Close Encounters

According to Virgil, there are nine Circles of Hell. I’m sure you know how it goes – in the Divine Comedy, Dante travels through Hell, into Purgatory, and on into Heaven. On his journey through Hell, he discovers that there are nine Circles, each worse than the one before it; each catering to a different kind of sinner. For example, the Second Circle is for those guilty of the sin of Lust. The Third is for Gluttons. When I was walking through town the other day, I came across a group of people on day release from the Eighth Circle. I saw them from a distance and was instantly wary, for I have encountered their kind before. I made the fatal error of making eye contact with one of the group, who had spread across the breadth of the street, as to ensure maximum exposure for their operation. It was only for the briefest of milliseconds, but it was enough – I was ensnared by the Hell-denizen’s tractor beam – I was being pulled in.

I tried to hurry past, pretend it wasn’t happening, but denial would not help me. As if my own personal gravity well had replaced that of the Earth’s, the figure loomed larger in my peripheral vision, desperate as I was to avoid eye contact. I couldn’t help it. My own bodily functions were being overridden by the will of this other. My eyes found his once again, sealing my fate. I started to slow down, and my finger pressed the pause button of my iPod, inside my coat pocket. My brain screamed at me to simply ignore the existence of the Hell-denizen, but to no avail. My free will was being sapped by some kind of irrational, supernatural means. I slowed almost to a halt and turned to meet the man approaching me, his eyes filled with hunger for something that he wanted to take away from me.

“Have you got a second?” asked the charity collector. His logo-emblazoned jumper leapt out at me – he was a representative of the World Foundation. His clipboard was similarly branded, as was the pen clutched in his sweaty, expectant hand as it poised above the direct debit form attached to the board in his hand. It was almost game over for me. Given even a second’s silence, these people will smoothly proceed as if you had replied affirmative to this simple question.

Something within me fought the artificial malaise being forced on my body. As the charity collector’s eyes moved from my own towards the branded clipboard, readying one of the forms to take my money from me, part of the spell broke, as if his supernatural abilities relied entirely on having a line of sight with his prey. As he looked down, a single word escaped my throat as I wrenched my eyes away from the figure.

“No!” I croaked, and began to walk again, brushing past the man and continuing desperately on my journey. He started to walk with me. I dared not look at him again, even though every instinct in me screamed to be socially polite and indulge this man.

“Just a second?”

Given my desperate state, my only possible action was to simply issue a blanket denial of anything he said from that point on.

“No.”

“Are you a student?”

“No.”

“Oh well that’s perfect because – ”

“No.”

“The World Foundation – ”

“I’m sorry, no!” I begged, trying to keep my eyes from his, lest I fall under the same spell again. My tactic worked. With that he abandoned the chase and took up pursuit of another pedestrian behind me. But my trial was not over. I realised with horror that I had wandered into a nest of the creatures. Not ten metres from my original encounter, I sensed another closing in on me. I fixed my eyes firmly on the ground, but again, he somehow knew I was aware of him. I felt, rather than saw or heard, him move closer.

“No.” I exclaimed, involuntarily returning to my defense of blanket denial.

“But – ”

“No!”

I quickened my pace, and fortune was with me on that day. I was not stopped by any more of the Hell-denizens.

Here I pause to point out that the Eighth Circle is the second worst in all of Hell. Murderers and tyrants live up on the Seventh Circle. Only traitors and betrayers live on the Ninth. Who exactly lives on the Eighth? The Fraudulent. There are lots of gorges the spirits of the damned have to walk through. The first gorge contains the seducers – those with silver tongues who convince others to do things in their own favour. Demons line the sides of the gorge and whip the people who have to constantly walk along the gorge. Once they get to the other side, they turn around and start all over again. This represents what the seducers did in life – namely, driving others towards some goal against their will. Included in this gorge are the emotional blackmailers of the world.

Hence, charity collectors. Paid to stand on the street and stop people as they walk, they have to hit you in the guts with whatever it is their charity stands for right away, because otherwise you might walk away, denying them their commission on whatever you sign up for. Emotionally assailed with famine, pestilence, war, and all of the other terrible things in the world, often people cave and give their hard earned cash out of guilt. Maybe some people’s eyes are opened to the horror and give out of a newly awakened sense of justice. But underneath it all, no matter where the money ends up going, no matter if it all ultimately makes a difference to someone in need’s life, it all began with a silver-tongued emotional blackmailer on the street.

Jeph Loeb

I know. Comic book geek bitching about comics. How much more cliche can I get?

But I think this needs to be said.

Jeph Loeb is a hack.

I cannot understand how this man gets work at all, much less work on important titles. If they sell, there’s a reason why — because they’re important titles, not because he’s writing them.

I’m tired of seeing this LAZY writer get work. He’s awful. His expository dialogue — which he is infamous for — is the literary equivalent to a litter box that hasn’t been cleaned in a month. His need for bold statements and monumental action moments that are supposed to wow the audience come off as childish and more than a little fanboyish.

Jeph Loeb is so awful, I cannot even bring myself to download and read his work illegally, much less pay money for it. And he’s about to fuck the Ultimate universe, a section of Marvel that with the exception of Ultimate Spider-Man, has sucked for about three years now. Normally, I wouldn’t care that Loeb is ruining this portion of the universe, if it at least made sense.

A teleporter dies by drowning? Really, Loeb? This is the best you could come up with? If I was capable of being disappointed in you, I would be.

In the mean time, I’ll just shake my head in disgust, and hope your Crisis event — because that’s what this is, a Crisis for Ultimate Marvel, and a poor one at that (which is bad considering Crises themselves are awful and make little sense) doesn’t fuck up Ultimate Spider-Man.

But it probably will.

More Legend of the Seeker, plus, Dungeons and Dragons!

Legend of the Seeker

In my last post about Legend of the Seeker, I was, shall we say, less than kind towards the show. I did point out its good things — special effects, cinemtography, fight scenes, Bridget Regan and Bruce Spence — but overall, I felt the show was lacking.

I’ve since watched more episodes.

I have to honestly say, it’s still a bit lacking.

They’ve managed to turn a massive epic into an adventure-of-the-week show. They killed my one requirement for good television — overall, continuous plot — in favour of something less continuity heavy. Good for the average viewer, absolute shit for those of us who take the time to follow our shows and appreciate some mental stimulation.

BUT!

Not all is lost. There is still hope for Legend of the Seeker.

I just finished watching the two latest episodes, back-to-back. And they were both taken from the original novel. Granted, adapted to fit television, but still, holy shit, folks, we’re back on track.

And better yet… the series has dared to defy the book.

Yes. That is a good thing. A very good thing.

Because while thusfar, I’ve preferred the original novel — note how I say ‘original’, I’m still of the opinion about how the series started off great and gradually began to slip as time went on — the series is daring to do something else. Something different. I’ve read the book. If I want the story from the book, I’ll go read the book itself. Because despite the vast improvements of the show, there will always be faults that an elitist like myself will find fault with. Sad, but true.

So, watch out, people. From this point on, here there be spoilers.

It all started with the episode entitled, to my glee, ‘Denna.’

Leather-clad dominatrix fetishes aside, Denna was always one of my favourite characters. She’s a classic Broken Bird character, with the added bonus of being a Bad Girl, and the Crazy Girlfriend Competition.

She just has this legitimate madness to her,  like at first, you think, “Hmm, well, she’s an evil bitch”, and then you realize, “Holy crap, this girl is NUTS”, and the worst realization of all, “Oh. That poor girl.”

I have to say, the ‘Denna’ episode was Craig Horner’s best performance yet, but I still want to point out that’s not such a great feat. But he *almost* sold me on him being Richard for once. *Almost*, but not quite. He still comes off as a little too young, a little too pretty, a little too brash, and a little too dumb.

Now, did Jessica Marais sell herself as Denna? I’ll be honest. Not for the first half of the episode. She looked a little uncomfortable in the role, struggling a bit. And then, when she had the opportunity to show a little bit of that ‘Broken Bird’, well, shit, she pulled it off. I was kind of impressed, and definitely glad for it.

But the most shocking thing about this episode? The one thing that absolutely guaranteed that I would be watching this show for a while yet?

Denna lived.

In the book, Richard turned his sword white, and ran her through, using the Sword’s innate power of forgiveness, the opposite side of its battle-wrath magic, to strike her down. Same thing happened here, albeit, in the heat of combat with Denna resisting him, as opposed to offering her life up to free him, and then…. another Mord-Sith, using a brand new Deus Ex Machina magic that was previously revealed in the episode… brought her back.

That was enough to keep me watching the show from there. I was debating dropping it.

Then the next episode, Puppeteer, came up. Again, it delved heavily into book plot, which was a welcome continuation. But that’s not what I’m going to discuss. What I’m going to talk about is Darken Rahl. Or rather, Craig Parker.

Up until now, I’ve doubted Craig Parker in the role of Darken Rahl. Not because of anything he did or didn’t do. I just didn’t like his ‘look.’ He doesn’t look like Darken Rahl, to me. For one, I’m reasonably sure Darken Rahl was blond, but that might be me on crack. For another, Parker appears too soft to be Rahl. Evil, sure, but he has a soft look about him, whereas Rahl is all chiseled edges and harness.

But now we’ve finally seen Parker perform as Rahl. And…. while I wouldn’t call him ‘masterful’, he was more than passable. He was enjoyable. Not perfect, but again, I’m an elitist.

I will definitely be continuing on with Legend of the Seeker.

Dungeons and Dragons

This Sunday, both myself and Kypora will be rocking an online D&D session. We’ll be playing a 3.5 Edition Gestalt campaign. High Seas adventures await us, and booty will be had. Someone may even walk a plank. That’s right, folks, this will be a Pirate Campaign.

Expect logs to be posted, and a merry good time to be had by all.

Most Useless West Wing Characters

The West Wing has a great ensemble cast, there can be no denying it. It’s the Final Fantasy 6 of television dramas – too many damned characters than it knows what to do with or develop properly. As an inevitable consequence, some of these characters come out half-formed, much like a premature baby. Need to plug a gap in continuity? Roll out a new character. Here we take a look at a few.

LEON
He helps run Vinick’s campaign, gets uncomfortable with the fact that they’re starting to play on Santos being Latino to gain ground in the race, and quits. But who the fuck is he? Come on, kids – if we’re expected to garnish any kind of sympathy for a character, it’s best that we’re not introduced to, and say goodbye, to said character within the same episode.

ANGELA BLAKE
At the start of the fifth season, Leo brings Angela in to do “under-the-radar” polling on Bartlet invoking the 25th. Which, fair enough, but the notion of discrete polling always confused me – surely there’s no roundabout way to ask a question like that? As Joey Lucas tells us in season three, if you ask a veiled, somehow-relevant-but-not-really question, it gives you skewed results. So Blake does this polling – then a few episodes later Josh lands in the doghouse after losing an important Democratic Senator and gets benched. Who does Leo bring in to carry out Josh’s legislative duties and run the Federal Budget negotiations? That’s right – our Ms Blake is a real crackerjack. There’s no one else I’d rather have administering government policy than a chick who can…run secretive polls? She’s got a killer personality, too. Well, not really.

WILL BAILEY
So here’s what you do when you control the helm of a television show – when a much loved fan favourite leaves, you go out and you hire the least charismatic college buddy you know to replace him. The character is good on paper, but in execution he will be unwatchable, entirely due to the guy you got to play him. Then you leave the show, and the people who take on the mantle of the series do the only logical thing under the circumstances to the only cast member in the main line-up who really needs work to properly mesh with the plethora of existing characters – they have him quit his job and work for the Vice President, ensuring that the only character he’s managed to carve out any kind of relationship with will hate his guts. Granted, Will is like a fine wine – he ages well, and ultimately gets his nose rubbed in the mess he’s made by backing Russell as the Democratic candidate. His character also led to the creation of this author’s “Will Bailey Drinking Game,” wherein you must take a drink every time Will appears on screen and says “Vice President,” “Russell” or “V.P.” within ten seconds. After season five, it’s a winner every single time – unless Will is awkwardly flirting with Kate Harper, in which case you can just tear your eyeballs out of your skull upon witnessing the most unlikely romance ever conceived blossom. And speaking of the Commander…

KATE HARPER
“Here’s what this show needs – a sexy Deputy National Security Advisor!” What I imagine to have been said in the writer’s room, probably moments after the decision to have Will quit his job. I love Mary McCormack. But what on God’s green Earth does Kate actually do? After she single-handedly achieves peace between Israel and Palestine, she proceeds to take over the Sit Room, ensuring the Pres never has to make a tactical decision ever again. Uhm, maybe this is just me, but isn’t the primary function of the Deputy National Security Advisor to…well, advise? Instead she’s the big man calling all the shots at the age of all of, like, twelve. Where the hell did Nancy McNally go? I loved that lady. Unfortunately, Kate Harper is what happens when an immensely talented writer leaves the creative process and lesser men and women scramble to fill the void. They do okay at creating echoes of former glory with existing characters, but newer ones fail to shine. As with Will, I can think of one redeeming factor – if a man of Mr Bailey’s calibre can somehow wind up regularly sleeping with a woman of Ms Harper’s calibre, then anyone (read: me) can too.

MANDY
What’s Mandy’s surname? Who gives a shit! Angela Blake stuck in my mind more than this gal, and Mandy was around for an entire season. As a series regular. From the start, I always felt that the West Wing had one too many media consultants or communications officers – and that one’s name was Mandy. Unceremoniously axed somewhere between the end of season one and the start of season two (which was what, five minutes in West Wing time?), Mandy was plucked from the continuity of the show and no one ever asked where she had gone, and no one ever mentioned her name again, spawning the name of and becoming the first resident of “Mandyville,” the place where crappy West Wing characters mysteriously vanish to and go out to pasture. Given that her most memorable scenes involved her (unintentionally) causing the death of a FBI negotiator; a memo, of which I couldn’t really see the catastrophic fallout the characters were stressing about; and a Chinese panda named Lum Lum, Mandy is a good example of when a writer throws up his hands, admits he was wrong, and just pretends that it never happened. Ever.

GOVERNOR RITCHIE
I might have been a bit more awed by this guy had he actually been in the damned show. Instead we hear mention of the Pres’s main rival for, oh, almost six months of show continuity before we see the guy in the flesh. And then we see him but once during the entire re-election campaign before the debate, where he gets his arse handed to him by Jed, which somehow bags Bartlet the entire election. I’ve got to give it to John Wells – he might not be half the writer Aaron Sorkin is, but he did his election campaign story arc a hell of a lot better than Sorkin did.

LORD JOHN MARBURY
Oh my, an eccentric, alcoholic, womanising Brit. I guess I really am watching an American drama. Good of the writers to erase all doubt. Lord John’s job is to get pissed, terrorise the women-folk, and right at the end sober up enough to spout some philosophical crap about the topic of the episode, be it a nuclear missile shield, or the conflict between India and Pakistan. Which is all well and good, but I feel there should have been an extra minute at the end of the episode where one of the key staffers frowns in confusion and anger, slaps Lord John about the chops, and tells him that they covered everything he just said like thirty-five minutes ago, dude. Obviously Lord John missed all of the exposition because he was trying to grope Abbey’s breasts at the time.  The moving but ultimately useless rhetoric the Earl of Croy gushes obviously has more of an impact to an American audience in a British accent, even though all it does it prove that the episode has achieved nothing except a stirring summary of the situation rather than try to provide any kind of substantial resolution to it, in addition to being spoken by one of the worst human beings featured on the entire run of the show. Imagine Lord John if he spoke in an American accent. Yeah, there you go – less “eccentric” and more of a “dick”, now, isn’t he?

And that’s all I’ve got. You have yourself a happy new year, guys.

The Classics

In a shocking turn of events, I have completely and utterly decided to agree with my fellow posted Kypora. The latest episode of Terminator was, without a doubt, ass.

I love the crap out of that show. I really do. It has its flaws, but I roll with them. I understand that they’re needed in order to make Terminator into a weekly TV show.

But what the hell were the writers smoking when they put together that ass-tastic episode? Had they just finished a Roswell marathon, one that they consumed many drugs while watching? We may never know. Hopefully it’ll never be discussed again. Stick to killer robots from the future, guys. It’s the show’s strong point. No alien conspiracies, even if we know they’re not really alien conspiracies.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. That was just a quick bit where I was sidetracked.

No, what I want to discuss today is the film Resevoir Dogs.

For about ten years now, people have been bugging the crap out of me to see it. “It’s a Classic,” my friends would say. “You’ll absolutely love it. It’s right up your alley.”

So, I finally got my shit together and watched it yesterday. And learned an important lesson.

I fucking hate the Classics.

Books. Movies. Doesn’t matter. If someone claims it’s a “Classic”, I will inevitably, 9/10, hate it. Especially Resevoir Dogs. Which was WEIRD for me.

It’s the kind of genre I like.

It has characters I normally find interesting.

It’s the kind of plot I like.

It’s by Quentin fucking Tarantino.

It has Steve Buscemi. STEVE FUCKING BUSCEMI.

But it wasn’t a movie I enjoyed at all. People praised it for its original dialogue. Well, to me, the dialogue was horribly paced, kind of staggered drunkenly along, went to go visit a few friends, and then collapsed in the gutter without going anywhere.

The story was told in a non-linear fashion. Now… when you tell a story in such a way, there better be a fucking point to it. Usually, you tell a story in a non-linear fashion in order to pull a fast one on the viewer. Confuse them with the details, let them sort out everything in their head, and while they’re working it all out, BAM, you hit them. Vidocq, Boondock Saints, and The Usual Suspects are all very good examples of this. But Tarantino… he just seems to tell non-linear stories because, well, it’s what he does. And it serves no real purpose, other than to tell a non-linear story. Maybe he thinks it’s different? I don’t know. But it really didn’t work with Resevoir Dogs.

What’s more is…. I don’t know. I liked the tone of the movie. I liked the *idea* of the movie. But I didn’t like the movie itself. Buscemi and Madsen did their jobs wonderfully, but….well, everyone, especially Roth, came off as kind of weak to me. And what’s more was, when the movie ended, it … well, it felt like there should’ve been more. I thought, once the credits hit, “Surely this can’t be all there is? There’s more, right?” But there wasn’t. The movie lacked something. And I’m still not sure what it was.

I haven’t felt this disappointed after watching a ‘Classic’ since Apocalypse Now, which I’m pretty sure I gave myself head trauma in order to forget.

Unidentified Flying Episode

I’ve got to be honest, the latest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles did not make a whole lot of sense to me.

Sarah’s been dreaming about these three dots, right? She keeps finding excuses to keep going on about it, like seeing them on her basement wall (speaking of which, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense either. At first it looks like the guy bursts through the patio door of the house, bleeding to death, having literally just approached the house. But later it’s like, no, first he broke into the basement, wrote a load of shit on the wall, went back upstairs and then died. Would it not have made more sense to just go to the Connors first and just told them using the time it took to write all of that crap? Anyway.) So Sarah finds a UFO convention where she’s seen these dots. Immediately alarm bells start going off in my head, but I stick with it.

So this woman approaches her at the convention about some blogger named Abraham, who was writing about some metal he was researching, and offers to take Sarah to give her more information about the whole thing.

I don’t worry about the day I find myself in a similar situation as Sarah’s. I now know that the exact information I’m seeking, even if it’s at a place apparently completely irrelevant to what I’m actually looking for, will undoubtedly be offered unreservedly up to me by the first person who approaches me out of a crowd of dozens.

Blah blah blah until Sarah doesn’t bail the second she realises “Eileen” has brought her to her isolated trailer in the middle of the desert filled with freaky UFO pictures with absolutely no one within screaming distance, instead opting to have a cup of tea with “Eileen.” Then they go to a UFO themed bar, which, I’ll be honest, if I was a UFO enthusiast I would burn to the ground out of protest. How crap were the “decorations”? I feel the production crew were scrimping and saving with this set. But there’s no time to worry about that, because Sarah inexplicably has a hallucination! Of herself! With a knife! And then it turns out that “Eileen” is actually Abraham, A.K.A. Alan, disguised as a woman! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!?

But seriously, was that a dude dressed as a woman? Or a woman playing a dude who’d had a certain operation to become a woman? Or just a woman playing a man dressing as a woman? In any case, I was just confused, perhaps enough to want to go and try cross dressing myself.

Etc etc etc until Sarah cajoles Eileen/Alan into hypnotherapy, leading to his (her?) death. Then she pulls the location of this secret facility out of her arse through a previously edited version of Eileen/Alan’s therapy session, manages to get shot, and then sees her three dot UFO – a Hunter/Killer aircraft. D’oh! Guess it was the military/a giant corporation all along.

In between all of that, we have the usual excruciating, grueling debacle that is the John/Riley/Cameron triangle. While I appreciated it to begin with, it’s now, like, a thousand episodes later, and nine hundred and ninety nine episodes beyond the shelf life of the arc. Well, maybe nine hundred and ninety five, to be fair. But still, waaaay past the threshold of my attention span when it comes to such things.

Riley whined about people whining, Jesse was a bitch (probably just prior to her being homicidal – I suspect she was the one on the motorbike), Cameron was hawt but also a machine, and John got another emotional scar when he found Riley in a pool of her own blood. All of this whilst redecorating the house. I’m amazed I lived through the episode. When are we going to see the John we glimpsed back at the start of the season? He was set to be all leader-of-the-Resistance when Riley showed up and nipped that right in the bud. So yeah, I’m not overly concerned that she tried to off herself.

As a season, the second has been consistently solid, despite a few hiccups here and there, and it’s a shame it ended on such a dud note. Hopefully it’ll be back on track when it returns in February.

Fallout 3: Best Game Ever?

I’m uncomfortable with this title. It means that this game is the most awesome game ever made, more than any other, in all regards. Granting that no game is perfect, it stands to reason that there is one game in existence that is the best game ever. Is Fallout 3 that game? The answer is a resounding…probably. I love Fallout 3. I’ve sank nearly 40 hours into it thus far and I’m going for a replay. I loved Oblivion, and I consider Fallout 3 to be the natural successor – the inevitable evolution – to what I previously considered to be the best game ever. You Morrowind fans can bite me, but that’s not for here. Where was I? Oh yeah – I love Fallout 3. But I can’t pretend that it doesn’t just plain suck in some regards.

The ability to animate a 3D model has apparently continued to elude Bethseda since they made Oblivion. We get this beautifully rendered world, this gloriously barren wasteland, and the character models look like arse. God help you if you pay close attention when they speak or walk, or, y’know, move in any way. Combat is just…I mean, wow. I’ll shoot a guy in the head five times and he’ll carry on coming at me. Why can I stop to consult my PipBoy 3000 and repair my firearm as a Mole Rat is stuck hovering in the air, paused in mid-action as it soars to rip my throat out? Not that that would be such a bad thing – if you think the enemies are resilient by resisting headshots, then your character is virtually invincible, soaking up unbelievable amounts of damage in a sweeping disregard for anything resembling realistic combat. Are you a FPS or an RPG? Make up your mind, most beloved Fallout 3!

Backtrack further up the post – specifically, to “gloriously barren wasteland.” I mean, yeah, it’s a beautiful pile of rubble Bethseda have rendered here, but…it’s a fucking pile of rubble. Granted, they’ve done their best with half-demolished highways and collapsed buildings, but did the progression of nuclear technology stop with American culture in this alternate, pseudo-1950s world? I’d like to think several nukes – because if I were in control of the Chinese military, I’d sure as hell point more than one of my apocalypse-bringing arsenal at the White House – would have visited a more epic amount of destruction upon the Capital.

Music? Good. Felt like I was listening to the same backing music as Oblivion a lot of the time, but there you go. The radio stations were pretty much defunct – unlike GTA4, where the radio lends to a bit more realism as the broadcasts continue even when you can’t hear them (and also that there are more than two stations) there were continual glitches in the Matrix as I played Fallout 3. Every time I walked past an active radio I heard the exact same broadcast over and over again from Three Dog or President Eden. Maybe it was just bad timing on my part, but it seemed to me that I only heard about 45 inconsecutive seconds of original content over the airwaves during the 40 hours I played. Not a good ratio to be working with.

*spoilers*

And finally, the plot. Warning, cause here be spoilers. There were a few nice twists and turns as the game proceeded, but overall the game failed to turn me on. I get that Project Purity is integral to the future of the Wasteland, but distilling a lot of water is just not sexy. At no point was I excited by the prospect that my actions would have far-reaching consequences over the rest of the world. The bit about the Enclave was nice, but the plot twist with President Eden was over as soon as it began, literally resolving itself in the same exchange of dialogue, and I couldn’t help but feel short changed by the Brotherhood of Steel’s involvement in the whole affair. Before I was even aware that I was in the final leg of the plot, I was running alongside a bastard-big robot and then had to choose whether or not to sacrifice myself in a radiation bathed control room. Which is a nice ending and all I guess, but I was completely nonplussed by the presence of Fawkes in my team – looking for the G.E.C.K., Fawkes happily runs around in a corridor swimming with radiation, but apparently forgoes this willingness as soon as it actually matters:

“Fawkes, we need to switch of some fucking thing in the control room but there are fatal levels of radiation in there. Get in there, switch it off, and we can all go for an ice-cool glass of fucking water. What? No? Oh I see, you’re giving me some bullshit excuse to cover for the fact that the writers forgot about this possible loophole until the last second. Thanks for fucking nothing, you piece of fucking shit.”

*spoilers over*

But gripes aside, it’s a pretty solid game. It took everything that was good with Oblivion and improved many bad things. The skill distribution is a lot better now – in Oblivion it sometimes felt like cheating when you’d get Athletics points just for running around normally, for example, but in Fallout 3 the only time you improve is when you level up. As in the Elder Scrolls IV, you wind up spending more time on quests not associated with the main story, so I can’t complain too much about how lacklustre I felt it was when there’s so much enjoyable questing to be done at the periphery. The system of law was a pain in the arse in Oblivion, and that’s not an issue here, seeing as how there is no system left.

But I can’t help but notice that throughout this article all I’ve done is compare Fallout 3 to Oblivion, and that’s because what I was doing playing it. Is this game just “Oblivion, with guns,” as I’ve heard it so frequently described? I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but yeah, that’s pretty much it. I love Fallout 3 dearly. It’s an amazing game that sucks you in, and you will lose many hours of your life to it. But ultimately, it’s just a jacked up version of an existing game. And I’m sure Tyramir has something to say about how it’s also a hijacked version of an existing game.

The Elusive Muse

Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. You can go for weeks and months without it, and then one day you just get hit with a sudden burst of creativity. That invisible, winged cherub that comes to hang over your head, and then leaves with as much warning.

That’s all well and good, but I think I know the true nature of a creative rush, rather than a phantom baby - it usually happens when you know there’s absolutely no way you can put it into action. You could sit, inactive, for months on end, with absolutely nothing better to do. The only guaranteed time you’d experience a sudden burst is right at the end when you have to move on to something else.

Stuck in work? You’ll want to write a bit of that story. Know that you have to get some sleep? Just as you climb into bed you’ll think of a new note for that song you’re composing. Your computer crashes? You’ll think of a passage that absolutely would have sat one hundred percent with the rest of the poem you just lost on your hard drive.

Why all this? It’s because adversity inspires, and for us Westerners a lot of the time the worst thing that faces us is getting out of bed in the morning. It’s no coincidence that the greatest thinkers and writers thought and wrote what they did in a time and place they could be killed for doing so. On a more trivial, but still entirely relevant note, some of the best films of recent times have been made on a shoestring budget, the director facing a different kind of adversity standing a penny away from total insolvency.

Would I trade our society for another? Not so much. But I watched something last night that made me stop and think – the Tonight report. It detailed the life of Riley, who at four years old could not for the most part communicate himself beyond baby noises. The interviewer asked a researcher why there are an increasing number of children who – forgetting reading and writing – cannot speak properly, when as a society we have more time, luxuries and resources than ever before. The researcher replied that as we become more focussed on material things like work and money, other things begin to slip away.

Another researcher told that “business talk” – language specifically targeting no-nonsense activities for kids, such as “go get your shoes,” or “eat your dinner” – began to be the only outlet kids had with their parents. As a result, kids can no longer hold conversations because all they’re hearing is sober, sterile instructions from the people who are supposed to teach them to hold a meaningless conversation. This is not a recent problem – this study began thirteen years ago.

“The point” is what is stifling our society. Kids can’t speak at the age of four because their parents can’t see the point of having a conversation that is ultimately meaningless. If something doesn’t have an express purpose at the outset, then it has no point, and is deemed irrelevant. Almost everything that is artistic or creative is pointless, and as a result it’s becoming scarcer as we go along. Add to that the weight of liberty and freedom of speech, and it’s a marvel that creativity isn’t dead already. We have enough money and food to sustain our country – what’s the point in writing about harder or better times? What’s left to strive for if we already have everything?

The first thing to remember is that we do not, as a society, have everything. The second thing to remember is that scraping enough cash together to buy whatever’s being advertised on the television – the thing that’s going to complete your life – well, it just isn’t. The third thing? Make some time to do that which has no purpose, because it seems as though that’s what’s going to give you the most fulfilment in the long term. My point is this – we need to forget the point.

The Thing About Dead Space

It’s terrifying.

There you have it, the short, compiled version of the rest of this entry. But why is it terrifying? I think I have it figured out.

Having just replayed Chapter One: New Arrivals, it’s safe to say that Dead Space is one of the most psychologically intelligent examples of entertainment I can recall, perhaps since Alien. The original horror/sci-fi story that still haunts my dreams (the Alien being the thing that unnerves me more than any other movie monster) was clever because of its psycho-sexual imagery, subconsciously evoking notions of rape and the desecration of sex itself provided by the mere presence of the various incarnations of the Alien. This sense of revulsion fuels the fear the viewers feel towards the Alien, which is what propels it above and beyond the regular scope of movie monster.

Dead Space mirrors this, but drawing on another base instinct – fight or flight. It does it in a way no other game before it could, the most obvious reason being advances in graphic technology, but also because of the setting. Resident Evil placed the player in cavernous mansions, epic city-wide treks and, once, on the wrong side of a one-sided mirror in a police interrogation room. In Dead Space, the only times you get a bit more room to move about in usually means something bigger and ultimately worse than the enemies you’ve been fighting is on the way. Mainly, it draws on its own sense of claustrophobia, and the fact that it’s down to the player to move Isaac down the very narrow, poorly lit corridor as they can hear something skittering along the air duct above them. But upon starting again, I have discovered that Dead Space does something more than just provide basic scares. As I drew closer to the end of the game, I could feel myself growing desensitised to the jumps and jolts. Thus, as I completed it, I felt confident that I could do it again without the tension felt throughout much of the first run.

Yeah, I was wrong about that.

Replaying the first chapter, I found out what makes Dead Space so special – it psychologically conditions the player to fear commonplace actions very early on. The first enemy you see eats the rescue team’s security detail, bounds through an air duct and lunges for you instead as Kendra screams hysterically for you to run away through the just-unlocked door, which, not being a complete idiot, you do. And there you go. Straight away, the game has trained you to want to run away rather than fight an enemy, which is going to be difficult a lot of the time because much of the game takes place in corridors about a metre wide.

Then, elevators. The enemy chases you through a strobe-filled corridor, assaulting your senses and pumping the level of fear through the roof, all the way to the elevator at the end of your desperate getaway. The doors close before it can reach you. Then it forces them open, slavering jaws reaching for Isaac’s neck as he cowers against the far wall of the maybe three feet square of box he’s sought refuge in. The doors wrench closed, slicing the creature in half, but from now on, every time you run away from an enemy, you’re going to be unsure as to whether or not the simple metal barricade is going to keep them at bay.

Throughout the first chapter, the game assaults you with shocks and scares. The dead body you see lying stationary in the middle of the corridor? That’s actually one of the beasts, which will wait until you’re exactly within reaching distance before revealing itself as active. Trouble is, there is no shortage of dead bodies in this game, and so for every one you see, you have to assume it might wake up and want its dinner. Every air vent becomes a threat as a Necromorph bursts out of one right in front of you, eager to introduce its claws to your internal organs. A dead body drops from the ceiling as you open a regular door. As Isaac disembarks an elevator to a lower level, an enemy rushes forward at insane speed as a burst of screeching music assaults your ears. During my first run, every time I was in an elevator I aimed my gun straight and centre at the doors before it arrived at its destination. Now I know where that habit came from. The stupid thing? That’s the only point in the entire game I can remember a creature waiting outside an elevator for our intrepid protagonist.

At another point, as Isaac approaches a door, the power dies. It’s not that door is now locked; it just doesn’t work any more. The lights fail, the ventilation system shuts down, and the only thing you can hear is…nothing. Your weapon’s flashlight does little to illuminate the corridor, and you’re left boxed in at the end of the gangway, your so-thought avenue of escape now a dead end death trap, when the power comes back on, restoring things to normal. No enemies have come to eat you, and these false-start scares do two things – 1) make the player cling even more desperately to the already pathetic amount of light throughout much of the ship, afraid it might get taken away again, and 2) make the player unsure whether or not triggering events will lead to a tooth and claw festival. This idea to withhold full-blooded scares and use minor ones in their place is brutally effective, ensuring that the player’s nerves are torn to pieces with every little movement and sound.

In short, again, it’s terrifying. It messes with your head and plays mind games so subtle that I didn’t even realise it was happening until I began playing again from the start. And yes, while this method of scares is hardly a new invention, Dead Space does it with such finesse that even as you expect to receive this treatment, you don’t notice it as it happens. Top notch.

Legend of the Seeker

 

So, I’ve begun to watch Legend of the Seeker. I was a moderate fan of the books it’s loosely based on, The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. That is, until the main character basically became an unstoppable machine who pranced around from area to area, absorbing in peoples and cultures, and then telling them how everything they believed and did was wrong, and how he was right. But that’s another rant, which I don’t think I’ll be going into.

 

Legend of the Seeker is … well, it’s a train wreck. You want to look away, but just can’t do it. When I say it’s loosely based on the series, I mean, it barely resembles the books. Minor changes crop up at every turn, main plot points from Wizard’s First Rule – the first book – come up, and then are tossed aside and stomped on. Richard, who in the books, is a thinking character, a man who analyzes and examines every situation before making a move, is now a young hothead who leads with his heart. And worst, Sam Raimi’s in charge of it. Now, I love Sam Raimi. I pray at my Deity every day for that man to get more work. But Raimi has a problem. And that problem is called nepotism. He can’t stay objective when he’s hiring actors. He always needs to fill spots with friends, family, and people he’s worked with before. I didn’t even know Raimi was a producer on the show ahead of time. I didn’t find out until after I saw an episode with Ted Raimi in it. You know. His brother. Who was also Joxer in Xena. As well as a couple random roles in Army of Darkness. I’m waiting for Bruce ‘God’ Campbell and Lucy Lawless to show up.

 

But don’t get me wrong.

 

I actually enjoy Legend of the Seeker. It has its problems. The acting could use a little bit of work here and there, the writers only seem to be acquainted with the books because someone mentioned them at a dinner party one time, and I think Richard’s character’s been raped horribly by something truly vicious.

 

But then I realized. I don’t actually like Richard Cypher. Oh, sure. He starts off okay. But then he quickly becomes a pompous ass who knows better than everyone, can kill an army of two thousand men armed only with a dagger, and, of course, is capable of doing no wrong whatsoever.

 

This new, barely recognizable Richard? I could see myself liking him, with time.

 

Bridget Regan screams Kahlan on a visual level. She’s exactly what I expected her to look like. She’s an okay actress – nothing special. We’ll see if she grows in time. And Bruce Spence as Zedd? Genius.

 

The scenery and cinematography are both beautiful, and the special effects are stunning. The Boundary was awe inspiring with how it was handled. I could sit back and look at it for days. However, the depiction of a Gar was a little wince-worthy in its cartoonish qualities. But it’s a TV series, so I can forgive.

 

And then there are the fight scenes. My god, the fight scenes. They’re extremely reminiscent of Angel and 300, with their use of good camera angles and slow motion followed by normal speed. They took the lessons learned from those two, and then built on it. Visually, the fights are amazing. The choreography is top notch, too, although, sometimes I have slight difficulty believing some of the physics behind it. While not nearly as bad as, say, Xena, Kahlan disarming a man wielding a two-handed axe, and then using it herself in her offhand makes me scratch my head and wonder. It can be a little distracting.

 

Legend of the Seeker is not The Sword of Truth. It’s not brain candy. Some of its plot has been reduced to cliché. But you know what? I like it.

What else is there to say?