[r o j i . p a n t y . c o m p l e x]

The key difference between Van Halen and Final Fantasy

2012-02-02T14:55:00.000-05:00

Is Final Fantasy XIII-2 the Van Halen of Video Games?

I think the point being made isn't that Final Fantasy should be more like Skyrim, or
that time travel should be more faithfully represented in video games. I think it's
that, in trying to appeal to both a wider audience as well as their established
fanbase, Square thought that they could offer freedom to the player while
maintaining a focused story, but they shot themselves in the foot by choosing time
travel as the means to explore the world of Final Fantasy XII-2 - something that, by
nature, creates unprogrammably infinite possibilities. By falling short of such a
monumental goal, they seem to be highlighting the artifice if this supposed freedom.

It's the symptom of a bigger problem, really. Square just doesn't have confidence
any more. There aren't any more visionaries like Sakaguchi, and the smart guys like
Kitase and Tokita are too busy producing Final Fantasy IV ports. They seem to make
everything with committees now, which explains the wholesale misunderstanding of
current design trends and the mixed-up fear of being too alienating or not being
Final Fantasy enough.

The truth is that we're never going back to the days of IV or VII or X. Square can't
focus on this mysterious ideal of Final Fantasy that they or their fans feel obliged
to resuscitate again and again, because it's not working either critically or
financially. They need someone who know what they're doing to take charge and make
something because THEY WANT to make it, not because people on the Internet are angry
or because some board decides its about time for another one.

Gurren Lagann and the Power of the Spiral

2012-01-09T16:29:00.002-05:00

The power of Gurren Lagann's story is in its telling. It starts as a three-person travelling anime, not unlike Pokemon, with episodes connected just loosely by plot. It then grows exponentially in scale - the size of the cast, the weight of their actions, the insurmountability of their obstacles. The cheeky tone gradually becomes Serious Business, and the flat ensemble becomes whole and integral to the telling. A mediocre show becomes brilliant before your eyes.

And like all good science fiction, the beauty of life is heightened by paralleling facts of existence with the unspoken qualities of human experience. In Evangelion this was done rather negatively, explaining that sadness as a result of being unable to relate with others is an immutable part of being human. In Gurren Lagann, the forces of creation and evolution are revealed to be a result of the love and FIGHTING SPIRIT inside of all living things, a power so great that it could create or destroy the universe, and it is possible that delivering a super encouraging speech will literally increases your likelihood of winning.

HOW CHRISTMAS WAS STOLEN AND NOBODY CARED

2011-12-24T23:58:00.002-05:00

a Final Fantasy VII fanfic from 1997

Every Citizen
Down in Midgar
Liked Christmas a lot ...

But Sephiroth,
Who lived just in the Northern Crater,
Did NOT!

Sephiroth hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite cares about the reason.
It must be that there were no (good) Chanukah specials to watch on TV at night.
It must be, perhaps, that his underwear was too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his kidney was two sizes too small.

But,
Whatever the reason,
His innards or his briefs, who knows why
He stood there on Christmas Eve, hating the Citizens,
Staring down from his crater with a jerky, Sephiroth-like frown
At the deteriorated buildings below in their town.
For he knew every Citizen down in Midgar below
Was busy now, hanging up mistletoe.

"And they're hanging their stockings! Oh, shucks!"
Then he snarled, "Boy, this really sucks!"
Then he growled, with his strong fingers nervously drumming,
"I MUST find a way to keep Kwanzaa coming! Err, uh ... Christmas FROM coming!"
For, tomorrow, he knew...

...All the Citizen girls and boys
Would wake up bright and early. They'd rush for their toys!
And then! Oh, the joy! Oh, the joy! Joy! Joy! Joy!
That's one thing he hated! The JOY! JOY! JOY! JOY!

Then the Citizens, young and old and really old, would sit down to a feast.
And they'd feast! And they'd feast!
And they'd FEAST! FEAST! FEAST! and vomit! and FEAST!
They would start on Citizen-pudding, those cannibals, and rare Citizen-roast-beast
Which was something Sephiroth couldn't stand in the least!

And THEN
They'd do something he liked least of all!
Every Citizen down in Midgar, the tall and the small,
Would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing.
They'd stand hand-in-foot. And the Citizens would start singing!

They'd sing! And they'd sing!
AND they'd SING! SING! SING! SING!
And the more Sephitoth thought of the Citizen-Christmas-Singing
The more Sephiroth thought, "I must stop this whole thing!
"Why for twenty-three years I've put up with it now!
I MUST stop Christmas from coming!
...But HOW?"

Then he got an idea!
An awful idea!
SEPHIROTH
GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!

"I know just what to do!" Sephitoth got goosebumps
"I'll dress up as Santa Claus, all nice and plump!"
And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a dastardly trick!
"With these horns and this neck, I'll look just like Saint Nick!"

"All I need is a reindeer..."
Sephiroth looked 'round.
But since reindeer are scarce, there was none to be found.
Did that stop this jerk...?
"No!" Sephiroth simply said,
"If I can't find a reindeer, I'll make one instead!"
So he called Jenova. Then he took some red thread
And he tied a big horn on top of her head.

THEN
He loaded some bags
And some sleigh-bells all ova'
On a ramshackle sleigh
And he hitched up Jenova

Jenova turned around her face all red
She was tired, cranky, and wanted her bed.
"What a stupid idea! What's all this fuss?!
"What is really the point to stealing Christmas?!"

Then Sephiroth said, "Shut up!"
And the sleigh started down
Toward the slums where the Citizens
Lay drunk or asleep in their town.

All their windows were dusty. Toxic snow filled the air.
All the Citizens were all thinking about new games from Square
When he came to the first slum littered with filthy hair.
"This is stop number one," The old Sephy Claus hissed
And he climbed to the roof, empty bags in his fist.

Then he slid down the chimney. Pretty rather small.
"But if Santa could do it, then I'll see him next fall ...?!"
He got stuck several times, for ten minutes or two.
Then he stuck his head out of the fireplace flue
Where he cursed and he cursed.
For the fire was still going and he jumped out with a burst.

Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant,
Around the whole room, and he took every present!
Game.coms! And Playstations! Underwear! Guns!
Xenogears! Metal Gears! Furbys! And hot cross buns!
And he stuffed them in bags. Then Sephiroth, very nimbly,
Stuffed all the bags, one by one, up the chimney!
Each one exploded into flames.
Sephiroth hoped he wouldn't be the one to take the blames ...

Then he slunk to the fridge. He took the Citizens' feast!
He took the Citizen-pudding! He took the roast beast!
He cleaned out that fridge as quick as The Flash.
Why, Sephiroth even took their last can of corned hash!

Then he stuffed all the food up the chimney with glee.
"And NOW!" grinned Sephiroth, "I will stuff up the tree!"

And Sephiroth grabbed the tree, and he gave the chimney quit a clog
When he heard a small sound like the kupo of a Mog.
He turned around fast, and he saw a small Citizen!
Little Marlene Wallace, who was not more than seven.

Sephiroth had been caught by this little Barret daughter
Who'd got out of bed for a cup of lukewarm water.
She stared at Sephiroth and said, "Sandy Claws, why,
"Why are you taking our Christmas tree? WHY?"

But, you know, that old Seph was so smart and so slick
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
"Why, my sweet little tot," the fake Sandy Claws lied,
"There's a pine needle on this tree that's ... missing on one side.
"So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear.
"I'll fix it up there. Then I'll bring it back here."

And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head
And he got her a drink and he sent her to bed.
And when Marlene Wallace went to bed with her cup,
HE went to the chimney and stuffed the tree up!

Then the last thing he took
Was the coal for their fire.
Then he went up the chimney himself, the old jerk.
On their walls he left nothing but hooks, and some portrait of Captain James T. Kirk.

And the one speck of food
That he left in the house
Was a crumb that was even too small for a mouse.

Then
He did the same thing
To the other Citizens' houses

Leaving crumbs
Much too small
For the other Citizens' mouses!

It was quarter past dawn...
All the Citizens, still a-bed
All the Citizens, still a-snooze
When he packed up his sled,
Packed it up with their presents! The ribbons! The eggnogs!
The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The pogs!
But no one cared for those ...

Three thousand feet up! Up the side of Gaea Cliff,
He rode to the tiptop to dump ...... ah, the Christmas stuff!
"Screw the Citizens of Midgar!" he was Sephiroth-ish-ly humming.
"They're finding out now that no Christmas is coming!
"They're just waking up! I know just what they'll do!
"Their mouths will hang open a minute or two
"Then all the Citizens down in Midgar will all cry AH CRAP!"

"That's a noise," grinned Sephiroth,
"That I simply must hear!"
So he paused. And Sephiroth put a hand to his ear.
And he did hear a sound rising over the snow.
It started low. Then it started to grow...

But the sound wasn't cussing!
Why, this sound sounded happy!
It couldn't be so!
But it WAS happy!

He stared down at Midgar!
Sephiroth popped his eyes!
Then he shook!
What he saw was a shocking surprise!

Every Citizen down in Midgar, the fat and the thin,
Was singing! Without any presents for the kin!
He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!
IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

And Sephiroth, with his Sephiroth-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
"It came without Nerf guns! It came without Metal Gears!
"It came without DVDs, Yahtzees or imported beers!"
And he puzzled nine hours, `till his knee was sore.
Then Sephiroth thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a toy store.
"Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more! Like religion!"
Then Sephiroth thought, "Nah, you've got to be kiddin'."

And what happened then...?
Well...in Midgar they say
That the Sephiroth's small kidney
Grew three sizes that day!
And the minute his kidney didn't feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with his load through the bright morning light
And he brought back the toys! And the food for the feast!
And he...

...HE HIMSELF...!
Sephiroth carved the roast beast into oblivion!
Then the devil threw away the filet mignon.
He jumped on the table kicked off the dishes and cups
and chucked all the pups.

Suddenly a daring lad
named Cloud confronted Sephiroth on top of the pad.

"I want my Zelda!" Cloud demanded.
"You want it? Come and get it!" Sephiroth reprimanded ...?

And so they engaged in an epic bout.
The clash of their swords echoed through out
as the rest of the Citizens carolled about the city.
The fact that the two weren't was a pity.

Sephiroth was about to deal Cloud the final blow
when a sleigh landed on the villain's big toe.
He shrieked and he shrieked but to no avail
Cloud stuffed him in a beach pail.

A lo and behold, out of the sleigh
came jolly old St. Nick, with a sack full of toys he was arrying-cay.
Santa Claus poured out all 'o the gifts into huge piles
and allowed the Citizens who take their picks. TILES!

For Cloud, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
For Tifa, a brand new virtual pet, Pocket Mime.
For Aeris, a bouqet of pansies
And for Cait Sith, a nice warm pair of orthopedic panties.
For Barret, a bootleg copy of Shaft
For Red XIII, a Furby that goes "ACHOO!"
And for Cid, ANOTHER virtual pet, Pocket Pikachu.
Finally, for Yuffie and Vincent came nothing
because they didn't show up for the ending.

THE END

Moving Forward

2011-11-17T10:32:00.002-05:00

What do you think? The black, right? 'Cause it should be something...
serious."

Amy was holding the dress in front of herself, then brought it down to
look at it again.

"No, that's too much. It'll be like I'm trying too hard."

She went back to her closet and returned with a pinker, more summery
top. "This is more cheerful. Wouldn't it be nice to be... No, that's
stupid, I can't go there like this, like it's a normal day."

She tossed it onto the bed. "If I had my red dress... He liked that
dress. Are you sure I didn't leave it at your place?"

Blaze had dressed in her purple regal garb, as she often did. She
didn't consider putting as much thought into her appearance as Amy
did. "I could go back and look again."

"No, forget it. I'll just wear the black. Black is... it's what you're
supposed to wear, right?"

"Black is traditionally worn in mourning, yes."

Amy appeared to have had the air sucked out of her by the word.
"That's what I am, aren't I? I'm mourning. But... I have to be the
supportive one. I mean, Tails, and..."

She stormed back to the closet, sweeping every piece of clothing from
one side to the other. "Why? Why is it all pink? Why do I always...
Why do I dress like some damsel in distress?"

She turned back to Blaze. Her eyes were wet and turning pink as the
rest of her. "How come I can't be the rescuer? Why can't I save
anyone?"

"Amy."

"I can't."

"It's okay, Amy."

"I cant do this!"

Blaze suddenly took Amy's head in her hands and pulled her close. She
began to breathe in a slow, steady rhythm. Amy began breathing with
her, quivering. When she calmed, Blaze cupped her face in her hands
and their eyes met.

"We can do this."

"I know. I know we can. We can be there for... Oh, Tails, little Tails..."

Blaze tightened her grip, as though to wring the doubt from her. "We
can be strong."

"Yeah. We can."

She stepped back and stood up straight, looking around her room.

"I wish I had the red one."

* * *

"You."

Heads turned to see the a visitor standing in the doorway of the
vestibule. Though he had traded his familiar red flight jacket for a
black trench coat, there was no mistaking his ovoid frame.

"You!"

Tails had already lurched out from his pew. He struggled to stand
straight as he walked toward the huge, round man, but grief and fury
wracked his body with tremors. He was always the youngest of them, and
now he was shaking like an old man.

He stopped halfway down the aisle, lifted his head, and opened his
arms as though to invite Eggman to take in the sight of the
congregation, their empty faces, the altar, Knuckles standing at the
lectern, the box holding his dearest friend.

"Congratulations. This is what you've wanted, right? Everything you've
built, everything you've destroyed. It was all for this view, right?"
Tails began to stagger toward him again. "You made it. Was it... worth
it?"

Tails' body seized, and he fell down to his knees. Vector, who was in
the nearest pew, came to his side and offered a hand. Tails slapped it
away and leapt up at Eggman, no longer hiding his tears.

"Why are you here? To gloat? You've always hated him, and now look
what you've done, look what you've made!"

His fists pounded hollowly against Eggman's soft exterior until he
didn't have the strength to hold himself up, and he slumped against
the rounded doctor and whimpered.

Slowly, gently, Eggman put his arms around the small fox.

Once he was certain there would be no resistance, Vector pulled Tails
away and brought him back to his seat. Then Eggman sat down in the
nearest pew and, along with the rest of the congregation, politely
turned his attention to the lectern.

That man could deliver a better eulogy than I ever could. Knuckles
cleared his throat and took a moment for the air to clear. They knew
each other longer than any of us.

He would never have thought of giving the eulogy if Tails hadn't
asked. He expected the departed's closest friend to speak, since
Knuckles himself was making all of the other arrangements, but in the
end Tails yielded this last responsibility to the taciturn echidna as
well. Even after all this time, in many ways, Tails still had growing
to do.

"As some of you know, my first encounter with Sonic was on less than
amicable terms.

"I... adopted the belief that he and Miles had invaded Angel Island to
take away the Master Emerald, which my people held sacred. I
challenged Sonic at every turn, not realizing what I was doing. I did
not realize I was being deceived."

He was unsurprised to see heads turning to look for any reaction from
Eggman, who feigned ignorance either out of pride or courtesy.

Knuckles sighed and shook his head. "I know what some of you are
thinking, and I'm afraid you're mistaken. There's one person to blame
for what I did - and that's me.

"I deluded myself into thinking that the world ended with me. I didn't
trust anyone from outside to let me be safe. To let me be myself. I
was stronger by myself. I was stronger alone.

"It wasn't until I lost everything that I realized I had nothing. I
was the custodian of a floating tomb and I didn't know anyone who
would call me friend."

Knuckles looked over at the blown up picture resting on the easel next
to the coffin: the arms rebelliously crossed, the eyes wide with
expectation, looking as he did when they first met. Is this how he
will be remembered, while the rest of us get older?

He gathered himself again. "He pointed me in the right direction and
he showed me what could be accomplished if you have the courage to
trust someone. As he trusted Tails. As he trusted me. And most
importantly, as he trusted himself.

"Sonic was a risk taker, and he would be the first to admit that -
like any of us - he'd made mistakes. But that's what life is. It's
mistakes. Live and learn.

"He never regretted a single thing he did. He learned, and he kept
moving forward. He had a steadfast heart of gold. No matter what
happened, no matter what anyone said, everything he did was a step in
the right direction. And it's because Sonic was such a risk-taker that
we're all here today."

It wasn't until then that Knuckles noticed the irony in those words.

He took another moment and looked out at the faces staring back at
him. Amy and Blaze and Cream. Vector and them. The bird rogues he
never really knew, but he was glad they were here. Shadow, Rouge. Big.
Tails. He never would have known any of them if he had stayed on that
island.

"It's because of Sonic that we're together right now. He was open to
every possibility that life could offer him and his world exploded and
grew to include each and every one of you.

"He was strong. He could fly. He reached the other side of the
rainbow. But if you look around, you'll see that he's still here in
each of us. In the way we live each day. Always moving forward, with
no regrets."

As Knuckles stepped down from the lectern, he felt lighter. Whether he
had gained something or lost something, he didn't know.

* * *

"That was really wonderful, Knuckles." Rouge leaned in to touch him on
the shoulder.

Shadow draped his coat over his other arm and checked his watch again.
Why is everything she wears cut so low? She seemed set on showing
herself off to everybody in attendance.

Knuckles turned his attention from the Babylon Rogues to Rouge with a
sense of relief that didn't escape Shadow's notice. "Thanks. I
appreciate it. I hope he would've liked it."

"The eulogy he would've enjoyed, but the reception! I don't even see
any chili dogs here."

Knuckles laughed politely. "I still have some things to clear up
before I go. But, hey, Cream's family is having people over later,
though, so... I'll meet you guys there?"

"Oh, a get-together? That's nice." Rouge looked back expectantly at
Shadow, who made an exaggerated show of checking his watch. "Well, I
guess we'll... go and change first. See you later, Knuckles."

She hugged him, then turned toward Shadow, who was already walking out
the door into the cool dusk. She hurried to catch up to him.
"Somewhere to be?"

"We do now, evidently."

"Come on, just go with me. You don't have to say anything to anyone."

"I've had enough of that today." Shadow still couldn't feign vapid
optimism the way he assumed everyone else did, no matter how often he
was subjected to it. Sonic had pulled him into this world and Rouge
was keeping him in it.

He fished his keys out of his coat and unlocked the Escalade from
afar. They stopped when, in its headlights, he saw the silhouette of a
boy with two tails.

"Oh," said Rouge, "Hello, Tails. Do you...?"

He looked up at her with dry, steely eyes. "Knuckles is staying here.
Can I... get a ride home?"

Shadow looked sidelong at Rouge. He had no intention of acquiescing,
so he left the honor to her.

"Of course you can. Come on in."

As they pulled out of the lot, Shadow spotted Eggman walking along the
curb toward his Eggomatic hovercraft. Rouge waved politely as they
passed, but it was too dark then to tell if he had noticed.

She crossed her legs and sank back into her seat. "What a lonely man."

As they approached the intersection, Shadow turned his head to look
for oncoming traffic, and in the corner of his eye he saw Tails
looking out of the window back at Eggman without a hint of scorn.

Written for a contest at 1UP. The winning entry is here, with a runner-
up here. Like mine, they all confront Sonic's characters with the simple
tragedies of civilian life. And I am only half joking when I say that.

Earthbound, by Philip Armstrong"

2011-04-25T16:33:00.002-04:00

In Dr. Mae-Wan Ho’s essay In Search of the Sublime she describes
the first time she saw a performance of The Magic Flute.

The electrifying moment came when the Queen of the Night launched into
her aria. I sat bolt-upright on the edge of the seat, and must have
held my breath for the entire duration. My heart ached and tears
welled up in my eyes. Her voice rang through me everywhere as though I
had dematerialized into an exquisitely sensitive ethereal being that
filled the auditorium. There was intense excitement, but also
something supremely joyful and serene. No words can capture that
charged moment but that I was in the presence of the
sublime.

Sublime moments, she argues, are points where significant forms, in
active engagement, create something akin to love.

"Love" is an overused and abused word, and hence thoroughly inadequate
to describe the rich panoply of feelings that make up the aesthetic
experience. Nevertheless, for those who have been fortunate enough to
have experienced love in the sublime, it is indeed not dissimilar. It
too, is a feeling of heightened awareness of being connected, not only
to the loved one, but to everything else by sympathetic transference
(of both sameness and contrast). The lover is indeed in love with the
whole world. The loved one becomes a sign through which everything
else, even the most ordinary and mundane, is known and loved afresh:
the whole world takes on a new significance.”

The last time I played through Earthbound a line early in the game
jumped out at me. Before Ness starts out on his big adventure his
mother gives him some words of encouragement, including the advice:
“Remember to ‘Go for it!’” I was stuck by the profound absurdity of
this statement. Those quotation marks add so much. By including them
Ness’s mother acknowledges the emptiness of her platitude and further
cheapens the advice by not simply telling Ness to “go for it”
(whatever “it” is) but not to forget to follow the hollow cliché. In
five words we have a critique on the worthlessness of generic sanguine
encouragement far more scathing than any photoshop of a “teamwork”
encouragement poster ever was. But at the same time she is so sincere,
so genuine with her support, that the sentence twists back on itself
into an ouroboros of quiet, deep hilarity. Finally getting the joke,
and the realization of what masterful writing this was, was a moment
of sublimity.

Despite playing the game consistently since its 1995 debut it still
took more than a dozen playthroughs before the "Go for It!" line
distinguished itself for me. Earthbound is the only game where each
repetition brings new revelation. It is a mine which never depletes,
and with each unearthing produces a new and precious gem. There is so
much than endears me to this game that goes beyond the usually
ascribed appeal of wh-whackyness! and “It’s an RPG set in modern times
with like baseball bats instead of swords and stuff!” Director
Shigesato Itoi’s direct but rich and subtle script is only the
beginning.

I marvel at how the graphics which seemed so primitive in ’95 have
only become more timeless and iconic as the game ages; at how the
music is affecting with both melodic and ambient tracks, both layered
with a seemingly endless amount of samples and references; at the
sound that a bicycle makes riding through a swamp.



While all these are well documented details adored by many players,
Earthbound offers personal revelations as well. I was 14 when I first
played the game, and though I first dismissed it as childish and
simple, it lodged itself into my brain. One day I surprised myself by
unconsciously humming the theme to Onett. I was impressed that this
game I had found so distasteful had managed to imprint on me so
strongly. One moment in particular captivated my memory: the trumpet
player who stands on the cliff overlooking the sea playing Dvorak's
Symphony No. 9, Movement 2. Something about that haunting melody
overlaid with the Onett theme sparked a powerful sense of nostalgia,
despite having only played the game a few weeks earlier. This was the
first sublime moment and because of it I returned to Earthbound with
an open mind and an eager heart.

Earthbound has the unique and special property to engender nostalgia.
Both for itself and within itself. To a large degree the plot is about
recovering sweet memories, and there’s nostalgic quality in nearly
every location. A sense of both goodwill and impending loss. The
allure of Earthbound’s nostalgia is so strong that not even the game’s
primary antagonist is immune to its allure.



For several years after when I encountered a particularly beautiful or
seductive place in nature I would call the spot one of “My
Sanctuaries” after the gentle places of power in the game. Such was
the strength of association between Earthbound’s special sense of
nostalgia and real life discovery, beauty, and fleeting tranquility.

Since then I’ve made other happy discoveries within Earthbound’s mise
en scene (for lack of a better term). These include the recognition
that as you move through Onett to Fourside you also travel through a
year from late summer to the hight of spring. Or that the noise in the
background during Poo’s trail is the sound of Om. Unverifiable
interpretations these may be, but for me they enrich and personalize
the experience.



Earthbound is a game constructed out of small sublime moments. Or as
the game itself says over a warming cup of tea, “like a great
tapestry, vertical and horizontal threads have met and become
intertwined, creating a huge, beautiful image.”

Divine as these moments are, none come close to the definition of
sublimity as love. No, that moment comes, as it should, at the end.
The main through-line of the game is that Ness is visiting his My
Sanctuary locations to gain enough strength to defeat an evil alien
who has enslaved the earth in the future. At each location Ness
receives part of a song know as “Eight Melodies.” It’s a beautiful
song, though until it’s completed is filled with a considerable amount
of discord. During the final credits a expanded version called “Smiles
and Tears” plays while images from throughout the game play in the
background (there’s that nostalgic element popping up again). “Smiles
and Tears” is a moving and profound end to the game. The perfect cap
to an amazing ending. However, very very faintly, just as the music
swells to a climax, a voice whispers “I miss you.” It’s so faint that
many people miss it entirely. I completed the game at least ten times
without hearing it myself. After learning about the line on the
internet, and that it was Shigesato Itoi’s voice no less, I made sure
to listen carefully the next time.



One of the main questions in the 'Are Games Art?' debate is if a video
game can make a player cry. Most often this is couched in terms of
narrative, that a game could tell such a moving plot with such
compelling characters that the player would be moved to tears. While
I’ve been moved by games narratives before (Mother 3 and Shadow of the
Colossus spring to mind) I’ve never been close to crying.

"I miss you."

When I heard those words for the first time I felt such a powerful
upsweeping of emotion that I had to blink and wipe the back of my hand
across my eyes. It may not have helped. People have speculated what
this whispered message means. Is it Ness professing is desire for
Paula? Is it a reference to Mother 3? To me it couldn't be more clear.
Here, this game which I have spent so much time with, have discovered
so much about, which has influenced who I am and how I see the world,
and which knows me by name, was telling me personally and singularly
that it regretted that our time together was over. It was confirmation
of a profound connection between me: player, audience, person and a
immaterial collection of data and ideas put together by a man half the
world away who I had never met. It’s hard to express the depth of my
feelings. I can only echo the sentiment of Dr. Ho: no words can
capture the moment I was in the presence of the sublime.

“The creation of significant form is an act of communion, of love
between artist and nature, between artist and amateur, between amateur
and nature. It is nature presenting nature to herself through us who
are all of the same cloth, to reaffirm and celebrate that universal
wholeness that is both the source and repository of all
creation.”

"The importance of EarthBound isn’t found in its contributions to the
development of the medium, but to the development of actual human
beings who played it during their formative years." -Michel
McBride-Charpentier

Threads of Fate

2011-03-04T22:45:00.003-05:00

Well, I just finished Threads of Fate, and the main thing I can say about it is that it's better than Okami.

No, I'm kidding. But also I'm not kidding. Threads of Fate might not be more clever, but it is definitely a better video game than Okami.

You know how in some games you can speed up the appearance of text in dialog boxes by pressing or holding down a button, and how sometimes speeding up the text and progressing to the next line of dialog are two different buttons? Well, in Threads of Fate, it's one button. If you double tap it, all of the text appears at once, and another tap progress immediately to the next line of dialog. If you hold it down, the dialog continues to progress until you release it.

Threads of Fate is stupendously playable is what I'm saying; so playable that you even feel like you're in control of the story scenes with each button press. The controls are tighter than Square's previous action-RPG, Brave Fencer Musashi, or even more so than ANY Square game since, I dunno, Secret of Mana. Running and jumping around is a Mario-esque joy, and every attack is answered by an enemy's collapse and a satisfying WHACK. Special attacks consume MP, and MP can be gained by landing normal attacks. Healing is done at the inn or via Zelda-esque enemy drops, and upgrades are handled at the tool shop for a nominal fee. Menu navigation and inventory management is minimal or negligible. The town of Carona serves as a hub from which you visit and revisit the various levels of the game - and is, brilliantly, shaped like a wheel, with the camera following you from a fixed place atop the fountain in the middle of town. It is the most easily digestible action-RPG I can think of right now.

This breezy gameplay is accompanied by a straightforward story. There's a legendary relic of unimaginable power lurking just beyond the boundaries of a sleepy port town, and several parties are in a Mad Mad Mad Mad World dash to get it, including the two playable characters. This simple frame allows for a steady pace and a steady escalation of mounting conflicts as the climax grows closer and closer.

It also has a really modest visual style with bright colors and simple textures. It's very plain, but used with great panache. All of the characters have big eyes and a small array of very expressive animations. And even though they aren't the deepest characters, they become more and more likable over the course of the game. They work incredibly well as an ensemble, and form one of the most cohesive and admirable casts in a Japanese video game behind maybe Phoenix Wright. At least for me.

It's not a COMPLETELY euphoric experience, though. It's been said that between the two playable characters Rue has the better gameplay and Mint has the better story. Rue is a shape-shifting amnesiac who wants to use the relic to resurrect his foster sister/savior/lover, and Mint is a magic-using ex-princess who wants to use the relic to rule the world.

Rue's scenario is rife with melodrama and "angst" - or what passed for angst in 2000. Man, if reviewers knew the kind of angst Japanese RPGs were manufacturing just four years later, they'd be BEGGING for Rue's story. Honestly, I remember Rue's plight being pretty affecting because it was so subdued, even if it was familiar territory.

Though, it's true, you can't deny the appeal of Mint's story. If Rue's scenario is Threads of Fate's "real story" then Mint's is more like a parody of that story. And, honestly, it's the one I remember most, and her crazy antics are much more in keeping with the tone of the game, and her interactions with all of the NPCs bring out the best in their characters, I think.

The main deviation between the characters in terms of gameplay is their differing SPECIAL TALENTS. Rue can transform into any of up to 5 enemies he has defeated, altering his moveset. Though really interesting, I honestly always had less fun playing as Rue in any form other than his own - because he already moved so briskly and controlled so well, few others could compare. The main advantage in transforming is accessing elemental moves specific to certain bad guys.

Mint's magic is cast by combining an ELEMENT with an EFFECT. For example, Fire and Normal creates and simple fireball, while Fire and Super create a devastating flame thrower. It's a breeze to use and switch between the various magics, though by halfway through the game you realize there isn't nearly as much variety in strategy compared to Rue's abilities. Sure, enemies might have different elemental weaknesses, but every magic spell is just... a different kind of projectile. Any given Mega Man has a wider arsenal of more fun weaponry to choose from.

Also, you return several times to the very first forest stage of the game for various reasons, which doesn't bug me as much as you're forced to return to the second, more maze-like underground ruins. It's not as much a sin like the backtracking in Musashi or something else, but I feel it could have been so easily avoided.

But, really, that's it. It's great. Unlike Musashi, I would happily suggest it to anyone. Would I suggest that you play it twice, one with each character? If it's your first time, yes. MOST of the game is exactly the same, but it's so interesting to see how NPCs react differently, and to see what the other guy was doing while you were doing something else. But this past time? I just played as Mint. I actually had to stop myself from playing as Rue. I like this game, but I have other stuff to do.

One last thing. I really like the soundtrack. It's very different from Musashi's bombastic music - it's super mellow, almost new agey, and very video gamey. This track has 1158 plays on my iTunes, mostly because it's on my sleep aid playlist. The composer Junya Nakano would be chosen by Nobuo Uematsu, along with Masashi Hamauzu, to help with Final Fantasy X's soundtrack.

Also, at the risk of sounding like a weeaboo, I'd like to say that the Japanese title "Dewprism" is a much more fitting one than "Threads of Fate" because it has less syllables and actually has anything to do with the game.

Brave Fencer MusashiSquare's Blue-Headed Stepchild

2011-02-14T23:17:00.003-05:00

Listen and read

For a time I felt like I was the only person in the world with fond memories of Brave Fencer Musashi. I love the silly voice overs, the colorful world, the whimsy. Most people, though, remember things like having to be at certain places at certain times and being forced to make jumps at disadvantageous camera angles. The reason most people got it was to play the packaged Final Fantasy VIII demo.

The main reason I decided to play it was to make a simple comparison between the Square of then and now. Musashi works as a very interesting time capsule. There isn't a scent of angst in this game. It's all silly as shit and very simplistic; no illusions of grandeur, no one talking about darkness or dreams and honor and memories. Looking back, Musashi was the fulcrum balancing the old Square and the new.

The evil Thirstquencher Empire descends upon the peaceful Allucaneet Kingdom. The royal advisers descend to the foundation of the palace along with Princess Fillet, so that they may summon their only hope - the legendary Brave Fencer Musashi. But when Fillet performs the procedure (called "HERO SUMMON"), they're greeted by a short, scrawny, gi-garbed, geta-wearing spiky-haired boy who has no God damn interest in dealing with shit that has nothing to do with him. Only once he's reminded by the royal steward that the Princess is his only hope of returning to his home world does he agree to secure the Legendary Sword of Luminescence and recover the Legendary Five Scrolls before Thirstquencher does.

Musashi is a cheeky little bastard, and who can blame him? He's a hostage in the world he's supposed to save. He treats all of the stuck-up or weird adults around him with minimal respect and often resorts to unprovoked name-calling. And the funny thing is that everyone seems to like him regardless.

At one point you have to find a cure for the grocer's ailing son Tim - who Musashi has already decided is a little prick - so Musashi and the hotel owner (cleverly named Hotelo; he also has a brother named Motelo) split up to get the ingredients. Naturally, Hotelo doesn't return, and Musashi goes out to find that he's slumped on the ground, too tired to go on. The only way to snap him out of it is to berate and express your disappointment in him. Everyone's just asking for it.

And just think of how he treats his enemies! All of the members of the Thirstquencher Empire are verbose idiots, not unlike the people of Allucaneet, only they're also trying to kill him... Actually, now that I think of it, Musashi treats the bad guys pretty much the same way he treats the good guys, really, only he also beats the shit out of them. The main difference is that it's actually pretty cathartic seeing Musashi's aggressions turned against the guys who actually deserve it.

The cast is colorful and sweetly stupid, more likable then Musashi gives them credit for. They're excellently voiced in an overly exuberant Saturday morning cartoon fashion, some of the best and most fun voice acting in a Square game to this day, with casting provided out-of-house by Animaze. The characters were designed by Koji Matsuoka, a man who mysteriously has no other credits for doing anything else. More recognition went to Tetsuya Nomura, who did all of the official illustrations. Each character is used economically; for the most part Musashi has no more than three scripted encounters with any of them. Each of the members of Leader's Force - a Thirstquencher task force made up of three members, all of whom introduce themselves as its leader - are only met twice. The story moves at a pretty brisk pace as a result.

The outlier of this whole cast, though, is Musashi, the spiky-haired boy with a Sonic the Hedgehog-esque chip on his shoulder (even his homeworld rival Kojiro is a tightass jerk like the rest). I believe that Musashi represents the new Playstation-era Square looking back at where its come from. He's a Japanesely dressed warrior stuck in a land of European fantasy. Knights and empires might be cool for all the people that live around that stuff, but he's way over it. He's ready to beat the shit out of these walking cookie-cutter parodies, have some fun if he can, and then ship out, leaving behind this medieval cum steampunk world once and for all and explore new styles and new genres.

The entire first sequence of the game leading up to the end of the first boss fight is a really excellent episode. The kind of opening that Square RPGs are known so well for - Super Mario RPG's raid on Bowser's Keep, Final Fantasy VII's bombing mission, Vagrant Story's Greylands Incident, Final Fantasy IX's play and kidnapping - it's the kind of bite size video game level you would be happy to play by itself once in a while. It stands as a satisfying chunk of story on its own, it steadily unfolds the mechanics of the game and promptly rewards the player for their understanding, and it perfectly represents the world while still promising greater wonders beyond it.

Musashi sets out with a specific objective - get the Legendary Sword Lumina, bring it back, go home. The player is introduced to Fusion, the less legendary sword with which Musashi performs his most basic attack. Soon you discover that Fusion can -Assimilate- the abilities of an enemy, Kirby style, providing you with a new skill. The first area you can explore is nice and linear with a variety of enemies with which to practice Assimilation. You come to a stream with a makeshift drawbridge risen on the opposite side, and with a hint from Musashi you Assimilate a projectile attack from one of Thirstquencher's lackeys and shoot at the planks of the bridge, causing them to fall and letting you pass. With great relief you discover that puzzles in this game will be solved organically using actions that are already useful in their own right, not just by grabbing keys.

Musashi soon arrives at the tower that holds Lumina. Another training puzzle comes up, requiring you to use the same projectile ability, followed by a third puzzle that requires you to find a new ability that can be used to freeze enemies in place - whom you can use to depress a switch that lowers the force field around Lumina.

After obtaining Lumina, a giant stone head falls from the towers and rolls after a fleeing Musashi, down the side of the tower, down the forest path (when you realize that the useless boulders you passed by on the way to the tower are now serving as obstacles in your mad dash), all while Musashi frantically shouts at the player, "Whoa! JUMP!!" at the sight of pits and bumps, all the way to the palace, where Musashi finds Princess Fillet being held by Thirstquencher's Rootrick, a large and inexplicably Texan soldier, who tells Musashi that he's "gonna get a lickin'" before teleporting away with Fillet in tow.

The first boss fight which follows is a wonderful bout with a quadrapedal steam-powered war machine that starts in the great hall of the palace and sends you crashing through the wall out into the village as the monstrosity knocks over pillars and crushes houses like a huge dick. It's the first challenge that requires a combination of all the techniques using Fusion and Lumina that you've learned so far. Musashi ends the fight by tossing the mangled machine off of a cliff, shouting, "Hey! You forgot something!" and crushing it with its own wrecking ball. He then falls asleep where he stands, exhausted. The screen fades to black and you're prompted to save your game for the first time.

The excitement of discovery is sustained into the next chapter, when you first explore Grillin' Village. Half of the village is useless in a harmless sort of way, but all the NPCs have names, character portraits and daily activities. The shopkeeps have their own personalities and keep their own hours.

The pawn shop serves as one long running gag; seemingly valuable treasures that are discovered in dungeons await appraisal from the grumpy pawn shop owner, revealing them to be useless trash like pie tins and shovels, which you can then sell for a handful of dran. In a clever reversal, seemingly useless junk will turn out to be pieces of Legendary Armor once appraised.

From the village you can explore the rest of the kingdom. There aren't a great many locations, and they're not graphically astounding, but they are varied, colorful, and a few of the set pieces actually surprisingly striking. The dragon's head on Twin Peak Mountain, the eerily glowing underground lake, the great tree that contains all of the steam valves that keep the kingdom running...

Steamwood.

Pretty early on, Steamwood goes haywire, and the people of the village plead to you to fix it, because the guys that usually take care of it are useless I guess? After trotting through a forest path where pipes intertwine with trees, you reach Steamwood. To keep the whole thing from exploding, you must release the pressure valves, a mini-game that involves pressing the X button at the right time. Releasing each valve isn't difficult. The hard part is getting to each valve in the proper order before the valve timer (different from the "Game Over" timer) reaches 0.

Steamwood is made up of a circular catwalks with an elevator going up and down between the floors, and the camera is set low to follow Musashi - holding left or right for long enough will bring you in a circle. These catwalks don't have guardrails, though, and some of the direct routes to the valves are blocked by scalding columns of steam. Reaching the valves requires jumping onto pipes and support beams before landing on the catwalk again. The low camera angle makes it very difficult to make a direct landing, and landing on the curve of a pipe will cause Musashi to freeze, slide over the edge and fall off, leaving you to try and land on a lower platform or fall all the way to the bottom. If you can't reach the next valve again before the timer hits 0, you have to start again from the beginning.

Must people see their first Game Over screen at Steamwood. Most detractors of Brave Fencer Musashi cite Steamwood as the game's zenith of suck. I respectfully disagree: when Steamwood goes nuts a second time and you have to release all of the valves again, that might be worse.

While Steamwood is the most obvious example of a portion of the game in which a terrible environmental layout and damning camera angle act as a substitute for a challenge, it is not the last and certainly not the worst.

At the point-of-no-return before the final dungeon when you can't return to the village, Musashi reaches a rather gorgeous multi-tiered fountain floating high up in the sky. To reach the top of the fountain where the Fifth Scroll lies, you must utilize all of Lumina's elemental powers - earthquakes, flamethrowing, walking on water - and, of course, jumping.

At this point in the game, you've already figured out that after falling off-screen, Musashi takes damage and is teleported back to the last piece of "solid ground" he stood on - that excludes conveyor belts, mine carts, rotating platforms, etc. For some unfathomable reason, only a few portions of the fountain count as "solid ground". This means that, until you reach certain specified invisible checkpoints, you will have to start over from the beginning, which means having to go all the way back up to where you fell from before you even have a chance to make the jump again. I spent something like ten God damn minutes at this fountain. It's not the grandest locations in the game in terms of scale; it might even be the smallest.

The whole game isn't like this. Some dungeons are downright fun, even. The underground ruin has a wide enough variety of challenges to accept a couple of pitfalls, and the Frozen Palace is a beautifully designed, Zelda-esque locale. The best portion of the game is toward the end, the sequence before taking on the final leader of Leader's Force in a Dance Dance Revolution competition (You heard me). It's a giant courtyard filled with big, threatening enemies, the most powerful bad guys you meet, and Assimilating them grants you the most powerful abilities. It's really simple, nothing more than a few arenas strung together, but each combination of obstacles requires quickly refining your skills in crowd control, prioritizing threats and choosing the right attack for the right job.

It's a very spectacular sequence, especially considering the previous portion of the dungeon is one long boring puzzle that involves walking through a series of doors in the proper order, and starting over from the beginning if you mess it up. Steamwood rearing its ugly head again.

When I first started writing about Musashi before I finished it I planned on being way more positive and not getting hung up on how joyless jumping around is, but it's like a thick coffee ring right on top of it, I can't look past it, mostly because it doesn't make any sense. The beginning of the game has you fighting colorful henchmen and monsters with TWO SWORDS, using your foes' own talents against them, neutralizing them with elemental magic, doing things you would expect to be doing in a game called Brave Fencer Musashi. But then you have room after room in which the only button you touch is the one that makes Musashi jump.

In combat you have options with which to overcome your obstacles, and you gain more as you progress. All of these options are moot when a long drop is involved. You can't stab, cut or burn a pitfall. There aren't even bad guys around during these jumping sequences most of the time - probably because they thought it would be too infuriating to deal with falling and being attacking at the same time - so you're just alone in a room, falling off of ledges as many times as you care to, being teleported back onto solid ground, losing a sliver of HP at a time. Even the HP gauge starts to feel less like a measure of your ability to resist your attackers' onslaughts and more like a "how many times you can fall off of ledges" gauge. It's like a joke. Musashi has TWO SWORDS with which to cut down his aggressors, but I guarantee that you'll lose just as much of your HP falling off of things.

Going through dungeons with lots of jumping often made me second guess the fun parts of the game, if they were even that well-designed. Often they really are, the beginning and the end of the game being particularly swell, as well as most of the boss fights. But with some thought, a few dungeons are revealed to be merely mediocre, especially when you realize that you can get from one end to the other by simply running past most enemies. Restorative power-ups which were littered around early on in the game mysteriously disappear as the game progresses, and enemies drop them less frequently as well. Consistent Musashi ain't.

I went through most of the game before I was able to articulate why I wasn't having fun. Why? It could be that Tsuyoshi Sekito's fucking amazing soundtrack rendered me deaf to its problems. At 75 tracks over two discs, it's an unheard amount of work that's gone into a Square game's sound design outside of Final Fantasy. I can think of one dungeon that plays 6 different songs, a different one in each area. Soaring, epic, often triumphant, it's the kind of music that dares all actions that occur while it's playing to be of incredibile importance. Most songs are bombastic and self-important, like Musashi himself, with royal horns and Japanese wood blocks and all manner of instrumentation mixed up of East and West. It makes exciting moments feel absolutely exhilarating, and make boring parts seem like perfectly necessary interludes between the fun parts. I wish I knew more about music so I could explain how much I love this soundtrack properly.

That makes the final result exceedingly sad as a result. The song that plays during the credits is the perfect cap on what Brave Fencer Musashi was supposed to be, the end of an adventure but looking back, I feel like the music is almost too good for it. Looking at all of the fun and colorful art that comes up in the credits, I can't find any drawings of Steamwood. It feels like a lie. The credits adamantly insist to everyone that the game was exactly as fun as it promised to be, but every once in a while you catch it looking at you in a way that you know means, "If you tell your parents that I did anything to you, I will hurt you worse next time."

Did Square learn any lessons from Brave Fencer Musashi? They did allow its spiritual successor, Threads of Fate, to be published with improved control over jumping and far less pitfalls. It was also among a huge number of new IPs in a four year span across various genres. Its sense of humor would lay dormant until Final Fantasy IX, after which both humor and new ideas would be sealed away like some ancient evil. Neither would truly resurface until The World Ends With You eight years later. Four Heroes of Light would also echo Musashi's colorful world with simple visuals and a simple story, but it might not have been made without having "Final Fantasy" attached to it.

The main difference between then and now is that things were less homogeneous then and fans were more forgiving of a developer trying to branch out. Square's followers are more bitter now. Square was erroneously rewarded for the comforting familiarity of Advent Children and the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, punished for exploring in Final Fantasy XII, both rewarded AND punished for Kingdom Hearts' sequels spin-offs, and rewarded and punished AGAIN for attempting to be familiar AND new with Final Fantasy XIII.

After all of these years, there are simply too many different expectations for what Square is supposed to be and what they are meant to do, and everyone believes that they must sift through these conflicting wishes and do what is best for everyone.

Square is like Musashi: a hero and a hostage. The best thing they can do is act take a cue from Musashi and fuck everyone. Do what needs to be done, but do it THEIR way. They have to take a risk, come from someplace real. In all of these years, Square has never really produced an auteur or a pioneer. No Kojima, no Cliff Bleszinski, not even a David Cage. And maybe they never will. But I'd still like to see Musashi come back. I'd be interested to see what he would have to say looking back on the time between now and his previous appearance.

Oh, wait. There already was a sequel.

(Some) Videogames of 2010

2011-01-02T12:49:00.013-05:00

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is evolution in action.

Every Metal Gear Solid game improves upon the formula of the previous
title while at the same time utilizing a feature that does not work as
well as it should. It was first-person gunfights in MGS2, camouflage
in Snake Eater, and expanding your arsenal in MGS4 (along with
changing or dropping rules from act to act). Peace Walker is the first
Metal Gear to improve upon all the features of its predecessors as
well as introducing new features like cooperative play and
mission-based progression that actually work. [Thought I guess
Portable Ops was good practice.]

While MGS4 was clearly a game about Kojima's mid-life crisis, Peace
Walker is much calmer and more focused, a necessary environment for an
integral chapter in the story of Big Boss' becoming the enemy of the
world. In Big Boss' conversations with his comrades - about nuclear
war, El Che, Stanley Kubrick, Alan Turing - it becomes obvious that
Kojima has an intense love of history and technology, how they have
affected his life and how maybe he can affect them. It's been said
that Snake and Big Boss are the obvious representatives for Kojima in
the world of his games, but I believe it's Master Miller - a man who
defines and is defined by his industry, whose identity is formed by
East and West - who speaks for him.

I have a hard time believing that Peace Walker will be anyone's
favorite Metal Gear Solid game - often it's the ridiculous mistakes in
form that appeals to lovers of the series - but I believe that Peace
Walker is Kojima Studios most-polished work, as both a video game and
a work of historical fiction.

Mass Effect 2 is the game everyone should be making.

It's been said that interactivity in video games is an illusion. You
can either make your character do something that doesn't make sense
and break the story, or you can make them do whatever makes the most
sense and be nothing but an accomplice to the story that was supposed
to happen anyway.

The solution to this is, quite simply, making each choice believable,
and Mass Effect 2 proves that the way to do that is by utilizing the
skills of competent artists: good writers and good actors.

A good game is a world, and that world must be constructed with loving
detail. Every event in Mass Effect is well-written, well-voiced, many
are even well-photographed, and all of them matter. Bioware is a lot
like Pixar in a way. They're not pioneers so much as they're just
really good at their job. Why doesn't everyone work so hard?

Bayonetta is the new standard for "over the top".

It was one thing to discover that she has guns in the heels of her
shoes, but once you see her make a giant spider out of her own hair,
you know that nothing else is like Bayonetta and nothing else will be
for a long time. Bayonetta tells a story that doesn't make any sense,
but all of the events transpire at such a monumental scale - the force
of your finishing blow on each boss is measured in gigatons - that you
can't help but want to step up to each new challenge and see how much
bigger your obstacles become.

Bayonetta is also the only game I've played twice this year, and I'm
thinking of playing it a third time.

Kirby's Epic Yarn is pure.

The Game Over as a concept is dead. No one wants to play a game that
doesn't want to be played.

You cannot die in Epic Yarn, but, on a personal level, you can
certainly lose. For every bit of damage Kirby and Prince Fluff
receive, they only lose the beads which they collect throughout the
level - an interesting cannibalizing of Sonic's rings. People who
aren't very good at video games will just be happy to have gone
through the level and seen all of the cute and yarny things that Kirby
can do, and pros can stroke their egos knowing that they kept all of
their beads and can use them to go and decorate Kirby's apartment in
Quilty Square.

Kirby exemplifies the extreme playability expected of a Nintendo game,
every level a perfect blend of cakewalks and hurdles, door prizes and
trophies.

Heavy Rain is a good
apology for Indigo Prophecy.

I was pretty harsh on Heavy Rain when it came out. I said that it was
pushing the industry further in the wrong direction, that its sense of
importance suggested in promotional material was entirely unwarranted,
that it was written by a talentless, racist lunatic. While I don't
think these assertions are incorrect, Heavy Rain is absolutely worthy
of at least one play by everyone.

Even with an insipid script and a schizophrenically cast array of
voice actors - stuff that even games that aren't trying to be movies
usually get right - Heavy Rain enthralls by throwing its heroes into
progressively more dire situations, and it can really get the blood
pumping when you're the one who has to start making the tough
decisions. It's at these points that Heavy Rain - often referred to
derisively as a playable movie - actually highlights the great
possibilities available to video games, at least if they can just
learn how to imbue their scenarios with weight.

Heavy Rain often doesn't know which side of the line to be on. For a
game whose most prided feature is being able to change the course of
the story, there are many times where it feels like you're simply
along for the ride, just watching a scene from a mediocre movie. Those
feelings usually go away, though, when you're asked to do something
just terrible.

The people I want to thank most at Quantic Dream are the artists who
built all of Heavy Rain's environments. The Mars household, Madison's
loft and the ethereal virtual surroundings of the ARI are incredibly
realistic and some of the most beautiful locales in video games.

I'd also like to the thank Normand Corbeil for composing the stunning
score that acted as Heavy Rain's emotional cornerstone.

Vanquish is looking for love in all the wrong places.

When people were talking about being disappointed with Vanquish's
story I thought that they were nuts until I played it myself. It's not
that it's impeccably stupid, it's just... not interesting. Considering
these guys are responsible for Godhand and Bayonetta and the director
is responsible for Resident Evil 4, its surprising how unengaged I
usually am by what's going on. Protagonist Sam Gideon isn't an
impetuous douchebag like Gene, cool in a doofy kind of way like Leon,
or just fucking ridiculous like Bayonetta. He's just a really basic
gruff guy who smokes. If you can't get me to like a guy who
rocket-slides around on his knees while shooting a machine gun in slow
motion and drill kicks holes through giant robots, you really screwed
up somewhere.

On the surface Vanquish satisfies all the needs of an action game in
terms of challenge and control (even though your melee attack
bafflingly deprives you of the ability to go into bullet time when you
most need it), but there are very few kinds of enemies to fight, and
thusly very few reasons to alter your strategy. You fight the same
giant transforming robot something like 18 times. While I'm
rocket-dashing from cover to cover and exploding Russian battle-droids
with my giant shotgun, I actually spend most of my time compulsively
obsessing over whether or not I should bring a certain kind of weapon
with me because, "Even though it's useless now, maybe it will be
better when I upgrade it!"

I also found it really frustrating that cut scenes throughout the game
suggest that Sam's really concerned about the welfare of his
allies on the battlefield, and the game even keeps track of how many
are KIA per mission, and yet we're never actually given a reason to
care about them. Some have names for some reason, but most don't. It's
like, what are you doing, game? If you want me to care about these
guys, make them likable or some shit.

It sounds like I'm really hard on it, but I guess it's no more of a
shallow mess than many other games. I guess I just expected more from
the makers of AAA titles.

Medal of Honor (2010) is a war game for those who don't play war games.

Its controls mimic precisely those of any of the recent Call of Duty
games, and like those games it also has you playing the roles of
several soldiers throughout its campaign, but Medal of Honor also has
a pervading sense of weight that becomes more and more apparent when
you realize there are guys on the other side of the world doing
this shit right now. The stoic Navy SEALS, the grizzled Delta
Forces and the gung-ho Army Rangers are all members of a family with
such strong ties of camaraderie, and the Man in Charge could never
understand why they would compromise a mission for one or two of their
own.

These kind of themes aren't alien to war stories, but they come to
light so subtly it's kind of surprising how affecting the game can be
when the shit hits the fan. There were a few moments in the game when
I believed that, just maybe, a video game could have more to say about
the situation of the modern soldier than something like The Hurt
Locker... That is, till we're treated to one of those big Walls of
Text about how all soldiers everywhere are heroes for keeping America
safe from our enemies. It feels a little disingenuous to outright
idealize values like brotherhood and keeping one's home country safe
when I just spent the last few hours killing very realistically
animated representations of human beings - even if they were all
Taliban. And then Linkin Park plays during the credits.

It sucks to me that Medal of Honor had a real opportunity to offer a
deeper, more human interpretation of current events and in the end,
save for some pretty interesting moments, it was pretty lukewarm. Its
funny, because that didn't stop the game from receiving backlash
in the media. The Medal of Honor situation is pretty sad to me on the
whole, considering that first-person war games could only exist as
they do today because of the first installment 10 years ago. It's like
the relationship between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or kinda like how
The Mummy ripped off the original Indiana Jones trilogy, and then
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ripped off The Mummy. Ideas are funny.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a sickness.

Strange Journey's fascinating scenario of an expedition to the South
Pole to investigate an expanding pool of nothingness that threatens to
swallow the world is designed to make you feel like something is
always wrong. The game takes place from the first-person perspective
of your hero, so you can only see in front of you. No creature is
visible until you are both occupying the same space. And even when you
return from your dungeon-crawling back to your base, all of your
allies are represented by static, unmoving images that are so small
as to seem very far away from you. The game constantly reinforces the
idea that you are alone in a land that doesn't welcome you.

As the game goes on, all of your safety measures are neutralized. Your
technologies fail, new forces appear to antagonize you, and your
closest comrades trade their humanity to embrace the insanity around
them. There's a mounting, apocalyptic sensation coinciding with the
realization that none of the methods you choose to resolve this
conflict is going to be a happy one.

The main problem with Strange Journey's story is that it's attached to
a game in which entire dungeons are filled with trapdoors and warp
tiles that you won't know about until you walk on them.

I only realized just now that Strange Journey was probably
always going to be a dungeon-crawler with trapdoors, warp tiles
and randomly-appearing items, and that the story about humanity's
self-destruction was just an add-on so they knew how to design the
cover. It's kind of brilliant to have a dungeons designed to highlight
all of man's follies - war, excess, consumption - and then have the
player spend hours fighting, fusing demons and grinding for the sake
of another fucking JRPG. Strange Journey could have been a psychedelic
survival horror, but it had to be another god damn number orgy.

Once you've played this game long enough, all of the things that made
the tone of the story so compelling become just frustrating. All of
your allies are small and they don't move. For some cockamamie reason
activating auto-battle makes all damage invisible. Playing this game
feels like playing another, more immersive game on the other side of
a window with those gloves specialists use to handle radioactive
materials. I don't remember the last time that I wished so anxiously
that the next dungeon would be the last. And I never found out how it
ended because the only advice I could find for overcoming the final
boss was "level up".

Now, all of the clever Shin Megami Tensei mechanics are there.
Contracting and fusing demons, balancing your party's strengths and
weaknesses while exploiting those of your enemy, and there are some
boss fights that require an expert understanding of these principles
in order to overcome them. If that sounds good to you, please, play
2009's Devil Survivor instead. Its characters emote, there are
no trapdoors to fall into, and your decisions actually affect the
story in ways outside of changing the color of your name to reflect
your alignment.

The Best Video Game Music of 2010

Tales of Symphonia - Fucking Pathetic

2010-12-20T14:22:00.008-05:00

After forming pacts with the Summons Spirits of Wind and Earth,
acquiring the Horn of a Unicorn sleeping at the bottom of a lake,
returning to my childhood home to obtain an Exsphere shard, and
reviving the Linkite Tree - the nuts of which play a beautiful song
when rattled by the wind that attracts the Summon Spirit Aska - I was
finally face to face to face with the mythical two-headed bird, a
combination of Moltres and Doduo. My party told Aska we summoned it so
that we might form a pact with it.

"Have you formed a pact with the Summon Spirit Luna?" it asked me.

What? No. I've never even heard of Luna.

"I will not form a pact with you unless you form a pact with Luna as well."

Colette, not seeming to be bothered by this assertion, says, "I guess
we have no choice but to form a pact with Luna."

"Then I will join Luna and wait for your arrival," Aska says.

No one thinks to object to this. No one stands up and says, "No, that
is fucking stupid, Aska. We will form a pact with Luna later,
but since we SUMMONED you and you CAME, we will form a pact with you
RIGHT NOW, because rewarding a series of fetch quests with yet another
fetch quest is the kind of dramatic blue balls the likes of which I
have never known in a video game."

But no, Aska just flies away. Someone in my party guesses that we'll
have to defeat both Aska and Luna simultaneously, so we'd better be
prepared.

So now I have to find Luna, and the game has given me zero clues about
where the fuck Luna is. Even in the SYNOPSIS menu that lists all of
the events of the game as they happen and what should happen next,
there's nothing indicating what direction I should go in. So I'm
opening a god damn walkthrough.

This game is actually making me miss FF13. It was impossible to get
lost in that game, and when something stupid happened there was
usually at least one character that said something about it.

Okay, so the walkthrough says that I have to go to the Temple of
Darkness in order to find out that the Temple of Darkness is too dark
to go into. Hey, you fucking idiots, you formed a pact with the Summon
Spirit of Fire. Why don't you use a fucking TORCH?

But, no, we have to go to the Elemental Research Laboratory in
Meltokio, a city from which our party is exiled so we have to slip in
through the sewer dungeon as not to get caught. Strangely, when I
reach the sewer entrance, it gives me the option to "quick jump" into
the city rather than going through the dungeon again. How come that
wasn't an option when I had to revisit all of those dungeons to get
the Summon Spirits? How come I can't quick jump to the fun part of
the game?

Symphonia uses the really good trope of the mentor that becomes the
antagonist, but they fuck it up. Kratos, the good bad guy, was just
going for a stroll through Meltokio when he ran into us, and we asked
him what he's up to in terms of his evil plots. He said, "I don't need
to tell you that now. And also, stop forming pacts with Summon
Spirits, there will be consequences that you cannot understand." Hey,
dude, why don't you murder us instead of being a cryptic
asshole?

"Be patient, Lloyd," he says before leaving.

"What does that mean?" Lloyd asks. Man, I don't know.

This game, like so many others, was made by a pack of artless losers
whose greatest inspirations come from anime and other video games.
Actually, it's more likely that Tales Studio was inspired by video
games that were inspired by other video games that were inspired by
anime. What I'm saying is that they're retarded.

This is the best thing to come from Symphonia

"The blue candle should be of use to you," says a researcher. "The
holy candle that negates the darkness," our healer Raine reflects
thoughtfully. What the fuck, Raine? If you're so smart, why didn't you
bring it up before? She always does this. Also, a fucking candle
doesn't have to be "holy" in order to do what regular candles already
do pretty well.

"Wait, we can't help them," say another researcher. "They got Kate in
trouble. She's going to be executed for helping these renegades.

"Oh, no!" Colette says. "We've got to help her." "Yes," Presea says.
"I want to help her too."

"What are we supposed to do?" Lloyd and I ask, hoping the answer is
fucking forget about it and get on with our quest to save the god damn
world.

"How about participating in the matches being held at the Coliseum?"
the buff Regal suggests.

I actually lost it when that speech bubble popped up with those words
in it. I was like, "Fuck this game. Cliche fucking piece of shit with
inconsistent-ass characters twiddling their fucking thumbs and putting
their hands on their hips and solving ancient mysteries that
apparently no one with a modicum of intelligence bothered with before
these guys rolled around."

Then I was like, "Thank fucking god, maybe something exciting will
happen now." In case you haven't figured it out, I'm not playing this
game for the god damn story anymore, but for the combat system
(Indeed, the description of the combat system is higher up on the
games Wikipedia page than the description of the plot). At least,
that's what I thought. Lately the only time I change my strategy is to
swap in Raine to heal my party during boss fights.

The Coliseum gave me a run for my money, though. I usually use my AI
partner to distract extraneous enemies while I focus on one, but I can
only use one character for these fights. I had to make a point of
positioning myself just out of range of attack, but close enough to my
target - a delicate balance. And healing items were banned from use.

But it doesn't matter, because after the first fight we walk to the
cells and free Kate. Then we're all standing outside of the Coliseum
and shes like, "Thank you." WHAT? Are the Pope and his knights
fucking morons? There are nine wanted criminals, all with
colorful hair, standing outside of a popular public venue and NOBODY
IS ARRESTING THEM.

ANYWAY, Kate needs a place to hide now, I guess. She says, "Take me to
Ozette. It's where I was born." I say, "Fuck you, you dumb cunt, we
already saved you from demise, walk there yourself if you wanna go
there so bad." Then the game just teleports us there, where Kate tells
us that she's the Pope's daughter.

For a second we see an interesting parallel here between Kate vying
for approval as a researcher under the corrupted Pope and Colette's
ascension into the role of Chosen under the scheming Remiel, her
angelic father. Unfortunately, we realize that because Colette pretty
much says, "Hey, my relationship with my father is pretty much like
your relationship with your father. Isn't that funny?"

That's not how story works, guys. It's like the passage in Twilight
where Bella Whatsherface has an argument with her father and storms
out the front door of the house, and then the book mentions that it's
the same door her mother left her father through years before. That's
not a symbol, that's just an explanation. You can't just say something
and have it be meaningful because you said it is.

Regal: Opposites will always be at odds with each other.
Sylvarant and Tethe'alla. Humans and elves. Heaven and Earth.
Raine: And those in the middle are sacrificed.
[...]
Lloyd: Yeah... Let's get the blue candle so we can form a pact
with Shadow.

Shut the fuck up. Suck my fucking dick with that nonsense. That's what
I wanted to do, but you guys just wanted to dick around. Was the
Temple of Darkness too dark inside to see just so that I could
discover this NPC's backstory? Is that seriously what the Coliseum was
made for, this one piddly sequence? That's almost as bad as the resort
town that has a casino where you can't gamble. I spend more
time in the lobbies of buildings talking to NPCs then I spent doing
interesting things in interesting places.

And what the fuck happened to LUNA?

I swear, I'd quit this game if I knew I wasn't so close to the end of it.

Actually, no. I can't keep playing this. Now that I've said all of
this, I can't play it in good conscience. It's over. I'm keeping the
save data, I'm keeping what few good memories I have left, and thanks,
Andres, for lending it to us, but I'm done. I'll read how it ends,
because imagining it for myself will probably be more exciting than
watching it.

And, y'know, I've never figured out what "Symphonia" actually is.
Probably some bullshit.

Some advice. If you want to play an RPG with an awesome combat system and Nordic influences, but you also want a story with some class instead of silly baloney for babies, play Valkyrie Profile.

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner - Will It Blend...ers?

2010-11-18T18:14:00.010-05:00

Many games that come out of Japan have had bad scripts and bad voice acting, but Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner features the rare combination of an excellent voice cast - the kind usually expected by a Kojima production - with a terribly written script. At several times throughout it becomes obvious that the script was translated word-for-word, often literally, from the Japanese. Some clauses are too long to sound natural, and some characters who probably used very particular phrases in Japanese just sound like they're talking past each other in English. Most of the time it functions well enough, but on in a while it's actually pretty amazing that the actors could be so committed in their deliveries of lines that just barely make sense.

Sometimes it's funny, and, shit, some people would say it's part of the game's charm, but I think it robs the game of its drama. The story could actually be really good. We have the cocksure Dingo Egret, haunted by his lost comrades and a deserter betrayed by his superior, Nohman, the commander of a Martian rebellion force, now driven mad with power. After a "fatal" injury, Dingo is hooked up to the Orbital Frame (read: giant robot) Jehuty in order to stay alive, thanks to Ken Marinaris, a spy who seeks to redeem herself and her father who worked under Nohman. On Mars he meets Leo Stenbuck, the protagonist of the first game who offers his help, but really just wants to be the hero again.

The characters' histories are actually worked pretty poetically into their motivations. Dingo's sudden willingness to protect others stems from his failure to protect his old comrades. Ken's feelings for Dingo suggest that she has daddy issues, since both men worked under Nohman and have saved her life. Leo, who needlessly throws himself in danger's way since he's given up control of Jehuty, actually appears to be somewhat suicidal. The story could have reached Metal Gear Solid levels of awesome melodrama. But with the script the way it is, all of these little tidbits seem to get lost. Instead, Dingo seems inconsistent, Ken is just a woman in a video game, and Leo looks like an idiot.

Fortunately, the rest of the game is still intact.

ZOE2 is an action/adventure game, that special kind of game assembled out of set pieces arranged in a very specific order, like beads on a necklace. They're hard to define - not so much from a certain genre as from a certain class of style. They're the natural evolution of the most basic kind of arcade game, a very carefully designed level-by-level progression of more fantastic sights and escalating challenges, offering a variety of possible utilities for a simple and accessible array of actions. I'd say the most shining example of the last decade is still Resident Evil 4. Often when I say that a video game is really "video gamey" and I mean it as a compliment, I usually mean it's simple, fun and short enough that I'd want to play it again a year later over the course of a Saturday afternoon.

What keeps Zone of the Enders 2 from being mentioned in the same breath as Resident Evil 4 is a few hiccups in terms of pacing. A few of the set piece beads on this action-packed necklace would probably look awfully nice on some other game, but they don't flatter ZOE2 at all.

It's a curious condition that some action games have. Developers seem to fear that the combat might become too repetitive, so they shake it up by introducing some new element or puzzle. Almost always, attempts to alleviate this imagined monotony harm the game's cohesion more than doing nothing possibly could have: jumping through spinning spikes in God of War, swimming around fighting ghost fish in Ninja Gaiden, etc. Its like, "Guys, I was having fun fighting those ninjas - WHY would you take them away from me?"

ZOE2 has about 15 "levels", and 3 of them are not that fun. In the scheme of things that might not seem so bad, but they all seem come at the worst moments. They all occur right after really fun sequences, and they all occur in the first half of the game, while you're still trying to figure out if you like it.

After the pre-title sequence, the game dumps you off at Deimos, and for a reason that hasn't really been specified yet, you have to find a Space Force soldier named Taper, a whiny, bespectacled coward (the Otacon of the game). He is hiding in a shipping container to stay safe. To find him you must search all of the cargo bays and use clues he provides to locate the specific box he's hiding in, and fire a shot to let him know that you found him.

At this point in the game, the player is unlikely to have discovered that ZOE2 supports the Dual Shock 2's pressure sensitive buttons, and that you can shoot a SMALL laser bullet by pressing the button lightly and a LARGE laser bullet by pressing the button firmly. As such, MOST PLAYERS who are lucky to find Taper's box will shoot him with the large laser bullet, exploding the box and killing him, resulting in a Game Over. What makes this more confusing is that shooting any box that Taper ISN'T in with either the small or large laser bullet will explode it, leading the player to believe that a small shot will also destroy Taper's box, which it wouldn't. This in turn leads to the player trying any number of ways to get Taper out of his box, none of which will work until her or she tries shooting them again. On top of everything, destroying any box will cause "security measures" to kick in and relocate all boxes to new cargo bays, forcing you to start over - though, fortunately, Taper gives you a new clue each time this happens.

Come on, guys. You don't start your ground-breaking action game by making the player feel like an idiot. And you don't put a puzzle in a game in which all your actions involve lethal force. It's like the bomb disposal mission from Metal Gear Solid 2 all over again, though at least that had sub-badass tortured bomb disposal expert Peter Stillman. This mission has Taper.

Though Taper-in-the-Box is the worst offender in the game, there are two others I can think of: a mission in which you have to keep misguided soldiers from destroyed civilian buildings (again, it's hard to be a pacifist when even moving threatens the lives of all around you), and a minefield that you have to cross based on directions given by your shrill, busty, backseat driver.

Interestingly, the core ideas of both of these mission are reapplied again much more successfully later in the game. During one boss fight, your enemy disables your ability to visualize your surroundings, represented by pitting you in endless darkness. You instead must rely on the guidance of your onboard AI, ADA, who tells you what attacks are being used against you and giving the distance between you and the boss. You have to close that distance quickly to reduce the amount of attacks that get thrown at you, but you also have to be ready to react appropriately to whatever ADA tells you. It forces the player to reapply what they've learned without being restrictive, in the end making them better at the game itself.

Another mission, possibly the most well-remembered by anyone who's played the game, requires you to defeat over 400 enemy units with the assistance of 40 Space Force soldiers. In order to win you must effectively split your time between thinning out the enemy and bolstering your own forces. Brilliantly, the way you save your units is by using the non-lethal Geyser subweapon to immobilize them, protect them from further damage and alert your buddy Leo to their presence so that he can heal them. Once you figure out how the fuck to lock-on to your allies without killing them, it's a clever solution to the whole "pacifist death machine" problem. Not only is this sequence incredibly visually impressive, the frame of the story up to this point makes it far more dramatic than the civilian-saving scenario from earlier.

When the game trusts itself, it's brilliant. It's simple to comprehend, satisfying to master, the second half is one spectacular action-packed set-piece after another, and to this day it's the pinnacle of full 360-degree 3D control - who knew ascending with the Triangle button and descending with the X button would be so effective? Unfortunately, its flaws in presentation and pacing keep it from attaining the widespread appeal needed to attain "game of the decade" status. And so Zone of the Enders will always be a cult classic. If you never intend to play it, you can at least watch the ridiculous trailer, which highlights everything good about the game.

An interesting fact, something I never knew before, is that Inhert and its pilot Lloyd, the boss you fight in absolute darkness, were designed by Kazuma Kaneko of the Shin Megami Tensei series. Makes sense. The guy's all about beautiful figures with weird things embedded in their faces.

Also, one of the singers from Heart of Air, who perform the theme songs for ZOE1 and ZOE2, is also part of Oranges & Lemons, who perform the theme song for Azumanga Daioh. You're welcome for that information.

Vagrant Story - Matsuno's Phantom Pain

2010-11-12T16:19:00.013-05:00

Ever since I found out that Ridley Scott wanted to end Alien with Ellen Ripley being eaten by the Alien and then having the Alien deliver the closing monologue in Sigourney Weaver's voice, I've wondered who I have to thank for all of the good ideas and who to blame for all the bad ideas in any given work.

After creating the Ogre Battle series with Quest, Yasumi Matsuno teamed up with Square to make Final Fantasy Tactics, finally giving birth to the fictional world he had been nursing in his imagination for some years: Ivalice.

Tactics' story was intriguing in ways that not even those who enjoyed would grasp immediately. Tactics was a biography - not just an objective history lesson, but a tale ("The Zodiac Brave Story") from one angle among many possible depictions of a single event (The War of the Lions). Tactics, even with all its convolutions, is a focused story. There aren't any mini-games that involve adding numbers or sequences where your party forms an impromptu rock band. It's all about war, faith and the limits of loyalty.

Upon Tactics' success, I imagine a thought must have occurred to Matsuno. What if Ivalice was a place that could be explored from a variety of angles? Not just from various points in its history, but through various genres as well? That's when Matsuno and his bros in aesthetic sensibility - music composer Hitoshi Sakimoto and character designer Akihiko Yoshida - set to work on Vagrant Story.

Two particular games would be released after Tactics: Parasite Eve and Metal Gear Solid. Both would inspire Vagrant Story's concept of a one-man army going on an infiltration mission to cease the ridiculous machinations of a villain with whom the hero shares an undisclosed connection. Indeed, the relationship between Ashley Riot and Sydney Losstarot is directly comparable to that between Parasite Eve's Aya Brea and Eve, which, to be fair, is nearly identical to that between Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife and Sephiroth, which was copped from Berserk's Guts and Griffith, who, really, might just be Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver from Treasure Island.

Vagrant Story would also apply Metal Gear Solid's deft production budgeting to Parasite Eve's concept of a "Cinematic RPG". The design team traveled to Bordeaux, France to inspire their complex virtual sets, and constructed the most expressive character models of the generation, and all would look impressive from every angle. Matsuno and gang would pass on including voice acting, since Square's experience was mostly limited to Brave Fencer Musashi and some of Ehrgeiz, instead conveying dialog through comic book-style speech bubbles.

I do sometimes wish that Sydney started singing "Out There" after crashing through the window.

All these tools would be used to compose the mostly tightly-directed cut scenes of the day to tell one of the most tightly written stories in video games. Even the speech bubbles would be figured into the composition of each shot. This brand of direction would go largely ignored by Japanese RPG developers, who were prefectly content with having camera slowly hover through cut scenes at eye-level from one glass-eyed static character model to the other, despite the fact that video game cameras don't have physical mass and can be moved literally ANYWHERE to achieve marginally more interesting results.

The truth is that Vagrant Story's story isn't even made up of very original components. An invisible evil force, amnesia, corrupt churches and corrupt states, silly hair styles - those motifs alone have been around since the first Breath of Fire. Like Tactics, Vagrant Story is one facet of a gem in Ivalice's history. This focus, putting some facts center stage while obscuring others, introduces an element of mystery that somehow makes everything more dire. Characters with simply stated motives seem to carry a depth suggested in their actions that we never quite fully see. Paradoxically, thanks to our imaginations, that minimalism is imbued with weight, realism, a kind of maturity not often seen in video games, save for maybe Silent Hill, Braid, possibly even Hotel Dusk. What I'm saying is Vagrant Story isn't supposed to be a kitchen sink RPG where you mourn your friend's death by going snowboarding. Vagrant Story is serious business.

Which brings me to the main problem with Vagrant Story as a video game - consistency.

In such a laser-focused narrative - in a game where the last dungeon includes a cut scene in which the exposure of a new fact that is integral to understanding what happens is limited to one single sentence delivered with impeccable timing, why are there there four puzzles that involve pushing boxes into holes?

You might think I am suggesting that Yasumi Matsuno is like Tim Schaefer, a designer who comes up with fantastic ideas but fails to actually have really fun video games made out of them. That is not true. Aside from the box-pushing puzzles, Vagrant Story features a beautifully intricate series of game mechanics. The problem is that

1) it's not finished, and
2) it doesn't belong with this story.

The first time I played Vagrant Story, I believed that a weapon's efficiency against a target was based on the target's "Class" - human, beast, dragon, undead, etc - and that training weapons to be more effective against those classes would help me deal more damage to them. This knowledge was supported by the player's manual and the fact that when examining a weapon the first thing you see is its efficiency against all of the enemy classes.

HOWEVER the Internet taught that a weapon's Class efficiency is a negligible factor in damaging enemies compared to its Elemental affinity and its type - and that, on top of attack and defense power, all of these factors work together to decide how badly you damage the enemy. I didn't fully understand this concept until my third play through the game 10 years later. If someone had just explained it to me as laying my weapon's affinities on top of the enemy's affinities like two rear projector sheets, everything would've been so easy.

But it's not just that the game tricks you into thinking you know how to play it - it still makes you think that you don't, even when you do.

Let's take the final boss as an example of how the combat system is amazing and retarded all at once. It is un-analyzable, meaning I can't check its defenses, and all of my weapons did zero damage to it, so I couldn't even really guess which angle I was supposed to attack from. What I discovered online is that ALL of its elemental defenses were astronomical. This meant no one element was more effective than the other, which in turn meant that none of them were the wrong one to use against it. Upon a single play through the game, of all the stat-boosting gems you collect that you can use to bolster your weapons strengths, you get the most wind-damage gems. So I loaded those all into my weapon with the highest innate wind affinity and went to town.

What's amazing about this is that I realized, technically, there is no "wrong" way to attack an enemy, that you can turn the tables with the right know-how. What's retarded about this, in actuality, is that if you can't figure out the "right" way quick enough, fights take forever, and the game does very little to help you.

My belief is that all of the little subsystems in the game - the stat-boosting gems, the ability to combine weapons to create new ones, rearranging blades and grips, the magic spells that boost certain elemental affinities - weren't just created to give the player a sense of control, but to keep the programmers from having to balance the difficulty themselves. It's like one of those "brew your own root beer" kits. It's a cool idea, and when it actually works you feel accomplished, but then you're just like: "Why didn't the guys who made this kit just make some root beer? It probably would've tasted better than what I made."

Even if Ashley's arsenal involves more statistics to keep track of than your entire army in Final Fantasy Tactics, the weapons system is fascinating - the kind of deep number massaging that nerds can really sink their teeth into, not unlike how the junction system in Final Fantasy VIII makes an otherwise challenging game more fun. Only change "challenging" to "incomplete" and "fun" to "playable".

But even then - even if you excuse the obtuse combat system and the weird "sure, that works" difficulty - the final nail in the coffin is ergonomics. Even with a "quick menu" to manage all of the options at Ashley's disposal, a walk through a single room can be prolonged by trial and error attacks to see if the enemy's weak against your weapon, going to the inventory to switch your weapon with a new one, attacking again, find that it still doesn't work, casting Analyze, going to the status menu to view the results, going to attach the appropriate gems to your weapon, not finding the gems, remembering that the gems are in a shield that you're not using, removing the gems, confirming the removal, attaching the gems, confirming the attachment, and the finally killing the enemy that didn't even really have that much HP left after all, and then switching back to your other weapon to fight other, different enemies.

It's a wonder why there isn't a WEAPONS or GEMS option in the quick menu, considering it's changing those things that eat up the most time. It's especially frustrating that there are instead options to access BREAK ARTS, which are mostly useless, and both CHAIN and DEFENSE abilities, which I rarely change.

If I had to remake Vagrant Story, I'd trim all of the fat and focus the entire combat system on your Chain Abilities - the various means by which Ashley actually inflicts damage, based on Super Mario RPG-style timed button presses - and management of your RISK - a gauge which fills as you perform more consecutive Chain Abilities, increasing the damage you take and the chances that you'll whiff. These two simple tenets, rewarding technical skill and punishing risky behavior, have been the foundation of making video games fun for as long as they've been around. Besides that, chain abilities and Risk are about the only parts of the gameplay that are directly tied to Ashley's character. I'd probably have to cut the blacksmithing, too - sure you wouldn't be able to make that Perfect Romaphaia 'Holy Win' Sword, but Ashely really shouldn't be dicking around like that anyway, he's on a mission!

All of this musing on what could have been just make me wonder again, who is to thank and who is to blame? Did Matsuno make all of these decisions, thinking they'd mesh perfectly? Did he have different ideas, but think the public would prefer these? Or did he kowtow to meddling from higher-ups?

We know that some things didn't go as planned. Early on, he thought the game might have included AI controlled partners, or even a second player, and then 50 percent of the "scenario" had to be cut - whether that means playable areas, written story or both, we'll never know. For all we know that 50 percent could have come out of the script, leading to the tight and exposition-dry version we've come to know and love. Maybe there was going to be a tutorial that actually taught you how to play the game. This information, along with troubles that would occur years later during Final Fantasy XII forcing Matsuno to "get sick" and step down from the helm, suggests that meddling and budget mishaps - indeed, Vagrant Story was part of the Summer of Adventure in America, a deluge of Square titles also including Parasite Eve 2, Legend of Mana, Threads of Fate and Chrono Cross - may have caused the incongruity between Vagrant Story's narrative and gameplay.

It is also possible that, after Tactics, Matsuno would be expected to produce a game with lots of numbers of changeable variables that players could fuck around with for hours and multiple playthroughs - and, with a history in strategy RPGs, he isn't a stranger to that sort of thing. So it's also possible that Matsuno created a story with such spectacular aesthetic sensibilities and consistency - including an incredibly human cast of saints and sinners and a score both hauntingly ambient and bombastically soaring - and then he attached a really fucking complicated game to it on purpose.

Why would he do this, aside from having stuff that happens while time passes between cut scenes? And why do I care so much?

Think about all of the RPGs you've played - not just the long and good ones like Earthbound, but even the ones you haven't liked that much, like, say, Crisis Core. All the people you meet, all of the monsters you defeat, all of the trials and bullshit you go through - you carry so much with you the whole way. It's like life. You can start to hate it, almost. But there's something about finishing a game of that length that is so important, exactly because it took so long and you worked so hard. You come out of the darkness and into the light, and its by that light that you can see all you've done.

Without going into too much detail, Vagrant Story is exactly like that, and at the same time nothing like that. You and Ashley goes through so much shit - so much fucking shit, shit beyond the both of you - and you're the only two capable of taking it, and you get out into the light and you wonder... Was it worth it? Who did we do it for? Would we have been happier if we hadn't?

Am I suggesting that Matsuno meant all of the frustration and confusion of the player to parallel that of his hero, and possibly himself? No. But that doesn't mean it didn't.

P.S. If you're trying to show off the game to your friends, use completed game data. You'll look like less of a schmuck.

P.P.S. The man who wrote the Brady Games Official Strategy Guide for Vagrant Story was Dan Birlew, AKA President Evil, who wrote the first ever Silent Hill plot analysis that I mentioned. That guy's gonna be connected to a lot of games that made me feel particular ways.

Silent Hill 3 and 4: Things Get Worse

2010-10-26T09:43:00.013-04:00

In all of the Silent Hill games, the player's goal is usually clear. In the first game, Harry Mason has to find his daughter Cheryl. What ISN'T clear are the circumstances that guide Harry toward his eventual success or failure. The game reaches Lynchian levels of confusion.

The first ever plot analysis for Silent Hill (or the first one to be distributed) was written by Dan Birlew, AKA President Evil. It processed all of the visual and contextual clues from the game to reach almost satisfying conclusions for the mysterious motivations for the characters and explanations for the heady, symbolist endings.

Reading it felt like playing the game all over again, and was a really intense experience for me. None of it was canon, but it made perfect sense logically and emotionally. I felt rewarded. The game must have been vague exactly so that the people who were enthralled by it could seek their own answers. As someone who hadn't even started high school yet, Team Silent and Mr. Birlew gave me my first real exposure to critical writing, analytical thought and semiotics. For this reason, Silent Hill - like Ren and Stimpy, Evangelion and The Simpsons - taught me much about living, and would become a permanent part of my psyche.

Silent Hill 2 would only raise the stakes, as the development team discovered how to tell a psychological and emotional story without being confounding about it. Upon completing it I was scared at night for days, just like last time, but I was sad too.

I said that the goal in Silent Hill is usually clear - in both games, the hero is to save their loved one. It's true, the mission doesn't really change, but everything else changes around it. As details come to light, as the world grows more and more oppressive, the road grows darker, the protagonist must eventually ask: "Do I really love her?" I didn't know it until now, but at that point in time, Silent Hill was a series about love. Even when it wasn't specifically romantic or familial love, it was about the intense passions of every character, not just the hero. The games were passionate.

Silent Hill 3 explained and confirmed the story of Silent Hill 1, permanently altering the nature of the series. To be fair, they handled it surprisingly well. In the end, it didn't really bother me at all that the character I was playing as was the reincarnation of a girl who was once simultaneously another, different girl.

In fact, Heather's character is the best thing I can say about Silent Hill 3, not only because linking her directly to the events of the first game is a smart way to bestow on her the responsibility of dealing with whatever new evil, she's also totally different from our previous two protagonists. She's gutsier, irreverent, more like the player controlling her. She challenges the horrors of Silent Hill by trying to remain unfazed - so when she DOES get scared and show some vulnerability, you know shit is getting real. Though it's also funny when Silent Hill becomes the OTHER Silent Hill she's just like, "Oh, hell."

The game also has the same quality of fantastic set pieces the first two games are known for, my personal favorite being the mirror in the hospital which shows a tainted reflection of the room that slowly seeps into the room itself, killing Heather. It's just full of the same wonderful visual ideas we've come to love, like the love letters to Heather that disappear when you return to their locations, suggesting that they're being moved around by their writer.

The main problem, like I said, is that it's a sequel to the original. Sure, then they were able to make references to the first game - some of them being very cool, like Harry's save-point/notepad scribblings in the amusement park, Cheryl's sketchbook, the confession event towards the end of the game - but that also means having to explain the events of the first game.

It just baffles me how these guys missed one of the most important tenets of horror: what you don't show is just as scary as what you do show. Before Silent Hill 3, you had to guess why everything was so screwed up. Are the people in the town evil? Is the town itself evil? Is everything a projection of your evil thoughts?

One very interesting and scary idea is that the game opens OUTSIDE of Silent Hill, and yet things are STILL fucked up. The explanation for this is Claudia, presumably one of the last members of the cult in Silent Hill trying to revive their old god, who coaxes Heather into following her to Silent Hill. It's bizarre, seeing our hero choose voluntary go there rather than being drawn in. This allows for a cut scene that is both excellent and infuriating. The darkness, the rain, the melancholy-ass music, the voice acting which actually makes Douglas' seem decent - it's such a tightly directed scene, unlike any other in the series. Unfortunately, it also includes the infamous "HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED" speech from Heather.

Well, it turns out the answer is cults. Doesn't that just make everything feel hokier? Like, "Oh, okay, let's get rid of the cult then?" It's too neat. It takes away a layer of mystery, a layer of fear, a layer of helplessness. The main problem is that Claudia is always ramming it down your throat in her faux British accent. "GOD is gonna bring PARADISE to the EARTH and it's gonna be fucking GRRREEEEeeeEEAAAAaaaaTttttTTTT!!!"

The most interesting thing about this set-up is Heather's motivation. When she decides to go to Silent Hill, its not to find her love or get to the bottom of a mystery - she's going to kill this bitch! The problem there is that the story is pretty predictable from that point on.

I make it sound like a travesty, but it's really not that bad. All of the artistic sensibilities of the previous games are there - the story's just a little goofy. But it still has that classic Silent Hill voice acting where you don't know if the actor is bad or if they're REALLY good at being on the verge of insanity.

Silent Hill 3's main claim to fame is the sheer amount of ridiculous easter eggs, including awesome weapons, potshots at Silent Hill 2, the definitive UFO ending, and a transformation sequence.

Silent Hill 4: The Room wasn't originally a Silent Hill, but Room 302. Apparently, it became a Silent Hill pretty far into its development. If it never became a Silent Hill, people would probably remember it more fondly.

Clearly, the core concept was always the same. Our protagonist is trapped in his apartment and must explore worlds via portals that appear as holes in the walls to find his way out. But why? That's when the team had to decide the frame of the story. Someone remembered an excerpt from a magazine lying inside a dumpster outside of the apartment buildings in Silent Hill 2.

The police announced today that Walter Sullivan, who was arrested on the 18th of this month for the brutal murder of Billy Locane and his sister Miriam, committed suicide in his jail cell early on the morning of the 22nd.

According to the police statement, Sullivan used a soup spoon to stab himself in the neck, severing his carotid artery.

By the time the guard discovered him, Sullivan was dead from blood loss, the spoon buried two inches in his neck.

An old schoolmate of Walter Sullivan's from his hometown of Pleasant River said "He didn't look like the type of guy who would kill kids.

"But I do remember that just before they arrest him he was blurting out all sorts of strange stuff like, 'He's trying to kill me. He's trying to punish me. The monster... the red devil. Forgive me. I did it, but it wasn't me!'"

The schoolmate then added, "I guess now that I think of it, he was kinda crazy."

So it was decided: Walter Sullivan would be retconned as a child raised in the ways of the town cult, seeking to use a horrible ritual to awaken his mother whom he believes is Room 302 in South Ashfield Heights, having been abandoned there when he was born as a baby, but ACTUALLY being tricked into reviving yet another old god. So not only would Silent Hill 4 continue this silly cult business, it would get Silent Hill 2 wrapped up into it as well. (In fact, one of James Sunderland's relatives is the super at South Ashfield Heights)

Walter Sullivan is a very interesting character, despite his dubious origin and all attempts by the developers to make him into a vampiric, Nemesis-like, "Mwahahaha!" kind of villain. He has been wronged, and he truly believes he's doing the right thing. I think there's something really impeccable about his design, too, especially the serene look in his eyes. He's a creep, but there's something more than malicious intent in there.

Really, the game is about him. All of the locations come from his life, and at a point you are actually referred to as being inside of him. It makes sense, because the game certainly isn't about the playable character Henry Townshend, a well-voiced and handsome fella who has literally no personality and no personal connection to the plot. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Henry's nothing but a vessel for the experiences of game - seriously, that's the reason Walter puts him through all of this.

The best things about Silent Hill 4: The Room involved the room itself. You can't reach the outside world, but you can view it through the windows, the peephole in your front door and turn on the radio for a random, thematically relevant news bite. Being in it regenerates your health and it contains the only save point in the game, and slips of paper appear under the door as time goes on, slowly illuminating the reasons behind your imprisonment.

And then you reach a point in the game where something terrifying dawns on you: the room no longer regenerates your health. Not only that, but things begin to seem amiss. The clock ticks more rapidly. Your framed photos begin to change. There is a meowing coming from the refrigerator. Your house slippers are gone, leaving only a trail of bloody footprints. And then you find that getting near these hauntings actually decrease your health. From this point on, even going back to your own apartment to save presents its own risks. It's a brilliant reversal, and it's only compounded when you discover that clues to your own liberation were right under your nose all along.

The game really can pull off the set-up and the resolution. It's everything in between that's the problem.

Y'see, The Room is way more video gamey than the other Silent Hills. There's a HUD this time around: a life gauge, and even a little circle that measures the strength of your next blow. You have a limited inventory, like Resident Evil, and you don't pause the game to use items, which adds a whole new challenge to the proceedings. The game also progresses in an Eternal Darkness-esque level-based format. Once you're finished with one world, you're dropped back in your room, at which point you can get ready for the next.

It's all very mechanical. The level-by-level progression makes things predictable and much less scary - things don't really get tense until the end when the formula gets shaken up. And the main problem with the inventory system is that it kills the importance of puzzle-solving. Resident Evil took place in the real world, so running around to unravel the machinations of some eccentric scientist almost made sense, but in Silent Hill, where the world is an abstraction of the real world... I don't know, I just felt like Silent Hill was above the running back and forth and seeing loading screens again and again. Rather than go back to the room to make room for something I had to pick up I would often just waste bullets or restorative items. It's also BULLSHIT that, when a weapon breaks, it stays in my inventory until I put it away in the room. It's like: GET RID OF IT, Henry!

Speaking of Silent Hill as an abstract world, the first time I played through The Room, I really liked the designs of the worlds. While I still think the Water Prison is an amazing environment, I realized that the strangeness of the worlds actually made them less scary. In Silent Hill 3, you have to make your way through an office building that's under construction. It's full of perfectly normal and legitimate business, and, even if many of the doors are closed, the layout of the building is perfectly realistic. The fear came in discovering the subtle perversions of perfectly normal places. Concrete towers and hallways full of roaming wheelchairs, while interesting, are too weird to be believable. It's harder to be worried for my character in make-believe environments - it was already hard to worry about Henry.

The biggest stink everyone makes about the game, though, is that the second half of it requires you to go back to all of the places you've already been, and to drag your bewildered and (maybe) bewitched neighbor Eileen along with you - maybe the single biggest backtrack in video game history. I let this slide for some reason back when I first played it, but everyone's right. It's pretty much inexcusable. It's bad enough that they make you go through the whole game again with more annoying enemies, but the puzzles themselves are giant backtracks as well. Most of them involve leaving Eileen some place safe, going through the whole level beating up dudes and opening up doors, and then going back to get her so you can finally leave.

It's the most bogus artificial lengthening of a game that I could have imagined. And, y'know, it wasn't really necessary! The other Silent Hill games are, like, half the length. And, y'know, it's different from one point in Silent Hill 3, when you get to the room before the final boss, only to find that you don't have the final tarot card you need to solve the final puzzle. The only other thing here is a key. The message is clear: you must travel all the way back to the start of the area to open the only locked door and retrieve the final piece of the puzzle. It's a little annoying when you realize what you have to do, but I found the trip to be kind of exciting - dodging the new enemies that appeared, running as fast and making turns as tight as I could. And the best thing about it? It only happens once.

Most things in The Room seem to be designed to waste your time. The hallways and rooms are bigger and take more time to walk through, less doors are broken so you're actually encouraged to waste time looking for items you don't have the space to carry, and Henry draws his own map, which is of a surprisingly low resolution, and unlike Heather he doesn't keep notes of rooms that have puzzles to solve in them, so I hope you can remember.

Most of the guys in charge of The Room, while always members of Team Silent, were in such important roles for the first time. With the exception of the Twin Victims, most of the monster designs are bullshit, either being uglier versions of real animals, or ghosts. (Though Silent Hill ghosts are scarier than regular ghosts... but why is Cynthia's ghost just that same ol' Ring/Grudge girl with the long hair over the face? She didn't even have very long hair.) And the sound design? The dog monsters make that stock wildcat noise from Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier when they attack. Oh how terrifying

It's tough to recommend Silent Hill 4. Unlike Silent Hill 3, which I'm still fond of, it's harder to pull my punches on 4. The climax into the final boss fight are brilliant, some of the hauntings are great, but the concept could only carry it so far. And on top of everything else, there's no joke ending.

Fortunately, unlike Sonic Team or Midway, Team Silent knew when they had run out of steam. They quietly disbanded after The Room.

ActRaiser: Godfellas

2010-10-17T16:37:00.009-04:00

At the time I talked about Soul Blazer, I had only ever played the beginning of Actraiser, and I had passed judgment.

Little did I know that playing Actraiser would teach me all I need to know about DIVINE JUDGMENT

In Actraiser, you take control of the Master (an amalgamation of a Judeo-Christian and an Olympian god) and his angelic servant. Master has just awakened from his centuries-long slumber following his defeat and ejection by Tanzra, the Evil One, and his demonic Guardians. The world has been apparently laid to waste and is now completely barren. The Master and his angel must now begin their work of restoring the world.

Though I can't name anyone on Quintet's team, one of them is most certainly an auteur in the Kojima sense. Every game these guys touch concern theism, restoring the proper order of the world, and humanity's relationship to the universe. Actraiser is the first of these.

In order to restore the world, you travel to each land in your Sky Palace, and then

1) descend to earth and take control of the statue of a warrior to clean out the monsters,

2) help the few people in the land develop their establishment with the assistance of your angelic vassal, then

3) defeat the Guardian tormenting your people.

The action stages are reminiscent of the old Castlevanias, in that you only have one kind of attack and you can't change the direction of your jump in the air. Very hard, but very tight, with a variety of bad guys, and all of the bosses are very scary and appropriately difficult.

As a kid I thought that the development stages were boring, but that's because I was too stupid to understand how they worked. Though they are less dangerous than the action stages, they are nearly as hectic. Between directing your miracles, continuing your peoples' progress and keeping them safe from marauding demons, your angel's a busy little guy.

The main thing Quintet is good at is imbuing a lot of importance into a 16-bit game from the 90s. Since you play as god, everything is treated with reverence. Your angel informs you very eloquently of all the options at your disposal, and apologizes when you attempt to accomplish something you yet have the ability to. Your people grant you offerings which can serve as power-ups, or knowledge like boating or bridge-building that can be shared between lands. And if something goes wrong, they remain understanding and love you anyway.

And because they love you, you really start to feel bad when things get shitty for your people. The people of my desert land, just as they were about to finish their expansion to the shore, were struck by a plague. All development came to a halt as little Jolly Rogers floated above their heads. "What do I DO?" I wondered? I had to wait until I restored the tropical land, when their people offered me medical herbs.

Then, when the people of the tropical land prayed to me that I might link the land of the far island to theirs, I decided to finally use my Earthquake miracle. My earthquake did indeed uncover a once submerged land bridge - and also annihilated all existing houses in the land. How could I have something so destructive at my disposal??

It wasn't until halfway through that I realized that playing this game was just like the episode of Futurama were Bender became a god. It's hard work.

Once you develop all of the lands and defeat all of the Guardians, the island of Death Heim, Tanzra's stronghold, is revealed. Death Heim is a grueling boss rush of all the previous Guardians - plus both of Tanzra's forms - without restorative power-ups. It's an incredibly old school kind of difficult, and it's very rewarding.

Once Tanzra's taken care of, your angel takes you on a tour of the world you've resurrected, highlighting each plight you fixed - the plague you healed, the false idol you struck down, the kid anachronistically named Teddy you saved from monsters.

He then takes you into one of the shrines that dot the land in which people prayed to you and granted offerings throughout the game... only to find it completely empty.

The continents shrink out of view as the Master floats away in his Sky Palace, presumably to slumber again, perhaps this time forever...

(also, for more God-to-man relationships: Illusion of Gaia)

Me and my roommates play MGSMetal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

2010-09-22T20:45:00.004-04:00

Metal Gear Solid is pretty well-balanced. I can't say that it's perfect, but it's REALLY good.

Some boss battles are a test of sheer endurance (Cyber Ninja, the entire end of the game), while others are more like puzzles (Psyhco Mantis). The nice thing is that most challenges require both a perceptive mind to observe the enemy's behavior and mad skillz to neutralize them.

Despite having such high stakes and such good voice acting, the characters never forget that they're in a video game. President Baker tells you to look at the back of the Metal Gear Solid CD case to find Meryl's Codec frequency. Naomi tells you to put the Dual Shock controller on your arm so the game can pretend to massage you with the vibrate function. The Colonel comes up with the brilliant idea of plugging the controller into the second player port to escape Psycho Mantis' mind reading.

Oddly, all of these references to the artifice of the world never takes us out of the moment. We all appreciated the game's honesty, and I much prefer it to the faceless text-driven tutorials in other video games. The sense of urgency might actually be heightened exactly because the player's role in the story as its operator is integral to helping Snake progress - the only one who can press the Circle button fast enough to resist Ocelot's torture is the only character who has thumbs: the player.

Things of note that happened between Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2.

The World Trade Center was attacked.
Kojima produced Zone of the Enders
Kojima watched The Matrix, and probably a bunch of other movies.

Joe and I played MGS1.
Joe and Chelsea played MGS2.

Sons of Liberty is more full of things.

Snake can do more things. He can aim at specific body parts and things, he can sidle up to walls and shoot around corners, he can KO enemy guards and stuff them into lockers. There's more to do, and there are more expectations. We saw the game over screen many times.

The cut scenes are longer. The character models are more detailed, so time is actually spent on the expressions. Time is spent on looking at a LOT of things, actually.

MGS2 is so much longer than MGS1. Playing it, we all remembered that Fatman was the first boss encounter. What we didn't remember was the encounter with Fortune, and that you accidentally "kill" Vamp before that boss fight. We all remembered the bomb disposal mission, but we forgot how long it took.

The difficulty threw some of us for a loop. Me, I remember MGS2 being really hard. Being able to go into first-person view and aim at any part of any enemy from afar - introducing fatal headshots to the series - opened up a lot of strategies. In response, the enemies get much more ruthless. For us, being caught is tantamount to a game over, unless you want to hide in a corner for three minutes and wait, which none of use ever wanted to do.

I also don't remember the fight against Fatman taking so damn long. It doesn't even really make any sense. The idea is that, while fighting him, you have to disarm bombs which he plants, and you can't hurt him through his bomb suit, so you have to shoot him in the head - he takes something like a dozen shots to the head to die. It's just frustrating.

Most of the challenges in the first game were do-or-die. You had to find the best strategy to quickly and efficiently take care of bad guys before they killed you. There was always weight. In MGS2 everything feels like an endurance test. The difficulty feels half-assed.

To take the fight with Fatman as an example. When he has very little health left he stops planting bombs, which means he stops coming to a halt. Instead he just zips around on his rollerblades. He takes shots at you, sure, but they don't even hurt much, not enough to Game Over you. But the only way to get a head shot on him is to go into first-person mode which makes you stand in place, which isn't very helpful when shooting a target that is constantly changing direction and distance. Otherwise he just rolls around, wasting your time. It's not punishing, it's annoying.

Mr. X shows up and throws a lot of objectives on you. You have to use a directional microphone to identify the hostage with the pacemaker, but to GET to the hostages you have to dress as an enemy soldier, which means you need to carry the same kind of artillery as well. And this is before you even get to the part of the Big Shell in which you need to apply this information. I forgot how much time you spend running around the same areas of the Shell at the start of the game. MGS1 only has one mission that requires backtracking... Maybe two.

While walking to strut F to get the M9, a Cypher came in from nowhere and spotted us - it just floated in without warning and was like, "Oh, you're in alert mode now." We fled to strut F were we just laid down the controller and let the massive attack team waiting for Raiden fill him with bullets. It was easier to just have the game kill us and send us back to the time we entered the room, safe and stealthy. The risk is not worth the reward.

MGS2 is DEFINITELY a game in transition. I don't believe they yet knew how to balance the difficulty - or the fun (like sitting in a locker and waiting for the CAUTION gauge to empty) - to match all of the new actions you could perform.

It's once you find Ames that the game unfolds and the pace picks up. Raiden's life is directly threatened, Ocelot steps up and the Ninja jumps in. MGS2 starts shining as a sequel. It makes me wonder if Kojima was even paying attention during the entire Fatman chapter.

Now we have to get to Shell 2 to find the President. Which means we have to disarm the explosives on the bridge by shooting their triggers. Which means we have to go BACK to Strut F to get a sniper rifle. Jesus, the game DOES NOT want us to move ahead. We've been on Shell 1 for eight years.

Though this is definitely where things start getting crazy. Solidus officially introduces himself to us, and Vamp, having already died once, comes in with a Harrier, which Solidus JUMPS onto. It's also the first incident of Raiden one-uping Solid Snake in terms of heroism - a jet is certainly a more impressive take-down than a helicopter. Also, "Pliskin" hovers around in his helicopter throwing you rations and ammo through out the fight. It's the first time he and Raiden team up, and it's pretty great - the first step in the passing of the hero baton. I guess it wouldn't have been so effective if they hadn't been through so much together. In that way, the whole Fatman fiasco serves a purpose. I wish there was some other alternative, though.

Also: ridiculous and amazing that characters switch to Codec communication to keep others from eavesdropping on them. It's as though the Codec screen is totally separate from the rest of the game's reality.

Once E.E. dies, all bets are off. The game officially goes into crazy-awesome mode. Snake and Otacon have a manly handshake, a parrot makes us feel sad, and everything we've done is a lie.

Y'know, when you break it down, by virtue of the Solid Snake Simulation, MGS2 is just like MGS1. There's a serious problem with real world implications - plus a bunch of voodoo. The only difference is that MGS2 amps up the crazy.

It's a fucking riotous success as an exploration of vidjer gams and the future of the digital age. The trade-off? Up until the end, it's not very fun.

I'm watching the ending right now. There's more to say, but I'm not the one to say it. Just read Dreaming in an empty room.

... Though what DOES Kojima feel about women?

Let me tell you about Demon's Souls

2010-09-13T20:38:00.001-04:00

[from Reddit]

Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser. If you are already a man, it will make you into some sort of bizarre double-man. What’s that you say? You’re a woman? You don’t want to be a man? Too bad. Too bad. That’s the Demon’s Souls way.

You’ve probably heard that Demon’s Souls is hard. Pshh. Lots of games are hard. Some are even harder than this one. The difficulty is not the point. What sets Demon's Souls apart is the way that it doesn't just kill you, but also stomps on your genitals when you’re down. And it will make you realize that that’s what you needed all along.

It’s a lot like life. Sometimes in life you win, and sometimes the giant armored skeleton stabs your face off because the flying mantis monster you didn’t even see shot you in the back with a spike at just the wrong time. And when that happens in life, do you respawn at the same spot and carry on like nothing happened? NO, asshole. You go back to the beginning of the level, leaving all your hard-earned souls out there on the pavement, and you fight your way back. And you learn a lesson from the whole thing, because you should have been wearing your Thief’s Ring, now shouldn’t you? That’s life.

The trend in hard games these days is to unlock “Easy” mode for you once you’ve died enough times. Do you think Demon’s Souls does that? Do you think Demon’s Souls is so much as aware of the concept of “Easy” mode? NO IT IS NOT. If Demon’s Souls even knew we were talking about “Easy” mode, it would come over here and kick the shit out of all of us. And we would deserve it.

I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because Fuck you is why.

Have I told you about the online elements? At any time when you’re in Body form, another player from anywhere else in the world can invade your game and murder you to regain his own body, or just to keep you on your toes. This happens when you’re in the middle of fighting armies of unthinkable monsters that are probably already three-quarters of the way towards killing you. And no, you cannot opt out of this feature! This is what you signed up for when you agreed to be a man.

When this happened to me -- when a guy strolled into my game like it was Taco Bell and exploded my torso, costing me my body and all my progress in the level -- was I mad? No, because I was too busy being in awe at how fucking hardcore the experience was.

Now, don’t let this dissuade you. Demon’s Souls is a pitiless master, but let it never be said that it is not fair. The game rewards handsomely those who stand up to it, and the greater the challenge, the greater the glory.

What the hell are you waiting for?

Wild ARMS Advanced 3rd(I was tempted to write "Advanced Turd")

2010-03-24T00:20:00.024-04:00

"It was a dark and stormy night."

At first I thought it was bold of Wild ARMS 3, a 2002 JRPG developed by Media Vision
for the PS2, to begin its story with such a cliched first line. Now I'm worried that this
might be horseshit, because 1) I doubt that Media Vision's translators understood that
they were even committing such a faux pas based on the dry writing of the rest of their
script, and 2) it's not even raining in the damn game.

Anyway, the text eventually fades away. Zoom in on a train chugging through a barren
wasteland in the dead of night. Our heroine, Virgina, is stirred awake by some sort of
commotion in the adjacent car. When she goes to investigate the precious cargo therein,
three mysterious Drifters jump into view from behind a crate, the opposite door and
through the window. Immediately all four of them pull their guns on each other.

Freeze frame. The player then chooses which character to play as.

For those who got Western blue balls from the first two games of the series, this sequence
was very encouraging. It seemed that the development team had finally watched at least
one movie set in the Old West. They didn't have to rely on their usually brilliant sound
composer Michiko Naruke to cop melodies from Ennio Morricone in order to fill in for
all of the Western motifs they had forgotten to insert. They understood that outlaws
wielded guns and not swords or magic wands and that people traveled great distances
via railroad and not by foot on a World Map screen. Even magic spells are now explained
as an extension of native mysticism rather than by the rites of nuns or vampires.

When you select one of the characters, you're treated to a playable flashback of how he or
she came to be on the train. The point of this prologue is to introduce you to the
mechanics of the game by having you play through four snappy little dungeons, one for
each character, each one very different from the other.

The one positive thing I can say about every Wild ARMS game, as far as I remember, is
that they all had fairly well-designed dungeons. Rather than just being a long series of
hallways to walk through while you fight monsters or fall asleep, most of the dungeons
in Wild ARMS 3 actually have puzzles to solve, traps to evade, you know, things for you
to do. The interesting thing is that some of the puzzles can only by solved through the
use of magical tools only in the possession of your party. It's the moments when you
solve these puzzles, when a door opens because you put out a torch with your snowman
plush-doll that shoots freezing laser beams, when you believe that you are the first to
plunge the depths of these ruins not just because you are so smart but because they
were waiting for you.

At the end of each prologue dungeon is a boss. Each boss has some sort of trick up
its sleeve - some can heal themselves, one is highly evasive and one can multiply itself.
The only way to overcome these trials is by taking advantage of each character's talent,
usable with enough FORCE POINTS, a gauge that builds up whenever damage is dealt,
received or evaded, kind of like the power gauge in a fighting game. A healing foe can
be dealt with by using Accelerator, which allows Jet to act before all others. An evasive
foe can be felled with Lock-On, which allows Clive to deal 100% un-dodgable damage.
Multiple foes can be eliminated all at once with Extension, which allows Gallows to
target all enemies at once. All of these battles set up the expectation that future fights
will have to be won with the utilization of these techniques and not just with brute
force alone.

Back in the present, the precious cargo that was supposed to be in the chest in the
freight car is revealed to have been stolen by a trio of drifters who have fled to the roof.
Our four heroes go after them and have a little boss fight atop the speeding train.
They retrieve the priceless ARK SCEPTER and Gallows convinces everyone to help
him return it to his hometown, the village of the Baskar People.

It's there that they all get mystic powers and are saddled with a destiny that says that
they will - probably - have to save the world from an encroaching evil.

Huh? So we've gone straight from a handful of character who all had their different
personal reasons for heading out into the wasteland to a single unit that only has the
word of one NPC to believe that they have a good reason for going anywhere together?

Let's take a look at these guys: Jet (white hair) is a brooding amnesiac. Clive (with the bill)
is such a clinical observer that he's not that cool, despite carrying a huge rifle and looking
like Citan Uzuki, the most badass family man in any video game. Virginia (flower holsters)
is such a naive Pollyanna. Gallows (curry rice and tempura) is a lush who ditches his
family and runs away from his duties as a priest-in-training. Gallows is the most
sympathetic character because he actually behaves like a real human being.

The game would have us believe that these guys' sticking together is what we should
want because that's what our purported protagonist Virginia seems to want. It would
have been interesting to have seen Virginia's need for traveling companions extending
from her fear of being alone, a fear possibly originating from her mother dying and
her father leaving her when she was young. Instead, she just says that it's the right
thing to do.

Clive and Gallows sympathize with her viewpoint rather easily, but Jet the Amnesiac
Loner says that he'd rather split and not be held back by a bunch of wannabe drifters.
Virginia shows some cajones when she finally shoves Jet's "I'm a loner who works
alone" bullshit right back in his face when she asks him to name a single thing he's
ever done on his own that was worthwhile.

See, that's part of the problem, though. If I were to believe Jet as a misanthrope, he'd
say, "Well, fuck you," and leave the party right then. As ensembles go, the cast of Wild
ARMS 3 doesn't have much chemistry. The only thing keeping these characters
together, and the only reason the kid is in charge, really, is because the story would
end otherwise.

The cast of a JRPG is a funny thing. First you've got to put all the characters into a
situation where they HAVE to work together, and then you have to develop them until
they believably WANT to work together. Wild ARMS 3 shoots itself right in the foot
with its fancy new six-shooter by having the characters admit, before their objective is
even defined, that they have no reason to travel together.

This coalescence of playable characters is much different from the cast of the unfairly
maligned Wild ARMS 4, in which our young hero liberates a girl from the hands of an
evil empire with the help of her would-be captor, all of whom implore the help of an
older and stronger drifter in evading their pursuers. From the start all of our
protagonists are united by their opposition to the antagonists, forgoing the old JRPG
trope of never revealing the villain until the second or even third act of the game in
favor of a more defined, believable story.

Until Wild ARMS 4, though, Media Vision was perfectly comfortable having their heroes
putter around the wasteland, reluctantly agreeing to find meaningless treasure based on
vague clues from townsfolk.

I was about to describe the townsfolk as "faceless" until I realized that, actually, Wild
ARMS 3 might be one of the few RPGs in which every NPC has a name and a character
portrait. Considering everything else the team missed, it's funny to see such detail.

I'd also like to take this moment to explain something I NEVER noticed the first time I
played this game was what happens when you choose to discontinue your game after
saving, because I always just turned it off. You're treated to a little song set to character
illustrations and your party's stats, including total play time, number of saves, etc. It's
like the credits and the end of a TV episode. Between this and the opening animation
that changes depending on how far into the game you are, it seems like it was trying to
be an anime.

It's so weird to see so many little good ideas in this game. Dungeons are still a delight to
explore and every once in a while there's a boss battle that is just difficult enough to
allow the combat system to unfold its mechanics like a blossoming flower. But frankly,
a stronger narrative would've held all of the parts together.

We'll see how much farther I care to go in this game.

Heavy Rain is a pretty good apology for Indigo Prophecy

2010-03-02T18:07:00.002-05:00

GAMEPLAY NITPICKS

In the scene in the park, Ethan can play with Shaun in several ways at the playground - on the see-saw, the swings and the merry-go-round. After playing with everything in view, the game gave us the prompt to LEAVE, but we still wanted to take Shaun on the carousel. When we took Ethan over to the carousel, there was no prompt to interact with it. Why would there be a carousel if we couldn't do anything with it? We walked all around it, we went to the man at the booth, but still the game would not let us take Shaun on the carousel. So finally we gave up and pressed X to leave.

Sure enough, what does Shaun say when we're about to leave? "I wanna go on the carousel!"

Listen, David Cage. I get that you have a story to tell, but you can give me some damn leeway. I shouldn't have to wait for the game to tell me to do something if I already had the idea myself. This is especially confusing when there are several other points in the game where leaving an area means never returning to it again.

When Jayden is waiting in the police department to speak with the police chief, the game lets you control Jayden while he is waiting - you basically get to decide how he's going to pass the time. You can cross and uncross your legs, recline, and even play virtual wall ball with yourself - and if you do, a slack-jawed cop looks at you in befuddlement, one of the few attempts at humor in the game.

However, moments later, when Ethan is confronted by his wife about Shaun's disappearance, she spends the next minute blaming him and whining, and, as Ethan, you don't get to do ANYTHING - you can't calm her down or explain yourself or even say a word. This was incredibly frustrating to me. How is that you're allowed to cross and uncross your legs, but you can't converse with your wife over the crux of the game's conflict?! There are a lot of moments like this were Cage seemingly forgets to allow the player liberty at a point which would greatly benefit from exploration.

PRODUCTION NITPICKS

In Heavy Rain, we are treated to a flashback of a particular character as child. While the adult version of this character had no peculiar mode of speech, this child has an accent as thick as a croquembouche.

Promotional material for Heavy Rain boasted that it had a "Film Quality Narrative" and "Hollywood Production Values". Quantic Dream, seemingly ashamed of their own business, desires to brand itself, not as a video game, but a Very Serious Movie, or something like one.

If David Cage wants to make a movie, there is some advice I would like to give him:

Many Hollywood movies begin production with an attached creative staff, like a big actor who will play the lead. This actor and others will go where the movie goes and be available on location for all the days of shooting which they are needed. However, some movies require a great many amount of actors to portray various supporting characters, and producers are often busy with many other facets of the film to focus on this process. That is why, when filming in a particular location, they hire casting agents in the area.

The job of the casting agent is to cast actors who can:

act well
believably portray a character from the place in which the film is set

Even if a movie were NOT to shoot on location, the producers might contact a casting agency from the place in which the movie is set so that they might be able to cast actors from that area.

It is my belief that no one at Quantic Dream actually knew that casting agents where a type of people that existed. Had they known, they could have called an agency from Philadelphia to help them fill out their cast, so that Heavy Rain might actually seem like it takes place there as opposed to some alternate-dimension Brussels like I had at first assumed.

I will listen to defense of all of Heavy Rains' hiccups in presentation and interaction, but there is no excuse for the poor casting. I'm sure that many of these actors would prove to be quite talented in their native language, but they all could have been replaced by equally talented actors whose native language is English. There are a countless number of good American actors desperate for work, and for a project with such a sizable budget - a project built around a gripping drama driven by actions performed by believable characters - such a gross lack of effort in seeking these actors out is inexcusable.

As has been mentioned by many others, the actor who portrays Private Investigator Scott Shelby is by-and-far the best actor in the game. However, it is when those actors who are less stellar than he are speaking that the awkwardness of the writing is readily apparent. A great actor can find meaning in the dumbest lines, but a bad script cannot hide the silliness of its dialog forever. This is especially true in lines delivered by women or children.

Madison: "You go, girl!"

Jason: "Please dad, can I have one? I'd really love to have one!"

It's funny that children are such an integral part of Heavy Rain's story considering Cage has no idea how to distinct between the behavior of an actual child and a directionless, warbling idiot.

There are a few crowd scenes in Heavy Rain, times where you have to make your way through a large group of people. You may not notice, but very few - I would say approximately none - of these people are black.

At first I was relieved. The last black character David Cage had written into a game was Tyler from Indigo Prophecy, who was pretty much a basketball-playing, Motown-listening stereotype (however, much like Cole Train from Gears of War, his stereotypcial traits made him the one character in the game with the most personality). I thought that maybe Cage had come to terms with the fact that he obviously has never met a black person in his life and decided to give up on pretending he could write a black character.

But then Mad Jack was introduced, a huge, bald, tattooed, dim, big-lipped, sadistic ex-con who works in a junkyard. At first I was taken aback. But then I thought, "Okay, okay. So he's a violent brute, and he HAPPENS to be black. Maybe these things happen?"

Then, a couple of scenes later, while some characters are pondering the identity of person whom they only know as a name on a gravestone, out comes the groundskeeper of the graveyard - an elderly black gentleman, leaning on a shovel, who just happens to know the deceased because he's worked in this graveyard all his life. He then proceeds to tell the story of the deceased, which unfolds in a playable flashback. God bless you, Menial Labor Exposition Negro!

Also, Paco Mendes, the only Hispanic character I can recall, is a sleazy, womanizing, drug-dealing nightclub owner.

The funny thing about these these characters is that their voice actors are all quite competent, despite the fact that many of the supporting roles in the game are portrayed by actors who are much weaker or entirely miscast. This suggests several possibilities:

Cage emphasized the importance of casting good actors to effectively portray his racist stereotypes over most of the other supporting roles in the game.
Cage sees no difference between white people from Europe and white people from the United States and felt free to have them cast interchangeably.

Either way, it's difficult to assume that Cage is not racist.

Heavy Rain is not a bad game. But, pretty and engaging as it is, it's not the bastion of progressive video game storytelling. In fact, just last year, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories featured a variable narrative presented with a fraction of the budget and processing power available to Quantic Dream. I suppose the main difference between Shattered Memories and the "Hollywood-quality" Heavy Rain is that one has good actors and good writing.

Desktop Cleanup: Speed Racer

2010-01-13T22:49:00.007-05:00

It seems like the main reason Speed Racer's dubbing is so laughable is
that Peter Fernandez, the director, wanted to remain as true to the
original script as possible - so every line is translated with such
exactitude that the only reason anyone sounds natural is because of
some truly committed work on the part of the actors - all three of
them.

But sometimes it seems like even in the original Japanese the actors
would have to be speaking as fast as possible in order to get every
line across.

...

The third episode, Challenge of the Masked Racer Part One, starts with
a narrative restraint that wasn't present anywhere in the first
episode. For about a minute, Speed and Trixie enjoy a mostly
dialog-free drive by the waterfront. Then they gasp and use the Mach
5's jump-jacks to avoid running over a wayward puppy.

We're then immediately introduced to the Masked Racer - who we all of
course know as Racer X, who we all of course know is Speed's brother -
as he supervises the transportation of his racecar, the Shooting Star,
from aboard a freighter. It's a very ambitious series of animations,
neglecting the usually dodgy perspectives and proportions the show as
a whole tends to suffer from.

Racer X is surrounded be mealy-mouthed and kind of hilarious reporters
seeking to grill the Masked Racer on his recent implications in
accidents during various races. As these ugly, fast-talking schmucks
squabble about, the Masked Racer calmly sees to his car's well-being
and drives away slowly to enough to take a brief, meaningful glance at
Speed and Trixie through his rear-view mirror.

This sequence is striking for two reasons. First, we're introduced to
a character who doesn't immediately challenge our patience and
tolerance by jabbering idiotically the moment he appears on screen.
Second, this is the first real incident of the animators trusting
the subtext of the actions we see to speak for themselves.

Over only two episodes, the visual direction has become more ambitious
and the story has developed a subtle pathos that seemed impossible
given the quality of its premiere.

I mean, before long we're reunited with the same chimp nonsense,
needlessly lengthy looped racing scenes and characters jumping to
impossible conclusions. But that's what makes Speed Racer Speed Racer.

"Meanwhile, in a secret hotel room, the secret head of the Alpha Team,
Mr. Wiley, is holding a secret conference."

Desktop Cleanup: The Big O!

2010-01-13T22:31:00.002-05:00

I'm deleting old files in a bid to clean up my computer's desktop.
This includes several text files which I meant to one day be full-fledged
essays. I post them here in case I may ever want to return to these
subjects. Though I likely never will.

The Big O! Serial Storytelling in a Post-Evangelion World

Marketing concept falling by the wayside in favor of the story
-Big O does not go into detail explaining the event 40 years prior
-just like Y the Last Man doesn't explain the death of every male
-just like Eva stopped being a monster-of-the-week show for selling toys

The form of the story gives way to the crux of the story
-Big O makes a point of highlighting the roles of the characters,
characters are revealed to be living sham lives
-LOST is built on characters' flashbacks and flashforwards until the
story is literally jumping back and forth in time
-Every character in Eva is depressed as hell, and it is revealed that
the whole point of Instrumentality is to fix those emotions

Between seasons, The Big O creators were given time to think, much the
way that Anno had two years to think about the direction of Eva's
story.

Sheep No More - Forging Our Own Way in Boston Theatre

2009-12-15T21:13:00.006-05:00

When I went to Emerson College to study performance, I learned that theatre consisted of more than beautiful people singing and jumping and dysfunctional families yelling at each other in cross-sectioned living rooms. In studying the post-modern avant-garde movements, I learned that theatre can be sacred and violent, as real as it is surreal, personally affecting and brimming with meaning in every facet. It doesn't have to be financially gluttonous, or chained to tradition. It is alive, and it can grow and change and cast aside those tenets which are no longer useful.

Of course, school and the real world are very different places. In school, actors have the space to expand their horizons. In school, actors are always busy.

I wouldn't say I'm naive. As an actor, I don't expect deluges of fantastic roles all of the time. But as a theatre enthusiast, I demand to see progressive work.

I know I can't expect all theatre artists to produce naked transvestite versions of the Old Testament, or to sell tickets for the privilege of walking over a foot bridge while a man watches from beneath and masturbates, but, damn, I was hoping I'd at least be able to find more challenging scripts on stage.

I know that there are wonderful parlor dramas. Some of my favorite theatre experiences were just people talking honestly to each other about real concerns. However, these realistic depictions of life can't be confused for the foundation of theatrical work, because it's not. If anything, the avant garde examples I described are more closely linked to the classical and proto-classical, communally significant rituals that spawned what we now consider to be theatre.

I know that the 70s were ridiculous, but I thought there were some important lessons in there! What happened; did all those artists grow up and say, "Boy, that was silly, and I've had quite enough of it"?

Yeah, it was silly. Yeah, it was ridiculous and unlike anything anyone had seen before. That's what makes it worth remembering! It's always been hard to make people accept progressive work, but even the most popular mediums like film and television, I feel, seem to have a wider spectrum of topics and trends than theatre manages. I think there's room for that kind of work along with the stuff we're usually doing.

But no one is willing to take the plunge. Financial leaders in the world of Boston theatre don't see a reason to fix what isn't broken. Theatrical events, unlike movies, do not have trailers. This make it harder to guess what you're getting out of your money, and that makes the investment riskier for both producers and audience alike. No one wants to put up something weird and new if it means running the chance of alienating their core audience - which in 80% of all instances is senior citizens. Thinking about it now, I suppose that's a normal fear, like telling a girl that you like her: will she still want to be friends after that?

Some companies have noticed the shortsightedness of this approach, though. It's difficult to ignore the fact that the elderly in whom they invest so much will be dead within a few decades. And then all you'll have left are the young theatre professionals who can barely even afford to see a play on a regular basis.

Marketing strategies have been altered to target those bright-eyed youths (anyone under 40). Snarky taglines, hip and minimalistic posters, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the whole shebang. So how come it isn't working?

The shocking answer is revealed by this guy named Isaac Butler. According to Butler, the secret to attracting a younger audience is to 1) produce something they'd want to see, 2) produce it well, and 3) offer it at a reasonable price.

"Theater companies and producers for the most part do not want to do the above three things. What they want to do is do the same work and use marketing to trick younger audiences into thinking it's what they want to see."

Unfortunately for those producers, those younger audiences are smarter than they get credit for. The problem that companies are having are either that they simply don't know how to appeal to these audiences on an honest basis, or that they never cared about younger people to begin with - just their money.

[I'm sure I'm writing about a lot of basic topics here, but, please, let me think this through.]

Money makes the world go round, sure. Community outreach, especially the kind involving donations, is the cornerstone of theatre. For all I know, possibly the only reason there's still theatre in Boston is because of the amount of wealthy elderly living here.

So it's not just about ticket sales. Those who can afford to make donations help the company, and in return the company analyzes the demographic of their donors and puts up a play that would make them want to donate more.

How many young people do you know who can afford to make a donation to a company between rent payments? I have many friends who love theatre with as much intensity as anything, but not one of them has a subscription to any local company's season. Producers think they have nothing to give, and thusly say: "They're worthless; forget about them!"

But they would be wrong again! For there is one thing that young post-graduates can provide to a company that some older audiences cannot or will not; something which, in fact, they done very much of and have not yet gotten out of the habit of doing.

Volunteering!

It was my peer and fellow actor Scarlett Redmond who first told me about volunteer opportunities for Sleep No More. Even hearing her description of the production as a fusion of Macbeth and Hitchcock in a vacant school, I had a difficult time imagining it as something other than a haunted house with the ghosts of Laurence Olivier and Robert Donat wandering about.

Even after volunteering my ideas weren't terribly more concrete, but after stuffing headless plastic baby-shaped forms with sticks and paper for two hours, I knew I would have to come back and discover just what the importance of my work was in the greater scheme of the production.

I found that Sleep No More is what I've been waiting for, and it proves that my education was not a waste.

Designer Amanda Cameron and several others along with myself put on a performance just prior to which the performers, including Amanda and myself, dispersed ourselves amid the audience members. Only one professionally-dressed performer, Jim Sligh, opened the doors to the space and admitted everyone and bid them to be seated. He handed out newspapers in which different specific commands were given to the reader, which they were to act out based on particular sound cues from Oh the Places You'll Go, read aloud by Amanda (as stipulated in her newspaper). For about the next five minutes, various members of the audience jumped, took off their shoes, sought after certain objects that did not actually exist, applauded and lead around another blindfolded audience member who then recited the Pledge of Allegiance, during which all other audience members hit the deck and covered their ears exactly as they were commanded, among other things. And I was stripped to the waist, bound, gagged and dragged on stage to writhe in pain at the sound of applause. No one knew who was in on it until it was over.

What we did and what Punchdrunk has done is a very old school idea. In crossing the border between performer and audience, a single group is created, all of whom are creating and living in an experience. The audience stops being the audience and starts being creators - sometimes, in terms of volunteerism, quite literally so.

This is the one way in which theatre can always overcome the cheap and instant gratification of TV, film and streaming video - rather than a series of events to look at, you can make a world to inhabit.

And it's a strange and wonderful world indeed. Sleep No More's space is full of so many different, curiosity-piquing sights - "What does it mean?" you constantly ask yourself. The amazing thing about the show is that there is a headquarters of sorts, the Manderley bar, where you can ease your feet, take off your mask and ask the person next to you, "What was up with that room with the single stuffed fawn?"

I realized just now that I can talk about Sleep No More without end, but it's very difficult to write all those thoughts and keep it coherent. I guess the main thing I've learned is that there is at least one company that reflects the aesthetic inclinations of artists and non-artists my age with pomp and elegance, and their success should be a lesson to everyone.

Now I'm gonna talk about all of the video games that Sleep No More is similar to. Imagine my surprise when I found out that A.R.T. artistic director Diane Paulus described it as "art installation meets living video game", because that is exactly what I thought.

---------
Notes:

THESIS: Old people are ruining things for everyone, so they can fuck off and die.
ACTUAL THESIS: Old tendencies are hindering theatrical progress in Boston, and it's up to those in the spotlight to make the first move.

-What I was taught theatre was capable of (bare, ritualistic, violent)
--What I thought I could bring to it (daring scripts, simple and human storytelling)
-What theatre in Boston actually is (imports from NY, the same "classics")
--A mobius strip of self-defeat (http://theatregreaterboston.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/theatre-in-greater-boston.pdf)
---Like Emerson itself, too clique-y for its own good

-Outreach: how do people even end up going to theatre?
-Theatre vs Film
--Film has trailers. Plays don't. The investment is riskier
---Film doesn't do the same fucking classics over and over
-Asking the community to help
--Typical Boston theatre's outreach to the elderly (money)
--Punchdrunk's outreach to the young (volunteering)

-SLEEP NO MORE is...
--everything I'd hoped for
---a personal connection, as a theatre student (performer to performer)
----as an avant-garde performer (I've DONE this shit before, I can't believe it's actually viable!)
----as someone who wants to make bold, moving pieces
---freeform
----independent discovery
----open to interpretation
----encourages discussion amongst patrons (online, piano bar): THEATRE IS FUCKING COMMUNAL

-Criticism from old people
--"too open"
--("In the interest of attracting a younger crowd we should not succumb to today's popular formula of empty sophisticated forms, with food and drinks.")
---Sleep No More doesn't come close to being as vacant and grubbing (merchandise, subscription offers) as popular theatre
--Valid criticism
---"If the ART is to survive, it needs to reach out to the younger generation, so I am in no way suggesting that the problems noted above should affect the approach of the new management, but I wonder if it might make sense to have a couple of old folks performances of Sleep No More with a more limited attendance and a little more attention to enriching the artistic experience of those who are no longer as fast as they used to be."
---The old and the young

Life Is Awesome

2009-12-14T16:32:00.001-05:00

Another Bad Night

2009-12-09T11:14:00.004-05:00

This Saturday night at 7:30, my theatre company, Rough Week - which I have just introduced to you RIGHT NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME - will be producing five short plays by playwright, friend and founder of The International Brain Transplant Committee, Jeff Belanger!

These are the funniest and most surprisingly thoughtful plays I've ever had the pleasure of working on, and you can see them for the low, low price of FIVE DOLLARS, or the low, lower price of THREE DOLLARS if you're a student, or the low, lowest price of TWO DOLLARS if you're an Emerson College student! Add snacks and merriment on top of that, and you've got a night of theatre that can't be topped!!

Located at United South End Settlements at 566 Columbus Ave. at the corner of Massachusetts Ave., it's two blocks from Symphony station on the Green Line and a mere one block from Massachusetts Ave. station on the Orange Line!

Witness the birth of a bright new star in the sky of Boston theatre! ANOTHER BAD NIGHT!

Reserve tickets at roughweekproductions@gmail.com.
Or check out the Facebook page!

It's December, and it's been a year since last December

2009-12-03T23:22:00.002-05:00

I had a dream where my roommate Conor and I were waiting on a couch in a well-kept suburban living room for our host to arrive.

A cat entered the room. It had the head of a woman who was gracefully entering her middle-age. She cleaned herself with her tongue, hopped up on an ottoman on the far side of the room, smiled demurely, hopped down and left through the same doorway.

Conor and I were okay with this.

This book is the single most important thing in the world

2009-11-27T23:24:00.002-05:00

After I liberated Beast's Castle, Sora and gang get pulled back into Hallow Bastion so Merlin can tell them that he found Winnie the Pooh's story book. Sora is pleased as all hell. In fact, as soon as Merlin steps out, he can't jump into the book fast enough to see what Pooh is up to. He is so damn enraptured by Pooh that when the Heartless steal the book through a clever ruse, Sora immediately dispatches them and jumps right back into the book. And then we find out that all of Pooh's friends are missing, because the pages of the book are missing.

15 minutes to set up a sidequest, and I didn't even get to see Sora kiss Winnie the Pooh.

Climb

2009-08-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

To dream that you are climbing up something (ladder, rope, etc.),
signifies that you are trying to or you have overcome a great
struggle. It also suggests that your goals are finally within reach.
Climbing also means that you have risen to a level of prominence
within the social or economic sphere.

To dream that you are climbing down a cliff, indicates that you need
to acknowledge and take notice of your unconscious. You are
expressing some hesitance and reservation with delving into your more
negative feelings. Alternatively, it suggests that you may be feeling
low or emotionally drained.

2009-07-12T02:25:00.005-04:00

Hello.

My name is Terry.

I live in the house across the street; 12 Verndale St. #2.

Last night, as I lay in bed, the dog in the apartment to the right of the lobby entrance began barking and howling distressedly. It was 2am.

This continued for some time.

I put on my shoes and came over to investigate.

Of course, I wasn't sure what I should do...

I thought I might alert somebody else in the building to check and see if everything was all right.

I was unable to attain any responses.

This is the first time I've heard this dog howl so - maybe you were dog sitting?

I just want to be sure that everything is all right, with you and the dog.

Take care.

That Is What the World Calls Love

2009-06-25T22:02:00.014-04:00

The night before I graduated from Emerson College, rather than getting some rest for the ceremony in the morning, I started playing Ouendan 2 on hard mode. I got to the last song. I couldn't quite beat it. I tried again and again. I shifted in my seat. I changed the rhythm with which I breathed. I altered my psychological mindset, back and forth, over and over again. I had to try every combination until victory came.

And then I looked out the window. The sun was rising.

Not a sunrise... but a galaxy-rise.

Namida no naka ni kasuka na akari ga tomottara
Kimi no me no mae de atatameteta koto hanasu no sa
Sore demo bokura no koe ga kawaite yuku dake nara
Asa ga kuru made semete dare ka to utaitai n da

Kinou no anata ga nise da to iu nara
Kinou no keshiki wo sute chimau dake da

Atarashii hibi wo tsunagu no wa
Atarashii kimi to boku na no sa
Bokura naze ka tashikame au
Sekai ja sore wo ai to yobundaze

Kokoro no koe wo tsunagu no ga
Korehodo kowai mono da to wa
Kimi to boku ga koe wo awasu
Ima made no kako nante
Nakatta ka no you ni utai dasu n da

Bokura wa izure dare ka wo uta gacchimau kara
Semete ima dake utsukushii uta wo utau no sa
Kanashii kotoba de wa
Nani mo kawaranai n daze
Yatsura ga nani wo shitatte iu n da

Kinou no anata ga uragiri no hito nara
Kinou no keshiki wo wasure chimau dake da

Atarashii hibi wo kaeru no wa
Ijirashii hodo no ai na no sa
Bokura sore wo tashikame au
Sekai ja sore mo ai to yobundaze

Kokoro no koe wo tsunagu no ga
Korehodo kowai mono da to wa
Bokura nazeka koe wo awasu
Ima made no kako nante
Nakatta ka no you ni utai dasu n daze

Ai to heiwa!
Ai to heiwa!
Ai to heiwa!
Kanashimi de hana ga saku mono ka!

Atarashii hibi no bokutachi wa
Takanaru yokan ga shiteru no sa
Kimi to boku ga yume wo sakebu
Sekai wa sore wo matte iru n daze

Anata no tame ni utau no ga
Korehodo kowai mono da to wa
Dakedo bokura tashikame au
Ima made no kako nante
Nakattaka no you ni Oh yeah
Kanashimi no yoru nante
Nakattaka no you ni utai dasu n da ze

Sekai ja sore wo ai to yobun daze!

LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!

When a faint glimmer shines in your tears
I'll say something to warm you up, right before your eyes
Even so, until our voices give out
Until dawn breaks, I want to at least sing together with someone

If you say that wasn't the real you yesterday
Then I'll just throw away yesterday's scene!

A new you and me will
Connect these new days
We're somehow sure of it
And that's what the world calls Love!

The thing that connects the voices of our hearts
Is so intense that it's frightening
Your and my voices come together
It's as though we're starting to sing
As though there hadn't been a past until now

We'll someday be suspicious of everyone
So at the very least, I'm going to sing a beautiful song now
Nothing ever changes
When it comes to sad words
"What have they done?" I ask

If you were a traitor yesterday
Then I'm just going to forget about the scenery from yesterday

The thing that will change these new days
Is innocent love
We're sure of it
The world calls that love too

The thing that connects the voices of our hearts
Is so intense it's frightening
Somehow, my voices come together with yours
It's as though we're starting to sing
As though there hadn't been a past until now

Love and peace!
Love and peace!
Love and peace!
A flower will bloom from sadness!

The 'us' of our new days,
They're full of expectation!
You and I cry out our dreams,
And the world is waiting for it!

The thing that I sing for you
Is so intense it's almost frightening!
But we met for a reason,
Like up until this point
There had been no past,
Just like how there had been no sad nights
That how we want to sing!

And that's what the world calls Love!

LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!
LOVE & PEACE!

Yes, we ARE all trapped in a maze of relationships

2009-05-28T22:33:00.004-04:00

I just finished Persona 4, and I should have a lot to say about it considering how much I loved it. But in reality, I've been playing it for so long that I've already professed that love again and again in my head, and articulating those thoughts seems kind of redundant, now.

All I can really say is that Persona 3 and 4 represent the best new ideas to surface in JRPGs in a long time. They are sleek, charming and aesthetically unique. Not only are they set in the real world - a novelty in itself - but they manage to be more thematically resonant to modern life than other franchises.

Something that ATLUS can work on for the next installment, though, is learning how to sustain that greatness over the course of an eighty-hour game. While Persona 4 is technically more refined than 3 in terms of gameplay, I find that 3's story managed to maintain its dramatic weight more evenly in the end.

Now I can finally look at my Persona 4 art book without fear of spoilers.

EDIT: Oh, bullshit.

Apparently there's a True Ending that I didn't unlock.

Well... I guess that's what YouTube is for.

Code Gay Ass: Le Douche of the Rebellion

2009-05-13T15:31:00.007-04:00

So, hey, I just started watching this anime.

It's about this school boy. He's good-looking and really smart and has a lot of big ideas.

One day he gains the power to manipulate the wills of others from a detached, otherwordly being.

He decides to use this power to right the wrongs of the world around him - so he creates a persona to gain the appeal of the public while hiding his true identity.

And the story is how he tries to connive his way to world peace while maintaining his secret lifestyle and discovering the workings of his power.

Lelouch copped Light Yagami's style because it's a good one. It's still a pretty fresh idea in mainstream anime - the sneaky bastard as both the hero and the villain, at odds with the entire world around him.

So what happens when you take a fresh idea and put it into a genre known for its staleness? The results are pleasantly confusing.

It seems like Code Geass makes a point to reinsert all of the cliches that were missing from Death Note. The otherwordly agent is a bright-eyed girl with flowing green hair and shapely derriere, rather than a creepy demon. The opponents are not a task force of office workers, but an empire with a fleet of giant robots (Knightmare Frames) with silly names German names. Code Geass also makes sure to put in all of the awkward and superfluous classroom scenes that Death Note was so foolish to neglect! I mean, how else are we going to get to see schoolgirls misunderstand each other and get embarrassed about things?

At first glance, the injection of cliches might seem like a step back for the genre. And, well, maybe it is. Code Geass is obviously seeking to fulfill a different need than Death Note. Code Geass is Death Note by way of a Saturday morning cartoon. There is no subtlety. Everything is much more colorful and distinct, and the pacing is swift and consistent. If there is ONE THING I have to praise Geass for, it's for keeping the pace with quick cuts and by constantly developing the action without reusing old frames of animation or relying on talking heads as a means of exposition.

It kind of reminds me of that Spider-Man cartoon that was on Fox Kids - an ACTUAL Saturday morning cartoon. They always managed to cram so much story into very little time. It was often as stupid as it was exciting as a result, and it may have been confusing, but it was rarely boring!

Hey, Lelouch is a lot like Spider-Man. He's got a lot of secrets to keep and people to protect and everyone's out to find out who he is and take him down.

However, cliches can only work for you in so many ways. When I first started watching Geass, I was excited, but wary. I knew that the show could not maintain it's momentum merely through scenes of military robot action. No. I knew, at some point, the action would have to come down and that I would be forced to endure scenes of schoolchildren acting like schoolchildren just like they do all of the time in all anime, with all the schoolgirls' voice actors living in their upper registers and no one sounding at all pleasant or natural. And I knew that I would be introduced to new characters who were stupid and cloying and who, once they were named, would officially become a part of the cast and would not go away.

That's one problem with stealing good ideas. If all of the characters are really dumb or uninteresting, it becomes that much more obvious that the one interesting character isn't even original. Besides that, what good is a super-intelligent manipulator if most of the people around him are total dopes?

The one time this sort of seen-it-before characterization works out is through Suzaku, Lelouch's childhood friend. He is much different from Light's partner/rival, L, in that he does not fight fire with fire. Rather than using his intellect in the struggle for peace, he relies on virtues typical of the anime hero: instinct, courage, honor and a big robot. In this way, he's actually a perfect foil, highlighting all of our anti-hero's strengths and vices. He's like the Laertes to Lelouch's Hamlet. Or the Ramza to his Delita.

The last anime I spent any great deal of time with was Stand Alone Complex, an incredibly thoughtful and mature if slow-paced series. After I watched it, I thought, "Yes, this is the future of animation."

And then Lelouch walks into my life - tall and skinny and pretty, with his tokusatsu mask in one hand and a stupidly obvious symbol for justified manipulation (a chess piece) - and flashes his Geass at me, and I'm under control. My sudden attraction to this nutty show is so confounding that it seems like something apart from me. At first glance, Geass seemed as though it was everything I stood against, a step BACKWARDS. Then my friends showed me the first episode. Now, after watching only six more episodes, I have been moved to write about it. It pains me to admit it, but that obviously means that it's worth something.

Cliches exist for a reason, right? There's always something bigger beneath them, like the tips of icebergs. Does Geass have what it takes to tap into the strengths of these cliches? Do I have what it takes to see this through?

Lelouch; I accept your contract.

Addendum: 5/23

Go here, and start watching.

www.codegeassepisode.com

Code Geass has successfully combined the heightened theatricality of anime with the sheer dramatic momentum of a primetime blockbuster.

I don't hate it.

Street Fighter IV, from my radio show

2009-03-26T23:10:00.003-04:00

I was trapped in my shower earlier today.

At one point the water from the showerhead was far too hot to bathe
with, so I stepped out of the way and dipped the dial into the cold
side. After a minute at a comfortable temperature, the water became
ice cold. I gently nuzzled the dial towards the warm side again, and
the water became impossibly hot. I had never felt water so hot outside
of my own nightmares.

As I waited in one corner of the shower for the hot water to run out,
still covered in patches of unrinsed suds, I thought about my first
time playing Street Fighter 4. My brother gave me the controller, and
I asked him how I should start playing the game. Should I jump right
into arcade mode, or should I go to the training room first? He told
me to go to trial mode. There, the game would educate me on the most
important moves for each character, and then challenge me to string
those moves together into deadly combos that I could use in mortal
combat.

Of course, as time went on, these challenges became more difficult. I
discovered that simply performing one attack after another was not
enough to create a seamless combo. Very often, I would have to input
the button sequence for an attack JUST BEFORE the previous attack was
finished, and every once in a while I would have to launch the attack
just after the initial attack was completed. Only once in a while did
my actions on screen directly match my own button inputs.

I thought about the temperature dial in my shower - about how the
water was scalding even though the dial was pointed far away from the
hottest point, how it became cold a minute after I had touched the
dial, how I was still waiting for the water to return to normal - the
incongruity between what I was seeing on the temperature dial and what
I was feeling on my skin.

Is Street Fighter 4 like my tardy shower? Or is that a noob question?

The fact that there are exceptions to every rule in this game makes
the fact that some people are so damn good at it that much more
impressive, but it's also kind of maddening. With Street Fighter's
ultra-streamlined online matching, which allows you to briskly take on
challengers even while playing arcade mode, comes the crushing,
repeating realization that I'll never be half as good as half of the
people I meet online.

I was surprised to learn that most normal people don't realize the
differences between a game like Street Fighter and a game like Mortal
Kombat. I mean, I guess I shouldn't be too harsh - at any given point
when spectating either game, you're likely to see two people facing
each other with their respective life gauges at the top of the screen
and a countdown timer in the middle. I guess I can't fault people for
failing to see the difference between TOUCH OF EVIL and ABBOT AND
COSTELLO IN THE FOREIGN LEGION, either, since both movies are in black
and white. DERP DUH DEE

Street Fighter was developed with the idea that in the end the best
player would win. Mortal Kombat was developed with the hopes that, in
the end, someone will be crushed to death.
Street Fighter isn't a joke, man. Street Fighter is serious business.

I asked my little brother why I was having such a hard time
successfully completing a combo.

"It's Negative Edge," he said.

I looked at him the way a cow looks at an oncoming train. Was that
supposed to be an answer? I felt like James McAvoy when Angeline Jolie
told him to CURVE THE BULLET. Negative Edge? Who had the audacity to
come up with such a term, and what does it mean?

Fighting games were built by overzealous fans. The idea of the combo
came from the realization that a flurry of attacks one after another
could effectively stop your opponent in their tracks and keep them
from attacking. It wasn't a purposeful decision - it was a GLITCH.
Combos, air combos, juggles, cancels, most of the tools that the
greatest players use all started as accidents of programming. Over new
iterations of Street Fighter and other fighting games, these glitches
became facts of life and common vernacular among fighters as
developers tried to keep up with players, giving them freedom to
exploit the features that added depth to their games while making sure
these games were not actually broken or unbalanced.

Capcom's philsophy of fan appeal is much different from Nintendo's.
When Smash Bros. Melee came out, some fighters discovered that a
lateral dodge from the air would allow a character to slide across the
ground, allowing them to perform powerful stationary attacks while in
motion. This came to be called wavedashing in some communities, and it
became a fact of high-level play. In tournaments across the world,
players who thought they were pretty good were trounced time an again
by those who discovered and mastered the art of wavedashing.

When Smash Bros. Brawl came out, lateral dodges were removed, and
wavedashing was no more. Nintendo deemed the comfort of new players
more important than the freedom of advanced players.

Which is more important? Accessibility or depth? Is it possible to
have both? With Street Fighter 4, Capcom managed to create a system
with depth while at the same time targeting a much wider demographic
than in the past. In my week of playing the game off and on, I was
unable to verify the result. All I know is that a lot of people like
to play as Ken. Like, a LOT. My brother wanted to rename the game Ken
Fighters 4: Clash of the Ken Masters.

Honestly, I believe that Street Fighter 3 had the perfect balance of
accessibility and depth. If only Capcom had marketed it nearly as
well.

P.S. The term NEGATIVE EDGE refers to the idea that a special attack
can be executed not just by the press of a button, but by the release
of a button as well. As it turns out, it's a very useful thing to
know. If that's so, then why is it not in the manual, and why is it
named after a kind of inground swimming pool?

Valkyria Chronicles, from my radio show

2009-03-26T23:03:00.006-04:00

Valkyria Chronicles is a video game made by Sega. Not so much the Sega
responsible for the recently released Sonic and the Black Knight,
which I have yet to play. This Sega is more like the one that
developed for the Dreamcast, the Sega that wasn't afraid to take a
silly idea and really run with it, like jet-powered roller skates,
flying pirates ships or intergalactic-retro-future space journalism.

Valkyria Chronicles is the story of a boy and a girl and their
struggle to protect their homeland from the Imperial Alliance
attempting to forcefully unify their fantasy version of World War
II-era Europe.

Japan has been fetishizing and transforming the ultra-idyllic European
countryside since before Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, and
Valkyria Chronicles' story is definitely Miyazaki-esque, as it is
ultimately about how love between normal young people can change the
course of history, and it's actually rather sweet, if predictable. The
smart localization and for-the-most-part-really-good voice acting help
light a fire under what could be a cliche script. Just check out the
opening cinematic on YouTube. It's like an HBO drama. Band of
Brothers: The Anime: The RPG. You can tell there are real human
emotions at play here. As well as a winged pig wearing a red bow. But
don't worry about that.

Valkyria Chronicles is a tactical RPG, probably the first tactical RPG
in a decade to successfully break the mold set by Final Fantasy
Tactics. You can move any unit in your command whenever you want,
multiple times even. And when you do issue a command, you then take
control of your unit and move them across the battlefield, minding
your surroundings and looking for cover, and rather than issuing and
order to attack, you line the shot up for yourself and pull the
trigger. Careful positioning and forethought are still important, but
because there is no preset turn order and your characters are not
locked into a grid, battles rely less on numbers and more on your
knowledge of your troops and your surroundings. It's more about
experience rather than just experience points.

I mean, there are still experience points, but rather than grinding to
level all of your units up, you can level up each unit class as you
see fit. You can customize your squad to suit your style, whether
you're the type of commander who likes to march your shocktroopers
head on with no regard for their welfare, or if you look to lure out
the more dangerous units for your snipers to dispatch. It's good to
keep things balanced, but the game never forces you to do so. Both my
little brother and I have completed missions in totally different
ways. It's a good feeling to have your own signature style as a
commander.

If I have any issues with Valkyria Chronicles as a game, it's its idea
of what "difficulty" is. There were times in battle when I've screwed
up, and the enemy should've had me dead to rights. Except, for some
reason, it just decides not to finish me off. Maybe out of some sense
of honor, like the way the British marched in straight lines during
the Revolutionary War? It's just weird when the enemy will be way open
and I can just walk in with a single scout and pop off a number of
guys at once. It makes me feel silly.

But THEN there are missions with really vague objectives that you go
into, not really sure of what to do. And then after you've wasted time
and resources figuring it out, something will happen and the
objectives will change, and enemy reinforcements come out of nowhere.
I mean, hey, it does happen, and I know you can't win 'em all, but it
still sucks to play a mission for an hour and then have to start over
because of something you had no way of knowing about.

The main thing about Valkyria Chronicles, though, is that as far as I
know, there isn't any other tactical-third-person-shooter-RPG
like it. And if there is, I don't think it's as neatly packaged as
Valkyria Chronicles. The storybook motif, the episodic nature of each
mission and the importance of each goofy individual unit makes it feel
like you're part of a really charming and thoughtfully put together
anime. If that sounds good to you, then please get it for your
Playstation 3.

Dear Andy and Larry,

2009-02-14T23:07:00.002-05:00

My name is Terry Torres. I am an actor and a director, and I will be graduating from Emerson College in May – a year after Speed Racer’s release. And I want to tell you something.

Joe Pantoliano came to Emerson College about two weeks ago to talk about No Kidding, Me Too! and his experiences working in the entertainment industry as a depressed dyslexic. He got onto the subject of The Matrix – which he paired with Memento as the two movies his took part in that he’ll never fully understand. Then he brought up you guys, how much he admired you. And then he said that you might not continue to direct, because your favorite work – Speed Racer – did not fare very well in the box office.

My ears perked up as soon as I heard him mention Speed Racer. I wanted to hoot and holler and clap my hands, but I was in the middle of a theatre full of stone-faced acting and filmmaking students. I was able to stop myself just short of pumping my fists into the air. I felt a breeze over the plains of my heart, a stirring not unlike the way I felt when I watched Speed fly over the red and white for the first time with my brothers at the AMC in the New York Palisades Center. I was leaning out of my seat.

Kevin Bright, the pseudo-famed producer of Friends who was moderating the discussion, asked, “No one liked it?”

“No one liked it,” Joe responded.

“I fucking liked it!” I shouted like a reflex over eight rows of students and faculty.

Joe, Kevin and the rest of the theater turned to look at me. My heart was in my throat. When Kevin looked up at me, I couldn’t tell if he was confused or upset. I didn’t expect him to ask me, “What was it you liked about it? In a sentence.”

I looked off to the side in search of the words, but there were too many to choose from. It was then that I realized just how much I had been touched by it. The week before I had shown it to my friends, who cursed themselves for not seeing it in theaters. A week before that my brother sent me a text message after President Obama’s inauguration, reading, “It’s a whole new world, baby!” I think I was even wearing the God damn lucky red socks I bought from Foot Locker on Halloween, when I dressed up as anime-era Speed. Maybe I was obsessed, or just completely wrong? All I could do was say what came to me.

“It’s a vibrant… honest story.”

“Huh,” Kevin said. “That sounds more like The Reader to me.”

Joe turned to him: “The Reader was a boring piece of shit.”

The audience responded with scattered laughter and applause.

I want to be brave enough to be myself, to make something and have others look at it and want to make something for themselves. There is a fire in me now. I want to help you ignite that fire in others, at least in my own way, but I still need to work hard enough to sustain that courage. I need to know that there are people out there who love doing what they do as much as you guys.

So, please, don’t stop doing it.

Driven,
Terry Torres

Dear Friend of the Library,

2009-02-10T12:38:00.000-05:00

We find ourselves in straitened circumstances indeed, don't we? Every day a car wash sits idle; every day a taco gets halfway to a mouth but then the purchaser thinks no, no, I cannot do this. The taco is put back on the plate. The car rolls on in relative filth, its dashboard (particularly the area around the steering column) dusted with cuticle dander and atmospheric motes. Verily, the driver gets a taco at Taco Bell, which is actually cheaper than a real taco. This land is your land, this land is mine.

I hope that those of you who straddle the twin lips of the crevasse between WTF and OMG can make a break for either camp and parts beyond. I hope we stop scaring each other into groupthink hoarding. I hope we enjoy each day with a hot or cold beverage and a sweet or savory dish.

Thank you for reading, and as I ramp Achewood back up into a fairly steady mode of production, I hope you continue to enjoy the work. It'll be what it'll be, and it is my hope that as long as I have a laugh, you have a laugh.

Best wishes on a lifeboat of a year,
/C

Terry Torres vs. Joey Pants vs. Kevin Bright

2009-02-03T21:16:00.010-05:00

So, Joe Pantoliano came to campus last Friday to talk about his new documentary and how it is working in the entertainment business as a clinically depressed dyslexic.

The moderator for the discussion was Kevin Bright, who's been hanging around Emerson for the past two years. When he first got here to produce some kind of pilot, everyone was saying stuff like, "Oh! Kevin Bright!" Now they're mostly saying stuff like, "Oh. Kevin Bright."

The Greene was packed with film and theatre students. I think most of us were expecting a big Q&A thing where we tried to figure out how to break into the biz. The discussion turned out to be more weirdly intimate, as Joey, obscuring his T-zone with a Red Sox hat, told us more about his hardships and how they've influenced his craft. He talked about Christopher Nolan, The Sopranos, how Cypher is the most fully-realized character in The Matrix, and how he was able to gain the mutual respect of the Wachowskis.

"So," Kevin started with a smirk, "What's it like now that the Wachowski Bros. are the Wachowski Siblings? Is it weird to think of Larry on-set wearing a dress?"

Some of us shifted in our seats. Some sighed, shook their heads and softly murmured, "Kevin... Didn't you used to live here? Don't you know how big Emerson College's GLBT population is - both on campus and in this room? Don't you know that joke wouldn't have been funny three years ago?"

Joey looked at Kevin from beneath the shade of his hat. "Let's see you laugh when your good friend tells you that he's thinking of being a woman from now on."

"But then," Joey said, "They're not even sure they're going to continue directing. Their favorite project that they ever worked on was Speed Racer, and that was a box office failure."

I was already sitting straight up on the words "Speed Racer". I felt a rush of adrenalin, and I was sitting between two strangers and I wasn't sure what to do with myself. I soundlessly pumped my fists into the air. I didn't want to make any assumptions. Did Joey understand Speed Racer? Were he and I the only ones?

"Nobody liked it?" asked Kevin.

"Nobody liked it," said Joey.

Like a reflex, I leaned forward in my seat and opened my mouth. "I FUCKING LIKED IT!"

Heads turned. There was scattered laughter, a few claps. I broke the wall well before the question-and-answer segment. I instantly felt like an asshole.

I didn't notice that Kevin Bright had already turned to look up at me from the stage, apparently very interested in finding out who could be dumb enough to make so bold a statement. "Well, uh, could you tell us what you liked about it? In a sentence?"

I looked down at the back of the seat in front of me, and then to the far seat at the end of the row. What was there to say? How can I succinctly, effectively describe the way that I feel watching Speed Racer?

I raised my head. "It's a vibrant... honest story."

"Huh," he said. "That sounds more like The Reader to me."

Joey turned to Kevin. "The Reader was a boring piece of shit."

Year of the Big Shell Incident

2009-01-07T19:51:00.001-05:00

Times When I Felt Like A Little Man, Vol. 1

2008-12-30T01:15:00.002-05:00

During my second semester at college, I was in a production of Much Ado About Nothing. This production was set in post-WWII Italy, and there were two swing dance numbers. So the director invited the cast to a swing workshop at MIT. "Okay," I thought, "I get to look good on stage, and I can pick up a few moves to impress ladies."

Only a fraction of the cast showed up. We all headed over to MIT together, and we were a little late. They got past the "Here's everything you need to know" part, and had already moved on to the "Grab someone and dance with them" part.

They started playing Artie Shaw or something. I started out with someone in the cast. We were just like, "lol whoops look at us dancing poorly wee," and then they were like, "OKAY, ladies, move to the gentleman on your left." My new dancing partner was obviously from MIT. She looked like a scrawny Velma with very nice glasses. I put my hand on her hip, went, "Uh, okay," and started moving my feet. I stepped right on her toe.

She looked at me with her brow furrowed: "You're leading," she said.

My balls rolled right out the door and down the stairs.

-----

At the start of last semester, on the first day of a lecture class, I was talking to my friend Chelsea, catching up and the like.

"And I got a girlfriend," I said. "Her name's Chihiro. She's really shy."

Two girls in the row in front of us, Katie and Laura, turned right the fuck around. They sort of knew me, and they clearly couldn't believe I had a girlfriend.

"Who is she?" they asked with a mix of pride and fright. "Does she go to this school? What does she study?"

"Um," I said, "I was talking about a video game. I have a girlfriend in a video game."

They looked at each other. They were disappointed, but not at all surprised.

Chelsea told me that the same thing happened to her when she talked about playing Harvest Moon.

-----

So, I don't know how many months ago, I sent in this postcard that came with the FLCL Complete Collection to get a free T-shirt with this design on it. I got it, like, two weeks ago. I like it a lot.

So I wore it when I was asked to fill in for somebody at the convenience store on campus. It was a pretty slow day, classes didn't start until the next day, and I spent most of the time on my feet because I couldn't fit the chair in front of my computer, because they were storing an excess of fountain soda boxes under the counter.

My shirt got a few long glances of interest from some people. Three dudes in all spoke up about it, saying like, "Nice shirt, that show is great." My responses became less and less wordy: "Yeah. There was this postcard that came with the FLCL complete set, and I sent it like a year ago, I didn't get it until just now." "Yeah, I got it for free with a postcard in the series collection." "Yeah, I got it free with the DVD."

Towards the end of my shift, this very, very cute, pale, small-voiced redhead came in and bought a Nutrigrain or something. She used her small voice to say small things like, "That's all," "Here you go," "Just a sec," as she was putting her stuff on the counter and getting her wallet out. After she paid, she said, "I like your shirt."

"Thank you. I got it free with the post card."

"What?"

"Oh. The one that came with the DVD."

I looked at her for about four seconds. I realized that she didn't know about FLCL - she actually just liked my shirt. Now that I had stopped her from leaving, I had to somehow justify the awkward silence by telling her something interesting about the shirt.

"It... I didn't have to pay for it."

"That's... cool."

"Thank you."

2008-12-06T12:36:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving: Engage

2008-11-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

"If I was a guy, then I'd be getting roles and getting laid."

2008-11-03T21:25:00.001-05:00

Maybe I should take dance lessons.

My legs are so itchy

2008-10-09T00:30:00.000-04:00

Yuka Abe got onto my train today.

2008-10-04T23:44:00.003-04:00

I don't quite remember when it was. I think it was at Kenmore. I'm surprised it didn't happen before. It seems like there was a huge exodus of college students to Brookline and the surrounding area.

It took me three or four double takes to confirm her identity. Her hair was longer, and she had a worn expression that suggested she took that line routinely. She was wearing a pretty cool long jacket.

She got off before I did. I didn't say anything. I wonder if she saw, or even recognized me?

Work is Work

2008-09-06T17:58:00.005-04:00

I used to think food services weren't that bad. My gig at the convenience store on campus was pretty sweet, but I could only ever work once a week.

This week, though, my roommate who's a slave to the company that handles all food on-campus convinced to help him make 800 sandwiches for an orientation event.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it was just the kind of job where you take ingredients and put them together and wrap them up like you're supposed to, but then you'd run out of ingredients like every half hour, and you'd have to find out where in the hell you're supposed to get more, so you have to find the one guy who knows anything about anything, but he is too busy helping the German chef who is BATSHIT CRAZY, so you need to find some OTHER cook who doesn't understand you to prepare the ingredients you need, and then wait around and pray to GOD that some manager doesn't find you and say "What are you just standing around picking your nose for?! Take these boxes to the loading deck!" because you know that some other guy who is bigger than you is going to be holding the service elevator and will tell you to step the FUCK off because what he has to do is a HOLY MISSION FROM GOD compared to whatever pissant errand that you were asked to do.

We encountered the chef (who is only known as "Chef" - literally nobody knows whether or not that's his real name) while we were on our way to clean up our station. He asked my roommate where his knives were, and he responded jokingly, "We lost them," and smiled. Then Chef did that threatening gesture that Viggo makes in Eastern Promises, where he points two fingers to his throat then points violently at my roommate.

Assuming I would know, he asked me earnestly, "Where's that from again?" and he performed the gesture again.

"Uh... Eastern Promises?"

"THAT'S RIGHT!" he said, grabbing my roommate by the shoulders, "So you'd better WATCH IT!"

2008-08-17T16:27:00.009-04:00

During the credits for The Dark Knight, we sat still with no desire to join the throngs of moviegoers leaving the theater. No one said much. There wasn't much to say, and we were tuned enough to understand that.

Then Jess, meaning well, began to compliment the story. "It's so literary," she said.

Lauren stood up. "Whoa," she said, cutting Jess off, "Hold on," adding some sort of epithet in reference to Jess' promiscuity - "slut," "whore," etc.

Lauren straddled Jess in her seat and grabbed her like she was going to drop her from a fire escape.

"Don't you dare," Lauren said. "This is a glowing example of the film medium."

I was in a receptive state, a feeling very close to prayer or post-coitus. Both happy and sad, I was looking for something that made sense to me.

Hideo Kojima said that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was his attempt to tell a story that could only be told in the medium that he used. The player could indeed trigger events and conversations through optional interactions, but was this material "story" or were they just examples of hypertext; Easter eggs?

Is it really possible to tell a story in one medium that could not be told in another?

The Dark Knight could have been a novel, I guess, at the forfeit of subtlety. I guess you could give a description of The Joker's joy ride - that reprieve from the violence and the maniacal laughter, a moment of serene satisfaction, a devil in heaven - but, God, why not just SEE IT? Besides everything, half of the movie is a series of parallel actions that would be too clumsy to render in text.

Interestingly enough, Metal Gear Solid 2 is not the video game that I consider to be medium's best example of storytelling. For a while, it was Silent Hill 2. It featured Easter egg-style deposits of information, as well, but as far as I know, it's the only game that actually interprets the way in which you play the game to decide the ending - even if you didn't mean to come across as suicidal when you decided to examine the knife intently and drag your wounded ass around without using any Health Drinks for six hours.

We haven't gotten too much closer. Silent Hill 4 tried to reinvent the series like Resident Evil 4 did and fell flat on its face, becoming neither a great game nor a fantastic experience. Metal Gear Solid 4, while dazzling, is essentially an interactive five-part HBO special event.

But how could it be that video games haven't reached their full potential? Aren't the graphics good enough yet? Aren't DVDs and Blu-Ray discs big enough to contain all of that hard work and money and the products thereof? Aren't they real enough? Aren't they cinematic enough?

Aren't they unlike video games enough?

Portal does not present you with a cut scene detailing its world's rich history or the main character's back story, or a romantic other - at least, not in the typical sense. What you see is what you get. The rest is for you to figure out. What is the point, then? Why run around and shoot your gun? Well, what else are you going to do when someone gives you a gun and a series of hallways to run through?

A game makes us believe that, in its world, there are parties with differing interests: an architect, a benefactor, an obstacle. In Portal, they're all one in the same: GLaDOS. But the illusion of conflicting interests, overcoming obstacles to meet an end, is true in all video games. Portal knows this.

Rather than just looking at other video games for inspiration, Portal looked at the medium itself. The question was not, "What gimmicks can we copy and expand on?" but, "What do we have here, and what can we do with it?" Of course, I know that Portal was made with Half-Life 2's Source engine, but the fact that such a revolutionary simulation of real-world physics could be taken and turned on its head (as the player does with Aperture Science's portal gun) is a testament to the sense of discovery inherent in the game.

Portal is brilliant because it does not strive to be anything other than what it is. In doing so, it lights a fire under the old cliches, reminding us why they were such good ideas to begin with. The cliches become archetypes.

There's something I heard Carl Sagan say once: "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

Braid is that apple pie. It is scrumptious and terrifying.

Like Portal, Braid is a video game about video games and, by extension, everything.

When I say it's about video games, I don't just mean the medium. I mean video games; specifically, Super Mario Bros. It's plain to see: an adorable man-child hero (Tim), stubby bipeds vulnerable to blows on the head, princessless castles at the ends of stages, and there's even a Donkey Kong effigy in World 3. Braid is to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as Super Mario Bros. is to Hamlet.

Think about that: we have finally reached the point in history where Super Mario Bros. is something to be referenced, revered and dissected. Rejoice. Or weep. Whichever.

When you defeat Bowser at the end of the first seven worlds in Super Mario Bros. and Mario walks off to the right to presumably find Princess Toadstool, a mushroom-headed little man greets him and tells him something that has become a joke among nerds, as well as a slogan on a T-shirt that I own:

"Thank you Mario! But our Princess is in another castle."

Braid investigates the seriousness of this statement. Indeed, if Tom Stoppard had made Braid and needed a quote for the title, he might have called it "But Our Princess Is in Another Castle".

It should be known that Braid is its own game. Again, like Portal, it is what it is - an ingenious series of challenges set one after the other, all hinging on a clever mechanic. In Braid, it is the control over the flow of time. And because time is under your control, the number of times any challenge can be attempted is limitless; death and the Game Over screen is nonexistent. Time control is such a seamless part of the game, as natural and running and jumping, you might begin to wish that EVERY game worked the same way. Braid should be remembered for this alone.

Through diaries lain out in the cloudy lobby of each world, we learn that Tim lost the princess - "This happened because Tim made a mistake." However, since gaining control over time, Tim refuses to let his mistakes stick, and has vowed to fix everything in his control.

However, Tim's control starts to slip away. As the game progresses, the player comes across creatures and objects that are unaffected by Tim's powers, and obstacles he has to stretch his abilities to their limit to overcome by creating parallel timelines and imbuing his ring with chronological energies. The challenges become more and more oppressive, just like any video game.

But what if the given difficulty curve of a game increased indefinitely? What if the challenges suddenly became humanly impossible?

Tim can change the course of his actions and the actions of those around him, but he can't change their minds.

Tim doesn't just fail to rescue the princess - that would just be mean, to make failure the only outcome. No. Tim fails in his assumption that the princess ever even wanted to be rescued. He fails in his assumption that he can control the outcome of everything. He fails in his assumption that he even deserves a tangible reward for his efforts.

Take a look at Braid's web site. The game has no manual or box to summarize its content, so the web site is pretty much it.

http://braid-game.com

The site doesn't mention any princess. The description at the download screen doesn't mention the princess. Only the enigmatic diaries convinced me that the princess' rescue was my main objective.

According to the web site, my main objective was to solve puzzles.

The fact is, Tim never assumed anything. Tim doesn't even say a word in the whole game. It was me. Only me. I am the one who wanted to save the princess. I am the one who wanted my efforts rewarded. I am the one who wanted my actions to count for something outside of myself.

I am the one who missed the point.

Old games had terse and disappointing endings all the time - a single screen that said, "Thank you for playing." And then you're brought back to the title screen, to start again, like you're just supposed to keep going.

Tim can do nothing but keep going. There are no staff rolls or developer insignias to get in his way. It never ends. Nothing ever ends.

What else can you do but keep going?

Lawrence told me that The Dark Knight is a tale of hopelessness. Bending the rules is the only way to overcome the odds, and no good deed goes unpunished. The only way to validate the hope of the people is to lie to them. Alfred even denies Bruce closure by burning Rachel's letter, in order to fuel Batman's righteous anger.

"But at least he's alive!" I said to him somewhat desperately.

Are results the most important thing? How well or how fast or success or failure? To experience the doing is the essence of living, isn't it?

I don't know when it's going to end, if it ever will. Even if there's no princess, as long as I don't know whether I'm right or wrong, all I can do is continue the fight.

The Illusion of The Illusion of Gaia (of Gaia)

2008-08-08T20:20:00.020-04:00

When I was a kid, The Illusion of Gaia took me a long time to play through. I had lousy reflexes and I was too dumb to solve the puzzles very quickly. The abandoned continent of Mu, for example, took something like a month for me to get through.

This time, though, it just breezed by - it took me a single evening to reach Mu, and another to reach the floating village of Watermia. I can't believe I never noticed how fast-paced the game is. You're constantly getting thrown into crazier situations, with very little rest between each new challenge. I'm starting to think that my beloved Chrono Trigger took a tip from Gaia in that department.

Unlike its spiritual predecessor Soul Blazer, in which you can travel between all areas of the game at practically any time, Gaia is incredibly linear. After triggering certain events, you're carried further into the story to the point that you can't turn back. Me, I've always appreciated a bit of linearity. It ensures progress, and it keeps the game from getting stuck in a rut.

Every new location you reach is special because you know you won't get a chance to explore it again. The game feels like an adventure novel - the climax of each chapter gives way to anticipation for the new sights and sensations to come. I asked my friend Lawrence what it is that's missing from new games in comparison to something like Gaia. "Mystery," he said.

Gaia's world is a strange one indeed - a mish-mash of enigmatic and historically important locations, crunched together to negate most of the actual distance between them in space and time. Freejia and the Diamond Coast, obviously a play on the Ivory Coast, are likely a diarama verion of apartheid-era South Africa. Euro is a singular, vague representation of a bustling mid-Rennaiance Romantic city. Other locations, like the Nazca Plains, the Great Wall of China, Ankor Wat and the Great Pyramid, speak for themselves.

Many of the cultures are rendered with an equal amount of respect, despite the rampant use of artistic license in their depiction (though there is a fisherman in the Vietnam-ish village of Watermia who knocks up his wife then goes on to gamble away his life in a game of chance... but there are nice fishermen, too). It was neat to be privy to such knowledge as a kid, though really, Gaia taught me about as much about the Angkor Wat as Parasite Eve taught me about mitochondria, which is not much.

Soul Blazer's story of a world being restored from the nothingness, while grand, was less effecting to me than Gaia. Like all great stories, Gaia's is huge and at once personal - a young school boy leaves his childhood behind to become the harbinger of a new age of civilization. Along the way, many great and terrible things befall him and his friends, and he must forego his innocence for the good of the world.

At the game's end, Will reaches the top of the Tower of Babel - the Old Testament tower essentially built as a challenge to God - defeats the heavenly invader that threatens to erase humanity and all of its feats, and gains the comfort of knowing that people will continue to thrive, taming the demons of their past and continuing to aspire to greatness.

The Japanese have been tapping the well of Judeo-Christian lore to pad out their fiction for a long time. Gaia's use of biblical imagery, though, is rare in that it seems to be used to an end outside of empty symbolism.

In the story of the Tower of Babel, the tower is a symbol of human avarice. God changes the tongues of all those who built the tower, so that they each speak in languages that others can't understand (arguably "babble" is derived from "Babel" - huh!). This explains how different languages arose from a common people, and why those people chose to remain separated from each other in different tribes.

In Gaia, though, the tower is not struck down by a divine power. Instead, the divine power (a meteor controlled by "Dark Gaia," probably inspired by the fallen star Wormwood from Revelations) is struck down by Will - a boy who has traveled the world and delved deep into the hearts of all cultures. Will, rather than being a symbol of human pride and territorial cowardice, is a culmination of all of the knowledge and achievements of human civilization. He doesn't stand for any one tribe, but all of humanity.

From the top of the tower, Will sees, not just the world, but human history stretched before him - a history of fantastic feats, not by god, but by man. Even throughout the game, all of the awe-inspiring ruins of the past, which may have been built in the names of gods, were built with the hands of people. Gods, even when they do appear, are relegated to hidden, single-screen save rooms, floating in obscurity like Zordon.

One of the strangest relationships in the game is that between our hero Will and the goddess Gaia. You first encounter the goddess on the roof of Will's school in South Cape, on the other side of an ethereal door into Dark Space. Approaching her reveals that you're the chosen one or some such, and then she offers to save your game. Will has no qualms with this. Is this not the first time he's met Gaia? Why is Will her earthly emissary? Just what kind of goddess is she, anyway? Unlike the Master in Soul Blazer, Gaia does not appear to be the beloved caretaker of the world. Hell, I don't think anyone in the game acknowledges Gaia at all. Could it be that the age of exploration has also brought upon the age of atheism?

Or it could be that Gaia is actually Will's own "personal" god, an embodiment of the courage and power he needed to help him fulfill his destiny. With the defeat of Dark Gaia, Will takes back his responsibility and recognizes the power inherent in himself. Maybe THAT'S the illusion of Gaia.

It's hard to believe that the game is capable of any statements about the relationship between man and god when you look at the writing. It barely even reaches the level of mechanically elegant simplicity exhibited in Soul Blazer. I'm not sure if it's just because of the script's translation, but some of the dialogue ranges from laughable melodrama to outright nonsense. Will's internal monologues are sometimes in past tense, sometimes in present tense, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third person. Sometimes the subject and the object of certain sentences just aren't clear. Will's friend Eric says to no one in particular, "Don't tell anyone," when he really means, "I won't tell anyone."

Such fumbling translations were commonplace back then, but after seeing how far we've come (especially after comparing the script of 1997's Final Fantasy Tactics with the vastly improved script of the 2007 remake), it's so disappointing to see the more successful tenets of story-telling from the 16-bit era being hampered by a standard of mediocre writing that never should have occurred. Old games told stories in a way that new games have overlooked, maybe because developers assumed that simplistic story-telling was a byproduct of primitive technology. Subtlety and even visual coherence became much less imporant when we started jamming dazzling FMV cinemas into our games - not to mention load times, inconsistent voice acting, and drawn-out battle animations - just because current mediums have the space for it.

ANYWAY, pangs of insight do happen to shine through during certain moments of the game, though typically anything poignant is more a result of the situations depicted rather than the writing. At one point, Will has to play a song on his flute to restore the memories of his amnesiatic friend Lance. However, in doing so, all the other characters in the room suddenly become incredibly nostalgic, homesick and sad. Later on the princess Kara, who ran away from her "prison of silk and gold", learns that home is where the heart is, saying, "When I'm far away, I feel close to it. When I'm close, I feel far away." And these are all 14 and 15 year old kids. I guess I just have a thing for sad children.

But sometimes the game misses golden opportunities to capitalize on incredibly dramatic scenarios. In order to get off of the continent of Mu, Will and friends have to travel through an ancient underground tunnel - a grueling hike that ultimately takes a month to complete. It's probably one of the most harrowing experiences that the entire group goes through together, bereft of sunlight or any sort of sustenance aside from dirty water and cave mushrooms.

Rather than allowing you to experience any of it - except for one part where you have to walk over to the other side of the screen and grab a mushroom - the scenario mostly just plays out through dialogue, flashing forward periodically, and it doesn't last for more than two or three minutes. The tunnel scenario is much different from one great sequence earlier in the game, in which Will and Kara are stuck on a piece of wreckage in the middle of the sea. At least you can catch fish in that part.

I can't believe I forgot how good the game looks. The environments are colorful and detailed, the monsters are strange and scary, the animation of the wind blowing through Will's hair is so visually impressive that it's emblematic of the game entire, and the music that accompanies them all is always affecting, if a bit bombastic.

I think the one thing that keeps Gaia from being remembered for its aesthetic contributions are the graphics for the NPCs. They're just so plain and static, like 2D Playmobil figures. It's also really weird to think that cute characters like Kara live in the same world as some of the awful monsters you have to fight.

Come to think of it, the graphical discrepancy provides an interesting dichotomy: the world of the plain and placid NPCs and the world of the frighteningly detailed monsters.

But then that still doesn't explain why the laboriously animated Will looks so weird standing next to his incredibly boring-looking friends. It's more likely that some of the artists were way lazier than the others.

That explains the shortcomings of so many great works - some guy just did not do his job as well as everyone else.

When I was a kid, I liked Gaia well enough, but it was always "that adventure game that isn't Zelda". This time, I was finally able to enjoy it, not in how it compared to other games I liked, but for what it was - a strange and exciting tale of a boy and his world reaching their potential. How come it took so long for me to appreciate it? Could it be from the insight I have gleaned from my college education in semiotics, symbology and stage direction? Or am I just crazy with nostalgia? I guess that depends on how deeply you care to look at it.

FUN FACT: The first name to appear in the credits was the woman who wrote the story, Mariko Ohara. She is a science fiction writer, and was the president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan between 1999 and 2001. Gaia is the only video game she worked on.

Soul Blazer, Joel Frasier

2008-07-28T21:44:00.004-04:00

Quintet's first video game was ActRaiser. My memories of ActRaiser are limited almost exclusively to the background music from the first stage and an episode of Nick Arcade. Mostly, as a kid, I just remember being really disappointed that the hacking and slashing of that first stage suddenly gave way to some kind of top-down SimCity bullshit, and that my manly sword-wielding warrior was replaced by this tiny weiner angel.

For a while, I've wanted to go back and see what I missed in ActRaiser. I thought about buying it on the Virtual Console. "Don't do that," my little brother said. "That's stupid."

"YOU'RE stupid," I told him. But I relented. After all, why go back and dredge up the past, when there are so many new games to play?

Then, while my back was turned, my little brother went to the X-Zone at Nanuet Mall, where he bought Doom and Soul Blazer for five bucks each. As some sort of olive branch for telling me that my desire to play ActRaiser was stupid, he gave Soul Blazer to me and told me to play it.

Soul Blazer, also by Quintet, is essentially a spin-off of ActRaiser. You take the role of a divine being sent by "the Master" - Nintendo of America's clever pseudonym for God - to revive the world, which has been emptied of all sentient life as a result of a Faustian deal between the king of the land and the evil deity, Deathtoll.

Each time you enter a new area in the game, it is completely desolate. No NPCs or anything - just you and the environment. After you walk around the giant empty space, failing to find anything but the magic tile that you teleported in on, you're only choice is to walk to an adjacent screen, where "monster lairs" spew out streams of demons. By defeating these demons and deactivating the lair, you release a new creature that appears in the "safe" screen back at the beginning of each area. Your mission is to dungeon-crawl from monster lair to monster lair, freeing creatures and carving new paths until you reach the boss who opens up the road to the next area.

The game itself is very simple. You gain magic spells along the way, which can be handy when you can actually aim them, but really, it all comes down to slashing. You press the button, you slash the sword, you kill the monsters, over and over. Rather than being merely rote, the constant slashing fosters a kind of arcade-style hypnosis, and you immediately understand that the challenge isn't so much in the slashing as it is in positioning yourself and anticipating the position of your enemies.

Despite the game's extremely repetitive nature, there's a constant delight in seeing who or what the defeat of each monster lair will release, and these continous rewards goad you on. "Yes!" you think, "My world is coming together!" I often played while my little brother was in the same room on his computer, and I would read the text in the dialog boxes aloud to keep him updated. "ButtLord released an old man." "ButtLord released a tulip." "ButtLord released a squirrel." By reflex I would sometimes read the text aloud even when I was alone.

Some creatures give you useful items or advice. Some thank you profusely for bringing them back to life. Some... well, some are just NPCs. But despite the cut and dry translation, the world is full of a colorful array of creatures. A magician deer, a pioneer basset hound, a shly romantic soldier, an angel fish that tries to impress you by jumping very high, and this one mole who pops up and says, "BOO!" when you walk by.

Seriously. You are on a mission for the Master, trying to revive the world and defeat the forces of evil, and this fucking mole is hiding in a hole in the wall waiting for you to walk by so that he can scare you. But, hey, it's just a mole. If that's what it wants to do with the life that's been returned to it, more power to it.

There is a mermaid in the underwater queendom of St. Elles whom, upon being released, tells you that she is one of the Queen's dancers, and if you release the other two dancers, they will perform for you. When you finally release all three, they invite you to dance, at which point you figure that the music will change or a cut scene will start. But no. They all just swim back and forth repeatedly. You kind of expect a token of their gratitude in return for reuniting them, an item or a new magic spell or something. But the dance is all. They're dancers, after all.

There is one man you release early in the game who guards the bridge to the other side of the first town. When you walk towards him, he steps out of the way before you reach him, effectively granting you passage. You don't even have to talk to him. He's completely superfluous. He just comes packaged with the release of the bridge. It's interesting, though, how the game says, "ButtLord released the bridge keeper," as opposed to "ButtLord released the bridge." The bridge may be more important to me in that it aids my progress, but in the world of the game, the man who guards it is much more special.

At one point, you pick up an item called the Dream Rod - which looks a lot like the star-tipped wand from the Kirby games and Super Smash Bros. With it, you can visit the dreams of sleeping creatures. You know which ones are sleeping because talking to them gives you a "Zzzzz" message.

This message appears when you examine a tulip that isn't wafting happily in the wind like the other tulips. "Zzzzz," the tulip says, even though tulips aren't known to snore - or maybe only heavenly beings can hear the snore of a tulip. Entering its dream brings you into a little room, with a little red bird in it. When it sleeps, the tulip dreams that it is a bird.

As you go from region to region, you release different sorts of creatures. Middling townsfolk, nobility, woodland creatures, aquatic creatures, domestic creatures, etc. There is one region, the Mountain of Souls, that is home to a peculiar race of halflings that travel by hopping or by riding on giant cave snails. Talking to a bouncy mushroom reveals that these creatures are born, grow up, get married, grow old and die all within the span of a year. The mushroom goes on to say that these creatures never feel that life is too short.

One of the first named NPCs that you meet in the game is Lisa, the daughter of the brilliant Dr. Leo who was forced by King Magridd to create the machine that summoned Deathtoll. When she is revived, she appears in her house at the edge of the town where she lives by herself. She is relentlessly grateful to you for reviving her. Her gratitude slowly but surely turns to romantic interest. Between the loss of her father and her impossible love for a heavenly being, Lisa is fairly tormented.

At King Magridd's castle, you meet a harpist who tells you that he once fell for a girl with "a name like Lisa."

Though your avatar can comprehend the languages of all creatures (including certain doors and cabinets), he is completely silent. Despite being the Master's only agent, you cannot speak for him, which is probably a good thing. Imagine the kind of questions you'd have to answer for the Master. "Where were you when Deathtoll was here?" "Why wasn't I born a bird?" "Why can't I leave this bridge?" Like some sort of idol, people talk to you, but you're unable to give them the spoken reassurance that they want. You restore their life, sure, but after that, they're on their own.

There are a few points in the game were you can reply Yes or No to a particular question. At the end of the game, Lisa asks you a question, but there is no choice as to your reponse. The only answer you can give is Yes. At this point, rather than being a conduit for the player's thoughts, the avatar gains a desire; he doesn't want you to say No, so he won't let you.

Soul Blazer has a sort of quaint thoughtfulness that is mostly overshadowed by things like extremely short sentences and gorillas that you need a certain sword to defeat. Still, I'd like to think that the existentialist beats made more sophisticated games (Earthbound, Valkyrie Profile) possible.

If anything, at least it was a good set-up for Illusion of Gaia.

Magdelene

2008-07-20T12:53:00.002-04:00

I just finished playing the piano, with nobody else in the house.

It felt so good.

2008-07-08T23:14:00.000-04:00

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/b/e/9/be9d31cb2a96cef7a39d16fa82f2d29b.wav

Fucking thing SUCKS

2008-06-07T02:47:00.005-04:00

You know why the 60s happened the way that they did? The children of wartime America grew up, looked at the world, the cold war, racial riots and the screwy priorities in civil rights, and they turned around and looked at their parents with their hands on their hips and said, "Look at this shit. What the fuck were you guys thinking? How did you screw up this badly?" And then they all made a putsch to overthrow the old way and replace it with the new, better way. And they marched into and onto things to make a point of it.

We're stuck right in the middle of a transitional period. It's no wonder so many grown people are acting like teenagers - history ITSELF is going through puberty all over again.

Or maybe I'm just at the point where I can see that history is stuck in an eternal adolescence. The endless waltz, repeating the three beats of rest, unrest and revolution.

That makes more sense. I've been having redundant epiphanies all week, being all Columbus, discovering things that've already been discovered.

Tuesday night I was asked to cover the primary election for New Jersey senator. Specifically, I was covering the Jersey City-based Libertarian-turned-Republican dark horse. He was pretty much like Ron Paul. You wish every politician was like him, but you know that nobody else cares, so you wonder if there's any point in your caring.

I hitched a ride with the photographer down to his campaign HQ. I couldn't tell if it was more like a baby shower for a teacher going on maternity leave or just a basic family reunion. Half of any present were by the row of computers checking the incoming electing results, and the rest were mingling or boozing on the opposite side of the room. Young guys with nice hair cuts, old guys in fitted suits with their younger wives. There were two kids, my age or younger, on Facebook or something, laughing with beers in hand.

Right away I recognized the senatorial candidate from the the Google image search result. I had no idea what I was supposed to ask him. It was supposed to do a color story. A joke story, really, because there was no chance the guy would win. The only reason we were covering him was because he's based in Jersey City. So while the award-winning photographer snapped away at the would-be senator and his supporters from all different angles, I leaned against a cubicle occupied by a mostly-drunken freeholder candidate and tapped my pen against my notepad with faux thoughtfullnes. I wrote down phrases like, "FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE".

They were projecting live online coverage by NJN onto a nearby screen. The stream was nearly inaudible, but I stared into it as though I was gleaning all sorts of information from it. I leaned over people's shoulders and checked the results from the polls with them.

After reading about him in the Star Ledger's archives all day, I wanted their guy to win, too, but that would mean the story would be bigger than anyone anticipated, and I wasn't sure I wanted that.

While I wasn't looking, the candidate was suddenly being interviewed by another reporter who looked pretty close to my age. She was using a pretty beefy recording device to get all of his answers. I thought, Oh, man, a recorder, why didn't I think of that? But then I thought, Whatever, I'm old school that way, that bitch probably doesn't even know how to USE a notepad.

However, she DID seem to know how to interview someone, which was more than I could shake a stick at. As the votes came in, it became more and more obvious that our boy was going to lose. He stood contemplatively in front of a computer monitor with his arms crossed. I looked on as well, then I leaned on the chair next to him.

"So I noticed that every incident of the phrase "Legalize Freedom" is capitalized on your web site. Has that been trademarked yet?" I gave a sharkish smirk.

"Ehh. I don't know. Try asking Jimmy," he said pointing behind him. "He took care of the site."

I leaned forward a little more, and dipped into my serious voice. "So do you plan on staying in politics if you lose tonight?"

"Well, I've been writing about this for a long time, and that's not going to stop anytime soon..." I began nodding as I scribbled into my notepad, trying to write as fast as he was talking, like a real reporter. Not even before he finished his first sentence was I filled with dread as I watched the words come out of his mouth and onto my notepad in a horrifically jumbled mess while he looked on, agast at my sheer incompetence.

Terry the reporter, can't even read his own handwriting. I imagined the fate of Terry the F1 Grand Prix driver - putting his vehicle into reverse at the start of the race and careening directly into a crowd of seated patrons.

I continued to scribble as though I perfectly understood every cryptic line and arch. In reality, I was overcome by embarrassment. That special kind of private embarrassment that clouds your memory until you can't quite remember how it ended - just that it happened. Before I knew it, Mr. Candidate was looking at another monitor with his back to me and I was leaning against another cubicle carefully looking over my nonsensical notes.

Fortunately, the photographer had already left to cover some other politcal event. He probably would've been deeply disgusted by the fact that an idiot like me was hired by the same people that hired him

The cloud of embarrassment keeps me from remembering when exactly it was that the two Facebook kids started talking to me. The guy reminded me of a film student from Emerson. The girl worked as an aide of some sort for the candidate, and I couldn't decide which high school clique she would've best belonged to. Smart but snarky like the girls who would hang out in that nook in the hallway, with an air of vaguely cute annoyance that I would attribute to the majority of the Lunch Bunch. It helped (or didn't help, I guess, depending on how you look at it) that she was buzzed.

She was wearing what looked like a modestly low-cut prom dress, complete with one of those refrigerated flowers. Even after I already made a concerted effort not to, I kept looking at her cleavage. She's probably reading this, too, since she ultimately convinced me to befriend her on Facebook.

She complimented me on my eyes, beard and sense of humor. She also gave me a kiss on the cheek and wrote her number in my notepad as I was leaving. It felt incredibly unprofessional, but nice, too. This stuff doesn't happen to me often, so I never know how I should react.

With the help of a regular at the paper, I was able to put the article together on the blog. All in all, I was intrigued at how aloof the candidate was, standing around button-lipped with his arms crossed, clearly anxious as all hell. Meanwhile, all of his friend and support are have a good time, treating it like a regular party, almost as though they were enjoying themselves precisely because he could not. And then to find out that he lost after all of that waiting and campaigning and hard, hard work - to concede to men who he truly believed he were not suited as senator in comparison to him - that takes a lot of courage. He has to remain hopeful for the battles ahead. This loss was just one. He has to remain confident that liberty will prevail.

But if you look at the story as it's written, you realize that it could have just as easily been written by anyone about anyone at anytime. It was just like my dad had said. If you know how the game is played, you can write the story before it even happens.

I wanted to write with a sympathetic nod towards the candidate, but that's just not how news works. That's not the media's job. They have to convey the facts. Feeling is for the readers and the viewers to do.

Keeping that in mind, Tim and I did the video for the closing awards ceremony at the Hoboken International Film Festival. The main event as far as anyone was concerned was Billy Dee Williams accepting of a lifetime achievement award. We made the video with that in mind.

We also got footage of Jeff, the entertainment editor, on the red carpet with Billy Dee and others. Jeff is great, but didn't include him because he simply did not seem relevant to the rest of the report, and we didn't include much of our red carpet footage because it just wasn't very impressive. Frankly, we didn't SHOOT much red carpet footage because it wasn't very impressive. If it was interesting, we would have shot it, but it wasn't, so we didn't.

So what do I hear about our video the next day? "Where's Jeff? Where's the red carpet? Where's the glitz and the glam and the girls with their impossible amounts of cleavage?" I couldn't tell them, "On the cutting room floor where they belong," because they're paying me. Now they're asking for another cut of the video with all of that stuff put back in.

I'm just confused, that's all. I'm confused as to why I have to take the present emotion out of one event and infuse another event with artificial importance. I have to do a story on something that, as far as I'm concerened, didn't really happen.

I've already tried to look on the bright side. I nearly convinced myself that my stint at the paper was the best thing going for my career.

I'm through with lying. I done with pretending. I'm

so sick and tired of being admired
That I wish that I would just die or get fired
And drop from my label and stop with the fables
I'm not gonna be able to top what my name is~~

The freshest of beats

2008-06-05T00:57:00.000-04:00

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/a/c/8/ac89eba69c634da23b4a03618550b362.mp3

Final paper for Performance Perspectives, 5/5/08

2008-06-02T14:00:00.002-04:00

I want to explore the performer-audience relationship. Specifically, I want to show how a particular audience's attitude and receptiveness can effectively change the outcome of an artist's work. This includes literal censorship, the criticisms of the audience and the community at large, and the pressures of an audience's expectations on the mind of the artist.

I want the audience to feel their impact on the performer's artistic freedom. I want them to decide exactly what the performers limits will be, and see how those limits take effect. I want the performer to make the best of it.

I've looked into particular incidents of artists' reactions to audience responses, and the effects on their later work. I’ve also looked into the works of artists that have explored their relationship to the audience and to their selves.

I drew inspiration from the two works that have affected my life the most: Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ren & Stimpy.

Knowing the demands of the audience, John Kricfalusi and Spümco studios fought tooth and nail with Nickelodeon to air episodes of Ren & Stimpy that eventually became classics. Nickelodeon then fired the original crew and attempted to make new episodes mimicking the style of the original ones. Most of them missed the point, relying entirely on sight gags, gleaning over the complicated relationship between the titular characters.

The tale of Ren & Stimpy is one of deceit and woe. Even after attaining critical success and a dedicated audience, it turns out that artists can still be screwed over by their producers. Still, while their happiness was brief, it was still there – an uncompromising understanding between artist and audience.

Director and writer Hideaki Anno received death threats from fans in response to the series finale of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and then used scans and screenshots of these death threats in the End of Evangelion movie. Fans complained about a complete lack of sex and violence in the series finale, and requested that the movie fix this problem. So Anno wrote some disturbing scenes involving voyeuristic masturbation and brutal evisceration – not exactly what fans had in mind.

Anno started by seeking sympathy from his fans, and eventually began to regard them as something like adversaries to be overcome. Despite their wishes, he always made the work that he wanted to make. Interestingly, despite this tension, the fate of Anno and Gainax studio was the opposite of Spümco’s – the Evangelion franchise is still growing and accumulating a new audience.

Sure enough, this revelation ties into the findings in my field research.

I am a moderator at the RPG Maker Pavilion message board. I don’t use any of the RPG Maker programs anymore, but I stick around because it’s a nice, smart, funny community. Many people here are creative sorts, writers and drawers, and some still make RPGs. So in a topic of my own creation I asked point blank: “Is the artists' job to speak for the audience in their work, or to do whatever the hell they want and hope the audience can appreciate it?”

The answers I received were kind of obvious, and I figured I probably should’ve framed my question a little more tactfully.

EvilNixon666: “If I'm doing work for myself, then I create what I want to see. If other people like it, woo. If they don't, it still appeals to me. Work for money means it has to appeal to someone else, too, and maybe a lot of other people. So I guess it depends on the situation.”

The Ice Cream Man: “A true artist creates for him/her self and if people like it good. However, if you're trying to make money, well you better appeal to your audience.”

highwind: “i write stuff that makes me laugh. on rare occasions, other people laugh too. i write music that i want to play. some people kinda like it. there's my answer!”

One person by the moniker of “Perversion” gave a very detailed account of his own experience.

My first game for RPGM, Series 1, followed the traditional RPG formula, albeit adding things to that formula that to that point had not been done with RPGM3. Meaning, it was meant to appeal to the widest majority of people in the community who download and play RPGM games. It had/has a respectable amount of downloads.

For the "Extravaganzicon" contest, I decided to make a game for myself, not necessarily a game to win the contest. I had made a poetry topic … and it was met mostly with indifference. So I decided to base an RPGM game around my poetry and short stories, and included about 15 minigames/puzzles to add actual "gameplay" to the game. There is no story. There is no character development. You basically play minigames and solve puzzles in order to unlock and be able to read my angsty writing.

I predicted that I'd be lucky to get 30 downloads in the first 6 months for the game, A Series Aside, due to the somewhat esoteric nature of the game. But lo and behold ... even though it was released more than half a year after my first game (which was more traditional, and thus, I thought, able to appeal to a larger audience), it currently has more than 50 more downloads than Series 1, my first game. A Series Aside has over 500 presently … while Series 1 has not even broken 450 (I think).

The point being, I'm of the opinion that if an artist follows his own path, and creates something that is meaningful/relevant/enjoyable to himself, a prospective audience will most likely be able to pick up on this, and begin to form a stronger fanbase for the artist's work, while those creating specifically for "the masses" will soon be forgotten.

More than anything, I just found this answer to be very heartening. I agreed that above all, a work should be honest, and should come from the heart. This energized me and renewed my verve.

I began to get an idea of what I wanted to do. I dipped into the well of knowledge provided by my Living Art in Real Space class, and discovered Marina Abramovic.

In Abramovic’s 1974 performance piece, Rhythm 0, she placed many objects on a table and invited the audience, via sign, to use any of them on her as they wished. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip and a gun with a single bullet. In the six hours that the performance took place, the audience moved from hesitation to out right aggression, pricking her and cutting away her clothes. Someone went for the gun, but was ultimately dissuaded from using it. Abramovic discovered that, in leaving your fate in the hands of the audience, “you can be killed”.

The idea of giving oneself over to the audience was the crux was my whole idea. Not only did it demonstrate the effect of the audience’s presence, it got them to actively participate. In that way the work in itself becomes a collaborative effort. Of course, I did not want my performance to be potentially fatal.

So I borrowed some sense from another performance artist I had learned of: Matthew Barney.

Barney was recruited by Yale for its football team. That didn’t pan out, so he began focusing on making art - what he calls “restraint pieces”, environments in which he made drawing as difficult as possible. For example, by attaching himself to rubber cords and straining up an incline to make a mark on the ceiling. They were "facilities designed to defeat the facility of drawing."

Barney demonstrates that, like a sport, art involves strategy and intuition. "Being the subject of that kind of manipulation is an interesting way to learn about how flexible an image can be … how the subject must have the ability to evacuate his or her body in order for the transformation to take place."

It’s been said over and over that restrictions can be quite freeing in the creative process. However, I wanted the restriction in itself to mean something. I believed that the ideas presented Barney’s and Abramovic’s work might actually compliment each other quite well. One examines the role of the audience. The other, the process of the artist.

And so I had my idea. I would invite the audience to restrain me to whatever degree they please. Then, having been restrained, I would attempt to create some kind of artwork. I would dictate the tools at their disposal, and similarly, they would dictate the tools at my disposal.

Now that I was certain in my goals, there was one more thing I wanted to know: the safest way to use duct tape in a performance. So I sent an email to my academic advisor, stage combat guru Ted Hewlett.

Hey, Ted.

I'm shooting a scene in a movie where one of the actors is supposed to be tied up rather uncomfortably to a chair, rendered mostly immobile. The actor said he'd be ready for any kind of treatment, but I want to make sure.

Would you know the most effectively safe way to restrain someone to a chair while keeping it as convincing as possible? Our initial plan was to use duct tape, and adhere their arms to the arms of the chair, and their legs to the legs.

Mainly, I'd like to know if, when we finally take the tape off, the hair on their arms and legs will be pulled right off or not. That's something that only just occurred to us.

He responded promptly and in great detail, giving all sorts of solutions to the hair problem, in a numbered list. The very first solution was the most obvious: “Costume the actor in long shirt/pants. You'll still be able to restrain him by taping him to the chair, but it won't be right up against his flesh.”

So that’s why I decided to wear my GAP sweatshirt for the performance.

In addition to duct tape, I also purchased rope – mostly for its difference from duct tape, aesthetically. I also decided to include toilet paper and plastic wrap in the inventory for finer control. The important thing is that there were enough implements for everyone to share.

I obtained the big sheet of paper from Fajitas & ‘Ritas. It was the same paper they use as placemats. All I had to do was ask.

It was important that I use a print notice to enact the whole restriction process. To have written it makes it seem as though it comes from a different mind, from fate or something else. If I verbally asked everyone to do it, it would seem more like a dare or a challenge. I felt like that would undermine everything.

It was also important that I was sitting. That way, the chair, as a place of comfort and power, could become a burden under the proper circumstances. Also, being tied to myself just doesn’t seem that restrictive.

I was very nervous that the invitation would fall flat altogether. I wasn’t sure the atmosphere was right. In my Living Art class, people are on their feet all the time. The lecture set-up of our classroom, though, made me nervous.

I thought, at most, a handful of people would even bother to check the notice. Imagine my delight when the whole class came like a wave towards me. I’m sure a bunch of them were kicking to get out of their seats. Maybe some were just glad to be part of something as opposed to listening to more hypothetical performances. Nothing against them. I just wish there were more straight up performances. All those performers in the class, afterall.

Anyway, the class’ enthusiasm was wonderful. The restriction process went exactly as I had hoped. No holds barred and all that. I didn’t expect my ears to be stuffed with toilet paper, but I welcomed it. It didn’t quite work, though.

Something I didn’t expect was the use of the Crayola pencils as some sort of gag. The pencils were my only means of creation. I thought at first that I should separate them from the rest of the tools on the table, but if I put them too far away, I might not have been able to get them once I was restricted. Also, we were short on time. So I just put them on the table.

It’s a good thing someone came up with the idea of the gag, though. When I started the creation process, I couldn’t find the package of pencils on the table. I couldn’t reach very far to search, either, since my wrist was taped tight to the chair. I didn’t find out until after the performance that the package was knocked onto the floor, anyway.

Moving myself and the chair was tougher than I anticipated. The blindfold made it tough for me to sense were I was going, but there was enough space at the bottom for me to lean my head back and see through. I could locate the trash bins and the class, so I just had to get through them to reach the paper on the wall.

As soon as I got past the bins, I couldn’t move any further. I had been tied to the door of the classroom with rope. I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I played it up like I was. I heard Steve or Grant talking about it while everyone was tying me up. Secretly, I had hoped someone would be cruel enough to do it. It turns out that I knew my audience better than I thought I did. I considered it might happen, and fortunately I was close enough that I could go through with plan B.

I leaned down towards my lap and let my Crayola gag fall out of my mouth into my hands. I won’t lie; I was pretty disappointed that my only options were yellow, blue and brown. But, like everything else, I had it coming, so I rolled with it.

I had no idea what the pencils would taste like, but I trusted that they were non-toxic, since they were Crayola products. As it turns out, colored pencils are absolutely tasteless. At least, these were. I wasn’t especially sensitive to how much of any color I was chewing up. I knew that blue and yellow made green, but once you added brown to the mix, anything could happen. I gave up the idea that I would be able to control what color the resulting mixture would be and I focused just on the composition.

I really wasn’t sure my plan would work. I’m not a very good spitter to begin with, and I wasn’t sure I could make the distance between the wall and me. Fortunately, there was no rush. I licked all the specks of waxy graphite or whatever out of my teeth and gathered it up, along with some mucous to give it some weight.

I enjoyed the reaction I got from my first barrage. I believed that my Living Art class might have actually waited respectfully, in silence throughout the whole performance, but I think I appreciated the wiseass jeers from all of the actors much more.

On my second spit, I could just barely see Sisskin-Fernandez jump out of her seat. For I moment I was worried that I might have sprayed a little and hit her. I felt really bad, but it’s very easy to get over things when you’re tied to a chair.

I thought that, by throwing one of the pencils like a dart, I could make some sort of mark that I could consider a signature. It didn’t work out that way, but I’m okay with that.

Saying “Thank you” to end the piece didn’t occur to me until just then. I kind of a wish there was a way to signal the ending without speaking, but it just happened that way.

The responses I received on paper were overwhelmingly positive, though very few of them actually had anything to say about the performance. One wondered if the purpose was a statement about grotesqueness. I hadn’t considered it to be an issue, but I was flattered that they would use the word “grotesque” to describe it.

One person expressed mild confusion, but was reaffirmed that “you can make art no matter what”. A few other people were able to gather the same conclusion. I’m very glad that there was something positive to be extracted from it.

I was absolutely prepared to answer any questions that anybody had after the performance. I wanted people to know that real work and thought went into the preparation of it. Having it end the way it did, though – without a resolute discussion, without class-wide closure – was just perfect. Right now, I think I have my own answer to the artist/audience equation. I didn’t want to hand it to everyone. I didn’t want my work to be about answers. That they had time to think to themselves instead of speak was fantastic.

Hit and a miss

2008-06-01T18:52:00.002-04:00

I went for a walk to clear up the funk I was in. It was working for a while, but then I overshot the time it would take to walk back to the house, and I thought myself into an even deeper funk.

I ran into Mrs. Robertson walking the dog. We said Hi, kept walking, and then ignored each other until we realized we were walking in the same direction. She asked how I was and I struggled not to say anything self-flagellating or depressing.

She's still pretty grateful for that time I showed up to drive Matthew to work.

The Pillows, "Last Dinosaur"

2008-05-15T14:53:00.003-04:00

Kitzukarenai de todome o sasu
dono jidai mo iki nobite kita
uso mitai na sora no shita
kowai mono nante oboe shainai

Machi o sotto mi oroshite
kimagure ni huntzu ketari
sokora chou ni hi o tsuketa
sou ieba nante namae dattakke

Kanashimi o zenbu hiki uketa tte daijoubu
tekagen nante iranai
doko de datte dare no mae datte
tada jibun de itai

Hibbari dashita kage no kage
shimi konderu kodoku na hibi
sekai chou ga iji tsuita tte
detarame ni kyou mo wa meite miseru

Sonna ni minai de
PINTO zurashita kurai de ii
hadaka mitai na kibun
uki ashi datta mirai ni human demo
me o samashite itai

Kanashimi o zenbu hiki uketa tte daijoubu
tekagen nante iranai
doko de datte dare no mae datte
tada jibun de itai

Put in the final blow without being noticed
That's how I lived each generation
Under the sky, like a lie
I don't remember anything I'm scared of

Looking down at the city
I step on things at whim
Or put things on fire
What was that name again?

I don't mind taking on all of the sadness
I don't need any sympathy
Anywhere, or in front of anyone
I want to be myself

The shadow of a shadow that was pulled out
Lonely days that are soaking in
Even if the entire world is annoyed
I will scream nothingness today again

Don't look at me so much
It's just perfect if you're a bit out of focus
I feel like I'm naked
Even if I'm not happy with the future that's floating under me
I want to be awake through all of it

I don't mind taking on all of the sadness
I don't need any sympathy
Anywhere, or in front of anyone
I want to be myself

Closure is as closure does

2008-05-03T13:52:00.004-04:00

Importance Revisited

2008-04-26T19:27:00.001-04:00

What's important

2008-03-17T00:02:00.002-04:00

2008-02-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

http://www.freewebs.com/radleygh/RAHM.mp3

"Me" project supplement

2008-02-06T00:28:00.001-05:00

2008-01-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

IGN Film Force
Which area of the country did you loathe going to?

David Cross
I had no problem in Alaska or Hawaii, which I never went to, but I'd say the continental United States was where I liked going the least. I always had a huge love/hate relationship with it. I would approach the gig going, "Oh, this is going to suck, it's going to be a nightmare." But then always in the back of my mind going, "I'm going to get some killer stories out of this. I'm going to meet some retarded people and I'm sure something's going to happen, someone's going to yell at me, somebody's going to want to beat me up, and it'll be a good story. There'll be that. At least that'll be happen. It may be a nightmare on stage, and the week might suck because the headliner's a fucking asshole, but at least I'm going to get a good story and it's only going to be five days. I'll figure it out, and I'll go home, and I'll have a little pocket money, and I don't have to have a day job, and I can go play softball and ride my bike around. It'll be all right."

Time is but a river, and I fucked up

2008-01-26T18:46:00.000-05:00

2008-01-12T02:29:00.000-05:00

http://www.idrinkyourmilkshake.com/milkshake.mp3

2008-01-11T01:29:00.000-05:00

The saddest time of every year

2008-01-10T00:57:00.000-05:00

is going through iTunes and unchecking all of the songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas so they won't play on shuffle anymore.

Burn My Dread

2008-01-08T00:21:00.000-05:00

Yukari
It's easy to get freaked out by something you can't see, don'tcha think?

Junpei
Actually, I'm more worried about things I CAN see... like bats. And knives!

Laeti Triumphantes

2007-12-25T23:10:00.000-05:00

You can't find it until you stop looking for it

2007-12-17T01:28:00.001-05:00

Wah, wah, wah

2007-12-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure I can remember the last time I screwed up so many things at once.

Not since this time last year.

It's like a whole new holiday in itself.

I always let my guard down this time of year.

A moment of weakness is it all takes for everything to go Jenga on me.

I used to like December.

Thinksgiving

2007-12-01T15:18:00.001-05:00

Farah threw herself all over me, like she always does whenever we meet.

I had never considered until then that I could probably get something from her pretty easily.

I promised Chad that I wouldn't, so, that's that.

Farah would complain about how things are boring and awkward. Whenever there was a lull in any conversation, she would say, "Awkwaaard," with some faux anxiety.

That never improves the situation. Does she realize that? She probably doesn't care.

I guess it's not enough to look in the mirror. Just today, I said my own name out loud, and it sounded completely foreign to me.

Farah talked to Rick while she was clinging on to me. She brought up Emily Wolfe. I wished she hadn't, even though I wasn't in a position to feel anything.

People were looking for somewhere to go and something to do. Larry offered up his place, but I was in no mood for any more buses.

So the meeting soon reached an evolutionary dead end. We parted like a newspaper in a rainy gutter.

I dropped Charles and his two friends off at his house. I only remembered one name, since it was just a letter - E.

I was ready to drive home and wash my hands of everyone I knew when Tim called. He told me to go to the Warren household - John had Battlestar Galactica episodes on CD waiting for us. They were on the toaster in the kitchen.

On the road, I was certain that someone was following me. Even when I took a wrong turn, the car was right there behind me. Of course, it did not follow on the next turn.

I pulled in front of the Warrens' place. Tim told me the CDs were on the toaster - did he expect me to go in and get them myself?

At our house, friends rarely knock or ring the door bell before entering - especially not John. I figured the practice was the same at his house.

Still, I was hesitant. I opened the screen door and knocked. There was no response. It was late, and I didn't want to ring the door bell. So I opened the door and stepped in.

Mario came up and started barking like crazy. Considering I was an unannounced visitor, I couldn't really blame him.

Mario knows me. At least, I thought he did. I thought dogs were good at that sort of thing.

At the time, there was a dog residing in my house, as well - my cousin's dog, Ozzie. He's a good dog. Quiet, calm, amiable, and he can be easily led from the room if you just don't want him around.

Using my relationship with Ozzie as a model, I figured I could reason with Mario.

"Hey, hey," I said. "Easy." I lowered myself slightly, presenting my hand to him as a gesture of trust.

And then Mario bit me.

I had never been bitten by a dog before, so I was kind of surprised by how it felt. It felt a lot like my middle finger had been slammed in a door.

Mario kept barking. I stepped backwards out of the house, and the screen door closed in front of me. Mario had successfully ejected me.

I looked down at Mario through the door. He was still barking. I looked at my finger. It was too dark to see what kind of mark may have been left. I thought about reaching in to close the front door, but I didn't want to rile up Mario again.

I reached for my phone and called John.

"John, are you at your house right now?"

"No, I'm in the city."

"Oh. Is anybody in your house right now?" Besides Mario, I mean.

"Let me check."

He hung up. As I put my phone away, I noticed blood on my coat - right on the front, and another blotch on each sleeve. Even in the faintest light, its vibrant red hue was striking. I smiled.

By this time, Mario had retreated to the stair case a little ways beyond the entrance, staring me down. In a moment, Mrs. Warren descended from the steps behind him, went into the kitchen, and came back with the CDs, wrapped in yellow notebook paper.

"It looks like you've already been in."

"Yeah, I was, but, uh, Mario nipped me."

She invited me in for a bandage. In the kitchen, she saw the blood on my coat. She took soap and cold water and wiped it off.

"Mario, you fuck," she muttered.

Mario sidled up to me, looking up and slightly to the side. He was not barking. He seemed apologetic enough.

Everyone has passions. Some let them bubble over, coating everything in a hot, musky sheen. Some curb them until they seep out through the pores. Some are too sensitive to notice. Some are too sensitive to live by anything else.

I wonder what Mario smelled on me that night?

I've got to know

2007-12-01T00:12:00.001-05:00

I'm not sitting around and waiting. Not this time.

Security isn't worth humiliation.

It looks like I have some pride, after all.

She sure didn't pull any punches, though.

2007-11-29T22:03:00.000-05:00

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/2/c/5/2c5418b0fcc61629e1d192c8581e4ab4.mp3

Man, whatever.

2007-11-04T18:51:00.000-05:00

2007-10-31T01:02:00.000-04:00

pages.emerson.edu/Students/t/Terence_Torres/RipleyRedux.mov

Precedent

2007-10-25T00:36:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn't watch a movie today. I guess that means a failed the Daily Movie Challenge.

Instead, I watched a bunch of Cinemassacre's Monster Madness videos. I watched all of them. And then I watched South Park. That's got to be almost like watching a movie, right?

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/a/7/7/a7765571ef6af4d566206f3f19f46d7c.mp3

The Daily Movie Challenge

2007-10-23T21:10:00.000-04:00

I heard once that, while working on Kill Bill, Quentin Tarentino watched a movie every single day. I don't know where I heard that. I probably made that up.

Whatever that impish asshole actually did, I think I'm like to watch a movie a day. I keep saying, "Oh, I should see that movie," but I never do. But perhaps if a set a PRECEDENT, my will might be bolstered.

I figured today was as good a day as any to start.

SO. UH.

I watched Casablanca finally. For some reason, the first thing that struck me was the great score, and not just As Time Goes By.

It's been a while since I wished I was a fictional character, but man, do I wish I was Rick.

It's amazing how iconic this movie is. Everything, everyone. It's a near-perfect culmination of character and story.

Needed more Peter Lorre, though.

Fine Print Faggotry

2007-10-12T15:34:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, roughly a month after we moved into our Boston apartment, my roommate Ken tells me that we finally got our Comcast bill. He hands it to me, because the account is in my name.

We opted for the student bundle, which includes cable TV and high speed Internet. We're charged $37 for Internet and $55 for TV. And $155 for a previous balance.

Wait, what? There were two things wrong with this. One, this was the first bill we had ever received. Two, even taking into account this theoretical "other bill", we still shouldn't owe anyone 250 damn dollars. We could buy a Wii for our apartment with that much money. We wouldn't NEED Cable television if we had a God damn Wii.

So I call them up, and I ask the fellow on the other end why our bill is two hundred and fifty fucking dollars. He says that the bill also includes the charges from last month's bill. I tell him that we never received a bill for the prior month. He seems slightly dumbfounded, and after doing something on his computer he says that the billing department will send us a copy of last month's bill, which we would receive in a week's time - three days after our current bill is due.

I try to ask him for a breakdown, anyway. Why would our first bill cost $155 when the student bundle is supposed to $80 a month? He doesn't know. So I try to walk him through it like I was an orderly. Was it the cable box? Is the cable box worth 70 dollars? He says it's worth 30 at most. Was it the signal booster? How much is that? He said the signal booster comes standard. What does that mean, sir? Does "standard" mean "free"?

I wish him a good day, and check Comcast's web site like I should have done to begin with. Apparently all I have to do is create an account online, and I can view and pay my bills right there. How come the guy on the phone didn't suggest this? I go through my account pages, and download .PDF files of both of my bills.

When I finally got a look at the elusive first bill, I noticed how it was different from the one we had received in the mail. There was an additional charge for $57.90 - "one-time charges and credits". Oh, right. Forgot all about those darn one-time charges and credits. How STUPID of me to FORGET.

The reason we never get this first bill is because it was sent to Roxbury, Massachusetts, not to Boston, where we live.

Typecast

2007-10-09T00:27:00.000-04:00

The last thing I need right now is hope

2007-10-08T20:26:00.000-04:00

2007-09-30T23:15:00.001-04:00

http://www.redpaperstudios.com/Files/I'm%20Not%20a%20Power%20Ranger%20(2004).MP3

Claptrappery

2007-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

The Talented Mr. Ripley monologue

When I first tried this in class, I did it at the piano, like in the movie, playing the only song I know. I took it slowly, more so than in this clip, proceeding pretty much whenever everything felt green, like playing Frogger. Everyone was pretty captivated, and I'm sure the pacing of my song helped a lot. Instead of offering directorial advice, Ken said he had nothing to add.

Then Nick, seeing right through me, asked, "What's he going to do in an audition where there's no piano?" Ken said, "Let's find out."

Obviously, the result is quite different without a prop to occupy me. It felt good, but after looking at it, it seems sort of lifeless. Maybe it's just the fan.

Impromptu senior service story

I forgot I had to come into class with a story ready to tell. The night before, I had been talking to my roommate about the Northern Valley Arts Festival, and especially about my relationship with Paul Vecchio. I had no idea how I would compact it into a single story, but I gave it a shot. I pretty much failed, because it took about ten minutes to finish, and I still missed a lot.

Still, I got applause and sympathy. Ken said he didn't understand what the hell I was talking about, but enjoyed my energy. He said I reminded him of Steve Buscemi. I was honored.

Sometimes I feel like the only reason my performances are impressive is because they belie my apparent social nature. I don't think studio executives will give a shit about my social nature, though.

[Ken was forced to cut out much of the story, including Stink Van, Charles Zhu, and Vecchio's usurpation of my home.]

What I've learned so far

2007-09-16T19:52:00.000-04:00

I am capable of being aesthetically appealing. This concept is new and frightening.

I was late to my camera acting class. I approached the elevator and stood next to a girl in a pretty dress, making the most out of the remaining days of summer sun. She herself had just run from a ballet class just prior. She was out of breath. We were both late. And yet she still found the time to turn around and introduce herself to me, and asked for my name. I was at least mildly confused, and considered her ulterior motives.

Later on, once she was doing her monologue from Cowboy Mouth, Ken told her to choose a listener, someone to react to her so that her delivery would have some foundation in reality. She wondered aloud, "Who haven't I worked with before?" and pointed right at me. We sat on the floor with everyone around us, and she looked into my eyes, put a hand on my hairy knee and told me that rock and roll is more inspiring than God. I helped her up from the floor once she was through.

I was wearing a button-down shirt at the time. I must purchase more.

When I was at Bed Bath & Beyond, the second lady behind the counter complimented my eyes and my eyebrows, and conjectured that my mother must be beautiful. I stammered a Thank you.

I am not a Medium. I am a Small.

While Emerson students as a whole seem mostly irresponsible in regards to planning for the future, my friends are not. Their goals are oddly specific, but genuine. Is that how it always is? I must find a particular venue and pretend that I care about it.

In at least one capacity, I know what I want. At this point, it's only a matter of timing. I have my research cut out for me. I'll see what this week brings.

If I miss the boat, I'll swim there myself.

Just like every year

2007-09-11T18:33:00.000-04:00

I show up.

The city is bathed in beautiful, golden sunlight.

The wading pond glistens.

Happy people splay throughout the garden with their sweetie pies.

Children shout and laugh and chase pigeons.

How lucky am I to have my own place in a city as pleasant as this?

And then the clouds descend.

And it rains.

And it rains.

And it rains.

From Lowdown

2007-09-10T18:55:00.000-04:00

Lance
To the abductors, the victim is just a commodity, see? For the sake of argument, let’s say someone wants to by your car, and you agree to sell it. You quote them an amount, and when the prospective buyer happily, eagerly agrees to the price, what goes through your mind? “Damn, I should’ve asked for more.” It’s no different with kidnappers. If you give into their demands, they’ll hang on to the victim for as long as they like. What you have to do is haggle. You have to let them think the victim isn’t worth as much as they had thought. That way, you give yourself an edge. You play their game, fight fire with fire. Kidnapping is a business. You have to treat it as such.

---

Lance
Life moves just like water. Some people settle for the still calm of a secluded pond… But those with ambition move more like waves. Just like it is with waves, with every rise there is a fall. If this case is any indication, I’d say I’m on a rise. And I’d rather fall hard than never rise at all. When I do fall…when I hit the pavement, and my legs are broken and blood is filling up my lungs, I’m gonna pull myself up, turn around, look to the sky and say, “See how high I was? I could see everything.”

---

[Lance hangs up and sits for a moment. Then he throws his wallet out of the passenger window.]

Lance
Whoop. Say, could you go out and grab that for me?

[Josh looks out the window, and then looks at Lance like he’s crazy. Looks out the window again, then looks back at Lance as he opens the door and steps out.]

[Front view of the car as Josh walks towards the wallet. The door closes and locks. Josh turns back to the car.]

[Through the window.]

Josh
Hey!!

Lance
Josh, buddy, I decided I can’t involve you in this anymore. I’ve gotta take action, and it’d be stupid of me to endanger someone else while I’m on the job.

Josh
He’s my FRIEND!

Lance
HEY, listen to me! I need to tell you something… There was once a great Zen master named Gutei. Whenever anyone asked him about Zen, Gutei would quietly raise one finger into the air. There was a boy in the village that started doing the same thing. Whenever he heard people talking about Gutei's teachings, he would interrupt the discussion and just raise his finger. So Gutei heard about the boy's mischief, and when he saw him in the street, Gutei took him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and started to run off, but Gutei called out to him, “Boy!” And when the boy turned to look, Gutei raised his finger into the air. At that moment, the boy became enlightened.

[Beat]

Josh
But--!

[Lance raises one finger. Then he puts the car into gear.]

[Josh takes a step away and Lance drives off.]

2007-08-31T02:34:00.001-04:00

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/b/3/4/b34611e7d1d7fa858e070f165ee12a22.mp3

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/f/4/1/f4157082b9be87a4a80155bef5f6ab53.mp3

http://141.158.22.131/jay-zeezer/mp3/16_99_Luft_Problems.mp3

DIAL "P" FOR PANCAKE

2007-08-28T22:13:00.000-04:00

written by Kefka Jr., Sir T. Magus, Gollum-X, Crazy Dan, Ish, Jake McNeill

CHAPTER 1

Hobema chased the culprit down the alley. He was good, but he was no match for HOBEMA: the experienced chair repairman.

The country road was desolate this time of year. Despite that, there was a lot more roadkill stained into the ground. Robins populated this area greatly. Their Italian accents rang throughout the countryside. Badgers cook their rice around this time of day. It’s used in their guitar smashing rituals.

But our story doesn’t take place here. The current setting is a futuristic city in Thailand. Hobema was on this fitness brochure hi-jacker’s trail for two months now. Now he had the chance to lay the smack down on him.

Hobema jumped over a family, ran down the sidewalk and kicked the postman out of his way. He felt he couldn’t get this guy. He was fast, due to his condition, armstrongyria, which replaces the person’s blood with rubber cement. Since the body can’t function too well without any blood anyone with the condition needs to have a series of painful blood injections every four minutes. When that time comes, Hobema will have him.

Gaddi zoomed down the sidewalk, passing the many bystanders in his way. Dammit, get out of my way! he thought. This guy’s persistent... he’s been chasing me for two months now!

He checked his wristwatch again. Damn, one more minute until my horribly painful blood injection!

Gaddi glanced back to see where the chair repairman was. He’s catching up, and fast. Gaddi looked forward again and saw any means of a faster escape. There was a kid boarding a hovercycle directly ahead. Yes! The perfect escape vehicle...

The speedy fitness brochure hijacker caught up to the kid and grabbed the hovercycle’s handles.

"Hey, what’re you doing, jerk?!" the kid yelped.

Gaddi looked down at the child and grinned. The smile stretched from ear to ear and his jaw dropped to accommodate his huge, white showy teeth. He looked like some deranged fish. A toothy fish.

The kid screamed and fell to the sidewalk, motionless.

That was another advantage to armstrongyria: The ability to paralyze children and small animals.

Gaddi started the hovercycle, and levitated several feet off the ground before crashing back down. He fell off the bike. A hunk of hair was jammed in the bike’s exhaust port. It was jammed in there real good...

"Oh no!" Gaddi screamed as he began to convulse.

Hobema stood over the gelatinous mass on the ground. He picked up a stick and poked the beige-colored blob of rubber cement. It was the brochure hijacker all right. He must’ve missed his injections.

After poking and flinging more of the criminal around, Hobema called the police at the nearest payphone.

"Yeah, he just expanded and turned into a blob," Hobema explained to the police chief. "It’s like what happened to the villain in Blade, but less stupid... Uh-huh... Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’ll be waiting."

He hung up and stuck a finger in the coin-return slot. There was nothing inside. Not one coin.

"Aw, come on!" Hobema cursed. Before his anger could subside he heard a ticking sound. It was faint, but it was there. And it was coming from the phone.

CHAPTER 2

Gimmpy the Crab sat on his desk. He found that odd because he usually sat on a chair or a water cooler. He grabbed a frog from his desk drawer and dangled it over a blender set on puree. He squinted and asked the frog the question he asked the other frogs.

"Is Denis Franz made up of thousands of other bald men?" Gimmpy swallowed his prostate, which was extremely painful considering the location of the prostate and yelled "TELL ME!"

The frog stayed silent.

"IS HE!?!" Gimmpy screamed and dropped the frog into the blender. The frog let out a scream of pain. A scream Gimmpy identified with the song of the songstress Hairy Bill the Gas attendant.

Sweaters, Gimmpy’s secretary, opened the door and announced:

"Mr. Gimmpy? There’s a call for you on line one," she grunted a manly grunt and left with a slam of the door.

Gimmpy picked up the phone, then dropped it, then picked it up again, but then he accidentally hung up the receiver. Luckily the phone wasn’t plugged in so he never received the call. Gimmpy continued his questioning until the phone rang. Gimmpy picked up the phone, then dropped it, then he fell off of his desk and the radio fell on him, finally he picked up the receiver. It was his partner: Ike Turner.

"Yo man, it’s Ike!" Ike exclaimed in his usual silly voice. That second Gimmpy’s life changed forever. Gimmpy realized he didn’t have a job, secretary, or a partner. Gimmpy hung up the receiver and headed home.

*****

As Gimmpy headed home he noticed a large lump of rubber cement. A man stood by the lump, distracted by a payphone. Gimmpy noticed a brochure in the lump. He picked it up and read it. It advertised a tour of a man’s colon. It sounded like an exciting and very illegal activity. Gimmpy pocketed the brochure and continued his powerwalk home.

The powerwalk home was very unusual, not like his regular way home. Gimmpy thought he was drunk at first, then he thought he was a vampire, finally he noticed something on his left arm.

Usually on his left arm was an over-sized white freckle. This time it was a scar the shape of a pork-chop. Pork Chops were his least favorite food; he was disgusted by looking at it. He had no idea how it got there, but he had a feeling someone did it.

******

That night he had a dream, a dream of pork chops, pork chops that kill. In that dream there was a fat lady that sang to him after the pork chops killed him, the singer looked exactly like his secretary. But for some strange reason she never moved, she was like a basketball poster.

That morning when Gimmpy woke up he had a tune in his head, it kind of went like this... Diddy diddy do do do laddy do liddy da. He made his usual cup of decaf coffee and read the sports section of the newspaper. Then at 8:34 A.M. a slimy and juicy pork chop hit him in the side of the face.

Gimmpy looked around, all he saw was his newspaper and his coffee. He walked around his one-room apartment for any explanation of how it happened. He found nothing so sat back down.

Ten minutes later, another pork chop hit him, but this time something was carved on it. It read... "Pancakes shall kill all of your loved ones, one by one". Gimmpy searched once again for an explanation.

Then, in his left arm, there was a stabbing pain. The scar on his arm was no longer there. Instead, there was carving, still in progress, it said the same thing the pork chop had said, Pancakes shall kill all you’re loved ones, one by one. The pain was felt as if his arm was on fire now. He associated the feeling to continually spilling hot water on yourself.

Then his 1930’s phone rang, which it hasn’t done in 30 years.

"Pancakes shall kill all of your loved ones, one by one."

Blinking, Gimmpy was at first scared, but then realized that he hated everyone and everything, so he had nothing to fear.

Suddenly, King Phillip appeared from under the carpet and stole the phone. Gimmpy cried. Seconds later, a harpoon was shot from the chandelier and hooked onto Catameran’s stomach.

"I’m Catameran," said Catameran to no one in particular and flew away.

"Wow, that’s a lot of useless, named characters. I’m happy," chuckled Gimmpy as he wiped away a tear.

Out of no where, a flock of pancakes burst through the window singing a song that went something like this: dah dah dah dum dah repeated 23 times, each time in a squeakier voice. Arming himself with nothing in particular Gimmpy ran at them with both legs in his pockets.

Gimmpy woke up to the noise of his 1940s phone.

"What a day, what a day." Gimmpy then proceeded to pick himself up and walk towards the shower. As if to try to dodge an oncoming train, Gimmpy dove into his closest and stayed there for six months living on the rat poison he stored for an emergency like this.

CHAPTER 3

Six months and seven days later…

Dick Deacon walked down the hall to his chief’s office. He wondered why the hall was so long. Did it have something to do with Taiwan’s building code? Was it obligatory to have at least one, huge, long corridor in every building? Now that Deacon thought about it, there are a lot of long buildings in the city.

That didn’t matter now. Deacon was late for his meeting and the office door was just over the horizon.

Fifteen minutes later he opened the door to the chief’s office and walked in.

"Hello, Deacon, it’s good to see you again," the chief said.

The chief was a number of a man. Fairly overweight, a big long nose with a mustache underneath, and a pipe underneath the mustache. His marble shaped eyes, thin eyebrows, huge chin, and super-receding hairline didn’t do much for his appearance either. And he always wore suspenders. If Deacon didn’t know any better, he’d swear that he was working under the chief from Inspector Gadget.

"It’s good to see you, too, sir," Deacon replied and took off his coat and hat. His clothes would have been dripping wet had the office hallway been shorter. But the long walk gave his rain-soaked attire time to dry.

"Please, sit down," Chief offered, waving a hand at the chair before his desk.

Deacon did so. "So, what’s so important?"

"I’ve called you down here today to discuss a very important case," Chief said, smoking his pipe at the same time. He pulled a manila folder out of one the desk drawers and handed it to Deacon.

"Six months ago an experienced chair repairman named Hobema Pannini died in Thailand. He was calling the police after he caught a brochure hijacker when the payphone he used exploded and killed him," Chief said. "At the same time, Gimmpy the Crab was haunted by visions of porkchops and was attacked by a flock of pancakes."

Yeah, the pancakes are pretty bad that time of year, Deacon thought. "You think the two deaths are related?"

"Yep. But Gimmpy didn’t die immediately. He was found in his home last week by a fisherman. Apparently, Gimmpy was feeding on rat poison in his closet."

"Crabs aren’t too smart," Deacon pointed out.

Chief nodded. "True, true. But there’s something going on here, Deacon. And the United Nations wants to know what it is. I’m sorry, the United Nations want to know what it is… Damn, how do you say it?"

Deacon was surprised. "The United Nations? What does the U.N. have to do with this?"

Deacon suddenly slipped out of his chair and fell on his backside. He hopped around patting his buttocks until the pain went away. After a long, hearty laugh they both got back to the conversation at hand.

"The criminal Hobema caught, Gaddi Bupkis, was an international brochure hijacker," Chief reminded Deacon. He took the manila folder back from him and read a paper. "He’s been through Brazil, England, France, Spain, Canada, the United States, Japan, Middle East nations… This guy’s a man of the world. No doubt he’s done some naughty things in more than one of those countries. He’s also had an extreme case of armstrongyria."

"That’s right, so extreme he gellatinated," Deacon said. Gellatinated. Deacon giggled.

"And here’s a shocker, Deacon," Chief paused, waiting for Deacon to stop giggling.

"Hee hee… Sorry."

"Gaddi was a member of the Illuminati," Chief finally said.

Deacon gasped and his eyes widened. The Illuminati. He thought he’d never have to hear that name again.

Chief nodded solemnly. "I was surprised, too, Deacon. But I know you can handle the Illuminati. You did before."

"Of course, sir," Deacon assured the Chief.

"Now, here’s a lead to go by," the Chief took a brochure out of the folder. "This is a brochure that was found in Gimmpy the Crab’s home."

Deacon took the folder and read it over. So you Want to Take a Tour of a Man’s Colon. Creepy. And it sounded very illegal.

"You may also want to visit Gimmpy’s home and the crime scene in Thailand. And remember, watch out for the Illuminati," Chief said and handed the folder back to Deacon.

Deacon nodded, took his coat and hat, and walked out of the office.

About four-sixteenths down the hall, the chief’s office exploded. A fireball rushed down the hallway and dispersed just before it reached Deacon.

He slapped his forehead. He forgot to give me one of his self-destructing notes.

As Deacon walked past the halfway point he realized something: He never told me why the U.N. was involved. Then he realized he was in way over his head. Then he tripped.

CHAPTER 4

Deacon’s face ripped through the floor like a rock through paper. Very thin paper. Then he found himself peering into another room. The room was square shaped. There was a comfy looking armchair on shag carpeting. The next thing he knew, he was sitting in that chair. Shortly after, a crazy tune started playing. Then, a dwarf in a red suit walked out from behind a curtain.

"DeEk DeEcAn. ThArEs MoRe To ThE PuZzEl," the deranged little guy mumbled.

Deacon didn’t hear what the unusual dwarf had to say. He was busy drinking coffee and eating cherry pie. He hated having these hallucinations. However, something was different about this one.

Deacon expected the dwarf to go on, but instead, it started dancing. Suddenly the armchair fell through the floor. He found himself in a plane. It seemed that while he was having the hallucination, he got a plane to Thailand. He decided to take a nap.

But a light scampering sound interrupted it. It was amidst the sound of footsteps. The stewardess came up behind him. A lock of her red hair overlapped her left eye. She had a big smile. Deacon had her all picked out. Then the stewardess put her hand on the armrest of his chair. Her fingers were pointing straight down and were the only parts touching the armrest. The middle finger, however, was pointing out and away from the other fingers. Her hand looked like some sort of animal.

"Would you like some coffee?" The stewardess steadily moved her middle finger as she spoke.

Not one to insult other people’s habits, he copied her motion, resting his hand animal on the armrest. "No thanks," he said, moving his middle finger in tune with each word. "I don’t drink alcohol."

Suddenly, Deacon’s feet flew into the bathroom. Somewhat fortunately, the rest of the body was still attached. He turned the lock and stood up to the urinal.

Three hours passed.

Once he finished doing his business, he flushed and washed hands. He flicked his hands at the mirror so drops would hit it.

"Hee hee." Doing that made him happy.

Then he cranked the lever on the paper towel dispenser to make paper towel come out. Without looking, he dried his hands on the object and wiped it against his face. He strolled over to the trashcan to throw it away. He was horrified to see what he had used to dry himself.

It was a pancake.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" He woke up in his bedroom as always, silent. It had all been so real... He brought his hand up to his forehead only to realize he was in a cold sweat.

"Patrick?"

At first he didn't even hear the voice, his experience had shocked him so.

Eventually, though, it got through to him.

"Patrick, what's wrong?"

Patrick Duffy turned to his wife to answer, but the words just wouldn't come.

"Did you have a bad dream again? What was it this time?"

Finally, he spoke, "I-it was just AWFUL, honey. I don't remember all of it, but it was just this terrifying collage of... weirdness..."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I remember there was some sort of chase between two men named Hobema and Gaddi... and Gaddi has some sort of condition that turned him into cement Jell-O. And Hobema died, and then there was a crab named Gimmpy, and a detective named Dick Deacon trying to make sense of it all. And there were pork chops and pancakes, and brochures... and drugs... I'm pretty sure everyone was on drugs... and then, in the end, Dick used a pancake to dry himself!!!"

"Now, calm down, honey. It was all just a bad dream. You haven't slept well at all since you lost that show with Suzanne Sommers."

"It's that damn Sasha Mitchell's fault... if he didn't go off and beat his wife, then-"

"Calm down, honey, calm down... Just go back to sleep, OK?"

She turned the light off again, and turned to go to sleep. Patrick tried to do the same, but he just lay there for hours, eyes wide open, mortified at what he'd just seen. Finally, he couldn't stand it any more. He got up and started putting his clothes on. His wife, disturbed again by the noise, sat up.

"Honey... what are you doing?"

"I have to find out what happened to them... I have to go there, or I'll have no peace!"

"What... what are you talking about?"

"I have to go to Thailand!"

Patrick ran up to the desk in the airport, determined. His wife trailed behind, screaming at him, trying to inject some kind of sense into him.

Although Patrick was normally as weak-willed as flan, today, he had to keep focus. Today, he had to do whatever it took to regain the last shreds of his sanity.

"One ticket to Thailand, please"

"Patrick, are you even listening to me? If you do this, we're OVER!" His wife broke into tears.

"Honey, don't you understand? I need to know this... maybe it is just something in my head, but I need to find out, and this is the only way."

"Look, Patrick... I tried to put up with you after you lost your job, and God knows it isn't easy being married to an out-of-work actor, but somehow, I've managed to pay the bills every day. But you just can't DO this... it's... it's... it's CRAZY!"

Patrick lightly kissed her on the forehead. "Don't worry, hon. I'll be back. You know I will..."

The two embraced, and Patrick boarded the plane.

CHAPTER 5

"Holy smokes!"

Immediately, Deacon dropped the pancake. The pancake defied all physics and flew back up at his face. With unseen claws, or paws, or something, it latched itself onto Deacon’s face.

Deacon yelled a muffled scream and tried to pry the cake of pan off his face. In fear of the pancake laying it’s eggs in his chest Deacon closed his mouth and continued to tear at the pancake’s unusually tough body.

He wasn’t panicking anymore. Deacon was madly hysterical. So hysterical he got his foot stuck in the toilet and a hand stuck in the sink. He hung there in the middle of the bathroom like a human hammock. A human hammock with a pancake violently stuck to his face.

Now that Deacon was helpless the pancake detached itself from his face and flopped on his chest.

He was breathing heavily. The pancake heaved up and down on his chest.

"Jesus Christ superstar," he managed to say .

Somehow, the pancake stood up on Deacon’s chest. Deacon could feel the pancake’s stare. It’s icy, cold, light, and fluffy stare. It was a stare of pure evil.

"What do you want from me?!" Deacon yelled. "What are you?!"

The stewardess knocked on the bathroom door. "Don’t mind that, sir, it’s just the plane’s gremlin."

Deacon didn’t notice the little airplane-headed gremlin before. It was beating a nuclear warhead with a sledgehammer.

The pancake smiled. Well, it didn’t really smile, but Deacon knew it was smiling. It was a smile of pure evil. The pancake spoke,

"I’ll swallow your soul!"

Deacon screamed a scream that would make Courage the Cowardly Dog proud, "AAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!"

Enough was enough. Full of adrenaline, Deacon used his free leg to kick the hammer out of the gremlin’s hands. With a stroke of unrealistic luck the hammer bounced off the wall and fell on top of the pancake. The hammer and pancake fell off Deacon’s chest.

That gave him enough to pull his leg out of the toilet. His hand was still stuck in the sink’s drain. With enough strength to pull a sink out of a floor, Deacon pulled the sink out of the floor and a broken water pipe drenched the whole bathroom. He didn’t think that would, or could, happen on an airplane.

Before all was well, the pancake bit Deacon in the shin. He kicked his leg against the wall trying to fly it off. Then he stuck his leg in the water geyser and the pancake got caught in the current.

Deacon picked the hammer up from the pool it was sitting in, loomed over the pancake in the corner, and repeatedly smashed it into oblivion. And he smashed. And he smashed, and he smashed, and then he smashed some more.

"Swallow that."

After plugging the water pipe with a nuclear warhead, and trying to calm an extremely irritated and wet gremlin, Deacon exited the bathroom.

The stewardess was there with her hand animal crawling around on the wall. "What happened in there?" she said as she moved the hand animal’s head/middle finger.

Deacon, drenched with bathroom water, put his wet hand animal on his other wet hand.

"El Nino," his hand thing seemed to say.

Then the stewardess’ lips curled back, her eyes shut, and her nostrils flared. Deacon thought there was something wrong with her until she started to laugh. He let out a sigh of relief. He didn’t even think the joke was that funny.

She continued her strange laugh. It was the kind of laugh only Ludwig von Koopa could love. The other passengers began to get worried.

Deacon did his best to ignore her and walked back to his seat. His shoes made a wet "squish" sound each step he took. He sat back down and dialed his vid phone.

Seconds later an image of the Chief appeared on the small phone’s monitor.

"The price just went up another ten mil, Chief. I was almost killed by a soul-eating pancake, this plane’s stewardess is really freaking the hell out of me, and they ran out of those salty peanuts."

The Chief furrowed his brow. "Deacon… you’re not a bounty hunter…"

"…Crap."

*****

A pair of eyes stared at Deacon through a piece of Deacon’s luggage. They were cold unfeeling eyes, one might say they were "uncolding" eyes. The eyes adjusted themselves in the suitcase. They them wondered how and why they adjusted themselves, they had no appendages to adjust for they were nothing more than eyes… "uncolding" eyes.

The eyes grew impatient; they wanted to be free of their velvet prison. They wanted to report back to Mr. Buttly. They thought sneaking into Deacon’s suitcase wasn’t worth the trouble he could put them in. The eyes loved being part of the Illuminati but they hated stinky suitcases. They knew if they thought of their hero, Golf Pro Richard Palmer, they could get through this. Realizing they had been drifting off for hours now, the "uncolding" eyes snapped their attention back to Deacon.

*****

The Chief nervously hung up the phone in his usual wacky manner. He felt like he needed a drink, a "Big Gulp" from the local 7-11. He debated about what he would put in it, Oil was number three on his mental list, Sunkist was the second on the list, and a virgin’s blood and number one as usual.

The Chief was so caught up in his order he forgot he had a revolver up to his head. Oh god. He thought to himself. That was way too close. The Chief put his revolver back into his desk. "I should stop holding guns up to my head." He said to no one in particular. As he finished his sentence he remembered he had a bomb strapped to his chest. I didn’t strap a bomb on my chest. He thought.

"That’s right, I put the bomb on your chest!" An incredibly good looking, sharp dressing, and high fiber man exclaimed. The Chief thought there was something odd about his hand but he couldn’t put his smelly finger on it. The man resembled Kenneth Braughnagh (Gollum-X’s Note: How the hell do you spell his last name?) in Hamlet. Man, I gotta see that movie The Chief thought.

"There’s no Hamlet where you’re going!" The man said with an evil laugh.

"Mississippi?" The Chief asked fearfully, then he a realization came upon him. "How do you keep reading my thoug-" His question was cut off by the man.

"There’s no time for questions! Now… let me ask you something. Do you know who I am?" The man asked with a smile. The Chief opened his mouth when he was cut off. " I am… Muzz Buttly, The New ruler of The Illuminati."

The Chief gasped. "Muzz Buttly! Son of Leslie Buttly, the man that ruled The Illuminati with a wet noodle fist!" The Chief grabbed his ears and torn them off with tiger-like speeds. Right then and there The Chief noticed what was odd about Muzz’s hand, if you could call it that. Instead of a hand he had an over-sized live dog’s head there, The Chief thought he was pretty slick. He knew no one would notice it for days, it was so subtle. Well, That’s what you learn when you’re on the force for 5 hours. The Chief chuckled.

Muzz became enraged, "You did this to me! When you killed my father he ate my hand! I can’t speak with my fellow Illuminati! Do you know what it’s like to not be able to talk through you’re hand!" Muzz shook his dog head in the air. "I’ll get my revenge on you. Then operation "Pipes" will be under way! You’re little slug Deacon will be dead soon. I’ve got two agents following him!"

Muzz grabbed the chair The Chief was sitting on and wheeled by the window. "Where’s my dinner?" Muzz said and cackled. The Chief realized he had wet his pants, with his urine. The Chief breathed his last few breaths then a few more. He felt the window shatter against his face as the floor below him disappeared. He held out a "Yikes" sign as he plunged out of his ground level office onto the cold dirt where his head was smashed like a ripe melon being shot by a canon. There he died peacefully.

CHAPTER 6

Patrick Duffy pulled his finger out of his nose to inspect what he had found, It was a sticky white liquid that stuck to his finger, a large crusty green disc was protruding out of it’s center. Damn Patrick thought no Nazi Gold. There was never any Nazi gold up his nose like there was on TV Bored with his find he flicked it into a large woman’s puffy red hair.

Duffy inspected his laptop screen noticing the Metal Gear Solid 8,000 video was still at 45%. It had been at 45% since he boarded the plane. Duffy continually smashed his skull against the screen until it the screen was broken into pointy little shards. He threw the remains of the laptop through the airplane window.

The broken window unleashed a vacuum that began to suck in the wind of the plane. But, You probably don’t care about that. I’ll skip us to a good scene. Ready…. Now: Duffy stood frozen with fear as two man wearing black suits walked out of the bathroom. They were both toting a .9mm camera. The vacuum continued to suck papers, cause chaos, and create a really cool battle scene.

"Leslie Buttly doesn’t like you. POOPIE HEAD!" One of the men screamed. He pointed the camera at Duffy. He ducked and threw an orange at the first man.

"AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" The first man screamed as the orange smashed into his eyeball. The man gripped the orange as it lodged itself into the eye socket. The man cussed under his breath as he passed out.

2007-08-27T17:34:00.000-04:00

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/3/f/6/3f687da141ff444f607ef551d4208d93.mp3
http://content.ytmnd.com/content/a/3/3/a33d3c4e0a06cfd7de923d894ac0061c.mp3
http://content.ytmnd.com/content/4/d/d/4dd12ca789ad9854447d3b89e68a2eb6.mp3

We're Better Than You

2007-08-27T02:11:00.000-04:00

(And now the Jehoveh's Witnesses dancers!)

We only have one thing to say and we know you won't like it....
We saw Jesus Christ and you didn't
You fat people what's wrong with you
You always think the stupidest things ...
Like how there's that fat guy that has that list
And how those people light candles. And we don't do a *#@$ing thing all damn year.
WHY? Because we really suck.
But we're better than YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

2007-08-18T00:28:00.001-04:00

http://kokoro.sega.jp/swf/bgm.mp3

So I remember this later

2007-08-15T00:54:00.000-04:00

Hello Cast & Crew of Age Appropriate,

As you all know Age Appropriate was an official
selection at the Independent Television Festival in
LA. While we did not win best drama at the festival
we did meet many people who enjoyed and were impressed
with your collective work on the show. We were by far
the youngest people involved in the festival and
everyone marveled at the quality of the work for the
extremely modest budget that we were ab;e to work
with.

I highly advise that you all enter any future pilots,
documentaries, or variety type shows you make in this
festival. It was a great experience. We made
terrific contacts and incessantly took advantage of
the open bar. It's a great way to get your name and
talents out there and everyone was extremely
receptive.

Also, in addition to our success at the festival we've
just found out that the script for Age Appropriate has
won second place in the Scriptapalooza TV writing
competition which we hope will garner the production
further success.

Thanks to all of you who've stuck with us over the
past year or so. I can't tell you how much your
support continues to mean. We'll be putting the
finishing touches on the newest draft of the pilot
very soon and we'll be continuing to get people
excited about this story. Hope you've all had a
terrific summer. I wish everyone the best in the
coming school year.

Most Sincerely,

Jason Perlman

undue concern

2007-07-30T16:35:00.001-04:00

James Tate, "The Vacant Jungle"

I sat there thinking, the minutes fall into hours and the

hours fall into days and the days fall into weeks and the weeks

into month and the months into years and the years into decades

and pretty soon it's all over for you. You slip out of the picture.

It is almost as though you were never there. Time keeps rolling on,

going nowhere. "What are you thinking?" Maya said. "Me?" I wasn't

thinking anything," I said. "Yes, you were," she said. "I swear

I wasn't thinking anything. My head's a blank. I had a long day,"

I said. Maya's nails are too long, but you can't tell a woman that.

It's like she has taken it upon herself to measure the passing of

time in a particularly rueful way. And she's wearing eye makeup,

which she's never worn before. I mean, I know our cat died a week

ago, but what has that got to do with eye makeup? "Now you're

thinking something, aren't you?" she said. "I was just thinking

about something Cameron said at work today," I said. "What did he

say?" she said. My mind went blank. I had assumed I could just

make something up on the spot, but I couldn't think of anything.

"What's for dinner?" I said. "No, I want to know what Cameron said,"

she insisted. "He said he liked ducks more than most people,"

I said. "What the heck was the context for a remark like that?" she

said. "Well, we were standing in line at the water cooler, and I

guess it was the water that made him think of ducks," I said. "And

what did you say?" she said. "Well, I wasn't going to get into an

argument with him. It was just a stupid remark," I said. "Still,

it shows you how shallow he is, how cynical. I don't want you to be

friends with him anymore, and I'm certainly not going to have him

in this house," she said. I regretted bringing Cameron into this

whole thing, especially since I hadn't even seen him that day. And

now he was banned from the house. "Cameron is one of the nicest

people I know," I said. "If you happen to be a duck," she said.

Maya had had her hair highlighted. I had just then noticed the

orange streaks against the black, like our old tabby. "I like your

hair," I said. "I had it done days ago," she said. "Yes, yes, I

know. I've been waiting for the right moment to tell you," I said.

"What's so right about this one?" she said. "The light from the

window," I said. I thought that was a rather poetic answer. "I

never know what you're thinking," she said. Then she stood up and

left the room. I don't either, I wanted to answer her, but she

wouldn't believe me. So I sat there with marbles rolling around in

my head. Bing, bam, bongo I could hear my watch ticking. It was

running out on me. The sun was setting. "Maya, come quick, you

must see this!" I shouted. "What?"she said. "It's the sunset, you

must see it," I said. "I can't right now, I'm cooking," she said.

I stood at the window weeping, for what I don't know. It was the most

beautiful sunset I had ever seen, which probably isn't true. I just

liked saying it. It sounded so dramatic. And then it was dark, and Maya

called me to dinner. "So how was your day?" I said. I barely

recognized her with the dark eyes and the streaked hair. Her finger-

nails clicked against the table like castanets. She was apparently

speaking to me, but I could barely hear anything. "Alicia . . . laundry . . .

mall . . . gas. . . ." It didn't sound too bad, a normal day, like mine

had been. I expected her to break into a dance, a tango maybe.

Instead she said, "You know what I love about you, Warren? You have

such a rich interior life. It must be like a jungle inside your head,

full of exotic animals no one's ever seen before. That's why you

can barely talk to me. You're too busy just keeping them all in line."

"Animals with no names and nowhere to go, that's me," I said.

Eternal Preparation

2007-07-06T22:35:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while I get these stupid emails from Campus Progress. I get them because I once took a survey on which the only question was "Do you think college is too expensive?" My answer was Yes.

I finally decided to take a look at the email I got today. It pretty much just linked to the latest articles on the Campus Progress site: the possible perks of single life, why selling out is integral in achieving happiness, and there was an article on Imus. The man is still news.

I don't have anything against Imus. Last time I listened to him is when my dad would drive me to middle school. I thought he was pretty funny. I thought he had a swell radio voice. And once there was this guy on the show who was talking to someone, and he threatened to "tear off your head and pee down your neck, and when the pee comes out people will think that it's your pee." My dad and I both laughed at that one.

I will always advocate free speech, so objectively speaking I support Imus, except that I care as much about him as I do about anything else, in that I don't.

Still, it got me thinking - a dangerous endeavor for everyone involved.

I have never been offended by racism. In fact, I'd say I'm pretty jaded towards it. In fact, I think it's pretty funny. Should I finally realize my goal of becoming a DJ at Emerson - which will be difficult now that I live off campus, even more so since the only slots available for newbies will probably be early weekday mornings - what if I were to say something racially insensitive? Not that I condemn races on a regular basis, but what if I should let a not-subtle-enough joke slip out, or if I should play the YTMND Racist Kramer remix?

Here is the best case scenario.

Hopefully the fiasco would occur a month or two into the semester after I've gained momentum and a solid fanbase.

And hopefully, I would not be fired immediately. I will have been a responsible DJ up to that point, and my remark would be open to interpretation. I would merely be asked to apologize by the radio people, the Berkely Beacon, possibly the faculty.

And I would. But not right away.

I would put up fliers and send out Facebook messages, and I would personally spread the word of my public apology, live on WECB. I would update my companion web site on Blogspot in preparation for TERRY'S PUBLIC APOLOGY SPECIAL!!

I would not introduce the show. I would begin my prepared monologue about my conception of race, speech and predestiny. Periodically, I would interrupt my monologue to play music, just as usual.

"The fact of the matter is that I had a difficult time discovering a racial identity as I was growing up..." [cue One Night in Bangkok]

In reality, the music itself may actually have some sort of context, not so much in relation to my monologue, but in comparison to the songs before and after. The soundtrack would tell a different story, I think - a sort of parallel action. The listener would learn that this show is not just about my apology. There is something else at stake here.

Actually, I think I might like all my shows to be this way. I want a system to my songs, an idea and a story, to stitch together an assembly of artists' independent thoughts into a cohesive arc. Along with myself - I don't want to merely introduce each song and make stupid jokes. I want to be part of the listening experience in a greater capacity than as a custodial mouthpiece. Whatever I have to say will have a place and a reason in the grand theme of the episode.

And then in the end, I would finally say, "Sorry I said the N word on the air, guys."

John Patrick Shanley's note in The Big Funk

2007-07-01T02:52:00.000-04:00

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We must have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy. I do not understand how to live in this society. I don't get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can't breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. you can't smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It's a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me, making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again? I don't ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it's not a safe place, it's abusive to actors and audiences alike. When it's safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it's a boring travesty. An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and the artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Don't be fooled.

Don't act for money. You'll start to feel dead and bitter.

Don't act for glory. You'll start to feel dead, fat and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Don't be fooled.

You can't avoid all the pitfalls. There are lies that you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depths of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness. Don't worry about Art. Do these things and it will be Art.