No Airbending Allowed

You’d be surprised how many people I would ask about James Cameron’s Avatar film and had them wonder about the cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. More than a few people actually believed he was directing the live action film coming out next year, as opposed to M. Night Shyamalan. Figures. Of course, that’s died downed considerably now, as more and more word has gotten out about the film and more and more people have seen it. I saw it almost immediately after it came out, but as usual, I got lazy and didn’t write about it on time. Most other websites, friends, and family members to those who are reading this have also probably seen the film by now, so this is kinda redundant.

But I don’t care! I’m going to write about it anyway and you’re damn well going to read it! …no seriously please don’t close your browser I’ll be good.

So what’s to say? Well, the pedigree of the director is pretty good. James Cameron is known for his massively successful blockbusters and his amazingly good action scenes, with movies like Terminator 2 and Titanic earning massive critical acclaim and grossing millions upon millions of dollars in cash. Thus, most people went in knowing that we were about to see something epic… not to mention horribly expensive. I mean, the movie cost something like 400 million dollars to make. That’s a hell of a lot of money for a single film, even though it’s pretty much guaranteed that he’ll make that money back in box office sales. Because it’s James Effing Cameron. Come on.

There was also the matter of the interesting nature in which the film was developed – it was intended to be in 3D. And it was not to be the childish 3D that has been all the rage in a bunch of films with a target audience of 12 and under, with the old red and blue tinted glasses. No sir, this is a new kind of 3D, a lot smoother and visually appealing. Cameron had to design and invent a bunch of cameras during the filming process just so he could see exactly what the movie was going to look like during filming, and a large majority of cinemas in numerous countries have all been outfitted with the technology needed to show these things. If there was one thing to be promised from this movie, it was that it was to be pretty.

So enough rambling about the technology – let’s get into the movie. Sam Worthington finds himself as a marine on the moon of some alien world called Pandora, where humans have set up camp to mine a rare and precious metal called Unobtainium. Yes, they actually called it that. A nod to TV Tropes, perhaps? Either way, it’s never explained why this metal is so valuable, other than the fact that it is, so we’re all just expected to sit and nod and agree that humans have a dire need to take over this planet and strip mine the shit out of it. So why is Sam Worthington there? Well, because there are native aliens on the planet – blue catpeople aliens called Na’vi, a very primitive and spiritual race – and so in order to communicate with them the human scientists have cooked up artificial hybrids called Avatars (oh, so THAT’S why they called it that) that are mentally controlled by a few people to go out, study the planet, hang out with the Na’vi, and get them to shove off. Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully, who is there because his dead brother was the person that one particular Avatar was genetically encoded to, and he just happens to share the genome. Things are already looking pretty grim, since you know what happens when you give a soldier a new toy…

So they get a stupid crippled ex-Marine in one of the big blue body suits, and let him loose on the planet along with Sigourney Effing Weaver (I love this actress) and that one guy from Dodgeball who I forget the name of, and they go frolicking around doing all this science-y stuff. Sam Worthington ends up pissing off an animal and gets separated from the others, meaning he has to try and survive the night in Pandora alone in his Avatar body. He bumps into a Na’vi female, however, and she realises that he’s special and brings him back to her tribe. He’s made to study and learn their ways by Na’vi and humans alike so that, again, he can make them sod off so the humans can roll their miners in.

And from there, the rest of the movie up until the last parts are pretty much Jake learning of the Na’vi race, understanding their hunter ways, their culture, their spiritual connection to the rest of the planet, and culminates in him learning very very closely the femininity of his female Na’vi guide. Hellooooo. You’ll probably hear plenty of jokes about the furry porn scene, but it’s incredibly tame and I’m sick of hearing the jokes, so I’ll just pass them on.

Nonetheless, at about this time, the humans decide that diplomacy is taking too damn long, so they start steamrolling. Jake gets pissed at this, since the Na’vi are pretty cool guys and humans are just dicks, so he ends up getting his fellow Avatar operators to fight against them. And then we get fourty five minutes of the most ridiculously freaking hardcore action scenes to be filmed this decade. Seriously, this shit is phenomenal, and by the end of it I was just grinning and applauding the welcome return of James Cameron. Say what you will about him, but the man can make a bitching fight scene.

That’s the base idea of the plot. So what can be said about it? Well… it’s not perfect. I can summarise the plot in such a manner as I have because it is, well, cliched. Just about every little bit of the plot is drawn from this cliche or that, and anyone who is at all like me will be sitting there accurately predicting the outcome of the movie half an hour before it happens. The plot can largely be described as a modern retelling of Ferngully, more or less, only throw in a touch of the Matrix and of every mecha series out of Japan for added hardcore. The dialogue is nothing to write home about, either, generally being pretty lame or unimpressive. But it gets the job done in the end, and the actors pull off what they can with it. Have I ever mentioned that I really like Sam Worthington? He and Sigourney Weaver in the same film made me happy. Moving on…

So the plot is average and cliched but entertaining, and the dialogue is meh. So the other half of the puzzle is the visuals. Oh man, the visuals. Modern video game developers WISH they could make graphics look this incredible while modern video game players will be groaning at a visually over the top game with too little funding on, you know, gameplay and stuff. But that’s bitter, cynical, and largely irrelevant of me! You didn’t come to hear me talk about that. Back to the point, Cameron has crafted a massive, lush, verdant, horribly horribly beautiful world in Pandora. He’s developed a giant forest, inhabited it with a bunch of interesting and bizarre creatures, and thrown in more unique flora and fauna than Australia has going for it. Probably even more dangerous than Australian flora and fauna too, and that’s saying something. Everything is pretty – even the Na’vi are pretty in their catlike way, and even the military establishments and crafts are at least put together with a lot of attention to detail.

If that wasn’t enough, they then technofied the whole thing by making it 3D. Every frame of the movie took hours upon hours to perfect, and it all comes together incredibly. The 3D isn’t quite as “OH SHIT THERE’S AN ASTEROID FLYING RIGHT AT ME” as it has been in the past, and it just ends up creating a multi-layered picture before your eyes that ends up making it feel a touch more natural, and gone are the days of red and blue colours in front of everything – now it just looks normal, like it all belongs there. Granted, it wasn’t perfect – I was watching this movie at a big screen cinema and I was positioned towards the front on the far right side, so there were times when things seemed a touch out of focus and not completely aligned. There’s also the fact that 3D has never properly agreed with me, and I ended up leaving the theatre with a bad eyestrain headache. But all in all, the visuals are just so incredible that I can’t recommend seeing it in 2D, you just miss out on so much.

Now we come back to the action scene. And boy, it’s big. Effectively, the entire airborne armada of the humans is flying towards the primary Na’vi spiritual centre (to not give away too many details), and so an airborne armade of Na’vi riding dragonhawkbirdinosaurthings comes to meet them in a dogfight the likes of which could never in your life be replicated in a blog like this. Suffice to say, it is ridiculously good. You have to stretch your sense of disbelief slightly, just to accept the fact that Na’vi arrows which before were entirely ineffective on human ships are now piercing through them when shot from above, but if you’re willing to do that (and you should be) you get a badass action scene that leaves the little manchild who likes explosions in all us very sated.

Prior to that big battle, though, it’s largely a documentary sort of thing. I don’t really mind this – I enjoyed District 9 for that reason, and it does paint an interesting and very pretty picture about Pandora and the whole setup. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, though, and I know plenty of people who were altogether disappointed with how the rest of the movie played out.

Still, I’ve rambled on enough, so let’s get a conclusion going. In case you can’t tell, I liked the movie. There were plenty of things I could pick fault with – as I said, the plot is cliched, the dialogue is less than impressive, there’s a few holes in the plot and a little suspension of disbelief required, and in returned you’re lambasted with glorious eye candy. I consider it entirely worth it. The cliches didn’t really ruin anything for me, and I was just willing to put aside my inner critic, relax, and enjoy. And enjoy I did. At the end of the day, I can’t be overly critical of it, because it’s obvious to me that the entire movie was a labor of love by the director. He poured his heart into it, he put an immense amount of money and effort into making it the way it is, and it seems like he really, strongly believes in it.

For that reason, I am all too happy to believe in it as well. Two thumbs up from Kris with a K, and I highly recommend you all to go see it if you haven’t already. I also suggest that you see it in 3D if you are given the chance, because it really does add a whole new dimension to the picture. Hahahaha… ha.

We’ve almost ended the year, it seems, and I’m a little disappointed with how lackluster a performance I’ve given as far as steady updates for this whole blog thing. Something to work on, I think. I’ll probably give a post in the next couple of days before the year is out just to wrap things up.

I woke up this morning and just hated everything!

So I changed the theme for Blog With a K, as you can see. Why? Well, I got sick of the colour scheme and just wanted something plain, as well as something that takes up most of the screen so my walls of text don’t seem quite so condensed. Hahaha… yeah… fat chance of that. At the same time, I also changed it to match the secondary blog I’ve decided to start up after much umming and uhhing, which you can access over there on the links bar to the right. As the name implies, it’s pretty much all about World of Warcraft, so read at your own risk.

Once again! I have gone an entire month without posting, and once again I make the half-hearted promise that I shall not do so in the future. I don’t have much to write about at the moment, given that my gaming time has been largely taken up by World of Warcraft as usual, but I can sum up a few of the games I have been playing until I can get around to writing full reviews of them.

Torchlight: This game is pretty much Diablo in every way, shape and form, with shiny graphics and a bunch of unique and individual features which I seriously hope Blizzard is taking note of. They could make Diablo 3 an even better game than it’s already shaping up to be.

Dragon Age: There’s a lot of hype about this game, and most of it is true. It’s a good, solid RPG in an actually relatively dark fantasy world. I have some gripes with the gameplay mechanics, but that can wait for the full review. Suffice to say, it’s worth your time.

Star Wars – Knights of the Old Republic: I picked this up on a Steam sale for $2.50 US, given that I never actually got around to finishing the game when I first had it. I’ve been playing through it, and it’s just as awesome as I remember it being.

Left 4 Dead 2: This game is a lot of fun from what I’ve played, but due to irritating technical difficulties, that’s really not much. I keep getting crash to desktop errors and so any experiences have been very limited. I need to find ways around that… maybe just installing a new OS because Vista has long since worn out it’s welcome. Still. Plenty of zombie-killing action to be had, even in the censored Australian version.

And that’ll do for now. I’ll be back.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the download

I’m a mad collector of games, most who know me can attest to this… and if you’re reading this blog, then you probably know me, so start attesting. If you cannot attest, then you obviously don’t know me as well as you think you do, and thus I find it curious that you’re reading this text and am curious as to your story. Leave a comment or send me an email or something, okay? Chatting with more people would be cool.

Wow, that was an interesting tangent. Back on topic.

For whatever reason, I find myself collecting more games than I actually play. It’s pretty much my means of burning disposable income which I could have been using on things like, you know, a life. A future. Or books. Mostly books. But that can wait. I own several dozen PS2 games that I’ve picked up over the two or three years that I’ve owned the console, and yet I usually bought them because they fit the genres or stereotypes or archetypes or tropes or whatever the hell you want to label them that appeal to my taste in games. You’ll find a ton of RPGs, a handful of strategy games, a couple of fighters and action games, and so on so forth. You’ll also find a few rare ones which anybody in Australia has probably never even heard of, let alone seen and purchased in the store. One such game – Shadow of the Colossus – is probably my favourite game on the console. Again, that’s deviating from the topic at hand.

So it’s no surprise that with as many games as I have, I tend to be in and out of the video game stores quite a bit. And that brings me finally to the discussion I wanted to have. See, I’m at the point now where there’s very few games that I want to buy anymore, and those that I do want to buy usually don’t make it to Australia so I import and/or pirate as needed just to play them. I lack a current generation console beyond the PS2, which gets very few new games, and a Wii, which is currently broken and will not be repaired until there’s a new game on it I want to buy. It’s been broken for twelve months now and has not had a game purchased for it since Super Smash Bros Brawl came out in June 2008. It’s only just now considering getting fixed because I want to buy Pikmin 2. Nonetheless, I have no Xbox 360 or PS3. That leaves the device that I spend most of my time with – the PC.

The PC still, from time to time, gets games that I would like to play. Many of them are ports suffering from horrible consolitis – Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Oblivion are recent examples. But plenty are not. However, the PC distinguishes itself in that these days there are now two viable options of purchasing games for it. You have the traditional means of exchanging money for goods and services at ye olde electronic entertainment shoppe, and you have the power of the internet delivering you games straight to your computer in the form of digital distribution.

At first digital distribution didn’t get that much attention, but these days it’s being seen more and more. Valve Entertainment has their practically iconic program slash service slash media entertainment platform that they call Steam, and it’s certainly the captain of the industry. Just about every major game developer these days works in tandem with Valve and puts their games up on Steam for digital distribution. Pick a game, fire off your details, and bam. It’s downloaded to your account. You can then download and install it freely on every computer system that you log in to Steam on, which is massively convenient if you have more than one PC like yours truly. No more than, you know, putting the CD in one PC then the other, but you know what I mean.

I didn’t pay much heed to it at first, but I’ve started to use digital distribution a lot more myself. This started at first due to some games simply not being made available by any other means, like the Penny Arcade games (which are hilarious if you’re a fan of the comic, by the way). Just yesterday I bought Torchlight through Steam following favourable reviews, some interesting looking trailers and videos, and because I thought it might suffice as a time killer until Diablo 3 shows up on my doorstep. And I’m starting to look at digital distribution for most of my PC game needs too.

There are various reasons for this. I have no problems going out to a store and buying the games there – I’m not so antisocial that I refuse to step outside or anything, so the convenience is convenient but not an absolute essential fact. The primary reasons are very simple though. The first is that I can access the American versions of many games, which is useful in various ways which I’ll elaborate on. But the second is that MOST VIDEO GAME STORES ARE RUN BY COMPLETE RAGING ASSHOLES.

Ahem. Right now, the Australian currency practically mirrors the US currency in exchange rate for the first time in as long as I’ve been old enough and internet savvy enough to give a toss. It’s something like a 10% surcharge on the US price, which is nifty. However, most brand new US games go for 50-60 dollars… and Australian games go for 100-110. Cost of living and wages and what have you will even that out somewhat, but when the exchange rate is favorable, I can go nuts on the internet and buy everything I need for practically half price. I get fully supported digital versions of all the games and all the documentation that I might need for them without incident, and these will continue to work even if my disk drive breaks or the CD gets scratched… because there is no CD. The only limiting factor is that you have to be able to access the internet most of the time, but if the internet is down I just leave the computer and go play console/read a book anyway, so that’s not a concern. The other major issue is that you have to download these games… and some of these puppies are a whopping 15GB of data. When you’re on a download cap like most Australians have to be, that’s a significant chunk of your monthly allotment gone in a flash. That’s the only real thing that concerns me personally.

Then there are the video game stores. These guys, in Australia, are jerks. Because the gaming industry isn’t that huge here with only a small amount of residents in the country to buy the games, let alone very few of those people actually interested in buying them, they very rarely get most games in. A lot of developers don’t bother releasing games for us, and those that do usually just make use of the fact that we share the same regional codes as Europe and make us buy those instead. Even then, a lot of the video game stores don’t import from Europe, meaning collectors like me often find about 30% of the games I’ve wanted out of reach either by lack of localisation or lack of local imports. This doesn’t help the consumer market grow, which in turn means less sales, which in turn means less reason to import the good games which maybe three people in the country (myself among them) want to buy. That’s frustrating.

Then there are the prices. As I’ve said… these things are expensive. Assuming that you can FIND a copy of the game, the local stores will charge double what the US will. Even the used games are ridiculously overpriced, usually with only ten bucks chopped off the top of the price. I don’t really expect them to adjust their prices for exchange rates, honestly, since I’m sure they have cost prices and what not to make a profit on… but then because they don’t, it suddenly becomes horribly infeasible to buy them locally. Thus, I’m turning more and more to digital distribution, and will probably do so in the future extensively.

The internet is already pretty much the way of the future for the PC in both general use and in the gaming scene, so this doesn’t really surprise me. But no doubt more and more people are considering to buy through these methods.

All that said and done, I’m going to look buying and downloading Dragon Age through Steam. Because really… I don’t want to have to pay 40 bucks extra for a pretty box. As much as the box looks nice in my collection pile…

Better late than never

Anybody who expected this blog to be properly maintained and promptly updated on a regular basis clearly doesn’t know me well enough. But I refuse to let it languish forever.

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, so I’ll quickly sum up the events of the last few months. Following the latest post, I did end up seeing Inglourious Basterds, and it was every bit as good as I’d hoped it to be. The production quality was exceptional, and the movie was very well written to the point that while each scene lasted quite a long time, it captivated you with every word for every second. It was really enjoyable, and I can see why Tarantino considered it his magnum opus.

Some time afterwards, I went with a couple of friends to see District 9. Apparently this film has been known about and under careful scrutiny for some time – the writer or director or somesuch was originally slated to produce the Halo movie but got this when it was scrapped – and yet I didn’t even know of it’s existence until I saw the trailer a week before release, when I was seeing Inglourious Basterds (amusingly enough).

So I saw it that weekend, and ended up walking away with a grin on my face. It felt like a video game movie done right. It was your standard science fiction fare with a thinly veiled social commentary over the top of it for the first half, and played out like a documentary which I thought was interesting and well handled. Towards the second half of the movie, the whole style changed and it became much more of an action film. However, as my friends and I were all video game afficionados, we delighted ourselves in seeing comparisons between the ensuing slaughter and a number of various games. We saw bits and pieces of Doom, Half-Life, Far Cry, Halo, and every major FPS franchise under the sun in there. It wasn’t the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, but it was definitely one of the better films I’d seen this year and it was vastly enjoyed.

Unfortunately, that’s about the extent of my filmgoing for a while, though next on the agenda is Avatar – that’s the James Cameron sci-fi flick, not the one based on the cartoon series. That’s The Last Airbender, and I’ll be seeing that next year. From what I’ve seen of the previews, it looks to be an interesting sci-fi flick, and I’m a fan of gadgets so the new 3D projection cameras or what have you will be interesting to see in action. Plus it has Sam Worthington as the lead actor, and he was the large redeeming factor of the Terminator Salvation and has quickly become a favourite of mine. Thus, it should be worth supporting.

Nowadays, my time has been spent playing a slew of DS titles as well as the odd PC or console game here and there. I have a few write ups that I plan to give (and actually give) in the coming days, and will probably use those as a break from writing my NaNo. That’s where the rest of my time is going now – I’m furiously writing out a novel for that competition, meaning I need 50000 words written of an entirely new story by the end of the month. It’s a grueling competition, but well within my capabilities… I just need to do it. I’ll likely put the results of my writing up here when it’s finished so I can begin the editing process.

Finally, the writing is also coming into conflict with such things as my casual job, my casual studying and the last few weeks of that course, and the massive preparations that my family and I are putting into my 21^st party that occurs towards the end of the month. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate, but at least it’s keeping me busy.

Nonetheless, I’ll be back to writing in this blog. Don’t wait up for me, but do keep an eye on this spot.

The John Dillinger Society

On the weekend, I went with a few friends of mine that compose my regular D&D group out to see a movie. We had every intention of going to see the latest Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds (yes, that is spelt correctly), and partaking in what was sure to be a bloodbath of proportions that popular culture would go so far as to call art. I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all, either – Tarantino is really quite a good film maker, and while his trademark may just be excessive violence in many ways, every single one of his movies is a homage in some way to this or that genre and usually does a great job. This is a movie we legitimately wanted to see.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see it, because it wasn’t released yet. This is despite the cinema company’s website insisting that it would be available that day at regular intervals. We plan to see it next week. That said, one doesn’t simply make the trip up to the shopping centre with the intent to see a movie, and not see a movie. So we ended up seeing Public Enemies instead.

It’s been a few days since I’ve seen it, and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. I wanted to like the movie, I really did, and I think at the basest level I do like it. My friends all enjoyed it and we walked away feeling pretty satisfied. And yet… I sat through the entire thing feeling somewhat disengaged, pondering to myself about the highlights or downsides of the movie and just trying to see where it went wrong – what it did that failed to draw me into it as so many other movies have.

The movie is, essentially, historical fiction. It’s set in the later years of the Great Depression era in America, and focuses on some of the more famous gangsters in history – notably John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber, played in this rendition by Johnny Depp. This is always a good sign – Johnny Depp is renowned as an actor for being able to take just about any role from the widest range imaginable, and pull it off really well. Public Enemies is no exception, and as ever he delivers a great performance. The biggest downside to that is, however, that the character comes off being remarkably calm and cool to the point of feeling less than alive. He seems real enough, sure, but it’s hard to engage with him when he comes across as so very blank. The movie follows his progress from about the time that J. Edgar Hoover gave Dillinger the rank of Public Enemy #1, and also highlights the actions of the investigator charged with bringing him down – Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale and delivered equally well. The film guides the viewer through Dillinger’s exploits up until his eventual takedown, showing his organisation and the plots and actions of the gangsters while contrasting this with the counter plots of the police forces trying to bring him down.

Sounds good? It was okay, but as should be clear by now, it didn’t really come across as excellent. It feels… flat, I guess. The bank robbery scenes are delivered in such a way that they lack feeling, it seems. These could be suspenseful or fast-paced or any other number of descriptors and come out as real highlights in the movie, but they’re just so… bland. They end up sinking into the background and fail to make a large impact on the overall story. The same thing happens during most of the gunfights and standoffs, leaving only one or two actually memorable action scenes within the entire flick. This could be easily passed off if the story focus was heavy and the intricacies of the gangster movement’s were made clear. But they weren’t. It feels disjointed in that it jumps from scene to scene with little explanation and not all that much progression, and thus as a stand alone, they all suffer. In the particularly heavy character building scenes, these could have saved the movie if John Dillinger had been a really likable guy, but as said earlier, Johnny Depp played him off as being a little too cool, a little too detached. He just felt hard to like.

So at the end of the day, my friends and I could all agree that it wasn’t a bad movie and we had our fun with it. Yet, as I said, it all just felt too disjointed and lacked any real spark of excitement. It didn’t engage me at all, and just left me feeling dispassionate. I’m not even sure if I actually liked the movie, or just really wanted to like it because… you know… Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, gangsters and bank robbers. It sounds like a match made in heaven, but it really wasn’t. This isn’t a movie I’d tag as “You must go see it right now”.

Here’s hoping Inglourious Basterds is better!

Mind control and mecha, oh my

It’s been something of a slow week in my life, hence the lack of posts. I could probably have whipped up something, but eh… I’m still working on that laziness thing. I have, however, stumbled upon something that may hopefully provide motivation for me in the future.

For a start, I’m now seriously looking at doing freelance writing for websites. A buddy of mine from my local World of Warcraft community, of all places, actually writes video game articles as a job. When I commented to her that she’s pretty much employed in my dream job, she responded by giving me a heads up to a few websites that might just take freelance submissions. I’m researching the matter a little, but with luck, I might have just found a way to get started into this gaming journalist career I’ve been hunting down for a while. Wish me luck.

In lieu of gaming today, given that I’ve been doing so little of it, I’ll bring up another topic… anime. A considerable portion of my free time these days has found itself dedicated to watching through one notable anime series. I’m not usually a huge watcher of anime – a lot of overly excessive geeks will just watch any old anime series and treat it like pure gold, just because it’s anime. I prefer to take a more objective view – like any film or television series, I judge it not on the medium it uses, but on the experience it delivers. As such, barring all the negative connotations so many people attach to anime watchers, I try to watch the best series and judge them for myself. This hasn’t led me astray, as some have been really, really good.

I’m watching one of those now, and it goes by the name of Code Geass. It’s an incredibly complicated affair. In an alternate world, the country of America (now called Britannia) decided to make a bid for power and started invading several other countries around the world, including (and primarily) Japan. Of course, they did so with the ultimate weaponry of any anime genre… giant robots. These Knightmare Frames, as they’re called, proved the turning point and Japan ended up as a conquered nation labelled only as Area 11. Naturally, a lot of people aren’t happy about this, so resistance groups sprang up all throughout the country as matters progressed to a head. But overall, not much happened in the way of getting their country back.

That is, until seven years later, when the main character enters the scene properly. A student named Lelouch, it takes all of the intro of the first episode for his aim to be stated – he plans to destroy Britannia. By the end of the first episode, he’s given the means to do this – he gains the titular power of Geass, with which he can issue orders to a person that they have to follow, without question. Naturally, the power has limits in terms of use and duration, but with this he sees a chance to see his dreams fulfilled… and so his power struggle to take up arms and fight Britannia begins. That pretty much sums up the plot – there is a lot more to it, and there’s all sorts of internal affairs and complicated happenings going on during these events to make it even easier. The plot gets pretty convuluted at times, but never seems too hard to follow.

Overall, though, I have to say that I really like what I’ve seen of the series so far. Lelouch is one hell of a Chessmaster, playing off all the various groups and characters of all sides with remarkably precise manipulations, making for some real “Holy crap” moments when all the plans and actions come together properly. This is compounded further by the other characters. Each of them has a role to play, and tends to have a very fleshed out character history and personality, so the way they’re all interwoven together into the story and each other with such tact is really remarkable. I found myself really understanding and liking a large majority of the characters, and so watching their antics was really quite a joy. Like Death Note before it, Code Geass also serves to making both of the sides believable and understandable, and though you find yourself supporting one or the other, you can’t help but like the other and hope that they get a happy ending too.

So great characters, great writing, great plot. If that wasn’t good enough, Code Geass is home to the ultimate guilty pleasure for so many geeks, myself included – mecha. Giant freaking robots out the wazoo. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I really like the things, and their inclusion in this series was a surprise at first, but definitely a welcome one. The action scenes with the mecha end up being remarkably well animated while being frantic and fast-paced, and they provide a nice contrast to all the storytelling and dialogue and keep it from dragging on or getting too boring. So all in all, the anime really is the complete package. I’m just hoping it remains as excellent as it has been thus far all the way through to the conclusion. There were two seasons, each with 25 episodes, and I’ve watched the first 20. Odds are I’ll see it through to the very end, though.

Guess that’s pretty much all I have to comment on for now. Oh, actually, one last note. I’m sorely tempted to make a blog dedicated solely to World of Warcraft. Reason being is that I can think of two majority groups of my friends and contacts who might be reading this… those who play WoW, and those who don’t. Rather than alienate one or the other, I’ll probably set up a separate blog for all my WoW thoughts so that other readers don’t just roll their eyes and ignore this blog as a result, and that gives me a working space to blab away about where a good portion of my gaming time goes. What do you guys think?

Just add satisfaction

Earlier this evening, I finished Mass Effect after a small amount of delay. It was a lot of fun all up, and the ending was satisfying and sets the stage for the sequels nicely while still providing enough closure to make me feel like all my actions had paid off. It also gets kudos from me as being one of the few games since Planescape Torment to allow you to talk your way out of one of the final boss battles. However, as gratifying as it was, it certainly wasn’t the same feeling of sheer joy that I got when, say, I completed Golden Sun 2 for the first time. Or when I cried at the end of Final Fantasy 9. Or when I beat Chrono Trigger and then immediately set about replaying it to get every ending. So that leads me to the point of this post.

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how gratifying video games are these days… that is to say, whether or not they actually are. If I look back at the games I played when I was younger and how I approached them then, it seems like I had a lot more fun then than I do now. There are numerous factors as to why this could possibly be, and unfortunately I can’t figure out whether things were different with the games, or if things are just different with me.

Interestingly enough, my first major experiences with gaming as a whole came in the late years of primary and early years of high school. I’d sampled a few games during the lead up to this time and was a Tetris champion by the age of five – to this day people seem to be scared of how well I play that game – but I never truly understood just how big the world of video games was until I played the first generation of Pokemon games back in 1998. I could (and probably will at some point) write a whole post on Pokemon, but I’ll cut it down for now and simply say that it changed my understanding of how games could work. That they didn’t have to be short, simple, insert coin to replay style affairs but could actually have long chains of progression towards the one or more conclusions set up at the end of the adventure. From there, I tried a few other games that I started to get into, ranging from Quake to Starcraft to Baldur’s Gate to Chrono Trigger. Some of these games I’d even played before briefly, but they never really opened my eyes to the hobby as a whole until Pokemon.

Probably part of the reason that I found gaming so fun and satisfying back then was that everything I sampled was new to me. Back then, every time I picked up a new game, it was probable that it was a genre I’d never tried out before, or did something that might have been a convention then but certainly was nothing I’d ever experienced. It only progressed as I got older and went into high school. A lot of my earlier gaming experiences actually came from emulation, I’m embarrassed to say… the Nintendo 64 was entering the final stretch of it’s lifespan, and the Playstation 2 was already starting to dominate the industry even as the Gamecube and Xbox were being prepped for launch. Yet I didn’t have the money or the insipidly placating parents to get me any of these consoles, so… I instead turned to the internet and harvested the very best games from the previous generation of systems which were no longer available for purchase, mostly the Super Nintendo. To this day, that console stands as my absolute favourite due to the huge diversity of unique and interesting games that it had, many of which set the bar for what we play today.

Nonetheless, my small group of geek friends and I would end up talking about this game or that that we’d tried, and usually swapped the emulated games around to further our experiences. It was like virtual drugs or something, in hindsight. But these games were the very best at the time, and I played them for hours on end every day, always enjoying and always trying more. This has continued for years to the point where I am now, entering adulthood and trying to find a place where I can write about this stuff for a living. And… I suppose in the decade or so that I’ve been gaming, it’s started to grow stale.

Nowadays, a lot of my time is spent gaming, yes. But in the past year, a huge percentage of that gaming time was dominated by the implacable World of Warcraft, the ultimately pinnacle of online games or so many would tell you. I purchased a PS2 and a steadily growing pile of games, I bought out all the games that were worth playing on the Gamecube and then the Wii, and I hunted down and collected just about every DS game that I’d ever need. I’m insatiable… I tend to buy games just for the sake of having them, purchasing elusive and rare titles before barely playing them, simply taking pleasure in having them in my growing collection. For all those games that I’ve purchased and enjoyed, none of them have come close to draining hours of my life compared to WoW. Why is this? Addictiveness aside, for the longest time I’ve felt a much stronger pull to WoW than I have to any other game. Part of this may be the fact that I use it like a second social life, embedding myself in roleplaying communities and forging online friendships that have been just as special and important to me as the relationships I’ve developed with people here in real life. But sometimes, I just feel… that the other games are lacking. The gratification that I had as a teenager is gone, and I can’t figure out why it’s gone.

Sitting in front of a console for hours used to be something I’d relish, but nowadays I’ll sit there in abject boredom wondering when the fun will start before simply giving up. Even games I adore get a couple of hours of playtime before I put them aside for days… weeks… even months. The most affinity I’ve had for a console game in forever was Persona 4, which I racked up a huge amount of playtime on during the initial few weeks. Three months after the launch, I still haven’t finished it. As time wore on I played it less and less. I do plan to finish it, if only to conclude what I’ve already spent fifty hours of playtime on, but the appeal just isn’t really there… nor is it there for any of the dozens of other games I have sitting there, calling my name. In comparison, my PC gets a lot more playtime… but if you take away WoW and all the other online activities I take part in, they’d probably be fairly even. Heck, even my DS gets more playtime, largely because I take it with me everywhere I go and there are a lot of long train trips in my weekly schedule that need a time killer.

I wonder why this is. Have I just grown old and bitter, to the point where I don’t like having fun and gaming anymore? I really doubt it. There are two potential answers I have regarding the situation. The first is that I relished gaming when it was all shiny and new, but now that it’s become such a huge part of my life, it takes something truly special and unique to pull me in because I’ve experienced everything else before. This is quite likely, really… none of my all time favourite games were made in the last five years, and everything since the release of, say, the second Golden Sun game has been mild upgrades over long-standing formulae to the point where it just doesn’t feel new. Fun, sure, sometimes. But it lacks something that pulls me in.

The second answer is that the games themselves are at fault. Developers have grown lax, developers have lost their inventive spark, developers have forgotten their priorities and focus on shiny graphics than good gameplay systems and intriguing stories. At times this seems to be the case too… I’m still waiting to see a game with dialogue and intrigue as compelling as that presented in Baldur’s Gate 2 and Planescape Torment,or a JRPG as all around refined and fun as Chrono Trigger. The industry has gone mainstream and is more concerned with pulling in the big bucks than actually being new and interesting. It could easily be the case.

Maybe even both of these are the case. Maybe the games just aren’t what they used to be, and as such I’m tired of the same old repetition that each “new” experience delivers. Maybe it’s something else entirely, in that I might be drawn to the social element of gaming more than the games themselves, leaving me feeling alone and empty while plowing through single player games. Who knows… but it is something I think about. I’m not so impassive that the hobby is no longer fun, though, and I’ll be at it for a while and boring you all with walls of text for years to come, no doubt.

This is a subject I’d really appreciate comments and feedback on, though, more than any of the others here so far. What are your thoughts on this subject, guys? I know at least a few of you are reading.

The effect is massive

As I go back and forth exchanging minor blows with my health for a week or so, I found myself with little urge to write, and instead to immerse myself in whatever games came along. I suppose it needs to be said that I’m a phenomenally slow gamer – it’s very rare that I purchase a game on launch day, and even if I do, I usually don’t actually get around to powering through it for a considerable amount of time later. Whereas plenty of people will just pick up a game and sit with it until it’s been conquered a week later, I dabble in my games slowly, piece-by-piece, often taking years to complete games that everyone else has long since tired of. Prototype was the only experience in recent memory that I got new and finished new.

So there was this one game that I’d heard quite a bit about but, lacking the right console at the launch and the interest after the PC port became available, I didn’t pick it up. But the pedigree was quite impressive… an RPG made by Bioware, the giants that have brought some of the greatest western RPGs in history to us. With the company that assisted in the creation of such utterly brilliant titles such as the Baldur’s Gate games, I must have been crazy to let this game languish for so long.

In case you hadn’t figured it out from the post title, the game in question is Mass Effect.

I picked the game up last week sometime while it was going cheap in a sale at EB. After having a little trouble installing it, I eventually jumped right into it… and then couldn’t stop. I don’t think I’ve had the game any longer than eight days, yet I’ve poured well over twenty hours into it thus far, bringing me to what I assume is almost the end of the game. The logical progression of the plot seems to indicate that, anyway, but I’ll see. In case this doesn’t seem like much, I assure you that it is for me… and I can even add that my brother has poured no less than ten hours into his own save file, so the game certainly has not gone to waste in the slightest. I am really quite disappointed that I didn’t pick it up during all the initial hype, but then I suppose it’s better late than never.

The game is something of a real treat to me. I’m a true geek in that science fiction always calls out to me, and I know that Bioware is capable of doing it well, having enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic quite a bit. I wasn’t sure how they’d handle an entirely new universe and sci-fi setting, but they’ve pulled it off with remarkable skill. The little details they’ve put into the technology, the races, the politics, and the history all seems pretty straightforward at first glance and doesn’t have to detract from the overall game, but the inquisitive players like me are rewarded for our curiosity with detailed files that go even further into the surface of the Mass Effect universe. The in-game Codex was a delight, letting me sate my nerd needs on all sorts of polished details like the lifespan and societal structure of the turian race, the full mechanics behind your vessel’s stealth system and weapons, backdated history of alien struggles that would have occurred about the time the Pyramids were being built, and so on so forth. Even the party characters have their own little backstories and personalities which you can delve into, picking up some pretty interesting stories along the way. The exchanges I had with Wrex, the Krogan mercenary, stand as some very highly enjoyable tales, which is always a good sign. It may not be as detailed or in-depth as the previously mentioned Baldur’s Gate, but there’s plenty of flesh to these characters. Bioware really went to great lengths to flesh out a brand new setting, and while it’s not so in-your-face that it consumes the action, it’s readily accessible to anyone who wants to know.

Speaking of the action, the gameplay is very enjoyable too. Obviously, it’s a western RPG, but the stats are pretty much left at the wayside for a large part of the game and it’s presented as a largely action-based title. A third-person shooter, in fact… a genre which I believe the world could really use more of, so I was quite pleased to see it. You’re given four different weapons straight off the bat – a complement of pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle, all with various strengths and weaknesses for each situation – and then allowed to run and gun to your hearts content, swapping the weapons as you need. It plays a little like Gears of War in that cover is really everything, and you spend much of your time hiding behind it and taking pot shots at targets of opportunity. Charging in has the unfortunate habit of getting me killed a lot, though I did play a support class… nonetheless, it felt to me like it was encouraging you to shoot safely, at least until I was reaching the later stages of the game and my gear and skills were through the roof.

The only time to RPG side of things really pops up is either when you’re equipping yourself, or when you’re getting your skill cooldowns. As mentioned, you get all four guns with each character right from the start, but they’re pretty standard issue and lackluster in terms of power. As the game progresses, more and more different brands and makes of these weapons show up, and as with any RPG you end up swapping your gear out for whatever gives the most pluses. This is improved slightly by giving a customisation option to your weapons, allowing you to modify your gun and your ammo pretty much on the fly to give extra benefits. I often found myself juggling between the anti-synthetic and anti-organic bullets depending on whatever I was facing, and the difference was noticable. And in the end, all your gear helps you gun down the hordes of enemies between me and award the most precious thing any RPG player seeks… XP. Getting enough of this gives you the traditional level up, and this in turn gives you skill points which you can drop into a list of skills, divided up between the logical breakers of weapon type, armour type, skill type and so on. It’s all nicely customisable, letting you tailor make your character(s) and prioritise what skills you want as you go. This will often unlock skills, which can be used in the heat of the moment for short bonuses like boosted damage, shield replenishment, more accuracy, or what have you. It all comes together well, allowing for a min-maxing RPG player to get his action on and pretend he’s playing Halo.

All the run and gun action is broken up by… uh… drive and gun action. See, pretty early on a good portion of the galaxy becomes open to exploration by you, and this will often see you exploring an unmarked planet with a toxic atmosphere. What do you do in this case? Well, you get dropped onto the planet in a Mars Rover-esque vehicle with enough firepower to level an army, and then you get to drive around and dig up alien artifacts or blast apart pirate strongholds. These vehicle sections of the game come up at numerous times, and while they’re not really bad, I don’t find it quite as satisfying as the on-foot sections. There’s little benefit in cover and most attacks are pretty easy to dodge, so you usually just drive in circles around an enemy and exchange shots until they die, a lot less satisfyingly than when you’re dancing around cover and blowing skill cooldowns left and right. As Three Panel Soul said, you’re basically running around and looking for flaming ragdoll-shaped XP containers. This can be fun for a while, but it does really feel like this part of the game could have used work. Either way, it’s not the focus, so I can enjoy the occasional vehicular fling or two.

So yes. Now that I’ve torn the guts of the game out like any good reviewer, I’ll sum it up. The game is a nice balance of action and RPG elements, and aside from the occasional pacing issue with the vehicle scenes, it ends up being a pretty fun experience all throughout. The brand new setting is incredibly in-depth and really quite impressive, and I found myself spending a lot of unnecessary time in my Codex, reading up on the details they’d seen fit to include about it all. Although I didn’t mention the plot at large, it is reasonably good. Nothing too original or out of the ordinary, but it’s presented nicely and really helps to make you feel like a big part of the action. The game can also be strikingly pretty at times, even if I’m not running it at the absolute highest graphical settings. So really, the game gets my recommendation if you haven’t given it a shot already.

Of course, this whole post is probably needless because I imagine most people played and finished the game looong before I ever picked it up. But I’m not really here to be the first to report everything, I’m just here to give my spin and thoughts on whatever comes my way. So on that note, tune in later this week when I review the original Dragon Quest!

Slow gamer, indeed…

One late July night

So I have to wake up in a few hours, yet I can’t sleep. I suppose this is a problem I’ve brought on by myself thanks to staying up later and waking up later. Oh well, I’m killing time by posting here.

The excess free time of late has seen me struggling to write, as I mentioned in my last post, but I’ve been making attempts to resurrect a few of my older story ideas. I don’t think I’ve linked any of my writing on the blog so far, but most of you people reading this would likely have seen traces of it before, so I’ll hold off for now until I have something new to show and somewhere organised to display it. In the absence of writing, however, I’ve taken the time of organising and judging a fanfiction contest over on Fanfiction.net for the Golden Sun community, which I’ve mentioned before as being one I frequent quite a bit. I’ll probably dedicate a post to that as things go along so that people can take a look, but the deadline is for July 30th, so I’ll let it continue a while longer before that.

Nonetheless, when I’m not doing much writing and I have little in the way of social outings to attend, I end up turning my attention to electronic entertainment. Naturally. I’ve been in a bit of a nostalgia frenzy, as I’ve spent quite a bit of time locating and installing some of the older PC games in my collection and attempting to make them work on a Windows XP machine. I’ve met with some success, getting Master of Orion 2 working. This is probably my favourite 4X strategy game in existence, and it really deserves a post on its own, but suffice to say that this is a game that always brings me back for another round every so often.

Probably the most exciting addition to my hard drive is, however, TIE Fighter. For a Star Wars geek (yours truly included), this is probably known to be one of the best space simulators in history and one of the better Star Wars games ever released. More so than that, however, is my personal history with the game. I first acquired it in… I have no idea what year, but the collector’s edition that I own was released in 1995. This game is archaic, and it looks and feels it… but it’s one of the first games I ever completed, and one of the games I absolutely adored and dedicated myself to in my childhood. It shaped me into what I am today and it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s good to have it back. That said… the difficulty is astounding, if only because I’m out of practice in using an actual PC joystick. But really, when you’re jetting around in an unshielded TIE Fighter, a single stray laser blast will one-shot you. Even on the very first mission of the game. Much cursing was involved, but I was grinning even as it happened. I’ll be coming back to that in the near future.

One last game to note is Dawn of War 2. The original game is a very good RTS based on the Warhammer 40k tabletop game (which I also play), and between it and it’s three sequels, the game chewed up a considerable amount of my time. It was also a favourite amongst my friends for a while as a multiplayer game. So naturally, I followed the development of Dawn of War 2 with some interest. It came out a few months ago and after sampling the multiplayer beta and finding it interesting, I purchased the game on launch day. I’m not a hugely competitive player when it comes to onling gaming, so the first thing I did with the new game was test out the single player campaign. To my surprise and delight, it wasn’t just a training simulator for multiplayer like so many other RTS games tend to be… it was actually a stand-alone game, practically. It mixed up the RPG and RTS genres quite nicely, giving you only a handful of units to control but making sure each one had their own special abilities and skills. Then, it threw in a levelling system which let you tweak and customise those skills further. Lastly, it gave you the ability to deck out your squads in wargear to improve their statistics and skills even further. Couple this with a simple but acceptable story and a reasonable amount of variety and replayability in the missions, and you had a game that kept me occupied for quite some time.

I’m mentioning the game now simply because I finally stopped dawdling in my first campaign and completed the game at last, after playing it off and on again since release. I had a real blast just doing the side missions and gearing out my squads as best as possible, but once I was sitting pretty with the stats I finally decided last night to just finish the game and get it done with. The final level started out excellently, though the ending was a touch anticlimactic despite being quite epic in its conclusion. Nonetheless, it was a very fun game and I’d recommend it just based on the strength of the single player alone. I’ll probably start diving into the multiplayer scene a little more in the coming weeks, though, just to check that out and see how I fare. From what I hear, I’ll do absolutely horribly, since my favoured race is somewhat underbalanced and everyone else has been practicing for a lot longer.

It’s what I get, I suppose. Well, time for me to make another attempt at sleeping.

Hooo boy.

I’m not dead, and I haven’t forgotten about this place. It just seems like the less and less pressing that I actually have to do in my life, the less of *anything* that gets done. Given that I have nothing but free time on my hands right now, you’d think my side projects would progress in leaps and bounds… but sadly, it’s not to be. So this place unintentionally languished, and I’m not about to go more than a month without posting anything. That said, though, only a short one tonight since it’s really far too late for my brain to function properly.

Firstly, the awaited Prototype review is kind of outdated now, given that the game has been out for a month and most people would have acquired and finished it by now. That said, it was a very fun game and I did enjoy it for all fifteen hours of it, though the last couple of encounters served to be far more frustrating than fun or challenging. Aside from that little mishap, the rest of the game stands as a very fun sandbox and I do recommend it if you just want to be evil and lash out at everything for a while.

Secondly, on the matter of films. Firstly, Terminator Salvation is a decent action flick, but not really a true successor to the Terminator franchise. There’s no way it could stand beside Terminator 2 and feel noteworthy, it just kind of exists. There were a number of problems with it, and a huge number of nitpicks you could make about it when you step back and look over the entire setting, but again… as a straight up action film, it’s passable. Christian Bale made for a pretty lame main character, though, and Sam Worthington’s character was far more interesting and in-depth than this interpretation of John Connor.

Next up is Transformers 2. I enjoyed the original movie, but felt that it was less of a Transformers movie than an action movie with Transformers as the side cast. That, and the humor felt insanely childish and facepalm-inducing. Curiously enough, this is true of the sequel, as well. Little has changed and the basic concept hasn’t been improved, showing that they’re really trying to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of storytelling and humor. However, my biggest gripe with the original was alleviated, as the Transformers themselves take a more forward role and get into a lot more action fights. They have their flaws, but there’s a little bit more characterisation to them and some pretty damn awesome fight scenes, and given that watching giant robots beat the crap out of each other is *exactly* the reason why we bought the movie ticket, I was satisfied. The franchise is far from intelligent, but I’ll save it for another day. All up, same flaws as the first movie, but improved on what was important. As such, your mileage may vary, but I imagine most people who were ever interested in seeing it would enjoy it.

Finally is a comedy movie that I just happened to see based on amusing looking commericals – The Hangover. It’s a pretty straight up comedy in which a few male friends have a bachelor party in Las Vegas, go completely overboard, and wake up without any memory of the previous night. They’re also down one of their friends, and there’s a whole lot of crazy and inexplicable stuff in their apartment and beyond. Watching the cast stumble through all the mysteries of just what they did the night before was pretty amusing, and the story it weaves is outrageously insane but really quite funny. It all comes down to a decent conclusion and while it’s not the best movie ever, it’s very well crafted and easily succeeded in its task of making my laugh uproariously. Highly recommended.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back!