Some people are good at just one thing. There’s nothing wrong with this. While you don’t want to over-emphasize specialization in any endeavor, as you never know when something outside of your specialization is going to come along and topple your entire plan, trying to be good at everything usually means you’re just mediocre in most ways and don’t excel in any way.

Most, however, aren’t. They have passions, talents and drive that go beyond normal expectations. A good deal of sane people dedicate themselves to a particular career path – “I want to be the best cheese salesman in the history of dairy products!” – but it’s a vary rare individual who’s capable of selling cheese for every hour of every day they happen to be conscious. Humans need to have a break now and again, to eat or rest or use the lavatory. Even if one is so wired for selling cheese that they want to sell cheese every waking minute, others might not be inclined to buy cheese meaning those cheese wheels will be spinning with no forward motion for that period of time. And what if the cheese salesman really doesn’t want to be selling cheese? They might have to, just to make ends meet, but what they really want to be doing is following in the footsteps of Hunter S. Thompson even when they stumble about the place because he was hopped up on something. Or several somethings.

My point is, what we do with our time on a daily basis isn’t necessarily what we want to be doing or what we love doing. I know some people who are blessed to be able to do what they love every day all day as their vocation, even when it’s a struggle to do so. It shouldn’t be a struggle, in a perfect world, but it is and I think I have an inkling as to why.

The world in which we live isn’t based on doing what we love, but rather what makes us useful. The corporate machine needs many, many cogs to continue operating smoothly. A corporate executive needs an expensive car to drive in order to show his status. The car salesman is happy to sell that car because his wife is concerned about her appearance and frequents the local spa. The owner of the spa wants to get more salesmen’s wives in and knows they spend time on the Internet. The spa owner’s Internet company helps him maintain his site, and so on and so forth. If the salesman’s wife were suddenly to take up painting rather than frequenting the spa, for example, the whole system might collapse.

It wouldn’t, but it might, and so the system rails against this creative desire by advertising more distracting and degrading things. It distracts with shiny objects geared to be of interest to the audience, and degrades by suggesting that not owning said things makes the viewer less of a person. “Do the trick you’re required to do,” they say, “and you’ll be rewarded with these things. Do something else and not only will you be unable to enjoy these rewards, but society itself will conspire against you in the form of rising gas prices, exorbitant communication fees and unforgiving landlords.”

It’s from here that the struggle arises. We are not one-trick ponies meant to cantor for the amusement of those holding the golden strings of corporate purses, yet those purses often remain closed to those who refuse to entirely conform. Some willful and determined animals are capable of breaking from the pack and running free despite being hunted by the wranglers of corporate greed and soul-grinding utility billing. Some give up and wander with the pack with no real idea of where they’re going. And some struggle against their restraints because freedom is too precious a commodity to be purchased with money, fear or a twisted and warped vision of the self sponsored by cosmetics companies and beer distributors.

I’m probably blowing things out of proportion. I’m given to hyperbole, after all, since I tend to think in terms of fiction involving space ships, wizards, steam-powered robots and vampires that don’t sparkle in the sunlight. Still, the point I’ve been hysterically gesticulating verbally at remains that we are not one-trick ponies. No matter what the advertisements, status quo or your boss might say, there’s no need to tread the same ground over and over again after the whistle blows. Find the seed of your passion, place it in fertile ground and shelter it from the elements. If it happens to grow into your daily life to shore up what you do for most of the daylight hours (or nighttime for you third-shifters), so much the better. If it grows if a different direction, let it. It might lead you someplace wonderful.

You’ll never know unless you try, and once you start trying, don’t stop. The greatest disservice you could ever do to yourself is letting the thing that makes you come alive starve to death while you’re totaling up your billable hours.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Opinion, rant, work, writing

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Here’s a few of the reasons why I’m excited by Maschine Zeit, and you should be too.

Good Scary Writing & Scary Good Writing

The best horror stories do not rely on jump-out in-your-face scares. They don’t base themselves entirely on bloodshed or gore. The effective use of stillness and partially illumination of the unknown cause for a much more tense and compelling atmosphere than the tactics employed by your local haunted house attraction. Maschine Zeit is definitely in the “stillness of the unknown” category. The writing and pacing sets the stage for the kind of flashlight-gripping terror that used to define the kind of storytelling experiences that would have Hitchcock nodding in quiet approval as the rest of the audience screamed bloody murder.

Characters That Are People, Not Just Stats

The character creation system, which I’ve tested a couple of times, has a flow to it that puts the personality of the character front and center rather than putting it behind a wall of statistics. While the stats are certainly there, Maschine Zeit again sets itself apart by actively encouraging players to min-max their characters. Instead of having player aim at being good at everything, this system ensures that the character can accomplish certain tasks with dramatic flair and apparent ease while other characters take on other roles. The shy, intelligent James Sunderland type might be good at figuring out puzzles but he’s not going to be as accurate with a pulse rifle as Duane Hicks. It might seem a bit counter-intuitive at first to players of other tabletop RPGs, but it fits right in with the atmosphere of the game and gets you into your character a bit more adroitly than sitting at a table rolling dice over and over again, praying to Gygax for the best stats possible.

An Apocalypse We Can Believe In

One of the best things that Maschine Zeit has going for it is the way its world is grounded in reality. Even as things begin to turn towards the surreal and supernatural, there’s a tone of voice that has the player thinking “Yeah, that could totally happen.” This grounding makes the events over the course of the game that much more visceral for the players. Combined with effective use of the game’s narrative structure and characters that feel more like real people than fantastical archetypes, this realistic foundation of Maschine Zeit’s world and its stories make for a unique and immersive tabletop experience that can be very difficult to find.

But find it you can, thanks to the genius minds behind Machine Age Productions. There are plans for us to play through a scenario tonight, and tomorrow might find me doing a postmortem on both how the game plays and how the characters fare.

Unless of course all y’all would rather I talk about Dan Brown or something.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Gaming, horror, preview, sci-fi, tabletop

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The problem with comparing these two is that they’re very different animals. However, a comparison is likely to prove interesting – we just might not have any shots with folded chairs or pile-drivers happening. So, apologies in advance for having this be less of a throw-down and more of an argument around a pub table. Insert your own punching sound effects if you like.

Setting

There’s a war on in both The Hurt Locker and Inglorious Basterds, and both films take the armed conflicts that serve as their settings seriously. Hurt Locker is focused squarely on the gritty, tense and all-too-real atmosphere of modern warfare. The film’s emotion, humor and drive come from that realism. While the World War II backdrop of Basterds is slightly different at tone in times, and even verges on romanticism now and again, there’s an undercurrent of realism to it, as well. The fact that it’s an undercurrent in Basterds is the biggest difference in terms of setting. Hurt Locker is shoulder-to-shoulder with the soldiers of Bravo Company, while Tarantino keeps the Basterds at cameras-length from us at all times. Sometimes the camera is very intimate, and sometimes it’s pointing out how awesome something is.

Characters

Compare our two male leads.

See where I’m going with this? At first these two seem like pretty much the same character, only each has a different sort of edge, in keeping with the different films’ settings. Renner makes no concerted effort to make James heroic beyond the simple nature of his actions and attitudes. There’s some cowboy in him, to be sure, but this come across less as macho swaggering and more as simple deflective behavior, putting on a certain amount of airs to avoid dealing with people around him in a way that might get him hurt. He wears his emotions and attitude the same way he wears his bomb suits. Aldo Raine, on the other hand, is meant to be macho, and Pitt plays him that way, from the smirk that comes from his affected drawl to the way he sneers at Nazis. He’s having fun, in spite of the seriousness of the situation, and by extension, so are we.

Theme

The Hurt Locker tells us that “War is a drug” and uses that as the central thread around which the narrative is woven. Inglorious Basterds has a few thematic elements, the strongest of which is its focus on films and film-making. MovieBob has already touched on this in his ‘Escape to the Movies’ feature and I plan on doing the same, though from a slightly different perspective since the Oscars have come and gone.

So which is best? From a standpoint of watch-ability – ICFN spoiler alert! – they’re both worth your time, for different reasons. As for the rest… well, my thoughts on The Hurt Locker have already been documented, and Inglorious Basterds will get its turn.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Post tags: badass, films, Opinion, thriller

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I didn’t watch the Oscars.

Well, how in the living Hell can you expect to recap the Oscars if you didn’t spend five hours watching them, hm, hmm?

Simple. People blogged and tweeted the stuffing out of last night’s pop-culture Super Bowl. Which was another event I didn’t watch. And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that neither team that has anything resembling my attention got to the game, nor the fact that I didn’t feel inclined to go to anybody’s house under the pretense of watching a game in which I had no interest just to scarf down free snacks and beer. I would’ve felt bad for the false pretense just before devouring my first wing, I imagine. It’s been a while since I’ve had good wings…

What was I talking about? Right, the Oscars. No big surprises.

Before we get to “the little movie that could” as MovieBob called it, let’s not forget that one of my personal and probably all-time favorite animated films, Up, walked away with two Oscars – Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. The music in the film was instrumental in the storytelling and I’m glad that got recognized. I’m really looking forward to watching Inglorious Basterds tonight, provided the postman obeyed Netflix in bringing it speedily to my door, and I’m sure that tomorrow’s post will basically boil down to “How the fuck did people overlook this film?” if everything I’ve seen/read/heard is to be believed.

Kudos to Jeff Bridges (FINALLY!) and Mo’Nique for their awards, and Sandra – she’s very sweet. I like her as a person. Some of her jobs have been less than stellar, but it’s nice to see a nice person win an Oscar. Then again, maybe she’s a complete prima donna behind the scenes. I’ll probably never know.

So let’s talk about The Hurt Locker. I’m so glad it beat the stuffing out of Avatar. I had a feeling it was going to earn at least a couple of Oscars, but earning a total of six golden statues compared to Avatar’s three is, to me, a great victory for the proponents of substance over style. That isn’t to say that Ms. Bigelow isn’t without style, as there’s quite a bit in her films. It’s just that her style is far more understated and patient than the frenetic gee-whiz in-your-face nature of glossy 3D graphics and sexualized giant cat-people. However, I have no idea how Hurt Locker stacks up against Basterds, and as I’ve mentioned that’ll probably be something I discuss tomorrow. Maybe another vs. match as I did for True Blood vs. Twilight? In case you forgot, here’s how that turned out.

Anyway, other more learned folk have covered the Oscars and, since I was playing video games instead of sitting through lackluster performances and a truckload of adverts, I have little else to say on the awards themselves. Tomorrow will bring a challenge, as I don’t want to spoil the inevitable ICFN Basterds post in the throw-down. Stay tuned!

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Post tags: films, writing

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The Razzies are the antithesis of the Oscars, in that they honor the very worst in film-making while Oscar honors the best. Or at least the most lucrative. Anyway, Sandra Bullock classed up the joint by showing up to accept her award. She might do the same on Sunday at the Oscars, for an entirely different movie, but I like any celebrity who’s capable of laughing at themselves. So kudos, Sandra. You’re still aces in my book.

Unsurprisingly, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was awarded “Worst Picture of 2009″ despite its monumental box office returns, coming in just behind the blue-furry-powered Avatar. As kind as I was to the film in my review, a lot of that came from touches of nostalgia that help me return to the head space of a more innocent boy who hasn’t been exposed to things like collections agencies, unemployment and Uwe Boll. I acknowledge that it isn’t that great a movie, and some parts of it hedge on the terrible, but I still cannot completely chalk it up to bad writing.

In the article from Yahoo, something caught my eye that I felt bore mentioning:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was picked as last year’s worst picture and won two other Razzies, worst director for Michael Bay and worst screenplay for Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Okay. Bob & Alex, I know. Well, I don’t know them personally, but apparently Bob’s been to this blog before. These guys worked with J.J. Abrams to bring us both Fringe and the new Star Trek film. Yet they were also involved in Revenge of the Fallen.

“How is this possible?” I often asked. “How are two guys who are distinguishing themselves as smart writers involved with something that, if I’m being honest, is a little dumb?” I think I have my answer.

Who is Ehren Kruger, and why did he ruin Transformers?

A little investigation may have yielded my answer. Apparently Mr. Kruger, before becoming involved with Transformers, adapted the Japanese horror Ringu for American audiences – that is to say, he dumbed it down. So he’s got a track record for making things worse than they had to be. But where did he start? What original works as he produced? Drilling down a little further I found my answer: Reindeer Games.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Now, I’ve only seen Reindeer Games once, during my university years, and I think I might have been hung over at the time. I don’t remember if I was more nauseous due to the previous night’s shenanigans or the awful, awful nature of this film. It’s one of those films that sits there and does absolutely nothing new. I wouldn’t watch it again unless someone asked me to. And gave me proper incentive.

Yeah, pretty shameless plug, I know. Click on those ads on the right while you’re at it, ad-clickers.

Anyway.

So the guy who shat out Reindeer Games and watered down Ringu for the fans of Jason & Freddy got involved with Orci & Kurtzman? That’s like having Gordon Ramsay and Morimoto-sama working together on a dish and inviting a hobo to come in and contribute whatever they want. Whatever delicious experimentation the two experts have undertaken is going to be completely overpowered by the rotgut, old anchovies and that shoe the hobo was chewing on before he got picked up. No wonder Revenge of the Fallen was such a mess. It all makes sense now!

Don’t read this as a diatribe against collaboration. Working with other people on a project often yields better results than going it alone. Peter Jackson could have worked alone to adapt The Lord of the Rings, but working with Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh made the films into masterpieces. Chuck Wendig wouldn’t have been able to blast his latest script draft in the face without the suggestions & input from people at Sundance. Well, maybe he could have, this is the Magic Talking Beardface we’re talking about.

All I’m saying is it takes one bad cook to spoil the meal. George Lucas insisted on so many things in the Star Wars prequels and had so much momentum behind him that nobody dared to question his decisions. I wonder if Kruger had Michael Bay firmly in his corner and pushed him to make changes to the screenplay after Bob & Alex were done with it. Other explanations make less sense. Bob & Alex, on their own, do good work. I just have to imagine that Kruger & Bay destroyed most if not all of the good they did for Revenge of the Fallen. Or maybe everybody was drunk. I think a couple of the cameramen certainly were.

Anyway, that’s what sprang to mind when I saw that third name on the list for the Razzie those guys won. This is just my opinion, I have no evidence to support it, rant rage etc. Nothing to see here, move along.

I’ll probably talk about the Oscars tomorrow. Not sure if I want to watch them, but I’ll be sure to talk about them. I have better things to do with my time. Like watch my lovely wife play the lovely Assassin’s Creed II. It certainly looks better than the first, which is a game I never finished.

More on that soon, too.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 11 comments | Post tags: films, writing

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Combat in the first Mass Effect is, like the inventory system, ripe territory for micromanagement. Every character has a variety of powers that are mostly on separate cooldown periods. To effectively survive combat encounters with minimal expenditure of medi-gel or grenades, especially on higher difficulty levels, using the radial menu to pause the game, look around and target party members’ powers on specific enemies is every bit as important as making sure your guns have the right load-out. It’s a combat system that rewards preparation and planning. If you know there will be a ton of geth in a particular hotspot, load up on anti-synthetic ammo and be sure to have at least one tech specialist in your party to ruin the geth’s day by destroying their shields. Areas of rachni, thorian creepers or other organic hazards will require different ammo and a wider array of powers. And if you want a real challenge, try fighting without biotics. The ability to take an assailant off the ground with your brain or slam them against the wall as a killing blow are things you’re likely to miss when a geth Destroyer is coming straight for you.

Mass Effect 2’s combat is a bit more straight-forward and faster paced, as I’ve mentioned. Like other third-person shooters, most notably Gears of War, just about every where you go in the Terminus Systems you’ll find plenty of chest-high walls. You survived a lot longer in the first game when shooting from cover, but you were also spending half your time in the radial menu. The sequel seems to want to limit the amount of power-picking, so while you do have more places to map powers (a definite improvement), you have fewer powers from which to choose. Shepard can have up to six, seven if you count Unity, while members of your party won’t ever have more than three. Sure, there’s less to keep track of, meaning you’ll be moving through combat a bit more rapidly and it adds to the overall action-oriented feel of the game. But I can’t help but feel that something’s been lost.

I’m not saying one method of combat is superior to the other. They both work, they’re both fun and neither feels completely out of place. To be honest, the only major difference is that combat in the first feels more like an RPG while the second is more shooter-oriented. Yahtzee accurately points out that gameplay is still ‘flailing about’ trying to strike the right balance, and the first two games lean just a bit too much in one direction or another. Again, this is not a complaint, merely an observation. I hope that BioWare keeps trying to find that balance for Mass Effect 3 and doesn’t turn it into Gears of War: Spectre Edition.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: BioWare, Gaming, sci-fi

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Currently, the prevailing definition of the word “gamer” is “someone who plays video games.” However, the label has an older connotation. For years, gamers were people who populated the tables of college dorm basements, comic store back rooms and Mom’s dining room, one of them hunched behind a screen describing unspeakable horrors while the others rolled dice, complained about rulings and flung Cheetos at each other. Thankfully, that hobby is alive and well in the world of testosterone-charged first-person shooters and time-destroying MMOGs. With love in its heart and tongue firmly in its cheek, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising shows us how these “real” gamers live and play.

Produced by the Dead Gentlemen, Dorkness Rising is a follow-up to the original film called The Gamers. However, it’s not necessarily a sequel. The story centers on Kevin Lodge, a man struggling to create a unique campaign world for Dungeons & Dragons and writing up its first module. His regular gaming group, however, is frustrating him at every turn due to their shameless power-gaming rules-mongering ways. To fill the ranks of their small group, one of the players – arrogant, by-the-book Cass – enlists his ex-girlfriend, Joanna. It turns out that Joanna, like Kevin, is more interested than the story than the rules. The perspective shifts between the players and their characters, and as the adventuring party embarks on their quest to retrieve the Mask of Death from an evil necromancer, the gamers themselves begin to grow in their understanding of both their characters and the reasons they play these games.

At first blush, there’s a lot of similarity between The Gamers and Dorkness Rising. It has gamers rolling dice, yelling at one another and making off-color jokes at each other’s expense. If you’ve never sat down for a session of Dungeons & Dragons before, you’ll get a pretty good idea of how they tend to proceed. There are plenty of jokes about both the nature of table-top role-playing games and the people that play them. Some of these might fly over the heads of a general audience, but anybody who’s rolled dice to determine a hit against a goblin’s armor class can tell you they’re right on the money. Beyond the scenes and jokes themselves, the film’s probably been responsible for an explosion of conversations that begin with someone saying “Dude, something just like that happened to me when…”

The surprising thing about Dorkness Rising isn’t the humor, however. This film has got a lot of heart. It parodies the lives of gamers and plays up the hilarity of some of their arguments out of love rather than spite. The story has a lot to say about the nature of friendship, the way people immerse themselves in their hobbies and the process of storytelling itself. Despite the ways in which certain characters behave, the film never resorts to mean-spirited or blatantly gross-out humor to get a laugh. That isn’t to say that this comedy is high-brow, by any stretch – there’s bawdy jokes aplenty. But the jokes never really exist for their own sake. Like action that has the audience riveted in a well-directed film, the comedy in this story grows organically from character interaction and growth.

The only real drawback to this film is that it’s aimed at a very specific audience. A lot of the jokes, references and situations will be utterly lost on anybody who hasn’t ever played a table-top role-playing game before. And beyond that, there isn’t a whole lot to say about Dorkness Rising. Chances are, if you’re at all connected to table-top gaming, you’re aware of this film and you know if it’s up your alley or not. While there’s a lot to like about both of the films in The Gamers series, beyond their good-natured humor and the surprising quality of the storytelling in the second one there isn’t a whole lot to say about them. They’re funny and clever and aimed straight at table-topping dorks everywhere. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means pick these up on your Netflix queue. But not everybody’s going to enjoy the same kind of thing. That’s just as true in the gaming world as it is when it comes to movies. I remember this one time I was playing a rogue in a Planescape campaign and…

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: comedy, films, Netflix, Reviews

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It isn’t all fun and games out here, kids. I’m looking for a new place to live, I need to take our littlest kitten to a vet because she’s way overdue to see one, Vera needs some additional servicing since I didn’t get her an oil change when she was last in the shop after my run in with [INCIDENT REDACTED], and there may be yet more hoops my lovely wife and I must hop through in order to get her legally working here in these United States.

All these things are going to take capital, cash, moolah. And none of these things are included in my monthly budget, which is devoured in things like rent, car payments & insurance, keeping the lights on and information flowing through the Intertubes. I eek out what entertainment I can, in the forms of leaving the apartment with my intrepid Canadian companion at least once a week and bringing in new movies and games when possible, and I always make room in what finances I have to go see my son in State College. Anyway, the point is, to keep Damsel, my car and my wife’s immigration efforts healthy, more cash is required.

I was hoping that cash would be coming from Uncle Sam. But after dealing with a few other financial loose ends this afternoon I turned my attention to my taxes. Initially I filed, truthfully, as someone “married filing jointly,” which yielded a rather sizable refund estimate. Unfortunately, since my wife doesn’t have a Social Security number, it might not be possible for us to file in that way at all. And, if I file as “single” with the intent to amend the return later, the refund will be significantly smaller. 811% smaller to be exact.

Want to know how that feels?

That’s how that feels.

Add in another rejection from the Escapist and all the other day-to-day doings of the dayjob and, well, you can probably predict where my head is at right now. Nothing to see here, really. Move along.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Post tags: personal, rant

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“Who’re you calling a program, program?”*

Right, first things first. The day job is keeping the roof over our heads (until we move to a new one in a couple months) and food in the pantry. I’m moving positions, shifting away from phone-answering bug-squishing troubleshooting to code-chomping cart-rolling Flash-AAHHHH-”savior of the universe”ing programming. It’s not a promotion, mind you, more of a lateral, semi-upwards shift in responsibilities and protocol. Still, it’s in improvement. I have a few things to square away in my current workload before the move is official, but it’s forward motion. By focusing on PHP, SQL and my already pretty extensive Flash skills, and leaving the ever-shifting environments of up-front client relations behind, I think I’ll not only become far more valuable to the company, but also start enjoying work a bit more overall.

The Project Marches On

I’m trying to crack open the manuscript for the Project and drop a few words in every day. Sometimes it’s more than a thousand, or even two or three. Others I’m lucky to get a couple dozen in there. But any motion is forward motion, and I’m trying to keep my spirits up. I know where I’m going with this plot, and I’m aware that some places might be a bit slower than others. If my setting had ninjas, I’d have them attack any time I was in doubt about what to have happen next. Ninjas are always cool.

“Did we just threaten someone with zombie rape?”

Tonight’s another session of the awesome Iron Kingdoms game being run by my wife. Our team (myself, David Hill and his lovely wife Filamena) have sort of become a steampunk version of Burn Notice. Dave’s noble never kills unless he has to, Mena’s gun mage is on the lookout for the next opportunity, and my rifleman sees violence as a direct solution to most enemy encounters. …Which pretty much makes me the Fiona.

Property of BioWare

I’m playing through Mass Effect again. Call me boring or easy to please if you like, but I have achievements to get, a whole other gender to experience (since Shepard can be either male or female) and situations to set up for future games. Once I get where I want in the first game, I’ll be playing the second again. And I also have things I want to do with Dragon Age, as well. Again, this probably points to me being dull, but in retrospect I feel this is a better way to spend my time than playing Star Trek Online for the time being. That and BioWare isn’t charging me $15 a month just to play their games.

And then there’s this stuff.

Taxes, bills, finding a new apartment that doesn’t suck, getting cats to a vet sometime in the near future… being a grown up sure is fun, isn’t it?

*If you know this reference you officially rock my socks.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Post tags: BioWare, family, work, writing

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The game Halo and I have something of a history.

I grew up with shooters in one hand and space flight sims & strategy games in the other. When I was fed up with the politicing of my AI opponents in Master of Orion and had rescued humanity from the clutches of the Kilrathi in Wing Commander, I fired up Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom. Now, neither of those games had anything approaching a complex narrative – “here are some Nazis/demons, go shoot them in the face” about sums it up – but this was long before motion capture, voice acting and model rendering had gotten to the point that video games could call their experiences “cinematic” with a straight face.

When I first played Halo, I liked it. I liked its control schemes, I liked its portrayal of the conflict between humanity and the Covenant, I liked the mystery behind the Halo itself, and I liked Cortana. Spunky AIs always appeal to me. Note that I’m talking about the single-player campaign, here. I did play multiplayer with a few friends, and was mostly reminded of deathmatches in Doom. I didn’t really see anything new other than the initial gee-whiz of the graphics. Still it was fun and hearkened back to simpler days when demons roared at me from within brownish spikey ghouls that seem laughably rendered by today’s standards. Even after a couple years, when I found out a place I was working was maintaining its own Halo server, I jumped in. Unfortunately, my boss never showed up – that guy needed a sticky grenade on his backside something fierce.

I played Halo 2 once, just to try and get the story. And while there were a couple “HOLY SHIT!” moments during the cutscenes, the gameplay felt vastly unchanged. Characters returned but really didn’t grow at all. It wasn’t necessarily bad by any means, it just felt like the story was beginning to take a backseat to the multiplayer. Again, it was fun to play split-screen with a couple of friends. But that was about the extent of my experience, and by that point, Half-Life 2 had come along and, in my opinion, completely blown Halo 2 out of the water.

I can’t come out and give a solid opinion on the Halo series as a whole, as I haven’t played Halo 3 or ODST. In terms of story and gameplay I have no idea how they stack up. They remain in shrink-wrap on the local GameStop’s shelf and I admit to a somewhat passing interest, since I do find myself curious as to the fate of Cortana and the experience of being an average Joe in generic space armor fighting the Covenant, instead of being a genetically engineered hyper-masculine superman in generic space armor fighting the Covenant.

Two things bug me about the Halo series that have nothing to do with the games. One is the parade of copies that have come in the wake of the franchise. Gears of War, Haze, Turok, and Too Human, just to name a few, all feature characters very similar to Master Chief: gruffly voiced manly men wearing futuristic (if not powered) armor, grimly facing down hordes of gruesome creatures, handfuls of hot heterosexual automatic fire in their grip. For the most part, though, I can ignore these things. I played a little bit of Gears of War 2 and immediately found myself wishing to play a different shooter with a more interesting premise, character or setting – like Painkiller, or BioShock, or Half-Life, or Mass Effect.*

But the advertisements for and attitude towards each new installment of Halo would have you believe that you will not have an experience even remotely resembling what you get out of that game. And that’s the other thing that really bothers me about the franchise. Call me out for being a dull gutless effeminate story-loving dweeb if you must, but the screaming cursing teabagging fist-bumping Beast-drinking backwards-baseball-cap-wearing hair-frosting (yet completely straight) core demographic of Halo’s multiplayer really turns me off of the game. I feel like I’m missing a point somewhere. Halo, to me, is a sci-fi shooter with limited weapons capacity, lots of guys in generic space armor and a couple of interesting weapons and maps. What’s the big deal? The story’s half-decent, the physics are all right, the weapons all feel very sci-fi and the vehicle sections are well done. Again, I’m only talking about the first two games here, so maybe the third one or ODST will suddenly start delivering Battlestar Galactica-scale narratives or reveal that Master Chief was a disenfranchised orphan who was driven into the Spartan program and defied the nay-sayers who said he’d never amount to anything by becoming the savior of humankind many times over. Or maybe both he and the story will remain on the bland side of things. I can’t say either way.

It sort of reminds me of a wine called Yellow Tail.

Yellow Tail is a mass-produced wine specifically designed to be sold at a reduced cost and be more palatable to most pedestrian drinkers than those who have discovered a particular pinot or cabarnet that they enjoy. I’ve tried Yellow Tail, and while it’s drinkable, it isn’t as good as wine from a vineyard. The advertisements for it, on the other hand, would have you believe that Yellow Tail is the sort of wine that tastes delicious, leaves you plenty of money for expensive aperitifs and will probably get you laid. Based on this scheme, Yellow Tail rakes in the cash, much like Halo does.

The original Halo did its shooting very well, had great vehicle sections that were fun to do with others and even had something resembling a story to tell. I feel that as the series goes on, there’s less story happening while the amount of gameplay and features remain largely the same. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t stop Halo in general and a generous portion of its fanbase from bothering me. Maybe if I pick up the Halo games for my wife and take some time to play them myself again I can form a more solid opinion on the matter. But that’d require money. And I need my money for other things.

Like food.

And Assassin’s Creed II.

* I know both Mass Effect games are more RPGs than shooters, but they still have solid sci-fi shooting action. And while Shepard and his team tend to wear space armor, especially in the first game, the characters have at least a little depth to them.

© Josh for Blue Ink Alchemy, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Post tags: Gaming, Halo, Opinion, rant, shooter

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