As a matter of fact, that very same film is in need of some geek assistance. We have found ourselves in need of a Sasquatch. If anyone has a Sasquatch costume, or (more likely) an adult-sized Chewbacca costume that they don’t mind us modifying, please shoot me an e-mail at milos_parker at yahoo dot com. Again, if you have a Chewbacca costume, we’re going to be modifying it beyond recognition– so no collector’s items.

We have $0, but will cover S+H.

Reading the eighteenth volume of Dark Horse’s Little Lulu reprint series, which collects issues 82 through 87, I came across the answer.

From the back cover copy:

When Jolt City’s sworn protector the Green Knight falls ill with cancer, his former sidekick Martin Rock embarks on an incredible journey: from self-reliance to friendship, from pain to peace, from anger to joy.

Along the way, he’ll fight a jousting match atop a unicycle, team up with a super-speedster, visit an alternate earth populated by talking snails, and thwart an invasion.

Unabashedly in love with its genre but unafraid to take it deadly seriously, JOLT CITY is free of camp, laced with literary wit and heightened with stark poetical beauty. So turn off your bleeper, snuggle up in bed, pull the covers over your head, flick on your electric torch, and get ready for 358 pages of unrelenting two-fisted awesomeness.

MY WIFE THE ADDICT

I’m married to a beautiful and intelligent woman named Mary. I could go on for pages and pages about how wonderful she is, how much I adore her, how blessed I am that she puts up with me. She is my partner both in life and in art, my closest collaborator and my best friend. We connect on so many levels about so many things. But like most couples, there are a couple of areas where we don’t see eye-to-eye.

It’s not so much that we disagree, but that we don’t share the same cultural touchstones. There is a slight age difference between us, and so when I mention a geek landmark from my childhood, like Duck Tales or Transformers or “east-most peninsula is the secret”, she generally has no idea what I’m talking about. Superhero comics hold no allure for her, and she never really got into video games. Sure, she plays them from time to time, but she fits pretty squarely into that demographic so beloved by gaming companies and so disparaged by gaming enthusiasts, the casual player.

Now that I’ve told you a little bit about Mary, let me tell you a little bit about Sacred 2. It is, to put it charitably, Diablo-esque, and while my familiarity with Diablo is passing at best, it’s safe to say that it doesn’t do it nearly as well as Diablo does and doesn’t bring much of anything new to the table. The translation and voice-acting is surprisingly atrocious and borders on being annoying. The story is inane and run of the mill. There are technical glitches and bugs, not to mention a fair share of camera and difficulty curve issues. And while some games insist on holding the player’s hand throughout the entire experience, never allowing them to explore or discover anything for themselves, Sacred 2 takes the opposite route, throwing the player into the thick of it with very little by way of concrete explanation.

And my wife Mary, the casual player, knows all this, admits it freely, even brought some of it to my attention. And despite that, Mary stays up playing Sacred 2 until four or five in the morning. Since I’m unable to sleep alone, I consequently don’t get to sleep until four or five. At ten or ten-thirty, I prepare to go to work; often, Mary has resumed playing the game before I even wake up.

When I come home, she’s still playing the game. I used to come home to a freshly-prepared meal, sometimes quite ordinary (pasta, veggies, fish-and-rice), sometimes quite adventurous (turkey and collard greens with beans and wine-cooked rice), but almost always exquisitely scrumptious (the time she used salsa instead of pasta sauce, eh, not so much). Mary enjoys cooking immensely, derives as much pleasure from preparing a meal as I do from eating it, but since Sacred 2 came into our house, I’ve had to make runs to McDonald’s for hamburgers. I haven’t had fast food this regularly since I was in high school, and it no longer agrees with me. Meanwhile, Mary’s seraphim has gone up another two levels and has learned a new combat art.

I have seriously considered hiding the game before going to work, but since that would involve (1) waking up before she does, (2) distracting her from its absence until I have left the house, (3) “forgetting” my phone and shutting down all the phone lines at work so that she couldn’t call and ask where it was, and, finally, (4) finding a place to stash it where it would remain undiscovered for the six hours that I’m away, as I have no doubt she might spend that time in a single-minded T-1000-esque search of the house, I have not gone through with it. I’m just far too exhausted from the lack of sleep and far too ill from the fast food to expend that energy or think that far ahead.

And the thing is, while Sacred 2 isn’t a resolutely terrible game, it’s also not a particularly great one; it’s certainly not good enough for a non-gamer to be playing it thirty or forty-plus hours a week. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever spent thirty or forty hours in a single week playing video games, plural, let alone one game whose flaws are so glaring and so obvious.

And, again, Mary is acutely aware of these flaws; she’ll complain about this one or that one, threaten to kill the NPCs if they don’t shut up or stop singing, curse the camera or the insanely tiny and hard-to-read text. “I know it’s not very good,” she’ll say, “but there’s something addictive about it.”

GRINDING

That “something” is looting, pure and simple. You kill something to get stuff which allows you to kill more things to get more stuff. Progressing in the game makes it easier to progress in the game; the reward and the effort are forever intertwined in an unending cycle, a sort of perpetual motion machine of gaming. It’s this cycle that made the Diablo games so popular, that caused so many players to sink so many hours into it. That same cycle is responsible for the success of massively-multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (and, it should be noted, the various controversies that politicians use to score cheap points).

The funny thing is, I’ve never really gotten into Diablo, World of Warcraft, and now Sacred 2; I’ve never really gotten into looting for its own sake. In my article “The Problem with RPGs” (Russell’s Quarterly No. 2, p. 9-64), I sang the praises of the leveling up concept but lambasted the sometimes monotonous grinding upon which it runs. Even in some of the best and most fondly remembered RPGs, battles often devolve into selecting “fight” over and over again.

Why is it, I wondered, that gamers had put up with selecting the same command over and over again in game after game? It was, of course, the story, and that was “The Problem” that gave that article its title. The player had no control over the flow of the story and the major source of meaning was not game play but cut-scenes. Most irritating of all, the player was often hedged in by arbitrary “road blocks”. You know what I’m talking about: the guards standing at every corner of the town that don’t conveniently leave until after you’ve killed all the rats in the cellar.

PLAYER AUTONOMY

Sacred 2, conversely, gives the player a great deal of control. You have, first of all, an insane amount of options and ways to customize your character. The items you loot can be taken to a blacksmith and fixed with stat-altering gem stones; skill points can be spent in different combat arts; new combat arts are unlocked by “memorizing” (using) runes.

The player has complete autonomy to how their character progresses in the game. This autonomy extends to the the way you progress through the game’s world. There are literally hundreds of missions and dungeons to explore and you more-or-less have the freedom to go where you want, when you want. Here, then, is a game that answers some of my most persistent pet peeves in role-playing games.

And yet, for me, that is the biggest problem. It’s not the literally dozens of glitches and bugs. It’s not even the absurdly simple combat, the absolutely terrible voice-over, or the fact that all those missions and dungeons are as generic as possible. And as much as it turns me off, it’s not even the grinding.

It is, instead, that freedom and openness. I just don’t know what to do with it. I spend hours wandering around, trying to find out what I want to do next. When I get a skill point, I have no idea where to spend it; I don’t know what loot to keep and what to discard; I don’t know what combat arts I should be learning. I’m really just overwhelmed by the freedom.

HOW SACRED 2 CHANGED THE WAY I THINK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES

And this realization was very troubling for me. As much as I rail against the linearness of RPGs, as much as I despise cut-scenes and road blocks, as much as I disdain “rhythm vomiters” like Guitar Hero, I came to the realization that I as a player need some kind of structure. That I like knowing where I should go next. That I like knowing that I haven’t made some kind of huge mistake that’s going to make the rest of the game insanely harder or saddle me with the “bad” ending. That I like having a limited number of things to invest my skill points or red orbs in, and that I like seeing the end result of that almost immediately instead of four or five levels later.

Video games are an art form without an audience. Instead, you have two authors: the designer(s) and the player(s). One creates a context for the experience of the other. The designer is the player’s advocate and his opponent at the same time. The games I get the most enjoyment out of are those where I can feel the designer’s intelligence pitted against and yet working with my own. The problem here is that it feels like the player is doing all the work.

This reminds me, oddly enough, of the online flash game/community Creature Breeder, in which you raise, breed, and care for a number of whimsical creatures. Happy creatures cause money to grow on your money tree, and you use that money to buy things to make them happy. You feed them, click on them, toss a ball at them to kick. That’s really all there is to it. The player is responsible for their own enjoyment or lack thereof. The problem isn’t that it was boring. I mean, sure, it was, but the reason why it was boring is that I couldn’t detect the other author.

The Holy Grail of video games is a game in which every player has a different experience. But having played Sacred 2, which at least has some of that potential, I’ve realized that to pursue that Holy Grail is folly. I still think that players should have a great of options, but at the same time I’ve realized that if you give the player too many options, the choices become meaningless.

A great game designer (or team of designers) will strike a balance between the two extremes: providing enough linearness to give the player context and challenge but not so much that they feel hog-tied. Freedom, as a wiser man than me once said, is simply slack in the reins.

Sacred 2, then, has profoundly changed my thinking about the video game art form, its innate need for linearity, and the interface between the player and the designer. I don’t know if I’ll ever put it back into my Playstation machine, and I don’t know if I’d ever recommend it to anyone.

But I’m extremely grateful that I played it.

SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Because video games are about navigating through screen space (and overcoming the obstacles and enemies within that space), it’s always important for the player to have (and for the designer to impart) a sense of screen geography, of how big the pit before them is, how much time it will take for the enemy to reach them, where the enemies are in relation to the player. Your average first-person shooter doesn’t do that for me; they often leave me feeling discombobulated. There’s no sense of body, of weight, of exactly how high and how far I can jump (in those games where jumping is required). While it’s less “realistic”, I’ve always preferred third-person action games because they give me a better sense of where and who I am.

But because the two Riddick games depend on stealth– on sneaking up on guards instead of blasting your way through, on finding cover, hiding and waiting breathlessly for the moment to strike, on inching your way slowly across a room– becoming more aware of your surroundings is one of its defining game mechanics. It makes that sense of uncertainty an asset instead of a crutch. The inclusion of the blue tinting when in stealth mode– which indicates that you are completely hidden in the shadows and invisible to your enemies– compensates for the lack of body sense. The game’s designers give the player all the tools they need to succeed; should they be spotted and/or killed, the player has no one to blame but themselves. This, in turn, ensures that no matter how difficult the game is– and I found it quite challenging even on “Easy” mode– that difficulty is implemented more-than-fairly.

PACING

I like fast-paced action games, but for many of the spatial-related reasons mentioned above, first-person shooters are a little too fast-paced. The fact that the camera– i.e., the way in which I receive the information necessary to play the game– and the gun-site– i.e., the way in which I play the game– are one-and-the-same has always been a major cause of frustration. If some little alien comes scurrying along the floor at me, I have to tilt down to try and shoot it– and now it’s stinging me, and I have to back up in order to shoot it, and, oh my goodness, there’s something behind me, and I whirl the camera around trying to find that one and it hits me again and I have to tilt the camera another way to hit its weak-point and sometimes when I’m whirling around it overshoots and I have to swivel back and now it’s hit me again and, oh, look at that, I’m dead. Again.

With Riddick, on the other hand, the stealth gameplay dictates a pace that’s more amiable to the aiming/viewing camera. I can line up my shots carefully, wait until a guard comes into view, sneak up on them and snap their necks, strike from the shadows and retreat. Granted, there are a couple of faster-paced exceptions that force the player to adapt the more traditional (and, for me, rather frustrating) run’n'gun approach, and we’ll get to those and discuss the implications thereof in due time.

For now, let’s look at these two games in a little more depth, starting with the first.

ESCAPE FROM BUTCHER’S BAY

TUTORIAL

You can tell a lot about a game, right off the bat, from its opening. As I detailed in my study of Super Mario Bros. (see Russell’s Quarterly No. 5, pg. 24-52), a game’s first level is “the most important” one, for “[it] is the first level that gives us an immediate sense of what is in store for us. It is the first level that makes us want to play the second, and the second the third, and so forth; this flow of desire begins with the very first stage, and if it does not generate the necessary momentum, then the player has no reason to play the game… The first level of a game, then, must contain the entire game in miniature without exhausting the game’s content.”

Butcher’s Bay’s tutorial level does this quite ably. After an opening cinematic establishes that bounty hunter slash mercenary Johns is escorting Riddick to Butcher’s Bay, a particularly desolate and inescapable “slam”, we find ourselves at the gates of the prison with two other prisoners. One of them suggests that while Johns has his back to us that we break his neck; a flash of onscreen text tells us how to do so. The emphasis from the start is on stealth.

Upon breaking Johns’s neck, a number of guards come pouring out of the Bay, guns blazing, and the emphasis switches to evasion. I will admit that I was so disoriented at first that I missed the escape hatch directly behind me, running past it and getting riddled with bullets. On my second attempt, I found the hatch and down I went.

Before that, however, I noted that one of the other prisoners had tried to grab a gun and was electrocuted. As Vin Diesel helpfully explained in voice-over, the weapons at Butcher’s Bay are DNA-encoded. As if to test the theory, after I had knocked out a guard in a particularly brutal bit of melee combat, I attempted to pick up his gun and got a jolt. That’ll teach me to doubt the Diesel.

Imagine my surprise, then, a few guards later, when I found myself in possession of a gun. What was special about this gun that I could pick it up? Strange. I also noted that the ammo is displayed on the weapon itself; this keeps the HUD down to the bare minimum– just a life bar in the upper left hand corner of my screen.

Soon after gaining the ammo for my weapon, I found myself sloshing about in the darkness of a sewer tunnel. My gun possesses a flash-light, but that in turn could alert the guards in the tunnel to my presence. What followed was a tense sequence of moving, toggling the light on-and-off, shooting at a guard, retreating, returning, attempting not to arouse the other guards. It was tense stealth-based shooter game play, and despite the fact that I died a few times, I found myself having fun with an FPS.

That’s when a bright light filled the tunnel, and I heard a voice telling me to rise and shine. Cut scene: I’m back on Johns’s ship, Johns is still alive (I *knew* his character was in the movie), and the preceding was all a dream. And, usually, “it’s all a dream” is a cop-out of grievous magnitude.

But in this case, it worked. First of all, because it operated from a sort of dream logic; the pace was deliberately too fast and certain incongruous details (Johns’s death, the sudden ability to pick up the gun) were present. Secondly, and far more importantly, it constructed a miniature narrative that gets the player acquainted with the various types of actions required to play the rest of the game. Each element fits effortless and systemically within this narrative, flowing naturally; some tutorial stages, by contrast, strain credibility to try and fit all the disparate game play elements into a single level. This is a testament not only to the narrative skills of Riddick’s designers but also to the fact that the various game play elements all fit together naturally in the first place.

It also worked on a formal level. A lot of tutorials feel very different from the rest of the game; for example, the various on-screen hints and prompts are in greater abundance. Some games try to mask this by trying to fold the overtly instructional tutorial into the progression of their plots; some games emphasize this by creating a special “training room” (consider, for example, the tutorial stage in Katamari Damacy). Butcher’s Bay marries both approaches together, by setting it formally apart from the rest of the game (pre-credits sequence, all-a-dream) without ignoring the story’s primary focus and tensions (escaping from the prison, antagonism between Riddick and Johns).

It also serves as the first telling of a game-play sequence that structures the entire game and serves as a potent source of excitement. In this first sequence, Riddick starts off with only his fists and, through combat prowess and some Mr. Sneaky stuff, he gains weaponry, thus becoming more powerful. When it is revealed that it is all a dream, of course, Riddick is left again with only his fists.

When we regain control of Riddick in his cell, we set about the task of gaining some weaponry for ourselves. First, we get some knuckledusters, then a shiv, then, after we get our DNA added into the prison’s database, we start picking up assault rifles and shotguns. We lose all but one of these when we fall into the pit; we slowly regain our weapons until after a boss fight with a guard, Abbott. A cut-scene moves us to a higher security level, and we find ourselves empty-handed again. More than that, our DNA is no longer in the database. (More on this, and the acquisition of the tranq. gun that dramatically changes the game play, later.)

We will find ourselves empty-handed one more time, and one more time we’ll have to work to build up our arsenal. By my count, the player has to start out empty-handed four times: once for the tutorial dream sequence, and once for each security level. What this does is it makes each acquisition of a weapon that much more crucial and that much more game changing. It’s less like picking up a weapon and more like picking up a power-up; it foregrounds the start-weak-and-grow-powerful mechanic at the heart of so many games and ensures that the player never gets to the point where they’re vastly over-powered.

DIFFICULTY

In fact, I often felt slightly under-powered and at times over-whelmed; Butcher’s Bay’s difficulty level is fairly high. Not only did I die on the game’s first screen, but I died several times through-out the game. When you find yourself exposed to gunfire, you’re really exposed; a couple of guards and/or turrets working in tandem can make mince-meat of your health bar in a manner of seconds. When I was able to respond in kind, my weapon’s aiming dot was just that, a tiny dot.

Compare this to the more straightforward first-person shooter BioShock; thanks to a generous first-aid stack limit (Riddick does not carry any kind of health power-ups, but has to rely on strategically-stationed Nano-Med machines) and larger aiming dots, I’ve yet to die once despite the fact that I am frequently surprised by suddenly-appearing psychopathic splicers and frustrated by having to whirl the camera around trying to discover who the heck is hitting me.

I don’t make the comparison, however, to be detrimental towards Riddick; the high difficulty level is fitting and purposeful. When you find yourself opened up to a barrage of enemy gun fire, it’s because you haven’t been paying enough attention to your environment or because you haven’t exercised the right amount of patience. The next time through, you’ll be more careful, wait longer, and look closer. Or, to put it more succinctly, the game’s difficulty teaches you the skills necessary to overcome its obstacles. If Riddick gave you BioShock’s larger aiming dots and stackable health-kits, you could make a stupid mistake and survive it, just barely making your way through to the next challenge. The game would be easier, but you wouldn’t learn anything, you wouldn’t actually be getting better at the game.

And that’s not to say that the game’s difficulty level is necessarily a punishing or unforgiving one. Quite the contrary: the game’s designers want you to get to the next challenge. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve got one bar of health left and you’re about to embark on a particularly tense section crammed with guards. Try as you might, you just can’t sneak or snipe your way to the other side; you just don’t have enough health to make it. Fail enough times and the game will tip the scales into your favour by replenishing another unit of health. That extra unit was just what this player needed more than once. And though I only noticed it happening one time, I’m pretty sure the game also gave me some extra ammo the last time through in an area in which I had been hopelessly outgunned.

These little acts of sympathy towards the player, coupled with the fact that the game’s difficulty stemmed from and supported the stealth game play style, ensured that, while certainly difficult, the game’s difficulty level was fairly implemented and a sign of strong systemic design.

SHOWERS SEQUENCE

If every game should spring from a strong and unique high concept (in this case, bringing a more overt stealth element to FPS game play), every game designer should be able to come up with multiple strong and unique ways to deliver on that concept. Failure to do so can result in long-and-tedious more-of-the-same, in one-trick ponies that squander their novelty’s potential.

Butcher’s Bay, thankfully, features a number of tense sequences that deliver on this central concept, and the protagonist’s ability to see in complete darkness. For example, shortly after gaining the eyeshine ability, you find yourself in the brightly-lit showers utilized by the prison’s guards. To doubly emphasize the need for stealth, the Diesel reminds himself to maintain a low profile.

Strategically-positioned light switches plunge the guards into darkness; using your eyeshine, you can sneak up behind them and perform a stealth kill. However, the guards aren’t completely stupid. They don’t just stand there in the dark when the lights go off; they grab their guns, turn on their flashlights, and head out to investigate.

Staying out of the way yet observing your prey, not being afraid to strike yet not being too hasty: the resulting balancing act results in a tense and rewarding experience. Fail in one way or the other, and one of the guards will sound an alert. Then, you’ll have a fire-fight on your hands.

In fact, that’s what happened the first few times. And once I had mastered the art of taking down the first four guards, I found others waiting for me around the corner, others that I couldn’t sneak up on or around. I back-tracked, searching for some other avenue of escape, some other light switch I might have missed. I went up and down the showers and locker room and still it seemed that I was missing something.

That’s when I went back to the lockers, and opened them. I had noticed before that I could open them, and had grabbed some ammo/cigarettes (more on that unsavory bit of business later on). I thought it was a nice little bonus, a nice way to add a little verisimilitude. I didn’t realize there was more to it than that until I opened the locker containing the guard’s uniform that would allow me to walk brazenly and unnoticed into the guard’s quarters. The sequence that followed was just as tense, as I waited for guards to move away from other guards, made my kill and hid the bodies.

In another game, the designer would have tipped off the player more overtly to the presence of and/or necessity for the uniform. “The locker room. Maybe I can find a disguise here.” But the people at Starbreeze trust that the player will be intelligent enough to put two and two together on their own. (And, it should be noted, most players are much quicker on the uptake than I am.) This makes it more of a real puzzle, and thus its solution proves more of a real reward.

It also emphasizes the stealth theme in a more oblique way; stealth is about paying attention to, sneaking around, and ultimately using your environment to your advantage. Embedding the solution within the environment– that is, in an object that can be interacted with, such as a locker– makes that solution part and parcel with the overriding game play mechanic.

THE TRANQUILIZER GUN

Excluding the melee weapons– such as knuckledusters, clubs, and knives– which figure prominently in the game’s “stealth kill” mechanic but are in that regard largely interchangeable (that is, whatever stealth kill weapon you have is, animations aside, going to bring about the same result: one dead guard), the weapon that best delivers on the game’s marriage of sneaking and shooting is the Tranquilizer Gun. Little surprise, then, that this is the weapon that gets used most often throughout the game.

The Tranquilizer Gun fires a bolt of electricity at a guard, paralyzing them temporarily. The player must kill the guard before the shot wears off– otherwise, the guard will naturally be quite alert. A second jolt from the gun won’t do it; you need to get right up next to him and clobber him with it.

Because the gun takes so long to reload, this requires a bit of stealth and timing. You can’t just walk into a room full of guards and start firing willy-nilly, and if you misfire it will take precious seconds to reload. You still need to wait until the guards are isolated, aim your shot carefully, and be prepared to act at just the right moment.

What sets the Tranquilizer Gun apart from the other weapons—which are not at your disposal, since upon your recapture the warden was smart enough to take your DNA out of the prison’s database– is the required follow-up. While armed with a shotgun, you can hide in the darkness or atop a balcony and line up your shots; because the Tranquilizer Gun requires you to rush up to the afflicted guard in order to finish the job, the added step equals added tension and added exhilaration. It is, more than Dark Athena’s Ulaks, the signature weapon of the Riddick video game franchise.

RUNNING AND GUNNING

While stealth is the name of the game, Butcher’s Bay features a number of sequences that depend more on the traditional shooter formula of shooting the hell out of everything as your rush to your goal. As you can probably intimate by the praise I’ve been heaping on the stealth end of things, as well as my problems with the first-person shooter genre, these were my least favourite sequences in the game. It is a testament to the abilities of the game designers, however, that I found myself having a lot of fun in all but one of these. We’ll cover the fun ones first.

The earliest of these sequences takes place shortly before you acquire the eyeshine ability. Riddick has been tasked with retrieving a radio for a man named Pope Joe who lives in The Pit, deep inside the prison. Also residing there, in near total darkness, are a horde of humanoid creatures that explode satisfyingly with a well-aimed blast of your shotgun. (This visceral and messy exploding-enemy business encourages you to blast through them quickly.)

Because you have not yet gained your eyeshine, and because your gun’s flashlight is burnt out, you must take a number of flares with you as you venture into the narrow tunnels. Throwing a flare will illuminate part of the passageway, allowing you both to see the next corner and the bloodthirsty horde that’s rushing at you. You must throw the flare, switch to your shotgun, blast your way through, and throw the next flare. You’re given a very limited supply of flares, which, unless you’re some kind of gaming god (and I know I’m not) is exactly the number that you’ll need to get through this sequence.

I died many, many, many times before I finally got it right, and part of me has to admit that getting through it had more to do with rote route memorization than any increase in skill on my part. And I did get irritated when changing between the flares and the shotgun; the game doesn’t pause during this process, and you can get yourself attacked while you’re fiddling around with the radial. Ditto for changing between the shotgun and the flares.

But, despite depending on game play skills that I didn’t have and being hard as all get out, I couldn’t help but have fun with the flares sequence. I thought it was a clever way to play with the light-and-shadow motif, that the limited resources created a sense of real danger (one could make the case that the Riddick games also have a survival horror vibe that gets thrown into the stealth-and-shooter mix), and that it made sense for the game to have you be afraid of the dark one last time before giving you the eyeshine ability that gives you an edge over your opponents.

You’re also given an edge, albeit temporarily, when the game puts you in control of a mech. At one point late in the game, Riddick climbs into a Riot Guard suit, which is so satisfying after having to deal with those uber-powered sons-of-seahorses throughout the prison. You’re given unlimited fire power and a generous health bar as you wreak mechanized terror upon your enemies.

This run ‘n’ gun sequence, as well as a later bit that puts you inside the even deadlier Heavy Guard (you get to STEP ON your enemies! awesome!), are so much fun because the player is so ridiculously over-powered. After sneaking around, being careful, and agonizing over every time you take a bullet, wishing you could find a Nano-Med station– it is just plain damn satisfying to cut loose. It provides meaningful balance to the stealth aspects of the game instead of merely acting counter to them.

Which brings us, of course, to the sequence that I found the least entertaining and the most frustrating. Shortly after Riddick has set off a bomb in the prison’s mines, he finds himself falling into a hole occupied by savage man-eating aliens. There’s no dark to cling to, no suit of armour to hide in. You’ve just got to pick up the shotgun, the assault rifle, and some grenades and blast your way through. Three problems:

My first problem with this section is a story problem. For the last few hours, I’ve been using (and loving) the Tranquilizer Gun to dispatch the guards. As I’ve said before, Riddick’s DNA has been removed from the prison database, and since all firearms will electrocute anyone not in the database, I haven’t been able to pick any up. But now, all of the sudden, I’m able to use them again. There’s no cut-scene that explains it, nothing that seems to separate the weapons lying before me from all the others. While I understand the game reason for it– after all, the Tranquilizer Gun isn’t going to be particularly effective against a rampaging horde of aliens– this sudden reversal does create a strong sense of disconnect and takes me out of the experience.

Problem two: whereas the flares sequence took place in tight narrow tunnels, much of the area occupied by these creatures is fairly open. Since the creatures scurry along the ceiling and the floor, and since I can’t see the entire environment at one time, I have to constantly toggle the camera around as I run like a mad-man. This, in turn, doesn’t allow me to get a very good sense of where I am in physical space. In fact, on my first few attempts in the early portions on this stage, I didn’t notice the ramp along the left wall. Said ramp was, of course, where I was supposed to go; instead, I had pressed on to a dead-end cul-de-sac and ended up getting massacred.

Problem three: unlike the man-sized creatures in the flares sequence or the human and/or robot targets in the mech stages, the creatures are at knee-level. Which means I have to tilt the camera down to try and strike their weak point– on their freaking backs, not on their face. And when they’re attacking me, they’re too close for me to get a bead on them. Instead, I have to back up as I’m trying to shoot them and as they’re approaching. Often, I backed up right into another enemy. Which caused me to whirl the camera around as I was attacked from all sides and, well, you know the rest of the story.

While I appreciated the flares sequence and understood the need for the mech stages, this part pretty much stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It seemed so different from the rest of it, and because it was so different it was extremely frustrating. I tried to figure out why on earth the game’s designers, who had made so many strong and dynamic decisions in the rest of the game, would drop the ball so monumentally at this late stage.

I think the answer has something to do with “the climax problem”. In genres with a more deliberate pace, such as a stealth game or a block-puzzle game, you don’t have the same “build” and linear progression of difficulty that a more straightforward action game does. In talking about the stealth genre, Street Fighter tournament player and game balancer David Sirlin pointed to boss battles and other action sequences as the ying to the sneaking yang;

“building an entire game around only sneaking around is a bit much—a bit too repetitive… [Bosses] are the high points—the crests—and the sneaking around parts are the low points—the troughs—of our rising and falling action sine wave.”

And while I recognize the existence of the climax problem in the stealth genre, and while my esteem for the depth of Mr. Sirlin’s insight into game design will never quaver, I think I agree with Jerry Holkins (of Penny Arcade fame) when he weighed in on non-stealth action sequences in the Metal Gear Solid series:

“If we are focusing the aperture exclusively on the game play, I can tell you in only a few words what I don’t like about MGS. If I fail at sneaking, the game ceases to be Metal Gear. In the space of a second, it becomes an incredibly clumsy action game. The boss battles are comprised almost entirely of this other system, a mechanism that has now been exposed for what it is: a punishment.”

Now, coming back to Butcher’s Bay, the action aspects are in this case far from clumsy. Both the melee combat and the shooting are tight and in most cases tied into the sneaking. The only time it really doesn’t work is in this creature sequence because it abandons the sneaking entirely.

If that sequence was removed, would the game suffer from a “climax problem”? Climax being defined not in this case as a worthy conclusion, as I think the game’s final boss battle provides that and as this creature sequence actually comes near the end of the game’s long second act, but rather as the “crests” that Sirlin speaks of? No, I don’t think so; the sections after this sequence are as suspenseful as they come, and the segment that caps it is probably the most climactic in the game. This section, in which you must kill two Riot Guards and several gun-men en route to an escape ship, depends on your ability to sneak into the shadow, use your environment to gain an edge over the Riot Guards, take cover behind crates while you try to pick off a gauntlet of guards, slowly gaining ground.

That section is pretty much what the game is about, and there’s not a scurrying alien to be had.

MINOR QUIBBLES

Upon completing Butcher’s Bay, I found myself armed with a few minor quibbles, though nothing major; besides that annoying creature section, it really is pretty close to a perfect game. Those quibbles are, in no particular order:

The load times. Not so much in general, as they’ve been a part of gaming for several years now, but more than once the following scenario took place: I come to a small room between two doors. As I approach the one ahead of me, the loading bar appears. Ten or twenty seconds later, it has finished loading and the door opens. On the other side of the door is an enemy. They’re firing at me. I retreat to avoid fire. The game starts loading the previous section. Ten or twenty seconds later, it’s done; I approach the door again and it starts loading again. Ten or twenty seconds later…

The collision detection for context-sensitive events, such as pushing the triangle to climb up on some boxes. The key to defeating your first Riot Guard is climbing up on a balcony where you’re safe from his fire. And I figured as much on my first attempt and tried to climb up. It didn’t climb. I figured the boxes were too high up and tried to fight through it. Several deaths later, I tried to climb up again. Didn’t work. Tried to kill him on the ground a few more times, once again got my head handed to me. On my fifth attempt to climb up, it climbed up. There were a couple of sections like this, and I think the detection bubble should have been widened a bit; and, since firing is handled with R2 and context-sensitive events like climbing, entering grates, and moving bodies is handled with triangle, it’s not like there’s any danger of someone accidentally climbing up when they meant to shoot somebody.

I found the map to be extremely unhelpful. I’m used to a map screen that indicates, if not my next goal or side mission, at the very least my position. While I understand that Riddick wouldn’t have a GPS on his person and that not knowing exactly where you are or how different areas re-connect and overlap is part of the stealth experience, I really would have liked a map that had greater utility.

As I mentioned before, switching between weapons happens in real time. By pressing R1, I bring up the radial; then I have to move the thumb-stick in the direction of the weapon I’d like to select. Sometimes I move it in the wrong direction, sometimes I don’t move it forcefully enough; while it’s actually a pretty decent interface, the real-time aspect makes it difficult, especially when I’ve got people shooting at me.

Finally, there’s a matter of the game’s extra content. To unlock it, you have to find packs of cigarettes. While each pack is labeled with some bit of humour hinting at its lethal nature, the “find every pack of cigarettes to unlock the bonus material” thing is a really bad idea and in really bad taste. While I’m not going to accuse them of aiming anything at children, as this is an M game that more than earns its rating with over-the-top violence and copious amounts of swearing, the game’s designers had to know that this decision was going to rub a few people pretty raw. And, since my father died of lung cancer at the age of 38, it rubbed me pretty raw indeed.

ASSAULT ON DARK ATHENA

CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS

I was pretty relieved when I came across the first collectable in the included sequel, Assault on Dark Athena, which take the form of hidden “bounty cards”. This is not only less scuzzy than its predecessor’s cigarette packs, but it also makes sense within Dark Athena’s mercenary/pirate setting.

It’s not the only thing that’s been improved. The use of the left and right buttons on the D-Pad as “hot buttons” that you can assign to frequently used weapons goes a long way towards preventing the player from being murdered while he’s trying to switch to a more useful weapon. The load times are less frequent and less likely to cause a “door problem”; the collision detection for climbing on boxes presented no hiccoughs this time around. And as for the map: well, there is no map. Or, at least, there is no map on the pause menu; instead, you’ll have to consult “you-are-here” displays present through-out the Dark Athena.

You would think, after my above rant, that this would irritate me but it’s actually quite the opposite; I think the removal of the map screen is a very smart decision. The map function doesn’t stick out as being useless or poorly implemented because it doesn’t exist; furthermore, as it would detract from the experience of sneaking around a hostile ship, it wasn’t really necessary in the first place. It’s up to the player to familiarize themselves with the ship’s geography as they sneak around, take out guards, and figure out how all the various nooks and crannies connect to one another. And, since the game puts an even greater emphasis on successful sneaking and the use and mastery of your environment than its predecessor, the removal of the map only deepens the experience.

And, though I deemed the difficulty curve in the first game to be fairly implemented and laden with purpose, I was relieved that Dark Athena seemed a bit gentler. Nano-Med units, and the all-important Nano-Med refill cartridges, seemed to be in more plentiful supply and I died far less often. I think the latter has more to do with the intense refocus on the stealth aspect; I found I spent much more of my time cloaked in the darkness, watching my victims and waiting for my chance to strike. It resulted in a uniquely compelling experience, full of heart-pound moments.

Part of this has to do with the level designs. Cargo boxes give a natural form of cover, and there are a number of platforms under which to sequester oneself. Every area seems to have been designed with giving the player avenues to practice stealth, whereas a number of areas in the original game deprived you of those options.

All in all, Dark Athena is a vast improvement on a game that didn’t really leave much room for it; it’s perfection perfected.

With that said, let’s pry open the Dark Athena and see what’s in store for us. As the game play, while improved as noted above, is largely the same as the included first game, we’ll be slightly more brief this time around and concentrate on the new things that Assault on Dark Athena brings to the mix.

SEND IN THE DRONES

The signature enemy for Dark Athena is the drone, a corpse repurposed by way of cybernetics as a remote-control robot. Now, this is certainly eerie, but you’re probably wondering, what separates the gun-wielding drones from the various gun-wielding mercenaries that run around the ship? The answer delivers on the stealth theme in an extraordinarily clever fashion.

Once you’ve killed the drone, you have the option, as always, to drag its body. But you’re also given the option to use the gun mounted on its arm. Selecting this option causes Riddick to pick up the body and aim. The drone’s gunfire is limited, and the player cannot move or hide when using the drone gun. Using it, then, requires you to drop the body and drag it to a strategic location. The player must wait for the right moment to strike, for as soon as they do, they will be exposing themselves to enemy fire.

By marrying the use of a weapon to the stealth aspect, the drone gun rivals the Tranquilizer (which reappears here for a long stretch before the player gets their hands on portable bullet-firing weapons) as the weapon I think of when I think Riddick. It’s also another way that the player uses their environment to overcome obstacles. (We get more of this in Dark Athena as well, as there are a couple of occasions in which you can break a window and suck your enemies into the abyss of space before the emergency air lock springs into action.)

In one of the game’s run ‘n’ gun sections, you’re put in control of a series of drones (they’re remote-controlled, remember?). Once one falls, you simply activate the next one; the enemies you’ve killed and the obstacles you’ve overcome remain dead and done, greatly decreasing the sense of failure when one falls. In fact, you’re encouraged not to worry about it, as you must sacrifice a drone in a giant whirling fan, thus gumming up the works, so that the next one can pass safely through.

Because the drone is remote-controlled, Riddick only sees what they see through a video screen, and because of this, the drone is unable to use Riddick’s signature eyeshine ability. By removing the tools necessary to sneaking, it also removes the impetus to do so, thus shifting the emphasis to the run ‘n’ gun aspect.

And as in the first game, you’ll find yourself in control of a mech, complete with a limited supply of rockets. Even though we’re in the suit and clearly seeing what lies before us through a glass bubble, your eyeshine is non-operational here as in the drone-control section. This doesn’t put the player at a particular liability, as you’re unable to shoot out the lights that would make the eyeshine an advantage in the first place. But I still missed it, especially since the first game’s mech sections still allowed you to turn the darkness to your advantage.

AGUERRA PRIME

Speaking of darkness, Dark Athena makes the interesting but natural decision to deprive you of it for a long stretch of time spent on a colonist’s planet, Aguerra Prime. The planet is absolutely drenched in blistering sunlight. You can no longer simply stick to the darkness and sneak up on your enemies; you have to actively search for cover or high ground and then return fire.

The weapon you have at your disposal, however, is no ordinary pistol. The SCAR gun fires little sticky bubbles of air that can then be remotely detonated with the L2 button. A cluster of SCAR bubbles can do a massive amount of damage when set off at the same time, and the SCAR gun also allows you to destroy wooden doors and bridges. It’s a fun and quirky sort of weapon, and it provided a fair amount of challenge in some pivotal boss battles, but I ultimately didn’t find it as much fun as the Tranquilizer Gun or as interesting as the drone gun; it’s a neat concept, but it doesn’t feel as natural to the stealth element as the other two.

HAND-TO-HAND

Dark Athena’s “open” combat sections (that is, the fighting sequences in which the enemy is fully aware of your presence, there’s nowhere for you to hide, and stealth is not an option) put a greater focus on the hand-to-hand melee combat than its predecessor did by depriving you of projectile weapons. When you battle Iron Lord, Margo, Jaylor, as well as the first go-around with main baddie Captain Revas, you must do so with your fists or melee weapons such as a knife, club, or the Ulaks.

The melee combat is very tight and technical. Moving to evade your opponent, moving in to strike, knowing when to go on the offensive and blocking at just the right moment are pivotal. It’s more like a match of Street Fighter than Bloody Roar, as it similarly requires and rewards precision, strategy, and skill.

I found it more rewarding than gun-based boss battles in both games; there’s no whirling around, no getting hit while trying to aim. Needing to be so up-close both increases the danger (by putting you within range) and minimizes it (by allowing you to block). It’s an exciting and compelling counterpoint to the game’s dominant stealth vibe; despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with sneaking at a surface level, because both types of game play require timing and strategy the melee combat feels quite at home with it.

MOVING THROUGH PHYSICAL SPACE

Dark Athena has a few moments that would fall under the auspices of platforming, requiring you to jump over pits. If falling does not result in instant death, it does result in being exposed to enemy fire. In one particularly frustrating sequence in the hanger bay, I had to make a series of jumps from a platform to a walkway, then from the walkway to the platform, and then back again in a room guarded by two heavily-armed and technically indestructible mechs. When I missed that jump, which I did often, I found that there was really no way to get back to the platform without being shot to death by the rapidly enclosing mechs. It required complete and total accuracy.

The problem, of course, is that the first-person perspective generally isn’t amenable to platforming accuracy. There’s no body sense, no sense of how far I can jump or even where I am on the platform. That platforming stands out as easily the weakest and most frustrating part of the game.

There’s a tense spotlight-related sequence that has the player climbing over, and then hiding behind, and then climbing over a series of boxes and ledges. When you’re climbing on anything, the perspective switches to third-person, allowing you to see where you are in relation to your environment. But the switch suddenly deprived me of my knowledge of where the spotlight was, and at times it was so dark I couldn’t actually see what my character was doing (the eyeshine doesn’t carry over to the third-person perspective). I finally got it right on the fourth or fifth try, but I wonder if a change to either the implementation of the third-person perspective or the design of the level could have prevented this sense of spatial disconnect.

This flaw, no matter how small, is made more glaring by comparison to the rest of the game, which more-so than Butcher’s Bay gives the player a very strong sense of spatial geography. Part of this has to do, of course, with the aforementioned refocus on stealth and the level designs through which that refocusing was accomplished. But part of it has to do with the use of overlapping spaces and locked doors.

A control room in the Dark Athena acts as a sort of hub, from which the rest of the ship’s main areas (the Cargo Bay, the Cell Decks, the Berthing area) branch off. Once you reach the control room, you can gain access to the cell decks and begin chatting up the NPCs. Jaylor gives you a mission that sends you across the way to the Berthing area. There, you notice a vent, for which you’ll need a vent tool. Complete the mission and you’ll get a screwdriver in the storage shed next to the cell decks. The screwdriver allows you access to a tunnel, which leads to the aforementioned climbing boxes/spotlight section. From there you’ll bring back the tools to the cell decks (passing through the control room and passing by a locked elevator to the hanger bay) needed to create the vent tool; back to the Berthing, through the vent, onto the next mission. The conclusion of that mission, which yields a data pad, will bring you past a communications/fan room and back into the control room, back past the locked elevator, back into the cell decks. Give the data pad to the right person and you’re able to use the communications station to begin plotting your getaway.

That getaway will ultimately result in the player using a code to unlock that elevator to the hanger bay. Because the player passes through the control room so often, and passes by that locked elevator every time they do so, it cements the location in the player’s mind. It creates suspense and wonder: I know I’m going to have to get in there, the question is, how and when and what lies on the other side?

Strong mission design, strong level design, and just plain damn strong game design come together into a trifecta of spatial geography. Such is the power of overlapping spaces, hub sites, and locked doors.

JAYLOR

I’ve spoken very little of the storyline for either game; as someone who’s passionate about the video game art form, I find myself most passionate about those works of art that use or explore the non-mimetic aspects of that form. Dialogue, graphics, cut-scenes and plot twists don’t matter as much to me as level design, interface, and the game’s central concept.

But the dialogue in both games is worth commenting on. The game designers are completely committed to the dark sci-fi world created in the Riddick films, a merciless universe of violence and profanity. While some of the uber-macho profanity in the first game provoked a few laughs from myself and those watching, particularly because of the Diesel’s perfectly straight delivery, there was a moment in the second game that made me turn it off for the rest of the day.

In that section, the prisoner Jaylor basically announces his intention to murder and then rape the corpse of the woman in the next cell. There’s nothing subtle about it. He uses language that’s extremely vile and extremely demeaning to women. And, I understand that he’s intended to provoke fear and revulsion, that he’s a villain, that you’re going to get to kill him and so you should want to kill him, and that evil is cheapened (and thus strengthened) when depicted with kid gloves. But it was just so over the top that as soon as it had concluded, I quit the game and turned off the system.

“Well,” said I, noting the little check-mark icon in the upper right corner, “at least I won’t have to see that again.”

Imagine my horror when, upon restarting the game the next day, I found myself at an earlier checkpoint. I had to make my way back to Jaylor and experience the scene all over again. Luckily, I could then skip over it this time.

What I’m circling around is here is that while, yes, this is a game for adults and you should not let children anywhere near it, I wonder if that dialogue could have been toned down a bit. It’s not so much that video games can’t tackle themes of this darkness and magnitude, but I wonder how seriously they can do so in the context of an action game, of an experience meant first and foremost to impart a sense of “fun”.

MULTIPLAYER

My Playstation 3, purchased specifically with this review and the ones that will follow it in mind, is not yet hooked up to the Playstation Network. From what I’ve heard, however, there’s a number of great multiplayer modes available as well. When I do get the system online, I’ll try them out for myself and report my own thoughts back to you.

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for the quick-and-dirty “Should I buy this game?”, then your eyes probably glazed over long ago. But the answer is, yes, you should definitely buy this game. Whether you’re a fan of first-person shooters or if, like me, you find yourself hopelessly overwhelmed in most of them, here are two terrific fully-featured games for the price of one. I recommend it highly as both a gamer and as someone who cares deeply about the video game art form. So go out and buy it already, and cross your fingers that they make a third.

You’ll find all five of these must-have elements in RUN JUMP, the new platformer from, um, me.

RUN JUMP is platforming reduced to its simplest and purest elements– there’s no story, no weapons, no power-ups. Just moving from one side of a room to another, from one room to another, from one level to the next, overcoming obstacles with deftly-timed jumps. There’s more to it than that, of course; not only can the player’s robot wall jump, but she can stick to and move along any ceiling in the game. There are no exceptions to this rule: every wall can be bounced on, every ceiling can be clung to, and through a liberal use of both abilities, every obstacle can be overcome.

So, um, go play it or download it.

But, is it a good game?

The short answer is, I think, yes.

In the most important and fundamental ways it is a better and deeper game than most hack-and-slashers, and actually it has more of a right to be called a role-playing game than, say, the Final Fantasy series. Blasphemy, I know. It doesn’t have any cut scenes or limit breaks. Your “party” consists of you and a small pet over whom you have no control. Your character isn’t even an amnesiac who saves the world!

The storyline is more akin to that of a platformer; that is, it exists only to give a context and a winning condition to the game play. There is an amulet fifty floors down and your job is to fetch it for your deity. The game’s many collaborators (and the creators of NetHack’s inspiration, Rogue) understand that a storyline can get in the way of game play, that it hedges the player in and diminishes their ability to choose, and that it allows for very little actual role-playing in a role-playing game.

In NetHack, however, the player’s ability to choose is at front and center. More typical of table-top or pen-and-paper role-playing games, most notably Dungeons and Dragons, you begin with character creation: choosing a name, character class, race, and alignment. There are a number of character classes available, from standards such as priest and barbarian to oddities such as samurai and tourist. The player’s choice at this stage narrows the number of races they can choose from; whoever heard, for example, of an orcish samurai? The alignment, which determines if the player’s character is lawful, neutral, or chaotic, is sometimes determined by these previous choices as well: orcs and elves, for example, tend towards being chaotic, while knights and samurai are unlikely to be anything but lawful and good.

These choices give the player different abilities, tools, strengths, and weaknesses with which to answer the game’s challenges. They also affect the sort of challenges the game throws at you: an orcish character, for example, is less likely to have trouble with goblins and orcs, while a gnome or dwarf will have an easier time exploring the Gnomish Mines.

The choice of alignment –and, to some degree, the other choices the player makes– also puts a stronger emphasis on the role-playing aspect of the genre. The player is rewarded or penalized for how well or how poorly they stick to their chosen alignment. A lawful character who robs shopkeepers or a chaotic character who kills other chaotics is likely to anger their god, making that deity less likely to assist when the player is in need of help. In extreme cases, the god will curse you, take away an experience level you’ve earned, or even strike you down dead.

“But,” you say, “how is this any different than many of the best MMORPGs?” And it’s true that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games do allow you to create your own characters. And these games are far more non-linear than NetHack and other rogue-likes, in that there is no way to “win” an MMORPG. In fact, while NetHack’s Dungeons of Doom are fairly large, you have entire cities and worlds to explore in an MMORPG. And of course there’s the fact that an MMORPG, by definition, is also a multiplayer experience, while NetHack is for a single player only.

But this is actually NetHack’s strength. A game like World of Warcraft is fast-paced and competitive. The player is required to quickly respond to enemy attacks if they want to stay alive. It is extremely unwise to linger in an area to think about what your next move will be, as more enemies– and more players, some of whom can be extremely and inexplicably aggressive towards less-experienced players– will soon cross your path. NetHack, by contrast, is a thinking person’s game and very strictly turn-based. Nothing happens until you choose to do something, allowing the player to fully consider the ramifications of what they’re doing. Surrounded on all sides by a particularly bloodthirsty crowd of monsters, the player can take as long as they need to think a way out of their predicament. You can call up a list of all commands by using the help command, ?, or you can view your full inventory, i, to see if you have anything that can save you. / will identify nearby items and monsters so you can better work out a battle (or flight) stratagem.

There’s never any reason, then, to panic or to hurry. Your character can be near death, and you can walk away from the computer, have dinner, watch a movie, and be confident that when you come back, your character is just where and as you left him.

The game’s focus is heavily on exploration and it achieves this focus through three basic and deliberate design decisions. First, the combat in the game is de-emphasized by virtue of its simplicity. Merely walking into a monster will attack it; there is no need for frantic button-mashing here. And while some monsters require different strategies– throwing a weapon from afar, for example, or utilizing a magic spell– none of this approaches the same visceral feeling you would get with an MMORPG or even Final Fantasy. In the most extreme cases, it’s more like an intellectual puzzle, which in turn makes the combat a function of the exploration.

Each time you start a new game of NetHack, the dungeon is randomly-generated, and this is the second design decision (albeit a cornerstone of the rogue-like genre) by which the game’s focus is narrowed. No rote memorization or walkthroughs will do you any good here. This encourages the player to learn from their mistakes in a meaningful way. In most games, learning from your mistakes is not meaningful and could be termed situational; for example, don’t stand for too long on the platform just past the red coin or the floor will give way. The only thing you’ve really learned in that case is how to best act in that particular situation.

Such a game can be won simply via trial and error, and thus requires nothing intellectually of the player. In NetHack, however, each situation is different: there are no patterns to memorize. The game therefore cannot be won by remembering the placement of traps and enemies. The player has to develop real strategies for exploration instead of the more common situational simulacrum.

Thirdly, the player is encouraged to explore by the sheer number of ways available to do that– literally dozens of commands enabling the player to explore not only the dungeon but the game itself. The level of interactivity the game provides is akin to the now-popular open-world/sandbox genre. The player not only can search, look, loot, force locks, kick open doors, drop items, throw them, or dip them into a fountain–just a few among many other very useful commands– but he can also name any creatures in the vicinity with the call command, c. Doing so does not change the outcome of the game or benefit the player in any way. There’s no real reason for this command, other than the most important reason of all: it allows the player to do as they like.

Even though the game’s general direction is technically linear– move from the top level of the dungeon to the bottom, side quests and offshoots notwithstanding– the game-play is decidedly non-linear, due to the large number of possible ways a player can overcome an obstacle or solve a puzzle. And because the game allows you to discover so much for yourself– nothing like “Eastmost peninsula is the secret!” is in evidence here– this, too, puts the emphasis squarely on the player’s autonomy and thus on exploration.
But all that would be for naught if the game’s world was not worth exploring. Thankfully, all the tools and commands at the player’s disposal are matched against a world with a rewarding complexity and a strong level of relative verisimilitude. Your character can faint from hunger if he does not eat; your pet must also be fed, and if confused from hunger might try to bite you. Slain monster corpses double as comestibles, but usually taste bad at best and are poisonous at worst. Each item you pick up has weight and mass, slowing down your ability to move and fight; if you’re carrying too many things, you’re also liable to fall down the staircase leading you to the next level of the dungeon, and thus taking damage. There are few things as humiliating as having been slain by a flight of stairs.

But– to put it delicately– the game can be extremely humiliating. In its own way, it is as difficult as Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts– perhaps moreso, because nine times out of ten, your character’s demise is the result of your own carelessness.

And when you die, that’s it: there are no resurrections or second chances in NetHack. Dead is dead, and when the game is over, you have no choice but to begin anew.

In another game, especially a game of this length, such an unforgiving mechanic would be frustrating to the point of exhaustion; consider, for example, the universally-derided Bomberman: Act Zero. In that game, however, this “no-continues” system could technically fall under the auspices of arbitrary difficulty, but not in the sense that this system arose out of the general incompetence of the design team. The people behind Bomberman: Act Zero made the game as unforgiving as it was on purpose, through a deliberate design decision on their part rather than a mere oversight. The game is supposed to be this difficult, and it is the same with NetHack; the difference, however, is that it was a good design decision on the part of the NetHack crew and a very bad one on the part of the people behind Act Zero. Or, to put it another way, while the decision in both cases was made on purpose, only in the case of NetHack was the decision made for a purpose.

And that purpose, again, is to teach the player how to play the game, how to explore, how not to die. How to think, instead of merely regurgitating patterns. And it achieves this by making sure that mistakes have an actual and dire consequence: game over. If you could reload the game from a saved state, or continue, then there’s no real consequence to dying and thus no consequence to what prompted the death and thus, no impetus to learn from your mistakes.

If you were killed by a black pudding explosion the last time you played, you can bet dollar to doughnut that you’re going to be more cautious around them the next time you see one. Whereas if the mistake was divorced from any lasting consequence, a player might make the same foolhardy mistake again, and, who knows?, maybe this time he’ll survive the explosion. If a save system is in place, nothing is risked because you can always restart from your last save point.

In most extremely difficult games, the difficulty is intended only to provide a challenge to the player; satisfaction is derived from besting it: I beat Contra in twelve minutes without losing a life is an mind-numbingly incredible achievement. The difficulty of NetHack is designed to make you better at the game. It’s a refreshing design decision, implemented with intelligence, grace, and skill, existing organically within a complex and ingenious system.

NetHack has a cult following, and it must be said that the game’s difficulty is a huge contributing factor to that, along with a certain defiant esotericism: a game without music utilizing ASCII characters in lieu of graphics, in the not-exactly thriving rogue-like genre, dozens of commands and its own complex mythology– hardly qualities that engender popular appeal. But there are two important points to keep in mind.

First, the game is not deliberately obscure. The designers didn’t get together and say, “Let’s make a game for just this narrow audience! Oh snap!” This is a game, remember, that has evolved over the course of two decades, and in the thick of the eighties, ASCII symbols-for-objects was not only acceptable for computer games but a step-up. Music was unheard of and rogue-likes were more popular online than they are today– though it must be said that the type of people who were online in the mid to late eighties are just as likely to appreciate a rogue-like today as then.

While the game has expanded and evolved over the years, it have kept true to the spirit of the original. However, the development team have introduced optional features, such as an “explore” mode that makes the player immortal and a graphical interface that replaces the @ with a more traditional avatar.

So, these more accessible options are provided to potential players. It’s just that they’ve been largely ignored by the NetHack community as a whole and treated with thinly-veiled disdain: “real NetHack players don’t use the explore mode! Graphics are for wussies!”

My second point regarding the game’s esoteric qualities can best be summed up with a story about Woody Allen.

The venerable director wrote the screenplay for What’s New, Pussycat?, which was the highest grossing comedy film up until that time. Allen was dissatisfied with the end results, however, and became a director largely to prevent his material from future mutilation at the hands of others. Regarding Pussycat, he once said that if he had had creative control over the material, the film would have been twice as funny, but half as successful.

The same “esoteric” qualities that make NetHack an unlikely candidate for, say, Halo-level popularity, are the qualities that make it a better game than Halo. The lack of music or “sophisticated” graphics narrow the focus on the game play; it has a zen spartanness that is nicely balanced by the robust and expansive game world.

In fact, expansive is the perfect word to describe this game that takes up half of a computer screen and less than 2 megs of memory. Not only in the sense that the choices available to the player and the amount of things to be discovered are expansive, but also in the sense that the very mechanic that powers the game is expansive– the dungeon opening up, expanding and unfolding as you move through it.

NetHack home page
USENET newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack
WikiHack, the NetHack wiki

And then there’s the twitter game. (The rules are here.)

I trust if you’re still reading that you’ve done just that, and now we can get to the business of discussing it. There are a number of ways of looking at Alternate Path: as a collection of puzzles, as an experiment, as a meditation on gaming, as a sort of history of platformers. And I’m sure there are plenty of others that I’m missing but I’ll start with that last one.

The first “level” of the game allows the player to move and to jump using the arrow keys; the only way to dispose of the enemies in this scarcely-populated area is to jump on their heads, ala Super Mario Bros. One touch from any of these enemies will kill us, thus sending us back to the very first level. This is platforming at its most rudimentary.

But as the game progresses, that formula is complicated and transformed. We gain a gun that can destroy barriers– shades of Mega Man 2 and Blaster Master, not to mention countless others. We gain a health bar and lose the ability to jump on enemies, instead utilizing our gun– now the standard for action games. We gain a second weapon and the ability to switch between them instantaneously with the touch of a single button; today’s greatest platformers, such as the Ratchet and Clank series, make weapon-switching a central feature of the game play.

We’ve gone from simple to complex, from light-and-bouncy (or, given the game’s decidedly low-fi visual style, what passes for it) to dark and murky as grays and blacks eventually give way to brooding reds. Now, I’m certainly not trying to read too much into this here– I don’t think, for example, that it represents, say, a lament for the platformer’s loss of innocence or some such nonsense– but I found this meta-narrative, this Short History of Platformers in five minutes or less, to be emblematic of the game’s approach, which is largely referential and metatextual.

Or, to put it another way: structuring it as a history of the platformer makes sense because it foregrounds the fact that this is a game about gaming. Take, for example, the two major puzzles that the game confronts us with.

First, there is the giant pit puzzle. As we enter the room, we are helpfully told to press the F5 function key to save. To our right, there is a large pit, too large for us to cross over even with our recent jump power-up. There are no invisible blocks; we try to jump across and we fall into the pit. The room restarts and we’re told again: press F5 to save. We just might do that, so we can try to solve this puzzle later.

But the solution is staring us in the face: press F5 to save. We jump towards the abyss and press the F5 button and we are “saved”; we arrive on the other side of the ledge.

It’s such a smart little puzzle, calling into question part of video gaming grammar that we had taken for granted: the meaning of the word “save”. It’s an intuitive puzzle– it’s not that hard to figure out, all the clues we need are present– but it doesn’t beat us over the head either. It requires us to think.

Not only does it require us to think in order to solve the puzzle, it requires us to think about the puzzle. About the meaning of “save”. In my case, it reminded me of moments in my life when I had made a boneheaded mistake and wished I could do it over, that I could just reload from a previous point in my day. It got me thinking about how dangerous a place like the Mushroom Kingdom would really be– how many lives would be lost each year as the result of those bottomless pits and wayward turtle shells.

And that got me thinking about how this game doesn’t feature a lives system, and how a lot of modern action games have eschewed that convention as well. And I reflected on the game’s meta-narrative, and I wondered how much richer it might be if the player started the game with a finite number of lives that gave way to the unlimited-lives health-bar system. It got me thinking about other ways the meta-narrative could be complicated and perhaps improved.

And then I reflected on how that really wouldn’t be fair to a player; this pit puzzle, taking place before the acquisition of the health bar, would be brutal if the player had a finite number of lives. But it would still be a cool idea, to do a meta-narrative game, a platformer that encapsulates the history of the genre, and I started thinking about ways to implement such an idea.

All this thinking– thinking about my life, about my gaming experience, about game design: it all sprung out of this little puzzle. And I’m not trying to argue that Mr. Yates intended me to think along those lines when he created this puzzle; I’m saying that he intended us to think, period, to reflect and meditate upon games and language and the language of games.

The next major puzzle, and the one that’s probably the most likely to get people stuck, is the “What do you need?” segment. We’re faced with a door or barrier and we find an rectangular object lying on the floor in the same room. “This is exactly what you need,” we’re told. But what is it that we need? We’re prompted to type in the object’s name.

I got stuck on this puzzle myself, typing “key” and “pass” and other variants. And while those are common barrier-destroyers in video games, it was just as common, back in the day, to use a gun.

And that got me thinking about the ludicrousness of that trope. If I knew someone who used a gun whenever confronted with a door or barrier, I’d frankly be a little frightened of them. But it makes perfect sense in the context of gaming, as part of the language of games.

There a lot of things like that: the idiosyncratic way gamers use “save”, for example. The presence of extra lives and checkpoints. Boss battles. Health bars: why can we function just as well at 10% health as we can at 100? The reliance on violence, even cartoony violence, to solve conflicts and achieve goals.

And all of it, like Miyamoto’s framework, is pretty arbitrary. Sure, it all works, it all makes sense, and it’s all grown organically. But why are those tropes the ones that are dominant? Why is that the language of games? What else is there?

What’s more, this language has nothing to do with life. All other art forms have something to do with life, or else it’s just pretty nonsense. It’s a discomfiting bit of introspection to go through as a proponent of games-as-art.

And, again, I’m not saying that Yates necessarily meant us to think that deeply about that specifically, but his puzzles are constructed in such a way that they ask us to think deeply about something. About games and the way they are constructed.

This comes to a head at the game’s conclusion, in which we’re confronted with the creature responsible for our alternate path: the AntiPlayer. His purpose, he tells us, is to stop us from achieving our purpose; our purpose “was to play this game.” But, one interesting-if-slightly-overlong boss battle later, someone (the game’s creator?) explains that the goal of the game was to defeat the AntiPlayer, and having done that, we have completed the game. This poses the question:

Granted, this is a bit of story, of dialogue; it’s a mimetic thing. At the same time, the game play itself builds to this question. The puzzles are built around it, around the act of asking questions and thinking about the art of gaming.

Alternate Path is an interesting experiment, greater both in ambition and achievement than most indie games. It investigates the way in which meaning is communicated in video games, and asks why deeper meaning– the stuff of life– isn’t communicated through those non-mimetic means.

It’s an important and unsettling question. It does not provide us with an easy or pat answer. Maybe that’s because games can’t tackle the deep meaning of real art on their own.

At the same time, I’d like to think that they can, and the experimental game that pulls it off– that will be something to see, that will be the holy grail. And by demonstrating his capacity to ask these uncomfortable questions, I think Yates is closer to finding that grail than most of us.

I eagerly look forward to his next experiment with the hope that it’s less Godard and more Bresson. Good luck and godspeed.

It’s not that it’s a “big” movie, per se, the way Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers was a big movie. While this film has it share of violent set-pieces, it’s extremely low-key, subtle, closely-observed. Which is really the perfect choice for Eastwood the Director to make; it’s the same choice that Eastwood the Actor has made with all his best performances. There’s a reason that he’s a man that can hold our attention simply by squinting.

Eastwood’s best performances are always tough-edged and shorn of easy sentiment. His best films are the same way: clear-eyed about life as we know it today, acknowledging the joys without forgetting the disappointments. In Gran Torino, it becomes apparent fairly early on that Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski doesn’t much care for his two sons and the grandchildren they’ve given him– the granddaughter with the pierced belly button and skimpy skintight clothes is a particular irksome cause for consternation.

In a lesser movie (say, any one of the prepackaged “indies” that come out every year, complete with an all-star cast and some bullpuckey about how it’s the little movie that could), Walt and his granddaughter would bond and learn to accept one another. But Eastwood knows that some fences never get mended, and that real people often never let go of their disappointments and their grudges. Even as Kowalski starts to accept the Hmong family next door, and to bond with Thao, the conflicted and vulnerable son of that family, he never drops his prejudices, never stops spewing racist invective.

The film’s violence is a strange thing. The threat of it is there at the beginning; Kowalski effects two different rescues simply by holding a gun and talking like Clint Eastwood, without a single shot being fired. The bulk of the film is devoted to the relationship between Kowalski and Thao, as the former attempts to “man-up” the latter. For a while, you forget the violence that haunted the film’s early moments. In fact, you’re glad it’s gone– you just want to see these people live their lives in peace.

And that’s when the violence comes back, as unwelcome in their world as it is in ours. It’s movie violence that feels like real violence, that really hurts us, that makes us afraid. How it all wraps up, I leave for you to discover.

Though the film isn’t really about plot anyway. It is about looking: looking at life, looking at other people, looking at Clint Eastwood. It’s that rare film that is perfectly attuned to its leading man’s performance, where the style of the film, its cutting, pacing, and shot composition, all flows out of the way he stands, the way he squints, the way he growls, functioning as an extension of his body, of his self.

It’s the most satisfying picture Eastwood has made in years.

The Wizard is the most obvious example; this movie, which is explicitly about gaming (and Nintendo in particular) gets so much wrong that’s it’s hard to tell where to start. The always prestigious and often foul-mouthed Angry Video Game Nerd covered much of it in his review.

Or, how about the final episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie? The “Truancy” sketch opens with the following image:

Holy crap, it’s Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts! It’s even using the theme music!

The next shot is of Hugh-Laurie-as-surly-teenager. Stephen Fry enters, playing the father, to discuss Hugh’s truancy; apparently, he hasn’t been to school in four years. What has he been doing all this time? He’s reached Level Nine.

Level Nine? But Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts doesn’t have nine levels. It only has eight. And that screen-shot is clearly from the first level!

And because I know this, I can’t let myself enjoy the rest of the sketch. Perhaps you might fare better; here’s a video of that sketch in Russian.

It’s like those Tolkien fans whose brains explode when the scores of elves show up at Helm’s Deep. We know it isn’t so; we can’t turn off the fact that we know it isn’t so; we can’t enjoy it.

And furthermore, the people creating these entertainments know this. They know they’re risking alienating a portion of their audience by fudging things or, at the very least, not checking their facts. So why would anyone knowingly piss off a portion of their audience, especially a portion that is made up of sticklers (for where does geek devotion live save in the details?)?

The only answer I can come up with is that they think that portion of the audience is so small that they can get away with it. That, in and of itself, is an insult. (I would argue that Lost is insulting even without this, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

In the case of that Lost example that Michael cites, it’s not even just a matter of having contempt for a portion of the audience; it’s having contempt for the source material as well. They want to make the Star Wars films say something it doesn’t say, and the films are sufficiently beneath them that they consider it to be malleable.

I have another example of this, from a local independent film that I did some acting for. (I’m not going to name the film, as it’s unlikely to find distribution and I’m predisposed not to gang up on fellow little guys.)

In the scene in question, one brother (the family screw-up) is telling the other (a successful CEO of a technology company) about his recent visit to an arcade (the film takes place in the eighties). He explains that there’s a gamer who is the master of Centipede. Every time he plays, it’s flawless. But this time, he’s having trouble. He turns to our narrator: “Dill, I need your help.”

And so Dill puts in his quarter, and together, they blasted that centipede, they saved the day. And Dill sums it up for his brother: “isn’t it great when someone needs you for who you are instead of who you’re always pretending to be?”

It’s a touching moment; it’s the character’s best moment, and the one that sums up one of the major themes of the film.

The only problem, of course, is that Centipede doesn’t offer two-player co-op. I brought this up to the director. At first, he tried to argue with me about it; then, after I dragged him to an arcade and showed him an old Centipede machine, he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just Centipede.”

Why not, I suggested, use another game– one that is a co-op? No, he said: “It’s just Centipede.” Centipede was so far beneath his towering work of art that it should have been lucky to be twisted around in its service.

One more example, a positive one: the film Reign Over Me, starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. First of all, it’s just a great film, one that avoids the sentimentality one might expect with great writing, great performances, and strong detail work. One of those details in the presence of the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus, which the Sandler character is obsessed with. The game isn’t bent out of shape, details aren’t fudged: that’s miles above the other examples, to start with.

But more than that, it actually fits in with the film thematically. Instead of grabbing some random game (or other object of geek devotion) and bending it to make it say what they want it to say, they spent time finding the perfect game for their film and its theme. They treated that game, and all members of the film’s audience, with respect. End result: a good film that doesn’t take anyone out of the experience or insult them.

I am a Democrat and proudly liberal. I did not vote for Bush, did not like Bush, did not agree with his worldview, his policies both foreign and domestic, or his actions. I furthermore do not think he was a particularly good President.

All that being said: the man deserved so much better than this film.

Many reviews have stated that “W.” treats its subject with even-handedness. That it takes the man, and particularly his conversion from party animal alcoholic to born-again and on-the-wagon, seriously and at face value. And I wonder what movie those reviewers saw.

“W.” does not take its subject seriously. It treats him as a joke. For example, it mocks him through its use of music; twice, the old sappy theme from the BBC series Robin Hood is reprised (‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen’). All the supporting characters, with the exception of James Cromwell as Bush-41, are presented as broad caricatures– hairstyles and bad vocal mannerisms masquerading as acting, history presented as a geek-show pageant. There’s nothing even-handed about it.

Not to mention, of course, that some of the history is suspect. There’s no record of Dick Cheney ever proclaiming, “there is no exit” from Iraq and that they should pursue “empire”. There’s no evidence tying George W. Bush to the Willie Horton ad (if he had, he would have broken federal election laws by farming it out to an outside organization). There’s no record and there’s no evidence because these things didn’t happen.

As you can guess, there’s a lot of things I think one could fault George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for. But those things are things that actually happened. Why would one ever feel the need to fabricate this libelous and conspiratory excrement?

Well, that actually should come as no surprise when you’re talking about an Oliver Stone film. Here’s a man that feels no shame about inventing “facts”, the loonier the better. For example: famed historian Stephen Ambrose was cited as a source for several of Stone’s spurious claims in the annotated screenplay of “Nixon”; Ambrose pointed out he often said the exact opposite of what Stone said he said.

And, of course, there’s “JFK”. “JFK” is one of those terrible works of great art, like “Birth of a Nation”: incredible artistry in the service of the most vile and reprehensible aims possible. It is 205 minute ode to lying. As a result of that film, a huge chunk of American citizens honestly believe that hundreds of members of their government, in cahoots with Castro and/or anti-Castro Cuban exiles, decided to kill the President. (Do not even get me started on all that bullpuckey.)

Stone argues, of course, that he is a “dramatist” and not a historian. And, yeah, I’ll buy that to a certain extent; Shakespeare’s Richard III would not be so memorable if he conformed to historical accuracy. The difference, however, is that Shakespeare is a good dramatist and that Stone is a very poor one: bombastic, over-reaching, completely incapable of sustaining a coherent vision of style, tone, or substance, of intelligent inquiry, of coaching believable performances, of making art that will last longer than five or ten years.

Oliver Stone is a terrible filmmaker; “W.” is a terrible film, completely lacking in nuance, texture, or empathy.

One core problem is that the film utilizes a poorly-implemented flashback structure that ends up giving us two films, both executed with supreme ineptitude.

One film follows the trajectory of Bush’s life before the Presidency: from hard-living failure to successful and dry politician, his courtship with Laura, and his strained relationship with his father. And however I feel about the man, sure, I’d love to see that film, done completely seriously (without being sanctimonious or cloying). It would be a film outside politics, like John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” or Leslie Martinson’s “PT 109″. I think people on both sides of the spectrum could and would enjoy such a film.

The other film is a political thriller, about the clash of personalities leading up to the invasion of Iraq. This is the film that Stone is most interested in, and, of course, the film that he fails the most miserably at. He could have crafted a film on par with Roger Donaldson’s excellent “Thirteen Days”, making it thick with process and minutiae. Instead, he gives us composite scenes and clownish impersonations.

And while less people would have been that interested in that second type of film, and while it could lend itself more to charges of being politically biased on way or the other, that could have (and still could be) a great and engaging film. Foreign policy is dramatic and tense enough without dressing it up with suppositions and “heightened’ reality. I direct the reader to Henry Kissinger’s book “Crisis”, most of which is comprised of actual phone transcripts from the Yom Kippur War, which in and of itself could probably make a great film, just an actor playing Kissinger on the phone for two or three hours.

The Iraq War decision-making is particularly apt for such in-depth attention to process and personalities; the way Condi Rice wrested control of the policy from Rumsfeld is delicious and engenders a respect and awe for the woman, not to mention a certain sex appeal, that is all but lost in Thandie Newton’s terrible, stiff, genderless ideologue– not a fighter, but a sycophant. What a sad fate for such a dynamic figure, one who became a Republican in the first place after enduring Carter’s naive black-and-white us-vs.-them approach to world politics.

(On a tangential note, “W.” features Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair. Both gentlemen appeared in the excellent William Wilberforce biopic “Amazing Grace”, which does capture the excitement of the political process: the maneuvering, the power-plays, finding loopholes.)

I wasn’t expecting much out of “W.”, but I also wasn’t expecting so little. It adds nothing to our understanding of the man or the history he shaped. It has no sympathy for him because it does not present him as a human being but as a cartoon.

As a proud and patriotic American who respects the dignity of the office even when I don’t fully respect all those who have held it, I am offended that this picture holds its main character in such disdain. As a dedicated progressive and liberal, I am offended that Stone felt the real criticisms that could be leveled at the Bush Administration are not “dramatic” enough, that he felt the need to make crap up (doesn’t he realize that when you do that, you undermine the validity of all your arguments?). Finally, as a cinephile, I am offended by the lack of focus, intelligence, sympathy, and open-mindedness inherent in every frame.

Regardless of where you stand on Bush, politics, and the last eight years– avoid this film at all costs.

A final note: I really strived to keep this a movie review and not a political piece; while I felt it only right to admit my political biases at the start, I did try to keep them out of my analysis. I’d like to ask commentators to keep their comments focused on the film, the filmmaker in question, and how a better film might be made of George W. Bush’s life/legacy and to stay away from the politics and the same old tired left-versus-right rigmarole. (Especially since, if I’m not mistaken, I’m severely outnumbered here.;-))

Albero and the Great Blue Emblem– which, if you’ll pardon my informality, we’ll just call Albero from this point onward– bills itself as an “exploration-based platform RPG”, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to extend to it that last genre designation, I will freely admit that it ably taps into two of the genre’s most essential features, perhaps better than some canonical RPGs, by allowing the player to control multiple characters– each with different skill sets– who become stronger and more capable of meeting the game’s challenges as the game progresses.

The challenges in Albero, though, are more intellectual than acrobatic. The player does not develop any offensive capabilities until roughly an hour into the game play. And though there are enemies through-out, the focus doesn’t really shift to combat at that point and, indeed, one might forget he has the ability to fight back. It is, in fact, a surprisingly gentle game, and this, in turn, makes the player more contemplative and thus more responsive to puzzle-solving.

When I say puzzle-solving, I don’t mean that the game is in any way akin to Layton or Lolo; the puzzles are far more intuitive– less along the lines of a formal puzzle in which you are presented with a set of circumstances and must find a solution, more along the lines of “I know I need to get over there– wonder how I do it?”

One very good example of this exists in the first few minutes of the game play. Our hero, Albero, is unable to access the elevator that will carry him down to the next part of the game’s world; he cannot jump high enough to reach it.

Moving to the right, after navigating past some disappearing/reappearing blocks, he finds a jumping power-up next to another ledge. Even with this power-up, Albero cannot clear to this ledge to the right.

The solution, of course, is absurdly simple; the player moves left, back to the first ledge, and discovers that he can now clear it with ease. On the other side of the elevator he finds an elevator pass that gives him access to the next floor down. On that floor, he spots an elevator pass that he can’t reach and he finds a jump power-up that enables him to clear that jump to the right on the preceding floor. And there, he’ll find the first other playable character in the game, Rusty the Bowerfly, who is able to reach that other elevator pass using his hovering ability.

That’s where I’ll leave off my description of that particular chain of events– this is a review and not a walkthrough– a chain of events that illustrates quite nicely the kinds of puzzles featured in the game, the kind of thinking required to conquer them, the ways in which different elements of each challenge are layered rather than laid out for you, and the general modus operandi powering the evolving skill sets.

In most games, when you get a new character, or when that character develops a new skill, what is striking about this evolution in the player’s palette is what he can do with it– the damage he can inflict. Whereas in this game, it’s not so much about what you can do, but rather about where you can go. You’re not increasing your physical prowess, but rather your range of motion: it really is a game centered around the concept of exploration.

This general rule is apparent in the skill sets of all four protagonists: only Rusty can pass through the special bowerfly markings on certain walls; only Acacia’s ability to spew forth water enables her to move past the levers that block her path; Dark Alby is the only one able to enter pipes, while Albero himself develops the ability to cling to certain ceilings.

Often times, you’ll see an area or a goal that’s unreachable, and soon after a character will develop the ability to reach that area, which in turns allows another character to reach a different area, and so on. The dominant theme of the game is that of co-operation, and the most important action is not the utilization of the different skills but rather switching between them. The player cannot switch between his characters at any time, like he can in the heavily action-based NES platformer Little Samson, but rather only at specific points– points that in and of themselves add to the level of strategy involved.

One memorable sequence involves the introduction of Dark Alby, Albero’s clone, and the restoration of the orange sky to the town of San Verdes. The player must switch between the two Alberos as they make their way through separate sections of a cave. A number of gates bar their progress. Albero can open gates for Dark Alby by placing his “purity orb” on a pedestal; Dark Alby can do the same for Albero.

And so: Dark Alby must make his way from the switch point to a pedestal, place his orb to open one of Albero’s gates, and make his way back to the switch point; Albero then travels into the new space Dark Alby has opened for him, places his orb on a pedestal, opens a gate for Dark Alby and goes back to his switch point; Dark Alby then goes into his new area, et cetera, et cetera.

This could rapidly– and, indeed, at times, does– become tedious: a lot of switching, a lot of going back and forth. And, to be blunt, there is a whole lot of back-and-forth in Albero. For example: character hit points are increased by one point when you escort a bowerfly to the Bowerfly Fields at the second-from-topmost floor. Through-out a large portion of the game, this means finding a bowerfly, moving to the elevator, and riding up, up, up, up, up to the Bowerfly Fields, claiming your point, and going back down, down, down, down, down to where you were you at.

Granted, shortly after you’ve gained access to all four party members, the game also introduces a number of teleporters that allow you to jump from one floor to another without having to constantly ride up and down the elevator. And this addition is an empowering one, the feeling of an increase in one’s range of motion and ability to explore being tied to the previous portions of the game in which one was denied it.

Royer also finds ways to liven up the game play while still mostly keeping with the game’s non-violent ethos. One way he does this is by the inclusion, at key moments in the game play, of “Hesta the Skills Tester”. In these sections, the player must navigate through an obstacle course in a very limited period of time. The execution has to be as close as possible to flawless: the timer provided is more-or-less perfectly calibrated, giving the player just enough time and not a second more.

But he’s not called “Hesta the Time Tester”, and that’s for a very good reason: each test is intended for one specific character. It is that character’s skills– and the player’s ability to use them– that are tested, further ensuring that the player can ably control all four characters.

One rule for good game design that Royer is insightful enough to follow is “change the rules”. Adding a wrinkle or a stipulation to the game play ensures that a given level or challenge is memorable for more than just its locale. The Great Exotic Juice Tree Canopy sequence is memorable not because of its foliage, but because Albero and Dark Alby are being held captive, forcing you to navigate the potentially dangerous area alternating between Acacia and Rusty, who have no offensive abilities– though Acacia’s fire-goo comes in handy during that sequence’s concluding boss battle. The specific challenge the two of them has to face– freeing spirit blocks to form a staircase that will lead them to the top of the tree– supplements this feeling of uniqueness.

Likewise, the Slugga Labs sequence is not memorable because of its high-tech spriting and cool blue-gray vibe, but rather because the player must depend on the assistance of, and provide protection for, the computer-controlled Dark Emfly. (That’s right: an escort mission.)

These tweaks and specific challenges modify the standard rules of “typical” game play in a given game. In fact, a good maxim for game design is that a game should have no “typical” levels– that every challenge is in some way different, unique, and compelling without violating the over-all feeling of systemic coherence.

This is an important point: in Albero, the game play is varied and tweaked but still remains, at its heart, the same style of game play, with the same interface, controls, and skills– it’s just viewed through a different filter or slant. A lot of game designers try to vary the game play by adding a snowboarding stage– a stage which, in turn, has close to absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the game.

Royer does not fall into that trap. The only thing that ever feels even slightly out of place are several of the boss battles; dodge-and-shoot, while being a skill that every gamer needs to practice and develop, does not really feel indigenous to Albero. The game is much more successful with boss battles such as the one that takes place between Dark Alby and the dragon inhabiting Slugga Labs: this battle tests a specific skill possessed only by Dark Alby, and thus feels at one with the rest of the game play.

But when I say the puzzles are intuitive, I certainly don’t mean to say that they are by any means simple. Sometimes, especially late in the game, you’ll find yourself doing a whole lot of head-scratching. And, indeed, I’ve been stuck at the same spot for several months now:

So, go ahead and give the game a try, and if you get past this part, tell me how the heck to do it.

The Power crash-lands the player on a weird and uncharted planet, and tasks him with recovering his survival gear, navigating hostile terrain, and defeating bosses– all of whom speak of a mysterious power, always prefaced with a certain definite article. It’s all fairly standard platforming stuff, but it’s done very well– with style, grace, and balance. While it doesn’t add anything to the genre or provide any new twists on old chestnuts, they are, in the end, still very tasty chestnuts.

Like most Metroidvania platformers, the game is somewhat non-linear, in a linear way.

player is allowed to explore the planet, moving not only left and right but also ascending and descending, revisiting old areas at will, with numerous and helpful save points and check points scattered throughout. This exploration– and thus, the non-linearity– is buffered by barriers of various sorts, which can, in turn, be overcome or destroyed by the weapons, items, and upgrades you pick up in your explorations. A recently opened area will often contain the tool required to open another area, and that area the next one.

On a systemic level, it’s quite elegant; the motivation for exploring an area, and ultimately for playing the game, is to unlock more areas to explore and the means to do so. That is, the player wants to play the game so he can play more of the game. This central game mechanic– often at the heart of many exploration-based platformers– also provides a benchmark for the player’s progress: namely, the ever-increasing area the player makes available to himself. Some games, such as Albero and the Great Blue Emblem, emphasize this benchmark in a more obvious way by tracking the player’s progress on a map-screen.

On another level, though, this mechanic actually reveals the game to be far more linear than it seems. The player cannot explore at will, but rather only explore certain areas; new areas are unlocked in a certain and specific order. There is not more than one way to beat the game, no areas are optional. Every player will fight the game’s (many) (hard) bosses in the same exact order.

This is not a fault of game design but rather the end result of that elegant and rewarding game mechanic, and, indeed, games that share this particular mechanic– such as Blaster Master and the aforementioned Albero– are less non-linear than games like Zelda or Metroid. The game’s central mechanic, which depends upon getting object a to bypass barrier b, where you can find object c to open up d, et cetera, basically herds the player from one area to the next, often tracking back and forth over the same terrain, in a strictly linear fashion.

Comparing and contrasting The Power with Albero is actually quite apt and revealing, as the two games provide very different game play experiences using the same central exploration mechanic. In both games, items or ability power-ups function as increasers of mobility. In The Power, however, these items also do double-duty as weapons, making them perfectly at home with its action- and dexterity-heavy approach. Land mines, missiles, and even a grappling hook not only destroy or overcome terrain but also baddies.

Albero, on the other hand, with its more cerebral approach, favoured puzzle-solving over action. Enemies were mostly to be avoided and seldom put in an appearance. It made that game somewhat “zen” and peaceful, but is also made it somewhat less accessible, as players could get stuck on a given puzzle for hours if not days.

In The Power, however, there are no real puzzles; its focus is strictly on the action, and the exploration functions as part of that action. It makes the game more accessible and increases, in a strange way, a sense of fairness; your progress in Albero could be hampered by not being able to figure out what solution its creator had in mind, while in The Power, the only thing hampering the player’s progress is his own ability. You don’t have to figure anything out; you just have to be good– damn good– at the game.

And it is no walk in the park. The game’s many bosses provide a great deal of challenge; they are often equipped with both devastatingly powerful attacks and an ungodly high number of hit points. Most of these battles fall into the predictable pattern of “dodge, than shoot, dodge, than shoot”– a pattern that, in this itineration, requires extremely precise timing on the part of the player. The player must slip into a very exacting rhythm and maintain it– a process made doubly nerve-wracking not only by the length of these battles, due to the aforementioned high number of hit points, but also by the fact that the game does not feature a pause script and boss chambers do not have any kind of “safe” zones.

Thankfully, a check-point save is created whenever a player enters a boss battle, and so, upon the player’s demise, his hit points will be restored to whatever they were at the battle’s commencement. This gives the player a chance to catch his breath (and rest his twitching fingers) between attempts, and upon defeating a boss, one’s hit points and missile count are restored to the maximum.

In fact, the game’s regular save points– distributed quite liberally through out the game world– also restore one’s health and missiles to the maximum. And, since these save points are separate from the check-point saves, no one has to worry about the frustrating experience of being “stuck” at a boss, unable to access any other part of the game without starting over. Of course, because the game’s trajectory is so linear, there’s not much else to do but to stomp over old territory.

This extremely forgiving save system renders any kind of health power-ups irrelevant, and so Andújar wisely does not bother providing them. The save and check-point system also help to smooth out the game’s difficulty level– an example of player’s advocacy at its best.

The game’s controls are another matter. While I did not particularly mind the use of the up arrow key to jump in this case– it helps that the game doesn’t have any bottomless pits or instant death spikes that necessitate a lot of quick and careful jumping– I found the four action buttons to be a little overwhelming, especially since they were placed, somewhat oddly and non-intuitively, in the middle of the keyboard. It did help to mitigate things that two of these actions– dropping mines and activating the grappling hook– were used far less seldomly than the power beam and missiles.

The missiles themselves might make the game a little too easy; they make short work of most enemies and are extremely effective against most bosses. In fact, the last set of “bosses”– four sword-wielding stick figures in formations of one, one, and two– are pathetically simple to dispatch with the use of one’s upgraded missiles. After defeating them, I came across the game’s final save point. Ah, I thought. This must be it. The big kahuna. I saved my game and girded myself for the boss fight of my life.

Instead, I discovered that the game was over. To say that this last leg of the journey was somewhat disappointing is a bit of an understatement. Thinking over my experience, I realized that while many of the game’s bosses were difficult, the ones I had the most difficulty with– the ones who killed me the most times– were actually at the beginning of the game. As I found more weapons and health increasers, I became more powerful and the game became easier. I think some more work should have been put into creating bosses and threats that were credible despite my increase in power.

I also think– and of course this is quite strange coming from me!– that the game’s storyline was disappointing. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot out of the game’s promised titular revelation. I knew that the boss characters continually spoke of this mysterious Power, and that they continually upbraided me for perceived greediness on my part. Some of the bosses were downright friendly, like a poor frog with indigestion, and so I expected, at the game’s end, to learn a lesson about the pitfalls of selfishness and man’s propensity for violence; a lesson that, while cloyingly moralistic, would be strangely appropriate for a game about exploration (read: expansion, in the Manifest Destiny mode) and treasure-hunting.

But when I reached the game’s end, and it was revealed not only that the Power was that of imagination itself, and that I had proved myself worthy of that Power by killing creatures and grabbing as many items as possible, I felt a profound sense of cognitive disconnect. Did Andújar not realize what he had been building to through-out his game, or that the ending he gave us is directly at odds with that build-up?

While The Power may be inconsistent in regards to its difficultly level and thematic elements, there is one overarching constant, and that’s the game’s pure playability. As I said at the top of the piece, it doesn’t really add anything new to the formula– but it mostly delivers on that formula, and it must be said again that that formula is a potent one. It is also, to its credit, extremely fast-paced– something one really couldn’t say for most exploration-based games, especially those with a higher degree of nonlinearity– and thus never overstays its welcome.

In representing this review of mine, I realize that some readers might be unfamiliar with the great and now long-lost freeware gem Albero and the Great Blue Emblem. A review of that game will be forthcoming, along with reviews of current commercial releases.

For reasons explained in this interview, we’re self-distributing our films on DVD via Amazon.com and CreateSpace, with V.O.D. looming in the near future, starting with that afore-trailered film, The Man Who Loved.

The disc includes the entire feature film plus an eight-minute discussion/commentary bonus feature, rather handsomely packaged.

It sells on CreateSpace for $15 and on the more prestigious Amazon for $19.99, though that price should be dropping to $15 as well as soon as they get around to updating it; we do get a larger royalty with CreateSpace sales, if that makes any difference.

Here are some clips from the film, which should tell you whether or not it’s your type of thing; please click on the little “HQ” button because YouTube’s compression really doesn’t represent the visual look of the film very well otherwise. (A slight bit of ribald guy talk is present in the first clip.)

(CLIPS TO COME ONCE I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO POST YOUTUBE VIDEOS WITH WORDPRESS).

In the next month or two we should be releasing my superhero novel and our next feature, “Son of a Seahorse”. Here’s a trailer for that one (and remember to click “HQ”!):

More game and movie reviews will be forthcoming.

This is actually a review I originally wrote for my game design magazine, Russell’s Quarterly, edited slightly (and sans my fifteen original footnotes). It should give you a fairly good idea of the way I write game reviews so that as I review more games, both freeware and commercial, you’ll know what to expect.

This particular collection of games was created by Jonatan Soderstrom, a.k.a. Cactus, already a legend in the indie gaming world and most recently celebrated for his zany presentation at this year’s GDC.

(You can download this and other games from Cactus’s site.)

The reason why I can justify using this space to review seventeen short games by one designer when there are plenty of longer, bigger games with a longer development time– most of the games on this compilation were created in the space of a few days or hours– is that even the least of these games demonstrates more ingenuity and– yes– genius than most other “full” games, professional or otherwise.

Looking at these games as parts of a whole, the first thing that strikes me about them is the incredible variety on display. I’m not simply talking about visual style, which effectively stamps each game with a distinct identity, even as several of the games share a simple black-and-white aesthetic emphasizing line art and abstract geometric shapes; that, in and of itself, is no mean feat.

No, I’m talking about the actual game play. The vast majority of these games are action-based shmups, yet no two of them are alike. Each game provides a different, interesting, and invigorating slant on the popular genre; each game transforms it with a wild and crazy idea, an idea that breaks new ground in the genre and yet seems completely organic to it– an idea that makes such perfect sense that one has to wonder, “why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?”

xWung is a shmup in which the player has no bullets. Instead, the player controls a ship (one assumes it is a ship) which serves as the pivotal point for a weight and a telescoping line. As the player moves the mouse, the line and the weight whirl around, crashing into enemies. The enemies turn into debris, which the player must avoid; the faster he swings his weapon, the more debris fills the screen and the harder it is to dodge. A single misstep on the part of the player means “game over”, and the process is further complicated by a series of multi-part bosses.

The first question this game brings to mind, of course, is this: does it really count as a shoot ‘em-up? It certainly doesn’t play like any shooter I’ve ever encountered– maybe a better term would be swing ‘em-up?– and yet it is recognizably a shmup: hordes of enemies, lots of projectiles to dodge, one-hit deaths. It takes the form of a shmup (dodge-and-shoot), boils it down to its essence (dodge-and-attack), and than extrapolates from it anew with a brilliant high concept.

And this is something that Soderstrom does in game after game. Protoganda: Strings revolves around time: if the player is damaged, he loses time, and if he causes damage, he gains it. The game ends when this precious commodity expires, resulting in a heightened urgency. In Seizuredome, the player doesn’t need to worry about losing lives, taking damage, or dodging bullets– enemies and their projectiles push him in this direction or that, seeking to push him out of the “ring” as in a sumo wrestling match. In the justly celebrated Clean Asia, perhaps the game for which he has won the most notoriety all over the interwebs, the player is given a choice between two ships; the less conventional of the two does not attack by firing, but by ramming into and through parts of the large enemy characters, dispelling debris. The player can then magnetically attract that debris and expel it as a projectile– causing more debris to fling off and to be absorbed and to be expelled.

Even in his less obviously innovative shooters, Soderstrom provides the player with a unique and, dare I say, vital experience. The huge, distinctive sprites of F*** Space crowd the screen, creating a sense of claustrophobia and difficulty that’s at once more intense and more forgiving than games that subject their players to bullet hell. Minubeat might take its cue from easily the stupidest and most insulting genre of game to arise in the last ten years– the rhythm-vomiter, as exemplified by Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Dance Revolution– but, in making rhythm-timed button presses an offensive option, it actually manages to be worth-while and surprisingly difficult. Burn the Trash’s unique mechanic– the longer you hold the attack buttons, the wider and deadlier the spread of your enemy-destroying weapon, and the higher the probability that you’ll overheat and destroy yourself– might not be as mind-blowing as xWung or Clean Asia, but creates a dynamic tension between the player’s desire to blow the hell out of everything– which, given your ship’s colourful and charmingly chaotic discharge is unreasonably delightful to watch– and his desire to not, well, die.

Perhaps more important than these ideas is their execution. If these ideas were not supported by solid and well-considered game design, they would be interesting but ultimately disappointing. But none of these disappoint; each central idea is supported by strong and intelligent game design decisions. Or, rather, each central idea leads to those decisions in a system that appears effortlessly elegant.

xWung is a perfect example of this. Shmups, like most action games, are “about” the player’s ability to navigate quickly and accurately through physical space– moving away from or around enemies and their projectiles while placing yourself in the right spot to attack them with your own projectiles. But xWung has no projectiles. Neither is there any need to position yourself in order to attack your enemies; get it spinning fast enough and the player’s weapon has considerable range, allowing him to strike most enemies from any spot in the playfield.

If xWung had otherwise stuck to the typical shooter formula– if the enemies had fired bullets– its unique weapon would have greatly upset the balance between the twin desires to stay alive and attack; if you can more-or-less strike from anywhere, it’s no great feat to position yourself somewhere relatively safe, moving about this way and that, and unleashing your uber-weapon.

Soderstrom wisely avoids this pitfall by depriving normal enemies of bullets; once you destroy them, however, they break apart into pieces of deadly debris that the player’s normal weapon cannot destroy. This means, of course, that the faster you dispose of the enemies– thus racking up extra points– the faster the screen will fill with projectiles. The dynamic between the two desires is back in place: to stay alive is to deprive yourself of the ability to attack, to attack is to endanger your life– the only life the game gives you.

This dynamic is further enhanced by the special features of the swinging weapon itself. The faster you swing it, the wider its range, and the more enemies it is likely to destroy, thus filling the screen with more debris; the slower you swing it, the shorter its range– which means that you’re likely to hit less enemies, but that those enemies you do hit will expel debris that’s much closer to you, and thus much harder to dodge.

With these design decisions, Soderstrom adapts the genre to his high concept, ensuring that the two work together to create a seamless and unique experience that’s at once eminently accessible and surprisingly deep. All of the design decisions in his action games show this same process, this same depth of understanding, not only of genre but of the form itself: of how to create conflicting goals, of how to best show off and extrapolate from his central concept, of how to use time and especially space as a source of meaning.

Seizuredome and F*** Space, for example, are all about the player’s ability to control spatial relationships, or to be controlled by them. The name of the latter, in fact, doubles as a sort of pun; not only is it intended to show one’s disdain for supposedly limitless outer space, it’s also damning space as an abstract concept and creating a space in which the player is, to put it somewhat more delicately, about to get “screwed”.

Three of the games featured in this collection take their cue from Hikoza Ohkubo’s famous freeware shmup Warning Forever, similarly being comprised only (or mostly) of boss battles: Clean Asia, Fractal Fighter, and Protoganda: Strings. And while Protoganda shares Warning’s time mechanic, all three games are really as different from one another as they are from Ohkubo’s game.

Two of the three stages in Clean Asia (Thailand and New Korea) are centered around boss battles. In both of these stages, the bosses are comprised of multiple individually-destructible parts– a motif that reoccurs in xWung and Fractal Fighter. While the bosses in Protoganda: Strings are also made up of multiple parts that fall away as the boss is damaged, those parts are not individually-destructible as they all share one single spatial weak point, the red orb at the enemy’s center. In the case of the boss battles in these other games– which are, perhaps, more typically “Cactusian”– each part or unit can be destroyed by the player, blending fast-paced action game play with strategy in a way that does not entail the long deliberations that the word “strategy” usually implies but rather split-second high-risk decision-making amid the chaos of cascading bullets. While Protoganda is a fun and highly-addictive game, it ultimately lacks the depth of Clean Asia and Fractal Fighter, and a large part of that can be attributed to the superior enemy design in the latter two games.

In the easiest– if any of them can truly be called “easy”!– of the three stages in Clean Asia, Thailand, the bosses are made up of large blocks. Carefully avoiding the enemy projectiles, which flow out beautifully from the center of the boss, the player uses his thrust attack to zip through and destroy a given block. He must be careful, though, to clear the rest of the boss after doing so. In this way, then, the physical shape and movement of the boss “creates” the difficulty of the encounter– more so, perhaps, than their actual attacks, though they can still be quite formidable. In most boss encounters, the shape of the boss’s sprite is irrelevant– certainly not as important as the amount and type of space it occupies and the rate and way it moves through the space it shares with the player. But in this game, the shape of the boss– the way in which it occupies that space– is deathly important, perhaps more-so than its actual size.

In the Thailand stage, the player can attack the various pieces of a given boss as they choose; in New Korea, however, the order in which you destroy chunks of a boss impacts the boss’s methods of attacks. Destroy the parts of a boss attached to its guns, and you’ll destroy those guns; at that point, the boss will unleash what could politely be called bullet hell on your ass. The natural solution, of course, would be to destroy the other parts of the boss first, then going after the guns. This is easier said than done; the guns are usually positioned in such a way that they must be destroyed before going after other parts of the boss. Again, Soderstrom creates a dynamic tension between two goals, in what we might call the Eugene Jarvis rule of video game design.

Another rule that’s very much in evidence in Clean Asia is the idea that, just as every game should have its own central idea that separates it from the rest, every level should be readily identifiable and easily discernable from other levels in the same game. This does not mean merely providing each level with its own visual or aural identity– though each of Clean Asia’s levels has a distinct look and sound– but with its own theme. While the Thailand and New Korea stages provide different spins on boss battling, the China stage throws several different enemies at the player– enemies who move at a considerably faster speed and are, I have to say, extremely hard to see. In this stage, the debris the player uses as a projectile– which he must break off the boss characters in the other two stages– floats freely about, making it slightly more fair and somewhat closer to a traditional shmup.

If variety is the name of the game in Clean Asia, Fractal Fighter takes a radically different tact. Each boss fight in Fractal Fighter plays very much like the one before it– only harder. Each boss is made up of multiple weapons, all of which must be destroyed; with each boss, the number of weapons increases, thus increasing the number of projectiles on the screen and the difficulty.

There are, however, different types of weapons– weapons that cannily organized into layers that, in and of themselves, are progressively more difficult than the one preceding it. A given layer must be destroyed before the next one attacks; that is, you must destroy all the single-firing cannons before the triple-fire cannons can attack or be attacked, you must destroy the triple-fire before tackling the heat-seeking shots, you must destroy the heat-seeking shots before tackling the lasers.

These weapon types, and this general process of moving from one layer to the next, remains exactly the same from one boss to the next, making the increase in the game’s difficulty a largely incremental process. On a systemic level, it’s very beautiful and much “purer” than Clean Asia. It’s as accessible and simple in concept as xWung, deeper and more rewarding than Protoganda. Of all the games in the Cactus oeuvre, Fractal Fighter is my absolute super-secret crush.

Part of that has to do with the sheer number of options available to the player. In all three of these boss battle shmups, the player is given multiple avenues of attack.

The main ship in Clean Asia zips through the enemy and magnetically attracts its debris by holding the “X” button; that debris can be released in a string of bullets by also holding the “Z” key, or it can be expelled wholesale by releasing “X”. In Protoganda, the player can fire directly at the boss by positioning himself below it. When that area gets a little too crowded with the enemy’s own bullets and missiles, the player would do well to swing over to the relative safety of the side of the screen. While there, he can charge a powerful homing attack that’s guaranteed to hit the boss– provided it fires before the player takes any damage. A “shield”, which deflects nearby enemy bullets for a brief moment, rounds out the package.

In Fractal Fighter, the player is also given three equally viable options: his standard machine-gun type fire, a laser that damages all enemies in its path (especially good for dispatching a trio of three-shooters), and a special homing missile attack that takes out whatever target it hits. In order to hit these targets, the player must line himself up precisely with the targeted area; this can be done from below or above the target, meaning the player doesn’t always have to be right in the line of fire to take down one of those big ugly enemy laser cannons.

This variety of methods, across all his games but especially in Fractal Fighter, not only increases player choice but also increases the depth of the game’s strategic content– each approach is more useful in some situations and less so in others, carefully balanced within the game’s system.

Fractal Fighter also allows less-skilled players, such as myself, the option of choosing how many lives (up to five) with which to play through the normal game; more lives, of course, means less points. And, should the player be especially good, or if they’ve just taken leave of their senses, they can choose to access the game’s random mode, which generates an insanely well-armed and completely new enemy, thus ensuring that the game’s content can never be exhausted.

There’s something else that all these shmups, boss-oriented or otherwise, have in common, besides their shared shmuppiness: they’re all extremely difficult. While your mileage may definitely vary, my first stab at most of these games didn’t last more than twenty seconds. But, let me be clear: they are not arbitrarily difficult. This is purposeful difficulty of the highest order, this is challenge derived out of carefully-considered game play mechanics. Each game is eminently fair, and supported by solid design decisions that ensure this fairness.

For example: the player’s ship is usually very tiny, meaning that he can squeeze between enemy shots, carefully but swiftly weaving his way around. For example: enemy shots move at a much slower pace than the player’s, allowing the player to clearly register their speed and movement. You’ll never be wondering what hit you in a Cactus game; you’ll always be aware of what your mistake was and you’ll be able to learn from it.

Mondo Head-Scratching

If the Cactus Game Arcade collection consisted only of those games we’ve mentioned so far– his shmups– I would still have no qualms about singing the man’s praises or strongly recommending that you download this vital and important collection; the body of work I’ve described thus far is a singular and astonishing achievement by any litmus. But this collection and this body of work is not only comprised of shmups and Shotgun Ninja; the package is rounded out with a handful of intriguing puzzle games.

But perhaps “puzzle” is the wrong word, as it summons visions of pushing blocks around, searching for key cards, and depressing levers. All of which– don’t get me wrong– is fun stuff. And while one of these games does feature colour-coded barriers (God Came To The Cave), these games are as different from those sort of puzzle games as they are from the shmups that make up the bulk of the collection.

First of all, neither the problems nor their solutions are strictly logical in nature. Reasoning and deduction won’t get you very far, for example, in Psychosomnium; that game, which takes place in a dream world, operates with a sort of trippy dream-logic that runs counter to not only traditional methods of thinking, but also traditional methods of game play. In most (if not all) games, death– whether caused by enemies, bottomless pits, or beds of spikes– is to be staunchly avoided. In Psychosomnium, this holds true– except in those cases in which it is more useful for the player to die.

The game begins when a floating pipe spews out Jimmy– the player character. If Jimmy falls off a cliff, the pipe simply spews him back out again. There are no “lives”, per se, but falling into the pit, since it necessitates restarting the game, is established– as per prevailing video game norms– as an impediment to the player’s progress. Having cleared a series of pits on the second screen, we find ourselves faced with the third: Jimmy is on one platform and a devilishly-handsome little critter named Tom is on another. They are on opposites sides of a chasm; below them is a bed of spikes and between them, a wall lined with more of the same. Tom implores Jimmy to come over to his side; Jimmy points out that the spikes might be a bit of a problem.

“It’s your dream, Jimmy!” Tom reminds him. “You set the rules here. Just come on over! Hurry!”

But, as it turns out, there is no way for Jimmy to cross over to Tom’s side. If the player attempts to walk or jump or somehow get around the spikes, Jimmy dies– but the game does not restart at the pipe. Instead, the player finds himself in control of Tom.

And it’s not just because Jimmy fell on a bed of spikes; it’s not as if spikes are “safe”. If Tom leaps on a bed of spikes or gets clobbered by a set of falling spikes, the player must start over at the last save point– unless, of course, like the death of Jimmy before him, it’s more advantageous for the player to die. In Jimmy’s case, the “puzzle’s” “solution” required no thinking on the part of the player; the player had no other options except to throw himself into the spikes. Consider, then, the following puzzle:

Tom runs into Mitch, a brawny sort of fellow who is, quite understandably, frightened of the spikes that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the late Jimmy’s still-flowing dreamscape. Tom deftly leaps over a bed of spikes and finds himself faced with a gauntlet of adorable bunnies. After a brief but memorable Dadaist dialogue encounter, it becomes clear that the bunnies aren’t going to budge.

Touching them, of course, means death. When you jump, they jump; with a great deal– and I do mean a great deal– of coordination and skill, the player can jump slightly, trick the bunnies into jumping, and then scoot underneath them one at a time. (Because Tom’s quick like that.) But then, the player finds himself with another challenge– a series of jumps that are far beyond Tom’s ability. There seems to be no way for Tom to pass them. And, that’s true: there is no way for Tom to make those jumps. Mitch, on the other hand…

Heading back (or, more likely, heading to, as the player is probably restarting from that last checkpoint) to Mitch, Tom now throws himself on the bed of spikes. The player now finds himself in charge of Mitch, who not only can dispatch the bunnies with a powerful punch– the only bit of combat to be found in the entire game– but who can easily clear the various leaps of the next screen.

It’s a testament to Soderstrom’s skill as a designer that he gives us not one, but two different challenges: one that Tom can overcome with great difficulty, and one that he cannot overcome at all. If he had just stuck with the first– the bunnies that Tom can just barely sneak by– then the game’s meaning would have suffered considerably. That’s right: here I am praising a designer for boxing in the player and denying him meaningful choices– very strange, coming from me.

But it is, all-in-all, a very strange game. Its puzzles defy any attempt to think them through; consider, for example, the screen that confronts Tom just after Jimmy’s death; a large chasm, too large for Tom to leap over, separates him from his goal. There are no hidden platforms, no way to leap over it. At all. But if the player walks back– to the left– he’ll end up at the right of the screen, on the other side of the chasm. Then he can walk to the right side of the screen and exit to the next screen.

There are no “clues” to this puzzle. There’s nothing even remotely logical about it; in any other game or genre, it wouldn’t be fair. Because games are systems, and because players have to be able to understand them on a systemic level, those systems must not only be cohesive– as, I’m sure you’ve noted by now, I’m inordinately fond of saying– but also coherent and consistent. If one bottomless pit kills you and another takes you to a bonus world, with nothing to distinguish them between the two, it’s unfair to the player; having found one bonus world, he’s liable to leap off of cliff after cliff, expending precious life after precious life, trying to find another.

Of course, this is where, once again, Soderstrom’s unorthodox approach is buffeted by strong game design decisions. Because the game’s check-points are frequent– a new one every few screens– and because the player has an unlimited store of lives, the player is encouraged to experiment and given the freedom to do so. If these non-logical puzzles were presented to a player in the context of “three lives, then it’s game over”, the game would be, frankly, impossible. It would be like those older games in which your success depends on how much of a level’s layout you have memorized.

Those games, however, are actually less frustrating than some of the Cactus puzzle games. Because there is no way to “lose” any of these games– none of his puzzle games feature “lives”– the only way to end a session of play is to beat the game, or to quit. In a badly-made game, or one that depends on rote memorization, the player always has the option of declaring a game “janky” or too hard– and, perhaps in those cases, rightfully so. But with these games the player is denied that option; if he quits, it’s because he’s not good enough. On a systemic level, that’s far more brutal than anything the eighties unleashed upon us.

Psychosomnium’s difficulty curve is actually rather gentle; though its creator describes it somewhat provocatively as “an intelligence test. If you get stuck, you’re probably not very bright”, because it embraces dream-logic it still, in its way, possesses a kind of logic. It presents us with a sort of system that, while not as apparently comprehensible as those in other games, still can be understood in some way. For complete and total madness, one really needs to look at Mondo Medicals and its sequel, Mondo Agency.

Both of these games take place in a three-dimensional world, and both thrive on and emphasize the potential disorienting aspects of a three-dimensional space in video games. In fact, Mondo Medicals takes the form of a battery of preliminary “disorientation” tests that the player must pass if they want to become part of the Mondo Medicals team. The first of these tests tasks the player explicitly with following arrows. If the player does that, however, he’ll just be looping around endlessly in circles. But if he “follows” those same arrows backwards– that is, if he goes the precise opposite of the directions that the arrows are pointing, if he doesn’t follow the game’s instructions– the player will discover the level’s exit and move on to the next challenge.

This puzzle, and the one that immediately follows it, set up a pattern– a system, if you will– of looking for twists, of things not being what they seem. Indeed, when faced with the third disorientation test, “Dead End”, the player assumes that there must be some secret he is meant to look for. This feeling only deepens as he moves along a seemingly-endless path– did I miss something? am I just going around in circles again?– but, as it turns out, there is no twist in this stage. Or, rather, the twist is that there isn’t a twist. The corridor is not a dead-end at all, just extraordinarily long; the player’s been wasting time looking for a secret that wasn’t there.

Other tasks require less head-scratching but more hair-pulling. Consider, for example, “Count to Fifteen”, which asks the player to do just that by walking over fifteen numbers scattered through-out a maze in numerical order. If you take too long trying to find the next number in the sequence, a buzzer sounds, indicating that you have to start over.

If it sounds less like a game and more like, well, a disorientation exam– well, that’s exactly what it feels like. I’m not saying, necessarily, that that’s a bad thing; they are, after all, a very interesting series of tests, even if they are mayhaps more than merely mildly mind-boggling.

God Came To The Cave, another of the puzzle games in this collection, is much gentler; in fact, one hesitates to call it a puzzle game at all. There’s nothing really to solve here: to get past a red barrier, the player presses a red button and passes by a “powering-up” station that allows him to pass through it. It’s very simple and straightforward– overcoming one barrier allows you to overcome another and so on.

No, there’s no puzzle-solving here, and very little by way of game play. It’s more of an aesthetic experience, exposing the audience to a very gentle little universe. When the player passes through a given barrier, its pieces crumple into themselves like very delicate paper. Given the chance to leave the cave, the player is first told to find up a pair of pants. Pants, naturally, lead to shoes and a shirt and then, amusingly, a head. It’s not incongruous in the slightest; if we had been told to find a head first, it would have seemed really odd and perhaps a bit morbid. But, as the final part of a progression, it’s very charming– almost touching.

The entire game is long on charm, and– like all the other puzzle games featured in this collection– it is, above all, interesting and unique. But, it should be said, they are only interesting to a certain point– they lack the depth, I think, of his action games and they certainly lack the replay value. Part of this has to do with the genre itself, as even more traditional, logic-based puzzle games aren’t nearly as interesting once you’ve solved and thus exhausted all of its puzzles.

But a larger part of that, I think, has to do with the nature of the puzzles themselves. The point is not, as in a logic-based puzzle game, to deduce the solution, thus resulting in a feeling of accomplishment; the point is to discover the twists and to allow yourself to be surprised and fooled. This works quite nicely the first time through, but far less so the second or third. And, because these are more structured experiences than they are games, they deny the player the variety and depth of choices that make the Cactus shmups so astonishing and accomplished.

To my mind, those shmups are probably better and certainly more accessible games than Mondo Agency or Illegal Communication. But don’t get me wrong– I’m glad to have played these other games, I’m glad they exist, and I’m glad they’re part of this collection. Because, perhaps more-so than the shmups, these games show Soderstrom’s willingness to take chances, to try new things, to test himself and the art form. These games also show his imagination– devilish, clever, and brilliant– in a purer, less adulterated form. In his shmups and action games, he has to tame and bolster his crazy ideas with design decisions and concerns about whether or not the game will be fun; in his puzzle games, he can let that imagination run wild.

Taken together– the shmups and the puzzle games– they form a coherent, lively, and inspiring body of work. Most inspiring of all is the fact that the artist behind that body of work has only just begun, and that body of work will continue to grow and astound for years to come.

There’s a little bit of kissing/sighing going on in this trailer, but I think it’s fairly innocuous.

How could noble Rom, who values all lifeforms save those of their immortal enemies, the dread Dire Wraiths, knowingly sacrafice another world to save his own? He does so… by leading Galactus to the Dark Nebula– home of those very same Dire Wraiths!

And then, when Galactus tries to eat said Dark Nebula…

… it kicks him six ways to Sunday!

Here’s a story full of action, surprising twists, and great character-work. Here is the spectacle of Galactus in tatters, never seen before and never to be repeated.

And here is a story that will never be reprinted, for the simple reason that Marvel doesn’t own the rights to Rom. (Mattel does.) I understand that this is one of the reasons why Marvel’s current editorial is easing out the licensed characters.

But I kinda wish they’d just buy the rights to Rom outright. I mean, come on, it’s not like Mattel is doing anything with it. And Rom does have a pretty solid fan-base that would eat up reprint volumes with a spoon.

And, less importantly from a commercial standpoint but more importantly from a fan’s, these are great stories.

Is Spidey saying that race doesn’t matter at all? No, not necessarily; racism still exists, and the very real discrimination that continues to this day shouldn’t be treated lightly. But what Spidey is saying is that race itself shouldn’t matter. People are people, and we’re all voyagers on this space-ship Earth. Spider-Man, in the able hands of J. M. DeMatteis, treats the issue irreverently– thus deflating the importance it’s been given by both sides of the racial spectrum.

I like that.

Here’s a link:

Thought Bubbles

At the same time, I was a little disappointed, and I certainly would have been upset if my wife and I had spent $17.00 plus parking to see it in the theater.

It’s been charged that the movie is just a ninety minute version of the show– the longest episode on record. And I would agree. It did feel like one very long episode of the television series. But, again, it being a series that I enjoy, I didn’t have a problem with that so much.

I came into it expecting it not to make a whole lot of sense. I expected the humour to be brutal and surreal. If roughly the first forty minutes of a film is devoted to assembling an exercise machine, you can’t really fault it for being weird.

In many ways, it was in keeping with the show– but I think that, in the end, it was missing the heart of it. And that heart is Carl Brutananadilewski.

The surreal humour of the series is anchored by the strong characterization. If there were no characters, the show would truly be without a point and, more importantly, a frame of reference. Since one can count on Meatwad to be dumb, Master Shake to be selfish and abusive, and Frylock to be the straight man, one not only has schtick and character relationships to look forward to in a given episode, but also a status quo, a standard of normality to be violated in increasingly interesting ways.

But if the only characters were these three, the show would be too insular, the structure too hermetically sealed. Meatwad will always be abused (except when he turns the tables) but generally not know any better. Master Shake will always be the aggressor, and Frylock is generally regulated to the Offisa Pup role. It is the character of Carl that makes the show truly special.

Carl is there to react to the various strange going-ons. When he is victimized, he doesn’t simply accept it like Meatwad. He responds with a unique mixture of deadpan terror and shrieking anger. Having Carl say something as simple as, “You are weird” is incredibly amusing. Just the way he says it, supported by the equally deadpan style of animation.

Or, in one of my all-time favourite episodes, after Carl has been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past From the Future:

“I remember eating carpet. Not so much the robots and the lasers, though.”

This kind of response– simple, direct, and funny– makes Carl a sort of “viewpoint” character. Just as Robin was introduced as a character that children can identify with, making the Batman more palpable, Carl makes the adventures of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force more accessible. It’s not the brutality or dadaism that I find appealing in the show, but rather Carl’s response to it.

What makes him very interesting as a viewpoint-type character is that he’s not the blank slate usually prescribed for such a role. In fact, he should be pretty damn impossible to like. Here’s someone who has a number of unhealthy obsessions, habits, and viewpoints, ranging from token misogyny to a complete and utter disregard for his own personal safety:

But my point is, without Carl, the entire enterprise is thrown severly out of whack. He provides a weird sort of comic straight man to the various proceedings.

And in the case of the film, quite frankly, there’s not enough Carl. While Carl is somewhat integral to the plot, he very seldom gets the time to act (or, more accurately, to react) like Carl. With nothing to really anchor the movie’s surrealism, it unfolds something akin to a very long geek show, or a film like Pink Flamingos. Parts are entertaining, parts are distasteful, but on a whole, the entire thing feels like a film made in some alternate universe with only a very tentative relationship to our own.

Tom Russell is a filmmaker. His current film is The Man Who Loved.

When I first started reading Wieringo’s work, I didn’t “get” it; it seemed– and this was a common charge– too “cartoony”. But I’ve gotten smarter with the passing years, and I can honestly say he’s one of the greats. His work can be beautiful– like Tellos– but it also goes beyond that: he was able to successfully tell stories in the form of comics. His page layouts, his sense of timing from panel-to-panel– it was impeccable.

There’s a book that came out a year or two ago, called “Panel Discussions”– that featured a lengthy interview with Wieringo, in which he shares his working methods and his thoughts about the comics form. I highly recommend it, and all of the man’s work.

Rest in peace, Ringo.

Not that I’m expecting anything, of course.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3E23EETG1QP6I/

Now, you’ll note that the list belongs to one Mary Russell– who is, of course, my beautiful wife. Generally, I don’t think one will have a problem differentiating which things are mine, and which things are my wife’s.

As a general rule of thumb, I’m not anxiously hoping for a cookbook.

This is the secret of Big Ethel: she was always exactly and stubbornly herself. She never tried to fit in, but rather asserted her own unique personality at every opportunity. No compromise.

But all social interaction requires some level of compromise. The problem with not trying to fit in is that you don’t fit in. And so, all-too-often, Big Ethel was the butt of the joke.

I’m not a Big Ethel fan because she was a punchline. I don’t like that level of cruelty in my Archie comics. I’m a Big Ethel fan because of the way she reacted to the cruelty.

She didn’t shrivel up and cry about how nobody liked her. She didn’t start dressing like the other girls and beg for their acceptance. She went right on being herself– passionately, without apology, enjoying the very act of being true to herself.

The message there is, it doesn’t matter if people like you. Your happiness should not be contingent on the opinions of others. And this Big Ethel Message goes hand-in-hand with the Jughead Message.

For the illustrious Mr. Jones is also stubbornly and intensely himself at every turn. And yet, unlike Big Ethel, he still has friends. Part of this is the structure of the series– Jughead being the weird friend, Ethel being the weird outsider– but there’s a message there, as well. Jughead doesn’t compromise to try and make people like him. The people who like him like him, then, because of who he is.

Obviously, in today’s day-and-age, Big-Ethel-as-a-big-joke won’t fly. Change was needed. She had to be integrated more fully into the Archie circle of friends. It was time for the gang to accept her. But rather than staying true to the character, and the idealistic be-yourself message, they chose instead to echo the immortal theme of the musical Grease: change who you are, and people will like you.

First, they changed her appearance, getting rid of her sexy buck-teeth and the distinctive Jughead-style nose. Her physical similarity to Jughead also echoed the fact that they shared a eccentric personality. Gone.

Gone, too, is the personality. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of wild-and-crazy Muggs, they reduced her to her plot-puppet purpose– she is now defined by her love for Jughead. A love that is also marked by compromise.

She’s not even “Big” Ethel anymore– just Ethel. Just like Betty, Veronica, Midge and all the other colourless, nicknameless Riverdale girls.

Big Ethel, realizing that the maxim that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach is especially true in the case of Riverdale’s resident gourmand Jughead Jones, takes up baking, bribing Jughead into dates with cupcakes, muffins, cookies, and other sweets. And so, he’s not accepting her for her– but rather for her skills in the kitchen!

And the thing that’s the most lovable about her– her pluck, her unflappability– that’s gone, too.

Moping. Baking. Compromising. What happened to my Big Ethel, the rugged individualist, the gangly man-crazed feminist? Now she looks and acts like every other female in Riverdale, and now they accept her. Sometimes, I can’t even tell who she is, mistaking her for one of the nameless studentry or background characters. She’s been beaten down by the forces of conformity.

She deserved better.

After Ditko left, Peter Parker moved out of his aunt’s place and became damn near gregarious. Bland, “normal” villains like the Rhino or the Kingpin were more likely to crop up than the more colourful ones. The mood of the title under Romita was more romantic, both in terms of interpersonal relationships– Peter now had a real honest-to-God girlfriend– and in terms of storytelling: big, Kirby-esque superhero battles.

In short, everything that made Spider-Man Spider-Man was gone, and as a result, he became more popular. The Spider-Man of the hit Sam Raimi films is Romita’s– not Ditko’s.

I call this the Arthur Effect because of the Marc Brown character, Arthur Read the Aardvark. In the first book, Arthur’s Nose, he looked like this:

Arthur, unhappy with his long aardvark’s nose, goes to Dr. Louise, the rhinologist (who is, naturally, a rhino). In the end, he decides that he likes his own nose the best: “I’m just not me without my nose!”

But now let’s take a look at a more recent book in the Arthur series.

What happened to his nose? The whole point of the first book– that we should accept, and celebrate, the things that make us different– is completely invalidated by the rest of the series. And it’s this noseless Arthur– more bear than aardvark– that makes up the bulk of the series, stars in chapter books, has his own television program, toys, oversized plush dolls, backpacks, lunchboxes, stationary, music cds, and posters. Nothing differentiates him from all the other cute, cuddly children’s book characters– and so he’s more palatable to a wider audience.

I’m not saying this is always a bad thing, nor is it always a direct result of trying to capture a wider market. Because of the Comics Code, the friendly Silver Age incarnations of Batman and Superman are vastly different from the brutal Golden Age originals. And in the case of Superman, I think that’s an assest: no one wants to see him hurtling war criminals like javelins.

With these rough edges and quirks gone, they became more acceptable to the mainstream audience, and more-or-less codified the concept of the superhero. Really, the Arthur Effect is one of refinement.

But what a character or story might gain in beauty, clarity, and thematic unity– all very attractive to the widest possible audience– they often lose that most mysterious and precious of things: vitality.

During this period, Clark Kent fought Al Capone (Superman # 142: “Superman Meets Al Capone!”), Jimmy Olsen became convinced that he was the reincarnation of the greatest traitors in history (Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen # 110: “Jimmy Olsen’s Blackest Deeds!”), and Superman wore a number of amusing hats in order to cleverly conceal the presence of a third eye brought on by Red Kryptonite (Action Comics # 275: “The Menace of Red-Green Kryptonite!”). This is the era that saw Superman transformed into a lion (Action Comics # 243: “The Lady and the Lion!”), an “old duffer” (Action Comics # 251: “The Oldest Man In Metropolis”), the Superman of the Future (Action Comics # 256: “The Superman of the Future!”), and even Alfred E. Neuman (Superman # 126: “The Two Faces of Superman!”).

There are a number of reasons why people don’t like these stories. They think they’re silly. They think they lack polish. They’re the products of censorship, the neutered concept of the superhero that emerged in the wake of the Comics Code Authority. And to all that I say, hogwash!

These stories are great! The hallmarks of fantasy literature! And, over time, I hope to revisit some of these great stories and tell you why I love them, and what makes them tick. But if I may take this moment to address another common complaint about The Greatest Superhero Comics Ever Made…

People say that the Silver Age Lois Lane is a misogynistic mish-mash of a character. That she’s a projection of the hatred and anxieties of the male editor and his male writers towards women. And to that I say: hogwash!

Lois Lane is the crowning achievement of the Weisenger Era.

Superman is a decent enough guy, but he’s a fundamentally static character, one lacking in tension. Spider-Man has angst and anger and the whole power-and-responsibility thing to mull over; Batman has the whole revenge thing going on. But Superman is someone who is in control, super-competent to the point of being nigh-infallible, super-powerful and just plain super. The Silver Age Superman stories depend less on Superman as a character and more on the crazy, wigged-out world he lives in, his colourful cast of friends and enemies, and the occasional bit of surreal plotting. I mean, do you remember the time Jimmy Olsen saved Superman from Braniac using giant cheerios?

(And that wasn’t an ad, by the way– it was a ten-page story from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen # 116: “Braniac… Big-Time Operator!”)

Many of the Silver Age Superman stories were deftly-written pieces of high comedy. There was the occasional serious story– “Return to Krypton” is a bit of a tear-jerker, among others. Sometimes the comedy is subtle and heart-breaking– take “The Lady and the Lion!” or the psychologically complex “Superman’s New Power!”– but generally it’s all about the funny.

And Superman himself isn’t really funny. As I hinted at above, he’s really more of a straight-man. So it’s up to his supporting cast to pick up the slack.

And as handy with a box full of cheerios he might be, Jimmy Olsen is something of a comic void. (More than that, he’s a genuinely unlikable character. Conceited doesn’t even begin to describe him.)

And despite occasional moments like this–

– Perry White’s not exactly Henny Youngmann, either.

The comic foil of the Man of Steel– the one who instigates most of the plots, causes the most trouble, and is constantly scheming is the Metropolis Maiden herself– Lois Lane.

In his review of the great, great film “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”, the esteemed Roger Ebert once wrote:

“One secret of fiction is the creation of unique characters who are precisely defined. The secret of comedy is the same, with the difference being that the characters must be obsessed with unwholesome but understandable human desires. Many comedies have the same starting place: A hero who must obtain his dream, which should if possible be difficult, impractical, eccentric or immoral. As he marches toward his goal, scattering conventional citizens behind him, we laugh because of his selfishness, and because secretly that’s how we’d like to behave, if we thought we could get away with it.”

And, really, that’s Lois Lane in a nutshell: pure comic gold. She’ll do anything to either (1) make Superman marry her or (2) discover his secret identity. Either will do, and in the end, both goals are the same because both are, at least in the Silver Age, unattainable. Which makes her want him all the more.

Some critics have pointed out that there’s a subtle revenge vibe to this sweet and lovely little rom-com of a story engine: Lois shuns the nerd, and so the nerd-in-disguise shuns her– punishes her. A fundamentally abusive relationship, they say. Something only a man would write, not healthy at all.

And they’re right, to a certain point, as far as the Golden Age Lois is concerned– her cruelty to Clark borders on psychopathic. But the Silver Age Lois is quite a different bird altogether.

Lois has a number of suitors from time to time– mostly sultans, princes, and the occasional Greek god. But she spurns them all.

She doesn’t want them. She wants Superman, the best man on earth, and she’s not going to settle for less. She’s a woman with high standards and I ask you, how exactly is that misogynistic?

The other common complaint is that Lois is stupid– too stupid to realize, for example, that Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same man. People who say that have obviously never read a Superman comic book. For the secret of the Silver Age Superman comics– the twist in the formula that greatly differentiates it from the meaner Golden Age comics– is that Lois does know that Clark is Superman. But, like a good reporter, she has to prove it first.

An astute observer, she notices the discrepancies in Clark’s behaviour. Canny and cunning, she looks for plots and delights in ploys that might prove, once and for all, and beyond a reasonable doubt, that Clark Kent is Superman. And whenever Superman, “through an elaborate ruse” (as Michael Fleischer liked to say in The Great Superman Book), refutes her proof, she doesn’t give up. She’s plucky, that one– and unflappable.

Another common retort is, hey, if she’s so smart, why does Superman always outsmart her? To those geniuses I just have to say, “Hey! He’s Superman! He’s the smartest man on the planet!” It has nothing to do with gender politics and everything to do with the fact that the man is a bloody genius!

But if you look carefully at these stories, you’ll see that Lois often makes Superman sweat. He does not pluck these solutions effortlessly out of his hat. He has to think– and react– quickly. She puts him to the test, really runs him through the wringer. More-so than Lex Luthor and Braniac, she is truly an adversary to be reckoned with.

And if her plots and ploys are just as likely as Luthor’s to kill Superman– for example, leaving bits of kryptonite around to see if he reacts to it– it’s not because she’s insane. She’s driven.

Okay, so perhaps she’s driven to the point where she has a reckless disregard for human life– but you have got to admire such sheer bloody-mindedness. Which is, again, a good thing when you’re talking about a comedic character.

And that’s what Lois is. At least, back in the Silver Age. Now, Lois and Superman are married. She’s long since discovered his identity. She’s achieved her goal. The thing that was driving her– the thing that made her funny and charming and special– is gone.

Now, that’s not to say that I dislike the modern Lois. She’s just a different character, for a different time and a different kind of story. A kind of story where, ironically enough, it’s Superman who takes the center stage– Superman who is the most interesting character. The reasons for a comedic approach– the necessity for it– is gone.

And I think that comedy approach– not, mind you, a camp approach, but a comedy approach– is what made the Silver Age Superman comics the best superhero comics ever written. The creators had the freedom to be surreal, to truly surprise and astound us, and the characters had a much easier time of working their way into our hearts: comedy characters are almost always more enduring, the more exaggerated the better.

And Lois was a marvelous comic exaggeration, without ever being a caricature. She was never stupid, and she was never too selfish or too shallow. I really think that far from making Lois a projection of their own fears and insecurities about women, the writers loved Lois. They loved her ingenuity, her pluck, and her determination. Here was a woman that would make any man a very happy husband.

But the choice wasn’t up to the man; it was up to her, and she only wanted the best. More-so than Wonder Woman, Lois Lane is, in my estimation, the first real feminist icon in comics.

SPECIAL BONUS SECTION

Kurt Busiek, the current writer of SUPERMAN and many other fine comics (you are reading ASTRO CITY, aren’t you…?), was kind enough to answer a few questions about Lois.

What do you think are the major differences between the Silver Age Lois Lane and her modern day counterpart?

Aside from the pillbox hat?

I’d say the major difference stem from the whole approach to the
series. The Silver Age Superman stories — and particularly the
Silver Age Lois stories — are written for eight-year-olds. They
operate on a child’s logic, without trying to be “realistic.” So
Lois is a cartoon, a kid’s idea of an inquisitive reporter, always
snooping dangerously, and focused on exposing Superman’s secret
identity to the point of mania. There’s not much believability to
the romance, because kids don’t understand romance. She’s just
Superman’s girl friend, that’s all — that’s the status quo. Within
that, she can scheme, trick, be tricked, pull the meanest scams of
Superman (and he on her) and it won’t change them loving each other,
because that part’s just the rules, and the stuff in the stories is
the game. To an adult, it’s illogical, emotionally-warped and
bizarre, but to a kid it’s just fun.

Today, of course, things have gotten far more realistic, a
progression from the Seventies to now, and Lois and Superman’s
romance is more nuanced and emotionally understandable, and her
career as a reporter revolves around actually being a reporter,
rather than just an excuse to meet nutty scientists and be given
gills or super-brains or whatever. And it’s a result of the audience
changing, and responding to different material.

What things have remained the same between the two? Do you see a “core” personality that has remained intact from 1938 to the present day?

The core personality traits that remain: She’s a tough cookie, she
loves Superman and she doesn’t quit. That’s what makes Lois Lois.
She’s tenacious, she’s resourceful and she’s determined. And however
weird it’s been over the years, she loves Superman and he loves her.

Do you think the modern-day Lois would be able to sustain her own monthly title? Why or why not?

I’d guess not, in part because she’s less likely to do wild and
fantastic things than she was back then, and today’s audience
probably isn’t interested in the adventures of a newspaper reporter,
even in a superhero world. However, give that SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY
JANE seems to have worked well — and is a great book — I think it
might be possible to find a way to make it work.

Tom Russell is a writer, an artist, a composer, a politician, a programmer, and a filmmaker– none of which he gets paid for. Yet. You can find out more about his new film, The Man Who Loved, at manwholoved.blogspot.com.

It was announced earlier this month that Warner Bros. has optioned a script for a theatrical feature-length CGI-animated ThunderCats film.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117966320.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

ThunderCats was one of the best animated action/sci-fi series of the eighties, marked by strong animation, comparatively rich characterization, and a cohesive universe. A film would be a good thing. But… CGI?

CGI-animated films have come a long way in the last ten or fifteen years, but other than, perhaps, The Incredibles, I’ve yet to see a good action or sci-fi film. The only other one I can think of– the Final Fantasy film from a few years back– had that really creepy doll-look.

I’m just afraid that a ThunderCats film is going to look clunky– like Beast Wars of something. I personally think it’d be a much better idea to do it live-action with some sophisticated make-up effects. It would put the focus squarely on the characterization, and would give the whole thing a more realistic feel; and the animation in ThunderCats was more realistic than that in, say, the Transformers or Masters of the Universe.

Ah, well.

I was one of the many non-professionals who sent in a proposal. Sure, it was a lark, and it didn’t pan out. But I figured it was worth a shot.

And, since it would never see the light of day otherwise, I’ve decided to share my rejected revamp proposal with you!

Captain Action Proposal– Tom Russell

WHO IS CAPTAIN ACTION?

We all know who Captain Action is– he’s the hero
that can turn into other heroes. But who is he
really? What’s his essence, what’s his personality?

His personality is in a constant state of flux.
He’s forever becoming other people. Not just adapting
their powers, their costumes, and their appearances,
but actually becoming them. Their personalities are
his personality, their thoughts his thoughts.

The man we call Captain Action has no sense of
identity other than those he chooses; each day, he
defines himself anew, not only in a battle against
evil and injustice, but also in his own personal quest
for himself.

THE FIRST STORY

When we first meet him, he has chosen to define
himself not as a hero, but as an ordinary and affable
man with a new job: Harold Kane. He is regular in his
habits and mild in his entertainments: a life that is
strictly regimented, one that clearly defines him and
his place in the world. He is content and stable.

That’s when the office building comes crashing down
around him. Part of him wants to lie down and die, as
people would expect of him. That’s when he acts “out
of character”, that’s when he breaks the role he’s
defined for himself: he frees himself from the rubble
and sets about to rescue an office mate.

Suddenly, a huge beam crashes down. Instinctively,
he transforms into a well-known superhero, holding the
beam up, allowing his co-worker to escape.

She thinks she’s stumbled onto his secret identity.
He wonders if he hasn’t been hiding a double-life
from himself. He enjoys turning into this hero, until
he comes face to face with the real McCoy. He
instantly is transformed into a new form, a form we
recognize as that of Captain Action!

Searching for himself, he can find no proof that
Harold Kane ever existed. The first time anyone heard
of him was when he applied for the job. He soon
discovers that he can not only become any hero he
chooses to, but any person and, indeed, ANYTHING!

CAPTAIN ACTION’S POWERS

The ability to transform is actual a minor tweaking
of reality itself, limited only by his imagination.

He can become an animal or a tree or even the
wind– IF he thinks of it. IF he believes he can do
it. If he has the will power and the ingenuity.

He is, however, not the only force manipulating the
very fabric of existence. There is a malevolent force
that seeks to eradicate free will– and thus any
notion of identity itself. A force that fully
understands its own power, and is not afraid to use
it.

Captain Action is an agent of balance, created
(perhaps by the universe itself?) to counter this
nameless, shifting evil. To stand up for free will,
self-determination, and personality itself.

THEMES OF IDENTITY

Thematically, this approach would open the door to
examine issues of personality, of nature versus
nurture, of who we are, not only as a race, but
individually as well. “What makes me who I am?” is a
question all people have asked at one time or
another… especially during their formative years.

And that’s why I would have Captain Action become a
surrogate father to a teenager: a young girl who is
confused about who she is and searching for her place
in the world.

She could just as easily be a young man, I suppose,
but I’d like to stay away from the whole sidekick
shtick at this point. The benefit of a female
character is that it provides contrast to the
masculine Captain Action and the genderless evil
force; it also emphasizes that this search for
identity is a universal thing.

I would put more emphasis on this theme than on the
basic struggle between Captain Action and the
reality-shifting evil because that would open up more
stories and possibilities.

This time, he’s a big boy scout; this time, he’s a
dark and ruthless vigilante. He’ll find that he’s
capable of any guise, and he wonders which one, if
any, are true.

Perhaps all of them; perhaps every one of us
contains multitudes and are thus slightly schizoid.
For example, there’s the Tom Russell who is writing
this proposal, the Tom Russell who is quiet and
well-mannered at the library, the Tom Russell who is
boistrous with his friends, and the Tom Russell who
dances with his wife. I would explore this idea of
compartmentalized personality, which fits a character
like Captain Action to a “T”.

At the same time, his name _is_ Captain Action, and
storie should provide diverse surface thrills as well.
This time, Captain Action assumes a pulp hero guise,
and so the story’s more pulp; this time, he’s more
campy; here, we have a detective story and here, a
space opera. It opens up a wide range of genres,
moods, and themes to explore, all tied into that
search for identity and the larger tapestry.

THEMES OF IMAGINATION

By having no limit to the kinds of stories we can
tell and emotions we can evoke, it would emphasize
that there is no limit to what Captain Action can do,
save the limitations he imposes on himself. He can
become anything he can conceive of– he can choose to
define himself in anyway he wishes– but first he has
to conceive of it.

LONG-TERM STABILITY

And, from a more pragmatic point of view, such an
approach would provide room for many, many stories.
Many months and years and trade paperbacks worth of
stories that would provide for many, many dollars over
the long-term.

It’s also an approach that delivers on the basic
premise– Captain Action becomes other heroes– and
extends it– Captain Action can become anything he can
imagine. And I think that’s a liberating message–
“we can define ourselves, we can choose who and what
we want to be”– one that would resonate with readers
both new and old.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Tom Russell