Self-Titled

I saw The Incredible Hulk tonight and it was pretty much what I expected: light on story, heavy on action.  The action scenes looked great, especially the scene on a campus.  The end action scene looked too CGI-ish and I kept noticing it.  I was looking forward to seeing another movie with Edward Norton in it since he’s usually good (Fight Club!), but he seemed kind of wasted on this movie.  His character, Banner, was flat and uninteresting.  He did a good job with what he had to work with, but it still left me wanting something more.  Overall a good summer action flick without a lot of depth.  (Spoiler!)  I’m interested in seeing where they go with bringing Iron Man into the mix.  (End spoiler.)

Battlestar Galactica is the best TV show I watch right now. It never fails to entertain. God I love that show. The mid-season finale had an incredible ending. I think it’s a better show than Lost, even though I consider Lost my favorite show. BSG is a remake of a TV show made decades ago, but they completely transformed it. The writing is incredible. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

When a TV show loses an actor or actress, the writers have to replace their character with a new one and make sure it’s all consistent with the plot.  This takes valuable time away from what could have otherwise been a kick-ass space battle.

I’d be too impatient to artfully work around a change in cast.  I wonder if you could get away with doing a half-assed job of replacing the actor or actress but essentially keep the character the same.  You could introduce the new character, make a lame attempt to flesh them out for that episode, then forget all that and write the new character just like the old one: same personality, same way of speaking, same past, knowledge, etc.  You’d just pretend that nothing really happened and continue on.  It’d be hilarious!

I bought the Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy when it was released and I’ve almost finished it (ten stars left to get). It’s a superb game, with beautifully-executed graphics, sound, game play, and level design (IGN gave it 9.7/10). It’s the best game on Wii right now and I’d recommend it to anyone who liked other Mario games or wants to see the Wii controls done right. However, it does have a couple faults.

Camera

Perhaps the most notable thing about Galaxy is the gravity game play, in which Mario can run on and jump between objects of varying sizes, shapes, and themes floating in space. Each object has its own gravity tug like a planet, so “up” and “down” from Mario’s perspective change as he moves from object to object, or even from surface to surface on the same object. Unfortunately, the camera’s orientation (”up” and “down” from our perspective) doesn’t change to match Mario’s, preserving the orientation with which we started. As Mario’s orientation changes, it can be difficult to predict how the controls will change with his orientation. Moving Mario forward (up on the analog stick) may move Mario away from the camera when on one object, but toward the camera when on another object. Don’t even get me started on left and right. You grow a sense of what to expect after a while, but it never feels natural, and sometimes you guess wrong. The ideal controls would always be relative to the camera so that up, down, right, and left on the analog stick would always do what you’d expect.

Since some objects are very small, their surfaces are sharply curved. The camera doesn’t stay directly over Mario’s head, so sometimes you lose your depth perception and can’t tell where Mario will land if he jumps somewhere.

Level design

Many of the 120 stars in the game involve level remixes, where an extra element is thrown into a level to make it harder, like limiting Mario’s health, making enemies faster, time limits, races, coin collecting, etc. Some of them were fun and others weren’t. Some of the purple coin challenges (collect the one hundred purple coins throughout a level to get a star) were hard, frustrating, and tedious.

Some levels were just too hard. There’s no way you’d pass the first time or even the second. When you find yourself dying for the fifth or sixth time, you have to ask yourself what the point is. It’s just making you frustrated, and that’s not fun. Those levels needed more tweaking to balance out the difficulty.

Damn it! I was just sitting here, watching the end of Return of the Jedi on TV. You know, the party on Endor after the big climax where the music plays and they’re all dancing and hugging. They changed the ending! The music was much quieter and less energetic and they now have that dude who plays Anakin in Episodes 1-3 standing there as a ghost instead of the older version of himself. The changes thoroughly sucked ass. The music always used to give me a warm feeling and it was touching to see the old Anakin stand there with Yoda and Obi Wan. Now there’s no sense of euphoria at the end. Plus I don’t give a crap about young Anakin, there’s no place for him in this story.

Damn you, George Lucas! Leave my classics alone.  Most art is probably never perfected in creators’ opinions. But the artists need to put it out there for people to enjoy, so at some point you have to leave it be and set it free.

You can’t even buy the original version of the movie anymore!  South Park was right.

I finished the game Portal a little while ago. I think it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. The game play is very original and exciting and offers many opportunities to stump us with environmental puzzles and brain teasers. But on top of that, the writers have infused it with a sense of humor I’ve never seen before in a game that totally works. At times it’s subtle and at other times it’s hilarious. The credits are amazing and shouldn’t be missed. But what really surprised me was how well the game works, despite how simple it appears to be on the surface. There’s a moment in the game where you’ve completed the goal put before you at the start and you think everything is over. But the game keeps going. Then a character says a simple, innocent line along the lines of “Put down everything, lay down, and wait to be taken away.” My motivation and attitude completely shifted and suddenly I wanted to do exactly what the game creators wanted me to want to do, without telling me what I should be feeling or what I’m doing next. It’s brilliant, and I’ve never experienced anything like it in a game before. Valve has perfected the art of melding game play, story telling, and perspective in a way I haven’t really seen in any other games, in my humble opinion. They constrain your point of view to the first person and never leave it for cut scenes or flash backs or other points of view. You experience the game through the continuous consciousness of the person you play. Your character never speaks; you have no way to speak or communicate with other characters. The effect is to make you feel like you are there, that you are part of the story and are making important choices that affect the outcome of the game. In short, it amplifies your emotional attachment and immersion, which add to the enjoyment of the experience. In addition, it helps to focus the game experience because anything boring or of low quality is immediately apparent because the player must engage with those things in a way that cannot be completely controlled by the creators. It also forces the creators to develop plot and characters in an interactive, engaging way because it has to happen live in front of the player. You might think a strict first-person perspective might make telling back story contrived or impossible, but Valve managed it brilliantly in Half-Life 2. Portal’s game play is an extension of all of these things and works brilliantly because of it.I highly recommend gamers try this game out.

I love the character Auntie Muriel in the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. She uses her age like some kind of free pass that entitles her to boss those younger than her (everyone) around. To paraphrase, “Give me your chair, I’m one hundred and seven years old.” Awesome! It’s like everyone is obligated to be her bitch.

There should be more age-based benefits. I would want cuts in line. We could all wear numbers ranking our seniority in the nation to help sort ourselves in line.

What older-than-thou privilege would you want? Extra credit if you know from where I got the title.

I’ve been reading an essay by Marc Laidlaw, entitled “The Hypermodern Muse“, in which he presents his experiences and reflections on writing for games. In case you don’t know, he’s the writer for Valve’s critically-acclaimed Half-Life games. When describing the essence of fusing writing with gameplay to make truly great games, he uses the game Majora’s Mask as an example. MM is one of my favorite games ever, but I’ve never been able to satisfactorily express why. When I read this, I realized that what he talked about was exactly what I had felt deep down this whole time.The following is the excerpt about MM:

But what about fuel? What makes this ship fly?

Here’s where we diverge from the orderly routine of construction.

Here’s where the blueprints are of little use, and writers fall back on their own odd survival skills.

You might be disheartened to learn that the writer’s life at Valve is not all glory. It is not as exciting as you might think to find a dozen ways to write, “RELOADING!”

But the Half-Life games are made up of a huge laundry list of exactly these kinds of lines. And in fact, turning them into exciting dialog is about as thrilling as converting someone’s laundry list would be.

Without inspiration, without our muse, we’d have nothing to cram into the carefully constructed corners of these contraptions.

I’d like to take the example of the Majora’s Mask, an episode in the Legend of Zelda series that I consider the closest thing to an Alice in Wonderland level classic that the industry has yet created.

Here is a game so intricate it appears to have been designed by Lewis Carroll working in concert with M.C. Escher and a Black Forest clockmaker. Every single bit of this game is intricately engineered to interlock with every other piece, on a scale that is truly beyond my ability to visualize.

Underpinning this game, was a well-oiled development team, fresh from making Ocarina of Time, and an intricate plan. Without this, the whole thing falls apart. And yet, every single piece of this elaborate contraption is exploding with life and character. There is not a single NPC who doesn’t seem to have some completely bizarre backstory. The closer you look, the weirder it gets. And, often, the more poignant. There’s nothing wasted in this elegant design. Every character also has a very specific reason to be there for purposes of gameplay.

If you’re not familiar with this twisted jewel of the Zelda series, it takes place entirely in the span of three days, with an ominous moon-sized clock ticking toward doomsday. Every time you peel back a layer of the game, you have a chance to set the clock back to the first moment of the first day and save the world from certain destruction. You do this by influencing time, by tipping the balance a little at a time, interfering with the clockwork lives of the world’s inhabitants. Only you, the player, in the guise of Link, are free to move in and out of time. Which is to say, only you can save the world.

What the world is made up of, in addition to the traditional series of Zelda dungeons, is a cast of bizarre characters locked into hundreds of intricate timelooped anecdotes. The game design is perfectly rigid; on some level it is nothing but design, scrupulous and elegant. The stories themselves are jewels set in the frame, the best ones possessing the brilliance and brightness of fairy tales or surreal fables. One in particular has always stuck with me.

In an early stage of the game you visit a desolate plateau cut in two by a dry gorge that once held a running river. On the side of the dry river sits an unmoving millwheel attached to a sad little millhouse. A little girl comes down the steps from the front door and crouches near the river. If you approach her, she flees back inside. You must restore the flow of the river to lure her out, then sneak into the house without being seen. If you do so, you discover that her father has been turned into a Gibdo–one of the wailing zombies that infest the world of Ocarina and Majora. If you have learned a song of healing, you can heal the old man, which leads to a brief scene of reunion that is more affecting than it has any right to be, considering the truncated animation, the spare text, the cartoony stylization of the scene.

Now…when Zelda fans gather, they talk about stuff like this. They spend a little bit of time talking about the puzzles, the dungeons, the clever weapons that are also keys. But mostly they talk about the odd bits. The things that come like gifts, out of nowhere; that didn’t have to be anything in particular, but end up being perfectly memorable.

This scene with the waterwheel and the father and daughter reunited, is a perfect meld of story and puzzle, but…it could have been anything. From a design standpoint, it need only satisfy the requirement that it be a puzzle with a layered, multipart solution. You need to restore the river’s flow, and in order to do that you need to have solved other puzzles. You need to sneak into the house while the girl is outside. To heal her father you need to have learned a specific song.

To solve the puzzles requires mastery of the larger time dilemmas of the game. Lacking any one of these pieces, you experience slightly more of the mystery; only with all of them in place can you solve it. There’s the puzzle. But is there anything in the puzzle specification that suggests a little girl and her father—let alone a tender reunion? Is it necessary that the reward for solving the puzzle be anything more than the Gibdo mask? Why should it have any emotional content? All of these additional aspects are irrelevant, but without them, would I have remembered the scene? I should mention, this is little sketch of a scene filled me with envy, and it’s only one. The frustrated romance of Kafei and Anju, two lovers who continually elude each other, is structurally worthy of Shakespeare. And the intricate framework of Majora’s Mask allows this kind of character-driven scene over and over again. It is like a Chinese puzzle box full of hidden drawers, a twisting road that is nothing but detours through a fantastic country.

In fact, every story except Link’s is a detour. As the hero, his journey is ultimately generic. He must save the world. How dull!

However, the designers have taken the care to create a world worth saving. They’ve hit upon the fact that it’s the thing our hero cares about that matters most. It’s the weird supporting characters and mysterious moments we remember.

The writer Karen Joy Fowler has pointed out that the heros of most stories tend to be unlike anyone you actually know or care about, and for this reason rather unsympathetic. However, if you cast around in the shadows, while you can generally find someone you can relate to. It may be a sidekick or someone even less conspicuous. There is a lot of magic in an unfinished sketch, a partial glimpse; the mind never stops trying to fill in the blanks of these characters.

Lost is back, baby! Season three kicked off a few weeks ago, and so far it’s off to a good start. I watched seasons one and two again with my mom this summer, so I’ve got everything fresh in my mind and ready to piece it all together. I’ve been listening to a really good podcast for Lost at deltaparkproject.com/lost. Sadly, the season premiere wasn’t as good as season two’s, but oh well. It still had a really good beginning.I’m really glad Desmond and Locke made it through the season two finale; they were both too good to write off. And it was nice to have Boone back for a little bit. The best theory I’ve heard so far for what’s going on is that there are in fact two groups of Others; the Dharma Initiative members split into two factions and the people seen in the jungle by Eko and Jin with the teddy bear are a separate group. This would explain why Ben keeps referring to his group as the ‘good ones’. We’ll see. I’m lost as ever.