Professional Aesthete

Prediction

2010-07-23T13:00:00.002+12:00

It’s an unfashionable thing to say, but the world is a fairly predictable place most of the time. In similar situations, similar things happen. There’s only so many ways people will behave. That said, there are times when that predictability takes own its own strange scope and mystery.

In April, or June, a plane went down in Poland, taking with it an extraordinary chunk of the country’s national leadership. The dignitaries, strangely enough, were on their way to a memorial service for the Katyn Massacre, in which almost 22,000 Polish politicians, doctors, lawyers and intelligensia were killed by the Soviet internal security services. I don’t have to spell the parallels out, do I? But the most extraordinary thing, the thing about Poland that always caused some part of my brain grind to an astonished halt, was that this was a country presided over by twins. One was current president, the other Poland’s previous prime minister. It was a mythic set-up made real, perhaps by Poland’s inimitable history.

The plane crash, which mirrored so perfectly the very memorial they were on their way to attend, felt like fate. This is not a word I like, but what others do we have? How do we talk about this kind of thing? It is the sort of news that leaves me feeling supersititious. It was as though, for an instant, some arcane universal machinery had creaked into action. Its purpose – to redress circumstances too ridiculous, or too extraordinary to be allowed to last. Only an event of equal absurdity could reset the balance.

Later, a completely unrelated thing happened in the mediterranean. Isreali security forces stormed a group of aid vessels attempting to defy the Gaza Blockade. Whereas the Polish aircrash has something of the ineffable about it, this event had a logical ugliness to it – nine people were killed in the latest piece of violence to erupt in an area proverbial for it.

I think my point is that two very different kinds of predictability were at work. One, the aircrash, has a sort of mythic fatalism about it. The other, Israel’s most recent piece of criminal activity, seemed simply inevitable. I found myself enjoying both guiltily – the former because it suggested the world may yet act in ways too strange to fully explain; the latter because it seems to push us ever closer to a watershed moment in the Middle East, when Israel’s claim to self-defense would finally fall flat.

I don’t know how to finish this, because the process is unfinished itself. I am waiting, I suppose, for something to happen. Something bigger that, once and for all, exposes things for what they are. Heidegger would talk about lanterns in the darkness, someone like Swedenborg would speak of veils moving briefly aside. I don't know.

I really don't.

Wilkommen bei uns

2010-06-16T10:37:00.000+12:00

Ladies and gentlemen, please redirect your attention to Professional Aesthete dot com.

Danke.

Gordon, my friend

2010-06-14T10:32:00.011+12:00

[O/T]

I don't claim to know Gordon Brown personally. I've never been to his house. I've certainly never sat down and eaten a meal with the man. I don't know what Gordon Brown's hair smells like, or how he holds a fork. At no time was I on holiday with Gordon Brown, or his family. Neither of us were in Tuscany at the time ... or any other time.

I have never met Gordon Brown.

That said, I would be lying if I claimed not to know his ruff of hair, his ruddy, slightly slacken face. I have a vague grasp on his political pedigree: Gordon Brown, rough diamond, a kind of Obama for the Home Counties, beaming up the left wing. There was a lot of excitement around him, as there was Tony Blair. Though I never heard anyone call Blair a 'saviour'.

Gordon has goen now. I know we were supposed to trust his terrierish ruffle of hair, his calm face. The solid will. But I never could. That is my confession. At a distance, he seemed paper thin. A lost cause. Not so much insincere, as impossibly transparent. To me it was a miracle that he held himself together at all and did not explode under the compression of constant scrutiny.*

["the thing I am now imagining is like a human airship, inflated, aloft from the pressure of the atmosphere around it - a social Jupiter"]

I hope he's happier now.

[E/O/T]

*this is a defensive take on Borges's poem 'Music Box', in which 'shyness of melancholy ' is invoked as a successful containment of desperation at the arrival and passing of time.

Borges at night

2010-05-31T11:03:00.001+12:00

Penguin is publishing five (!) new Borges books this year. While three promise great things at a later date, collecting classic and unpublished essays on Argentina, Writing and Mysticism, the first two are already out, collecting his sonnets and his poems about night and darkness. For Borges, growing up with the knowledge that, like his father, he would eventually go blind, darkness is both threatening and perversely comforting – eventually the day will become the night, and all things will end.

Harpers published "Sonnet for a tango in the twilight" here (subscribers only, unless your eyesight can overcome low-res thumbnails), but the publishers released another sonnet, "Music Box", as a teaser.

Music of Japan. Drops of slow honey 
Or of invisible gold are dispersed 
In a miserly way from a water clock, 
And repeat in time a weaving that is 
Eternal, fragile, mysterious, and clear. 
I fear that each one may be the last. 
It's a past coming back. From what temple, 
From what fresh garden in the mountain,
From what vigil before an unknown sea,
From what shyness of melancholy, 
From what lost and ransomed afternoon
Does its remote future come to me?
I cannot know. No matter. I am
In that music. I want to be. I bleed.

No such teasers are available for Poems of the Night, but the book's pitch informs me that the translators include W.S. Merwin, Alan Trueblood, Christopher Maurer, and my personal favourite, Alastair Reid. Both poetry books are dual-language, with parallel text – helpful if someone gives you "horrifying" for "atroz", and you just know that "atrocious" would scan better. Having different translators offers mixed blessings – the reader is exposed to a range of quality English-to-Spanish scholarship, but the potential to compare poems translated by a range of individuals is limited. Atroz.

I picked up on the theme of night and day – or specifically, dawn and twilight – in last year's thesis, though in favour of proving a point, I focussed primarily on his earlier poems. I'm very interested in the contents of Poems of the Night, but in the meantime, here's something of an extract from the thesis, examining the tension between night and day, as mediated by the streets of Buenos Aires. The image of Borges the flâneur, writing the streets he would soon no longer be able to see, percolates through the early poems, particularly those in the collection Fervor de Buenos Aires:

[...]

Fervor, for example, opens by moving beyond the names and dates engraved on tombstones in “Recoleta Cemetery”, to Beatriz Sarlo a site of belonging and remembrance that represents Borges’ sense of the liminality of the past and present worlds, and which necessitates his creation of a frontier between Europe and America. Sarlo places much emphasis on Borges’ position on the literary space of the orillas, which “possess the qualities of an imaginary territory, an indeterminate space” between the past and present, the plains and the first houses of the city. The orillas represent a final chance of an unmediated view of the horizon and, importantly, of the sunsets, which threaten to disturb both the city’s landscape and its aesthetic appeal to the flâneur. In “Sunset over Villa Ortuzar”, a street’s end at sunset “opens like a wound on the sky”; in “Campos Atardecidos” the sun refuses to heal the scarred sky by setting.

The transformative power of the naturally changing light enables Borges’ thematic transitions from the mundane to the eternal image gestured towards in “The Streets” and depicted in full force in “The South”. While the fleeting glimpse of a pure image would be developed and Borges’ focus on the image strengthened in the metaphysical fictions, the early poems hinge on the uneasy potential for transition from object to image and real to ideal. These poems emphasise Borges’ self-determined position on a border not just between Buenos Aires and the pampas [plains] or his family’s past on the one hand, and invented literary present on the other, but between a literal lived experience and the poetic or aesthetic response to it.

In “The Streets”, images of the day and night frame the transition from the real “neighbourhood streets where nothing is happening / almost invisible by force of habit” to the ideal image of the streets “rendered eternal in the dim light of sunset”. In this case, however, the sunset does not threaten the poet’s experience: the act of writing the poem makes the streets eternal, but it is the sunset that mediates their transition to this state. Conversely, “Benares” places the poet’s imagined city (“False and impenetrable / like a garden traced on a mirror”) as a vision at dawn, as the “sudden sun / shatters the complex obscurity” of a “city which a foliage of stars oppressed”. The scarcely believable existence of the real Northern Indian city of Benares “with its precise topography / peopled like a dream” is described in more banal terms in the parenthetical statement that ends the poem:

with hospitals and barracks
and slow avenues of poplars
and men with rotten lips
who feel the cold in their teeth.

This persisting city is nonetheless less real to the poet than the lyrical image of “the imagined city / which my eyes have never seen”.

In this early collection, Borges toys with the opposing realities of the imagination and the real: the Benares of his imagination is more believable and is thus set in dawn or daylight and described in more concrete terms. The ‘reality’ of the city’s existence – notwithstanding the inevitable precision of its topography – is mitigated by being “peopled as a dream”, in which we see banal existence of the “men with rotten lips”. […] Reality is ghastly, slow and reduced to a parenthetical statement; the transitory dawn vision of the imaginary takes precedence. The qualifying statement of reality, though, undercuts the poet’s optimistic image of the city at dawn and invests the poem with a sense of resignation towards reality, even as it forms the poet’s closing image.

“Benares” is an early indication in Borges’ work of the unwelcome incursion of reality on a perceived state, but even the imagined city of the poem is prefaced by a warning to the reader. Borges had forewarned readers against the “illusion of verisimilitude” in the opening couplet of the poem, describing the city as “False and impenetrable / like a garden traced on a mirror”. The imaginary city is thus presented as a second-degree object from the beginning, with its existence dependent on comparison with a correlate.

Framing the impenetrable city in terms of its relationship with the ‘original’ sets up a binary relationship between the real and imagined in Fervor, even as the collection reflects on a transition between the two; Borges would later conclude the essay “Crossroads of Berkeley” with the observation that reality itself is no more than a reflection in a mirror, contingent upon the existence of observers, and is subject to non-existence when the mirror or the observer is absent. This is, of course, a simpler re-statement of Berkeley’s dictum that to be is to be perceived, but it serves as Borges’ early introduction of the mirror as a primary method of intuiting the difference between phenomena and noumena. An imperfect or incomplete duplication offers a glimpse into the profound: the concept would recur in Borges’ work throughout his life, from the various and divergent editions of the fictional book in “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” to Pierre Menard’s fragmentary Quixote, and onward to the rise of Tlön. That Borges debunks his own literary contrivance in part refutes the egoisms of the poem; that he counteracts his ideal image with the inevitable intercession of reality refutes the assumed egoisms of the poet. Despite the intensity of the poet’s emotion, it is held in check by an equally pragmatic reserve, a balancing act that restrains a poetic climax.

If the inevitable appeal of idealism is halted in “Benares”, the poet is still searching for an equivalent epiphany, as tentatively expressed in “The South”. The poet’s fervour in this first poetry collection is for his internalised and idealised city of Buenos Aires, as its title proclaims, but it is also the search for the epiphanic moments worthy of being retold: the unwelcome intervention of reality into the unreality of literature. “The South” recounts the essential elements in a list of separate images that are concatenated into one:

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
…
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
– these things perhaps are the poem.

The still night envelops the images, its quietude precluding the transition to daylight that would threaten to introduce reality. Despite the poem’s restrained pace, the list of images still allows the formation of a single ideal artefact: the essence of a Platonic poem. This ideal poem-within-a-poem, suggested by concatenated images, anticipates the ideal artefacts of Tlön. The mere suggestion of aesthetic epiphany in “The South”, however, lacks what might be called a conclusive element – is there existence or meaning beyond the poem? For Borges at this early stage in his career, the poem is both means and end: a serpent content, for the moment, to eat its own tail.

Similarly, “Unknown Street” sees the bridging effects of twilight amplify an otherwise mundane experience in the poet’s mind, where the street’s

walls and cornices
took on the pastel colour of the sky
that nudged the horizon
…

Perhaps that moment of the silver evening
suffused the street with a tenderness,
making it as vivid as a verse
forgotten and now remembered.

The street becomes all streets as it assumes Platonic form, lending it a quality as intense as that of a poetic fragment. Once more, a partial image of a poem – albeit one that is more effective for being lost and subsequently recollected – assumes a curious primacy within Borges’ verse. “The South” brings to the reader a reflection on death and cyclical time, themes to which Borges would return throughout his life. The immediacy of the poem is threatened, however, within its closing lines:

Only later did I come to think
that the street of that afternoon was not mine,
that every house is a branching candlestick
where the lives of men burn
like single candles,
that each haphazard step we take
treads on Golgothas.

The poem’s earlier images of completeness become fragmented, as the poet recognises an underlying tension in the once-familiar street. Where twilight allowed the street to assume an idealised form, the poet’s memory of twilight inverts the image of the once-familiar street, now containing houses lit like candelabra, in which “the lives of men burn” like isolated candles. Kate Jenckes sees the evening characterised as a hopeful beginning: “The end of the day does not signify an end, but a beginning, a ‘venida’ of something at once hoped for (‘esperada’) and ancient”. This twilight-prompted beginning, she continues, “destroys the structures of interiorization that the poet constructs in a moment of dreamy nostalgia”, and invokes a new relationship between the poet and both past and future. Once more, the aesthetic appeal of nostalgia or ideal objects is not enough to overcome the inevitable fragmentation that results from prolonged introspection.

In “Remorse for Any Death” and “Inscription on Any Tomb”, Borges continues his contemplation on what he sees as the transitive states of life and death. The former poem, meditating on the universality of death (“unlimited, abstract, almost future”), concludes that: “We have divided among us, like thieves, / the treasure of nights and days.” Time, he suggests, will slip away; the “dead person … is nothing but the loss and absence of the world”, robbed of both potential and experience. The individual is reduced to an absolute: “the dead body is not somebody: It is death”. The latter poem, however, concludes of the aftermath of death: “as you yourself are the mirror and image / of those who did not live as long as you / and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth”. Borges here depicts the self as both the instrument and the result of duplication, reaching through time to influence the lives of others. Others are made in the image of the self, he writes, that they might remake the world, the optimistic result being that the potential for one’s immortality lies in the actions of others. Mirror and image are fused in the self, and the key moments and emotions of the dead man’s life will “abide forever”; Borges exhorts the reader: “Let not the rash marble risk / garrulous breaches of oblivion’s omnipotence…. Let not the marble say what men do not.”

In the poem, “Break of Day”, Borges grapples with the consequences of philosophical idealism, where reality is threatened by the absence of perception during the “horrible dawn that / prowls the ruined suburbs of the world”. Borges recalls

… the dreadful conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares that the world
is a mental activity …

He sees Buenos Aires threatened with non-existence at

… the shuddering instant of daybreak,
when those who are dreaming the world are few
and only the ones who have been up all night retain,
ashen and barely outlined,
the image of the streets
that later others will define.

This is the hour in which the “tenacious dream of life / runs the risk of being smashed to pieces”. Borges refers to the “common act of magic” that keeps the city of Buenos Aires in existence, before tightening his focus to close the poem: “with a certain remorse / for my complicity in the day’s rebirth / I ask my house to exist”. Here, the night encompasses and allows the idealised or imagined image, and only with the break of day does the real image intrude as “again the world has been spared. / Light roams the streets inventing dirty colours”.

By the same token, however, the dawn that in other poems had mediated the transition between reality and imagination here confirms the “dreadful conjecture” – that the city had been close to becoming unravelled without the perceptions of wakened people to reinforce its reality. This poem, which begins with the poet recalling a philosophical detail, concludes in the imagined space of a city threatened by that same conjecture. Borges steps inside his supposition to offer the vision, anticipating the way he would frame “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; in casting himself as the narrator retelling the recent history of a world in flux, he both allows conjecture on the results of philosophical idealism and assumes a position from which to offer a more personal commentary and his own aesthetic response.

Knowing that he would eventually face the same congenital and progressive blindness as his father, Borges acknowledges the difficulty of relative perception as “Break of Day” closes: “The spent night”, he writes, “stays on in the eyes of the blind”. The liminal stages of dawn and twilight herald a transition from the ideal to the real for some, but not in the same manner for all: the imagined city exists in a different sense for those who do not experience it through sight alone. If to be is to be perceived, then an alternative mode of perception results in an alternative existence. The poet’s perception and recreation of Buenos Aires lends that city the same sense of unreality as the unvisited and therefore imagined city of “Benares” – itself “false and impenetrable” because of its genesis in the imagination. For readers – as for Borges with the city of Benares – the poetic recreation of Buenos Aires serves to ‘open’ the city, creating in one’s mind an idealised version of an otherwise very real place.

Hair, over there

2010-05-30T10:45:00.004+12:00

My daughter is one, and currently involved in an undergraduate psychology experiment run by the University of Otago's Psychology Department. Ignoring the implication of the department's location inside the gaping, embarrassingly puddle-ridden Commerce Building, we trundle up the 7th floor, where she sits in front of screens and is shown faces of various races. The experiment, I was told by a young, slightly orange-faced young woman whose perfume reminded me of a cheap bar, was designed to investigate the details children used to differentiate between people of different races. My daughter was good at distinguishing people of roughly Nordic heritage. She struggled a little with Pacific Islanders, and, to cement a cliche as old as rice paper itself, was utterly lost when confronted with a range of Asian and Middle-eastern faces. Thankfully, it only took a few visits to get considerably better at discerning less familiar face types. My brazenly Aryan daughter had redeemed herself.

It turns out that the pattern recognition systems employed by our brains kick in early, lurching about, searching for a reliable range of details to distinguish one person from another. European children go for hair, noses, mouths. Asian kids are much better at eyes. And so on. The process is generic - it's not as though Korean kids are hardwired to recognise eyes - they're hardwired to find something to define one face from another, and it turns out, eyes are the thing. Hair in Asia, broadly speaking, just isn't varied enough to cut the mustard identity-wise. As a result, Asians' distinctions, when based on hair, are made in fairly broad strokes. Which solves, for me, an enduring mystery.

Consider the following:

I have no idea what these guys won, or who won, or even who they are, but there's some pretty funked-out, ka-ni, architectural hair going on right there - as there often is when young Japanese guys appear in front of a camera.

And now we know why - conditioned from birth to largely ignore hair as a definitive personal characteristic, these guys have to try about 3 or 4 times harder than you or me, to make a mark with their 'do. They're pushing against a crushing weight of cognitive selection, just to be noticed. Hence, what seems like a touching homage to My Little Pony (viz, the dude to the right of the MC) is really a restrained and debonair quiff that practically pays for itself after only two-and-a-half hours in make-up, and enough hairspray to fossilize a small penguin colony.

Or am I just being crazy, and the guys on American Idol look just as frou-frou?

ene-be-a

2010-05-28T16:50:00.000+12:00

I grew up with a father ensconced, to varying degrees according to the whims of the Otago Law Society, in the legal profession. Lawyers, I take great pleasure in noting, charge not by the hour, but determinedly by the six-minute unit, meaning that a dozen short phone calls from a drunk fifteen-year-old in the police cells asking for advice over a 30-minute period could equal roughly an hour and a quarter of billable hours. (Few professions can bend time like this, or altogether deny its existence right up until the moment they sent the bill.)

Basketball, then, was a pretty sweet deal. Forty-eight minutes, no injury time, limited time-outs: it kept to the family schedule, didn't run over time (the 1993 NBA Finals Game Three was a notable and extremely tense exception), didn't ever finish before the final whistle, and legitimised baggy clothing with readily apparent logos and brands. Important, in 1993.

It's probably unfair to assume that it was solely a unit-driven upbringing that predisposed me to enjoy basketball – the spectatorship of which lives and dies based on a delightful formula whose end-product is a 24-second possession – and the appeal of that knock-off Chicago Bulls Starter singlet wore off pretty quickly. That formula, though. Try reverse-engineering the thing, imagining Commish David Stern's 1954 equivalent in your ear: "Fans want a hundred points per game from their team, and we've only got 48 minutes to give it to them. Twenty-five points in 360 seconds per team per quarter, divided by the average points per team possession (crunch the FG, FT and 3PT percentages, carry the one)…" It's a thing of beauty; it's finding a capital-'P' Proof based on first principles.

I'm now in a country where NBA games are free-to-air and live, and while Eastern Conference games can't be found for love or money, the battle for the West continues every two or three days. Or it would, if live coverage of the Socceroos' gripping press conferences wouldn't keep obscuring TNT's pre-game comment-off. Not that I'm missing much from Charles Barkley, whose co-hosts have to help him along every misstep of the way. Kobe gets in on the act, too – where players without shoes named after them have the humility to ask the Round Mound how to get the step on defensive boards, Bryant just offers a shit-eating grin and asks how many donuts CB34 got through in his career. Former Indiana Pacers swingman Reggie Miller can't quite make up for it, commenting just as he used to play, by keeping his head down and sniping in from left-of-screen when everyone else is tired.

The Mound is all kinds of interesting, but I want to hear Toni Kukoc telling us just why Goran Dragic thinks he can drive to the hoop again. I want to hear Clyde Drexler analyse Steve Nash's scoop layups, hear Spud Webb explain why Shannon Brown didn't quite manage to jump over Jason Richardson in Game One, hear John Starks belittle Derek Fisher. I want to hear Karl Malone laugh.

Though, maybe he could look at Pau Gasol's gameface.

With the series tied up 2-2, today's game was always going to be a barometer, a test to see whether Bryant and Gasol could push back against the Suns and their scarily efficient bench. Whether I'd be able to discuss the Finals with Wilburforce the Fucking Pro Wrestler without knowing – knowing – that my Eastern Conference underdogs, whoever they turn out to be, would effectively be swept by the guys in imperial purple and gold. Whether Los Suns could pull off an emphatic triple construction.

After losing two straight, Kobe was angry – in the pre-game interview, he almost threw his microphone out of the pram. The first scoring play saw Steve Nash milk an all-too-cheeky foul from Derek Fisher and hit two free throws. Robin Lopez's afro was ridiculously buoyant throughout, but it failed as a measure of the Suns' success. At the worst, the Lakers led by 18, and even a late run and an eventual 3 to tie everything up at 101 apiece couldn't do more than give Kobe another chance to take a game-winning shot in the final 3.5 seconds. Or, as the case may be, airball it straight into the hands of Ron Artest, who only had to appear to take the shot or be fouled. Back to Phoenix for Game Six.

Welcome to the Space Jam

2010-05-28T12:49:00.001+12:00

Oh God. I can't get enough of this (pdf), Michal Brody's paper on the startling similarities between the 1996 MJ-and-Bugs vehicle Space Jam and the Mayan creation myth Popul Vuh.

Consciously or unconsciously, the film's writers have developed a narrative in which a pair of heroes (Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan) 1) are summoned to play a high-stakes underworld ball-game against a variety of frightening villains, 2) manage to defeat those villains through the heroes' summoning of extra-human ability, and 3) ascend from the underworld with a glowing orb, all of which occur in the Popol Vuh. While the details vary (in the Popol Vuh, the heroes intend to retrieve the head of their father, Hunahpu; whereas in Space Jam, the villains have stolen the talent of NBA stars such as Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing), the congruence is remarkable. Brody also shows that the well-known phonetic irregularities of, e.g., Daffy Duck and Sylvester are quite analogous to those of ancestral characters in a variety of native cosmologies.

Hero twins. Also, Bill Murray.

In addition, the Looney Tunes are not bound by the physical laws of the known world and are capable of recovering almost instantly from injuries that would more than kill any one of us. Those characteristics are shared as well by the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. Like the Tune Squad, their adventure in defeating the lords of the under-world is filled with treachery, faith, and the symbolic power of the sphere. Thus, we’ve seen that a venerated and classic story with grand- scale cultural importance has significant thematic parallels with a trifling and inconsequential Hollywood bauble intended principally for viewing by children.

There's a digital version of the Popul Vuh (Wuj?) here, if anyone would like to take this further, compare-and-contrast styles. Alternative option: compare Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the inevitable apotheosis of the monomyth's Universal Hero.

Compression

2010-05-24T09:26:00.004+12:00

I watched this without really knowing what I was getting into.

The first question that occurred to me was: 'Did they actually hire a stadium for this?' Then I wondered exactly who Wayne Rooney was. Then I just let go, and sat, utterly speechless, at the scale of this advertisement's ambition. Seriously, how much narrative can be compressed into 3 minutes? Someone is going to laugh at me, but it reminds me of Fellini, the way he will scarcely show you something, trusting that even a glimpse of the right image at the right moment will do the work it needs to. There's something hypnagogic here, something mythic maybe.

I am a huge fan of the art form known as the preview, which is closely related to the music video. This ad has all the best elements of both, honed down to a glinting, razor edge. I suspect should be more horrified by this piece of cinema, but I'm not. I love the economy of it (a funny word to use, but it is perversely a very parsimonious piece of work), the efficiency, the direct-to-your-cerebral-cortex potency of it. It was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, of Amorres Perros and Babel fame, but it's almost impossible to find out how much it cost. This would be my only real complaint right now.

Needs no further comment

2010-05-19T11:38:00.005+12:00

Aside from the all-too-obvious note that he's a singular Elvis.

I'd pay to see Elvi (and his stage show) at any one of Balmain's iconic local pubs, should the aging Melburnian Jemaine-alike take this thing on the road. There's one around every corner, according to the real estate shills, and there are certainly enough skintight bike suits and dayglo tape repositories to sustain a nightly show. Amaaazing. Can we get some more blacklight up in here?

Soap

2010-05-19T10:48:00.006+12:00

It is the curse of media culture that the brutal, banal or tedious must often stand in as emblems of larger issues. One thing stands for another. Many events are similar in shape, ultimately. I’m thinking of McCarthy barking across the floor in the hearings that bore his name, and the echo that rang out over America. I’m thinking of the fungal silhouette that loomed over the lives of anyone born before 1991. I’m thinking of Britney Spears’ garish divorce playing out like the murmur of a hotwater heater in the bathrooms of our souls. She has less currency than she once did, and there are dozens vying to replace her, but she remains a byword for that breed of hapless, tasteless ambition that thrives in the afterglow of America’s time in the sun. No less than a mushroom cloud.

Imaginary blog

2010-05-18T23:01:00.008+12:00

Jorges Luis Borges believed nothing said in 500 pages could not be expressed in 5. In this spirit, nothing written in a blog could not be expressed as a comment underneath.

It prompts a worrying thought. If this entry is in, its form, a comment, then what was written to inspire it is not yet written. We must presume a future webpage. It may contain a digression on the narratology of knitwear, or a diagrammatic how-to guide for provoking pandas into writing minimalist haiku. We cannot be sure. There may be no working backwards, or an infinite profusion of possible future pasts.

What I know is this: if the above is funny, or truly annoyed you, or you thought of Kurt Godel at any point, or you know what the word neoplatonic means, you are exactly the right person to be reading this blog.

On books and other books

2010-05-03T12:41:00.000+12:00

The ugly fact is that books are made out of other books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

Cormac McCarthy, 1992

Last week, like a garden-variety postgrad junkie, I attended a William Faulkner masterclass at UNSW with Professor Noel Polk, who edited Faulkner's novels (1930-35) for the Library of America, and who probably has a better handle on Faulkner's manuscripts than anyone else in the field. (Received knowledge, this, but after the masterclass I don't have cause to argue it.) I followed the crowds from the 891 to the middle of the campus – modern, sporadically weeded and no less confusing than any university campus – wandered around until by some stroke of luck I found the right building, and despite feeling like I was walking into a high-school gymnasium, eventually ended up in the correct seminar room.

Once there, we heard a paper from Noel about "The Leg" and "Mistral", two minor short stories with the common thread of never quite knowing what's going on, and I left with the distinct impression that despite not having read enough Faulkner in undergrad courses to get a handle on the guy, my thesis topic means that almost anything to do with literary conversation and dialogism in the Modernist field is worth hearing. I left the burbs with the title of a book to track down, Richard Gray's A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, and a recurrence of that uneasy feeling that shoehorning both Jorges Luis Borges and Malcolm Lowry into a discussion of literature's Platonic Library may be verging on the optimistic. Tending towards pessimism in any case, T.S. Eliot's seminal "Tradition and the Individual Talent" provides a leg-up, and I'm working towards a thesis that Borges' sense of the Universal Library equates to an individual fascination and horror at the near-infinite (but decidedly finite) sources, whereas Lowry, the congenital copier with a "pelagarist pen", relies exceedingly heavily on outside sources for his own creative process. Despite our lack of time to adjust all the frame-widths for resolution-agnostic viewing, the last iteration of The Malcolm Lowry Project shows this reasonably ably, even 1994-era hypertext being a natural medium for annotation.

The synecdochic extension of undergraduate classes and, to a lesser degree, even the necessarily blinkered research for a Master's, tend to leave rather a lot of elephants in any given room, and the process of determining them Indian, African or otherwise is rather overwhelming. The spectre of Tradition, of drawing together all possible and probable sources, looms large, and even then managing to avoid (re)stating the obvious – well of course books are made out of other books – remains a concern. Lucky these things are supposed to take a few years.

The Australian Association of Literature is holding its 2010 conference on Literature and Science at UNSW in July. I've (optimistically) submitted an abstract promising to examine the guiding principles of sf hybridity in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos – framed by discussion of the triune Keats persona as mediated by an unknowable Logos – but at the very least there's a lot going on here, conference-wise. (I had a back-up abstract ready to go on Philip K. Dick's DADOES, our two cats and the production of kipple, that physical manifestation of entropy, but the less said about that, the better.)

Not The Sharpest Tool

2010-04-17T12:14:00.003+12:00

Adapting foreign television games shows for a New Zealand audience proved fertile soil for producers here in the 80s and 90s, with Krypton Factor, Sale Of The Century and Wheel Of Fortune all serving as family favourites; the latter two were also developed into board games, amounting to little more than poorly made tart-ups of Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition and Hangman, in exchange for coupons for consumer goods. Both sat neglected, alongside local anomalies Kiwi SportsMania and Poleconomy in the games cupboard. So it followed that the reality television boom of the past decade would be given a zero-budget local refit and sold to the lowest denominator. High production values are out of the question, so you lose Real World, Big Brother and Amazing Race straight out of the gate. Incidentally, The Amazing Race has been hosted since it’s inception by ex-pat NZer Phil Keoghan who, in 1990, was working as a presenter on after school TV escapade 3.45 Live, the same year Nick Tansley hosted the only televised season of Treasure Hunt, featuring couples negotiating the country in a helicopter solving clues. Coincidence? But cheap Polynesian versions on a Survivor/Treasure Island theme can be knocked out relatively easily and there are more than enough C-List media whores (to populate dancing contests) and bored housewives (with inept DIY husbands). And that about sums up New Zealand’s weight class.

Occasionally you think they get the downsizing ratio just right, like New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker as a small town / small time franchise of Master Chef, and I still have high hopes for Savage’s (sub)urban “fish-out-of-water” saga Hip Hop High. But I love watching the trainwreck when ambition wins out over reality, and we get treated to generous helpings of televisual pudding like New Zealand Idol, New Zealand’s Next Top Model and The Apprentice: New Zealand. Pretending there is a market for manufactured pop stars and high-end catwalk models in this country is endearing its own way, but the façade of penthouse-suite corporate power suits – in Wellington – is easily the masterstroke. Right now, a sausage sizzle is firing up outside 721 Fifth Avenue, New York. Surely. I'm not suggesting producers be put off developing other people's concepts in lieu of a genuine brainwave themselves, not at all, but that someone really, really make a local version of ...

Tool Academy.

In the many and varied world of race-to-the-bottom reality programming, this show reigns supreme right now. It's not the most entertaining, or the most cringeworthy, or the most lucrative, but there is also a lack of guilt associated with the indulgence of watching it, because all the contestants are fucking retarded. Three seasons have run in the U.S, and in each twelve 'Tools' are duped into thinking they're going to be party kings, but instead are being taking into televised couples counselling. This ruse somehow continues to be effective beyond the first season. Incredible. Credit to the show, though, they go beyond the classic archetypes on repeat model of casting of The Real World, and get quite creative with their pigeonholing, evidenced by the line-ups in Seasons One and Two. Overheads are low. There are no big prizes or elaborate challenges, just the Tools, their partners, and the soothing voice of the counsellor/judge/jury/executioner, who for authoritative reasons in the U.S is played by stern Briton Trina Dolenz. Here in New Zealand, they should probably just use Mary Lambie. She was fantastic in The Weakest Link. As for local villainy, many of the originals are Universal, but it would be remiss to exlude Bogan Tools, Black Power Tools and Sexually Repressed Through Colonial Overhang Tools.

The novelty of seeing New Zealand's Bad Bad Boyfriends scrapping it out for airtime and public humilation/redemption pales is dwarfed, however, by the potential of Tool Academy to branch out into the Celebrity Edition. The cult of celebrity, and the sense of ownership the tabloid buying public seems to claim, has ben on the up and up for a while, demanding exemplary behaviour of these perceived immortals who live in the Public Domain. If I sat outside your window and took photos of you getting undressed, I would most likely be arrested. If you make films or music for a living, I would be considered a valid news source. And when the celebrity falls, oh how the opinions fly, the fame-whores emerge, and the public demands their pound of flesh. So why not do it in the most public, most heavily edited, most controlled, most ridiculous forum possible: Celebrity Tool Academy, with Tiger Woods (Texting Tool), Silvio Berlusconi (Prime Ministerial Tool) and Jesse James (Grand Wizard Tool) all making solid contemporary candidates. Public humiliation is the only satisfying catharsis for the modern media zeitgeist, and the sooner they realise this the better.

A Pile of 20c Pieces

2010-04-14T14:55:00.000+12:00

I don’t know that anyone would care to sift through these ... gems? gewgaws? ... but here they are: a collection of Conversations about Games, on Air, between Gentlemen, ca 2009. There were more, but in my rush to leave NZ for a funded (but non-dedicated) office chair I left them nestled among my newsy detritus on Mandroid’s computer. Files are courtesy of Radio One, as are all soundbites in the Commonwealth. Tally-ho.

Revolution X
(Midway, 1994)

Our hero saves latter-day rock gods Aerosmith from a fate worse than death – Headmistress Helga and rollerblading street thugs! I’m sure that twenty-seven percent of all one-dollar coins that passed through my hands between 1998 and 2001 went to a good cause. The continuing presence of the Rev X arcade machine is, incidentally, one of the reasons I always insist on getting to Dunedin Airport earlier than is strictly necessary to complete the check-in formalities.

Outrun
(Sega, 1986)

A spritely racer, complete with a hen-pecking trophy girlfriend. Somehow Yu Suzuki had tapped into that consensual hallucination about grown-up life.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time
(Konami, 1991)

Bodacious! Tubular! Generic Affirmatives! My childhood was great fun, but I didn’t discover segues until I got to high school. Had I discovered nonsensical time travel and odd scale issues, however, I would have been fine.

Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden, Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa
(Independent [Tales of Game’s], 2008)

It’s oddly disconcerting just how closely this game maps to the one semi-original plot I came up with between 1992 and 1994. Except in my version the Round Mound of Rebound was an actual hill that MJ and his apprentice had to climb so they could see the destruction that David Stern had caused. I wish I’d worked Ghost Dad or Juwanna Ball in there somehow.

Mario Teaches Typing
(Interplay, 1991)
QWERTY Warriors
(Flash game, ???)
The Typing of the Dead
(Sega, 1999)

Mario talked way too much about George Washington’s wooden teeth for my liking, and DVORAK Warriors would have scanned a little better. Bringing up these two games on air were a circuitous excuse on my part to talk about The Typing of the Dead, itself probably an excuse to get gamers to type ‘purple monkey snot’ in order to defeat assorted cadres of undead.

The Secret of Monkey Island
(Lucasfilm Games, 1990)

Digging up t-shirts and swapping mugs of corrosive grog has never been this much fun. Monkey Island has more people writing accolades for it at this very moment than people playing it, which is an imbalance I feel like redressing this afternoon. Don’t ask me about Loom.

Brutal Mario
(ROM hack, ???)

It’s still easier than I Wanna Be The Guy.

Dirty Challenger Muscle Men / Kinnikuman: Dirty Challenger
(Yutaka, 1992)
Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou!
(Winds / Virgin, 1995)
Cho Aniki [Super Big Brothers]
(Masaya / NCS Corp, 1992)

As soon as I realised that the bottom of the Shit Games barrel concealed a false bottom where the Idiot Games congealed, I was in on the ground floor with 900 Nintendo points. Also, having the presence of the Other be entirely tongue-(among other things)-in-cheek works pretty well.

Sex

2010-04-13T20:29:00.007+12:00

In order to understand my own brand of confusion, and interpret the following, you may want to read the whole article I'm pulling the lines from (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jenny-diski/diary). It's about Roman Polanski, but Jenny Diski also writes about being raped at age 14. She says:

"My overall reaction solidified into contempt rather than shame. I didn’t think that it was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. It was a very unpleasant experience, it hurt and I was trapped. But I had no sense that I was especially violated by the rape itself, not more than I would have been by any attack on my person and freedom. In 1961 it didn’t go without saying that to be penetrated against one’s will was a kind of spiritual murder. I was more disgusted by him than I was shamed or diminished. A different zeitgeist, luckily for me."

I was thrown by that. By someone whose writing I really respected and enjoyed saying, effectively, that the cultural pathos of rape had deepened its horror. I'm not sure exactly what I thought before that. Maybe not a lot. Diski's passage slowly connected to my memories of Africa, where marriage, sex, and breeding are more or less economic relationships. That is the social set-up round sex in those parts. No-one talks about love - which seems, to me, to be the word my culture uses to sanctify sex. What happens, say, on Taranaki St, or on a larger scale in Cambodian sex tourism, is sex for money. Sex for money. That's what it is, isn't it? It's not rape. It's not love. As soon as you demote sex to 'another thing that happens' (which it could be, and I suspect, should be) the horror becomes merely the lack of choice. Now, I'm NOT going to get as deterministic as I sometimes do and say, shit, even this blog is (I believe to a very advanced degree) pre-determined, because I feel in very shaky territory. What I can say is that any number of events less horrific than rape are equally forced and choiceless. Marriage still operates in some cases as a protracted form of rape. But that's speaking metaphorically, which is disingenuous perhaps. I don't know. I'm a bit lost now. Sex isn't sacred. Sex is sex. Rape is what happens either side of that, perhaps.

We are lost here

2010-04-12T16:11:00.009+12:00

The Hurt Locker is a film about a three-man bomb disposal team working in Iraq. TIME critic Richard Corliss called it ‘a near perfect movie’; The Los Angeles Times pronounced it ‘the film about the war in Iraq that we’ve been waiting for’; and it took the highest average national box office returns for its opening weekend. Then it won the 2009 Oscar for Best Picture. And at first I could see why. The cinematography was well considered, gelling neatly with the editor’s urge to cut faster than I could blink, and the actors seemed convincingly disoriented by the resulting effect. But as the movie drew on, I came to think that what The Wall Street Journal called ‘austere technique’ was really the most recent perfection of an utterly familiar sequence of pull focuses, tense high angles, and jerky claustrophobia. The dialogue was as jarring as the camerawork, and the characters felt as if they were assembled from soldiers killed in previous films. They included a tense, neurotic coward who gets shot (but does manage to kill someone first); a stolid African American resistant to the idea of children; and the new commander (replacing Guy Pierce, who explodes in the first scene), whose cowboy antics endanger the team, yet never quite reveal the disturbed rag doll beneath. I felt myself watching something ghostly and familiar, a noontime apparition that could never quite shake its shadow.

The Hurt Locker was very well received, which makes it the latest example of that most revealing of American misonceptions: that an explosion is an event. An explosion is an instant, which the surrounding material illuminates and gives impact to. In other words, it really depends what’s being blown up, and in The Hurt Locker the surrounding material slowly revealed itself to be little more than the wadding from other, better films: the cowboy is lodged in a profound emotional rut; he at first jeopardizes then unifies the squad; the psychiatrist, focusing mistakenly on the coward’s rationality, is blown-up when he decides to join them on a mission, and son. These plot-by-number details are disguised by the care Kathryn Bigelow, the director, takes to isolate her characters from the larger picture of war – a picture in which her characters’ arthriticsm would be more crippling. It reminds me that there is a certain beauty that turns men’s heads, which makes for a profound banality when admired for longer than it takes a woman pass in the street. Bigelow assembles the fragments of her film with a student’s sympathy, but if it lives up to its claimed ‘perfection’, it must be that perfection lies in her merging of details – perfection as an act of obscurantism.

And this is the essence of my complaint with the Hurt Locker – not in the ongoing fatalism of the military myth; nor the insidiousness of its representation of Blackness (as something with a cellular fealty to values upon which America has an implicit monopoly); nor even the killing of Guy Pierce and then Ralph Fiennes within five minutes of meeting these fine character actors. The hard core of my gripe is: It told me nothing. Characters are bootstrapped to events and the result is a handful of angry humuculi backlit by a series of aborted explosions. About the most we learn is that Iraq is hot, dusty, and very confusing – but so what? I know war is confusing. Every piece of decent writing since Frost has told me this. Joseph Heller told me this. Norman Mailer told me this. Francis Ford Coppola told me this. I even found myself enjoying Sam Mendes when he was telling me this. I get the point. War fucks you up. How often must I hear this before the reality takes the course of all good fiction, and changes? The options are: a) an end to war, or b) make a different kind of modern war film. Though neither seems particularly likely, the latter is at least conceivable. However, it was never something in Bigelow’s ambit. She was once married to James Cameron, and her control of spectacle is no less impressive. Spectacle, after all, must first and foremost be managed, presented, packaged, but this does not make Bigelow a talented director, it makes her a seamstress. One who is very adept at disguising her stitches.

I distrust an audience that can regard this species of pastiche as ‘incisive’, let alone critics who term it ‘a penetrating study’. We know that power can be drawn from repackaging the old as new, but the critical response to the film seems oblivous – almost obeisant – to this part-way honesty, the semi-sufficiency of the half-truths it wallows in. Like the war itself, in which a partial lie first mobilised an invasion, then was castigated by a similarly incomplete revelation, America’s reluctance to investigate its own mythology has predictably turned into flagellating the mythology itself. The film’s aim is to challenge the viewer, one senses this in its air of doubt and discontent, but only an audience deeply inured to or sheltered from modern film could find it confronting. It’s challenging in the way that everyday life must be arduous to someone missing an arm. What it is not, is interesting. The question, then, is this: was The Hurt Locker's vibrant reception based in the mainstream audience’s lack of acquaintance with cinema, or their numbness to it?

The circuitous answer, I suspect, is that materialism focuses on circumstances over psychology. It is an almost unforgiveably general statement, but modern life is largely concerned with material conditions. Always outwards, pointing in, behaviourism has become a sort of default social stance, in which the individual’s situation is assessed in terms of access to infrastructure, income, known history and any other details we can glean. Only literary biographers and post-Colonial theorists bother with the inner states of groups. Educated to look to events and objects as measures of well-being, audiences respond to characters informed by those same forces, while writers, directors, artists and poets treat realism as a kind of fastidious documentary process: an explosion is the latest sign that the stolid, black character is unhappy. He does want children now? see conflagrations 3 through 7. Realism, under either of these conditions, is no longer realism. It is a collage of approximations, a subalternation of the truth.

I cannot say when precisely we past the crest of this realist wave, probably in the seventies or late sixties when a brand of surrealism the likes of which informed Catch 22 or Apocalypse Now was turned to realist ends. These films reached at the truth through overstatement, exaggeration, the vile twisting of some unconcious recognition. Unfortunately – as the surrealists discovered in the mid-fifties – after this movement, there is nothing. The terrain through which you were moving at last swallows up your point of origin, leaving you lost, directionless and perhaps unreachable. After that, films that sought to deal with war could only tell us this one thing: We are lost here.

In the space between form and formulaism lies all of art. Confronted with an accustation of cliché or triteness, the writer’s response is frequently to point to Joseph Campbell and mutter something about the monomyth. This is the narrative equivalent of a three-year-old standing beside a broken window and pointing to the dog, as if to say, he did it. Wittgenstein struggled to find the atomic elements he felt constituted all of language, but I do not think it’s seriously in doubt that there are fundamental features of fiction. In fact, I would go further and say that ‘story’ can be reduced to a basic, finite componentry and remain both meaningful and useful (if a little blurry). This is not the same thing as seeing, tucked into the tailends of testaments to The Hurt Locker's brilliance, adjectives such as ‘sturdy’ or ‘efficient’. This suggests something more mechanical, with joints and pivots we can reveal, if we just pull back a little of the film’s skin. When this is done, what is on display is not a shining, oiled cinematic skeleton, but a fairly typical oblivousness of the inter-workings of the classical mythologic structures.

True to Ecclesiasties, there is nothing new under the sun. It is the essence of this misleadingly nuanced declaration that Campbell takes his bearing from, and unless one is directing a French new-wave film from 1972, there will always be a Change of Circumstances in a story, there will always be a Girl, there will usually be a Coward. These are the ideas that any apprentice should be inculcated with. But still it can be taken too far. We had seen the characters in The Hurt Locker before, but this was literally true in the case of the coward – the actor Brian Geraghty played an identical character in Jarhead, a far more potent film on a more or less identical subject. I hadn’t seen Jarhead recently, so had to check the Wikipedia page to quite believe it. Bigelow co-opted the character in toto. Near the film’s end, he is shot by the cowboy, who is trying to save his life (the coward doesn’t die, he is only injured), and afterwards is evacuated from Iraq, whining and swearing. Over 120 minutes, the character had not altered in the slightest. The stunning arc of the black character, by comparison, moves through five or six near-death set pieces until he realises that having children may be the only way to save himself from a job that will almost certainly kill him. It might have been touching, but there was no movement toward this point. We simply arrived there, making the moment seem like a pirhoutte. Having ticked the ‘revelation’ box, that was the last we saw of him. The cowboy’s disregard culminates in him stepping into the shower in full battle kit, and collapsing. I would have thought that this scene was terminally shop-soiled, but apparently most of America has never seen Macbeth (though surely they must have seen Casino Royale, or The Abyss, or even Moon 44 ...). The cowboy’s anxiety is not investigated, merely inserted. A character in need of an epigram, he finally falls victim to a quote seen at the outset: to the effect that war is a drug. We see him return home after his year in Iraq, play ironically with his son, try to buy some cereal and become utterly lost in the comforting, price-check-isle-three contentment of middleclass America. Cut to the cowboy, back in Iraq, suited up for another round of hurt.

The film’s ending, too, is Jarhead’s. In each a soldier cannot relinquish the warrior, though at least Jake Glynhaal makes it home. The impression in The Hurt Locker is that the tension of wartime Baghdad induces a homeostasis that supports the cowboy – the denoument shows him suited up, walking into a bomb disposal job. The music is jaunty. We are offered in these last few seconds a romantic view of the antihero, condemned to his post, this Sisyphus of conflagrations. It is not much of a message and might as well describe the debauched, bored fashions that produce such films. Though this was not the opinion of Peter Howell in the Toronto Star: ‘Just when you thought the battle for Iraqi war dramas has been fought and lost,’ he wrote, ‘along comes one that demands to be seen ... The Hurt Locker strips the Iraqi conflict of politics and brings it right down to the garbage-strewn pavement, where lives are saved through skill and nerve but lost through bad luck and malevolence.’ The erasure is noticed and applauded, as though the whole conflict were just too complicated and thank god someone focused on real people. Anti-heroism is a natural pose for current American mythology, and this tightened, individualist focus is useful to it – this is no war, just something that’s happening.

Beyond being a painfully ironic phrase, the idea that ‘the battle for Iraqi war dramas’ could have been over before the conflict itself finished is a prominent spike on the graph of oblivion drawn by war films in the last 40 years. The real people on show are, of course, American. Iraqis are kept to the roles of rude mechanicals, and not even Howell seems to have noticed that the ‘battle’ has yet to actually feature an Iraqi perspective. Snipers are silhouttes rather than people. Admitedly, this is how soldiers see the locals. The problem is the presentation – that this is okay, this is bravery, rathery than institutionalised stupidity. We are offered these soldiers as heros, rather than accomplices. Anything else might interfere with the carefully controlled descent of the mythology into ambivalent territory. Thankfully, Bigelow lands squarely in the Green Zone.

As an acknowledgedly tendentious piece of synechdoche, take the title – exactly what a ‘Hurt Locker’ is, or who coined the phrase is never made clear, though by the end of the film one gathers what it must mean, this unascribed colloquialism. It is a neat trick to convey that sense without spelling it in brazen dialogue, but this sort of trick is repeated throughout the film, a camoflauging of lineage: allusion after allusion is drawn together, coiled into a piece of visual rhetoric so tight that it obscures its own origins. The effect, if not the purpose, of this erasure is, predictably, to isolate a situation from its causes. In Bigelow’s case, this is her art – the seamstress, tucking away the edges of stories she has transfused. The Iraq war, in all it’s flamboyant, dull horror, is no longer an extension of an ambiguous American will. We are presented only with confusion; any opportunity we had for unravelling this or moving away from such inertia has been artfully precluded.

If The Hurt Locker never leaves its moral Green Zone, this is perhaps the most realistic thing about it. Edward Said believed that such refusals of context were the essence of occidentalist power playing, and the film’s form certainly speaks to that idea. Critical response focused broadly on its verisimilitude, implicit being the notion that a sufficient description is also a causal one, as it lays clear a variety of relations. But Bigelow is not so thorough. Hers is an incorrigibly partial view, through the eyes of characters whose flimsy derivation leaves them with only one foot in the film. The point is not to seriously investigate the effect of an unvalourous war on its combatants, but to descend far enough to give the antihero somewhere to rise up from. In this sense, one begins to suspect that the film is successful exactly because America is so hungry for myths of redemption right now. A narrative that offered to rehabilitate a nation’s view of itself, while seeming to deal honestly with the conditions that required it, was always going to find a place in the pantheon.

The Hurt Locker's predictablility is anchored to a single fact: God is still American. It is a Hollywod movie that strives to deny its Hollywood pedigree, but like the rest of its ilk, must abide by certain covenants made long ago. This is the rule set the film cleaves to – not traditional myth structure, but the American myth. There is no room for a true anti-hero, someone genuinely unlikeable, or whose downfall we hope for. On the cowboy’s shoulders rests America’s image of itself – brazen, conflicted, but ultimately just. Notions of fate – that most Islamic of forces – are quietly conscripted into the service of a story that has been told and retold since the first wagons rolled West. Something, though it would be extraordinarily difficult to say precisely what, has come full circle. Some story even older than California. God has returned to his old stomping ground, but he has clearly found a new chosen people. For in the final analysis, this is Babylon, familiar and vile. Virtue will always be an intruder here.

Prior to which the best of intentions were beset from all sides

2010-04-01T11:03:00.002+13:00

Upon arrival in Sydney, we were warned of the brazen motorcycle gangs and the accompanying perils of roadside steakhouses, pickpockets to rival Oliver Twist’s most kleptomaniacal fantasies, the dangers of walking on grass with bare feet (funnelwebs abound!), vicious teen muggers, eleven-year-olds carrying knives, ATM skimmers, ‘self-pruning’ gumtrees endangering passersby, violent hailstorms, termites, snakes, cockroaches and the apparently furious bidding wars for desirable rental properties. The worst thing I’ve found so far is the number of Robert Lowell books in the second-hand bookstores. (Lowell’s often the last book on the LOW-- shelf, so I’ve been blaming him for the lack of Lowry). Still, Sursum corda, and be glad I’m not stuck with a Lois Lowry collection.

We got here on Feb 13th, and I don’t think I’ve found Australia yet*. Not that I’ve been looking terribly hard; most of our time has so far been caught up the the rush to find a house before our savings ran out, or our welcome ran out with the extended family. With that done (living just outside of Balmain in the Year of the Tiger has its own appeals for anyone passively schooled in late-nineties NRL fandom), we may now have a little more time to start casting our eyes sideways. There is a very loud amusement park right beside our present lodgings. It seems that way, anyway – in all honesty, it’s mostly just the recurrent problem of Antipodean girls.

I’m wary of judging a country by its free-to-air programming – where, on that scale, would NZ fall? – but it’s difficult to avoid it. Case in point: I’m now living in a city that is big enough to warrant its own news hour, and this is not entirely a bad thing. How provincial, to think it would be! When the wind blows from the mainland TVNZ is almost aware of its Auckland-centric coverage, but I’ve never watched enough TV in Auckland to appreciate just how reassuring it can be to hear about nothing further away than the outer ‘burbs. It’s distressingly insular, but comfortingly so. When we stabilise enough to secure an internet connection, I do intend to catch up on current affairs from the rest of the world; 13,000 RSS items and counting await that luminous moment.

We wandered around the CBD earlier this week, turning when we thought that the iPhone was pointing in the right direction, and found – by chance – two small public sculptures, each comprised of three small square blocks. The first set we found had one block labelled ‘HELL’, I think, and two blank; the next again had two blank, but the middle block was engraved with the word ‘PURGATORY’. I suppose they have something to do with Pyrmont’s imaginatively named sandstone quarries, but we’d already found limbo; even after filling out too many customs forms, we have to wait six to eight more weeks before our personal effects (read: my books, Jen’s clothes) arrive, and as of this evening our freshly assembled flatpack shelves don’t hold much more than a television and various pieces of paper that may or may not prove useful sometime in the next 36 months. Thirty-six months (42 in the laziest case) is now the yardstick against which any major future plans are measured.

We didn’t find ‘PARADISE’ engraved anywhere, although Gould’s Book Arcade, panacea for a house filled with empty shelves, is probably a reasonable fascimile. Gould’s poetry shelves don’t show any kind of organising principle, though, so instead of blaming Lowell I just find my hopes flaring up briefly whenever I see his Collected Works.

*Australian media still seems to be trying to sort this out, incidentally. Not in any sensible kind of way, but in true PSA fashion, where the good ship HMS Federal Racism Statistics is broadsided with advertising dollars in the hope of bringing her down.

the eXile

2009-09-16T10:34:00.002+12:00

I'm borrowing my supervisor's office for a few weeks, while he's away on leave. Several benefits accrue on that account – not least of all that I'm writing and revising my thesis in the same room in which my undergrad work has received so much criticism and assistance, which lets me channel my indolence into a constant stream of improvements to grammar and expression – but the best part of it all is the immediate presence of all the books an old-school Modernist could ever want, with particular emphasis on Lowry, Beckett and Joyce. And sidelines on Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Dante, John Fowles, Graham Greene, et cetera, ad infinitum.

My casual reading list has been much richer for all of this, of course – last week it was Lowry's Selected Poems and the Conrad Aiken-inspired Ultramarine. (Lowry named the novel after Aitken's Blue Voyage; Aiken suggested the more fitting title of Purple Passage.) Then I moved on to a book of essays on Joyce's "The Dead"; the hard-to-find (at a reasonable price) Faber edition of Eliot's manuscript for "The Waste Land", with plenty of annotations and strikethroughs by Ezra Pound; Brian Boyd's take on Nabokov's Pale Fire (and then Pale Fire itself); Borges' Inquisiciones and Other Inquisitions; and yesterday, to a book I didn't think I'd find here – The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi.

There was a flurry of interest in the eXile around these parts in 2003, when Critic landed an interview with Dr. John Dolan, who'd left the University and the woes of what was then English 124 (now ENGL126) behind him in a cloud of dust, and headed off to co-edit the newspaper. Critic's then-news editor (later editor for real) Hamish McKenzie wrote this feature on Dolan and the eXile, complete with gratuitously long quotes with so much gold that there was nowhere to cut or paraphrase:

"Listen, I taught the first-year med students at Otago for EIGHT YEARS!!! You think I'm scared of death? Death is nothing! Those terrible lectures in ENGL 124 on Monday afternoons - those were the test for me. I remember that nightmarish first year - I came so close to bolting from Castle 2 one time. The valium prescription had run out on me about halfway through the lecture and I saw in full intensity the serried ranks of those mean, med-student faces sneering lazily down at me from the nearly-vertical rows of seats. People at Otago don't know how strange the atmosphere there really is by comparison with most real universities. I had been teaching at [University of California] Berkeley, where students of 18 are grown-ups and pleasant, witty, trusting grown-ups at that. To be faced by eight or nine hundred vicious, provincial adolescents staring down at you on a sleety Monday evening ... you think that after surviving that I'm going to be scared in Moscow? Death is easy; the med students are scary. Those were the most vile, evil, worthless excuses for human beings I've encountered in a long and checkered life. It's a pity they can't all be put to work shovelling the water out of the Leith with colanders."

...

That's Dolan for you - give him an inch and he'll write a column lambasting everything that's wrong about the society you live in.

The book (Grove Press, 2000) has a foreword by Edward Liminov in almost-broken English that sets the tone:

[The] female condition in eXile is worst than in poorest Bedouin family wandering in the deserts of Israel.... The eXile's crew is also arrogant, and making fun of authorities. They have questioned Russian men: How much money would you have to be paid before you'd fuck Madeleine Albright? Russian men declined proposition.

What are political beliefs of Ames and Taibbi? they are totally politically incorrect. they are extremists of a new brand: leftists and right-wingers in same time, they are racist red communist agitators worst than three-key people, bloodthirsty as Chikatilo, about women you know.

But damn it's a great read. Ames and Taibbi clip in dozens of articles from the newspaper as sidebars, slander their workmates and each other, come up with new and curious ways to get some serious libel happening, and slam idealistic expatriat Americans to the ground. Wonderful stuff – if related by potentially unreliable narrators – it's depressing and scary, all the more so because it's exactly like the alternative press should be anywhere in the world, strugging for funding to stay afloat, jumping from scandal to libel to the horrors of everyday politics, and it's nothing I'd have to guts to write myself, regardless of where I lived.

The eXile is gone now, shut down over a year ago after an "unplanned audit" of its editorial content; scared investors promptly pulled their funding. “The government does not need to jail or shoot people,” Mark Ames told Carl Schreck. “All they have to do to keep people under control is say ‘Boo!’" Here's Owen Matthews, writing for the Moscow Times:

Is the paper guilty? Hell yes - at least by the puritanical standards of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The eXile was a biweekly dish of political gossip (often surprisingly incisive), grim reports from the country’s underbelly and amphetamine-fueled vitriol against Middle America. It was also heavily laced with pornography, satirical graphics and outrageous club reviews penned by a series of fictional correspondents. This was the paper that created the “Death Porn” column, a compendium of the week’s most gruesome crimes illustrated with police photos. Its most recent issue hailed the early arrival of “snapper season,” complete with photos of naked provincial girls taken from the “Dyevscovery Channel.”

The original website's still up, apparently still shilling for donations to stay afloat, while new content has shifted to http://exiledonline.com/. Gems from the eXile's new home include Tal Sutsa's article "Memphis: where Steve Jobs goes to eat his fellow Americans" (link) and Mark Ames' new radio show (link). The eXile is a model for controversy, fun, an incidentally increased readership and doing absolutely everything you can't do if you get that internship at Fairfax.

À droite

2009-06-24T13:08:00.000+12:00

Having exhaled (exhumed?) the lowbrow products of procrastination (below; backdated), a few things are jumping around for attention. This article is still remarkably fresh in my mind, for example, if only because it's so delightfully derivative of Borges' "Benares" (1923, Fervor de Buenos Aires):

False and impenetrable
like a garden traced on a mirror,
the imagined city
which my eyes have never seen
interweaves distances
and repeats its unreachable houses.
The sudden sun
shatters the complex obscurity
of temples, dunghills, prisons, patios
and will scale walls
and blaze on to a sacred river.
Panting
the city which a foliage of stars oppressed
pours over the horizon
and in a morning
full of steps and of sleep
light is opening the streets like branches.
At the same time dawn breaks
on all shutters looking east
and the voice of a muezzin
from its high tower
saddens the air of day
and announces to the city of many gods
the solitude of God.
(And to think that while I play with doubtful images
the city I sing persists
in a predestined place of the world,
with its precise topography
peopled like a dream,
with hospitals and barracks
and slow avenues of poplars
and men with rotten lips
who feel the cold in their teeth.)

Or, at least, derivative of the paraphrasing I was doing around the poem in my thesis. I'm still riffing on parallel structures, though, and this morning chewed through Urn Burial's fifth chapter again, where Browne turns from cataloguing the virtues and idiosyncrasies of funerary customs to melancholy: "'Tis too late to be ambitious," he sighs. "The great Mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes." But the point is, really, that it has always been too late to be ambitious, and it always will. Which leaves unspoken the problem of Art; the significant absence, perhaps, as obvious as "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"'s footnotes about Tlön's "scandalous" materialism leaving the problem of material.

All of which is, effectively, the Borges-narrator resigned to the rise of Tlön and hiding in his uncertain translation of Urn Burial. In what will be a fusion of Quevedo's satire and Browne's reflections on mortality, the narrator of "Tlön, Uqbar" is writing the equivalent to the story in which he exists. Circularity rocks. And, one assumes, rolls.

Browne, for all his subtle gloom, managed to find something positive, although it's mildly undercut:

Darknesse and light divide the course of our time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremeties, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

Oh, and despite Borges' avowed love for Urn Burial – he name-checked it in 1925's Inquisiciones, wrote "Tlön, Uqbar" around it, and translated Chapter V for Victoria Ocampo's Sur in 1944 – I still haven't found any articles linking Browne's style to Borges'. There's plenty of thematic junk, and I'm sure adding to the pile, but nothing yet on the way the semi-colons balance the omissions, distortions and contradictions, and, mostly, assist the underlying pragmatism. Although it may be too obvious to mention without being a little gauche.

Apropos of nothing, or perhaps of the trend towards the gauche, I just flicked past Choire Sicha's review – and fitting proposed subtitle – of the new Transformers film, Michael Bay's very male gaze and Megan Fox:

All on her own, she is reeling back twenty years of gender and film studies textbooks. While we may have thought the male gaze was wilting or troublesome, Megan Fox proves that (for her and a select few others, at least) the male gaze is just some flimsy and pitiful little ray to rub her flesh up against so as to keep warm her nearly-exposed rump. She is hard to believe, with the soft kitty-cat stripper ways of a Gina Gershon melded with the hard machineness of a Linda Fiorentino.

Snap.

And finally, this whole thing jumped out at me in my daily headline filtering this morning. I'd heard all about Neda Agha-Soltan's death, I thought, and by now everyone has, but I'd like to know why it hit a little harder than the other deaths of protesters in Iran, or anywhere. That a video camera was right there? Her wide eyes when she lay on the street? Or the Persian meaning of her name – "voice", "calling" or "divine message"? I'm going to leave it there, because trying to answer that brings me right back to the gauche. And, to make the stupid pun I promised myself I wouldn't, I'd rather aim for the adroit.

Review: Afro Samurai

2009-06-14T14:09:00.000+12:00

Namco Bandai Games

PS3, Xbox 360

If part of the review process involved adding subtitles to games, I’d probably settle on something like Afro Samurai: Lost in Adaptation. (Unfortunately I was beaten to the punch by the slightly more entertaining Afro Samurai: I've Had It With These [expletive deleted] Samurais On My [expletive deleted] ‘Fro!) Year-old memes aside, it’s pretty clear that the transition from anime series to video game hasn’t been terribly kind to Afro Samurai. It’s uncommon for a slavish reproduction of any form of media to pay off, but this game could have benefited from slightly more cribbing from – and less free interpretation of – the original series. Not to say that the charm of the manga and the anime isn’t present in spades in the IP’s third major outing, but for all of the effort put into reincarnating the storyline, the beat-em-up game suffers from minor misteps.

Cell-shaded and coloured with the same muted tones of the anime series, the game plays like an extended episode – although at roughly six hours, it clocks in at three times the total length of the series. And for all of that time to expound on just what the hell is going on, Afro Samurai still doesn’t get the story across. Moreover, while it has polish in spades and Samuel L. Jackson returning to the fold, portraying both the kick-ass Afro and his constantly swearing sidekick Ninja Ninja, the game soon wears thin. Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t pay through the nose just to listen to Sam Jackson talk to himself for six hours, but there’s a limit to how much of the same hack, slash, rinse and repeat I can put up with.

While you gain experience throughout the game and learn new moves, you don’t need them. There isn’t a boss that cannot be beaten with repeated taps on the heavy attack button, occasionally interrupted with a judicious block-and-evade combo. Killing enough of the cookie-cutter enemies (among them assassins, bulky guys with clubs and half-naked stripper-ninjas) gains focus, which can be spent in chunks to slow down time, or blown all at once to engage in a one-hit-kill spree to clear large crowds of enemies. The game plan is set in the first battle scene, and in contrast to the poorly explained and ever-changing plot, it stays constant throughout.

RZA’s influence, so vital to the anime series, is back in force on the beats, even if he couldn’t be personally involved in the process. Too busy to score the game himself, RZA offered up his notes and samples to composer and producer Howard Drossin.

The battles are highly stylised, and it sure is fun to slice and dice in time with the music, dismembering waves of enemies in new and interesting ways. And for a while, the combat is utterly brilliant – RZA’s melding of C-movie samples, soul tracks, Wu-era beats and laconic raps is the most complementary music possible for the game. Until the point where, through my own ineptitude and unwillingness to spam the heavy attack button, the battle lasts just a little longer than anyone had planned, and there’s a pause. Silence. And the same track starts up again, and momentarily jolted from your violent reverie, you continue.

So here’s the kicker: players can’t draw out the intensely enjoyable combat, aiming for enemies’ heads and thrilling in the cinematic qualities of the slow-mo finishing moves, without experiencing a little hiccup that says two things; first, an inference on your lack of skill, that you are remiss for not having killed everything on screen; and second, that the durée of combat is shattered, and is no longer the graceful, rhythmic and interactive moment-as-continuum that it should have been. All of which is to say that lacking the simple addition of a bridge or looping track, enjoyment can go downhill very quickly.

All in all, Afro Samurai is a collection of opposing statements, a rebuttal of its own marketing bulletpoints. The game apes the cinematic sense of the anime, but the camera can be poorly integrated at times; it uses RZA’s music to great effect in battles, until the end of each track; and while the epic story is present, it’s shifted almost beyond recognition. There’s little explanation as to whether you’re in the game’s present, or playing through a flashback scene, which adds to its disconnect. This one’s strictly for fans of RZA, afro-toting and cigarette-chomping martial artists, Samuel L. Jackson saying motherfucker, and the inevitable Venn diagram intersection of the three.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition

2009-06-14T14:02:00.001+12:00

Raven Software

PC, PS3, Xbox 360 (‘Caged’ available on PS2, Wii; ‘Neutered’ for DS, PSP)

Wolverine is one of the more popular characters in the Marvel multiverse, but before now he hasn’t been well represented in videogames (other than in Marvel Vs Capcom, which was alone in getting absolutely everything right). X-Men Origins: Wolverine aims to change that, grafting an experience tree and basic RPG elements onto stock-standard action-adventure fare. It’s been scaled down and cutesified for Wii and handheld consoles, but the full blood-and-guts editions are about as lifelike as a game based on a movie based on a comic can get.

For a game that’s apparently all about origins, there’s startlingly little originality involved; Wolverine mixes the rich tropical forests of Uncharted, the illogical and simple puzzles of Tomb Raider series, and a combo and experience points system similar to that of 2007’s difficult-to-master but entirely underrated Conan. And yet, despite its pick-and-mix modularity, at least Wolverine pulls its inspiration from the right places – the combos are easily chained together, even flicking hits back and forth between different enemies; the environments are sufficiently lush and rich to distract from their linear nature; and while the environmental puzzles aren’t anything to write home about, they separate the endless lines of fodder for Wolverine’s adamantium claws.

And that’s really what it’s all about – the ‘Snikt’ sound effect that never gets old, the animal roar, and cutting enemies to shreds. Chaining together light and heavy attacks lets you eviscerate and decapitate any number of generic henchmen; there’s even a lunge attack to quickly close the gap between you. While this works wonders on the low-level fighters you’ll come across at the start of the game, tougher bosses will easily swat you out of the air, necessitating slightly different tactics.

Given Wolverine’s mutant healing factor, you’ll find that the health bar refills within a couple of seconds of withdrawing from the fight; the ubiquitous auto-healing hero finally makes sense. Graphically, too, the healing factor works wonders – you can see Wolverine take enough damage to reduce parts of him to a bloody pulp, and then to bone, but if you can get out of danger for long enough, he’ll heal up. Just as the lunge attack removes the annoyance of having to walk to the next enemy, the healing factor removes all fear of taking damage. It suits the source material, but makes for an easy game – the normal difficulty setting is a breeze, and even the hardest game mode is only a slight challenge.

There are few epic battles in the games – most involve a whirlwind of sharpened adamantium encountering flesh – but the battles with the Blob and a Sentinel do manage to get a little adrenaline pumping. The latter is particularly impressive, but not exactly representative of the rest of the game, which is mainly spent lunging between different groups of fodder and activating the odd quick-time event.

The major criticism of most third-person action games is that they’re not similar enough to God of War, but Wolverine does manage to surpass SCE’s creation in some ways. It’s a matter of swings and roundabouts, though – Wolverine’s healing factor makes the game too easy; the lunge, while cool enough the first few times, encourages a kind of laziness and doesn’t punish a beginner’s lack of skill.

Damning the game with faint praise, it’s been widely touted as one of the best movie adaptations ever. But while both the film and the game take liberties with comic book source material, the game makes very little sense. It’s internally incoherent, which is disconcerting for anyone who likes a reason to cut heads off with retractable claws. X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Too Many Subtitles has little connection between its ludic and narrative elements other than, of course, the ever-popular ‘Snikt’. If you think a single sound effect justifies a game – and you’re probably not alone – consider Wolverine justified. Otherwise, borrow or rent the thing before you commit this week’s student loan entitlement to it.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

ShiftSpace: Wikifying the Web

2009-06-14T14:00:00.000+12:00

Annotation is the red-headed stepchild of research, it sometimes seems, and yet so much relies on it. Without level-headed (or contrarian) commentary on a text, too much can be taken for granted as true; some of the most reliable books I’ve borrowed from lecturers and students have been annotated so much that there’s more pencil than ink on any given page. Of course, annotations can be as suspect as the printed word – if only there were some way to toggle annotations on or off, depending on who wrote them…

Enter ShiftSpace. A simple plug-in to the Firefox web browser, ShiftSpace (currently at v0.14) has been annotating the web for a few years now, and has morphed into a pretty stable wee script, containing multiple ‘Spaces’ for users to ‘Shift’ webpages. Users can annotate pages using the ‘minor’ Spaces by highlighting certain words or terms, and adding sticky notes to certain sites – both useful for group work and note sharing – or go the extra step and work with two major Spaces – SourceShift and ImageSwap.

ImageSwap lets users switch out certain images or logos and replace them with others – you can, for instance, Shift otago.ac.nz by replacing the pictures of happy graduates with a picture of a burning sofa, as seen above. (Or a kitten, if that’s still your thing.)

SourceShift, alternately, is a blessing for anyone with rudimentary html skills, and enables users to freely alter the source code of a given website, adding annotations like videos (copy and paste the embed code from YouTube), pictures, or additional text. Once you’ve made a Shift, you can save it – anyone coming to the site in future will have the option to view your Shift, create their own, or view the page it its original format.

While there’s scope for abuse, ShiftSpace isn’t all about hacking or parody. For example, searching for “falun gong” on google.com will give a different result than google.cn, as Falun Dafa is censored in China. ShiftSpace includes a note on the Chinese results acknowledging that they have been censored, and offers the uncensored top search results of falundafa.org. ShiftSpace lets viewers stake a layer of freedom over the web, even over proscribed content.

Public annotation can, I think, be an art form in itself – assuming one draws a similar distinction to that between vandalism and street art. The already-vocal commentariat can be let loose from the bottom-of-page confines of comment threads, and respond directly to the page’s content, on the content. We can, with the simple addition of a layer in a browser window, return to the panoply of views that the internet purports to represent.

It’s locative art turned mainstream, framed in a browser, and from an aesthetic standpoint, ShiftSpace recreates the consensual hallucination of the web – Gibson’s proto-matrix be damned; ShiftSpace is a layer of textual awareness that can be toggled on or off, can be altered to suit any viewpoint, twisted to support protests or reinforced to back up arguments with insufficient evidence. It certainly results in a confusion of annotations and pranks, but it reclaims the web as public space, and making an already democratic medium slightly more fluid and open to re-creation is never a bad thing.

A How-to Guide
(Instructions and all links are also on shiftspace.org/install)

Download and install the Firefox browser.
Install the Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox. This lets you run small Javascript programs to modify websites, from annotations like Shiftspace to user scripts and tweaks of Google’s email/calendar/docs ecosystem.
Head to shiftspace.org/install and click on the link to install ShiftSpace, then refresh your page, update to the latest version, and you’re good to go!
While browsing, you can call up the ShiftSpace console and view all public Shifts made by other users, then toggle them on or off.

[This article first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Halo Wars

2009-06-14T13:56:00.000+12:00

Ensemble Studios

Xbox 360

For all of the caterwauling about the lack of quality real-time strategy games on home consoles, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a ready market for the product. Ensemble Studios certainly thought so: they’d even decided to bring the RTS genre to living rooms before they received genuine Bungie-grade manna in the form of the Halo license. With a control scheme designed from the ground up to work with the Xbox 360 controller, Ensemble made a great start on the project, before coming slightly derailed in its execution.

On the face of things, the Halo universe seems ripe for the RTS plucking – it even comes complete with a three-way tie for galactic domination by way of the UNSC, Covenant and Flood forces. (Think Terran, Protoss and Zerg respectively, if that helps.) But the questionable decision to restrict the campaign mode to the slightly prosaic UNSC forces in campaign mode, and not allowing gamers to play as the other two armies does limit the game’s single-player mode. And while the Covenant can be used in multiplayer, the Flood isn’t playable at all, which kind of takes the appeal out of things – the insect / zombie / biohazard races always offer the most visceral fun. Sometimes literally. Of course, gamers with a rainbow connection to Master Chief may disagree, as the thrill of seeing multiple Spartans take on the Covenant masses will likely overwhelm all pretence of reason.

Combat in Halo Wars is balanced with the now-traditional rock-paper-scissors approach, where infantry units are beaten by ground vehicles, ground vehicles are beaten by aircraft, and aircraft, somewhat bizarrely, are beaten by infantry. There are slight variations on the theme, for better or worse, but that’s the basic idea. Missions are tightly scripted, with less room allowed for player decisions (base placement, technology trees) than traditional RTS titles, although the game’s restrictions do tie well into its cinematic qualities – you’re playing through a story much more interesting (and marginally more profound) than anything Command & Conquer could come ever up with, time-travelling Russians be damned.

I’m a fan of damning games with faint praise – or concealing barbs behind a turn of phrase, if the opportunity presents itself – but it’s hard to be oblique enough when I’m talking about the controls. They’re adequate, but radial menus on analogue sticks aren’t anything groundbreaking. I’d go out on a limb and say they do the job, except the job is such a stripped-down version of what RTS gamers are used to that it’s like the Xbox 360 controller has a completely different vocation in mind. You can’t assign units to custom groups, you can’t set different rally points for different unit types, and you can’t access the build menu without the ‘eye of god’ being close to your base. The tricks of the trade, then – the elements of strategy that have evolved from playing in a hectic skirmish-filled real-time gamespace – are moot. Halo Wars might serve as a passable introduction to the genre for those gamers who didn’t cut their teeth on Starcraft, but its value extends little further than prolonging the story until the Halo 3 prequel ODST drops later this year.

With the upcoming release of the ‘Strategic Options’ add-on pack, though, Ensemble are about to add some value to the title, by tacking on three extra game modes, available in both skirmish or multiplayer game types. There’s a CTF play-alike mode called Keepaway, where teams fight to capture a free-roaming Sentinel drone, an army-building race to supremacy called Tug of War, and a battle for constant one-upmanship called Reinforcement, as battle units arrive in waves and you are forced to adapt tactics to suit different situations.

The DLC adds another four Achievements, worth 100 points in total, but hasn’t yet been priced for NZ release, or dated more specifically than ‘in the coming weeks’. Halo fans will likely seize upon anything that extends the life of the title; others may resent buying new options that do little other than bring a slightly substandard game up to par.

All of which is to say, Halo Wars isn’t for hardcore strategy fans, who would likely be much more at home practising South Korea’s national sport on their home PCs. If there were such a category as medium-core experimental cinematic fan service, though, that’s where I’d place the game. It’s a buzz if you’re caught up in the Halo universe and mythos, and the sheer appeal of controlling a bunch of UNSC Spartans from the sky – like unto a god – carries a lot of weight. I’m left wondering, though, if God wanted me to really enjoy an RTS game on a console, why can’t I just plug in a keyboard and mouse like He intended?

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: LittleBigPlanet

2009-06-14T13:55:00.000+12:00

Media Molecule

PS3

LittleBigPlanet was released in late October last year, making its inclusion in this first May issue of Critic questionable, if we’re still pretending to keep up with the new media releases. But in our defence, it has taken a few months for the game to settle down, in a sense, for the crowd-sourced content to reach past a saturation of dick jokes and approach something resembling quality.

Not to say that the single-player mode – stripped back with a designer’s eye for simplicity to pre-Super Mario Bros. controls – isn’t a bucket-load of joy in itself. The game sure is fun, and zipping through the fifty or so levels put together by people paid to transform design documents into virtual superstructures is a hell of a way to spend an evening, but the fun really starts when you shrug off the shackles of developer / consumer hierarchy and download a shared level from a fellow gamer. Life at the bottom of the distribution pyramid has never been this much fun.

Media Molecule, in an extended fit of designer pique, threw a couple of layers of authorship onto the game disc, and both the single-player jaunt and the inclusion of the robust level-design toolsets are equally elegant. There’s an almost overwhelming profusion of things you can create using a simple dual-analogue controller, but the sheer fact you can publish your finished (and partially finished) creations for the rest of the PSN-connected world to share is reason enough to invest a few hours in the game. Play. Create. Share. The tagline says it all.

This is a big step for console games, although one with which PC gamers will be much more familiar. Bethesda, for example, has offered toolsets to each of its Elder Scrolls games for the past ten years; Counter-Strike had its roots in a heavy mod of the Half-Life engine. The primacy of modding on computers over consoles was partially because of the need for complex controllers, input devices, and internal storage, but it’s been happening for a long time. Hell, even before Quake offered level editors, there were unofficial (but tacitly supported) mods of Doom remade with The Simpsons character sprites and sound effects, hackable at its most basic level for anyone proficient enough in MS Paint to put a smiley face on every single brick texture.

But we’re not exactly talking about mods, here. LittleBigPlanet does offer that capability, of course – you can alter the ready-made levels at will, but why would you want to stop there? Why not set up a Gradius clone side-scrolling shooter, or make a working calculator as part of your level, anything but the predictable (and soon-to-be-redacted) penis levels. Or, if you’re still mired in cupcake SNES nostalgia, knock up the inevitable SMB 1-1 map. But like the ‘offensive’ levels, that will get pulled by Sony’s team of copyright infringement police soon enough – better to invest your time in a little bit of real creation. Make Tolstoy happy: transmit some feelings, make your level the vector for an emotional state. Art is infectiousness, after all.

As such, short of comparing LittleBigPlanet to the latest outbreak of H1N1, I can’t say enough about the game. Suffice it to say that my magnum opus of a level, set in the beige confines of the Critic office, is almost complete. A storm of diatribe submissions battle for the player’s attention; errant apostrophes, misplaced semi-colons and the ever-hazardous em-dashes rain down in a hail of doom. Sackboy teeters on the edge of a precipice throughout; the dual and opposing chasms of journalism and academic life await on either side. It is not until the player reaches the back left-hand corner of the office that he or she realises the banal and atrocious existence of the black hole where time itself cannot escape. Also, it turns out the princess is in another castle.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Siren: Blood Curse

2009-06-14T13:54:00.001+12:00

SCE Japan Studio

PS3, PSN

In reimagining the PS2 stealth horror game Siren in downloadable episodic and later Blu-ray form, SCE Japan Studio also made some alterations to the game’s plot and structure.

It’s still a haunting slow walk through the village of Hanuda, which is itself still as creepy and implacably horrific as it was in the last console generation. Reported to have engaged in human sacrifice more than thirty years ago, the villagers are now shambling horrors, all ready to kill any American film crew stupid enough to wander into town. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a reality TV crew on its way.

Siren: Blood Curse offers a more linear narrative to the game than its predecessor, despite it being split into twelve chronological episodes. Even playing as different characters, the story progresses in an orderly fashion, and each character has clear primary objectives in each chapter. The only secondary objectives serve to fill in the game’s archive, and chipping in parts of the backstory. Hidden in the chapters are items like diaries and logbooks, all of which are only accessible outside of the game. It creates a curious perspective on the action, having to withdraw from the narrative to delve into the supporting structures of the diegesis, but it’s nonetheless engaging.

Also adding to the immersion is the split-screen sightjack system, which lets characters ‘lock on’ on the sight of nearby enemies and friendly characters. Seeing their vision side-by-side with that of you character is at first disconcerting, but the practice is a useful one, enabling you to sneak past enemies and clue in on their cycling attention spans.

Picture that old practice of reading a serialised novel chapter by chapter, of paying off an encyclopedia set volume by volume, and only having a complete set to reference at the very end of the exercise. Similarly, the game’s chapters aren’t great value for money separately, but PSN also offers the chance to buy them as a set, or as a full set on a disc.

The trouble is that at a certain point, you need to have the whole story in front of you if you’re able to appreciate its smallest parts. And since it’s the small parts that are supposed to make Siren: Blood Curse so accessible, we’re in a bit of a bind. The only answer here is to get hold of the whole game, or don’t try it at all. There’s little resolution at the end of each chapter, and the only thread tying the first few chapters together is the (hopefully) inevitable curiosity of the player. Assuming you feel like protecting an American reality television crew, that is.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

2009-06-14T13:53:00.000+12:00

Evolution Studios

PS3

While you spent the Easter break healthy and hale, enjoying the last of the summer sunshine – or perhaps replanting native forests in some hippy wonderland – I channelled my own brand of pragmatic indolence, and deformed the virtual “interactive” foliage of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift. And, well, if the virtual native birds were foolish enough to flutter near the virtual track, they got churned up along with the mud.

While the pacing and features of the original Motorstorm suffered for being rushed out the door to meet the PS3’s launch window, the extra couple of years have been kind to Evolution Studios, as the modified graphics engine and bells and whistles of follow-up Pacific Rift proves. Racing against a field of five or six different vehicle types still feels subtly wrong – how can it be fair to beat a dune buggy with a big rig in a race? – but it’s a credit to the game that it’s possible to win with each vehicle class. Pacific Rift adds monster trucks to the mix, and offers many more shortcuts on each track, as well as more streams, lagoons and lava – that staple videogame hazard.

Tracks are split up into four element-themed zones – earth, fire, air and water, each with their own pitfalls and challenges. Water tracks allow greater use of the engine-heating boost system, while the fire tracks are a threat to its use. Deep water is a hazard to all but the biggest vehicles, but these vehicles are threatened by their own top-heaviness, requiring a steadier hand to avoid being flipped by a stray rock, or a nudge from opponents. Air tracks are better suited to lighter vehicles, where their low mass means they’ll jump (and boost) further.

Evolution have stripped down the load times for Pacific Rift and beefed up the feature set, while keeping the tactical gameplay mechanics of its predecessor. Chief among those, of course, are picking the best racing lines for each vehicle type, and mastering the shortcuts with judicious use of the boost system. Small vehicles stuck behind the pack late in the race can often recover lead positions by following the heavier trucks, which can knock down dense vegetation on shortcuts.

Cribbing from the Burnout playbook, Pacific Rift has minor attack moves mapped to the L1 and R1 buttons, but these attacks are no more than minor swerves – there’s no real culture of destruction and no grievous penalties for crashed vehicles. This can actually work in your favour when combined with the many shortcuts on each track, and perhaps the low aggression of the other racers matches up with the lack of any real benefit to attacking, bar a quick shove for the sake of imaginary vengeance.

Despite the improvements in this incarnation of the Motorstorm vision, there are some minor niggles. Traction on different surfaces (or different wheels) feels remarkably similar, regardless of whether you’re racing on loose scree or plank bridges. Physics is another weak point, as the weight and turning speeds of the vehicles just won’t map to your initial expectations. Additionally, the sheer range and length of tracks means your failure rate (death by cliff edge) will be very high until you memorise the right lines to pick, by which time you’ll be racing by numbers. Four-player splitscreen racing makes up for these problems somewhat, adding some value to the weak attack buttons, and Eliminator and Speed modes do add replay value to the sixteen tracks on offer.

Overtaking both DiRT and Pure in the current-gen off-road racing stakes, Motorstorm: PR both kicks the tyres and lights the fires. What it lacks in vehicular combat stakes, it gains in a richer palette of racing environments than its competitors – to its lasting credit, it’s no monotone desert racer.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Killzone 2

2009-06-14T13:52:00.000+12:00

Guerilla Games

PS3

For gamers firmly entrenched in Sony’s hardware ecosystem, the Killzone series has been a blessing doled out every few years. After the initial Killzone was released in 2004 for the PS2, its first sequel Killzone: Liberation followed two years later on the PSP, trading in its FPS roots for a top-down, isometric melange of genres: primarily a sci-fi dungeon-crawler with a healthy injection of guns, upgrades and action shooter DNA.

Enter the third game in the series, Killzone 2, and the noble fight is taken to the Helghans’ planet, Helghast. There’s a fair resonance with more contemporary political warfare here, as you oversee a group of marines taking on the indoctrinated troops of a charismatic leader. There’s a stolen experimental nuclear weapon tossed in the mix for good measure, although it feels more like a token WMD justification to invade the planet.

Having missed the first instalment in the series, I suppose I didn’t buy into the game’s revenge theme – taking the fight to the initial aggressors of the interplanetary war – but strangely enough that worked to my advantage, as there suddenly appeared shades of policy I wouldn’t otherwise have considered: this wasn’t my war, one might say, and yet there I was, trying to dismantle the military power of a questionably sane foreign leader, one red-eyed enemy soldier at a time. All Killzone 2 needed for a more uncomfortable resonance would have been a fight over a resource more tangible than propaganda and more believable than a super-nuke.

It is propaganda and the impact of martyrdom on warfare, however, that forms the central moral to the game – it’s a subtle take on the morality and consequences of war. Without giving away too much of the ending, it’s patently obvious that ending a battle is much more difficult than beginning one. (Another sequel or two should wrap things up quite nicely, though.)

To survive on any but the easiest difficulty setting, you’ll need to master the game’s cover system, aim accurately, and predict enemy AI – pretty much par for the FPS course, apart from the fact that Killzone 2’s enemy soldiers are damned smart. They duck quickly, weave unpredictably, and hold cover positions better than any NPCs I’ve seen, and put paid to any thought of traditional run-and-gun tactics.

Killzone 2 outshines even its stellar campaign mode in the multiplayer arena: the 32-player matches include support for four 4-player squads on each team and offer seven combat classes to choose from, although the unlocking system to reach the different classes and abilities takes grinding to a new level. Multiplayer maps spread both horizontally and vertically, and offer a surfeit of cover, ambush spots and atmospheric wreckage for some of the most exciting PvP combat you’ll see this side of the console divide.

There are remarkably few shortcomings in the game (though the omission of co-op play through the campaign is foremost), and even the tacked-on sixaxis controls – mostly for interacting with set-pieces in the game environment and keeping your reticle steady while sniping – don’t detract terribly much, laggy as they are. Level design is stellar, with alternate ways to approach different situations and clever use of architecture as dividers and channels for the game’s action. Where Bungie famously designed the Halo series around 30-second bites of action, Killzone 2 seems to be set up around two-minute set-pieces – enough for players to get breathless and stressed out, but not too much to deal with at any one time, despite the bullets-akimbo nature of each minor battle.

The gruff stereotypical manly-men are certainly present and (for the most part) accounted for, but where Gears 2 offered glamour and glory, Killzone 2 brings the grit and the guts. If you’ll pardon the belaboured analogy, the comparison between the two games could be roughly equivalent to that between their two native consoles – Microsoft throws enough money at its target market, and some of it sticks; Sony throws enough money (and development time) at a franchise, and suddenly there’s a solid first-person follow-up to Killzone. Not that either games are the product of first-party developers, but it’s still telling to see the sorts of games that each console attracts as exclusive releases.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Resistance: Retribution

2009-06-14T13:49:00.000+12:00

SCEA Bend Studio

PSP

For the first handheld outing in the Resistance series, Retribution doesn’t do such a bad job. Despite the natural controller shortcomings of the PSP – most notably the single control nub instead of two analogue sticks – the game overcomes the potential miss-step with a competent aim-assist mode and an automatic cover system that rarely misreads your intentions. This faint praise aside, even being helped out this much doesn’t make the game too easy, as the steady stream of angry enemies, often requiring a quick switch in weapons or attack tactics, keep you busy.

Controlling cockney soldier Lt. James Grayson, you’re after revenge (what else?) following the death of Grayson’s brother in a Chimera conversion centre, which adds a certain frisson to the action. Sure, Grayson may look like biker who failed his gang initiation, and he tosses out lame cockney one-liners without pause (or reflection), but at least he’s a skerrick more interesting than the original Resistance’s Nathan Hale, who pales in comparison to this new loutish protagonist.

If you’re enough of a fan of shiny black plastic to own both a PS3 and a copy of Resistance 2, you’re able to hook up both systems, enabling an ‘Infected’ mode, where you’re given regenerative Chimera powers and new weapons for the campaign. While it’s hooked up, you can also play through the campaign with your PS3 controller, assuming you keep both machines connected while you’re playing. Using the more precise controller, the aim assist mode is turned off, but the novelty enables a more natural mode of play mode.

Multiplayer content in Retribution is very well supported – using either ad-hoc or infrastructure network modes, you can easily set up eight-player games. There’s even support for clans and headset chat, and of course, you get bonus geekery points if you can convince seven other people with PSPs to play the game at the same time as you. Good luck with that.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

A literal repackaging of pagan symbols [Inadvertent video post]

2009-04-02T15:47:00.001+13:00

So it turns out context is everything ...

... and it only costs $3.49 at the Warehouse here in Dunedin, just in time for Easter. I appreciate the misuse of inverted commas, and will endeavour to use air-quotes all 'weekend'. 'Hilarious'.

It's also nice to see that the manufacturers – straight outta RD6, Warkworth – are offering prizes if you can correctly identify the relationship between God and Jesus, and the Easter bunny. "Although Jesus was dead and buried, [blank] raised Him back to [blank].... Christians rejoice that, because of what happened that first Easter, people can now have a special [blank] with God our [blank]. How amazing!!" they say, with two earnest exclamation points. Correct entries go in the draw to win one of five $100 Warehouse vouchers. It's tempting to fill one out with my left hand, for added child-like veritas, but I think I'll pass.

Now I'm just holding out for the inevitable chocolate crucifix in a retail setting, and the incredible, edible body of Our Lord and Saviour – dare I say it, the immaculate confection. Aww yeah.

Not that Jesus wasn't way cool, at least according to King Missile:

Oder auf Deutsch, Jesus war so cool:

Und finally, Beck responds, circa 1992:

Edit: Turns out Tom Waits got there before me with that immaculate confection joke. Bullhorn and prancing auto-confetti performance below. Ignore Letterman, if you please.

Review: Gears of War 2

2009-03-31T14:18:00.000+13:00

Epic Games

Xbox 360

Ultra-gruff ultra men growling gutter insults at the comically inept girl-man rookie? Cutscenes designed from the ground-up to make pubescent gun-loving USA-chanting retards feel warm and fuzzy inside? Killing, killing, killing in a world of beige and cat-vomit gray?
- Michael Jensen

The above comments from my compatriot offer the kind of illumination only a weary gamer can shed upon Gears of War 2. Overly tinged with what we think is existentialism, our response to the game is a little too like a Peggy Lee song for comfort: is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Or, you know, complaining about the fact that we’ve grown up and games – obviously – haven’t. Damnit.

Gears of War 2 is all too much – too many guns, too many explosions, too many subterranean monsters hell-bent on crippling the human race. There’s a vestigial story hidden somewhere in the melange of ultra-violence and gore, but for the escapist market CliffyB and Epic have been aiming at, it’s really outlived its purpose. After all, even Unreal started with a story, before devolving into various states of tournament FPS gibbing and ultra-gruff muscles with heads facing off against scantily clad minxes whose steel bikinis provided damage resistance equivalent to full-body armour. Even odds that Gears will do the same, before yet another hastily assembled grunts-versus-aliens plotline is hashed together to do justice to yet another interminably shiny graphics engine.

This is what happens, presumably, when you hire the writers last. And with the gameplay so relentlessly pure, fast-paced and, dammit, fun, you might well ask, who needs writers? Racing games like the Burnout and GT series don’t need them – they’re all about the cars and the crashes. Puzzle games arguably don’t need them – how much of a story can a match-three-blocks game require? (Puzzle Quest notwithstanding, I hasten to add.) Singstar has never needed a protagonist. But there’s an acceptance implicit in playing those titles – that blurredly fast cars, matching more than three blocks in a row or massacring ‘Take On Me’ in front of your tipsy flatmates are all that’s important to you: that’s what you like; that’s the thesis statement for the game. If you’re happy playing a game that is about killing, about the glories of Epic’s new pixel shader, about a consistent adrenaline rush being more important than a narrative arc, then Gears 2 may well be the game for you.

It’s not rocket science. Gears of War 2, for all its narrative flaws, is one of the most complete third-person shooters on the market. The game is everything a shooter has become, and at a potentially backwater stage in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle, it’s all you have any right to expect. And now that it’s over, can the adults in the room look forward to a new genre, perhaps with some kind of story attached? (We won’t even call them “games,” we promise – they can be “second-person protagonist explorations,” “interactive novels,” “industrial meta-fictions” or some shit.)

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Distributed gaming

2009-03-31T14:17:00.000+13:00

The Games Development Conference has been raging for the past week, and amongst the exaggeration, misrepresentations and flat-out lies of the PR blitz, one company is offering something that could (gasp) change the industry as we know it – after seven years in ‘stealth mode’, OnLive is promising gamers with amazing broadband connections the chance to play console and PC titles, all without the need for an expensive disc-based console. Yeah, they get all the luck.
With high-end computers running at the server-side, and video feed being pumped through the ether to your television or computer screen, it’s the equivalent of cloud computing. The bandwidth issue might hold back the service from these shores for a while, though – a 1.5Mbps connection is required for standard-definition content, while a whopping 5Mbps connection is necessary for HD-quality footage. There are two main hardware options as well – running the service through a PC or intel-based Mac will be cheapest as OnLive can be run through any browser window, but if you’re playing on a television, you can buy a cheap “microconsole” (pictured, with the ugly controller) to relay the signals from the cloud to your television. Controller issues have also been addressed, and OnLive is promising 1-millisecond ping times and a magically minimal signal latency. Demos at the show looked promising, but there’s no proof that the problems of streaming high-res video and managing controller feedback have been solved.
The company is also promising a raft of community features, including spectator support for all users, brag clips from any game you’ve played and friends lists with video-based avatars. OnLive’s promises may sound suspiciously like those of the Phantom console (R.I.P.), but the new service already has the support of nine publishers, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos, EA, Epic, Take Two, THQ, Ubisoft and Warners. With little chance of software piracy, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t sign up and try to tap that mythical untapped market of gamers with spare money but no consoles.

Best of all for the new company, OnLive doesn’t really have any competitors. If it takes off, this distributed gaming thing could be huge. That said, pricing tiers for games haven’t yet been rolled out, and subscription fees to the service could be prohibitive – and without competition, there’d be little incentive to decrease their prices or offer non-restrictive terms and conditions to consumers. And we’re not even beginning to address the question of ownership of non-corporeal digital games. Still; it’s exciting times, the future is now, but where’s my flying car, et cetera.

Edit: Eurogamer smashes the OnLive dream here.

[This article first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Mistkunst

2009-03-27T15:29:00.001+13:00

I should probably write about Das Roq Opera, just because Aaron's pretending to be modest, but conveniently overlooking the fact that he's plugging it every morning on air. Not without reason, though – it's the best thing I've seen at the Dunedin Fringe so far. So here's a collection of my unformed impressions.

It's a 'what-if' conversation spun out of control, a rock (sorry, roq) opera fusing digital art, song, dance, techno melodrama and Greek myth, with hip-hop narration of grandiose proportions, all compressed into just over an hour. Oh, and there's a guy in amazing skin-tight gold pants made up in an odd mix of silent film eyeliner and vaguely Bowie-like Egyptian kohl. So, you know, bonus.

Hitting the Dunedin Fringe square in the face with an open palm, Das Roq Opera opened last night to a sell-out crowd at the Globe Theatre. It starts off, as all the great rock operas do, with a silent film-style montage, which results in a girl being locked in a cellar by her over-protective and Teutonic-tempered father. (Unable to resist a dig at the ODT, I'll just note that the Fritzl parallel had their staff frantically googling DRO to see which real newspapers in real cities had mentioned it.) Riffing on the Medusa myth, there's a voyage, several set-piece scenes with flawless (flawless!) digital sets and a live band accompanying the whole thing. Electro-funk creeps in on the action whenever it can; there's a 'Nights in White Satin' solo for no apparent reason; and there's not a hint of seriousness about the whole thing – as Hannah Gould's dance number at the end would suggest. It's just good, slightly unclean, all-singing, all-dancing operatica. And based on just a scant paragraph in the Fringe line-up, there was a full audience. Granted, we're talking about the Globe, but still.

There were people sitting on the floor in front of me (I would have offered my seat to one of them, but I'd got there early for a reason), I saw a small crowd turned away at the door after the house was full, and everyone loved the show. Kudos to the band, kudos to the dancers (especially Leigh, who danced up a fucking storm), and kudos to all the singers. Likewise to Pip Walls, the director / producer and of course, the writer – Henry Feltham.

There's a recorded interview (courtesy of RDU) with Feltham here, if you're wondering who would script such a preposterous idea. Mac users should force-stop the unresponsive scripts on the page, and anyone should ignore almost every question/comment from the interviewer, who keeps coming back to the Fritzl angle. (All that's over in the first ten minutes of the show, anyway.)

But damn, it was cool. It's showing tonight and tomorrow (Fri and Sat) at 9.30pm – doors opening at 9.00pm if you want to beat the others to a seat – and there's even a double-header on Saturday night - a Late Night Half Drunk Rock Opera Bonus Level, with doors opening at 10.30pm (show starts at 11pm). And in my humble estimation, it'd be arguably more entertaining with a bottle of wine in hand, ready for covert swigging every ten minutes.

Check out the ticket info at www.dunedinfringe.org.nz, or just laugh at it here. Regular tickets are $10 – cool. Concession tickets are $10 – oh...kay. And if you're in a group of six or more? Well, no-one really cares. It's still $10 each. That's just how they roll. And, presumably, roq.

Is Resident Evil 5 racist? It’s hard to say. Is it great fodder for a po-co FIME dissertation? Hell yes.

2009-03-24T14:16:00.000+13:00

With the recent release of Resident Evil 5, we head back to Africa, the cradle of life, to find out more about the origins of the series’ mysterious (and oddly recurrent) T-virus. This necessitates, with transparent videogame logic, the requisite zombie horde to be black. Except, when you’re playing as a white man in army fatigues, with a light-skinned African woman at your side, it feels more than a little uncomfortable to go around targeting the dangerous black zombies.

Former Newsweek writer and gaming pundit N’Gai Croal – gaming journalism’s great hope, now pursuing a career in private consulting for developers – took issue with the game’s first trailer, noting his first reaction (“Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game”) and pointing out that the images “dovetailed” with classic racist imagery.

Not that black zombies are necessarily the problem, according to Croal – rather, the game seems to “tap into … racist iconography,” as even the pre-zombified villagers are depicted as somehow sub-human, and lacking in any empathy compared to the white main character. There aren’t even, as he points out, any African characters you can save – men, women and children are all depicted as dangerous, and they all have to be destroyed.

Early review copies of certain $140 (!) games, it seems, aren’t forthcoming for student magazines, but based on a rushed play-through over the last week, not to mention the torrent of videos showcasing scenarios in the game, RE5 certainly hits squarely in a grey area, skipping any overt discussions of black and white. Which is all too face-palmingly convenient, really.

Shade of anti- and post-colonialism will linger here, I think. Zombie films traditionally eschew racial boundaries while propagating the idea of a completely different sub-human state, and Resident Evil games always pit a few brave souls against soulless multi-nationals and their attendant zombies; RE5 blends the thorny issues of race relations and meddling white Americans with the “Othered” zombie. The shock and horror of these zombies isn’t their juxtaposition with unaffected humans – there’s none of that Land of the Dead zombies-in-overalls-pretending-to-pump-gas schtick going on. RE5’s zombies have red eyes and dress in rags, playing up the mythemes of darkest Africa; the savage and the Other.

But the game’s supposed to be scary, you might well argue; and how better to get that across in this setting than tap into those very mythemes? It’s all too bluntly obvious, to be honest. That Africa is being victimised by pharmaceutical companies is a less readily apparent (but much more meaningful) theme; the idea that Africans are the victims of the colonial powers’ grand plans and that anti-colonial feelings exist, are both present and accounted for. And who can blame these zombies for wanting to fight back against cultural imperialism?

The game’s certainly been a latent firestorm in a forum tea-cup, though, and a potential PR nightmare for the developers at Capcom, should the racism arguments either prove to have merit or spill out into the mainstream press. (Capcom, for its part remaining oblivious to the vaguest possibility of scandal, has been promoting the game’s release by leaving a trail of body parts throughout London – the person who collected the most valuable body parts won a trip to Africa. Arms and legs were worth two points each, torsos were worth three, and a head was worth five points. Some body parts, peppered with chicken liver for added realistic gore, went “missing” during the competition, which didn’t faze the organisers in the slightest.)

Resident Evil 5 was released just over a week ago for PS3 and Xbox 360, so the commentariat will be able to make up their own minds and then construct rational arguments about race, colonialism and gaming. Or they can start new flame-wars. Even odds, I’d say.

[This article first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Flower

2009-03-24T14:15:00.000+13:00

thatgamecompany

PSN, $15.50

Developer Jenova Chen doesn’t play games any more, doesn’t see the attraction of first-person shooters, and doesn’t like wasting his time on games that don't create an emotional connection. Good, then, that he and thatgamecompany have spent their last couple of years of development time tending Flower, a “visual tone poem” of a game that is a natural successor to thatgamecompany’s PSN hit flOw.

Using the PS3’s motion controls, you direct a gust of wind towards flowers in a series of increasing gloomy meadows, aiming to make the world a brighter place and, perhaps, beautify a city overgrown with spiky power pylons. Maybe. The themes all get a little muddled, which is, I suppose, the wont of poetry.

It’s easier to assume that there’s no direct moral to the game – there are traces of commentary about the benefits of renewable energy and the ugliness of traditional pylons as compared to wind turbines, all mediated through the dream of a flower on a windowsill. Certainly it isn’t really made clear until the last couple of levels, where somehow flowers and the wind can eliminate “bad” electricity and replace it with bright colours and the good stuff. Poets, right?

The motion controls work well, if only because there’s no time limit on completing levels. This means mistakes or a missed flower in a sequence aren’t punished, and the only thing you’ll miss is hearing the accompanying note (or later, chord) in the right sequence. Again, no great loss, and it’s a testament to the visual characteristics of the game that it’s often more interesting to “wander” around the levels before making all of the flowers bloom, simply because, well, it’s so damn pretty.

All up, Flower will last for a couple of hours, which is probably about as long as I’d want to spend rotating a PS3 controller before my wrists give up on me. That it ends before the pastoral conceit gets old is a nice touch, although the relatively small levels mean that there’s no real free play mode – I’d happily flick to the game on a whim if I could tool around a level for as long as I wanted without encountering a menu. flOw managed this admirably – although given its origins as a Master’s thesis in game design on the “flow” state of play, that’s hardly surprising. Flower doesn’t allow quite this level of interplay between different levels, but nor does it have any gradation of difficulty – great for validating its purchase to non-gaming flatmates, perhaps, but there’s little reason to go back to the game after it’s been completed.

The levels through which you progress, controlling a gust of wind, are slightly less open than you might expect – it seems that even a powerful breeze can’t get past certain wooden fences. But the budding flowers are spread out over hill and dale, which lends a degree of veritas to the motion as you puff your way along rows of flowers and bring foliage to barren fields (after a couple of hours play, the lyrical aspects of the game begin to overwhelm and influence, as you may well notice).

Flower confuses electricity generation with perennial propagation, but the con-fusion is revealing. Flowers on windowsills dreaming of brightening a dark city, pollen controlling a breath of wind, or a heuristic “she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not” petal-picking solution to global warming – when a game (or poem) is paced so well, the presence or absence of grand themes don’t really matter. All that’s necessary is an enjoyed moment in time – the promise of an objective correlative for the experience – and Flower supplies those moments in spades; even the overuse of colour saturation and rampant bloom (see what I did there?) can be part of the game’s conceit. All it’s really lacking is a rhyming couplet to round things off with a flourish.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

All the best fields lie fallow for months, I'm sure.

2009-03-23T18:33:00.000+13:00

A couple of months into the thesis, and I'm already seeing Borges everywhere. I worry, briefly, that it's like the Discordian rule of five - that certain themes becomes more apparent the more I look for them. (Then I just shrug my shoulders.)

But having seen a couple of solid films in what passes for our friendly neighbourhood baroque theatre (just without the friendliness from anyone on staff, and as an added bonus if you're sitting downstairs, with a pinch of drunken screams from the nearby alley), I'm starting to think that certain filmmakers are cribbing from the same playbook.

First of all - Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth. Without more than a cursory viewing, one can see each of Borges' four kernels of fiction: the double, the travel through time, the story within a story, the contamination of reality by a dream. Having read Labyrinths et al altogether too many times, the references to Zhuangzi and the butterfly at the end of the film felt tacked on, an unnecessary throw towards explaining the conceit, but I'll take it. (In an ideal world Matt Damon wouldn't fuck it up with a bit part, but I'll still take it.)

More glorious, however, was Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. (Wired covered the hell out of this movie last November, publishing a meta-article on Kaufman, and letting publishing geeks the world over see the sausage factory at work. The creative director detailed his part in the process here.) But the film? A play within a play, mirrors upon mirrors and progressive regression until the withdrawal from reality and subsequent death of the creator – check. Most strongly resonating with me, though, was the Borges quote that wasn't even mentioned in the film, but applies almost beyond words: "Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face."

So much so, that I drove home repeating the final phrase in my head over and over - "the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face". The part stands for the whole, the general stands for the specific. I'm so enamoured of this that a couple more weeks on Petrarchan sonnets wouldn't go amiss at this stage.

That nothing bothered me more than the dissonant references to Schenectady, NY, probably says more about me than the film. Although if I'd known of the city beforehand, it would have been smoother sailing. Balance, the demand for a more and more structured mimesis, and the abrupt ending (fade to white FTW!) made for the high points, and only the fact that the inward focus meant the ideal repetitive world didn't subsume the rest of New York keep the film from eating into more of my thesis mind-space.

Speaking of re-using the big four ideas and constructing fresh narratives from them, I'm turning over in my head the idea of a circular show about people working for some under-funded or mis-managed association. Key to this is the notion of having no sympathetic characters, the ready co-existence of the banal and the atrocious and a pervasive and depressing subtext that branches into the dialogue. I can do con-fusion, apparent idealism, and a pervasive lack of coherence like nothing else. Surely there's a market for this outside of comparative literature....

~

This week I wrote something stupid about Resident Evil 5, and something slightly more glowing about thatgamecompany's beautiful Flower. Next week I'm skipping the review basics entirely and instead writing about narrative in my 'review' of Gears of War 2, and hopefully after that I'll be free enough to start some source material comparisons with Beowulf and Conan, and their most recent hack-slash incarnations. Leading up to, of course, the inevitable travesty of Dante's Inferno (tagline: "Go to Hell". I'm not kidding.) Dear Lord. Dante's all up in the demons' faces in the trailer, below, stabbing ghouls with a crucifix. No word on whether the ultimate goal of the game would be, but I presume it's not saving Beatrice from Lucifer. Otherwise we'd be retreading Ghosts 'n' Goblins territory.

Granted, the nine circles of hell would lend themselves to game levels rather nicely (the dark wood as a tutorial level, perhaps?), and there's a built-in trilogy option if it takes off, but goddamn if it doesn't look like a poor man's God of War, with extra crucifix.

Anyway, work, work, and more work. But if you're up for what passes as banter around these parts, you could listen to 91FM (Dunedin) at 8am and 9am weekdays. (If there's no banter on a certain day, sorry. We're not particularly chatty at the best of times, and certain brands of topical humour began and ended with Murphy Brown.) Alternatively, you'll hear the day's top news stories read out loud, then slightly undermined or roundly castigated, which is probably the best way to do it.

Review: Noby Noby Boy

2009-03-10T14:13:00.000+13:00

Namco Bandai

PSN ($7.90)

Made by Keita Takahashi, designer of the popular Katamari Damacy, Noby Noby Boy makes a little less sense than I had any right to expect. The game, available for a nominal sum on the Playstation Network, makes the most of a rather simple conceit – as the snake-like Boy, you can eat anything you can see on a level, allowing you to stretch yourself out, whip yourself around, and fling objects into the air. Quite what the ludic purpose of this is, I’m not sure – beyond being able to tie yourself in knots with the precision handling of two analogue sticks – but it all adds to the colour and general fun of each level, and besides, watching cartoonish people trip over your elongated rainbow midsection never gets old. Especially if you decide to devour them after the fact.

If you’ve got your PS3 console online, you can collaborate with other players all over the world – once you’ve eaten and stretched the Boy enough, reached certain worldwide total lengths (which are stored online in the form of a space-dwelling, ever-expanding character named Girl), bonus levels will be unlocked for all players. In a real way, then, you’re helping other gamers by contributing to Girl’s length, and as long as enough people keep playing, there’ll be new levels popping up in the game every few weeks.

In terms of immediate value for money, you might not be terribly impressed. $7.90 for a glorified version of that Snake game your flatmate has on his oh-so-generic Nokia phone? Not so cool, Keita Takahashi. But some people cough up this much money for a single drink. (Or more, if you want your drink to match Boy’s rainbow colours.) The game is, however, perfect for pick-up-and-play relaxation and is as logical a next step as you can imagine from Katamari Damacy. Which is to say, it shares nothing with its predecessor other than a colourful art direction and a pervasive lack of context.

Noby Noby Boy is more about the experience than the destination. There are no enemies, time limits, or real hints about just what a player should be doing. The stages are randomly generated, and you can switch between them at will, regardless of your progress. While the game does support Trophies, they seem to pop up randomly, and there’s no real objective, beyond advancing Girl outside of the solar system and forcing the developers to make more levels. Ultimately, Noby Noby Boy is simply good clean fun; a brightly coloured, confusing and slightly rewarding way to fill in time.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Dead Space

2009-03-10T14:11:00.000+13:00

EA (Redwood Shores)

PS3, Xbox 360, PC

EA’s surprising turn last year towards the relatively uncharted waters of – gasp! – new IP paid off for the company and gamers alike. Mirror’s Edge caught the spirit of parkour in its first-person urban dystopia (and caused motion sickness in countless couch potatoes); and Dead Space hits the space horror nail firmly on each of its Giger-inspired heads.

Survival horror games can be a mixed bag at the best of times, as Resident Evil’s many imitators will attest – there’s a fine line between selling the story and pitching it too far for your average willing suspender of disbelief to accept. But the space horror genre – characters avoiding monster x while flanked on all sides by an unforgiving vacuum, the innate terrors of deep space threatening insanity to all and sundry – can be a little more forgiving.

There’s no doubt Dead Space borrows liberally from the sci-fi classics, both of literature and film. Shades of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are readily apparent, and aspects of the Alien quadrilogy, Hellraiser: Bloodline, even Event Horizon are familiar strains throughout the game; but in the best tradition of adaptations, the old material has been made thoroughly new. Apart from the main character’s name, which is a bit of a clanger.

Controlling Isaac Clarke (wince) from an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective, your job is to unravel the mystery of the USG Ishimura, a “planet cracker” ship that has lost contact with the powerful Concordance Extraction Corporation (think Aliens’ Weyland-Yutani).

After receiving a confusing (delusional?) message from someone Isaac knows, then being separated from your team in the traditional convolutions of the genre, you soon find out that the former crew of the Ishimura has been turned into monsters, and you’re left to fight your way through them. But here’s the thing: it’s not a military ship, you’re just an engineer, and there are precious few weapons on board, so you’re forced to make do with the tools of your trade, which include plasma cutters, saw blades and mining explosives.

As a nice touch, there’s no on-screen heads-up display in the game – inventory management is projected holographically from your suit, which also ticks off your health indicator along its spine. It adds up to a compelling and immersive (and difficult as hell) experience, a far cry from the usual inventory-as-pause screen scenario.

Also slightly different from your average survival horror scenario, the monsters – called “Necromorphs” in the game designer’s least appealing nomenclature decision – can’t be killed by the traditional headshot or “three in the chest.” The only way to kill them is to employ “strategic dismemberment,” which basically means cutting off their limbs one by one, aiming carefully and switching between your weapons’ horizontal and vertical axes to do so. At first it seems like a cynical switcheroo, making you shoot the arm or legs rather than the heads – what difference would it really make? – but the net effect is that the difficulty (and subsequent freaky atmosphere) is amped up. It’s difficult to stop, aim precisely and shoot when there’s a big fuck-off ex-corpse with stabbing vestigial limbs rushing at you, after all.

In terms of sound design, Dead Space is a winner. There’s discordant music swelling dramatically as you’re backed into a corner, the corridor-amplified caterwauls of monsters or insane crewmates-who-are-about-to-become-monsters, odd scritching sounds coming from the corners of the room that make you wonder from which side you’re about to be attacked – in short, this is one of few games it’s advisable to wear a good set of headphones while playing.
Likewise, turn off the lights – it’s easier to be scared in the dark. The game’s palette is almost irritatingly bleak, but when played in a darkened room, it’s freaky as hell. Buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy of this game to play this Friday 13th, and you won’t regret it.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Fear and Loathing in the D.C. Wasteland

2009-03-03T17:41:00.000+13:00

A curious duplicity comes into focus with the release of Fallout 3; the game’s timing was imprecise but close enough to real events. As the world's eyes were turned towards the concept of a new America freed from the ills of the Bush era, so were those of gamers fixated on Bethesda's microcosmic version of the same. Well-known subway stations, memorials to long-dead presidents – all are present and accounted for in both iterations of D.C., all shelter the mistakes of the past, and offer the vague hope of a society free from oppression.

For reasons both too numerous and too readily apparent to mention here, I wasn't able to attend the inauguration of the new U.S. President, Barack Obama. Instead, I attended an altogether different ceremony, in a landscape of a lower resolution – albeit a more idealised one – and thus better suited to recall.^* Touring the D.C. Wasteland of Fallout 3, one can avoid the pitfalls of reality, the discomfort of crowds, while still cashing in on the ‘I-was-there-when’ veritas of the magical moment.

In the real world, crowds of adoring democrats, republicrats and assorted hangers-on cried and proclaimed their love for fictive political constructs, tiny paper flags and standing outside in the cold; in the wasteland, crowds of ghouls, Glowing Ones and the inevitable supermutants appeared rather annoyed that I had disrupted their unending search for human flesh, and promptly triggered an instanced attack. Despite the skirmishes and constant search for stimpacks, I decided I had the better deal than those who made the journey to the real Washington – warmth, maps, and haptic feedback being infinitely preferable to biting winds, jingoism and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Shepard Fairey, a man whose idea of creativity is to watch three scenes from John Carpenter’s They Live. (The PS3’s loading times being what they are, however, the idea of a four-year wait to reset a bad situation may not be inconceivable.)

Exiting at Foggy Bottom station in my ideal version of D.C., there was a wasteland wanderer begging for purified water or bottlecaps (the local equivalent of money). The U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger would later write of running into a homeless man outside Foggy Bottom on inauguration day, a man with the audacity to ask for change. “Even the homeless have talking points,” Schlesinger quips, before fighting against the tide of humanity to watch the inauguration from the safety (and warmth) of his office.

Parallel structures abounded that day. Was the version of the inauguration I ‘attended’ any less real than that version Schlesinger avoided? Certainly we both saw the same television coverage, but the version of Washington D.C. I've spent so much time in is simply more real than the other place. I know the tripwires around Arlington Cemetery, the difficulties in navigating the trenches in front of the Capitol building, the inadequacies of defending the Lincoln Memorial. Why, then, would I really need to go to Washington, if not to destroy my memories of the city as I know it?

* When John Key stepped up to become our own nation’s new Prime Minister last year, however, I didn’t feel the need to find some next-gen version of the ceremony I could pretend to attend. A bootleg copy of Dig Dug and a damp towel perfectly emulated both the self-congratulatory Parnell house-party and Key’s speaking ability, respectively.

In Which We Merely Say That Time Will Tell

2008-11-17T11:58:00.000+13:00

In between sitting out the remainder of a full-time job (split by watching the bottom line tick over and applying judicious amounts of certain peripheral-based rhythm games), and helping putting together an updated framework and fresh content for an altogether more noble endeavour, there's also the growing pressure of finding oneself a punchline for a lack of written output, referred to in passing and in social networking status updates. At least now I know how Meiks feels.

But my text having migrated, as it were, here we are.

And here we all are, in the thrall of a National-led government that has – shock and horror – apparently thought about voter representation, and not merely cementing a 51% share of the House and going about business. Time will tell, of course, whether any promises are kept, whether the long-awaited tax cuts will materialise or indeed be a responsible act, or whether the inclusion of the Maori Party in the Nat/Act/UF melange was more than insurance for 2011; all the same, on Sunday afternoon I felt a sudden warmth to see the Maori Party holding ministerial roles for Maori Affairs and the Community and Voluntary Sector. This was quickly stemmed when Tariana Turia giggled her way through the well-staged press conference. (But at least Turia didn't have the perma-smug mask that Key seems to have made his own.) She was, however, looking for all the world as if she'd got more than she expected out of Key, a man with a homestead so grandiose there are apparently serious talks about building a new outhouse for the Diplomatic Protection Squad. According to the SST, the DPS is currently squatting in a caravan while they wince at the nearby market rents – one can only hope they've got an awning ready for those brief Parnell showers. And maybe a swing tennis set in case it's sunny out.

It's good to see in the Maori Party / National agreement, though, that the larger electorates will finally get funding for more support staff. Consider, if you will, the extra time and effort it takes to co-ordinate any kind of resources for Te Tai Tonga (147,000 square km) compared to Epsom (22 sq km). And it only took a year and a half for that particular Goulter report recommendation to go through.

I do hope, finally, that I'm not the only one who's feeling the unease of seeing a segment of the mainstream media fawn over the new PM-designate, self-made millionaire or no. Sure, it's an easy angle on a rather beige man, but I'd really rather be told that JK reheats his cups of teain the microwave than see helicopter shots of his poolhouse. Somewhat distastefully, just a couple of days ago, passive TV news viewers saw Parnell featured as a flourishing suburb despite the much-editorialised hard times. A healthily made-up lady in a dairy, barely missing her soundbite cue, mentioned the dozens of champagne bottles she'd gotten through in the leafy suburb. One local real estate functionary, more on the ball, referred to a recent $9m house sale as proof that the economy wasn't in such bad shape. Suffice it to say that these people, the PM-dez among them, will not be the first ones feeling the crunch. And suffice, once more, to say that these people are not our people. Call it tall poppy syndrome in a selfish meritocracy, but I'd rather hold back my praise until Key improves day-to-day life for anyone other than the Parnell Players.

Two Thousand And Eleven

2008-11-14T15:22:00.000+13:00

In an interview on Radio One this morning, incoming National List MP, failed Dunedin North candidate, and lover of short skirts Michael Woodhouse said that "the campaign for 20011 begins now". That the newly elected politician is showing such long-term fervour can only be constructive for the people of Dunedin. Woodhouse has also said he will set-up 'clinics' on the University of Otago campus for students to bring their concerns to him. He has also hinted - perhaps naiively - that he wants to push for editorial space in student magazine. What is a concern is that this long-term drive doesn't seem to be, in public at least, reciprocated by the Opposition Elect.

It wasn't foreshadowed, but it came as no surprise that Helen Clark stood down as leader of the Labour Party on Election Night. It showed her willingness to speed up the wound-licking process and get on with recovery. It's also no surprise that Phil Goff was announced as her successor. Recently in the United States Presidential race we saw the complementary partners approach at play in the selection of Vice-Presidential wannabes. A young black man chose an old white crank. An old white crank chose a retarded 'Hockey Mom'. The idea is to choose a running mate that provides properties that you lack, to broaden your potential support-base. What little speculation there was centred around people like David Cunliffe, to balance the left-right factions of the party, but two white men from Auckland was considered too narrow an image. Lianne Dalziel is female, Christchurch-based, and has a union background, with an almost creepy resemblance to Sarah Palin to combat the 'sick of her teeth' crowd. Instead, Labour went with Annette King.

It's not much of an ideological stretch to see King/Goff at the helm of the National Party, quite frankly. Touch on criminals? Why, it was Phil Goff as Justice Minister that made Legal Aid a loan, and introduced unqualified Court Registrars as defendants first point of contact within the court system, encouraging them to plead guilty in a nation-wide efficiency drive. Goff has already launched into apology mode - and I guess we now get to see where he and Clark differed in opinion.

This then leaves the centre-left hoping for either of two outcomes: this is a caretaker Labour leadership, priming someone like Cunliffe for 2014, or the Greens grow some left wings and eat into the traditional Labour support the way National pandered to their centrists this year. Over time this could leave the left without one major party, which is fine unless MMP gets biffed out over the next few years. Campaigning now for 2014 seems a bit defeatist, however realistic it may be, and Labour is asking a lot of it's traditional support base's patience if this is the case. Let us not forget the damage done between 1990 and 1996, damage not entirely undone by 2008.

Elsewhere, John Key's negotiations for forming a government may set an MMP record. Without the meandering of Winston Peter's, and associated re-arranging of baubles, National want this done in time for Key to swan off to Peru for APEC (can't wait to see his smug face beaming out of traditional Peruvian garb), and they have let everyone know this it would seem. The Maori Party, Act and United Future had all met with Key by early this week. The real question was how Tariana Turia was going to be able to uphold their noble proclamations of direct democracy. 'We will take any agreement to Maoridom, and let them decide' was always the angle. What Maoridom got this week were rushed hour-long meetings that refused to discuss the content of the deal, and simply asked for blind support from the masses.

Ok, so they have no choice. The options for the Maori Party as of Sunday was nothing at all, or next to nothing with the Nats, so it's a bit of a no-brainer. And, considering the furore over the Foreshore and Seabed that spawned the party in the first place, going with Labour is no less of a sellout than getting into bed with Key, Hide, Dunne and Co. On that note, why do National have such a hard-on for Peter Dunne? They don't need him for numbers, or for ideology, and if he sat in the middle of nowhere he could indeed fade into nothing over 3-6 years which is surely good news for everyone. What bothers me about the Maori Party ramming through its consultation process to get John to Peru is that for short-term gains, and the possibility of scrapping the dole, their long term survival could be toast if National sell out the middle and lower classes - which include a large section of Maori Party voters I would imagine - like they did in the 1990s.

To lighten the mood pre-weekend, I am now off to fight old art matrons for finger food at the opening of Rita Angus: Life and Vision, 140 works - originally curated for Te Papa in Wellington - showing at the DPAG. Curator Jill Trevelyan will present a floor talk on the whole thing from 3pm tomorrow. If that's not enough for your monocle, you can check out the Royal New Zealand Ballet production of Don Quixote at the Regent Theatre this Saturday/Sunday, if you're in Dunedin.

It's Not Just Politics.

2008-11-12T15:54:00.000+13:00

So, apologies to some, and a relief to others I'm sure. But the fallout from the weekend has been the catalyst for driving me headfirst into more immersive distractions. At very different ends of the sonic scale, two men tucked in the fringes of the music community have provided more solace than most.

Matt Middleton is an institution in Dunedin, and a man who bears the burden that comes with the man/myth/legend status and for good reason. He's spent good tracts of time as a fairly comprehensive and compulsive bridge burner, a man who seemed hellbent on sub-conscious self-destruction. In his early twenties he landed a release on the already fading but still notorious Flying Nun imprint, as Crude, the most prolific / noted of Middleton's monikers I suppose, and 1997's Inner City Guitar Perspectives was a compilation culled from earlier cassette releases. Two years later, Middleton's trash-rock / swampfest / garage trio The Aesthetics had their debut LP My Right To Riches issued by Thurston Moore's label Ecstatic Peace. Kansas-based label Mental Telemetry (now Invisible Generation) - home of Six Organs of Admittance, The Magic Carpathians and fellow Dunedin headfucks The Futurians - have also lent support to a swag of Crude/Aesthetics releases half way around the world. So how, more than a decade on from being dumped on the doorstep of New Zealand's self-styled indie/lo-fi godfather label, is this man still so unremarked upon?

Because this is Matt Middleton who wouldn't bother getting on the plane to go to gigs. The man who would tear a sign down and throw it through the window of the casino restaurant. The man who knocked himself unconscious mid-set by smashing his head into his microphone. The truth and the legend blur constantly, of course, but the end result is that the myth is the prominent lens through which people see and read him, and sadly that often means that people don't take the time to listen to his music, which is truly sad, because by 2008 the man and the music have matured to the point that this truly feels like a pivotal point in the Middleton ouevre. More than in any time I can remember, he is attacking the music with a fury that finally fits the searing stomp-skronk-wail-riot of the sonic vision.

A one man vaudevillain, crooning demented lounge ballads over thumping electro freakouts, and taking charge of the saxophone like it's some kind of man possessed, needing to be tamed and tamed it shall be.

It is easy to forget when people are making music that doesn't fit into handy three and a half minute blocks, stacked mile high; music that eschews form in favour of function, that sets about digging cavities into your frontal lobe so you never have the option of returning to a life like you led before you heard, frontal assaults on the mind and body, that the whole often obscures the musicality that flourishes within it. Crude's jazz background, a clarinet player initially, is what holds it together, stitching anarchic improvisations together literally by a thread. It is also the real flourish behind him, pausing hesitantly, hovering over a fret board, then lurching suddenly into scratchy trills that pierce the swampy depths below. It's not always easy listening music, and don't expect to be let off lightly either by the production of the music or the live performing of it, this is stuff you need to digest, but thanks to the way Middleton can so effortlessly cast you under his fidgety spell, the challenge soon gives way to a spatial-temporal realignment before your very eyes and ears, taking you to a jaded post-apocalyptic overpass, howling at the moon to no avail.

Crude is Crude, but Crude is also The Aesthetics. Often unfairly labelled simply as a Crude band, they belong to two very different spaces. The trashy regurgitation of Motor City rock n roll filtered through the rising pretense of New York No Wave - live at least, references to The Contortions finally seem valid again, thankfully - sets The Aesthetics apart from the future worlds Crude inhabits. But Middleton is an auteur, and while it is negligent to deny the impact of the list of past influences and band mates, there's no denying that the scope of the sound can still be boiled down to one man. Same goes for the far more infrequent works of jazz-freak rogues Anomie Ensemble.

Matt Middleton is a small man who makes a lot of noise. Auckland composer Warwick Blair could not be closer to the polar opposite of this. An imposing figure, dressed largely in black with a formidable paw for the shaking. For such a giant of a man, Blair's compositions have deftness and subtlety that are astonishing. Much like Middleton, you are also unlikely to see his music videos pop up on C4, or on the radio. His projects are highly conceptual, and seem more at home in a gallery space than at a pub. He is comfortable with the term composer being substituted for songwriter. His latest epic, Stars was written with a gallery space in mind, and it made it's full length debut here in Dunedin a few weeks back. Simply, it was one of the most stunning, and more importantly immersive, musical experiences I have ever had. In short, it's an ambient composition that plays uninterrupted for 24 hours, but around the room is an accompanying ambient film by astronomer/artist Paul Moss, in real time: clouds and rainbows during the day, starscapes at night. The stars are a bit too static, says Blair. It's a work in progress. At the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Blair played his 24 hour opus from 4pm on a Saturday to 4pm on a Sunday. The gallery remained open all night, and you could come and go as you pleased. I went back six times.

Hearing Warwick Blair talk about his music you could be forgiven for thinking it was the work of a man more interested in the programming than in the songwriting. The day is broken into eight movements, each exactly three hours long. Then, each three hour section is broken into eight movements, each 22.5 minutes long. Somewhere roughly in the middle of each of these drops the central motif. I use the word drop rather lightly here. Echoing digital percussion rings out clear over lush rolling ambience, more hypnotic perhaps than engaging. And then, out of nowhere, comes the incredible haunting voice of classical Indian singer Sandhya Rao Badakere, sitting on a pile of cushions in the middle of the room. You can't even see her breathing, but the voice that comes out of her belongs to another world and another time. And then her twenty-two and a half minutes are up, and she is gone again. Not before a dislocatingly human hack out in the foyer.

For logistical reasons, it is difficult for Stars to be presented in its entirety, although a four-hour preview version has been produced in Wellington. It's not something you can digest in one sitting, a la Warhol's Empire, but it is a truly beautiful treasure, in a time when it is more difficult than ever to use the term sincerely. If you missed it, don't worry, he is bringing it back to the Dunedin Fringe Festival next year, and an expanded version (with screens on the roof and ceiling) will be showing at Galatos in Auckland for the Fringe early next year. It gets better. After this is an eight stanza opera - ruminations on love, death, sex, drugs, dance etc - with a jazz singer, two opera singers and a folkie, with three multi-instrumentalists. The 'Dance' section is a tempo-mapped remake of New Order's 'Blue Monday', the biggest selling 12" single of all time.

Escapism, pure and simple. Don't take on an empty stomach, and if problems persist, consult a physician. In times like this sometimes only prescription medicine can numb the pain.

Electile Dysfunction: Numb Notes On A Long Weekend

2008-11-10T15:18:00.000+13:00

Well there you have it.

The moment all filthy pinko lefties had been denial about for the last couple of years has come to fruition, and the wonderful world of democracy has delivered our country, in the midst of the turbulent economic situation worldwide, into the hands - as David Slack has noted - of a champion gambler, who celebrates his victory in a gambling emporium. The victory was more emphatic than most dared conjure, but from the perspective of any potential social conscience over the next six years, and that's rather optimistic, it would have been good if they got the numbers on their own. For all his rhetoric about Helen Clark pulling together a "five-headed beast" to run the country, it looks like John is set this week to cobble together a centre-right Frankenstein of his own.

Speaking of which, they didn't thaw out Sir Roger long enough before his televised address on Saturday night, and his eyes took on a glow that burned the colour of Chicago. Perhaps a little less freezer time, and a little more time in Rodner's tanning booth might be in order. Structural changes must be made. Their only real policy seemed to be Sir Rog as Minister of Finance, but have backed down as a potential coalition partner, and will instead offer support on confidence and supply. Hide and maybe Heather Roy will get Ministerial portfolios, but won't be sitting around the Cabinet table. Don't think you're safe, yet. Douglas would make a fine head of the so-called Razor Gang Key has pledged to hack through the civil service. Or chairing a Select Committee or two, if he can stay awake that long. He really makes John McCain seem quite spritely. They get five MPs in total, including the terrifying Sensible Sentencing Trust advocate David Garrett, and Rodney Hide is drumming up a storm, taking their 3.72% support as a serious mandate for reform. This from a party that couldn't even get more votes than Winston Peters. The Nats get 59 seats, and Act's support takes that to 64, which is enough to govern, but not enough for Key. He has openly courted Peter Dunne, and the Maori Party, which could eventually make it 70 on their side to 52 against. Decisive indeed.

Drawing is as many of the minor parties as he can gives Key frightening leverage, and a fantastic way of evading responsibility for the more unpopular reforms that could be on the way. They have the mandate to move in more of a neo-liberal economic direction than they would dare institute themselves, and blame it on Act, and then push the moral conservative angle if it suits them and dump the blame on the doorstep of Peter Dunne. If they wanted to start locking up prostitutes again, or give us our right to bash our kids, there's nothing stopping them. They can call them policy concessions, rather than party policy. Not that National's justice programme isn't worrying enough on it's own. It plans to give judges discretion to sentence a violent offender to life in prison without parole, for a first offence, if the crime is "heinous" enough. Further, second offenders for violent crime (which includes theft in Key's initial proposal but as with most policy was a bit vague and non-committal), will also be no longer eligible for parole. Anyone who is arrested for a crime that could carry a maximum penalty of jail time will also be forced to submit DNA to a crime register. That includes the crime of being in possession of spotting knives, of all things. Whether or not it is destroyed when and if you are cleared is unclear. Having been screened for DNA myself in the past, for 'elimination purposes', they aren't that good at keeping you informed about what's going on. Hell, they didn't even tell me when they no longer considered me a rapist.

So, have we formed a coalition police state wrapped in the robes of the religious right? I am preparing for the worst, but it doesn't seem necessary to get angry for it's own sake. But we have to be careful and make sure we actively resist the New Right regime should the worst eventuate. Active Opposition to the Government has to start now. This is day one of the 2011 campaign.

Under Clark and Cullen's management, this country has seen nine years of economic stability, until very recently, and they can hardly be held responsible for that. On top of that, it has been a great season of progressive reform: the success of KiwiSaver, the establishment of a centrally owned bank in KiwiBank, the right for same-sex and secular couples to recognised Civil Unions, the legalisation and regulation of prostitution, the removal of the excuse of reasonable force in child abuse cases, the 'clean slate bill' wiping your criminal record for ancient minor offences, the banning of smoking cigarettes in bars/clubs/restaurants/schools/offices, the reacquisition of the national rail system, the unbundling of Telecom's monopolistic practices, finally establishing a systemic working solution to the national climate change responsibility, the Working For Families scheme offering necessary relief to stay-at-home parents, nationalising the compensation industry and removing the interest charged on student loans for active students and graduates living in New Zealand make up a short but breathless list.

It hasn't all been bread and roses, as they say, and seeing as Phil Goff's meddling in the Justice Dept is some of the ugliest, it is ominous that he is being tipped as the replacement for Labour's outgoing leader. Labour seem to be making a push to the centre. It's no small sign that they put forward Clare Curran (from P.R) rather than Don Pryde (EPMU - President - who eventually fought the losing battle against Bill English in Clutha-Southland) in the safety of David Benson-Pope's empty Dunedin South seat. They are looking to the future, and that doesn't seem to include their working class roots as much as many would like, with some consolation coming from the oft-tipped Andrew Little (EPMU - National Secretary) to fill the shoes of Labour Party President Mike Williams. With the advent of a slightly diluted version of Wayne Mapp's notorious 90-Day Probation Policy just around the corner, giving employers of twenty employees or less the right to fire workers without recourse to Personal Grievance claims, the centre-left could use some gnashing Union Teeth.

There is new blood in Labour's ranks, despite the carnage, but the centre-left, inside and outside of politics, needs to be far more active in the next three years. History suggests National will get at least a couple of terms in, but it isn't unachievable for Labour to revive itself in 2011 to the same degree National did in 2005. And the Greens, sadly, learned that fighting a Presidential campaign without a personality to lead it can only get you so far, even if you have the best billboards and t-shirts. The Greens need profilic representatives, or candidates at least, to bring them the attention they will need to push on past being simply the 'best of the rest'. The real challenge is who will step up in the Beehive and challenge the New Right? Clark and Cullen may or not be around the full term, and like his politics or not, you have to admit having Winston Peters around would have been useful for sheer antagonism. I mean, Trevor Mallard can't do it all himself.

So, a sombre and sobering result for the nation, perhaps. Or a call to arms for the socially aware, most optimistically. Disaffected liberals are the centre-left's biggest enemy, and frustratingly, it would seem, some of the most difficult people to mobilise. The lack of voter numbers in Auckland Central, for example, let a 28 year-old middle manager with no political experience waltz into one of the most crucial seats in the country. What will it take to get the cool kids to vote? Bomber Bradbury for Auckland Central in 2011? Perhaps for the Greens? It might well take someone with their own television channel at their disposal to break the conservative grip over the news media. When the media scrum tried to get at Key, who needed a team of SIS thugs at his own party HQ, it seemed to be the first time they were prepared to question their idol. Wait until the King has been crowned, and then it's safe to find out his glaring inadequacies. Their self-made prophecy came true, because nobody doubted them.

Through it all, I suppose, it may be bad news for bureaucrats, but it could be boom times for punditry and satire. The latter of these could prove to be a useful mode of engaging a tough and media savvy demographic the way that Neo-Liberalism seems to make the 20 and 30-something Commerce grads wet. Gateway politics, maybe?

I promise more optimistic distractions next time, but in the meantime, the most retarded band promo, in a hilariously feline way, is right there for you to stare blankly at.

Review: Fable 2

2008-10-23T14:08:00.000+13:00

Lionhead Studios

Xbox 360

In 2004, Peter Molyneaux and the team at Lionhead Studios made some massive promises, and while the original Fable was an enjoyable action-RPG, the promised ‘anything and everything’ just failed to deliver – you could make the villagers like you, but once you’d done it once to see their reactions, there wasn’t really a pay-off to doing so. Changing your status from good to evil was a fun gimmick, but it didn’t add terribly much to the gameplay, beyond accessing certain quests.

Four years and many more promises later, Molyneaux still wants you to feel "very f***ing cool" when you’re playing Fable 2, he’s added a dog as your companion, removed stats from the different clothing you can wear, updated the graphics, and, for some odd reason, really screwed up the game’s menus. But it’s still an engrossing game, despite the flaws – you’ll hit the walls on the much-vaunted person-to-person interactions pretty quickly, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Set 500 years after the first game, Fable 2 sees the player set course on a classic revenge mission, to right the wrongs done against you (and your family) in the game's opening scenes. In doing this, you'll have to assemble a kind of dream team of Heroes - corresponding to the three experience trees the game offers - Skill, Will, and Strength. Seeing other Heroes fit into these categories did make me wonder where my Hero fit in, and it might have been interesting to see your Hero take the role of one of the three, but I suppose there's more to be gained by letting players alter their specialities than locking them in early on.

Molyneaux apparently made a point of removing the stat bonuses from clothes, which is an interesting design choice – after all, clothes should just be about appearance bonuses, and not good or evil – but as far as I can tell (sixteen hours into the game, my Albion-wide property portfolio all but complete), there just isn't a big enough range of outfits to justify Molyneaux's decision. Lucky, then, that you can dye your clothes any colour you want - provided you've found or bought the right dye. (There's even a goth Achievement, which you get after you dye your hair and all your clothes black, as well as putting on black makeup in a beauty shop.)

Another hyped design choice is the addition of a dog to accompany the player throughout (almost) the entire game, and this one really pays off – there's a real emotional bond with the dog, for all that it can't do much more than bark when there's treasure nearby, and attack enemies when they're on the ground. There's even a subset of emotions available to let your dog know just what you think of it, and a rubber ball you can throw for the dog, although the options available are slightly more complex than necessary, given the dog's reactions.

And that's just one more oddball thing about Fable 2 – for all of its supposed complexity, it still feels incredibly dumbed-down. It's an odd dichotomy; a lot of work obviously went into the game, and there's a lot happening behind the scenes, I'm sure, but binary choices (good/evil, corrupt / pure, male/female, rich/poor etc) are barely choices at all, because they don't result in any kind of real change in the world – at least not a change that matters, or one that alters the main storyline. Your 'relationships' with NPCs carry no emotional heft, even after you've 'married' or 'slept with them', and it's simple to reset their opinions of you by giving gifts, hitting them or simply throwing gold around willy-nilly. Yes, you can buy a pub, give the beer away for free and get everyone in town drunk, but it's the equivalent of turning on the disaster mode in Sim City, for all it means to you. And while at least there is a choice, all it really offers is a reason to play through the game one more time. And once you've gone through the game as a saintly man, or a downright evil woman (my first two characters – and what does that say about me?) I don't see a great reason to play it again. (Although that may change once online multiplayer is patched up, so watch this space for an update.)

The main storyline will last a good ten to twelve hours, after which you’re free to run around in the world you’ve saved (or doomed), buy property, run businesses in a very stripped-down fashion (you’re pretty much limited to raising or lowering prices), get married (as often as you like), have children (as many as you like), and work as a bartender, woodchopper or blacksmith. (Well, I say ‘work’, but it’s more like a rhythm game with only one button – when the dot is next to the green zone, press A, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseaum, or ad repetitive strain injury-um.)

Of course, all of these sidelines are available while you’re polishing off the main quest as well, but I found that they simply served to unnecessarily complicate the game. Yes, Fable 2 has a rather large variety of gametypes and play styles, but the game focuses on the same types as its predecessor – story-driven action-RPG, and the open-ended world sim, and they’re best taken separately.

Also available at any point are the pub games, which were released separately on Xbox Live, and let you merge a Pub Games patron with your Fable 2 hero to win or lose massive amounts of gold. Of the three, there’s really only one that’s worth playing – Tower of Fortune. Spinnerbox is pure chance, whereas Keystone is too involved for casual gamers or anyone looking for a diversion. Better, and more profitable, to put your idle Fable hours into the jobs, where there’s at least a modicum of skill required. Short of getting all of the Achievements in the game, I don’t see a reason to play these games at all. Harsh words, but true.

I have a few proper gripes, and they’re mostly to do with the game being rushed out the door to meet its shipping deadlines. It ships without online multiplayer, and you’ll have to patch the game as soon as you get it to enable the feature. At the start of the game the splash page loads in at least four separate chunks, leaving quarter of the screen black while the rest of the data catches up. Also, if you’re too rushed with your button-pressing to get the game up and running, you can actually stall the ‘load game’ progress, and freeze your system, necessitating a quick restart.

Once you’re in the game, you’ll find that menus load tortuously slowly – it’s not as crippling as the menus in the recent Force Unleashed, but when you’re trying to get to a couple of potions quickly, the load times are infuriating. Buying items is a bit of a trial as well, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to compare the traders’ weapons with those currently equipped, or even to see how may of a particular item you currently own. It seems bizarre that only Japanese RPG-makers (and Bethesda) can get the inventory management system right, but I haven’t seen a European RPG with a decent menu / inventory system yet. Still, if the game can be patched to allow multiplayer from day one, surely Lionhead can fix the other problems as well. Right?

Last on my gripes list – why can you buy potions that give you experience points? It’s fine if they’re limited to prizes or gifts from loved ones, but being able to buy experience? It’s all a little too close to in-game gold-farming for my liking.

Fable 2 is still stretching Molyneaux’s vision of a medieval world sim, and if you buy into Lionhead’s (typically European RPG) idiosyncrasies, you’ll find a solid timesink of a game. RPG fans won’t necessarily appreciate the menu oddities, but they’ll find a compelling storyline, slick graphics, satisfying magic and combat, and a faithful canine companion. And did I mention the lambskin condoms, designed to avoid unwanted pregnancies and 'social diseases'? They’re just weird.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Wipeout HD

2008-10-23T14:05:00.000+13:00

Sony Liverpool

PSN

First things first: while it is brilliant, Wipeout HD isn’t a new game – it’s essentially a high-def conglomeration of the well-received PSP title Wipeout Pure and its sequel Pulse. It features the same vehicles and teams as the handheld games, and even the licensed soundtrack has the same mix of dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass and techno. Where HD shines, though, is in recreating and recompiling the two games in full high definition – 1080p, screaming past your eyes at 60 frames per second. It’s a gear junkie’s dream: simultaneous justification for hardware investment and supplier of bragging rights – the gaming equivalent of BBC’s Planet Earth, or Dark Side of the Moon in blistering stereo sound.

So it looks good. But there’s more to the game than just its visuals – there’s also the small matters of gameplay, enjoyment and Wipeout’s traditional punishment of newcomers.

As with most games designed in-house for the PS3, Wipeout HD supports the Sixaxis’ accelerometer controls. Unfortunately, as with most non-Nintendo games supporting motion control, the additional control method offers very little of substance to the actual game – simply put, you’ll be racing so fast that the very slight delay in the accelerometer’s controls will outweigh its coolness factor. That said, though, once you become familiar with the easiest tracks, steering by leaning into the corners is really quite fun.

Newcomers to futuristic hovercraft racing (and surely there’s someone out there who’s never tried it) can turn on the new ‘pilot assist’ feature, which basically forces the craft away from the edges of the track. Past the first two or three events, however, the helpful robots or magnets or whatever the hell they are become a hassle – you’ll want to cut some corners closely to pick up certain weapons or speed boosts, and getting a weak nudge away from the wall often hinders more than it helps.

As mentioned above, HD offers much the same as its PSP predecessors, right down to the track selection – Chenghou Project, Sol 2, Vineta K, Sebenco Climb, Anulpha Pass and Ubermall are in the mix from Pure, and the fantastic Moa Therma and Metropia from Pulse round out the eight available tracks. While the tracks have the same layout, and can still be played in both directions (with slight alterations), the transition to high-def really makes them shine. Zone races, in particular, are a visual treat – textures are stripped from the levels you race through, replaced with fluorescent colours, and your aim is simply to survive through as many ‘zones’ as possible, as colours change and your vehicle inexorably increases its speed well beyond the capability of mere human reflexes. Unlike the other modes, where you effectively choose your own skill level before the race starts, zone events are increasingly challenging; and, being able to survive longer and longer as your skill level increases is correspondingly satisfying.

Wipeout HD clocks in at $33.90 – great value for such a range of content, even if you’d played through both of the PSP games before. And since the PSP games had such great downloadable content options (new packs with extra tracks and vehicles were made available to PSP owners every six months after the games’ release date), there’s a great chance that even more content will be added to the title over the next few months.

Despite its obvious roots in the handheld genre, Wipeout HD feels more like the spiritual successor to the three games released on the original PlayStation – it’s not every day that a game comes out so perfectly suited to a hardware platform that it can define a console. As Wipeout 2097 flooded the market and became a given purchase for PSOne owners, so should Wipeout HD – and, at the low price point afforded only to downloadable content, why would it not?

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

2008-10-23T14:03:00.000+13:00

LucasArts

PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2 (and stripped-down versions for PSP, DS, iPhone)

Many Bothans died to bring you this review. Well, it was just one, but in my defense, he was being kind of a dick.

Released to a collective fangasm – the equivalent of millions of voices whimpering in pleasure as one – The Force Unleashed fills in the blanks between the old (good) trilogy, and the new (shinier, less good) Star Wars trilogy. You take the role of ‘Starkiller’, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice – through the course of the game you’ll hunt down numerous rogue Jedi knights, kill hundreds of storm troopers, bash a few wookies over the head, and – of course – fall in love in the cheesiest possible manner. So it’s par for the LucasArts course, then.

After a couple of decades of an ever-expanding Expanded Universe (EU), every possible gap after the original trilogy has been filled in. (Did you ever wonder what Han Solo and Princess Leia’s children would be like? Turns out they were force-sensitive twins, one of whom – Jacen – got broody, fell to the Dark Side, changed his name to Darth Caedus and was killed by his sister Jaina in a dramatic sequence worthy of Days of Our Lives.) But while the animated Clone Wars films filled the gap between episodes two and three, there’s a correspondingly large gap – say, 18 or 19 years – between episodes three and four, just begging for a George Lucas-approved plot filler.

I’ve often wondered just what happened to eliminate the Jedi who survived the Clone Wars. Could Vader really have hunted them all down himself? How would he have balanced all that Jedi-hunting with the effort required to keep his black robo-suit nice and shiny? These are the things that keep me up at night. And this is one reason why The Force Unleashed is one of the best releases this year, on any console.

Gamers like acting out through vicarious violent games, and Unleashed supplies plenty of fodder for your force lightning throughout – since Vader wants to keep knowledge of his new apprentice secret from his own master, you’re given carte blanche, and simply instructed to kill everyone you run into, storm troopers and rebel scum included.

While the force isn’t exactly ‘unleashed’, Starkiller is an incredibly satisfying character to play from the very first level. Picking up crates, explosives, droids and TIE fighters at the press of a button never gets old, and flinging them towards your enemies for maximum ‘splosiveness is a heck of a lot of fun. Even if the targeting system for choosing the right barrel isn’t exactly accurate, the auto-targeting of enemies is flawless.

Not quite so flawless are the controls, however – Starkiller’s steps don’t map onto his movements, it’s all too easy to fall off cliffs in the middle of (epic) lightsaber battles, and no angled surfaces in the game offer any kind of purchase for your character’s feet, which pushes the game into punishing platformer territory. But it’s a testament to the power of the IP and the game’s original story that even these nearly crippling issues don’t mar the experience.

Graphically, Unleashed delivers a stunning show for the major consoles – the PS3 and 360 versions are really slick, showcasing textures with fine details, impressively long draw distances and a solid framerate. Due to the Wii effectively being one-and-a-half GameCubes duct-taped together, the Wii version suffers a little in terms of its graphics, although being able to use the Wiimote’s motion controls for lightsaber battles makes up for these losses.

Since it’s a banner title, Unleashed has also been released on all currently active consoles, including the DS and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the iPhone. Neither of these handhelds can offer the same graphical fidelity as the top-end consoles, but both still offer something different. The DS version, put together by developer n-Space, runs in full (blocky) 3D, while also using its touchscreen and stylus for force powers. Clocking in at around two hours all up, the iPhone version offers a much shorter game, but it’s correspondingly cheaper – around $15 to $20, compared to $80 for the DS version, and upwards of $100 for the flashier consoles.

Taking hardware limitations into consideration, in each different port The Force Unleashed’s art direction is utterly brilliant – like the films, it hits the visual high notes. However, unlike the films (and episodes one through three, I’m looking at you), Unleashed avoids most of the lazy plot holes and head-slapping pratfalls. If there were ever a post-Timothy Zahn argument for someone (anyone?) other than George Lucas to write stories set in the modern Star Wars universe, Unleashed is convincing evidence indeed.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: PixelJunk Eden

2008-09-24T13:00:00.000+12:00

Q-Games

PS3 (PSN)

PixelJunk Eden is the third PSN title released for the in-name-only PixelJunk series, and it’s another new direction for the Japanese developer Q-Games. PixelJunk Racers was a mediocre puzzle-slash-slotcar racer, PixelJunk Monsters was a critically acclaimed tower-defence and strategic resource-management game, and Eden – well, it’s an entirely new take on the burgeoning swing-em-up platformer genre.

You control a small creature called a grimp, and by using the three basic movements – gripping, jumping and swinging – you work your way through the levels in search of the 50 lost ‘Spectra’, which are scattered throughout the levels. As you’d expect, though, the Spectra aren’t easy to find: they’re often located at the highest points of the levels, meaning you’ll have to grow your own platforms to reach them. And that’s where the game starts to get interesting.

From a gripping position, you can make your grimp swing in circles on its silk strand simply by rotating the left analogue stick. This is pretty fun in itself, although the strand breaks relatively easily, and you’ll only last five or six full rotations before the silk snaps and you go flying off at whatever tangent you happened to be on. While spinning, though, you can catch the floating ‘Pollen Prowlers’, which explode in little puffs of pollen. Catching more than one Prowler on a single silk thread increases the available pollen; and, once you’ve hit at least five, you can also pick up oscillator crystals, which keep your grimp ‘in tune’, and give you more time in the level.

Pollen is the most valuable resource in the game, and the more you can get, either by catching the Prowlers or defeating the enemies in the level, the more platforms you’ll awaken. If you’re close enough to a seedpod when you’re catching pollen, it’ll get swept into the pod, and once it’s collected enough, you’ll be able to germinate the seed, and grow another flower, a patch of grass, or something that looks suspiciously like a turgid sea tulip. The constant cycle of germination, the omnipresence of pollen gametes in the gardens, and the grimp’s role as a vector for the pollen all add up to a pretty fertile experience. There’s a lot of ‘flowering’ going on – let’s leave it at that.

Once you’ve impregnated enough seeds and sprouted enough tumescent plants to reach the Spectra, you can unlock even more plants in your home garden, the titular Eden. These new plants let you climb, jump and swing your way to the entrances of more difficult levels, each of which has five additional Spectra to find.

Keeping your ‘oscillator’ ‘in tune’ is a major problem with the game, and one that almost breaks the experience. From being a relaxing platformer with fine-tuned jumps, Eden suddenly shifts to a nagging race against time, with the constant threat of failing a level. Once you’ve mastered the art of predicting the waves of the world’s fluid medium, jumping ahead of your target and timing your spins for maximum pollen and crystal collecting, though, the time limit becomes less of a problem as you work your way through the gardens.

This is a blessing, really, because the next big issue crops up as you’re working your way through. Each level has five available Spectra to collect, and for some reason you can’t get any more than one new Spectra each time you play through a level. At least for your first play through the game, this means that four out of five runs through any particular level are redundant, as the seedpods reset each time you revisit the level. That would have been fine, if slightly irritating, for the first garden you visit – heavy-handed simplicity as a training tool isn’t a new concept – but for it to happen in every single garden? It should have gone without saying, but level (and time) redundancy is never a good feature to enforce on players.

The game’s issues aren’t insurmountable; they’re just annoying. Perhaps a tighter editorial cycle near the end of the game’s development would have resulted in something more user-friendly. The obvious comparison to make is with thatgamecompany’s flOw, although it’s more of a conceptual frame of reference than any concrete similarities between the two. flOw, after all, went through the travails of being developed for the web before it went anywhere near a PlayStation console.

But where flOw could put the unsuspecting gamer to sleep, Eden demands your attention. Jumps are easily missed in the early stages of the game, and while you can still correct your course slightly mid-fall, it’s often difficult to reach the very top of the level again, particularly if you haven’t woken all of the seeds below you. Eden’s driving technotrance background music also helps keep the tempo going, and it changes in each level, as do the primary colours of the level.

All three games in the PixelJunk series hit different genres, which is a bit of a surprise, given most developers’ tendencies to stick with proven hits. What Q-Games offers, though, are fresh takes on proven genres, all wrapped up in clean and bright HD textures, packaged for sale for a bargain ($15.50) through a distribution network that doesn’t rely on the gaming equivalent of food miles, extra plastic packaging, or dealing with the multifarious behind-the-counter grimps at videogame stores. And that works just fine for me.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Soul Calibur IV

2008-09-24T12:56:00.000+12:00

Project Soul

PS3, Xbox 360

In each instalment, Soul Calibur tends more and more towards the boob physics-based gameplay made infamous by Tecmo’s Dead or Alive franchise, and Soul Calibur IV is falling further and further into that same rut. As a fighting simulator, though, it still shines, despite the sheer improbability of many of the featured characters. But that’s hardly the point of the game.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what it would be like to be Nightmare, the Azure Knight who’s been fully corrupted by the evil spirit of the Soul Edge sword, but after playing SCIV, I have some idea how he’d react in a fight. So it’s less of a fighting sim (à la Virtua Fighter) than a collective orgasm for fans of the series, a fruitful (frightful?) mélange of improbable characters, fighting styles and costumes, all regurgitated in the caustic bile of Soul Calibur’s storyline. Look it up online – it’s utterly ridiculous and, in the best tradition of fighting games, entirely irrelevant to all aspects of the gameplay.

The Soul Calibur series has always been friendly to button-mashers, and it’s still very accessible for newcomers to the genre. SCIV is slightly more balanced, allowing guard breaks as well as a new function called ‘Soul Crush’, which punishes players who rely on ‘turtling’ – using a guard defence for too long.

There are 18 characters available to unlock, for feats as simple as beating certain sub-bosses, completing the story mode with other characters, or simply earning enough credits in the character creation mode. That mode, incidentally, is slightly improved from its appearance in SCIII, and allows for an amazing variety of homemade fighters complete with stat-adjusting accessories – whether the newly minted fighters look slightly different from their appearance in the game, or strikingly similar to Ronald McDonald, there’s a lot of scope for creativity.

Fans of the Soul Calibur series will appreciate the latest installment, although that’s a redundant statement, akin to saying that if you like anything, you’ll like something that’s almost exactly the same. As far as current-gen fighters, though, SCIV is probably the best available title in the genre, at least until Tekken 6 stumbles its way onto the PS3 at the end of next year. Fans of either series would do well to pick up SCIV either as a rental or at retail, as its distinctive use of weapons – and now, destructible armour – results in one of the most complete fighting games on the market. And with the added bonus of fighting as Darth Vader (only on PS3) or Yoda (360), as well as The Force Unleashed’s Secret Apprentice, the answer to an age-old question – who would win in a fight between a lightsaber and Soul Edge? – will be able to be answered.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Too Human

2008-09-24T12:54:00.000+12:00

Silicon Knights

Xbox 360

Games that hide their bare-bones mechanics with flashy graphics, 2.0 shaders and pixel mapping rarely offer genuine appeal to anyone not running PC benchmark programs to six decimal places. In the locked-down hardware world of home consoles, however, even the questionable lure of FPS tests is denied to most users. It’s particularly interesting, then, that critically successful console games are those that manage to cloak basic gameplay, appealing directly to the hindbrain, with the trappings of a greater narrative.

Puzzle Quest, in its myriad iterations, took a popular jewel-matching pastime (à la Bejeweled), and built around it a gripping, if utterly clichéd, storyline. With Puzzle Quest, what had previously been a bare-bones three-in-a-row swap-and-match ‘genre’ – notable only for its ability to distract even the most hardened paper-shufflers – was suddenly clad with the comprehensive sum of all thing RPG, including methods to dramatically alter and subvert the pure luck and statistics on which the gem-matching game-type was built. The ludological component was still the same, for all intents and purposes, but with a dose of added player control and a pinch of narrative, the game became a compelling addiction.

Your typical hack-and-slash RPG isn’t typically bereft of narrative value, however, and Too Human doesn’t go against type. Developers Silicon Knights reimagined the Norse gods as cybernetically enhanced humans, their technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. Players control Baldur, as he fights off the hordes of mecha that threaten the world of Midgard. There’s probably a moral buried somewhere in the game about using increasingly sophisticated technology to defeat highly complex mechanical enemies, but it’s glossed over easily enough. The story simply works, although it’s plagued by pacing issues, a distractingly disjointed chronology and a tendency to confuse the hell out of anyone not paying full attention to the cutscenes. Its end-sequence is almost without par in terms of narrative value, even if it all turned a little Halo 2, in terms of setting the scene for the next instalment.

Too Human also gets the loot equation exactly right, with so many increasingly powerful items that it’s impossible to obtain in a single pass through the game. (It might seem to be a negative point, but gambling against the probability of getting your class’s best item is like pure meth to RPG fiends.) Items and weapons fall back on classic Diablo nominalism, which is a familiar touch – you count on weapons with the same prefix or suffix having the same add-on effects, with runes modifying your items much in the same way Diablo II’s gems worked with socketed items. And the myriad branches on your character’s skill tree? There are so many, it’s more like Ygrrdrasil, the World Tree. (Mythical high five!)

The game’s major departure from its genre, to my eyes, is its abandonment of button-mashing attack controls in favour of a dual analogue stick approach. It’s probably too late to remap players’ brains from using the left analogue stick to control movement, and that’s fine, but Silicon Knights have offered a convincing argument for remapping the right analogue stick to player attacks. After all, there’s no need to continually press a button if you want to continue an attack when pushing in one direction will work just as well. The approach also works when switching between the enemies swarming all around Baldur, and is particularly useful if you happen to be using a weapon with a knockback effect. The right trigger on the controller fires projectile weapons, although these are generally too slow and too weak to do much more than put an enemy off-balance for a few seconds while it runs towards you.

Given that the stunningly simple control change requires a lot of concentration while players adjust to it, it’s disappointing that the automatic camera control is so distracting, and there’s little independent control available in the middle of the action sequences, bar an auto-centre button. Players who simply need to have independent camera control should probably pass on the game, but they’ll be missing out on what could be a watershed moment for hack-and-slash RPGs. Too Human – it’s Geometry Wars meets Diablo meets Lawnmower Man. What more could you ask for?

(You could ask that a scant ten minutes into your second playthrough, your 360 console doesn’t decide to overheat, resulting in it being unusable for more than six minutes at a time. Too Human was the straw that broke my beige plastic camel’s back, and while that doesn’t count against the game itself, it’s stunningly disappointing that the hardware it’s exclusively released upon is still dramatically unstable. I’m currently hoping that future installments of the Too Human series will be released cross-platform, although by the time it takes Silicon Knights to make another full game, Microsoft Customer Support may well have come through with a refurbished console to last me another few months.)

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Braid

2008-09-24T12:47:00.000+12:00

Number None, Inc.

XBLA, PC

Controlling a character as he jumps through complicated levels, bounces on his enemies’ heads, and tries to rescue a generically cute princess in a castle is an all-too-familiar trope for gamers. While Braid, released for digital distribution on Xbox Live Arcade and PC a couple of weeks ago, seems to start off retreading this familiar ground, almost every one of seven short worlds you play through adds a new gameplay mechanic, as a complex story unfurls.

Initially, you’ll need to cope with the idea that Tim, your character, can rewind time – all the way back to the start of the level if you want – in order to reattempt particularly difficult jumps or timed sequences. (Think a more difficult Super Mario World with Prince of Persia’s time-based mechanics.) Now, that’s all well and good, and a less involved (and dedicated) developer than Jonathan Blow, who spent five years working on the title, would have stopped there. Once you reach the second major world, though, you’re introduced to the concept of time-immune objects, which manifest as objects whose state takes precedence over their position. For example – you can fall down into a pit to collect a time-immune key, then rewind time to ‘jump’ out of the pit, key (whose state becomes ‘held’ as soon as you touch it) safely in tow.

There are also levels where time runs relative to your horizontal position on screen – instead of rewinding time, all you have to do is move back to the left of the screen. If I’m being honest, while fun, this is one of the cheaper mechanics of the game – your rewind function is reduced to just what it was in the Prince of Persia series; a way to ameliorate the (sometimes extreme) difficulty.

Most difficult to wrap your head around, though, are the levels where your ‘future shadow’ re-enacts the movement and actions just prior to your last rewind. It’s confusing as all hell, but the satisfaction when you deliberately kill your character, rewind, then watch as your shadow dies and you make the most of the resulting position of your enemies is very rewarding (if equally difficult to explain in this medium).

In later levels, as you near the (hidden) denouement, time simply begins to run in reverse, and it takes several attempts to reach the desired end-state. Once you’re there, though, you’ll experience a huge twist in the final level, where the (by then) simple ability to rewind time tells more of the story than any of your character’s actions can.

While gameplay is key to Braid’s success, the art direction of the game also stands out – painted (frame by frame, in the case of the character design) by artist David Hellman (A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible), the distinctive and organic painted backgrounds complement the structured mechanics of the game, and several layers of parallax scrolling really play up the developer’s and designer’s love of classic 2D platformers.

It’s rare that you’ll find a videogame that actively tries to hide its true story from you, or one with such an obviously unreliable narrator. Once you start looking for hidden aspects of the game, though, you’ll be rewarded, albeit with subtle inferences that all is not as it seems. The patterned flags that fall as you cross each level’s finishing lines at the end of each level correspond to nautical symbols for ‘stop’, ‘negative’, and ‘danger’, for example, and even the tomes that tell Tim’s backstory as you progress through the game get insidiously complicated. To add yet more shades of grey, some of these tomes are objectively discussing with Tim’s story, some are very subjective, and some are completely hidden from view, their contents ridiculously indistinct.

One thing is clear – the Princess you’re chasing after represents something more than a person, but the muddled and obscurantist narration confuses the matter somewhat. Shades of the Manhattan Project, theories about time travel, and reflections of love and loss abound, and while you’re likely to be left with more questions than answers after finishing the game, that’s usually the mark of a good piece of art, in any medium.

The idea of a plain old platformer raising questions about time, space, love and death – all at once – hadn’t seemed possible before I’d played Braid. After playing it, I can’t seem to shake the in-game feeling of security at being able to rewind my mistakes, and the real-life feeling of being incredibly unsettled by the game’s unfolding story. Suffice it to say that the game’s a must-play, and even at 1200 Microsoft points ($20), it’s comparable in narrative scope (and in time investment) to an emotionally charged film. Braid’s much like the fan favourite Portal, in that sense. In the same way, though, you’ll end the game wanting much more, and that’s something that just can’t (or won’t) be delivered. Braid is one of the best releases on XBLA this year, and its only shortcoming is its story – like Portal, since it wraps itself up so well at the end (or is that the beginning?) of the game, there’s little chance we’ll see downloadable extra levels or a sequel in the future.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Ninja Gaiden II

2008-09-24T12:44:00.000+12:00

Team Ninja

Xbox 360

Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden: Sigma were both hard; the diamond-coated disc kind of hard that made me snap controllers due to utter frustration at my own lack of skill. I knew, though, that I was the weak link. Practise makes perfect, as twitch gamers well know, timing is everything, and there’s a lot to be said for repetitive tasks in terms of building muscle memory. (Also, to paraphrase my patron saint Neal Stephenson, I knew that if I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard, I could still become the baddest motherfucker in the video-gaming world.)

Ninja Gaiden II, though, is a different sort of hard; the kind that kicks players in the teeth for no good reason. It’s ironic, I suppose, because the actual fighting is much easier than it has been in previous games – scroll techniques are easier to pick up and chain together, enemies seem to have more obvious weaknesses and it’s almost a joy to run through the environments. ‘Almost’ being the operative word here – the game’s graphics, while pretty in that overly smooth current-gen way, aren’t a huge step forward from previous titles, combat can freeze for a second or so when enemies are engaged in close-quarters and projectile combat at the same time, and the game’s camera actively discourages players from continuing. So we’re back to gaming’s version of the camera obscura. Le sigh.

Also obscuring the prospect of a fun experience is the game’s plot, although that’s never been the highest selling point of the series. This episode, set one year after the events of Ninja Gaiden, sees ninja Ryu Hayabusa jet around the world, trying to stop the Black Spider Ninjas from summoning the ancient Archfiend Vazdah. Of course, the Black Spider clan need the Demon Statue kept in the Dragon Ninja village – Ryu’s hometown. What follows is more an attempt to juggle the disparate plot elements than any logical progression of events, but as long as it ends with a climactic battle on top of an erupting Mt Fuji, the fanboys will still be happy. More discerning ludonarrative critics would probably disagree, but said critics are unlikely to have got past the first couple of hours of gameplay, marred as it is by the indelibly poor camera control.

A lack of options to change the control scheme really compound the matter – depending on where Ryu is in a level, the camera will swing wildly to show him at his most ‘cinematic’ angle, with no apparent thought given to the shocking disconnect this shift in viewpoint engenders in the player. As a result, the camera restricts player movement and combat equally. To be fair, there is a button to centre the viewpoint behind Ryu’s head, but I’d hazard a guess that most people would be too busy dealing with hordes of lookalike evil ninjas to spare a regular button press to centre the camera.

Although frenetic and actually enjoyable at times, Ninja Gaiden II will likely be remembered as one more casualty of the shift towards cinematic games (or interactive cinema?) – one more flagstone on the road towards that golden future of gaming. (Which should kick in at any point now, right?)

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Ecochrome

2008-09-24T12:42:00.000+12:00

JAPAN Studio

PSP, PS3 (download only)

In their very nature, third-person games have a major hindrance – the camera positioning, relative to the character you’re controlling. Some games (Mario 64, Gears of War) manage this relatively well by minimising camera clipping, locking the camera close to the main character, and effectively hiding the problem; for others (Ninja Gaiden II, Sonic Heroes) the shifting, impossible-to-control viewpoint simply negates any positive gameplay aspects the games may have had. An actively obscuring camera obscura, if you want to (re)coin a term.

Ecochrome, a recent release for PSP and the Playstation Network, demands a literal paradigm shift from the player, although it’s one that isn’t difficult to grasp. Initially, there’s the disconnect from the on-screen character – it’s not under your direct control, instead continuing to follow its path as far as it can. Like The Trials of Topoq or Super Monkey Ball, you’re aiming to move an object (in this case, literally a mannequin) through several goals (echoes), until you reach the end-point of the level. Unlike those two games, however, Ecochrome’s movement constraints are determined not just by the objects around you, but also by the camera’s perspective of the level.

For example, if there’s a hole blocking the Walker’s path, you can simply shift the camera so that the hole is hidden – using the game’s ‘law of perspective absence’, the hole simply ceases to exist while the camera holds its position. The ‘law of perspective presence’ means that if a gap between two pathways is blocked from your view, and appears to be connected, it is. Similarly, if two separate pathways seem to be touching, they are, and the Walker can cross between them. Finally, the Walker falls and jumps according to the camera’s two-dimensional interpretation of the 3D levels – he’ll land on whatever appears to be beneath him, and jump up to whatever appears to be above him.

The above five ‘laws’ of the game generally hold true, but controlling the camera so minutely – swinging your perspective to a pixel-perfect point where paths converge – is actually pretty difficult, albeit less so with the PS3’s thumbsticks than the PSP’s nubbly analog stick. Individual results may vary, of course, but some of the later levels are so mind-bendingly difficult (on either hardware platform) that you’ll be perfectly happy to blame the controller.

You could equally blame the repetitive music, I suppose. Sound design really isn’t a strong point, with discordant and unsettling classical music looping again and again. Not that it doesn’t suit the game – you’re likely to make the Walker fall off the edge of the level often enough that a looping track seems entirely appropriate. The lack of alternative music is disappointing for a black-and-white game streaming off a UMD or hard drive, but there’s always a volume control if it gets too much.

Take-home message? Ecochrome is a Reutersvärd-meets-Escher feverdream, at times infuriating, but packed full of so many different levels that you’ll easily overlook the fact that it’s compromised of almost pure theory.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One

2008-09-24T12:31:00.000+12:00

Hothead Games

Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Mac, Linux

Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve spent the past decade building up a hobby of writing and drawing comics into a self-sustainable business, with legions of fans worldwide waiting for your biweekly updates on penny-arcade.com. You have the power to ‘wang’ all but the biggest corporate servers, with a link, faint praise and a casual flick of the wrist. After the cataclysmic failure of the E3 convention to simply do right by gamers, you start your own convention, by gamers, for gamers, and by following the cardinal rule of ‘not being a dick’, end up with the premiere gaming expo in North America. Oh, and you’ve also kicked into gear a charity for sick children, raising millions of dollars worldwide by harnessing the bountiful goodwill of gamers sick and tired of being characterised in the media as violent misfits. So what’s next?

If you’re Mike ‘Gabe’ Krahulik and Jerry ‘Tycho’ Holkins, you hook up with Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame) and Hothead Games, and design your own episodic RPG game with the longest title imaginable, all set in a Lovecraftian-cum-steampunk world. It’s the stuff a certain subset of dreams are made of – and as if to prove that a) cross-platform releases are entirely plausible, if not the best idea since sliced bread, and b) we are living in the future, Hothead released the game simultaneously for three different home computer operating systems and the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade store. Any day now, they’ll come up with a downloadable flying car. Probably.

Episode One of On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness kicks off with a rather basic character creation system, which lets you choose a gender, gives you a few choices of skin and hair colour, as well as a limited number of wardrobe options. It’s actually a disappointing beginning to the game, but the restrictions are likely to cover up for the fact that, somehow, your 3D character is also transmuted to a perfect rendition of Krahulik’s drawings, for use in the 2D cutscenes. Particularly for fans of Krahulik’s online offerings, seeing your avatar come to life in these interstitial comics more than makes up for any shortcomings of the creation.

The game kicks off with your character’s house being destroyed by a gigantic steam-powered Fruit Fucker, which Krahulik’s and Holkins’ alter-egos Gabe and Tycho have been tracking. Armed only with a simple rake, you team up with the two detectives, and quickly find yourself embroiled in a world where the twin evils of mimes and Cthulhu are hilariously conflated, where hobos with shiny hair rule supreme, and where evil clowns, barbershop quartets and sexually vigourous juicers run amok on the streets of New Arcadia.

Holkins and Krahulik are obviously trying to cram a lot in here, and it’s not really until you reach the end of the game that you realise just how much humour is packed into a scant three environments. While Penny Arcades’s humour can be a hit-and-miss affair, there’s no single line of dialogue that Holkins hasn’t tweaked to a sharp edge. Similarly, Krahulik’s skill and flair are obvious throughout, in both the level and character designs.

When it comes to gameplay, Precipice is basically an adventure game (get item A, use it on / give it to NPC B) with solid turn-based battle mechanics. Each of the three characters you control have three gauges, which fill at different rates – the items gauge fills first (useful if you need to heal an ally or throw a cheap grenade), followed by the attack gauge (each character has a different attack to complement different enemy weaknesses), and then the special attack gauge. Special attacks, while effective, try to incorporate minigame elements to decide on the exact amount of damage done to your enemies, but these aren’t challenging enough, and waiting a long time to see the same attack animations gets boring after a while – it’s more satisfying to use your normal attacks and finish off that roving barbershop quartet faster.

Despite its minor flaws (and brevity, although 6-8 hours of gameplay for $30 isn’t such a bad deal), Penny Arcade Adventures is definitely onto a good thing. Later episodes can only improve the already-solid battle system, and as long as Holkins continues his Lovecraft pastiche and reveals the origins of the so-far unexplained Fruit Fucker Prime, the story will lead the way. Overall, it’s a great start to what’s likely to be a classic series, and with such a strong focus on equalising different gaming platforms and emphasising the end of the bricks-and-mortar retail experience, it’s also a sign of things to come for gaming.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Burnout: Paradise

2008-09-24T11:34:00.000+12:00

Criterion Games

PS3, Xbox 360

After Burnout: Revenge was ported to the 360 mid-way through last year, adding a couple of HD splash screens, a pinch of native 720p resolution and healthy dose of shinier-than-thou next-gen attitude, there must have been a sense in the Criterion offices that the franchise had reached its logical conclusion – after four solid hits, there wasn’t much more the developers could do, working in the same framework. So what’s next? A series reboot, of course.

Burnout: Paradise keeps the gist of the series – missions in the game include typically shiny graphics, a near-overwhelming motion blur effect, the now-standard arcadey racing through busy traffic, and vehicular combat.

Since January, when Paradise was first launched, the game has actually changed considerably. In any other console cycle, this simply wouldn’t have been possible. Now, however, developers can release patches and updates to any title, just by making the game ‘phone home’ through the player’s broadband connection as it starts up. (This would be also a nifty but intrusive anti-piracy measure, should home consoles be plagued by counterfeit discs.) It also means that developers can still meet shipping dates without getting all the features nailed down, and in extreme cases, developers can be more sanguine about releasing buggy games – if it can be fixed with a quick patch, what’s the big deal?

Recent software updates to Paradise (oddly named ‘Bogart’, ‘Cagney’, ‘Davis’ and ‘Eastwood’ – collectively known as ‘Freeburn 2.0’) have resulted in the addition of motorcycles, day / night cycles and any number of online bug corrections, sequencing errors and gameplay balance tweaks. In a way, it’s a confluence of increased online play and the democratisation of gaming – developers Criterion have truckloads of data from ranked matches to sift through, and anyone who whines loud enough about the game’s balance on forums is likely to have their complaint checked out.

Now, a non-updated retail version of Paradise doesn’t have bugs per se, but the 180-degree handbrake turn away from the series’ common fallbacks has resulted in a few shortcomings, one of which still hasn’t been addressed through software updates. Instead of being based around individual missions, everything now takes place in one huge city, meaning that players have to drive around to find missions. Failing a mission means that you have to retrace your steps (or follow the smoking trail of wreckage, if you will) to the start of the mission – there’s no quick ‘retry’ option. For a series whose original appeal lay in its quick accessible nature, the biggest barrier to new and returning players is its fancy new feature – and it’s a big enough problem to make the game border on tedious. Paradise City is fascinating and exciting at times, but it’s as if the developers stopped halfway through making a sandbox game, and are periodically patching the thing to recreate their initial vision.

Driving something straight out of Back to the Future doesn't hurt, of course.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Race Driver: GRID

2008-09-24T09:50:00.000+12:00

Codemasters

PS3, Xbox 360, PC, DS

When you’re framing the concept of an ideal racing game, there’s a fine line between the pixel-perfect windscreen wiper simulations of Gran Turismo and the Burnout series’ lightning bolt from the arcade gods. Whatever shortcomings Race Driver: GRID may have, it toes that line throughout, taking enough positive attributes from each extreme to make a complete driving experience. Without getting bogged down in collecting seven hundred makes and models or causing as much damage as possible to innocent civilian vehicles, GRID just works admirably as both a racing and team management game. Although, for a driving game, it sure does have a pedestrian title.

GRID follows in the footsteps of the crowd favourite TOCA Race Driver series, and uses a very similar graphics engine to stablemate DiRT (which, incidentally, is the reason there are no off-road tracks left in GRID – they all got shipped off to a different game). Developers Codemasters rewrote parts of their Neon engine from scratch for GRID’s Ego engine, paying particular attention to the already-solid damage modelling. Unlike GT5: Prologue, which refused to show a single scratch on your car, even if you drove off a cliff, GRID’s damage shows every single ding, dent or scrape, and even minor damage to your car will impact its performance. Another feature that will appeal to literal-minded gamers is persistent damage modelling, meaning that the bumper bar you shed on the first lap will continue to be a hazard for you and the computer-controlled drivers each time you pass it. (Given the time penalty inherent in hitting a wall and getting back up to speed, though, there’s no question of tactically spreading debris across the course to gain an advantage in the race.)

Upon starting the game, you’re thrown head-first into a race, and told not to concern yourself with placing, and only to finish. Once you cross the line, though, you’re given a worse car – a beaten-up Mustang, and told to go and seek your fortune. It’s a common enough method of starting up, although it has an air of the ‘abilitease’ about it – start the player off with a souped-up monster for the smallest possible amount of time, and then reduce them to a shell of their former selves. Despite this, the effort involved in building up a car, reputation, and (later) a racing team are among the most fun parts of the game – it’s kind of like Super Burnout: RPG.

The cars handle very smoothly on the courses, and feel slightly less fine-tuned than those in Gran Turismo, although there’s still a hell of a learning curve. This difficulty is ameliorated somewhat by the addition of the new ‘Flashback’ feature, effectively letting you rewind the action after any crashes serious mishaps, and take control again from the point you screwed up. It’s as if all game developers these days liked the 3D Prince of Persia games so much that they’re shoehorning in a ‘mulligan’ feature wherever possible, regardless of genre expectations or plot. Why call it a flashback when the point of racing games is immediacy, and the rest of the game is based, necessarily, around forward motion? Braid (reviewed here) plays with and subverts this concept, but GRID seems to just throw the feature in to flatten out the rapidly spiking difficulty curve. Accessibility isn’t usually a concern of racing game devs, though, and while inexperienced gamers may appreciate a do-over, the inclusion of flashbacks comes across as surprisingly patronising, if occasionally useful.

There are fifty events to complete in the single-player game, ranging from the hilly streets of San Francisco (complete with a shiny muscle car, a la Steve McQueen), drift tournaments in Japan, Touge events that will see you measuring your performance in microseconds, a Le Mans 24 endurance mode, and, to wean players off Burnout (as if Paradise hadn’t already done that), you can even take part in some very satisfying demolition derbies.

Visually, GRID again toes the line between current-gen versions of GT and Burnout on the major consoles, while still offering moments of level design and art direction that catch players’ breath – in particular, the glowing, hypnotic night-time levels in Japan and the crisply defined open-wheel street levels in Germany spring to mind as magnificently designed and laid-out set-pieces.

In comparison to the morass of menus in GT5, navigation through GRID’s options is incredibly straightforward. Want to buy a new car for your team? It’s only ever a couple of button presses away, and the only real clanger in the process is the branded eBay Motors screen – easy enough for New Zealand audiences to ignore, perhaps, but the hefty product placement still mars the (otherwise independent and accomplished) game.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Warhawk

2008-09-24T09:36:00.000+12:00

Incognito Entertainment

PS3

Also burning the DLC oil is PS3-exclusive Warhawk, one of only two PS3 titles available as both a download and retail product. It’s also a reboot of an earlier series, although the name is pretty much the only thing it has in common with the original PlayStation version.

From its release, Warhawk was a brilliant game for those with overflowing PSN friends lists, and as it’s decidedly multiplayer-only, not much fun at all for players without broadband. (Unless, of course, you have that recurring dream where you’re the last person left alive on a deserted island that just happens to be well-stocked with planes, tanks and ammunition.)

As it stands, though, it’s a solid multiplayer game straight out of the box, depending on the speed of your broadband connection. It allows for 32-player online matches, and four players can use the same PS3 console on split-screen mode for non-ranked matches, and few experiences compare to flying around an island controlling planes with a SixAxis’ motion sensor. (Alternate control schemes are available for those unimpressed with the imprecise nature of motion controls.)

Updated, however, Warhawk is a shining example of what multiplayer console games can be, given enough development time and continued support after shipping. April saw update 1.3, which included a rebalanced mode for players who preferred not to use vehicles, new weapons, additional (free) customisations for planes and troops, and new chat modes, including cross-team chat. Updates 1.4 and 1.5, due later this year, promise new game modes, in-game music, and support for Sony’s nascent Trophies.

If the free updates aren’t enough for you, there are also two expansion packs available for download through the PlayStation store for less than twenty bucks each, which offer new maps and vehicles. Operation: Broken Mirror and Omega Dawn aren’t interoperable, sadly, but the decision to monetise these packs means that the free software updates for the core game will keep coming, at least until Warhawk 2 rolls around.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Uncommon Arrangements

2008-09-15T12:18:00.010+12:00

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
Katie Roiphe
Virago

Katie Roiphe, daughter of first-generation feminist Anne Roiphe, vaulted her way to a semi-permanent spot on the list of America’s intellectuals with her first book, The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism On Campus, which was simultaneously hailed and reviled for its unapologetic and polarising subject matter – sexual politics among young adults. Heralded initially as the “first intellectual of her generation,” later relegated to simply being a part of the post-Reagan young Conservative movement, and then grudgingly accepted back into the ranks of post-feminist writers who felt they owed little to their antecedents, Roiphe the younger has made a successful career out of toeing the line between her mother’s more overt feminism and a peculiar kind of logical individualism.

Uncommon Arrangements, too, is a boundary book, and delves into the grey area between popular literature, historical biography and academic criticism, giving Roiphe the chance to revel in the ‘soft’ genre of literary biography. The book focuses on the marriages, long-term affairs and friendships that linked a group of writers active between 1910 and the beginning of the second world war, featuring well-known (and often-referenced) pairs such as Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, but also stretches to cover couples such as H.G. and Jane Wells, as well as H.G.’s mistress, Rebecca West.

In analysing these lives, Roiphe seems completely at home, safe with the hard-copy evidence of piles of literary detritus, and a comfortable prose style possible only when writing about deceased subjects. With such material, then, Roiphe recovers from the jarringly callow observations to which she was prone in her earlier work, although the few that still slip through likely say more about the author than she would like readers to take from the book. She approves wholeheartedly, for example, of the understanding letter Jane Wells wrote to her husband after he walked out on her and their young son, in which the long-suffering Jane blames herself for being too possessive, and not understanding her husband’s needs. Roiphe is harsher on H.G.’s mistress, Rebecca West, who simply “wanted someone to fuss over her.”

There’s an odd double standard throughout Roiphe’s editorialising – in the narrative she constructs, her subjects manage to defend the traditions of marriage at the same time as they infer the social benefits of extramarital affairs. Reconciling this is no easy matter. The book keeps coming back to the idea that strong (and fiercely intellectual) feminists can still find an appeal in brutish masculinity, just as Roiphe comes back to her favourite themes – accountability and personal responsibility, sometimes in the face of all logic. In her steadfast refusal to cast women as victims, it seems that Roiphe has internalised the male gaze in her writing, while simultaneously professing to agree with the logic of feminism. And all of this bleeds through the literary value of Uncommon Arrangements.

New Zealand audiences familiar with the cottage industry C.K. Stead has built up around Katherine Mansfield will find little new information, although Roiphe contextualises extremely well, and Uncommon Arrangements provides a grounding in the complex public and private relationships of writers around the same period as Mansfield. Roiphe gradually builds up a picture of what she sees as the (tempting and attractive) flaws and (safe) inhibitions of the Victorian age. Marriage, she says, was a socially acceptable convenience that enables a queer sort of freedom in the newlyweds, the freedom that can come only after they have accepted the constraints of society. The tie that binds can also loosen, it seems.

It may appear so, but Uncommon Arrangements isn’t a dry history of married life – rather, it’s a very involved account of several intertwining relationships, as seen through the eyes of an equally involved writer. The power dynamics between couples clearly fascinate this author, and investing her time into scholarship rather than polemic allows for a much more balanced book than her previous efforts, if one that is still an introduction to the literary letters scene.

To revert to a more Victorian parlance, Uncommon Arrangements acts as A Young Academic’s Primer: a point of departure for further study, rather than a destination in itself. Those following the overarching Roiphe story – how the author revises and reiterates her idiosyncratic mindset over the course of writing her different books – will, however, read much of interest into the book.

This article was first published in Critic.

Review: Metal Gear Solid 4

2008-09-14T09:39:00.000+12:00

Kojima Productions

PS3

Fans of Hideo Kojima’s confusing, complex and downright compelling Metal Gear series will lap up every last overly cinematic second of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, although newcomers to the series may have an adverse reaction to the series’ final instalment.

It’s just over twenty years since Kojima’s first stealth game, and Guns of the Patriots is a worthy successor to the previous games in the series, as well as providing a capstone to Kojima’s career as he redefines not just a genre, but an entire medium. A grandiose statement, to be sure, but that’s exactly what he’s done – MGS4 is possibly the best example of an interactive movie that’s ever been produced. Just under half of the game, in terms of total play time, takes place in in-engine cutscenes. This is a hefty chunk of time to relinquish control of a game, particularly one retailing for upwards of a hundred dollars, but Kojima’s story carries quite an emotional weight, especially for players already invested in the series.

The game begins five years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 2, as a prematurely aged Solid Snake (now referred to as Old Snake) shuffles his bones along a dusty road with a militia convoy, and fights alongside them against one of many private military companies (PMC) owned by his (ridiculously named) arch-nemesis Liquid Ocelot. These PMCs fight an endless series of proxy battles on behalf of business interests – in effect a stock market of human lives and territories – and, coincidentally, provide a usefully obfuscating background of violence, weapons and dust for Snake to do his now-familiar sneaking. Called out of retirement for one last shot at assassinating Liquid Ocelot, Snake grumbles through the opening stages of the game, but for an old man, he’s remarkably agile, throwing himself into battle with aplomb and no small amount of panache.

Allegiances are fluid on the battlefield, and throughout the game Snake can win over separate militias by fighting alongside them against the better-equipped PMC soldiers. Players new to the series will likely have some difficulty taking the time to identify targets before attacking, as mistakes are punished very quickly, even on the easiest difficulty level, by hordes of hostile soldiers suddenly switching their allegiances and seeing you as a target.

Experienced players will be more comfortable with the idea of being between a rock and a hard place, but it’s a maddening feeling, have to hide in various darkened corners while endless streams of enemies file past. Try to pick them off one by one, as you would in any normal situation (for certain console-based values of the word ‘normal’), and they’ll switch to high alert mode and try to flush you out. Even if your retooled camouflage suit is doing its job and the PMC soldiers can’t find you, there’s a seemingly infinite number of them to replace the ones you’ve killed. Progress, then, is best made by timing short runs between hiding places, judicious use of grenades and petrol-filled bottles to kill, maim and confuse, and the familiar gaming fallback of dying enough times that you begin to learn the patrol patterns of enemy soldiers.

It’s infuriating. But what starts to happen, after the first dozen failed missions, is that your attitude towards the game starts to change – the PS3 controller becomes an extension of your hands, you mirror Snake’s stress meter, and become much more comfortable moving along at a snail’s pace. And the tension that bedevils you earlier on in the game will be released by the lengthy cutscenes. It all becomes very zen, really.

In terms of replay value, MGS4 is good for at least another two or three run-throughs, if only to catch the final plot points that sailed over your head the first time. It’s also remarkably fun skipping all the cutscenes and restricting your weapon use to the handy old tranquiliser gun – a hell of a challenge, but it stops you from treating the game like a garden-variety shooter. And for a stealth game, MGS4 does make a terrible shooter.

Judging apples against oranges is difficult enough in normal circumstances, but MGS4 is different again – difficult for some gamers to swallow, it’s truly its own strange fruit.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

2008-06-06T12:27:00.000+12:00

Level 5

Nintendo DS

Unless you’re running homebrew applications on your DS console (and you should, if only to re-experience old LucasArts gems through the magic of ScummVM), you may have felt the lack of point-and-click adventure games on anything resembling a current-gen console or handheld. With the same richly coloured and stylistic take on middle Europe that saw Dark Chronicle succeed, as well as by putting a charming spin on the puzzle genre, Professor Layton and the Curious Village steps in to save the day.

Along with his assistant Luke, Professor Layton is called to the village of St Mystere by a certain Lady Dahlia, widow of the late Baron Reinhold. Reinhold’s last will and testament had stated that his inheritance would be given to the person who found the mysterious Golden Apple, and it’s this treasure that Dahlia wants you to locate. Now, Professor Layton is apparently pretty famous (think Sherlock Holmes minus the opium addiction, and with the ubiquitous deerstalker replaced with a top hat), so everywhere you turn, you have to solve puzzles to prove you are who you claim to be. Initially you do this to get past the NPCs, who demand answers to puzzles they’ve been thinking about for weeks, but after half an hour in the game you’re actively searching out new puzzles to solve (there are 135 in total).

It is a little patronising, being refused access to certain areas of town or the use of a rowboat until you’ve proved that by moving only three coins you can invert a ten-coin pyramid, but these small road-blocking questions are what the game’s all about. The resulting small progressions in the plot are enough to keep your attention, and keep you playing, however.

Some of the mind-benders can be very difficult, but you can use hint tokens (a finite number of which can be found throughout the village) to buy tips on solving particular puzzles, up to a maximum of three hints per puzzle. Correctly solving puzzles wins you a certain number of points, called piccarats, but giving a wrong answer decreases the available piccarats for the puzzle.

Unlike puzzle titles in the Brain Age and Brain Training series, which only make the player better at player those specific games, Professor Layton has a much greater range of puzzles – including geometry, general maths, sliding tiles, common sense and trick questions. The DS’s touchscreen is perfect for almost all of the puzzles offered – character recognition is spot-on for maths puzzles and the stylus is well suited to sliding tiles and drawing efficient routes. Multiple-choice questions, of which there are quite a few, are neither here nor there; some are bewilderingly easy, others quite hard, while some simply rely on common sense (picking which chair is best suited for a multi-purpose town hall, for example). These questions don’t make much use of the hardware’s capabilities, but they’re at the crux of the game’s appeal – when all else fails, the simplest answer to any complex question is probably the right one. Occam’s razor, it seems, has found its home on the DS.

Visually, Professor Layton is a real treat – in-game cinematics, as well as the general style of the village, have definite shades (if not broad strokes) of The Triplets of Belleville’s quirky-yet-creepy animation. The game adds a rich sepia tint to almost everything in the village; colours are slightly muted, but jump out when the narrative needs to add a bit of drama. Similarly, characters are represented on-screen as two-dimensional animations, and the display flicks between speaking characters placed on top of meticulously painted backgrounds.

Navigating the village is very similarly handled to games like Myst, or even The Neverhood – moving around the streets by clicking on arrows, you move from static screen to static screen. It’s not boring, though – almost every time you move past the same street, there’s something different to do – a new villager will appear with a puzzle, or a previously inaccessible building will suddenly be opened up. These constant changes, and the many discrete puzzles, mean that the game’s great for casual gamers, although as the plot unfolds, the game becomes more and more difficult to put down.

Professor Layton does for puzzle games what Puzzle Quest did for three-in-a-row jewel swappers; it dresses up the core gameplay mechanics, wrapping it all in a beguiling plot and well thought-out setting. There are additional benefits for gamers with wi-fi connections; free puzzles are available to download each week, meaning that even when you’ve finished the story mode, you can keep your hand in while waiting for the sequel, Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box, as well as the as-yet-unannounced final chapter in the trilogy. It may be a long wait, but it’ll be well worth it.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Gran Turismo 5: Prologue

2008-06-05T12:23:00.000+12:00

Polyphony Digital

PS3

Let’s not mince words here – Gran Turismo 5: Prologue isn’t even a full game, but it’s flat-out, balls-to-the-wall gorgeous, to the point where you’d be forgiven for thinking that replays of races you just finished were actual live-to-air motorsport events. Despite its shininess, though, this scaled-back version of the PS3’s next banner title isn’t quite enough of a game in its own right to be worth your time.

Easier to newcomers than its predecessors, Prologue has a more forgiving driving physics engine underpinning the game, and consequently feels a lot more natural to pick up and play. It’s still punishing on anyone not used to fine gradations of movement with the PS3 controller, but rewards precise controls in a way that most games don’t. The recently released Burnout: Paradise, for example, is almost the antithesis of Prologue; the former is an arcade racer that rewards sharp turns, quick decisions, supports highly detailed damage modelling and even manages to punish players in entertaining ways. The Gran Turismo series, though, has always been about realism, something that Burnout decisively eschews.

In its service to racing realism, though, Prologue does miss out on showing any kind of damage modelling on the cars, regardless of how much you end up sideswiping your opponents. This makes the game seem a little sterile, as it’s more like driving (pretty) bumper cars without any rumble feedback. Like most games coming out for the PS3 for the past few months, Prologue supports the newly released DualShock3. If you don’t already own some kind of force feedback-enabled, GT-licensed driving wheel (to go with your Ford / Holden duvet cover, perhaps), it’s probably worth picking up a DualShock3 simply to play this game the way it was always meant to be played – with the player able to feel the nudges from other cars, not to mention the difference in driving surface when you go off the road, rather than having to keep an eye on the speedometer and rely on the changes in the sound textures. The Sixaxis’ clunky accelerometer controls aren’t supported in the game; this is probably a blessing, considering how demanding the control setup is.

Appealing to car aficionados as much as fans of photorealism, Prologue offers 71 retardedly realistic models of cars from a diverse range of manufacturers – many aren’t unlocked or available at the start of the game, though, and it can take a fair amount of time grinding easy levels to get enough credits to buy the pricier cars, some of which you need to own to participate in later races. Disappointingly, the game only offers six tracks, which are spread out around the three racing grades C, B and A (in escalating order of difficulty). Thankfully, you do end up racing slightly different version of these tracks (impressively – on the level design front – this includes racing the same track in a different direction), but having such a small choice of gamespace to inhabit really limits the game’s replayability.

What Prologue does best, though, is make the wait for the ‘real’ version of GT5 even more bittersweet – on one hand, the controls are responsive, the cars handle perfectly, and the environments are glorious – barring occasionally low-res character models at the side of the tracks – but on the other, the wait for the full game could mean that you’re well and truly bored with realistic racing sims by the time 2009 rolls around, additional cars and tracks notwithstanding.

Selling a demo before the full version of a game is an uncommon and ballsy move for a publisher, but it’s one that developers Polyphony Digital are familiar with, having released a prologue version of GT4 to the Japanese market a year earlier than the full version. It’s a pretty savvy business move, if one that won’t endear the company to any but the most hardcore fans. These fans had better save some of their course-related costs, though, as they’ll effectively be buying the game twice, paying $70 for a demo on steroids, then in excess of $100 for what’s effectively an expansion pack, albeit one that will probably give ten times the number of cars and tracks to choose from. If you can hold off and wait until next year to pick the full game when it’s good and ready, you probably should. In the meantime, though, now would be a good time to pick up some Polyphony shares, as the money’s likely to roll in to the company pretty steadily for the next year or so.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Lost Odyssey

2008-06-05T11:25:00.000+12:00

Mistwalker

Xbox 360

Despite its impressive graphics, Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Lost Odyssey still doesn’t tick enough boxes to make the 360 exclusive a must-play game. It’s still a solid RPG, but odd camera control and stale combat systems hold the game back from its potential, despite small attempts to freshen up the latter.

Sakaguchi, of course, shot to prominence on the back of the early Final Fantasy games, and with new studio Mistwalker, he’s still churning out quality, albeit by-the-book, JRPG fare. Sakaguchi’s previous epic for the 360, Blue Dragon, leaned towards cartoonish imaginings of the characters and enemies, and the whole design team has turned almost completely in the other direction for Lost Odyssey – characters, sets and cities are beautifully realistic, although still stylised just enough to avoid a downturn into the uncanny valley.

You play the game as the amnesiac immortal Kaim Argonar, caught in political intrigue between two nations as a magic-industrial revolution changes the world around him. Sakaguchi worked with Japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu to write Kaim’s backstory, which is revealed in fragments throughout the game, and is collectively entitled 'A Thousand Years of Dreams'. These text-only story elements are skippable, but they add immeasurably to the emotional heft of the game, which probably has one of the most engaging storylines I’ve seen in an RPG for years, even if it borrows tropes from sources as varied as Tolkien and the later Final Fantasy games.

The game’s spread over four discs, primarily to compensate for the amount of cut-scenes, which apparently take up about a third of the data spread across the discs. It took me five or six hours to get a full party together, by which time I’d reached the end of the first disc – the whole game clocks in at around 30-40 hours, a not-inconsiderable chunk of which is spent waiting for the enemy battles and cut-scenes to load. It’s worth the wait, though; the cut-scenes are beautifully rendered, and character design is fantastic, just as it was in Blue Dragon. Battles, though, are randomly placed in the wilderness maps, which means that trying to get anywhere in a hurry can be very quickly bogged down by loading screens.

During battle, it’s interesting to note that mortal and immortal characters in your party have different styles of play, and how you pair the two styles will have a great impact on your party’s effectiveness. Mortals, for example, level up normally and can use skills at any point once they’re unlocked, whereas immortals must be ‘linked’ to mortals in order to learn skills. There’s a lot of depth available in linking the two types together, and it’s also rewarding to play around with different combinations.

Twitch gamers will appreciate the addition of the combat ring system, which adds a timing-based bonus to any attacks, but this does little to make up for the incredibly slow pace of the rest of the game. It’s what you’d expect from long-form RPGs, to be sure, but if Lost Odyssey didn’t have such an appealing story, the pace would be a killer blow. As it stands, you’ll need at least a week without distractions to crack the main story.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: God of War: Chains of Olympus

2008-04-30T09:20:00.000+12:00

Ready at Dawn

PSP

God of War: Chains of Olympus is set as a prequel to the existing games, at a point where all-around tough guy Kratos has already been saved by Ares. As the game opens, you’re defending the city of Attica from the Persians, a battle which culminates in the first boss battle of the game, against a basilisk. Still doing the dirty work for the Greek pantheon, Kratos soon finds himself mixed up in yet another god’s scheme to take over the world, or at least the heights of Mt. Olympus. The plot is remarkably engaging for what’s effectively the franchise’s third time around the block, and still manages to pack in a few surprises.

What won’t be a surprise to experienced GoW players is the game’s battle system – thankfully, it’s still set up to use the same combos and quick-time events as finishing moves, and seems to be exactly the same as that used in God of War 2, right down to the button combinations for special moves. Developers Ready at Dawn have obviously put the effort into making sure that the moves look and feel exactly the same, and despite the slight control differences (the PSP, is, after all, missing two shoulder buttons and an analog stick), the game handles very easily. In fact, the change to controlling your magic (R + a face button instead of having to use the D-pad to switch magic types) means that players who rely on button-mashing to get their game on won’t waste as much magic energy by accidentally hitting the wrong button.

Even the sound effects seem to be exactly the same as those in the earlier God of War games – thumping enemies is incredibly satisfying, regardless of the amount of damage you’re doing. During combat, the action is made to seem even more larger-than-life by pulling back the camera from the fight at certain times; this does have a somewhat bewildering effect the first few times it happens, but any hint of planned cinematic effects is usually enough to counteract that. Controlling a main character who’s little more than two or three millimetres high can be disconcerting to start with, but that more than makes up for the problems that cropped up in games like Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, where the fact that you couldn’t see more than a few virtual metres past your character only exacerbated the lack of a second analog stick.

Chains of Olympus moves the story along in three quite different ways – in-game cut-scenes, pre-rendered full-motion video, and what looks like animated concept art. I’d have been a bit taken aback by the concept art, but it probably saves space or processor power for the rest of the game, and whatever has been done has had the beneficial effect of completely removing loading times between and within levels. Add to that the side effect of making some of the cut-scenes narrating the interstitial action seem like dramatic retellings of ancient Greek myths, complete with slowly animated two-dimensional pictures, and it all adds to the overall (weighty) impact of the game.

I only have two main gripes with Chains of Olympus, and for once, they have nothing to do with the PSP not having a second analog input. What’s actually the problem is that certain quick-time events require you to twirl the thumbstick around to register a certain move – something easy to do when it’s a full analog stick, but slightly more difficult to do with the tip of your thumb when you’re trying not to drop your console at the same time. Second on my list of gripes is the slight screen tearing that kicks in when the on-screen action gets too intense, or when you’re moving through the environments too quickly. Granted, it doesn’t happen very often, but it’s enough to be noticeable, distracting, and kind of annoying by the end of the game. As a side note, the time it takes to finish the game could also count against the game – six to eight hours should see you comfortably finish the whole thing – although six to eight hours is about as long as I’d want to spend on a portable game anyway, to be honest. Built more for a slim profile and ease-of-putting-in-a-pocket, those consoles aren’t exactly made to be comfortable to hold for too long at a time.

These distractions aside, if you hook up the system to your television set (only possible with the newer, slimmer, PSP model, mind), you’ll almost believe that you’re running the game on a PS2 – it’s only very slightly behind the quality of God of War 2, which itself is probably still the best action / hack-n-slash game for that home console. Keeping that in mind, if the only counts against this title are the small amounts of screen tearing, difficult finishing moves and the length of time it takes to play through the main quest, then think about what you’re getting – an epic game that hits the high mark set by previous titles in the series, and all running on a piece of machinery that weighs less than 200g. Now that’s epic.

Despite the minor flaws, Chains of Olympus is hands-down the most impressive game on the PSP, and if future developers take as much care with their games as Ready at Dawn obviously did with this one, there’s still a long lifespan ahead for the handheld.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

2008-04-18T08:17:00.000+12:00

Insomniac

PS3

Directions for making a hit action-adventure game: take one lovable rogue as the main character, a shady, cigar-chomping second-in-command, and an increasingly useful (and attractive) female lead. Mix in some good AI for your NPC friends, a range of weapons, enemies, a third-act twist to rival any game you’ve ever played, and drop in a legendary golden treasure at the last moment. Remember to preheat the whole lot with platform exclusivity, and you’re golden, so to speak. Not that Uncharted is formulaic, by any means – the game just manages to hit all the bases.

The latest release from successful developer Naughty Dog, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune sees you take the reigns as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter with a knowing grin, quick wit and permanently half-tucked shirt. A descendent of Sir Francis Drake, Nathan is searching for the legendary treasure of El Dorado, following clues and notes that Sir Francis left behind.

If this all sounds a little grown-up for the developers behind the cartoony Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot series, don’t worry. Uncharted actually plays for laughs at quite a few parts throughout, despite your character being shot at for half of the game. The characters, while relatively lifelike, can manage some pretty hilarious facial expressions, and a fair amount of banter goes on between them. Imagine the Matthew McConaughey-slash-Kate Hudson film Fool’s Gold made into a game, but with more pirates, guns and gold. And then imagine that the plot was actually good, and that you didn’t have to look at either of the two ‘stars’. It’s a simple comparison.

Visually, Uncharted is a huge step up from almost everything else on the PS3 or any system – it plays like a colourful version of Gears of War, set in a more open, realistic environment. Where Gears was monochromatic, heavily stylised and set mainly in corridors and small rooms, Uncharted zooms the camera out, letting you enjoy the colour and freedom of walking through (and fighting in) a lush jungle.

The game’s combat mechanic takes a leaf from Gears, as well as Resident Evil 4 and GRAW, and uses one button (L1) to aim, and R1 to fire. Hitting L1 pulls the action from the standard third-person view to over-the shoulder mode, which gives you a remarkable amount of accuracy, even with the least powerful weapons. You’ll find that you need to use cover when you fight, as any open-air battles against more than two opponents quickly sees the screen fade to gray as you promptly get killed. Using cover could have been a problem, but a quick tap on the circle button lets Nathan get behind any kind of cover, regardless of its height. Using L1 to aim will see Nathan peer out from his cover and draw a bead on the opponent; and best of all, the location of your targeting reticule is saved between peeks, so all you’ll need to do is pop back out once and take care of each enemy.

Enemy AI is very effective, particularly in the early jungle levels – the modern-day pirates will use their own cover, try to flank you, and flush you out of cover with grenades. Later indoor levels see these tactics toned down slightly, as there simply aren’t as many indoor hiding places for them, but there’s a surprising amount of complexity in how the enemies respond to you – you can’t rely on them following the same path to the same place. I kept dying at one place in a level near the end of the game, sure that I had the best approach to kill everyone who was shooting at me, but I hadn’t realised how my early actions had attracted their attention,

resulting in a sudden hail of bullets every time I stuck my head out of cover. The game keeps you moving as well – there’s no hiding behind trees if you’re running low on bullets, as enemies will simply come and find you.

The AI for Sully and Elena, your two non-playable sidekicks, is some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Depending on the type of enemy you’re facing (and there’s quite a range – from pirates with pistols to mercenaries with sniper rifles and grenade launchers), your allies will take cover, soften the bad guys up with a few well-placed shots, and even take a few of them out, if you’re hiding for too long. There’s a definite feeling of co-operation, despite knowing that the other character is an NPC.

Half of the game is fighting, and that’s done very well indeed. The other half, though, is a cinematic 3D platformer where your target is always clear. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I felt that the platforming aspect was a little too easy – bar a few mistimed quicktime events on my part, I flew through these parts of the game, pausing only to admire the view.

Textures pop-in on occasion, and there’s a fair amount of screen tearing if you’re turning the camera quickly, but these problems barely mar the game. There are moments when you’d swear you were making your character run through a real (abandoned) city: some textures have more resolution than you’d expect from digital cameras, and the cinematics merge quickly with the in-game action, letting you get back to business with a minimum of fuss. For a relatively short game (8-10 hours), there are enough shining moments in Uncharted to go back to it long after you’ve completed the storyline, if only to play through your favourite chapter one more time.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Patapon

2008-03-26T11:12:00.000+13:00

SCE Japan

PSP

Categorising Patapon is a pretty difficult task – the game has shades of almost every genre that’s been proven popular on the PSP. At its heart, though, it’s a God game with shades of real-time strategy, as well as a keen rhythm / action hybrid, with RPG aspects lightly blended in. Oh, and there are a few rhythm minigames thrown into the mix as well, although they back up the RPG elements more than anything else, as your success in these games is rewarded with increasingly rare items.

At first glance, you’d think that the game was either an indirect sequel or some kind of spiritual successor to LocoRoco. Both came out of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan’s development offices – looking increasingly like an endless cave of wonders these days – but there’s only one staffer from LocoRoco who contributed to Patapon, and that’s hyperactive sound designer Kenmei Adachi. Patapon is more of a collaboration than we’ve come to expect from Sony, as it features the game design of Hiroyuki Kotani (Game Yarouze) combined ably with the aesthetic of French designer Rolito, whose 2D vector-based characters and assets just pop out of the PSP’s small screen. Add to that the energetic soundscapes Adachi is known for, and Patapon’s a remarkably successful game; for all the individual talents that have gone into it, it still comes across as an entirely coherent vision, if not one that provides a lot of information to the player.

Starting the game, you’re greeted by the small Patapon tribe as a god, which is generally a good sign of things to come. Clearly the Patapon have seen better times, and it’s up to you to lead them through attack, defense and hunting levels to increase their numbers, wealth and experience, and rediscover the spirits of their lost warriors – all of which can be used to your advantage in later battles. All up, there are just over 30 levels, which is a lot more than you’d expect in a newly released (and bargain-priced) game. There’s also plenty of replay value in the boss battles, which can be repeated many times with the strength of the boss increasing each time you defeat it.

Despite its often frenetic pace, Patapon is a pretty simple game underneath the fanciness of the rhythm genre and the shiny graphics. There are only four commands – moving your army forwards or backwards, and ordering them to attack or defend. Things get complicated, though, because the only way to action these commands is to take part in a call-and-response rhythm with your army that sees you hitting the four face buttons in time with the Pulse of the Earth (the background beats; a looping percussion track).

Build up enough of these rhythms, and your army will enter Fever mode, which sees them fight harder and move faster. In fact, they fight so much more effectively that you’ll often find yourself holding back from a fight until you reach Fever mode, and only then weighing in. This strategy is much more effective, particularly when fighting bosses or many enemies, but it adds a grinding aspect to the game that will take away some of the enjoyment – not to mention the RSI that develops after a few hours fighting vectorised dinosaurs and giant crabs.

Choosing which units to bring to battle brings another element of strategy to the game – hunting levels, in particular, are more suited to using archers and spear-wielding troops (Yumipon and Yaripon, respectively) than general sword-and-shield fighters (Tatepon). With the rediscovery of the Megapon – troops carrying trumpets – and Dekapon (massive melee fighters) later on in the game, there’s a remarkable depth of unit choice, which can be tailored even more by equipping fancy weapons to the specific troops.

It’s hard to stop comparing Patapon to LocoRoco – both have a distinctively crisp visual style, and both are perfectly optimised for handheld play on the PSP. LocoRoco, though, was marginally better at explaining what the player had to do to reach a successful end-state – simply get all the LocoRoco to the end of the level. Patapon suffers at times from holding back too much information from the player – sure, the general plot is laid out easily enough, but it’s still easy to reach stumbling blocks where the next step just isn’t laid out clearly enough to follow. One such place, for example, sees you pit your army against a fortress that simply cannot be beaten without an item you can only obtain by killing a random golden bird in a previous level. Sure, the existence of the bird is hinted at, and you’re told you need the item to bring down the fortress, but the two are never linked.

The only way the PSP console lets the side down is its speakers, as the Patapon’s chants and constant background music can sound pretty tinny, particularly in later levels. That said, the game is much easier to play with headphones, as you can keep the beat (and reach that elusive Fever mode) much more easily. Also, if anyone else is going to be in the room (or next door) while you’re playing, you may want to invest in headphones even if you’re not bothered by the speakers. Hearing constantly repeating kitschy-cute beats and screaming monsters for any longer than a few minutes won’t appeal to any of your friends or housemates.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Patapon will be making its way to the PS3, in some form or other, by the end of the year – like LocoRoco spawning its own interactive screensaver / minigame on the next-gen console in Cocoreccho, the IP is just too good for Sony to pass up.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

2008-03-11T09:10:00.000+13:00

Insomniac

PS3

You know how Ratchet and Clank games work by now – start off hitting enemies with a spanner, collecting bolts along the way, work your way up to a range of ridiculously awesome guns and other weapons, level up said weapons, throw in a bunch of boss battles, prettied-up quicktime events, and spend hours in front of a television screen at a time, grunting incoherently at flatmates as you shoot novelty ammunition at mutant goldfish. Well, that’s how it works for me.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is the first outing for Insomniac’s popular PS2 franchise on the PS3, and it’s fantastic. Utterly fantastic. Newcomers to the series can pick up a controller and get straight into the game without having to be told which buttons to press (although the tutorials are helpful), the graphics pop out of the screen in brilliant colours, and the in-game action is on par with cut-scenes from as little as two years ago. What’s more, the whole thing runs at a steady 60fps throughout the game.

Plot-wise, the basic gist of things is that you’re alternating between chasing the evil emperor Tachyon, running from him when he’s too powerful, and trying to get your hands on some kind of ultimate weapon before he does. Simple stuff, really. You do get to find out a little more about the history of the Lombaxes, which was teased pretty heavily in previous games; and, if you manage to get to the end of the game in one piece, you also get to prevent the destruction of the universe. Which is nice.

The basic storyline aside, the game actually has more in common with the likes of Mass Effect than previous Insomniac titles – although the developers have thankfully scrapped the central hub that was so infuriating in the most recent Ratchet game, Up Your Arsenal. Instead, you move from planet to planet, upgrading your weapons as you collect raretanium crystals (don’t even ask), and blowing up the aforementioned mutant goldfish. Fans of the arena battles still have the chance to battle it out against a range of enemies, although these can be skipped if you’re not fond of prizefighting.

Once you get into the grind of collecting bolts, firing increasingly extraordinary (but no less amusing) weapons at an array of enemies, you won’t notice the graphics. That’s not to say you won’t appreciate them, but after the first couple of hours playing, what you’ll be most impressed with is that the graphics don’t impede your progress in the game, are clear enough that you won’t get sore eyes after hours of playing, and are, simply put, as good as you have any right to expect from a next-gen game. This is living, you might say.

Aside from the tacked-on (and best forgotten) space shooter sequences between the real levels, a little quick-and-dirty level design near the end of the game is pretty much the only thing that mars my experience of the game. Separating platforms by massive artificial gravity jumps might sound cool, and may even look pretty to someone watching over your shoulder, but when the player has no input into the direction you’re travelling, all it becomes is a gussied-up version of Resident Evil’s opening doors loading screens. Granted, the creaking doors idea was a great workaround for a static loading screen, but in Ratchet, the level shouldn’t even need time to load, and adding in some element of difficulty to moving between platforms would have gone a long way towards improving player involvement in the level.

Overall, I’m damn impressed with the game. Now, I’m disinclined to think that a ten-hour game can redeem an $800 machine, but I’ll be damned if Ratchet and Clank’s latest outing doesn’t smack the action-adventure ball right out of the park.

And here’s where Sony’s marketing machine kicks in. Ratchet is, along with Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, being held up as some kind a shining beacon of competitiveness, or some other abstract noun, against the more established Xbox 360. Prior to the summer release schedule, there were really only a few reasons why any sane gamer (with a limited wallet) would have chosen to buy a PS3, and those reasons were largely to do with the other things the machine can do – run Linux, join Stanford’s Folding@Home project to find novel cures for obscure diseases, accommodate a non-proprietary hard drive, and simply allow a greater deal of customisation. And now they’re adding some good games to the mix, exclusive games that weren’t originally designed for another platform? It’s about time.

Sony’s been on the back foot for a few reasons, and it’s not just because they launched their console almost a full year later than Microsoft. Sony also has a rather lacklustre online store, a good few rungs down the ladder from the 360, which was able to springboard off the success of the original Xbox’s Live service. Add to that an initially clunky XMB interface, a collection of mixed messages about peripherals such as the PVR add-on to the PS3 that’s supposed to turn up sometime “early” this year, launching without a rumble-pack controller, and the seemingly requisite bare-faced lies about why they didn’t provide the DualShock 3 from the beginning (it’s coming out “soon,” though), and it’s all a bit of a mess. Thank God for upgradeable firmware, you might say – it’s the only way Sony can dig themselves out of this little (piano) black hole. Well, upgradeable firmware and stellar titles like Ratchet and Clank Future. Things might be looking up.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Mass Effect

2008-03-06T18:17:00.000+13:00

Bioware

Xbox 360 (now), PC (soon...)

Let’s get this out of the way first – Bioware’s latest game was hyped up like nobody’s business. Early builds from the creators of RPG-heavy Knights of the Old Republic showed a surprisingly complex character whose responses to NPCs determined their future interactions with him or her, a solid over-the-shoulder combat shooter, as well as some pretty damn fine graphics. Luckily for everyone just waiting for another reason to buy a 360, it turns out that pretty much everything hinted at by previews and pre-release builds was on the money.

Starting the game, you’re faced with a panoply of options to define your character – male or female; black or white; or anything in between. Want clearly defined cheekbones and artificially inflated hair a la a 1972 David Bowie? Easy as that. You even get some say in your back-story, which influences how characters react to you the first time they meet you. Every reaction after that is up to you, as you use Bioware’s new little toy – the conversation wheel. It’s a simple enough mechanic, but it allows you to control conversations that flow with cinematic timing and quality. The voice acting is remarkably good, and barring the inexplicably low-res shadows that fall over the characters’ faces during close-ups, the game’s graphics are incredible, especially given your control over your character’s appearance.

That control extends to every aspect of the way you and your squad fight, as well – you can control new skills learned by yourself and other squad members, or delegate that to the console to automatically upgrade skills you use more often. You can have as much or as little control over this as you want, and if you change your mind later, it’s only a matter of heading to the menu and switching the option.

Fine-tuning your characters, and the weapons they use, is actually quite a fun part of the game, especially when you can see what a huge impact it makes on the difficulty of firefights. Having trouble against the robotic geth armies? Switch to Shredder rounds for extra damage against synthetics. Facing off against a huge Thresher maw? Polonium rounds give toxic damage against organics. Problem solved.

From the outset of the game, you have almost too many choices. Once you’ve finished up the first hour or so of gameplay, though, you get free run of the entire freaking galaxy, all at blisteringly fast FTL speeds. Important locations are clearly marked, but it’s just as fun to avoid the main plot and explore some of the numerous planetary systems, perhaps prospecting for valuable minerals, or hunting down alien data discs along the way. Some of these planets are tied into secondary assignments, so you might find yourself saving colonists or scientists from some alien threat; or, more likely, saving colonists from the scientists. Morality in science doesn’t seem to be a strong theme in the game. Didn’t they learn anything from Alien?

These side missions are great fun, don’t get me wrong – you get to drive across the planet in a six-wheeled tank-thing, shoot at enemy encampments, prospect for minerals, and recover alien probes that seem to have crashed all over the universe. The only negative comment I could possibly make about the tank-thing is that there is no way to customise its firepower – you’re stuck with a standard machine gun and some kind of explosive. Effective in a firefight, no doubt, but in a game where every single other damn thing is able to be changed by the player, being able to swap in toxic-laced shells to kill organic enemies just that little bit faster would have been a nice touch. But I’m picky that way. Switching to third-person mode is easy to do at any point, though, and you’ll find yourself in many sequences where it’s easier (and more fun) to get out of the vehicle and fight.

As much fun as it is to avoid the plot, the main story is one of the most engaging videogame narratives I’ve played since, I don’t know, the last time I spun up my KOTOR disc. You see Commander Shepard drafted as the first human Spectre, a kind of intergalactic secret agent, and chase down an agent who’s gone rogue, while finding ancient alien technology and uncovering secrets about the universe, and the cyclical nature of civilisations. If you can imagine M. John Harrison settling in to write Goldeneye after watching two or three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in a single sitting, you’re starting to get the idea.

As for the much-publicised sex scenes, yes, they are in the game, but you have to play through the entire main storyline before Shepard gets a little nookie, and you really have to put in a lot of conversational groundwork if you want the other characters to answer you with slightly more salacious responses. If you don’t want to see your character getting it on with a blue-skinned alien (or a human crew member), if that’s the way you swing, no worries – any emotional involvement with the other crew members is completely avoidable, and it all depends on how you respond to the crew using the conversation wheel. So, just like in real life, then.

Aesthetically speaking, and contrary to much of the negative publicity about the scenes (the phrase “virtual orgasmic rape” springs to mind as one example), they’re tastefully done – plenty of side-on camera shots, a little soft lighting, and some emotional music. It’s certainly been scripted to avoid full-frontal nudity, and to tie in with Shepard’s emotions towards his or her crew – as determined by fifteen or so hours of conversations controlled by the player. Overall, I’ve seen worse scenes (and better, for that matter) in PGR-rated films or primetime television.

Completionists will probably take upwards of twenty hours to finished the game – I rounded it off in about eighteen, having put about eight hours into searching every single available planet in the galaxy, although I did leave a couple of the collection quests unfinished. As it stands, Mass Effect is probably the single most compelling reason to own an Xbox 360, at least until its inevitable sequel comes out. It’s as simple as that.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]