time instead of better.  He needs a companion, but he no longer will let himself have what he needs.

Thus, we have ‘The End of Time.’  Ultimately, this episode is somewhat silly, somewhat illogical, and just a slice of really good drama.  The plot is silly, I’m afraid to say, and almost entirely obscured from the audience until the end.  *Something* is happening, we’re told, that will result in the Doctor dying, but what?  We’re not sure.

The Master reappears (in a very silly resurrection spell), is nearly killed again by his ex-wife (who is equipped with an illogically obtained counter-spell), and then ends up half-way restored and wandering, looking for the Doctor.  When he finds him, he begs him to understand why the constant drumming in his head might drive anyone mad (in a fairly dramatic way) and in return the Doctor asks for help in averting his death.

Wilfred Mott, the grandfather of the Doctor’s most recent ex-companion Donna Noble, is the focus of half of the episode this time.  He starts to have odd dreams that encourage him to find the Doctor, so he gathers up the over 80s society to search the city to find him (silly), said society finds him in a rock quarry despite nobody having a plausible reason to ever be near a quarry (illogical), then Wilfred talks to the Doctor about the fire in Donna’s live having diminished since she left the Doctor and the Doctor admitting that while he can’t bring her back, he is having a terribly hard time moving on without her (good drama).

It’s really a shame that so much time is spent on the silly and illogical sections of this episode, because the dramatic elements are actually very touching.  It’s actually capitalizing on what living forever might be like for someone like the Doctor and the wreckage of lives he leaves behind.

But, alas, silliness is inherent in the Doctor, such as in the climax of the episode, where the Master uses a Stargate (or something) to turn everyone on Earth into a clone of himself.  It’s supposed to be scary or dramatic, but it’s just absurdly silly.  Why would someone even WANT to turn the population of a planet into copies of himself?  Furthermore, the dialog establishes the Master set the device to turn all ‘humans’ into Masters, but if anything has been established in the last 5 years of Doctor episodes, it’s that there are an awful lot of non-humans on Earth.  What happened to all of those people?  What about all the things pouring out of the Rift in Cardiff?

Then, the episode ends with the sudden and unexplained reappearance of the Time Lords, having become un-extinct somehow.  This rings somewhat dubious to me.  One of more significant plotlines of the last few years has been the Doctor coping with his entire species becoming extinct, and then, with a behind the scenes wave of the hand, suddenly they’re back.  Why?  Doesn’t this somewhat superficially defuse much of the Doctor’s problems without him actually doing anything to cope with his pain?

So, that’s where we stand right now.  In four days the conclusion will air and we’ll see how Ten’s end comes about.  I would like to think that somehow the Doctor comes to grips with his depression over the last few years, but I can’t help notice that so much airtime is dedicated to silliness.  I want Ten’s end to be powerful and dramatic, but I kinda expect that it’ll be a errant shot from an ally or perhaps from the Master himself (who hears the 4-beat knock in his heart ever since he was born, therefore fulfilling the prophecy established in Planet of the Dead).  He’ll die, thinking it’s time to let go of his over-important attitude and regenerate into a kid to symbolically start anew.

Lets see what happens.

…

Happy New Year everyone!

Nothing to review today, haven’t really had the time to devote to anything other than my job and keep my baby son happy.  With the holidays coming up and much needed vacation time at home, I’ll have more freedom to devote to my hobbies, though there is a bit of a question as to which hobbies that will be…

Looking back over 2009 for this site, there was obviously a few posts in the beginning of the year and then a huge gap of very little content up until November when I started getting into the habit of posting again.  Not a great year in general for this site in any capacity.  Few blog posts is one thing, but absolutely no other content being generated is a much larger ‘other’ thing.

I’m not sure what the reason any particular person would come to read this site, since there is little to see and read most of the year, and I’m just a regular guy with little of interest to point to.  Of that little bit of interest is, of course, the Webcomic, and my writings.

Never-Forever, my webcomic, flounders spectacularly most of the time.  I haven’t had a new page since sometime in late 2008, and before that I didn’t have much in the way of content since 2006 when Chapter 3 finished and I started the initial work on Chapter 4.  That’s a very long time to wait for two paragraphs of text to continue the story.

Never-Forever continues to live on in my mind.  And while I have nothing to show for it, I have spent time this year working on ways to expand the world I created.  I’ve worked on a novelization of the story, a possible rebooting of the comic back into strip format, and even spent time developing scripts for a video game adaptation of a short story I wrote in the universe.

Of all of those efforts, honestly, video game adaptation got the furthest, in that I actually had a completely outline created for the story.  There is a reason for that, and it’s something I struggle with in many of my efforts to create new content for Never-Forever.  The origins of NF come from the early comic strips with Bitnine (these are pages designated ‘Chapter 1′ in the archive).  They’re very different in tone from Chapters 3 and 4.  In fact, they’re more than a little silly at times.  This tonal shift has proven hard for me to account for in adaptations of the story.

I like the more serious tone of Chapters 3 and 4, actually, as it’s more the style I’m used to writing.  But I can’t just wind back the clock and start again using the same tone in Chapter 1 because, well, the reason why Bitnine and LJ go on their first trip that kicks everything off is because of the silly idea that Wolfgang was supposed to recruit Bitnine to save the world and Bitnine said, essentially, “shove off.”  A lot of Chapter 1 is like this, really, and not only do I have to find more serious ways of telling those early stories but I also have to change the motivations to be less off-the-wall.  And that’s somewhat slowed me down.

Anyway…. what’s my point with all of this?  Well, I think it’s that for all the desire I have to continue Never-Forever, all efforts are still in the early stages of work and I’m not sure how long it’ll be until something new does happen there.  Maybe it’ll suddenly all fit together next year?  Maybe it’ll be another two years before there are new pages.  Time will tell.

On to other things.

As it turns out, I’m working on something with Kainsin right now.  It’ a video game project that is being programmed by Kainsin and has it’s story and art from me.  Kainsin hopes to have it out next year sometime but I’m not sure how I’m going to come up with all the art assets for this game in that period of time.  I’ve made some good progress on the temp art he asked me for, but just thinking about how much more there will need to be created just to have a playable game…. ugh, it’s really intimidating.

The outline for the game is thankfully finished, though I need to go back over the scenario now and add in the incidental dialog.  Some of that is going to be governed by how much freedom we have in graphics engine that Kainsin is developing.  Some of that is governed by my own rate of burnout for dialog.  I will say this, though, Kainsin is an excellent programmer, and I have the feeling that if I ask for a certain ability in the game, he’d be able to deliver on it eventually.  I just need to remember not to start writing for a Jerry Bruckheimer film and end up burning HIM out.

I do other writings, which I’ve mentioned before here.  Apart from the fanfiction I spent a lot of time on between 2006-2008, I also have been trying to write some other original stories in prose form.  This has not been very successful, unfortunately.  Even my effort at a Never-Forever novel, which I ostensibly know pretty well, has been hard to put a good dent into.

I am working on a sci-fi novel right now, at a glacial pace.  I tried to significantly expand upon it for NaNoWriMo but that proved to be more than a little difficult.  I think I’m just spoiled though.  Between 2006 and 2008, I wrote over a MILLION words of fanfiction.  That’s enough to fill a dozen novels.  One of my stories (“A Period of Silence”) is over 120,000 words on its own.   So I’m more than capable of writing, I just need to be more confident when writing in my own worlds instead of someone else’s.

So that’s where we stand as of the end of 2009.  No comic pages, no other Never-Forever work near completion, some writings on video games and nothing publishable on the original novel front.  Not much really to be proud of.

Well, except that I have a three month old son.

Maybe things aren’t so bad.

It’s more than a little embarrassing to admit that one of the luminaries of Interactive Fiction simply doesn’t appeal to you.  It’s like saying you love science fiction movies and you love action movies, but you hate James Cameron’s works.  One almost would prefer to say nothing at all than to admit such heresy.

I won’t be bashful anymore, though.  After ‘So Far’ and now this game, ‘Shade,’ I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of Plotkin’s works in IF.

Shade is a one-room puzzle game, but what a room it is!  Technically, this game is very accomplished.  The room feels large and cramped at the same time.  While there are no other real locations to go to in the game, the room has distinct areas that you can enter or exit but which don’t really impact the scope of your actions.  What I mean by this is that you can enter the ‘kitchen’ area of the room, and the status bar will even reflect that, but if you then type ‘sit at desk’ (which is in the living room) the game will seamlessly make you leave the kitchen area then sit at the desk without complaint.

So it feels like one room but actually has distinct areas that you can look at and interact with, which makes it much easier on the player when he/she is trying to examine everything in the room trying to figure out what to do next, which, unfortunately, is something I was doing quite frequently in this game.

For all its technical achievements (which I admit all Plotkin games excel in – technical fluency), I simply wasn’t interested in much of the game.

The story starts out simple enough: You are going on a trip on an early flight and haven’t been able to get much sleep when suddenly you realize you can’t remember where you put your tickets.  We’ve all been there before, and the charming familiarity of the scenario definitely piqued my interest at first.  But then, as the game progresses, your room starts to lose a bit of its solidity.  The descriptions of objects change almost randomly, and slowly the game descends into dream-logic.

There is a problem with dream logic in games: it changes the rules.  While it can be fun to read a book where a character watches his sofa turn into a thousand snakes and then slither off, and halfway fun to watch it unfold in a movie or TV show, in a video game it means every gameplay mechanic up until the leap into dreamtime falls into question and the player is left in a lurch not sure what to do anymore.

I feel Shade fell into this problem and there came to a point in the game where I was doing things simply because the game wanted me to and not because I understood the reasoning behind them.  Obviously since it was following dream-logic by that point, there was no reason behind it, but that was not very satisfying.

In the end, I sort of figured out what was going on, and the cause of the delirium the player stumbles into, but it’s never entirely stated that my supposition is correct, only vaguely gestured at.  Personally, I like to see closure in a game, even if it is not a victory condition for the PC, and the strange happenings, and unclear ending of Shade didn’t work for me.

I’ve been meaning to play this Interactive Fiction game for some time now.  I had heard that it was one of the landmark games in the indy IF scene, and that it had a very intriguing genre mix of “Time Travel/Historic/Romance”.  Also, I had heard on several occasions that the antagonist/romantic interest – a gender-undefined character named Black – was particularly noteworthy.  With all this praise heaped upon the game, one would be foolish not to have it at least on their to-do list if they liked IF.  Since I like IF, and I was looking for a new game to play, I picked it up.

And very nearly immediately put it down again.

As a latecomer to the IF scene, I have to admit to being more than a little spoiled.  Intellectually, I knew games like Photopia, and Galatea, and Violet, and Blue Lacuna were atypical entries into the massive ocean of IF games, but, I think, somewhere in there I had come to expect that most games were like that, even games that predated them.  So I was surprised to realize that Jigsaw – released in 1995 – had more in common with Zork (circa 1980) than it did Violet (circa 2008).

What all that means is that Jigsaw’s gameplay is almost brutal by today’s standards.  There are several sequences in the game that are very tightly timed (including, to my astonishment, the prologue!), as well as many, many ways to unknowingly put yourself into an unwinnable situation (including, again, in the prologue).  Furthermore, the game expects you to look under and on top of things, deliberately, without any hints that something might be there, even when doing an ‘EXAMINE’ on the thing in question.

Another difference, and probably the hardest thing for me to adapt to, is that the game is very sly with respect to available exits.  Rooms occasionally have exits that are undescribed and there is really no way to ‘LOOK’ or ‘EXAMINE’ the area to find them.  Sometimes, if you attempt to go in a direction that you can’t, the parse will respond with “You can only go southeast and north,” but other times, it’ll simply say “You can’t go that way.”    In the prologue of the game, in fact, there is a vital room you must enter that you only find out is there if you attempt to walk in a direction you can’t and get a message implying that there might be something behind the wall if you go one room west then head back southeast.  Also, there are many cases where you’ll be navigating in cardinal directions (N,S,E,W, etc.) and then suddenly be expected to use a different way to navigate.  Such as when you are on a boat in one sequence, and randomly you have to use ‘fore’ and ‘aft’ to navigate the deck, even though you were using cardinal directions when indoors.  Or in the several places where you stand in front of a doorway and its direction is unstated.  “IN” works, in these cases, but it turns out the door does have a direction associated with it, but there’s no way to find out except through trial and error.  This wouldn’t be an issue except, once you’re inside, you are sometimes expected to know from what direction you just came from!

As might be apparent from the above, almost all of these differences manifest themselves in the Prologue, which is to say, the very first section of the game before you know how to time travel, before you ever meet your antagonist, and before you even know what the game is about!  I spent quite a while in that part of the game trying to figure out what was going on and what I should be doing before putting the game down for a second and taking stock.  If I couldn’t get through the prologue without a walkthrough, what were my chances with the rest of the game?  Would it even be satisfying to play the game if I ended up using a walkthrough for everything?

For me, the answer is yes, it was satisfying.  In the end, I did have to use a walkthrough to get past 90% of the puzzles in the game, but I still enjoyed seeing how the game worked, and loved every time you came face to face with your sometimes partner sometimes enemy Black.

Black IS an interesting character, as it turns out, mostly because you’re never quite sure what Black is doing, even at the end of the game.  The first time you meet the character, Black tells you that history is going to be improved by your actions – even at the start, Black treats the player as part of a team, much to the enjoyment of the player character who is immediately attracted to the rogue – and demonstrates this by using the time machine to try and prevent World War I.

Now, if you let Black carry out the mission, history will be irrevocably altered and you, the player, will end up being someone different and the game will end because you no longer remember anything that has happened between you and Black.  So, as painful as it becomes to the player’s growing affection for Black, you must try and ensure history goes it course in every mission.

Oddly, this doesn’t always mean you’re fighting against Black.  In some cases, Black accidentally changes history and you have to right it.  In others, there are hints that Black comes from an alternate history altogether and the changes being made are actually the way things went in the player’s past, so you have to instead help Black accomplish the mission.

Just reading the above, you might start to think that Black is somewhat annoying, running through history changing things willy-nilly.  But the real charm of Black, and really the charm of the game as a whole, is that despite conflicting interests Black never gets all too angry with you, just frustrated.  You two are, after all, the only ones who can travel through time, and that does make you partners in a way.  Black is almost always cordial with the player, and, it appears, begins to share your affection.

Watching this relationship evolve is fascinating, and the situations the player and Black find themselves in are frequently entertaining or suspenseful, which definitely makes the game enjoyable even when you’re using a walkthrough to solve every puzzle.

In fact, I’m not sure if it would have been all that great of an experience if I had to figure it all out on my own.  I don’t want to repeat myself too much but those puzzles were HARD.  Not just guess-the-verb hard, but really out-of-nowhere solution hard.  The best advice I can give will sound awfully familiar: pick up everything you can.  Fortunately, your rucksack is bottomless so you can carry everything you find for the duration of the game.  And, if you pick up food or drink?  Drink or eat it.  Nine times out of ten, that’s what you’ll be expected to do.

But even that’s not enough to get you through the game.  One of the last puzzles of the game depends on you not only picking up a few hard to find objects in the prologue, but then using those objects persistently through the game without any indication or awarding of points to indicate that you should be doing it.  This might not be such a bear in another game if not for the sheer size of Jigsaw.

It took me a good six hours to get through this game in the end, even with the Walkthrough.  Without it, it could take days.  I’m delighted to play a game with so much content, but the war you’d have to wage with the game to see that content without a walkthrough is incredibly discouraging.

So, in the end, I have to say the recommendations were good ones.  This game IS worth playing!  But please, keep the walkthrough handy, because this game deserves to be played to the end, and I’d hate to see a relative newcomer to IF gaming give up because the game appears impossible.

Awakening is a relatively straightforward Interactive Fiction game designed to deliver a particular atmosphere rather than a unique gameplay experience.  Since this game was part of the 2009 Saugus.net Halloween Ghost Story Contest, you can probably imagine what that atmosphere is.  On the whole, it succeeds in its endeavor.

The player finds himself waking from a muddy grave in the middle of a torrential downpour.  Darkness and gloom permeate the environment and force the player to proceed towards the only light that can be seen.  The player suffers from amnesia and can’t seem to figure out who he is or, for that matter, what he is.  Much of the game is spent lumbering around the dozen or so rooms looking for some way of clearing the fuzziness from his brain.  Actually accomplishing that task depends on whether or not, by the time you reach that which you desire, you’ve figured out (in a meta-sense, the PC remains in the dark) what you really are.

What I mean is that it’s apparent from early on in the game that you are undead.  If rising from a grave in the opening text doesn’t do it for you, the recurring reminders that you seem to be dying inside your cold body makes it pretty plain.  But which form of undead remained a question for me up until you encounter another person.  The game indicates that this NPC is ‘alive with life in the way you are not’ and then continues the constant reminders that you are incredibly thirsty.  All attempts to drink either the bottle of alcohol or the NPC itself are refuted, however, because the proper command is ‘bite’.  While this method of drinking blood is very common in vampire myths, the game itself never hints in any way that a ‘bite’ command is implemented.

I only got stuck once in the game, and that was plainly my fault as I missed an exit description in a room in which I wasn’t expecting to have additional exits.  Otherwise, this game is pretty enjoyable.  Great atmosphere, easily decipherable puzzles, and a somewhat interesting method of NPC control that fit very well into the ‘story’, for what it is.  No real bugs to speak of, either, though I didn’t spend a lot of time hammering on it. Took me near an hour to figure out because of my aforementioned ignorance, but I’d say a more observant person could finish this off in ten to twenty minutes.

Gleaming The Verb and Earl Grey were both entries into this year’s IFComp (Interactive Fiction Competition) which is held annually in the fall.  Both games consist primarily of clever word puzzles, and both games miss the mark in interactivity for different reasons.

Gleaming The Verb does away with any pretense of a story and, honestly, almost every IF convention along with it.  You can still examine things but beyond that, every other action (or ‘verb’) you enter at the command line is offered as a potential solution to the puzzle before you.  So there is no exploration, no interaction with any objects other than the puzzle before you, and no story beyond the fact that you are trapped in a featureless room with a floating, glowing cube.

At this point, one might wonder why this person even used Interactive Fiction as the basis for the game when it could easily have been done with forms in a webpage or even a Quizilla.  Well, the only reason I can think of (being the jaded person I am) is that if they used a webpage or Quizilla they couldn’t have entered it into this year’s IFComp.  So… I’m left thinking this person just wanted a greater audience for their work and picked IFComp to do it.

This is a shame, because, if anything, having it presented on the surface as an IF-game only forces it to be judged on measures it shouldn’t be judged on.  I wouldn’t normally open a puzzle book looking for a story or an interactive experience, and their absence here meaninglessly detracts from what is not a terrible string of  word games.

Yes, it’s short, and yes, the game suffers from it’s implementation – presumably the puzzle ‘cube’ in the game requires the avatar to physically manipulate it in some way that solves the riddles present, which was fine by me until I was asked to TITRATE the cube, which is simply absurd – but otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with seeing these five puzzles presented on a page for me to solve.

So, I guess, my recommendation is to go into this game with your expectations properly set and you could get a good 10 minutes or so of enjoyment out of it.

Earl Grey, on the other hand, is a little more completely implemented than Gleaming the Verb, and relies on what I think is a pretty ingenious gimmick (which may or may not make up for any other shortcomings it has).  The avatar in the game is given a magical bag that allows you to manipulate the words used to describe the world around you in one of two ways.  You may either ‘KNOCK’ a letter out of a word, or ‘CAST’ a letter into a word.

For instance, if you are “Standing in the room with someone’s Aunt,” you could ‘KNOCK’ the last word in that sentence and suddenly you’d be “Standing in the room with someone’s ant.”  The only restriction the game places on the player (presumably, there are a few missteps in the implementation) is that the resultant sentence must be grammatically correct.

This clever manipulation of the world is pretty exciting at first, but the game very quickly falls into drudgery when you realize how carefully every sentence is worded such that KNOCKing and CASTing opportunities are, in fact, limited to a single linear path of puzzles leading you from start to finish.  The incredible freedom you might imagine with the power to change on letter in any description just doesn’t measure up to the implementation here.  Often your avatar is shoved from featureless room to featureless room using portals instead of doors so you end up with no spatial reference.

In the end, if a room has something in it, it’s going to be KNOCKed or CASTed eventually.  The stranger the placement of the word in the sentence is also a good sign that something needs to be manipulated.  You might think this would be a benefit to gameplay, however, the puzzles you are presented with sometimes require two or three separate KNOCKs and subsequent CASTings to solve and the intermediary steps often don’t appear to be taking you any closer to your goal.

Furthermore, there is a definite feeling that the puzzles were developed prior to the environment they were placed in, which explains why portals whisk you from place to place and that the flow of solutions doesn’t seem to follow logical sense.  I’d think the most satisfying chain of puzzles would involve making a number of changes to a single sentence that get you closer and closer to your goal until they all add up to the solution.  But Earl Grey doesn’t have any situations like that.  Often, if there are three sentences describing an area, there will be three changes to be made one to each of the sentences and ONLY in the order the game wants you to make them.

So, while the game has a brilliant idea here, it doesn’t succeed in fully exploring it, which disappoints.  It does, however, have a very funny and charming commentary by the player character that appears after the command prompt after every effective action.  It appears to be the stream of consciousness of the PC you’re controlling, and, if so, he’s a pretty sarcastic person and definitely witty.  One action comes to mind is when you enter a room and see a large clock standing to one side.  Naturally I tried to KNOCK the clock and, as a result, a large lock ends up standing to one side.  The commentary at the bottom of the screens says:  “Yeah, that could have gone one of two ways.”

So, my recommendation is to give it a try at least to experience this interesting gameplay mechanic, but keep the walkthrough handy for when the game goes off on a path that doesn’t immediately make sense.

I was never a huge X-Files fan when it was originally on.  I had several friends who had watched it from the start and, through discussion, I got to understand most of what was going on in the first three or four seasons.  I even watched a few episodes since they aired on Fridays and that’s when my friends and I were typically together.  I think I had a pretty good idea of what was happening, in any case, right up to the first movie, X-Files: Fight The Future.

I liked the first X-Files movie, actually, I thought it was quite fun and didn’t require too much knowledge of the TV series to enjoy.  The whole conspiracy bit is a little opaque without knowing much about the Cigarette Smoking Man and the Well Manicured Man, and all sorts of other strangely titled people, but since I DID know enough to understand, it was pretty much enjoyable all around. It even teased that forever questioned relationship between Scully and Mulder.

Then, after the movie, things went downhill and I stopped watching.  I heard that Robert Patrick put on a good show as Agent Doggett, but I wasn’t really inclined to check in again until the last episode of the series, titled, simply “Truth.”  A lot of stuff was brought up and put to rest in that episode but I think the important part in the end was that Scully and Mulder had fled, the alien apocalypse didn’t happen, and much of everyone else was probably dead.

Then, nothing for years.  Until this film, titled ‘I Want To Believe’, one of the slogans of the show and the immortal words on the famous poster in Mulder’s office.  With the decline of the TV show in later years, and all the trouble getting this movie made in the first place, I didn’t have very high hopes for this film.  And, unfortunately, there isn’t much to be astonished by in this film, but there are a few highlights.

The premise of this movie is actually quite simple and rather mundane by X-Files standards: A serial killer has been attacking people and leaving body parts behind in a frozen lake in Winter.  A ‘psychic’ has led the FBI to a few of the body parts and they’re not sure whether to trust his predictions that the FBI agent that was recently kidnapped is still alive.  They decide — rather whimsically — to find Fox Mulder, who is a de-facto expert in these matters, and ask him to find out whether the psychic is legit or not.

This setup, now, is kind of awkard I have to say.  Why does the FBI go looking for Mulder all of a sudden in the middle of a manhunt for a kidnapped agent?  It seems like they should be investigating all leads they have, right?  Apparently, though, Amanda Peet — who plays some lead agent in the investigation whose name escapes me — has decided this is what she wanted to do and therefore, that’s what they’re doing, regardless of how much every other member of the FBI team disagrees with her.

So, ignoring logic, they chase down Mulder.  It turns out he’s not that hard to find.  Scully is working as a neurosurgeon at a hospital in Virginia under her real name and Mulder, of course, is living with her.  Considering that the last episode of X-Files established that the FBI was kind of pissed off  at Mulder, I’m surprised that nobody has gone looking for him before now.  Especially since Scully is still using her real name in the place she now works AND that place happens to be in the same state as FBI headquarters.

There are a few hints in the film that the FBI largely didn’t care any more about Mulder as long as he was keeping himself quiet, but I don’t think that’s very reasonable.  They tried him for murder, after all, someone must have been looking for him.

Anyway, Scully gets draw into the story because Mulder refuses to work any cases without her.  This is standard buddy-cop film set up and is supported by the TV show, so it’s not too incredulous.  But this being a feature film, Scully needs to do more than act as Mulder’s back up, especially since Mulder has Amanda Peet now to stroke his …. ego.

So we find out that Scully is dealing with a cancer patient at her hospital.  The patient is a boy and there is very little she can do for him (her being a neurosurgeon, naturally the boy’s cancer is in his brain).  So her side story is her struggle to find new methods of treatment for the boy while the hospital is pushing to have the kid shipped off to a facility designed to deal with the about-to-die.

Frankly, the whole Scully part was boring.  I’m not going to lie and make some statement about medical treatment and one-doctor-against-everyone being interesting in its own right.  This is X-Files, and if the boy doesn’t have psychic powers, or alien heritage, it frankly doesn’t measure up.

And, really, that’s my whole complaint about this film to begin with.  Given it’s pedigree, this film just doesn’t deliver on the conceit of the TV series.  There is no aliens at all to speak of, and the ‘X-Files’ element of the film is completely limited to the man who is able to predict where the next body part will show up (or has been left behind).  This movie ends up feeling like someone crossed Criminal Minds with House M.D.  Which, by the way, I can think of two episodes off the top of my head of those respective shows that are identical to the plots of this movie.  So, there isn’t even new territory to explore here, it just feels humdrum.

Honestly, I can’t imagine that the film could have done any better, either.  X-Files, in its day, was revolutionary.  But now, the ‘revolutionary’ aspects of that series are somewhat standard now.  It’s the classic scenario where the trendsetter lived past its uniqueness and now seems to have been overtaken by the imitators.  Nothing makes that more clear than ‘Fringe,’ a TV show by J.J. Abrams that is, essentially, X-Files for the current generation.  And Fringe is everything X-Files isn’t these days, which is to say, more action packed, more humorous, and, unfortunately, of less substance.

Yeah, I don’t like to say it, but X-Files was often about hinting at the supernatural and playing with our expectations.  It was, despite a large number of bad episodes, more cerebral than action packed.  That just doesn’t fly as well anymore.  Fringe is very in-your-face about the supernatural and unexplained.  It hides nothing because it’s all about setting up the next thrill before you’ve had a moment to catch your breath.  Compared to that, X-Files simply seems slow in comparison.

So, now that I’ve gone all across the map on this one, what’s the conclusion?

Conclusion: C+

I wanted this to be good, but it’s really not.  The film’s direction is often nebulous, screentime is dominated by an uninteresting secondary plot, and frankly, the film doesn’t live up to its own premise.  It doesn’t matter if you want to believe or not, X-Files is over.

I played some more Interactive Fiction yesterday, this time a game called Alabaster by Emily Short.  I’ve mentioned Emily before when I put her blog on my blogroll, but apart from that I haven’t actually spent any time discussing her work, so, given the similarities in gameplay between the two, I’ll take this opportunity to mention Galatea and contrast it against Alabaster.

Galatea was an Interactive Fiction game by Emily made way back in 2000.  On the surface it’s a relatively simple game.  You are an art critic, and you are standing in one room of a gallery observing a piece of art.  The piece of art and its podium are the only things in the room, and you can’t leave the room or the game ends.  So there is really only one thing you can do: interact with the piece of art.  Fortunately, the piece of art is Galatea, the statue come to life of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion from Greek myth.  In the game, Pygmalion is gone now, for reasons not initially clear, and Galatea has a lot to say if you choose to ask.

The game’s simple structure belies its careful construction (much like the eponymous statue herself).  Nearly all of the gameplay involves asking Galatea questions and turning her answers into more questions to ask.  Through discussion, you learn about Galatea’s past, how she was created, and, depending  what chain of dialog you choose to follow, what might be in her future.  There is not a singular solution, but dozens, and most are distinct from each other, rather than variations on a theme.

I enjoyed the game thoroughly, though I did have to turn to a walkthrough to get more than a handful of endings.  Ultimately, who Galatea is and why she exists is not predetermined.  As you play the game, and approach certain endings, her responses change and she starts to more firmly manifest a single form.  But the next time you play the game, she’ll be back to a blank slate again and your questions may push her destiny towards another path.

In concept, I find this style of gameplay intriguing.  The idea that a character is nobody until she is interacted with; it definitely has potential as a metaphor for human existence and bears similarity to the idea of tabula rasa, first posited by Aristotle.  Unfortunately, the concept is not embodied in the game very much – at least to my recollection – and is more of a meta-concept than a deliberate one.  I would love to see a game use this idea more overtly, where a series of blank forms are given purpose and even history by the player through their interactions with them.

In any case, the execution of this idea is entertaining for a while but starts to lose its novelty the longer you play and start to see the seams at the edges.  Once you start to understand how certain discussions lead to certain endings, you can see more clearly where Galatea’s purpose seems to shift dramatically from one question to the next if you don’t follow the preferred line of inquiry.  So, in the end, the game glows with the wonder of possibility at first… then rapidly fades the longer you play with her.

Which is a shame, really, because that is the exact opposite of the progression of the player character – the art critic – in the game.  It seems his initial reaction is one of boredom, but the longer he talks with Galatea, the more his interest grows and he begins to realize how much more she is than the simple plaque beside her podium states.  I’m almost envious of the critic by the end, because in the endings where his life seems to progress alongside Galatea’s it’s clear his eyes have been opened to possibilities that were never there before.  It makes my growing awareness of the limitation of the game feel depressing in contrast.

But, then again, I cared what happened to Galatea.  And that’s really the goal of any artist, right?  To get me to care about their creation?  I just wish we could both feel happy in the end.

Alabaster, in retrospect, is very, very similar to Galatea.  This time you are playing a fractured version of Snow White.  You are the huntsman, that poor servant who is instructed by the Queen to kill Snow White and return with her heart in a box.  The game begins as you are walking through the forest with Snow White and stop to examine a dead animal on the path from which you intend to extract a heart to fool the Queen with.  Apart from Snow White and the dead animal, there is nothing else to interact with.  And moving in any direction is interpreted by the game as the decision to either return to the castle or travel to the safe haven populated by seven dwarves.  Your only means of making up your mind as to which place you should go to is to interact with Snow White, and she has a lot to say if you ask her.

Unlike Galatea, however, Snow White’s identity is not shaped by the questions you ask.  Whether you find out who and what she is does depend on the questions you ask, but the game makes pretty clear that even if you don’t ask the right questions, her nature is the same.

This is both a benefit and a drawback in my opinion.  Where in Galatea after a while you could see the seams in her programming that allow her destiny to change based on what questions you ask in what order, here Snow White’s responses are uniform, and the tiny hints always line up with the broad declarations.  The integrity of the game’s characters is maintained.

On the other hand, once you figure out what’s going on with Snow White, getting the other endings is often an exercise in willful ignorance, which is not very satisfying.  The very first ending I got in the game, in fact, revealed to me her true nature, which would have made subsequent playthroughs pretty disappointing had there not been one extra action I initially had overlooked that helped me to realize that Snow White’s real face was not the only mystery the game had to offer.

Still, the game’s world – as limited as it is – is very well defined and the prose is very enjoyable, as I’ve come to expect from Emily Short’s games.  Of course, not all the prose came from Emily.

The other ‘feature’ of this game has nothing to do with how it’s played, actually, but has to do with its genesis. The game was an exercise in collaborative storytelling, initiated by Emily and offered up to the IF community for expansion.  She had written the initial description and created the environment, but then let everyone who played the development version of the game offer additional dialog choices and responses.  Emily collated all these options and integrated them into the game, lining up the dialog trees and creating endings for certain lines of discussion.  So, really, the game has many, many authors, who have all been corralled into a gameplay mechanic devised by Emily.

So, in conclusion, the game is enjoyable the first few times around, and there really is a lot to discover about this version of the Snow White fairy tale.  The multiple endings start to wear thin after a while, which may be unavoidable but since there are so many offered I have to believe that it was intended at least for some players to try to get them all.  The experiment in collaborative story development, however, is pretty clearly a success, as the game is well written, imaginative, and cohesive, yet still has nearly a dozen authors.  I dare the movie industry to do so well.

Two more links in the blogroll today, this time not from Interactive Fiction authors (the horror!).

First is Mary Ann Johnson, also known as the Flick Flisopher.  She’s a particularly snarky internet movie reviewer that has been around for quite a while now.  I found her a loooong time ago when Penny Arcade linked to her review of ‘The Majestic’ (starring Jim Carrey).  She used to do her reviews in a very irregular format, often making her reviews transcripts from movie exec meetings, or interactions between characters in the films complaining about how bad they are.  Then, sometime a few years back, most of her reviews became more standard “let me tell you what I thought about this” style posts.  Still, I read them because they’re interesting and because she wears her biases on her sleeve.

Yes, she’s a self described ‘geek’ and after so many years of reading her reviews it’s pretty obvious where her tastes lie.  She’ll never give a good review to a slasher/horror film, and very, very rarely enjoys any modern comedies.  This is good, in my opinion, because I pretty much agree with her.  Since Mel Brooks stopped making films, I haven’t seen a good comedy.  And before him, well, I suppose there’s the Marx Brothers…

Next — and changing gears dramatically — is Erica Friedman, who runs the blog called ‘Okazu.’  Okazu is… well, let’s just quote the site:

The Yuri anime and manga blog. Okazu is the oldest and most comprehensive blog for anime and manga reviews, news and events of interest to Yuri, Girls Love and Shoujoai fans by Erica Friedman, founder of Yuricon.

Erica was a Sailor Moon fanfiction writer (waaaaay back in the day, early 90’s-ish) that I read back when I was a Sailor Moon fanfiction writer (see above).  She wrote some good stuff, especially stuff starring Sailor Uranus and Neptune since they were the lesbian couple in the show and that was — and still is — her niche.

The blog she runs now, however, is about reviewing Manga and Anime from Japan (and sometimes elsewhere in Asia) that has yuri — or lesbian — content.  Additionally, she’s the publisher of a anthology of short stories (in English) in the manga tradition and has some pretty good contacts in the US publishing world both on the anime/video side and the manga/books side.  She also is chairman of the Yuricon convention held every year.

Some of the most interesting stuff she blogs about, however, are some very interesting and sobering descriptions of the current US publishing market.  She’s fluent in Japanese and has seen, in detail, the manga publishing market in both Japan and America and has some pretty striking observations about why it works in Japan (profitable) and doesn’t in the US (on the decline).

Anyway, I suggest you check them out!  I think both  blogs are pretty entertaining and often educational.

I randomly got in the mood to play some more Interactive Fiction (despite my previous posts on this subject, I don’t actually play very many IF games — much the same way I don’t actually read much fanfiction despite producing it in sometimes copious quantities) and picked a game from the 2007 IFComp called ‘Deadline Enchanter.’

DE is one of a relatively small set of games that turns the player-parser relationship on its head a bit.  The player (meaning me, or you) typically talks to the game in text and a parser interprets and replies with a suitable response.  Often in IF games, there is also a distinct player character that acts as your avatar within the game world.  This PC has a name and history and things he/she will or won’t do at a given time.  Typically, the PC is unaware of your (the player’s) existence, and the parser invisibly takes your commands and transforms them into thoughts that appear to originate from the player character’s mind.

A few games, however, like Deadline Enchanter and, a particularly memorable example from the 2008 IFComp, Violet, change the relationship between the player and the player character by giving the parser a personality.  In Violet, the PC is the significant other of the titular Violet, and Violet herself is the parser, replying the way the PC’s girlfriend would, adding tidbits of information and occasional commentary on the player’s attempts to solve the puzzles.

In Deadline Enchanter, it’s even more complicated.  The PC in the game is another player of a piece of IF within the game world.  The parser in this game is the voice of the person within the game world that wrote the IF game.

Still with me?

It’s terribly surreal at first, playing DE, but as you move through the game it starts to make more sense and you start to understand the rhythm of the game.  Through the course of the game, you learn that what has occurred is that the parser, a princess trapped in a tower, has created an IF game as a means of training someone to go through the motions of freeing her.  You, the player, is in essence playing someone who has found the game and is playing to figure out how to free the princess.

It’s a pretty ingenious setup in my opinion, but hard to classify and even harder to explain.  The game ends up using a few narrative tricks that offer variety to the game play experience, and the ending… well, it gives the player just the slightest hesitation, in the same way that Prince of Persia did, in fact.

In the end, I liked it, and would encourage others to give it a try.  It’s actually rather easy, and probably not terribly bad for beginners to IF.  I wouldn’t go into it expecting this is how most IF goes, though.

The game did give me some ideas to consider in my own IF.  I haven’t actually created an IF game yet, but I’ve been cobbling together notes and sketches and trying to figure out how I might create one of my own.  Inform 7, the language this game and many others are now written in, is terribly easy to use.  It was developed specifically to make game development easy for people who are not programmers.

I’m thinking of making a smaller game, though, using some ideas that this game has inspired in me.  Maybe such as offering a selection of parsers.  So the player could choose at the start of the game to play with Parser A, who is very precise and logical, and Parser B, who is emotional and might be a bit unreliable.  I’m intrigued by the shift in tone between the two, something that was played with to my joy in a game called ‘Being Andrew Plotkin.’

I’ll have to sit on this some more, as I’m not ready to begin coding anything yet, but I’m getting more and more motivated to actually start work on this game.

Deadline Enchanter was created by Alan DeNiro.  I downloaded it from the IFWiki (here) and played it on the WinFrotz 2002 interpreter (here).

The following is copied verbatim from Robin Johnson’s blog in a post called ‘Elegant Variation‘:

The term “elegant variation” was coined by H. W. Fowler, describing a particularly erroneous journalistic rule – namely, that no word should be used twice in one written piece, or repeated inside some limit like three paragraphs. English teachers propagate this myth; second-rate newspaper hacks obey religiously. Thus, editorial articles, having once mentioned bananas, subsequently reference “bendy yellow fruit”, while public figures accumulate curious nicknames — “troubled superstar”, “erstwhile ginger prime minister”.

Ostensibly, these literary gymnastics prevent readers getting bored from perusing identical expressions successively. However, its real effect instead obfuscates communication, demanding ever obscurer, less precise synonyms because authors exhaust their mental thesauri searching for new alternate lexical strings. Difficulty with composing also increases exponentially. Such arbitrary regulations predictably reduce linguistic freedom, producing unstomachably crippled prose, which sceptical scribes will find becomes easily apparent upon any prolonged attempt to maintain strict avoidance of repetition.

Isn’t that alarmingly clever?  I presume that Johnson composed it himself (he is another Interactive Fiction author and is more than competent with the English language), and not copied it from another source since it’s not attributed otherwise.

I like the post both because of it’s self-reflective nature (it talks about the drawbacks of Elegant Variation while using it demonstrate those same drawbacks) and because it brought to my attention that I try to use Elegant Variation in my own writings and frequently run squarely into these problems.

There are a number of tragically bad habits that English teachers intentionally train students to have, and I’m more than a little annoyed by them.  Apart from this Variation (which, I admit, was never directly said to me but was constantly encouraged through the comments and criticisms my teachers laid on my writings), there is also the classic “never end a sentence with a proposition” rule that is not only untrue, but again forces some ‘linguistic gymnastics’ on writers they would normally be able to avoid.  I also recall the rule to never start a sentence with ‘But’ or ‘And’, and while I’ve gotten mostly over that one I do think about it whenever I openly defy it.