Spiral Reverie - An Author's Musings

E3 2013: Microsoft Turns On Its Customers and Sony's PS4 May Crash the Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 07:34:00 +0000

There's an electricity in the air.

Yes, once again, it's time for the Electronics Entertainment Expo, otherwise known as E3, the big annual video game industry trade show in Los Angeles which we always hear is becoming more irrelevant. And granted, we seem to be seeing less games there every year - what with the ever-increasing industry woes I've chronicled my thoughts on here for years - but still, everyone goes and makes it out to be a big deal. There's always awkward technical glitches and nonsense video game system customers don't care about, like attempts to push Sony and Microsoft branded alternatives to streaming services like Netflix and apparently now convince us that we need to manage fantasy football leagues right there on our console dashboards while also watching more commercials. Everyone still goes - except Nintendo at least had the foresight to do a series of their usually excellent prerecorded Nintendo Direct internet broadcast conferences instead of their usual awkward stage show, just showing up to show off the games directly to the press and to attendees on the show floor - and it's generally kind of terrible and embarrassing every year.

And I still write about it. But this year, it's different.

I've been writing about it for years, the ongoing crumbling of the video game industry with Sony and Microsoft. The previous generation ended since my last E3 posts, with the arrival of the Wii U last November. Understandably, by faults on the parts of Nintendo, third parties, and ultimately the messy state of the global economy and visibly declining state of video game hardware and software sales, the Wii U has struggled so far. They didn't even push New Super Mario Bros. U at launch, when that should have been front and center in the marketing everywhere. Now the 3DS is the only healthy traditional video game platform on the entire market now, dominating globally after its early struggles. This is a turnaround Nintendo is obviously hoping to repeat with the Wii U, though it's awful that it's had to go through this in the first place. But there's a lot at stake in making this turnaround happen, and not just with Nintendo.

Sony and Microsoft have unveiled their new consoles, the stagnantly named Playstation 4 and confusingly named Xbox One. (The very naming of which makes it clear that in retrospect, the Wii U name isn't nearly as confusing as the competition's - nor as tired.) And in the past 24 hours, the day before E3 2013 officially starts, Microsoft and Sony both held their press conferences. But after a whole generation of the industry beating itself to death on the PS3 and Xbox 360, something's different. Change is in the air. This is it. We're finally arriving. Critical mass.

To begin, reality has little bearing on the narrative about the industry you'll hear within the video game subculture. Nintendo has been 'doomed' for coming up on twenty years in this narrative. Every PS3 and Xbox 360 game was a hit, and all industry struggles and losses are nothing to ever think about or consider - let alone dare connect with the PS3 or 360. They were the 'real winners' of the past generation despite losing billions of dollars, the PS3 barely breaking even recently - catastrophic after over 7 years on the market - and the Xbox 360 financial problems carefully obscured by Microsoft couching it within the rest of their entertainment division. As I've been over in this blog ad nauseum - because it never stopped - these platforms, favored by the industry over Nintendo for increasingly irrational and unjustifiable reasons (When you see an industry figure lash out against any company over social media, it's always Nintendo, and it's never any more informed than the average gaming message board rant, which is to say, not at all.), continued to get aggressive third party support all generation despite neither platform ever becoming consistently or reliably profitable, with the average game requiring around 1.5 million copies sold in the early days to break even (The average PS3 and 360 game does not even come close to selling 500,000 copies, and never has.), and development costs increasing with developer ambition unchecked over the course of the generation, with budgets skyrocketing (Quite a few breaking the $100 million budget barrier and taking spectacular losses) and game after game expected to be a smash hit - including titles as recent as the new Tomb Raider game earlier this year - failing to come remotely close to turning a profit, even in some cases after selling several million copies. Instead of changing their behavior, the industry continued this unsustainable behavior and as I've noted time and time again, has hobbled itself more and more every passing year. Because apparently there are very few people in positions of power in the video game industry anymore actually willing to make the necessary budget allocations and platform choices to run a viable, functioning business.

As we head into this new generation with Nintendo attempting to decrease development costs on the Wii U from those of the PS3 and Xbox 360, and Sony and Microsoft pushing new platforms aiming for another dramatic leap forward in graphics and a huge leap forward in development cost that nobody in the industry can afford, has the industry learned anything? No, of course not.

The PS4 was unveiled in February to a relatively flat reception with graphics that impressed, but games that inspired no passion. The powerful hardware specs had leaked months ago, along with details of some pretty heinous anti-consumer DRM intended to eliminate the sale of preowned games and keep people from lending games to friends and family members, among other awful things. Despite this, the vocal elements in the video game subculture that have been declaring Nintendo 'doomed' as long as they've been gaming - and refused to accept that the Wii led the market (In hardware sales, software sales, first party game sales, third party profitability rates, total third party exclusives, and overall cultural impact - by effectively every metric) in spite of all evidence that contradicted their willful ignorance (The sort of cognitive dissonance human beings do not like to have threatened by terrifying things like facts.) - continued to fantasize about the Playstation 4 as a 'new PS2,' longing to return to the days where Sony dominated the industry with their increasingly stagnant, ultra-conservative hardware, which now focused on graphical horsepower and 'movie games' above all else, and they could feel more comfortable with Nintendo's 'doom' as their hardware languished, lacking the sorts of games at the time of Sony's dominance that helped trigger their resurgence with the DS and Wii. Namely classic-style 2D Super Mario Bros. games. Like with the PS3, the cognitive dissonance associated with the PS4 also included completely ignoring what the cost of development actually meant for the industry, telling themselves time and time again that games were 'successful' with the low sales necessary to make the average lower-budget PS2 game profitable, when in reality these games were crippling their parent companies financially, and we saw massive layoffs and both developers and publishers big and small falling over the course of the generation - Sony themselves opening the previous generation with the PS3 putting an end to Factor5, previously a beloved presence on Nintendo platforms, and the generation closing with THQ's utter collapse and the scavenging of its intellectual property after too many PS3 and 360 games bombed.

The Xbox One was unveiled to more of an uproar less than a month ago when Microsoft revealed its own draconian anti-used-games DRM much like that which had been leaked as being in Sony's PS4. It also lacked in compelling games at the reveal, and much like the PS4's announced library, relied heavily on up-ports of PS3 and 360 games releasing at the same time, which are no incentive to buy expensive new hardware. Much of the reveal was focused on unnecessary features like fantasy football leagues and the idea that the Xbox brand should be all about your watching TV - including getting achievements for watching TV - while gaming was an afterthought. Microsoft was finally trying to push their overpriced set-top box where gamers did not actually own their games. On top of which, they decided against offering any backward compatibility with Xbox 360 games and for all the focus on their account system - as with Sony - they opted not to allow their customers to carry any of their digital downloads forward, making building a longer-term digital download game collection impossible. Sony has done this with the PS4 as well, but is getting a pass on criticism for it due to the bias overwhelmingly in favor of Sony that has existed in the video game subculture since their initial domination of the industry following their entrance back in the mid-'90s. This is a bias that has remained unshaken even in the face of the failure of the PSP outside of Japan, the PS3's existence as gaming's biggest financial catastrophe - outweighing those of the Atari Jaguar and Panasonic 3DO by far, not that the Sony audience tends to know what those even were - and even the complete and utter failure of Sony's Playstation Vita, gaming's most ironically named platform in market history. At their own conference just a few hours ago, Sony barely acknowledged the Vita, tossing some old PS2 ports - curiously, the Wii was always jeered at when it got improved versions of PS2 games, yet the Vita isn't - and insisted it was fine, despite the fact that the public has access to their hardware sales numbers. There's no question that the platform's effectively done already, not even a full year and a half after its release outside of Japan, as it's proven to be nearly as costly to develop for as the PS3, and barely anybody owns it, making it impossible to make money on. A crisis mirroring what both the Xbox One and PS4 are going to face upon their launches, even more harshly than the Wii U's own deep sales woes. At any rate, when it comes to the aforementioned Sony bias, where Nintendo has been 'doomed' forever, Sony has been 'on the verge of a comeback' ever since the DS and Wii crushed the PS3 and PSP in the market. The writing is never on the wall for Sony, and Nintendo is never allowed to have one victory - also, whenever exclusive third party games get announced for Nintendo platforms anymore, it's the obsessively self-entitled Sony audience that throws tantrums, no matter how dangerously unviable their platforms are. It happened with Dragon Quest IX, it happened with Mega Man 9, it happened with Monster Hunter Tri, it happened with Resident Evil Revelations, it happened with Shin Megami Tensei IV, it happened with Bayonetta 2, it happened with Sonic Lost World, it happened with LEGO City Undercover, and it even happened with the recent announcement of the end of Sony's Yakuza series exclusivity with HD ports of the first two games now Wii U-bound - and Nintendo funded and published some of these games as collaborations themselves. The list is still growing.

Microsoft held their E3 press conference more than twelve but less than twenty four hours ago in the early afternoon. It lacked in exclusive games, and what few first party games it had had no shot to speak of at turning a profit, selling the millions more they would need to, when they couldn't make Xbox 360 development viable with a sales requirement to the tune of millions less. The whole conference was an embarrassment, from them dredging up old Nintendo franchise Killer Instinct - owned by Rare, which Microsoft bought quite a few years back, and effectively reduced to a shell making games for their failed Kinect peripheral, while all the staff that mattered at Rare left the company years ago - just to hand it to a notoriously inept outside developer to turn it into a generic Mortal Kombat clone to trying really hard to convince people that they'll get the most out of the Xbox experience by buying the suffering Windows 8 (Which reminded again that Microsoft is in no way infallible as a corporation, despite the undue reverence they often receive.) and their Surface tablet to use their Smartglass application, which, after its big unveil at E3 2012, has gone on to be incorporated into very few games and essentially bring no real value to the gaming experience. And on top of all of this, just as Sony has tried to awkwardly force people to stick with their failed Wii remote and nunchuck knock-off in the Playstation Move by making a few more PS3 and now PS4 games using it despite its vast unpopularity, Microsoft has continued to push Kinect with the new Xbox One, but it's less about games now - when it was always a cynical response to the Wii's incredible success and nothing more, like Sony's Move, typical terrible business moves that've been made hundreds to thousands of times before and will be made again; there are books dedicated to these mistakes that nobody ever seems to learn from - and more about spying on you to make sure you're not violating any license agreements by doing something horrible like streaming a movie while there are 'too many' people watching it in the same room with you. On top of which, they set a $500 price point for the system, and the next Halo's not coming for another year and a half or so. It's a vastly anti-consumer train wreck, conceived with the notion that the PS4 would be too, effectively colluding in an attack on consumer rights. Just as Microsoft went from a laughingstock with the original Xbox to somehow beloved with the 360 despite its numerous shortcomings from excessive reliance on FPSes to massive financial damage to the industry to its infamous Red Rings of Doom, Microsoft fell in their hubris back to being reviled. With that, the ultimately entirely unprofitable Xbox line joins the ever-growing pile of failed Microsoft electronics, in part due to how incredibly unpopular and untrusted their brand is with much of the public, and they seem to think that pretending that isn't the case will somehow make that be. The fact that they thought those "Scroogled" ads were a good idea when they also datamine on Bing and sell your information, like Google, says much of Microsoft today.

Suffice it to say, the Xbox brand is done. With that, and after the PS3 and Vita, you would think that things would be a cakewalk for Nintendo now. Even after Sony and Microsoft's press conferences, Nintendo still has the games advantage by a galaxy, with a growing mountain of exclusives the competition lacks and a massive, continuous deluge of incoming indie support for the Wii U and 3DS eShops that the gaming media, for all its lack of objectivity, refuses to acknowledge, much like the subculture - 'indies hate Nintendo' has been part of the 'Nintendo is doomed' narrative for as long as online download shops have existed on modern gaming platforms, while somehow indies have an undying love for Microsoft and Sony, despite Xbox Live Arcade having been awful for most who published on it, Xbox Live Indie Games having been a huge failure that led to Microsoft's dropping XNA, and PSN notoriously charging developers and publishers for bandwidth and indie games largely going ignored on there too. But hey, Microsoft started the indie push, so their love is assumed and that narrative is unshaken, while Sony funds and publishes their own awkward 'artsy' games and calls them 'indie' even though they aren't in any sense. We're watching indie developers flee from Sony and Microsoft to Nintendo's eShops as they reach out to indies aggressively - Dan Adelman deserves a lot of respect for the excellent work he's doing - and to online platforms like Steam (Where Zeboyd Games saw their fun retro-style RPGs, Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World - which I can happily personally recommend, having enjoyed both thoroughly - dramatically outsold their original XBLIG releases in short order.), Desura, Gamer's Gate, Good Old Games, and so on. The PC scene is still unquestionably the strongest gaming scene for indies. But it says a lot that as Sony and Microsoft's indie support falls - with Sony just creating their own 'indie' games as previously mentioned, then getting a few bigger name indies to appear on stage at their events - the fact that Nintendo routinely receives no credit for their eShops' significant strides and massive increases in support says it all. We're already seeing indies largely picking the winners this generation in the Wii U and 3DS.

On top of all this, Nintendo's poised to increase their exclusive game advantage even more in less than twelve hours at their big Wii U Direct conference online. And Pokemon X and Y, which releases on the 3DS in October, is easily a bigger game than anything coming to competing platforms this year. The forthcoming release of Monster Hunter 4 exclusively on the 3DS this September will, together with Pokemon X and Y, put an end to whatever last gasps the Vita's heaving at that point. But despite these games and the huge influx of major, sorely needed first party games coming to the Wii U in the latter half of the year, Nintendo has a major challenge at hand after Sony's conference, and more than just Nintendo's future rides on it.

There's an electricity in the air. The very fate of the industry is at stake. We're finally there. Critical mass. Different from previous years. There's no carrying on like there's nothing wrong with the PS3 and 360 causing the industry to deteriorate while said industry continues to thumb its nose at Nintendo and Nintendo customers. We're finally headed for that climactic collision.

Now, let's slow things down for just a moment as we move on to Sony.

Imagine you're standing at the edge of an active volcano. At the base are people hoping it doesn't erupt, but they're drowned out by a crowd cheering for it to erupt, certain that its eruption won't kill them, but would instead make all of their dreams come true.

This is where the industry stands now. Sony's software lineup in their conference was decidedly weak, riddled with first party titles that wouldn't have made money on the PS3 - and the vast majority of their first party PS3 titles did not, even this year and in recent years - and Sony themselves can't afford their own leap forward in game budgeting. The game that was supposed to 'save' the Vita, an excessively tasteless, gory Monster Hunter knockoff called Soul Sacrifice, even ended up bombing hard in the end. And last year's hyped up return of Sly Cooper at E3 led to a silent release and complete flop on both the PS3 and Vita. Sony's own shameless knockoff of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series was a spectacular failure as well. Rather than pushing any of their bigger IPs for the PS4 launch, they focused them later in the PS3's life, with smaller titles that wouldn't have been viable on the PS3, giving those even higher budgets, while they'll do little for the PS4's actual sales when they finally arrive. Otherwise, its third party support is largely shared with the Xbox One, and the one somewhat dismaying moment was watching Square Enix - which acknowledged in recent interviews that one more failure of the catastrophic financial scale of Final Fantasy XIV would bankrupt them, and hasn't had a single successful game in years, increasingly turning into a Japanese-run Eidos/Crystal Dynamics with no sane budgeting to speak of, their Japanese staff mostly long gone - announcing that Final Fantasy Versus XIII (Essentially the Duke Nukem Forever of the Japanese RPG genre - over 7 years in development with still no real gameplay footage and only prerendered videos to show for it, impossible to turn a profit on) is now Final Fantasy XV and PS4 exclusive, as is the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts 3. Though in the meantime, the Kingdom Hearts series has fallen hard in sales, and Japanese RPGs notoriously couldn't break even on the PS3 - the announcement of these games (On top of titles that've been in development hell for years that don't break even, like an upcoming new Thief game, and a very high budget mystery, Murdered, that doesn't have a prayer at profitability) was effectively Square Enix announcing that they will be going out of business in the next couple of years. I wouldn't be shocked if they ended up going bankrupt before some of these games released. The silver lining is that Dragon Quest creator - and franchise owner - Yuji Horii, industry legend close with Nintendo, will likely end up taking the Dragon Quest series over to Nintendo with his studio, Project Armor, and establish his team as a new second party for Nintendo, which has been localizing and publishing Enix's Dragon Quest games abroad for years now. Most of the Square staff from their '90s golden age has formed teams at Nintendo in the past decade as well, so the Square that's perishing now is a husk of its former self, and what we'll be losing isn't really worth mourning anymore, sadly. I wonder if we'll see Akitoshi Kawazu and any of the Crystal Chronicles series staff come Nintendo-ward after Square's collapse.

At their conference, Sony also had the gall to be smug and ugly about their calculated choice not to screw their customers, just to screw Microsoft instead, making the calculated choice not to pursue anti-used-games DRM at the last minute after the Xbox One backlash, while shrugging at the fact that they've abandoned free online play - the very same fanatics who used to boast about Sony's free online play are now scrambling to say going pay made sense all along - and attempted to replace backward compatibility due to their own poorly planned Cell-based PS3 hardware design with paid game streaming. They're also now heavily focused on trying to sell the public on 'cloud gaming' for how cool and essentially futuristic it sounds, but it's inherently anti-consumer and in no way a replacement for backward compatibility. And their basis for their streaming service, Gaikai, failed independently, as did OnLive, for reasons very different than merely lacking a major corporate backer.

All of Sony's corporate hubris was back on full display in their press conference - honestly, it was never gone. It's been there the whole time, they just never had the chance to display it as proudly and smugly as they do now since Jerry Lambert, the actor who played the obnoxious character of Kevin Butler in years of Playstation brand commercials - a character essentially conceived to paint a 'cool guy' face on the 1% during years of tremendous suffering - quit, and then they sued him for daring to appear in a tire commercial that included a Wii. Claiming that they owned his face. And won. To call Sony's presence in gaming ugly would be kind. And what they bring out in the ever-increasingly toxic video game subculture is something so vile I recommend you never familiarize yourself with it. By the time you'd come to fully understand what brand fanaticism brings out in gamers, with Sony's the most vocal of the tribes, you'd come away from all of it with nothing but the deepest of regrets and disgust. Some things aren't worth understanding. If you stare too long at ugly things, it makes you ugly inside too. That's the central problem of the vile video game subculture - its ugliness is self-perpetuating, spreading and infecting. It associates itself primarily with the two brands destroying the industry, and over time it's metastasized into something cancerous that's headed into its fourth and final stage now. Self-awareness is scarce - the gamers who realize what the subculture is tend to have the good sense to stay away from it entirely.

They also boasted about datamining to create their social platform response to Miiverse - one of the shadiest things you can do, and they announced it with PRIDE, reminding us that they're not a corporation to be trusted. Unfortunately, their fanatics trust them blindly. And thus, we watched as legitimately disturbing moments of corporate hubris and mistreatment of the public at large were shrugged off, as this visibly crumbling corporation - which only posted a profit in the past year due to major western HQ real estate sales, Kaz Hirai has no 'brilliant' plan to turn Sony around - is heralded as some kind of 'gaming hero.' Ugly truths happily ignored in the name of blind video game console tribalism. One of the stupidest sentences I've typed in my life, and yet still true. We have truly allowed corporations to conquer us and become the worst kind of consumer. Moments like this make me think this country doesn't even deserve someone like Elizabeth Warren. And then I sigh and realize that even if it's hopeless and it isn't worth it, it's still a fight I have to do my insignificant part to fight until I'm dead. Better to spend your whole life fighting for better things that will never come to pass than to throw it away over the comfortable apathy with which far too many people prefer to live.

During Sony's press conference, the moment Shuhei Yoshida stepped on stage, the twitter feeds for the event were flooded with comments to the effect of, "GET THAT ASIAN GUY OUT OF HERE," and worse. When it comes to Sony's market in the gamer subculture, I'll leave you with that bitter nugget.

The gaming subculture, as nasty and toxic as it is, harbors a lot of very, very unhealthy people. (For but one recent example, see the aggressively misogynistic backlash to Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women project.) And if Sony does indeed succeed in crashing the industry this generation, we're going to see a lot of very tribalistic individuals with no other hobbies who largely define themselves by their video game console brand of choice come a bit unhinged. There are a lot of very old, very ugly human traits that go into this sort of factional, tribalistic behavior, to the point of proudly eschewing reality outside of the tribe - be it one built on a car brand, a sports team, fondness for a certain show, or even, of course, a video game console brand. There are many things about us that are still very primitive, no matter how far we think we've come. And there's tremendous ugliness in these things. They remind us of how simple we still are. How little progress we've made in many respects - how far we haven't come.

Sony's fanatics are heralding the press conference as Sony 'saving' gaming with the PS4, in contrast to the Xbox One, when in truth, it's nothing but another executioner in a different mask. I've seen this coming and have been observing it here for years. Naturally, the industry has done nothing to avoid it.

Apparently 'winning' E3 has less to do with games, according to this first night, and more to do with a small price advantage in a time when $300-350 is too much for a console and $250 is too much for a portable, choosing not to pursue anti-used-games DRM, and then airing a video you produced to sneer in your closest competitor's face over the lack of said DRM than games. Never mind that Sony has patented something just as draconian, and we had more than enough development leaks to know that they were going to use that technology until late in development - it was a calculated move in response to the backlash Microsoft faced over those anti-consumer measures that undoubtedly caused them to back off on that technology at the last second. It's not even their most heinous anti-consumer gaming patent, either - they have one to force commercial breaks into your gaming sessions that requires you to say the brandname the commercial was for into the camera in order to resume your gaming session once the ad ends. They're by no means 'heroes' or 'champions' of consumer rights. Companies of such conscience don't pursue patents like these in the first place. But this was a calculated decision - hit Microsoft at the last second instead of the consumer, when Microsoft pursued their own draconian anti-consumer 'features' specifically in full awareness of the PS4 leaks revealing its anti-used-games technology - rather than the customer. Eliminate the competition first. Then, with less competition, you can begin implementing these dreadful 'features,' to once again use a term Sony used in the past to deflect criticism of major design flaws in the PSP, complete with an awkward metaphor comparing themselves to a 'genius gate designer.' Because genius, apparently, makes you beyond criticism. There's that hallmark Sony egotism.

The important takeaway? It wasn't by games that Microsoft lost. And it wasn't by games that Sony supposedly 'won.' Both of their platforms have weak announced libraries, and the biggest games announced aren't coming anytime soon, let alone at launch to face Nintendo's significantly stronger fall lineup for the lower-priced Wii U.

There is only one leader and advocate for fiscal responsibility and industry sustainability in the traditional video game console and portable industry - Nintendo. They're jeered by Sony and Microsoft for it, and reviled by the most vocal of gamers for not joining Sony and Microsoft, for not becoming another volcano threatening to erupt and destroy the whole industry. And, of course, the one generation when they outdid Sony in hardware power and matched Microsoft is the generation most frequently invoked as seemingly eternal proof of Nintendo's supposed predestination to failure. That's what you get for trying to please these gamers. With that vocal crowd, they can do no right.

Everything I've been observing and discussing on this blog in regard to gaming for years has continued to go wrong in the industry. Naturally, this is a complete nowhere corner-of-the-internet blog, so of course virtually no one heard what had to be said. I've sat back and written about Sony and Microsoft destroying the industry and pushing it toward a crash, and now we're rapidly approaching critical mass. The industry hasn't changed course, and the subculture's only gotten nastier and more tribalistic. If you love Sony - and until recently Microsoft - you're a hardcore gamer. If you so much as like Nintendo and their games, you're a fanboy, and you're wrong. Loving any corporation is a pretty bad idea in the first place.

Unfortunately, there's not much satisfaction that comes with being right about all this, after all these years of words I've wasted on an industry that isn't worth it. All I have to show for it is that quiet sense of insignificance that maybe people would be better off if they felt more often - but maybe not the futility I'm also facing here. I've been shouting into a hurricane here all along, and it's been as effective as just that. There's human nature at its ugliest on display here altogether too often. And in the end, I should probably be pouring this energy into causes much more worthy and important than video games of all things.

All of this reminds me why I have no faith in humanity in the first place. All of their ignorance and ugliness on display.

At times like this, I look at the industry in question and think, "How do you still exist?" and then think, "Oh, right. Not for much longer." Then I look at the underlying causes of this situation, from lack of accountability to lack of the most basic business acumen to the near complete erosion of professionalism - some very ugly sides of the industry itself have come out time and time again on social media in recent years that would get most people fired, but not in this business - to something deeper, more ridiculous and tribalistic in human nature itself. And you think to yourself, "How do we still exist?" and then recall that we're destroying the planet and sprinting blindly toward global uninhabitability, just like the gamers and their brandname of choice and 'hardcore' image trumping the future of the industry they love, and think, "Oh, right. Not for much longer."

(Too heavy-handed? Too bad. It's the truth, and there's no point in sugarcoating where we're going as a species. It's shouting into a hurricane too. There's a lot more of us doing that on this subject, but no matter how many of us there are, our voices never seen to achieve anything but quiet.)

At least in this case, these awful things are happening around something as insignificant as video games, so while a lot of people are going to end up unemployed and lives are going to be ruined, hey, it's not genocide. The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry where basic math and common sense hold virtually no sway. Let that sink in for a moment. An entire industry that ineptly run. Anywhere else, these people would have been fired a long time ago. This is what the end of an industry looks like. It's a remarkably ugly and embarrassing case of a whole lot of human beings being human in a way we should be smarter than - better than - but we're not. Because this is what we are. No matter how many years pass, no matter how many advances we make. We're still this same, basic, base creature under everything else. And it's nothing to be proud of.

Will the volcano erupt? We won't have a complete answer by later this morning. Or by the end of the week. Or probably even until sometime next year at the soonest. Every new platform limps out the door, and not all of them recover - despite all the hype so soon after Sony's E3 conference, the PS4 faces no easy ascent either, given that it's going to destroy its supporters with its sheer financial unviability at every turn. And it took both the Xbox 360 and PS3 years to gain anything that could be called substantial support or build up a stable of games making money at all. But until then, next year, all I can do - all any of us interested in this hobby or the future of its ill-fated industry can do - is keep watching that volcano with trepidation in relative quiet, while an ignorant lot continues to proudly, boastfully call for its eruption. Raise your voice in their presence and they'll get mad. After all, you're just a kiddy casual fanboy and not a cool guy hardcore gamer - what do you know?

The games shown for the PS4 and Xbox One at E3 this year will not make money.

This is an inescapable of truth of the video game industry where it is now. The last thing it needs is another dramatic leap in development costs, starting over again on expensive new home consoles launched in a major global recession with a starting audience of zero.

My hope is that by the time the industry crash over these deeply self-destructive budgets arrives - inevitable as it seems after that Sony conference - whether partial or complete, I'd like to be completely numb to this whole business. I have books to finish writing. One of which will be out later this year.

However few of you bother to read this out there, I'd like to leave you with this before it's on to the Nintendo post soon enough. Whether the video game subculture or anything else, don't allow yourself to stare too long at ugly things. It may not be easy. It's impossible to get through life without rubbernecking at a train wreck or thirty. But it's never worth it. It it doesn't make you ugly inside too, it'll leave you dead inside. And it's with a personal bitterness that I look on the hobby I grew up loving from the first time I picked up an NES controller in the late '80s and see the tremendous amount of ugliness coming from this thing I love, and just as much ugliness from the people producing these things. There's a cruel irony in that this is what video games are these days, in industry and culture. Sometimes the things you love will break your heart.

One can only hope that once all of this is over, whatever's left - whatever comes from that - is something new and worth finding. Even if one hopes in vain. Until then, it's time to look forward to what Nintendo has to show for the rest of E3. They need to throw everything they've got at Sony now. Gamers need something to look forward to. We need a future. Don't we all?

Two Words on Bullying

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:59:00 +0000

Oh hey, it's 2013 now, isn't it? And I haven't posted anything here for you guys since last November. Obama was rightly reelected, of course, but predictably, we've only seen the usual disappointment from the government since. That's a matter for another irate ramble, however. Normally, as I've meant to for the past year or two and still haven't gotten to, I'd start out the new year with some big rambling post summarizing things as of late - personal, boring nonsense. There's not much to report as of late, though I'll probably babble enough about it at some point, from my having been freelancing for over a year and a half now to tentative efforts to escape the south that I've been focusing on to present ongoing health problems threatening to derail more than I care to think about.

At any rate, just over three and a half months into the year, I'm starting out 2013 with a couple of things I felt compelled to post.

I've never really been the preachy type, and I pretty much feel like writing about bullying and conveying anti-bullying messages is after school special material. I kind of expect some of the darker jokes I've made and am making in future novels may even get me accused of 'bullying' in some sense in the future due to my fondness for cruel jokes in my works of fiction. Thus, you haven't seen me write about bullying here before, and it's not a subject I particularly plan to spend a great deal of time on.

No point in making any secret of it, though - I was bullied growing up, by all sorts of people and in all sorts of circumstances. It wasn't fun, and I don't like to think about it, but it's certainly made a lifelong impact on me that's reflected in who I am today. That is, after all, what tends to happen to people who go through that. In retrospect, most of my protagonists in my novels so far were bullied too. My empathy lies with them, so I write about losers in one sense or another. Each screwed up in their own way with their own unique damage.

It's with that observation about victims of bullying that I get on to the point of this post - sharing two videos that ended up popping up on my Twitter feed within the same 24 hour duration last week, both sharing the subject of bullying. I wouldn't call either after school material, and both worth experiencing for what they are, for their opposite, and yet appropriately complementary responses to the subject.

First up we have To This Day, a collaborative animated art project with numerous contributors, adding animation and music to a dramatic poem about bullying and its lasting impact on victims by poet Shane Koyczan. I learned of it through a relevant link that cartoonist Kate Beaton posted on Twitter.

I watched this expecting to get bored and close the tab a minute or two in, thinking, "Hey, good message, but I probably don't need to listen to a seven-minute poem about the subject." Then the poem's message, wordplay, content, and tone just kept escalating - I found myself unable to break away, and to my surprise, I was actually moved. I found myself actually reflecting on my past experiences that I generally try to forget and not to think about, even though I live every day with the damage done. This isn't hokey like I cynically expected - it's just honest and powerful. It articulates with eloquence things I've definitely felt, and some I still feel, from old bruises to shades of hopelessness. So even though I don't tend to do PSA type things here on this blog - those would also require a public to read this hole-in-a-wall blog, seeing as I've been running it for close to six years now and I'm still a writer without a single published book (Hoping to change that this year) and without a readerbase to speak of - I felt the need to share this. Some part of my subconscious probably loves the idea of being some secretive writer whom nobody reads, a weird, nebulous ghost out of there on the internet left to be discovered only decades after his death. (Let's be honest, we don't have centuries left as a species.) This probably comes from the same part of myself that hates being looked at. But then every writer needs their readers, and we all need to eat to live. Anyway, watch the video. Watch it and bask in the irony of my now linking to - and actually liking - the Vimeo service after I wrote a blog post jabbing at in the early days of Spiral Reverie over a potential weird viral marketing thing they may have done that I read about on the Something Awful forums. Living up to the goon name.

Now, hit the link and watch the video.

Were you moved? Good. Few things are more important than the casual and routine exercise of empathy - most exercise it far too infrequently here in American society, and that's one of our diseases that cut right to the core of our problems politically and societally.

Now, let's move on to the second video - an episode of an ongoing web series on YouTube that I'll be highlighting sometime this year in its own blog post as I bring back my old one-part series, Internet Spelunking. (Because the internet is a cave and there are stalactites and stalagmites and this will be on the test. Also jokes about giving your brain the black lung.) That series, of course, is none other than Puddin', an ongoing series created, written by, and starring in silence Patton Oswalt's brother, Matt Oswalt, who shares his brother's gift for amazing twisted humor. (See: Patton's joke in his Finest Hour special about the stripper whose father fucked her in a Garfield mask. You weren't expecting a reference to that in a post about bullying, were you?) Of course, it's comedy legend Eddie Pepitone who carries each episode of Puddin', while Matt sits there eating pudding in the office break room where every episode takes place, largely ignoring him and trying not to crack up. In this particular episode - and they're typically pretty short - they're joined by a number of members of the hilarious 5secondfilms crew, whom I'll probably dedicate a future Internet Spelunking post to as well, because their special brand of micro-comedy is worthy of attention and regular laffos too.

Do you feel slightly violated now? Do you perhaps want to cry a little bit? Or do you feel incredibly vindicated? I saw both of these things in the same 24 hours - now you have too. And they do go together. Let's not lie to ourselves here. You've probably never seen a better pairing of bullying-themed videos in your life. And I subjected you to both of them. Take that, every bullying-themed after school special and all those televised and internet-based anti-bullying campaigns. What're you going to do? Cry about it?

So, it's 2013 now. Be cool to each other, kids. You too, overgrown kids. One of the many things adulthood has taught me, as I near the end of my twenties, is that most adults don't have any idea what they're doing either - we're all caught up in this big, ridiculous society game, just trying to survive, and we can all stand to be kinder.

Election 2012: The Wealthy are Not Entitled to Their Delusions

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 23:32:00 +0000

Here we are at last, Election Day 2012. Four years ago today, we made history by electing Barack Obama to the office of president of the United States. It's been a bumpy four years since. After all, on inauguration day that following January, the Republican party - led by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell - came together and swore to prevent this administration from enacting policy and prevent Obama's reelection. Right on day one. And they had the gall to spend this entire election season complaining that Obama wasn't 'bipartisan enough.'

I've already voted. Hopefully you have, too. Either way, I'm writing and posting this far too late for it to affect anything or change anybody's mind about anything. Not that it was going to have any effect like that in the first place, on a podunk blog like this. At any rate, what follows here is a pastiche of thoughts I've been having and articulating for months. I meant to make Spiral Reverie more active for months prior to this, but kept stumbling, as per usual. Thus, you were deprived of the usual assortment of my thoughts and writings that I assaulted your eyes with just before the 2008 election. This year, you get a lot of that all at once in this post with a unifying thought there in the title. There'll be more thoughts in other posts later. Because that's what keeps you going.

We should reelect Obama, of course. Not because he's going to liberate us from the broken corporatocracy we've become, a sham of a democracy. I was born while Ronald Reagan was president. While I was growing up being taught to believe in American democracy, because education demands that we be idealistic even if it means being naive. But even as I was born, as my generation came into this world, democracy was being sold by the great white hope of the Republican party. Never mind that the man actually had the sense to raise taxes on numerous occasions, that he ignored AIDS, and that he was going fairly senile by the time he left office. What really matters is the myth the man became and the blight we call Reagaonomics - the birthplace of the trickle-down economic policy the Republican party continues to push, despite a well-established history of pushing the wealth to the top where it's hoarded, while the rest of the nation suffers. In fact, it was recently debunked yet again in a nonpartisan congressional study. The Republicans hid that, of course. How else could the rich continue to get away with hoarding everything, while continuing to take the entire concept of job creation and stability hostage? And business owners are outright threatening their employees to vote for Romney. And Mitt Romney himself urged this short of behavior. The ruling class that should rightly be overthrown exerting their power.

Obama won't stop this, of course, but he acknowledges the problem, and of our two choices, he's the only one who might actually pursue overturning the Supreme Court's nationally destructive Citizens United ruling that outright sold our democracy.

Now, let's talk a bit more about what Romney and the Republicans are running on. The theme of this year's Republican National Convention back in late August was 'We Built It,' a cynical line in response to an out of context line from an Obama speech referring to infrastructure built by government labor. In Tampa, Florida, just a few months ago, a lot of rich, white, well-connected people gathered to make sure we knew that they built everything of theirs themselves. That we should ignore the context of the original quote, that we should ignore the vital government role in maintaining our crumbling government infrastructure, that we should ignore the considerable ministrations of their hired labor. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

In Republican fantasy land, where the wealthy are 'middle class' and corporations are 'small businesses,' corporations and businesses exist and succeed as they do by the grace of god, just as our rights are bestowed by one, and aren't things people fight for, that a government working for the people enshrines with legislation. Why, it should just be good ol' common sense by now that businesses and especially corporations have every right to exist and oppress the world financially for the benefit of an extreme few of at the top through our broken institutions and lack of regulation. The government has nothing to do with allowing business to exist in the first place and recognizing it. Business and financial commerce are the highest form of natural existence! Never mind that the very value of all currency is an illusion maintained only by that we as a collective whole agree to give these things certain agreed upon values that are constantly in flux. And naturally, the taxes must be the work of some sort of unholy monster from down below. Why should we have to pay a price for participation in society? Let alone dare think about maintaining it?

As usual, the party that denounces government, continues to seek election to it and when elected, seeks to break it and prevent it from properly serving the interests of the people. They seek to become supposed public servants, but when elected to that position, have no interest in serving the public. In a sane, informed nation, such a political party would be entirely unviable. But this is America. We're going to run this shit into the ground, all while shouting, "Fuck you! Got mine!"

The truth is, we're not civilized enough to maintain a civilization.

Further RNC thoughts. This is where things will start to get a little more jumbled and potentially redundant - try to stomach that, if you can. At any rate, foreign policy and incompetence.

This year, they upheld Condoleezza Rice as a foreign policy expert. She spent her eight years as a key member of George W. Bush's administration acting primarily as an enabler of reckless war after war, and was right there in the middle of things as we became a global laughingstock. She criticized the Obama administration for diplomacy, as the GOP has year after year, as a weakness rather than the supposed strength the GOP continually shows in its endless beating of the war drums. In many ways, their foreign policy seems to boil down to little more than that if you don't like America, we should kill you.

Rice's - and the Bush administration's - policies exuded jingoism, and historically, that serves no one well. The GOP fantasy includes all other nations in the world being backward shitholes, where America exists as some kind of Shangri-La - and it's easy to peddle that to a xenophobic base that has little awareness of the outside world. It could probably be said that America is a nation too large for its own good - not merely too big for its own britches, but ultimately so insular and self-suffocating in its cultural identity (or lack thereof in the widespread rejection of the celebration of cultural diversity that should define us) that too many Americans lives oblivious to what life is like outside of the US, in a fantasy world where we're either the only ones who have freedom, or that we're somehow the 'most free.' Republicans feel they have a right to live in this fantasy world where we invented concepts like freedom and democracy, instead of increasingly distorting them as we have - and anyone with a grasp of functioning human civilization and nature (Sorry, Libertarians) gets that freedom comes with its limitations, including speech, such as hate speech and shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Just a few months ago, as the London Olympics opened, we watched Mitt Romney go on a three-country tour - including to the UK, where he picked up the nickname, 'Mitt the Twit,' which undoubtedly made him glad his nickname isn't Mott (As Obama noted in his DNC speech, "You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.") - and invariably piss people off wherever he went, stumbling and bumbling at every turn. When the election's still three months off and you manage to anger one of our closest allies right off the bat because you're incapable of even paying them the expected Olympic lip service - and hey, even I watched the opening ceremonies and thought Danny Boyle and all involved really came up with something fun - you're displaying a certain level of foreign relations incompetence that should effectively bar you from any position of global power. Of course, when you also manage to insult a whole local community over a beloved local bakery, maybe running for any kind of office or interacting with other human beings just isn't for you.

Considering Bush's behavior and the GOP's criticism of Obama's foreign relations history, apparently we're supposed to strut around like cowboys and tell the rest of the world that we rule them. In essence, that we should encourage the rest of the world to despise us so we can keep saying they hate us because we're better, all while effectively inviting attacks on our country and future war in general, as much as we've made a sport of war in recent years. And our rather cavalier use of drone strikes throughout the Middle East and eagerness to launch into preemptive cyber warfare come off as entirely ill-advised - aggressive policies that can and will probably come back to bite us in the britches in the future.

Speaking of blisters in the britches, cranky failed candidate John McCain's been mad this year that we're not at war in Iran and Syria as we speak. Because apparently good foreign policy means not only more American imperialism - we all know how popular that's made us abroad (If we keep troops on the ground in three more countries, we get a free Big Mac!) - but more war. And nothing says competent, humane foreign policy quite like marking some bad guys, dropping some bombs, and shrugging off a whole lot of civilian casualties, because hey, you shouldn't have gotten in the way of our bombs/bullets/drones. Not that I'm defending the Obama administration's ongoing drone program either. That's a horrific, illegal approach to things that's asking for a serious long-term backlash, but when that is the so-called 'socialist' response to the GOP's constant war mongering (Seems they won't be satisfied until there's not much left to the Middle East but Israel.), we're in a place worthy of being called fucked up. We can't expect to play the world's abusive police force forever without serious repercussions. Then again, that's how we're treating the environment, and we're pretty well bound for extinction sooner than we know for it, but I'll get to that in a future post.

There's also no question that the basis for the Iraq war, the very war Romney's advocated for not ending, was a lie - all those who perpetrated the war are criminals who committed atrocities upon the Iraqi people. Condoleezza Rice is among them, alongside Donald Rumsfeld (Another dangerously unqualified Obama foreign policy critic), Dick Cheney, and George W. "Boss Hog" Bush himself. But there's not going to be any justice. Those of the same mindset in the government are already eager to start new wars in Iran and Syria, like the aforementioned McCain. And while there's no ignoring that Asad is, obviously, a huge problem (This is a tremendous understatement, especially for all the people he's killing), butt another war is not the answer. This isn't a situation like Libya where we can just target him and his forces like we could Gaddafi, either. And on the note of Libya? It's no secret that Paul Ryan voted to cut security funding from our Libyan embassy along with the rest of the GOP before the tragic attack last month. Despite that, he and Romney have been desperate to exploit the incident to score every political point they can off the senseless death of an ambassador and several others. It doesn't excuse the clumsy political gamesmanship on the Obama administration's part around the attack, but it doesn't make what Romney and Ran are doing any less slimy or dishonest.

In relation to both foreign and economic policy as well, the GOP has been fearmongering for years that unless we return to the dangerous economic policies of the Bush years - and take them aggressively further, no less - we'll become the next Greece. Who cares if the wealthy are hoarding the vast majority of the nation's wealth and supply side economics have been proven entirely unviable by both history and math? It's time for austerity, they argue. Naturally, this entails ignoring the hate groups gaining power in part as a result of austerity in Greece. We're told that unless we pursue what Greece has done, we'll become them. Ignoring entirely the horrible elements that can and do surface in times of great suffering and desperation. There are extremist elements like Golden Dawn alive and well in America - they may not be able to gain power running as Neo-Nazis, of course, but if the GOP regains power and is able to successfully pursue a program of national austerity, the ugliness Obama's election alone easily exposed within our nation will start to look friendly by comparison to what the desperation wrought by austerity would bring out.

Of course, if the majority of the newsmedia was actually focused on informing and both pointing out and dispelling cognitive dissonance, we'd all be better for it. Unfortunately, we have a major network entirely built on it, as one of the many toxic planks in the crooked Rupert Murdoch's empire. They've fought for the right to lie and deceive in court and won - a very American story, a so-called news network winning the right to deceive its viewers in court. That, too, tells you where we are, and ultimately part of how we've landed ourselves in this era of what is effectively politically branded tribalism rooted frequently in ignorance. Political parties are treated as sports teams by a disturbing number of the comfortably ignorant masses. It's increasingly apparent that we're just not cut out modern or postmodern civilization, and our proudly exalted founding fathers were some naive motherfuckers - that much is clear. And the Constitution itself is a fatally flawed document to the very end, as much as we watch conservatives revere it, while all the same time rallying to alter it to restrict and take away freedoms, and otherwise to write bigotry into it.

Following now are some short asides, starting on the Constitution and the problem of guns in America - I haven't even gotten to my horribly late forthcoming post on the tragic gun violence we've seen throughout the year, from Trayvon Martin to The Dark Knight Rises massacre.

The Constitution does not guarantee the right to personal firearm ownership for the fun of shooting cans off your fence or, y'know, whatever. Nor does it grant the right to own them in order to live out personal fantasies of violent vigilantism. Nor does it grant the right to bear firearms designed to kill huge numbers of people in a short period of time without reloading. It doesn't even guarantee the right to stockpile arms and ammunition in case 'something happens.' We've seen record gun and ammunition sales since Barack Obama was elected in 2008 amid a level of paranoia beyond the usual schizoid/GOP histrionics about how electing a Democrat will be the end of the nation that we hear every damn election cycle. It only gets shriller and more disturbed each cycle. And if Obama is reelected today, we will see more of this. One party is defending this sort of mindset when it comes to firearms and has successfully enshrined it in American culture, aided by the dangerously powerful NRA. This party is not the Democrats.

Of course, with the Republicans, we're talking about a party of people who believe firmly that America was founded on personal liberty, unless they don't like how you'd exercise your liberty, say, through the right of reproductive choice or the very notion extending full civil rights to the LGBT community. So much for that freedom thing.

Then again, this 'freedom,' in their lexicon, is just another word for deregulating corporations and letting them both run and devastate our society. After all, if you're a corporation, you're a person, and if you're truly free, then nothing is unethical. Like all those perfectly legal and perfectly crooked means Romney rather clearly used to dodge paying a fair tax rate for so long. And naturally, corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes, either - they may be people, but freedom naturally means freedom from the responsibility to the rest of the society you participate in in the first place. You can totally be the guy who bursts into the party uninvited, steals all the chips, and leaves, flipping everybody off.

Also, for a party that supposedly has so much respect for democracy, it's been interesting to watch the Republicans continue to hurl accusations at the Democrats of plots to steal elections year after year of my adult life. All while openly attempting to suppress the vote and steal elections themselves, in an era where their viability is, in the least, being threatened by America's ever-increasing racial and ethnic diversity. Something that is in itself a great national strength to be celebrated.

In Romney, we've had a candidate who, in his visible contempt for the electorate, has attempted to keep as much of his life and record secret. And month after month this year, we've heard about one aspect or another of Romney's life being off-limits, from the business record he's supposedly running on - one full of loading up companies with debt, raiding pension funds, and destroying thousands of lives - to his religion. And, you know, I can almost empathize with the scrutiny one's religion must get when it involves wacky things like white Native American angels, magical golden tablets, magic underwear, and a history of polygamy from people who believe in immaculate conception, talking burning bushes, and that they're eating and drinking pieces of their savior at church functions. (Church janitors have the roughest jobs. All that blood and flesh left on the floor.) Except, of course, as an atheist, I'm part of the most widely despised religious minority in America in my outright lack of religion, and I'll be long dead before we ever see an atheist run for the presidency taken seriously, because hey, despite that constitutional stuff, we've obviously gotta elect somebody who believes in some pretty crazy stuff from an old book. I mean, believing in none of that? Who does that? Next thing you know, you're going to tell us the scientific method isn't just some wacky alternative to religion WHY DON'T YOU GO MARRY A PETRI DISH.

That was needlessly intense. Let's get back to the nonsense at the RNC, shall we?

'We Built It.' Making talk of self-reliance into Republican code for, "If you're suffering, it's your fault, you don't get a safety net - fuck you." What we saw on display with that nationally embarrassing theme was that if you question a Republican businessman, he gets upset and needs to prove to you that he's a self-made man who owes nobody any share of the credit for his successes. This is called insecurity. This is a long-time driving force in the Republican party.

Of course, the GOP message also includes that self-congratulatory millionaires and billionaires of America today who feel they've 'won' don't have to pay taxes or contribute back to the public. They feel their 'contributions' should all be profit-driven. But these people didn't 'build' this country, and they couldn't have built anything they did if the vast majority of them hadn't come from privilege in the first place. These individuals pretend to protect the American dream, but then ultimately define the American dream as little more than running a successful business, as though entrepreneurship is the only thing worth doing in human existence. But hey, starting a small business, then facing a leveraged buyout from Bain Capital and watching vulture capitalists happily snort your pension funds? You weren't really planning on retiring, were you? In this economy? Better vote in some Republicans so they can strike down those job-killing regulations and protect that job you no longer have. If you let the wealthy have all the money, you can have any job you want - just don't expect to get paid.

In America today, rich white men think they're entitled to everything, along with the entirety of the credit to any and all successes they've experienced in their lives. Their interests are the very spine of today's Republican party. And it was that shrill, petulant cry that dominated the RNC this year - self-victimizing braggarts are not so much the people most empathize with, when they're already complaining from a position of incredible privilege, out of touch with how most people live. These are the people in the minority that benefit from Grover Norquist's poisonous pledge - the very dangerous, irresponsible pledge that made the Republican party the enemy of the American people as a whole.

All this 'We Built It' braggadocio stinks of the idea that these wealthy, entitled men just raised their hands and ushered their businesses forth from the grounds below, as though wearing the sorcerer's hat in Fantasia, ignoring that it was labor that built their businesses, and as the suits on top managing things, their own personal labor was in many terms the least part of the equation. Naturally, this is the party that's proudly nearly killed unionized labor, to what should be our considerable national shame. We like to pretend that any workers' rights are now a gift bestowed by the great Job Creator out of the kindness of their hearts, not something people spent centuries fighting for, and like women with their reproductive rights, must sadly struggle to retain. We're not allowed to make progress and keep focusing on moving forward - we got to a certain point in the twentieth century, and since then, we've been fighting constantly to retain that which we fought for, with no room to move beyond that, facing a relentless tide seeking to sweep us as far back into the Dark Ages as possible. We've yet to truly escape. In this postmodern era, feudalism threatens to swallow up our modernity. Civilization Dada. Without all the positives Dada entailed.

Throughout the RNC, Republican businessmen stood up and gave speeches about their personal success. Completely missing in these stories was that these people are not Randian heroes who conjured up their financial success through rugged, self-possessed gumption and genius business acumen - and many of them had connections and all sorts of help and luck that they naturally give no credit to - and that they all relied on labor to get them where they are. Within the Republican party, labor is thankless. On Labor Day this year, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor spat in labor's face by praising management instead. North Carolina and Florida housed this year's conventions. North Carolina and Florida are both Right-to-Work states - a term which sounds positive on the surface (Making it an easy sell, like the GOP's Clean Air Act in the Bush years, which actually served to enable polluters), but is largely a law passed time and time again to suppress unions and prevent union formation as much as possible. Only 2.9% of the North Carolinian workforce is unionized. This hurts workers in the long run. It's on the backs of these people that all successful entrepreneurs make their money, and on whom all major businesses depend to keep things running. And it's an especially thankless job without union representation to fight for better pay, benefits, and further rights.

The Democrats often keep the labor issue tragically at arm's length, while the Republicans are outright hostile to union labor, effectively arguing time and time again that in order to compete with the outsourcing of labor to third world nations where workers lacking in rights are easily exploited, we too much strip our workers of their rights, working conditions, living wages, and more. That we must essentially become a feudal third world nation ourselves in order to 'bring the jobs home.'

Despite GOP mythology, the fact is that in reality, the 'You didn't build that!' sentiment applies to more than just infrastructure. Nobody running a business in America built that entirely on their own - no business in America is successful in a vacuum without inside input. All businesses are built upon and rely upon their hired labor for success, as well as the existent government infrastructure - both physical and legal - to exist in the first place, and ultimately upon luck. There is no such thing as a business that was successful without luck. As much as the GOP loves to revere this Randian image, there is no such thing as the prodigy businessman savior whose brilliance and personal hard work alone paved the way to tremendous success. This is a lie by which the American people have been shamed and abused for far too long.

RNC speakers intended to inspire had but the same story over and over: 'I was poor and now I'm rich!' Implicit, of course, is 'Vote for our party and you'll be rich too!' (Pyramid scheme politics!) As though wealth-seeking entrepreneurs are the only Americans who really matter, the only ones pursuing something that can be called the American Dream. It's a theme we've seen time and time again throughout this campaign. Even but weeks ago, Romney and Ryan were attempting to woo women voters in Ohio, and naturally disregarding the explicitly misogynistic Republican party platform, focused on telling women, "We can help you become entrepreneurs!" Again, a giant blind spot.

Among the convention's other trite slogans was 'We Can Do Better,' with the implication that today's Republican policies, even more extreme than those of the Bush administration but a few years ago, are the panacea to our nation's woes. Especially the economic ones - apparently in the Republican party, the American dream is nothing more than entrepreneurship. If corporations are people, apparently we should all aspire to be corporations unto ourselves - as literally as possible. In reality, our current economic woes aren't due to some dramatically different Democratic economy. Thanks to years of non-stop obstructionism from a party that swore upon Obama's election that their number one goal was to prevent his reelection by preventing him and the Democrats from enacting policy, we're all suffering under a prolonged, relapsed economic crisis in a stagnant Republican economy. We never cast off the shackles of Republican economic policy because of the party's refusal to allow Obama and the Democrats to enact policy, repeatedly threatening to shut down the government and filibustering as much legislation as possible, shutting down virtually all meaningful policy discussion and demonstrating how unfortunately broken our government truly is when one of our two major parties refuses to allow it to function. What Romney and Ryan promise, with the rest of today's Republican party, is more of the very sort of disastrous policy that led us into this situation in the first place.
We can do better, and we should do better. That would entail reelecting Obama and a strong Democratic majority to both houses of congress in order to end the constant filibusters and necessity of a supermajority, finally paving the way for them to actually enact Democratic policy and bring about the change from the Bush era policies they were elected to enact in the first place. Thanks to a historically unprecedented amount of the dirtiest, most obstructive and destructive, divisive politics, "that hopey changey stuff," as a certain now persona non grata individual once called it, was effectively shut down as the Republicans largely successfully blocked President Obama from meaningful pursuit of the very policy changes the American people elected him to bring about. In short, rather than acting as a check or balance to the Obama administration these past four years, we've watched the Republican party at its dirtiest in recent memory as it has outright circumvented democracy and effectively insisted that unless they're in power, government isn't allowed to function and policy isn't allowed to be enacted. This is a party that has become increasingly known for their inveterate dedication to mythology, casually lying to the public to justify their continued work against their interests, and their refusal to acknowledge any fact that contradicts their increasingly dangerous policies.

The fact that this party continues to remain viable says nothing great of the character of the American people, let alone of any hope for future broad prosperity or stability. Long-term stability of any nation or civilization is, of course, functionally impossible, as something that flies right in the face of human nature itself, but you'd think we as a nation would be capable of rising just far enough above delusion to avoid voting ourselves back into serfdom.

An ideal beginning would lie in regaining our respect for labor. Perhaps recalling that we once realized that as a collective group, we've been capable of great things that benefited us all. That whole notion is pretty much the centerpiece of democracy - or it was before the Supreme Court sold it to the wealthy.

It's abundantly clear at this point that a disturbing number of Americans actually like the idea of being ruled by a fascist dictator, so long as said dictator's a good white Christian man who knows the importance of keeping the Job Creators happy by eliminating all taxation of the wealthy and corporations, ending the separation of church and state so long as it's in good ol' Jesus's name that you do that, ensuring that women have no reproductive rights and that those icky gay people can't ruin marriage for everybody else by sucking all the holy light out of it with their love for an individual of the same sex, and affirming that health care access is a privilege for those who can afford to pay the insurance and pharmaceutical companies whatever the hell exorbitant fees they feel like charging. Maybe if you work hard and pull yourself by your bootstraps, someday you can get rich and join the ruling class, too. By the way, no more social mobility for you, and also, if you try to unionize, look forward to going to jail. Let's see if we can make Eugene Debs rise from his grave and haunt this damn country as a raging poltergeist! In any nation, there is no 'us' and 'them' among its people - there's the whole of the electorate, and the government works for all of us. Those who seek to rule us through unchecked, absolute control of the government processes as the GOP does, are effectively pursuing the end of this flawed American experiment in democracy.

It's also telling that the GOP largely no longer even acknowledges the eight years of George W. Bush that preceded Obama's first term. His political legacy hung over this year's convention like a shroud, much as it did their convention in 2008. This is a party that began to condemn the Obama administration and adamantly insist that their policies had 'failed' within mere days after the inauguration. They've even attempted to rewrite history by claiming - even Romney himself at the RNC - that the country had 'united' following the 2008 election and they were all rooting for him to succeed. There's no lack of record that this could not be further from the truth, and looking back, there were more bald-faced lies than even half truths coming out this year's Republican National Convention.

So again, it's telling that the GOP did everything they could to ignore the veritable ghost of George W. Bush's presidency and foist the blame for the catastrophic results of his administration entirely on Obama. They repudiated him severely over and over for failing to fix the problems their party and their politics - over eight years, at least six of which enabled by a rapidly expanding and virtually unchecked executive branch - caused in the first place. They spent the entirety of Obama's first term abusing the filibuster like never before in American history to cripple his presidency, outright fighting against the best interests of the American people at every turn in order to prolong the current misery and stagnation much of this nation faces in hope of destroying the entirety of the 'hope' message Obama had campaigned on in the first place and drawing the same voters back to their party. In short, they inflicted grievous wounds on our nation over the two Bush administration terms, blocked as many efforts as possible by the Obama administration and Democrats to begin a national recovery from those disastrous years, and proceeded to throw salt on an already battered nation's wounds. Now they expect us to vote for them again - a party that refuses to accept a loss and allow their opponents to govern, the party whose politics got us into this mess in the first place, the party that has only shifted further to the extreme right over the past four years in reaction to their defeat in 2008 by the nation's first non-white president - when everything about their politics has only gotten more regressive, reductive, and flat out dangerous over the past several years. Like the McCain/Palin ticket in 2008, Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans are once again insisting that since the disease successfully resisted our attempt at a cure, it's time to vote disease again. It's time to double down on the policies that largely haven't changed and move even further to the right. See that void down below, from the edge of this cliff we've barely been hanging onto since the end of the Bush years? It's time to let go and jump.

When one party refuses to allow the other to govern when they're legitimately elected as single-mindedly as today's Republican party now does, when we're not allowed to budge from right-wing politics even slightly and have no choice but to plunge over the edge deeper and deeper into extreme right territory - which historically has never worked out well for the people of any nation - and when that party's gained a tremendous advantage as a result of our democracy having been sold wholesale to corporations and the wealthy by the Supreme Court, we no longer have a functioning government, let another a functioning democracy. Right now, America is teetering on the brink of dark times, having already been largely submerged in the Bush years, and frayed further by Obama and the Democrats being constantly held back by the Republicans since his inauguration in 2009. At this point, hope and change seem to have been effectively drowned. If Romney and Ryan are elected in November, and the Republicans manage to gain majorities in both houses of congress, it will be, and so too will effectively be this nation. We're already somewhere awful, but we're nowhere near the bottom - if the Republicans end up getting the big wins they're gunning for in November, there's no coming back from where we're going, let alone where we are now. If Obama and the Democrats were hope in 2008, we've already seen that hope blighted by despair. Having taken up the mantle of the party of despair for many years now, the Republicans have successfully brought us to a tipping point. Do we fight for the future, or do we succumb to the continual cancerous outgrowth of these seemingly endless Dark Ages? Things aren't looking good. These days, Americans aren't making any effective counterargument to my own documented suspicion that we're a species sprinting toward extinction. In the hands of our 'patriotic' authoritarian party of the Job Creators, the end of America as we know it is well in view.

If we can't even have functioning government in the 21st damn century, as I've observed ad nauseum, we're just not meant for much as a species.

Overshadowing everything else at this year's RNC was the appearance by Clint Eastwood, an old Hollywood celebrity - and everyone knows how the GOP loves Hollywood, I mean, Reagan! - talking to a chair. Talking to himself, he appeared to have little awareness of what the GOP and Romney were actually campaigning on. And he apparently he forgot that most of our founding fathers, venerated as they are, were lawyers too. Naive ones, apparently, in retrospect. Not even they anticipated how terribly we'd turn out.

The open hypocrisy was entertaining, too. Typically, you'll find no lack of angry people on Twitter and other social media telling comedians and writers to shut up about politics. I've noticed a trend of these individuals' own twitter feeds being a dull morass of sports tweets. It's always those guys who get mad at comedians and writers and tell them to shut up about politics. They've made politics into a form of tribalism, much like professional sports - the NFL, NBA, and MLB, in particular - about nothing more than picking a team and rabidly demanding its victory. The GOP wants celebrities to shut up about politics unless they support theirs. And when they get ones that do, they're often incoherent, whether Clint Eastwood, Kid Rock, or Meatloaf. Kind of a shame seeing this is where Eastwood's mind is, considering his legacy as an actor and proven talent as a director. Letters from Iwo Jima tells a side of World War II more people could stand to learn about.
And now, if you managed to wade through all that - even if I said a lot of redundant things - reward yourself with the last few things I have to say.

A few months back, I watched an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher (The August 31st, 2012 show) featuring Ron Christie and Dinesh D'Souza. Bill called them out repeatedly on the lies they continually touted. They didn't even flinch in the face of facts - this goes back at least to the inception of Conservapedia, the conservative reaction to Wikipedia, a rewriting of history and reality in the rejection of Wikipedia's own strident requirements for proper citation of reliable sources for articles to keep them grounded in truth. In effect, Conservapedia is a vandalism of reality, of history, in its attempt to rewrite both in following the party line of a political party that rejects these things for all the inconveniences they pose - largely in exposing how dishonest, hypocritical, unethical, and outright dangerous their party's politics are. What we're witnessing here is the political disease becoming drug-resistant, so to speak - when exposed to facts, when their lies are exposed, when reality is brought to the table, the disease only responds more aggressively, rejecting reality when it should wither.

Interestingly, for all the talk of a Democrat enthusiasm gap threatening to derail the election, that wasn't even remotely at the DNC - especially in contrast to the rather bleak RNC, where it was already the end of the world and Obama was the antichrist.

The debates were largely depressing affairs. Romney lied constantly and wasn't politically hurt for it, even when called out. Obama was barely there for the first debate. The VP debate was a surprising highlight, between Paul Ryan's failure to shine as the Republicans' current Randian golden boy, whose policies are dangerous for the vast majority of the country, with a strong, spirited performance from Joe Biden and actual journalism from moderator Martha Raddatz. A stark contrast to Jim Lehrer, who in the first debate, just kept asking the candidates to tell us how they're different and allowed them to constantly break debate rules. Candy Crowley didn't quite match Martha Raddatz in the third debate, but wasn't bad, either. I actually missed the third presidential debate, accidentally sleeping through it, but I read the transcripts, and Lehrer seemed weaker than the two women, though above Lehrer in terms of presence, at least. In none of these debates was climate change discussed. Then super storm Hurricane Sandy came and smashed through much of the eastern seaboard, devastating parts of New York City and many parts of New England. We're going to see storms that make Sandy look tame sooner than we realize.

Time to close things.

It's easy to be cynical. Perhaps too easy. I would know - I'm a tremendous cynic, as I've long established on this caustic little corner I've carved out for myself on the internet. And when you're a cynic, it's far too easy to excuse apathy, but there's no excuse for apathy when it comes to what we could be. Our options this year may not be the greatest, but we have to be reasonable and work with what we've got, then work upward from there. Even if it doesn't work out, even if we get burned, it's of vital importance that we not back down. Sure, I'm just a nobody writing on a nowhere blog speaking to a void occupied by billions of people, only some of whom are the huge number of apathetic and often ignorant American citizens who routinely neglect to exercise their civic right and duty to participate in the democratic process. But even that being the case, these things are worth saying. I'm misanthropic to the point of being hopeless for humanity's future, but even if it's a hopeless fight, we should still fight it to the very last. We should fight this battle, if for nothing else, to say that we're capable of better than this, and that we know it. Polls are about to close across the nation as I post this. These words will affect nothing, and probably no one. I've still written them, even if it's a horrible mess of a post, stitched together from months of incomplete posts. I'm posting them anyway. For all the nasty things I've brought up in terms of human nature, over the course of these months of messy, interconnected thought patterns and arguments, it's human nature, too, to keep fighting to the last in hopeless conditions. There are things worth fighting for, even if there's no hope. Our future, all of our futures, are among them.

Ghost Roast

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:37:00 +0000

November 1st.

It's too late for a Halloween story, you realize. It's the day after. It's too late.

That's never stopped me before, you realize. If it's one thing Spiral Reverie readers love, it's waiting forever for posts that may or may not be excruciatingly disappointing. The greatest thing about me is when I'm not there at all. All those spaces are left unfilled, overflowing with suffocating potential.

I'm my most intriguing when I'm a ghost. When the mystery thrives over whether or not the blog's finally dead. But it's never dead. It's one of the only things that'll outlast the end of civilization. Not even the end of the internet, the end of servers, or the end of language could destroy this blog.

No. The end is just the beginning. The beginning is never the end. Burgers are waffles. If those drums in your ears were timpani, you'd have headaches all the time.

And now in the spirit of whatever the hell that just was, another attempt at beginning to post content here again for a while. Starting with the nonsense from me you love most. ANOTHER RIDICULOUS STORY.

Ghost Roast

"It's going to be spooktacular," said Phantasmo, as though he'd invented the variation of the word. "This year's Ghost Roast will totally knock everybody's socks off. If they still wore socks. But they don't, because they're dead and lack the necessary appendages for that." Overexplaining everything was a character flaw of Phantasmo's that allowed the rest of his gang.

"Yeah, it starts in what, five minutes? Nobody's here yet," observed Specterclus, pushing his ghost glasses up on the bridge of his ghost nose. Nobody really understood how that worked or how the glasses even existed, least of all Specterclus himself.

The Ghostly Gang, as they liked to call themselves - in no way original, by the way, as there were at least 4,000 other groups of ghosts registered in the MostGhost social network going by the same lazy name - had booked the Spooky Manor #7324 Theater weeks in advance for their newly planned annual Ghost Roast, where ghosts could gather to roast that year's subject to raise money for a good cause.

"I'm the host," said Boober. "Ghost Roast Host. That's me. I may not have had people skills when I was alive, but boy do I know how to work a dead crowd."

"You didn't believe in ghosts when you were alive," said Specterclus. "Ghosts are still technically people."

"Were people," Phantasmo butted in. "People aren't really people anymore when they're dead. We don't even look like people. That guy who designed the game with the yellow circle who overdosed on pills? That guy must have died at some point. You're supposed to be the smart one, Specterclus."

Specterclus's ethereal glasses fogged up in indignation. But then, taking a deep breath - which is pretty strange when you consider that ghosts don't even have lungs - he calmed down. There was no point in getting mad at Phantasmo. This was probably why that mugger stabbed him to death. Instead of accepting that he'd been mugged, he thought he'd made a new friend and just wouldn't let the poor guy go. Nothing ruins a good mugging quite like an uncomfortably oversociable victim. That's just poor mugging etiquette.

"Obviously every part of this is poorly planned," said Specterclus. "But in the spirit of my supposedly being the smart one, I suppose I should ask - we've picked a cause, right?"

"It's for a good cause," said Boober.

"I know that, but we have to be more specific," insisted Specterclus. "What good cause is this roast going to support? What is it that we're expecting our fellow ghosts to rally around beyond the hurling of insults?"

"A good cause," repeated Boober.

"You don't have anything," said Specterclus.

"What is a good cause, anyway?" asked Phantasmo. "What do we ghosts really like in the first place? I mean, besides scaring children, causing heart attacks in the elderly - more ghosts! - and occasionally a nice biscotti. Also rotting old houses, possessing people and working them like puppets. Then there's reruns of Scooby Doo's Space Race, hiding under staircases, and let's not forget the Ghost Olympics!"

"The Ghost Olympics don't exist," said Specterclus.

"It's attitudes like yours that keep them from getting off the ground."

"It was Yogi's Space Race, not Scooby Doo's," Boober chimed in.

"So we have no cause. Great. And what, there's about a minute and a half left before this thing starts? No cause, and let me guess - no roastee," groaned Specterclus.

"Don't look at me," said Specterclus. "You were the one who put me in charge of booking the roastee. All my new friends keep running away. I think they're trying to get some kind of game of hide and seek going, but probably don't have the communication skills necessary to make that clear. All my new friends are socially inept. Also, ghost hide and seek doesn't really work. I can barely see you guys and you're right here."

Specterclus was speechless.

"Hey, we could roast this piece of toast!" suggested Boober, holding up the ghost of a burnt piece of toast. "You're kind of a milquetoast, ya know that?"

"Stop that - do you want to write the Ghost Post's headline for tomorrow?" Specterclus sighed. "Ghost Roast Toast. That's what they'll say. With toast as the verb, not roast. In case there was any confusion."

"I'm hungry," said Phantasmo.

"Don't even think about it, man," warned the toast ghost. "I'm burnt on all sides, if you know what I mean."

Just when things seemed like they couldn't get any worse, that jerk had to show up.

"Hey HEY!" the doors burst open - not really, ghosts can't exert that kind of force on doors - and in strutted none other than the Roast Ghost. He was the world's one and only whole roast chicken to produce a ghost. "I hear you turkeys are throwin' at party for me!" As he shouted from the hole where his head had once been, he did a little dance with his wings and drumsticks. For some reason, this cute little dance made him extra popular with lady ghosts, even though you'd think attraction would be a non-issue with ectoplasmic entities entirely void of the capability for trivial things like desire.

"Get out of here, Roast Ghost! This isn't your party!" shouted Specterclus.

"No can do, turkeys!" Roast Ghost continued his dance. "This thing's got the Roast Ghost basted all over it!"

"How do you talk?" Boober asked, going ignored.

"Look, there's only the three of us here in this empty building-" Specterclus started.

"Hey!" shouted the toast ghost. "I may not want to be here, but you don't forget this guy! My name's-"

"There's three of us and that thing," Specterclus continued. "There's no party for you to crash this time, Roast Ghost."

"I saw those flyers! There were like six of them down 'round Ghost Coast!" Roast Ghost just kept dancing.

"This was all a bad idea. We were supposed to start this roast three minutes ago. Now we're just a bunch of stupid ghosts in a house," said Specterclus.

"We could always haunt this place," Phantasmo said.

"What are you, stupid?"

"On second thought, you turkeys just keep doin' what yer doin'," said Roast Ghost. "Me 'n toasty here're gonna go make breadcrumbs down in that alley 'round the way."

"I don't even know what that means but at least I have no concept of pain," said the toast ghost.

Silence fell across the empty theater. The roast really was toast.

Finally, Phantasmo spoke. "Guys, why don't we have more friends?"

E3 2012: Nintendo for Wii and U

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 14:52:00 +0000

It's over. Go home.

Hey, you've reached the last of the big E3 blog posts for this year! And this one's the shortest of the bunch! Because I decided to turn a bunch of relevant content into a later blog post for sometime in the coming weeks! Because sometimes I feel like showcasing that I understand the value of brevity despite my routinely choosing to neglect it! It's time for me to stop these exclamations, E3 is an annoying, draining thing to cover - especially on a dead-end little blog like this - and it's profoundly sad that this week is such a big yearly event for so many nerds whose lives simply have nothing else of value within them!

That's enough.

At any rate, it's Nintendo time, after I gave up before even getting to them last year. So, after seeing the dire state of the industry and general corporate cluelessness thoroughly reflected in Sony and Microsoft's conferences, it was up to Nintendo to swoop in and save the day.

Yes, they did. But you wouldn't know it from the overreactions on many corners of the internet, because remember - Nintendo can do no right, no matter what.

Wii U Conference

The whole conference opened with a recorded bit involving father of modern gaming Shigeru Miyamoto leaving his dressing room to open the conference, with Pikmin appearing everywhere. A gutsy, but risky pander, considering that it's a relatively niche Gamecube franchise - relative to the rest of Nintendo's backlog - to headline with at an event like E3. Joined by Bill Trinen, Miyamoto gave us some details on Pikmin 3 along with a first trailer and the revelation of one of the new Pikmin types. Game looks lovely, and I can see this game outselling the original Gamecube games with the much larger audience the Wii U should ultimately have, but it was definitely a surprising pick to open with, as it's no old-school Mario in terms of wide reach, that's for sure. Having been stressed by the first game's time limit - but still having managed to beat it completely with all the extra treasures - and personally considering Pikmin 2 to be one of the very best Gamecube games, though, I'm really looking forward to this title.

Moving on, there was talk about the new Wii U GamePad and uses for its second screen - which is a resistive touchscreen just like the DS and 3DS's lower screen. They discussed game design philosophy and how these new additions to the controller work out differently in a console than a portable. There's been some criticism of the fairly constant talk - particularly on vision and philosophy - throughout the conference, and I'd say there's some legitimacy in that, as it slows down an event that many viewers want to be nothing more than a series of game and hardware feature announcements in rapidfire succession from beginning to end. Personally, though, in contrast to the competition, I find it nice to actually see hardware and software design vision on display, and a parade of something other than one-note first-person shooters and gory hack and slashers.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime appeared next and announced that they had 23 WIi U titles for the stage show, and that the Wii U and 3DS titles to be discussed were only a small part of what was playable for each system. A strong array of set-top box style video streaming features were announced for the Wii U, including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon Video. And he also confirmed that the Wii U would be able to support two GamePads, not just a single GamePad in conjunction with Wii remotes. There was a look at the 'social window' of Miiverse in the GamePad's screen with communication very similar to the 3DS's Swapnote application, as previously unveiled at last Sunday's Nintendo Direct conference that first introduced the forthcoming Miiverse social network.

Then it was on to Wii U game reveals. This began with New Super Mario Bros. U, the biggest game of the show. Though these old-school 2D Mario titles always come under fire from self-proclaimed 'hardcore' gamers, they have a track record of moving 20-25+ million copies and a huge amount of hardware. The upcoming New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the 3DS will be vital in getting the 3DS's western hardware sales from merely good to outright great, and New Super Mario Bros. U has the power and mass appeal to guarantee a gigantic launch for the Wii U. And it's the first Mario game to launch with a Nintendo console in 16 years, no less - first 2D Mario to launch with a Nintendo console in 21 years, too. A huge deal and amazing call. The game resembles Super Mario World in inspiration more than the NES Mario titles like previous New Super Mario Bros. games, and the game looks absolutely gorgeous and polished, with some stunning backgrounds and the most personality in a New Super Mario Bros. title's visuals yet. Flying Squirrel Suits and more Baby Yoshi were confirmed, along with the usual four-player local play and some very cool asymmetric multiplayer features allowing for up five players to play at once, with someone using the Wii U GamePad to create Boost Blocks and assist or troll their fellow players depending on their mood, potentially playing a vital role in multiplayer speed runs. This game looks like something magic, and it'll undoubtedly help the Wii U to sell out for months, as New Super Mario Bros. Wii did for the Wii.

They moved on to some third party highlights after that with a look at Warner Bros.' announced games so far, in Batman: Arkham City: Armored Edition, the definitive version of the game-of-the-year favorite from 2011 with all of the downloadable content included on the disc and some exclusive Wii U features. Lacking either of the other systems it was originally released on, I'm definitely interested in this myself. They also presented Scribblenauts Unlimited, the latest installment in the popular Scribblenauts puzzle adventure series, which is also receiving a 3DS release, and the Wii U version will allow a second player to join in with another GamePad for cooperative play. A fantastic approach to the popular series.

After that came a third party reel which included footage of THQ's Darksiders II (An interesting looking Zelda-esque action game. Unfortunately, THQ is on the very brink of collapse now after some very poorly chosen PS3/360 investments, assuming too much of an audience they should have known better than to bet on.), EA's Mass Effect 3, Namco Bandai's Tank! Tank! Tank! (A straight port of the hilarious and very fun-looking arcade game - I'm really looking forward to this one, and I'm hoping it sets a precedent for strong, quirky Namco Bandai Wii U support after they often neglected the Wii - failure to release Tales of Graces on the Wii in the west being a notably big mistake.), Namco Bandai's Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (The clip even included a Mario reference!), Atlus's Trine 2: Director's Cut (A solid little start from Atlus, and an eShop download indie release.), Tecmo Koei's Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge (Which, unfortunately, is said not to be particularly great.), and Sega's Aliens: Colonial Marines (Developed by Gearbox, which has been championing the Wii U's capabilities since the console's debut at E3, and the game looks excellent for those into this sort of title. Sega, on the other hand, is unfortunately facing catastrophic losses after repeated failure after failure on Sony and Microsoft platforms in recent years where their games visibly do not sell. And yet they've now got the latest and most expensive yet of Toshihiro Nagoshi's PS3-exclusive Yakuza titles on the way to lose an incredible amount of money for the fifth time this generation. At this point, it's rather crystal clear that Sega is going to go out of business if they don't drop Sony and Microsoft's platforms where their games have - with the exception of Phantasy Star Portable on the PSP in Japan when the platform was still healthy there - never sold well, and lost a tremendous amount of money this generation. Sega's fanbase of old has visibly merged with the Nintendo fanbase today - Nintendo and Sega fans having much more in common with one another than with the Sony or Microsoft audiences, which typically have no respect on the whole for Nintendo, Sega, or either company's legacy. Despite this, Sega recently pledged more support to Sony's already largely dead Vita portable, committing to costs no sane executive should even consider greenlighting - at this point, the best thing that could happen to Sega would be for Nintendo to buy them. They're just going to go out of business otherwise, at this rate.).

Soon after, Reggie brought joy to the internet by invoking the 'my body is ready' meme that he spawned years ago and unveiled Wii Fit U, draining the joy of the 'hardcore' as quickly as he'd provoked it. Of course, for all the predictable complaints - it was just a few years ago that the internet was consumed with 'hardcore' gamer temper tantrums proclaiming the original Wii Fit to represent the 'end' of all gaming - this is another vital mass market appeal title that's guaranteed to sell millions. I never did pick up the original Wii Fit or Wii Fit Plus myself, but this one looks even better. It apparently allows you to carry over your save file from previous Wii Fit games on the Wii - and it has been confirmed that Wii downloads like Virtual Console and WiiWare games, as well as save files, will be transferable to the Wii U - and will also come with a special pedometer that detects a variety of things, not just your steps, to add more information on your daily movement and exercise upon syncing with the Wii U GamePad. Also, there's butt luge on the balance board. Can you really say no to butt luge?

Drawing further ire from the 'hardcore' was a fresh new mass market oriented unveil, SiNG (Working Title), a karaoke and dance first party Nintendo title for something to appeal more directly to the Just Dance crowd from Nintendo themselves, without using the 'Wii something-or-other' name that many of these games did this past generation, and Wii Fit U is obviously continuing that trend. The title seems well suited to completely replace Sony's own Singstar karaoke series, which has lost relevance in Sony's decline. A smart idea all around, as well suited to functioning as a karaoke machine as the Wii U is in the first place, easily choosing between songs on the GamePad screen in party settings.

Scott Moffitt came out briefly after that to bring a little 3DS news, teasing the hour-long 3DS conference they had the next day on the 6th. New Super Mario Bros. 2 was revealed to be full of gold coins, with a focus on collecting one million coins, with lots of powers oriented toward the appearance of coins everywhere. Local two-player cooperative play has been confirmed in the game as well. A guaranteed huge hit. Slated for August 19th release.

For some reason every sticker or 'sticky' joke I keep coming up with is dirty.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star was next, the fourth installment in the popular and very funny Paper Mario role-playing game series. Everything in the game world seems to revolve around stickers, scissors, and all sorts of interesting ways of interacting with the environment this time. It may not have the partners who usually join you in this series, but it's possible they were held back from the trailer and screenshots as so to diligently avoid spoilers. While the entire series has been excellent so far, Sticker Star looks and feels to me like it may have the sort of magic and sense of wonder all throughout the sprawling game world that we saw in the very first game on the N64 but haven't quite seen in the others, The Thousand-Year Door on the Gamecube and Super Paper Mario on the Wii, which were both excellent games regardless. Sticker Star drops in time for the holidays, and it's a title I'm particularly excited about, personally.

And then Moffitt also showed Luigi's Mansion 2, now renamed Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, the long-awaited sequel to the original Luigi's Mansion on the Gamecube, which arrived at Gamecube launch eleven years ago. It looks like a thoroughly polished, enjoyable exploration and ghost-busting filled experience like the original was, now with multiple mansions, some special new flashlight moves, more puzzles, and a new mission structure for lots of things to do. Another holiday release, though I'd love to see it arrive closer to Halloween, personally.

Moffitt's time on stage ended with a short third party 3DS game reel featuring Disney's Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion (Which looks like a wonderful mix of modern Epic Mickey adventure/RPG platforming gameplay and old-school Castle of Illusion aesthetics.), Kingdom Hearts 3D (Never really got into this series myself, not a fan of the director, but the environments in this game are gorgeous and the gameplay looks fun.), Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate (Which feels more like God of War than Castlevania to me - I can't wait for Mercury Steam to be done with the franchise, personally, and I'm hoping that Konami will return the series to its original timeline with future 3DS and Wii U titles by Koji Igarashi, whose style of Castlevania is what the fanbase has been asking for more of for years now.), and Scribblenauts Unlimited.

Last year's big surprise Wii U unveiling of a Nintendo/Traveller's Tales collaboration on a LEGO spoof of the Grand Theft Auto series, previously named LEGO City Stories, was given a hilarious full unveil with its new name, LEGO City Undercover. The game will have separate Wii U and 3DS versions - the 3DS version not yet unveiled or seen, but still confirmed - and the game itself is essentially a big cop movie spoof making fun of things like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. The game looks beautiful and incredibly fun in motion, and as one of at least several sandbox-style games coming to the Wii U launch this holiday season - and one of the first, if not the first on the 3DS - it's one of the most exciting titles on the system, as far as I'm concerned, as it appeals to my own tastes far more than Rockstar's series. There's lots of goofy dialogue and dramatic moments, over the top brawling combat, the expected vehicle stealing and exploration, a job system to switch into disguises for different vocations to unlock access to various parts of the city and more things to see and do, and the ability to communicate through video calls back to the police department and scan for criminals with the Wii U GamePad. The game looks like a beautiful showpiece for what the system can do, and the game looks like it'll appeal to pretty much everybody. That's enough of my salivating.

Following that was Ubisoft's time to showcase their strong third party support. They've announced eight titles for the new console already: Sports Connection (For those looking for something in the vein of Wii Sports, as the Wii U doesn't have one of those announced yet.), Avengers: Battle for Earth (A motion control focused crazy brawler featuring tons of Marvel superheroes and villains. Looks fun.), Rabbids Land (The always hilarious Raving Rabbids return in their first Wii U party outing, this time centered around a theme park they've taken over, set in a Mario Party style board game format.), Just Dance 4 (The inevitable continuation of their smash hit franchise that's always sold best on the Wii by miles - the Wii U version will have exclusive features.), Zombi U (I'll get to that in a moment - it's a big title.), Rayman Legends (An exclusive follow-up to Rayman Origins for the Wii U, following Origins largely not selling on anything but the Wii, given its style of cartoony platforming gameplay.), Assassin's Creed III (The latest in the hit action/stealth series.), and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 (For those who'd rather use a different exercise program than Wii Fit U.).

They went on to demonstrate Just Dance 4 first, with its exclusive Wii U controller features on stage - another huge third party title that will sell millions and help sell the Wii U to a ton of people. The 'hardcore' crowd still hates the franchise, but at this point, it's time to let it go - if people are having fun, especially in numbers these large, it's not a bad series. Fun is paramount in gaming, period.

Up next was the aforementioned Zombi U, a revival of Ubisoft's very first game, Zombi, from the ZX Spectrum in the mid-'80s. Rather than just your typical zombie first person shooter, this is more of a serious survival experience, set in a seemingly rather open London. You spend your time working on missions to help other survivors and escape while collecting weapons, food, medical supplies, and more to get by. The game makes excellent use of the Wii U tablet, having you shift your focus away from the television screen when looting corpses, going through items, and working on opening doors and so on to proceed, shifting to camera angles on screen to keep you constantly looking over your shoulder for zombies. And these are more your old-school Dawn of the Dead style zombies, which mostly groan, lurch, try to break down doors and barricades, and gradually overwhelm you. The worst I've seen, behavior-wise, is the occasional zombie in demo footage that will scream and run at you. The game's legitimately very tense and beautifully designed, a surreal atmosphere pervading the ruined yet familiar London landscape. The game also features a really cool, unique feature wherein if you die, you don't restart, but instead, you're switched over to controlling a different survivor elsewhere in London. And if you track down your last character who just died, you can kill them as a zombie and get all of your weapons, food, and supplies back with your old bag. Likewise, friends can come and kill your character turned zombie, too - not sure if there's any online cooperative play or not, though, as much as that would benefit a game like this. There is an aysmmetric competitive move, though, in which a player gets to use the Wii U gamepad to play zombie master and spawn a horde of zombies to attack the others. A very big, ambitious title that looks much more in tune with the roots of what makes zombies appealing, as opposed to the Michael Bay style barrage of constant gunfire and explosions Resident Evil 6 has become.

Ubisoft ended their stage time with a reel featuring some of the previously mentioned titles they've announced. They deserve to be applauded for betting as heavily on the Wii U as they have - the biggest third party commitment yet - with such a smartly balanced lineup of titles for 'core' and wider audience gamers, bringing something for everyone. Watch_Dogs, an extremely ambitious title they unveiled at E3, may also see Wii U release in the future. It seems tailor-made for the Wii U GamePad and its touchscreen.

This is the part where you cast aside cynicism for childlike joy.

Nintendo then brought their conference to a close with the most controversial part, attacks on which have been largely exaggerated out of angry hyperbole and willful misconceptions. They announced Nintendo Land - which will likely be packed in with the Wii U, much like Wii Sports was with the Wii outside of Japan - a virtual Nintendo theme park for the Wii U. It fills up with Miis based on your friends and others from their Miiverse social application for the Wii U and 3DS. If it has full online support to meet up with friends and play games together - as it should have - it looks like an amazing way to get most, if not nearly all people to bring their systems online and have fun meeting up with friends and family members as their little Mii avatars over long distances. In this digital virtual wonderland seemingly out of Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars, there are twelve attractions containing games based on a variety of Nintendo series with single player, cooperative multiplayer, and competitive multiplayer modes to enjoy, each of these attractions much deeper than any individual game in Wii Sports or Wii Play - while the 'hardcore' online have thrown a tremendous temper tantrum over the game and insisted that it could only be another throwaway title in the vein of Wii Play despite all evidence to it being an excitingly substantive title. Confirmed are attractions based on Animal Crossing (A game of tag based on the Chase Mii demo from E3 2011.), The Legend of Zelda (A fun cooperative battling minigame where your Miis dress up as Link.), Donkey Kong, Luigi's Mansion (Another sort of haunted house-based game of tag where one player is a ghost and the others try to catch the invisible ghost with their flashlights while the ghost player tries to sneak up on them.), F-Zero (A smaller racing game within the game.), and the Mysterious Murasame Castle (A Zelda-like series set in feudal Japan that has never made it west before - this particular attraction focused on hitting ninjas with throwing stars. Perhaps a hint at the Murasame series getting a 3DS or Wii U revival in the future with global release.).

In many ways, in conjunction with Miiverse, Nintendo Land looks as though it could be Nintendo's answer to Sony's Playstation Home, but done much better. A virtual Mii world to hang out in and meet up with friends while playing little games and perhaps customizing your own living space with little things earned from games would fit in well with the world created for Nintendo's Mii avatars and add an additional layer to the burgeoning social focus Nintendo is adopting with the launch of the Wii U and Miiverse later this year. In the least, it's known for certain that you earn coins for achievements scored in Nintendo Land and spend those on statues to customize your own park. A nice idea. Holding special online holiday events with special prizes and seasonal content, as well as weather from rain to snow and more would be a great addition, too, whether within Nintendo Land or some other similar style of virtual Mii social space online expanded from the concept. Nintendo Land looks like the kind of place a lot of Nintendo nerds dreamed about as kids - someplace you'd want to log into and never leave. I wouldn't be surprised if the large, populated hub area contained special activities like scavenger hunts and such as well.

Reggie then closed the main Wii U conference with a repeat of their focus with the platform and the Wii U's slogan: "Together. Better." We were left with a scene of fireworks over the lit-up Nintendo Land at night - a beautiful sight with a magical atmosphere that I cannot wait to see in-game myself. Between the revealing of Miiverse as our main social hub in the forthcoming Nintendo Network - around which we're missing many, many details yet, which will be continually revealed as we move toward the Wii U launch this holiday season in further Nintendo Direct online conferences, along with more games - and the introduction of fresh online virtual Mii worlds in which to socialize, relax, and have fun within a magical atmosphere, Nintendo's off to an amazing start with their new social online focus. I can't wait to see where they go from here - the more virtual Mii worlds and playgrounds we get to roam, play around with, and build up with our friends on the Wii U and 3DS, the better.

3DS Conference

Then on the evening of the 6th, Nintendo held another hour-long conference for the 3DS. There's not as much to recap here, so this won't take long.

Following a surprise appearance by the Nintendo Direct conference's Non-Specific Action Figure - who became a new meme this E3, along with Reggie being portrayed as a purple Pikmin - we saw more of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, and Scribblenauts Unlimited. All known games.

After those came a sizzle reel with LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Which got an excellent demo released on the 3DS eShop.), a good looking Transformers Prime game, and Rabbids Rumble, an appealingly strange looking seeming Rabbids RPG with a focus on collection of the Rabbids, leveling them up, and battling them in wacky turn-based battles.

The eShop celebrated its one-year birthday, otherwise, and we got a new wacky, bizarre comedy series on Nintendo Video by the now-over/long-running Nintendo Week digest series' Phaea Crede. As usual, the original comedy Nintendo's been producing this comedy is pretty cheesy and odd, but it's hard not to like.

They ended with another look at New Super Mario Bros. 2. Disappointingly, there was no Animal Crossing, as I've been looking forward to that game and had been hoping we'd see it out this fall. Fire Emblem: Awakening was quietly announced just after the conference, though, with even less fanfare than Nintendo's own announcement's of the Wii U's great-looking Project P-100 (A Platinum Games collaboration full of bizarre superhero mob and alien combat.) and Game & Wario (Working Title) that appeared on their website but received no mention in their stage shows.

In The End

Aside from that, there's rumblings of more major western third party support for the Wii U coming in the next few months, including Skylanders Giants from Activision, possibly the latest Call of Duty, and EA's usual sports games. Word is that there's due to be more of a Japanese third party lineup unveiled soon enough too, as entirely lacking as the Japanese presence at E3 this year was - and I'm speaking as someone who primarily plays Japanese games - though what presence there was was more on Nintendo platforms than any others by far, at least. The 3DS has some more quality third party titles and localizations on the way too, including Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage!? by WayForward, Planet Crashers 3D by Renegade Kid, Unchained Blades by XSeed, Code of Princess by Atlus, and Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and Project Happiness by Natsume. No sign of SWERY65's promised PS3 Deadly Premonition Director's Cut, though - I'm hoping we might see a Wii U port of that yet, given that even that would be a more viable market for an ultra-niche title like that than the PS3 at this point, and implementing Wii remote and nunchuk controls would do wonders for the game.

With no Wii or DS games showcased, there's still questions of whether we might see Pandora's Tower and the Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Wii remakes released in North America yet this year too - the former's already out in Europe and the latter will be arriving there later this year. They'd make a nice send-off for the platform, as fantastic as Xenoblade Chronicles has been, and as much as I'm looking forward to The Last Story later this summer.

There was no Wii U release date or price given either, as Nintendo announced well before the conference that they wouldn't be telling us either of those. They'll be saved for future Nintendo Direct online conferences with more hype, no doubt. I'm hoping for no more than $300 - less would be a dream - and otherwise, launch has been confirmed for the holidays this year.

As noted throughout this post, it's not to say that everybody's happy, of course. There are many of those who were never going to be pleased by these conferences - those in particular who believed Nintendo needed to drop the original Wii's focus (As well as name) from the Wii U entirely and narrow their focus to the so-called 'hardcore gamers,' following Sony and Microsoft off their current cliff. Refreshingly, that's not what we saw Nintendo do - rather, the followed through with promises made about the Wii U at E3 last year, promising both a serious commitment to online and for the platform to have a 'wider and deeper' focus, aiming at an even broader audience than the Wii, while also intensifying their 'core'/'hardcore'/'traditional' gamer focus and strengthening third party ties. These were lofty promises, and they delivered on all of them.

In reality, looking at what Nintendo pulled off, continuing their mass market focus while the others continued their self-destructive behavior when the industry's outright collapsing around them, Nintendo didn't just win E3, they won gaming. The Wii U has one of the best upcoming launch lineups of any new console or portable in ages, and the 3DS has a good lineup with more surprises, apps, and firmware updates coming yet this year, as well as New Super Mario Bros. 2 to get the western sales to catch up with Japan's incredible enthusiasm for the platform. Despite all the anger - which I'll be elaborating on in a sort of postscript post on E3 and looking back at my old Sane Gaming series - Nintendo ran circles around the competition.

Microsoft showed an increasing disinterest in gaming and a refocus on set-top box features with a weak game lineup that won't alter their current downward trajectory. Sony abandoned their dying new portable and provided nothing for the PS3 that will get it out of its own spiral, and unveiled a peripheral they're only going to see a big net loss on that they can't afford now. Nintendo unveiled the Wii U with an aggressive lineup targeted at continuing what made the Wii a smash hit and taking things further, as well as the vital software needed to greatly strengthen the 3DS's position in the west. And they're still keeping their cards close - we only saw known things for this year at this point, where Sony and Microsoft had no lack of 2013 content on display. We haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet in terms of Wii U games and features, and there'll undoubtedly be many more great 3DS surprises over the course of the remaining half of the year, with many Nintendo Direct conferences yet to come and many questions to be answered about the Nintendo Network, Miiverse, and more. Sony and Microsoft have largely gotten all the hype they can out there for their platforms for the bulk of the year now - the announcements, surprises, and hype with Nintendo is far from over.

E3 2012: Microsoft and Sony Strangled

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 01:53:00 +0000


More important than things that actually matter.

So, I wrote earlier this week about how increasingly apparent it had become that Sony and Microsoft have no business being in the video game industry in the first place. They both went on to hold their respective E3 press conferences and ultimately only reinforced my statements, entirely as I expected. Even their intended 'big surprises' were the result of exceedingly poor planning and an utter lack of understanding of this industry, their place in it, or even their own small and rather rigid market demographics that their focusing on catering to all generation has only served to isolate themselves from the larger market.

Let's take a look at their trainwreck of a situation further.

Let's start with...

Microsoft

You might say that gaming was a second thought at best at Microsoft's press conference, but that might be giving it too much credit. This year, they really wanted you to know that you can totally do other things on Microsoft systems than play games. Like, maybe you should be doing those things instead. And perhaps investing in Microsoft's brand so they can chop off the gangrenous gaming limb and refocus on the set-top boxes the Xbox line was conceived to Trojan Horse into people's living rooms. (It's a verb now.) Also, dubstep. Lots of dubstep. You're already watching a Microsoft press conference. In case you haven't learned yet, it's time to punish your ears. You're only doing this to yourself, you know.

Hey, how about that XBox SmartGlass? You were totally looking for an awkward answer to the Wii U's GamePad screen and multifunctionality that won't actually be seriously used by anybody. Also, everything's better with Kinect, guys. Haven't you been watching the ads? Let's pretend you're still hyped for dance games even though the genre still runs circles around Kinect on the Wii. We'r all psyched to get fit with Nike, too - I mean, there's gotta be sweatshop levels, right? Everyone with an XBox and Kinect can't get enough of fitness games, they couldn't possibly be getting consistently outsold by Wii exercise titles on a platform where motion controls weren't just an attempt at a cynical cash-in. And why we're at it, why not an Usher concert? If it's one thing people love, it's impromptu Usher concerts.

Of course, Microsoft didn't completely forget the audience that got them where they were now. I mean, you can't have a Microsoft gaming event without guns. Lots of guns. And explosions. This isn't redundant at all. Speaking of which, Gears of War 4! Halo 4! Multiplatform releases of a new Splinter Cell game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, that really uncomfortable Tomb Raider reboot - we hope you like hearing the constant sound of a woman in pain! - and Resident Evil 6, now with less survival horror! A game lineup perfect to sit down with with a case of Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel and get up from with diabetes! If only mashing buttons and pushing analog sticks burned more calories. You should've gotten fit with Nike.

Microsoft owes much this generation to the fact that they essentially began the generation by launching the XBox 360 first in 2005. Today, we see a confidence that they can wait as long as they please on the next generation and that they have a loyal market they can treat however they wish and they will always be there. We've all seen what that sort of hubris has done to Sony.

This confidence has led to a narrative where making a more powerful successor to Kinect a standard feature in the next XBox will somehow turn the platform into a powerful response to the Wii U - ignoring that it seems to appear that the Wii U may possibly possess the same kind of body-tracking motion controls within the Wii U GamePad's camera, allowing it to pull off the same style of gameplay, just as it carries over the ability to use all sorts of Wii-style motion controls with the Wii Remote, nunchuk, MotionPlus (And Wii Remote Plus, of course), and balance board. And the Wii U GamePad even has its own gyroscopic sensor and accelerometer like the 3DS, so the system appears to have essentially every sort of motion control option to date available on a single platform.

There's also the problem that Microsoft has largely ignored and avoided acknowledging the Kinect's own struggles - just as Sony has avoided acknowledging or addressing its own problems in general, both in stark contrast to Nintendo, where the company has openly displayed humility going to the very top and both acknowledged and addressed problems faced, changing in order to learn from their mistakes - and there's a very visible disconnect between Microsoft, whom they think they're appealing to and selling their consoles to today, and what their base actually wants. This disconnect was on full display at their E3 conference this year, with video gaming largely taking a backseat to pushing technology their market isn't buying, services that don't meaningfully enhance the video game experience, and celebrity appearances including the aforementioned Usher concert. Even South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to be aware of how embarrassing the event was. And the press conference's closing speech drove the disconnect home further by ending with footage of the new Call of Duty that is by no means an exclusive for an audience very capable of moving to other platforms.

With the muddled mess Microsoft has gotten themselves into, they've largely squandered the big gains the XBox 360 made over the original XBox in terms of hardware sole and marketshare - despite these gains, they've failed to do anything but lose billions of dollars again this generation, and have yet to foster an environment in a single generation in which they have a healthy platform on which most third parties can reliably make money and actually build a business. Likewise, they have a longstanding history of isolating themselves with their targeted demographics of choice and don't seem to understand that cheerily and cynically flailing at the 'dumb casual' demographic they consider to be Nintendo's market as of the Wii and DS onward will not - and is not - helping them make new inroads into broader audiences. You can't draw an audience you don't respect, let alone respect enough to make a primary focus. Nor can you draw an audience you don't understand, and the entire 'dumb casual' argument used to marginalize Nintendo and their market for the entire Wii and DS generation has been built on a foundation of entirely that - a mixture of misunderstanding and a tacit refusal to attempt to understand a more complex, discerning, and varied audience of mass market customers that they chose to disrespect from the very beginning. The moment you start thinking of any segments of the market as suckers, you deserve the financial backlash you'll ultimately receive. Sony and Microsoft are both extremely guilty of this.

In the end, at E3 this year, Microsoft came off as though they wanted to throw a party and for everyone to know they're invited, but to do so specifically to trap you in an advertising meeting and rope you into spending lots of money on movies and music streaming services. Games? Eh, here's some guns and explosions - what can possibly go wrong with resting on their laurels while in decline? While you're at it, why not XBox Live even though you can play online for free elsewhere, and hey, that Nike stuff? Let's just go ahead and get all the big monolithic corporate brands together we can and throw a big party celebrating success on the backs of human suffering and customer disrespect! We can be cool like the guy from those Sony commercials who tried to make the 1% out to be your cool pal who makes it totally clear you're an awesome dude for buying his company's products. Y'know, from before Sony couldn't afford to hire that guy anymore.

Let's keep moving.

Sony

Let's not ignore the elephant in the room. As noted in my previous post, Sony is well on its way to going out of business, and it's entirely the company's own fault. While they focused more on games than Microsoft did, they did just as good a job of revealing nothing that will shake them free of their current death spiral, and like Microsoft, no games that will dig them out of this ongoing global video game sales depression.

Of course, Sony began their conference with your usual reminder with David Cage that games are art. And pouring as much money as possible down the bottomless sewer drain called movie games has become a fond pastime of Sony's this generation. Who didn't love the clumsy, pretentious, semi-interactive student film that was Heavy Rain? There was a killer, and some plot twists, and people were sad - there was even a naked lady and you got to press X to Jason! Video games are the highest art form, you guys. After burning a huge stack of cash on a budget they could never make back - much like Capcom's own recent Dragon's Dogma - Sony opened its show with Quantic Dream's next 'game' you watch, Beyond: Two Souls. Complete with the expected lack of interactivity, and oh, hey, every other vaguely Sony platform related game needs to have 'Soul' or 'Souls' in its title lately, doesn't it? Ellen Page is in this one. Surely this is a career decision she won't later feel uncomfortable looking back on. There's no medium of storytelling more effective for conveying a compelling character drama quite like expensive CGI on a video game system, with heart-wrenching tales scripted by video game writers. I totally bet there'll be some crying, and maybe a rape controversy - like in that recent Hitman sequel trailer - I mean, the lead character is a girl, after all, and what better theme could there quietly be in video games this year than abused ladies? The men doing the vast majority of writing in video games these days totally know what lady troubles are all about. Then there was Super Smash Playstation All Stars Battle whoops. Because shamelessly attempting to copy Nintendo's own beloved franchises has worked out so well for Sony in the past - all those nobody who bought ModNation Racers couldn't help but prefer it to Mario Kart. And we all know what a smash hit Playstation Move Heroes was. Everybody loves those memorable Sony mascot characters, like that one guy named Nathan, that guy named Cole, and that other guy whose name features both Nathan and Cole as parts of it. These games totally aren't focus-grouped by design as soulless corporate piles without a shred of personality or vision. It's Sony, you guys! We all remember the Walkman.

Remember that super cool, ultra-powerful Playstation Vita portable that launched back in December in Japan, and February in the west? The one with all those sneering ads with the guy who resents having to go to work because all he wants to do is play video games, and who walked around in public staring down at his system instead of watching out for traffic when crossing the street? Apparently, Sony doesn't. But don't worry, all those franchises that didn't sell the PSP and all that nonexistent third party support in Japan will surely take Sony back to the top. I mean, graphics! Those are supposed to blow us away and win every generation. By the way, buying your own expensive proprietary memory card? Totally a feature, not a flaw. And hey, you guys love crossplay, right? It's high time you started buying multiple copies of the same game for different systems. (Vita will never be Wii U controller answer.)

Oh hey, Assassin's Creed 3! And Far Cry 3! We can all get excited about multiplatform sequels to franchises nobody's buying new game consoles for now. Stabbing people to death? SHOOTERS!? 5-6 years into this generation with hardware and software sales horribly depressed globally, we're seeing fresh, exciting new ideas at every turn. So much creativity is visible across this 'art form.'

Which brings us to a new peripheral that nobody wanted, the Wonderbook, an augmented reality edutainment device designed to work with the Move and Playstation Eye, two more peripherals the PS3 audience has ignored. Slap all of these together with the J.K. Rowling Book of Spells collaboration, and you have a holiday 2012 deal that would inevitably cost you upward of $400 including the cost of a PS3 itself, hardware not typically purchased with children in mind in the first place. Surely this won't be a lowpoint in Rowling's career. (In her defense, speaking as a writer myself, can we really expect most writers, let alone someone as successful as Rowling, to waste their life actually being informed enough about the video game industry to realize what a bad decision this is?) And the combined feature set you'd get with this hardware? Nothing you couldn't get out of the Wii U, and nothing you're not likely to see used more creatively on the Wii U, as we're going to see about as many games make use of Wonderbook as we will Microsoft's XBox SmartGlass.

A good friend of mine summed things up well when he said that Wonderbook is one of those things that reminds us why Sony lost $6 billion last year. You're not 'reinventing the storybook' with a video game peripheral that requires the ownership of an already incredibly failed peripheral. And as a writer, I can honestly say that Sony is the last company I would ever count on to 'reinvent' anything book-related. Children's book authors are probably a little more concerned with getting kids to use their imaginations than getting their parents to buy them video game systems.

Then there were the big star titles of Sony's conference, which many want to use to excuse the rest of this trainwreck, God of War: Ascension, and Naughty Dog's dead serious The Last of Us, neither of which will be seeing release until well into 2013 - funnily enough, most of the PS3 and 360 game lineup planned for this fall and holiday season has ended up shoved into the release schedule for early 2013, leaving both platforms with weaker lineups for the later part of the year than usual. And this hefty clustering during a slower game sales period in later winter and early spring will inevitably kill most of these games at retail - especially at a time when the only console hardware that will likely being seeing any kind of sales high is the Wii U.

But, ah, The Last of Us. I remember when Naughty Dog used to make fun games that brought out the kid in me. Then Jak & Daxter's sequel was forcibly pushed into awkward 'dark' territory that threw out a lot of what made the original game so fun. And then the PS3 came along and it was more important for games to 'elevate the medium' by getting worse at actually being games. Every time I read anything about what Naughty Dog does these days, I can't escape the sneaking feeling that fun is about the last thing on their minds. Much like Quantic Dream's David Cage, who seems to make you want to quit the hobby with games like Heavy Rain. Could you really blame anyone who did?

Apparently, as we've seen all generation, 'mature,' 'serious, 'forward-thinking' games aren't supposed to be concerned with fun. But pretentious student film level writing and thematic cognitive dissonance? Super cool. Also, call games art, but never, ever question what that's supposed to mean or attempt to elevate the conversation. That has a tendency to shatter simplistic preconceived false narratives.

The Uncharted crowd will undoubtedly go wild for The Last of Us, but like the rest of Sony's major franchises and ongoing fixation on making games more like movies - telling themselves that they're telling serious stories, the mass market won't care, and the game won't move sorely needed hardware or affect the ongoing hardware slowdown. All it will do is appease the same incredibly insulated audience that isn't keeping Sony afloat or overly relevant in gaming. I've noticed that the more seriously a game takes itself, and the more important the developer and publisher behind it thinks it should be, the less the game actually makes a meaningful impact in the market. These aren't games we'll be talking about in ten, twenty years. But the earliest arcade movie games, like Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair and Space Ace? We're still playing those. It's funny.

Sony also announced that they're giving their customers a free year of PS Plus, because they would really, really like to move toward a fully paid subscription service like XBox Live, what with the whole going out of business thing. What better way to push that than by trying to sucker their customers in with the promise of 'free' games that you have to keep paying them a monthly fee to retain access to! This is after the PS3 was talked up as 'superior' to the XBox 360 because its online play was free. Meanwhile, Nintendo appears poised to outdo both XBox Live and PSN with the forthcoming Nintendo Network and Miiverse, all while keeping their services free. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, they don't slather their menus with advertisements - Sony also recently filed a software patent for a code system designed to interrupt your gameplay and show you ads. Man, Nathan Drake sure would like you to chug some BEST BRAND SODA. Better go do that. And everyone was waiting with bated breath for Playstation Mobile. Who wasn't dying to buy a Vita for games already on smartphones?

Speaking of the Playstation Vita, they had close to nothing new to announce for it, spent barely any time acknowledging its existence, and had nothing to announce that even moved PSPs. They're still forecasting massive sales for the platform this year when, realistically, it'll be clearanced and simply removed from shelves by year's end. The future of the portable market is entirely clearly Nintendo's 3DS, smartphones, and tablets. Sony didn't even try with this thing, simply shrinking down their catastrophic latest console and learning literally nothing from the mistakes that wrecked the PSP globally and made the PS3 the suicide machine it was. They've also assured us that there's no price cut coming to the Vita either, so hey, don't worry, guys - this troubled machine that nobody seems to want isn't going to get any more attractive anytime soon.

On the note of not learning a thing from their mistakes, not only are they not commenting on a new console for 2013, like Microsoft - not that Sony can afford one at this point - but they've gone on to imply that they will be launching their next console last, with the most powerful hardware yet and highest price yet again. So, should Sony actually survive to launch the fabled PS4, that's pretty much the last thing they'll get to do. It's apparent that you don't actually have to be good at business to be put in charge of a massive megacorporation, as much as many in this world love to equate wealth and power with ingenuity.

It's becoming clearer by the day that Sony is run by unqualified people who're probably surrounded by yes-men. Howard Stringer wasn't a great leader for Sony and he made a poor choice in grooming Kaz Hirai, who rode the Playstation brand into the ground, as his successor. Following the financial catastrophe of the PS3 with the failures of Move and Vita, even considering a new home Playstation console is approaching the event horizon of the kind of ridiculousness the company can endure before it collapses completely. We're already seeing its stocks hitting its lowest lows since the early '80s, and it's lost over 40% of its value since Hirai took over earlier this year, and its plummet is only continuing.

The Bottm Line

Where E3 hasn't helped Sony's stock, Microsoft's has continued its fall as well. It's readily apparent from outside of the Microsoft bubble that what they're pursuing isn't anything with a viable future in the video game industry.

Microsoft entered gaming in hopes of becoming a powerful set-top box producer getting Microsoft hardware and software hooked up to every home's television possible - a Trojan Horse for their brand. It's not about gaming, and it never was about gaming - that was nothing more than a conduit. And it's a conduit that hasn't worked - they're not heading into the territory they were hoping for so they could largely drop their focus on gaming and change strategies. But the set-top box focus in today's modern consoles has given rise to the popular alternative use of platforms like the Wii as places to watch streaming videos from services like Netflix and Hulu Plus. HBO Go now appears to be on the way, and Google seems to be creating dedicated YouTube applications for every platform they can too. And with video streaming shown possible on the Wii U's browser, I suspect it'll be possible to watch regular Hulu streams directly on one's television through that as though on a computer when the system launches as well.

While there are already very successful and affordable dedicated streaming set-top boxes out there like the Roku, we've only seen one gaming console brand build itself more meaningfully through such set-top box features in Nintendo's Wii, and all of this is continuing on with the 3DS and Wii U. And certainly, there's been no lack of use for Netflix streaming on the PS3 and 360 as well, but the majority of their additional set-top features have been regarded as more extraneous than vital or meaningfully expansionary for these platforms. To put it bluntly, they're not selling points. Nintendo's focus, on the other hand, is still on primarily selling their platforms as gaming systems, but all the additional set-top box features have their known avid audiences and they're a very nice extra that certainly add value, but they aren't hyped and pushed as the reason to buy their systems, as opposed to with Microsoft. Gaming has backfired on them, and now they're facing steeper set-top box competition. In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have tried to force their way into an industry in which they had no serious ambition in the first place. They should have just gone for what their end goal always was. Back when set-top boxes weren't yet commonplace.

And visibly, we saw much time spent at Sony and Microsoft's conferences shamelessly copying the competition. While the Wii U is essentially its own unique thing and if anything, comparable to being a sort of ultimate evolution of the Dreamcast controller, Nintendo Network and Miiverse are not shaping up to be the carbon copies of XBox Live and PSN that people were hoping for from Nintendo, but rather turning out to be a leap beyond. This is in defiance of low expectations after Nintendo's hesitation to set up a modern online network after having dabbled in online features and content longer than their competitors, going all the way back to the days of Satellaview on the SNES in Japan. Sony and Microsoft are shamelessly ripping off each other and Nintendo to no great success for it, while Nintendo's working on blazing its own trails as per usual, though it's only a matter of time, no doubt, before we start seeing Sony and Microsoft copping their newly unveiled Miiverse social features and trying to add similar additions to to Live and PSN. Sony was able to succeed in gaining a foothold in gaming in the first place by copying Nintendo and exploiting a massive market gap created by errors on the parts of both Nintendo and Sega at the time in the later mid-'90s. That era is long past, and copying the competition has proven to be a surefire way to failure in gaming today, where the features Sony and Microsoft pull from Nintendo platforms aren't even unified or standardized, as opposed Nintendo's ongoing efforts in the past decade to bring essentially every method of gameplay input imaginable together, rather than conservatively clinging to one basic controller design for an increasingly limited range of gameplay experiences. The one big thing aside from haphazardly expensive graphics that Sony and Microsoft had over Nintendo this past generation was online play - now they won't even have that, and the industry can't afford another gigantic graphical leap forward.

In the end, Nintendo's half-hour Nintendo Direct on the Wii U alone was more exciting than the entire contents of Sony and Microsoft's conferences. They have three conferences this year, and any one of them alone would be enough to 'win' this year's E3. Once again at E3 2012, we've seen another clash between the new and exciting and more of the same and stagnation, with only a scattering of major titles and the middle market having mostly vanished on Sony and Microsoft's platforms due to the destructively high development costs. Ultimately, the two megacorporations only served to remind us again that the industry and market need Nintendo. And while Nintendo didn't exactly pull out all the stops and announce new installments in every major traditional series like people had hoped, they did deliver the strong conferences needed to assert not only their continued position of industry and market leadership, but to expand that further. I'll be getting that to my next post, my final fully E3-focal one.

Pre-E3 2012: Wii Need Nintendo

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:51:00 +0000

No! No no no! Haven't they stopped this nonsense yet?

Oh hey there, internet. Guess it's about time I showed up this year, isn't it? I've actually been working on an assortment of posts for your consideration and prompt disposal, but as usual, I've been so caught up in all sorts of writing - including the aforementioned posts - that E3 coverage ended up being my first 2012 posts this time. Yes, there's no excuse, but there's plenty of time for me to be charming and witty and horrifically grating about that later.

With E3 2012 beginning today and Nintendo having kicked things off early last night with an impressive second unveiling of the Wii U - their new console successor to the Wii, which they'd been forced to initially unveil last year at E3 2011 when they weren't quite ready due to leaks - it's time to talk video games. And if there's one thing you love to hear talked about, it's video games.

Video games.

Video games, video games, video games.

There's that smooth transition you've always heard about! Isn't it exciting how smoothly this went?

So, the overall state of the industry - where is it these days? If you ask many parts of the internet on gaming subculture message boards, you'll hear that Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's XBox 360 teamed up and 'defeated' the dastardly Wii which dared to advance game controls and appeal to a wider audience than America's future unmanned drone pilots. You'll also hear that Sony's Playstation Vita is just one western shooter away from becoming a major platform and taking off globally. Also, Monster Hunter is totally around the corner even though Monster Hunter Tri G has been selling like gangbusters in Japan since its release last fall and Monster Hunter 4 is confirmed as a 3DS exclusive. Also, Capcom's Vita support has been extremely minimal and hasn't resulted in a single exclusive title.

So, what is the actual overall state of the industry this E3?

Looking at Japan first, let's go platform by platform. The XBox 360 never took off there, so Microsoft isn't even a player there. Given the cynical nature of the peripheral, lack of brand popularity, and frequently cramped living spaces in Japan, Kinect did nothing for the system there either. The Playstation 3, while routinely selling the best of the three consoles in Japan now, is still millions behind the Wii and doesn't move anywhere near as much software on a regular basis. Likewise, now that it's running out of major titles, its hardware sales are gradually beginning to flatline and trending toward the sub-10K weekly sales numbers where most platforms in Japan are now that we're transitioning into a new generation. Only one PS3 game has broken a million copies sold in Japan, and with the console's extremely high cost of development, the average game on the system requires well over a million copies sold to so much as break even. Despite lasting as long as it has, the console can neither be called healthy nor a success this generation. The Wii's hardware numbers have largely been weak and well under 10K selling a week for months now, and in the end, the system never hit PS2 heights in part due to the reliability of the hardware and even more in part due to third parties' decision to commit their support to the PS3 over the Wii from the very beginning of the generation, no matter how badly they were burned for it. Despite a lack of regular major releases as the platform is mostly dead there now, software sales are still steady and healthy, and as software sales rise and dip, it's very common to see Wii games returning to the sales charts time and time again with sales legs no other home console had this generation - over longer periods of time, Wii owners buy new games more than any other console market. The DS, rarely receiving anything of note these days - though Pokemon + Nobunaga's Ambition (Or Pokemon Conquest in the west) and the upcoming Pokemon Black and White 2 are big end-of-life surprises for the system this year - still sells a few thousand units a week. The PS2 has been in a similar position since the end of its generation as well, though it's also seen weeks this generation where it outsold the PS3. The PSP, having seen virtually the last of its major releases, is trending downward right alongside the PS3 to sub-10K weekly sales territory as the platforms both reach the end of their lives. The problems being that the Sony doesn't want and certainly doesn't need the PS3 numbers to collapse like this with the kind of losses they're taking and have been taking for years now - as a whole, Sony corp is publicly circling the drain at this point - and despite its deflating numbers, the PSP continues to outsell its successor, the costly and ironically-named Vita (Formerly NGP), which fell flat on its face right at launch and hasn't taken off in any region. The only platform seeing healthy sales in Japan at the moment is Nintendo's 3DS, which saw some global stumbles in 2011 after its February launch in Japan - Nintendo has since taken drastic measures in a major price cut and ambassador reward program for all the early adopters, and between that and the games the system needed to be successful finally arriving, the 3DS now sits in the position of presently being essentially the only viable dedicated gaming platform to develop for in Japan. Third parties have taken note, and the system now has a strong lineup on the way to incredible territory in Japan - the biggest problem there for those of us in the west is that a huge number of these third party games haven't been announced for western localization yet. Hopefully we'll see a major turning of the tide in that regard beginning at this year's E3. With only one viable platform and one platform selling games in notable numbers in the 3DS - also the least expensive platform to develop for, making it an easily profitable gamble - Japan is still sorely in need of a new viable console. The field is wide open for Nintendo's taking, and they're visibly the one going for it.

Now, let's talk the west. The PS2 doesn't chart here anymore. And between America's NPD and Europe's own charts, gaming numbers have been incredibly depressed this year. Far more money is being lost than made in gaming right now, with no strong console moving games and the 3DS having improved in the west, but not yet having hit the kind of sales level it has in Japan, in large part due to many games people want and expect still being missing and too many third parties playing a game of caution more justifiable on the Vita at this point, which is selling incredibly poorly globally and visibly not turning into a viable platform of any kind. Its small audience isn't responding too well to the likelihood that it will be the first platform we see outright withdrawing from the market due to its failure since Nokia's N-GAGE and Sega's Dreamcast. (Nothing too shocking here, given the PS3's overall catastrophic life on the market and the fact that the PSP failed to become a major platform in the west and saw the majority of its support dry up in its earlier years.) The Wii has more life in it here than Japan, still receiving scattered third party releases (Including the reliably successful LEGO franchise, which sees the majority of its sales on Nintendo platforms and has succeeded at building a huge audience across all age brackets.) and the occasional hit like Nintendo and Monolith Soft's own recent brilliant Xenoblade Chronicles - one of the best games of this generation, easily. Other than that, like in Japan, Wii games continue to have incredibly long sales legs in the west and keep moving years after release. The PS3 and XBox 360 are outselling the Wii on a regular basis in the west, but like in Japan, neither will be anything but a distant second or third to its overall market position this generation, and neither of the consoles is moving in big numbers. Sony's cynical Playstation Move motion controller peripheral that shamelessly knocked off the Wii remote and nunchuk and dropped onto the market with zero enthusiasm has just seen its most hyped title - Sorcery, a fairly simplistic straightforward clone of the Harry Potter console games - dropped onto the global market years after it mostly disappeared, with no marketing and no real consumer interest. And for all the hype around the notion of it turning the XBox 360 into a 'Wii-killer,' Microsoft's Kinect is driving neither hardware nor game sales, and even its recent laughingstock Kinect Star Wars dance title saw lukewarm sales at best despite the major brand. There was neither a meteoric rise in gaming for Kinect, nor a clearly corresponding collapse in Wii sales. With the current generation coming to an end, it's reasonable to say that while the technology involved in Kinect is certainly cool, it's offered a very limited range of gameplay experiences - much akin to Sony's own Eyetoy - and hasn't achieved the kind of success it was expecting. The fact that Microsoft still couches its big yearly XBox division losses in its entertainment division numbers to spin the continued losses positively - after over a decade of the XBox brand now only having yielded billions in losses for the company - pretty much says it all. With the Wii continuing its slow burn and the PS3 and 360 gradually burning out, with even major recent titles underperforming and failing to move hardware - leading to month after month of news stories on the continually poor gaming numbers in the west - and the Wii brand itself powerful, the field is wide open for Nintendo to take the west, too. New Super Mario Bros. 2 arrives on the 3DS in August, intended clearly to get 3DS hardware moving more comparably to Japan, and we're seeing many western third parties surprisingly and impressively jumping on board with the Wii U already after largely disregarding or simply shrugging at the Wii as some kind of anomaly not worth respecting. The western industry needs Nintendo to revitalize things with hot new hardware and get customers buying again, just as badly as Japan does. Word has been that the most profitable game of 2012 so far has been Activision's Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, as well, which saw the bulk of its sales with the Wii console version and exclusive 3DS version - much of its profit coming from all the figurines that drive the game's content - and even the teams that made those games are known to be preparing the upcoming Skylanders Giants for Wii and 3DS, and they've dropped some hints about the Wii U.

What we've seen over the past year is decline - decline everywhere. And the only company on the upswing is Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft's 'the next generation starts when we're ready' attitude will only get them left behind entirely, as they continue to push products that never caught on with the mass market, never actually made money, and aren't suddenly catching fire since the Wii and DS sales declined - it turns out the whole world wasn't waiting for the PS3 and 360 to get cheap and 'upgrade' from the Wii. When Wii third party support largely dried up and Nintendo began focusing on the transition to the Wii U, the whole industry entered a decline. And now they're the only one with a successful new portable when the market was ready for a new platform, and the only one with a new console coming out when it's needed most. Both are blatantly targeting the competition's market share - they're already largely consuming the vital Japanese PSP market, which isn't bothering with the Vita, in turn leading to virtually no third party support for the system and sending it into an effective death spiral. Just as Sony was vulnerable in Japan, Sony and Microsoft are both incredibly vulnerable right now after a generation they're not ready to see end in which they both lost billions of dollars gambling on absurdly overpowered and expensive hardware, and in Microsoft's case not even bothering to make sure they wouldn't break in incredible numbers for a huge part of the XBox 360's lifespan. Third parties shrugged off and often outright sneered at the Wii and its audience, and the game they played this generation didn't push the mass market over to the PS3 and XBox 360 - it got them burned horribly.

What the bottom line is right now is that the industry needs Nintendo to hit this E3 out of the park. It needs for the 3DS to only continue picking up steam and become the sort of powerhouse it has in Japan. It needs for the Wii U to be a smash hit across a broad, mass market like the Wii and DS - the industry needs these things to happen in order to course-correct and avert a crash that would largely reduce the video game industry to a scant few larger companies that could ride out a crash (Nintendo being among them, Sony not so, and in Microsoft's case, it simply isn't in their best longterm financial interests to keep burning money on an industry the company doesn't understand.) and a whole lot of tiny developers primarily working on smartphone and tablet games with a shoestring budget.

The industry needs for Nintendo to come in and revitalize it, after they failed to properly back the Wii and rode the PS3 and 360 into the ground.

This brings us to just how much Nintendo is dominating E3 this year in terms of sheer numbers of events. Before the expo even began, they opened things and stole the competition's thunder with a fantastic Wii U unveiling in the latest of their ongoing Nintendo Direct online conferences they've been holding since last fall to address their customers as directly as possible. We'll get to that in a moment. Today, multiple third parties will be announcing Wii U and 3DS games at their own events, with some already having made pre-E3 announcements last week, and others, like niche publisher Atlus, have gone ahead and begun making early morning announcements - Atlus itself having revealed a localization for Guardian Heroes-like 3DS brawler-RPG Code of Princess, their first niche Nintendo platform localization that isn't an in-house developed title in Japan or broader-appealing puzzle game like last year's Mahjong Cub3d (Originally a Sunsoft title.), a return to form for Atlus that I definitely hope to see continue with more niche 3DS and Wii U localizations in the future.

On Tuesday, Nintendo will be holding their usual noon E3 conference, which they've already confirmed will primarily be dedicated to Wii U games. Late that night, Nintendo's Katsuya Eguchi - creator of the beloved life sim series Animal Crossing and producer of the Wii U itself - will be holding a developers roundtable for even more of an indepth look at the system, third party testimonials, and upcoming games. And on Wednesday, they'll be holding a final event in a broadcast floor show to look at all of the relevant Nintendo platform games at the show this year. They have so much going on between the 3DS, Wii U, and forthcoming Nintendo Network that they're spreading it across four days this year. And considering that I ran out of steam after my indepth analysis of Sony and Microsoft's problematic position last year and never even got to Nintendo in my E3 writeup and commentary then, that's going to make this year's coverage even more of a lion to tame, but I'm looking forward to coming through for all three quarters of you this time.

By the time I finished writing this, Microsoft's E3 presentation already finished. And it was one of their weakest and most redundant yet, fully demonstrating yet again how little they get this business and that their market isn't expanding for good reason. It says something that the Wii U actually began trending on Twitter during their conference.

Sony's shouldn't be any better, with most of the showings having leaked well in advance, like Microsoft's conference. They'll supposedly be unveiling a subscription game streaming service with a partner like OnLive or Gaikai, neither of which have set the world on fire and neither of which will gain much either way by a partnership with Sony. And where Microsoft embarrassed themselves with blatant rips of Wii U controller features and a knockoff of Sony's violence porn series God of War, Sony's already known to have an outright cringeworthy Super Smash Bros. clone on the way and yet another attempt to create their own Mario Kart after numerous failures. And this is the same company that just recently filed for a software patent for a system to allow them to interrupt gameplay in order to force you to watch advertisements. The company is visibly well on its way out, and since he took over, Kaz Hirai rather clearly has no strategy, having essentially announced, "We're going to keep doing everything we've been doing, but better!" shortly after taking the reins. In the grand scheme of things, Sony is where they are because it's where they should be for the things they've done and the things they're doing. The Playstation brand collapsed with the PS3, and the Vita's failure to garner sales or support is reflective of just how far gone Sony really is in gaming now. It's not exactly a loss.

Now, on to last night's pre-E3 Nintendo Direct conference on the Wii U. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata handled the entire conference this time, opening with a bit of discussion of the concept of 'Dokusou,' or creating something unique. He revealed that Tuesday's Wii U conference will be focused on games, so this smaller online conference was to introduce the Wii U to customers in a more conceptual sense. Pop psychology book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other was cited as a lead-in to discussion of the Wii U's focus on doing a better job of connecting people, both in the same room and over great distances - seeking to do what the Wii did, but to only improve on it further.

Iwata then unveiled the final form of the Wii U GamePad, recalling the long history of gamepads prior to the Wii Remote. He confirmed that the controller can be used as a universal television remote, and showed that it has a Near Field Communication reader/writer on which certain physical objects can be placed to interact with games, much like Activision's Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure and its figurines. The asymmetric diversity that can be achieved in gameplay with the Wii U controller was touched on, and will be seen more in Nintendo's main conference on Tuesday. There was some visible hinting at a new Wii Sports as well. Motion controls - potentially Kinect-style camera-based body tracking - were further confirmed in the new GamePad, though all forms of Wii input, from the remote to the balance board, will also still be used on the Wii U. A Wii U Pro Controller - essentially a new Classic Controller - that largely resembled an even more comfortable Dual Shock-esque evolution of the SNES controller and Classic Controller Pro (Nintendo's original SNES controller has served as the basis for basically all modern traditional controllers, including Sony's and Microsoft's.).

The forthcoming Nintendo Network (Nintendo's forthcoming answer to the Playstation Network and XBox Live - not a paid service, either!) and its newly unveiled Facebook and Twitter-like social network, Miiverse, were then unveiled through a goofy, comical video not unlike their Wii and 3DS digest shows Nintendo Week and Nintendo Show 3D, demonstrating a frustrated nerd going on Miiverse to ask for help with a zombie boss in a game. A friend checked his Miiverse activity feed from an app on his smartphone and called the nerd to basically taunt him before the nerd found another gamer willing to help him, who happened to be an octogenarian quite certain that he was his best friend - this exchange was demonstrated through the system's Skype and Face Time-esque impressive video chat functionality.

A universe of Miis. Wii U, 3DS, Nintendo Network.

They followed the goofy video with a closer look at the Miiverse plaza itself, with crowds of Miis made up of your own Mii avatar, others with accounts on your system's Mii avatars, friends' Mii avatars, and those of strangers playing the same games. Plus, the plaza is filled with big icons for all the games and applications you have, plus those you don't. In Japanese, the service is named Mii Wara Wara, 'Wara Wara' describing the noise of such a large gathering. Lots of bubbles appear above each crowd around a game or app with bits of the tweet-like text messaging and hand-drawn Swapnote-style messages through which people can communicate around each game and app. This Mii Universe will be interchangeably usable on the TV screen and Wii U GamePad, and will be available for multitasking while playing a game any time. When posting messages, you'll be able to post screenshots, set facial expressions for your Mii, and even mark your screenshots for spoilers. Player-created content will be able to be transmitted through Miiverse as well. Miiverse will be able to interact with all Wii U games as an apparently quite killer social networking platform - Nintendo has gone from well behind Sony and Microsoft in terms of online functionality to leaping beyond them with the Nintendo Network and Miiverse, and the service is free! On top of which, there's much about Nintendo Network and Miiverse that has yet to be unveiled.

LOL!! indeed.

An example of Miiverse functionality shown displayed the first on-Wii-U gameplay footage we've seen in a new old-school 2D Super Mario Bros. game, in which a player died running into a Koopa Troopa and then saw comments from Miiverse pop up from other players who died at that same point. The Super Mario World style world map also had comments from others on Miiverse, and seemingly the appearance of an achievement system as well. The Miiverse social network has been confirmed as coming to the 3DS, along with Nintendo Network itself, too, while there will be apps for Miiverse for the PC, smartphones, tablets, and essentially every device that can connect to the internet.

Last, Iwata showed some new web-browsing functionality too, by which you could surf the internet on the Wii U GamePad's screen while covering the television with curtains, and then throw surprise content up onto the screen like YouTube videos. You could also highlight specific text and photos for the TV from the GamePad screen as well, making for very convenient web-browsing and video streaming from the user's own couch.

We learned last that Iwata himself is guest-tweeting on the Nintendo of America Twitter account this week during E3 and will be reading customers' feedback. And on Tuesday, we'll finally begin seeing complete examples of the sorts of video game experiences that never existed before the Wii U. Exciting.

At any rate, at such a pivotal time as this when the industry so badly needs the 3DS and Wii U to bring back customer interest, Nintendo seems set on hitting these platforms out of the park and pushing out their competition entirely. There needs to be the right blend of the kind of support the PS3 and 360 received and more of the broader support the PSX, PS2, and Nintendo's NES and SNES received in the past for the broadest audience possible. Likewise, the more socially driven and mass market appeal oriented the Nintendo Network is, the better. And price is also key - the more affordable the Wii U and its games are to the mass market, the better. Increasingly, I suspect that we're moving toward a one-console, one-portable industry with Nintendo providing both, and competing more indirectly against smartphones, tablets, and PC gaming, as the very industry itself continues to change and gaming continues to transform. There evidently isn't room in today's market for two dedicated portables, and absolutely not for three dedicated gaming consoles. And with how poorly Sony and Microsoft are faring with no evidence of coming change or burgeoning understanding of the customers they want to buy their products, it's very possible we are headed into single-console territory and a gaming industry that looks strikingly different in another 5-10 years from how it does now. Doesn't hurt that Wii U games can be developed at a lower cost than on the PS3 and 360, and Nintendo's been aggressive about getting free middleware to developers to encourage as much support as possible. We've got a very exciting E3 ahead this year. Just probably not so much if you're a diehard Sony or Microsoft fan - there's bitter medicine on the way for that lot.

The Tears of Caga Tió

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:55:00 +0000


Holiday cheer meets confectionery defecation!

It is Christmas day now, isn't it? And as usual, I'm exceedingly sleep deprived after staying up all night working on various things. You'll never find a healthier chap.

At any rate, though I was tempted to do a Krampus story this year - there will be a Krampus story yet - this year, you get a bizarre little short for the Spanish crowd.

Just earlier this month, the surreal, brilliant Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Christmas special introduced me to a certain Catalan mythological character and holiday tradition - none other than Tió de Nadal, otherwise known as Caga Tió. In a sense, Caga Tió is the anti-Krampus. Rather than punishing children for being children - all children are terrible, remember, you parents out there especially know this to be true - like Santa's monstrous Germanic pal, Caga Tió's sole holiday task is to inevitably poop candy. Ideally, turrón.

Should the Caga Tió fail in this task, the children beat it with sticks. Savagely. See? I was right about children all along.

Anyway, your annual Xmas short story. The whimsy. The weird. All that noise. Go!

The Tears of Caga Tió

Can you really blame anyone for hating the holiday season? All the avarice and unmitigated capitalism wrapped up in a veneer of insincere holly jolly nonsense. Everywhere you look, televisions and signs point guns at your head. "Think you love your family? You're buyin' them these gifts!" A low hiss. Always in a low hiss. That's the you-mean-business tone. A hateful tone to drown the holidays in. A good reason to drown your sorrows in egg nog. Spiked. 90% rum, ideally. You're drinking to forget. You've got to take that seriously.

Not all of us can drink away our sorrows. Or inject them away, or snort them away, and whatnot. This brings us to our poor, dear friend, Caga Tió, the Christmas whipping log.

Everybody loves Santa Claus. He shows up and tosses a bunch of gifts at people. Sometimes he fires them out of cannons. Rotund and jolly, but never diabetic. This whiskery holiday wizard whisks children's reasonable dreams from home to home across the globe, and only sometimes sics his understandably child-hating compadre Krampus on today's kids. He's gone all soft inside.

Caga Tió's holiday season consists entirely of things going in and out of his butt. If you can say that logs even technically have butts. And then he gets beaten mercilessly, because children know no mercy. Can you really blame him for needing therapy?

That's where Jana Holiday, licensed holiday therapist comes in. No, that's not her actual last name. Were you really expecting stressed out holiday characters to go and talk to someone named Schmidt? They expect the obvious. They expect cheese. Would you really expect anything else of individuals who exist solely by the sheer willpower contained within the collective human imagination? We've got this thing called the internet now. Imaginations were just how the primitive peoples passed the time waiting for funny cat videos to be invented.

It's the day after Christmas. Caga Tió's carried out his annual task. Always a dark day. The first year, he contemplated putting a gun in his mouth, only to realize that because he was a hollow log, it wouldn't do him any good. It's overcast, but it's only in the mid-fifties. Hardly snow weather. Hardly festive. As we join him, he totters up to the glass doors leading into the Holiday Holiday Counseling Service. He smacks into the doors sixteen times before anyone notices and lets him into the building. They have to press the buttons for him in the elevator, too. Caga Tió's stiff, awkward limbs aren't made for walking, let alone jumping, or any kind of interaction with the world around him.

Caga Tió waddles into Jana's office and, as usual, the Easter Bunny goes out of his way to trip him. As though that would take much effort in the first place. Caga Tió used to think that they could be friends, but apparently there's a huuuuuuuuuuuge difference between pooping candy and pooping candy concealed within colorful plastic eggs. Nuts to that guy, Caga Tió thinks as the secretary helps him right himself. On his back, Caga Tió's more helpless than a flipped turtle.

"Same old, same old," Caga Tió grumbles as Jana sets him upright on the patients' chair. "Why don't you kids just go buy a block of turrón already? I don't have to take all this abuse."

"No luck with that existence crisis, huh?" Jana sighs. "Look, Tió - if they just bought the candy themselves, you would no longer need to exist. You still understand this, right?"

"I get it. Nothing gets it more than me. With sticks. And bats. Every year. I mean, at least I have no actual capacity for physical sensation like you humans, so I don't feel anything when the turrón comes in and out, but it's the principle of the thing! I'm being violated!" Caga Tió flips over on his side, in one of the only visible expressions of emotion of which he's capable. "Can you blame me for sometimes wishing nobody had imagined me? I mean, come on, this is on you humans, too - a lot of you like the idea of beating up a log until it dumps out candy for you. I even have a face now!"

"We've discussed this before," Jana says, "but don't you think it's about time you took ownership of what you are? You can steer the course of your own identity if you try."

"Sure, maybe if you're Santa Claus you can get a lucrative soda deal and everything, but come on! I'm a hollowed-out log with little stilt-legs. Nothing is designed for us. Can you even imagine how many times a day I fall off counters?"

"Well, uh, I'd suggest masochism, but since you have no physical sensation whatsoever, I guess that's out. At least you don't feel any physical pain when the children beat you," Jana says.

"Only my pride," Caga Tió sighs. "Only my pride."

"I guess the whole filling yourself up with things you like and dislike on your own time idea fizzled, huh?" Jana twirled a pencil between her fingers.

"I don't even know what I like or dislike - nobody's imagined that for me, either. Maybe some of them think I'm supposed to be enjoying the beatings. Maybe the rest just don't care. I may be a log, but I'm a log with a face. You got to grow up, make friends, and go to college. I popped into existence longer than any of you have lived and my existence has been nothing but holiday songs, beatings, and candy pooping ever since! And it's not even really pooping! You guys just personified me that way - it's more like I'm evacuating my entire body cavity!" Caga Tió falls over onto his back, shaking his little stick-limbs furiously.

"For what it's worth, Tió, I think you're a pretty stand-up - what I mean to say is, you mean well. I understand that you're frustrated - you're living with an existential crisis that no human being can even begin to relate to," Jana attempts to console the log.

"I spend a couple of weeks every December hanging out in kids' houses so they can beat the candy out of me. I spend the rest of the year in my little house built for humans falling down stairs and trying to open jars. You understand nothing." Caga Tió would have sneered at Jana here, but he's incapable of changing his expression.

"By the way, I was wondering if I could follow you around in your home for a few weeks," Jana says. "You know, for a documentary. For the internet."

"Oh no! I know how this works! I've heard of that boxy thing with all the pictures." At this point, Caga Tió attempts to get up and storm out angrily, only to fall out of the chair onto his back.

"You mean well, Caga Tió," Jana says as she reaches down to help him up.

"I'm a candy-pooping holiday log. Why do I even pay you?"

"You can leave the turrón over there on your way out."

The Cruelest Holiday Season

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:50:00 +0000

Oh hey, it's already December. And not only December, but Christmas Eve. An exciting time of the year, if there ever was one. But arguably, all times in any and all years are both exciting and unexciting at once. Depends on where you are, who you're with, and countless other variables. Predicable opening paragraph, predictable opening paragraph filler. The opposite of exciting.

And I haven't even remarked yet about how I still need to write here on a more regular basis. Good thing I just got that out of the way. 2011 is a year I've spent mentally congested. Exceedingly so. This was my most inactive year yet writing here on Spiral Reverie. One of my 2012 goals is to change that. This inactivity on my part certainly hasn't been for a lack of trying. I have piles of blog posts sitting here unfinished - many things I wanted to say, or to finish saying, but then that mental congestion struck. Not that it's much of an excuse.

I'll be getting a few more of these things out of the way over the course of the remaining week of the year, at any rate. With any luck, perhaps I'll be a more exciting writer worth your following in 2012. Should I fail at that, in the least, there'll be more juicy little morsels entailing various strings of words that may or may not form thoughts that make some kind of sense for you to sink your mind-fangs into in the next year

All that yammering aside, I'll catch the few of you passing internet tumbleweeds up on all things interesting and uninteresting in a post I'll end the year with in another week or so, the salvaging of a post I intended to complete about four months ago. Funny, that. (And there will be a funnier Xmas story later tonight. I promise. I won't break this one.)

On to the purpose of this post. These prior paragraphs? An appetizer - probably some bread you've filled up on enough as so to lose interest in what lies ahead - before the mass of somber that follows as the substance of this post. You guys like somber, right? Statistically, a lot of you aren't feeling too wonderful at this purportedly festive time of year, after all. I've actually got some legitimate excuses for my latest bout of lethargy and malaise.

This one's for you, sad people. Relatively raw, just the way you like it. Always gluttons for punishment.

Those of you in any way familiar with the subject matter of my work have doubtlessly noticed my fixation on death. To call it an obsession would be fair. There are worse things to be obsessed with than mortality. Trivial things, for the broadest example. Death isn't trivial. The very cessation of being - of consciousness, of experience, of sensation, of memory - is something that haunts everybody at some point or another. And it's not even an exclusively human experience. Not all animals may necessarily experience or be capable of experiencing existential crises, and arguably, that's something to be envied. But many of them still grieve. There's nothing uniquely human about grief.

One day or another, our tenses all shift from present to past. He was. She was. They were. They are no longer. They are not.

I have a complex history with death, be it that of a relative, teacher, acquaintance, friend, or pet. Only one case of an individual's demise that I can recall can be said to have been taken poorly. That individual was not human. Whenever people I've known have died, I've always felt a little bit numb. Perhaps a little guilty that I didn't know them better, or didn't spend more time with them when I could have. That guilt doesn't go away, but you learn to push it down and ignore it. I feel like letting it go entirely would do a disservice to the deceased. Even though they're gone - it's not like they exist in any capacity by which they could care whether or not I felt guilty. And even if they did, they probably wouldn't want me to feel that way. The deceased I've known weren't a rotten bunch - not a single one of them.

No one escapes death's afterimages in this life. There isn't a single person who doesn't experience the departure of someone or some animal dear to them. And the weight of those deaths grows only heavier, the longer you live. You have to develop coping skills. We don't live in a world where time is allowed to stop - at least, not for long - when faced with mourning.

We all have different rituals. We grieve privately, and we grieve as communities - whether as large as a nation or as small as a family, perhaps only one or two people. We hold funerals. We bury our dead, and we burn them. We come together and cry. And we cry alone, pouring out the poisonous emotions within ourselves by whatever means we can. A matter of necessity. The restoration of homeostasis. Both as an individual, and as a community. You can't milk mourning forever - that's a disservice too.

I don't grieve like that. After the first death I took poorly, I had to develop stronger coping skills. The next death I faced - it was a relative's that time - I felt nothing. "Oh. I'll never see them again." That thought generally comes packaged with a particularly sharp sense of personal emptiness. It repeats. The repetition only makes it worse. We ache. I don't. The first time that hit me, I wasn't sure how to feel about myself as a person. I was only just getting into my teens back then, after all. How are you really supposed to feel, knowing that people are hurting over the loss of a dear relative, when you yourself don't really feel anything? And this was before some intensely negative formative experiences during my high school years that radically transformed my relationship with death and birthed my obsession with it - with endings.

From a constructive angle, I can really only hope that as a writer, this obsession will allow me to deliver unto you endings that really pack a punch. Endings that leave you thinking or feeling something - endings that haunt. Anything less would be another disappointment.

This year, my holiday season has been poisoned by death. I've found myself faced with two separate forms of grieving, each distinct. Every year, I've felt the so-called 'holiday spirit' less and less. Thanksgiving and Christmas creep up, and while I like the holidays for what they are, I've only felt increasingly numb, and as always, incredibly trapped - the end of each year brings a vivid reminder of how little of actual substance I've accomplished with my life. That I'm nowhere near where I want to be in terms of my writing career, in terms of life experience, and even in terms of geographic location. I am not where I want to be. I am not where I need to be. We had a very warm autumn this year, and winter has been off to a horribly warm start, too. We had the air conditioning on just yesterday, thanks to how uncomfortably hot my bedroom became by mid-morning. And I'm sick again, as I often seem to get at this time of the year. Every day, I see food - and tasty holiday confections - that I want to eat, but can't. At a point in my life where I'm occasionally sick for a month or longer, and find myself ill for an entire week surrounded by things I can't eat, it's impossible not to long for aspect of my youth where I was usually over any illness within a couple of days. And I'm stuck wondering just how much damage my stomach has incurred over the past decade, along with what that means for my future health.

The holiday season. Closing another year with a disheartening reminder of my own fragility and the inhibitions said fragility impresses onto my life and capacity to be who I want to be. There are few things I hate more than having to face this fragility, my distinct limitations as the human being I am - rather than the one I'd rather be - and watching as time continues to tick down as I head toward my thirties, feeling like a complete failure. I'm not the only one in this boat by a long shot - let alone within my own generation, considering how many of us have flat out failed to 'begin our lives' even now due to factors out of our control - but that knowledge isn't really a source of comfort.

As though that weren't enough - or horribly self-indulgent and self-centered enough for me - time came for death to cast its pall across my already pallid season. I'm writing a 'poor me' blog post when talking about the deaths of others. What a creep.

Just a few days before Thanksgiving last month, someone I knew in college was killed in a fatal hit and run. I didn't know Val well enough to call her a friend. She was among the first people I encountered, but never got to know back at the beginning of my freshman year in August of 2002. She was a member of the university's anime club, in which I largely found myself an unwanted silent presence, the whole club being the huge drama bomb that it was - routinely exploding. Most of the older club members flat-out ignored me when I tried to strike up conversation and make some new friends. Among the experiences that inevitably led to my spending much of college holed up in my dorm room as a hermit. Val wasn't one of those people.

She was later in a relationship with a good friend of mine whom I don't hear from too often these days. I hung out with the two of them and another of my good friends a few times before the small social circle I was a part of for much of college largely split apart as we all began to move in our own directions. I drifted, for reference. And that's where I am now, still - grasping at the direction I seek. For the time being, at least, it's out of reach.

My memories of Val at their most vivid were those few times the four of us hung out late at night. She always had a certain eccentric energy around her, and she lived true to herself, regardless of how others saw her. She was a strange one, but in an entirely positive way. That was the sense I got from the little time I spent in her company. I can't go as far as to say we were friends - we weren't even friends on Facebook, and as a result, I was one of the last people to learn of her sudden, tragic death. A week and a half later. We were friendly acquaintances, but she was a good friend to others I knew. I can only imagine their suffering. Mine inevitably pales in comparison - I simply went into a bit of shock upon learning what had become of her. "Oh. I'll never see her again." The usual numbness. And now my memories of college bear a distortion - the nights the four of us hung out, I can recall just how intensely into one another she and my friend were. My other friend and I would roll our eyes and comment that they should get a room already when they were pretty much all over each other in the main room of the apartment, when we hung out there. But I got a strong sense of how deeply the two of them cared for each other then. As someone who's never had a single romantic relationship that wasn't terrible, and who's the definition of a cynic as a result, you would think I would have rolled my eyes at their whole relationship. But I didn't - I was sincerely happy for them at the time, as much as I rolled my eyes at public displays of affection. I was glad they had what they did with each other. And that when they eventually broke up, they remained good friends. If nothing else, at least they seem to have found the woman responsible for Val's death.

I wish this were a more suitable tribute and a better obituary in general. But instead, this was mostly a selfish musing on my own thoughts and feelings - my own shock. But while Val's death made an impact on me, it's not even comparable to so many others, because I simply didn't know her all that well. From what little of her I knew, however, I know without a doubt that she was one of the good ones. My condolences and deepest sympathies go to the Miranda family and all of Val's friends. I really do wish I had more that I could say that didn't come off as entirely inadequate. She deserves better, but in the least, a bit of a tip of the hat here in my little blog is better than nothing, I like to hope.

A week after I learned of Val's tragic death, we had to put my dog down.

Other dogs will tell tales of your glory.

Bastian was fifteen. A Scottish Terrier. We had him for fourteen of those years and probably close to another couple of months, roughly. The above photo was taken when he was ten, before he got sick. Before the numerous health problems he had in the end began to pile up. By the end, he was essentially living in canine hospice care in our house. He was on effective painkilling medication to live his final weeks and months as comfortably as possible. Before that, he cried out in pain on a number of occasions. Every one of those cries cut right through you. We had to keep him wrapped up in little padded dog wraps to deal with his incontinence as well. There were stains, and there was blood. He drifted in an out of a mental fog at times, having gone a little senile. But when he wasn't in that fog, he was still his same old self. And over recent years, he'd given us more than a few scares - every time we thought he was going to die on us, he pulled through and recovered. He even recovered from going deaf for a little while, and what we believe was a stroke. He lived longer than most Scotties ever do. And when it came time for him to go - when it was the humane thing to do, as much as none of us wanted to say goodbye - he went out himself.

He never lost his mischievous, fun-loving personality. He never stopped being protective. Despite his somewhat-senility, he was never unrecognizable as himself. When he passed away, he wasn't defeated by death - rather, death was his conduit away from his pain. I was one of the only two of us in my family who stayed in the room with him, petting him as he passed away. I watched as he slumped over as though he were comfortably napping one last time in the end. As he received his injections and the life left his expression. I continued to pet him as his heart stopped beating. And for the first time, I witnessed death firsthand - it's not the same as finding your fish floating upside down in their tank, or coming home to finding a hamster or gerbil curled up in their cage, gone.

Death hangs over everything in much of my writing. And it's practically a lead character in my upcoming second novel, Project Princess - which I'm hoping to finish in its entirety in 2012. I'd already written about what it was like for the protagonist to not just witness death firsthand, but to witness the transformation someone you've killed undergoes the moment you kill them. My experience of being there with Bastian as he died under my gaze and affection mirrored what I'd already written with eerie exactitude. The moment someone dies in front of you, they transform. They're gone. What you're left with is a shell. A husk. You're no longer with them, and they're no longer with you. You're there with someone who looks just like them - Bastian's fur was just as soft, and he was still warm as I pet him even after his passing. But they're no longer who they were. They're just a body.

As established, I'm generally numb to death. Despite my coping skills, if they can be called that in their twisted nature, watching and feeling my beloved pet die that day, roughly around - a little before or after - 5:30 PM on December 7th, hit me the hardest anything has in years. I came home from the vet's office to fitful sleep, remembering clearly what his fur felt like on my hands for the very last time. Roughly two and a half weeks later now, I can still conjure the sensation of his fur to mind with such vividness that I can nearly feel like I'm petting him again. I can still recall coming home to his half-empty bowl, full of kibble he'd never finish. The frayed nerves everyone had then. My mother throwing out his bed the next morning. He'd already torn it up and gotten more use out of it in the near-year he had it than many dogs did out of beds they had for much of their lives. And now my younger brother is home for the holidays, and his little dog is here with him as usual. She's using Bastian's old food and water bowls. The whole world feels askew.

The most intense listlessness I've felt in years fell over me like a net, and I didn't really feel like doing much of anything for the first week or so after his death. But little-by-little, things are returning to normal. 'Normal,' in this case, meaning that I'm successfully adapting to life without him, after facing just how much of my daily life and thought processes used to revolve around that dog. He was basically my fuzzy younger brother, after all. We had him for more than half of my life. It was my job to look after him at night. Whenever I'd leave my room at night, I'd look out for him to make sure I wouldn't accidentally bump into him. My mornings would pretty much begin with my removing his wrap and taking him outside for a stroll around the yard. I'd take him on walks in the evenings on days when I was awake then. I keep odd hours. Inconsistent in a way that frustrates me. There's still a little tuft of his fur in the corner of my room that I don't really feel inclined to clean up. A reminder that he was here. And since I finally picked up a Nintendo 3DS a little over a month before his death, I'm carrying him with me in both figurative and literal senses, as I managed to get one good low-resolution 3D photo of him with the system before he passed, as well as his face in the built-in Face Raiders game. So he's with me in both my memories and my video game system. Even my memorials are nerdy.

Bastian really was my furry brother, a closer friend than any human being, never a companion more loyal. And to me, he stands as a symbol for over half my life - most of my adolescence up to my late twenties. Bastian was there with me for both the lowest lows and the few high points my life had over those years. He'd met the girl who damaged me tremendously in a way that ultimately became formative in my teen years, largely destroying my ability to love or get too close to anybody. And he'd also met the last girl I loved some years back when I last saw her, before a great distance suffocated all hope I ever had with her. Bastian was an era of my life. And with his death, something vital inside myself has been severed. More than mourning. He was in many ways my strongest tie to this place in North Carolina - I always felt that whenever I finally escaped from here, seeing him again would always be a chief reason to come back and visit - not to diminish the rest of my family, of course. That reason no longer exists, and I feel far, far less tied to Raleigh and North Carolina in general. Part of me really just wants to leave this state and not look back, but the not looking back part's pretty much a no-go as long as I still have family here. Still, with his death, so goes a major era of my life. And I feel as though in order to properly move on and do justice to Bastian in everything that was amazing about him, I need to escape from this place and move forward with my life. I need to succeed as a writer, if only in part as a personal, internal tribute to the dog. You can't spend forever mired in the stagnant era of someone you've lost forever. You just have to keep their memory inside and move forward. And I'm probably doing that for deceased dogs more than any human being I've ever known who's passed away. Apparently that's the kind of person I am, for whatever it means.

We knew he was going to pass away sooner or later, and had many months to prepare ourselves as we looked after him with all of his mounting health problems. But no amount of time was ever going to be enough. And now I have all of these dumb old nicknames and absurd little songs that I used to sing to him, and nothing to do with them. There'll be another dog in time, but they won't be another Bastian. They won't get his songs or his nicknames, but when the time is right, I look forward to meeting them, even though I'll never be as close. I hope to be living another era of my life elsewhere by then. If I can't manage that much, I can't even forgive myself. At least we've got Bastian's ashes with us, so he's with us in a sense, at least for the holidays.

If you can take anything away from the angle of this post, it's that I'm one self-centered bastard. I'd like to hope most writers are that way, but I can't speak for everyone else. I embody too many of the negative stereotypes about writers already, and the funny thing is, that doesn't even really bother me. Stereotypical or not, at least it's authentic. And the fact is, over the past month or so, the world lost a person and a dog whose losses have made the world a worse place. So long, Val. A shame we never got to talk more. So long, Bastian. Looks like I've got no other recourse now but to set the whole world on fire with my words.

The House That Murder Built

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:41:00 +0000

Oh, right. Halloween.

Once again, I disappeared for over a month and a half. More blog posts are coming, but things are clogged up, and for reasons that are surprisingly reasonable for once. This time, anyway.

But hey, I tossed something horribly spooky at you last year, so this year, you're getting a goofier, weirder Halloween short story again. And not very long, unfortunately. But then, short fiction is short fiction. In the least, though my short story output has been much slower this year, it hasn't halted entirely.

With how infrequently I update these days - frustrating as that is - feel free to think of this blog as a ghost. Ghost blog. You lose, Ghost Dad.

The House That Murder Built

Few things have annoyed the everycity nasties quite like Haunted Hill. Kids've called it that for generations because of its unusually large collection of menacing dead trees. They tend to continue to call it that even when they grow up to be all normal-size and partially covered in fur and all that nonsense. The problem is, there's nothing haunted about Haunted Hill. It's just a hill with a bunch of trees. Sometimes the grass gets overgrown, but Mr. Sanderson pops by about four times a year to take care of that.

You see, the everycity nasties never bothered to actually haunt Haunted Hill because it seemed too obvious. Everyone's going to expect ghosts and junk all over someplace specifically named for that. That's why you don't haunt there. You don't want to compartmentalize how you haunt and terrorize - that's a pretty good way to not scare anybody. They'll just avoid the place. Spooky is only spooky when it's unexpected.

"Oh look, there's a dancing skeleton with a hatchet or whatever." This is not the reaction you want. "Gee, I hope he doesn't dismember us or anything, what with his zero muscles and no gender. What's going on, technically an it?" Stop that!

The point of all this is, the everycity nasties are pretty annoyed. None of them really want to have anything to do with Haunted Hill, but this crap's getting out of hand. To resolve this point of annoyance, a gaggle of assorted ghosts, ghouls, mega-insects, and other miscellaneous creepy and disconcerting buggers have congregated on Haunted Hill to build a haunted house. Also, it's more of a mild incline than a hill. And roughly half of the trees that got it its name were cut down nearly a century ago during an unusually harsh winter. It's hard for anything lumpy to make much of an impression terrain-wise when you're haunting a piedmont region, I mean, why even bother? Scary things are all about angles askew. These monsters hardly amash can only really disappoint themselves and they know it.

Things are going okay, if you consider the fact that none of the creatures had an architectural degree or any handy boards with nails in them to be 'going okay.' But then, oh no! Not him! He shows up to get everybody off task! This is totally going to ruin what was probably going to go nowhere and lead to a lot of collective discomfort by replacing it with a slight variation on that very same discomfort!

None other than that accursed Greg, the socially awkward aspiring serial killer who has no human friends. The monsters let him hang out with them because they honestly just feel bad for him. He's shown up in a hockey mask. Come on, man.

"Oh look, here comes Greg," Creepula intones.

"Sorry I'm late, guys!" Greg huffs. "The community game ran long tonight." He pulls his hockey mask up, which still appears to be fresh out of the plastic. Not a trace of blood.

"Look, man," says Sledge, "you've gotta get better about these things. I mean, Brett over there drove all the way from his subterranean lair beneath Wall Street for this meeting. The least you can do is be on time."

Greg grins sheepishly. "I guess time just got away from me. Like it was a ghost. Or something."

"That's not an excuse," Gnarly-Tooth sneers. "Did you at least kill anybody on the way here?"

"I let an old lady cut in front of me in line for snacks. I mean, she kind of threatened me, but in a sense, I almost killed her with kindness. Responding to threats is totally a kind thing to do."

"Come on, Greg," Ghostly sighs. "We were just talking about this before you got here. I mean, you're a nice guy and all, and we get that it's not that easy making friends - hey, I used to be alive. But you're really screwing up the vibe we're trying to go for here."

"I'm trying really hard," Greg protests. "I'll kill somebody one of these days. Lots of people! I've just got the murderer version of that thing writers get - writer's block! I have a murder block. You guys totally get what I mean."

"None of us have ever had that. Ever." Creepula rolls her numerous eyes.

"I'll bring candy next time. That stuff's getting a big discount tomorrow. Surely some sugary treats will help you look past my transgressions," Greg offers.

"This is exactly what I mean," Ghostly groans. "Destroying humans is kind of our thing. Scaring them to death, scarring them for life, making them mysteriously disappear forever - you get the picture. We just don't feel that comfortable hanging out with a human who hasn't even committed to the whole murder thing. What I'm trying to say is, even we have our limits, Greg."

Greg shuffles his feet, putting on his best puppy-dog face.

"We gonna even start this haunted house thing or what?" Brett grunts.

"I've got a staple gun," Greg offers.

"Fine," Ghostly concedes. "Go get your staple gun. That candy next time had better be great."

A Funny Story About 9 and 11

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:50:00 +0000


Hey! This is a no smoking city!

Happy Terror Day, everybody! Now that we've hit the ten-year mark, I'd say it's about time we started commercializing this bad boy. Wouldn't you agree? This is America, there's MONEY TO BE MADE! We can turn this tragedy into treasure - and failing that, cold hard cash - or my name isn't Otis Bunkport Jr.! Which it isn't, mind you. But it might be someday, depending on the degree of violence with which people react to my completely tasteful picture caption over there.

You see it? Are you laughing? You're not laughing. Why aren't you laughing?

Let's be honest. It's the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Many people are going to be sentimental and weepy. Others are going to be distasteful and balance that out with some appropriately inappropriate jokes. And others yet are going to make everybody uncomfortable by being angry. Very angry. Blindingly, seethingly, I-spit-fire-and-you-will-be-incinerated angry. And no, not necessarily at nebulous foreign forces perceived to be eternal enemies of 'our freedom,' or 'threats from within,' entailing non-white, non-Christian, non-conservative persons within the United States. 'Are Country' nonsense. Rage that will set your house on fire and possibly neuter your dog. ~~Painlessly, mind you. You should have had that done already, anyway. What are you? Some kind of irresponsible dog owner?~~

Guess what kind of content is in this post below! ~~You've been warned.~~

September 11th, 2001. The day a lot of terrible things began. People love to say it was the day we 'lost our innocence,' as though we hadn't done that plenty of times before. As the proud, hubristic world power, we've gotten very good at turning a blind eye to the realities of our actions and relations with the rest of the world over the decades. Of course, now we're no longer the world power, and as a world power, we're only slipping lower, having been surpassed by much of the rest of the first world in most manners that matter - standards of living being one of the big ones - in recent decades. And with China rising, we continue to sink.

Following the terrorist attacks in 2001, we responded to unconscionable, savage butchery with butchery in kind. At the receiving end of our reprisals have been countless victims who far outnumber those who attacked us. Decades of US foreign policy played a role in influencing and even outright training those few who declared a more complicated form of war on the United States. But as those involves - and those victimized - live on the other side of the world, we Americans are blissfully out of step and out of tune with the realities of our much-celebrated military ventures. Our 'heroics' abroad. And in that willful, comfortable ignorance, none of our hands are clean. None of us are innocents.

Whatever moral high ground we could once claim, we sprinted to demolish. We became what we fought in the name of defeating. With more money and better organization. Not that that stopped us from slaughtering an incredible number of civilians and laboring to cover up as many cases of that as we could, as WikiLeaks has helped to reveal.

War is horrible and ugly, and here in America, we love to whitewash and romanticize it. Ever since our celebrated heroics in World War II - glossing over all the atrocities we also committed, because hey, fuck the inhuman monsters in Dresden and the Japanese 'civilians' we firebombed and dropped atom bombs on, am I right? - we've been hungry to prove our own perceived glory to the rest of the world time and time again through unnecessary war after unnecessary war. Even now, there are people proudly ignorant to what we were doing in Vietnam and insist that we 'could have won,' as though slaughtering even more farmers really would have meant something. Our hands as a nation are not merely stained, but despite our always having a staunch anti-war movement, there are many more who possess an outright thirst for blood. Whether fueled by our horrific war profiteering machine, or an unhealthy sense of nationalism whereby one feels compelled to prove America's 'superiority' through the conquest and destruction of 'enemies.' The kind of dangerous thinking that should not exist in a civilized society.

We're so bizarrely detached from the reality of what we're doing and the atrocities we commit that we even can't get enough of video games largely about distortions of our current, seemingly endless military ventures in the Middle East. People just pop onto Xbox Live to play some Call of Duty and shoot at each other and further dehumanized caricatures of the 'evil brown people who don't look like us or speak our language' that we've come to regard our 'enemies' as. And sometimes you'll even have the good fortune of running into small children, whose parents have done such a fine job as to have them yelling "Faggot!" at strangers online while trying to murder them. And it's well known at this point that these games are even very popular among our soldiers as a way to pass the time and have fun when off-duty during their deployments.

If that isn't disturbingly meta enough for you, an official US military first-person shooter, America's Army, exists completely for free online as an intended recruitment tool. Because if you love running around in pretend uniform and shooting guns in a game on the internet, you'll love getting trained not to think so much for yourself, getting deployed, and possibly ending up in the shit and scarred for life so you can come back home and enjoy the crushing poverty with the rest of us. Don't worry, you're totally a hero!

Domestically, we've been witnessing a swing to the extreme political right here in the US for decades now. By today's inflammatory rhetoric, you'd think there was some kind of 'radical' left threatening to shiv Uncle Sam, burn the patriots, and fuck the apple pie. That our two-party political system functioned as some sort of pendulum on a clock, swinging back and forth between extremes of left and right, and that the left was somehow threatening to break the whole clockwork. In reality, there is no representation for the left or the center in the US anymore. No actual, quantifiable political power. No ability to call for real moderation, no ability to affect change, no ability to make the kinds of changes necessary for us to reckon with the challenges of the future. We're trapped between the extreme right party - which moves further to the right by the year, today even making the Bush administration look moderate by comparison - and a center right party being inexorably pulled further to the extreme right by the other party.

The spineless Democrats, and the authoritarian Republicans. The former occasionally concerned with the interests of the people, and the latter shameless about their lies, detachment from reality, and sole loyalties to the wealthy and corporations, putting them routinely at odds with the interests of the American people. Many Americans continue to regard themselves and vote as though they were no more than lapsed billionaires. Over the past several decades, concepts like welfare have been successfully made into dirty words. And the rest of us are just too apathetic to stand up and take a real stand against the rising tide of right-wing extremism threatening to engulf and strangle us. The 2010 election was evidence of that. The people as a whole stayed home, while those who proudly stand for enabling our nation's worst and most dangerous - the so-called 'Tea Party,' worthy of no moniker more respectful than Teabaggers - came out to vote in numbers enough to break our already dangerously gridlocked congress further.

A recent example of the sort of people we've elected in this swing to the right? Since the further consolidation of Republican power after their retaking the House of Representatives last year, we've seen the likes of the power-hungry Eric Cantor holding disaster victims hostage in the wake of Hurricane Irene, insisting that we couldn't provide relief in the wake of the damage done - catastrophic in places - unless we cut spending even further. Repeating the Republican party and Teabaggers' present ongoing mantra that we can somehow use spending cuts to get back to financial and economic prosperity, but should never, ever even consider the sane, progressive taxation of the wealthy. Let alone actual regulation, after years of deregulation devastated us. Also, we should apparently more or less consider the likes of multibillionaire Warren Buffett a commie traitor for arguing that we need to start taxing the wealthy again. We have so much to be proud of.

And in watching the current Republican candidates fight it out for their party's nomination to run against Obama next year, we've had the pleasure of seeing them proudly reject science - especially climate science, as catastrophe looms much nearer than we realize on the horizon - boast of the size of their families, reject the entire social safety net as no more than a 'Ponzi scheme,' and take bold stances including hating cancer. Obama's ratings are terrible at the moment, and his administration's efforts to serve the people have been hobbled pretty much since day one as the Republicans joined in lockstep to block their efforts to accomplish anything, even if it meant standing against the people's best interests on a routine basis. Should one of the usual field of incompetents get the nomination and somehow manage to oust Obama - despite the Republicans being at the very center of Obama's disappointments, in addition to Obama's eagerness to compromise with and appease a party set on destroying him, and his administration's general conservative leanings - let alone the dangerous Rick Perry, it's not really hyperbolic at this point to say that we're pretty well finished as a nation. We haven't even begun to recover from the damage inflicted by the Bush administration, and the Republican party has largely become an entrenched cancer on the nation. One that we cannot hope to recover from unless we excise the tumor before it's too late. Much of the Bush administration damage - particularly to our economy and job market - is increasingly appearing to be irreversible. And unless we - and not just America, but the whole world - begin to react more dramatically to climate change very soon, we're simply going to bring about our own preventable extinction. We're already heading well into past-the-point-of-no-return territory. We aren't even able to acknowledge the problem as a whole.

I have seen insisted frequently on the local editorials page - and in online comments as well - that Obama is supposed to take ownership of everything the Bush administration and Republicans brought down upon this nation. Specifically, that because Obama couldn't fix all of these problems in no time - especially facing the constant resistance he has since his election - everything Bush and the Republicans caused is now his fault, and we're not to look back at the root cause of these problems, let alone the now-entrenched fatal flaws in our political system that prevent us from finding actual solutions.

We also now know that after all our bold, heroic support of the Libyan rebels, we spent considerably more time, money, and effort backing up Muammar Gaddafi, and even tortured a man who went on to become one of the rebel leaders in charge when they finally drove Gaddafi out of Tripoli and removed him out of power. The overwhelming response to that story on the Yahoo News comments when I first read about this? Declarations that if we tortured (or 'renditioned') him, that he must have been a terrorist all along! This is America. We have so very much to be proud of.

The trend of a swing toward right-wing politics in response to growing Islamophobia in recent years is only becoming increasingly evident in many parts of Europe as well. The actions of an extreme few have largely led to political gains for those who should not be empowered in response. And even in Canada, poor Canada, they've been dealing with Stephen Harper for years now, and only just lost Jack Layton mere days ago.

It shouldn't have to be said, but it's okay for us to not be paranoid about terrorism, and cool to not hate Muslims. Crazy as it may sound? They're just as sick of this as we are, and they're just human beings like the rest of us. We'd all benefit as a society - and as individuals - if we'd stop trying to make others of each other and actually take the time to realize that people are far more alike than you know. The less alien you make other people in your head - regardless of language, religion, appearance, and so on - the more you'll realize the less you actually have to fear.

When we use fear as an excuse to oppress ourselves and each other, as they say, the terrorists have won. If we can't be courageous enough to stand up to the worse elements in our society that have reared their ugly heads and taken power time and time again in the past decade and only continue to consolidate it, we have no future. When we allow ourselves to be ruled by the wealthy, and to be dehumanized and diminished at every turn by corporations focused solely on lining executives' pockets while our standards of living collapse, we have failed. We don't get second chances. There are no do-overs.

If nothing else, this past decade has convinced me that we're a failure as a species. We have so much potential, it's criminal how much we've failed ourselves and each other. On the upside, at least we'll all be dead much sooner than we know. Someday, this poor planet can have a functioning ecosystem again as it consumes our ruin.

I'd say that we've succumbed to our worse nature, but that would imply that we have a better nature. Taking the long view of our species, it's probably more honest to say that greed and destructive, obsessive self-interest are our nature. That inner wretchedness with which we continuously struggle in an endless battle against what it is that we actually are and loathe to acknowledge. We try to be better, but there's too many of us who are too set on the idea that we're all players in a vicious game of winner-take-all, or we're simply too apathetic to care about any of the things that matter. That as individuals, we're powerless - and if we can't come together as a collective of individuals to change things for the better, we are. It's a losing battle.

If this blog drew enough readers to actually have a readerbase to speak of - here's a shout-out to the ghostly few who do pop by and all you lovely people who come here via Google searches and leave immediately - somebody would probably come along and tell me to shut up. To never forget - that 9/11 changed everything, so our continued violence isn't just okay. It's heroic and patriotic. This sentiment drips from so many corners of this country. And it's an illness that afflicts all of us - those of us wearing ourselves down fighting it the most acutely.

In the end, it appears that above all else, we're too selfish, too hateful, too apathetic, too proudly ignorant to survive.

That said, my condolences to all those who lost family and friends a decade ago today, and to everyone whose lives we ended or otherwise wrongly ruined in response. And even more sympathy to the first responders, whom we've failed to even properly look after as their health began to fail following their sincerely heroic work in the wake of the attacks. Most people don't have it in them to do what they did, or to make the sacrifices they now have for it. Human beings who've defied their nature and should continue to serve as a reminder to us all that we can be better. That we could.

This post? Total reader magnet. Also, I guess it's me inviting crazy people to put me on lists. The bad kind. Then again, isn't anything?

Osama Bin Laden's dead. But we didn't defeat him. And at the rate we're going, we may not. We aren't learning.

It's kind of funny how much more misanthropic I've become since my only other 9/11 post, from four years ago, back when this blog was just beginning. I had about as many readers back then as I do now.

Lower Your Eyes to Die with the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:42:00 +0000

Spent too much coming up with things to say in my next few blog posts - hence the delay. A comedy post, the big, horribly-belated-as-so-to-be-irrelevant Nintendo E3 blog post, and a post on the Operation Rainfall campaign for several great-looking Wii games are coming soon.

That said, just popping in briefly to post this.

The first teaser for M83's new album. This will be another amazing album of music I can write to, no question. Amazing Before the Dawn Heals Us vibes.

E3 2011 Day One: A Wilting Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:38:00 +0000

Oh god, not this shit again.

Oh hey, it's Electronics Entertainment Expo time again. Is the industry any healthier this year than it was last year? Not at all. Can you skip over this first post on the continually declining relevance of Sony and Microsoft? Probably. Everybody's known for years that the Playstation's years as the "hot brand" in gaming are over, and the XBox line never was. Still, here I am blabbing at you. Why do I do this? Compulsion, maybe. I'm so sorry.

At any rate, I'm going to try to keep my E3 posts a little saner this year than the ones from last year, just to get the post done and ultimately move on. Better for my own time and sanity. First up, just some quick thoughts on Sony and Microsoft's showings. To say the least, I wasn't impressed.

Microsoft and Sony have already held their conferences, of course. Microsoft pimped Kinect, Sony pimped Move, and neither peripheral is the Wii, let alone disrupting the Wii. Once again, literally flailing at relevance again this year. The rest of their lineups was nothing all that notable either - nothing that would surprise you if you were familiar with either, since at this point, a good 5-6 years into this generation, they're relying on redundant game releases and over-sequeling to the point at which their conferences were just a combination of boring and embarrassing.

Microsoft's facing internal calls for the ouster of Steve Ballmer after the company was passed not only by Apple, but now by IBM too. As of this fall, they will have been in console video gaming for 10 years with the XBox line, and despite the persistent media popularity and the brand's vocal online following, they've only taken a net loss in billions of dollars, never having been able to turn gaming hardware into a profitable front, and they've suffered catastrophic losses due to all kinds of hardware issues this generation. Kinect has done nothing to dig them out of that pit. Their E3 conference this year showed nothing game-changing and nothing that would inspire confidence that they're going to dig their way out of their financial hole. Their more 'traditional' games aren't moving hardware and are turning into a string of unremarkable sequels that the press squeals over, but then, the press has a history of squealing over virtually every major or hyped XBox 360 and PS3 game this generation, rendering gaming "media" hype ultimately worthless, given that virtually all of it has been known for years to be paid shilling. At this point, it's hard not to think that the XBox line won't be going the way of the Zune sooner than we think. If Microsoft has any competent businesspeople left, it will be.

In Sony's case, the PS3 has been an even bigger catastrophe overall, with ridiculous development costs like the XBox 360's that have ensured that in many cases, games can sell over a million copies and still fail to break even, let alone actually turn a profit. And most games on both those consoles have failed to sell anywhere near the million mark - most games on the platforms have ultimately taken painful losses, and the third parties, remaining foolhardily loyal to Sony and Microsoft despite their poor financial standings this generation, are running incredibly ragged right now. Third party lineups this E3 have been the weakest I've ever seen them. I'd feel bad for the industry if the situation wasn't self-inflicted. Sony's response? Introducing the Playstation Vita - formerly the NGP - essentially the PSP2, which boasts of graphics and hardware power (And ultimately development costs) comparable to the PS3, and Sony's trying to be competitive by selling it at such a loss that it's guaranteed to lead to billions in losses and further incredible instability in the company, all the while, its lineup at unveiling was nothing less than pathetic. Especially when compared to the incredible lineup and set of games Nintendo had ready to show for the 3DS at its unveiling at E3 last year. Third parties bet on the 3DS over Sony's PSP, which failed outside of Japan and largely sold as a multimedia device in Japan, with only a select few franchises turning a profit on it. (And most games suffering horribly due to an incredible piracy problem.) After trying to join with Sony and Microsoft to push customers away from the Wii bled third parties as badly as they did, betting heavily on the 3DS was the first smart third party call in quite a few years.

Sony's stock has been heading toward circling-the-drain territory since a series of major hacks dating back to mid-April took the Playstation Network down, and over the following weeks, every PSN user's private data stored on the servers was stolen. And then all of Sony's other online services were hacked, and their users' private data was stolen from those as well. As it turns out, Sony wasn't very interested in protecting their users' information - credit card numbers and more! - and was storing a tremendous amount of very, very sensitive user information in plain text, without any kind of encryption. In the weeks since, Sony has been scrambling to do as much public image control as it can, while doing as little as they can possibly get away with to make it up to their customers or actually secure their information. The very amusing hacktivist group Lulz Security - otherwise known as LulzSec for short - has been making headlines with their hacks in recent weeks, and not a week has gone by in which they haven't hit Sony at least a few times. Sony hasn't begun working on their security, and apparently breaching them is child's play - going on LulzSec's online testimonials. Ultimately, Sony's made it clear that they don't take safeguarding their customers' sensitive information remotely seriously, and think they can placate all those compromised by these regular hacks by the least they could possibly offer up in giveaways that they wouldn't take a real loss on by giving away.

As such, Sony's stock has been trending downward daily for over a month now, and their E3 showings this year don't stand to change that course. The Vita doesn't stand for anything the company or the industry needs to move forward in a new, healthier direction. And the near-daily to outright daily hacks are going to continue to undermine consumer confidence on every front, as they well should. By failing to make any effort to secure customers' sensitive data, Sony has demonstrated a disgustingly cavalier attitude toward their customers, and reminded further why their brand has been crumbling across the board in recent years. A lot of people are never going to buy Sony products again after this - I'd be among them if they hadn't shown me their character even sooner than this and convinced me that they were a corporation in no way worth my continued patronage - and this isn't a new trend overall. They've fallen behind all over the place in recent years, having developed a reputation for overpriced electronics that can easily be found both cheaper and better quality from the competition. They made no friends with their CD rootkit fiasco as well, having intentionally planted malicious malware in their customers' computers with CDs. Sony's future in gaming looks no rosier than Microsoft's. They can't sustain the incredible losses they've been taking for years, the Vita will do nothing to change that, and LulzSec's hacks will only continue to wound them more deeply. Looking back, I'm increasingly convinced that the smash successes of the Playstation and PS2 were flukes easily allowed by Nintendo and Sega's failures at the time, and that Sony really doesn't understand the video game industry, video game hardware, or the average gamer customer - who isn't the type to spend all their time foaming at the mouth on online forums over the latest shooter. All the successes of the first two Playstation consoles did was imbue them with a sense of entitled callousness toward their customers that makes them completely deserve the mess they've gotten themselves into.

In the end, Sony's PS3 games were built largely around trying to push their failed Wii Remote rip-off peripheral, "Move," just as Microsoft spent most of their conference trying to push Kinect, while most of the industry isn't getting behind it all that much, and most Kinect games haven't sold all that well. Sony and Microsoft simply continued last year's trend of thinking they could make the customer think their systems were "better Wiis." This tactic hasn't worked for either company, and is largely revelatory of the truth of their increasingly dire situation in the industry. The Vita won't do anything for Sony but lose a tremendous amount of money, given that they have to be eating a significant amount of money per unit sold at the announced $250 pricetag, with an incredibly weak lineup so far, set to launch this holiday season, by which point the 3DS is going to have a killer game lineup on shelves and be the better deal hands down - as it stands with even its current library, the 3DS already is. As things stand, a sense of desperation has hung over this year's E3 so far as two of the three big companies have struggled toward relevance and profit, their platforms having yielded the most dramatic financial losses the video game industry has ever seen. Nintendo successfully disrupted Sony with the Wii and 3DS, while Microsoft has clearly never understood what they were getting into with the XBox in the first place. The industry tried to reject Nintendo despite these successes, and now the third parties are running ragged, profit margins the thinnest they've ever been and more games than ever leading to huge losses. The industry's trying to contract inward and only becoming more conservative in response to change it rejected, and that is visibly destroying it.

Whether or not this will lead up to a second great industry crash after the one following the era of Atari and Colecovision remains to be seen. If it happens, it will be one that the industry chose to inflict upon itself in attempting to reject Nintendo's return to the top in the industry, their widening of gaming's audiences again with the Wii and DS, and the addition of features vital to the evolution of the video game experience: motion controls in particular. Sony and Microsoft are a long ways down their self-destructive paths - neither company seems to have learned a thing, and both have suffered enough financially from their respective catastrophic consoles this generation that either of them turning things around is entirely unlikely. Big conservative corporations like Sony and Microsoft aren't good at being forward thinking or adapting to change - when product lines fail (Microsoft isn't likely to keep the XBox line going too much longer now that they're coming up on a decade-plus of billions in losses to show for their video game console venture.), they're cut off like the gangrenous limbs they become. Microsoft did just that to the Zune not long ago, and financially, despite the investment made, there really isn't a good argument for continuing to push the XBox line forward in light of its continued incredible losses. There's no reason anyone should be confident that will change. Sony has simply allowed their own hubris and utter disregard for their customers to destroy them this generation - they've made it abundantly clear that they've learned nothing from their mistakes, and the companies that continue to swear a pointless fealty to them will sink with them. The Uncharted series is not the magic bullet they think it is. The proof is in the franchise's sales, and its proven inability to move hardware. Most people aren't looking for linear 3D Pitfall meets shameless Indiana Jones ripoff, more interested in looking and feeling like a movie than being a good game.

At any rate, Nintendo's big conference is the only one remaining in just over 12 hours now. There, we'll see whatever they have to show for the Wii and DS as they enter their final days, more secrets, surprises, and big new games for the newly launched 3DS - which I have yet to get my hands on, but am definitely jonesing for after playing Pilotwings Resort on a demo unit, knowing what's going to be coming out in the coming months - along with a more solid release schedule for all their games for the rest of the year. On top of that, they're going to unveil Project Cafe, the only relatively recently confirmed successor to the Wii, which may be launching a little over a year from now, assuming there's any truth to the word so far. Motion controls will be sticking around and evolving further, but from the sounds of things, there's going to be an interesting touchscreen controller of some sort too - where Sony and Microsoft demonstrated thoroughly this year just how low they've sunk and how low they've taken the industry's third party game developers by now, Nintendo stands poised to dominate E3 yet again, as they have a history of ever since the DS and Wii reveals midway into the past decade. Where Sony and Microsoft are ailing, Nintendo is at their financial best yet, and have rediscovered the importance of appealing to wider audiences - as well as returning to the fundamentals of older style gaming, the loss of which has damaged the industry as a whole, with things like the 2D New Super Mario Bros. games, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Wii Sports - and fresh off a strong 3DS launch, they're in a good position to become the only major player in the console and portable sides of the industry sooner than most realize. This, of course, is ignoring Apple, but their role isn't quite the same in the gaming scene either - more complementary than directly competitive, but still a company to keep an eye on nonetheless.

After a depressing first day for E3 2011, tomorrow is where things get interesting.

Back from the Rapture!

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:01:00 +0000

This is NOT what it looks like.

Hey guys! Long time no see! You won't believe where I've been the past few weeks! For once, I actually have a legitimate excuse for not updating.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but the Rapture actually happened, guys! Back on May 21st, just like that Harold Camping guy predicted! I'm not sure what that 'family' radio stuff is all about, but I've totally been to that heaven everyone's always talking about.

And I've gotta tell you, totally overrated.

Sure, you'd think, "Man, it's heaven! Clouds and stuff everywhere! This is totally friggin' sweet!" But you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. So dead wrong that you don't even have to die to go there, or even come back here - but I'll get to my unrapturing later.

I guess the first thing you're probably dying to hear is what heaven's like. It's okay, I guess, but only if you like the stuff that's there. If you don't, well - have you ever listened to someone talking about their latest golf game, but you don't care about golf and start to feel that if you hear them make one more 'birdie' joke, you're going to break their kneecaps and fashion them into stylish elbow pads as a warning to your enemies? It's basically like that constantly. And I'm not just talking about the droning noise the big guy makes whenever he starts talking - he almost makes the adults on the old Charlie Brown cartoons seem comprehensible - you have to really take the entirety of the concept of annoyance to this degree and stretch that and apply it to every aspect of existence imaginable. If you can do that, you can imagine what heaven is like. Not so cool now, is it? Unless you like golf stories, in which case, get out.

Anyway, there's clouds everywhere. Just like you'd expect. And there's solid ground, too - not on the clouds, though. There's guard rails and warning signs everywhere because if you step out onto the clouds, you're just going to fall through them to your death. I'm not sure what exactly is down there to fall to, but the clouds are made of cotton candy, and I'm pretty sure Earth's clouds aren't - science and all that - so maybe it's another planet. A stupider planet. Sure, cotton candy clouds sound pretty fun on the surface, but do you really want the sky to be full of spun sugar? That just makes everything uncomfortably sticky. Also, there's no dentists in heaven but your teeth still decay. There's no toothbrushes, toothpaste, or even running water. What the hell is up with that?

You're probably wondering, too, "How the hell did you get into heaven?" Man, I can't even tell you. Literally, I can't. I don't know. I'm not sure what the criteria are, but I can tell you for a fact that it's not something you want to do. Just meeting whatever requirements there are to be hurled heavenward made me want to completely change the way I live my life as so to ensure that whatever those requirements are, I can be certain that I will never meet them again. I was one of maybe three or four people who got picked up this time, anyway, so obviously not very many people qualified for this Rapture. There were some other people there too, but they couldn't have numbered more than sixteen or seventeen. I'm honestly surprised there were even that many - there's no upside to dealing with everything there.

I mean, sure, the big guy built a game room at some point, but even that pretty much sucked. They had a foosball table and a pinball table from the '70s, but only one of the flippers still worked. Also, someone apparently lost the air hockey table's puck a few years ago so it was worthless. I mean, if you're not even going to replace the puck, what's the point? There's nothing to do. Except maybe collect hair. The big guy doesn't like to shave, and his son isn't much better. Those dicks just shed all over everything, and apparently neither of them have heard of a fricking push broom. That's just unsanitary.

I had to get out of there - I wouldn't be here typing this if I hadn't succeeded either, obviously. But yeah, I basically just shoved the others around until the big guy threw me back to earth. Some people here have told me I was hit by a car.

~~Twenty cars.~~

~~All the cars.~~

I guess the real lesson here is that that Harold Camping Guy was both more right and wrong than he knows. Also, in case you're at risk of Rapture, maybe try carrying around a spare air hockey puck in your pocket, just to be considerate.

Then again, those guys are jerks. Keep my foolproof unrapturing method in mind. Unless you don't have arms.

The Restaurant at the End of Remembrance

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Wed, 11 May 2011 09:58:00 +0000

Everything I write about lately is death related. These brief thoughts won't be any different. One of these days, I still need to write about JD Salinger's passing, and we lost him nearly a year and a half ago now. At any rate, moving on -

10 years ago today, Douglas Adams passed away. We lost a brilliant, hilarious author, a humanist, activist, an atheist who didn't make the rest of us look bad, and a truly wonderful human being whose life's work only bettered the world. We lost him at the tragically young age of 49 to, of all things, exercise - the stress of something intended to only improve our health and extend our lives can, at times, have the opposite effect. I imagine he would have appreciated the irony.

Cheesy a thought as this is to end on - So long, and thanks for all the laughs. Also, a pity that we'll never know what was going on with the rhino in The Salmon of Doubt.

Process Talk: Shoegaze Fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 06 May 2011 22:45:00 +0000

In recent posts, I've shared some of the music and imagery that inspires me just for a bit of a glimpse into my process - what gets the old neurons firing - when I'm writing. In fact, some of you may be sick of that by now. And if that's the case, you'll just have to hang on for another post - this is one that's been bubbling in the back of my head since back in early October last year. Again, my thinking is that if I continue to find things to post - and go back to and finish posts intended to be finished and posted months ago - I will eventually finish clearing out the remaining mental cobwebs.

The big twist, of course, is that behind the cobwebs lies nothing.

At any rate, let's get on with it. Music. More of that. A subject I've wanted to write more about from my perspective for some time now - not so much in the cheesy, banal music-journalism sense as to explore the places that music can take you, what exactly sound can inspire. By my understanding, it's pretty common for writers to listen to music while plugging away on their current projects, and I'm certainly no different. Music can be vital to setting a tone, creating a mood. When I find a new band that I like, the phrase, 'music I can write to' reverberates through my head quite a bit. I like to create soundtracks to my novels, and there's no question that I'm not the only one doing that. I like the idea of someday being able to create original scores or pieces of music to accompany my work as well - whether or not I'll ever manage that at some point in the future is impossible to say at this point, though.

My current and ongoing second novel project, Project Princess, is arguably a work of fantasy. Yes, that's an appropriately pretentious, clunky way to begin this paragraph. I say 'arguably' because my focus is on the writing of distinctly literary fiction, which is itself a nebulous, complex, and often horribly pretentious concept. Once you establish yourself as trying to write literary fiction as opposed to mainstream commercial or genre fiction, you're pretty much slapping the 'You think you're better than me!?' crosshairs on your forehead, and can come off as if just by your focus and process, you're insulting all the commercial and genre fiction authors out there. To backpedal a bit, that isn't exactly my intent, but it's more of a matter of that literary fiction writers are focused on something different from commercial and genre fiction authors. Yes, we would like to make money on what we're doing, but we don't expect to make much - to generally make much less than commercial and genre fiction writers.

As the linked Wikipedia article details, as subjective as the definition of 'literature' is, what separates literary fiction from commercial and genre fiction is in its focus on style, psychological depth, and character over narrative and plot. The mainstream commercial fiction reader might find literary fiction to be meandering or frustrating, because it takes a lot longer to get where it's going, and more than the journey or destination, the story is really about the complex characters presented. Personally, I like to liken literary fiction to the written word equivalent of cinema's art house, and poetry to abstract short film. In literature, we have the likes of J.D. Salinger and Haruki Murakami alongside the likes of film's Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, as opposed to mainstream commercial fiction's Tom Clancy and Stephenie Meyer to Hollywood's Michael Bay and James Cameron. The narrow versus the broad - the niche versus the mainstream.

To get back to what I was saying before, Project Princess is arguably a work of fantasy, and technically speaking, my first novel - Project 27 Days - could be considered at least partially fantasy as well. Both of these novels are written in the setting I've sought to define myself by as I've developed as a writer - 'somewhere both familiar and unfamiliar.' Project 27 Days follows confused, muddled, and deeply conflicted people from the world as we know it through a near-month in a bizarre, surreal setting and set of circumstances. And the book itself is written in a very slice-of-life manner, each chapter following a day from its beginning to its end, with plenty of variation, twists, and turns as the story calls for it. It's a slow-paced, entirely character-driven story that those not into that sort of writing would find meandering and frustrating. Most of the action takes the form of conversations revealing of the characters, sometimes in a straightforward manner, and sometimes with calculated subtlety. It's unquestionably a very direct effort at an odd piece of literary fiction targeting a particular audience that enjoys that sort of writing. The book was even written with the idea that readers might spend a near-month reading it themselves, pacing their experience with the book to a chapter a day, to really drink in and savor the plot and moody setting, and go through the story with the characters on a more real-time level. Of course, readers could probably inhale the entire book in a day or two if they really tried, too - and I certainly wouldn't complain if anyone enjoyed it that much. That said, character is the center of my writing, far above plot.

Project Princess has significantly more of a concrete plot for the characters to follow than Project 27 Days, where the characters alone are the plot. Still, in its scope and ambition, the characters are still the center of Project Princess, too - it's just that they have more of a directed plot to follow, a literal path laid out, enemies to defeat both within and outside in the external world, and unlike Project 27 Days, there's extremely little sitting around. As opposed to Project 27 Days' gauzy, surreal setting, Project Princess's is a literal frozen apocalypse wherein those who stop moving for too long face the risk of dying before too long. The world of Project Princess, unlike Project 27 Days, is not our Earth - the characters are human, and many of the initially available themes and icons in the narrative are comfortably recognizable from the lexicon of the fantasy genre. If you've enjoyed the works of Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, or George R.R. Martin - I'm going on what I've seen of Game of Thrones so far, based on the latter's A Song of Ice and Fire series - you'll feel right at home with easing into the world of Project Princess. There's kingdoms with complex histories and political relationships, princes and princesses, castles and common rabble, swords and sorcery, trials and tribulations, monsters and more. The chief difference here is that the world is fanciful in different ways from the aforementioned works - or rather, it was, as the novel takes place in a world that has largely become a frigid husk of its former self. Extinction is an inescapable image.

In such a dreary world, you would expect a despondent tone on every front. But that's not quite the case in terms of the music that's inspired me. Heavy metal music has been associated with fantasy for decades, and so the concept of 'metal fantasy,' in all its associated violence, is hardly an unfamiliar one. In the past, metal has even come under fire for its lyrical themes labeled from merely juvenile to misogynistic and otherwise at times too occult-heavy for more conservative parents of the 1980s. While on one hand, I can certainly see the appeal of metal, I feel neither pride nor shame in saying that it's not particularly music that suits my tastes. Rather, where metal has been the music of choice for many a headbanging teenager for decades, my tastes and musical influences are a little bit less mainstream. Rather than 'metal fantasy,' what I seek to explore with the world and tone of Project Princess is something I like to think of as 'shoegaze fantasy,' drawing on my favorite subgenre of alternative rock - shoegaze.

Where metal fantasy is dark, gritty, and violent, 'shoegaze fantasy' is surreal, emotional, and dreamy, with a focus on profound melancholy avoiding melodrama. Where metal fantasy is a well-explored concept with a cult following, fantasy associated in particular with other musical tones in its inspiration is much less so. And in general, shoegaze tends to have a much smaller following than metal, which is comparatively mainstream. Metal has never 'died,' while shoegaze is a subgenre that is considered to have died and been at least partially reborn in more recent years, and even the genre name itself wasn't exactly conceived to be complimentary.

Where metal is intense, aggressive, and very, very extroverted, shoegaze is deeply introverted - it's music for the cerebral daydreamers, with a certain sort of sultry, heady sex appeal in many cases as well, entirely lacking the violence and energy of metal. Shoegaze is, at heart, a special brand of rock for navel-gazing introverts - speaking as one of those myself, they're certainly a big part of the inevitably intended audience for my work, just as a natural product of my own mental processes. In a world where there is metal fantasy, but little thought considered for fantasy influenced by and tied with other genres of rock, my intention is to find out if there's an audience for shoegaze fantasy. And the intended end result is, rather than something gritty and violent, a work of literary fiction set entirely within a constructed fantasy world: a story where there can be considerable violence, but the worst of it is emotional, rather than visceral.

With that, I'm going to take you on a brief walkthrough of the musical evolution of Project Princess. Where we begin, funnily enough, is not actually shoegaze. Rather, when I first began the initial - and eventually abandoned for rebooting - draft of the novel as I began to lay out Project Princess' skeletal structure back in March of 2006, I was listening to British indie electronic pop artist Imogen Heap's latest album, Speak for Yourself. Its opening track, 'Headlock,' sounded to me like the ideal opening tune for a complex work of alternative fantasy, the lyrics conveying a mixture of thoughts and emotions that put my mind to work on trying to establish exactly what the novel's central characters' relationships were and how exactly they were going to play out over the course of the story - in particular, the protagonist and heroine, as so far, a young man and woman are usually the core of my novels.

Following the inspiration I drew from the fantasy qualities in Imogen Heap's sound, I fell in love with New Yorkers Blonde Redhead. They aren't 100% shoegaze either, but the shoegaze sound - the gauze, the ethereal - is certainly a notable element in many of their songs. When I heard them perform the title track from their 2007 album, 23, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien shortly after I moved home from college for the last time that May - reflecting on how many years have passed since then and that I'm still living at home now, it's hard not to have mixed feelings - they were a band that immediately struck me as 'music I can write to.' And between that album and their latest - their 2010 release, Penny Sparkle - they've only further cemented themselves as the band driving Project Princess and defining it with their sound, while Project 27 Days was a mix of Feist, various classic rock songs, and Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton. Stars and M83 have both had strong influences on both of my novels so far as well, but where Emily Haines' Knives Don't Have Your Back is the definitive album of Project 27 Days, Blonde Redhead's 23 is the definitive album of Project Princess.

23. The age of the lead characters in Project Princess. Desolate, dreamy music that defines perfectly the tone I want the novel to breathe - the quiet aching, the hopelessness, the inescapable destruction, the flickering final dreams. The definitive song of the novel. As the wall of sound consumes you, so to do I seek to consume my readers with the endless frozen melancholy of the novel.

Dr. Strangeluv. Pure yearning. A song of journey, something to accompany the damaged protagonist as he seeks out the lost princess. A song of solitude and isolation, of deep-seated loneliness. A song of someone with no one. The protagonist. Can he save anyone?

Silently. A lighter-toned song. Subtext. The protagonist and the heroine. Persistent past tense. The lightest song associated with this novel. The feeling of letting go.

SW. The journey continues. The reflections continue. The crushing melody gradually wears you down, as signs of hope continue to fade away into the endlessly gray horizon. Everything is unclear. There are no certain answers. Spiraling.

Here Sometimes. From last year's Penny Sparkle album. A detached existence, a detached mind, a life lived in dreams. A tone that sounds very suitable for fantasy to me, like the rest of the songs shared.

Everything is Wrong. Another Penny Sparkle song. Continued spiraling. The world losing and the world lost. Resignation.

Not Getting There. A final song from Penny Sparkle. After 23, perhaps the song that in its simplicity, next captures the tone and feel of the novel. Near-definitive.

Also worth noting is that Blonde Redhead scored the 2008 Dungeons & Dragons documentary, The Dungeon Masters. That right there only further confirms that I'm not the only one who gets a very particular 'fantasy' vibe from the band, but that it's even intentional on their part.

And now, to wrap, two more tracks by bands that have also made a significant impact on Project Princess and my writing in general.

Danish shoegaze-influenced self-proclaimed "pretentious art rockers" Mew's White Lips Kissed, from the album, 'And the Glass Handed Kites.' They make some of the most wintry music I've ever heard, and this particular song got a lot of play time when I was working on Project 27 Days - it's getting quite a bit with Project Princess too. Both novels are set in completely snowbound settings, after all. (The third novel will not be - to break the trend.) Like many songs I love, you'll notice that this is a song that can absolutely consume the listener. Its lyrics connect a bit more with Project 27 Days than Project Princess, though both novels share some thematic commonalities, and some fairly dark themes will be recurring in my novels - hopefully not redundantly.

And lastly, while I can't embed this particular upload, the music video for UK electronic pop group Ladytron's Destroy Everything You Touch is a huge source of influence on Project Princess, the song itself effectively being a sort of co-definitive musical theme alongside Blonde Redhead's 23, and the snowbound fantasy music video being a source of inspiration in my writing of the novel's setting. Double whammy. For all my talk of metal fantasy and proposed shoegaze fantasy here? A music video representation of New Wave electronic pop fantasy.

In a world where a western can have a rocking Neil Young soundtrack, there has to be room for a new kind of fantasy. There always has to be.

More Like Osama Bin Awkward Joke About Somebody Dying

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:34:00 +0000

So, as you've all heard by now, Osama Bin Laden has kicked the proverbial bucket, bitten the proverbial dust, and tripped over the only-halfway-metaphorical toad. Not at all shockingly, theories that he had died years ago were proven untrue. Not quite ten years after the September 11th attacks, the big bad al-Qaeda head honcho we've devoted so much time, so many resources, and so many lives - not only our own, but the countless civilian lives lost in our not-wars-but-great-ways-for-contractors-to-make-money in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should we take to the streets and start singing 'War is Over,' as out of season as that would be? Break out the giant foam hands and wave them while chanting that America is number one until our voices give out and we tire of the redundancy?

I'd suggest a third option, but we as a people are not overly inclined to take that. I certainly don't find Bin Laden's death objectionable myself, there's no question of that - it was no different when Saddam Hussein was executed years back. But it's really just that - I'm feeling exactly the same way now that I did back then. When Hussein was killed, we had hyped up the Iraq war cause so absurdly that we practically expected the sky to open, and for Jesus Christ himself to descend on an escalator and personally give George W. Bush the greatest high-five in recorded history, leading the whole world to shed tears of joy and bow down before their true savior and the GREATEST PRESIDENT THERE EVER WAS as they stood together in that monumental moment. Because as we've learned all throughout history, pop culture, and more, all the bad things in life can be eliminated and greater good can be achieved the world over through wanton violence. Get to the end of that final level, defeat the final boss, and BA-BA-POW!!! a new high score and the world is saved. At least until that next bad guy gets his hands on the next MacGuffin that we forgot about until then - then it'll be time to go kill him too.

At the center of all this is just what there was when Hussein was hung. A man died that day. Another man died yesterday when Osama Bin Laden was killed. Neither of them were good men, and while on some humane level, I'd prefer they spent the rest of their lives suffering in prison, I don't find myself feeling horrible because they're dead. As someone who doesn't believe in any afterlife, part of me is inclined to feel that death let these men off easy. Bin Laden in particular spent his life sowing human suffering. His demise is no loss for the world, and more a relief than anything else, as his demise means that further suffering he would have caused firsthand has been prevented. But at the same time, I look around and see people cheering on a killing, and I can't help but think that despite all our pretenses of being civilized, postmodern twenty-first century people, there's still something savagely barbaric about us. And the killing of major villains around the world brings that out in us on a primal level.

While I have no particular empathy for Bin Laden, as I did not for Hussein, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of cheering on somebody's death, no matter who they are. Misanthropic as I am, my hatred doesn't extend in a direction where I would laugh at and find pleasure in somebody's death - there's a difference between that and not finding an individual's demise unwelcome. And since Bin Laden has died, there's talk of this being the 'end' of an era - amid, of course, every effort by the Republican party to diminish any credit to Obama or the current Democratic leadership while cheering on George W. Bush, as though he'd hunted down Bin Laden himself - after ten years of the 'War on Terror.'
Is the 'War on Terror' over? Not by a long shot. We're not just in it for the long haul - we're still seeking something cruelly undefined and open-ended. The chaos and tragedy of war and needless death are far from over. For all the initial sense of finality there was in Saddam Hussein's execution and is much the same in Bin Laden's long-anticipated killing, things haven't changed. We're still bankrupting ourselves on three wars now, while allowing our biggest criminals on Wall Street to get off scot-free while we attempt to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and middle classes, funneling their remaining money into the pockets of the nation's wealthiest. In America, livable work is hard to come by. People can still go bankrupt with ease when they try to see their doctor, and die from an easily preventable illness. In America, improving our standards of living incites foaming at the mouth and words of 'class warfare,' while we casually brush aside the slow crushing the upper classes have put the lower classes in America through for decades now. In America, unionization is treated as though you're affiliating with Josef Stalin himself. In America, teachers are 'lazy,' 'overpaid' when they don't make a living wage, routinely accused of indoctrinating children with 'liberal propaganda' for attempting to educate instead of teaching conservative propaganda, and we insist that they 'get summers off.' America's wealthy? Heroes who clawed their way to the top and are rightly living the American dream - why punish them with progressive taxation? Also, ignore that most wealth is inherited.

To our credit, fucking nobody went to see that Atlas Shrugged movie. We love Michael Bay, but oh, we draw the damn line at Ayn Rand. It's one thing to tell a 'story' with explosions - it's something else to make us sit through a hundred-page speech akin to "Fuck you, got mine."

Killing Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden doesn't change things, in the end. We are the ones who have to change - not merely through impassioned rhetoric like what led to Obama's election followed by years of nationally-destructive obstructionism by the GOP, ensuring that we won't just fail to achieve change, but that we'll backslide further if we keep electing them and head into dangerous territory - we have to demand an end to endless war. To call for the rebirth of a nation where 'welfare' is no longer a dirty word, and where the people stop treating each other like rivals in some bitter, desperate scramble for the invisible millions of dollars just waiting to be claimed by the next brave American willing to pursue their dreams. In a nation where the 'American Dream' has become a winner-take-all game of, "I'm gonna be rich, you're gonna die in a ditch," we cannot hope to build any kind of future if we cannot get past our increasingly feudalistic inclinations. The greatest crime of the human race is that we're capable so much better than this.

To quote the ending to Kurt Vonnegut's Dead-Eye Dick, "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet."

The Limits of Control

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:56:00 +0000

You're overdue for some movie talk. I need a subject to blog about today. Two and two - let's go.

This time, we're taking a look at a fantastic film that most critics and viewers have hated. That alone should tell you outright that I enjoyed it because my tastes are better - and not in the "Hey, Marmaduke wasn't made for critics!" sense - and by establishing this, I am officially firing a shot off the bow of the critical giant that is Roger Ebert.

Oh god, what have I done?

I've been a fan of Jim Jarmusch's films for over half a decade now, having first experienced his work through 2005's Broken Flowers, having taken an interest in it as a result of my following Bill Murray's career turn to art house film over the past fourteen or so years. I enjoyed Broken Flowers, but it was different than any other art house film I'd seen before - and I was pretty well-versed in the more comparatively 'mainstream' art house filmmakers by that point, having plunged into the art house world in the earlier 2000s with Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Kelly, and Terry Zwigoff's works - and intriguing in a way that I struggled to articulate.

In the years that followed, I added Coffee and Cigarettes, Dead Man, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to my collection. They each appealed in their own way. Coffee and Cigarettes spans decades with its quirky, enjoyable vignettes. Dead Man became one of my all-time favorite films, a zen-like black and white art house western with a strange sense of humor and a killer original score by Neil Young. Made four years later, Ghost Dog was a perfect follow-up to Dead Man. I caught about twenty minutes of Night on Earth on Showtime at the end of a free preview weekend - the preview ended just as I was getting hooked - just a few weeks ago. And Jarmusch himself even guest-starred on an episode of Bored to Death back in the first season, making fun of himself. All this and my experience with The Limits of Control have successfully convinced me that Jim Jarmusch is one of America's greatest filmmakers, inevitably unappreciated as he is in the mainstream. You can be an amazing filmmaker, and you can be a popular filmmaker - the two rarely overlap. Just ask Christopher Nolan. (His Batman movies and Inception are horribly overrated and frankly not very good.)

On the surface, The Limits of Control is a crime thriller. Three suspicious men meet in an airport. None of them have given names - nor does a single character in the entire film. The ensemble is led by Isaach De Bankolé, who plays a mysterious character simply listed as 'lone man.' He doesn't speak Spanish, but he's been given a job to do in Spain. Exactly who he is, what he does, what his job is, and why it has to be done are not established. And only one of these questions has a straightforward answer - the rest are left floating adrift in a sea of mystery. Feeling frustrated? Use your imagination. That challenge to the audience is central to The Limits of Control.

Starting in Madrid, the lone man follows his cryptic instructions - to visit a cafe near his accommodations and watch for a violin. These instructions lead to a long journey that takes the lone man across Spain, meeting with various mysterious strangers and exchanging color-coded matchboxes containing messages. There's a neurotic violinist (Luis Tosar), a nude woman who constantly tempts the lone man with sex and drapes herself over him at every opportunity (Paz de la Huerta), a blonde woman obsessed with old art house movies (Tilda Swinton), a woman obsessed with molecules (Youki Kudoh), a man with a guitar (John Hurt), a Mexican who discusses dream-like states and peyote (Gael Garcia Bernal), and matchboxes are exchanged with each of them. Between encounters, the lone man wanders the streets, visits art museums, and listens to music.

The script is minimal, built around monologues and exchanges between the mysterious strangers that the lone man - a mysterious stranger himself - and more than telling a concrete story, focuses on the suggestion of plot through repeated cryptic statements and thoughts, subtly expressing the film's themes beneath a gauzy veneer. The lone man himself is nearly silent over the course of the film, and when he speaks at all, it's rarely more than a mere single-syllable word. The other characters have much more to say, speaking in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Japanese. Even if the lone man couldn't understand their words, he could still use his imagination. De Bankolé is the definition of calm, detached, expressionless stoicism in his portrayal of the lone man - one of the coolest film characters ever created. A stoicism to which I can only aspire, but never hope to reach.

At times, The Limits of Control possesses a certain quality that I'd be inclined to call Tarantino-esque, but really, the film embodies the very sort of mood and spirit that Quentin Tarantino has spent much of his career paying self-aware homage to, without ever plunging in headfirst and abandoning all irony. Of course, with characters like Tilda Swinton's, even The Limits of Control is not without its intentionally meta, intensely self-aware moments of absurd humor. It also lacks the reliance on violence that Tarantino's films possess. The film breathes mood, aided only by the visually arresting cinematography of the always-brilliant Christopher Doyle. (Who was also the cinematographer for one of my all-time favorite films that I've written about before, my love of which will stay with me until the day I die.) You could take a still frame from just about any point in films Doyle has done the cinematography on, hang them on the wall in a museum or art gallery, and it would make sense. The film's intensely moody score - peppered with tracks by the Japanese band Boris - also recalls Dead Man and Ghost Dog, imbuing the film with a similarly otherworldly mood.

Beneath the surface, The Limits of Control is no mere crime thriller. It's something else entirely - an experiment in minimalism, a challenge to the audience, pretentious art house masturbation, or a parody of just that, depending on who you ask. Any way you look at it, it's a film for the patient, rewarding only those who give themselves over to the moody world of the film and fully immerse themselves in its seductively mysterious narrative.

As previously mentioned, most critics and viewers have absolutely hated this movie. It's not hard to understand why. Minimalistic films aren't for everyone - taste is subjective - and not every mininalist film is going to work for everybody, let alone something as experimental as The Limits of Control. The structure of the film is a mysterious stranger meeting other mysterious strangers, engaging in a little cryptic dialogue full of odd riddles, and passing coded communiques through matchboxes before parting ways and moving on. All of this is involved in something stranger and greater than a mere criminal plot - something mysterious and existential beyond the boundaries of reality, but they don't quite let the audience in on what it is that everything is building up to: just that something big is coming. A vague and intentionally unclear plot like this is naturally unsatisfying for most.

Still, these sources of dissatisfaction are not necessarily matters of objective flaws, so much as something to be understood subjectively, as the film even touches on in its script. It's not about a story, or even so much its characters - you would expect to fail on those grounds alone, and it still might for many viewers even if they understand what the film is getting at the entire time. But rather, the point of the film is to be drawn into its surreal, dreamlike atmosphere - to leave our world behind for the slick and stylish unreality of The Limits of Control - the definition of cool. It would be hard to make a film cooler.

As they say, la vida no valle nada.

Even If You're Never Awake

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:12:00 +0000

This post is pretty much a reconfiguration of something I've been meaning to post since late last September. As I keep up with the regular posts, I've been planning on expanding into more music and video posts, and I wanted to share this particularly inspiring piece of amazing, ambient drone music by Stars of the Lid.

Originally, it was going to be with this fantastic video of the snowy environment and nature captured on film up in a wintry Canada. Unfortunately, in the months since, that video was removed due to copyright claim. Curse you, legal system. That video wasn't harming anyone. This video just has a single still - but appropriately chilly - image of some icy mountains. An image that will be appearing in Project Princess as well.

I had also intended to post this during the winter, when a cold, snowy, deeply wintry bit of atmospheric music like this would be entirely appropriate. With May mere hours away, we're bound for the latter half of spring at this point. What I'm trying to get at here is that I deserve a medal for my punctuality.

Evocative, atmospheric, deeply moody music like this serves as yet another source of inspiration while I work on my second novel. I probably wouldn't be half the author I am - take that as you will - if not for the music I listen to while I write. If I ever manage to expand into music in the future as I would love to, it would be a tremendous fortune and privilege to create anything even slightly near the universe of this song's quality. (Though obviously, seeking out that fortune and privilege in the literary world is my first goal before I fire any shots off the bows of other creative media.) This song is nothing less than pure emotion - and exactly why I enjoy ambient drone music and you should too.

The Places We Leave Behind

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:08:00 +0000

My current novel, Project Princess, begins in ruins. Not the ruins of some ancient civilization - 遺跡【いせき】, iseki, or 'historic ruins/remains/relics' - but 廃虚【はいきょ】, haikyo. The ruins of an abandoned building, or something more recent. In the case of my novel, the ruined building in question had been functional and inhabited mere weeks to months prior to where we join the protagonist, at a time in which the passage of time has not only become unclear, but relatively meaningless. Ruins have spent quite a bit of time on my mind in the past year.

The 'Stairway to Hell' within Hashima Island/Gunkanjima.

Images and thoughts of decay, atrophy, and ruin have been commonplace in my mind for as long as I can remember. Weren't old, run down, rusted, rotten places that you weren't supposed to go fascinating as a child? Nightmares where the world is literally falling apart. The quiet poetry of places where people once lived, learned, loved, experienced, and died. Ruins are the haunting corpses left behind by civilization neglected, abandoned, and forgotten.

Where decay and atrophy are ugly shadows clinging to the backs of the living, the urban decay that turns buildings into ghosts and towns into ghost towns is more transformative. That which never lived cannot die in a literal sense, but it can instead become a captivating reminder of the transitory nature of not only our existence, but that of our very civilization. Too often in our hubris do we assume that we are the ultimate form of life on Earth, that our civilization will be the one to rise to the stars and become more than any other species on our world has ever dreamed of. It is that very hubris that undermines any possibility of our achieving such lofty ambitions, as we shackle ourselves with short-sighted selfishness and comfortable ignorance.

My fascination was only ignited again further through discovering 6 Differences several years ago on Kongregate, which features a good bit of focus on urban decay through its manipulated long exposure photography. There's many things I want to do in my life - skills I want to develop, talents I want to explore, risks that I want to take - and among them is to learn how to do long exposure photography myself. If I can eventually move to a major urban center, as is my goal - New York City being at the top of that list in the long term - I want to have the experience of spending a night roaming the city taking photographs of this particular type. If I can manage that, it'll be one less regret in the long run. I consider this style of photography - especially when coupled with surrealist visual manipulation - to be the still visual equivalent of the mood I wish to set in most of my writing. And mood is very, very important to me.

This fixation only grew further last year when - just over a year and a week ago now - I received Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon for the Wii for my 26th birthday. Focused on its isolated, deeply lonely mood, central to the game was the exploration of haikyo - the ruins of Tokyo and surrounding areas many, many years after an apocalyptic event that largely erased humanity from the face of the Earth. I played the game fairly obsessively for a couple of weeks until I finally finished it, and found myself wishing that it had been even longer when it was over - a rare experience. Games that I feel that way about tend to have one thing in common: a world I don't want to leave, a setting that I feel I can connect to completely. Those are few and extremely far between in video games, and I consider Fragile Dreams to be one of the extreme few games that legitimately succeeds as a work of art, for all the overblown talk we here these days trying to elevate the respect video games get without actually understanding what the pursuit of art means, as nebulous a concept as that is to define. Nearly a year after finishing the game, its main theme still sticks with me. While it's not a game designed for 'fun,' in breaking with the primary function of video games, it works as something only an interactive medium like video games can do that no passive medium can quite achieve - an exploration of intense loneliness that the individual embarks upon and completes themselves, rather than passively experiencing it through another.

Thankfully, I can honestly say I'm not the only person to hold this morbid fascination with decay. Urban exploration and photography have only developed more of a following in recent decades, and for obvious reasons when you see the photos. There are some absolutely incredible, breathtaking images of decay out there simply waiting to be captured. One could certainly argue that it's a bit of a bourgeois pastime, considering how many people in the world have no choice but to live within decay, but I don't personally feel that diminishes the value of urban exploration and photography, as dangerous as it can potentially be. Though I'm not exactly much of an 'outdoors person,' a pinnacle of unnaturalness in the unnatural existence human beings frequently lead, I'd like to do some urban exploration and see something devastating and breathtaking in ruins myself while I'm not yet a ghost myself.

The ruins in Project Princess aren't quite the familiar ones of our modern world, but more those of a developing medieval society suddenly wiped out. I can guarantee, though, that I will write an even more urban decay and ruin-focused novel sometime in the future. With any luck, perhaps I'll finally be a mature enough writer by then to someday take all of you somewhere enchanting and break your hearts repeatedly. Somewhere ruined, with scattered works of Banksy-esque graffiti, and an eerie stillness. Hold that image in your mind and keep your fingers crossed. I've still got a long way to go, and in a world we ourselves are ruining, what could be more relevant than ruins?

A Few Words: Blathering Anew

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:14:00 +0000

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

That's too many waits. Still, in usual form, I know what you, my phantom-like readers are thinking. You may be sick of the shtick, but as you know, we aren't all born clairvoyant - it'd be a shame to waste this talent. Especially considering how many seconds of your valuable time I've already wasted with my inane prattling. For every second of your life I steal, I only become stronger.

Obviously, my brain has been far too congested this year for my own good, let alone the good of any of you. Thus, this is me continuing to turn over that new writing leaf with as many harpoons and pitchforks as it takes.

The facts are these: I finished the initial full draft of my first novel, Project 27 Days, two years ago as of last month. I will have finished the final draft two years ago as of early October. Project Princess is continuing in full swing - not just in the figurative sense but also in the sense that in the narrative, things are sometimes swung and in many of these cases, lives are lost. My goal is to have the full draft of the book finished before I hit three years after completing Project Princess next year. Whether or not it'll have a real shot at being published by then remains to be seen, but failing that, I may take the plunge and risk self-publishing through Amazon, going by the reasoning that the fantasy genre has thrived in the self-publishing scene, and Project Princess does technically take place in a fantasy setting. There's no sexy troglodytes, though - the next big thing, you realize - and that may cost me dearly.

Aside from that, if I'm going to get out of here this year - and the prospects of that are looking as dim as ever - I need to find some freelance work that I can actually juggle with everything else to finally start making some money. I'm also going to be focusing on the iPhone game I'm involved with more now too, as we're beginning to enter the writing phase with that project - the game itself is a ways from nailing down a release date, but as that project begins to surface more visibly on the internet, I'll devote more time to talking about it.

The Spiral Reverie redesign the other day was part of an effort to jar myself out of my severe posting lull as of far this year. Aside from the former visual design, another problem with this blog has been its over-reliance on ridiculously long - and often image-free - posts that few have the courage or patience to brave. And over the years, I've started numerous post categories/topics, but haven't spent enough time fleshing many of these out. The neglected include: Ben Doesn't Know Anything About Sports, Movie Talk, Internet Spelunking, Publishing Chronicles, Film For Lovers, Science Babble, Sincere Personal Nonsense, Let's Get Morbid, You Call This Comedy?, This Guy Isn't a Great Short Story Writer, Actual Writing-Related Content, Apparently I Listen to Music Too, Porcupine Corner, Baby Pictures: Future Asshole or Furniture Mogul?, and That's Probably a Goiter. Subjects sorely missed by all, I know. It's tragic, if you think about it - and even more tragic if you don't.

This was supposed to be a much shorter post than it's shaping up to be. Unfortunately, I'm too good at introducing things, it seems. Yet another character flaw to lament. Let's move on to, at last, the first installment of the now regular feature this post is intended to introduce: A Few Words. Yes, short-form content on a more regular basis. Exactly what you were dying for. And also what I should actually be capable of producing more consistently - possibly the sort of thing more people might read.

My brief thoughts this time are horribly America-centric, but they are, I feel, a legitimate lamentation. Though this past winter was largely disappointingly brief and mild here in the southeast United States, massive snow and ice storms swept across the country and continent for much of later 2010 and the earlier months of 2011. We saw record and unusual snowfalls across a significant part of the country, along with plenty of power outages, some times when it was necessary for drivers to abandon their cars in treacherous conditions, and even a few deaths.

On the extreme-right, we saw a very predictable response to these weather conditions: smug, self-satisfied proclamations of "How 'bout that global warming?"

Now, just over a month into spring, we've seen dangerous storm systems crossing the country in recent weeks, bringing heavy rainfall, hail, and even some devastating tornadoes, including ones that killed over 250 people just the other day. This kind of extreme weather - much like the extreme conditions we saw across much of the country this past winter - is by no means normal, and the damage done and lives lost are certainly no laughing matter.

That said, I've noticed a distinct lack of commentary on the role climate change has likely played in these extremely unusual weather conditions over nearly the past six months now. We don't tend to see this much extreme weather clustered together, but few seem to be commenting on what we're seeing here. Much of the nation is either uninformed or completely misinformed about the nature of the catastrophic climate change our planet is going through, in large part thanks to the Republican party's ongoing war on science and the corporate-owned media trying to create 'debates' out of things that are not being debated - like the fact that industrialization is contributing to our planet's excessive carbon problem and dramatically affecting the climate. When the right writes off climate change - as in the aforementioned response to extreme winter weather - they tend to casually shrug off 'global warming' as the pleasant thought that someday our whole planet might be one big tropical paradise.

The reality, of course, is that as global temperatures rise, so too rises the temperature of our oceans, accelerating the already rapid rate at which the polar ice caps are melting. This will put large parts of countries, major cities, and even entire island nations underwater in mere years. And as the planet warms, weather patterns grow more extreme - we see harsher winters with more blizzards and ice, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, and more powerful storms. What we're seeing now is really only the beginning of a situation that isn't going to get better by shuffling our feet and making excuses for not reducing our carbon emissions. And as more extreme weather tests us - as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005, the harsher winters have begun to in recent years, and the waves of powerful storms and tornadoes we've seen in recent weeks - the more we're seeing how unprepared we really are for the much more dangerous weather patterns that we bear some responsibility for.

As a nation, our infrastructure is falling into increasing disrepair. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, George W. Bush flew in for a photo op and we largely turned a blind eye to the city and its suffering people. The powerful blizzards of this past winter and the devastating storms of recent weeks have served as reminders of how fragile and fallible our ways of life are - all it takes is a certain amount of ice and we're trapped in our homes. All it takes is some strong enough wind or a tornado, and our lives are easily destroyed or even lost entirely. At every turn, we continue to seek excuses for continuing our addiction to fossil fuels, while setting hesitant carbon emissions reduction goals for the far off future, by which point, it will be far too late. And it's becoming increasingly apparent now that in many capacities, we may already be a ways into 'too late' territory and well on our way into turning this world into our coffin.

When seeing this kind of unpreparedness and suffering at every turn in the face of especially unusual extreme weather patterns in recent months, it's hard not to get the sense that we're already in completely over our heads.

As you'll notice, a 2011 trend here is to post depressing, soul-wounding things. Because now is not the time for optimism. Arson, perhaps - but that's a little debatable.

At the end of this post, one thing can be said for certain: this was not a few words. The next one will be shorter.

The Change You Hoped For

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:32:00 +0000

Whoa, hey. What is all this?

I don't like change.

I know that's what you're all thinking right now. Also, "Why the hell haven't you caught up on replying to comments lately?" I'd give you an excuse for that, but it was recently run over a bus. Several buses. Multitudes of buses. You understand how that is.

At any rate, most posts are coming soon. I went from being merely old to even more of an oldmin recently, and I'm obliged to prattle about that yearly. Also, it's been kind of a weird, stressful ~~month~~ year so far. Still working on getting rid of the mental congestion that's been hindering my writing here as of late.

Obviously, things have changed here. We all miss the bland gray - the nothing-but-gray. You're not alone in that. Unfortunately, technically relatively unique though that look for the blog may have been - particularly in the sense that most people have better aesthetic sense than I do as so to know not to just slap a bunch of grays together and call it a website - I suspect that many potential readers probably took one look at the blog's visual design and stomped off to forget about the site a full three and a half seconds later. As such, here I am, ever the boring conformist, with a massive new Spiral Reverie overhaul that no longer looks terrible.

Sure, it isn't unique, and I have to ascribe 100% of the credit for the layout, colors, and background image to the resources provided by the new template designer that Blogger added last year, which really removed all excuses for a terrible-looking blog. I resisted the temptation for a while, but in the end, I succumbed - I'm so sorry, ghostly readers. I've failed you all.

In the spirit of failure and the celebration of a new version of the blog, I hereby retire the Spiral Reverie 1.0 subtitle, which has served it well since its initial inception back in January of 2007. No longer will this site be 'Spiral Reverie: 'round and 'round the sickle spiral, dreaming of what's lost,' as appropriately gloomy as that was. Today, I present to you the birth of 'Spiral Reverie: tomorrow's robots, ineffectual today.' Think of it like the little superlatives they change in the opening of the Colbert Report every so often - just far less often in my case.

Someday, I will have an entirely unique looking, far better blog than I do today. A Spiral Reverie - the title of which, I'm sure you've all wondered about the meaning of for no less than years - that in no way resembles the Spiral Reverie today. A Spiral Reverie with a thousand times the regular content - and I'm going to try to post more routine short-form thoughts starting very soon - with better, original visual design, and a haunting atmosphere. Everything you look for in a struggling author's blog. Except maybe jetpacks - those things'll take your legs off. I would know.

Someday.

Hope Estranged

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:29:00 +0000

Oh hey, I do have a blog, don't I?

I've been much quieter than usual this year. I keep promising more content 'soon,' but then not delivering. It's surprising that all two and one-sixteenth of you checking this blog with any kind of regularity have yet to gang up on me in a very small mob and threaten me with a crowbar. Still, there's a reason for my near-silence since early last November. There's a lot to be less than happy about these days - frustration with ongoing publishing efforts, struggles to get a paid writing job, the end of a very disappointing winter, fading hope of escaping the south this year already, my dog's declining health, the shocking earthquakes and tsunami that just hit Japan hours ago, and the state of both the country and the world. All of these things are weighing heavily on me at the moment, but the last one in particular has essentially clogged my resolve in recent months. I've had all these thoughts - intensely negative ones on the whole - stuck in my head for months now, interfering with my sleep, souring the enjoyment of my hobbies, disrupting my daily life, and keeping my stress levels high. I need to wake up earlier. I need badly to get out of this house. And I need to clear this blockage - this post is months coming, but hopefully it'll help.

This post is intended to be something cathartic. It is rambling and unpleasant, but if you feel like proceeding, go ahead and click the title to proceed. You've been warned. I have to admit, though, in finishing this post, I feel it's one of the better things I've written in a while - hopefully a testament to why maybe, just maybe, I should someday be able to make a living on my writing - and I'm sacrificing sleep for it, of course. Maybe I'll sleep better with all this off my chest. I hope to.

Where to begin?

Election Day, last November, I suppose. That's where the bitterness blockage - and its effects on this blog - seem to originate. Back then, I made my reasonable, rational plea to America not to sit back and let terrible ideas flood back into power. I was so much younger then, those four months ago. Once again, less than half of the country's registered voters turned out. Those who did were largely galvanized by the propagandizing of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and many sponsored by the Koch brothers, among others from America's ruling class. Rather than being energized to respond to the dangerous rhetoric of the corporatist Tea Party - the purpose of which runs wholly counter to that of the original Boston Tea Party - rational-thinking Americans stayed home and after two years of Democratic government often foiled by Republican obstructionism, America took another step backward.

Today, we're watching protests and revolutions take place across the Middle East as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and others have stood up against their oppressors - some in Iran and Saudi Arabia have again tried in vain. Here in America? Our 'revolution;' our 'retaking' of America? Angry protest against the best interests of the people - against the workers, for the corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers; calling for smaller government, but demanding legislation that restricts our most vital personal freedoms and greatly affects our personal lives; rhetoric driven by greed, bigotry, and xenophobia, wrapped up in the American flag.

In the November 2010 midterm election, the voices of those who voted rang out and called for us to continue our decline: to truly become a nation ruled, not governed.

In the past twenty-four hours, revolting things have happened. In congress, New York Republican representative Peter King held flat-out bigoted hearings targeting America's Muslim population. You'd think we haven't bullied our pitiable Muslim minority enough since 9/11, considering the relentless attempts to tie their entire religion and all associated ethnicities to terrorism and common calls for genocide smeared across the ugliest parts of the internet, but apparently not. It's hard not to wonder if we'll ever grow up enough as a nation to start treating these people like the actual human beings they are. Experts and statistics have already invalidated King's baseless arguments that American Muslims "aren't doing enough" to foil domestic terrorist plots within the American Muslim community and that they're being radicalized. That didn't stop him from not inviting any experts to actually testify at the hearing, of course. Facts have no place in a GOP discussion. Like the fact, as Reza Aslan mentioned on last night's Colbert Report, that there have been more non-Muslim domestic terrorist threats in America than Muslim ones in the past decade as well. It's also worth noting that Peter King is a passionate supporter of Ireland's IRA political terrorist group, which he doesn't consider a terrorist group because they haven't attacked America. When people like this are elected, something has gone deeply, horribly wrong in your country.

In addition to that, after weeks of protest and polls showing that the public has turned sharply against him, the Wisconsin state senate and governor Scott Walker found a legislative loophole by which to successfully strip the public workers' union of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. This after the 14 Democratic state senators stood by the people by fleeing to Illinois to prevent the Republicans from holding a quorum. In the end, the GOP senators separated their union-busting power grab from the budget - on which the Democrats and unions had already given up all ground outside of the collective bargaining rights issue. In sneering at and shrugging off weeks of protest and the people of Wisconsin turning against them, both governor Scott Walker and these GOP state senators made it abundantly clear that the term "public servant" is a contradiction in their cases. Textbook examples of the sorts of people who should not be in any form of public service, let alone actually elected. The silver lining in this is that recall elections are looking very likely for many of these state senators and possibly Walker himself.

At the center of the attack on unions lies a much, much bigger issue that has been gestating within America for decades, and hasn't been improving. This attack on American workers was orchestrated in the name of so-called 'fiscal responsibility' - a popular Republican banner flown today in the name of attacking any and all programs and rights that benefit the American people and American workers. "Wisconsin is broke," said Scott Walker. Similarly, GOP leaders in congress like house majority and senate minority leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have echoed that sentiment on a national level. The truth of the matter is, that's a lie: the GOP's modus operandi. Wisconsin was in fine shape financially until they passed a bunch of corporate tax cuts and ceased to properly, progressively tax the wealthy. We've witnessed the same problem on a national scale. While claiming to be the 'party of fiscal responsibility,' the GOP ignores their eight years of frequently unchecked reckless spending under George W. Bush that turned a massive surplus into an incredible deficit. They attack president Obama by saying that he's spent even more, but even that's a lie - they continue to cite the Bush administration's fraudulent financial records in which they chose to conveniently omit the insane costs of our violent ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. A major part of the explosion of Obama's spending comes from the fact that his administration has not continued the Bush administration's deceptive bookkeeping practices.

Where the Tea Party-backed Wisconsin GOP leaders seized on the budgetary crisis caused by irresponsible taxation of corporations and the wealthy to attack the unions, we're watching a similar crisis unfold on a national level as congress attempts to avoid a government shutdown by the GOP. This week, both Democrat and Republican budgets were defeated in each of the houses of congress. Neither of them were good, but the Democrats' was the lesser of two evils. The GOP's budget continued their usual strategy of staking out an extremist position and watching as the Democrats and so-called "socialist" Obama capitulate and give them close to everything - if not outright everything - they demand, much to the detriment of the nation and people. In the GOP's budget - and I'm sure we'll see them continue to press the attack - were efforts to completely defund Planned Parenthood, PBS, and NPR, among other programs and services vital in both our dangerously corporate public media and to the general public. And NPR is likely most at risk thanks to another Andrew Breitbart backed and distributed 'sting' video by professional scam artist and privileged conservative white kid James O'Keefe, both of whom have discredited themselves repeatedly and shown themselves to be among the slimiest of the crooks lowering the political discourse in the country year after year. NPR didn't stand up for themselves, and even sadder, the NPR executive on tape wasn't wrong in his statements on the Tea Party - when recognizing the objective fact that racism and ignorance are driving factors in that increasingly thug-like corporatist group is enough to wreck your career or lose your job, we're witnessing the rise of a legitimately dangerous mob. Apparently we learned nothing from what Breitbart and O'Keefe did to Shirley Sherrod last year.

America's biggest problem is by no means the deficit - that can be resolved quite comfortably, but we have no one in power willing to act like responsible adults, let alone responsible leaders, and begin closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on the wealthy as necessary. And of course, that's not to forget the vitally important reduction of our incredibly bloated defense budget, much of which goes into feeding the toxic military-industrial complex. Our biggest problem as a nation is the continued spread of poverty, and since John Edwards withdrew from the public eye in personal disgrace (While the just-as-personally-slimy Newt Gingrich is planning on running for president now and recently tried to credit his 'passion for America' for his cheating on his wife while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. What.), we almost never hear any politicians speak of poverty anymore. That would, after all, entail actually regarding the impoverished as human beings instead of sneering at them and blaming them for their own hopeless situation.

Whenever the proper progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy is brought up, the GOP begins rattling their sabers about "class warfare" and "wealth redistribution," while the Tea Party crowd feels they're being clever by saying they've been "Taxed Enough Already," despite our unsustainable obscenely low tax rates today. You cannot have a functioning, thriving 20th - let alone 21st - century society without a functioning central government working to serve the people and a populace mature enough to understand the importance of a strong progressive system of taxation. We take everything the government provides for granted and like self-entitled children, we demand it all for free, while also thumbing our noses a government and telling ourselves we're "fighting the man," when we're instead further enabling the corporate interests that have all but snuffed out democracy in America.

Just days ago, in a fantastic speech in Madison, Michael Moore brought up the issue of wealth redistribution that the GOP loves to attack American's working and shriveling middle classes over - the very fact that the income disparity in this nation is the largest it's ever been, and that 400 people have the total wealth of half of the rest of the country combined. We've had the "socialism" the GOP sneers at for decades since we began a program of corporate/privileged appeasement and welfare back during the Reagan years that began a dramatic redistribution of America's wealth from the many to the few, undoing decades of hard-fought workers' rights and the very basis of our middle class. Class warfare has been waged from the top to the bottom for decades in America - those of us in the middle have fallen hard, and whenever we even observe what's happened and suggest fighting back, the right-wing-owned media noise machine quickly shouts that down in an effort to keep it from public consciousness. Limp as ever, the Democrats continue to allow the GOP to frame every debate, allowing America's working public - and teachers especially as of late - to be vilified while upholding the horrifyingly wealthy corporate leaders and Wall Street bankers who fill Republican campaign coffers and successfully got our conservative-bent Supreme Court to sell out democracy in the Citizens United case ruling in January 2010. Not one person on Wall Street has gone to jail in the wake of the economic collapse their reckless gambling has caused.

As the American people continue to sink into destitution, the Republicans in congress are set on balancing the budget on the backs of the working class and dying middle class. They nearly shut down congressional procedure at the end of 2010 to essentially blackmail their way into an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%, even holding up health care for 9/11 first responders. This is the heart of their party's professed 'morality.' Morality that dictates that, as Gloria Steinem put it beautifully on last week's Real Time with Bill Maher, "life begins at conception and ends at birth." They speak of the need for "everyone" to "sacrifice." But what they really mean is something more in the vein of, "If you aren't obscenely wealthy, you can go fuck yourself." If you're rich enough, you "win," apparently - I'll get on to another "winning" disgraceful figure who's gotten far too much media attention in just a bit - and get to be exempt from making the same "sacrifices" as the rest of us. The policies the GOP continues to push forward will cut hundreds of thousands - if not ultimately millions - of additional jobs. They focused heavily on job creation during the 2010 campaign season, then changed their tune immediately, refocusing on cutting jobs as they did during the Bush years with a callous lack of caring reflective of their increasingly cartoon-level sociopathic agenda.

Throughout the protests in Wisconsin, you couldn't swing a dead cat on a major news outlet's comments section without hitting a seething comment about "union thugs" and how "hard-working" America's wealthy are. All this of course ignoring that only 7% of our workforce is now unionized, and many states are outright union-free - even the GOP's beloved Ronald Reagan called the death of unions the death of freedom a good 31 years ago now - and that's just another part of our dramatic wage stagnation since the 1980s. Of course Reagan would be a key link in the chain of leaders that began putting down the American union and taking away workers' rights. In this, we've even seen the right-wing phenomenon of support for union-busting from impoverished individuals envious of union workers. Instead of finding inspiration and seeking to fight back for union rights - a long, hard battle America has to fight a second time because we got complacent and let our rights be stripped away - they'd rather see union workers as miserable as they are. The fact that this is commonplace speaks again of a great illness that's infected the American character quite visibly in recent decades.

While we face all of these things, the GOP continues to encourage the country's woes to only worsen so that they can blame Obama and the Democrats for the state of things as they attempt to retake the White House in November next year. Thankfully, they have nobody electable to run. But still, president Obama does the American people no favors by continuing to capitulate to the GOP at every turn. We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The virtually criminal Bush tax cuts weren't allowed to expire. And Obama just gave up on closing Guantanamo Bay this week and joined George W. Bush in tossing the rule of law away to side with continuing the indefinite detention of suspected terrorist detainees that we cannot convict due to a lack of evidence. And these are only a few of the things he's capitulated on. It's a wonder we got Don't Ask, Don't Tell overturned just before the end of last year. And while it's also appreciable that the White House will no longer defend the similarly bigoted Defense of Marriage Act, the Republicans have their true colors on display as usual in their announced plans to defend it themselves.

In the end, we attack teachers and public workers in general; we attack any and all efforts to begin working on fixing America's infrastructure, which would create tons of jobs; we demonize the idea of improving American transportation by joining the rest of the modern world with high-speed rail; on top of all that, we desperately suck up to corporations and engage in welfare for them, while deriding welfare for actual human beings. And of course, after getting depressingly watered down health care reform the other year, the GOP is now set on trying to repeal it entirely and continue to prop up our broken system that's still more focused on profits than providing actual health care. They won't succeed - at least, not as things are now. But what we got in 2010 was more for the insurance companies than the people - being able to receive treatment or go to the doctor for a check-up is increasingly becoming a privilege in America. Our grave national illness is not merely a matter of metaphor.

As all of this goes on, we the people busy ourselves with irrelevant matters while learning nothing. We complain about the fluctuation in gas prices over Middle East unrest instead of investing in green energy technology. Even China's well on the way to leaving us in the dust on that front now. Fox News keeps busy by telling us that Middle Eastern revolutions will lead to more enemies for America - ignoring our long history of violence and propping up oppressive dictators there, earning our hatred - while arguing that we also need to increase our fossil fuel addiction and dependency even further. Continuing our focus on what's on television, we distract ourselves from any real news by laughing at the crazy antics of a drug-addicted actor with a history of abusing women that we love to shrug off with an, "Eh, they're just whores." Something symptomatic of our longstanding misogyny problem.

In January, Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a public meeting with constituents in Arizona, which is increasingly turning into a portrait of the end of America. The shooter was very mentally ill and obsessed with anti-government conspiracy theories, but neither a clear "leftist" or "right-winger." We spent weeks slinging mud, each side trying to pin this individual, Jared Loughner, on the other. The argument was eventually made that the heated, increasingly violent political rhetoric - primarily from the Republicans, but not exclusively - could have contributed to his snapping and going on his rampage, in which even children were killed. This led to a facetious play at civility and feigned bipartisanship in congress, with the Democrats and Republicans even sitting together for once - and our lone real socialist, Vermont's Bernie Sanders, one of our only senators actually working for the people - while president Obama gave a rather weak State of the Union address in February. It's enough to make you wish our politicians were more honest about how disinterested they are in actually serving the public - to make you wish these individuals were as politically unviable as they should be. A silver lining, at least, is that Gabby Giffords is making an impressive recovery. And a much rustier and more corrosive lining is that every time we have a public rampage like this - every few years - instead of having the gun rights discussion America sorely needs, the far right scrambles to deregulate guns even further. The obsession the American public has with firearms is not something healthier nations have in common with us.

Ultimately, that's the theme of what I've needed to get off my chest today. That America has been infected with an incredible cancer for decades now, and as we continue to undo decades of progress, dismantle the "American Dream," and turn increasingly into a nation of the deluded destitute, it's hard not to feel hopeless. The state of things today is exactly why I'm a misanthrope. We're not learning. And most of us don't even vote. We're witnessing the result of the failure of democracy in America, a system which itself fails when you don't have an engaged, informed populace. We have neither, and haven't had either for decades now. I've been losing sleep over this for months. I've had these thoughts and feelings rattling around inside, and they've impeded my forward momentum in this blog. Maybe that will change now that I've written this. I hope it will. But I can't promise an outpouring of optimism.

There was no Film For Lovers series in Feburary this year primarily due to a lack of material. I might have covered Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I plan on blogging about at some point anyway, even if it's already been done to death. It's a brilliant film - and one of Jim Carrey's legitimately good ones - deserving of unceasing love. I haven't seen much focused on love in months (I'm not sure if I'd spotlight Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in a feature like that or not - love plays a big role, but it's more fun and nerdy than anything else. If anything, it's a work of love for its source material by everyone involved.), though, and my own film collection's growth has slowed to a relative crawl as of late. To toss some recommendations out there from what I've watched the past few months, The Social Network, The Kids are All Right, The People Speak, Monsters, Temple Grandin, Micmacs, and Cyrus are all worth your time. I'll try to do some more film themed blog posts again soon - I'm hoping to start writing a bit more about music this year too. I've been meaning to contribute my own thoughts, and I have a few videos I'll be posting on here as short posts (Like last year's Trains Through Tokyo), for a little more content. Music journalism as a whole is pretty terrible, but I like the idea of sharing a bit of what kinds of music I like, and what inspires me. Plus, M83 has a new album coming out sometime this year, which I can't wait for - I need to pick up Asobi Seksu's new album still, too. Basically, I'm a Shoegaze nerd. Prepare your ears for walls of harmonious sound. For the hell of it, my current state of mind, through M83. One of my very favorite albums and album cover images.

I don't write about writing or the craft nearly as often as I probably should, and since my older brother - in encouraging me to 'get with the times' and get into self-publishing - sent me a link to this blog post the other day, I've felt a good diatribe against self-publishing and the deeply sleazy, anti-literary vibe I'm getting from all this coming on. My views all make me sound like an incredibly pretentious, narcissistic asshole (And really, what that I write doesn't?), but I have some very strong feelings on that while self-publishing can be beneficial and valuable for some, it's ultimately damaging to literature. As a writer devoted to cultivating his literary writing craft, I take tremendous offense to the commodification of books to the point of dumbing them down to treating a novel like a cheap 99 cent iPhone app. If the internet self-publishing eBook revolution is going to kill literature, then I'm going to go down with the ship and die in the gutter. The revulsion I felt in reading that, if anything, really helps me define even more of my identity as an author (And not just the aforementioned pretentious narcissist), and further establish my absolute need to find an agent and through them an editor and publisher. I will not settle for sinking into a sea of professional-contact-free low-effort dirt-cheap digital pulp - my desire, my need is to produce works of far more substance and authenticity than that. I'll leave it at that, because I can elaborate much more in the inevitable self-publishing rant post that I'll probably end up doing within the next few days.

Also, I'm probably going to finally cave and rework this blog's appearance soon with a Blogger template even as much as I dislike the idea of it not looking entirely unique. Spiral Reverie needs more readers - this thing needs to look more appealing if it's going to draw them. In addition to more content. I'm not good at selling or marketing myself in general. My approach, ultimately, is more in the vein of "If you build it, they will come." That often doesn't work on the internet, of course. You're supposed to track down other authors and communities of fellow aspiring authors and start networking if you want to get attention - I can't really do that. Extreme introversion extends to the internet, too. I don't even like posting on message boards - I'm a lurker at heart, creepy as internet lingo makes that sound. I'm well aware of the fact that while I like Spiral Reverie's "shades of gray" visual theme that I put together myself, it's ugly. As fun as it is to revel in writing massive, near-unreadably long posts of tremendous substance that almost nobody will ever stumble across and read like this - as fun as it is to be underground, which isn't hard to be on the internet - a writer needs readers. And even if it means temporarily sacrificing some of the blog's uniqueness, a visual look that won't drive off visitors is more important right now. I'm no web designer myself - I know what I like when I see it and have a lot of vague ideas, but I'm not good at articulating, let alone expressing, my aesthetic sense - and so I'm probably going to have to wait and see if a day ever comes that I can afford to spend thousands of dollars hiring a web designer to make my presence on the internet as cool as, say, Haruki Murakami's. His western website is the epitome of cool author websites. Maybe someday I'll have a publisher that loves me enough to foot the bill to make my internet presence that cool. It's nice to have dreams.

At any rate, the 3DS launch is 16 days away now. I'm really looking forward to that, but also stressed out at the same time. Money is a big problem. I'd ideally like to be able to snag one by late spring or early summer, but the system's going to quickly get as rare as the Wii was for years, and they're launching at the same $250 price point the Wii did. The system's hardware power, fantastic array of built-in features and games, and incredible announced lineup of games coming in the future more than make it worth the cost of entry - that thing's going to be beautiful and revolutionary. (Some people get extremely excited about new Apple releases - Nintendo's my drug.) But getting hold of one won't be easy, and while I've been working on getting a freelance writing job to start making money, it's tough to balance that with work on Project Princess - which is coming along again, and in the least, will be less weird and more marketable than project 27 Days, though just as literary in its ambition - regular query letters, and at least the occasional post here. If I can find some decent-paying freelance work and actually get the job - I've had some stumbles and been ignored before, much like with the query letter process, which I've at least started hearing more responses to here and there though nothing elaborate - I can quickly see all of my early money disappearing into a 3DS and some early games for that, though.

Considering that the last time I went to a game store was over 5 months ago now, as helpful as games are in my stress management, I don't seem to be able to sponge off loaned money from my father to sustain my hobbies for much longer. And that's something to deal with in trying to gain difficult financial independence - losing the ability to buy games, books, music, movies, and more tends to raise my stress levels tremendously, as much of a privileged first world problem that I really shouldn't even be complaining about as that is - and similarly, my hopes of escaping the south and moving to San Francisco this year have already more or less sunk. The friend I was going to move in with forgot about our plans and moved in with another friend out there, so the costs of moving and living out there just went from potentially affordable to unlivable, as they are for someone as literally broke as I am in any major city - and as a writer and someone needing to actually experience more of life at my embarrassing age of coming-up-on-27 (See ya, mid-twenties. Hello, near-thirties.), anywhere less than a major city would be profoundly dissatisfying. When I find concrete numbers for paying freelance writing work on the ads I've been checking out in working hard on finding work in these first months of the year, what I get out of them is that I'd have to focus more on freelance work than creative work and absolutely scramble to make so much as $1000 a month. And even that would barely cover rent in a decent single apartment in San Francisco - it wouldn't be remotely enough for the overall costs of living, let alone furniture, hobbies, and responsibly saving so I can actually build up the kind of financial reserve everyone needs. In short, like in my less than cheery New Year's post over two months ago, life is still kicking my ass. But hey, all the authors worth anything who've made any kind of meaningful mark no the world and produced authentic, substantive works of literature that could touch people's lives all had to face tremendous hardship - even if mine pales horribly in comparison - before achieving even a modicum of success, right? Right? Of course, a lot of them died miserable and destitute and never really make much of a mark or achieved any kind of following until after they were dead. This is why - for all my ranting - people write for the money, not to produce meaningful art.

All this, and at the end of this horribly self-indulgent blog post, I've still barely mentioned the incredible crisis that Japan is going through as we speak. Compared to that, my existential, creative, professional, and personal sources of anguish are minimal. My hopeful thoughts? Right now, I've reserved those for the survivors. In the least, the world is pulling together to offer what assistance and relief we can - the more, the better. Just last week, I watched the season premiere of No Reservations and was devastated by the state Haiti's still in, even after what the world contributed. Years before that, Anthony Bourdain did a show in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, reminding that in the wake of disaster, we often don't even take care of our own here in America. Considering its vital place in the world, I'm convinced we can all do better with Japan, but at the same time, we shouldn't forget New Orleans or Haiti. One of the most heartbreakingly common human traits is our capacity to turn a blind eye to profound human suffering. I'm afraid that even by the substance of this blog post on its own, I've provided ample evidence that I'm no better.

Pocket Warfare: 2011's New Generation of Portables

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:04:00 +0000

Oh, hello there, internet! I almost didn't notice you there after spending too much staring at screens caused my eyes to atrophy and fall out. You know that thing they say about all your other senses strengthening in response to the loss of any individual one? Apparently that's not always true.

Anyway, half-hearted fabricated blog post openings aside, I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing: "Hey, what the hell man? You said you were going to start posting more often and now January's almost over and you've only got one post up. What's up with that?" But more importantly, you're also thinking, "WHY ISN'T HE GUSHING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES YET THIS YEAR?! THERE'S MORE NEWS OUT AND I WANT IT HERE AND ONLY HERE." Okay, I get it, my blog is the singularly greatest blog that has ever existed on the face of the internet. Calm down - breathe into this paper bag. I'm here. You should really consider getting some counseling - this half-baked blog hasn't even gotten a single decent redesign since it awkwardly gray conception over four years ago now. It's like the internet equivalent of a frozen dinner you left in the back of your freezer and only remember to poke at every now and then - it's not like you're ever going to eat it, or like it's even still edible.

Now what we've established in the introduction to the second post of 2011 that Spiral Reverie has severe freezer burn, it's time for you to hit the title link jump below the cut to the meat and potatoes of this post - a discussion of the new portable war to ensue on the market this year between Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's newly unveiled "PSP2," currently codenamed the NGP. (And for those not interested, more non-video-game content is coming very soon! Sit tight.)
Now on to the main event, the bare knuckle battle and other appropriately violent hyperbole filled market conflict coming this year between Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's "PSP2," which was unveiled in the past 24 hours as the NGP, or "New Generation Portable."

We've known about the 3DS since roughly last March when the handheld's existence was first leaked by a Japanese newspaper and word spread across the internet like wildfire. Nintendo unveiled the 3DS at E3 last June to incredible fanfare, with its glasses-free parallax 3D visual effects, hardware horsepower falling somewhere between the Gamecube and Wii, additional graphical shader capabilities that even the Wii lacked (Allowing some games, like Capcom's upcoming Resident Evil games, to look nearly like the output on Sony and Microsoft's high-definition consoles, but on a significantly lower budget.), numerous new features, and some of the strongest third party support a Nintendo system has seen yet.

A Japanese release date and price point were set alongside some additional game announcements at an event in Tokyo at the end of September, a special Nintendo World event was held early in the new year, and westerners got a similar treatment back on the 19th in New York and Amsterdam. The system hits Japan on February 27th, Europe on March 25th, and North America on March 27th, going for $250 here.

The PSP2/NGP was unveiled in the past 24 hours with much less to be excited about, much to slap one's forehead in reaction to, and the typical internet responses. I'll get to all of the above in a bit, but first, let's break down the elements of each of these platforms.

Graphics
Discussing these is pretty unavoidable these days, as much as they're used to push hardware these days, and as much as they inflate game development costs for developers and prices for customers alike. Both systems feature vastly improved screens over their previous iterations, though on a technical level, as you'd expect, the PSP2's is superior to the 3DS's and an overall more impressive piece of technology.

In Nintendo's case, the 3DS still has two screens like the original DS - a larger upper screen, where the gameplay will largely be taking place on the system, and smaller lower screen, which is the same size as the original DS screens and still serves as the system's single touchscreen. The upper screen is also the only 3D one - there's a 3D slider on the side of the system that allows you to make adjustments to the 3D display, allowing you to find your own customizable settings depending on your face's distance from the screen and your own personal level of comfort with 3D, which can be troublesome for some people. And for those people, the 3D can also be turned off entirely. Speaking personally, the 3D effects are the least exciting aspect of the 3DS to me, not having gotten into the 3D movie craze or had any interest in ever owning a pair of those specialized 3D glasses. As far as I'm concerned, while the effect is neat, it's about as meaningful in the grand scheme of entertainment as the introduction of high-definition televisions and visuals, which is to say, not particularly notable, as the content isn't all in technical visual improvements. As the visuals go, I'm just happy to see the power the system has - one of the smallest gaps between a current generation console and portable system yet, between the Wii and 3DS - and that it's being represented on the platform in a broad range from Dreamcast-level visuals to graphics that at times look to match the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 without the insane pricetag attached to development.

As for the PSP2, Sony's made a number of changes. They've stuck to a single screen, but as I'll continue to elaborate upon, they've made a considerable effort to do with the PSP2 what they've always done - shamelessly copy Nintendo, then shamelessly try to pass what they do off as new and innovative. After spending an entire generation attacking every new feature Nintendo introduced as "gimmicks," then proceeding to shamelessly release a knock-off of Nintendo's main motion control setup for the Wii as a largely underused and overpriced PS3 peripheral last year - which didn't even receive the reception that Microsoft's insanely heavily marketed Eyetoy knockoff did - they copied their touchscreen, making the PSP's screen a touchscreen. As an aside, they added a touchpad to the back of the system itself as well, but it's hard to say what real functionality that'll bring to the system. It's hard to see it being comfortable using a touchpad that doesn't display anything and that you don't actually look at on the back of the system while playing a game. Some fingers do need to be devoted to actually gripping a handheld system when using it, after all. Other than that, the PSP2's main screen is an HD one - banking on the appeal (And much higher budget) of high definition graphics on a small screen. Of course, this is also coming nearly half a decade into the current console generation, in which both Sony and Microsoft banked heavily on the notion that HD television and movies were about to explode years back and that gaming would naturally join them - history has since shown as the customers voted with their wallets that most people don't care if a game's graphics are HD or not, so long as they look appealing. And the trend in focusing on "photorealistic" gaming has led to some of the blandest, ugliest, and altogether most visually unimaginative and unappealing games the industry has ever seen.

The PSP fell somewhere in between the PSX and PS2 - roughly a Dreamcast overall. The PSP2 looks to essentially be a portable PS3, Sony's console presently in dead last this generation, which has lost the company billions of dollars and on which development costs are so high that most games - like on the 360 - do not break even, let alone sell well enough to turn any kind of notable profit, with relatively few exceptions. Even Sony's first party games are never guaranteed to make money (As we've also seen with Microsoft, looking at how Alan Wake completely bombed last year after years of hype.), after multiple first party releases flopped on the PS3 this generation. After the PSP failed to achieve mainstream success - tanking everywhere but Japan, and largely only finding the success it did in the Japan on the backs of the Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star Portable franchises, both of which are likely to see 3DS releases this coming portable generation - as an overpriced mess by design with minimal compelling software, Sony seems to have apparently come to the conclusion that they didn't go far enough with the PSP, in now producing a portable version of their over-powered, incredibly expensive console that took them from first to dead last in gaming. There's a very special kind of hubris visible here, trying to repeat what has already failed horribly and led to billions in losses for both Sony and third parties that blindly supported the Playstation brandname this generation with the PSP2. A direct indication that even when their platforms have undeniably faced failure and resulted in staggering financial losses, they've learned nothing from it, as they've continued to publicly call their failures successes and push forward with an entirely self-destructive strategy in the video game industry, devoid of any kind of vision beyond graphics and stealing from Nintendo. Corporate thought at its worst and most utterly embarrassing. The last thing an entertainment medium needs more of.

Software Library
Of course, as we've seen with the HD consoles and every console that's had a significant graphical advantage over its competitors, it's never the graphics that make a market leader or vastly successful system - HD, 3D, or otherwise. It's all about the games, and on this front, there's no comparison. Nintendo has a massive variety of games coming to the 3DS, with some incredible third party support right out the door.

A major focus of this generation on their part is continuing to bring the third parties back after they largely fled from Nintendo's consoles when they fell from their former position of market leadership with the N64. Nintendo tried to get their support back with the Wii, designing it to be significantly easier and more affordable to develop for than its competitors, the Xbox 360 and PS3 requiring massive, multimillion dollar budgets to develop for and typically requiring over a million copies sold for games to break even or turn a profit - costs that have led to notably incredible financial losses for most of the video game industry this generation. Instead of taking advantage of these improved costs, third parties continued for the most part to display the disdain for Nintendo they had grown accustomed to over the decade or so of Sony's control of the industry with the first two Playstation consoles, putting out extremely low-budget, often intentionally half-hearted efforts on the Wii, then refusing to market their games at all, then acting surprised and trashing the system when their intentionally insulting releases on the platform didn't sell - reflecting their lack of effort - even in cases when they actually turned a profit. Funnily enough, you never hear a peep out of the third parties when third PS3 and 360 games routinely fail to turn a profit. There's been no lack of complaints over the Wii's graphical hardware horsepower too, compared to the HD consoles, when it's very visible that the same extremely high-end graphics they demanded on the HD systems are wrecking these companies - when you're focused on graphics so expensive to make that you have very little chance of making money on the game afterward, your gaming company's executives should probably be fired for some of the poorest leadership imaginable in this industry. And funnily enough, a major first party Nintendo release coming this year, The Last Story, handily demonstrates how little most third parties ever tried on the Wii, demonstrating outright that the Wii can compete with the HD consoles visually when developers actually try. Imagine that.

At this rate, despite a few stand-out third party efforts on the Wii that deservingly did well and made good money - Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Monster Hunter 3 Tri were high-effort Capcom titles that beat expectations and made money, last November's GoldenEye 007 revival did quite well as you'd expect, as did the excellent Epic Mickey, which Disney made the most heavily marketed Wii third party game (And the only Wii third party game that saw a serious commercial campaign in at least three years.) - Nintendo's unlikely to see the third parties come back to them on the Wii with their tails tucked between their legs this generation. On the 3DS, on the other hand, we're seeing just that - the portable market has become much, much larger than the console market in recent generations (The original DS being the most successful dedicated gaming system in the industry's history.) - as third parties can't exactly deny how vital strong 3DS support is to their future, especially now that they're hurting as much as they are after routinely taking hefty losses on overpriced PS3/Xbox 360 development. Much as Sony and Microsoft did with the design and development with their veritable Hindenburgs of gaming consoles, Nintendo involved third parties with the 3DS's design to ensure that they got the higher end graphics they wanted on the system - just without the attached suicidal pricetag. Likewise, the system was region locked - though seemingly only in the software, allowing companies to potentially release games that could be played on other regions' systems if they chose to, the region lock system has a lot of people confused at the moment - in order to increase profitability by region after the original DS and Gameboy Advance had been region-free, and both Nintendo and third parties have boasted of a very strong anti-piracy protection setup on the system to make it less likely than the internet's shameless thieves will be able to wage war on the industry's profit margins anytime soon. The original DS developed something of a piracy problem over time, though it wasn't quite as bad as the PSP's, which suffered from being cracked within days of the system's release, leading to its notoriety as the pirate's platform of choice in this past handheld generation.

As a result of Nintendo's efforts, third parties have one of the most varied and appealing lineups in a long time coming to the 3DS, even stronger than the original DS's - and the original DS's was excellent, just a bit oversaturated with many of the same genres repeated, and many third parties never utilized much of the DS's hardware power, leading to a lot of more advanced Gameboy Advance style 2D games and a relative minimum in 3D open world releases compared to the Playstation and N64 consoles the original DS was closest to in terms of overall hardware power. After a good decade of fan campaigning, Capcom's even reviving the long-dormant Mega Man Legends 3D action-RPG/adventure take on the popular Mega Man series with the 3rd game being developed exclusively for the 3DS as a special project with lots of online fan input. Nintendo's reviving Kid Icarus for the first time in 20 years with Kid Icarus: Uprising, as well as Pilotwings, which hadn't seen a new game in about 15 years. Already turning into a platform that's made the seemingly impossible appear possible, many are wondering if we won't see more long forgotten and left behind cult game series such as Sega's Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and Seaman, among others, get new installments as well. And in addition to their excellent third party support, Nintendo has a portable Virtual Console - like the Wii's - coming, that will start by releasing classic Gameboy and Gameboy Color games for download, and in time, hopefully Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket Color titles as well. The DSi line's DSiWare online downloads will also be available on the 3DS's online eShop - which now takes currency instead of converting your money into 'points,' and will include customer ratings between 1-5 stars, full details on games, downloadable game demos, and movies to look at gameplay footage so you'll have plenty of options before you guy games - as will new 3DSWare downloadable titles that you'll be able to run directly off an SD card, and Nintendo's including a 2-gigabyte one of those with every 3DS.

In the PSP2's case? Third parties have pledged support, but unveiled zero original games at this point. We saw a similar surge in support announcements for the original PSP, but most third parties that backed the system heavily came away very disappointed, with waves of support often followed by extended droughts as a result of the companies' losses on games developed for it. Sony had virtually no original software to show for the PSP2 at their unveiling today. Just a bunch of direct PS3 ports that were supposed to wow us with that they were successfully pulled off, except these are ultimately all games that have been out for years now, can be found for $30 or less (The HD consoles' games tend to drop in price very quickly due to how hard it is to move $60 games to begin with and how poorly most games sell on those systems, even the biggest ones largely selling the bulk of what they're going to within days of release, sales slowing to a crawl after that.), and they're undoubtedly going to be sold at a much higher price again on Sony's portable. An armload of PS3 ports to a smaller screen make no argument for why you should buy the PSP2. They just leave you asking why you should buy one at all. Hardware horsepower has never, and still does not drive the video game industry, and Sony is still apparently deadset on focusing on that above all else, much to both their detriment and the detriment of third party developers still convinced that they should be focusing on Sony's platforms as they continue to sink the company. The lack of actual third party unveilings or any original software so far is very telling of the hesitation many third parties likely have at this point in supporting the PSP2, the PSP having failed to take off in most of the world, and the PSP2 essentially being a portable version of Sony's biggest console failure, debilitating development costs and all. There's no reason for third parties to get behind the PSP2, knowing full well how unlikely most games are to make money on it, just as it's incredibly hard to justify continuing to support the PS3 now after all the losses the industry has taken on that - conversely, it's similarly difficult for them to justify continuing to dump on the Wii. Only with Nintendo does the industry look for excuses to say that it "doesn't count" when their consoles are the market-leading mainstream ones. And that attitude is nothing less than suicidal on an industry scale.

Online Support/Social Functionality
As we've moved forward each generation, online play has become increasingly important in both console and portable gaming. Sega first brought it into home platforms with the Dreamcast - years after it had begun to become commonplace in PC gaming, of course - with a few games with online play (Including the revolutionary Phantasy Star Online, which while fun, still didn't exactly live up to the original Phantasy Star series.), and neat little things like being able to download a Christmas tree for the city hub area of the game in Sonic Adventure. Now, a good decade-plus later, tens of millions of people are playing social games on Facebook every day and strong online support is an expected standard feature on dedicated gaming devices.

As one of their notable weaknesses, Nintendo's always been overly conservative with online play and features in their systems. On the Gamecube, we only got a couple Phantasy Star Online games that could be played by hooking your Gamecube up to a network. Online launched a good 8-10 months after launch for both the DS and Wii - the Wii at least starting out with online shop, News, and Forecast Channel access. While online play on Nintendo systems has always been fun, it's been undeniably cumbersome and inconvenient, having to deal with 12-digit Friend Codes for every single game, and even an individual one for the Wii system's address book, which only really allows you to exchange Mii avatars, Wiimail, and photos online.

Thankfully, with the 3DS, Nintendo's taking a significant leap forward in giving us a single dedicated Friend Code for each individual system, for starters. In addition to that, we're also getting a single dedicated friend list that can contain up to 100 people, and an indicator light system on the DS to alert us when friends are online. From what's been revealed so far, we'll be able to see a little orange light on the system to let us know when friends are playing online - while the system itself generally attempts to connect to any WiFi online network in the area to keep you constantly online, and otherwise to connect to any nearby 3DSes when the wireless connection switch is on - as well as what they're playing, and to see a Facebook-like status message of some kind. Some kind of instant messaging system has been confirmed as in the works as well, and we'll be able to easily check our friend lists when playing a game, thanks to the Home menu suspend feature. We'll also be able to directly exchange friend codes through local connections with other nearby players - using a friend request system of some sort, apparently - and be able to exchange codes directly online in some games, without always needing to directly input the 12-digit code manually anymore. A huge step up in convenience.

Beyond this significant leap in core functionality, however, the system still lacks any announced online bells and whistles, which are now expected as a standard in online play. Microsoft has had Xbox Live since the original Xbox launched with Halo, and that set something of a standard on the Xbox 360 with dedicated online profiles and social networking tied to your online username, letting you collect your stats, achievements, and so forth on a single profile and share that with friends, as well as display "gamer cards" with a basic overview of your stats on outside websites. Sony adopted their own version of this on their Playstation Network (PSN) with the PS3 this generation, creating a similar profile system to display their own achievement system, trophies. Free online Flash-based game websites like Kongregate and Newgrounds have their own achievement and stat-tracking systems for their games, tied into player profiles on the sites. And even Apple just recently launched their own system like this on the iPhone and iPad, Game Center, where you can track many games' achievements, leaderboard positions, and more. And of course, even digital online game store and social hub Steam gives each registered user their own dedicated profile to track high scores, achievements, and more on to share and compare with friends.

Nintendo is literally the only major presence in gaming these days that lacks a system like this, and recently Nintendo of America translator Bill Trinen made comments on such systems that demonstrated the company's increasing openness to such systems - despite lead designer and video game legend Shigeru Miyamoto's (Father of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and essentially modern video gaming) distaste for them - but also suggested that it's not likely that we'll see one on the 3DS anytime soon. That said, while the core functionality of the 3DS's new online system is robust and great - going on strong third party testimony and the fact that it's finally centralized with a single friend code - people aren't going to be happy if Nintendo doesn't get on bringing about their own version of these bells and whistles. And as is, Nintendo has some excellent bells and whistles on the 3DS - which I'll be getting into momentarily - but they aren't online ones.

Social online gaming is huge these days, considering the massive popularity of games like Farmville and Cityville on Facebook, and thanks to the cumbersome multi-Friend-Code system on the Wii and DS, while they've had great online games, online has been vastly underutilized. And Nintendo themselves have been startlingly unambitious when it comes to their own online feature ventures. It's understandable and praiseworthy that Nintendo's wanted to keep a strong focus on local multiplayer, as online gaming definitely can't replicate the experience of sitting around in a room with friends, but they've needed sorely to focus on keeping up with and outdoing the competition in online and what little has been revealed about the 3DS's centralized online functions so far is still pretty bare-bones - the kind of experience you could get in PC games online over 10 years ago. It's very functional, but it doesn't live up to today's online standards in terms of social networking - a dedicated profile, centralized stat tracking to share stats and achievements with friends, perhaps Facebook and/or Twitter connectivity, and so on - people are going to complain, as it goes against the expected standard. People want to be able to connect with their friends on more levels than just instant messaging or seeing what they're playing at the moment - they want to be able to see everything they've played and share what they've played, what they've accomplished, their high scores, and more, perhaps even passively affecting the content in each other's single-player experiences by connecting online. This is the core of modern social gaming, and Nintendo's only partially gotten on board with this, when they should be at the forefront.

At the January 19th event in New York, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime repeatedly emphasized the importance of the new focus on "building communities" on the 3DS, but the still relatively bare-bones online features we've seen so far on the 3DS aren't enough to satisfy that desire online. They've introduced a brilliant, innovative social feature in StreetPass, the system's feature in which it scans for any and all nearby 3DSes when you're out in public and you've got it in sleep mode in your pocket, connects with them, and exchanges some information. When you go to the StreetPass Mii Plaza on the system, you'll visit a pleasant little virtual park where your Mii avatar meets the Miis of all the people you interacted with and collects their Miis and very basic little exchanged profile cards with things like their name, the number of times you've connected with them, where they're from, and the last piece of software or game they played. Also, if you've played any games in common, you'll exchange certain data in those. For example, if you've both played Nintendogs + Cats, when out walking your dog or cat in your virtual neighborhood, you'll pass the Miis of people you've StreetPass connected with walking one of their pets every so often, adding more life to your little virtual world. In Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, you'll fight passive battles against other game owners with action figures that you collect when fighting these passive battles, so you need to connect with all the people you can on StreetPass to collect as many figurines as you can. Samurai Warriors Chronicles seems to have some kind of passive local warfare waged between 3DS owners upon connecting with other game owners. And Dead or Alive: Dimensions, The Sims 3, and others have confirmed their own StreetPass functions. Fantastic social concepts with one drawback - the whole feature is geared toward gamers in Japan, where it's much easier to find and passively connect with other video gamers on the street. People are much more spread out in America, and odds of connecting with someone outside of a specialist store, gaming event, or the streets of a major city are very slim.

As it stands, there's been no online alternative to StreetPass announced yet, when something like that is a definite must in order for western gamers to get the most out of those social features - some manner of exchanging that StreetPass data with friends online, perhaps with some daily limitations as so to make sure you couldn't abuse it and collect all the Super Street Fighter IV figurines in a single day. Similarly, it's kind of absurd to talk about "community building" in the sense of a very fun, fresh feature like this, exchanging data with local friends and strangers, but then giving us a very bare-bones core online setup where we can only see when and if our friends are online, what they're playing at the time, a status message, and IM them. It's a great core for functional online play, but a very lackluster one for the aforementioned "community building" in an online setting.

In the past, when the system was first revealed and Nintendo talked about the system having a much more robust, centralized online system, things like trading ghost data, high scores, achievements, and all sorts of day-to-day new data with friends were bandied about. So far, what we've seen of their new online system is not that - it's hard to say if we'll see any ghost data exchange until Mario Kart 3DS comes out (Either this fall or next year, there's no set release locked in yet), there's in-game achievement systems in some games like Super Street Fighter IV, and no real content trading in online multiplayer confirmed yet for any game - but simply an extremely bare-bones centralized friend list. Again, as I've emphasized, functional and nothing to complain about in itself, but beyond that, with what little we know, the online experience looks like it'll still be lacking outside of individual games. Super Street Fighter IV 3DS and Dead or Alive have robust online options, as all 3DS fighters should, and Samurai Warriors Chronicles has cooperative online battles to join into with friends for rewards, but no online features have been confirmed in any first party Nintendo games yet (Though they've been hinted at for Kid Icarus: Uprising), and outside of the friend list, eShop, web browser, and constant connection when a wireless internet connection's available, we haven't seen any other significant online features suggesting the serious investment in a fuller centralized online system that they've been implying for over half a year now.

All that said, we still don't know the full functionality of the 3DS online yet, or what may come in the future. Bill Trinen himself has shown that he's not 100% in the know about all of the 3DS's features, present or future, having had some confusion over whether or not we'd have access to the eShop at launch - it's looking that it won't be preloaded on the system at launch, but there will be a firmware update on launch day to download it immediately then and gain access to the Virtual Console, DSiWare, and 3DSWare games available then. And technically speaking, functionality like downloadable content and patching have been confirmed for the 3DS, so it's fully possible that Nintendo could launch a new, fuller online social network in the vein of Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, and Game Center later this year, patching compatibility with it into all previous games - which would be feasible within the platform's first year of life - with a full stat-tracking and achievement system. As is, the 3DS contains an Activity Log feature, which tracks all of your daily footsteps with the system in-pocket using its pedometer feature, and there's a software log section in that which tracks every game and application you've run on your 3DS and ranks them by total time and total number of play sessions, tracking every use, total time, longest and shortest sessions, average session length, and so on, in an expansion of the Wii's Nintendo Channel's simple time and use number stat-tracking. It seems a little silly to only track these things, though, when with a simple update to the software on the internet and included standard in future hardware shipments, they could add additional functionality to the channel, letting you view pages of actual game-related content with your in-game stats, high scores, achievements, and so forth viewable directly within the system.

Likewise, to match the aforementioned social services on the other platforms, rather than connecting it solely with each system's online shop, Nintendo could expand their online Club Nintendo service - on which users already have registered usernames and accounts that Nintendo could dramatically expand the functionality of - to connect with the system as a whole and develop a new social networking site akin to Microsoft's Live and Sony's PSN with their own approach and unique Nintendo flavor. They've flirted with online social elements before, with the now sadly long dead NintendoWiFi.com from the launch of the DS's online games back in 2005, which allowed you to view which games you'd played online and various stats about online play, and for a while, they had an online gamer card system for Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, which let you publicly display your stats for the game online. There's nothing like that available for any of their online games or features now, and the only online display features we have at all are photo upload to Facebook on the DSi (Which will presumably come to the 3DS too) and plans for some kind of QR code online display for the 3DS, which would allow you to share out Mii designs online by posting the image of the QR code for people to photograph with the 3DS and generate the Mii from the data encoded in the image. That itself is a really cool function, but definitely not enough to satisfy people. Expanding the Activity Log to track-in game content, trophies and challenges in Mario Kart, medals in Star Fox, progress and treasure collection in Zelda, and other assorted milestones from game to game to share with friends on an expanded Club Nintendo social network viewable through a web browser or directly on the 3DS would be a massive leap forward and would make people happy, getting them hooked on the addictive social metagames that achievement and stat tracking and comparisons have become. And considering that everyone has them now - even Apple, Nintendo's cited chief rival, which doesn't even put out dedicated gaming platforms, has such a system - and Nintendo's begun to open up to the idea, it's hardly a matter of if, but when they finally choose to implement systems like this. And frankly, the sooner they bring a system like this to the 3DS with a firmware update and get to patching compatibility into games released prior to that, the better - they'll only stand to benefit in the long run.

Basically, the 3DS's core online functionality so far is excellent, but missing the bells and whistles today's gamer demands and literally every competitor already has. Nintendo needs to get cracking on implementing their own take on these features, but ideally finding a way to do them one better with their own trademark warm, pleasant Nintendo style. Perhaps some kind of virtual space Mii world to explore and build with friends while showing off achievements, continuing to use Miis as the primary user avatar on Nintendo systems (As it's clear that we will be setting our personal Mii as the system's owner for a variety of functions in the 3DS.), akin to the warm world seen in Wii Sports Resort's Wuhu Island, the Mii neighborhood and city with its changing seasons in Personal Trainer: Walking on the DS, and the pleasant, cozy virtual life-esque apartment in the Wii's Wii no Ma channel that sadly has yet to make it across the pond for western Wii owners. The possibilities are limitless, and I'm sure Nintendo could find a way to completely outdo the others' online social systems, getting into them last, but doing them best - and completely free, where Microsoft charges monthly fees and Sony's openly moving toward that - it's just a matter of Nintendo finally stepping things up more fully after all their talk and giving us an ambitious means of doing all that aforementioned "community building" online. It's only a matter of time, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll see a huge leap forward into that from them sooner than later - far as I'm concerned, that's pretty much all they're lacking now. I'm fine with using dedicated friend codes for each individual game system so long as we could link them to our Club Nintendo profile for achievements, stat tracking, and social networking, and have at least some kind of recurring username in that, each system basically having its own individual phone number.

Finally getting to the Sony front, the PSP2's online details aren't all confirmed either. It will connect to users' PSN accounts and use the same trophy system, that much is confirmed. 3G support for online has also been confirmed but this may entail regular fees to go online with the system too, and it hasn't been confirmed if it'll have any free online play, or if they'll be going fully pay online like Xbox Live, considering that they've been gradually reducing the free online content and focus on the PS3 to try to push users toward paid PSN Plus accounts. It's hard to say if the PSP2's online will be better than the 3DS's overall from what we know about both platforms at this point, but in the least, it has a dedicated profile to connect to and an achievement system, and the 3DS doesn't have those yet, at least, giving it a potential slight advantage on that front.

Additional Features

Whew. Time for some shorter-form talk. I doubt most of you made it through those previous rambles.

Let's start with the 3DS's additional features. The 3DS gained an analog slider - these days called the 'circle pad' - above the dpad for improved control over movement in 3D games, which is said to be a lot better than the original PSP's problem-prone analog nub. It also has a motion sensor and gyroscopic motion sensor inside, allowing for the use of motion controls in some games, like the augmented reality games, full motion periscope control in Nintendo's new Steel Diver submarine game, bow aiming in Zelda, and more. Where the DSi systems contained a fairly simple digital camera for photography and some basic camera-based games, the 3DS contains two outer and one inner 3D camera for 3D photography, hinted future 3D film recording, augmented reality games that impose game content onto the image of the real world with special cards included (The AR Games themselves come preinstalled on the system.), photo-based Mii generation, and other assorted camera-based gaming and non-gaming functions. The new 3DS stylus is telescoping, so you can adjust its length to your personal comfort. A charging cradle is included to improve the ease of recharging the system further, and it apparently also boosts the wireless signal for faster online content downloads when connected to the internet in SpotPass mode. And then there's the built-in software - you'll be able to suspend to the Home menu when playing games to do a little multitasking, specifically allowing you to use the web browser, the built in gaming notebook, check your received data notifications from StreetPass and SpotPass, and check your friend list and do instant messaging. You'll be able to do all of those normally otherwise, too. Then there's the aforementioned preinstalled Augmented Reality games using the cards that come with the system - only a cool target shooting game has been shown so far, the others are secret as of yet - a fun Face Raiders augmented reality arcade shooter also preinstalled on the system; which generates enemies to shoot at based on your face and images captured of the faces of others around you while you play; the Mii Maker (Which can store up to 100 Miis in its plaza like the Wii and features a bunch of new Mii design features the original Wii Mii Channel lacked.); the aforementioned StreetPass Mii Plaza for local social data viewing; the aforementioned Activity Log; the aforementioned eShop; Nintendo 3DS Sound, which lets you play mp3s and aac files as well as create and share your own audio files and songs and share them with friends (There's some kind of ranking system too, but a lot of these things have yet to be detailed.); the ability to transfer DSiWare from DSis to your 3DS in the future; and there's going to be some kind of 3D video feature in the future, allowing you to view movies on the 3DS as well. All the details of that have yet to be hammered out.

In short, as I said earlier, while the 3DS's additional online features - bells and whistles and so on - need some serious fleshing out for community building and deeper socializing, the 3DS is in no way lacking in the bells and whistles department otherwise. The camera and preinstalled augmented reality games alone will hook a lot of people, no doubt.

On the PSP2, they created their own blatant tag mode knockoff of the 3DS's StreetPass mode (Undoubtedly designed after it was unveiled for the 3DS last June) with no actual integration into anything shown yet (Just as most of the new PSP2 features - most stolen directly from Nintendo - have yet to be demonstrated as actually being used ina nything.). They also took the motion sensing features in addition to the touchscreen, though they haven't been demonstrated yet either. It's using a simple menu system like the 3DS's, but by design the PSP2's user interface looks much more amateurish and far less appealing overall. Sony's always struggled with their user interfaces. The PSP2 also has a built-in GPS (Undoubtedly to compete with iPhone GPS features. I have a hard time seeing this being meaningfully used on the PSP2, though - just being yet another thing inflating the price.); aforementioned 3G, which will likely lead to regular fees for that, jacking the price up even higher; a second analog stick, but this time both analog sticks are full sticks, not nubs, hampering portability; an electronic compass (Not sure how useful this will end up being.); and lastly, they added a microphone, which the DS introduced to portables and the 3DS also has included standard. No actual use for that has been demonstrated yet either. And considering Sony's struggles to demonstrate any grasp of meaningful use of motion control on the PS3 with the Six-Axis controller or Move peripheral, I have to say I'm skeptical that they'll make even half the kind of use Nintendo platforms do of the numerous features they shamelessly copied directly from Nintendo for the PSP2. And it's just kind of embarrassing that they dumped all these additional features like the GPS in there, when most people aren't going to buy or use a PSP2 for that - it's awkward flailing at competition with Apple, which already has the market for this sort of thing down anyway.

Brand/History
It's not hard to figure out what's going to happen in this newly dawning generation of portable hardware, going by the most recent portable and console generations. The original DS was launched to widespread skepticism and insistence that it would be the end of Nintendo in portable gaming after always having dominated it, as the PSP was basically a disc-based Sony attempt at their own Gameboy. Everybody raved about the PSP's graphics and concluded that graphics would determine the generation's victor - as they never have (Note: Gaming 'analysts' and 'journalists' are generally nothing more than paid shills cheerleading for their side of choice. Not people with any kind of perspective on the industry or its history or any real connection to gamers outside of the violently polarized and fanboyism embarrassing subculture that video games have. If I can impart any wisdom to anyone out there interested in video games, it's that you should stay far, far away from the subculture and stick to having fun with your friends.) - and then when the PSP came out, it turned out to have some serious design flaws. Sony responded to criticism of these flaws with, in short, "Shut up, they're features, not flaws. You can't criticize us." After all the skepticism, as major titles - the flood beginning with Nintendogs - began hitting the DS and its online games launched, the system went from doing well, but not blowing the world away to knocking socks off left and right and expanding the market in before unthought of ways with new types of software, creating incredible millions of new gamers. The PSP ultimately went on to fail to gain a meaningful userbase or market presence in the west, most games on the system going ignored or getting pirated to death. Only in Japan - as previously mentioned - did the system find a successful base thanks pretty much entirely to Capcom and Sega's popular cult Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star Portable games, which dont' have as much of a following in the west. The DS, on the other hand, went against all expectations and became the most successful gaming platform of all time.

The Wii was met with similar expectations, since it wasn't a massive graphical powerhouse like the HD consoles Sony and Microsoft put out, and instead banked on lower budgets, broader appeal software - going for both traditional gamers and new gamers with everything from ultra-violent action games to epic adventures and easy pick up and play sports and party games - and general innovation. And like the DS, it was a disruptor, and went on to infuriate Sony and Microsoft's bases by quickly demolishing their consoles in sales and pulling in the mass market that they thought their platforms were entitled to with their primary focus on dark, gritty shooters you mostly play online on clumsier older style controllers less than ideal for even that kind of gameplay.

Over the course of the past console and portable generations, we've watched Nintendo's second meteoric rise, going from merely having a cult following in consoles and dominating the portable market to rising back up in consoles and knocking Sony from first to third place as Sony let their romanticization of their own brandname go to their heads and commit brand suicide with the PSP and PS3, the DS overcoming doubts and ultimately being a disruptive game changer in portables - taking down their fiercest portable competition yet, comparatively - and the Wii going from being a laughingstock in the online subculture to leaving that same crowd in tears as it similarly disrupted traditional console gaming and completely changed the name of the game. Now Sony is desperately flailing at relevance, copying Nintendo in an effort to improve the value of their hardware, and both Sony and Microsoft have put out motion peripherals in the past few months in an attempt to recapture some kind of relevance. Sony's failed and hasn't given their cynical Wii Remote knockoff peripheral much backing. And in the case of Microsoft's Kinect, they've seen some strong opening sales in pumping more money into marketing their Eyetoy knockoff alone than any other advertising anyone has done this generation. That said, they didn't produce something that's going to bring in the mass market - it didn't even disrupt the Wii, it just helped boost Xbox 360 holiday sales, though the Wii still beat it with the help of some strong holiday games in Epic Mickey, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and GoldenEye 007 - and when people refer to it, it's never the Kinect games they're talking about. It's purely about the peripheral's novelty, and like the Eyetoy, its gameplay functionality and long-term novelty are limited - you can only do so much with dancing around in front of a camera, and notably, very, very few of the few games out for Kinect have actually sold well, and few are actually coming in the future.

When you get down to it, Sony committed rather violent brand suicide after the PS2. They largely showed that they didn't get what portable gaming was about with the PSP, and made some indefensibly poor decisions - like pushing the PSPGo in an attempt to get their users off physical media entirely so they could control all the prices directly on their digital online store, kill physical ownership rights entirely, and cut retailers out as well, screwing both the customer and retailer royally, as Sony has a history of openly espousing belief that "download-only" is the future of gaming - and the PS3 is a staggering trainwreck of a system that, like the Xbox 360, has simply been a mammoth financial failure. Sony went from number one to dead last, losing billions of dollars - and all their PS2 and PSP profits - with the PS3, which sent the whole company into a rather unstable place after they pretty much bet the farm on the assumption that their customers would pay anything and that it was the guaranteed market leader. Their followup solution this generation? To make a portable PS3 - basically, trying to put out a fire by using more fire. As for Microsoft, they've never turned a net profit on their Xbox line - their ventures in video game hardware have been nothing but a huge failure from every angle, and they're having a hard time justifying keeping the Xbox line going. The PSP2 shows no sign of Sony getting where they've gone horribly wrong, only that they're desperately trying to cling to Nintendo's coattails in the hopes of remaining relevant. The 3DS, with all of its new features, is similarly disruptive like the Wii and original DS were - Nintendo's continued portable dominance is pretty clearly in the bag already, as Sony's PSP2 revelation's made clear, and I'd bet that the Wii's successor will handily beat whatever the competition serves up, if Sony and Microsoft can even get away with putting out future Playstations and Xboxes after what a disaster this generation has been for them. Neither company has a clue how to reach the mass market, and looking back, Sony's decade of success was in large part a fluke - not something they earned by being an incredible, visionary company in gaming hardware. That's the last thing they've ever been - they were never more than a faceless corporation looking to make money, as they even pretty much outright flaunt with their embarrassingly smug "Kevin Butler" PS3 ads where they try to convince us to buy their systems with an incredibly grating corporate executive character. I'm not so sure their marketing department gets 'funny.' With the third parties flocking to the 3DS, I suspect the Wii's successor will be betting a lot more respect as well.

Portability
Let's face it - one of the most important factors of any portable is its actual portability. This'll be an even shorter discussion.

The 3DS retained its predecessors' simple, elegant, and very functional clamshell design, making it easy for you to close the system in your pocket, keeping it in sleep mode to drastically reduce power consumption, which will help a lot when the wireless switch is on to hunt for other 3DSes to connect with when out in public. Designed as the culmination of all of the original DS and DSi's revisions, it's small and comfortably designed, and with the built-in pedometer function - through which you can earn "Play Coins" to unlock content in games, another very unique Nintendo-innovated feature, designed with the pedometer to get players out and about with their 3DS to look for people to connect with in StreetPass - you've got good reason to enjoy its portability and carry it everywhere. The battery life raised some eyebrows when it was first announced, based on Nintendo's always very conservative battery life estimates for their new portables in recent years, but those have since been cleared up. If you have the 3D effect on its highest setting - which is the most likely to potentially risk eye strain if you use it for more than 30 minutes (Though it goes without saying that you should be taking regular breaks when gaming anyway.) - with the brightness on its highest setting and the wireless search on, you'll get 3-5 hours out of the 3DS's battery before it needs to be recharged. However, by turning the brightness down - to its numerous but still very visible other light settings - using the power-save mode you can turn on, turning down the 3D effect or turning it off, and turning off the wireless if you're traveling and in no position to make use of StreetPass or SpotPass anyway, you should be able to get at least 8 hours if not more out of the system, so the 3DS's very comfortable portability has been ensured by design.

The PSP2, on the other hand, reverted to the design of the original PSP - not a good sign. It's essentially an awkward brick in your hand, now plus the back touchpad and additional analog stick. The original PSP's screen was notoriously easy to damage and break - pretty much by design - and while the PSP2's is undoubtedly sturdier as an OLED touchscreen, the fact that you don't have a clamshell setup like with the 3DS still means that the screen will constantly be rubbing up against the inside of your pants (As will the touchpad), which could potentially cause some long term wear, I'd imagine. Not to mention, the fact that they went for full-on analog sticks instead of the original PSP's nub with the PSP2 also means the sticks will awkwardly jut out in your pocket and make it much, much less comfortable to carry. And it's hard to see anybody making use of the PSP2's StreetPass tag mode knockoff feature - which they haven't detailed much yet anyway - if it's not even comfortable to carry around in your pocket. And considering the insane sheer power of the PSP2 as an essential portable PS3, odds of the battery life being anything less than dire are nil. Like with the original PSP, Sony's demonstrated with the PSP2 that they still have yet to grasp the basic concept of portability - neither battery life, nor the idea of making something you can comfortably carry around in your pocket. I've spent a lot of years poking fun at Sony for their increasing incompetence, but honestly, they're like cartoon characters now - if they can get something wrong, they do these days.

Hardware/Software Price
And now it's time for the clincher, the dealmaker or dealbreaker.

The 3DS is launching at the end of March with a very strong launch window lineup of around 30 games - many of them very good looking - hitting between the launch and E3 in early June. The system itself will retail here in North America for $250 - the same price the Wii went for, and it easily justifies that price with all of its excellent features, built-in content, future promise, and the amazing announced software lineup. The software prices haven't been officially announced yet, but Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stated they'll be in line with the original DS game's prices, and the confirmed Japan prices already reflect that. So in short, we should be seeing average prices from $30 to $40 and probably not much more. I could see some third parties experimenting with the $50ish mark, but like others who've tried going to $40-50 in the past, like it happened on the PSP, I doubt it would last - the market isn't willing to pay console game prices for portable games. And with the development prices skyrocketing to match the PS3's on the 3DS, I have a feeling we're going to see a mass exodus of smaller name developers in Japan from the PSP to the 3DS in this coming new generation. Here's to hoping I get a shot at an English release of a 3DS Kenka Bancho, or something similar, perhaps a Yakuza from Sega - it's about time they branched out with that franchise, considering that it's not likely making money on the PS3 with those sub-million total sales numbers.

As for the PSP2, there's no prices for anything yet. It's not hard to speculate, however. Sony's made it clear that they've learned absolutely nothing from the incredible trouncing the PSP got from the DS and how insanely poorly the PS3 has done this generation, in trying to counter the 3DS with a portable PS3. I can't imagine what thinking led them to conclude that the console that lost them billions of dollars would suddenly make a hit portable. The lack of critical thought and self-awareness going on at Sony these days is simply staggering - they're like a cartoon version of a bad corporation. That said, with all the features announced for the 3DS on top of its hardware power - and PS3s going for $300-400 these days - the cheapest I can see the PSP2 launching for when it supposedly hits for the holidays later this year (Not much time to prepare new games, considering the massive development cycles PS3 games require for years on end, while the 3DS has a phenomenal library coming in its first year alone that'll be very well established by PSP2 launch.) is around $350. But considering so many of the other features, I could see it more likely being in the $400-500 range. And considering their continued behavior this generation, there's no doubt in my mind that Sony would seriously consider - if not outright go for - that price point. And considering that PS3 games are $60 as a standard, I could see them setting PSP2 games at that too. Considering how incredibly unprofitable the PS3 has been and how much has been lost on it, given everything Sony revealed in these past 24 hours, there's pretty much no way the PSP2 or "NGP" has any shot at making money. I'm just astonished by how far Sony has fallen and how irresponsibly, how insanely poorly the company is run these days. How do people like this get control over this much money? I will never know.

Lastly, let's take a look at some Gamer Reactions.

As usual, you've got the crowd that hates Nintendo on one hand,. They've spent the past 6 months trolling every blog and message board insisting that the 3DS has to be terrible and that the PSP2 - based on a magical image they'd built up of it in their heads - would come along and make their fantasies of the original PSP crushing the DS years ago come true. When the much more underwhelming - to flat-out embarrassingly terrible - reality of the PSP2 was revealed today, they're still sticking with it and insisting at every turn that it'll somehow be a serious competitor when Sony just shrunk down their massively failing current console. Literally the worst thing they could have done. But Sony's mistakes and even outright insults to its audience don't shake their most devoted fanboys, who'd buy anything Sony told them to. But of course, this crowd controls a tremendous part of the gaming media, and thus, we get no lack of very visible scorn for Nintendo at every turn over their well-earned current dominance of both the console and portable sides of the game industry, and this has led to some third parties listening to this crowd and the biased - and typically flat-out paid off for positive buzz - media, getting a very different message from what's actually happening, ignoring their actual customers to focus on angry, Nintendo-hating people online who don't actually buy as many games to begin with, let alone as many types. So we get this constant message that it "doesn't count" that the DS crushed the PSP and that the Wii's a universe ahead of its competition, while Sony and Microsoft both visibly flail at relevance with peripherals like Move and Kinect and Sony shows that they have literally no ideas of their own with the PSP2.

Listening to this crowd has been toxic for the industry, which has spent years trying to ignore the elephant in the room - the fact that development costs ballooned to an unsustainable level on the PS3 and 360 - and now will on the PSP2 - requiring million-plus sales just to break even or turn a profit. A tiny sliver of any gaming console's library pulls that off, while the majority do less, and in the past - and present on Nintendo platforms - still made good money at sub-million sales. There was a healthy market for niche and cult games that Sony and Microsoft have forced off of their platforms as a result of the exploding development costs and increasingly long development cycles, so we find ourselves waiting much longer for games to come out, we get less games overall, and hype dies down after you've seen the same game being talked up at the same game show for multiple years in a row. The PS3 and 360 have been undeniably toxic presences in the industry, but too proud to change courses and refocus on the only profitable platforms being put out and backed anymore - by daring to actually make big effort Wii games and marketing them - the industry's been choosing to continue to poison itself, many companies repeatedly losing millions of dollars on PS3/360 releases, then trashing the Wii instead when a low-effort and marketing-free game still made money, just not millions of sales. They turn and attack Nintendo, and they attack the Wii's audience - and you don't get much worse as a company than flat out attacking the very audience on which their survival is dependent, dumping on the actual mass market that has always driven video games. You don't tell the customer they're wrong - third parties need to accept their own error and shift platforms. But in the least so far, they're obviously showing interest in partially doing that by focusing on the 3DS aggressively, while they're all coming off as very standoffish on the PSP2, and rightly so - the original PSP itself wasn't even particularly good for most developers.

On another hand, we get the video gaming forum's equivalent of the "both sides are equally wrong - the truth always lies in the middle" political school of thought. In other words: "You guys are passionate about one side or the other and I don't care to familiarize myself with the facts or follow any trends, so I'm just going to assume you're both wrong and everything's fine." This particular gamer is often seen these days insisting that Sony is 'fine' - when they visibly are not these days - that the PSP was 'equally successful' as the DS, that its library was 'just as good,' that piracy did 'equal' harm to the PSP and DS, that no matter how many millions to billions of dollars Sony and Microsoft lose on their hardware and third parties lose on games on their systems, 'they're fine,' and never ever in financial trouble (You have to ignore all the open signs of companies sinking deeper and deeper into the red this generation, the issue of many companies propping themselves up by merging together to try to support their continually poor business decisions while reinforcing their utter disconnect from where the gaming mass market is these days - the market they desperately need to stay in business.), and that whatever troubles companies have faced, Sony and Microsoft would never lie to us about how they've been doing, nor would third parties ever intentionally opt not to comment on their HD failures while going out of their way to rail on Wii games that even succeeded. They attempt to rationalize and even intellectualize - in what embarrassing ways gaming can be 'intellectualized' - irrational behavior on the industry's part, particularly in regard toward bias against Nintendo and toward Sony, when no facts or objectivity can back such behavior any longer. This type of gamer tends to be seen defending Sony's forum and blog zealots - like the aforementioned lot - who insist that Sony is always the 'rightful king,' and as the company continues to boast that they're "still number one" in dead last place after losing billions of dollars, believe in what they say, while they try to rationalize how it "doesn't count" that Nintendo has changed gaming again as it has, and how vital to the industry and its future it is that Nintendo return to the top, as the only hardware manufacturer with any real vision for the medium. No matter what, all companies have bottomless pockets, Sony and Microsoft are 'fine,' and all complaints about Nintendo are 'justified,' but all criticism of Sony or Microsoft is ill-founded and uncalled for - those media outlets could certainly never be paid off to shield them! - and that no matter what, Nintendo's always on the verge of falling down, while Sony and Microsoft are always reportedly in the middle of a new meteoric rise to the top that simply isn't happening.

In the shortest of the short - the gaming industry is a very stupid place these days, and the gaming subculture is just as awful and stupid. The PSP2 is looking to be an incredible trainwreck of a system, more in line with the PS3 than the PSP (Which was at least a moderate success with some worthy games, though it had nothing on the DS and a lot of serious problems.), and the 3DS is looking to be something pretty incredible, though Nintendo seriously needs to get more ambitious with their online focus. Also, to say it again - if anyone who's ever remotely interested in gaming checks this post out from the outside, heed my advice and stay far, far away from gaming's subculture. Proud "gamers" are some of the most embarrassing and insufferable people you could ever meet - this also tends to be the case for most subcultures.

Years Like Avalanches

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin Fennell) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:16:00 +0000

New Year's Day, 2011. The day that in a silent clamor, new words fell across the untrodden internet gravel of Spiral Reverie. For the first time in almost but not quite two months.

Excuses were offered, manly tears left unshed. Minds like fuses were blown, their boxes unplugged and shipped first-class to deep space. The nebulae were unappreciative, as they usually are. And then the aforementioned excuses were packed up into additional crates and fired off into the future - to be included in an incoming jumble of overdue blog posts delayed for various reasons over the time period not quite known and not quite named "The Missing Months."

So yeah, none of the usual holiday season or new year's fanfare here. "A curious silence," you guys undoubtedly thought - when I say "you guys," I mean the theoretical three or four of you who might accidentally stumble across this blog on Google at some indeterminate point in the past and/or future. This past holiday season was probably the first in which you could say I wasn't "feeling it." However much time I spent trying to get into the "holiday spirit," "cheer," and whatnot, I didn't feel like any of it. The whole season felt like a very sudden and rushed week - a busy and somewhat stressful time, pleasant though it otherwise was. A brief little typhoon, but for the most part, I felt like an outside observer, even inside my own body. And now, just like that, the year's over.

It doesn't really feel like a year's passed. I still feel like I just got over being ill in the late spring/early summer a mere few days ago, though it's January. A January starting with a 62-degree high, following lightning striking thrice in December, in snow falling here several times when it usually never does in December. And this year, it even fell on Xmas night, for the first time in over 60 years. Ups and downs. Pleasant, surreal, and at the moment, a warmer day than I'm fond of seeing in January lies ahead. Looking back, it's the aforementioned illness and its aftermath that defined 2010 for me - not exactly the sort of thing you want defining a year. It's as though a car of some kind just plowed through me when I fell ill back in May last year. I struggled with eating comfortably afterward, and I still feel like I'm not eating entirely normally or comfortably like before now either. I began to starve in the earlier half of summer for how I was feeling, and that's not a problem now, and I've grappled on and off with issues of discomfort with leaving the house and traveling in moving vehicles. At least some of this is probably due to ongoing problems with allergies that I'm to blame for anyway, with a lot of cleaning and dusting to do that's needed doing for months. Congestion can be a real killer. But still, I've felt "off" for over half a year now, and that uncomfortable feeling has yet to cease. It's definitely brought out the hypochondriac in me, and it's hardly a positive - the stress brought on from constantly thinking a million different things could be wrong with you.

These feelings acted as a continual source of distraction for me over the latter half of 2010. They distracted me from keeping focused on my writing - which amounted to attempting to juggle a dozen things at once, from writing contest entries to query letters to writing job applications to regular blogging to novel work; when you chase two hares, you will catch neither - and led me to often seek distraction in my hobbies or the internet. Anything to take my mind off my feeling stressed out, off-kilter, and as though there was something wrong with me in terms of health that I couldn't quite pinpoint, which it could very well just be a mere matter of months of crushing congestion taking a heavy toll. Unfortunately, my talent for adapting to discomfort has its limits.

I have other excuses for not posting here recently, but as alluded to in previous paragraphs, you'll see those excuses in the openings to upcoming posts as I work on catching up on my blogging backlog. I still owe you guys several months' monthly stories and half-cogent babbling on some other topics. (How do you feel about sustainable agriculture?) What better time for this blog to resume a somewhat more reliable update schedule than the new year?

Yes, it's horribly contrived - we begin every new year with the empty tradition of pretending we're going to resolve to accomplish something or some things that year. The older we get, the more mockingly we treat the idea as we realize how self-defeating it is - people rarely change, and even more rarely achieve their ambitions. We'd all be internet superstars if it happened for just anybody, and the very notion of drawing notice would lose all its appeal. We'd have to go counter-culture again, rebelling against the accepted and lauded norms before eventually coming full circle and having to find a new way to reject everything we'd achieved and stood for. Kind of like that recent controversial Patton Oswalt article about nerd culture needing to die in Wired that's prompted a collective temper tantrum from the internet's dominant nerd populace.

Still, as much as I dislike the tradition of "New Year's Resolutions," knowing as much as any other adult that they're wishful thinking that I'm no more likely to achieve than anyone else, I feel that same cringingly unoriginal urge to look forward to the new year ahead and think wishfully of the coming days. Let's organize these thoughts into bullet points - everyone loves bullet points!

- Publishing. Over the course of 2010, I only ended up sending out 8 queries total, falling far short of the number I wanted to send out. Out of those 8, only 2 got replies - both of which were rejection. In perspective, getting responses, even just for rejections, from a quarter of the agents queried isn't bad at all. But I'm still nowhere near the aspiring writer norm yet - I haven't hit the double or triple digits in queries sent, and I'll definitely hit the former this year, though it's hard to say in regard to the latter. You haven't really had the full aspiring writer experience until you've been literally buried if not flat out drowned in rejection letters. You have to be so accustomed to "No! GO AWAY!" that a positive response is nothing short of paralyzing.

I'm planning on finally getting another batch of letters out this month, and more in the spring - the real challenge is narrowing down just whom to query. Agent research continues, at any rate. I just need to find some more agents whose interests include the sort of strange literary fiction I produce.

- Finances. I'm only just over four and a half months from entering my late twenties, those last few years spent teetering on the terrifying brink of one's thirties. A time spent trying not to fall into an abyss constructed by a culture terrified of aging gracefully - or aging at all. You've gotta enjoy those shining years of your youth, 'seishun,' as they say in Japan. After all, once you get into your late twenties, early thirties, and beyond, that's when you get caught in the "real world" bear trap.

Get up, go to work, come home, relax briefly, go to sleep, repeat. Make money, spend money, pay rent and utilities, pay for things you don't have the time to enjoy anymore but are fun to think about. Find someone just as stressed out in their trapped, structured existence, bond, blow off some steam by sleeping together, do that a few more times, then make some mistakes like getting married and having kids. Grow older, realize you were never really in love with anything more than the concept, and that you were both afraid of being alone. Get a divorce, try to live vicariously through your kids, watch as the retirement age is raised every so often in the name of punishing the average person for the mistakes of the wealthy and corrupt. Eventually retire, stress out over reduced medical benefits and the inability to afford to enjoy retired life, get cancer, look back on a life spent working just to get by, die full of regrets.

This structure, when laid out and described in this manner, fits millions - if not billions - of lives across the globe. The magnificent insignificance and quietly tragic mundanity of our existence. So many lead this life or some slight variation of it - I'm ridiculous in that I want to avoid much of it. There's no satisfaction in a traditional life for me, just suffocation in an iron house lined with sleepers; some peaceful, some fretful.

I have yet to make a cent on my writing, though I'm staggering toward hopefully securing some freelance work I'd be suited to. Enough in time, ideally, to be able to make enough of a living to get by on my own. Nearly went with a job I was probably a bit overqualified for last autumn, but as the site's launch neared, I got the sense that it would be better to back out. So far, it's looking like I made the correct choice. I won't name said site, however - considering that this could be seen as a bit of a jab - out of both an interest in professionalism and personal respect for those involved with the site. I just need to keep looking for some kind of freelance writing work I'd be well-suited to while I continue to work on getting my first novel published. It would probably be ideal to find a steady paying writing gig for a longer period in the future too, if even possible, considering how hard it is to make a living on published novels - and writing in general - these days. Print and publishing have been dying for years now - it kind of only figures that my skill set is dependent on these fields. On people actually being willing to pay for my writing, and to pay to read it.

- Relocation. Moving didn't happen last year, but it's definitely on the table for this year. I need to get out on my own and 'begin' my life at last. San Francisco's still the primary destination I'm looking at, but things've only gotten more complicated. I need to work on arranging a trip out there for probably a week or so sometime this year - and to arrange it months in advance to minimize costs, as travel's hardly cheap - to get a feel for the place. One of my best friends and I were planning on splitting rent on an apartment when I moved there sometime later this year - he's kind of pushed that aside without warning now in lieu of now planning to get a place with a friend from his grad school instead, so I'm getting more into high-and-dry territory here, with costs of living now significantly increasing again. Lovely. This aspect of my plans for the year just got a lot more complicated, so it'll be interesting to see just what happens.

- Redesign. Still need to work on redesigning Spiral Reverie. Meant to last year, but never got much work done on that front. I still like the shades of gray-themed visual color scheme the blog's always had, but I know that it can be altered to work better overall. And frankly, the blog could stand to be more visually appealing - I'm sure its current look has driven off plenty of potential readers. I'm still just not sure where to begin - I'm disinclined to use the new Blogger template designer, since that's entirely geared toward using others' template designs, color schemes, photography, and other visual elements. Rather than looking like any other number of blogs out there, I want Spiral Reverie to be unique. The problem is, I lack the skill and visual design talent it would take to remake this blog into something more ideal. Still as much of a problem this year as it was last year.

- Novel Numero Dos. I didn't make nearly as much progress on Project Princess as I would have liked last year. I need to find the time to pick up the pace again this year and ideally get most of it finished within the year while balancing more regular blogging again.

- Those Crazy Electronic Thingamajigs. On a leisure note, Nintendo's launching their new 3DS portable in North America in March. A deluge of new information and game media will be coming out starting just a few days from now up through the Japanese launch next month and into the near-spring as the North American launch date nears. It has one of the most exciting game lineups - if not the most exciting - a new platform has ever had announced before launch. So as a video game nerd, it's a damn exciting year for the hobby, considering how the platform practically makes a good case for console obsolescence with all of its features and technical strengths. This is the first new platform launch since Spiral Reverie's birth on the internet four years ago today, so I'll undoubtedly be writing up some more nerdy commentary on it in the comings weeks and months. Look forward to that! (Or beware, depending on your interests as a reader of my blog.)

As of this coming June, it will have been four years since I moved home after finishing college. These years are passing far too quickly, and far too much of my youth seems to be quietly evaporating before my eyes, forming regret-condensation on my windows as the months wheel by and my precious cold months inevitably return to the heat that consumes more of each passing year. I have a lot that I need to get done this year. I've got to get better at juggling - I've got to stop feeling off-kilter and feel healthier again. I've got to get my life on track, my writing out there, before it stalls any further or worse yet derails. With each passing year, I carry only more pressure on my shoulders, only more stress, but there are things I need to do, that I need to accomplish like anyone else. Assuming it isn't a complete disaster, 2011 will be a big year. And I suspect that like the last, it too may tumble by like an avalanche.

Until everything ends, the future is always oncoming. It's hazy and often imperceptible, and never guaranteed to be bright and shiny - neither for individuals nor nations. All anyone can do is grit their teeth and continue marching forward. We have to try not to trip.