December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?

Yes, This Is Where I Weigh In On the Big Issues Of 2009: No LAN Multiplayer In Starcraft 2.

Starcraft 2, the sequel to possibly the most important videogame of my childhood, unless there is a seismic change in Blizzard Entertainment's design philosophy, will not have LAN enabled multiplayer. You will have to connect through Battle.net (Blizzard's free matchmaking online multiplayer service) to play the game with friends. It is because of this quirk that I am entertaining the serious possibility of not purchasing Starcraft 2.

(Pro tip: I am probably going to buy Starcraft 2.)

Blizzard is revamping (rebuilding is probably closer to what they're trying) Battle.net to integrate ideas like a marketplace, friends list functionality, achievements and becoming an overarching platform for Blizzard games into the long-standing service. (In a recent interview, [see below] it sounds like they're trying to synthesize Xbox Live, Apple's App Store and Steam into one platform, dedicated, solely, to the online experience of Blizzard properties.)



So, understandably, they're excited about the service and with the growth and evolution of multiplayer gaming, they're looking to make the multiplayer and singleplayer experiences as seamless as possible, via an online, off-computer cloud of data, giving players a reason to stay connected to the internet, if only for the new features and occasional authentication.

I don't like this, to be honest. And I recognize it's probably pretty silly for me to dislike it. I'm old (in videogame terms), and am part of pretty obscure and hard to reach market.

I have never bought Xbox Live (the new standard for multiplayer gaming) or even owned an Xbox, despite the fact that I'm a primarily a console gamer. I don't use Steam, despite the fact that I'm very much in the market for independent, quirky, off the beaten trail games and occasionally, I play PC and was extremely proud of myself for beating the last mission in Starcraft: Brood War, without cheat codes.

I am a very, very peculiar case and it would be fiscally irresponsible for Blizzard to seriously consider what I have to say when making their sequel. In short, this is my reckoning for not keeping up with the times.

I think my tastes in strategy games calcified after 2005 and unless Blizzard released it, I don't bother with PC games. That's not me being a snob, either. It's me being primarily a console gamer and having less and less time to fuck around with cracks, .exe files and "it'll just be another fifteen minutes". More than that, it might be wanting to jump to something I already am intimately familiar with, owing to the fact that it takes a lot longer to get to the point where I can shed responsibility and play games.

Now that I am no longer within a close physical proximity of Eleven Names writers and irregulars deputized to cover Anonymous protests, when I do play PC games, it's usually with a very good friend of mine at his house maybe twice a month and I ultimately end up insisting we play Starcraft or Diablo II together as opposed to Sins of A Solar Empire or Dawn of War and the fastest way to leverage this is through LAN connectivity.

Shit, the last digital matchmaking service I used was Battle.net, to play Warcraft III: the Frozen Throne, the last non-World of Warcraft game Blizzard has released.

I'm a Blizzard fanboy evangelical and the question is not whether I am going to keep the faith, but instead the question is am I willing to move with the company into the future? My view on human interaction changed dramatically after the third and final campaign in the original Starcraft, so I'd be leaving behind a significant amount of my intellectual history by not experiencing the single player game on its own. The multiplayer, which has been a vehicle for more fun times than I can count or remember, carries with it too many memories to count.

(Oh, and I'm not sure my laptop will be able to run Starcraft 2. But that's a money problem rather than an intellectual one, with a clear way to solve that conundrum.)

And here's where I go from carefully constructed argument to emotional plea for a way to express my unease with the change.

Aesthetically, LAN multiplayer is a lot cleaner than Battle.net. When I use LAN multiplayer, it's just my friend and I, going through no channels or lobbies in which other people and bots shriek for your attention. That LAN option was like going to an old hideout, that despite dust was clean and uncluttered. That's a finer point and not one that ought to hold much water, but it felt like ours, damnit.



It felt like that little place I could come to play with my friends. It felt like something shared no matter where I went. I got used to playing LAN multiplayer games in high school, something that feels very far away, in a dirty basement, with four or seven of my friends. We were then confused, figuring out how we feel about big ideas and those feelings are hard to separate from the balance of six zergling rush versus everything else.

This continued through college, around different people just looking at Starcraft as a joy to play and as an escape from our lives and the house around us. That feeling would have been broken by having to connect to a service and those channels, if only momentarily.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I don't want to be connected to millions of people automatically. I think I want to preserve that little private place where just my friends and I can go without interference. I don't know how hard it would be to preserve in the new architecture of the game and online service, but for this target market, it would feel like a personal (if anachronistic) touch.

And at the end of the day, that would be the big victory, that a game who'se development is likely larger than the combined GDP of three sub-Saharan countries chosen at random and has the imagination of a stable of gamers worldwide feels personal.

Quality Or Quantity: War Games

Here's a surprise: A game based on an actual, ongoing war, is going to have an uphill battle to climb.

The response to a feature on Six Days in Fallujah on Kotaku has been interesting. Some people have come right out of the gate saying that there's a double standard here being placed on videogames about the battle, that other mediums of communication are allowed to get away with and game aren't. I know I went over this elsewhere, but I really just skimmed over it.

Nestled in the comments to the feature, a lot is put forward in short, sarcastic sentences. (Oooooh, alliteration!) One rewarding conversation path is the idea of the anti-war videogame. (Apparently, the Metal Gear Solid series does not count.) Can a videogame based on a war be realistic and enjoyable?

I don't think so. War, to me, is horrible, visceral and sickening. It's not terribly often going in guns blazing into the enemy's compound with the element of surprise and the fate of the universe in the balance. From my limited understanding (in the current Iraq quagmire), it's far more often about pounding the pavement, talking to people who may or may not be shooting at you with a mask the day before, or if you're not in combat, watching employees of KBR, Titan or another multinational with no clear chain of command do your job for six times more money. That's not entertaining or exciting. When it gets exciting, the soldier the imaginary player is following usually isn't on the good side of the gun (if such a side exists) and members of the platoon tend to die, in the heat of battle, with or without a medic screaming and crying for help.

The player is used to having precise control over the soldiers movements and the ability to distance themselves from what's going on. Ignoring the mechanical challenge of engrossing the player into avoiding the pause button, do players really want to see what happens to troops when they lose control over their emotions, tempers and selves and be forced to carry it out?

Take this possibility: Let's say you, the player is pinnned down and you are given orders: Lay down some covering fire over where you think the enemy is. It later turns out they're not in there, and you might have lit up an unrelated grocery store or pizza shop.

Even worse, having to enter a building without information about hostiles that might be waiting for you inside the door and standard operating procedure is throwing 3 or 4 frag grenades to soften up the inside for intrustion. These grenades buy you a crucial amount of time, if enemies are in there, because otherwise, they'll shoot you (and likely kill you) when you enter. What if the enemy is hiding in a school building or hospital? Or if it's in a building that's been abandoned, but you've heard reports of civillians running out of screaming?

Do players want that? That's more realistic, I think, but I doubt it would be enjoyable or entertaining. I doubt the experience would be one where the replay value would be discussed so much as shock and abject horror.

I suppose I am tipping my hand here, but would one call this game anti-war? Or, to actually use some of the education I've recieved, would it be a hyper-war game?

Perhaps I'll write on the questions it brings up for tomorrow: Would anyone care? Would it be boycotted? Would parents shelter their children from it? Is it better for children to be sheltered from it and grow up later to support it?

We've Gotta Stay Positive

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.


Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

...

...

...

I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just can has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.

Finished Demos: The Ideal

I don't know how much else is left to say. I think this game (Six Days in Fallujah) is going to fail. I think it's too big for the development team. I hope it doesn't, but there's too much other shit going on around this game. Case in point: I doubt that the dev team and the bigwigs are on the same page when the bigwigs say that "We're not trying to make social commentary...We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable" and one of the stated goal of the game is to give players ethical dilemas in the shoes of real soldiers.

But, before the game finds a life in the hands of Papa Bear and his ilk (not that I'm singling out Bill O'Reilly here), I wanted to talk about it in tones that are respectful and distant, if not hopeful. I'm pessimistic. This needs to succeed in a way to shake up gamers, the press and eveyrone looking over the team's shoulder. There's an outside chance that the people making this have that kind of a game in them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not that my two cents carries much weight.

Anyway. The title is a song by the Explosion, off of their near-perfect Jade Tree full length called Flash Flash Flash. Go buy the CD right now and listen to one of the best punk rock records put to tape this decade. The Ideal starts with the lyric: "There are no good Samaritans. There are no proud Americans. This isn't my idea of success."

Perfect.



“Six Days In Fallujah” is a third-person shooter game set to be released sometime in 2010.

I usually don't get too concerned when I hear titles, but when I heard about the game I seized up. The president of Atomic Games, the company producing the game in conjunction with the Marine Corps and Activision, says they want “Six Days In Fallujah” to be the most realistic military shooter ever.

As a genre, shooters are not known for careful examination of their surroundings. Look at Gears of War 2. That game was as deep as a dog's water dish, but is a fantastic success, not just because it's executed nearly perfectly, but also because it didn't really challenge players. (Okay, Dom tried to find his wife and players complained that he was "too bitchy" during the game.) So a game based on a real-life six-day battle is going to be a tough sell—not to mention a difficult thing to write, script and program.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is based on a careful recreation of one of the longest instances of close-quarters combat the U.S. Marine Corps has been involved in since World War II. To get it right, the developers took the extra step of talking to some of the insurgents involved as well as Fallujah’s civilians.

Read that last sentence again. That's gonna be a sticking point.

Even ignoring the inevitable public outrage over the background work (which in any other medium would be reasonable), there is the larger issue of whose interests the developers are looking out for or sweeping under the rug.

The civilians are going to have a different perspective on the fighting and the tactics employed by both the insurgents who came to Iraq to fight the Jihad and the indiscriminate use of firepower by members of the United States Marine Corps. Oh, and both the irregulars fighting against the Americans and the Marines are going to have different (and truthful) perspectives that are going to skew how the game ought to be portrayed.

The Marines aren't going to be happy if the creators mention the pre-attack bombings Fallujah was subject to or the military’s offensive use of white phosphorous. The insurgents who risked their lives to talk to the game’s developers aren't going to be happy if the fact that members of their group used the civilian population as shields for their indiscriminate attacks is revealed. Oh, and let's not forget a coherent, well-designed game has to be made out of this, one that will make Activision and consumers happy.

“Six Days In Fallujah” has a lot of external hurdles ahead of it — a public suspicious of videogames and commentators looking for an easy topic to boost ratings.

But I think the biggest problem is internal. There's a lot of conflicting, accurate representations of those six days, so how do you pare down the experiences from all these different perspectives to something that resembles the truth? How do you put an ESRB rating on it?

“Six Days In Fallujah” frightens me because this game’s going to be in the spotlight and the creators have the time and money to dig themselves into a pretty big hole. To get the experience right, “Six Days in Fallujah” needs to set a milestone in storytelling. Frankly, I doubt the team is up to the challenge. I want them to succeed, but everyone looking over their shoulder has a different measure of success. And these are just the thematic concerns.

How, exactly, do you make a scripted third person shooter that acknowledges the claustrophobia of high density urban combat and still remains fun? Realism is hard to acknowledge when the actual soldiers can only clear buildings for an hour or two, tops and regularly pass out from heat exhaustion. If it's going to be realistic, then there is going to have to be an imposing penalty for using heavy automatic weapons on the map and huge bonuses for using less heavy weapons, which runs counter intuitive to the expectations the traditional player base.

The parallel that leaps to mind is Rainbow Six videogame series, which was realistic enough to dictate that when of the members of your unit got shot, they were pretty much down for the count if they were lucky. If they weren't, they're dead. Unfortunately, Fallujah isn't a series of three story office buildings or flat surfaces and building clearing is nerve wracking, when your enemies choose where, when and how the fight is happening is not what gamers are used to.

Gamers (I include myself in this) are used to having nigh-invincible, emotionally vacant, masculine demi-gods as their avatars, ones that have exquisite fire control and never empty a clip of ammunition to a room of people or prisoners because they've just been psychologically broken by seeing their friend's head explode in front of them. Are the developers of Six Days really going to digitally wrest control from the player at times and possibly alienate the players and force them to acknowledge how far removed our digital heroes are from flesh and blood?

Sherman said war is hell and I'd be willing to bet that with that description most gamers would expect "Doom". Let's hope I'm wrong.

Demos: The Impending Glory of American Adulthood

The title is another Crime In Stereo song, off of their now-venerated 2006 record, the Troubled Stateside. Buy it now. The song is track three. Both the song and this piece are about the same emotion: Shit, I'm growing up.

These columns are starting to turn into letters to the community. I don't know whether it's just my pronounced anti-social tendencies (Seasonal Affect Disorder, how are you?) or that I’m getting better at writing.
Grant me your attention, if for a moment. I do feel as if I'm clinging to my sanity or good humor.
The current generation of games does not interest me. This isn't for reasons of quality, since 2008 was one of the best years for games in recent memory. I simply can't afford the new games and systems. I'm feeling more and more distant from the current gaming generation and the reasons, aside from revenue, aren't really fashionable. I'm getting older and have other equally expensive interests to cultivate as well as a limited amount of time to indulge them all.

Investing in new systems is maddening. The Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure and has a tiered pricing structure, which means if I don't want to play inventory management on my console, I have to buy an external hard drive (or pay extra). Plus, its new games cost $60. The Wii has yet to find a library of third party games that take advantage of the Wii remote and are actually worth playing. The PS3 (and the games on it) is still too expensive for my tastes and does not retain the PS2 backwards compatibility, which is where most of my games are.
I've yet to exhaust that library. Sitting by my television is a stack of about five or six stellar PS2 games (a later Burnout and Splinter Cell iteration and God Of War 2, among others) released in the last four years, each of which needs finishing or starting. I'm also tempted by the promise of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections for a whopping $30 total.

Like books, movies, TV shows and other media, there’s always something new and shiny. But there are three or four less shiny things that get left along the way. The trick, if videogames are to be a hobby that does not cripple you financially, is to stay a couple years behind the cutting edge.

There are advantages to this for PC gaming—hopefully the bugs in the original games will have been fixed. The expansions on content will also usually come to you for free since the game is no longer current. It also means that on the console side the good games will have been removed from the chaff and will cost you half as much. It's because of these older games that I'm okay with becoming increasingly irrelevant in current videogame discourse. For reasons that make a sad logic to me, I am not much of a "gamer".

Gaming is an expensive hobby to stay up-to-date with. In some circles, it's only when I'm willing to pay a $350+ ante to play a $60 game that I am marked as a gamer. The disposable income exists to do that and buy one game, presuming I don't want to eat or enjoy anything else until the semester is over.
I'm keenly aware that I will not have as much time as I currently do later on, so five or six games will last me at least eighteen months. By then, the price will have gone down for the next generation systems and I'll have bought the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections.

As I get older, I'm beginning to wonder if the real question of videogames is not what you pick up and what you stay current with, but instead what you leave behind along the way. I view the trailing edge as the way to play videogames like one might pick flowers--slowly and with gusto. This only makes the scent sweeter in a world that moves quickly and without pity. Whether it's a chrysanthemum or a controller, I hope you'll pick one up.

A Chirstmas gift to our readers.

A brief note: If you celebrate another holiday, then consider the title to be a seasonally appropriate salutation, since, well, I and Thomas are Catholic, myself, if only fashionably and it feels a bit too off the mark to say a holiday gift. So, as you probably figured, no offense is meant.

Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?

You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)

Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:

the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland

If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.

That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.

I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.

So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.

Here's to never having enough time!

Demos: Magic Fingers

Yes, it's about the Spore DRM. Enjoy. I guess Eleven Names is dead. I can't really do anything halfway, so I'll still be posting things here, even if I'm the only one. The song is by a metal/thrash band called Cursed. Listen with your headphones up and a maniacal grin on your face.




What do you do when you're a gigantic multinational corporation and you've got a hugely anticipated game you've sunk tens of millions into getting pirated weeks before the release date?

If you're Electronic Arts (EA) and that game is Spore, you throw a new kind of copy-protection on the retail release.

Perhaps by now, one of your computer savvy friends has told you the gripe: If you buy Spore, the copy-protection (known as SecureRom) the disc only allows three installations. Buy it from the online store, you still only have three installations. If you use an illegal file-sharing network to acquire that same game, you have as many installations as you want.

Seem silly to you? It seems silly to a lot of people as well, who are upset, and reasonably, given that they are paying for a product that is fundamentally crippled from what they can download for free. SecureRom is also a bit of a pejorative in the PC gaming community, since the Mass Effect controversy, where the game required you to be on the internet once every 10 days so it could phone home to make sure the game isn't pirated, and that's being polite and not mentioning that installing that game (or Bioshock) might give EA administrative access to your computer. EA, however, has said that they are going to use SecureRom in the forseeable future to protect their games, which suffice to say, concerns me.

Let me say this explicitly: If you choose to purchase Spore, you are getting a product that may endanger your computer, and from one perspective is a $50 rental. If you don't pay for Spore, and find it online, you get an un-crippled version of the game and it is less likely you'll get viruses from the game. Whether you'll get viruses from the programs you need to run the game without a disc is another matter entirely. Most of this, though, is obvious.

What's not obvious is that EA doesn't have anywhere else to go on the issue. What are you going to tell your investors who can grow reasonably nervous about their continued involvement with an industry that takes millions of dollars in loses from piracy? That the best way to protect your multi-million dollar baby is to put less strong anti-piracy measures on the disc? You think swallowing a negative profit margin is tough, try telling an executive that the best way to curb illegal acquisition of the game is to just to throw a CD-key (easily crackable) on the retail copy.

The official stance from EA is that if you want multiple accounts, you'll need to buy multiple copies of the game. If you've forgotten your email or lost access to the password, you are out of luck, and are now out another $50. This seems draconian. In fairness, it will probably take a couple weeks of customers calling EA's customer service saying that they need more installs, and the company heads will probably get the message and remove the three install limit.

Until then, though, is the issue. If I am going to be remotely honest, my advice is to buy a copy of Spore, then download it on your favorite filesharing service. Even typing that sentence seems absurd, but if you want the game you paid for, and you want it to work on terms that are reasonable, that's one of the only honest options I can come up with. To quote a good friend of mine, you can expect other commentators to be far less merciful.

Yes, SecreRom a) frightens me that much, but also b) restricts the content on the disc that you paid for. I'm sympathetic to the gigantic corporation trying to protect its investment, but at this point, rampant piracy has already succeeded, so restricting the enthusiastic customers helps no one.

EA, sadly, is in a bind. They don't have the quazi-moral authority that a Blizzard or Valve does, and they have significantly higher operating costs and a much larger group of developers to corral. They have to take a strong anti-piracy stance, and if that means using an overzealous alaskan wolf as a drug sniffing dog, so be it.

They, however, ought to prepare for when their wolf ruins their customers baggage.

At least I'm honest, right?

We're back.

I'd lie and say we've been busy, but you all know better by know. Truth is, we've been working, some of us in summer camps, some of us manual labor, some of us on other pursuits.

I'm fairly sure the point of this blog was to pay for our liquor (beer, specifically), so typing this out after I've been drinking seems only appropriate. I've been listening to the Gaslight Anthem for the better part of the summer, mostly to the yet to be released the '59 Sound disc, and it's pretty fantastic, even if the same ground is covered each song on it. It sounds like Bruce Springsteen in 2008, if he was just starting out. On every song some variation of "driving", "Saturday night", "dancing" "the radio" and another that's not coming to me now. The themes, somehow, don't get tired. Maybe that's because of the liquor.  Neither, for that matter, do the song structures, which, for all but one song, is verse/chorus/verse/chorus/chorus/chorus (and if they're feeling adventurous, they'll throw a bridge in there).

In a way, the '59 Sound sounded oddly familiar to me on the first listen, because the first comparison was JRPGs. Much of the same themes are recycled in JRPGs, and I don't tire of those either. The one I'm still playing (Persona 3), has the same themes of teenagers making up for the sins of the earlier generation, a corporate coverup which has disastrous effects on the populus, a main character with an epic destiny and high school girls in short skirts as the rest of the genre.

There are rough patches in both pieces. Equipping a character in Persona 3 with a weapon means you have to walk up to them, and go into their inventory, scroll down, and then exchange the weapon, which is a pain, considering that the standard in JRPGs is that all characters can have items swapped out from your menu. Miles Davis and the Cool, off of the '59 Sound has it's own issues, a fairly pointless minor part in the song that (almost) kills the flow of what could be the perfect song to play during the iconic scene in Say Anything, with a hook of "so I laid a kiss on a stone/tossed it upside your window, upside the roof", but the song survives due to its strength everywhere else. 

Speaking of everywhere else, when Persona 3 gets into a groove, it's pretty much undeniable. Spoilers follow.

One of my favorite scenes in the game is one after a brutal death, a particularly close friend (Akihiko) of the deceased says his goodbyes to his friend after the ceremony and the rest of the school left the auditorium. Somehow, the character, has a conversation on his own with the deceased, just to say goodbye, but introduces it like this: "I had the usual for lunch...Ramen tastes a lot better when you're cutting class."

Spoilers end

The power in those sentences is in what isn't said. It's not that the ramen, likely, was made any better, but that the deceased character kept telling him to cut class with him, and he probably never did.

The same power in what isn't said can be found in the song High Lonesome, where the singer (Brian Fallon) murmurs to a girl "It's a pretty good song, babe, you know the rest" before hesitating and finishing the line: "baby, you know the rest." Again, the power is in what isn't said. Lord knows what meaning that song has for the two of them, and Mr. Fallon only hints at it.

Hell, Persona 3 doesn't feel like a JRPG when I play it, and yet I've already sunk roughly three four days into that game. I can't count the number of times I've played the '59 Sound straight through. Maybe 40 60something? Lord only knows. Even if the themes are recycled and familiar, I still enjoy the time I spend with both discs, and will spend more before the summer is out. 

Introducing: Demos

Eleven Names and my campus' newspaper occupy a strange place in my head. Both are repositories for my coalesced thoughts on a given issue, and frequently, they overlap. I could publish something on Eleven Names before it goes to the newspaper, but when it was originally written for the newspaper, it feels a little bit like cheating.

In fact, I wrote something that was originally written for the school paper, but I published it here when I realized that it would be a month or so before it was published in the school. That gave me an idea that I sat on for a couple issues. The editors tend to screw up the column when they don't check what they're putting on the page, which made me think, I'll take my own mistakes so long as I can do the final spell check. My columns will be be great!

So, I'll publish my first drafts here, a couple hours after they appear in the campus' paper to be digested. I hope this is a fairly stable new feature, where you all will get the demo version, what I sent to the paper for them to supposedly improve, and in fact, foul up with not catching the notes on the edits they were making.

Enjoy!

I wrote in recently about videogames and about the ease that journalists can dismiss them. But now I’d like to focus on why, with a couple reasons stolen outright from Wired’s Clive Thompson.

Why don’t videogames have the same kind of in depth discussion associated with them that recordings or movies do? First and foremost, I would imagine is because they simply aren’t good material for a daily feature or column. Just speaking about the time invested in (or expected from) a video game, the sweet spot being anywhere between 20 and 40 hours, depending on the kind of game, there’s no way that columnists could play a third as many videogames a year as they write columns or articles and expect to maintain a readership. They wouldn’t be saying anything useful. To make a quick comparison: If my college’s DJs had to sit through 3 10 hour CDs a week, they’d give up.

That is one of the primary reasons why videogames as a medium and form of communication do not get attention or care from newspaper media, the investment of time is too great as compared to other forms of communication and entertainment. In other words: Videogames take too long to digest for effective daily or weekly publishing material.

There’s also the monetary cost. Keeping up with the latest videogames is expensive, since the technology shifts every so often (PCs and consoles), in addition, the games themselves usually cost between $50 and $60 before tax. Unless, of course, you’re still playing last generation systems, in which case, it just isn’t newsworthy enough for further explanation in a paper or professional magazine.

Right now, video games occupy the same position that the “God-forsaken rock and roll noise” and “that awful rap garbage” did years ago, as the corrupter of children. How were those art forms absolved of their blame for being the worst thing to happen to morality since Original Sin? It was only through exposure to the music and an in depth discussion of the themes contained in the words that the form was acknowledged as legitimate and not as some kind of artless, puerile endeavor.

Pioneering political and social artists Public Enemy and NWA were bitter pills to swallow for Tipper Gore and Co., this is true, but almost two decades worth of distance from the outbreak of hip-hop music from racial boundaries, most serious critics acknowledge, at the very least, that those artists were writing about what they knew. (For that matter, “Fear of a Black Planet” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2004 alongside the Beach Boys and Dizzie Gillespie.)

The easy comparisons end there. Because video games today combine text, audio and an interactive portion with a controller or mouse and keyboard, games are judged in terms of a seamless interactive experience, which must be intimidating to players who don’t understand the vernacular.

With Grand Theft Auto IV coming out this year, gamers of all stripes can expect a storm of faux-controversy and hours of babbling from ignorant commentators who don’t know the vocabulary, but have no trouble proclaiming it as another murder simulator, peddled underhandedly to mentally unstable, titillated, teenage boys with predilections for school shootings.

Hopefully, you’ll know better.

SCIENCE TIME: EMOTIV

The internet has just informed me that, in the imminent future, I will be able to put on a helmet which will read my mind and use the data it gathers to enhance my ability to interact with immersive virtual environments. We are now living in a world where direct mind-machine interface is possible without any kind of invasive surgeries or bulky scientific equipment.

This is a prospect which excites me a fair bit more than it worries me. Considering that we can now build heads-up displays that fit inside contact lenses, I was wondering when someone would come up with a good user interface device for such. It appears we have to wait no longer than March 2008 for such devices to be in the hands of game developers, which means that if the wiimote is any indication, the Mobb will be hacking them and using them to control their fresh-built lego robot arms by May at the latest. Whether these arms will be capable of doing anything more nuanced than flailing when the users are happy remains to be seen.

The (clearly-anime-inspired) look of the device may need some work, but as I never travel anywhere without a hat already (and I ask you: what gentleman does?), I suspect that a slightly redesigned version of the hardware can be integrated into my normal streetwear.

It should be noted that this is not a Gibsonian device that allows one to 'jack in to the Net'. It allows our minds to interact with machinespace, not machinespace to interact with our minds. And while the press coverage for the device does promise many things, it sounds like the state of the technology is likely only about as progressed as reading emotions and maybe (I hope) responding to certain kinds of broad, easily interpreted mental cues. The website doesn't have too much in the way of concrete details. However, I think that even the possibility of, say, an MP3 player that changes your playlist based on your moods, or a character in a game that knows when you're smiling at them is more than enough to label this an outbreak of the future.

It's important to remember, as we wrap ourselves in the clothes of old empires and study the instability of our own, that there are new things under the sun. Incredible things are being created every day. I am tempted to say, as I suspect every generation has been tempted, that there has never been a time in human history more exciting, dangerous or filled with possibility, than right now, this moment, this place.

Way to be, Planet Earth. Keep it up.

For love of art.

Truth is, I was expecting a lot more from the new generation of video game consoles. With all the hype, I was expecting different ways of interacting with the interactive entertainment that I was told I needed to purchase.

Then something funny happened. Microsoft was the first one to get great games (Dead Rising and Gears of War), Sony camped out technology, and Nintendo decided to go with blue ocean thinking, and decided they were going to make theirs fun, rather than more powerful than their competitors. And that strategy has been rather successful for Nintendo. Unsurprisingly, whenever I get a console, odds are it'll be a Nintendo Wii, but that's oddly, not that germane to this monolouge.

Ultimately, I haven't seen a game that justifies the steep price of any of these consoles. Sony still needs to find a $700 game, in my eyes, and good as Resistance (Insomniac) is, it isn't it. Hopefully, it'll be the new Ratchet game (also by Insomniac), which should be eons better than Resistance, which bit most of its interesting technology bits off of stuff the last three Ratchet games. Much lauded was Resistance's "vision" to have players walk on ceilings, but much ignored was that you could do that in previous Ratchet games on the PS2. Maybe Metal Gear Solid 4 will do it. Then again, I played the second entry in the series, and while that was a nice movie, I paid for a game, and the endgame lost me entirely.

Nintendo, who has captured my imagination, has yet to deliver a great game with it. I've played Wii Sports and a little bit of the newest Zelda game for it. Still not sold. Nothing screams must buy, but then again, it is a good $150 lower than it's closest competitor, the Xbox 360.

Speaking of which, the Microsoft console has a couple games that scream must buy, which I've mentioned already. If you haven't played Gears of War yet, well, you should. It's the kind of synthesis of old and new ideas executed perfectly that ought to be commended from men in towers and people with trumpets. Dead Rising, from what I understand, is endless fun to play and has a spirit that most games would kill for. Unfortunately, the console on which you'd play those games is famously unreliable.
There's no way in hell I'm putting down $400 on a console that's prone to that many errors that have been denied and then fessed up to the company two, three years later. I don't have that kind of excess cash to spend on a wheel of fortune.

People who have venutred into my cave room will know that I do in fact, blow my copious discrentionary income elsewhere, but at least if I lose all my CDs, the files are backed up elsewhere.

However, I'm just fine with my PS2, which, I hear, will be down to $100 by the end of the year. That library, is probably the best and most eclectic in video game history, and paired with a console that works, great games that I still haven't finished and time on my hands, I see no reason to upgrade to the next generation. Perhaps, that new generation are like Hawkeye, Patriot, and whatever robot is calling itself Vision, they just need a chance to shine.

Whether that's the case or not, I'll be giving the current generation a wide berth. Maybe it'll find it's generation's Okami, or perhaps it's own Nick Fury to kick its ass into gear. If it does, I'll be watching.

Also, you may have noticed that we don't have a theme or any other posts since my last one. I'll try to fix that.

Hello to Devil May Cry 3 and Kingdom Hearts 2

I suppose I shouldn't be blogging as hard since my computer is currently being opened up and prodded by people who aren't me, but the germ of an idea came, and those never wait, so you have to strike while the iron is hot. The piece of idea being stuck? The introductions, or you could say, the "Hello"s of Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition and Kingdom Hearts 2. Why these games? Well, since my computer is being repaired, I have to spend time somehow, and it's been raining for a while. (Right now, the sky is grey. All of it.)

Both games take a similar approach to their introductions: The introduction to the universe is done through a opening cutscene of some length. Many games do this, that's not the issue, the point is how well the two opening cutscenes show off their respective game's style.

I'll first talk about the Disney/Square-Enix collaboration, Kingdom Hearts 2. That game's opening, unsurprisingly, is an expensive looking FMV masterpiece that looks like a million bucks, (It may in fact, have cost that much money to produce...) complete with an absurdly catchy and somehow driving piece of J-Pop. (If anyone has this song, do let me know what it is and where I can find it...) The character, Sora, is seen falling down, headfirst, for quite a bit of time, then catching up with his friends, watch them turn evil, turn good again, slip through his fingers, and so on. It is above all, serious. When Goofy and Donald appear, it is to battle by Sora's side, and nary a quack is heard out of Donald, perhaps for fear it might ruin the atmosphere. And that, is one of Disney's primary concerns.

What is for sure is that Disney was sure that none of the three main characters to wield bladed weapons or anything that looks real. Good brand management (thank you, Websnark) dictates that the cognitive dissonance of Goofy in Disney World bouncing and happy without a care in the world juxtaposed with Goofy swinging a sword, knife in his teeth screaming "I'll take on all you brigands!" in a lisenced videogame is not going to go over well with the consumer, so Goofy's weapon of choice is a shield. Is Goofy serious about his adventures from Twilight Town to whichever mighty jungle the lion sleeps in? Hel..Heck yes he is. But is he ever without the lacksidaisical, slouching grin? Heavens, no. So. Goofy is still Goofy, even in his new-ish digs and Disney's kid-friendly stamp remains.

The obscenely high production values, serious demeanor and kid-friendly vibe all reassure me it's going to be like the first Kingdom Hearts, except with a couple cosmetic changes, better graphics and a mode of travel or planet hopping that's a lot easier.




Capcom's Devil May Cry 3 SE, on the other hand, takes another route entirely. It's Capcom, so the opening mission video (I'm discounting the actual opening since the scrolling credits take you out of the experience) is in the games graphic engine, which is admittedly, pretty impressive.

It makes me smile a wide, meat eating grin. The main character, Dante is opening up a music shop. He is the kind of half-demon that answers the phone by pounding on the table to have the reciever spring into his hands. In comes a visitor, who is not looking for the bathroom, as Dante finds out, but is instead muscle of his half-brother demon brother Vergil, who has just arrived, by standing atop a mile-high castle that quite recently sprung up from the earth and devalues real estate for a couple square miles. After an unsuccessful intimidation attempt, the muscle leaves and Dante goes back to eating his pizza. This is until a good 6 or 7 demons appear out of the air around our main character and use Dante's body to insert the business ends of their scythes.

Dante is unfazed.

He doesn't even put on his (trademark?) red jacket. He, instead, gets up and walks over to the old jukebox, in the far corner of the room (blades still in his body) where tries to put on a song. It doesn't play. Dante, visibly annoyed, smashes the jukebox , and still no sound eminates. He sighs, accepts that he's going to have to kill these demons without music. Having now shaken off the blades, he turns and faces the assembeled crew of malevolent spirits, and defeats them by using whatever is lying around, including pool balls, and using one unfortunate soul as a skateboard while firing both of his pistols. After clearing the room, but finding still more enemies, Dante looks around and asks "The end?". More enemies show up. "Don't bet on it." Here is where the player gets control.

As you can tell, the entire entreprise is incredibly stylish, but done with a wink and a grin. That is to say, Devil May Cry 3 is serious and as self-aware as any of the new Ocean's movies. The game's m.o. is simple: you want to devastate your enemies with the variety of weapons in your arsenal, and you are given more in game currency the more you use your arsenal. (Your starting weapons are Dante's sword, Rebellion, and his dual pistols, Ebony and Ivory. Yes, one pistol is black, the other is white. Yes, that is how the game rolls.)

For example, you could just stand 20 feet away from an enemy and pour lead into their somehow corpeal forms with Ebony and Ivory, and that would get you a small amount of points. But, if you ran up to them slashed them with Rebellion, then launched the demon with an uppercut with the weapon, only to keep them in the air with fire from Ebony and Ivory, you'd get a hell of a lot more points, as shown when your onscreen point meter goes to Crazy!. You later get a guitar to use as a weapon. To get that weapon, you have to defeat the rock singer boss. It's pretty awesome.


It is that kind of style, the pardon the pun, devil may care sense of fun, that the introduction of Devil May Cry 3 embodies perfectly. Unlike Kingdom Hearts 2 where you get the distinct impression that you are someone else's oyster, Devil May Cry 3 gives you a knife and says get to it.

And that's, probably why ultimately, I'm spending a lot more time with Dante and not Sora...

I'm out here standing on a rooftop screaming "Hey world are you listening to me?"

Hello.

Much like most other blogs out there, our inception consists of a lot of enthusiasm, but few concrete details. (I said yes before the question was finished, by the way) To put our mission as precisely as I’m aware of it, we’re three nerds, unrepentant and full of opinions. It would not surprise me if from time to time we post opinions on politics. By and large, they’ll be pretty liberal. More than likely, there will be a lot of discussion of comic books, video games and various role-playing systems (D&D, GURPS, etc) because that seems to be the overlap in our copious free time.

For an introduction: Hi, I’m James. I’m the youngest around these parts. I listen to an obscene amount of punk rock music. In fact, I write for pastepunk.com in a news and interview capacity. I also keep up ipso.vox.com, which is based towards more video games and music politics. I have a feeling that ipso will be merged with this blog, but that’s neither here nor there. Or perhaps it won’t. I get the feeling this is pushed towards more of a length format, whereas ipso.vox.com is just getting ideas and thoughts off my chest at the time they come to me. Here, I’ll be thinking about things for a while, and then writing about them, not the other way around. Quite often, in fact.

Let’s get started, then. BioWare (you might know their games: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and other PC RPG staples…) announced they’re working on an RPG for the Nintendo DS. Righto. Could be awesome. The IP? Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yes, I’m serious, a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG, made for the Nintendo DS by BioWare.

Putting aside the feeling of being absolutely perplexed, there’s reason to be hopeful. BioWare has a pretty excellent track record with their craft, so at least in theory, the game shouldn’t have a tremendous amount of technical problems. The Nintendo DS and it’s retired counterpart, the GBA SP, seem to be smaller Super Nintendos, so at the very least, there will probably be an “old school” feeling to the just announced game. This is a nice aesthetic choice, since recently, as you may have heard, Sonic hasn’t really starred in games, so much as been whored out for snuff films, so putting an icon in the hands of a developer who appear to know what they’re doing is good news, no matter which way you look at it.

Also, as Nintendo and Square showed, you can have a genre-defining icon star in a game type that is completely anti-thetical to the original, and it can work wonders. In another form of art completely, Slayer took that kind of a leap with South of Heaven, and guess what, it’s a grower, and now full live performance of the CD is included on the reissue to their 2006 CD Christ Illusion.

It’s also an interesting bit of convergence. 10 years ago, I doubt you’d see anything like this, since Sega and Nintendo were bitter rivals. True, there have been Sonic handheld games on the Nintendo DS, but a full blown RPG made by a third party with no relation to either developer is especially interesting. I’m not excited, but at least interested and perhaps, perhaps hopeful.

Just saying that makes me happy. Hopeful for a new Sonic game.

To that end, I don’t think there’s a better way to inaugurate a new blog then with hope. To greater and greater things.