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The Wise Man's Fear - The cut-flower silence of a man waiting to die

2011-03-05T03:17:00.000-08:00

Go read this book. Right now.

Done? Okay. Let's talk.

So Pat Rothfuss is quite the guy.

He's got a way with words. The sheer amount of skill that comes out in his phrasing, sentence structure and paragraph length is just breathtaking. Rothfuss is poetic without being overwrought. He's clever without being silly. He can describe a song so well that you can hear it and magic so well that it feels like you could try doing it yourself.

His characters are well measured and structured. With a sentence here or a word there he can convey a character trait that would take a lesser author a good 10 pages to convey. And more importantly, they feel like real people. Whenever Rothfuss strays near an archetype (i.e. mean old noble guy) he'll salt something in to differentiate them. Screentime is carefully managed to leave the reader with the correct impression of a character.

I have been of the opinion for some time that Rothfuss is in fact the best author currently making use of the English language. We are privileged to live in his generation. While I was reading this book I did little else. When I walked down the street, I had my Kindle in hand reading. When my Associate turned his back, I would pick up my Kindle and read. I've been reading the book at every opportunity for the last 4 days.

Having finished it now, I am in awe of Rothfuss' skills and wonder how it is that a man of such incredible powers could make so many mistakes.

There are three ways in which the Wise Man's Fear disappoints. Let me emphasize again before I begin that this is still the best book written between the release of the Name of the Wind and now.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Flaw #1 - Plot

I really think what Rothfuss did right in the Name of the Wind was to take a step away from the World Building style of fantasy that plagues the genre these days, choosing instead to leave most of that stuff aside so that he could run a tight-plot. Even as Kvothe mucked about in the University and fought a Draccus, the plot never loses sight of the Chandrian

The Wise Man's Fear, on the other hand, does just that.

Going on a trip to Vintas to visit some Lord guy? Cool, that broadens the setting.

Fighting some bandits? Well okay, I guess that's how everybody gets their start.

Having sex with one of those slutty Great Faeries from Zelda? Oka-... wait, what?

All of the encounters are linked back to the main story just so clumsily. Kvothe getting information from the head karate lady in the one town just felt video game-ish, with Kvothe asking for what essentially amounted to a Quest Reward.

And honestly, where did the main plot really even go in this? Besides a brief Cinder cameo with the bandits and a few repetitive rumours (I know there are fucking seven of them and they don't like the Atur, let's move on), the Wise Man's Fear offers next to no new information. There's a list of names sure and you get how they knew someone was singing about them, but there's no more information about what their problem is. Honestly, I've waited for this for years and this is all I get? Surely some of the information coming in the third book could have been moved up into two.

Flaw #2 - Pacing and Kvothe's powers

A lot of the things in the book easily overstayed their welcome. Kvothe's training with the Adem is the first thing that springs to mind in this list. That was just pure World Building Fantasy. Chapter after chapter doing little more than exploring the eccentricities of these weird Karate People's culture. I don't understand the reason why that had to last as long as it did. I mean, maybe if the whole Lethani thing were linked a bit more closely to finding the Name of the Wind it would have been a bit better, but the whole thing seemed pretty arbitrary.

I also think that on one level Kvothe is getting a bit silly. In the Name of the Wind Kvothe was an eternal underdog, but now he's a Rich Magic Karate Singing Sword Man (who's great in bed). I know it's all going to fall apart nonetheless and sink him into a shitty inn in the middle of a bunch of shit farms. But did he really even need to learn all that martial arts shit? Personally I think sticking with goddamn magic would have been a lot better. That stuff he did when he used sympathy on a corpse to slit those bandits' throats was fucking awesome. I'd much rather he do shit like that then go around using obscure Karate.

I did really like the poem about beating up the 10 year old girl though.

And it was a bit of an odd choice to make the Karate moves and the sex moves have such similar names. "Thousand Hands" vs. "Sleeping Bear", etc.

Flaw #3 - Women

Okay. Let's start with the more minor problem...

So I remember Rothfuss once describing himself as a casual anime fan, but... well, I don't think that's true and that he's minimizing that. Because the first chunk of the book in the University really did read a lot like a harem anime. An Event here with Devi (Tsundere-type), another one there with Mola (Senpai-type), another with Fela (Idol-type) and another one there with Auri (Mysterious-type). Like a harem, none of these things were allowed to come to a natural conclusion. Kvothe would have a meaningful scene with one of them and you'd think 'oh okay how is this going to develop?' only to have him a similar scene with a different girl in the next chapter.

Pure harem. That isn't a major crime in and of itself, but it certainly was an odd choice.

But then there was Felurian.

I think I was hoping for a more Jonathan Strange/Mr. Norrel path into the fae lands, but I can get over that. If I could describe the way those chapters were written as anything it would probably be self-indulgent. His decision was his decision. It was certainly interesting to see Rothfuss amazing powers of writing employed in something so raunchy.

But what I don't like is what it did to Kvothe's character. Whenever Kvothe meets a pretty girl I must now ask the question 'Is he going to sleep with this lady?' On average, the answer in the WMF after the whole Felurian thing appeared to be 'yes' (unless she was underaged, which is a small mercy). Rothfuss in this regard seemed to be expressing a sort of promiscuous philosophy at times so I was glad when Kvothe's dalliances resulted in him being shut down with Denna. At least that shows that Rothfuss is aware of the limitations of that philosophy, but I nevertheless don't think that Kvothe being a man-slut serves his character very much.

Also I really don't like Denna. And her patron is almost certainly a goddamn Chandrian.

Nevertheless...

This was a fantastic book. Brilliantly written, well-structured and well-executed. I am eager to see how the plot will develop and look forward to having some friends read it already so that we can discuss questions as to Chandrian identities and where the heck Skarpi or Bast are or how Kvothe should just forget about that Denna bitch and focus his attentions on Auri.

The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi

2010-12-19T23:25:00.000-08:00

So I just watched this Disappearance of Haruhi movie (that's what it says up there)

Haruhi as a series has gone through an interesting arc. When I first watched the series, my only reaction was 'wow fucking awesome'. There you had this really weird and meta series, told out of order with quirky characters. Sure a lot of its ideas were lifted from some of the pillars of western science fiction, but it's okay to take ideas and recontextualize them. As far as I was concerned, that was a great series.

After that I hit the novels and discovered the uncomfortable fact that they were awful. The majority of the Haruhi novels, regardless of translation quality, are absolute unfiltered shit and the author is a talentless hack. The author tells obscure time travel stories and has characters say things like 'you wouldn't really understand' to paper over the glaring plot holes he introduces. Rather than exploring concepts he introduces, he leaves them half baked and starts throwing in new ones. The whole series is a complete fucking mess and was only made presentable by a really savvy director who knew how to spin lead into gold.

But the one time I would say that the guy almost got it right was in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. After watching the movie version, I am reminded of what the key word in that statement is: Almost.

So the basic plot of Disappearance is that someone (guess who?) has modified the universe so that Haruhi's disappeared and the rest of the SOS Brigade are all normal. Everyone's lost all memory of how things were except for Kyon, who is doing his best to restore the universe to the way it used to be somehow, though as he does so he's confronted by a 'normal' Nagato who quite obviously likes him.

So let's be clear: there's only one genuinely good character in Haruhi.

Mikuru is always just Mikuru, Koizumi never breaks out of his basic 'fruity esper-with-no-real-powers exposition boy' role and Kyon is just an (extra whiny) everyman. Haruhi herself is often described as being an unpredictable eccentric, but she's so predictably and unchangingly eccentric that to me she's just really a brat that's used to always getting her way without fail.

Nagato on the other hand is a character that actually has had some development as a character, or so I thought. She's this alien robot superlady that's confronted with human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon) for the first time and having trouble dealing with them. Recipe for success right there. So Disappearance, which is about her, should have been a winner.

It's not. At least not mostly.

The problem with Disappearance is that it's fucking terribly written. The first Haruhi season prospered because for the most part the author's storytelling style was set aside in favour of a more meta approach. This movie was basically a one to one conversion of the novel to the big screen and as a result it is absolutely terrible.

The pacing is a mess. The movie will move between Kyon wallowing in self pity, not knowing what to do, before arbitrarily stumbling on a clue and springing awkwardly into action. A good 30 minutes of the movie is dedicated to Kyon agonizing over whether or not he wants to stay in the peaceful 'normal' universe or go back to the crazy Haruhi universe and each moaning session comes to the exact same conclusion (he wants to go back to Haruhi world, I fucking get it).

The plot is incoherent. So much of the time travel mumbo jumbo is explained away with 'you wouldn't understand' that it just pisses me off. How did the time travelers even remain unaffected by Nagato's time warp? Why does Mikuru Senior know to expect Kyon?

But even beyond that, there's little dramatic unity in Disappearance. Sometimes it's a Nagato love story, sometimes it's about Haruhi and sometimes (when it gets really bad) it plays at being a sci fi thriller. All the disparate elements don't jive together at all and considering that literally nothing is resolved in the story (this is only novel 4 of 10 after all) it's really not a very satisfying film to watch.

Don't get me wrong, there are some great scenes in there. I'll be honest: I really do adore Nagato. The idea of an alien artificial intelligence going through Data's classic struggle to attain humanity (except with the romance angle thrown in) appeals to me greatly. Her character design is spot on and the voice of Chihara Minori is as powerful as it's always been.

Seeing those ideas explored thoroughly, even if it's only for about fifteen minutes in a 180 minute movie, was worth it I think. All of it is sloppily stuffed back into an arbitrary status quo shortly after that, but for that one shining moment Disappearance becomes a good movie.

That moment, however, is fleeting. Every character in Haruhi is stagnant and the story as a whole doesn't go anywhere. Six novels from now, Yuki will still be an android alien intelligence struggling with her human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon), with no real progression. Everyone else stays as everyone else. More bullshit is introduced, but the status quo remains uncontested.

And that just isn't good enough.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

2010-08-13T01:02:00.001-07:00

Scott Pilgrim was bloody great.

Comedy and action. Amazing direction and fantastic writing. Fun music, great nerdcore references and spot-on acting. I really don't have anything bad to say about this movie. The only thing I can say against it is that occasionally people in the theater were laughing too hard, which made it hard to hear some of the jokes. But that is not a cause for serious concern.

If you have any sense, you'll see this movie. Everything you want in a movie is in this film. A guy fighting against seven evil ex-boyfriends for the sake of the love of his life. It's honestly the best movie of 2010. Yeah that's right, fuck Inception. And if you're from Toronto it's basically mandatory viewing.

Watch it immediately.

Anyhow let's talk about it...

First of all, I've pointed this out to many people before but it bears repeating for those of us who weren't raised on Super Mario Brothers.

This is a Bob-Omb (of the non-sexual variety):

That aside, I've been a fan of the comics since a friend introduced me to them in the Second Cup that Scott's sister works at. After I read the first volume there, we went to the park where Ramona and Scott go to (the one with the swingset). Close to home, no?

It's great to see Toronto moving up the cultural ladder a bit. This is really a city that gets no damn respect. It's always New York or LA or Paris or London. When a city in Canada is used it's going to be fucking Vancouver or Montreal or something. Unless it's a fucking Robert J. Sawyer novel or something, Toronto doesn't really exist. And Robert J. Sawyer's portrayal of Toronto is just really a name with no soul. Scott Pilgrim is probably the first thing I've seen that's really captured the spirit of my city.

Emphasis on the word spirit. It's not just a matter of familiar locales and landmarks, it's a matter of actually showing the character of the people who live here. Scott Pilgrim's brand of a shy/sincere nerdy/somehow cool sort of guy is a prime Toronto specimen. Scott Pilgrim could easily be the guy I bought this computer from or one of the assholes I play Left 4 Dead with. I guess in the comic he's more plain old crazy, but in the movie that's less apparent. But the point I'm trying to make is that this is that this is the first work of fiction set in Toronto made by someone that seems to really love Toronto in a non-superficial way. The movie is sort of a love letter to the entire city.

I don't think it's just the Toronto thing that made it good though. My favourite part of the movie was the fight with Lucas Lee. It's a brilliant scene for a lot of reasons... the stunt doubles thing, Lucas' awesome lines ("The first click will be me hanging up... the second will be me shooting you dead!") and the awesome direction to name a few. When he went for coffee as the stunt doubles beat on Scott I was just cracking up.

That's an amazing scene no matter what the context is. The fact that that was Casa Loma and that I sometimes go and sit on the steps Lucas skateboards to read sometimes is just really an extra bonus.

I kind of like that. This is Toronto's movie. Anyone else can see Scott Pilgrim and love it. But only people from this city can truly appreciate it. And even among that select few, not many can appreciate the way I can. I mean, I live just down the street from Scott after all.

But anyhow, Toronto aside...

One thing I especially liked was getting to hear the music. A comic can't really convey what a song is supposed to sound like. I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and it's actually kind of bad, but that actually fits the fiction quite well. The Sex Bob-Ombs are supposed to suck. That's explicitly spelled out in the canon. I see that Beck did a bunch of the songs, which is a band that's big enough for me to actually know of them in spite of my obscure musical tastes. I imagine that they thus weren't actually trying to suck. But well, in spite of their best efforts, things worked out!

Plus this thing was fucking awesome.

Knives Chau was done brilliantly, but I think they made her click with Scott a bit too much at the end. It made it feel just weird when she just gave up in the end. If there's one thing I think the movie didn't handle too well, it's probably that. But that is extremely minor.

I think Ramona was pretty perfect. That sort of elusive air they gave her was nice and I liked the actress. I didn't think I would when I first saw her, but she more or less was the way I always imagined Ramona to be. Tough, smart independent, bit bitchy but still very cool. Pretty enough to justify the infatuation too. I think the problem with the trailers is they mostly showed the pink haired incarnation rather than blue or green.

The text stuff worked really well. Really kept the story going along at a good pace. I'm not sure how someone who hasn't read the comic would react to it, but I felt the pacing was pretty much perfect.

They also started to the Ninja Gaiden showdown a few times, but never did the finish. That was in the comics once or twice (I think that's how he finished the girl, I can't remember). They should've gone all the way with it. It's a classic.

So yeah, overall Scott Pilgrim was a great movie that everyone should see, particularly anyone that lives in Toronto. It was made for us and we should appreciate it.

Inception

2010-07-23T19:37:00.001-07:00

Going to make this one quick.

I liked the movie, but I feel like I'm still going to end up being a bit of a killjoy here because I'm going to mainly be talking about why I didn't like it that much. So let's first talk about why I liked the movie in a quick and dirty 1-2-3 list.

1) It's nice that Nolan trusts in the intelligence of his audience. The dream scenes got pretty complicated with the different time frames and time going slower in one scene than it is in the next. It was fun to keep track of all that without too many stupid visual clues with close ups of watches and shit.

2) The fight scenes were neat. I liked how the physics of the dreamworlds overlapped, with the van in freefall resulting in no gravity in the hotel and all that stuff. That was pretty unique and tense, although somewhat subverted by the fact that if the guy on the upper layers actually lost the other scenes would just collapse (and you knew it wouldn't end like that).

3) Witty banter, good music and a fairly original premise kept me interested. Little funny moments like the firefight that Eames ended abruptly with a grenade launcher helped piece this together.

So in other words, it was a popcorn flick. A few hours of good honest fun. If you want to see a movie that you can spend a few harmless hours enjoying, then Inception is a good pick.

Here's why it's nothing more than that:

1) Leonardo DiCaprio.

At no point in the movie did I find Cobb's character to be convincing. The story with his wife and kids, his emotional problems, his character as a smart dream spy guy... really everything about the guy just seemed so flat and artificial. I think he was a fine character on paper, but the problem is that Leonardo DiCaprio is a ham actor who had no business playing this kind of part.

The whole movie I was wondering why Nolan hadn't gotten Aaron Eckhart or raised Heath Ledger back from the dead or at least hired some sort of actor instead of a damn aging pretty boy that can read a script in an Acting Voice. It's especially weird since everyone else in the cast put on a fairly strong and convincing performance. Did Nolan think people wouldn't notice how fucking terrible DiCaprio is if he surrounded him with talent perhaps?

2) "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling" is a nice line, but the movie really did seem to be quite afraid to dream a little bigger.

Everyone has a different way of dreaming. When I dream (and remember it) it is usually a long tragic narrative, but other people just see images of sheep eating grass or something. What more or less everyone agrees upon, however, is that in a dream anything is possible. You can fly, you can breathe underwater, you can shoot lasers out of your eyes and lightning out of your fingers.

In Inception, everyone used guns. Nothing else. There's one instance where that one guy used dream magic to use those 'paradox' stairs to get the drop on a projection, but that's really just about it. You could argue that they can only use the things that the architect provides before they go in and that she isn't supposed to twist the world too much lest they attract the attention of the projections, but she's shown to have the ability to affect dreams on the fly. Why didn't she just manifest a fucking giant fire breathing robot dragon when things started getting ugly? What was stopping her? She could have hidden the thing when Fischer was around.

It feels to me that Nolan just wanted dream gun battles and nothing else and so nothing else was put in.

3)It was predictable.
I feared at the very beginning of the movie that it would end with some bullshit 'it was a dream the ENTIRE TIME and he was just trying to get the last secret from the Japanese guy' ending. I was relieved when it was apparent that that wasn't the case, but everything else was fairly predictable and straightforward. DiCaprio's wife being the first inception target and the entire story with her could really be traced twenty minutes in advanced.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you combine it with the fact that I never gave a fuck about Cobb or anything related to Cobb thanks to the ham acting of Leo DiCaprio you get certain stretches of the movie that are really fucking boring. If I'd had control in the theater, I would have skipped a bunch of those fucking scenes and just gotten back to the people with funny accents shooting assholes.

And that's about all I've gotta say about that.

The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence

2010-07-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

Scott Lynch's The Lies of Lamora Locke and Red Seas Under Red Skies are a really good pair of books, which is surprising considering how much they do wrong.

The basic plot is that you have a Thief Priesthood preying on a fantasy city with a whole lot of alchemy and such cramed in. The main characters Locke and his gang, who are a group of con-artists that prey on the rich with elaborate confidence schemes who then get caught up in underworld politics and tangled in all manner of complications.

The characters are well-realized and human. The plot twists and turns in surprising ways and the books are most certainly page turners. I read the second one cover to cover in one sitting. But unfortunately, Lynch suffers from an affliction that many Fantasy authors suffer from. Mainly: the guy loves his fucking world building and refuses to put that shit down.

World building is an exercise that every bit of speculative fiction needs to go through. Readers need some context if they aren't going to be in some form of Earth that they're roughly familiar with. If Earth has been enslaved by alien crabs you need to establish that much before starting the rebellion against the crabs. But the problem of the last decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that world building was been placed at the forefront when it's supposed to be in the background.

In my opinion, nothing illustrates this trend better than Lynch. Every three chapters or so, the man would call a halt to his actual story and do some world building. He'll literally leave the real plot on a coathanger somewhere and go on for twenty pages about a random world building detail that he apparently feels is more important than his actual fucking story. It's almost always unnecessary and breaks the immersion like a crying baby in the middle of the Dark Knight.

Some examples of the shit Lynch foists on the reader in the middle of his narrative:

- The cruel aristocratic Chess-with-peasants-as-pieces game of some obscure palace
- How a bunch of hookers rebelled against their pimps
- The rituals of the freaky death goddess cult

There was one part of the second book where Locke and his friend Jean are getting trained to be seamen. The first worldbuilding detail Lynch put into that sequence was something that I liked... a seaman superstition that it was deathly bad luck to go out to sea without a cat aboard the ship, lest you offend the Iono the Lord of the Grasping Waters who apparently is very fond of cats. That was a cool detail that I thought was hilarious at the same time. I mean it's not often you see a Fantasy author taking inspiration from lolcats

But nevertheless, that one good moment was soured somewhat by the fifty fucking pages of fantasy sailor jargon ("Hard to Larsboard!") that followed it. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, the world that Lynch has put together is pretty cool. It's got a really interesting set of political institutions, a nuanced criminal underworld, a well-realized religious angle, alchemy, clockwork machines, elaborate poisons and even a bit of diplomatic intrigue. Lynch even knows when to hold things back and keep them mysterious, as he does with a certain society of sorcerers for instance.

And fuck, he has cats in pirate ships:

But world building should be context. World building should be background. World building should be subordinate to everything else that's in the fucking story. World building should never be the story itself.

That said, the book has many virtues to make make up for this flaw. Let me go through them quickly so that I'm not just writing a negative review for a pair of books that I actually liked.

#1: Strong characters.

I'm a big fan of trickster protagonists and as the title of the first book suggests, Locke sort of embodies that. Trying to guess when he's lying and when he's not is what keeps the pages turning for me. As you read along and get a feel for his value system and personality it becomes easier to tell (which takes a bit of the joy out of it) but well-told and surprising lies are still in great abundance.

Unfortunately his world building mania does cloud into some of the more minor characters in the story. Like the Pirates (Plural! More than one!) who love Poetry and have long discussions about it. But fortunately that shit is minimized

[Note to Lynch: I get it, by the way. Lucarno is Seneca/Roman poets. The other guys were Sophocles/Greek poets. Thank you for inserting the discussion you had in a first year Classic seminar into your book. That was a very necessary thing for you to do.]

#2: Good planning.

The first two books have all manner of references to a girl that broke Locke's heart and left him, with no details or explanation. One thing that kept me reading so quickly was my curiosity about who the hell she is and why/how she did that and where she is now. In two books, Lynch avoids giving any tangible details. That tells me that he has the next five books in the series tightly planned and I strongly approve of that.

#3: Excellent fight scenes.

This one speaks for itself. Dirty thief fighting is full of quick movements, with dodges and distractions and feints. Often a fight in fantasy will rely on a character's gimmick or feel DnDish. Lynch's fights on the other hand seemed very real, with good accounts of pain, fear, hesitation and rage. I always like an author who pays attention to the physical nature of combat.

#4: Pirate cats.

Seriously.

Star Trek Online - "You betrayed your uniform!"

2010-01-26T11:49:00.001-08:00

Star Trek Online is the best MMO ever made. But that doesn't mean it's good.

The game has two portions... a Starfleet Command style ship combat system that's fairly sophisticated and pretty fun, along with a ground combat system that is awful. Most of the game takes place in space however so it's good on average. Like Guild Wars, the game uses an instance system and thus I went through the majority of the beta playing by myself and eschewing any and all contact with my fellow human being.

The gameplay of the average MMO is not fun. WoW fights boil down to finding an enemy, attacking them, pressing your hotkeys for special skills and hoping to kill them before they killed you. Party play took that central concept and made it somewhat grander but did not change the fundamentals. Star Trek Online is thus unique in the sense that basic space combat is actually a fairly fun game in its own right.

But unfortunately, that in turn begs a simple question: Who the fuck got all this MMO into my single player game?

So the first thing you do in the game is create a character.

At first I was trying to make a girl that looks like Jadzia Dax, but while playing around with the sliders I noticed that it's perfectly possible for me to make a Starfleet officer that looks like she's maybe 12 or 13 years old. After thinking "I would totally watch that anime" I created the first lolita Starship Captain in order to see how long it took some Star Trek douche to hit on me.

Thus was Atera Kell born and the answer to the hit-on question was five minutes after completing the tutorial. Oh Star Trek fans, you guys are just so predictable.

In any case, the character of Atera Kell in my head was a Wesley-ish Child Prodigy that was given her own ship because really Starfleet's standards are THAT low nowadays. Anyhow, this was funny for a while but by the time I became a Commander I was a bit tired of looking like a 14 year old girl and thus broke out the char creator again and aged her...

I actually really like the way you can change your look at a moment's notice. You can also hide things like body armour and such so that you can make a nice customized Federation uniform as I did above. It lets you really feel like you're progressing as you go along and makes your character feel a bit more consistent. You don a different uniform as you rank up, rather than simply put on whatever you find on Klingon corpses. I actually thought it was pretty cool when I became a Captain and changed my look to this:

Neat.

You can also customize the look of your crewmembers. From left to right there you have Ensign Kayla, Lieut Commander Olox (my Security Chief), me, Chief Engineer Takara and my medical officer Sha'kar. I spent a fair bit of time tweaking their appearances.

I especially like how Olox came out. Imposing Bolians are cool.

Anyhow, so this is pretty solid so far, I'd say. You have a ship... you have a crew... you fly around the galaxy shooting other ships and beaming down to planets to shoot dudes. Why's it so bad?

Reason #1: It's an MMO.

A random crewmate will be selected to read some quest dialogue ("Sir there are some Klingons here, let's kill them). I suppose the reason for this is that you aren't supposed to be chatting with NPCs, you're supposed to be chatting with other players. But that isn't how Star Trek is. In Star Trek social development is directed inside the ship, with only occasional appearances by Admirals and other Captains. In this you're in a fleet battle against 10 Borg Cubes every few moments.

That's not what Star Trek is like! Voyager sucked! Stop ruining the Borg!

I rarely grouped up in the game because that's how Star Trek should be: a single ship going around the galaxy, having its own little adventures. But at no point will you get any genuine personality from your officers. They're literally just upgrades for your ship that you take down on away teams.

I would really prefer a single player game with that sort of interaction. I'd like to be able to hear about how Olox lost his barber father during a Borg attack on the Enterprise or whatnot. I don't really have much interest in having five ship Captains beam down to a shitty planet to scan for microbes.

Which brings me to...

Reason #2: Scanning for Microbes.

Or rocks. Or lava. Or archeological artifacts. Or... whatever. Exploration is the essence of Star Trek and they tried to put it into this. This turned out to be just beaming down to a planet, finding a couple of rocks (usually 5), hitting 'scan' and then leaving. It's really boring and really pointless. Sometimes they'll be some random enemies loitering around the microbes which you have to kill before you scan, which isn't really how Picard did it in my memory.

What would be better is if they did what is done in the shows and used these silly missions to develop some of those bridge characters. When you do the missions with other people it's just a bit of the other dudes like 'this sucks' as everyone runs in every direction to find the shit. I would kill to have them use it as a platform for character development, but that sort of thing is possible only in a single player game.

Reason #3: The story is bad.

It's set thirty years after Nemesis. In true nerdish overcomplexity tradition, let me explain reason #3 in three parts.

#1: Bending over backwards to make references and connections to the original series. Stuff like this:

Ich.

#2: Complete unoriginality.

Almost all the missions are rehashes of old Star Trek episodes. There was a Section 31 mission that involved a long 'test' exercise on the Holodeck, like that Bashir episode of DS9. There was a mission about the Hirogen doing some bullshit that was not far removed from the shit they did to Voyager. There's a mission that's like that episode of DS9 where some Jem'Hadr have a Gateway. It's like they think that if something can't be directly connected with an episode, the fans will revolt. I guess this must be what Star Trek novels are like.

#3: It's stupid.

The game is based around combat. You can't hail a Romulan vessel and do a bit of cowboy diplomacy to get them to cut out their shit. You have to open fire immediately and the way they try to justify your doing that is often just retarded. Without going into the painful details, let's just say that there is no fucking 'neutral' zone anymore if I'm going into Romulan territory and destroying their ships.

And honestly:

Holographic ships? Fuck if you can have those why bother doing anything else ever.

#4: Ground Combat

It's really bad.

It has two issues that I would think any developer would be able to catch. The first issue is that the enemy does not deal enough damage. I didn't put much thought into my away teams. Two Tactical Officers, an Engineer, and a Doctor (I'm also a Doctor). The enemy could never even put a dent in me.

The second issue the worst possible thing you could combined with the first. They have WAY too many hitpoints. It takes FOREVER to kill ANYTHING. So you have a situation where fights last a good 5-10 minutes where you're struggling to whittle an enemy armed with frickin' dart guns down. Awful awful awful.

Your away team is also retarded. They can get stuck on anything. Open doors... chairs... a bit of debris... a knee high rock... you name it, they get stuck. It's fucking terrible and it seemed like I spent almost as much time trying to get my away team from room to room as I did fighting. A simple solution would be to have the idiots teleport to you if they got too far, but simple solutions don't belong in MMOs.

#5: PvP

Someone working at this studio needs to play Team Fortress 2. If they did, they would see that there are certain things that team-based PvP needs in order to succeed.

They are:
- Spawn points/safe rooms that cannot be camped
- Objectives to discourage turtling strategies.
- A setup phase to let people load the map so that you don't have 5 Klingon ships loading while there's only one Federation vessel.
- Autoteaming. There's no point in playing a medic without easy access to the team's health bars.
- Voice commands (i.e. "BEHIND US!") that can be broadcast with a press of a button.

The game has none of these. Space PvP missions thus boil down to Federation ships drifting around in a circle waiting for the Klingons to decloak and attack. If the Klingon ambush is good enough they win and get spawn camped. If the Feddies hold them off, Feddies win. Terrible.

In conclusion:

I had a fair bit of fun with this over the last week or so. It's certainly better than WoW. But it just suffers from the fact that it's an MMO in a universe that really just isn't an MMO universe. I thus will not be giving it any of my coin.

2009 - A Year of Unity

2010-01-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

So it's a new year and in two weeks it'll be one year of Unity Plaza. One of those two things is probably worth making a post about, but probably not both. So let's just say this is the joint 'one year' post.

Unity Plaza has turned out pretty much the way I intended. It doesn't get updated every couple of weeks infrequently, has attracted not so much in the way of readership but has given me a venue to talk about some of my more obscure tastes without cluttering my writing blog. Some might call these are rather modest goals, but I never have liked the idea of having a popular blog. Blogs are meant to just let a person sound off as an individual without having to worry about people yapping at them. If there were 20 comments on every post, I'd probably turn comments off.

So yes, Unity Plaza is a success and will hopefully continue to be a success in 2010. But since this is a year thing, let's do a review of 2009.

I have no idea why this fucking Haruhi pic is showing up on the front page. It's not supposed to be there. Fuck Blogger.

So it says at the top of the website that this is a place to sound off about books, anime, gaming and whatever else comes to mind. So let's take those things in order.

Books:

I'd say that the best book I read this year was probably...

With powerful writing and a gripping storyline, the Kite Runner was the one book that I didn't just sort of slog through during the year, but rather actually enjoyed and went through with great interest. The post about it is here, so no need to say so much about it, but in terms of Books-I-Read in 2009, this was probably at the top.

The runner up...

Not technically a book, but certainly a story that I shall remember forever more. Reverie is still my desktop wallpaper and I have no intention of removing her.

The worst book I read this year...

I didn't make a post about this. It's about communists in space. I read most of the book thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek parody of communist propaganda and that the author was laughing with me. In the last few chapters it became clear that he actually believed what he wrote. This just made me sad. God damn commies.

Anime:

The best anime I saw this year...

Assuming that I do this next year, Gintama will win next year too. And, so long as it continues, the year after that and the year after that. I tried to make a post about Gintama once upon a time, but I found that words could not adequately express my feelings for this series. It's basically a sci-fi comedy series about a freelancer samurai and his two wacky sidekicks. But those words do not do it justice. What Gintama truly is is the pinnacle of anime and perhaps of human endeavour itself. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it does everything that a work of art is supposed to do without ever taking itself seriously.

Thus do I salute Gintama and sing its praises.

The second best...

Of course. Awesome storytelling + wacky characters + unique setting = one damn good series.

The worst...

Ignoring the series that I watched one episode of and shut off in disgust...

I don't know who thought it was a good idea to do 8 different versions of 1 episode, but that guy needs to be shot in the fucking face. And then following that travesty up with fucking Sighs, which is the biggest load of bullshit in Haruhi's damn universe? Fuck. There are no words to adequately describe how angry I am. Not even that Disappearance movie can placate my anger.

Games:

The best game I played this year...

The game has many virtues, too many to list here. What makes Arkham Asylum the best though is that it brings the player the experience of actually being Batman. One feels everything from Bruce Wayne's silly morality to the confidence of being able to beat the crap out of everyone that looks at you the wrong way as you stride about Arkham in this Metroidvania-style opus. Long story short, I cannot wait for the sequel.

The second best...

Persona 4 is just one of those rocking and unique experiences that leaves you wanting more. Mystery, romance, drama, fantasy and a dash of horror... it's just got everything. With the undub version providing a stellar Japanese cast, it's just an experience that you carry with you after it's done. Hell, I should play the thing again sometime.

The worst...

Puzzles are stupid, especially time puzzles based on rather arbitrary and illogical game mechanics. And just because a story is hard to understand and keep track of doesn't make it smart or deep. Fuck this game, it should go to hell. At least it only cost 2.50, but frankly a bag of chips would've been a worthier investment.

And everything else:

Favourite movie:
District 9

Second favourite:
Sherlock Holmes

Favourite song:
Warsaw Philharmonic Choir - Lapis Philosophorum

Favourite song that people who aren't like me are likely to know:
The Decemberists - the Rake's Song

Favourite Comic:
Bad Machinery by John Allison

Second Favourite:
Penny Arcade

Preliminary Unity Plaza-related goals for the year:

Read:
American Gods
Stardust
1984 (I was reading about it on wikipedia the other day and it's been so long)
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Dracula (I started it but never got through)
The Sandman Graphic Novels
Sherlock Holmes
Look for more good Visual Novels like Planetarian
A good adult fantasy series would be nice

Watch:
Gintama
Monster
Akagi (as soon as I learn Mahjong's rules)

Play:
Team Fortress 2
Jade Empire
Edgeworth's game

Swear at:
Patrick Rothfuss
Hideo Kojima
Andres Franco
Stephen Harper

Stop:
Reading bad webcomics
Watching animes recommended by Fradener

There, done.

Happy twenty ten!

A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

2009-12-27T21:41:00.000-08:00

This book is a memoir written by a young man not much older than myself who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I actually don't know what to say about it. It took me about three months to get through it fully, because I kept having to put it down. That isn't really a criticism... at no point did I want to stop reading the book altogether or anything of that nature. Rather instead, the book is just so intensely sad and filled with such horrifying stories that it's just hard to read continuously. Beah exacts an emotional toll that is designed to obliterate everything before it.

This book might be too much for most people to read, but those that can withstand the intense and soul shattering grief that is presented will probably find the thing to be somehow rewarding. It's not a political book at all and at no time does it attempt to pass judgment on the political conflict. The story is rather told from the perspective of a boy who saw his family die in front of him before being given a gun, drugged up with cocaine mixed with gunpowder and sent to kill. The author tries to write as he feels and is extremely good at doing that.

It's not an easy story to read. But if you can get through that sort of thing, this is worth picking up. Just be prepared.

Few comments:

1) This is a memoir, so one is presumes that Mr. Beah's experiences are true here and I don't doubt them. A cursory glance at his wiki page reveals a discussion of some 'investigation' of a journalist from Sierra Leone that nitpicks details and tries to make the government look a bit better ('we didn't CONSCRIPT child soldiers, they were volunteers!'), but I'm willing to dismiss all of that as politically motivated hogwash.

That said, I did sense a certain amount of drama that felt a bit artificial. At one point, he's told that his parents and siblings are waiting for him in the next village and arrives in the village to find it burned to the ground just hours before. I would never have the guts to go up to this author and say 'Did it really happen like that?' but it still didn't quite ring true.

But quite frankly, I think it's his right to take some dramatic license with his story if he so chooses. It's his story to tell, after all, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.

2) The most powerful bit of the story for me was when he was standing in prayer in a village when the rebels attacked, scattering the prayer save for the Imam who stood before his Lord reciting a long sura until they came to butcher him. Beah isn't explicitly religious, but that image has power. That is the spirit that one hopes to hold onto as a believer, I do feel.

3) I don't cry for things that often and this is no exception. That isn't an assertion of some kind of machismo or anything, but rather it's just not what I do. Rather instead, when something makes me sad it gets me in my dreams. This book has haunted over me for the last little while and I think it will for a some time to come.

I should read something more cheerful next.

Baccano! - "My, my. This is quite a racket."

2009-12-17T00:56:00.000-08:00

I feel that this is a nice contrast to the last post.

Baccano is about two things. The first thing is 1930s New York gangster families that wear awesome hats and hire hitmen to shoot each other. The second thing is magic. Needless to say, it was really fucking good.

More than that though, it's a story that seeks to be innovative. It's not really a single story either, but rather something like three or four really cool stories (each with subplots inside) melded into each other. There are gang wars involving magical artifacts. There's a train that a terrorist group, a bunch of gang enforcers and some bandits try to hijack at the same time. There's an ancient feud between rival magicians. There's a Robber Couple that likes to dress up in weird costumes during their heists. It's a bloody wild ride. The only downside is if you aren't quick-minded you can easily get lost.

The cast is enormous (something like 15-20 characters in a 16 episode series) but everyone's such a character that they all get a lot of development in a short period of time. One of my favourite characters was this guy called Luck who didn't get much face time but made up for it by being so ridiculously laid back about the work he does that he just radiated cool. There is no dead weight on this cast list, which is very very rare.

It's a real breath of fresh air, I think. It's unique, arty (arty is not to be confused with artsy) and smart but never pretentious. It's just about having a lot of fun. Check it out.

Bit more talk after the jump.

Three spoilery things to touch upon:

First: The antagonists were great.

I really thought it was amazing how the villains were all these over-the-top cackling fiends and still managed to be somehow humanized. Ladd, Vino and even Dallas. They all were comically evil on one hand and yet filled with all these believable redeeming features. I think my favourite of the bunch was Vino, who's blood drenched affections will be difficult to forget.

Second: I liked how the magic worked.

There was a coherent and straightforward system for it. No magical surprise bullshit in this. The way that Maiza's character was sort of minimized so that he was really just a side character that was never in the thick of things I thought was an especially good touch. It leaves a lot to be inferred about him, which I think is a positive thing.

Third: Those hats really are pretty cool.

Seriously, why did gangsters stop wearing those things? They're awesome. They should bring them back.

Oh and I should also mention: Isaac and Miria.

Fuck yes. Normally pure gag characters wear thin after a while, but holy fuck I loved those two.

And nothing else needs to be said.

Ef - A Tale of Memories

2009-12-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

(Before we begin: Note that comments on the site are currently broken)

This was... hm... It's a 12 episode series about uh... artists.

The first storyline is about a one eyed writer girl with a bizarre form of Plot Amnesia that makes her forget all her memories for the day on the thirteenth hour of every day. She meets a dude who tries to give her confidence in her writing abilities so that she can write a post-modern novel about being a one eyed writer girl that loses her memories every thirteen hours.

The second storyline is about a genius manga artist that's trying to balance his publishing schedule and schoolwork. He has two co-dependent girls interested him (a cheerful though somewhat emotional gal and an overly possessive childhood friend) and he has to deal with that stuff somehow.

So... um... I am avoiding the use of the word 'bad' in reference to this, because really that's a bit too harsh. Still, I'm fairly certain that no one I know that I'm on good terms with would like this. But at the same time I'm sure there are a lot of people that swear by this thing and think it's the most deeply beautiful and meaningful thing they've ever seen. It's certainly very popular (multiple recommendations is why I ended up going through it, in case you were wondering). But still... let's talk about this, if you wish.

Let's start with the manga artist. Hiro Hirono.

When artists create fictionalized versions of themselves it usually is an excuse to pat themselves on the back. This is a tradition that goes straight back to that part of the Odyssey where that Bard sings about the Trojan War and has Odysseus in tears because of how awesome his storytelling skills are. That's basically what this guy is. He draws Shoujo Manga which he apparently started publishing when he was like 14 or 15 and while the show never mentions anything about what the stuff was about it is generally understood that it is awesome and that Hiro is amazing.

That in itself is a problem. I've never been a fan of the whole 'look at how awesome my artist character is, you can't see even a hint of what he might create' thing. It's a cheap device. But fine, whatever, that isn't the big issue here. The issue is that Hiro's utter awesomeness transfers to pretty much everything else in his life.

The guy spends his entire story being cool. He spends his time making deadlines and being pursued by gorgeous women. The women themselves are both kind of crazy and vicious, with each seeming to look to destroy the other's self esteem in order to win the artist. But the manga artist is pretty much detached during most of that giant emotional war, as he's just too busy being awesome. His only 'flaw' is that he didn't choose which girl he liked earlier, but that seemed to be pretty much thrown in as it was fairly clear who he would choose from the get go.

It's funny to me that this show plays at being post-modern and artsy so much and yet lapses into the 'stable, responsible and logical male'/'emotional, fickle and irrational women' molds. I don't know anything about who made this or why, but the way this thing was written struck me as base artistic wish fulfillment. And that just doesn't yield a satisfying story.

The second story is about Chihiro Shindou.

The amnesia I described earlier was caused by a car accident (which also took her eye). I know I don't really need to mention how stupid her condition is, but I will anyway. Thirteen hours of memories a day (her memories from before she was 12 are intact) and then she forgets it all. That is not simply not plausible. People might say 'well, it's fiction' but fiction needs to be internally consistent. I could not feel any sympathy for her condition throughout the show because it was just such a silly idea.

And that's a big problem. As I mentioned Chihiro's goal is to write a novel with the help of her boyfriend Renji, who she'll tell what's going on so she can keep on track and keep writing in spite of her memory loss cycle. But honestly, no matter how much she struggled and suffered, the inescapable fact was that it's a stupid premise that I couldn't suspend my disbelief for. Amnesia is an overused trope in any case. It's in everything from Firefly to Gundam. But this is stupid amnesia.

I doubt whoever wrote this doesn't even cared about that, being concerned more for the overall effect. It's 'a tale of memories' after all and so the author has to deconstruct the role of memory in human experience and obviously turning to something crazy like say science fiction to explain reoccurring short term memory loss would have just been so vulgar. So just stamp on 'amnesia' and keep going!

For some people that's probably enough... but me? I think it's lazy and irritating.

Finally, let's talk about the most egregious thing about this piece of work, mainly the art style.

Pretentious.

I get the feeling that whoever was art director for this thing thought that no one could understand him/her in high school. Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others) the scenes would randomly cut to a shot of one of the characters as a shadow or as a purple outline or the background would suddenly change or text would flash by. I'm not sure whether this style is called Impressionist or Expressionist or what... that isn't my area of expertise. But I do know that it was really annoying.

You can say art is subjective, of course, and I acknowledge that. But I think often people mistake novelty value for actual value. Great art would be something like Jin Roh rather than something that slaps a shadow on someone's face. I would even say Kaiji's big noses and weird looks outstrip this thing. All the silliness with photoshop filters and random scene cuts struck me as the product of someone who's really insecure and terrified that no one would 'get it' (though what 'it' is is rather nebulous). There was one scene that I really disliked which consisted of one of the girls leaving messages on the manga artist's cellphone.

That's how it looked like. As she left messages, what she said would write in text across the screen and she kept leaving messages which made more and more messages appear until the screen was covered. It went on for like ten minutes. After a minute or two I just said 'okay, I get it' and skipped the rest of the scene. But that's the junk I'm talking about.

Overall, I can say I got through it which is more than I can say about a lot of things. But generally speaking, I think this is not the way things should go.

District 9

2009-12-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

District 9... hmmm. Not too shabby.

Gotta give a film credit first and foremost for innovation. An alien refugee crisis in Africa filmed in pseudo-documentary style complete with occasional cuts to random experts/acquaintances of the main character. I've never seen anything like that before and it's a neat idea. The documentary aspect sort of breaks down after a while and it becomes what I think is fairly straight-forward science fiction. But still, I tip my hat towards risk-taking.

The movie was fairly politically charged, perhaps even a bit too politically charged. The politics of District 9 are pretty heavy handed, but also kind of vague. Refugee camps have extremely poor living conditions. Racism is bad. Okay sure. But these are bloody aliens.

Personally if alien refugees came to earth I would be in favour of a massive quarantine. You can't just let a bunch of people from another damn planet set up camp without knowing anything about them. Who knows what damn biological weirdness can come out of that? I don't care how damn malnourished the damn aliens are, you don't just let in a bunch of unknown organisms onto our planet. That's just stupid.

But in any case, details aside it was good. So let's talk about some specifics here...

Documentary-style:

I liked this. Documentaries have sort of become an art form these days, what with the spooky music and the interviews with loved ones/generic experts with European accents. It's all pretty standard and so seeing science fiction using the documentary style like this was rather nice. I would go so far as to say that I think that the first chunk of the movie before the infection part took off was actually the best part.

I especially liked the use of past tense. "Wikus was this" "Wikus was that"... made the movie more tense as you watched to see what was going to happen to the guy.

Main Character:

I liked the actor, I have to say. He really played the part of the semi-charismatic pseudo-liberal nerd pretty well. You could tell right from the get-go that this is the kind of guy that was picked on in high school and probably got his degree without doing anything that remotely resembled field work. He talks a lot about things being illegal, doesn't seem to like violence but is still kind of prejudiced. I don't think the audience is supposed to really like him, but he really works as a believable character.

That is until he gets some alien guns and becomes frackin' Rambo. Up until that point I was really liking the whole documentary aspect of it, but when Wikus blew up that whole military base and then escaped... well, he also blew up the documentary part too. Which is a shame really, as they could have still kept it going and put up some interviews with some people that survived his onslaught. That would have been awesome.

"He came through the door and shot the guard, yelling 'FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!'. We hid under a table and then he..." *breaks down weeping* "He told us to run... to run or else he would... he would..." etc. etc.

I don't know why they just abandoned that in favour of just a standard action scene.

That said, that mech he had was pretty cool.

Politics:

My main objection:

Why is it a stupid private contractor managing the aliens rather than some sort of government or UN agency? I mean, sure, I understand. Blackwater (or whatever the fuck those fuckers renamed themselves... Xe or something, isn't it?) is one of the most evil organizations on the globe. But for crying out loud, Blackwater are a group of mercenaries who are given contracts. You can't just put them in charge of the aliens. The whole shadowy 'MNU' thing running the show just felt silly.

Good Detail:

I think the movie does a fair enough job with explaining why the aliens don't just attack. They might have cool guns but when they get shot they die just the same and there aren't so many of them that they can just take over the Earth. If you chuck missiles at their spaceships, they will explode and if you shoot their crazy mech enough it will be destroyed. Nice way of justifying the refugee thing.

Bad Detail:

I don't understand how a trigger pulling mechanism is supposed to be linked to DNA. That's nitpicking though. But while we're on the subject, why exactly did alien fuel stuff make him turn into an alien?

Worst part of the movie:

Cannibalism. Or well, maybe not 'cannibalism', but the whole alien eating thing. I know that there are some weird cults with inhuman practices in Africa. But that was still really stupid. "I'm going to eat this thing to see if I can use this gun" is an idea with practical intentions. When that shit doesn't work then you can maybe see it not gaining too much traction.

The whole 'scary African gun guy' thing just felt out of place and unconvincing.

Space Wolves Codex - "Woof Woof!

2009-09-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

So I guess I can write a post about the Space Wolf Codex. If you don't know what any of those three words mean, stop reading now.

I'm a Tau player first and foremost, but I got my start in 40k (like most players) with the Marines. I've been done campaigns as Marines, I've drawn up some fluff for Marines and I've probably played hundreds of one-offs as Marines. Not just the Vanilla Marines either, I've gone through Blood Angels, Dark Angels and Black Templars and played more than a couple of games with Thorpe's bullshit Chaos codex.

So I know my Marine codexes pretty well and when rumours swirled of how strong and overpowered it was, my interest was piqued. The bullshit of Guard and their stupid 140 point cheeseplanes has gone uncontested for months after all and so having some imba Marine stuff to cut those stupid green fuckers down to size would have been good.

After having used the dex and making some lists though, I feel confident in being the first Marine to say: "Uh guys, this isn't that great."

Or at least it does if you compare it the normal Marine codex. I'm not going to cover the whole codex here, so let me divide this into two sections

Why the good things aren't really as good as you've heard:

Njal Stormcaller - aka Cloudman:

Everyone's probably heard about this guy and his stupid storm. For the record: The rules for this guy are stupid and I think he's just generally a stupid idea. But for the sake of novelty I put him in a Drop Pod next to some Wolf Guard and dropped him on the second turn next to a bunch of Guardsmen. For the three turns before he was killed he rolled the morale check power, which managed to run one crappy infantry squad off the board. And that's against Guard who are probably the most vulnerable race to that.

Don't get me wrong, the storm has a lot of bogus and game-breaking results, but the big hits only come in later turns at which point he should probably be dead what with his 2 wounds. And since the guy clocks in at 270 points with Terminator Armour I really don't think he's even worth it.

Jaws of the World Wolf - An initiative test or death for all models within 24" of a line going out from your Rune Priest. That's really not so great as it sounds. Your opponent doing something as simple as putting his troops in a zigzag really takes the teeth out of it. Sure you can snipe with it, but most high-value models in the game are initiative 5 which gives Jaws a whopping 1-in-6 chance of actually doing something worthwhile.

Granted the likes of Necrons and Carnifexs aren't going to like that one bit, but those guys have been fucked around by Lash and Weaken Resolve for a while now so they should be used to it.

Why the codex isn't as good as the vanilla codex:

Transports:

Apparently Space Wolves are really fat. Only ten of them can fit into a Drop Pod as opposed to the normal Marine twelve. This wouldn't be that big a deal for ordinary Marines, as squads are going to optimally come in groups of ten anyway, but for Space Wolves the optimal number (i.e two special weapons and one sarge a Power-something) is 11 (or 6 if you only want one special weapon, in which case I guess you can ride in the Razorback but then you have less models hitting the front line). The reason for this is that they don't have Sergeants per sey but rather have a Wolf Guard assigned to lead the squad at the beginning of the game.

So if you want to shove a squad into a Rhino or a Pod you need to either give up your power fist or one of your special weapons. I can't think of another race besides Orks whose maximum efficiency squad size doesn't fit in any of its transports. What is up with that?

Wolf Guard

I'm sure most Chaos players are looking at the options these guys have and then wondering what the fuck happened to their Chosen, but the costs for these guys are weird. Note that the following things are the same stat-wise.

Normal Tac Marine Sarge with Power Fist - 51
Wolf Guard with Power Fist - 38

Good deal. But...

Normal Assault Marine Sarge w/ Power Fist - 53
Wolf Guard with Power Fist + Jump Pack- 63

Normal Bike Sarge w/ Power Fist - 65
Wolf Guard with Power Fist + Bike - 73

You pay a premium for special stuff.

One could call that a trade-off I guess, but when you consider the transport problem it's more of a simple mark up on your sarges.

Long Fangs

These things are so stupid. The whole point of a devastator squad is to have heavy weapons that you have to chop through some flesh to get to. These guys have nothing like that. No flesh cover for the models, leaving 40 point models exposed to the depredations to any Loota/IG HWT/Crisis Suit on the board. Wow, great idea GWS.

No Ironclad Dreadnought

There's only one type of Dread worth taking in the entire game and let me tell you that Dread isn't a stupid 13/12/10 guy that costs 270 points.

No Sternguard

This honestly can't be minimized. Nothing beats the Sternguard.

No Combat Squads

If you're coming out of a Drop Pod, being able to split into two independent squads is absolutely critical. It let's you shove Combi-Meltas into multiple targets and split your fire. Wolves can't do that.

But there are still things that are actually cool:

Wolf Scouts

WS/BS 3 on Marine Scouts has always been stupid so I'm glad that Wolf Scouts have it back up to 4. The super outflank power is also an excellent thing to use in this new era of Guardsmen bullshit, although they can only pack one melta-gun (not counting the Combi-Melta from the Wolf Guard).

Thunderwolves

I'm pretty sure these guys are overpriced. 50 point a model for T5 W2 Sv3+ isn't a very good deal, especially since basically every army has a Demo cannon these days. They seem interesting though and I look forward to experimenting with them.

Sagas

These things really shouldn't belong to a Marine Chapter. I mean, Saga of Warrior Born is something that would fit a Khorne Lord a lot better than a damn wolf dude. But they add colour and I approve of colour.

Overall:

The transport thing can't be minimized. That's incredibly crippling and has army-wide implications. Space Wolves will excel against the likes of Orks, which is an army that's mostly moving towards you anyway. But against Guard, Tau, Eldar and normals Marines I think they're pretty subpar.

Planetarian - "Please do not divide heaven in two."

2009-09-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Planetarian is a magnificent piece of work that does what, in my opinion, more science fiction should be doing.

I've only read a handful of visual novels... three, in fact. First there was Fate/Stay Night, which was a decent fantasy yarn with a really out-of-place and too-long sex scene. Then there was Clannad, which were a web of reasonably well-told romances. Then there was Chaos;head, which was a wacky and good fun, though not really fantastic. Planetarian though is the first one that I actually want to actively recommend to people.

It's a short read. Took me around two hours to get through in its entirety, and this was while pausing to make a snack. The premise is simple though I think unique... it takes place after World War III/the apocalypse and stars a nameless 'Junker' (basically a heavily armed and grizzled veteran looking to loot things in order to survive) who is looting a 'Sarcophagus City' for when he stumbles across a still-functioning humanoid robot whose function is to guide tourists at a planetarium before the war.

(The spelling 'planetarian' in the title isn't wrong, by the way. The robot's name is 'Reverie Planetarian')

The story that unfolds is deeply moving and emotionally engaging, while the ending is something that I will always remember. There are only the two characters in the story (the Junker and Reverie) but they both get their hooks into you in a very short time. The setting is nicely conveyed and I think overall the work is a refreshing bit of science fiction.

My opinion is that all of you should try giving it a read.

It is a Visual Novel though and I would like to talk about that medium for a bit, if you don't mind.

Visual Novels vary in structure, but generally speaking it's a normal novel that you read on your computer usually with artwork, voices for the dialogue, music and the occasional sound effect. So the questions then are: Is that really necessary and would this work just as well as just a plain old novel?

In all the other Visual Novels I've read, I would say that the art isn't anything to get excited about. When a character is talking, one of several stock images of them will appear on the screen in one of maybe a dozen or so poses depending on what their mood is. Their lips don't move in sync with spoken dialogue and they aren't really animated at all. Planetarian sticks to the system in that respect, with Reverie on screen for the majority of the story.

I think it is cool to have an image of a character presented and by alternating the poses you can often get around doing a lot of the description work and keep the dialogue concise. The problem is though that often it seems like the images were drawn after the story was written. So when Reverie first enters the story, you have the protagonist in first person narration describe her, right down to her hair and ear-piece. But really, she's right there. I know what she looks like. What's the point of the visual part if you're just going to describe her to me anyway?

Though on the flip side, I think it is effective when the narrator later points things out about her as the picture changes. Like when she smiles and he points out as much, it tells me where the man's eyes are pointed, which is always a nice thing.

The other part where I think the artwork contributes is in the backgrounds. In the other Visual Novels that I've read a background is going to be a really boring picture that never ever changes. It's also kind of annoying, as there will be a big chair in the middle of a room and no one will ever sit in it. What Planetarian actually makes the backgrounds part of the story... I don't want to say too much about the fantastic astronomy scene, but if you're the kind of person that can (like me) be instantly distracted from anything by pretty space photos you are in for a treat. And certain images will hit the reader hard, no matter what his or her aesthetic preferences are.

I would post a picture to demonstrate that, but the scene I'm thinking of had such impact that I don't want to spoil it.

After artwork, comes sound...

Soundtrack-wise this isn't that exciting. A couple of good piano pieces (one of which I really like) and a few sorrowful tunes that set the mood well. An expanded musical budget to include some violins here and there would still have been opportune. During the battle scenes, you can hear gunfire and such as the fight is being described as if it were a novel, which I guess sets the mood (or at least isn't jarring at all).

The striking audio thing is really the dialogue...

All of Reverie's lines are spoken (in Japanese of course), but the protagonist's are not. I've read that in a later version of the novel the protagonist is voiced by Daisuke Ono (Koizumi from Haruhi). With all respect to Mr. Ono, I actually think that I liked the half/half structure stylistically. The protagonist is supposed to have a mysterious sort of air to him.

One of the objectives that the writer of this story has very early on is getting the reader to thoroughly love Reverie. That's in large part accomplished in record time by her voice. No matter what level of understanding one has of Japanese, her actress (who I looked up and found to be a completely unknown person who has done almost nothing besides this role) has this robotic sort of earnestness to her that is difficult for a reader to deny. That primal music of language that Patrick Stewart is always talking about is employed here to devastating effect.

All in all, I still consider Visual Novels to be a generally unproven medium. Most of Planetarian's success comes from the same place that any novel's success comes from - i.e. the writing. But I think that as production values increase and more things like Planetarian are made they'll become much more relevant to the discerning scifi fan.

Devil Survivor - "Rest in peace, sinners."

2009-08-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Devil Survivor is a game that ought to be selling millions of copies. It won't and will likely attain cult hit status in a couple of weeks and be impossible to find anywhere, but it still should be selling like hotcakes.

What you have here is an Atlus turn-based strategy RPG (Atlus being the creators of Persona) about the Apocalypse occurring in Tokyo. The story draws on Christian/Old Testament material in that strange Japanese way, but fortunately not in that Japanese way. Technology, angels, the internet, rock music and government conspiracies are also involved. It's a wild ride and is occasionally a bit too wacky, but over all it's a good yarn.

If you've ever played Advanced Wars or Fire Emblem or FF Tactics, then you're already familiar with the rudimentaries of the system. You have 3-4 people on a grid-based map, each of whom have various elemental attacks and movement-manipulating spells. Battles are thus strategic and extremely intense. Haphazard attacks, bad mana management and poor formations often result in party wipes.

In layman's terms: The game is really bloody hard.

But beyond the raw gameplay is a really compelling storyline that handles something that few games handle well... Choice. So let's talk about that.

(As you can see, I find all my screenshots by google image searching them. Stupid sites putting watermarks on the things)

When I play a Bioware RPG or really any game that involves making important choices, the first thing I'll often do whenever anything happens is save. That's a pretty basic thing, I thought... being able to save and then go back if you don't like what happens is something you sorta take for granted.

But here's the thing... Devil Survivor has only one save slot. And because the fights are so damn hard, you'd have to be crazy to not be saving constantly. Moreover, the way things are set up in the game has it so that a choice you make at one point will have irrevocable consequences an hour or so down the road.

At one point I heard that a certain person was being hunted by a very angry man who hangs out with demons. At the same time as that was happening though, a woman was trying to fulfill a blood oath. I gave said lady a hand in a tough but fun fight and then immediately afterward got to see my pal get incinerated before my very eyes. And, since my choice to help the woman over him had occurred much earlier, there was nothing I could do to 'fix' it.

It's really amazing how much that changes. I found myself really thinking about the decisions the game made me make in a way that really wouldn't have been an issue if I'd had 15 saved games. I actually would put my DS down and think about what I was doing and why, which was I think a strange thing.

The other interesting thing about choice in the game is what they're willing to let you do and become. If you're so inclined, you can become plain old evil and sit on a big chair sipping red wine while concocting evil plans and being attended upon by hot evil slave girls and thinking about how evil you are. But there are at least 5-6 endings and there's a rather large grey area surrounding the non-ultimate evil ones. As I was making the Big Choice, I found that I couldn't really decide which course would really be right. Questions of free will, morality and human progress all sorta bounce between them.

I think that's much better than the usual good ending vs. evil ending that crops up in RPGs. Evil is there and good is there too, but there's a lot in between.

It's a crime that stuff like this passes by mostly unnoticed while shit like Metal Gear sells millions of copies. So go buy it!

The Kite Runner - "For you, a thousand times over."

2009-06-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

So I really meant to keep politics out of Unity Plaza when I first conceived of it, but this is such a political book that I'm afraid this is going to be a political post. Strap in.

The Kite Runner was an awfully good book.

It's hard to really describe the book's plot adequately. The quickest way would be to say it's about the messed up life of an Afghani boy who grew up in the 70s and ended up as a refugee. It deals mainly with Pashtun culture and Afghani racial dynamics, while hitting fundamental themes involving the concepts of sin and redemption.

It's author, Khaled Hosseini, is an Afghani exile who lived in Kabul and ended up living in California. Pashtun culture doesn't actually have much traction with me. I vaguely am familiar with the ideas of Pashtunwali, but the details of those ideals are a bit alien to me. Still, no matter how un-Pashtun I might be, I know enough about the culture to know that Kabulite exiles are individuals one is supposed to be wary of. There is a small subset of that lot that have made their livings by selling out their homelands to our enemies, after all (You'll notice I say 'our' even though I have no right to).

Khaled Hossieni, I do believe, is not one of those people. This was a book he wrote from his heart and he did not write it to cater to a Western audience that wants its myopic stereotypes confirmed. But in spite of that, Mr. Hossieni is still a Kabulite exile and, for better or worse, it shows.

I'm always hesitant to talk about Afghanistan, mainly because I have a sister who has steadily been forging herself into the foremost expert on Afghanistan in the Western world. So I actually consulted with her about the book after reading one hundred pages of it, because I sort of could already feel what the author was doing and wanted to know if that instinct was right.

Mr. Houssieni's main political point in the book is the equating of the Taliban with the Nazi party of Germany through the character of a half-German half-Pashtun bully who later ends up in the Taliban top brass. Said half-German has read Mein Kempf and thinks it's filled with great ideas and also happens to like to rape young boys. It's thus strongly implied through the book's text that the Taliban are the Nazi successors. The word 'Islamofacism' is something that gets peddled around (though not so much these days now, thank you again Barack Obama) and Mr. Houssieni is obviously picking up on that angle.

It's a convenient sort of equation from the perspective of an Afghan on a lot of different levels. The Nazi party, from the perspective of modern German society, is considered to be a fit of temporary insanity. Many Japanese treat the Imperial period in much the same way. Labelling the Taliban as Nazis in turbans allows the Afghani exile to reconcile dual loyalities in a clean sort of way.

The problem is that I don't believe that that's true.

The Taliban were a military force that emerged out of one of the most brutal wars in human history. I don't sympathize with any of the policies or restrictions they imposed upon the Afghan people nor do I agree with any facet of their twisted practice of Islam. But I also am aware that their origins lie with a war against a brutal foreign occupier that sprinkled the countryside with landmines, followed quickly by a war against warlords that conducted systematic rape campaigns against rival ethnic groups.

There is a story I know about Mullah Omar that may well be a folktalk, but I shall recount it here. Mullah Omar had his origins as a low level madrassa teacher, very second-tier. One day when news came of some manner of warlord invading a man's wedding and kidnapping his bride for himself, Mullah Omar put up a sign on the madrassa decreeing: 'education is now haram'. For Mullah Omar and the young men he would lead, there could be no civilization so long as such things were taking place.

When people go to war on such terms, the only thing one can find on the other end is the Taliban. And that is why I reject any comparison between them and the narcisstic racial fantasies of an overly pampered European nation from a world away. To call them Nazis and fascists is, quite simply, a self-serving lie. It dismisses the specifically Afghan quality of their movement and tries to make it something foreign. It tries to make the Taliban not Afghani and, I guess I should say, not Pashtun.

The fundamental way I have come to understand the Taliban is that they are men who volunteered to fight against some of the blackest evils that world has ever seen and were tainted in the process. They fought an invading army that sprinkled millions of landmines shaped like butterflies about the countryside to attract Afghani children to them. They fought warlords who made rape into a regular military practice. And in the process of fighting those evils they, in the words of Nietsche, stared into the void and the void looked right back at them.

That does not justify any of their later actions, but I do believe that that is the proper context by which they must be understood.

There is a passage in which Khaled Hosseini does acknowledge his perspective as a Kabulite exile when he has a taxi driver deride his former life in Kabul as pampered and unAfghani. That took a lot of courage, in my opinion, and greatly enhanced my opinion of him. But nonetheless, my hope is that the oversimplification of the Taliban that he presents does not take root any more than it already has.

This all, of course, has very little to do with the actual book, which was really quite good. It's a fantastically written story, really. I found that the structure of the story was rather simplistic and you could usually tell when Mr. Hosseini was going to do something bad to his characters, but the amount of sheer abuse that he was willing to hand to his characters consistently surprised me. Though I guess that, in itself, is appropriately Afghani.

There is also a prayer scene that was extremely powerful when the main character turned towards God desperately in a hospital as the child that is in his care is about to die. I think there is a certain ardent form of prayer that's only possible from the Muslim context. The desperate sort of prayer that stems from the twin knowledge of one's recognition of the absolute supremacy of the Lord Creator and the belief in the infinite mercy that He is nonetheless capable of. It is a tearful prayer that is rooted in the purest sort of faith that one was not created without purpose, however unfathomable that purpose may appear at the time. It is the prayer of a person who has nothing else to hold on to and nothing left to suffer.

I did not think that the fundamentals of this prayer could be captured through fiction. In the Kite Runner, they were. And for that, Khaled Hosseini has my most highest of respects.

One Outs - "Please trust me now!"

2009-06-08T00:19:00.000-07:00

It took forever for this to be completely subbed. Geez...

So One Outs is a high drama about baseball and gambling. The basic storyline is that a famous baseball player meets a prodigy pitcher in some random baseball field in the middle of nowhere and recruits him onto his team. Said pitcher then makes a deal with the owner of the team that for every out he gets he'll get 5 million yen but for every point he gives up while on the mound he'll pay 50 million yen.

A show with that premise has no business being good, but One Outs was something special. It wasn't so much about baseball as it was about strategy, ethics and attitudes towards money. The long and short of it is that it was really damn amazing.

I'm just going to touch on a few points here...

Baseball is an awful game. I don't like playing it and the very idea of watching it brings me physical pain. That said, I'm really not sure how accurate a representation of baseball One Outs really was. How much thought does a pitcher and batter put into their types of pitches and where they'll swing? In One Outs it's treated as a purely intellectual and psychological exercise. Is that what it's supposed to be like? I don't really think so, but it being presented in that way certainly made the game a lot more compelling.

In any case, Tokuchi's skill isn't really in pitching, but rather in waging psychological warfare. He's good at reading people and will trip up batters with some rather delicious trash talk, though his main thing is to make the opposition terrified. He'll do things like have his team step out to the outfield to make a mockery of the batter and apply psychological pressure. It's often mean and vicious, but man was it good watching.

Let me say that Tokuchi Toua here was an amazing sort of protagonist. The entire show very much revolves around him, but what really struck me is how often he wouldn't talk. You never get his internal monologue or even the slightest glimpse into what might be going through his mind, save for the occasional smirk or puzzled expression. He's just this overwhelming force that sweeps everything before him in a high tide of unknowable talent and intellect.

You can't really grasp his motives... does he want the money? He doesn't seem to really care about that. It's not glory and fame, either... he's just got this strange and silent desire to climb the very highest mountain, no matter how many lesser men he must destroy along the way.

So the long and short of it is that One Outs rocked. Here's hoping for a second season.

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

2009-05-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...

I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.

I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).

But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.

So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.

The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.

There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself.

Persona 4 - "I reach out for the truth."

2009-05-05T02:24:00.000-07:00

Persona 4 was really damn good.

It's a modern fantasy/mystery RPG/Visual Novel hybrid set in a Japanese small town. It's a crossbreed of Majora's Mask, Final Fantasy and Fate/Stay Night, except much more sophisticated. The story is immensely complicated and nuanced while the gameplay is well thought out and challenging, though it's really the scope of the entire affair that defies description. The game is long, but unlike other RPGs that usually have a filler 'go collect some knickknacks for us', Persona is packed full of stories upon stories.

The game revolves around a series of murders in the town of Inaba, with bodies showing up on foggy days hanging upside down from powerlines. I won't talk too much about the plot (that would take too long), but as you might guess the police are baffled and it lies with you to form a sort of Scooby Doo mystery-solving gang in order to stop the murderer.

The writers likes to alternate between somber darkness and lighthearted fun as they tease out the mystery. The whole game has a very anime style... catchy J-Pop numbers play as you go around town or get into fights and the game has an all-star voice cast that includes the likes of Rie Kugimiya, Yui Horie and Ami Koshimizu (even if you don't know all those names, believe me, you've heard them before).

All in all: It was a fantastic game and I couldn't put it down till the credits rolled. I highly recommend it (the undub version, obviously). After the jump, I'll talk a bit more about the gameplay and then go into a few things about the characters in my usual way.

So one thing about gameplay: Man, this shit was hard.

The first ninety minutes of the game are just visual novel bits and then beating up some ridiculously weak enemies. Then all of a sudden the game becomes this nightmare land where every point of mana is precious and not sufficiently protecting yourself against certain elemental attacks means doom for you and your entire party.

It's not a situation where you'll lose a battle and have to go and grind levels to win. You could play like that, I suppose, but it's more accurate to say that the game wants you to be tactical. Don't expose your elemental weaknesses, buff yourself up, dispel enemy buffs, use the defend command when it's wise to and keep your health bars high. Often boss fights can last over an hour, with a boss switching tactics/forms every time you knock off 1/4th of its health.

It's brutal and exhausting, but ultimately extremely satisfying when you think your way through.

So that aside, let's talk about some interesting points of the game...

This is Kanji. He's a thuggish delinquent with a bad history of gang violence and involvement with the police. He's a good guy though and has a big old heart of gold, in spite of his tough-guy act.

Not that special at first glance, but the thing is that he also has the unusual distinction of being the very first openly gay video game character.

(Some people might take issue with 'first', so let me say that the Bioware lesbians don't count because they're designed first and foremost to titillate players and the blue alien lady isn't even really a lesbian because she comes from a mono-gendered species that can reproduce with more or less anything with a pulse)

I'm not quite sure what to make of the portrayal of Kanji's sexuality. Like for one... The murders in the game involve an alternate dimension that victims are being thrown into, wherein a combination of their desires, anxieties and fears are made manifest by the 'Shadows', a race that feasts upon negative emotion. Kanji gets thrown in there and when you go in to pull him out his dungeon is filled with gay characitures... like you have to fight muscular men in rainbow underwear in there. Not exactly a tasteful depiction, but the place is supposed to be a manifestation of both his fears and desires, so in a way it kind of makes sense. I mean, clearly the writers were having some fun here, but it also shows that this is how he would be afraid people would see him if they knew he were gay.

But the whole thing is muddled when Kanji later develops a huge crush on this one dude who ends up being a girl (albeit a somewhat transgendered one). So I guess he's at least somewhat bi? I really don't know. I actually personally think him and that girl are a pretty good couple (he's very brash and straight-forward while she's intellectual and reserved), but I believe that that sort of thing really doesn't work out long-term. Although I read online that in Japanese culture it's apparently more common to be bi than gay, so who knows?

What I liked about Kanji though is that at no point did he feel like fodder for the degenerate yaoi fangirls of the world nor did he feel like he was an attempt to shout 'hey being gay is ok' or whatnot. He's not someone that's defined by his sexuality as gay characters in fiction so often are, but it's rather just an aspect of him. That's why it made me a bit sad when I read about him online and saw people saying things like 'oh yuck, Kanji! I never used that guy ewwwww.'

I hold some conservative views myself, but for crying out loud people, can we get passed that?

The other thing I want to talk about is the game's primary flaw, mainly the relationship system.

I say 'flaw' but it's actually mostly a good system. A group of characters in the game have mini-storylines that you develop through the game that are attached to a Persona card in the game... as you spend more time with them, you level up that card and get XP bonuses when you make Personas of that class. So say for instance you become friends with Kanji up there, who is the representative of the Emperor card... when I go to the next dungeon and make Odin, an Emperor Persona, I will get a good 6 levels on creation, which is really essential.

The problem is that relationships max out at level 10... not a bad thing in theory, as there are lots of cards to max. But there's an interesting quirk in practice: Once you finish a card, the person is essentially dead to you.

So you have a situation like with Rise here:

Rise of the Lovers card captured my character's heart with her ability to call out an elemental weakness/immunity of the enemy before a battle starts and her capacity to refill my party's health and mana after each battle (always something to look for in a girl). And of course she's also voiced by Rie Kugimiya. But anyway, at level 10, love was confessed and a long-term commitment was made... But from then on, it was now in my interests to refuse to spend time with her and to ask out a blonde bimbo so that I could max out the Moon social link. And, of course, my doing this will have no effect on Rise.

I'm not saying the game should be a bloody dating sim or something, but that just makes no sense and it really broke the immersion. A lot of the side routes (i.e. the blonde bimbo) are pretty pointless too so why not cut one or two and make it so that you max out that card with the girl that I had my character commit to? Surely that would make more sense than 'okay she loves you, time to start seeing other people!'

... Right?

In the end though, this was a fantastic piece of work that I enjoyed from beginning to end. If at all possible, you should grab it.

Wolverine - "Every single time."

2009-05-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

This rocked.

Seriously, I can't imagine why it got such negative reviews. I mean, prequels are sort of problematic because you know in advance who's going to live through 'em, but that honestly didn't detract much from the movie. The main complaint I could see people having about the movie is that it's not terribly realistic, but for crying out loud it's a movie about a guy with a metal skeleton and claws. It's not supposed to be realistic.

What it is supposed to be was Wolverine chopping things up as various tragic things happen all around him. The plot twists and turns in a rather comic book-like way and there are many fights and explosions. It has everything you would really want from a Wolverine movie. I guess if you don't have any particular Wolverine-related desires, you could conceivably be disappointed, but I think most of the film's detractors must have their heads up their ass.

Was it as good as X2? No, probably not, although it does get bonus points for not having Halle Berry. But it was still a damn good watch.

Spoiler talk after the jump.

(If you ever get the chance, see if you can read the Marvel Wolverine Origins story, it's quite good)
I'm going to keep this short, so let me hit on some key points:

1) The intro sequence was damn good.

The whole point of the Wolverine character is to be this incredibly tortured creature that clings to a minuscule amount of goodness in a world where everything bad has happened to him. The war montage got that across, while also doing a good job of differentiating between him and Sabertooth. I thought it was genius.

2) The plot was wacky.

This is what all the critics on rotten tomatoes seem to agree on, but I'm not sure how it wasn't more twisty or farfetched than X2. Yes the 'Achtung, spy!' bit and 'he was working for me all along' stuff is loopy, but it's not hard to follow and this is what comic book storylines are like. I don't see why this is a bad thing in Wolverine and not in X2. X2 has mind-control drugs leeched out of a wheelchair psychic guy and two attempts at psychic genocide.

I think a lot of these 'oh the plot sucks' people are just hopping aboard a bandwagon. The main problem with the plot is that it's a prequel and you know generally what's going to happen. Content-wise, it was comic-booky but I sort of want comic-booky when it comes to comic book movies.

3) Hugh Jackman is too clean.

He plays a great Wolverine and I wouldn't have any one else. And most of the time he looks fine... grizzled and weary, just like you'd expect Wolverine to be. But there are certain scenes where the guy will look at the camera after a rough fight and just shine with excessive prettiness. Yes, I realize that Mr. Jackman has a female following to be concerned with, but they could've gone a little easy on the make-up.

4) Some of the minor characters are pretty stupid.

I think Marvel writers are partially spoiled by their movie success and think they can insert whatever bollocks characters they please into their movie. I'm not even talking about Blob (his scene was at least funny), but rather the throwaway mutants like Agent Zero or the guy with the swords. The Marvel universe has always been about a solid backing of b-list gimmick characters, but that doesn't mean that those clowns should get into the movies. Though I guess they aren't that much worse than your Toads or what have you, so this isn't a Wolverine-specific problem.

I didn't mind the last guy though, if only because it's sort of been established that that's the kind of thing that Stryker apparently likes.

5) The adamantium bullets thing was also stupid, but it's not the kind of thing I dwell on because (again) it's a bloody comic book movie.

The Alchemist - "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

2009-04-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

So the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is my latest foray into the non-speculative end of the novel pool.

This is a book about a boy from Spain who has a dream that there's treasure near the pyramids and goes on a journey to look for said treasure. He makes a trip through North Africa to go look for it and along the way he goes on a sort of spiritual journey too. Along the way he meets some nice people, gets robbed a few times and finds a girl that he likes. Oh and there's also an Alchemist guy.

It's very short and there really isn't much story to it. The writing is flowery and the story is punctuated by philosophical mutterings about religion and God and 'The Soul of the World'. Indeed, the whole story is more of a platform for Coelho's vague ideas about how God loves all His children. At no point does the Alchemist offend and it isn't really boring or anything, but it's ultimately a book about nothing.

So as I said, a fair chunk of the short-book is dedicated to a sort of spiritual awakening on the part of 'the boy' (the main character does not have a name). This read basically like any scene from any book where some form of mystical power is bestowed upon the protagonist. By listening to his heart the boy can speak to the wind and then to the sun and then look unto the Hand of God, which in turn let's him realize that all things are part of the Soul of the World and that the Soul of the World is in turn an aspect of God and thus he can perform miracles and turn himself into the wind.

Use the Force, Luke.

The difference between the Alchemist and a good story though is that there is no conflict in the Alchemist. He isn't going to use his Soul of the World powers to do anything besides steal money from a church (that's where the treasure ends up being) and then live out his days being happy. The story is simplistic and unambitious. There are only really three characters in the book. There's the boy, who is Pursuing His Dreams. Then there are the helper type guys who appears throughout the book dispensing philosophy and encouragement, who might have different names but who are really just one person with different titles. And then there's the one named character, Fatima, who is a girl he likes.

My point: there isn't any actual story in this story. It's a religious philosophy text dressed in a layer of fiction.

The actual philosophy is perfectly inoffensive. It's standard Christian Jesus-loves-everyone feel-goodism translated into a form that attempts to make it have universal application through a Soul of the World, which I guess is also an analogy for the Holy Spirit (whatever that is). It really doesn't go any further than that, as there are no evil characters in the book, so I thus feel comfortable dismissing it as being utterly shallow.

The other message is 'follow your heart' which is, of course, tripe.

But the shallow philosophy is not the problem. Fiction has been used as a platform for philosophical and political insights for a very long time. I don't have a problem with book with a message. But the difference between this and your 1984s or whatnot is that those books have actual stories! If you ignore all of Orwell's political commentary, you still are left with a boldy imaginative and engrossing story. If you ignore Coelho's philosophical dung, you're left with blank pages.

And that just isn't how a novel should be.

I Am Legend - "Come out, Neville!"

2009-03-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

I Am Legend really surprised me.

I actually thought it was a zombie novel involving a guy going around with a shotgun shooting said zombies in the head. This assumption might have something to do with the fact that there is a movie version starring Will Smith. But what it turned out to be was a masterfully written piece of high science fiction with a really strong psychological element. It tells the story of Robert Neville, the very last human being on Earth following a vampiric epidemic. He seals his house with garlic, which is besieged by mocking vampires that try to goad him outside so that they can eat him. Then, when the sun comes out, he goes outside and kills as many as he can find.

It's very short, clocking in at 170 pages, but it's incredibly engaging. Neville is perhaps the loneliest man ever conceived, living in a hellish world without anyone to speak to and nothing to do but brood upon the death of his wife and futilely research the causes of the plague. It's an incredibly layered and sad story that I would recommend to more or less anyone.

Plot discussion after the jump...

So when I was about fifty pages into the book, I messaged Andres on MSN and said that I would just kill myself if I were in Neville's situation. It's pretty telling that he didn't object at all, but instead just asked how I would do it (I would use fire to deny my blood to the vampires, while he would just hurl himself off a building).

I'm not a big fan of the idea of suicide, but the situation Neville is in just more than any one person could be expected to bear. Matheson has him kill his own wife, resort to alcoholism and go on frenzied vampire killing rampages. At one point, Neville tries to befriend a stray dog (the only living thing he can find), slowly offering it food and cultivating a friendship only to have it die in his arms. The intense loneliness is just too much to bear and it really made me wonder about what kind of mental state the author was in when he wrote this. It was so immersive that I even found even myself feeling terribly alone and isolated, with a lurking feeling of despair ever at the edges.

Yet somehow, Neville lives on in these conditions, in a sort of state of emotional detachment and numbness. And you never really get to understand why that is, beyond his sort of Darwinian need for self-preservation. He's not religious at all and he doesn't seem to have any serious hopes of ever finding a cure to the plague or even of finding any other survivors. He just sort of exists and Matheson does a fantastic job of showing the horrible weight on the man's shoulders.

A fair portion of the book is dedicated to Matheson's scientific investigation into the vampiric plague and this is where the book shows its age. The plague is a bacterial parasite, which is spread through spores carried in the wind and which feeds on human blood while turning its victims into bulletproof undead monstrocities that are allergic to garlic. I... I don't think bacteria, no matter how supercharged by a nuclear war, can really do all that. But oh well, I guess that was as good a way to make 'scientific' vampires as any back in the 1950s, so I don't fault Matheson for it. The way he presents these facts certainly shows that he put a lot of thought into them.

The big twist of the book is that some of the vampires get their minds back and set about rebuilding society and that all the Vampires Neville has been slaughtering have actually been 'people' in the new society. This I didn't really like... Neville's realization that he had become a predator or 'legend' to these Vampires that he was killing by daylight struck me as a bit fainthearted... a surrender to the plague, if you will.

But then I got thinking that perhaps all he was looking for throughout the novel was an excuse to die. He didn't want to just off himself and give in to despair, but he had no will to live and would readily embrace the first semi-dignified death he could find. Being executed as a murderer in a society of vampires was the first opportunity that came his way and he jumped at it.

An incredibly nuanced portrayal of human psychology, most certainly... the means really do matter just as much as the ends, don't they? But, needless to say, it's also an incredibly sad one.

The Shadow of the Wind - "Madrid you wondrous city..."

2009-03-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

I don't think many people that read this blog would be very interested in the Shadow of the Wind.

It's a historical fiction drama set in Franco Spain circa about 1945 by an author of the name of Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The plot is a kid is trying to research the biography of his favourite author, Julian Carax, who disappeared some years previous. It's a very sentimental sort of novel with intense romances, a layer of melodrama and a lot of subtle commentary on fascism and life in a police state. It also could be considered to be something of a mystery novel, what with the happenings that seem to surround Carax.

It's not dull. It's the kind of book that certainly keeps the pages turning... it's got likeable characters and the writing is smooth and occasionally powerful. But it pushes no limits and the plot is terribly predictable. If you're into this sort of non-speculative fiction, then by all means pick this up, but if you aren't don't bother.

That concludes the recommendation bit. I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking about the plot and what makes it so predictable and why Mr. Zafon's craft is of an inferior quality. Click on if you're interested in that.

So the Philadelphia Enquirer says on the inside cover that this book has 'a mystery that the author teases with mastery'. So let's take a look at this mastery, shall we?

As mentioned, Daniel (the teenaged protagonist) wants to find the biography of his favourite author Julian Carax. He discovers a book called 'the Shadow of the Wind' by Carax in a hidden library and finds out that Carax was apparently murdered in a Mysterious Fashion. Moreover, he also finds out that there's a scarred man with a lighter who wants to find and burn every single copy of Carax's work so as to erase them from existence once and for all. This man approaches him in a sinister manner, names himself after the devil from one of Carax's books and demands to have Daniel's copy of the book so that he can use it as firewood.

I honestly felt a little embarassed for Mr. Zafon when I read these scenes. The entire chapter was clearly aimed at making the reader think 'ohhh who is this strange masked man?' and he's not a bad writer, so he certainly got the mysterious feel right. But see, the 'master' here decided to be pretentious while he was at it and throw in a relatively obscure literary reference.

For those not in the know: Virgil and Kafka both ordered their manuscripts burned when they came to the end of their lives. The story goes that neither were completely satisfied with their works, so they decided that, since they couldn't do any more copy editing, fire was the only solution. A bit overdramatic of course, particularly in Kafka's case as he lived in an era where he could have just ripped the things up and tossed them in a dumpster. But hey, all authors have a bit of drama queen in them.

So gee whiz, I wonder who the devilish masked man who wants to burn Julian Carax's books is! Oh wow, could it be the brother of his childhood love? His old sadistic enemy who is now an evil fascist policeman? HMMM I WONDER! I'm not sure if you need to know the literary reference to really figure it out right away, but what me reading that told me was everything I needed to know about this author. Mainly: he's the spirtual sort that thinks it's okay to sacrifice his drama in exchange for a literary tip of the hat at his favourite authors.

From there, I pretty much puzzled out his plot points two hundred pages in advance.

"Why is Julian burning his own books?"
Because of standard issue Artistic Self-Hate born from a Personal Tragedy, involving a Girl.

"Julian suddenly had to leave Barcelona and went to Paris?"
Girl.

"Julian's biological father is an unknown person. Who could it be?"
The benevolent rich banker that gives him an opportunity to go to school.

Every time the book tried to make the reader ask a question (which it does frequently) I had the answer. Zafon's simplistic psychology and silly sentimentality was in hand and so he really couldn't surprise me. Even beyond just individual plot points, the overall structure was just in plain sight.

At one point in the book, Daniel (it's told in past-tense third person narration) says "I had seven days left to live". I just rolled my eyes when I read that and actually said aloud: "Yeah right! The structure of the book has you living a parallel of Carax's life except minus the tragedy. You're going to live happily ever fucking after." And so it was.

There's more to the book than the grand mystery, of course.

There's the high romance with both Daniel pursuing a girl called Bea who he loves very much and Julian (in the past) pursuing a girl he loves very much but who is also his half-sister. The problem with it is that the girls are about as dull as a post. No depth to them and not much personality to begin with... they're just Girls that the male characters happen to like.

There the Franco Spain aspect, with a comically evil Inspector guy that wants to torture everyone. But the politics are just a backdrop and nothing really useful comes from it. It could have been set in the Soviet Union, Germany in the 1930s or Italy without much of a difference besides the names and places. I assume it's set in Spain because the author is a Spaniard. He even included a bunch of pictures of Spain at the back of the book.

There are a few didactic statements about how television is the worse thing ever and novels are better, which struck me as a bit passe.

But the main point of the story is the mystery and the mystery just completely falls apart on itself when exposed to the tiniest bit of light. Carlos Ruiz Zafon is not an unskilled author. The problem is that his priorities are completely messed up. He wants to tell a story, but he also wants to inject this vague spiritual dimension while also presenting the corrupting influence of fascism on an inheriently good Spanish society. He has good characters, but he pollutes his work with empty sentiment and literary references. If he were a good enough writer, he could have weaved all this together into one coherent strand.

But he's not. And so he didn't.

Prince of Persia - "Evil gods, crazy women... what's the difference?"

2009-03-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

The Prince of Persia series has gone down a bit of a rocky road over the years. Sands of Time was their best performance, by far. It had fun platforming, slick combat and a pretty good story with likeable characters. Warrior Within removed most of the second and replaced the third with a lot of game-breaking bugs that made it so that I couldn’t even finish it. Two Thrones I heard was a slight improvement, but I could never find the Wii version so I never got around to playing it.

Still, my memories of Sands of Time were positive enough to put down 30 bucks for the new Prince of Persia, which is a reset of the story with a brand new Prince in a brand new world. And honestly, if not for a few things, this would be a glowing review. But alas, Ubi once again demonstrated their capacity to ruin a perfectly good product with bugs and a few retarded ideas that should never have made it off the drawing board, not to mention the biggest shafting of the PC consumer they could think of.

So the plot of the game is that you’re a thief (‘Prince’ is his ironic nickname) who wanders into some lost city that has an evil god trapped under it. There you meet Elika…

Let me take a moment to talk about Elika’s character design. Considering Prince of Persia’s pseudo-Middle Eastern theme, I think that a Bollywood temptress is about as good a female lead as you can hope for from one of these games. Certainly beats Farah’s harem girl look or that girl in the steel thong in Warrior Within. But honestly, how much better would she look if her shirt weren’t torn in strategic locations? They really didn’t need to show off that much skin to make her sexy and exotic.

In any case, as you might have guessed, the evil god wakes up and sends his four minions to four sections of the world to corrupt the land and break him out of his jail. The Prince, always a sucker for a pretty face, agrees to help Elika heal the land and stop the evil god guy. Most of the game consists of running across walls and ceilings, jumping over pits, flying and swinging off pillars until you reach the fertile ground, where you will kill a pathetically easy boss and then restore the land.

The first thing you notice while going through this is that the game is stunningly beautiful.

Like really, it is.

Jumping around a world like this is fun for the most part, if only because it let's you take in the wonderful scenery. There's combat too, but it's not really focused upon and there are only like a grand total of six different types of bad guys to fight in the game anyhow (and five of them are almost exactly the same).

The game's storyline is told via dialogue. Any time in the game you can also hit L to talk to Elika, sometimes about the story but often about nothing. In most reviews I’ve read of this game, the reviewer will either hate Elika and like the Prince or hate the Prince and like Elika. I though consider myself pretty neutral to both. The Prince is a lame Lawrence of Arabia type that comes across as being way too American, but still comes up with fairly clever and funny quips now and again. Elika on the other hand is bland and passionless most of the time, though when she does try to crack a joke at the Prince she can often be almost charming.

The net effect is that I don’t have a problem with either of them, but I could still care less about both. But I guess that's better than open hostility. And again, the pretty scenery really makes up for a lot of their flaws.

But anyway, those are the basics, so let's get to the sins of the game.

Sin #1: Bugs

I was expecting this game to crash a lot after Warrior Within, so I was actually surprised to see that it ran at a 100% consistent framerate with no crashes or bullshit. But alas, stability isn’t everything.

At any time in the game you can press a button to get Elika to send a little ball of light out to guide you along your way. It’s an open and complicated world, so this was pretty helpful for getting around. Unless, of course, the light were to do something crazy like take you around in a giant circle and waste five minutes of your time.

Which it did.

Very often.

Honestly, isn’t that the kind of thing that gets caught in testing Ubi? Making sure the glowing light doesn’t go in a big circle? That doesn’t sound so hard to me.

Sin #2: This guy

His name is the Warrior and he’s the boss of one of the areas. Each boss in the game has to be fought a total of five times (four stages per area + a final boss area). Normally, the way you beat a boss is by hitting him with your sword or throwing him around using your power klaw. But with this guy, Ubi decided to mix things up and make it so that he can’t be hurt but you have to use ‘the environment’ to get him. What that means is you have to stand around the edge of a cliff until he comes at you and then you have to knock him back into it.

But then after you knock him back, you have to do a quick time event where you overpower him by pressing the attack button over and over. If you fail, you have to start the whole thing process over again.

Fuck you Ubisoft.

I eventually got through this by getting to the quicktime event, pausing the game, going into the controls section and changing my attack button from my controller to ‘F’ (the F stands for ‘Fuck you’). I can hit F much faster than I can hit a button on my PSX controller, so while the frustration didn’t stop, I at least got through it. But the fact that it was there at all is unforgivable.

Sin #3: Combat in general

As I said, most of the game is platforming and I respect that. But quite frankly, with the exception of Mr. Fucking Stupid above, every boss could be killed in the following way: Circle, X, Triangle, X, Circle, Square. That one combo completely decimates everything it touches. Every boss (except Fuckface) and every enemy takes it in the same way. It made it so that combat was just a mildly irritating event that was thrown in between jumping sequences.

Something as simple as making each boss require a slightly different strategy would have helped stop the monotony a bit.

Sin #4: Leap of faith gameplay

This isn't actually so bad, but I consider it sloppy. Often when doing a jump, you'll come to a point where you don't know what the hell is next... you'll run down a wall and come to the end of it and the choice will be between just falling and jumping and hoping that there's something on the other side. Which is usually okay, as there most often IS something on the other side, but it makes it feel as though you're just running through the game's paces. It's not really timing or strategy on your part... you just press jump when the game wants you to.

Not that bad, but a flaw for sure.

Sin #5: The Ending

I liked where the game's story left off actually, but there's a three hour DLC pack that's coming out that continues the story. And, since it's not coming to PC, I will never get to see or play it.

Yeah, um... fuck you Ubisoft?

Honestly, I bought the game as an expression of pure goodwill towards this company. Sure they have a spotty history, but Sands of Time is great and Beyond Good and Evil was fantastic. The fact that this pack exists at all is part of a fucking bad trend in console gaming where companies try to nickle and dime their consumers by not finishing their fucking game and then releasing the rest of it afterward as a download pack. But randomly fucking over PC gamers (since when is the fucking PC harder to patch than a fucking console game) is just unacceptable.

So in conclusion, Ubisoft should go fucking die in a ditch.

Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder - "But if I keep them and she marries him... then he probably won't want me dating her."

2009-02-24T01:32:00.000-08:00

I'm a long time Futurama fan. It's the sort of thing that seems to have been designed explicitly for the use of me or people like me. In no other place can you find jokes about Star Trek, scifi cliches and Nixon in the same place. Not to mention that on average it's got a really great cast and an incredibly compelling romance plot in the background. The fifth season of Futurama is I think one of the finest mixes of sci-fi romance comedies that shall ever be forged.

The last two Futurama movies have, however, been complete disappointments. Bender's Big Score was okay, even if it was a bit redundant storywise with the fifth season... but The Beast With a Billion Backs' arbitrary break-up of Fry and Leela and shitty octopus plot really brought Futurama into a nosedive. Bender's Game was a bit better, but I was still thinking by the end of it I was thinking that the magic was gone and Futurama's glory days were over.

Into The Wild Green Yonder proves that I was wrong and it does so by quietly pretending that the last two movies didn't happen.

I've been saying ever since these movies started airing that the Futurama writers fear Fry and Leela's relationship. They're really good at writing Fry as the lovable nerd pursuing and idolizing Leela, who is a pretty ordinary person. One of my favourite scenes in Futurama is probably from the last episode of season 5, where Fry tells Hedonism Bot that he's going to make his opera and then it cuts to Leela on the other side of the room eating what appears to be a giant severed cockroach leg saying " *gasp* Me?!". It's just brilliant stuff. But the fear the Futurama writers possess is really of what comes after that... whenever Fry and Leela have had a moment that makes you think 'oh they're together now', it's often completely forgotten a few moments afterward.

I think the reason for this is a desire on the part of the writers not to interfere with the character dynamic. Futurama stems from the Simpsons and if there was ever a series that tries to maintain the status quo, it's the Simpsons. But for whatever the reason, the writers kept the two in a sort of pre-dating stasis field for the longest time... until, that is, now.

Into The Wild Green Yonder is not a Fry and Leela movie. The plot doesn't have much to do with their relationship and it's only in the background. But here's the thing: they have one. After so much bullshit about Fry suddenly dating someone else and Leela going back to being completely disinterested, they finally did a Futurama story where the two of them appear to already be together. And guess what? It doesn't actually change much! The character dynamics are more or less the same, except that I'd say that both Fry and Leela are greatly improved. They aren't mushy at all... Fry will still be as tasteless and dumb around her as always, while Leela still has a healthy amount of contempt for him. It's actually a bit sudden, considering that nothing happened between them last movie, but again that's why I'm saying they're pretending the last two movies did not happen. And in any case, what you get as a result is a nice breath of fresh air.

Amazing what happens when you let your characters develop rather than futilely clinging to an outdated status quo. One wonders why they didn't do it earlier.

Besides that, the rest of the movie was really nice. The first three movies often resorted to rehashed jokes. You know what I mean... having Mom do various Mom things that she's done before or just throwing the Hypnotoad out there. But this movie decided to do something controversial, mainly: tell new jokes. Fry's bits about how to be dramatic, the protesting feminists, Bender's bit with the Robot Don and pretty much everything Nixon said and did were just hilarious. For the first time, it felt like the Futurama writers were really having some fun.

What's more, I'd say this is the first actual movie out of the set. The other three had the problem of being a bit like three or four episodes of Futurama with a vaguely overarching plot gluing it all together. This one though had a beginning, middle and end. The major plot twist actually managed to be a bit surprising and it all wraps up nicely.

I've heard it said that this may be the last bit of Futurama ever made. If so, then I'm glad they went out on a note like this. It certainly wasn't the best bit of Futurama ever made, but it was quite well done.

Safehold Series - "Charis expects that every man shall do his duty."

2009-02-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

Let me start this post with an aside... the way Canadian bookstores handle their books is ridiculous. You have a situation where half the time you pick a promising title off the bookshelf, it'll end up being Book 2 of the Such-and-Such series or Book 3 of the Awesomeness Trilogy. And then you'll look at the bookshelves and find that the first book isn't there.

Such was the case with a book I saw called 'By Schism Rent Asunder' by David Weber, which is the second book in the 'Safehold' series. Fortunately I was able to remember his name and acquire both books. Unfortunately, they weren't particularly good.

Whenever an author writes anything, it's natural to get attached to your characters. As you walk down the dark, cold and lonely path that is authorship, your characters become not just your friends but rather a part of you. There is a danger in this, however... because if an author gets too attached to a character, he or she will become hesitant to do anything bad to them or portray them in a bad light.

This is the pit that Weber falls into, but he doesn't just do it for one or two characters. He does it with an entire country.

So very quickly:
The premise of the book is that a human space colony has reverted to a 15th century technology and is dominated by an anti-technology Church. The plot revolves around a nation that rebels against said Church with the help of an ancient robot girl wizard man. This results in a holy war. There's a lot more to it than that (the Church was made by some asshole colonial administrators and the rest of humanity is wiped out), but that's the gist of it.

The Kingdom of Charis is the country that's in rebellion. At first, you get the idea that what's going on is that the robot lady man is trying to subtly guide the people there back to the path of technology, but as the story goes on it becomes apparent that what Charis is actually just the sort of place that Weber thinks he would like, filled with the sort of people Weber wouldn't mind hanging out with. With very few exceptions, everyone in Charis is a paragon of virtue who values Human Rights above all else. Meanwhile, most people from the Church are either corrupt/evil or going through some sort of moral dilemma that boils down to 'Oh no, I love Mother Church, but Charis is just so right!'

Honestly, it's ridiculous. This is probably the most unrealistic book about a Holy War that anyone could ever write. At one point, the Church's Inquisition massacres a bunch of innocent Charisian merchants and their families (including women and children!) for being heretics... when news gets back to Charis, there's a scene in a bar with common sailors and soldiers talking over drinks that goes something like this:

"How dare they massacre our merchants! I say we go over there right now and burn their whole city down, women and children and all!"
"Oy! I didn't hear about no women and children attacking our ships!"
"Yeah! We can't sink to their level! I'm as upset as you are, but vengeance only begets more vengeance! We must respond in a measured and proportionate fashion"
"My apologies for my hasty words, friends. I spoke out of passion."
"Don't worry, we all make mistakes. Care for another drink?"

Honestly, it's ridiculous. Common sailors and soldiers reacting to a massacre of their fellows with restraint and reason in the midst of a religious war. Yeah that's incredibly realistic, Weber!

Charis also can do no wrong in the books. It's really a nation of overpowered Mary Sues. Weber spends hundreds of pages building up to epic sea battles, which Charis proceeds to effortlessly win. One major Charisian character has died in two books and his death was preluded by pages upon pages of 'HEY SYMBOLIC DEATH COMING UP'. At one point, it looked like one of the major characters was going to be assassinated, but that got Deus Ex Machina'd. The assassins were killed and said character went on to give a long speech about how Vengeance Is Wrong while still drenched in their blood.

To make matters worse, there were a few other characters that were against Charis that I actually liked, but they end up seeing the light and joining Charis, which pretty much leaves only the "Grrr we are the Evil Church" people on the other side.

I honestly would put it down to cowardice. Weber created this nation of Charis that he thought from the get go will be a place where people he likes will live and make didactic speeches about relgion and tolerance and being a good sort of person. Because Weber likes Charis so damn much, he sabatoges his own writing and makes the whole 'war' so damn one-sided that it's just ridiculous.

Good writers are willing to let bad things happen to good people. Not just that, but good writers have to be willing to let a good person appear in a negative light now and then. That's what keeps a story interesting and engaging. But alas, David Weber is not a good writer.

I'm probably being too hard on him. I mean, the books were page turners and I'll probably read the third one whenever it comes out (though not right away). But alas, until Weber learns to step back from his characters and learn to write what is best for the story he's telling rather than what's best for the characters he's writing he will forever remain in the pits of mediocrity.

Spice and Wolf - "To our profits!"

2009-01-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

Spice and Wolf is quite unusual.

It's set in a European-style fantasy world... Society is at a sort of pre-modern phase where harvests have come to be stable, traveling merchants go from city to city and there's a church that insists on religious orthodoxy. In previous days, the peoples of the world used to pay fealty to pagan gods and spirits of the harvest, but that of course died out with the advent of the church.

Sounds like a not-too-unusual brand of fantasy at first, but here's the catch: There's no swordplay to speak of and, with the exception of Ms. Wolf Sage Spirit, there is no magic. Most of the anime is dedicated to haggling, forging business partnerships and just turning out a profit. There really is hardly any action at all.

It is, in other words, something that has absolutely no business being as great as it was.

The premise of the story is that a traveling merchant meets one of these pagan ex-deities along the road, who calls herself a wolf sage spirit. She asks him to bring her north, to her birthplace, for reasons she keeps to herself. The merchant agrees and they begin to travel.

I've found that in any story where you're going to be experimental and try something new, the first thing you need are intensely likable characters. You can't make a show about mercantilism with the Gundam 00 crew and expect success, after all. So let's start with the two mains...

This is Craft Lawerence, the Spice side of the equation.

The first thing most people would notice about Lawrence here is that he's voiced by Jun Fukuyama, aka Lelouch. This is the first time I've really heard Jun outside of his Lelouch role and it took a few moments for me to get my head around the fact that the guy isn't out to viciously take over the world using any and all means.

He's really not what you usually expect from a merchant character. He isn't really all that greedy and he never cheats anyone. He certainly keeps careful track of his money and wants to get rich, but his ambitions are thoroughly wholesome (i.e. he wants to make enough money to settle down, get married and open a shop). It seems that his ideal deal is one where all parties involve profit handsomely and part on amiable terms, with the understanding that further business may be conducted in the future, which gets him into trouble. There's a certain intangible quality to the guy that just makes him thoroughly likeable. His thoughtful mannerisms as he considers a deal and his understated emotions with Horo just make him into the sort of guy you yourself would like to know. It's a rare thing for a character to hit a perfect note, but when one does you always remember them.

This is Horo. As mentioned, she's a Wolf Spirit (which is why she has Wolf ears) who was worshipped by a village for a few generations as a harvest deity, though she herself doesn't make any claims to divinity. She portrays herself as a spirit who just used her powers to help some humans out for a while, until technology progressed to such a level that she was no longer required. She isn't really bitter about this and is in fact pretty cheerful and mischievous throughout the show, but there's a certain unstated sadness to Horo that comes with the knowledge that her time has passed.

She's a bit of a counterpoint to Lawerence (or perhaps Lawerence is the counterpoint to her), in that she is pretty self-indulgent, a bit suspicious and extremely shrewd. Oh, and Geass fans will notice she's voiced by Kallen.

It's really when the two get put together that they really become magnificent. They're rather openly attached to each other, but their relationship is like an incredibly elaborate dance where each is trying to playfully outwit or outdo the other with misdirection and jokes. This isn't the typical anime affair where both parties are just too shy to actually say or do anything about it, but rather that they both seem to have more fun that way. They take a peculiar sort of joy out of making each other jealous and defying each other's expectations ("Why do you want me to stay with you?" "Because you owe me money").

It's a fun thing to see unfold as it goes along. If the show were nothing but these two, I would still highly recommend it.

Where things get even more interesting is in the money aspect. Lawerence sells furs in one town, buys pepper and moves on to the next. Horo helps him out with her sage wisdom (and, very occasionally, wolf magic) and the two are a money-making team. The world they're in is mercantilistic and he has to do things like deal with tariffs, fluctuating currencies, guild regulations and avoid church interference. The show is lovingly researched and structured, but it never gets so obtuse with the financial bits that you lose track of what the hell is going on and the characters make it engaging enough to be pretty dramatic. I never thought I'd be able to cheer for a guy to find a decent price to sell his pepper at, but they somehow pull it off.

There's an old addage that money corrupts that often pervades fiction. It's a literary tradition that reaches back to Shakespeare's Timons of Athens and beyond, so I expected the other merchants to be a pack of jackals... and so I was quite surprised when Lawerence said that he'd testify in a court of law against a company, the immediate response was not 'okay, time to kill you'. It actually took me a moment to realize that maybe the guy just didn't want to profit off of violence and death. Everyone cares about their bottom lines and profit margins, but even when hired thugs are sent out to slit Lawerence's throat in the dark they feel awfully guilty about it. It's a weird portrayal of old world spiritualism and morality combining with modern concepts of self-interest. The Spice with the Wolf, in other words... and I found that really intriguing.

(I feel compelled to mention, since I think I may in fact be one of the few people in the world who is equipped to properly notice this: the scene where Lawerence goes door to door asking friends and business partners for money is, in fact, taken directly from Timons of Athens. I would write a bit about the underlying meaning of that, but I'm already such a nerdy guy so...)

I will be the first to acknowledge that the enjoyment of Spice and Wolf does take a few rather obscure tastes, or at the very least a willingness to give a fantasy concerned primarily with high romance and the tides of commerce a chance. But if you're willing to broaden out your horizons just a little bit, I think you will be well rewarded.

The Schemers - "All conditions have been cleared."

2009-01-23T00:59:00.000-08:00

I think one of the most interesting things about the whole anime scene is seeing the marketplace of ideas at work. A new sort of protagonist or way of telling a story will be put out there and proven as being good and then, within a few months, you'll have new animes trying to build upon the new concept by trying to make a fresh and interesting take on it. Now this isn't the same thing as stealing, as unlike with Mass Effect, the new owners are making use of technique rather than actual material.

Try to think of the first episodes of Haruhi and Druaga to get what I'm talking about. The idea for the whole misleading-first-episode thing came from Haruhi and then the Druaga people said 'hey, this could work for us' and made that classic 'Jil's dream' episode. By taking a cue from the Haruhi folk, the Druaga people were able to make a complete masterstroke.

One idea that's been making the circulation lately is what I think of as the 'schemer character' and I'd like to talk for a moment about the interesting way in which this has been bounced back and forth...

The most well-known schemer characters are probably Yagami Light and Lelouch, so let's start with them.

Light is, as far as I can tell, the original schemer. If there is some sort of pre-Death Note figure that inspired him, then I am not aware of him.

Light is probably one of the most interesting characters I've ever seen. He's an ordinary upstanding man who believes in things like justice and equality who stumbles across the power to kill a person by writing their name in the book and immediately sets out to make himself into a god. What sets Light apart though is that, while he is a crazed serial killer, he's also in possession of a cold and nearly flawless intellect. He will hatch elaborate and occasionally ridiculous schemes to fool the police and take borderline super-villain-ish pleasure when they succeed. But what is most important is that he is the series' protagonist.

I will never forget the scene where Light was trying to discover the real name of that female detective whose husband he had murdered. How he weaved an elaborate web of lies to gain her trust and then...

Light is consistently portrayed as being a creature bereft of normal human emotion and, because the series is told from his point of perspective, Death Note essentially drags the viewer through the darker and uncomfortable corners of the human mind.

But even through Light's virtues, you can already see the flaw... if he's the absolute sort of evil, it becomes difficult after a while to have any affection for the man. He's just too remote from the average human being. At no point is he an unbelievable character, but he's just still not a character that many people can really relate to.

And that is really what brings us to Lelouch...

(Note that I am talking about the Lelouch of the original Code Geass season, not the second season which ruined the character)

On the surface, Lelouch is a lot like Light. He had a relatively ordinary existence until he stumbled across a tremendous supernatural power that gave him the ability to fundamentally alter the world. There are of course many more differences (Light wants to be a god while Lelouch is more of a conventional conquerer, etc.) but you can nevertheless see how the base of the Light character template is being employed for Lelouch here.

But what makes things interesting is that while Lelouch is cold and ruthless, at no point is he inhuman. One of Lelouch's first acts in the series is to murder his half-brother in cold blood, but that's not really what got my attention about him. Rather, it was this...

When Lelouch recalls what he did later in the day, he throws up. Lelouch justified the murder at the time by essentially saying it was to serve a greater good, much in the same way that Light did when he was on his killing sprees, but there's always a part of him that constantly screams that what he's doing is wrong. Sure he'll hatch Light-like schemes to get the better of his rivals and often destroys those close to him along the way in order to further his plans, but his sins gradually become a sort of tangible burden upon his shoulders. By giving the concept of Light a conscience, Lelouch really becomes a tragic hero in the old sense.

Both Light and Lelouch go down the route of being rather intimate pictures of amoral geniuses though, which is why I find this man to be particularly fascinating...

This is Toua Tokuchi and he's pitcher for the Lycoans. And yes, you read that right.

(It would probably be more accurate to call Toua the successor to Akagi, but I haven't seen Akagi yet so...)

One Outs is a show that really deserves its own blog post, so I won't go too much into the details here, but Tokuchi is the same sort of brutal genius that Light and Lelouch are. The gist of the story's premise is that every time Toua gets an out he makes 5 million yen but for every point he gives up he loses 50 million yen. He obviously never kills anyone (or at least he hasn't yet), but his technique is to wage elaborate campaigns of psychological warfare and deception in order to not only beat but also completely destroy the opposing team.

If you think that sounds stupid because it's baseball, then I don't want to hear it. I hate baseball as much as anyone else, but the point of One Outs isn't baseball.

What's interesting about Toua though when you compare him to Lelouch or Light is that he's completely opaque. He's the protagonist, but the show never presents his thought process or we hardly even get any idea of his motivation. Rather instead, most of the show is told from the perspective of the batters that have to go up against him as they try to second guess themselves. The show is really about what it's like to be pitted against a cold and malevolent human intelligence, rather than to show what that intelligence is like inside.

But again, I'll talk more about it later... I think by now you can figure out what I'm saying.

It's this sort of community of ideas and concepts that keeps the quality of Japanese fiction so damn high. Imagine for a moment if instead of 'hey let's take the basic Star Trek formula, give it a female captain and throw it into a different part of the universe' they had said to themselves 'what actually made TNG so good and how do we take that idea and do a new take on it?' Or imagine if Mass Effect had actually looked at the spirit of its influences instead of just going down the wholesale plagurism route.

If more of that sort of thinking went on over on this side of the Pacific, then I think that maybe we'd have something that's just a bit better than the gimmicky drivel that pollutes our bookshelves and televisions these days.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard - "Clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else."

2009-01-20T22:30:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write something about this for a while.

Beedle the Bard didn't generate nearly as much hype as something with the name 'JK Rowling' attached to it would normally generate. This is at least partially because of the content, for the book is a series of short stories intended for wizard children in the Harry Potter universe with academic commentary by Dumbledore. It was written for charity and probably took her about a week to put together. Still, one has to wonder to wonder if JK Rowling's sun has set. I guess we won't know that for sure until she releases another real book though.

But in any case, while Beedle the Bard is a decent enough read it is also rather forgettable.

The fictional author "Beedle the Bard" is modelled after Shakespeare, betraying JK Rowling's English geek roots. The theme of his stories is one of wizard-muggle harmony, which I guess is meant to extend into a general message of tolerance. The character of Beedle sort of bothers me, in that he's a bit too clean and good. The Dumbledore commentary constantly emphasizes that he's ahead of his time in terms of his progressive beliefs about Muggles, but the problem is he's too ahead of his time. There isn't a drop of prejudice in any of the stories. A bad decision, in my opinion. A drop of prejudice would have added a lot of character to the guy.

Anyhow, I've now gathered all their cover images, so the first story is "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"...

It's probably the worst story. It's about a guy who has a pot that follows him around making noises every time he refuses to help a Muggle with his magic until finally the wizard succumbs and decides to be nice. The Dumbledore commentary afterward is mostly a bunch of historical junk about muggle prejudice... but um... wait, what is the lesson here? You get the idea that it's supposed to mean 'if you don't help others, then it'll hurt you in the long run' but what I got out of it was 'if you piss someone off enough, they'll do what you want just to get you to stop.'

Maybe that's intentional and JK Rowling was just trying to call attention to Dumbledore's silly idealism... but it didn't really feel that way when I read it. It felt more like she was trying to make a Point.

"The Fountain of Fair Fortune" is the second story in the book...

It's about three witches and a knight looking for the aforementioned fountain. It's a nice little story without so many of the thin moral attachments of the first. It's just a story of four people on a little quest, overcoming obstacles with some humour along the way. Nothing to get too excited about, but it certainly isn't bad. Dumbledore's commentary afterward is also good for some more laughs, what with a story of Hogwarts students putting on a play.

Still, I got the feeling reading this that it was JK Rowling on autopilot. She could spit out a dozen stories just like this if you locked her in a room for a weekend. I guess this is what it looks like when a fairly talented author rests on her laurels.

Next up is "The Warlock's Hairy Heart"

Rowling seems to have put a bit more effort into this one. You've got a Warlock who doesn't want to have anything to do with women, because he believes that such unions spawn weakness. As you can see from the story's cover image, it gets surprisingly gruesome, all things considered, and is probably the one story amongst this lot that gives me hope for Rowling's future works. I think she really has the potential to hit readers hard with a 'mature' storyline.

There's an artificial moral in this one too, mind you, but I guess these are meant to be kid's stories.

The last original story is "Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump"...

This is about as bad as it sounds. It's full of tolerance babble and isn't a particularly interesting story either. There's a king, a witch and a con-man and it goes on and on. Dumbledore's analysis does little to improve it.

In two words: shit sucks.

Also included in the book is "The Tale of the Three Brothers"...

Which has the best cover image, but which you have already read in Harry Potter 7. And that story is in itself inspired by the Pardoner's Tale by Chaucer. It's probably the best of the stories in Beedle, which should tell you a lot. Still, what made the story so interesting in the books was the fact that it was of immediate relevance to the plot. On its own, it wasn't exactly awe-inspiring.

So I guess the real question with Beedle is whether anyone would take two looks at these stories if the name JK Rowling weren't attached to them. And the answer is probably no. They're passable, but extremely bland. If you're as big a fan as I am, then lower your expectations a bit and pick it up. But make no mistake: it's skippable.

Gundam 00 - "I believed, perchance, that our fates would once more be intertwined!"

2009-01-19T01:22:00.000-08:00

I have a strange relationship with Gundam 00. It's got beautiful animation and superb mech design, which is something I'm pretty vulnerable to. I've always been something of an enthusiast for a good mech. Seeing a flying bipedal machine having a midair swordsfight with another flying bipedal machine is just undeniably cool. I have known this truth ever since I first saw Heero fight Zechs in a snowplain when I was 14 and it's still true now with Gundam 00.

But the problem with Gundam 00 is... um... everything else. Fuck, what a mess. So submitted here for your approval is my very own 'Top 5 things I hate about Gundam 00'...

5) The Innovators

There have been a lot of secretive evil organizations in 00's course. It's hard to really keep track... there were those guys that that guy was talking to back in season 1. The Observers I think they were called? Whatever happened to those guys anyway? And then there's that Mei-Ling girl who's always going back and forth... but oh well, even though they're probably being used by someone else, the Innovators have taken center-stage in 00 and it's hard to think of a less credible antagonist.

It's not just that they're a bunch of girly-men... the problem is that they're that particular brand of villain whose egos never seem to deflate a bit after their asses are kicked. "Muhahaha," says the Innovator after it gets blown up once again, "The inferior humans cannot stand against us!" You'd think there'd be a chink in the ideological armour after a while.

4) Saji

The obligatory pacifist-in-a-warzone character. Nothing really needs to be said about him. He's like everything anyone has ever complained about in a Gundam character combined into one thoroughly unlikeable person. And no, his relationship with Louise does little to improve him.

3) Setsuna's retarded backstory

Gundam 00 gave up trying to do political commentary about halfway through season 1, which is something we should all be thankful for. But the damn writers can't seem to resist the urge to trudge through the Middle East a bit while they go along their merry way.

It would really have helped if they had at least done a google search before they dove into it. "Kurdistan was under attack and so I had to kill my parents for the Jihad" makes no fucking sense. Maybe they could have put just a bit more effort into it... made it so maybe Setsuna's parents were collaborating with the Iranians (I think it was the Iranians that invaded the Kurds there?) or... something. Because just making him say 'God told me to do it, so I did!' is about as shallow a reading of Middle Eastern cultures as you can get.

2) Marina Ismail

If you were to put Relena and Lacus into a giant blender, you would probably end up with a bloody mess of torn flesh and shattered bone. If you were to then take this mixture and filter out all the bits that made the two characters above so powerful and compelling and then use the remains to build a new person, you would probably end up with Marina.

I think what bothers me most about her is how passive and weak she is. While everyone else is off playing at war, she's busy being motherly to those stupid orphan kids, spouting tripe about war being bad and, of course, worrying about Setsuna who is forced to fight, even though he only wants to live in peace! Gag.

1) Who else could be #1?

If you can take Mr. Bushido seriously, then something is wrong with you.

Gundam 00 is really just an incoherent mess of bizarre plot devices, wooden characters and random retarded bullshit. But in that intricate web of awful, the Mr. Bushido farce really takes the cake. Back when he was just Graham he wasn't exactly an interesting character, but ever since he put on that fucking mask it's just been unbearable. On and on he goes about fate and the way of the warrior and his thirst for revenge... it's like they took out the manual of cliche anime badass traits and crammed as much as they could under his stupid mask.

Is there a point to this stupid fuck? He's in no way relevant to any of the factions or political groups... he's just there to inconvenience Setsuna by appearing at awkward moments to challenge him to a ONE ON ONE FIGHT. He's sort of like Gary from Pokemon, really. Ich, whenever I see a stupid fucker running his mouth about Bushido's BADASSERY I just want to destroy this world and everything in it.

Mass Effect - "Now where have I seen that before?

2009-01-17T23:06:00.000-08:00

So let's make our inaugural post about something I'm going through right now... Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is an RPG by that great titan of RPGs, Bioware... if you haven't ever played a Bioware RPG before, you're doing yourself something of a disservice as they are truly excellent. Up until Mass Effect, however, Bioware's games were based off of preexisting intellectual properties... DnD for Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars for Knights of the Old Republic. This is the first Bioware game I've played that's consisted of a completely original universe and I had high expectations, considering that what they did with other people's ideas had already been so bloody good. Free of the constraints of preexisting universes and canon, you would think Bioware's creative minds would soar. And sure enough, Bioware did come up with an impressively massive and detailed universe... which ended up being a compilation of every single bit of Western science fiction made in the last decade.

I guess fan fiction writers can only ever be fan fiction writers.

I'm not actually finished with Mass Effect, but the average science fiction fan doesn't have to get very far into the game to realize that there's something familiar about everything you see.

You're a ship's captain working on a state of the art vessel built by humans that incorporates technology borrowed from a semi-hostile alien race to create a state of the art stealth system...

Humanity in the universe is a relative newcomer on the galactic scene and most other races regard humanity as an upstart species that's trying to elbow its way into the stars. There's a council of aliens ("The Council") that's basically an intergalactic UN, but humanity doesn't fully recognize its legitimacy and is rife with strong anti-Council sentiment...

The bad guys are a race of robots who were originally built to perform menial tasks but who later turned on their masters when (whoops!) they gained self-awareness...

Their goal is to reawaken a sleeping race of ancient robots who awake every 50000 years to purge the galaxy of organic life...

There's also a space bug species that swarmed around the universe for a while...

And last, but certainly not least, you also run into an evil corporation that tests mind control spores on an unsuspecting human colony...

It's really quite sad. I don't think I've encountered a single original idea in the whole damn game (unless you want to count blue skinned lesbian aliens, which I do not). Even when they try to make an original spin on a old (and tired) idea, it ends up being stolen. Let's take for instance the Zerg (I know Heinlein gets credit for the original idea) derivative race, which they call the Rachnids. The twist for those things was that they didn't really mean it when they tried to swarm the galaxy over and it was all an accident and they didn't realize they were attacking sentient life. They sort of realized why they would end up being wiped out for that and expressed a desire for lasting peace. "Hm," thought I, "I guess that's kind of an interesting."

But then I realized that that's taken pretty much directly out of Ender's Game.

I don't have a problem with homages, but I think most people would agree that the business we're seeing here is taking things just a bit too far. It's sad really. Bioware is still as good at making compelling characters as they always have been, but they're just drowning them in all this derivative crap.

I'll finish the game and all that, though you have to sort of think to yourself: "Maybe Bioware should have stuck with Star Wars after all"

"Uh, excuse me, Admiral... but I'd like to introduce someone to you."

2009-01-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

So this is my new blog, Unity Plaza.

The intended purpose of this blog is to make my old blog a bit less hodgepodge. I thought it was kind of silly for me to have a blog that had my writing and political thoughts on one hand and my ramblings on gaming, books and anime on the other. Things make more sense that way, in my opinion. Plus I can update a blog like this a bit more frequently than I can update my writing blog. My goal will be a few brief updates a week. Topics will vary, but I intend to go between books, anime, games and anything that I consider to be not particularly serious.

So bookmark us and stay tuned.