Self-Titled

I saw the movie Blindness this evening with Heather. The characters were believable, the pacing was good, the plot was somewhat unoriginal and obvious, and there were a couple great effects, although the whiteout effect is overused. It’s quite good overall.

The main character annoyed me in the wards where she didn’t use her sight more to her advantage. How about just taking the gun from the leader when he’s not looking? Or kick their walking canes out from under them. This isn’t rocket science here. She didn’t try anything until after she prostituted herself. If you’re going to be desperate enough to kill, I’d think it would happen before you submit to anything as degrading as that.

I was pleasantly surprised by the perspective given by the eye patch character near the end of the film of the ways in which the common blindness had brought people closer together, as with their small “family.” Until that point, much of what we had seen was how the blindness had driven people apart and reduced them to desperate savages, so it left us with a warm, fuzzy feeling that maybe humanity isn’t lost forever.

I thought a couple effects worked very well. The first was a blind boy who walked toward the camera and stumbled into a table not visible to him or us, but at that moment the table flashes into view for us. It’s a perfect analog for how we form images in our heads of our dark surroundings and update them as we stub our toes or bang our knees into unknown objects. The second (spoiler alert) represented someone regaining their sight: a blind sheet of white that resolved into sight of coffee darkening the cream in a cup. Those moments alone made up for the effect excesses elsewhere in the film.

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.

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.