TW3: 13/02/10

What tickled my fancy or summoned my ire over the past seven days.

Countless Films
Having been off work for the week I’ve spent the time staring at various glowing rectangles. The highlights, the best and brightest: Gladiator, The Fifth Element, The Dark Knight, The Hangover, Inglourious Basterds, District 9…there have been more, but they’ve all merged into one hybrid memory, impossible to distinguish from one another. All except one – the ten minutes of Ace Venture: Pet Detective Jr. I saw before turning it off in disgust. Unfortunately, that will stay with me for a while.

Games
Similarly, my X-Box 360 has been my faithful companion throughout the week, only throwing up its annoying “Open Tray” error message once.

Mass Effect
Not all of it, but I started up again from an old save. I spent most of the time bitching at the TV. “Shut up, Tali!” “Oh be quiet, Ashley!” I forgot how annoying I found certain characters to be. I’d past the point of spending 20 minutes in an elevator but somehow it wound up annoying me more than I found it entertaining. I got a few new achievements out of it, anyway. Plus it was really because my friend is buying an Xbox with Mass Effect 2; we’re swapping so I can play the sequel while he catches up with the original.

Lost Odyssey
In theory I should love this game. Unfortunately, as with Final Fantasy X, I can’t bear the voice actors. However it’s worse than FFX. At least FFX had (some) fundamentally likeable characters. I could play it on mute whenever a cut scene happened. In Lost Odyssey we have (so far, I’m still only on the first disk) Kaim “One Word Answer” Argonar, Jansen “The ‘Comic’ Relief” Friedh and Seth “Shut Up Jansen, Stop Trying to Force Character Development He Obviously Desperately Needs Onto Kaim” Balmore.
Is Jansen a double agent? Is Seth deliberately trying to stop Kaim remembering the past? Does Kaim have a cognitive impairment or does he just act like he does? Finding it difficult to care. There is no group dynamic – I thought I disliked Jansen for being such a massive tool, but then I realised I hate him because he never shuts up. Why? Because he’s filling the yawning chasm left by the other two characters never, ever talking. I’ll struggle on in a couple of weeks after I get over my little temper tantrum.

The Dark Tower
There was a time, about a month ago, I genuinely thought I would never finish Wizard and Glass. Logically I knew I must at some point because I was turning pages and getting closer to the end, but in the same way time acts strangely in Mid-World, it felt as though the book would never be over. That I would spend an eternity reading about counting horses and fish nets. About how much Roland loved Susan. About how Aunt Cordelia was a massive bitch. YAAAAAAAAWN.
By his own admission, Stephen King writes in the author’s notes at the end that even he felt it all fell apart around page 600. Too right it did mate – I recall thinking exactly the same thing at the 602 mark. He generates a web of new characters in a new setting and sets up a fairly predictable turn of events for around 200 pages, and then treads water for the remaining two thirds, to suddenly and abruptly resolve everything rather clumsily.
Additionally, I dislike prequels at the best of times. While it can be interesting to see exactly how things arrived at their later conclusions, sometimes it’s better to leave things wrapped in an air of mystery. Also, I find there’s little thrill in seeing events unfold when I already know their conclusion. Case in point.
Luckily I’m onto Wolves of the Calla, which is proving to be a much more entertaining read so far.

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.

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.

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.

TW3 16/11/08

That Was The Week That Was; a summary of what pleased and irked for the past seven days.

Dead Space
How messed up was the ending? The Hive Mind reminded me of fighting a giant throat infection, with the giant yellow modules implanted firmly around its mouth and throughout the inside of its neck. I’m playing it through again, if only to get the achievements I missed this time around, but also I think I’ll enjoy playing it while not entirely gripped by terror, my courage bolstered by knowing pretty much when to expect the jumps and scares.

The Inbetweeners
Thank God for TV On Demand. I saw this advertised a while ago but didn’t end up watching it when it was first on. Very funny adolescent comedy from E4, it’s been picked up for a second series in 2009. Enough toilet humour to shake a stick at, but for me it was the bickering dialogue between the lads that got the most laughs. Perhaps not as diverse as peer programme Skins, but much, much better in the areas it does focus on. And speaking of Skins…

Skins
I just don’t get Skins – there are a couple of funny moments, but not enough to warrant labelling it as a comedy, yet hordes of seasoned comedians turn up on this show. I watched the last episode of series two, wherein Anwar realises his character has only been created to fulfil the producers’ diversity requirements and therefore has no drive or ambition of his own, the inevitable consequence of receiving zero character development throughout. His solution? Tag along with gay best friend Maxxie to London, whose own development only began during the second run, presumably because girls fancy him. It seems like the only two characters besides Cassie who might genuinely encounter some kind of resistance in their lives are barely given a look in. And where does Tony source the money to buy Sid a plane ticket to New York on a whim? Throughout the entire two year run, he hasn’t been seen working a job for a day of his life. Maybe he gets an EMA. I think Skins is an accurate portrayal of modern-day teenagers’ lives if money, self-confidence and discrimination are no object to living and doing - but as I remember it, they featured pretty prominently during my teens.

Police Interceptors
Amazingly bad law-enforcement-based reality TV. Whether it’s the entertainingly crap staff profile pages, thick thieves, the facepalm-inducing Dad humour or the gloriously guttural bordering-on-Mockney narrator, I can’t get enough. It’s on Fiver at various times throughout the week.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!
An oldie but a goodie. I spent several hours sailing the seas on stolen craft, terrorising the fine, upstanding citizens of the Caribbean. I’ve found my long lost sister and uncle but remain clueless as to the exact location of the Marquis’ secret stash. It’s a bit crap that you have to keep beating the same two guys over and over to forward plot elements, but it’s not going to stop me playing.

Surround Sound
New 5.1 speakers and a 6 channel sound card. Nuff said really. And linked in with this…

Rob Dougan
The man is a musical genius, and currently my favourite artist, ever. His “Instrumental” sat in the centre of aforementioned Surround Sound was like a Reiki holistic head massage, in that it nearly sent me to sleep. In a good way.

Here’s to the next seven days being full of meaningless distractions.

Left 4 Dead

Prominent in Tyramir’s last post was the word “bevy.” If you’re even remotely Northern British, this word, or one of its literary cousins, inspires thoughts not of beautiful women, but of cool, refreshing beer.

Bevvy, noun, meaning a drink of alcoholic nature. Useage, “Do you want to go for a bevvy?” Also to describe a state of drunkenness: “Let’s get bevvied.”

And then I read his post beyond the word “bevy,” and it had the added bonus of making me think of not only alcohol, but of scantily clad, buxom women. So, not a bad start, in my book. And naturally, with women and beer placed firmly in my thoughts, the next logical step was to add gratuitous violence to my state of mind, thus completing my temporary “perfect male” mental status, so I went ahead and downloaded the Left 4 Dead demo.

At this point, I feel I should point out that I’m not great at First Person Shooters. I completed all the Halo games, as well as Rainbow Six Vegas and Call of Duty 4. But when these games go online – that’s where I usually draw the line. It’s not the thought of playing with other people that bothers me; the apparently perfect reflex time of the other players does. I’m just not that good, so I always die – then I get frustrated, and then I give up. So as a game that’s pretty much designed to be a multiplayer, maybe this immediately isn’t the game for me, but I decided to give it a try. I should also point out that the minimum specs for this game ask for a 3.0 GHz processor, and I have a 2.1.

Guess what? I didn’t like it. Possibly because of my below-spec PC, the graphics looked awful, (although I’ve seen an in-game footage video on YouTube and to be honest, they weren’t much better than the ones I was looking at) and definitely because of my below-spec PC as soon as there were more than five zombies on screen, there was graphics slow down. I’m really not sure what this game is spending that enormous amount of necessary spec on. But that’s not what bothered me the most about the game.

Believe it or not, it’s the story. You might argue that it’s a FPS the same breed as Counter Strike, for crying out loud, and that I shouldn’t expect a very high standard from it. Well, yes, but I think that’s what I take exception to. Zombie films (and games, and TV shows) are about mood rather than action. There’s always a sense of terrible isolation and desperation involved. From what I saw of this game, neither of these things play much of a part in Left 4 Dead. The intro movie pointedly tells us that the events of the game take place two weeks after the initial “outbreak”. In this time, the group of four ordinary people have amassed a military grade arsenal, acquired perfect marksmanship and a sense of camaderie that completely erases the possibility of the usual zombie film group-breakdown storyline, which, frankly, I enjoy watching possibly more than all of the gore involved. Add to that the crying zombie scene, stolen in its entirety from the excellent “Domain” by James Herbert (except, you know, replacing the mutant rat with a zombie), and you can just tell I’m not a great fan of this already.

Gameplay? Too fast for me. This is a game designed for the rapid-reflex players mentioned previously. Zombies have astounding acrobatic ability and can leap dozens of feet from standing, but when unprovoked shamble aimlessly like their more traditional fictional predecessors. Several enemies (not including the zombies, which are obviously the most prominent theft) are lifted straight from other games, namely L4D’s “Smoker” (seen about halfway through the previously linked YouTube video) versus Resident Evil 2′s “Licker.” Except, it’s just not as entertaining. If I’m playing a horror game I’d rather see a horrifically mutated creature like a Licker rather than, well, a dude with a long tongue. Just takes some of the fun out of it somehow.

While it may seem as though I’m commenting on the game’s lack of realism and then moving straight on to complaining that the game is not unrealistic enough in terms of gloriously gory enemies, well, that’s because that’s what I’m doing. My main complaint? Pick a style and go with it. Everything about the game seems neither here nor there, and more to the point, half-arsed, and you don’t get to do that to the zombie genre. Unless you created it. But if you like Counter Strike, and have an obscenely fast computer, then go for it. As for me, I think for now I’ll save my money and spend it on a bevy of bevvies.

Problems With Pathways

I’m 22 years old, and I’m concerned about my future. It’s a strange world that we live in when I’m worried that getting more education might actually harm my employment prospects. My logic is that as you specialise in one field more and more, you have fewer and fewer vacancies you might apply for. Is there any factual evidence to back this up? I’m still working on that, and it’s occupying my thoughts a lot lately.

But then I remembered this. Applied Golf Management Studies. If you got a degree in this, then at least you know what you want out of life. It made me feel better about my thoughts about specialising in one area – as in, “at least it won’t be as much as this.”

And then I remembered this. A friend told me about it once. Postgraduate Robin Hood Studies. Your first impression, as was mine, might be that employment opportunities in this particular field would probably be limited. But you know what? You’d be wrong.

Not only are there jobs, but enough of them to justify a four day conference on the subject that successfully ran for four consecutive years. On the other hand, that was back in 2003, so maybe Robin Hood Studies isn’t a sustainable long term investment. But either way, you’ve got to love an international academic community that says, “You like Robin Hood? Here, we’ll pay you to talk about it.” I’ve just got to find the thing that I like to talk about. I’ll worry about getting paid for it later.