Rock of Ages (watch)

Inevitably in the discussion of whether Rock of Ages is a good movie or a bad movie, someone, in the style propagated by “predator dating” books, seminars, and the guy in the fuzzy top hat, will backhand the film with compliments, saying something along the lines of “It’s fun, but it’s a bad film” or “Sure I laughed, but that doesn’t make it good.”

To be fair, there are a number of people I imagine wouldn’t like Rock of Ages. It’s a musical staged around 80s rock songs, so people who don’t like 80s rock and/or musicals are right out. Some people have a blinding, seething hatred for Tom Cruise; they will probably not enjoy his spot-on-hyperbole of a performance. And then there are those who feel like anyone singing a song apart from the original band on the original recording are blasphemers; those people, too, should stay away.

Rock of Ages, simply put, is fun. It’s not subtle, but then subtle is not in the lexicon of musicals. It’s a comedy, really, that frequently bursts into song. Of the three love stories that wind their way through the film (that’s a joke about cassette tapes), only one, the young, amateur-singer couple, is played (ha!) with any sense of straightness. The other two are purely played for comedy. The humorous script and the performances, from Alec Baldwin’s and Russell Brand’s slightly inept bar owners, to Bryan Cranston’s adulterous husband/mayor of Los Angeles, to Tom Cruise’s Axl Rose/Gary Busey-hybrid rocksexgod save the film from being just an excuse to listen to 80s rock.

Some critics, no doubt, are going to attack the film for its ridiculous over-the-topness. And there’s no denying that it is way, way over the top, as well as hugely sex-obsessed. But these aren’t detriments to the film, they are necessary components. Fittingly, for a movie about 80s rock songs, the film itself becomes an 80s rock song. Bawdy, hyperbolic, lewd, loud, tongue-in-cheek; the kind of song you look forward to hearing again.

Dead Island (play)

In light of Deep Silver’s recent announcement of Dead Island: Riptide, I’ve been trying to figure out why I beat the first game. Story is the predominant determining factor in whether or not I even play a game, and aside from some interesting NPCs, Dead Island really had no story beyond GET OFF THE DAMN ISLAND (ZOMBIES). The whole game is one long fetch quest in exchange for four Golden Tickets (Zombie Chocolate Factory? Now that’s a game I’d play). Humorously, the four main characters pick up on the flimsiness of the plot, calling out the people you can’t trust way in advance, as if they too had seen this movie before. A great main character (or characters) can sometimes make up for a weak plot, but Dead Island’s four protagonists’ only glimmers of character are their weapon specialties and some mild bickering in about 90 seconds worth of cutscenes. At some point, I just started to refer to them as Knife, Gun, Phil LaMarr, and Texan.

But despite having almost no story, I enjoyed playing Dead Island, at least up until the sewers and the prison levels when fetch fatigue set in. I think it was because of a few simple gameplay elements: the loot/crafting system, the melee combat, and how death was handled. Loot was done as in most Diablo-esque loot games. There is loot out there that’s better than the loot you have; go get it. The crafting system was where the loot really shined though. Anything you picked up in the game could be crafted into a weapon provided you found the recipe for the weapon. This led to some great tongue-in-cheek moments as you barreled down hallways with a flaming machete or a deodorant bomb.  I looked forward to crafting things just to see what was possible, as opposed to, say, Skyrim’s crafting, which became a grind to get to Dragon Armor.

The Skyrim comparison also bears in melee combat. The Elder Scrolls games take some light heckling for their combat system being essentially two people hacking at each other with swords, axes, etc., until one of them falls down. But Techland has nailed first-person fighting. While the gun play just meets par, the melee is visceral, sharp, and reactive. Hit a zombie at the right angle and it loses an arm, or a leg, or a head. Miss with just a couple of swings or get distracted for a few seconds and you’re the one losing a head. This is how fighting should feel in a zombie game, like you could die at any minute. The developers balanced this propensity to die with a forgiving respawn. While you lose in-game resources in the form of cash, you only lose a few seconds of that most important of real-world resources, time. You’re punished, but not in the form of restarting half-a-mile away from where you died.

While I enjoyed most of my Dead Island playthrough, I know I’m never going to go back to it, nor can I say that I plan to pick up Riptide. On top of the lack of story and unending fetch structure, the leveling system, which is usually a major draw for me (I’ll play Magic Pony Sparkle Horse if I can upgrade my pony’s mane for more sparkle and his saddle to hold four rocket launchers instead of two), was weighed down by incremental improvements that didn’t have much impact on the gameplay. Oh cool, a +2% chance of a critical hit. Oh cool, an edged weapons +5% damage bonus. Leveling up was just something I did because a Level Up message kept popping on screen. The question of Riptide is the same as most sequels; can they hold onto the things that worked and improve upon the things that did not? Given the mediocre DLC released so far, I’m inclined to believe that Riptide will just be more of the same, not a 2.0 or 1.5 so much as a 1.1.

Das Boot

If war is Hell, then Hell largely consists of waiting. At least, that's what Das Boot suggests. The Wolfgang Petersen-directed German submarine film follows the Captain and crew of a German U-Boat as they attempt to disrupt British shipping lines. For the most part though, the viewer just hangs out on board. After an opening scene set at a drunken, lascivious party for the men about to ship out on subs, the camera descends down into the metal tube with them, and, excepting a few scenes, that's where the camera stays, in the long, crowded hallway that makes up the majority of the ship. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano choose to keep things crowded and claustrophobic. With the ship interior lit naturally in harsh glares of white, blue, and red, the camera bangs into people, walls, and the food supplies that are stored throughout the ship, all the while executing impressive steady-cam shots following crewmen from one end of the ship and back. The camera practically becomes a member of the crew, and as such so does the viewer. The sound work adds to the feeling. Every groan of the U-96 as it sinks lower into the ocean, every radar "boop", every creek of a bolt giving in to pressure breaks the silence as you and the crew wait. The camera likes to wait as well, lingering on a shot after other more time conscious editors would have cut away. The lingering lets you see some quiet, more subdued character moments, while reinforcing the sense of boredom and frustration the crew feels as they wait for orders, wait to get to their destinations, and wait until it is safe to move. The crew starts out fresh-faced, clean-shaven, excited to head out to sea. By the end, they're bearded, covered in weeks of sweat and sea water, and while they've learned to wait, their excitement of war has drained away.

I should note that I watched the Director's Cut version, which is about an hour longer than the theatrical version, but still an hour and a half shorter than the Uncut version. 

Gravity Bone (play)

I just finished an indie game called Gravity Bone, from Blendo Games, the makers of Atom Zombie Smasher. It is available for free download here: http://blendogames.com/files/gravitybone_v11.zip

When I say I just finished it, I should add that I started playing it 15 minutes ago. It's a short, short game that, except for one platforming sequence, should be beatable by everyone. I encourage you to give it a playthrough.

If I had to give it a genre, Gravity Bone would be a First Person (non)Shooter. It's all first person, but there are no weapons. Even the hammer you're given in your second mission can't be used on people. At no point in Gravity Bone will you be given any details as to your character, the plot, or why you have to snap pictures of five birds, who explode into fire afterwards. But along with the Iceberg Theory of storytelling, the game provides a unique, unified aesthetic. All of the graphics are blocky and pixelated, but with a strange sort of charm; big band music plays throughout. The game loves elevators for some reason. At the end of the second (and final) mission, your character has a couple of idiosyncratic flashbacks as he/she, well, you'll see.

I recommend the game because of its aesthetic, and also because of a chase sequence that occurs when someone (again, we're given little to go on, so it could be a spy, or a guard, or, perhaps, your character's babysitter from when he/she was 12 and really felt like he/she was far too old to have a babysitter, but would the parents listen, noooooooooooo, and so he/drove the baby sitter crazy all night and this is some sort of far-flung revenge plot on the babysitter's part. Far-fetched, perhaps, but not unfeasible) steals(!) the photos of exploding fire-birds you're painstakingly taken. Having no weapons, your only recourse is to chase her down, through air ducts and train tunnels, over steel piping and, memorably, up and down a Michael Keaton Bruce Wayne-esque dinner table.

The game is short, but memorable, coming across as a discarded good idea that just couldn't be made to fit properly into a full-form game.

Circus of Horrors

They don't make movies like this anymore. That's probably for the best.

Disgraced, scandalized plastic surgeon Dr. Schuler murders a cop and flees his country, only to murder a circus owner and...decide to make a fortune by taking over the circus and filling it full of beautiful women, women who were formerly prostitutes or thieves that agree to work in his circus if he performs plastic surgery on them to make them beautiful. As the years pass, he murders any one of his workers who threaten to I'm just going to stop here.

A cop-killer-plastic-surgeon decides to open a circus.

It's probably for the best.

The film does do a nice job of building tension in a couple of spots as performers do dangerous tricks and routines that Schuler has sabotaged. It closely mimics the tension the audience feels at a non-horror circus. It'd be interesting to know if the film was reacting against something in the 1950s, the rise of plastic surgery, the decline of circuses, a sudden surge of ex-plastic surgeon cop killers going into small business ventures.

Mario Climbing the Ivory Tower

In the recent debate as to whether or not video games can be considered art, there is one thing both sides can agree on: as a whole, video games have yet to be taken seriously by the academic community.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Video games have been looked at from an anthropological perspective, examining the cultures that build around specific games or genres. There have been psychological studies of gamers that looked to ascertain the effect of games on the player, or the relation between player and avatar. Game theorists have largely embraced games wholesale, as well as people interested in game design for game design’s sake. But works examining a game itself, looking at the story, the design, the theory, music, etc. etc., are limited to a few outliers. Any examination of the narrative of a game is largely restricted to one line questions, much like the ones that follow this colon: What does the Halo series say about organized religion’s place in modern society? What does Red Dead Redemption say about an increasingly politically divided America? How does Final Fantasy X exemplify and work out the disagreements between Freudian and Lacanian theory?

Of course, the average gamer probably won’t pay any more attention to a sudden surge of video game theory than the average reader would care about what academicians think about Stephanie Meyer’s latest work. And that’s perfectly fine. But the acceptance of video games into academia would signal (or signify, I always confuse the two) that video games are worthy of serious, prolonged thought, as I believe them to be. But before video games can be ushered into the elevator and fast-tracked to the Ivory Tower Penthouse, there are a few things that need to be worked out.

First, what is a video game? This isn’t something I ask flippantly; the term video game is given to a vast and varied array of works. Pong is a video game. So is Mass Effect. So is Farmville. One of the first things a good theoretician does is define his/her terms. So how do we define video games? I think we can agree that there is some sort of player interactivity, whether it’s pushing a button or making a choice. And to make it a video game, there would have to be some sort of technology involved. But beyond that? I don’t have the answers, but there are a few options I can imagine. We can leave the definition as is, which isn’t a great option, but is an option. We can set up different game design style genres: a puzzle game with no discernible plot could simply be a puzzle game; a puzzle game with a narrative could be a puzzle narrative. We could separate games into plot genres: Mass Effect would be a sci-fi space opera; Mirror’s Edge is a noir; Fable is a coming-of-age story, or a kind of bildungsroman. Entire papers have been devoted to arguing the genre of a particular work (No one thinks that Charles Chesnutt wrote in the Gothic tradition, but Aha! Have you considered this?), so that last one may not work. Or maybe it would. Or perhaps some combination of the second and third option. Or something someone else comes up with after much thought. Regardless, it is a question that has to be answered. Readers across the world may not agree on what makes a good novel and what makes a bad novel, but most could agree that any given novel is, indeed, a novel.

Secondly, how would a video game be cited? If I want to make a point about the scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby drinks a gin rickey, I put the page numbers at the end of the sentence in parenthesis, with the author’s last name (Fitzgerald 117-118). Likewise, if I want to talk about death and sexual awakening in Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. If I want to cite a movie, I can give the points in the running time (at the 1:14:32 mark). I could do the same with a song. But all of those rely on a shared experience, an agreement about where things are located. We may completely disagree about what the first line of Dorianne Laux’s “Facts About the Moon” really “means”, but we at least agree that the first line is “The moon is backing away from us.” But video games, especially larger, longer ones, are not experienced in linearity. I might play a certain segment three hours in; you may have ignored that segment until you were nine hours in. Or maybe I played a mission that is only available if your avatar is a female, or only available if you’re playing the game in a cutthroat fashion. In some games, the experience of it drastically changes depending on how you play the game. So, how to cite it, so that the reader of the article can go to the exact part the critic is referencing? A partial solution to this is also the solution to the third problem.

A single word can change everything. There’s a deep canyon of difference between “He moaned” and “He whimpered” or “She demanded” and “She implored.” A critic’s argument can sometimes hinge on one or two words, or one or two plot points. Double checking whether the author (or singer, or poet) used “rafters” or “crossbars” when describing a house is as simple as turning to the page (or the line, or the point in time). With video games, it’s exponentially more problematic. I only have to flip a few pages to see if Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man starts with “I am an invisible man” or “I was an invisible man.” I may have to play through forty hours of Fallout 3 to check and see what the main character’s father says when he/she finally reaches him. And as long as that’s the way it is, video games’ journey to Academia Land will be stalled. But, this can be circumvented if developers could be convinced to release copies of all of a game’s dialogue. This could be a convoluted process, particularly in games such as Dragon Age, where the choices you make can alter the dialogue you experience. But if a system of organization could be figured out, this could greatly aid critics, especially if a critic wanted to examine the differences choice made in game experience. I imagine it wouldn’t be easy to convince developers to release full dialogs of the game, and some rules may have to be laid down to determine who could access them (for instance, you could only download the files if you had purchased a copy of the game or had a .edu email address), but without this ease of access, teachers and professors who have their hands full already with class loads, committee meetings, and departmental conferences are not going to have the time to look at games through a critical lens. I’m afraid there’s no way around it.

There are, of course, problems beyond these three. For instance, it could be argued that there is a world of difference between writing or reading the line “Saren can still be saved” and choosing the line “Saren can still be saved.” Those first steps into video game criticism will be murky, no doubt. What is the difference, if any, between playing the game and “reading” the game? Are sports games right out? Or could the argument be made that the career mode of, say, MLB 11: The Show, is a viable text?

Again, there are many questions that will have to be sorted through as the field of video game criticism is slowly opened up. But if we don’t start answering through them, now, then video games will never achieve the level of accepted art form that they deserve.

How to Handle Ambient Challenges, or The Plea

Let me start by saying that ambient challenges aren’t going anywhere. Whether they’re used as game-length padding (Fable 3), to add to the tone of the game (Red Dead Redemption, Saints Row2), or to annoy the hell out of gamers everywhere (Gear of War, Soul Caliber IV), they’re here to stay. And that’s fine with me; well-implemented ambients can add another layer of depth and challenge to the game for the player that wants it, while not getting in the way of players who just want to make it through the main game/story. The problem is when ambients are poorly implemented.

Let’s start with Red Dead Redemption. On top of a top-notch main story, Redemption offers a diverse lineup of ambients. You can go treasure hunting, following vague to very vague treasure maps to bars of gold. You can go hunting, sharpshooting, flower picking. You can go bounty hunting. You can break horses, work as a night watchman, search for new outfits that give you various benefits. And all of this is pointed out to you. Pull up the menu screen and there’s a listing under Challenges. Pull up your map and it points you toward wanted posters, jobs, good hunting areas. There’s no hand holding; even if you know where the cougars are, you still have to kill them with your knife to complete one challenge. The rewards are great: money, fame, unlocked abilities.

On the other hand, Fable 3, a short game to be sure, is padded with two extensive ambient quests: Find (and shoot) 50 gnomes and find 30 books. Both challenges have their problems. The hunting of the gnomes is aided by a counter on the map screen that tells you how many gnomes are in any given location and how many in that location you have found. Because of this, I enjoyed the gnome quest. It was still a challenge (knowing which needle the haystack is in saves you time, surely, but you still have to go through the straw), but I never felt like I was wasting my time on it. The books, on the other hand, are another story (that’s a joke about books). For 25 of the 30 books, you’re given no direction. Nothing. When I finally gave up and went to the Internet, I found that I had walked right by most of them. But, because I was walking a foot to the right instead of a foot to the left, my avatar (I believe his name was Steve) had no idea a book was there. Granted your dog will sometimes point a book out to if, if he isn’t busy fighting/running around/barking at treasure/being hung up on a corner, but for the most part, you walk right past them.

Fable 3’s books commit the double mistake of a) not offering the player a way to narrow down the search and b) not offering a reward for finding them. The gnomes challenge also offers no reward beyond a completed quest, some seals, and some gamer score points. And that’s for, let’s say, 3-5 hours of game time per quest, depending on how Internet happy you get. Even Fallout 3’s bobble heads offered substantial stat bonuses in return. The quests aren’t bad ideas though, they’re just poorly implemented. Some sort of reward system would have made me feel like Lionshead valued my time as much as I do, as would a helpful way of narrowing the search down.

Bad ambient can even sometimes spoil a game. Soul Caliber II is my favorite Soul Caliber game, largely due to its extensive Quest Mode, that has you criss-crossing a map, engaging in different challenges (Don’t block in this battle! Use your mind to press the buttons! Blindfold!) for money and new weapons. But I stopped playing Soul Caliber IV after a few hours, largely due to its Tower of Souls mode, which has you climbing a tower and completing challenges for new pieces of equipment (armor, swords, hats). The difference is that the game doesn’t tell you what the challenges are. Instead, you’re given vague clues (Guard! Look to the stars! Embrace the abyss!). Here, there is reward, but no direction. You’re just told that there are things to unlock, and everything is unlocked differently. That’s no way to run an ambient challenge.

Of course, I can just run to the Internet to find out how to unlock new hats or find gnomes or dog tags. But I shouldn’t have to; that’s poor game design. It’s great that it’s an option (an option I used toward the later end of Redemption’s Treasure Hunt challenges), but it shouldn’t be a necessity, as it is with Soul Caliber IV and Fable 3. Video games, more than any other form of media, can be an immersive experience, but going to the Internet to hunt down a list that tells you where meaningless trinket #37 is takes you out of that experience.

Ambient challenges aren’t going anywhere. And I’m fine with that. But they need to be implemented in a way that respect’s the gamers and respects game design. A good ambient challenge should be a challenge and should have some sort of reward, beyond gamer score points. The gamer should be made aware of the challenge at some point throughout the game in a clear and concise way (this can be highlighted in the story or pointed at in the Achievement list or a separate challenge list). And the challenge shouldn’t require the Internet; it should be doable, in game, without send you on wild goose chases.

This isn’t a definitive list of requirements; some of Halo 3’s skulls were hard to find and Braid’s hidden stars are ridiculous in their hiding places, but then, they offered rewards. But these are things that designers need to consider when designing ambient challenges.

And please, don’t use them to pad game length. If your game isn’t good to begin with, having to find 50 gnomes/books/bananas isn’t going to help.