I'm still not sure how I'm going to treat this blog in the near future, but I did want to give a quick review, because I saw something worth acknowledging. That thing is Wall-E. And since I've been told that my reviews are too long, I'll keep it short: it kicked ass. That good enough?
Well, no, it's not for me certainly. But I'll keep it simple. This movie is my favorite Pixar movie, and I loved every Pixar movie I saw (which is all of them but Cars, incidentally.) It was tailor-made for me, though. Speculative future, satire working its way into sociological discussion, robots and technology in general; if it wasn't for the fact there was no possible way to get cute goth women into the movie, it would be perfect.
The movie is divided into two parts; there's the nearly dialogue-free first third, as Wall-E, the last sentient thing left on Earth continues to do his automated job while looking for the little pleasure of life that keep him going for seven hundred years. Not bad for a robot. The second half of the movie moves beyond Earth as Wall-E discovers the fate of humanity since his activation.
Much of what made this movie special has been said elsewhere, so I'll stick to a few things that made this film my favorite Pixar movie. There was the surprisingly dark storyline, especially for a Pixar movie, which suggested a doomed Earth and possibly a lot of dead humans. There was the simplicity of the main characters and how they acted, with a minimum of dialogue and brilliant reactions and emotive displays to compensate. There was the future of humanity, presented as neither dystopian as we normally see it and yet horrible in its own way. There was the art itself, with the bright future and the ruined Earth both masterpieces of design, and the brief scenes of space in between were awe-inspiring.
The biggest complaint I could have about the movie was an occasional logical detail that slightly warped my suspension of disbelief. None of them bothered me, and assuming you can accept the premise that robots either were programmed to develop feelings or somehow gained them despite the programming, I'm guessing neither will you. The movie gets and enthusiastic A+ from me.
And I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the short at the beginning. This battle between a magician and his rabbit sidekick was a hilarious, possibly Portal-inspired bit of Chuck Jones-y slapstick.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
My Life: This Blog, Again
And, more importantly, what to do with it. The lack of response to it so far has been disheartening, yes, and advice on how to get some people to notice it have suggested my writing itself, or at least my choice of topics, was the fault. That's fair, I suppose. I do have a bad habit of putting this thing off until the end of the day; I worry it's becoming a chore. I still plan on doing something with this, but I'm trying to decide what. It would be helpful, though, to get some suggestions of some of the writing that was good. Were there particular topics people liked? Particular articles? I suppose suggesting which ones really DIDN'T work would be helpful, too, though a "they all suck" would not. Regardless, I'll have at least one new post starting next week, as I decide what subjects are worth continuing.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
No, No Review Again
Nothing really to review, and honestly, I'm starting to wonder about my plans for this thing. I'm going to get some advice on what elements to focus on here, not to mention things like posting rate. Besides, some of my topics are running out of ideas. One of my goals in this blog is to avoid the depressing elements of my life and focus on the positives. And, well, if I keep on working on my life stuff, that may not last. As for the other elements, I'm not sure which ones to keep and which to scrap. I'm open to suggestions for now, but we'll see what decision I'll be making in this next week or too.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
My Inspirations: Too Much Mario Regrets
My latest inspiration is, admittedly, an inspiration I barely know that well, so this could be a short blog. His name is Tim Schafer, arguably the most famous video game writer in the industry. The reason I don't know him that well is, sadly, for much of my life, I was a console gamer, and Tim Schafer has until recently been a computer game designer. So I missed out on the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, and nearly all the other graphic adventure games. I did play the original Sam and Max, but I'm not sure that Tim was even involved in that one.
I did play Grim Fandango, though. And that one was indeed pretty awesome. But the first of his that I really loved was Psychonauts. It's not his fault it took so long. Honestly, I just never was mentally that attuned to the graphic adventure games. Grim Fandango took regular visits to Gamefaqs for me to visit. Sam and Max was a bit better, but not much. At least it had its own guide included with it.
Psychonauts, though, wasn't a graphic adventure. It was a platform game that sort of wanted to be a graphic adventure. And despite the sales suggesting otherwise, the combination worked wonderfully. Yes, occasionally, the platform descended into cliche (the collecting of some hundreds of weird items left something to be desired,) but, surprisingly, it often vanished completely at later levels so the hero could platform-game his way through a puzzle. Whether it involved telekinetically moving the parts of a board game or figuring out how to fool government agents using common household objects, you could practically see the "verb/noun" system running behind the scenes.
But it was the characters that made the game really shine. The game takes place in a summer camp for psychic children, and thus the game's cast is full of imaginative, weird, and hilarious characters. The only downside is that, as the game approaches its second half, these characters fade away. To make up for it, though, the game's levels take on a new, darker turn. The first half of the game's levels take place in the minds of psychic teachers, who are eccentric but not inherently crazy, but the second half takes place in the minds of mental patients. Learning what these people are really motivated by is both funny and tragic, and learning these back stories are the core of these later puzzles.
My affection for Tim's writing began here, but it continued as I learned more about him and his character-generating methodologies. He actually had a podcast about how he made Psychonauts, for example. This includes delving into the mindsets of his characters and the elaborate systems he used. For example, he would even created accounts on social sites for all of his characters, letting him think about what their favorite bands would be, what pictures they would use, how they are feeling from day to day, and so on.
That character planning is where my motivation comes from. As a result of works like Tim's, I have become much more deeply embedded into the mindset of my characters and struggled to give them voices unique to each of them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, of course, and I haven't gotten to the point of making a myspace for a character or anything. On the other hand, I have made Miis for a lot of them and have some of them vote as I imagine they would in the near-daily polls, so the way of the Schafer has been taken at least somewhat to heart for me. These days, I can imagine the voice of a character much faster, at least as far as I can tell. And I have Tim to thank for that. Now if only karma would make his next game a success, because the poor guy's due.
I did play Grim Fandango, though. And that one was indeed pretty awesome. But the first of his that I really loved was Psychonauts. It's not his fault it took so long. Honestly, I just never was mentally that attuned to the graphic adventure games. Grim Fandango took regular visits to Gamefaqs for me to visit. Sam and Max was a bit better, but not much. At least it had its own guide included with it.
Psychonauts, though, wasn't a graphic adventure. It was a platform game that sort of wanted to be a graphic adventure. And despite the sales suggesting otherwise, the combination worked wonderfully. Yes, occasionally, the platform descended into cliche (the collecting of some hundreds of weird items left something to be desired,) but, surprisingly, it often vanished completely at later levels so the hero could platform-game his way through a puzzle. Whether it involved telekinetically moving the parts of a board game or figuring out how to fool government agents using common household objects, you could practically see the "verb/noun" system running behind the scenes.
But it was the characters that made the game really shine. The game takes place in a summer camp for psychic children, and thus the game's cast is full of imaginative, weird, and hilarious characters. The only downside is that, as the game approaches its second half, these characters fade away. To make up for it, though, the game's levels take on a new, darker turn. The first half of the game's levels take place in the minds of psychic teachers, who are eccentric but not inherently crazy, but the second half takes place in the minds of mental patients. Learning what these people are really motivated by is both funny and tragic, and learning these back stories are the core of these later puzzles.
My affection for Tim's writing began here, but it continued as I learned more about him and his character-generating methodologies. He actually had a podcast about how he made Psychonauts, for example. This includes delving into the mindsets of his characters and the elaborate systems he used. For example, he would even created accounts on social sites for all of his characters, letting him think about what their favorite bands would be, what pictures they would use, how they are feeling from day to day, and so on.
That character planning is where my motivation comes from. As a result of works like Tim's, I have become much more deeply embedded into the mindset of my characters and struggled to give them voices unique to each of them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, of course, and I haven't gotten to the point of making a myspace for a character or anything. On the other hand, I have made Miis for a lot of them and have some of them vote as I imagine they would in the near-daily polls, so the way of the Schafer has been taken at least somewhat to heart for me. These days, I can imagine the voice of a character much faster, at least as far as I can tell. And I have Tim to thank for that. Now if only karma would make his next game a success, because the poor guy's due.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
My Ideas: Cheating in the Wish Fullfillment Category
Before I start today's blog, I have to admit something; of the five major sections that I do here, this is increasingly my favorite. I'm running out of things to discuss about my life, at least not non-depressing ones, and even the rants are trickier, but I always am eager to share the work I've made, even in this limited format. Yes, I know that pretty much nobody reads it, but in a way that helps, and in another way completely it doesn't really matter. What matters is that out there, I have made at least that smallest contribution to the collective information and ideas of the world. It's very cathartic.
That being said, this is a fairly embarrassing update. You see, of the sixteen ideas that formerly made up my portfolio, plus the new ones of the last couple of years and the overarching mythology tying them together, I'd say I currently have three ideas that I consider my favorites. These are ideas I constantly study, revise, go over in my head, and even live out or at least imagine the dialogue and characters thereof. If given the chance, I would accept the job of making any of these games into an actual product in an instant. However, there is a tiny part of my brain that gives a different answer in the hypothetical universe where I am given the chance to make any game I want in exactly the way I want it to be made. This alternate answer is the game I named Goliath, and the reason for this answer can be summed up simply: pure fanboy-ism.
Goliath is, at its heart, a futuristic action game using a city as the setting. In other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future. The innovations were pretty drastic, though. For one thing, you don't play as a person. Your character is Goliath, an experimental shape-shifting robot created for the military. Early in the game, you are lost by the unit that created you, leaving you to wander the city on your own. Over time, you get the ability to assume various forms, starting with a hovering, futuristic car, and later including a giant, robotic, cat-like creature, a humanoid better suited to individual fights, and finally a cat/bird hybrid form capable of flight. So, in other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future, except you play as the car.
The other main innovation, and the one that motivates my cynical response above, is that the game doesn't have a normal, linear plot. Instead, it was intended to be an anthology divided into many chapters. Each chapter can be separated from the others by months, years, or even decades, since Goliath is a robot and doesn't have to worry about aging after all, and each chapter features a new master/driver to command Goliath (except near the end, when Goliath is so free-willed he needs no master.) More importantly, each chapter has a new designer/writer and a new storytelling style entirely! In my ideal version of the game, each chapter's designer would be a bigwig in the storytelling universe, and of course they would include figures like Joss Whedon, Tim Burton, Charlie Kaufman, and others of my personal idols. It should be noted that my earliest version of this list included the likes of the Wachowski brothers and M. Night Shyamalan, which should give you an idea on exactly when I came up with this game!
So, yes, the sad part of me would make this game just so I could hang out with my idols and work on a project with them, is that so wrong? It's not like I think that the idea of the game is lacking by itself. The anthology idea alone could be brilliant, but mostly it's the setting, the city of Unaris, that inspires me. Sandbox setting plus future has been done before (including the recent Crackdown, which I haven't played yet. I will, I will. Sorry. Shut up.) For example, Jak 2 and 3 for the Playstation 2 directly aped the Grand Theft Auto design for its own city. But I found it lacking. For one thing, unlike the Grand Theft Auto settings, the Jak cities never felt real to me. They were too labyrinthine, too lacking in notable landmarks, too empty of activities and stories and life beyond the slack-jawed pedestrians.
I wanted Unaris to be different, so I spent much of my development planning time on its design. What else could I do, after all; I was planning on making a multi-contributor anthology, so detailed plot work was impossible. Unaris is notable in that it is a much more vertical location than modern cities. Buildings and entire districts are stacked on top of each other, which both makes for a nice visual motif of having the most affluent parts of the city being the only ones to have regular sunlight and making city navigation much more fun for a character more capable of platforming than the average sandbox protagonist.
Admittedly, there were a lot of clichés in this version, from the surface-level slums that barely sustain themselves on reflected sunlight to the top-level church designed to encourage the rich and powerful, but the sheer visual and gameplay possibilities were endless. There was Angle City, a mini-community all of its own created underground and run by madmen. Or the White Noise, an industrial district permanently shrouded by fog and hazardous to human inhabitation. Or the floating sphere that represents this city's equivalent of Wall Street. My favorite, though, is the mercantile district, and empty shaft stretching from the city's depths to its peak, showing an easy cross-section of all of Unaris; a dizzying view even before the artificial rivers built midway up the city and other landmarks. Even simple things like swimming in the city reservoir could be amazing in the right environment, and there are very few environments I made that I'm more proud of than Unaris.
Even in the very realistic view that I'll never make this game alongside the creators of Buffy and Edward Scissorhands, I would place this idea among the top ideas I would ever create. Just the image of Goliath struggling its way onto a floating saucer owned by the inevitably corrupt government officials, or leaping his way through the city's launch bay on his way into space, or simply bounding to the roof of the tallest building in the city and howling like the urban carnivore that he is still gives me chills years later. It's an idea that I not only want to share with my idols; it's one I want to use to become one of their peers.
That being said, this is a fairly embarrassing update. You see, of the sixteen ideas that formerly made up my portfolio, plus the new ones of the last couple of years and the overarching mythology tying them together, I'd say I currently have three ideas that I consider my favorites. These are ideas I constantly study, revise, go over in my head, and even live out or at least imagine the dialogue and characters thereof. If given the chance, I would accept the job of making any of these games into an actual product in an instant. However, there is a tiny part of my brain that gives a different answer in the hypothetical universe where I am given the chance to make any game I want in exactly the way I want it to be made. This alternate answer is the game I named Goliath, and the reason for this answer can be summed up simply: pure fanboy-ism.
Goliath is, at its heart, a futuristic action game using a city as the setting. In other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future. The innovations were pretty drastic, though. For one thing, you don't play as a person. Your character is Goliath, an experimental shape-shifting robot created for the military. Early in the game, you are lost by the unit that created you, leaving you to wander the city on your own. Over time, you get the ability to assume various forms, starting with a hovering, futuristic car, and later including a giant, robotic, cat-like creature, a humanoid better suited to individual fights, and finally a cat/bird hybrid form capable of flight. So, in other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future, except you play as the car.
The other main innovation, and the one that motivates my cynical response above, is that the game doesn't have a normal, linear plot. Instead, it was intended to be an anthology divided into many chapters. Each chapter can be separated from the others by months, years, or even decades, since Goliath is a robot and doesn't have to worry about aging after all, and each chapter features a new master/driver to command Goliath (except near the end, when Goliath is so free-willed he needs no master.) More importantly, each chapter has a new designer/writer and a new storytelling style entirely! In my ideal version of the game, each chapter's designer would be a bigwig in the storytelling universe, and of course they would include figures like Joss Whedon, Tim Burton, Charlie Kaufman, and others of my personal idols. It should be noted that my earliest version of this list included the likes of the Wachowski brothers and M. Night Shyamalan, which should give you an idea on exactly when I came up with this game!
So, yes, the sad part of me would make this game just so I could hang out with my idols and work on a project with them, is that so wrong? It's not like I think that the idea of the game is lacking by itself. The anthology idea alone could be brilliant, but mostly it's the setting, the city of Unaris, that inspires me. Sandbox setting plus future has been done before (including the recent Crackdown, which I haven't played yet. I will, I will. Sorry. Shut up.) For example, Jak 2 and 3 for the Playstation 2 directly aped the Grand Theft Auto design for its own city. But I found it lacking. For one thing, unlike the Grand Theft Auto settings, the Jak cities never felt real to me. They were too labyrinthine, too lacking in notable landmarks, too empty of activities and stories and life beyond the slack-jawed pedestrians.
I wanted Unaris to be different, so I spent much of my development planning time on its design. What else could I do, after all; I was planning on making a multi-contributor anthology, so detailed plot work was impossible. Unaris is notable in that it is a much more vertical location than modern cities. Buildings and entire districts are stacked on top of each other, which both makes for a nice visual motif of having the most affluent parts of the city being the only ones to have regular sunlight and making city navigation much more fun for a character more capable of platforming than the average sandbox protagonist.
Admittedly, there were a lot of clichés in this version, from the surface-level slums that barely sustain themselves on reflected sunlight to the top-level church designed to encourage the rich and powerful, but the sheer visual and gameplay possibilities were endless. There was Angle City, a mini-community all of its own created underground and run by madmen. Or the White Noise, an industrial district permanently shrouded by fog and hazardous to human inhabitation. Or the floating sphere that represents this city's equivalent of Wall Street. My favorite, though, is the mercantile district, and empty shaft stretching from the city's depths to its peak, showing an easy cross-section of all of Unaris; a dizzying view even before the artificial rivers built midway up the city and other landmarks. Even simple things like swimming in the city reservoir could be amazing in the right environment, and there are very few environments I made that I'm more proud of than Unaris.
Even in the very realistic view that I'll never make this game alongside the creators of Buffy and Edward Scissorhands, I would place this idea among the top ideas I would ever create. Just the image of Goliath struggling its way onto a floating saucer owned by the inevitably corrupt government officials, or leaping his way through the city's launch bay on his way into space, or simply bounding to the roof of the tallest building in the city and howling like the urban carnivore that he is still gives me chills years later. It's an idea that I not only want to share with my idols; it's one I want to use to become one of their peers.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Reviews: The Awfully Familiar Hulk
Today's review covers yet another geeky movie seen this summer. This one is round two of the season's three big superhero movies. Yes, there was Hellboy 2, but I didn't see the original, so it doesn't count. Hulk 2 is this week's sample, and while it doesn't come close to the level of success of Iron Man, the first and best of the super hero movies so far this summer, it at least entertained.
I call it Hulk 2, but technically it's called The Incredible Hulk, on the semi-mistaken impression that the first Hulk movie sucked. It still is a sequel in any sense of the word, taking the original movie's story and working directly from there, but conveniently avoiding any reference to Bruce Banner's father, the nemesis in the first movie. In this movie, for at least 3/4 of the total runtime, the main villain is the U.S. Army collectively, let by "Thunderbolt" Ross, Bruce's love interest's jerk of a father. He was more blustering and trigger-happy than malevolent in the first movie, but here he's more than happy to capture and dissect the protagonist as part of a really poorly-thought plan to make super-soldiers. Because nothing makes a better weapon than a crazed, enraged, uncontrollable invincible guy who doesn't even seem interested in fighting until somebody shoots him first.
But anyway, the movie had some serious plot issues, most of which I'll save for a post-spoiler section below, but otherwise it worked okay. Now, I didn't hate the Ang Lee movie at all, but I can see how some of its more esoteric elements were annoying to others, and all of them have been purged. Gone are the comic-paneling scenes and the psychotic villain with rapidly fluctuating motivation. And gone are the Hulk-poodles. In its place are a lot more scenes of the Hulk breaking things and Bruce running from guys trying to shoot him and avoiding becoming the Hulk, with refreshing amount of failure. Eventually, his own plans, which revolve around finding a cure but tend to find the most complex and circular ways of doing, nearly come to fruition, just in time for him to fight the movie's actual villain, The Abomination, who's basically an evil Hulk. That makes for an interesting conclusion, but it's a tough one to pull off in practice. The difficulty is inherent in having two enemies with equal powers fighting each other; what makes the hero win without it looking like a cop-out? And there are the problems when the powers are basically super-strength and invincibility, since neither are especially subtle powers, and that the hero in this case is not exactly a tactical genius.
But the interesting thing about the Hulk is that it's not mainly about the villains. Hell, when you get right down to it, the only heroes with a really exceptional rogues' gallery are Batman and Spiderman, though on the plus side that means that other superhero movies feel less obligated to kill the villains at the end of every movie. The Hulk's more about the internal struggle. It's about a superhero who barely counts as a hero at all except when in the direct vicinity of a sufficiently evil villain and created by a guy who hates his very existence in his "superhero" form. This makes the struggle internalized, which might be why it's been harder to make successful movies about him. This one revels in this struggle, both through the exposition and visually, and the isolation of the hero is one of the movie's strengths. That, plus some excellent actions scenes (I loved the initial Brazil chase even before the Hulk shows up,) bumps this movie to a B.
There were some obvious problems, though, which I'll address after a spoiler bump.
Good enough. Okay, first of all, the movie goes into detail about how careful Bruce is and how he avoids detection almost perfectly. Why, then, would he send an email directly to the cellular scientist he was working with even after his computer was captured by the military? Even if he failed to assume they would tag his and the scientist's aliases, why even bother sending an email? Why not just show up, since the email didn't seem to help prepare the guy for the meeting at all? It seemed like a very contrived way to set up the finale. Secondly, the government already has a super-serum that lets its soldiers become regenerative, super-agile, and tireless warriors with only slight aggression being a side-effect. Why not just use that and not the formula that makes you crazy? On the other hand, I liked both the setup that ensured said genetic scientist will be the obvious villain for potential Hulk 3 and that the series overtly links to the earlier Iron Man and the implications of a full-on Avengers movie in the near future.
I call it Hulk 2, but technically it's called The Incredible Hulk, on the semi-mistaken impression that the first Hulk movie sucked. It still is a sequel in any sense of the word, taking the original movie's story and working directly from there, but conveniently avoiding any reference to Bruce Banner's father, the nemesis in the first movie. In this movie, for at least 3/4 of the total runtime, the main villain is the U.S. Army collectively, let by "Thunderbolt" Ross, Bruce's love interest's jerk of a father. He was more blustering and trigger-happy than malevolent in the first movie, but here he's more than happy to capture and dissect the protagonist as part of a really poorly-thought plan to make super-soldiers. Because nothing makes a better weapon than a crazed, enraged, uncontrollable invincible guy who doesn't even seem interested in fighting until somebody shoots him first.
But anyway, the movie had some serious plot issues, most of which I'll save for a post-spoiler section below, but otherwise it worked okay. Now, I didn't hate the Ang Lee movie at all, but I can see how some of its more esoteric elements were annoying to others, and all of them have been purged. Gone are the comic-paneling scenes and the psychotic villain with rapidly fluctuating motivation. And gone are the Hulk-poodles. In its place are a lot more scenes of the Hulk breaking things and Bruce running from guys trying to shoot him and avoiding becoming the Hulk, with refreshing amount of failure. Eventually, his own plans, which revolve around finding a cure but tend to find the most complex and circular ways of doing, nearly come to fruition, just in time for him to fight the movie's actual villain, The Abomination, who's basically an evil Hulk. That makes for an interesting conclusion, but it's a tough one to pull off in practice. The difficulty is inherent in having two enemies with equal powers fighting each other; what makes the hero win without it looking like a cop-out? And there are the problems when the powers are basically super-strength and invincibility, since neither are especially subtle powers, and that the hero in this case is not exactly a tactical genius.
But the interesting thing about the Hulk is that it's not mainly about the villains. Hell, when you get right down to it, the only heroes with a really exceptional rogues' gallery are Batman and Spiderman, though on the plus side that means that other superhero movies feel less obligated to kill the villains at the end of every movie. The Hulk's more about the internal struggle. It's about a superhero who barely counts as a hero at all except when in the direct vicinity of a sufficiently evil villain and created by a guy who hates his very existence in his "superhero" form. This makes the struggle internalized, which might be why it's been harder to make successful movies about him. This one revels in this struggle, both through the exposition and visually, and the isolation of the hero is one of the movie's strengths. That, plus some excellent actions scenes (I loved the initial Brazil chase even before the Hulk shows up,) bumps this movie to a B.
There were some obvious problems, though, which I'll address after a spoiler bump.
Good enough. Okay, first of all, the movie goes into detail about how careful Bruce is and how he avoids detection almost perfectly. Why, then, would he send an email directly to the cellular scientist he was working with even after his computer was captured by the military? Even if he failed to assume they would tag his and the scientist's aliases, why even bother sending an email? Why not just show up, since the email didn't seem to help prepare the guy for the meeting at all? It seemed like a very contrived way to set up the finale. Secondly, the government already has a super-serum that lets its soldiers become regenerative, super-agile, and tireless warriors with only slight aggression being a side-effect. Why not just use that and not the formula that makes you crazy? On the other hand, I liked both the setup that ensured said genetic scientist will be the obvious villain for potential Hulk 3 and that the series overtly links to the earlier Iron Man and the implications of a full-on Avengers movie in the near future.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Rantings: Video Games and Community Contributions
The Internet! It's changed the world in countless ways. Business is redefined, communities are created, and globalism now is the standard. But enough about that. This blog is about video games after all, so lets focus on that element. But on the subject of video games, the concept started well before the Internet. Just like Dungeons and Dragons and other sub-cultures largely consisting of, let's face it, geeks, video games have formed a community regardless of the difficulty.
In ye olde early days, it was done via correspondents by mail and through the games themselves. Console games had few options on the latter, but arcades were defined by their community access. That was fundamentally the point of high scores, for example. Yes, there was the sense of accomplishment, but it wasn't just that sense that made it appealing. It was the ability to prove oneself to one's peers. Besides, it provides a much more dynamic challenge. Winning against a computer, however, briefly, was limited to the AI and the rules of the game. But the arcade system made both the game itself and the other players your challengers, and the latter only got better with time. There's a reason that this struggle is being made into movies even today.
But I have to admit, the arcade era of the video game community game was lost to me by and large. By the time I got into video games, I was seven or eight at the youngest, and that makes the date 1986-7. By then, arcades were already starting to fade, and those that remained had moved onto the Double Dragon style games, where the game play was longer and had a clear goal. The industry had reached the Nintendo Age, and linear, narrative storytelling was king. My first involvement of the community at large was in magazines like Nintendo Power. Here, community involvement was limited to letters at first, but at least this gave gamers a voice that transcended location and cultural boundaries. The magazine also had a "high score" section, where people could provide evidence of their successes with Nintendo's games. It effectively created a modern version of the arcade high score table. But even by then, the actual numerical high scores were disappearing. Many issues featured high score lists that were nothing but "game completed" messages.
Enough of the past, though! The Internet made the community an actual community in countless ways. For once, instead of competing for who did best against the computer, they could compete against each other in a greater way. But it was here where communities surpassed that limit. Instead of simply responding through playing the game, they also can actually alter and contribute the game through modding. Wolfenstein 3D, doom, and other games of this era let people create maps and missions for the game themselves, often letting them surpass what even the game creators made!
Let us look into the future, though. Now, we have seen the level of contribution increase since this point, from entire campaigns in RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, to full games through programs like the RPG Maker series, to parts of an entire virtual planet like Second Life. But what if they could affect the actual game itself? Imagine a conservative version of this theory where prototypes, betas, and demos for a game are released well before a game comes out, and the testers not only evaluate the game, but actually create new creatures and elements of the game? Or what if the game's engine is released well before the game itself comes out, letting its fans create new content using it?
Another option is through the use of sequels. Many games, especially RPGs, are known for their branching paths and multiple endings. We already know we have ways to submit game play information online directly to the game's creators; see achievements for example. Imagine if the game automatically uploads the first ending achieved to company automatically, and these affect the sequels' plots.
Or let's look at the really crazy possibilities. What if the sequential, narrative game came out at the same time as the game's editors? Thus, when the game comes out, there is a complete story, but as time passes, the creators release constant updates with new enemies, new quests, or even new endings, characters, or levels based entirely on the contributions of other players? Or it could be used in an episodic game, much like the modern Sam and Max series. Imagine that levels 1-5 are released immediately and for, say, half a normal priced game. Levels 6-10, though, are either cheaper and released later or are free, but the modified levels 6-10, with new enemies and other contributions by the players who altered levels 1-5 already, cost extra.
One last idea uses the Intromo concept I used back in the first few weeks. Let's say the first game is a single or limited player narrative game, but a sequel is a MMORPG or similar community based game. In this case, the community not only affects their own experience with the decisions they make and content they create, but that stuff will become the basis for the MMO. Your monsters become the spawn everyone hunts, your hero is the poor immobile dope that assigns quests, and the giant city the players all start in was completely or partially made by your own adventures!
These are just hypotheticals, of course, but they combine two aspects of video gaming today without compromising either. The network age is here, and this fact can't be ignored. But I refuse to believe that all the best games of the last two generations, from Metal Gear Solid to Silent Hill to Resident Evil to Shadow of the Colossus and even Katamari Damacy, were mistakes with nothing to contribute to the future of gaming either. By marrying the two, not only will video game costs potentially decrease, but the interested user base will increase at the same time, and it will be a great way for the industry to recruit new employees without much of the confusion that exists today. This may be only one potential view of the industry's future, but I'm optimistic it could be a successful one. If so, I'll let you know which of my creations is currently busy killing you!
In ye olde early days, it was done via correspondents by mail and through the games themselves. Console games had few options on the latter, but arcades were defined by their community access. That was fundamentally the point of high scores, for example. Yes, there was the sense of accomplishment, but it wasn't just that sense that made it appealing. It was the ability to prove oneself to one's peers. Besides, it provides a much more dynamic challenge. Winning against a computer, however, briefly, was limited to the AI and the rules of the game. But the arcade system made both the game itself and the other players your challengers, and the latter only got better with time. There's a reason that this struggle is being made into movies even today.
But I have to admit, the arcade era of the video game community game was lost to me by and large. By the time I got into video games, I was seven or eight at the youngest, and that makes the date 1986-7. By then, arcades were already starting to fade, and those that remained had moved onto the Double Dragon style games, where the game play was longer and had a clear goal. The industry had reached the Nintendo Age, and linear, narrative storytelling was king. My first involvement of the community at large was in magazines like Nintendo Power. Here, community involvement was limited to letters at first, but at least this gave gamers a voice that transcended location and cultural boundaries. The magazine also had a "high score" section, where people could provide evidence of their successes with Nintendo's games. It effectively created a modern version of the arcade high score table. But even by then, the actual numerical high scores were disappearing. Many issues featured high score lists that were nothing but "game completed" messages.
Enough of the past, though! The Internet made the community an actual community in countless ways. For once, instead of competing for who did best against the computer, they could compete against each other in a greater way. But it was here where communities surpassed that limit. Instead of simply responding through playing the game, they also can actually alter and contribute the game through modding. Wolfenstein 3D, doom, and other games of this era let people create maps and missions for the game themselves, often letting them surpass what even the game creators made!
Let us look into the future, though. Now, we have seen the level of contribution increase since this point, from entire campaigns in RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, to full games through programs like the RPG Maker series, to parts of an entire virtual planet like Second Life. But what if they could affect the actual game itself? Imagine a conservative version of this theory where prototypes, betas, and demos for a game are released well before a game comes out, and the testers not only evaluate the game, but actually create new creatures and elements of the game? Or what if the game's engine is released well before the game itself comes out, letting its fans create new content using it?
Another option is through the use of sequels. Many games, especially RPGs, are known for their branching paths and multiple endings. We already know we have ways to submit game play information online directly to the game's creators; see achievements for example. Imagine if the game automatically uploads the first ending achieved to company automatically, and these affect the sequels' plots.
Or let's look at the really crazy possibilities. What if the sequential, narrative game came out at the same time as the game's editors? Thus, when the game comes out, there is a complete story, but as time passes, the creators release constant updates with new enemies, new quests, or even new endings, characters, or levels based entirely on the contributions of other players? Or it could be used in an episodic game, much like the modern Sam and Max series. Imagine that levels 1-5 are released immediately and for, say, half a normal priced game. Levels 6-10, though, are either cheaper and released later or are free, but the modified levels 6-10, with new enemies and other contributions by the players who altered levels 1-5 already, cost extra.
One last idea uses the Intromo concept I used back in the first few weeks. Let's say the first game is a single or limited player narrative game, but a sequel is a MMORPG or similar community based game. In this case, the community not only affects their own experience with the decisions they make and content they create, but that stuff will become the basis for the MMO. Your monsters become the spawn everyone hunts, your hero is the poor immobile dope that assigns quests, and the giant city the players all start in was completely or partially made by your own adventures!
These are just hypotheticals, of course, but they combine two aspects of video gaming today without compromising either. The network age is here, and this fact can't be ignored. But I refuse to believe that all the best games of the last two generations, from Metal Gear Solid to Silent Hill to Resident Evil to Shadow of the Colossus and even Katamari Damacy, were mistakes with nothing to contribute to the future of gaming either. By marrying the two, not only will video game costs potentially decrease, but the interested user base will increase at the same time, and it will be a great way for the industry to recruit new employees without much of the confusion that exists today. This may be only one potential view of the industry's future, but I'm optimistic it could be a successful one. If so, I'll let you know which of my creations is currently busy killing you!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
My Life: A Minor Major and a Major Mistake?
I have to admit, I'm running out of obvious sources for these "life" posts. Too much of my time is invested in the art I absorb, contemplate, or write, which make up for the other four updates. What's left is some of my other interests, groups, and past, and some of that includes some of the relationship issues, which I don't like to discuss here, and some of my beliefs, which I tend to consider off limits. I can do some historical choices, however, starting with one I sort of regret. I already mentioned that I'm not satisfied with my college life. I'll specify one element, though, which I really tended to question: my major.
Now, I went into college with a number of idealistic assumptions about both college and my career plans. You see, ever since I was a child, I always wanted to be one thing: a video game designer. The hard part, now and as always, was figuring out how, but at the time, I assumed the path was pretty easy. You get it by making games. And at the time, I assumed that also meant one thing: programming.
Naive, yes, but keep in mind the state of hte industry at the time. I grew up with an Intellivision and was raised with a Nintendo and a Super Nintendo. As I was going into college and considering my choices, I remember the many choices Digipen offered. For one thing, they recently included a BRAND NEW MAJOR in, amazingly, three-dimensional game creations! This is the days before Maya, and where games took less than a year to make and a handful as many developers.
So I assumed that my first step would have to be being a computer major. I wasn't exactly wrong, mind you. This was also the era before official game writers, because, well, have you read the writing in video games at the time. For one thing, the video game industry was still largely dominated in Japan, so we were lucky to get a reasonable localization without obvious typos and grammar errors, let alone believable dialogue and descriptions. And I never had much experience in art or music design, which is a shame as those were pretty obvious paths into the industry even back in the day.
But there was more to video game designing than the programming I learned. Some of the most basic stuff was essential, yes, from learning basic programming languages to assembly language principals to the classic logic gates or electrical engineering. But programming is not my passion. As the classes got more advanced, stretching into creating an entire operating system or database administration, it became more obvious that this was going far, far away from what I planned on doing what I want in life. No, I wanted to create. I was into designing worlds, creating settings, and writing. And it's not like these elements are factoring into my real job now. I write C code in most days, or at the most some other programming or just assembly.
Now, there is one thing I didn't learn at school related to computer and really needed. That is becoming, well, the Computer Guy. That most translates into IT work, from getting people's computers up and running to troubleshooting the inevitible software errors and bugs. Oh, I can do most of the basic stuff like physically assembling a new computer and installing the basic software packages, but setting up specific requirements for, say, the office email network is nigh-impossible for me. I still have no idea where to start. The assumption that I can do these things easily and just assemble a weird, alien computer for scratch is common and very annoying to me. I don't do these things for fun. Hell, I almost never program for fun or as a hobby, I do things like, well, this.
If I could redo this, I would like to be an English major and a Computer Science minor. That woudl give me the basics
Now, I went into college with a number of idealistic assumptions about both college and my career plans. You see, ever since I was a child, I always wanted to be one thing: a video game designer. The hard part, now and as always, was figuring out how, but at the time, I assumed the path was pretty easy. You get it by making games. And at the time, I assumed that also meant one thing: programming.
Naive, yes, but keep in mind the state of hte industry at the time. I grew up with an Intellivision and was raised with a Nintendo and a Super Nintendo. As I was going into college and considering my choices, I remember the many choices Digipen offered. For one thing, they recently included a BRAND NEW MAJOR in, amazingly, three-dimensional game creations! This is the days before Maya, and where games took less than a year to make and a handful as many developers.
So I assumed that my first step would have to be being a computer major. I wasn't exactly wrong, mind you. This was also the era before official game writers, because, well, have you read the writing in video games at the time. For one thing, the video game industry was still largely dominated in Japan, so we were lucky to get a reasonable localization without obvious typos and grammar errors, let alone believable dialogue and descriptions. And I never had much experience in art or music design, which is a shame as those were pretty obvious paths into the industry even back in the day.
But there was more to video game designing than the programming I learned. Some of the most basic stuff was essential, yes, from learning basic programming languages to assembly language principals to the classic logic gates or electrical engineering. But programming is not my passion. As the classes got more advanced, stretching into creating an entire operating system or database administration, it became more obvious that this was going far, far away from what I planned on doing what I want in life. No, I wanted to create. I was into designing worlds, creating settings, and writing. And it's not like these elements are factoring into my real job now. I write C code in most days, or at the most some other programming or just assembly.
Now, there is one thing I didn't learn at school related to computer and really needed. That is becoming, well, the Computer Guy. That most translates into IT work, from getting people's computers up and running to troubleshooting the inevitible software errors and bugs. Oh, I can do most of the basic stuff like physically assembling a new computer and installing the basic software packages, but setting up specific requirements for, say, the office email network is nigh-impossible for me. I still have no idea where to start. The assumption that I can do these things easily and just assemble a weird, alien computer for scratch is common and very annoying to me. I don't do these things for fun. Hell, I almost never program for fun or as a hobby, I do things like, well, this.
If I could redo this, I would like to be an English major and a Computer Science minor. That woudl give me the basics
Sunday, June 8, 2008
We'll take this one off.
I think my review schedule may end up becoming more erratic and much simpler, really. Instead of having one a week, have one whenever somethign reviewable comes along and aim at shorter reviews of the one page or so size. For tonight, though, this fairly weak week (heh) of blogs will have to come to a late conclusion due to lack of inspiration.
Friday, June 6, 2008
My Inspirations: The Universe and Other Mistakes
In the beginning, I regularly went to camp. This was commonly regarded as a mistake and many regret it. But we've been over this.
I did, however, make some friends, even though some of them also proved to be mistakes. But nonetheless one of them had similar interests and some things that he liked were ones I never heard of. One day, he showed me the text of a radio show from England. It involved the quaint life of a put upon British guy dealing with government imposition and bureaucracy.
And the world exploded.
Yes, I'm talking about the great Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the late, even greater Douglas Adams. At the time, I barely got as far as the space stuff, but it was among the most hilarious thing I had ever read. It took a while longer, but I finally got a copy of the actual book, which as fans of the series know is the same basic story minus some parts, plus other parts, and with everything else rearranged into a completely different story. Douglas Adams was either a perfectionist or a loon, or to a degree both. After reading the first book, I quickly bounded to the three sequels that existed at the time and even tracked down my own copy of the radio script, letting me finally learn the original story and best of all read Douglas Adams' comments about the script and why he made decisions with his story. A lot of his reasons was "I had no idea what I was doing," but it was brilliant nonetheless.
With time, I of course read the fifth and final novel, and best of all, I had the chance to meet the man himself, mister Douglas I Don't Know His Middle Name Adams! I got my books signed, and a towel, and I even got to ask him a question. That question, which only people who read the books will admittedly get (but it's not like the rest of you got the towel thing,) was "If Earth was really the most powerful computer in the universe, why did the Hitchhiker's Guide only list it as 'Mostly Harmless?'" His response was "I screwed up." It was a classic.
The last book was nonetheless a depressing book at times, especially the end where all the protagonists apparently die. I later read in an interview that he didn't like it much himself, and he planned on writing another sequel. And then he died.
So it goes. That's a reference to another late, great, science-fiction author, but it applies here.
But despite that depressing ending, I love the series, for many reasons. The first reason, before I even learn about the wonderful characters and science fiction, was the sheer dialogue. Maybe it was because it my first bit of British humor before I even watched Monty Python. It was the little things; Arthur Dent outsmarting the construction crew, at least for a while, or his tale about how he learned about his home being destroyed in the first place. It really took off for me, though, when I got to the story and really surreal stuff. Best of all, it improves with knowledge. For example, when I first read the story, I laughed at an infinite number of monkeys writing Hamlet because of how weird it was at first, but after I learned about the theory, it was even better. It's all those levels that make this book among my favorite books every made. For a long time, it and them (especially the first three) were my top two books along with Brave New World. It's ironic that both of the original books were shorter than a Nanowrimo novel at under 50,000 words.
So, how did it inspire me? Well, part of it was the theme, but few of my ideas tend to be so depressing, with the casual death of so many people as a laugh. It's funny in a black comedy, but most of my ideas tend to have dramatic elements that make it harder. The cynicism, though, has appealed to me. I think the most important idea that affected me was taking the future and making it human. Even in a universe of aliens, advanced technology, and civilizations beyond our imagination, stupid people do stupid things for stupid reasons. I also loved the frenetic style of adventure, where there is little to know status quo. People get separated or even die, characters are sent halfway across the galaxy by accident, and people can end up in places that are not that pleasant. It makes for a very fluid method of storytelling, especially for a video game junkie so used to more linear plotlines. It does admittedly give the protagonists little control, but for the concept of the series, it makes perfect sense. Even now, I try to avoid the "hunt x bad guy around the continent in a convenient loop" or at least a very overt "defeat all the members of bad guy team y in the convenient order of their strength."
Also, I make up words all the time. Because that's just hoopy. And I know where my towel is, but it's in the car, so I might be in trouble.
I did, however, make some friends, even though some of them also proved to be mistakes. But nonetheless one of them had similar interests and some things that he liked were ones I never heard of. One day, he showed me the text of a radio show from England. It involved the quaint life of a put upon British guy dealing with government imposition and bureaucracy.
And the world exploded.
Yes, I'm talking about the great Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the late, even greater Douglas Adams. At the time, I barely got as far as the space stuff, but it was among the most hilarious thing I had ever read. It took a while longer, but I finally got a copy of the actual book, which as fans of the series know is the same basic story minus some parts, plus other parts, and with everything else rearranged into a completely different story. Douglas Adams was either a perfectionist or a loon, or to a degree both. After reading the first book, I quickly bounded to the three sequels that existed at the time and even tracked down my own copy of the radio script, letting me finally learn the original story and best of all read Douglas Adams' comments about the script and why he made decisions with his story. A lot of his reasons was "I had no idea what I was doing," but it was brilliant nonetheless.
With time, I of course read the fifth and final novel, and best of all, I had the chance to meet the man himself, mister Douglas I Don't Know His Middle Name Adams! I got my books signed, and a towel, and I even got to ask him a question. That question, which only people who read the books will admittedly get (but it's not like the rest of you got the towel thing,) was "If Earth was really the most powerful computer in the universe, why did the Hitchhiker's Guide only list it as 'Mostly Harmless?'" His response was "I screwed up." It was a classic.
The last book was nonetheless a depressing book at times, especially the end where all the protagonists apparently die. I later read in an interview that he didn't like it much himself, and he planned on writing another sequel. And then he died.
So it goes. That's a reference to another late, great, science-fiction author, but it applies here.
But despite that depressing ending, I love the series, for many reasons. The first reason, before I even learn about the wonderful characters and science fiction, was the sheer dialogue. Maybe it was because it my first bit of British humor before I even watched Monty Python. It was the little things; Arthur Dent outsmarting the construction crew, at least for a while, or his tale about how he learned about his home being destroyed in the first place. It really took off for me, though, when I got to the story and really surreal stuff. Best of all, it improves with knowledge. For example, when I first read the story, I laughed at an infinite number of monkeys writing Hamlet because of how weird it was at first, but after I learned about the theory, it was even better. It's all those levels that make this book among my favorite books every made. For a long time, it and them (especially the first three) were my top two books along with Brave New World. It's ironic that both of the original books were shorter than a Nanowrimo novel at under 50,000 words.
So, how did it inspire me? Well, part of it was the theme, but few of my ideas tend to be so depressing, with the casual death of so many people as a laugh. It's funny in a black comedy, but most of my ideas tend to have dramatic elements that make it harder. The cynicism, though, has appealed to me. I think the most important idea that affected me was taking the future and making it human. Even in a universe of aliens, advanced technology, and civilizations beyond our imagination, stupid people do stupid things for stupid reasons. I also loved the frenetic style of adventure, where there is little to know status quo. People get separated or even die, characters are sent halfway across the galaxy by accident, and people can end up in places that are not that pleasant. It makes for a very fluid method of storytelling, especially for a video game junkie so used to more linear plotlines. It does admittedly give the protagonists little control, but for the concept of the series, it makes perfect sense. Even now, I try to avoid the "hunt x bad guy around the continent in a convenient loop" or at least a very overt "defeat all the members of bad guy team y in the convenient order of their strength."
Also, I make up words all the time. Because that's just hoopy. And I know where my towel is, but it's in the car, so I might be in trouble.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
My Ideas: To Boldly Rip Off Other's Intellectual Property
A long, long time ago (in Internet years,) I wrote about the first role playing game of sorts I invented and played with my friend. That sufficed for a while, but like I said, it was limited, and I tended to dominate the creative elements. In the meantime, I worked on some of my own projects, including projections of myself into fantasy, but we'll get into that more in a later blog. The bottom line is a new universe in a sci-fi/fantasy vein was being slowly created, and it was starting to take up my attention.
In the meantime, I found inspiration in a completely different way; a stupid one. You may remember Yoshi, the goofy little dinosaur Mario first rode in Super Mario World before he entered the brave new world of spin-offs himself. One of those spin-offs was a game I'm a little embarrassed to say I owned, but I was a kid and my parents got it for me, so no big deal. That game was Yoshi for the NES, which is silly since Yoshi made his debut on the Super Nintendo. This was a puzzle game in the era when "puzzle game" meant "slight variant of Tetris," and Yoshi was not the exception. But what really mattered here was that Yoshi had a simple two player mode that I played regularly with my friend. As we played, we bantered, we joked, and we made puns. We were in the 11-13 range or so, so the jokes were terrible, of course. At one point, we were joking about placing Yoshi in strange circumstances, and I suggested "Yoshtrek," which featured Star Trek with Yoshi as a captain. For some bizarre, surreal, ungodly reason, the term stuck.
My ideas outside of the game turned towards silly sci-fi epics with a bend towards humor and space exploration, with the whole Yoshi theme tying around it and my own universe at the center. Eventually, as the last RPG idea wore out, I started this one, on the assumption that all my friends would create spaceships and crew, with the potential of a silly dinosaur at the helm. It was even more free-form than my last idea, with whole aspects of the universe coming out of my mind at once. Part of this was necessary; when I let people design their teams, I didn't put any limits on how powerful they were. So many of my friends would have armadas with the equivalent of twenty Death Stars!
The entire thing was often ridiculous, like the very worst cases of escalating power struggles between power gaming munchkins and a railroading DM minus the part where there are any rules. It nonetheless somehow lasted for years before the whole mess collapsed. I'd like to think this was a testament to my storytelling skills. But I'm pretty sure it was a testament to how bored we were. Nonetheless, this was the first time I created a universe this large and complex. With time, the joke elements began to take more serious tones, the Yoshi concept was slowly phased out (later versions were just called Trek,) and, in the end, I had the basis for nearly every idea that came before or since. This multi-dimensional setting was where it all began for me, creatively, and many of the characters that are 15-18 years old now came from these silly little adventures.
The lesson here, I guess, is that inspiration doesn't necessarily come from saying "I will be inspired HERE!" Sometimes it takes taking something small and simple and letting it grow. Rarely does one have a decade to let it grow, but any time can be helpful if you don't give up on an idea. That is one of the reasons I'm posting some of these ideas online; to revisit them years after their incarnations. It's certainly not to brag, though dinosaurs piloting spacecraft arguably would be something to brag about.
In the meantime, I found inspiration in a completely different way; a stupid one. You may remember Yoshi, the goofy little dinosaur Mario first rode in Super Mario World before he entered the brave new world of spin-offs himself. One of those spin-offs was a game I'm a little embarrassed to say I owned, but I was a kid and my parents got it for me, so no big deal. That game was Yoshi for the NES, which is silly since Yoshi made his debut on the Super Nintendo. This was a puzzle game in the era when "puzzle game" meant "slight variant of Tetris," and Yoshi was not the exception. But what really mattered here was that Yoshi had a simple two player mode that I played regularly with my friend. As we played, we bantered, we joked, and we made puns. We were in the 11-13 range or so, so the jokes were terrible, of course. At one point, we were joking about placing Yoshi in strange circumstances, and I suggested "Yoshtrek," which featured Star Trek with Yoshi as a captain. For some bizarre, surreal, ungodly reason, the term stuck.
My ideas outside of the game turned towards silly sci-fi epics with a bend towards humor and space exploration, with the whole Yoshi theme tying around it and my own universe at the center. Eventually, as the last RPG idea wore out, I started this one, on the assumption that all my friends would create spaceships and crew, with the potential of a silly dinosaur at the helm. It was even more free-form than my last idea, with whole aspects of the universe coming out of my mind at once. Part of this was necessary; when I let people design their teams, I didn't put any limits on how powerful they were. So many of my friends would have armadas with the equivalent of twenty Death Stars!
The entire thing was often ridiculous, like the very worst cases of escalating power struggles between power gaming munchkins and a railroading DM minus the part where there are any rules. It nonetheless somehow lasted for years before the whole mess collapsed. I'd like to think this was a testament to my storytelling skills. But I'm pretty sure it was a testament to how bored we were. Nonetheless, this was the first time I created a universe this large and complex. With time, the joke elements began to take more serious tones, the Yoshi concept was slowly phased out (later versions were just called Trek,) and, in the end, I had the basis for nearly every idea that came before or since. This multi-dimensional setting was where it all began for me, creatively, and many of the characters that are 15-18 years old now came from these silly little adventures.
The lesson here, I guess, is that inspiration doesn't necessarily come from saying "I will be inspired HERE!" Sometimes it takes taking something small and simple and letting it grow. Rarely does one have a decade to let it grow, but any time can be helpful if you don't give up on an idea. That is one of the reasons I'm posting some of these ideas online; to revisit them years after their incarnations. It's certainly not to brag, though dinosaurs piloting spacecraft arguably would be something to brag about.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Blog post tomorrow
I'm starting to realize that days I go to the gym on weekdays are not always the best days to blog. It throws my whole schedule off. But then, tomorrow's laundry day, but eh, I'll work around that.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Reviews: Getting Lost
Well, I thought the joke was cute at least. This week's review covers the entirety of season 4 of Lost, which I thought was the best one since season 1. There are many reasons why, but the first may be a matter of timing and brevity. Thanks to plans by the creators and the writers' strike, this season was little more than half the length of earlier seasons. Despite this, by waiting until so late to even start the season, the show managed to avoid having many gaps between episodes, a problem earlier seasons (especially season 2) suffered as weeks or months could pass between new episodes.
But it's the structure of the season and strength of the new characters that really made this season work. Now, nearly every season as of late has far too many "the characters walk from point A to point B" episodes, letting them take a good four episodes or so to resolve anything. For example, season 3 had an expedition from the base camp to the barracks, featuring everything from another Dharma base to a strange electromagnetic fence slowing things down. Now, any real obstacles between these points have been removed, and while it apparently takes anywhere from a few hours to over a day to get between these points, the trip itself is more of a non-event. This season's "location of mystery" is a boat located just off the coast, and while it again has a habit of taking a variable amount of time to get to and from, at least there's not an explanation of sorts; the implications are that the island has some sort of time-warping field around it, making it more obvious than ever that there's something overtly supernatural or even divine about the island.
As for the plot of the season, it revolves around determining how trusted the arrivals on the boat are and how to use that boat for all of them to escape the island, a story arc made more ominous by the general replacement of the "flashbacks," where we learned further history about the island's inhabitants, with "flash forwards," where we slowly learn that only six of the islanders manage to escape and the identities of these six.
That ominous, as we slowly learn that some conditions are inevitable while others are ambiguous, makes the season more suspenseful than many earlier ones. For example, we don't know what happens to anyone not listed as escaped until the season's finale. Are they dead? Hiding? Still trapped on the island?
As for characters, I approved of the arriving boat characters much more than the doomed tail section cast from season 2 or the overtly and pointlessly mysterious Others from season 3. Their pragmatism was refreshing, for one. The Others are mysterious because they follow some weird island-related cult not revealed for three years now, even when logic would suggest otherwise. For example, I know Juliet was forced to join and probably knew little about them, but it would be nice for Jack to at least ask, "So, what's with that whisper teleport thing you guys can do?"
The boaties, on the other hand, are mysterious because they have very conflicting objectives and some of them have the objective of "Kill everyone on the island, so let's not tell them about that yet," which makes sense. The less evil ones are there to do a job, and while most are sympathetic to the heroes, they're secretive because they have no power to decide what happens to the "locals." Again, it makes them both intelligently secretive and free to be explored as deeper characters. And many of them actually are open about their plans! The captain of the vessel, for example, will happily tell the locals anything they ask without misdirection. The only negative is that some of the season's villains, notably the mercenaries responsible for trying to kill everyone, evil to a cartoonish level, with no real signs of depth or redemption. On the plus side, this lets former villains like Other leader Ben get some sympathy and humanity, since we sometimes can root for him against a common threat. All of this leads me to give the season a solid A, making it one of my favorite shows this season once again.
The only real downside, as far as I'm concerned, is the death of one regular character (spoilers ahoy!)
That of Danielle Rouseau. She was a regular since season 1 and deserved a better death than the one she got. More importantly, her death left her character's past unexplored. We never learned what really happened to her science expedition, what drove her crazy specifically, and what she did with her life since then. But so it goes with this who; we never got a full resolution with Liddy or Mr. Eko, either. And at least the four surviving members of the expedition are more than worthy replacements. I like Charlotte the best of the four, but all four have their fans. Let's hope they are smart enough to drive sober!
But it's the structure of the season and strength of the new characters that really made this season work. Now, nearly every season as of late has far too many "the characters walk from point A to point B" episodes, letting them take a good four episodes or so to resolve anything. For example, season 3 had an expedition from the base camp to the barracks, featuring everything from another Dharma base to a strange electromagnetic fence slowing things down. Now, any real obstacles between these points have been removed, and while it apparently takes anywhere from a few hours to over a day to get between these points, the trip itself is more of a non-event. This season's "location of mystery" is a boat located just off the coast, and while it again has a habit of taking a variable amount of time to get to and from, at least there's not an explanation of sorts; the implications are that the island has some sort of time-warping field around it, making it more obvious than ever that there's something overtly supernatural or even divine about the island.
As for the plot of the season, it revolves around determining how trusted the arrivals on the boat are and how to use that boat for all of them to escape the island, a story arc made more ominous by the general replacement of the "flashbacks," where we learned further history about the island's inhabitants, with "flash forwards," where we slowly learn that only six of the islanders manage to escape and the identities of these six.
That ominous, as we slowly learn that some conditions are inevitable while others are ambiguous, makes the season more suspenseful than many earlier ones. For example, we don't know what happens to anyone not listed as escaped until the season's finale. Are they dead? Hiding? Still trapped on the island?
As for characters, I approved of the arriving boat characters much more than the doomed tail section cast from season 2 or the overtly and pointlessly mysterious Others from season 3. Their pragmatism was refreshing, for one. The Others are mysterious because they follow some weird island-related cult not revealed for three years now, even when logic would suggest otherwise. For example, I know Juliet was forced to join and probably knew little about them, but it would be nice for Jack to at least ask, "So, what's with that whisper teleport thing you guys can do?"
The boaties, on the other hand, are mysterious because they have very conflicting objectives and some of them have the objective of "Kill everyone on the island, so let's not tell them about that yet," which makes sense. The less evil ones are there to do a job, and while most are sympathetic to the heroes, they're secretive because they have no power to decide what happens to the "locals." Again, it makes them both intelligently secretive and free to be explored as deeper characters. And many of them actually are open about their plans! The captain of the vessel, for example, will happily tell the locals anything they ask without misdirection. The only negative is that some of the season's villains, notably the mercenaries responsible for trying to kill everyone, evil to a cartoonish level, with no real signs of depth or redemption. On the plus side, this lets former villains like Other leader Ben get some sympathy and humanity, since we sometimes can root for him against a common threat. All of this leads me to give the season a solid A, making it one of my favorite shows this season once again.
The only real downside, as far as I'm concerned, is the death of one regular character (spoilers ahoy!)
That of Danielle Rouseau. She was a regular since season 1 and deserved a better death than the one she got. More importantly, her death left her character's past unexplored. We never learned what really happened to her science expedition, what drove her crazy specifically, and what she did with her life since then. But so it goes with this who; we never got a full resolution with Liddy or Mr. Eko, either. And at least the four surviving members of the expedition are more than worthy replacements. I like Charlotte the best of the four, but all four have their fans. Let's hope they are smart enough to drive sober!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
