My Life: Okay, I have no excuse for September

Otherwise, though, it's been a busy time, in mostly good ways. I started a temporary job midway through August. Well, as of mid October, it's been made permanent! So I'm doing that now instead of, say, playing video games in the later morning/early afternoon period. This hasn't stopped me from writing, though! From the last week of September until this Tuesday, I've been working on my third (real) screenplay. And Nanowrimo, which I originally planned on skipping, is coming up in a few days. I declared this to be my "writing" year. Two books, two screenplays, and for now the final annual update of my ongoing universe? That's a pretty busy period. Besides, I also plan to look for a new place to live, pay off my remaining medical bills, and go car shopping. It's a good thing I already barely sleep.

I'll try to get back to regular posts here, though no promises. My Nano writing will come first. And a friend of mine is looking to expand her writing professionally, and she seems keen on dragging me along for the ride. I doubt I'll quit my day job (especially after it took so long to even get it,) but making money and just BEING a writer in the professional sense would be wonderful, so we'll see. And if I can option off a screenplay, and then I get involved with the video game adaptation, and I get the experience and resources from there...then I can probably go for a ride on my pet unicorn next. But still, it's nice to be a bit optimistic again.

Rant: Vampires, what's the point exactly?

And just as importantly, what's next? Right now, we're in a vampire renaissance. The damn bloodsuckers are nearly inescapable. We've got Twilight, True Blood, the books thereof, with the Vampire Diaries...present as well. Even Buffy has returned in comic book form. Sure, zombies are holding their own, and they're kicking butt in the video game industry, but the story's never about THEM. It's about the humans surviving them and how; the zombies are just an obstacle. Vampires, on the other hand, are characters. They talk, they think, they have ambitions, and they can form romances. And dear Lonnie do they.

But what's the appeal, exactly? What makes vampires so interesting? Frankly, why aren't we talking about all the dragon, unicorn, demon, angel, troll, faerie, etc. fiction out there? I think there are a couple reasons, and a couple why some of the above will make their return once we get utterly sick of vampires (it has to happen eventually! You know, for a while!)

1: They're physically appealing. In other words, they look at least sufficiently human. That's pretty important. You can create a touching romance between any species, but if it's to an orc or mind flayer, you won't get many teenagers excited about it. Now, they don't have to be human ALL the time. Look at werewolves, AKA vampires' wingmen. When they're not slavering monsters, they're buff dudes and chicks.

2: They're dangerous. This brings me to the point I made in the last blog. Oh, he's so big and scary, and my life is in danger around him! But he's a gentleman, a man of honor and chivalry, unlike those other monsters. And he struggles against his natural desires to do evil, using only the power of our love! It's interesting how this metaphor changed over the years. Before, it was a matter of temptation. Vampires were beautiful, but if you gave into your desires to be with them, you would be killed or worse, enslaved for eternity. Now, they're the "bad boys." It's a story of redemption, to put it pleasantly. Effectively, the vampire is tempted by humanity now. And as I mentioned before, it's almost always a female human and male vampire. On the rare time I see it the other way, the female vampire's obvious physical superiority isn't really a topic, and the female vampire (Fempire? Vampirette? Vampiress?) is not a penitent atoner or noble teatoller. If anything, she's clueless about the very option. See Jessica from True Blood. She didn't give speeches about being "vampyre," she just doesn't get anything about her own nature yet.

3: They're complex and well-recognized. This leads to the "myth speech" every vampire story needs sooner or later. You know how it goes; once the vampire becomes well known, the human protagonist asks a friendly vampire how the whole vampire thing works. Because there are just so many concepts of a vampire, not all of them work, and many of them contradict other ones. So the vampire teaches the clueless human, and thus the clueless audience, how it goes down. Do vampires need to drink human blood, or will animal blood work? How do stakes and sunlight work? What about sillier things like garlic and more spiritually specific things like holy symbols? Do vampires really turn into bats and mist still? Do vampires not show up on mirrors or security cameras? Are they obsessed with counting things (yes, that was a real myth, and yes, Sesame Street's pretty much the only one to keep that one?) This is a big, very important speech, and woe betide you if your characters break the rules without a very good reason.

But let's face it. No fad lasts forever, and while I'm sure there will always be vampires in fiction, I doubt we'll always have multiple shows and hit movies and comics and...I don't know, probably vampire breakfast cereals somewhere. If there aren't any, somebody's missing an opportunity here. There will always be a next big thing, and it's just a matter of what that big thing is. Option one is ignoring fantasy entirely. Sick of vampires? Bring in the aliens! Science fiction is a pretty minor thing in television, but it's never been absent completely. Recently, we have V, superhero themed shows like Heroes and the upcoming No Ordinary Family, and the occasional cyborg a la Bionic Woman. In movies, it's inescapable. We have the lovable aliens in Avatar and District 9, the lovable robot on Wall-E, and about three million superheroes, nearly all of them based on genetics or robotics technology. They fit the criteria. Most are originally human, are part-human, or are aliens close enough to basically be human. Even the giant Red Lobster platters on District 9 manage to evoke sympathy. Most are vastly more powerful than normal humans, or at least have the technology to do so. And concepts like extraterrestrial life and scientific advancements have so many possibilities that they might as well be the "vampire myths" speech.

But it can't always be science fiction. The range is still too limited, and the stories risk becoming passé as real science advances. Fantasy is universal and ancient, and it always has an element of mystery and thus danger than science fiction offers.

I suspect that in the eventual feature, two creatures will eventually get recognition and may even (briefly) surpass the vampire/werewolf duality. The first are demons (and possibly angels for the same reasons.) Obviously, they're the next tier of "evil monsters" after vampires. I mean, after cannibalistic corpses, beings made of pure evil is the only way to really go. Of course, we learn they're not REAL evil, at least not universally. This brings in the convenient controversy that vampires lost somewhere around the Buffy era. Nothing provides free advertisement like people yelling how people shouldn't see your work! Danger's right there, of course, both to your body and your soul, and temptation is equally built right into the system. The only problem is how deep you want to go with the complexity level. Namely, if not all angels are good and not all demons are evil, what exactly does that mean for Satan and God? Are they nuanced (to put it lightly) as well or simply asleep at their respective wheels? Yes, controversy sells, but you can only have so many.

The other option I'd consider are a bit of a tougher sell; the fae. The problem is that according to the mainstream, faeries are harmless fun. They make cookies, help out Santa, or fly around Peter Pan. That's going to be a tough image to break. But that's what makes it perfect for a deconstruction. Imagine a horror story where the characters learn they are in danger of faeries and scoff at it. Then they meet a redcap, and...The thing is that faeries are pretty damn dangerous. They have incredible magic power, most are ageless, they exist in a reality alien to our own, and most importantly, they don't exactly "get" morality. Here's how a faerie thinks: take a child, a perfectly innocent child with all their imagination and capriciousness, remove any sense of empathy, and give them a love of pulling pranks. At best, they just don't give a damn about us. At worst, they're the disturbed child and we're the flies they're pulling wings off of. And if we think they're harmless, even silly? Then we won't expect it. They are also complex, with different species, complex politics, and unusual strengths and weaknesses like trouble with iron (a great weakness in our plastic world.) And they're beautiful by definition; there's a reason they're often called the Fair Folk. Maybe there's a cute Lord and/or Lady who is "cursed" with a conscience. It makes as much sense as expecting camaraderie from the monsters that eat us.

There are other options, but if you're going for originality and plausible success, these are the creatures that I think will do it. Now it just takes someone with the determination, innovation, and most importantly money to make one a reality.

Reviews: Demons, Angels, Living Hair, the Undead, and Other Commentaries on Gender

It's an...odd time for the role of gender in pop culture, at least from my geeky perspective. Take two things I've recently played or read. On one hand, we have Bayonetta, a semi-recently released action game in the same genre of Devil May Cry (not surprisingly, since they have the same designers,) but with the notable difference that the cocky, confident, incredibly powerful protagonist is female. On the other hand, there's...the nearly unthinkable. See, I wrote a vampire-based novel recently, and I decided I needed to do some research. I was coerced into reading...sigh...Twilight. At least I could discuss the book with actual experienced now. Anyway, the Twilight novel's protagonist, Bella Swan, is the exact opposite of Bayonetta. Never mind monsters, she can't deal with a stroll through a forest, handle a blood drive, visit another town, or even walk ten feet without nearly killing herself.

We have two nearly completely different models of the female ideal, and I have to wonder: is either remotely a good thing? Should we even bother to use them for such a purpose, or should we dismiss them as one dimensional cardboard cutouts, too alien to be compared to our reality, or worse yet, given the dismissive label of "just entertainment" and thus without artistic merit in any way? It's easier to ignore the messages, but that gives both of them less respect than it deserves. Besides, as a Buffy fan, i can't really justify ignoring other uses of speculative fiction for feminist messages.

Let's start with Bayonetta. She comes from a long line of female protagonists, the descendant of Samus Aran and Lara Croft. She differs from them mostly in her sexual nature. Certainly, most video game women are extremely attractive (though in fairness, most male video game characters are intended to be as well,) and don't wear much, but they otherwise are happy shooting, impaling, or punching their way to victory. Bayonetta doesn't pretend to be unaware of her sexuality, and it reflects in her every action, from the way she walks to her in game taunts to her use of weapons to the fact that many of her most powerful moves briefly turns her naked. Well, technically she's always naked, since her clothing (by default a standard catsuit) is actually made of her hair, as are the demons she summons. It's a weird game.

Bella, meanwhile, reflects the now clichéd Vampire Romance Dynamic. You see it in nearly every modern vampire story, and there are a lot of them. I could probably write an entire article on that alone, but the short version is you start with a human woman (and it's always a woman,) suddenly in a relationship with a vampire man. It's a scary situation. After all, this vampire is so much more dangerous than you, with his strange needs and hungers that you, the female protagonist, can't understand. And he's so much bigger and stronger than you, and he could easily overpower you at any time if he just wanted to. But! Unlike many of his kind, he is a gentlemen who knows that he must be respectful and polite at all times. In fact, he must be this gentlemen, as it's the only way he can fight against the primal urges all beings of his kind have. And so he welcomes you into his world, showing all the incredible and wonderful things he can do, though he also must sometimes protect you and keep you from seeing the worst that his big, scary world has to offer.

Ick. I don't WANT to see the obvious gender dynamics in place in these stories, but they're just so blunt. It's unnerving. Just as the real world slowly works its way to a more balanced place, where women can be as competent as men (and just as importantly, where men aren't expected to be sex-addicted territorial alpha-types,) a fantasy version pops up that takes all the old stereotypes and makes them into a new ideal. Not that all stories who use this Dynamic are equal. Buffy, to use the obvious example, is special specifically because she avoids the implications of her weakness. She's more than a match for most demons and vampires, and at worst she is portrayed as equal to her vampire love interests. Similar, while I'm still working through True Blood, I was interested from the first episode when the female half of the Dynamic saves her eventual vampire love interest from a gruesome fate. And how does she save him? By almost strangling a guy with a chain. Sure, the Dynamic shows up soon after, but at least Sookie wasn't about to lose her own strength in the process.

Bella, of course, is the definition of this Dynamic. Not only does she need the protection of her vampire love interest against supernatural threats, she barely can exist in the regular world without her help. She would have died or worse at least twice in the first couple hundred pages of the book alone. The series also goes out of its way to avoid any hint of sexuality, or at least sex. Sure, it can't shut up about how beautiful Edward is, but any actual sex is off the table. It mostly relates to how vampire semen is toxic and would kill a human or something like that, so Bella can't sleep with him until she turns into a vampire, which he won't do, but then they eventually have sex anyway, but only after they're married (of course,) four books into the series, and...you get the idea.

So for all the differences between the two heroines, are we just talking the classic virgin/whore dynamic? Well, not exactly. For one thing, as sexually provocative as Bayonetta is, she has as much sex in the first game as Bella has in the first book. She's only had one game so far, so who knows if that changes, but in the first, she never gets past light flirting with a single guy; admittedly, it helps that he wants to kill her for the first half of the game. The problem, at least from a cursory glance, is the way the two take such extremes with what women should be. Either a role of passive emotional center to her man, the crucial piece needed to make him good in a dangerous world, or as an independent entity brazen in both her power and her sexual identity.

And to be fair, neither character completely matches her own ideal, though one undergoes actual characterization while the other regresses. Bayonetta starts as a bastion of self-interest, needing nobody but her information and item providing sidekicks/worshipers, but as the game progressives, she develops actual affection for her quasi-love interest and for a small child she has to protect. Okay, "strong woman learns to care for others through romance and motherhood" is not a great message, either, but at the same time, she is just as competent saving the world and fighting evil (well, evil-ish, they're mostly confused angels.) Bella, meanwhile, starts out at least showing signs of curiosity and the ability to solve a mystery. She only decides to turn her brain off after entering a relationship with a vampire. Even before, though, she is such an aggressive non-character. She hates the town she moves into, she hates the school, she hates her friends, she has no interests except for generic "reading," she just exists. At least Bayonetta has some interests beyond whittling a few notches in the celestial hierarchy.

I guess that's the answer. When making any character, you can't toss an archetype on them and call it a day. Give them interests, give them hobbies, give them activities beyond what their current adventure would call for. And if you make a female character, focus on this even more. It reminds me of a rule I discovered when I was younger and my creative talents were just starting to develop. Modern culture still is dominated by white male protagonists, but I find that working with minority characters is easier and more rewarding. With the dominant image of our society, you can get away with making them "the moron", or "the jerk," or "the loser." But such a simple, negative stereotype applied to a moron would look racist, sexist, or what have you. Do the same with a positive stereotype and you look like you're making a perfect token character. Neither is acceptable for any serious art, and so you're obligated to make a deeper character, one with faults and virtues.

Oh, right, this is a "Reviews," article, isn't it? Well, I'll make that part quick. Even ignoring the empty protagonist and the well-publicized creepy relationship she has with her chauvinistic stalker boyfriend, Twilight is a frustrating read. It starts out reasonably enough if you enter it without any presumptions, but by the time the relationship starts, the novel quickly regresses into a plot-free static. I was overjoyed when actual evil vampires arrived, but even they were defeated while Bella was conveniently unconscious. Bayonetta is a more traditional video game narrative, but it suffers from its own kind of extremism usually found in Capcom games (despite this one being made by Sega, albeit with old Capcom developers.) Every action you take is judged and graded, from individual fights to the entire level, and every deviation from perfection is penalized. Have to die and continue? Penalty! At least you still get an infinite number of them this time around. Use an item? Points lost! That's fair enough, since the only people who'd care that much about their score are the really hard-core fans. Everyone else will probably accept they won't get quite as many points as the perfect run types. The only real issue I have comes from the quick-time events, commonly call "press a button to not die." These show up all over the place, and if you miss the split-second command, you lose a continue and your score is ruined. These are game design philosophies that do not work well together. Still, I'd rather return to Bayonetta's world than Bella's any day of the week. Being male and all, it would be impossible for me not to.

Reviews: Behold The Same Damn Place!

I knew I forgot something! Well, more accurately, my delay was a combination of the leg thing, having a temporary job, and writing a novel (well, the first draft. And that's going to spawn at least another blog post,) keeping me busy. I'll try to play catch up in the next week or two, because I have ideas to burn. Starting with this one!

Due my continued being poor-ness, especially with the medical bills still an issue, I've been focusing on renting video games except for a few I got for my birthday last month. And I didn't beat them yet, so I'll worry about them later.

The latest game I rented was Bioshock 2, the not nearly as great sequel to one of the best games of 2007. I'm not saying it's bad; just a sequel not nearly as inspired as the original. The gameplay takes a step forward, but at least two steps back. But it's the story and setting that bothered me the most.

I'll start with the gameplay. The actual controls, at least, are better. The game lets you dual-wield your normal weaponry and magic-emulating plasmid superpowers. Not only does it get easier to select powers, but it's much easier to combine effects. Shock-stun an enemy and crush them in a melee weapon! Charge a super attack while simultaneous shooting enemies! And while there are few new weapons or powers, the ones they get are very cool. The improved versions of old powers lets you dominate enemies to make them long-lasting allies, summon robotic minions, create improved traps, or many more. The camera is replaced with one that records moving pictures (and mercifully doesn't require you to collect more film.) And the spear gun that lets you pin enemies to the wall? Priceless.

Beyond that, though, I wasn't impressed. The big problems include how linear the game became. Unlike the original, once you beat a level, it's gone. You can't return to collect recordings or items you missed, finish up with Little Sisters, or just visit particularly scary or compelling places. And speaking of the Little Sisters, while they cut the number of actual Sisters to only 12, once you collect one, to actually make full use of them, you have to let them collect ADAM from dead bodies while fighting off hordes of enemies who magically find you at that exact time. That barely sounds fun once. 24 per playthrough? This is MMORPG-level tedious.


The game just lacks creativity or even an ability to maintain its own theme. Take the enemies. There are only three new enemies in the game, all rare monsters, so you'll be fighting the same crazy people with melee weapons, guns, and occasional spider or invisibility powers as the last game. And the new guys are a bigger and stronger splicer and effectively two new types of big Daddies. That's EXACTLY what the game needs: more big, melee-heavy enemies that absorb a tons of fire. Why not create some monsters that actually use the potential of genetic engineering? Flying enemies that dive bomb or strafe you? Walking electric fields? Confusing enemies that create illusions or blind you?

And despite the game's premise that you're playing a Big Daddy yourself, albeit a prototype with different powers, you never once feel like one. Most of the weapons look bigger, but they rarely can kill enemies more effectively. The only weapon that really feels Big Daddy-esque is the giant drill weapon. And defensively, you feel far weaker than the first game. I barely last two seconds against enemy attacks. Sure, by the end of the game, I was walking death, but mostly because I was surrounded by three robotic or mind-controlled minions at all times. In other words, it came from the plasmids, nothing Big Daddy-related at all.

But forget all that. Despite the weaknesses, I enjoyed playing the game, just not as much as the original. It was the story and setting that bothered me the most. As scary and/or disturbing as the splicers and Big Daddies are, the really scary thing about the game is the city of Rapture itself, a ruins to fallen ideals populated by brilliant but misguided people who don't deserve the horrific fate of what they have become. A sequel was inevitable, but you can't simply repeat the scary thing in a horror game, but that's exactly what they've done. They just took a half dozen new loonies to replace the ones that screwed everything up last time and pretended that they were always there. Nice try, recordings of Andrew Ryan suddenly interested in new main villain Sofia Lamb! I'm not buying it!

Not that the game's plot is all bad. Once you get past the other new guys WHO WERE ALWAYS THERE and actually confront Sofia Lamb and the main plot-head on, it actually is affecting. Sure, the morality system is barely better than the original, but at least it shows some room for subtlety. And the game's only truly chilling moment, which I'll leave a gap before mentioning on the off chance anyone ever reads this and wants to avoid spoilers...











...appears here when you briefly see the world through a Little Sister's eyes and realize how truly horribly Raptured ruined these girls for personal gain.

But beyond that, the story just didn't grip me. It doesn't even really fit the setting. Sure, a communal government based on socialism is the logical mirror to the original games objectivism, but the latter fits the resulting city and the mad splicers scavenging for power far better than the former. What in the game is remotely for the common good? It's just people killing each other for ADAM all over again. Even the main villain's plan is less altruistic and more standard mad scientist.

I guess none of this would bother me as much if not for the fact that I at least feel I could do better. I had an idea for a sequel since the original came out, so I might as well share it. The trick is remembering that in a horror story, once you introduce the terrifying element, you can't just do it over and over again. That path leads to slasher horror sequels. You have to take that element and tweak it; expand it into a new world that makes it scary again in a whole new way. Compare Alien to Aliens, for example, or how Silent Hill 2 replaced the cult with a new and more personal story and was all the better for it.

In my version of Bioshock 2, shortly after the first game ends, the investigation of the plane crash and results of the ending (good is my canon version,) results in the public at large discovering the now nearly uninhabited Rapture. Soon, both the United States and the USSR have gotten their hooks into the place, both vying for the power that ADAM represents. A few years later, the water is drained, the old bodies disposed of, and Rapture is up and running again! Nothing could possibly go wrong!

With both unfriendly nations present, Rapture is basically Berlin Wall-era Germany underwater. The place is split into two sides, but there is a neutral zone between them and some groups, mostly engineers, are allowed to work in either location. It's the only way the electrical and hydraulics, which weren't built around the bisected city, can work. You play as one of those low-level grunts, too mundane for the leaders of either side to care. All of the sudden, we have political parallels to Ryan's libertarianism in the first game, but it makes perfect sense that they're there. All the men from Washington and beyond, Ryan's greatest fears, are there. And they're about to screw it up just as badly as he did.

That's where the horror of this game comes in. The player knows exactly what's going to happen to New Rapture, especially as the signs of disaster appear. But the characters remain as steadfast in the righteousness of their actions, as insistent that it can't happen again, not with the power of Uncle Sam/the people's will/God on their side! The suspense and horror of the inevitable builds, and by the time you hit the last third of the game, when Rapture again lies in ruins, things are all the more grim because you personally know many of the splicers and know for a fact that when your home went to hell, you did nothing (not that you could.) It allows for a broader ranger of moral options as well. Do you manage to talk you neighbors out of sending their daughter to that new school the government set up? Do you abandoned desperate refugees simply because they're from an enemy nation? Do you risk taking more plasmids early on knowing that, in the longer time frame of this game, you could actually start going mad before the conclusion?

This is a horror game with the ambition of the original Bioshock, one worth buying and not simply renting when you're done with Bayonetta. Which, conveniently, will be my next review! Or at least half of it.

My Reviews: Horror Games, Wacky Crazy Time, and How I Hate Grappling

Since I ended up playing two vaguely horror games in the last month or two, I figured it would make sense to review both games at once. Save for a few things (damn grappling,) both games are very similar. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories the latest game in what has been the second most popular horror game series out there, and personally my favorite horror series out there. This one is an innovative new game that retells the original game while doing away with the old cultist and demon storylines in favor of a new psychological emphasis. Deadly Premonitions, on the other hand, is basically a Resident Evil 4 clone with a Twin Peaks-esque setting. The sad thing is that I arguably liked the latter game, a budget title where 50,000 sales at $20 a pop is considered a triumph, the most. Let's compare the issues:

Graphics: Of course Shattered Memories wins this one, despite it being a Wii title and Deadly Premonitions being an Xbox 360 title. For all the arguments about next gen graphics, it ends up not mattering much when the final result on the 360 still looks like Playstation 2 or Dreamcast game. But again, it's a budget title. And while the graphics aren't good, they do work. Most of the game's locations have a handful of textures, true, and the normal character models look awful. But the main characters look emotive and detailed. But you can't beat a nation corrupted into a frozen wasteland and sickly near-humans hunting you down with little to no remorse.

Music and Soundtrack: At this point, the themes of both games start to diverge. Shattered Memories is a grim, unrelenting horror game with chance for brevity (save for the bonus ending involving UFOs.) Deadly Premonitions, on the other hand, loves to inflict mood whiplash. In the first hour, you witness a grisly murder, spend some fun with a crazy FBI agent who psychoanalyzes cartoon characters, shoot up an army of zombies, and have a light breakfast with a funny, hearing-impaired old lady.

Both soundtracks match the theme. Like every Silent Hill game, the music is ambient and meant to inspire dread. It's rare that you want to listen to the music outside of a game (save for Silent Hill 3,) but you remember it while you're playing. Deadly Premonitions meanwhile alternates between ominous music and genuine horror sequences with a catchy whistling theme that wouldn't be out of place on the Andy Griffith show. I'd have to give this one to Deadly Premonitions, simply because some of the songs, like that whistling theme and the game's main theme, won't EVER leave my brain AGAIN.

Controls: This was probably my biggest problem with both games. Deadly Premonition was just pedestrian, more unfinished than anything. That's unsurprising, since it is based on the same mechanics as Resident Evil 4 and its many clones. Aiming at enemies was often a chore, and there were plenty of stupid mechanics. For example, if you open a door, you take a good 20 seconds to carefully poke your way through, but you can just slam through if you're already running when you open it. And figuring out the game's inventory management, let alone flipping items between your inventory to and from the toolbox, was a massive headache. Changing weapons mid-fight in particular is impossible. The only serious complaints are in the action sequences, which appear all the damn place. During chase sequences, you have to use action commands to MOVE.

But it was far more usable than Shattered Memories, which often pissed me off. In normal circumstances, running around and investigating things works fine. The game uses the Wii Remote very cleverly with puzzles as you simulate turning around containers, rotating objects, and unlocking doors manually. In the action sequences, however, the game plummets to a frustrating standstill. When enemies grab you, you have to move both parts of the Wii controller in one direction. The action is jerky, uncomfortable, and HIGHLY inaccurate. Nothing is worse than trying to drive an enemy off you before you die and finding yourself completely unable to do so. Actually, no, there is something much worse than that; getting multiple enemies off of you by trying to drive them off one at a time with more enemies leaping onto you as you stand there, stunned and dying.

Ugh, I'm getting angry just thinking about it. Advantage Deadly Premonitions by default.

Game play: I'll give this one to Deadly Premonitions as well. Most of that is just do to the complexity and ambition of this little game that could. When not dealing with the action sequences, which includes about a half-dozen enemies and even some bosses, you have to puzzle around a mystery, solve puzzles, and just explore the strange town the game takes place in. There are 50 side-quests, all involving helping the local townsfolk, and they include winning quizzes, solving puzzles, exploring hidden locations in the town, simple driving sequences, and even fishing or playing a game of darts. It could take anywhere from 20-40 hours to beat the game.

Shattered Memories is part of a series where the game play experience is not the point. You usually play a poor schmuck incapable of real combat and forced to endure horrible monsters in hell. Shattered Memories is even more like this, with the action sequences clearly separated from the rest of the exploration (most Silent Hill games have both a normal, "foggy" world and a much worse nightmare world, but both have monsters.) And even when you have to deal with monsters, you can't fight them, only run from them. Fleeing invincible monsters is a terrifying experience. The first time. Once they catch you a few times and you die and have to continue, it just gets annoying. And this is beyond the control problems I mentioned above. These escape sequences are just annoying. Quite often, you don't know where you are even supposed to go, so you wander through a quasi-labyrinth only to find yourself going in circles, and now the enemies are on you, and you die and have to try again. Or you are going the right way but there's an enemy in your path, so it catches you and the others get on you while you're stunned. Or, and this is the really frustrating part, you are just running down a long straightaway and they catch you because they're simply faster and you can't do a thing to stop it. You have some options to slow them down, but they're not very useful. Sometimes you can knock something over behind you, which helps for a few seconds, or you can hide someplace, on the rare occasion you can even find one while you're racing through rooms at top speed. Your only real weapon is a road flare that keeps enemies at bay, but you're lucky to find one in every chase sequence.

Outside of the action sequences, the game is more intriguing, despite the total lack of actual threats. But there aren't many to them, and you'll probably find you can beat the game in six hours. That might actually be an advantage, given the nature of the game's plot and theme, but Deadly Premonition nonetheless deserves its victory here.

Story and Theme: Clearly here is where the Shattered Memories team focused their efforts, and it really shows. Outside of the no-combat combat, the game's main gimmick is its psychological experience, demonstrated by an actual therapist who analyzes a series of questions and challenges as if you were the main character. The game itself alters to reflect your responses, with other characters completely changing their personalities to react to you. The game has multiple endings which reflect what, based on your actions, the main character is like.

Deadly Premonitions opts for the more scatter shot approach I mentioned before. With all the eccentric nuts running around, most of the game's interactions are hilarity or just baffling. But then when the central murder plot re-appears, the game gets deathly serious again. The final few chapters are especially shocking. It reminds me a bit of an old Joss Whedon comment (Yes, yes, I know...) To paraphrase, you can't just start with the horror and misery and death before your audience even has a chance to get close to the characters. You have to make them enjoy the characters and the world they live in. Then when you inflict suffering on your creations, it does that much better a job of ripping your audiences' hearts out. And the game manages that quite nicely.

But the innovation of Shattered Memories lets me declare this one the winner. Both are fun head trips, though, that answer some to most of your questions but leave enough mysteries ambiguous that you have to think about the truth well after you're done with the game.

Grappling: It might as well be a major category now. Every damn game, especially ones with horror themes, use it now. Deadly Premonitions wins, because you only get grappled if you fail to deal with an enemy already, and many don't have grapple attacks. With Shattered Memories, the only attack enemies have is grappling, and you will get grappled in every or nearly every action sequence. It went past frustrating into infuriating very quickly.

So despite having better graphics and a better story, Shattered Memories just didn't intrigue me the way Deadly Premonitions did. Granted, I did beat the former game twice, but doing so took me about a third of one completely playthrough of Deadly Premonitions. I won't even say that Deadly Premonitions is the better game, but its weirdness and innovation did a better job of canceling out the bad parts compared to Shattered Memories. Besides, I like fighting horrific abominations! I miss the little guys.

My Life: Still In One Piece, But I Wasn't!

So, yeah. In the time since my last post, I still haven't found a roommate or a long-term job. But that's not what slowed me down. No, the inability to walk did that. On April 4th (yup, Easter,) I was at my parent's house with my entire extended family, and my various cousins and other family members thought it would be a good idea to play ultimate frisbee. It MIGHT have been a good idea, but not for me. One turn while running later, my leg went one way, and my knee went the other. It was dislocated. This is the second time this happened, the last having been 18 years ago.

So I was on an ambulance, taken to an emergency room, drugged up to hell, had my knee set back in place while I was unconscious (mostly,) gotten X-rayed, put on crutches and in a knee immobilizer, and sent back home. I had a few long nights where sleep was nearly impossible due to a metal bar under my leg in all positions, and it took me weeks to walk without the crutches.

Now, I'm a bit better. I still use a brace, but I can walk mostly normally. I still have to go to physical therapy and do exercises to teach myself to straighten my knee and bend it farther and farther. The real issue is finances. I have health insurance, but it's not good health insurance. There is a high deductible and worse looming over me. This has altered my schedule, my plan, and my life in general. I'm still looking for work and more, but priority one has to be what to do with my other problems.

But I am returning to writing. I've written an entire screenplay, in fact. And starting tomorrow, I'll go back to posting these blogs, no matter how many people read it. I already have plans for reviews of movies like How to Train a Dragon and Kickass, along with video games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. So as bad as things get, I won't let it stop me from writing. Giving up on your hope and your ambitions is far worse than a horrific leg injury. Though that sucked too.

Reviews: Alice's Adventures in...Narnia

In the recently released Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter often repeated the riddle from the original book: How is a raven like a writing desk? It's supposed to be a crazy question, a sign of how wonderfully mad that Wonderland (or Underland, I guess,) is. But there are answers to this question, both easy and hard ones. That's sort of the problem with the movie, really. It's not nearly mad enough.

I am a Burton fan in general, having watched pretty much all his movies, even most of the produced-only stuff. And I enjoyed nearly all of them. I even will defend the much-maligned Willy Wonka. I won't defend Planet of the Apes, though, because it's the least Burton movie that Burton ever made. So it surprised me that Alice in Wonderland, a movie that should be perfect for style, is the Burton movie that suffered the most from a lack of inspiration. Part of the problem, I think is that both it and Planet of the Apes are more purely fantasy or sci-fi, while nearly every other Burton at least starts in the real world and drifts into magical realism from there.

It got me to think about the reason for speculative fiction in the first place. We group science-fiction and fantasy into one genre fairly often, but they exist for different reasons. Science fiction, at its best, starts with reality and goes from there. It's about how things change. Sure, it often is used for little more than an adventure flick with lasers, robots, and spaceships, but at least I can understand the fantasy. A world like ours only better with a much more dramatic reason to exist? Who wouldn't like that?

Fantasy, though, starts with completely different reasons. Can it just be escapism? It might seem so at first, but why? In real life, if we went to a magic fantasy world, we wouldn't last a day before missing working toilets and refrigerators. So the only real benefit to such a world is the meaning. And that's how fantasy differs from sci-fi. There is little need to tie a fantasy world into reality, but in exchange, fantasy has to be about the why. There must be a meaning, a thematic reason for this alternate reality to even exist.

The original Alice in Wonderland usually is associated with the politics and society as its time. It's a fantasy adventure and a satire. Unfortunately, society has moved on and nobody knows what exactly its satirizing now. But the character is too iconic to do away with. In particular, Alice is one of the most well-known female protagonists in modern history. So remaking Alice means having to come up with new meaning.

Hero, Tim Burton ultimately failed. Without his normal tweaking to the real world, he does little but the standard hero versus villain LotR fantasy variant. It's like the Narnia movie. As religious as this country is, it doesn't really share the same spiritual sensibilities as C.S. Lewis, so we ended up with lines of fantasy monsters running into each other.

And Wonderland of all places shouldn't be like this. Why is there even a need for a good queen versus evil queen battle? Why did it have to end with Alice slaying a dragon? Why the need for all the prophecy and chosen one stuff?

Now, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the movie at all. It has the arresting visual you'd expect in a 3D movie that costs this much to make, especially a guy who helped make Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Johhny Depp was mostly coasting, but he was entertaining enough, and Helena Bonham Carter was fine as the Red Queen. But it needed to answer why it existed. Most modern interpretations of Wonderland imply that it takes place in Alice's head, and that the challenges of that world prepares her to be a confident, assured young woman in the real world. But even though this movie goes the exact same way at the end, it goes out of its way to insist that the opposite is true. Alice insists throughout the movie that she's inside her own dream, only for it to be dis-proven in the end. So where is the meaning? Is it the Red Queen as reference to the exaggerated, proper world Alice came from? So what's the White Queen for? Who does the nice but slightly crazy pacifist alchemist represent in Alice's head? I know that you have a limited time to make a movie, but something like Wonderland in particular needs to avoid a classic three-act adventure structure.

By the way, the easy answer to the original question is: both have feathers. Well, fine, they did when the book was written, shut up. The hard one, though, is that both are related to death. Ravens live on death and consume it, and writing desks are made of it (wood, paper, the above-mentioned feathers when appropriate,) and it produces death. Any written idea is an idea solidified, an idea dead to the creator. And yet if done right, the idea could cause the little death that is change to others. But it doesn't seek to do that, then after it dies, it stays head.

My Ideas: Or Maybe Reviews: The More Pretentious Side of Stealing Cars

I feel that I didn't give Grand Theft Auto IV the treatment it deserved. Sure, it had problems. Sure, the series itself hasn't changed that much since 3. And sure, nearly everything that could be said about the series has been said for the last two damn years or so. That...that's sort of a convincing argument, really.

Nonetheless, there is something I recently noticed that I haven't seen so much on our friend the Internet. If it isn't in a sub-thread on tvtropes, it's not a common theory, so here we go.

I'll start by focusing on a character that annoyed the crap out of me when I first played the game. Oh, spoilers coming up by the way. But again, it's been two years, so you had your chance.





The character is Florian, a friend of main character Niko's from the old country, a former member of his military unit, and for much of the game, possibly the traitor that got the rest of Niko's friends killed. But when Niko finally meets him, not only is he innocent, but he managed to completely turn his life around. He's living a peaceful life as an aerobics instructor, and he now goes by the name Bernie. Oh, and he's also gay. Really, flamboyantly gay.

Now, it's nice that a Grand Theft Auto game actually has a positive gay character. And after Niko learned Florian/Bernie was innocent, he befriended him again and helped him on several problems. But I was annoyed that he was such a stereotype. For a former soldier, he is incredibly useless in a fight, forcing Niko to do everything.

But as I thought about it, I realized that there is more to it than that. The game's main theme is about the horrors of war and violence and how people react to it. It's pretty established that those suffering from this past never emerged unscathed. That's true for Niko, of course, who's surprisingly honest about how shell-shocked he is. Most of the other characters are just as affected, but he puts up a persona to hide it. That's my theory at least for Roman's irrational optimism and the gambling addiction it manifests. Of course America is wonderful! Of course the future will be great! They have to be. Because home and the past were too horrible to contemplate, literally. Without that wonderful future to focus on, he'd actually have to think about and react to the past.

Hence Florian. Of course he'd be gay regardless of his history. And going from a conservative society to a liberal city in America with a healthy gay subculture, he'll probably embrace it. But that's not the only reason for his transformation. Florian saw all the terrible, traumatizing things that Niko did. But Bernie didn't. By becoming this new person, a person so completely different from his old life, he can have a happy life. You can see a bit of the old Florian at times, especially when Niko mentions Darko, the man who actually betrayed them. But that's the last thing he wants to be. If he goes back into his old life, his soldier's life, he has to deal with that memory again. For the same reason, it isn't vanity that makes him angry whenever Niko calls him Florian instead Bernie. It's because he ISN'T Florian anymore and he will never want to go back.

On a similar note, I think Dimitri, usually the main villain in the game, was not always the scheming disloyal rat he is revealed to be about a third of the way through the game. In fact, he wasn't even like that until immediately before he betrays the main character. He had his own traumatic past, including prison and life as a crime lord, but his breaking point came when he had to kill his own best friend to preserve his life.

Dimitri couldn't handle doing this or even stand to look at it, especially not while dealing with the man who physically did the deed and suddenly being forced to run an entire organized crime family when he previously could take a dispassionate look at his crimes and balance the books. So he created a new persona of his own: Dimitri the rascal, the rat, the betrayer. There is evidence throughout the game. He frequently blames Niko for his friend's death, never accepting his own responsibility for it. After all, as far as he was concerned, he didn't do it; the Rascal did. And the Rascal doesn't care. Or look at how his tendency to betray ceases to be even rational late into the game, especially in the "Deal" ending path. Even his voice changes after the incident. One might even argue that his constant attacks on Niko personally and those he cares about are an attempt to get Niko to kill him, the ultimate way to hide from the responsibility of his actions. This theory makes Dimitri a much more sympathetic character, or at least one with more depth, and one that is thus fitting for the darker version of Grand Theft Auto that this game strove for.

Reviews: Nit-Picking About Minor Actions of Extreme Violence

So, Grand Theft Auto 4. I almost feel bad about reviewing this one, because WHO HASN'T? It had its volley of exemplary reviews and the immediate backlash, to the point where there's practically nothing left to say.

But in case you haven't heard any of that, here's the quick summary. GTA4 is about the same as every GTA game since the third. It's a 3D action/shooting/driving game inside a larger, fully explorable city. This game play almost all takes place in the city itself, and in between or instead of missions, you can perform various mini-games or optional missions, find hidden items, or just go nuts and shoot people, evade the cops, or jump off buildings for no good reason. GTA4 reboots the series with a graphical update and complete design of New York-substitute Liberty City, and it is praised for its much deeper, serious story that connects with the dark criminal world the game takes place in. It also is criticized for that same story, as the series has always been known for sheer chaotic fun. More importantly, the game includes constant interruptions by your character's "friends," who are incapable of going a day without calling you, usually while you're doing something much more important, and asking you to get food, shoot pool, go to shows, or do other things not remotely related to the missions or the general mayhem. And if you refuse, they like you less and you lose some benefits. Oh, and also the driving is more realistic, and thus much worse for the insane high speed chases much of the game takes place.

But that's the stuff everyone praised or complained about. To make this review remotely worth it, I have to comment on the things that bugged me personally. For starters, there's the fact that all the friend and girlfriend interactions start exactly one in-game hour (about three minutes in real life,) after you make the plan. This is true if you're three blocks away from their house or if you're technically a state away and you have no chance of making the meeting unless you're already flying a helicopter at the time. If you're late, they dislike you even if you're a bit late, possibly lowering the approval instead of raising it. And they don't always show up at the same place! You could be midway to their normal location having prepared for this mess only to find they're on another island completely for no good reason.

The game includes a day planner, letting you know if there is a meeting on, say, six o'clock in three days. It's used about once in the normal game and maybe three other times for optional missions. What's the point? Why not set up these schedules up with your actual friends? And these silly things are so pointless. Going to a bar or getting food is just a time-waster. And you might enjoy the pool, darts, or bowling games, or watching the shows or...stripper lap dances (I won't judge.) But you can just do that anyway! You don't need a friend to help you with them. So why not give these games a point? Instead of generic date/hang out activities, how about there are actual missions, appearing randomly or after enough regular events, to surprise the player? It ties the friends/girlfriends to the plot better, you won't have to do as many irrelevant missions in the main story, and the surprising and fun missions make the player look forward to those silly dates.

This implies that the missions themselves get more interesting. Too many missions are one of a few things: go to a place and kill everyone, chase an escaping person and (usually) kill them, and...that's about it, really, and it's about the same as every GTA game I ever played. Some variety would be nice, or at least more optional ways to complete a mission. Even Crackdown, a superhero-themed copy of the GTA games, had many more options to beat a mission. And one more thing. Since Vice City or so, if you fail a mission, you have a way to restart the mission without driving back to the mission's start point. But you won't do it. You might if you just failed normally, but if you die, you lose 10% of your money (usually 1 to 2 times what you would earn for finishing it,) and if you are arrested, you lose that AND all your weapons! Nobody's going to do that when you can just load your last game. Why include such a useless feature. Maybe penalize the player for failing a random chaotic killing spree, but losing a mission shouldn't give these penalties at this point. We're beyond that.

My Life: Happy Anniversary

Most of us, at least most of us who live in or care about America, have treated the last day or two as a commemorative occasion for Barack Obama. After his first year of being president, people have asked how that year has been. Has he lived up to expectations? Underperformed? Does he confirm or refute his opponents' fears? What will come from now?

I, however, think about something else this week. As a follower of politics, I also wonder about the Obama administration, but today is another, more direct anniversary. On January 21, the day after the inauguration, I was laid off from my last real job. Not that I blame him for that. I down he even had time to enact policy that would suddenly result in me getting fired in those twelve hours or so, and if the universe was somehow karmically attacking us for electing him, I would be a strange target of it.

So I'll worry less about him and figure out my own progress. This...hasn't been a good year. Sure, I had my fun. I played a lot of video games, watched a lot of TV, and read probably less than I should have. But there are other barometers to success, ones more important than that.

Artistically: Overall, I'm happy with my artistic progress this year. I still did less than I should, but I did do more than most. In April I wrote what is probably my proudest accomplishment to date creatively: my first REAL screenplay. Maybe it isn't my favorite creation of all time, but it falls only behind a few of my favorite video game design documents. And while neither the design documents nor a screenplay counts as a full product onto itself, a screenplay strikes me as at least as an artistic achievement unto itself and not a suggestion on how to make an artistic achievement. I'm less happy with my novel made last November, despite actual plans to sell it. But the idea is fine, and I'm in the process of rewriting it, primarily next month. I only did a page so far, but the new direction is already better, and it was met with approval at today's writer group.

Financially: This was not so good. My income was sporadic at best. The first few months and the last few months were nothing. And when did I find a job, it was a temporary one. Things looked like they improved. I did a week of work in April, a few weeks in June and July, and a few months from August to October. In the meantime, I had unemployment, but no matter how hard I looked, nothing else has come up. In the meantime, I looked for something more fulfilling. I mean finally getting a job that involves video games, writing, or at least something creative. No luck so far.

As for outgoing expense, things went fine until at least September, when my last roommate moved out. Since then, my rent cost doubled, and that I can't afford. I've been putting this off, out of distraction or simply hope that I find a new roommate. Why? Because I know what moving means. It means going from a relatively nice apartment to a room or two. It means putting half my stuff in storage for God knows how long. It means the act of moving. It means things are going to be different, and for the worst. But it has to be done very soon, like the end of the month or so.

Socially: Hoo boy. To be fair, I had reason to barely try this year. The poor, broke, and jobless are not the most appealing people to date. Now I had some luck making friends, or at least hanging out with the ones I have. It's just a shame that too many live like an hour away. Hey, maybe when forced to move, if that happens, it can be slightly closer to them! Yeah, that's not much of a silver lining, but it's something. And at least I know that one way or another, things will change this year. Maybe that means something good, like a job I actually care about or even selling something I've written. Maybe not. But at the very least I know if I don't change things under my own hand, things will change anyway. Because the last, desperate change is to move back in with my parents. And nobody wants that, especially my parents.

Reviews: To prove I'm not dead, here's a series that likely is

No, I'm not dead. I've just been busy and a bit depressed. The holidays are great at inspiring both of these things, especially to someone unemployed and who has to move soon because he can't afford the place he currently lives.

This period also was the, at least temporary, end to a much less important segment of my life. My Gamefly account, useful as it's been, has been suspended due to the holidays, or more specifically the influx of games the holidays resulted in. I'm not 100% pleased with Dragon Age and New Super Mario Wii, the first Xmas games I've been playing, but both have been both entertaining and time consuming.

The Gamefly came to an end with Banjo: Nuts and Bolts, the latest of the Banjo Kazooie games that last appeared (in the main series, at least) on the Nintendo 64. It was a series I...huh. I had some affection for. That's the weird thing about Banjo. I remember the games, I enjoyed the games, but while I was nostalgic for the series, I can't say I especially cared for it, either. But we'll get to that element in a minute, because there is a much more crucial issue here: I HATE vehicles in non-vehicle games.

Something like the cars in Grand Theft Auto are normally fine (though the ones in GTA 4 have rubbed me the wrong way, hence why that one's near the back of my holiday games set.) But whether it's the dune buggies in Jak 3, the Mako in Mass Effect, and even Halo's famous Warthog, they just make me seethe. It's not the basic inclusion of a vehicle that's the problem, but the controls of these abominations are almost universally designed to get on my last nerve. If they aren't overshooting turns or getting themselves wedged into hallways or corners, they're taking a slight bump and immediately spinning around or flipping upside down on the first hill. I'm not a car or other vehicle guy in the real world, so maybe some of this is realistic. But I don't care. A vehicle is fine in a close race or when carefully dodging obstacles, not when I have to reset a race for the fifteenth time because a car can't even be trusted to stay pointed in the general direction of the target.

So Banjo: Nuts and Bolts was maybe not the best game for me. It has the same general premise of other Banjo games. The heroes, a bear named Banjo and a bird named Kazooie, explore various platform-centric video game levels to collect umpteen prizes as part of a vague quest to stop the witch Gruntilda. But in Nuts and Bolts, the platforming itself is all but absent, replaced by endless (about 90 of them, all told,) vehicle challenges. Sometimes you use the vehicles the game forces on you, but usually you can get around in machines that the player makes. And the actual ACT of customizing your vehicle is fun (at first.)

But using them is another story. Your fragile little machines are often either too slow to function or so fast that they control like, well, the jet engine on wheels that they often are. Conversely, any vehicle with the weapons or unique widgets needed for a mission is often too heavy and unwieldy to actually use them, at least with skill.

And it doesn't help that this is otherwise a Banjo game. The Banjo series has always aped the Mario series, but to me at least it always missed the point. The levels were huge, beautiful, and full of surprises, but the actual act of exploring them was often either sterile or so excessive to be overkill. In a Mario game, getting a Star/Shine or whatnot always felt like a singular achievement. In Banjo, they felt like items off a checklist. The problem is that as you get farther into a game or the series, each item wasn't just at the end of a series of challenges and possibly guarded by a boss. You had to find a minor NPC, let it ask for help, and accomplish some minor task for them first. Sometimes you had to perform three or four minor tasks, often with their own requirements, just to get one of the 120 primary collectibles (called "jiggies".)

Nuts and Bolts kept up this tradition and took it one step farther by not even integrating the tasks as part of the normal world. Instead, each level just has the help-needed characters standing around and speaking to them triggers a mini-game. To make it worse, each mini-game now has some other requirement, usually a timer or score of some sort. You have to finish each mission within a limited time to even get the jiggy, so it's entirely plausible to successfully finish a mission and still get next to nothing for it. AND there now are trophies that you get for each mini-game mission requiring you to do even better than the requirements for getting the jiggy. And each trophy is worth a quarter of a jiggy, so you have to get all THOSE as well to get everything in the game. AND FINALLY (phew,) the other major collectible in Banjo games, friendly animals called Jinjos, no longer can just be grabbed as you find them. No, that would be too easy. Instead, each one has their own mini-game now, tossing another 50 or so mini-games onto the list, those these at least are pass/fail. It's like Rare took all the complaints about too many collectibles into account but misunderstand the reasons for the complaints completely.

As for the mini-games themselves, they aren't exactly impressive. Most, Jiggy or Jinjo, require to transport some other objects from point a from point b, fight off hordes of enemies, taxi characters around, or win races. Oh, gods, the races. One of the reasons I dislike vehicles in games is the need to have to gallivant around areas while driving or flying through a bunch of tiny rings. This game has so many of these challenges that I easily lost count. There are a few boss fights, but not nearly as many as one can hope, and those few are just about dismantling someone else's vehicle, not a real boss fight. Considering how the boss fights, especially the final bosses, of the earlier games are among their most memorable moments, losing these really felt like a waste.

That brings up the original question of why I bothered playing this game, let alone to completion and near-total collection victory (no way in hell was I getting those 90 trophies, though.) Part of it was the memories. The series never really had the characters or world that something like Mario has, where every element is just so full of life and character. Honestly, except for the rhyming, horrific main villain, everyone's a cipher. But the series has its charms. In particular, it has a sense of humor, a self-awareness of how ridiculous this how is and how none of it can be taken seriously. And the levels themselves are often visually impressive. This game fell apart a bit here as well, with too many levels consisting of one big enclosed room with just a few hallways and side-rooms for variety, but even they were awesome in scope. The first level of the game was much better; an artificial farm surround by walls to hint that the whole thing is just a video game. But the game went beyond that, as the edges of the world had literal gears you can climb on, emulating the old days of platformers, and a flying vehicle could climb higher to see rotating artificial clouds, a "sun" in the form of a giant lamp, and the giant gear that operated this entire reality. And then you could leap into the volcano a mile below for fun.

The game's "hub" world, a massive town consisting of six major districts, was especially impressive. It wasn't a Grand Theft Auto city, no, but the way it expands and connects all of its elements made the whole thing more real than your typical action-adventure experience. It's telling that the very last thing I did before I returned the game was travel to the highest point in town, looked at all the lands I had explored and conquered, and sighed as I surveyed the areas beyond the city. What was that bridge to the east, the manor to the south, the farmlands and ocean that probably took up the free time of programmers for days yet did nothing? As I looked around, the music having muted itself as it traditionally does at high altitudes in a Banjo game, I felt that thrill to explore come over me, a sense of wonder possibly gone forever as the platforming games vanish from the face of consoles. If only I had a vehicle there.