I finally feel as though I can give a proper review of this game as I've played a decent amount of it and have gone through almost every character in one fashion or another. A disclaimer to begin with, I review games differently than most others that write these things. I try my hardest not to break the game down into it's individual parts, because, to me, that's not properly analyzing the product as a whole. With that said, however, this is a fighting game which puts it apart from something like Dead Space 2, the last game I reviewed. Thus there will be a lot of talk about the individual parts.
On with the show:
First the obvious: the entire Vs. series of games from Capcom, with a few exceptions, have been games made to appeal to a wider audience than their other fighters like Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. Going back to the two pre-Vs. games in X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes, the games have had a much more simplified manner of playing and not a lot of variance in the execution of moves. There are no charge characters like Guile or M.Bison from Street Fighter here -- even if Guile and M.Bison appear in the game -- and there's no intense Zangief styled 360 rotation moves to pull of devastating wrestling attacks. It's designed so that anyone can pick up the sticks and feel as though they're actually playing the game. That being said, however, the timing on Marvel vs. Capcom 3's gameplay is quite precise and unforgiving in a lot of instances. Especially if you're the kind of player going after those devastating combos that leave the other player feeling completely helpless.
The gameplay is fast, hectic, and intense. It's the kind of fighting game where sitting around and feeling your player out for a round or two just doesn't work. You've gotta have a good knowledge base of how your character works before the fight begins, and you've gotta be pretty decent at executing that knowledge base if you want to put the hurt on people. The gameplay is also FUN. I've not had this much fun, personally, in the Vs. series of games in a very long time. And for a series of games that were designed to be total fan-service, I would assume that would be one of the most important factors.
The selection of characters is a fantastic assortment of who's who from both sides of the battle. The selection process was a long, legal battle to get the characters that do appear in the game, but I think the end result is well worth it. There's a lot of familiar faces missing from the previous game (and some long-standing characters that also didn't make the cut). The reason that Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had so many characters, however, was that the game's visuals and battle data was all copy and pasted from other games. There were only a handful of sprites that were new to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Cable, Marrow, Amingo, and a few others) and everything else was ripped from Darkstalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, MSH vs. Street Fighter, the first Marvel vs. Capcom game, and the Street Fighter Alpha series. Visually, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was quite disappointing in that those recycled sprites didn't age well and became very pixelated (like Morrigan for instance), and even the new sprites didn't have the same polished feel as something from a Street Fighter III. Especially when set against the three dimensional backgrounds of the game. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is using a new engine (of which only two characters found in the game were previously rendered on; Chris Redfield and Wesker) in MT Framework, thus everything was being designed from the ground up. The animations for Chris and Wesker, while keeping the tone of the characters, are a bit different from Resident Evil 5; Ryu, Chun-Li and Gouki don't have any borrowed assets from Street Fighter IV, and Morrigan is actually brought into a new game with a new character model. Finally.
The character selection can be a little off when first experienced or first glanced, particularly on the Marvel Comics side of things. Especially if you don't read Marvel Comics or have a small understanding of what the New Marvel is trying to do with its properties. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of missing and/or absent faces that people would come to expect from another Vs. game, but people tend to forget that the last Vs. game came out ten or so years ago, and the landscape of Marvel Comics has changed drastically. A lot of characters that appeared in MvC2, for instance, are no longer relevant in the comics world (Gambit, Rogue, Sabretooth) and some of the characters in the game have risen up to take their places (Deadpool, X-23, and She-Hulk, for instance). While there may not be as many characters in this one compared to the previous one, I think the wide variety of the selectable characters from M.O.D.O.K. to Amaterasu balance the game out firecely. I'd also like to mention that with a much more compact selection of characters to chose from, it restricts the selection process and almost forces people to choose more characters. From a personal standpoint, I've used and have wanted to use more characters in this game than I ever did in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 across the arcade release, the Dreamcast release, and the more recent PlayStation Network release of the game. Each character is also presented in four different color schemes as per usual with Capcom's fighters. Some of them, like Spider-Man's selection, are all sorts of wonderful as I love Spider-Man's black and white costume the most even after all these years he hasn't worn it, and others are just painful on the eyes. One of Cap's and two of Magneto's are this way.
Visually, the game does what it's supposed to do. The design of the game was intended to be a living comic book, if I remember correctly, and it does just that. Each character model's rendering looks as though it could have been pencilled, inked and colored by any given comic book artist and then thrown into the game. This is one of the few games that really captures that vibe well, especially for a comic book related game. I don't know if this is a cell-shading process or what, but the end result is a rather brilliantly colored spectical of constant action. One of my biggest fears about fighting games going to a three-dimensional presentation from a two-dimensional one was the loss of intricate details such as flowing clothing, facial expressions, and the like, but this game has further cemented what Capcom has been doing with Street Fighter the past few years, and that fear has been silenced completely. There's a lot of detail going on in this game that, to me, rivals some of the animation that SNK has done with the King of Fighters series for a very long time. The backgrounds are also really well done, though I wish there was a background viewer of some sort in the game's gallery so you could see what was going on and fully appreciate it as it's almost nearly impossible to do so while playing the game. The backgrounds are just as varied as the characters, though there's a lot less of them, which is a bit of a downer for me. I miss the days of old when every character had their own background full of details, and then there were special backgrounds for specific things. Like the bottom of the Pit when you fought Reptile in Mortal Kombat, or the tall grass field in Australia where Ryu and Sagat fight in Street Fighter Alpha 2. My favorite backgrounds presented here are the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and the Tricell Laboratory (which is full of Lickers and a Tyrant).
The sound of the game is just bat-poop crazy. There's so much going on all the time it's hard to decipher what's what at times. The character vocalizations are more present here than in any of the previous games, or any other fighting game for that matter, and they really do illustrate the personalities of the characters. Deadpool, by far and far, is the most hilarious and outspoken character of the game. From his opening game taunts against Wolverine, Magneto or any Street Fighter character ("I love Street Fighter! Would you mind signing your spleen for me?!), to his fake Shoryuken, to the random names for his own moves (Katana-Rama! Chimichangas!), and finishing it up with his win-quotes, which are done in pure Deadpool style. He breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to you. Wolverine sounds gruff and growling as always, but it is definitely a different voice actor this time around. Spider-Man mocks and is quite playful, Doom is dominant and egotistical, M.O.D.O.K. is insane, X-23 is trying to hard to be a better Wolverine, so on and so forth. Capcom really went all out to capture the what makes Marvel's characters... well, Marvel's characters and nailed it on the head with all of them. And they didn't do too shappy with the Capcom side either. The game also comes with a really neat Japanese voice over track option for the Capcom side, and if you set it to "original" you'll get a nice presentation of how the characters have always been shown. Certain characters (Ryu, Zero, Arthur) will speak Japanese, while others (Chris, Wesker) will speak english.
There's a ton of music in the game as well. Each of the nine stages has three different themes going on at different times, and each character has their own theme, a lot of which are brand new, others are remixed versions of their classic themes from other games.
The presentation of the game, from the cinematic sequences which are nothing short of amazing, to the game's menus and game's modes are all well done. There's the traditional fighting game stuff of course (arcade, versus, online battles) and there's the training mode which, I have to say is a stroke of genius on Capcom's part, has the option to simulate connection speed. Part of the reason I don't play fighters online is because I can't adjust very well to bad connections and lag (the other reasons are input delay, and it lacks the intimacy and fun of being right next to the person you're playing against). Here you can select what kind of connection you are playing at or who you're playing against has and relearn the characters accordingly. There's also a Mission mode that operates like the Trial mode from Street Fighter IV and gives you some time to learn specific moves and combos for every character in the game.
All in all, the game was more than well done, and I think it was more than worth the ten year wait for it. Not everyone is going to like it for whatever reason, but it's a solid fighter that presents itself as a game that anyone can pick up and play and it executes that presentation very well. On the flipside of that, however, it's also got a great deal of depth to it for all those tournament-like players, and frame-counters and the like. I think the people that would enjoy this game the most are, of course, people that REALLY enjoy fighting games, and fans of Capcom and/or Marvel.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Bits and Pieces 8: ENTER THE SUBTITLE.
So Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation are coming out on Blu-Ray on April 19th, 2011. Two shitty movies made by some fucking dude that has no idea how a martial arts tournament works and a complete fucking asshat that no one should really pay attention to. Although I was a bit fond of the original attempt at turning Mortal Kombat into a movie, I have since grown up and pushed the action button, and realized that, just like his godawful attempts at making Resident Evil into movies, that guy ripped everything that was Mortal Kombat out of the movie and threw it in the trash, then made things up as he went along. Seriously, not one real fatality in the game? Hokey, pokey martial arts sequences that were better rendered in their native China than in any American flick EVAR?! It was nothing more than a case of some snooty filmmaker snob saying, "HEY, WE CAN DO STORIES BETTER THAN THOSE GUYS CAN, SO LETS JUST FUCK SHIT UP!"
This happens all the time in American cinema. Just look at every superhero movie made in the last two decades (minus the first two Blade movies, 'cause those were better than any comic Blade had ever been in) or any movie based on a video game. Especially Resident Evil and that Tomb Raider garbage.
And don't get me started on Street Fighter.
But that's all besides the point. Despite my ranting and raving and SHEER NERDRAGEHATE for the Mortal Kombat movies, I can still enjoy them.
I can enjoy them even more when they have nerdshit stuffed away in them that makes Ed Boon and his crew at Netherrealm Studios the kings of SECRET FIGHTING GAME SHIT. They actually started all that, by the way. With Reptile in the original Mortal Kombat arcade... oh, and those "fatality" things.
The Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Blu-Rays (both films probably make for really good films for me to watch really drunk, or to be watched with me while I'm really drunk) have a nice little easter egg stuffed away in them for the gamers. Yeah, folks like me. Embedded in the secret coding of the Blu-Ray lies an extra costume for Mortal Kombat -- the video game that's being released on the same day that's a reboot for the franchise -- for Jade. Jade's digital life began as a hidden character in Mortal Kombat II, before debuting in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a fully playable character. In order to fight her in MKII you had to use nothing but the low-kick button during one of the rounds that you win, and she'd take you back to Goro's Lair -- a stage from the original Mortal Kombat -- and beat the crap out of you.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the second time a Blu-Ray disc has featured a video game aspect to it that is only functional on the PlayStation 3 console. The first was the fully playable demo of God of War III on the District 9 Blu-Ray.
And just to connect the two, Kratos, the lead character from the God of War series -- and the most badass badass to ever grace the world with his GODRAGEHATE presence -- is a fully playable character on the PlayStation 3 version of the new Mortal Kombat game.
I do. I really, really do. But to keep this rant to the bare minimum of wordage, I'm hating them now for what they do to video games. It's no secret that video games make more money than Hollywood does nowadays. They just do. You want a good example? Look at the sales and money generated from Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops. It smashed all records in the entertainment fields like the Hulk when he got back to Earth after Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and the others shot him into space. If you didn't get that, or didn't understand it, then obviously you're not spending enough time reading comics. And that just makes you UnAmerican.
But it doesn't stop there, oh, no. Video games also offer better production (nothing can look fake in an all digital world), better acting for a great deal of the time, and... DUN DUN DUN, better stories. Take Black Ops again. It's a standard, big budget action flick, but it out action flicked most of the big budget action flicks I saw last year, and it was better written. And that's saying a lot since the Call of Duty series is hugely popular for it's online multiplayer, and isn't known for it's epic, cerebral storytelling masterpieces.
But... God of War III blew the remake of The Clash of the Titans to absolute fuckall IN THE TITLE SEQUENCE ALONE.
Yet, Hollywood still has this 'holier-than-thou' aspect to it where the collective they, whomever these faceless twats are, think they can take some concept that was thought up in a video game -- or in a comic or some other medium that wasn't in the HOLY GRAIL CINEMA -- and do a better job. And they fail. Miserably. Instead of making a straight on horror film that involves zombies, but spirals out into an elaborate biochemical fuckjob like the Resident Evil games WERE, they put in made up characters that aren't even in the game, and make them wannabe kung-fu action stars (sorry, Milla, you're no Donnie Yen), and take the story into weirdville.
And it continues. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves are video games that make a flawless merger between the lazy, voyeuristic, inactive aspects of the cinema, and the involved, interactive, busy-bee aspect of the video game. It's a mix between Raiders of the Lost Ark style adventure and... I've got nothing else. Yet, when the rights were optioned to make a film based on the franchise, this guy starts yammering on about making a movie about a family of folks to be reckoned with in the antiquities world. Which has absolutely nothing to do with Nathan Drake, the world he operates in, his motivations, let alone either of the two (soon to be three) game's the character has appeared in. What his intentions are... they're like optioning the rights to make a Batman movie, then dealing solely on Bruce's family issues, keeping Martha and Thomas Wayne alive... and never having him actually be Batman.
Okay, that was probably a bit much, but still... stop licensing stuff out and make Hollywood, it's shite writing staff, it's shite directors; make them find original material inside their own fucking brains for once.
It's a retard's medium, cinema. Good for wide-eyed, doped up entertainment, but little else.
And don't get me started on horror cinema from America. For the past twenty years or so, horror from Hollywood has been a giant turd that's been forcefully smashed into the surface of my eyeballs. Even video games get horror right.
Just look at Dead Space 2. Heh, heh.
My apologies for those of you that subscribe to the HOLY GRAIL OF ENTERTAINMENT that movies seem to hold over people. I just don't share that opinion at all. It's a passive and lazy form of entertainment that's the equivalent of a cellophane packaged yellow-sponged snack cake with cream filling.
Yes. A goddamned Twinkie.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Dead Space 2.
Bare with me with this, 'cause I haven't written an actual review of much of anything in ages.
In 2008, Electronic Arts released a game called Dead Space. Developed by Visceral Games, Dead Space was a horror game in the same vein as the Resident Evil series with a high emphasis on jump scare tactics, dread inducing confrontations, and very little in terms of provisions and what not. The sub-genre is called "survival horror," a label that Capcom created for it's Resident Evil and Dino Crisis games. At around the same time, I had just about given up the hopes that anyone would make a truly great horror game any time soon. Something that would instill a sense of immediate dread and not just rely on the jump scare routine that has populated Hollywood horror films since its inception. But Dead Space was different. The first lure that got my attention with the game was that Warren Ellis had worked on the story aspects of the game, followed by Antony Johnston. Two comic book writers whose work I am familiar with and fond of.
Playing Dead Space came with a new sort of precedent in interactive horror that I hadn't experienced before in a game. Dread was always there, always present. Even with the somewhat predictable jump scares they used, they never really prepared me for what was coming next, or, even worse, what COULD come next. The end result was the best horror related experience in video games that I had participated in.
Dead Space 2 is a different creature altogether. I relate the two games to Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens. Dead Space was the introduction. It was often a slow burn sort of horror to establish the world it takes place in and the characters that populate it, including the character you play as, Isaac Clarke. You don't know what's going on, and a lot of the focus of the narrative is spent on figuring out what's going on. By the time the sequel comes around, you already know what's going on, and it becomes a different sort of narrative. Dead Space 2, like Aliens, is about closure, but from a different perspective. Where Sigourney Weaver's character is slowly coerced into going back to LV-426, Isaac is just dropped into the mess (so to speak). One of the main differences between Dead Space and its sequel is that Isaac now has a voice. He can speak his own mind, and his reactions to what's going on are now something he possesses. In the original game, by not giving him a voice, they're essentially giving you that voice. Isaac's reactions are your reactions. In Dead Space 2, Isaac becomes his own character, and he's someone you don't mind following around and pushing through the meat and viscera of the problem. The other main difference is that in Dead Space, because it's an introductory sort of chapter, you do wonder what happened to the Ishimura, and you put into narrative induced situations that revolve around the answering of those questions. In the sequel, the answers are already there from the get go -- for the most part, there are new questions to be asked, however -- and instead you're provided with a new narrative aspect on the game, which is to get out alive, to survive, and reach that ultimate climax for Isaac and find closure.
Fear plays a pretty decent role in horror, but it isn't the end all, nor begin all aspect of it. Fear is also an entirely subjective thing. That's why I, as a 34 year old guy, am terrified of spiders while other men my age may or may not have a problem with them whatsoever. The intention of Dead Space 2, at times, may be to scare you indeed. A lot of what makes Dead Space 2 (and the first one for that matter) has little to do with fear. The guys and gals at Visceral Games have attempted to instill the sense of dread in you from the get go. They never want you to be able to play the game casually, to shrug off what's going on, or to not let if effect you. They're trying to emulate what all good horror does and should do: disturb you, set you off balance, emit emotions that are often best left in that dark space in your brain that you really don't want to think about. Throughout the first game, I was never calm. Dread was always present 'cause I never knew what was going to happen next, what I was going bare witness to next, or what sort of monstrosity was just waiting around the corner to do very, very nasty things to me. That's where the gore comes in. I've never been too big of an admirer of gore-less horror fiction. I don't like the philosophy of leaving it to the imagination of readers/viewers because that nulls the point of even trying to write, paint, or film horror to begin with. As a reader of horror fiction, I want the author to use his imagination to try to disturb me, not for you to try to get me to use my imagination. That's why I write horror myself. Nevertheless, the gore in Dead Space is there for a reason. Gore isn't a natural thing to behold in the landscape of the human condition. It's there, but not for the majority of the populace. Not everyone works in an abbatoir or as a forensic pathologist. It's stuff we do not see, and the mere idea of seeing what's inside us -- or another living creature for that matter -- is a repulsive, revolting act. In horror, it's often there to unsettle you, and weaken your immunity so that the presenter of the fiction has easier access to the psychological aspects of the horror. Dead Space is rife with it, as is the sequel. The sequel out does the original in terms of gore, and it has that aspect to it. There is a lot of psychological stuff going on in the game (from red herrings, to being hunted by men and monster alike, to the main character literally going insane), and the gore is there to keep you vulnerable to it. It's never the same kind of gore, either, in terms of the presentation of the fiction. In the action sequences (when the monsters are attacking you and whatnot) it's always the same, but in the cinematic, plot-driven sequences of the game, it's really threatening to your psychological make up in terms of how you consume fiction. There is a lot of stuff in Dead Space 2 that is truly unsettling, even to my experienced eyes. The plot elements present in Dead Space 2 are much more frantic and quick paced, while not lessening the horror elements from the first one at all. It's very, very, very much like the transition from Alien to Aliens, but not losing anything in between. Alien was pure horror, while Aliens was more sci-fi action with horror elements. Dead Space 2 is pure horror with some sci-fi action elements here and there that create a much more pulse-pounding pace. Another really key storytelling aspect of Dead Space 2 that was established in the original is paranoia -- which goes hand in hand with the dementia that plagues Isaac. You don't know who to trust, especially because of the original, and in this one it's taken a step further so you don't even know if you can trust Isaac. Especially towards the game's conclusion.
Another aspect of the story element of Dead Space 2 that really gave me a unique feeling was how seamless the plot unravels. In the original -- and with most other games -- there is a bridge between one level and the next. In Dead Space, the bridge was riding the tram from one location to the next, and while you're riding the tram the game goes to a loading screen. Other games use this same method as well. Dead Space 2 did away with it, and I, personally, felt that it was quite an innovative way to present a game that is heavy on storytelling. There aren't any loading screens in Dead Space 2, there aren't any moments where you ride a vehicle from point a to point b and don't get to enjoy the ride because the game is loading the data. There aren't any smoke breaks for Isaac while the game installs the next level (sorry, Snake, but I gotta poke fun at the smoke breaks). It was one of the reasons I finished the entire game in one sitting because not having those chapter breaks between levels and whatnot worked towards immersing you in the fiction better. I think that the guys and gals at Visceral Games took cues and notes from the folks at Naughty Dog and what they've done with Uncharted, to present you with a storytelling method that's not only immersive, but seamless.
Unlike a lot of gamers, or anyone who writes a review of video games, I don't rate or rank the graphics or visual presentation in any sort of normal way. I genuinely gave up caring about graphics as a focal point of gaming towards the end of the last generation of consoles (the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox). I base my appreciation, or disgust, with the visual aspects of gaming depending on how it serves the game's story. So, with that in mind, Dead Space 2's graphics are very, very impressive. Just like the original, Dead Space 2 manages to create tension, dread, and anxiety through atmosphere alone. Be it in darkened cafeterias, dimly lit corridors, brutally ransacked shopping areas, and even a brightly lit school-like district. The game takes place on the Sprawl, a massive space station near Saturn, which differentiates it from the previous game in a very distinct fashion. These were normal people that got all mutilated here, not engineers and the rest of the crew of the Ishimura. It was actually that section of the space station that disturbed me the most: the School district location. It was very brightly light, with lots of color... and lots of children monsters. There was a level of creepiness there that I hadn't seen in a long time in any sort of horror, but there was some levity there, too. The visuals in Dead Space 2 fit the fiction they're trying to tell almost perfectly. The in game menus are all holograms and fit nicely into the world they've created, the technology seems well thought out and has practical uses for everything you see (from plastic cups, to the more high tech gadgetry) and everything is animated very well. It doesn't hurt at all that Visceral dedicated a lot of effort in providing as much detail as possible. At lot of the environments reminded me of putting stickers on G.I. Joe vehicles when I was younger. There's a lot of detail to the point where you see warning stickers everywhere and they're clear and readable. The sound is also on par with the fiction they're telling. There's lots of creepiness provided through sound alone, whether it be through the music, the noises the monster's make, creepy children's songs, insane gibberish being spoken by one character or another. There are times when the sound drops out completely, which only fuels the dread. In the zero gravity sections of the game -- much like the first game -- they really hammered home the tag line from Ridley Scott's Alien to a very believable and frightening reality. In space, no one can hear you scream, indeed.
The meat of the game, as with all games, is the gameplay. Through my three play-throughs of Dead Space 2, I couldn't find a single flaw in the game play whatsoever. It's tight and fluid, just like the original. I think they may or may not have switched up a few button pushes here and there, but for the most part it plays identical to the first game, which is the way sequels to games should play. If you go into the sequel of a game and it plays drastically different than the original, then you're playing against the learning curve and it can take you out and away from the experience. I don't know if I had an unfair advantage in Dead Space 2 or not. I played the original a lot, and when I picked up Dead Space 2, there was no learning curve to be learned for me. I knew what did what, and I knew how to move fluidly throughout the environment. Of course, there were still plenty of moments when I was overwhelmed by the game and was reduced to a panicking little feather of a man just trying to get out of the chaos. But that's a perfectly acceptable in a game where horror is the main theme.
The replay value, something that is also a very important part of gaming, of this game is tremendous to me. I gotta stress that part of it. To me. The Dead Space games put me in an environment I'm quite comfortable with due to my love and adoration of horror, and replaying them never lessens the quality of the fiction they're giving me. It's to the experience I have when I re-read Clive Barker's the Books of Blood or re-watch many, many different horror films. I enjoy it thoroughly. And the dread, I'm happy to say, is always present -- even if I'm going through with all weapons maxed out and I can dispatch enemies with the greatest of ease. The atmosphere they've created is one I enjoy to experience again again. That said, however, unless you have the same particular fascinations that I do with horror, I'm not so sure one would find the pleasure in subjecting themselves to the atrocities that are present in the game on more than one occasion.
Dead Space 2, like the game before it, isn't just a good, quality made game. It's a good, quality made horror experience rife with shocking, jaw-dropping, and uncomfortable experiences. This kind of horror works its way into your bones, settles in your nerves, and shakes the very core of your humanity.
Just like all good horror should.
...fuckin' needles...
In 2008, Electronic Arts released a game called Dead Space. Developed by Visceral Games, Dead Space was a horror game in the same vein as the Resident Evil series with a high emphasis on jump scare tactics, dread inducing confrontations, and very little in terms of provisions and what not. The sub-genre is called "survival horror," a label that Capcom created for it's Resident Evil and Dino Crisis games. At around the same time, I had just about given up the hopes that anyone would make a truly great horror game any time soon. Something that would instill a sense of immediate dread and not just rely on the jump scare routine that has populated Hollywood horror films since its inception. But Dead Space was different. The first lure that got my attention with the game was that Warren Ellis had worked on the story aspects of the game, followed by Antony Johnston. Two comic book writers whose work I am familiar with and fond of.
Playing Dead Space came with a new sort of precedent in interactive horror that I hadn't experienced before in a game. Dread was always there, always present. Even with the somewhat predictable jump scares they used, they never really prepared me for what was coming next, or, even worse, what COULD come next. The end result was the best horror related experience in video games that I had participated in.
Dead Space 2 is a different creature altogether. I relate the two games to Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens. Dead Space was the introduction. It was often a slow burn sort of horror to establish the world it takes place in and the characters that populate it, including the character you play as, Isaac Clarke. You don't know what's going on, and a lot of the focus of the narrative is spent on figuring out what's going on. By the time the sequel comes around, you already know what's going on, and it becomes a different sort of narrative. Dead Space 2, like Aliens, is about closure, but from a different perspective. Where Sigourney Weaver's character is slowly coerced into going back to LV-426, Isaac is just dropped into the mess (so to speak). One of the main differences between Dead Space and its sequel is that Isaac now has a voice. He can speak his own mind, and his reactions to what's going on are now something he possesses. In the original game, by not giving him a voice, they're essentially giving you that voice. Isaac's reactions are your reactions. In Dead Space 2, Isaac becomes his own character, and he's someone you don't mind following around and pushing through the meat and viscera of the problem. The other main difference is that in Dead Space, because it's an introductory sort of chapter, you do wonder what happened to the Ishimura, and you put into narrative induced situations that revolve around the answering of those questions. In the sequel, the answers are already there from the get go -- for the most part, there are new questions to be asked, however -- and instead you're provided with a new narrative aspect on the game, which is to get out alive, to survive, and reach that ultimate climax for Isaac and find closure.
Fear plays a pretty decent role in horror, but it isn't the end all, nor begin all aspect of it. Fear is also an entirely subjective thing. That's why I, as a 34 year old guy, am terrified of spiders while other men my age may or may not have a problem with them whatsoever. The intention of Dead Space 2, at times, may be to scare you indeed. A lot of what makes Dead Space 2 (and the first one for that matter) has little to do with fear. The guys and gals at Visceral Games have attempted to instill the sense of dread in you from the get go. They never want you to be able to play the game casually, to shrug off what's going on, or to not let if effect you. They're trying to emulate what all good horror does and should do: disturb you, set you off balance, emit emotions that are often best left in that dark space in your brain that you really don't want to think about. Throughout the first game, I was never calm. Dread was always present 'cause I never knew what was going to happen next, what I was going bare witness to next, or what sort of monstrosity was just waiting around the corner to do very, very nasty things to me. That's where the gore comes in. I've never been too big of an admirer of gore-less horror fiction. I don't like the philosophy of leaving it to the imagination of readers/viewers because that nulls the point of even trying to write, paint, or film horror to begin with. As a reader of horror fiction, I want the author to use his imagination to try to disturb me, not for you to try to get me to use my imagination. That's why I write horror myself. Nevertheless, the gore in Dead Space is there for a reason. Gore isn't a natural thing to behold in the landscape of the human condition. It's there, but not for the majority of the populace. Not everyone works in an abbatoir or as a forensic pathologist. It's stuff we do not see, and the mere idea of seeing what's inside us -- or another living creature for that matter -- is a repulsive, revolting act. In horror, it's often there to unsettle you, and weaken your immunity so that the presenter of the fiction has easier access to the psychological aspects of the horror. Dead Space is rife with it, as is the sequel. The sequel out does the original in terms of gore, and it has that aspect to it. There is a lot of psychological stuff going on in the game (from red herrings, to being hunted by men and monster alike, to the main character literally going insane), and the gore is there to keep you vulnerable to it. It's never the same kind of gore, either, in terms of the presentation of the fiction. In the action sequences (when the monsters are attacking you and whatnot) it's always the same, but in the cinematic, plot-driven sequences of the game, it's really threatening to your psychological make up in terms of how you consume fiction. There is a lot of stuff in Dead Space 2 that is truly unsettling, even to my experienced eyes. The plot elements present in Dead Space 2 are much more frantic and quick paced, while not lessening the horror elements from the first one at all. It's very, very, very much like the transition from Alien to Aliens, but not losing anything in between. Alien was pure horror, while Aliens was more sci-fi action with horror elements. Dead Space 2 is pure horror with some sci-fi action elements here and there that create a much more pulse-pounding pace. Another really key storytelling aspect of Dead Space 2 that was established in the original is paranoia -- which goes hand in hand with the dementia that plagues Isaac. You don't know who to trust, especially because of the original, and in this one it's taken a step further so you don't even know if you can trust Isaac. Especially towards the game's conclusion.
Another aspect of the story element of Dead Space 2 that really gave me a unique feeling was how seamless the plot unravels. In the original -- and with most other games -- there is a bridge between one level and the next. In Dead Space, the bridge was riding the tram from one location to the next, and while you're riding the tram the game goes to a loading screen. Other games use this same method as well. Dead Space 2 did away with it, and I, personally, felt that it was quite an innovative way to present a game that is heavy on storytelling. There aren't any loading screens in Dead Space 2, there aren't any moments where you ride a vehicle from point a to point b and don't get to enjoy the ride because the game is loading the data. There aren't any smoke breaks for Isaac while the game installs the next level (sorry, Snake, but I gotta poke fun at the smoke breaks). It was one of the reasons I finished the entire game in one sitting because not having those chapter breaks between levels and whatnot worked towards immersing you in the fiction better. I think that the guys and gals at Visceral Games took cues and notes from the folks at Naughty Dog and what they've done with Uncharted, to present you with a storytelling method that's not only immersive, but seamless.
Unlike a lot of gamers, or anyone who writes a review of video games, I don't rate or rank the graphics or visual presentation in any sort of normal way. I genuinely gave up caring about graphics as a focal point of gaming towards the end of the last generation of consoles (the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox). I base my appreciation, or disgust, with the visual aspects of gaming depending on how it serves the game's story. So, with that in mind, Dead Space 2's graphics are very, very impressive. Just like the original, Dead Space 2 manages to create tension, dread, and anxiety through atmosphere alone. Be it in darkened cafeterias, dimly lit corridors, brutally ransacked shopping areas, and even a brightly lit school-like district. The game takes place on the Sprawl, a massive space station near Saturn, which differentiates it from the previous game in a very distinct fashion. These were normal people that got all mutilated here, not engineers and the rest of the crew of the Ishimura. It was actually that section of the space station that disturbed me the most: the School district location. It was very brightly light, with lots of color... and lots of children monsters. There was a level of creepiness there that I hadn't seen in a long time in any sort of horror, but there was some levity there, too. The visuals in Dead Space 2 fit the fiction they're trying to tell almost perfectly. The in game menus are all holograms and fit nicely into the world they've created, the technology seems well thought out and has practical uses for everything you see (from plastic cups, to the more high tech gadgetry) and everything is animated very well. It doesn't hurt at all that Visceral dedicated a lot of effort in providing as much detail as possible. At lot of the environments reminded me of putting stickers on G.I. Joe vehicles when I was younger. There's a lot of detail to the point where you see warning stickers everywhere and they're clear and readable. The sound is also on par with the fiction they're telling. There's lots of creepiness provided through sound alone, whether it be through the music, the noises the monster's make, creepy children's songs, insane gibberish being spoken by one character or another. There are times when the sound drops out completely, which only fuels the dread. In the zero gravity sections of the game -- much like the first game -- they really hammered home the tag line from Ridley Scott's Alien to a very believable and frightening reality. In space, no one can hear you scream, indeed.
The meat of the game, as with all games, is the gameplay. Through my three play-throughs of Dead Space 2, I couldn't find a single flaw in the game play whatsoever. It's tight and fluid, just like the original. I think they may or may not have switched up a few button pushes here and there, but for the most part it plays identical to the first game, which is the way sequels to games should play. If you go into the sequel of a game and it plays drastically different than the original, then you're playing against the learning curve and it can take you out and away from the experience. I don't know if I had an unfair advantage in Dead Space 2 or not. I played the original a lot, and when I picked up Dead Space 2, there was no learning curve to be learned for me. I knew what did what, and I knew how to move fluidly throughout the environment. Of course, there were still plenty of moments when I was overwhelmed by the game and was reduced to a panicking little feather of a man just trying to get out of the chaos. But that's a perfectly acceptable in a game where horror is the main theme.
The replay value, something that is also a very important part of gaming, of this game is tremendous to me. I gotta stress that part of it. To me. The Dead Space games put me in an environment I'm quite comfortable with due to my love and adoration of horror, and replaying them never lessens the quality of the fiction they're giving me. It's to the experience I have when I re-read Clive Barker's the Books of Blood or re-watch many, many different horror films. I enjoy it thoroughly. And the dread, I'm happy to say, is always present -- even if I'm going through with all weapons maxed out and I can dispatch enemies with the greatest of ease. The atmosphere they've created is one I enjoy to experience again again. That said, however, unless you have the same particular fascinations that I do with horror, I'm not so sure one would find the pleasure in subjecting themselves to the atrocities that are present in the game on more than one occasion.
Dead Space 2, like the game before it, isn't just a good, quality made game. It's a good, quality made horror experience rife with shocking, jaw-dropping, and uncomfortable experiences. This kind of horror works its way into your bones, settles in your nerves, and shakes the very core of your humanity.
Just like all good horror should.
...fuckin' needles...
Saturday, January 1, 2011
2010 in Games.
2010 was a crazy year for games. Lots of shit going on all over the place, and as a gamer I've decided to give quick reviews and whathaveyou for what I bought and played in 2010. Leaving out the stuff I have from previous years and whatnot.
I rented some games in January, for the first time in over a decade, but I won't really be covering them. They were Bayonetta, Darksiders, and MiniNinja. All three were fun, but not something I could see myself committing to spend sixty bucks on.
My 2010 year in gaming began in February when BioShock 2, Dante's Inferno, Aliens vs. Predator and Heavy Rain were released.
BioShock 2
The BioShock series, along with the Resistance series, is what got me to give first person shooter games another try after not really caring about them for a very long time. BioShock isn't like a Call of Duty or a HALO, or any of the psuedo-military shooters out there, as the narrative plays a huge role and it falls more into the dark fantasy genre than a war-like or military genre. BioShock 2 isn't really a sequel, as you don't continue on as the same character from the previous game and instead play as another individual set in the same world. I think the stories were connected, but I don't really remember how. It takes place eight years after the first game, and you play as Subject Delta, a prototype Big Daddy that apparently was forced to commit suicide and is resurrected.
The game was quite fun and the overall narrative is very pleasing in the end, and very twisted which is always a plus for me. One of the downsides to BioShock 2 is the graphics. It's running on the same engine as the previous installment, but for some reason or another, it looks a lot worse. A lot of muddy textures and detail pop up happened a lot. There were also some very hilarious issues with the physics engine that involved a man doing an endo on the back of his head after I killed him (located on the right) and some humorous twitcher glitches, which you can see in the video below.
Despite these humorous glitches and some minor graphical issues, the game still played really well and the narrative held me through from beginning to end. Which is all I really ask of games anymore, and it's becoming harder and harder for the more "elite" games to do that, and I'm finding it easier to enjoy games that used to be known for being relatively shitty.
Dante's Inferno
I don't have any neat pictures or videos about Dante's Inferno, but I did like the game. It was crazy, hellish and offered some really interesting moments. One of which was the first giant cock of video game, or at least it was the first time I had seen a giant cock in a video game. Lucifer's pecker hung to his knees, I shit you not. It was just there, flopping about while you're trying to kill the bastard fallen angel. Anyway, the game was designed around the same make up of God of War, and told the story of a Crusader/Templar Knight that broke his vows to his wife while on the Crusade, thus throwing her into Hell. Literally, Lucifer comes for her. Then you follow the path created by Dante Alighieri's Devine Comedy. It's a very interesting visual interpretation of the Christian mythological destination known as Hell and is full of all sorts of nasty demons and Cleopatra, who, like Lucifer, is also showing off her gigantic assets.
I do have to admit, at first, the idea of making an action adventure game based on Dante's Inferno was an odd one. The poem doesn't really translate to the video game medium all that well, but through the minor changes they made (making the main character a templar for instance) made the game work for me. A funny side note to it is: I let a friend borrow the game after I finished it, and he got freaked out by it to the point that he couldn't finish it.
Some of the best aspects of the game, or one of them at least, was taking the metaphor of "beating death" and turning it into a virtual reality. You actually do beat death after being killed in an elaborate boss battle. You kill him with his own Scythe after taking it as your own weapon.
Aliens vs. Predator
I wanted to really like this game. I did. But it kinda failed as an experience that could have been so much better than what it was. Why it raised all the controversy that it did is beyond me. The violence wasn't that over the top and was in perfect harmony with what had been established in both series of films. You can play as either a Space Marine (from Aliens) one of the xenomorphs (from the Alien franchise) or a Predator (from the Predator franchise, duh) but the end result is a lackluster video game that fails to capture the essence of either film franchise, but melds perfectly into the mehness of the two Aliens vs. Predator films. There's no tension, there's no buildup, and it's just a bit of a messy FPS game. Which is really, really sad. Though, I did play the crap out of it and had fun.
Heavy Rain
Hyper-analytical hat is going on. I wanted to like this game. I really did. I love horror -- yes, I consider this game to be horror, regardless of its lack of anything remotely supernatural -- but this game failed to reel me in from the get go. Which is a damned shame, because the originality of it, the presentation of it, and the design that went into it is all unique and pretty much awesome. But, I'm a consumer of fiction, and fiction takes precedence over everything when there's a narrative to be followed, or dragged through, or to be bored to death by.
Psychological thrillers, as critics and film studios call them, are a fun little sub-genre of horror that I really do enjoy. I'm something of a fan of Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels, and I love movies like Se7en, Zodiac (not minding the David Fincher connection there for a moment) and several others that are escaping my brain right now. So when it comes to this type of fiction, I'm going to hold it up against the things that impressed me the most, and not just compare it to other video games out there.
The writing was dull and uninteresting from the get go. You play as a wide range of characters (from what I understand) but you start out as a boring as fuck drawer of buildings and such, and you meddle around doing random uninteresting things that you do in daily life. You know, showering, doing some work, making some coffee, wandering around aimlessly in the back yard, all before the big tragic event happens. And said big tragic event in my eyes was nothing more than a cheap pop. First, you're presented with uninteresting character to play as that you have no emotional connection to whatsoever, and the game doesn't do much in terms of character building to devote an attachment to that character, then his child gets hit by a car. It's a cheap pop, which is a wrestling term if you hadn't realized so far. A cheap pop is something you do that will get an instant reaction out of an audience. Wrestlers do it by talking about the city they're performing in, or the local city's sports team that just won or lost. It gets an instant reaction out of people. As does anything tragic happening to a child in the first few frames of a movie. People, especially in this country, have abnormal attachments to children, and by doing something godawful to a child in any entertainment medium, you're going to get instant empathy from certain audiences. But, for me, it just doesn't work. I'm a writer, and I knew what they were doing when it happened, and I just groaned and rolled my eyes.
The game continues doing every day tasks, changing diapers, taking your kid to school, and all this stuff, until it gets to the main plot about a guy that's kidnapping children and murdering them. Which is kinda interesting, but it's not the kind of serial murderer fiction I care to ingest because it's associated to the cheap pop. Then there's the fantastical science fiction aspects of it that are the same reason I can't enjoy television shows like CSI and the like. The other aspects of the game try to adopt the prime time drama atmosphere and the psychological thriller atmosphere by presenting to us a real world looking environment. Until this detective/investigator guy shows up and he has a futuristic, I Am Robot (the Will Smith filmed version) detective gear that breaks the already established real world environments the game has delivered thus far. You even get to create a VR bouncy ball to help you wait in the police station.
Aside from a fictional standpoint, the game was pretty cool. Visually, it was beautifully designed (well, the character animations were a bit stiff, but other than that), and the gameplay was intricate and quite innovative. But, I'm not the kind of person that's going to give all sorts of accolades based on innovation and prettiness. I'm always much more focussed on the fiction I'm being told, and this one didn't sell me a good story. The voice actors were unconvincing, the dialog was pretty shoddy, and the overall plot was more akin to a Hallmark film than a serious psychological thriller piece. It really does play out like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I read in gradeschool, and the dialog shows it. You're given a lot of options in terms of what the character says, all of it has recorded audio, but in doing that they broke the natural ebb and flow of human conversation.
And then this happened:
I was attempting to make the character walk up a flight of stairs to the second floor of a hotel. She absolutely refused, turned around and began walking up an invisible flight of stairs into the sky. She never stopped, just kept going. That's about when I gave up trying to find something to keep me interested in the game.
Final Fantasy XIII
I don't have a lot to say about this game, 'cause I haven't finished it yet and I have to start over. My PS3 gave up mid-year, and I had to replace it. In doing so, the firmware update said THIS IS NOT THE HARDDRIVE I'M LOOKING FOR and I had to reformat it, losing everything. What I can say about it is that I liked it. Final Fantasy has gone from the old JRR Tolkein inspired RPGs that still populate the land, to a more Star Wars influenced Space Fantasy world while covering everything in between. FFVI and FFVII were more steampunkish than Middle-Earth based, and I quite enjoy that. I discovered later that I hadn't even made it out of the so-called twenty-hour tutorial for the game yet, and that kinda took the air out of my sails in starting over. I'll get to it, but not any time soon, I don't think.
God of War III
What can I say? Some people have hobbits, I have a god killing spartan. The God of War series met its ultimate conclusion this year with the spectacular God of War III. A game that really made me question the necessity of badly written, overly CGI ridden Hollywood films every step of the way. For instance, go rent and watch the remake or the original of Clash of the Titans (the original actually inspired the God of War development team, as can be seen with the inclusion of a kraken in God of War II, a mythological monster that doesn't exist in Greek mythology) then sit down and play God of War III. I loved every minute of the game, including the end -- which apparently left a lot of other gamers and critics feeling a little flat. The entire presentation of the game felt very polished, even the opening credits sequence that also recapped the first two games in the series, and did so artfully.
To catch up, God of War is about a Spartan warrior that became a commander of an army at a very early age. He finds himself in a battle he's inevitably going to lose, and essentially, sells his soul to a devil. That devil just happens to be Ares, the God of War, who then uses Kratos to his own means. He eventually leads Kratos to do something that should not be done (he slaughters his own wife and daughter) and vows revenge on the God of War, but not before fulfilling the duties of the other gods for ten years. Ares attacks Athens, which angers
Athena, and she helps Kratos (along with several others from the Pantheon) to retrieve Pandora's Box and eventually slay the God of War. Athena and the other gods then make Kratos the new God of War, but that doesn't last long, 'cause then he starts doing the same thing that Ares did. The gods take away his powers and try to kill him, but Gaia (who, for the sake of the game's narrative, has been rendered a titan) revives him once again and sets him on a path to get revenge on the gods. A tale of revenge that culminates in God of War III, where Kratos eventually destroys all of them.
The game is really a sword and sorcery piece in the vein of Robert E. Howard's Conan set in the insane world of Greek mythology, and it plays out quite beautifully, and in perfect tone with a lot of the tales from Greek mythology. Except the gods get theirs in the end.
The image to the right is one of those funny glitches you don't expect to happen, but happens anyway. Like in the Grand Theft Auto games from the previous generation, the ground disappeared beneath Kratos' feet. I had a good laugh at it, so I took a picture.
...to be continued tomorrow...
I rented some games in January, for the first time in over a decade, but I won't really be covering them. They were Bayonetta, Darksiders, and MiniNinja. All three were fun, but not something I could see myself committing to spend sixty bucks on.
My 2010 year in gaming began in February when BioShock 2, Dante's Inferno, Aliens vs. Predator and Heavy Rain were released.
BioShock 2
The BioShock series, along with the Resistance series, is what got me to give first person shooter games another try after not really caring about them for a very long time. BioShock isn't like a Call of Duty or a HALO, or any of the psuedo-military shooters out there, as the narrative plays a huge role and it falls more into the dark fantasy genre than a war-like or military genre. BioShock 2 isn't really a sequel, as you don't continue on as the same character from the previous game and instead play as another individual set in the same world. I think the stories were connected, but I don't really remember how. It takes place eight years after the first game, and you play as Subject Delta, a prototype Big Daddy that apparently was forced to commit suicide and is resurrected.
The game was quite fun and the overall narrative is very pleasing in the end, and very twisted which is always a plus for me. One of the downsides to BioShock 2 is the graphics. It's running on the same engine as the previous installment, but for some reason or another, it looks a lot worse. A lot of muddy textures and detail pop up happened a lot. There were also some very hilarious issues with the physics engine that involved a man doing an endo on the back of his head after I killed him (located on the right) and some humorous twitcher glitches, which you can see in the video below.Despite these humorous glitches and some minor graphical issues, the game still played really well and the narrative held me through from beginning to end. Which is all I really ask of games anymore, and it's becoming harder and harder for the more "elite" games to do that, and I'm finding it easier to enjoy games that used to be known for being relatively shitty.
Dante's Inferno
I don't have any neat pictures or videos about Dante's Inferno, but I did like the game. It was crazy, hellish and offered some really interesting moments. One of which was the first giant cock of video game, or at least it was the first time I had seen a giant cock in a video game. Lucifer's pecker hung to his knees, I shit you not. It was just there, flopping about while you're trying to kill the bastard fallen angel. Anyway, the game was designed around the same make up of God of War, and told the story of a Crusader/Templar Knight that broke his vows to his wife while on the Crusade, thus throwing her into Hell. Literally, Lucifer comes for her. Then you follow the path created by Dante Alighieri's Devine Comedy. It's a very interesting visual interpretation of the Christian mythological destination known as Hell and is full of all sorts of nasty demons and Cleopatra, who, like Lucifer, is also showing off her gigantic assets.
I do have to admit, at first, the idea of making an action adventure game based on Dante's Inferno was an odd one. The poem doesn't really translate to the video game medium all that well, but through the minor changes they made (making the main character a templar for instance) made the game work for me. A funny side note to it is: I let a friend borrow the game after I finished it, and he got freaked out by it to the point that he couldn't finish it.
Some of the best aspects of the game, or one of them at least, was taking the metaphor of "beating death" and turning it into a virtual reality. You actually do beat death after being killed in an elaborate boss battle. You kill him with his own Scythe after taking it as your own weapon.
Aliens vs. Predator
I wanted to really like this game. I did. But it kinda failed as an experience that could have been so much better than what it was. Why it raised all the controversy that it did is beyond me. The violence wasn't that over the top and was in perfect harmony with what had been established in both series of films. You can play as either a Space Marine (from Aliens) one of the xenomorphs (from the Alien franchise) or a Predator (from the Predator franchise, duh) but the end result is a lackluster video game that fails to capture the essence of either film franchise, but melds perfectly into the mehness of the two Aliens vs. Predator films. There's no tension, there's no buildup, and it's just a bit of a messy FPS game. Which is really, really sad. Though, I did play the crap out of it and had fun.
Heavy Rain
Hyper-analytical hat is going on. I wanted to like this game. I really did. I love horror -- yes, I consider this game to be horror, regardless of its lack of anything remotely supernatural -- but this game failed to reel me in from the get go. Which is a damned shame, because the originality of it, the presentation of it, and the design that went into it is all unique and pretty much awesome. But, I'm a consumer of fiction, and fiction takes precedence over everything when there's a narrative to be followed, or dragged through, or to be bored to death by.
Psychological thrillers, as critics and film studios call them, are a fun little sub-genre of horror that I really do enjoy. I'm something of a fan of Thomas Harris' Hannibal novels, and I love movies like Se7en, Zodiac (not minding the David Fincher connection there for a moment) and several others that are escaping my brain right now. So when it comes to this type of fiction, I'm going to hold it up against the things that impressed me the most, and not just compare it to other video games out there.
The writing was dull and uninteresting from the get go. You play as a wide range of characters (from what I understand) but you start out as a boring as fuck drawer of buildings and such, and you meddle around doing random uninteresting things that you do in daily life. You know, showering, doing some work, making some coffee, wandering around aimlessly in the back yard, all before the big tragic event happens. And said big tragic event in my eyes was nothing more than a cheap pop. First, you're presented with uninteresting character to play as that you have no emotional connection to whatsoever, and the game doesn't do much in terms of character building to devote an attachment to that character, then his child gets hit by a car. It's a cheap pop, which is a wrestling term if you hadn't realized so far. A cheap pop is something you do that will get an instant reaction out of an audience. Wrestlers do it by talking about the city they're performing in, or the local city's sports team that just won or lost. It gets an instant reaction out of people. As does anything tragic happening to a child in the first few frames of a movie. People, especially in this country, have abnormal attachments to children, and by doing something godawful to a child in any entertainment medium, you're going to get instant empathy from certain audiences. But, for me, it just doesn't work. I'm a writer, and I knew what they were doing when it happened, and I just groaned and rolled my eyes.
The game continues doing every day tasks, changing diapers, taking your kid to school, and all this stuff, until it gets to the main plot about a guy that's kidnapping children and murdering them. Which is kinda interesting, but it's not the kind of serial murderer fiction I care to ingest because it's associated to the cheap pop. Then there's the fantastical science fiction aspects of it that are the same reason I can't enjoy television shows like CSI and the like. The other aspects of the game try to adopt the prime time drama atmosphere and the psychological thriller atmosphere by presenting to us a real world looking environment. Until this detective/investigator guy shows up and he has a futuristic, I Am Robot (the Will Smith filmed version) detective gear that breaks the already established real world environments the game has delivered thus far. You even get to create a VR bouncy ball to help you wait in the police station.
Aside from a fictional standpoint, the game was pretty cool. Visually, it was beautifully designed (well, the character animations were a bit stiff, but other than that), and the gameplay was intricate and quite innovative. But, I'm not the kind of person that's going to give all sorts of accolades based on innovation and prettiness. I'm always much more focussed on the fiction I'm being told, and this one didn't sell me a good story. The voice actors were unconvincing, the dialog was pretty shoddy, and the overall plot was more akin to a Hallmark film than a serious psychological thriller piece. It really does play out like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I read in gradeschool, and the dialog shows it. You're given a lot of options in terms of what the character says, all of it has recorded audio, but in doing that they broke the natural ebb and flow of human conversation.
And then this happened:
I was attempting to make the character walk up a flight of stairs to the second floor of a hotel. She absolutely refused, turned around and began walking up an invisible flight of stairs into the sky. She never stopped, just kept going. That's about when I gave up trying to find something to keep me interested in the game.
Final Fantasy XIII
I don't have a lot to say about this game, 'cause I haven't finished it yet and I have to start over. My PS3 gave up mid-year, and I had to replace it. In doing so, the firmware update said THIS IS NOT THE HARDDRIVE I'M LOOKING FOR and I had to reformat it, losing everything. What I can say about it is that I liked it. Final Fantasy has gone from the old JRR Tolkein inspired RPGs that still populate the land, to a more Star Wars influenced Space Fantasy world while covering everything in between. FFVI and FFVII were more steampunkish than Middle-Earth based, and I quite enjoy that. I discovered later that I hadn't even made it out of the so-called twenty-hour tutorial for the game yet, and that kinda took the air out of my sails in starting over. I'll get to it, but not any time soon, I don't think.
God of War III
What can I say? Some people have hobbits, I have a god killing spartan. The God of War series met its ultimate conclusion this year with the spectacular God of War III. A game that really made me question the necessity of badly written, overly CGI ridden Hollywood films every step of the way. For instance, go rent and watch the remake or the original of Clash of the Titans (the original actually inspired the God of War development team, as can be seen with the inclusion of a kraken in God of War II, a mythological monster that doesn't exist in Greek mythology) then sit down and play God of War III. I loved every minute of the game, including the end -- which apparently left a lot of other gamers and critics feeling a little flat. The entire presentation of the game felt very polished, even the opening credits sequence that also recapped the first two games in the series, and did so artfully.
To catch up, God of War is about a Spartan warrior that became a commander of an army at a very early age. He finds himself in a battle he's inevitably going to lose, and essentially, sells his soul to a devil. That devil just happens to be Ares, the God of War, who then uses Kratos to his own means. He eventually leads Kratos to do something that should not be done (he slaughters his own wife and daughter) and vows revenge on the God of War, but not before fulfilling the duties of the other gods for ten years. Ares attacks Athens, which angers
Athena, and she helps Kratos (along with several others from the Pantheon) to retrieve Pandora's Box and eventually slay the God of War. Athena and the other gods then make Kratos the new God of War, but that doesn't last long, 'cause then he starts doing the same thing that Ares did. The gods take away his powers and try to kill him, but Gaia (who, for the sake of the game's narrative, has been rendered a titan) revives him once again and sets him on a path to get revenge on the gods. A tale of revenge that culminates in God of War III, where Kratos eventually destroys all of them.The game is really a sword and sorcery piece in the vein of Robert E. Howard's Conan set in the insane world of Greek mythology, and it plays out quite beautifully, and in perfect tone with a lot of the tales from Greek mythology. Except the gods get theirs in the end.
The image to the right is one of those funny glitches you don't expect to happen, but happens anyway. Like in the Grand Theft Auto games from the previous generation, the ground disappeared beneath Kratos' feet. I had a good laugh at it, so I took a picture.
...to be continued tomorrow...
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Bits and Pieces 7: Brain Dump
Graphics
I've been reading reviews lately on video games, and I know that I shouldn't, because I dislike reviewers of any sort, but I've been doing it anyway. There's only one reviewer I like to read, 'cause he's somewhat good at what he does, and that's Ben Dutka over at PSXExtreme. But I've noticed that people are still hankering on about graphics these days and it's just bothersome to me. I stopped worrying about video game visuals last generation with the PlayStation 2, because I knew they'd just continue to get better and better. Yet people still ramble on about them and if there's one minor hiccup in the visuals in the game, it'll severely damage the overall score of the game. Most of these hiccups are like seeing a random truck or car in the background of Lord of the Rings, you have to know what you're looking for to really spot it, and it doesn't remove you from the narrative being told. It's in graphics that video games are most like animation and comic books and are the least like films or any other medium of story telling. The visuals are artistic representations of the world the game is set in, even if the game is supposed to be set in a semi-realistic world. If one game looks more "realistic" than another, it isn't damaging to the one that is less in the realism department. Why? Because it's a different art team, a different development studio, and a different set of sensibilities that created that world. "Flaws" only become apparent when you compare one game to the next.
Graphics should be the least of gamers worries now days, and they shouldn't be a focal point of an over-opinionated twit that somehow believes themselves to be far more educated on the subject of video games than pretty much every other gamer that was ever born.
I hate critics. They spend very little time critiquing anything and spend more time criticizing everything. And their opinions aren't worth dirt, really.
Black Ops
Call of Duty: Black Ops was released this past Tuesday. It's funny to me 'cause I still am not a fan of first-person shooter games. I haven't been a fan of them since the days of DOOM but because of some friends I've found myself playing the Call of Duty games and rather enjoying them.
Apparently it's the in thing for gamers who express their opinions on the Internet to hate and loathe anything related to Call of Duty -- especially any of them that aren't made by Infinity Ward -- for no real reason other than they've become disgustingly popular.
Moving on: I dislike FPS games, but I've played a lot of them this generation. They've grown on me, I enjoy them, and I've become a lot better at them than I was even just a year ago. Black Ops has easily become one of my favorite experiences with an FPS game in my lifetime. The single player campaign was a better story overall than the past two COD games. World at War was another disjointed World War II affair and, while it boasted some decent voice acting, was entirely centered around surface material. Modern Warfare 2 was derivative of several movies from the 1980s -- most notably Red Dawn -- and lacked a great deal of atmosphere. While I enjoyed both of them decently enough, they weren't as good as games like Resistance, Resistance 2 or the two BioShock games. But, I think Black Ops sits amongst those two franchises nicely. There's the Zombie mode, of course, and there's a lot of other random weirdness like Dead Ops Arcade, which plays a lot like Zombie Apocalypse and Burn Zombie Burn, two downloadable titles. And the multiplayer isn't broken. It's pretty solid and evenly cut down the middle -- I've not encountered anyone taking advantage of any glitches in the game or the like -- and relies a lot on skill or dumb-luck, which is what I prefer. Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer, even after all the patching and whatnot, is severely broken with a great deal of disadvantages towards all players regardless of skill level. I may suck at online FPS games, but I don't suck that bad, but at MW2? Yeah, with all the danger close, commando pro, and other associated perks, along with the horrible input delay, lag and hit detection; the game is just broken. I always hear about how awesome Infinity Ward is in developing games, but in the two efforts from them that I've played, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. Especially since they did absolute fuckall in the way of beta testing for Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer and released it broken and retarded.
Kinda funny how I just wrote a few paragraphs about hating reviewers, then wrote a rather short one, eh? Difference is: no one's paying me for my opinion, no one's going to wage their enjoyment of anything based on my opinion of it, and no one asked. I think.
Vanquish
Another game I bought recently. A lot of fuss was made about this game being like Gears of War, but I found it to be nothing like that game at all. It's a mix between Contra -- oh, yeah, kickin' it hell'a old school -- and Transformers. The game is pure chaos with a heavy dosage of methamphetemines pumped right into the heart for good measure. It's good stuff.
The Walking Dead
Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead premiered as a television program on AMC almost three weeks ago and it's fantastic. I love how the drama is rolling out on screen and it all gets me excited and I have to fight against everything that is Dameyon to start telling people that are new to the fiction thanks to the television program what's going to happen next. The gore really exploded in the second episode, too. It's awesome. I think I've figured out what's going to happen in the season finale, though.
Dread and the Human Centipede.
I kept hearing about The Human Centipede and that it was gross, gnarly, disgusting, and horrific, and while I enjoyed it, I found it to be a bit disturbing, but overall it wasn't all that great of a piece of horror fiction. The way people were talking about it made it seem like it was the next Audition or Martyrs, but it was neither of those. It didn't dig around in the human psyche enough to get to that level, and it was more along the lines of Hostel or Saw, but better in my opinion. Hostel made me laugh, a lot, and Saw made me groan out of a complete lack of patience for the story they were telling me. The Human Centipede definitely brings a new definition to the term "ass to mouth."
Dread is one of my many favorite short stories from Clive Barker's Books of Blood. It's one of the few stories from that collection that doesn't deal with any supernatural elements, and revolves around a psychology student studying human fears. The film works along similar lines as Midnight Meat Train in that it uses the short story as a blue print and then goes, but develops it further. The movie is pretty good, I rather liked it a lot. I didn't like the ending as much as the ending in the short story, however. It had a similar impact surrounding the motif of dread, but the short story version was done in a much better way. Although it does have a few bits and pieces -- heh -- from the short story's ending thrown in around the whole thing.
And that's about it.
I've been reading reviews lately on video games, and I know that I shouldn't, because I dislike reviewers of any sort, but I've been doing it anyway. There's only one reviewer I like to read, 'cause he's somewhat good at what he does, and that's Ben Dutka over at PSXExtreme. But I've noticed that people are still hankering on about graphics these days and it's just bothersome to me. I stopped worrying about video game visuals last generation with the PlayStation 2, because I knew they'd just continue to get better and better. Yet people still ramble on about them and if there's one minor hiccup in the visuals in the game, it'll severely damage the overall score of the game. Most of these hiccups are like seeing a random truck or car in the background of Lord of the Rings, you have to know what you're looking for to really spot it, and it doesn't remove you from the narrative being told. It's in graphics that video games are most like animation and comic books and are the least like films or any other medium of story telling. The visuals are artistic representations of the world the game is set in, even if the game is supposed to be set in a semi-realistic world. If one game looks more "realistic" than another, it isn't damaging to the one that is less in the realism department. Why? Because it's a different art team, a different development studio, and a different set of sensibilities that created that world. "Flaws" only become apparent when you compare one game to the next.
Graphics should be the least of gamers worries now days, and they shouldn't be a focal point of an over-opinionated twit that somehow believes themselves to be far more educated on the subject of video games than pretty much every other gamer that was ever born.
I hate critics. They spend very little time critiquing anything and spend more time criticizing everything. And their opinions aren't worth dirt, really.
Black Ops
Call of Duty: Black Ops was released this past Tuesday. It's funny to me 'cause I still am not a fan of first-person shooter games. I haven't been a fan of them since the days of DOOM but because of some friends I've found myself playing the Call of Duty games and rather enjoying them.
Apparently it's the in thing for gamers who express their opinions on the Internet to hate and loathe anything related to Call of Duty -- especially any of them that aren't made by Infinity Ward -- for no real reason other than they've become disgustingly popular.
Moving on: I dislike FPS games, but I've played a lot of them this generation. They've grown on me, I enjoy them, and I've become a lot better at them than I was even just a year ago. Black Ops has easily become one of my favorite experiences with an FPS game in my lifetime. The single player campaign was a better story overall than the past two COD games. World at War was another disjointed World War II affair and, while it boasted some decent voice acting, was entirely centered around surface material. Modern Warfare 2 was derivative of several movies from the 1980s -- most notably Red Dawn -- and lacked a great deal of atmosphere. While I enjoyed both of them decently enough, they weren't as good as games like Resistance, Resistance 2 or the two BioShock games. But, I think Black Ops sits amongst those two franchises nicely. There's the Zombie mode, of course, and there's a lot of other random weirdness like Dead Ops Arcade, which plays a lot like Zombie Apocalypse and Burn Zombie Burn, two downloadable titles. And the multiplayer isn't broken. It's pretty solid and evenly cut down the middle -- I've not encountered anyone taking advantage of any glitches in the game or the like -- and relies a lot on skill or dumb-luck, which is what I prefer. Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer, even after all the patching and whatnot, is severely broken with a great deal of disadvantages towards all players regardless of skill level. I may suck at online FPS games, but I don't suck that bad, but at MW2? Yeah, with all the danger close, commando pro, and other associated perks, along with the horrible input delay, lag and hit detection; the game is just broken. I always hear about how awesome Infinity Ward is in developing games, but in the two efforts from them that I've played, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. Especially since they did absolute fuckall in the way of beta testing for Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer and released it broken and retarded.
Kinda funny how I just wrote a few paragraphs about hating reviewers, then wrote a rather short one, eh? Difference is: no one's paying me for my opinion, no one's going to wage their enjoyment of anything based on my opinion of it, and no one asked. I think.
Vanquish
Another game I bought recently. A lot of fuss was made about this game being like Gears of War, but I found it to be nothing like that game at all. It's a mix between Contra -- oh, yeah, kickin' it hell'a old school -- and Transformers. The game is pure chaos with a heavy dosage of methamphetemines pumped right into the heart for good measure. It's good stuff.
The Walking Dead
Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead premiered as a television program on AMC almost three weeks ago and it's fantastic. I love how the drama is rolling out on screen and it all gets me excited and I have to fight against everything that is Dameyon to start telling people that are new to the fiction thanks to the television program what's going to happen next. The gore really exploded in the second episode, too. It's awesome. I think I've figured out what's going to happen in the season finale, though.
Dread and the Human Centipede.
I kept hearing about The Human Centipede and that it was gross, gnarly, disgusting, and horrific, and while I enjoyed it, I found it to be a bit disturbing, but overall it wasn't all that great of a piece of horror fiction. The way people were talking about it made it seem like it was the next Audition or Martyrs, but it was neither of those. It didn't dig around in the human psyche enough to get to that level, and it was more along the lines of Hostel or Saw, but better in my opinion. Hostel made me laugh, a lot, and Saw made me groan out of a complete lack of patience for the story they were telling me. The Human Centipede definitely brings a new definition to the term "ass to mouth."
Dread is one of my many favorite short stories from Clive Barker's Books of Blood. It's one of the few stories from that collection that doesn't deal with any supernatural elements, and revolves around a psychology student studying human fears. The film works along similar lines as Midnight Meat Train in that it uses the short story as a blue print and then goes, but develops it further. The movie is pretty good, I rather liked it a lot. I didn't like the ending as much as the ending in the short story, however. It had a similar impact surrounding the motif of dread, but the short story version was done in a much better way. Although it does have a few bits and pieces -- heh -- from the short story's ending thrown in around the whole thing.
And that's about it.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Speed Death and Quick Violence
Violence or Death
Call of Duty: Black Ops developer, Treyarch, recently went on record that because of their current technology in regards to faces and the animation of their characters' faces, they had to tone down specific contextual kills in the game because they felt they had gone too far. Gamers responses were somewhat mindblowing and ignorant of the creative process. Part of that process is discovering the lines you won't cross when telling your fictions -- or creating your games, whathaveyou -- but gamers tend to ignore such things and wanted the aforementioned violence kept in the game, claimed it was both censorship and a hype-generator to create even more hype for an already over-hyped franchise, and flat out asked, "Did they not play God of War III?"
If a creator thinks of something, creates that something, and puts it into whatever fiction they're working on at the moment, and find themselves feeling uncomfortable doing so, it isn't up to the fanboy masses to include it into the final work, it's the decision of the people responsible. If it exists in another game, or there's an even more graphic version of the subject in another game, doesn't remove the discomfort of the creator(s) nor allow them to cross that line.
The more I read and interact with gamers on the Internet, the more I'm finding that there's a lot of things about creating a form of entertainment that they just don't understand.
A sidebar to this subject is the comparison of violence that's being illustrated in a realistic and plausible manner (one that takes place in a fictional world that's intended to represent our own) and that of fantasy. Going back to the two games involved, Treyarch removed a contextual kill that involved the snapping of another's neck at your bare hands. In God of War III, you do something similar, but it's very brutal and has a lot of graphic gore involved. The two don't compare. Why? It's context. The context of Call of Duty has always been an attempt to accurately portray the events of real world wars in a virtual setting. It's supposed to be realistic and in that context, some of the things in those games can be quite disturbing. A good case in point is a certain scene in Modern Warfare 2 that involves a contextual kill that 'caused me to set the controller down a few moments before I could continue. It actually disturbed me quite a bit, and that isn't something that is easily done. In the context of God of War, you play the role of Kratos, a former Spartan captain that's become a God. It's fantasy, set in a mythological fantasy world, and the violence and gore accurately portrays that: it's fantastical to the point where it's much more cartoon-like than realistic.
Context changes the intended emotive response to violence and even gore.
Running Time
Another thing I'm seeing a lot of gamers get irritated with is the length of games. Single player aspects of games that are less than ten hours seem to get a lot of negative criticism aimed towards them by not only the game players, but also by the supposed critics of games.
When I was younger, a lot of the games I played were just that: games. Most of them were just point based simple exercises that required good hand-eye coordination and not much else. Games from the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Super NES, among others. With the NES, games began to tell stories and whatnot, but even at that point a great deal of them could be defeated (if you were good enough) in under an hour.
Since then, the storyline aspect of video games have turned them into something different entirely. They're still games, but that's the most simplistic aspect of them. Now that the narrative is there, it's a complex storytelling medium that involves a lot of interaction between you (the player) and it (the fiction) and no game takes under an hour to get to the end, as far as I can tell. Some games have a five hour or a little more single player campaign, but that doesn't mean the game lacks quality nor does it mean it lacks replay value. A really good video game storyline is just the same as a really good movie or a really good book, and could very well warrant multiple play-throughs.
The most recent game I see getting flack for the lack of length is Vanquish, a third-person shooter that's accompanied by a pretty decent and epic science-fiction plot that could easily have substituted for either Transformers movie and had made a much better project. Without even playing the game outside of the demo, many gamers railed against the subjective quality of Vanquish simply because it had a less than ten hour single player campaign. Having played it myself, it's a pretty impressive single player campaign that proves that you don't need six billion plus hours of game time to make a good game. Just like all really long movies and really long books aren't the best things in the world, neither are a lot of really long games. Vanquish is one of many video game definitions of "short and sweet," and is accompanied by tremendous replay value, both in the single player campaign, and in the single player challenges the game offers you to be unlocked.
In my opinion, these same gamers need to read more short stories and learn the art of the short, powerful, and effective narrative.
Call of Duty: Black Ops developer, Treyarch, recently went on record that because of their current technology in regards to faces and the animation of their characters' faces, they had to tone down specific contextual kills in the game because they felt they had gone too far. Gamers responses were somewhat mindblowing and ignorant of the creative process. Part of that process is discovering the lines you won't cross when telling your fictions -- or creating your games, whathaveyou -- but gamers tend to ignore such things and wanted the aforementioned violence kept in the game, claimed it was both censorship and a hype-generator to create even more hype for an already over-hyped franchise, and flat out asked, "Did they not play God of War III?"
If a creator thinks of something, creates that something, and puts it into whatever fiction they're working on at the moment, and find themselves feeling uncomfortable doing so, it isn't up to the fanboy masses to include it into the final work, it's the decision of the people responsible. If it exists in another game, or there's an even more graphic version of the subject in another game, doesn't remove the discomfort of the creator(s) nor allow them to cross that line.
The more I read and interact with gamers on the Internet, the more I'm finding that there's a lot of things about creating a form of entertainment that they just don't understand.
A sidebar to this subject is the comparison of violence that's being illustrated in a realistic and plausible manner (one that takes place in a fictional world that's intended to represent our own) and that of fantasy. Going back to the two games involved, Treyarch removed a contextual kill that involved the snapping of another's neck at your bare hands. In God of War III, you do something similar, but it's very brutal and has a lot of graphic gore involved. The two don't compare. Why? It's context. The context of Call of Duty has always been an attempt to accurately portray the events of real world wars in a virtual setting. It's supposed to be realistic and in that context, some of the things in those games can be quite disturbing. A good case in point is a certain scene in Modern Warfare 2 that involves a contextual kill that 'caused me to set the controller down a few moments before I could continue. It actually disturbed me quite a bit, and that isn't something that is easily done. In the context of God of War, you play the role of Kratos, a former Spartan captain that's become a God. It's fantasy, set in a mythological fantasy world, and the violence and gore accurately portrays that: it's fantastical to the point where it's much more cartoon-like than realistic.
Context changes the intended emotive response to violence and even gore.
Running Time
Another thing I'm seeing a lot of gamers get irritated with is the length of games. Single player aspects of games that are less than ten hours seem to get a lot of negative criticism aimed towards them by not only the game players, but also by the supposed critics of games.
When I was younger, a lot of the games I played were just that: games. Most of them were just point based simple exercises that required good hand-eye coordination and not much else. Games from the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Super NES, among others. With the NES, games began to tell stories and whatnot, but even at that point a great deal of them could be defeated (if you were good enough) in under an hour.
Since then, the storyline aspect of video games have turned them into something different entirely. They're still games, but that's the most simplistic aspect of them. Now that the narrative is there, it's a complex storytelling medium that involves a lot of interaction between you (the player) and it (the fiction) and no game takes under an hour to get to the end, as far as I can tell. Some games have a five hour or a little more single player campaign, but that doesn't mean the game lacks quality nor does it mean it lacks replay value. A really good video game storyline is just the same as a really good movie or a really good book, and could very well warrant multiple play-throughs.
The most recent game I see getting flack for the lack of length is Vanquish, a third-person shooter that's accompanied by a pretty decent and epic science-fiction plot that could easily have substituted for either Transformers movie and had made a much better project. Without even playing the game outside of the demo, many gamers railed against the subjective quality of Vanquish simply because it had a less than ten hour single player campaign. Having played it myself, it's a pretty impressive single player campaign that proves that you don't need six billion plus hours of game time to make a good game. Just like all really long movies and really long books aren't the best things in the world, neither are a lot of really long games. Vanquish is one of many video game definitions of "short and sweet," and is accompanied by tremendous replay value, both in the single player campaign, and in the single player challenges the game offers you to be unlocked.
In my opinion, these same gamers need to read more short stories and learn the art of the short, powerful, and effective narrative.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Eleven Books.
My reading habits are like ordering an appetizer sampler at a restaurant: it's a little bit of everything and leaves you too full to enjoy a full fiction meal. I was reading ten books all at the same time, and now I'm reading eleven. I bounce from one book to another, depending on my mood, and it isn't hard for me to keep tabs on everything so I don't get lost. These are the books I'm reading right now:
Let Me In
Also known as Let the Right One In, this is a vampire novel by Sweedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist. I heard a lot about the movie version of it, and then learned about the American production that changed the title, so I decided to go after the book before I saw either movie. I'm only eighteen pages into it, but so far so good. I like reading fiction from other countries because of the culture differences and whatnot. It makes books more interesting. I'm just learning about the main character now, so none of the gooey vampire goodness has happened yet, but the book is looking to be decently pleasing so far.
The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story
This book is fascinating. It's about the discovery of the Ebola virus in Africa and was the basis for the film Outbreak from several years back, although I think that movie had a fictional, less terrifying virus going around. I'm not that far into it either and haven't touched it in a very long time, but I'm looking to get back into it as soon as everything else allows.
Twilight
Yeah, that book. I can't lash out against something that I have no knowledge of, and while I have seen the filmed version, I wanted to see what Stephanie Meyer's fiction was really like. The book is really hard to stomach though, and I'm only eight pages into it. I'm finding myself agreeing with Stephen King, though. Meyer really can't write all that well.
Chariots of the Gods
I've been wanting to read this book forever. I like the strange idea of the gods of antiquity having been aliens from other planets. I'm not saying I agree with it, believe it, or think that its true, but it's fascinating subject matter. This along with books like Fingerprints of the Gods and Forbidden Archeology (which I'm still looking for) capture my imagination pretty well. I first heard about Chariots in John Carpenter's The Thing, which is odd because I had seen multiple television programs dealing with similar subject matter before I had seen that particular movie. The book is fascinating and it poses a lot of questions that religions simply cannot answer.
The Devil You Know
I'm a fan of Mike Carey. I read his work on DC/Vertigo's Lucifer and Hellblazer for a while, and read most of his run on the relaunch of DC/WildStorm's WetWorks. When I found out he had written a novel, I started looking -- and by looking I mean I physically go to bookstores and look for them, and use the online stores as a last resort. This turned out to be the first book in a series of books, so I grabbed the first two. The series revolves around Felix Castor who is sort of a freelance exorcist, but I've not got to that part, yet. I'm thirty pages into it, and all Felix has done was terrify a bunch of children at a birthday party. It was pretty funny. I hope I enjoy these books enough to continue the series.
When Satan Wore A Cross
A true crime book about a 1980 murder of a seventy-one year old nun. Fifty-one pages into it, and it's pretty decently handled. I normally don't like true crime or real life stories.
The Dead That Walk: Flesh-Eating Stories
Zombies are everywhere. If you go to a book store and they have a horror section, you're going to find an abundance of two things: vampires and zombies. Unfortunately, most of the vampire stories are serial books that try to romanticize the creatures even further than Bram Stoker did with Dracula to the point where they're no longer horror novels. The zombies also suffer from an abundance of bad ideas and bad writing in that most of the short story collections are filled with stories that aren't good and the novels are just as bad. So if you're going to get a zombie short story collection, you'd want one with the best of the best, right?
Well, this is THAT collection. This book has stories by Richard and Richard Christian Matheson (together, which is fitting 'cause without Richard Matheson, we'd have no zombies), Yvonne Navarro, Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King), David J. Schow, Nancy Holder, H.P. Lovecraft (posthumously of course), Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, Kim Newman and Stephen King.
So far I've read Where There's a Will by Richard and Richard Christian Matheson, which is really different from anything zombie related that I've read. For the Good of All by Yvonne Navarro, which I really don't remember reading. I need to read it again, I think. The Things he Said by Michael Marshall Smith, which I also don't remember reading. A few of the stories I've already read in other collections, like Haeckle's Tale by Clive Barker and the Kim Newman story, but I'll delightfully re-read them again.
Wicked City: Black Guard
Hideyuki Kikuchi's awkward stories about humans and demons and those whose job it is to keep the balance between the two realms. I saw this as an anime years ago before I ever knew it was a novel (the same thing happened to me with his other series of novels, Vampire Hunter D). I also learned that Wicked City and Demon City: Shinjuku share the same universe. I like the book, even with the awkward language barrier -- Kikuchi is a Japanese novelist, and the books are translated to English and I think a lot is lost in translation. It plays out a lot like the anime.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men
One good thing about the Twilight series is that werewolves and lycanthropy have come back into popular culture in a nice way. Even the much more interesting and well plotted Underworld franchise of films didn't generate a lot of interest in lycanthropy the way Stephanie Meyer's books have -- though a lot of that new interest is misguided. I read a "review" not too long ago of The Wolf Man, the new one with Benicio del Toro, from a Twilight fan and all she did was rant and rave about how ugly and disgusting the werewolf was and how they "ripped off" Stephanie Meyer's ideas ('cause, y'know, lycanthropy hasn't been one of the myths attributed to every culture around the world since the beginning of mankind; the word lycanthropy comes from Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who attempted to serve human flesh to Zues when he came for a visit) and shows just how uneducated we are as a culture here in America. Anyone should be able to tell you that The Wolf Man was a remake of a film of the same name from 1941. And if you don't, you shouldn't be let out of the basement.
This book is full of werewolf stories from all over the place, both old and new, and it is awesome. None of them quite capture my imagination the way The Howling, An American Werewolf in London, and Dog Soldiers have, but some came pretty close. Twilight at the Towers by Clive Barker is my favorite so far (492 pages into it) and the idea behind it would make a terrific horror flick. Governments using lycanthropes as spies during the Cold War. The other one I really like so far is Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas, a coming of age story where not only does the main character's breasts develop earlier than the rest of her classmates (and larger) but she also gets the added feature of becoming a wolf on certain nights. My only problem with that story, and several other werewolf stories or stories with werewolves in them (like Twilight) is the quadrapedal take on them. Werewolves should always be bipedal in my opinion, because then they're not wolf-men, they're just people who turn into wolves. There's a difference. One interesting thing I've learned either from this book or while reading it from someplace else is that the full moon, the lunar cycle, all of that was added to werewolf/lycanthrope mythology by Hollywood, as was silver.
Dead Until Dark
Another book I'm not that far into, but this one has a decent explanation as to why. Dead Until Dark is the first of the Sookie Stackhouse series of books by Charlaine Harris, and is the basis of the television show, True Blood. I like the show a lot and was curious enough to buy my sister the series for Christmas last year, and she got me them for my birthday this year. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the producers of the show changed very little at the opening chapters, the book reads just like the show plays out. I'm not that far into it because I'm trying to write my own vampire fiction and decided that it was best to not read anyone elses, just in case stuff leaks through. That went south when I started reading Let Me In though. So maybe I'll pick it up again soon and blow through it quickly.
He Is Legend
The eleventh book on the list I just started reading last night, and I'm doing it differently than the others. The title, He Is Legend, is a play on the title of I Am Legend as it's a tribute, "an anthology celebrating Richard Matheson," which is right up my alley. Someone suggested I Am Legend to me about fifteen years ago or so, and I read that book really fast and ultimately fell in love with it, and the overall work of Richard Matheson. This book is a collection of short stories by authors that were influenced by Matheson's tales in their own careers and the stories they've provided for the anthology are sequels, prequels or are inspired by specific works from Matheson. I'm currently only reading the stories that are inspired by, prequels and sequels to the stories I've read by Matheson. Beginning with I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris. Mick Garris will always be a favorite of mine but not because of his work. I've read very little of his fiction, but I've seen a few of his films, but he'll be a favorite of mine because of the television program he put together for ShowTime for two seasons called Masters of Horror. I Am Legend, Too, which I just barely started, is a prequel to I Am Legend and deals with the character Ben Cortman. The other stories I'll be reading in this book (so far) are Everything of Beauty Taken From You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck, which is a sequel to Matheson's Button, Button (which was the bases for the movie The Box with Cameron Diaz; Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale, which is a sequel to Prey; and Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins, a prequel to Hell House. The others will wait until I've read the corresponding stories by Richard Matheson himself.
And that's what I'm reading right now. I think there are probably more that I've started and forgotten where I was in the book, lost my place, or simply forgot that I was reading it at all. Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror I've read bits and pieces of, I'm pretty sure I started Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Cemetery Dance and Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain, and who knows what else.
I should really start keeping better track.
Let Me In
Also known as Let the Right One In, this is a vampire novel by Sweedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist. I heard a lot about the movie version of it, and then learned about the American production that changed the title, so I decided to go after the book before I saw either movie. I'm only eighteen pages into it, but so far so good. I like reading fiction from other countries because of the culture differences and whatnot. It makes books more interesting. I'm just learning about the main character now, so none of the gooey vampire goodness has happened yet, but the book is looking to be decently pleasing so far.
The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story
This book is fascinating. It's about the discovery of the Ebola virus in Africa and was the basis for the film Outbreak from several years back, although I think that movie had a fictional, less terrifying virus going around. I'm not that far into it either and haven't touched it in a very long time, but I'm looking to get back into it as soon as everything else allows.
Twilight
Yeah, that book. I can't lash out against something that I have no knowledge of, and while I have seen the filmed version, I wanted to see what Stephanie Meyer's fiction was really like. The book is really hard to stomach though, and I'm only eight pages into it. I'm finding myself agreeing with Stephen King, though. Meyer really can't write all that well.
Chariots of the Gods
I've been wanting to read this book forever. I like the strange idea of the gods of antiquity having been aliens from other planets. I'm not saying I agree with it, believe it, or think that its true, but it's fascinating subject matter. This along with books like Fingerprints of the Gods and Forbidden Archeology (which I'm still looking for) capture my imagination pretty well. I first heard about Chariots in John Carpenter's The Thing, which is odd because I had seen multiple television programs dealing with similar subject matter before I had seen that particular movie. The book is fascinating and it poses a lot of questions that religions simply cannot answer.
The Devil You Know
I'm a fan of Mike Carey. I read his work on DC/Vertigo's Lucifer and Hellblazer for a while, and read most of his run on the relaunch of DC/WildStorm's WetWorks. When I found out he had written a novel, I started looking -- and by looking I mean I physically go to bookstores and look for them, and use the online stores as a last resort. This turned out to be the first book in a series of books, so I grabbed the first two. The series revolves around Felix Castor who is sort of a freelance exorcist, but I've not got to that part, yet. I'm thirty pages into it, and all Felix has done was terrify a bunch of children at a birthday party. It was pretty funny. I hope I enjoy these books enough to continue the series.
When Satan Wore A Cross
A true crime book about a 1980 murder of a seventy-one year old nun. Fifty-one pages into it, and it's pretty decently handled. I normally don't like true crime or real life stories.
The Dead That Walk: Flesh-Eating Stories
Zombies are everywhere. If you go to a book store and they have a horror section, you're going to find an abundance of two things: vampires and zombies. Unfortunately, most of the vampire stories are serial books that try to romanticize the creatures even further than Bram Stoker did with Dracula to the point where they're no longer horror novels. The zombies also suffer from an abundance of bad ideas and bad writing in that most of the short story collections are filled with stories that aren't good and the novels are just as bad. So if you're going to get a zombie short story collection, you'd want one with the best of the best, right?
Well, this is THAT collection. This book has stories by Richard and Richard Christian Matheson (together, which is fitting 'cause without Richard Matheson, we'd have no zombies), Yvonne Navarro, Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King), David J. Schow, Nancy Holder, H.P. Lovecraft (posthumously of course), Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, Kim Newman and Stephen King.
So far I've read Where There's a Will by Richard and Richard Christian Matheson, which is really different from anything zombie related that I've read. For the Good of All by Yvonne Navarro, which I really don't remember reading. I need to read it again, I think. The Things he Said by Michael Marshall Smith, which I also don't remember reading. A few of the stories I've already read in other collections, like Haeckle's Tale by Clive Barker and the Kim Newman story, but I'll delightfully re-read them again.
Wicked City: Black Guard
Hideyuki Kikuchi's awkward stories about humans and demons and those whose job it is to keep the balance between the two realms. I saw this as an anime years ago before I ever knew it was a novel (the same thing happened to me with his other series of novels, Vampire Hunter D). I also learned that Wicked City and Demon City: Shinjuku share the same universe. I like the book, even with the awkward language barrier -- Kikuchi is a Japanese novelist, and the books are translated to English and I think a lot is lost in translation. It plays out a lot like the anime.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men
One good thing about the Twilight series is that werewolves and lycanthropy have come back into popular culture in a nice way. Even the much more interesting and well plotted Underworld franchise of films didn't generate a lot of interest in lycanthropy the way Stephanie Meyer's books have -- though a lot of that new interest is misguided. I read a "review" not too long ago of The Wolf Man, the new one with Benicio del Toro, from a Twilight fan and all she did was rant and rave about how ugly and disgusting the werewolf was and how they "ripped off" Stephanie Meyer's ideas ('cause, y'know, lycanthropy hasn't been one of the myths attributed to every culture around the world since the beginning of mankind; the word lycanthropy comes from Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who attempted to serve human flesh to Zues when he came for a visit) and shows just how uneducated we are as a culture here in America. Anyone should be able to tell you that The Wolf Man was a remake of a film of the same name from 1941. And if you don't, you shouldn't be let out of the basement.
This book is full of werewolf stories from all over the place, both old and new, and it is awesome. None of them quite capture my imagination the way The Howling, An American Werewolf in London, and Dog Soldiers have, but some came pretty close. Twilight at the Towers by Clive Barker is my favorite so far (492 pages into it) and the idea behind it would make a terrific horror flick. Governments using lycanthropes as spies during the Cold War. The other one I really like so far is Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas, a coming of age story where not only does the main character's breasts develop earlier than the rest of her classmates (and larger) but she also gets the added feature of becoming a wolf on certain nights. My only problem with that story, and several other werewolf stories or stories with werewolves in them (like Twilight) is the quadrapedal take on them. Werewolves should always be bipedal in my opinion, because then they're not wolf-men, they're just people who turn into wolves. There's a difference. One interesting thing I've learned either from this book or while reading it from someplace else is that the full moon, the lunar cycle, all of that was added to werewolf/lycanthrope mythology by Hollywood, as was silver.
Dead Until Dark
Another book I'm not that far into, but this one has a decent explanation as to why. Dead Until Dark is the first of the Sookie Stackhouse series of books by Charlaine Harris, and is the basis of the television show, True Blood. I like the show a lot and was curious enough to buy my sister the series for Christmas last year, and she got me them for my birthday this year. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the producers of the show changed very little at the opening chapters, the book reads just like the show plays out. I'm not that far into it because I'm trying to write my own vampire fiction and decided that it was best to not read anyone elses, just in case stuff leaks through. That went south when I started reading Let Me In though. So maybe I'll pick it up again soon and blow through it quickly.
He Is Legend
The eleventh book on the list I just started reading last night, and I'm doing it differently than the others. The title, He Is Legend, is a play on the title of I Am Legend as it's a tribute, "an anthology celebrating Richard Matheson," which is right up my alley. Someone suggested I Am Legend to me about fifteen years ago or so, and I read that book really fast and ultimately fell in love with it, and the overall work of Richard Matheson. This book is a collection of short stories by authors that were influenced by Matheson's tales in their own careers and the stories they've provided for the anthology are sequels, prequels or are inspired by specific works from Matheson. I'm currently only reading the stories that are inspired by, prequels and sequels to the stories I've read by Matheson. Beginning with I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris. Mick Garris will always be a favorite of mine but not because of his work. I've read very little of his fiction, but I've seen a few of his films, but he'll be a favorite of mine because of the television program he put together for ShowTime for two seasons called Masters of Horror. I Am Legend, Too, which I just barely started, is a prequel to I Am Legend and deals with the character Ben Cortman. The other stories I'll be reading in this book (so far) are Everything of Beauty Taken From You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck, which is a sequel to Matheson's Button, Button (which was the bases for the movie The Box with Cameron Diaz; Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale, which is a sequel to Prey; and Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins, a prequel to Hell House. The others will wait until I've read the corresponding stories by Richard Matheson himself.
And that's what I'm reading right now. I think there are probably more that I've started and forgotten where I was in the book, lost my place, or simply forgot that I was reading it at all. Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror I've read bits and pieces of, I'm pretty sure I started Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Cemetery Dance and Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain, and who knows what else.
I should really start keeping better track.
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