Renaissance Gamer

Hire me to do game writing!

2012-01-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

Dear video game publications,

I am looking for more consistent, paid game writing. I've been freelancing for the last few years, but am specifically looking for work that I can rely on monetarily. I'm available for freelance work, columns, part-time, or even full-time work.

Portfolio

I've done several reviews in different styles. The A.V. Club's Sawbuck Gamer feature focuses on smaller games with shorter reviews, like this one of Bit.Trip.Flux. I also did medium-length reviews for The A.V Club, including bad games like Pirates of Black Cove, as well as good games like Gray Matter, a review I enjoyed writing due to the interesting confluence of adventure game item manipulation and magic sleight-of-hand. There are also a few reviews at Paste Magazine, including this focus on the mechanics and interface of the Bit.Trip series with their Complete collection.

Detailed focus on mechanics is also the heart of one of my favorite features for Gamasutra, on The Gestalt Effect Of Dragon Quest IX and how its combination of different mechanics and styles makes the game incredibly strong. I've also written about the emotional affect of things that aren't mechanics, such as this piece about weather effects in Skyrim and throughout gaming history. Video game history is a passion of mine, and that can be seen in pieces like my ranking of the 60 Most Influential Games for 1up.com, or an examination of old Ultima games and their lack of antagonists for The Escapist.

One dream of mine is to do a regular series on the best-loved games throughout game history, a video game equivalent to the A.V. Club's "New Cult Canon" series. I've published two prototype pieces on my blog. First is an overall analysis of Dragon Age Origins and what makes it special, including its fantasy tone and use of party members and their relationships instead of ethics. Second, a more meditative piece on Far Cry 2 and how it is both an anti-war game and a glorification of war.

While most of this is criticism, I'm also trained as a journalist, and have done some investigative or profile pieces. I'm especially proud of my Gamasutra feature interviewing and analyzing the career trajectories of the designers of classic games, like John Romero or Jane Jensen. And, since I am located in the Bay Area, I'd be available for local events, interviews, or conferences like GDC.

Finally, while game writing is the goal I'm focused on, here, I also have a more diverse background and set of interests. I regularly review books and television for The A.V. Club, including books like David Mamet's ridiculous The Secret Knowledge or Mat Johnson's fabulous Pym. Television shows include Terra Nova or Misfits.

I hope this gives a good idea of what I'm capable of. If you're interested in talking further about work, leave a comment, talk to me on twitter, or email me with my Twitterhandle/firstlast at gmail. Thanks!

The Backlog

2011-12-29T23:38:00.000-08:00

After Brad Gallaway put together his backlog, I though it might be fun to do mine. Here they are, ranked by system then by preference. Bear in mind that theoretically I'm working on a book on 1990s video games, and would like to be able to make more time for that, so in order to not have "Every 90s game I never played" as a list, I'll only list the ones I specifically acquired and haven't played before (a general rule for the list anyway.

PSX

Syphon Filter - Yeah, I never played this, picked it for the book for $2.

PS2

Persona 4 - I started this, got 30-40% done, but got overwhelmed and let it go.
God Hand
Sly Cooper
We <3 Katamari
Disgaea - I've started this and stopped at the same place 2-3 times, early on. Would like to push further someday.

Gamecube

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
Mystic Heroes
Metroid Prime 2 - I've had this for years, but every time I start, I want to play Metroid Prime 1 then I do and get my Metroid fix. One day.
Zelda: Ocarina Of Time

Nintendo DS

Radiant Historia - started this, maybe 25% through. I enjoy it but it hasn't grabbed me and demanded I keep playing.
Castlevania: Portrait Of Ruin - started this, enjoy the central out-of-the-castle conceit, but never pushed myself to go back. You know, if I had a job where I left the house, I'd play more DS games.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dubious, but it has so many fans I want to do it.
Dragon Quest IV/VI - picked these up for cheap, played a notable amount of IV, haven't started VI.
Lost Magic - Had this one on my list for so long I kind of forgot why.

Wii

Monster Hunter Tri
No More Heroes 2
Little King's Story - Started this, very much liked it, but was driven away by Nutcracker music (sister's recital aversion therapy)
MadWorld
Metroid Prime 3
Zelda: Twilight Princess - I did play most of this on the Gamecube when it was released, but it probably deserves a Wii play.
Super Smash Bros Brawl - Obviously it's best multi-player, but it's terrible with the Wiimote. So I need to get a Classic controller or two and have some friends over.
NHL 2K10 - I read this was one of the best games for use of the motion controls, but the controls didn't really click with me, and I think I have a bum shoulder.

PS3

God Of War III - Slowly working my way through this one, and it's top of the list of New PS3 game since it's borrowed.
Brutal Legend - I mean, Double Fine.
Valkyria Chronicles
Demon's Souls
3D Dot Game Heroes
Heavy Rain - I have this (borrowed), I started it, and I can't read it on my non-HD TV.
Resistance 2
Killzone 2
Brothers In Arms/Motorstorm - These were hand-me-downs, but I'll probably give them at least a quick try before trading them.

PC

The Old Republic - Like anything's getting played as long as this is #1....
Fallout: New Vegas
Bulletstorm/Portal 2 - I want to feel like my 2011 Best Games list is more complete. Own these. Haven't played. Should.
Bioshock 2
Bastion - Okay, I've played this, but is it New Game+ time? It should be, right?
Atom Zombie Smasher - This is kind of getting played alongside The Old Republic, so it's not quite a "backlog".
Skyrim - Yeah, I'll go back. Maybe let some mods and DLC show up?
Cave Story+
Braid
Limbo
The Witcher
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Dragon Age: Awakening
Just Cause 2
Assassin's Creed
Torchlight
Alpha Protocol
Amnesia
Recettear - Played long enough to get a good feel for the mechanics but not so good I didn't fail. Would like to go back and win.
King's Bounty/Crossworlds - I would like to finish one or both of these
SpaceChem - Played a while, need to play more.
Metro 2033
Binding Of Isaac
Shogun 2: Total War - NEVER ENOUGH
Eversion
Rock Of Ages
VVVVV
Diner Dash
Beyond Good & Evil
Mirror's Edge - Probably would be higher, but I have it on disc and don't have a CD-ROM drive at the moment.
Baldur's Gate II - I played this long enough to get a good idea that there was something impressive, but got stuck and said I'd come back to it.
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy
Frozen Synapse - Was not impressed when I started playing, but the Steam gift contest will push me into at least another try.
World Of Goo
Battle For Wesnoth
F.E.A.R.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines
Tomb Raider/Myst - These two are probably close on the "Most Important Game I've Never Played" pedestal
Prince Of Persia 2008
Mount & Blade Warband
Majesty 2
Titan Quest
Time Gentlemen, Please!/Ben There, Dan That
Splinter Cell
Ghost Recon
Might & Magic Heroes VI - I liked this a lot and I want to get back and finish more of the campaigns but oh man.
Terraria - Gave this a quick start, but was immediately pissed off by the lack of tutorial or manual. I guess it's hip to make your fans put videos up on YouTube instead of teaching your players how to play. Doubt I'll go back, honestly. Or play MineCraft. But I probably should.
Solar 2
Thief: The Dark Project/Thief: Deadly Shadows
Quake I/II/III
Orcs Must Die
Overlord I/II
Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus/Oddysee
NightSky
Monday Night Combat - I played this a bit and really liked it but there are so many team-based shooters around I'm not sure I'll ever go back.
Medieval Total War II/Kingdoms - I have so much love for the Total War but they're such an investment.
Max Payne I/II
Inside A Star-Filled Sky
Grand Theft Auto V
Gemini Rue
Oblivion
Dead Space 2
Delve Deeper
Cthulu Saves The World/Breath Of Death VII
Broken Sword
Avadon: The Black Fortress
A.R.E.S.
1...2...3...KICK IT!

Too many good reviews?

2011-12-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

One of the constant discussions I've noticed amongst my game critic friends this year has been about the excess of high review scores. Some see it as a sign that game critics are too soft, or even corrupt. Or perhaps the games really were just that good? Other, more detailed theories (like mine) focus on the 10-point review scale triggering a certain inherent inflation. Or particular review constraints and embargoes.

There's also the theory that maybe the games this year have really been just that good. I didn't necessarily buy this theory at first, but I've come to believe that a variation on it may be true. But "good" is a vague term, so I think we should be more specific.

I think it starts from the extra-mature console cycle. Traditionally consoles have roughly five-year lifespans, but we're getting into years six and seven for the Xbox 360 and PS3, which have come to dominate the blockbuster side of gaming. In the past, as consoles have matured, the games have tended to get slicker, more certain of themselves, and generally better. Consider God Of War for the PS2, or Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger on the SNES. But as we've moved past that rough time scale. The consoles are beyond normal maturity, they are, perhaps, stagnant.

So that's why we see a pile of third games in a trilogy coming out this year that all share similarities: Uncharted, Modern Warfare, Gears Of War, Battlefield, Resistance, Saint's Row, and a few other single sequels, Arkham City and Crysis 2. What do these all have in common? They're all slick, impressive, not-much-wrong-with-them sequels to popular franchises. That's essentially a guarantee of a high-scoring review. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But the thing is, with three games using similar if not essentially identical engines over a five or six year span, there's very little chance of surprise. Which is why most of these games, with the exception of Arkham City, aren't appearing very highly on Game Of The Year lists, I think. Instead you have games like Portal 2, Skyrim, and Skyward Sword, which may all be sequels, but they're sequels to games from several years back at the very beginning of the console cycle. They have the chance to both surprise and impress.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Most of those third sequels are games that I'm not terribly interested in to begin with, so if the people who are want to give them high scores, it's no skin off my back. But I do think it's a plausible explanation for high scores that doesn't imply that reviewers or fans are idiotic slaves to marketing.

Rowan's Best Of Television 2011

2011-12-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

When I voted for The A.V. Club's Best Of Television list, I included notes on all the shows I voted for. But since we only published the notes of shows that didn't make the main list, most of mine weren't included. In case you want more detail, here it is:

Parks & Recreation (15) – Parks & Rec had an absolutely stellar shortened 3^rd season, with maybe one episode of 16 being disappointing, and including all-time classics like “Flu Season” and “Fancy Party”, my pick for best episode of the year in any category. The 4^th season has been a little wobbly, but not enough to take the show out of the top tier.
Community (15) – A show this audacious should have less to show for it, but Community's hits vastly outnumber its misses. Even better, as its gimmicks have become standard, Community has also developed much more of a soul than it's given credit for.
Misfits (14) – Misfits' combination of comedy, drama, character work, and utter absurdity means that it, more than any other show, gives the impression that anything could happen. The tension helps the show be both more amusing and more emotional.
Justified (13) – You could easily make the case that Timothy Olyphant, Margo Martindale, and Walton Goggins were the three best actors on TV this year. I wouldn't argue with you.
Game of Thrones (12) – Possibly the most interesting show on television this year, thanks to considerations both on the screen and outside it. Also one of the best, although it did have its growing pains.
Louie (12) – Louis C.K.'s formal experimentation is marvelous. His use of drama in a comedy show is bizarre and intense, both in good ways. His willingness to dredge up the darker side of his psyche is impressive. It doesn't always hit, and it occasionally focuses too narrowly on a subject or scene, but I'm glad someone is trying that hard.
Archer (11) – I may be in the minority in preferring Archer's more grounded, lighter first season to its second. But that's not to say that there wasn't some great stuff, especially the three-part fall episode.
The Vampire Diaries (10) – At some point the ride has to end, yes? A show can't be this tightly serialized, with so many intense cliffhangers, and actually keep getting better and smarter. Can it? It's working for The Vampire Diaries so far. Why complain?
Mildred Pierce (9) - It's deliberately old-fashioned in a way that you might expect from, say, Masterpiece Theater, but Mildred Pierce has a distinct American flavor that keeps it interesting.
Treme (8) – It's a little less surprising in its 2^nd season, and some of the story decisions have been awkward, but Treme is as warm as ever.
Ricky Gervais Show (8) – Tighter editing transformed the 1^st season's occasional so-funny-you-choke-on-your-drink moment into a regular occurrence.
Bob's Burgers (7) – Halfway through its first season, Bob's Burgers switched from “potentially interesting” into “possibly magical”. Thanks to animal anus paintings, but hey, you take what you can get. If it can maintain that level of quality, it'll be towards the top of next year's list.
Children's Hospital (6) – For bite-sized dumb fun, hard to beat Children's Hospital. For clever parody that shows just how manipulative TV shows can be, it's also a good choice.
The Middle (5) – The Middle deserves recognition for being consistently good and sneaky-smart about class issues. It may never be one of the very best, but it's a great show to have around.
American Dad (5) – Like The Middle, it's a show deserving of some recognition for consistency, although it does it from an almost totally opposite direction.

Yes I Know About Breaking Bad - I started my catchup too late and it became a choice between that or three or four shorter, easier to handle shows. Next year.

As a side note - I did the writeup for The Vampire Diaries on the main list, and also The Cape and cult-comedies-on-hiatus for the specific TV Club Awards.

That Glee episode of Community

2011-12-09T13:20:00.001-08:00

I love Community. I think this season has been stronger than its gotten credit for. I will miss it during its break, and hope to see it back and renewed as soon as possible. So it's with that love in my heart that I have to say: last night's Community was among the worst of the show's run. Not because it wasn't funny (it was, often) but because it was almost totally soulless.

The key point of the episode seems to be when Abed says "I just like liking stuff." It's a rejection of snark, of mean-spirited jokes and criticism. It's an acceptance that things can be good just for being liked, that the heart wins out. It's a celebration of, well, the idea of Christmas and the television Christmas special.

Here's the problem: the episode undercuts that at every possible point. When Abed says this, he's been brainwashed by the Glee virus that, through him and his weakness, sweeps through the rest of the study group, forcing them to behave in ways they don't want to. The episode doesn't conclude with the group gathering to like things, it concludes with them gathering around to watch the Inspector Spacetime Holiday Special on the grounds that it's so-bad-it's-good.

But more to the point, beyond the interpretations of the characters' actions, the show itself doesn't abide by the idea that it "likes" things, because the entire episode is a vicious attack on its theoretical rival, Glee. As much as I love Community and as much as I might laugh at the jokes initially, they come across as just mean, jealous of Glee's popularity and zeitgeist. I mean, Glee deserves it, don't get me wrong. But Community has built its reputation on loving, character-based satires. "Modern Warfare" wasn't great because it was it a specific parody of an action movie using sitcom characters, but because it used action movie tropes in order to discuss the characters in a different, interesting fashion - notably the Jeff-Britta relationship. "Regional Holiday Music" dispenses with that in order to simply target one particular show, and a show that Community has already attacked multiple times at that.

Critics of Community often describe it as a soulless endeavor, a meta-sitcom that does parodies and pop culture references without understanding the soul beneath what it's making fun of. This description has always struck me as more fitting of post-cancellation Family Guy or worse, The Cleveland Show, which not a compliment, instead of Community. Community, I thought, was closer to The Simpsons, a show which was in love with the forms and history of television, but not so much that it couldn't make fun of them. Last night's episode? Last night's episode was Family Guy - cheap, mean-spirited jokes with a fake, ass-saving swipe at meaning.

November link roundup

2011-11-28T14:13:00.001-08:00

Time for another link roundup!

Over at Gameranx, I had a piece published on the slight disappointment I felt about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The idea that Hollywoodizing of existing properties dulls their edginess seems so obvious that I actually struggled a bit with coming up with an example. V For Vendetta proved a superb one in the end, but I always felt like I was missing something really obvious. Ian Cheong, editor at Gameranx, has been actively recruiting me through Twitter, and his persistence has won him a few upcoming Skyrim articles for the site, so keep an eye out for those.

I have, in the past, taken some issue with the term "game journalist" to describe my writing about games. I'm a critic specifically, or a writer generally, but if I'm only doing a bit of research on Wikipedia and not interviewing people, I really wouldn't call myself a journalist. At least, I wouldn't have until I did this piece on designers of classic games for Gamasutra.

My work at The AV Club continues, and it's actually been a fairly dense month for television, though less so for book reviews. One of the most random TV shows I reviewed was Knights Of Mayhem, a reality show on the would-be sports stars of professional jousting.

But perhaps the most exciting thing I did there was a Gateway To Geekery on Discworld author Terry Pratchett, which involved reading five Pratchett books in a week, which was a lot of fun. So if you or someone you know might like Discworld but was scared to start, here's the article for you.

Moving forward, I have a couple of Mass Effect pieces in the pipeline at some different sites, which is exciting, as it's one of the more comment-worthy game series around these days. It's also Best Of list time, and I'll have the chance to put together a few of those.

Link Roundup

2011-11-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I haven't been using this blog for much, so I figured I'd use at least to point you at other things I've done recently (and give a somewhat permanent record to them).

I made my front-page debut at The AV Club with this piece about the problems networks have with superhero shows. This was a fairly difficult piece to wrangle, but after putting up with No Ordinary Family and The Cape last year, it was pretty inevitable.

I've continued reviewing the middling but still potentially good Terra Nova there, along with the usually-charming, always-slight American Dad. More excitingly, my TV Club Classic reviews of Veronica Mars are back.

I also reviewed Neal Stephenson's Reamde, which both a very good book and an exciting opportunity for me to review a book from the King of All Nerds at a major website.

This review of Might & Magic Heroes VI may be my last game review at the AV Club for a while - there's lots of people who want to review games there, and...

...I've also started doing game reviews at Paste Magazine, including this one of Bit.Trip.Complete and this one of Red Orchestra II. I'm quite happen with both of them, as the editorial freedom there and longer word count gave me the opportunity to really delve into what made each of the games interesting.

Dragon Age: Origins

2011-09-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

Dragon Age: Origins represents the culmination of a few trends in RPG design, which gives it a certain tension in both narrative and game mechanics. Its much-lauded story and characters are at the heart of this tension. On one hand, it wants to be a dark epic fantasy, directly inspired by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. On the other hand, it still uses general fantasy RPG and specific BioWare plotting tropes. The setting includes dwarves, elves, wizards and orc-like creatures called Darkspawn from the beginning, making it appear more as a traditional fantasy than the human-centered, politically-oriented dark fantasy of A Song of Ice and Fire. As anyone who played the Dwarf Noble origin story can attest, adding those other races doesn't eliminate the bloody political intrigue – but it's hard to say that it adds much of significance other than some slightly different character models (with the major exception of the oppressed elves, which is a twist both good and novel).

The conventions of RPG storytelling, instead of setting, are far more constraining for Dragon Age: Origins. To perhaps oversimplify, most video game RPGs, western or Asian, tend to follow gaming's version of the Hero's Journey. You start at level one, and are presented with some kind of world-threatening crisis early on. The game follows your character as he or she levels-up until the world can be saved. On the other hand, the narrative form of the epic literary fantasy has become fractured, with multiple different point-of-view characters dealing with interconnected events – seemingly dozens in some books. They may never even cross paths once over the course of a series, let alone a book. Such is certainly not the case in most RPGs, including Dragon Age: Origins, although you do see the occasional external cutscene, usually focusing on the villain.

There are two narrative benefits to the fractured point-of-view approach: first, that it allows every major event in the world to be experienced by the reader, and second, that it keeps narrative momentum going via a series of cliffhangers. Dragon Age: Origins takes its subtitle from the fractured potential origin stories of its main characters, where choosing your character's background, like City Elf or Dwarf Noble, leads to a different recruitment by the Grey Wardens. However, once your avatar has been drafted, the plot coheres into a much more conventional Hero's Journey-style RPG story. The loss of the fractured storytelling weakens Origins' narrative at several points, most notably when your characters go to recruit the Circle of Mages, Upon your arrival, you discover that the Mage's Tower has been betrayed and taken over by demonic influences, with most of the population already dead. It's a major event, and it's one explained almost entirely by exposition, instead of demonstration.

Divided storylines are uncommon in gaming, but not unheard of. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, released in 2009 as well, utilized multiple points of view to tell its story successfully. More traditional RPGs like the classic Betrayal at Krondor also switched between characters from chapter to chapter, to tremendous effect. Dragon Age: Origins seems like it's built for such a game mechanic. The different origins could easily have made for different characters all as once, working simultaneously, crossing paths occasionally. The game suffers from having too many party members, nine, when only three can be in the party at once. Dividing them up with different characters and storylines would have forced the player to get to know them better, both in terms of personality and by encouraging the use of different tactics.

The party members dominate the game so much that they give the game both its greatest joys and biggest frustrations. They are, generally, complicated, three-dimensional personalities, with histories darker and deeper than normal RPG fare. Their personalities are consistent both within themselves and within their world, although there are the occasional interjection, like Morrigan talking about “survival of the fittest” or Alistair doing an internet-inspired “MUWAHAHAHA”, that doesn't quite fit. They're fun to talk to, in when they're in your party with each other, they'll also banter with each other, occasionally quite entertainingly. This is all good (and probably the best variation on the party member theme since BioWare kicked it off with Baldur's Gate), but the problem is that the game mechanics don't entirely support the character mechanics. The choices you're given are either too free, or too limited.

The essential issue is that, with three characters of nine to choose from, there are rarely reasons to pick any one character over another. They don't say “Hey, I'd like to go with you on this mission” or “I won't do this,” except in really exceptional, easily avoidable circumstances. Also, for having such strong personalities and histories that aren't necessarily congruent with your characters, they're fairly easy to please. Get them talking, nod in agreement, and buy 'em booze. The “Feastday Gifts” downloadable content makes it even easier to get into their good graces – I know I'll disable that one if or when I replay the game. Even the most common mechanical reason to develop different party members, splitting the party into different groups, only occurs once at the very end of the game, and only for a quick battle which is also easy to the point of irrelevance. Pushing the player to use different party members is common in story-based games, most notably in the Final Fantasy series, where FFVI's final dungeon used three different parties, and FFX utilized a system where you subbed different party members in and out of combat according to need.

The typical mechanical reason for using a previously under-utilized party member, in these games, is usually to keep them strong enough for use later in the game. Dragon Age: Origins totally eliminates this, by pegging every party member's level to at least one below the main character's. Bizarrely, Dragon Age doesn't force you to use party members, nor does it encourage you to use any of them. The freedom to choose may seem nice initially, but without consequences, the choice is essentially meaningless. Without an anchor, playing the game, I always felt like I was doing it wrong. Should I be using every different member? Should I pick a main party and stick with it? Most importantly, was I missing significant parts of the game by playing the way I wanted to play, instead of some ideal fashion? When, fairly deep into the game, I discovered that the party members automatically set their levels to stay playable, I was actually so disappointed that I stopped playing for a few days. The game simply felt hollower knowing that there was no mechanical reason to vary my party members.

An imbalance in the game's classes exacerbates this as a problem. Mages are both the best at healing and best at dealing damage. Only two party members are mages (and the player can be a mage as well), so if you're not using both Morrigan and Wynne, you're making the game harder than it needs to be. On the other hand, missile-based rogues and fighters are probably the least effective, making mages with their ranged spells even more relatively powerful. While this makes a certain kind of narrative sense – in any fantasy world, mages are probably the most powerful persons – it doesn't mesh well with one of Dragon Age: Origins' other influences, massively-multiplayer RPGs.

One of the hallmarks of the modern MMRPG is its rigid formulation of combat. Your party consists of four different groups: a heavily “tank,” who draws the attention of the bad guys and sucks up damage; damage-dealers like rogues and offensive mages; crowd control, characters who paralyze or stun enemies (almost always also characters who do damage once their crowd control is worn out); and healers to keep everyone alive. There's an entire jargon around MMRPG, involving “pulls” - using a missile weapon to gain the attention of enemies, and “line of sight” to draw them into areas where they're easier to defeat using traps or exploding spells or the like. Dragon Age: Origins has a combat system which seems to be built around the same premise – all of those things are possible, and if you get them to work, helpful – but it's only partially effective.

The goal of creating MMRPG-style combat (also shared by Final Fantasy XII) is undermined by two flaws. The first is the imbalanced class system – in an MMRPG, any class, of any specialization, played well, can be useful, which is not the case with Dragon Age: Origins. Second, the combat system itself is far too fast-paced for a player to play every party member. Constant pausing and deliberation is possible on the PC version, but the game doesn't include an auto-pause option as the old BioWare games like Baldur's Gate possessed, which makes full player control over combat lie somewhere between impossible and extremely annoying. Instead, Dragon Age: Origins utilizes a straightforward tactical if-then approach for non-player-controlled party members, such as “If the main character's health is below 50%, then cast heal.” However, using this for complete control is still impossible, as tactical slots are doled out by progress through the game, instead of being infinite.

The tension in the combat, then, is between a chaotic, action-packed form of combat common to real-time single-player RPGs and the more segmented form of combat in RPGs. Dragon Age: Origins may not have entirely decided which direction it wants to go, but it still manages to have an exciting sense of both chaos and control for the player. This is kind of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. It has wonderful, ambitious aspects which are slightly diluted by its reluctance to embrace them wholeheartedly.

The Good New Days Are Over

2011-07-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years, it was actually getting kind of good to be a media consumer. Digital distribution, thanks primarily to things like Netflix Watch Instantly for movies & older TV, Hulu for newer TV, or Steam for video games, was actually making it cheaper and more efficient to pay for media than before. Naturally, this is coming to a stop: Netflix is raising their prices on hybrid streaming/disc options, while Steam is fighting with EA, who are trying to set up their own distribution system.

And this here is the main issue - the distinction between publisher and distributor is blurring. This was most notable when Netflix announced that they were picking up a TV series, but it's also subtler in Steam's case - they're run by Valve, one of the great developers in video gaming, who can drive critical mass to Steam by making games like Portal, Half-Life 2, and Left 4 Dead. But Valve is also an underdog. They're one of the few companies which develops and publishes their own games - and the only company which also distributes them.

As an underdog, I think Valve understands what makes digital distribution work: it needs to be easy. The point of the exercise is to create an environment where you can type in a game's name, buy it, download it, and play it. This model can break down at several different points: if the game isn't available, if the game is too expensive, if the download is inefficient, slow, or broken, and if the game can't actually be played.

And - this is the most important point - those things have to work in order to prevent would-be players from jumping to the next-easiest option. The next easiest option is not conventional retail. It's not online retail. It's piracy. There, you type in the name of the game, download it, and play it. Steam can beat piracy by being more moral and having games that work without having to hack and crack. EA...well, EA is doing it wrong. They're still acting like digital distribution is an alternative to physical retail, half an alternative to piracy/retail, and half its own thing.

Likewise, while Netflix might still be a great deal, its recent price change combined with the pressure from Hollywood and the studios' attempts to get into the digital distribution game for themselves have started choking off Netflix's selection, or charging higher prices for it. The first results in frustration - as I and anyone following along with my Veronica Mars reviews felt last month - and the latter results in higher prices. Both make Netflix look like the bad guy.

Hulu, too, is losing its effectiveness in the face of "publisher" pressure. One side of FOX may have helped to found Hulu, but another side has rendered it more useless, moving its new streaming episodes from the day after to eight days after.

There's also the growing trend of ISP's trying to cap bandwidth, and behaving like it's a finite resource. This isn't just frustrating to the consumer, it's also frustrating to the distributor.

It's not like I don't expect growing pains in digital distribution. But I do think that this trend towards publishers and distributors (and creators and ISPs) merging is one which is likely to leave the people who benefited from low prices and digital distribution in a worse situation in a few years than they are now. Publishers are inherently conservative, trying to milk the most profit they can out of existing methods. Distributors have to be more experimental, trying to find and exploit new revenue streams. As long as they're underdogs, I'll root for them, but they're underdogs for a reason - the publishers have more power.

And the pirates, just outside looking in, are the ones most likely to benefit from this struggle for power. I think Steam and Netflix understand this, implicitly if not explicitly (GOG.com, which sells old games for cheap but makes sure they work, is explicit). It's not going to be easier to be legal for quick media acquisition if this continues. Likewise, the consolidation of creation, publication, and distribution of media is a direct path to monopoly. And it's not just media, either, I think we'll see providers of services on the Internet start to become Internet Service Providers over time. It may be a few decades after it was supposed to happen, but the corporate cyber-dystopia of Snow Crash is looking more and more likely.

King's Bounty Reboots

2011-07-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

There is a certain critically acclaimed, publicly tolerated subgenre of gaming which goes by the awkward portmanteau "Metroidvania." Based on the Metroid series of games, with an assist from a variation on Castlevania starting with Symphony of the Night, this subgenre focuses nominally on exploration and freedom. The idea is that you appear to have total freedom to explore, but difficulty and items which unlock areas - we'll call them "keys" but they can be more varied than that, like double-jumps or new spells - appear to open new areas.

In the Metroidvania style of gaming, these things tend to be fairly rigid. You explore for a while, and may note several obvious obstacles - this block clearly needs a new type of bomb, that door requires a key you don't have. There are a handful of options which are available to you, one or two of which expand the number of options. Go here, get the key, go there, get the double-jump. It's not quite fully user-driven and emergent, but it's not the linear experience that most games utilize. It is designer-created and fairly rigid, but offers both a small amount of choice but a large feeling of satisfaction.

Perhaps the most interesting and usually successful part of the 2008 King's Bounty remake, and its expansion/sequel Armored Princess, are that it adapts these Metroidvania concepts. However, since it does so in a strategy/RPG style instead of the platformer/RPG style of Castlevania, it invokes a similar feeling despite using very different mechanics. In many ways, it's better: King's Bounty only rarely uses keys, instead, it lets you choose your path by giving you information about potential opponents. It tells you what kind of enemies are in your way, as well as their strength relative to yours, allowing you to judge whether you're up for taking them on.

The gameplay, then, works like this: you get a few quests, which point you in the right direction to travel. In your way are several wandering or static enemies, which can be scouted. You can find multiple different paths, or do entirely different quests in a different area of the map, until you go up in levels, can hire more troops, and suddenly the enemies which had been rated as "Strong" are "Slightly Weaker" and can be cleared out, leading to more levels, more money, and so on.

The "Metroidvania" moniker is insufficient for describing this model, though it's closer than just about anything else to describe King's Bounty. I propose "organic exploration". It's not quite emergent narrative - though it's close - but it has the feeling of letting your knowledge of the map and game slowly expand with your character's power. It's something a little bit magical, like the aim of RPGs and many other games, but rarely ever actually achieved so directly.

With King's Bounty organic exploration comes problems, though. It's possible to fail. Not fail as in "you have to reload your last saved game". Fail as in "your strategy has failed. Restart the game." You can, quite easily, work yourself into a corner where you don't have enough money to recruit troops to replace the ones you just lost. But this is the flip-side to the organic exploration. The thrill of expansion is useless if it's not also balanced by the thrill of defeat.

Far Cry 2

2011-07-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

I am only good for one thing: killing. Fortunately, I am in a place where killing is the only thing that matters.

The fictional African country of Far Cry 2 has been destroyed by civil war, and that civil war continues. Why did it start? I don't know. Why does it continue? To keep mercenaries like me in business in the game, and gamers like me outside the game entertained. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is, simply, killing.

I never meet anyone who says otherwise. The representatives of the two factions in the civil war, the APR and UFLL, have no explanation for why all they do is kill. Their names might have meant something once. They don't now. Their leaders occasionally spout some Pan-African nonsense. They only care about power, and acquiring it by killing. Their second-in-commands, the ones who give me my missions? They're mercenaries just like me, and they know the score. If the war ends, no more work. Worse, an end to the war means a purge of mercenaries, so it's not just money they're motivated by, it's survival. Even when I'm working for one faction, its soldiers don't know it.

Virtually everyone I meet tries to kill me, regardless of my loyalties. So I have to kill them back.

Such is true of my “friends” in Far Cry 2 as well. They will aid me, yes, so long as I aid them. But what do I help them with? Tasks of petty revenge or maintaining the war. All of my tasks are amoral. Sometimes I destroy medicine. Sometimes I assassinate villains. I shut down the national radio station. Someone told me it was all propaganda. It called itself the voice of truth. Maybe it was both. But it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that I'm extraordinarily good at killing, in a world where that can be difficult. At night, I take a silenced pistol and SMG, alongside a dart gun, and sneak to my objective. Or in the daylight, I pick up a small grenade launcher, a powerful sniper rifle, and a giant machine gun, subtlety be damned. And the things I do! A truck drives straight at me as I stand in the middle of the road. I hastily reload a rocket launcher just in time to fire on it, and barely, just barely, step out of the way of the flaming wreckage as it flies towards me. James Bond eat your heart out.

I should take one part of that back. There is one person in Far Cry 2 who talks to me about morality: The Jackal, the arms dealer whose death is the entirety of my motivation when I arrived in Far Cry 2. Everything I do, every alliance I make, every ally I betray, every blood diamond I find, every single thing is supposed to lead me to his death. But he's the only one who sees what I see, that this is a big, dumb, self-perpetuating war. That there is no room for anyone but killing machines like myself in Far Cry 2, but killing machines like myself are unwelcome anywhere else in the world.

Although I had nominal control over the choice of my character at the start of Far Cry 2, he remains entirely silent. Other than the occasional character calling me “China,” my character choice is totally irrelevant. The Jackal, my ostensible enemy, is a better “me” in Far Cry 2 than I am. He realizes that the country is a total disaster. He realizes that there's no solution in this brutal civil war between interchangeable factions. And he has a plan to end it. This doesn't explain why he sold the sides the weapons in the first place, but then, I don't know why I'm in this country to kill him in the first place, so we're even.

Morality has always played an integral part in open-world games. Back in 1985, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar solidified the concept of the open-world game, building on the burgeoning role-playing genre to create a game where the world existed outside of the hero and his or her quest. You were a part of that world, and could interact with it in myriad ways beyond following a linear path to its conclusion. Ultima IV may be the most ethical game ever made, demanding the player fulfill specific virtuous goals to be successful. So it is perhaps somewhat ironic that, as open-world games like Far Cry 2 have moved outside of the RPG genre, they've become known for their gleeful immorality.

Far Cry 2 initially seems to fall into that immoral category alongside Grand Theft Auto, but I don't feel like it's immoral – I kill no innocents in Far Cry 2 – I think it's amoral. I am amoral My actions are essentially meaningless in an ethical sense. Death and life are entirely utilitarian. But Far Cry 2 does more with that amorality – it uses it to make a statement. If it sounds repetitive and futile, it is. Far Cry 2 succeeds as a monument to the repetition and futility of war.

There is a famous quote, attributed to Gillo Pontecorvo, director of The Battle of Algiers, that no film can depict war without glorifying it. This may be the case with film. Yet, while Far Cry 2 may revel in the glories of personal combat, it also frustrates my conventional gaming desires to heroically succeed through proper application of violence. I am not simply watching characters fight in this futile war. I am a participant – I am the most important participant in this idiotic war. And I cannot help but be unhappy at seeing what horrors my killing wreaks. My friends are all dead – many by my hand. My allies, who helped me out of many a jam and perhaps deserve my loyalty, are just as dead – many by my hand. Far Cry 2's glorification of war and violence becomes something more thanks to its commitment to amorality. It becomes tragic.

Serialization Visualization

2011-05-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

I talk about serialized stories and mythologies quite a bit, and occasionally link to my previous blog post on the collapse of Battlestar Galactica's narrative as an example of what I think about the subject. But it's not enough. Not that I disagree with it anymore, I still stand behind it, but it's a little bit too specific, talking about the very specific failures of one particular show. As a general theory, however, I think that my conception of serialization, mythology, and world-building makes much more sense visually than it does in simple text.

It still requires some text for explanation, so here goes. I imagine a well-balanced show to be circular. Everything fits best in a circle; they're the most efficient use of space. Most shows have an efficient premise, but as they add characters, cliffhangers, history, and continuity, they start getting ungainly. The mythology takes over from the storytelling. It looks like this:

It's a mess. There's no plan, things get lost, forgotten, ignored, or worst of all, lose their impact because they get cut out of the story, by retcons or resurrections or whatever. This could be a chart for The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica, or it could be Angel or Buffy. The difference between the former and the Whedon shows is that the Whedon shows remembered character came before plot. Angel, especially, shifted into emotional resolution more than plot resolution after its excess of serialization in its 4^th season caused problems.

On the other hand, The Wire is far more elegant:

The Wire is ruthless in focusing on the important parts of the story for each season, occasionally bypassing formerly important characters and bringing in entirely new ones. The tonal whiplash as it makes these changes can make seasonal transitions difficult, especially at the start of the 2^nd and 4^th seasons. However, this is necessary both to keep things fresh and to keep the show's overall world and mythology – which is huge, using Baltimore as a stand-in for the American city – working and symmetrical.

Babylon 5, for all its other flaws, also had serialization that worked, in a different fashion. Famously, it was built on a five-year plan, and the creator exercised rigid control over the story – so rigid that he wrote all but one episode over the last three and a half seasons of the show's run.

The premise and overall story for Babylon 5 – the “arc” - was universe-wide, expanding into all aspects of the setting. However, as the series started, the focus was much narrower, on the station itself. The groundwork for the later seasons was built (too) slowly through the 1^st season and much of the 2^nd, but it was done almost entirely on the station itself. There were hints that the story was bigger, done primarily through foreshadowing, prophecy, dramatic irony, and occasionally ominous whispers about a great evil stirring and the like. As the ambitions of the storytelling increased, it grew to fill in the gaps created by the foreshadowing.

Thus the increased complexity of the Babylon 5 story didn't feel like it was a bunch of added mythology tacked on later once the initial premise was getting tired, but instead built on solid foundations in order to increase the stakes in a satisfying fashion.

This piece is merely meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Both Babylon 5 and The Wire required a specific kind of wild ambition from their creators, which is always going to be unlikely to be duplicated. Likewise, just because a show is a mess in terms of continuity and mythology doesn't mean it can't be great. Battlestar Galactica may be structurally weaker than Babylon 5, but I'm not sure I'd actually say that, as a whole, it's worse. And Angel demonstrates that a series can go absolutely apeshit crazy with the serialization and still somehow bring it together.

However, I do think that using the visual metaphors for how mythology springs from serialization is helpful, and how I generally conceive of these things. I hope it helps to explain my point of view on the subject.

A Unified Theory of Game of Thrones

2011-04-20T13:38:00.001-07:00

Yes, the title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but having seen several reviews, both positive and negative, as well as the first episode itself, I'm starting to feel like there's an elephant in the room. My Twitter friend Noel Kirkpatrick hits upon it to some degree with his generally negative review, in describing Game of Thrones' issues with the big three of race, class, and gender, but it also touches upon the discussion of the series as a representative on the fantasy genre, and even bigger than that, what makes for successful, classic television and storytelling.

It can be summed up as this: what is the point of the story?

In fantasy literature, in general, the point is the plot. It is meant to describe an interesting, entertaining, set of events. There are very few popular fantasy novels where nothing happens. It's not necessarily earth-shattering (although it often is), but the main characters are important participants in some kind of important event.

In more well-respected storytelling, or high-brow, or snotty artsy-fartsy crap, depending on how you want to describe it, plot is much less important than theme. Great stories are supposed to reveal something about the nature of the world or humanity or America or suburbia or men or women or what-have-you. While major events could happen, having the characters as the main participants in them is a sign of genre fiction, and frowned upon to some degree. Fantasy, where that's the entire point, thus exists at arguably the lowest level of that hierarchy, as that goddamn New York Times review demonstrated.

Which brings us to television. Interestingly, television, despite almost all of its series being "genre" stories (with the possible exceptions of Mad Men and Treme), television, or "quality television," is quite strong thematically. When you look at the shows which are considered part of the canon, such as it is, they almost all have tremendous thematic relevance. The critical king of television, The Wire, is all about theme, most notably, the crushing weight of institutions. But it doesn't stop there. The Sopranos is about the corruption of humanity. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about growing up and dealing with responsibility. Even the great comedies have strong thematic elements. Arrested Development is about living with family. Seinfeld and later Curb Your Enthusiasm are about societal norms. Even The Simpsons has strong thematic elements, like its tendency to make fun of mob mentality in small towns.

On the other hand, you have shows that are considered trashy fun, like Glee or True Blood currently, where they're best described, as The Simpsons once famously said, as "just a bunch of stuff that happens." Glee of course tries to tack on morality, but it's so inconsistent that it undercuts its own ideals from scene to scene, let alone episode to episode. There are also the CBS-style procedurals, which occasionally have insulting theme descriptions (fascistic, hegemonic, etc) attached to them, but don't try to do much more than blandly entertain.

Here is Game of Thrones' problem: it is a story that is all plot. It's a great plot, to be sure, and some of the events can and will shatter your expectations of how plots are supposed to work (in a sense, it's somewhat similar to Joss Whedon's stuff, but we'll get there when we get there). But it's being treated as if it's a prestige series, to be placed in the HBO pantheon alongside Deadwood and Rome if not quite The Wire. But it doesn't have a strong theme. The theme might be emergent, that is, it slowly develops over the course of the show, and it will likely be subjective, changing from person to person. But that's not what makes for "quality television." And this may be Game of Thrones' biggest problem moving forward.

Note: my essential breakdown of story components is as such: all stories need good characters. Setting is where the characters live. Plot is what happens to the characters. Theme is what the characters learn/are supposed to teach the audience. Game of Thrones the book certainly has strong characters, which doesn't necessarily show up in the pilot, so there's plenty of hope yet.

Second note: I am not covering Game of Thrones in any official, paid, or week-to-week capacity. I would like to. If you know of anyplace that would be interested in taking me on to do it, let me know!

Fantasy, Gender, and Game of Thrones

2011-04-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

While I should not have been surprised about the new HBO series Game of Thrones turning into a referendum on fantasy, it has somehow turned into a huge discussion on gender in geek culture, which is somewhat more surprising.

The initial reason for this is that the highest-profile negative review, from the New York Times, specifically genders enjoyment of fantasy, calling it "boy fiction." This review's foolishness is well-documented (I took a few shots at it in my last post myself) and has led to a thriving mini-genre of female geek blog posts - see here.

However, as usual with gender, this is a multi-layered affair. Many of the writers who have treated Game of Thrones with the most disdain, and whose links are being passed around and mocked, and presumably have had their comments sections taken over by irate fans of the novels, have been female themselves. Myles McNutt, my co-AV Club writer, has documented and discussed this here, while my editor Todd Vanderwerff went into the subject a little bit deeper in the comments, citing both the male numerical dominance of online TV criticism, and even more interestingly, a masculine definition of what makes for a quality TV show.

This is without even getting into the text itself, where a gender analysis of the books, show, and the show compared to the books could all be fruitful. One consistent criticism of the show from people who haven't outright dismissed it for its genre has been an excessive amount of distracting boobage, which is also an issue I and others had with HBO's Boardwalk Empire. More subtly, I've heard suggestions that some of the impressive female characters from the novel are hard-done-by early on the show, since they don't have the internal, point-of-view monologue on-screen.

To sum up the different gender arguments, in case you're looking for a senior project, thesis, or dissertation topic:

Treatment of gender in the A Game of Thrones novel
Treatment of gender in the Game of Thrones series
Comparing and contrasting gender in the book and the series
Gender of reviewers responding to the show
Gender of TV reviewers overall
Gendered discussion of "quality television"
Stereotypes about gender of Game of Thrones fans
Stereotypes about gender of fantasy fans in general
And, finally, the one that I haven't seen mentioned often: the gendered discussion of fantasy literature as a whole

You see, I've long had the impression that fantasy was gendered female, especially compared to its fraternal twin, science fiction. Science fiction is largely written by men, and the subgenre of "hard" science fiction focuses on rational concerns, extrapoliting current science out into time and space (and note the gendered terminology, hard=rational=masculine, soft=imaginative=feminine). Fantasy, on the other hand, is written by women as or more often than men, and is reliant on magic, an irrational flight of imagination. I even had a creative writing textbook once which said that science fiction was a good genre because it could say something about the world we lived in today, whereas fantasy was pure escapism and totally unserious.

My personal experience bears this out as well. In the 90s, I spent a lot of time on CompuServe's Science Fiction & Fantasy forums, and found that yes, the fantasy forum seemed to have a much better balance of male and female contributors, whereas the science fiction forum skewed much more male. Interestingly, I also talked about Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in another subforum, and recall that being a primarily male forum.

To be fair: it is possible that, despite my possibly-accurate impression of the fantasy genre and its fans skewing female, A Game of Thrones is actually a more masculine-oriented novel, much as I found The Wheel of Time to be male. Perhaps there is something in the structure of the neverending fantasy series preferred by Jordan and Martin which fits in with masculine concepts, in the same way that Todd described "quality television" (usually serialized, dense, and overly serious) as seeming to have a masculine orientation. It could also be that by keeping magic largely on the sidelines, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, A Game of Thrones possesses a more historical, rational, and masculine appeal. On the other hand, one of the fantasy authors I would describe as the most "feminine" (despite his apparent male gender), Guy Gavriel Kay, also tends to write "fantistoricals." Or I'm theorizing excessively and this is all total nonsense.

Regardless, if I have a point here, it's that much like yesterday, it's hardly fair to attach qualities of gender to the Game of Thrones series in such a generalized, conclusive fashion. There are layers upon layers here, and as ever, I say it's more complicated than it may seem at first glance.

Fantasy!

2011-04-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

The HBO series Game of Thrones is still two days away from actually airing, but early reviews have touched off an apparently internet-wide discussion about the fantasy genre as a whole. Some early reviews have taken the form of pure snobbery - witness this witless line from the New York Times:

While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Others have taken a more engaged approach, if only out of curiosity, like reviewer Heather Havrilesky in the New York Times Magazine (motto: like our daily, but not as idiotic!):

All of which is very somber — and a little odd, when you think about it. Even with countless horrors on the way, wouldn’t there be at least one unshakable optimist in the bunch? Isn’t that how we, in the real world, get through life? Irrational optimism in the face of looming bleakness? Yet in this brand of fantasy (ed note: medieval fantasy, as opposed to superheroes or speculative fiction), grim-faced nihilism isn’t just a default philosophy; it’s a foundational religion.

Somehow this television series has become a referendum on literary fantasy as a whole, and what it means. I'll grant that this is understandable. I've even helped create this impression, having, in the past, described my excitement for Game of Thrones as being excited for the first-ever major television series in the fantasy genre - only Hercules and Xena have even vaguely attempted in recent years, and, well, I'm sure you'll agree that the comparison is slightly different. Yet the fact is that Game of Thrones and the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is not the entirety of the fantasy genre. It would probably be unfair to declare that any single book or series of books counts as that representative, but it's especially bad for Game of Thrones:

It's darker than most fantasy. Characters die. Life in pseudo-medieval Westeros is, as Hobbes declared, nasty, brutish, and short.
It's not magical. I first discovered the term "fantistorical" on the jacket of A Game of Thrones, actually. There is some magic, but it's mostly on the outskirts - ghoulish "Others" beyond a giant wall, or maybe dragons across the sea. The main story is all people.
It's political. The conflicts in the series are largely people in power trying to gain more, maneuvering in back rooms with occasional assassinations or coups. This is not Aragorn making a heroic speech as everyone charges with him into a mass of purely evil orcs and trolls.
It's a human conflict, both in the figurative sense of politics and grey areas (as opposed to ultimate evil or corrupt magic), and in literal terms. The characters are humans, not namby-pamby elves or conniving kobolds. It's not Dungeons & Dragons. Some reviews have mentioned that there are "dwarves" but this is misleading. The character in question is a little person, a human, not Gimli or Thorin.
Finally, it's really good. They're pulp novels, yes, and shouldn't be mistaken for high art, whatever that means. But they're remarkable at creating momentum, memorable characters and stunning plot developments.

Saying A Game of Thrones and the rest of the books of the series are representative of all fantasy literature is roughly akin to saying The Wire is representative of all television. There are differences, of course, GOT is popular within the medium where The Wire is a niche show, but both have such strong defenders in part because they do things differently than normal, and they do things better than normal. So judge Game of Thrones on its own merits. Judge fantasy in general based on a decent sample. But don't judge Game of Thrones, positively or negatively, because of fantasy as a whole. That's reductive, unfair, and almost certainly wrong.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll talk about the gender-based reaction to Game of Thrones and its reviews, since it keeps coming up, and you know, GENDER!!!

Why Babylon 5?

2011-03-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

As television criticism and analysis expands, it necessarily builds a canon. It's impossible to avoid canonization, for good or for ill. A few shows comprise the Mt. Rushmore of television discussion: The Sopranos, The Wire, golden age The Simpsons, and maybe surprisingly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Several more exist on a tier just below that: The X-Files, Mad Men, Deadwood, Lost, Star Trek & TNG, Angel, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, The Office, and more - just check the A.V. Club's TV Club Classic sidebar for a decent representation.

One show that's missing from virtually any canon discussion (not including me) is Babylon 5. And, you know, I'm not going to argue that it deserves to be on that television Rushmore - I'm not 15 anymore. But given the typical leanings of critical discussions, being biased towards speculative fiction, serialization, and structural experimentation, I would say that it deserves to be mentioned in the conversation. So here's my attempt at explaining, to all and sundry, Why Babylon 5?

There are three major reasons: it's serialization done right; it's historically important; and it's actually really quite good once it gets going. But first, the Why not Babylon 5?, ably answered by Tasha Robinson, one of my editors at The A.V. Club a few years ago:

Going in a completely different direction, virtually every science-fiction fan I know has taken time to sing the praises of Babylon 5 at me. I spent half the '90s listening to people say it was the best thing on television and that I was really missing out. In this case, I didn't get started at the right time, and now I look at the completed series—all 110 episodes—and see a mountain I just don't have time to climb. Especially since even the biggest fans admit that the first year or two is some rough trekking. As my boyfriend says whenever fans wistfully bring it up, "We'll watch it when we retire, at which point it'll probably be available in pill form."

She's not wrong here, and it's not like I'd recommend watching it instead of the collected works of Wong Kar-Wai or The Wire, if there is some kind of competition for your viewing time. But there's still some element of misconception here. The unspoken but logical idea is that Babylon 5 was built on a five-year plan, that this means that you have to start from the beginning or else you'll miss something, but the beginning kind of sucks. So why start? As a syllogism, this works, but syllogisms can be fallacious, even if their premises appear to be true.

Exactly why that conclusion is incorrect comes from the show's structure and its effective form of serialization. Shows like The X-Files and Lost have given the impression that tightly-serialized shows with plans (or shows that should have plans) begin with a central set of questions, and answer those questions in the finale. This is not the case with Babylon 5. Instead, B5 uses a series of interconnected, shorter-term storylines. The central question of the first season is the mystery of the conclusion of a recent war, with a slow realization that something may bepolitically rotten on Earth. The first question is largely resolved by the start of the second season, while halfway through that season, while the Earth politics move into a different phase of direct subversion when prove arrives that things are, indeed, seriously wrong.

Storylines are introduced and resolved in time spans of roughly half a season to a season and a third. Those resolutions usually lead directly to the next major problem, but, and this is the important bit, this resolution and introduction of problems mean that there are multiple different jumping-in points for the show. The structure is less rigid than Buffy's season long "Big Bad", and it's also more sustainable than the constantly-expanding mythology of other serialized shows like Battlestar Galactica. The show's setting and premise changes regularly, a fact illustrated a seasonally-changing intro, which alters the music, background, and premise narration each year. The first season begins with "The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace", for example, a narration which, by the third season, has become "The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed."

Moreover, B5 is lucky in that it's biggest and most important episodes are also generally its best episodes. If you want to skip the dross of the first season - and yes, there is plenty of dross there, sadly - and just watch the five or six most important eps, chances are, you'll also be watching the five or six best episodes of the season. Therefore it's easy to create a list of episodes to watch as well as to skip. You might miss a couple details, but it's written to work around that even without the crutch of the "previously on..." that dominate modern serialized TV.

The final way that Babylon 5's serialization works in its favor is that it manages to avoid the pitfalls of excessive mythology. The "procedural world-building" of its first season establishes the essential boundaries of the "mythology", and over the course of the show, the characters and plot have their influence expand to reach those boundaries. It's anchored in place by an effective use of foreshadowing and prophecy, so that what does happen in the show feels like it was the point, instead of as if the showrunners are making it up as it goes along. The constrast between Babylon 5's use of Londo dreaming his own death and Battlestar Galactica's disastrous attempt to make something out of its Opera House in its finale.

The reason Babylon 5 was so successful at serialized storytelling is part of the reason that it is historically important in television history. It is largely the brainchild of a single man, J. Michael Straczynski (normally called JMS, because, well, you try spelling that), who developed a five-year plan for the story to follow. It wasn't simply a series novelization, but rather a plan that had the flexibility to deal with the apparent cancellation of the show a year early, or contract and other disputes with actors (which happened multiple times over the course of the show). It serves as a pointed rejoinder to all the showrunners who say that it's impossible to plan that far ahead. Granted, JMS ended up writing 3/4s of the show's episode, the bulk of them in a row starting late in the second season, and he perhaps drove himself bald, grey, and insane, in the process. But it is possible.

Second, Babylon 5 was the first space opera not named Star Trek to succeed in any long-term fashion on American TV. The Stargates and Farscapes and Andromedas and perhaps even Battlestar Galacticas of the world owe it for demonstrating that it was possible. Alongside The X-Files and the Star Trek spinoffs, it helped create fertile soil for the speculative fiction and serialized storytelling boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

Finally, its technology was exceedingly important. In a world before Toy Story, it was the first series to utilize computer graphics technology for its special effects. These early stabs at it are occasionally laughable, but the improvement over time helps to show how CGI took over the science fiction industry.

The argument against that, of course, is that "watching it improve" implies that it started badly. And, unfortunately, that is true, in more areas than merely the SFX. Over the course of the series the CGI improves yes, but so does the writing, so do the actors, so does the makeup - really, everything gets dramatically better, which is most notable about halfway through the second season, much like its fellow SF travelers Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I will grant that it can be difficult to wait that long for shows on DVD to actually grow the beard, but honestly? It's worth it. Babylon 5's initially slow plot development gains huge amounts of momentum as the different seeds it plants start to bloom, and by its third season, it can get about as compulsively watchable as dramatic television gets.

I don't just say this as a former fan. Indeed, I specifically avoided watching Babylon 5 pretty much since its ending for two reasons: first, that I was pushing away most of my high school interests (didn't listen to They Might Be Giants for several years either), and second, that I was scared that it would be bad and I was a dumbass teenager. When I eventually did rewatch it, I was surprised and pleased to discover that it was much as I remember - good when it was good, bad when it was bad, and extremely well plotted. But you don't have to take my word for it - the Renaissance Poet watched it with me, unencumbered by nostalgia-covered glasses, and she thoroughly enjoyed it as well.

Perhaps its greatest qualitative achievement was its creation of two powerful, dynamic, scenery-chewing characters in the rival ambassadors Londo and G'Kar. Over the course of the show, both change goals and demeanor multiple times, and, like Wesley Wyndham-Price, king of dynamic television characters, both do it in a manner that seems natural to their characters. Foreshadowing helps as well - it's clear that this is intentional and part of their character history and future.

I mean, it may not be for everybody. The authorial voice is much stronger than in most TV shows since there was really only one writer for the bulk of the series, and if you don't happen to like that voice, it's hard to get into the show. Yet JMS does improve over the course of the series, particularly in terms of comedy. The whooshy electronic new age-style music can be a little bit dissonant, but I think it becomes one of the show's greatest strengths over time, much like Battlestar Galactica's Middle Eastern flairs in its soundtrack.

Babylon 5 is worth being in the conversation as television studies and criticism expand, not merely an afterthought like it has become. And I will happily continue to make that argument on the Internet as often and effectively as I can. Dammit.

New Computer

2011-03-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

I used my last computer from 2006 until last week. It was serviceable, given that it was a slapdash affair when I put it together - a barebones system with cannibalized parts from my previous computer, which suddenly stopped working (in retrospect, it was likely the power supply, the one thing I didn't check at the time). Anyway, the last computer got me through Bioshock, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead 2, and more, surprisingly given that it was probably something like 2004's finest. But it wouldn't run Dragon Age: Origins, or Fallout: New Vegas, and in the straw that broke the camel's back when I was offered a review copy, Shogun 2: Total War. My hard drive was also filled to the brim, and my wireless flaky as hell. With my tax return showing a decent amount of numbers, it was time to treat myself.

I had a few things to consider, and they didn't all work together well. At all. First, I wanted something energy efficient, in order to soothe my bleeding heart, and hopefully not destroy my electricity bill either. I'd also have preferred to have parts not made from blood cadmium or whichever, but that's unfortunately far too difficult to research. On the other hand, I wanted power - enough to play new games for three years or so. Happily, the rate of technology has slowed down over the last decade, so this is actually pretty possible to do. More good news - newer technology in chips and in video cards indicates that they're actually better than previous models at lower power usage, even when they're more powerful overall, because they do a better job of lowering energy using when not being used at full force.

Of course, the bigger issue is money. I didn't get that big of a tax return. Unfortunately, since the newest of those more-efficient pieces of hardware had the best efficiency, I'd have to figure out how much money to spend on bleeding-edge stuff now, which is "not very much." I also wanted to avoid doing too much computer-building, since that can be a pain in the ass, but I left it as an option.

I'm happy that I did keep that option open, because I cut probably 20% of the cost out, and was able to research my parts directly. Here are my specs:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Motherboard: MSI MS-7642
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5670
Video Card Display Memory: 2295 MB
Video Card Dedicated Memory: 503 MB
Sound Card: Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS*
Total Space: 476.8 GB
Hard Drive Model: WDC WD5002AALX-00J37A0 ATA Device
CD-ROM Model: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A ATA Device*

*cannibalized from older computer

All this was roughly $600. (though I also picked up Windows 7 and some accessories). No new monitor, though, and my current one maxes out at 1240x1040, so I'm not getting the very best resolution. But everything seems to be running well, Shogun 2 is a blast (my AV Club review is coming soon). I hope that this allows me to get more directly into reviews and discussions of current-generation PC games - and lets me play the best mods for the ones which have been out for a while.

In Which I Actively Invite A Decade-Long Flamewar To My Blog

2011-03-16T00:04:00.001-07:00

At some point soon I hope to be getting one of the two "core" game systems: PS3 or Xbox 360. I had been leaning towards the 360, just as I have been pretty much since release. However, given that I don't actually care that much about the specific specs of each, unless a game is REALLY bad on one system, my primary criteria are the exclusive games available on each (including PC games). Since many of the games I'm behind on are available for both, like Red Dead Redemption or Soul Calibur IV or even, if I dare, Final Fantasy XIII, or on PC, my preferred system, the simplest way to judge is to make a list of games on each that I should play. And surprisingly, the list as I think of it is tilted towards PS3.

PlayStation 3:
LittleBigPlanet 2
Flower
Demon's Souls
Valkyria Chronicles
Uncharted 1/2
Infamous*

Xbox 360:
Halo 3/Reach
Limbo
Gears of War
Fable

Looks pretty even right now, but in most of the cases I'm more interested in the PS3 games than the 360 games. I will admit to a certain level of ignorance towards indie games, but the biggest of them - Braid - is on PC now, removing a major 360 strength. On the other have, given that I have a Wii, Kinect seems vaguely more appealing than Move, but neither really excite me.

What am I missing here, fellow gamers? Bearing in mind that, as a general rule, I like most genres but only the very best games of most genres, though I'll tolerate more mediocre RPGs or quirky games.

Video Game History - The Elder Scrolls: Arena

2011-03-10T17:58:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990s on this blog. Today, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, surprisingly the only game of its era to make a game series which has lasted through today.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena was, eventually, a far more successful open-ended game than Darklands, though it was likewise somewhat more buggy than it should have been upon its release. However, it ended up spawning one of the longest-running RPG series to survive past the early 2000's, with four games in The Elder Scrolls main series as well as a several expansions and spinoffs.

Part of the reason for Arena's success was its effective use of modern game technology. It is built off of the Ultima Underworld model, but in many ways surpasses even that classic. For example, melee combat in previous 3D games was accomplished by clicking and holding down the right mouse button, with different attacks corresponding to different clicking locations, like a slash if you clicked from the right or left side of the screen. In Arena, on the other hand, melee attacks are accomplished by clicking the right mouse button and moving the mouse in the direction of the attack, which your weapon follows. The whole process is much more visceral and immersive, and makes the action in the game feel much more like action should. Likewise, the superb sound in the game adds to its appeal - hits land with satisfying thumps.

Arena's huge game world is also a major draw. Unlike its predecessors, travel around town is not accomplished via text menu, but rather, each town exists in its own space, and you can wander and explore throughout, from small villages to major metropolises. You can also wander in the outdoors between towns, but it is not an effective mode of travel. The game world is also filled with books which fill in the history and geography. Some days are holidays, with effects like cheaper magical items or free blessings in temples. There is something magical in Arena and it shows up best when you wander into a new town, discover that it's a major holiday as the snow falls and the game's evocative music plays.

These moments of beauty only really occur in games with huge worlds that put the player in small but important positions, as opposed to building the entire game world around the player's quest. Later Massively Multiplayer RPGs like World of Warcraft could achieve similar effects. The Elder Scrolls series is, in some ways, a predecessor to those MMRPGs, and later games in the series would often be described as “single-player MMRPGs.”

Arena is also creative in ways that many RPGs were not. It offered a spell creation system, which a magic-using character could use by combining the effects of different spells. For example, you could build a spell which caused both paralysis and poison. Its sheer amount of randomized dungeons and semi-randomized quests could keep you busy for weeks without ever having to worry about the main plot, although the simple fetch and escort quests could lose their charm.

Of all the great RPGs of the early 1990's it's something of a surprise that The Elder Scrolls: Arena ended up being the one with the most longevity. Its embrace of new technology and creative ambition certainly made it stand out, and subsequent games have demonstrated its creators' ability to adapt to different technological and business environments. Its first sequel, Daggerfall, surpassed it in most respects, but it's still an eminently playable game on its own.

Rowan Riting Roundup

2011-02-17T12:53:00.001-08:00

If, for some inexplicable reason, you really want to read the things I write on the internet, here are a few links to where I've been published lately:

At Gamasutra, I did a feature about how grinding works well in Dragon Quest IX, thanks to a gestalt effect of a bunch of smaller design decisions.

At 1up.com, I made two lists of five genre-benders that changed gaming, and five that should have.

I've started doing book reviews at The A.V. Club, including American Uprising, Triumph of the City, The History of History, and Journal of a UFO Investigator.

I also reviewed Magicka for the A.V. Club.

And finally, my TV Club coverage of the Fox animation bloc, No Ordinary Family, and The Cape continue, in addition to The Middle, which I just started.

Who's Your Reader?

2011-02-15T11:18:00.000-08:00

A piece in Slate about the influence of Alan Sepinwall, generally considered the father of modern TV criticism, has triggered something of a discussion about the role of the television critic-as-fan. My AV Club comrade Myles McNutt posted a typically in-depth response, which brought up a point that I always think about when I engage with (or write) a review: the audience matters.

It's arguably the biggest issue with reviews. Anything that you write about, you have to pick a target audience. Usually, that target audience is you, or people like you, since obviously that's your position of expertise, but it's not always that way. The essential question, on a continuum, is: "The Audience Knows Nothing About The Subject -> The Audience Knows As Much As They Can About The Subject."

As with most continuums, the far reaches of either side can generally be ignored. Reviewing a video game for people who have never played a game in their life would be an exercise in frustration, and writing a review just for people who know everything possible about something, up to and including possibly making it, is too narrow to be useful. In general, the critic acts as a guide: they know about the subject in some rank between competent and expert, and they use that knowledge to help the reader learn more about the subject, or contextualize it better. A new Wong Kar-Wai film would likely get a review that explains how Wong uses image more than dialogue to create his films, and how they're generally light on plot while heavy on emotion.

Yet there is also a set of people, which includes me, who already know about that, and are interested more in how the new film would fit into Wong Kar-Wai's existing context. Describing his past style is mostly irrelevant to them. They want to know how it compares. At its narrowest point, the question then becomes "Is it better than In the Mood for Love?" If the critic's answer is "Yes," then they're telling everyone who already knows about Wong's film that this is fantastic and worth seeing immediately - but everyone else is out in the cold.

This push-pull with the audience happens across media. Games, based on sequels and existing engines, may have it hardest. Books less so, but nonfiction does often rely on a certain level of knowledge and interest in the subject.

Which brings us to television (and, to a lesser extent, comics). Games, books, and films can still be seen as discrete entities. Regardless about whether you've seen Chungking Express or not, you can still talk about In the Mood for Love. However, television, as a serialized story, is many discrete entities (episodes) coming together to make larger discrete entities (seasons) which in the end comprise the entirety of the show itself. So a critic can write about TV at any of those three levels, or even combinations thereof.

But that combines with the audience question to make it essentially impossible for television to be reviewed in a fashion that will be generally satisfying. Someone may be dropping in on the show for the first time. Someone else has been watching and talking about the show from the beginning. They're going to have wildly diverging expectations from anything written about the show.

Any critic who engages in an episode-by-episode writeup of a show is, by nature, going to appeal to the people who also engage with the show on an episode-by-episode basis. And generally speaking, that's good business - better to have the same few hundred folks click once per week than a thousand who click once per year on a season-long review. But that doesn't help the people who are interested in trying it out, or even those who have just started sampling.

My solution to this issue with games and other similar tends to be to have multiple reviews, with each reviewer's perspective made fairly clear. If a new Dynasty Warriors comes out, I don't need someone to tell me that they find the formula tired - I like the formula! Tell me how it differs in minute detail from other games in the series! However, even that doesn't work so well with television. Yes, if a season (or character, or storyline, or anything that can be separated out from individual episodes) deserves examination, it could be examined, perhaps by multiple people.

Still, the upshot of this is that critical examination of media, which is difficult in any other medium, is virtually impossible to do with television in a fashion that will satisfy the bulk of readership. All that critics can do, then, is all they can do.

Video Game History - Total Annihilation

2011-02-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990s on this blog. Today, Total Annihilation, one of the biggest sleeper hits of the Real-Time Strategy explosion of the 90s.

Microsoft's success at breaking into the top tier of the RTS world may have been unsurprising, but Cavedog Software's wild success with Total Annihilation (1997) was much less predictable. In this case, the game's success has as much to do with its excellent gameplay as with marketing and corporate clout. Yet Total Annihilation is fairly similar to Age of Empires in one key respect: it's epic. Both games bring many more units to bear than previous RTS games, and both have a scope well beyond even the alternate history and fantasy world wars of C&C and Warcraft. Where Age of Empires was an epic covering the scope of early human history, Total Annihilation was a science fiction epic spanning the galaxy. It's clearly inspired by Star Wars, as just a few notes of the bombastic soundtrack make clear.

The premise of Total Annihilation is thin for supporting a story, but wonderful for supporting a setting: a group of supercomputer AI's called “The Core” have mostly taken over the galaxy, whereas some human rebels known as “The Arm” decide to fight them using armies of clones. In practice, this means massive armies of mechanized/robotic units, battling over a wide variety of planets, from beaches and lava to lush forests and cities which span entire planets. Nothing in the premise suggests anything small-scale or light-hearted, and nothing in the game threatens the perception of epic scale.

The key to making that work as a game is having enough units available, both in choices for building and varieties to create. Total Annihilation's claim to fame is its selection of hundreds of different units. The Arm and Core units are generally mirrors of one another in effect, but have significant visual difference. Each has dozens of different units, from light infantry to huge capital ships to speedy aircraft. Some are cannon fodder, others are elite units, built to last. The mass of different kinds of units replaces unit upgrades as well.

Even more impressive than the amount of units available is the fact that you can built them, in the hundreds. Many other RTS games limit population growth as best they can via artificial caps, such as the farms and houses that need to be build in Warcraft and Age of Empires. Total Annihilation, on the other hand, allows you to build as many units as you can, so long as you have the resources to cover it. Interestingly, its resource system is not based as much on what you have at the moment, but rather, what your overall flow of resources in and out is. You can build as many units and buildings as you want at a time, but if you aren't also getting enough energy and metal, your building will stall as they are collected. Most RTS games refuse to let you even start building troops or buildings unless you already have the necessary resources.

Moreover, it's easy and fast to build multiple things at once. Shift-clicking, which sets waypoints for movement in many games, can also be used for collection and building purposes in Total Annihilation. You can tell one of your builders to recycle metal from a handful of destroyed units, build several laser turrets for protection, harvest a few trees for energy, and then build a factory. Worker units can also be automated to collect metal from destroyed units and repair your damaged units and buildings automatically while patrolling from one point to the next. The buildings which gather resources do so on a consistent basis – it is impossible to exhaust Total Annihilation's resources, and therefore matches are theoretically infinite.

Unit-building is likewise sped-up. Total Annihilation helped to popularize another one of the RTS genre's necessary interface improvements: the build queue. Instead of consistently clicking on each new unit when the last was completed, now you can select as many of each that you want to have built in one go. If you want multiple units at once, shift-clicking lets you queue five at a time. In this way, you can set up a near-constant stream of new units.

The net effect of these gameplay choices – huge numbers of units, infinite resources, unit-building queues, and automated harvesting and repairs – is such that Total Annihilation feels built around the tactical and strategic aspect of the gameplay, instead of the economic aspects. In another RTS, sending massive armies of mechanical troops to fight and die for tiny amounts of progress would be a waste of resources, and you'd have to develop your economy better on the next try. In Total Annihilation, that's the point. It is in no way a subtle game – just look at its name – but its intense focus on using Real-Time Strategy methods to play out an galactic war worthy of George Lucas is both remarkable, and remarkably successful.

Rowan's Heirarchy of Narrative Needs

2011-01-26T16:34:00.000-08:00

How do people talk about their entertainment? Inspired by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, here's Rowan's Hierarchy of Narrative Needs. Note that I make no case for any kind of authenticity here, there has been no experiment of any kind - I'm doing this mostly to trigger a discussion of, well, discussion. One important thing to note is that in keeping with Maslow as a source of inspiration, the "hierarchy" part is important - theoretically, one has to be comfortable with lower-order things in order to progress to discussing the higher-order concerns.

8. Language
7. Plot
6. Politics
5. Characters
4. Writing
3. Form
2. Historical Context
1. Subtext & Theme

8. Language - I don't mean language as in writing style here, I mean whether it can be understood. Some people can't deal with foreign-language films with subtitles. Others hate dubbing. It's not just foreign language, it's also dialect - many people cite The Wire's dense urban Baltimore language as one of the biggest things stopping them from getting into the series at first.

7. Plot - Plot is the first thing that most people discuss when it comes to storytelling. Does the movie have an exciting story? Is the book confusing? Does this fit my conception of how the story should go? It also includes some degree of discussing quality in terms of plot, like saying that the best television episodes and plots are the ones where the most happens. This is fairly straightforward, although it also includes some less-obvious extensions like "shipping," in my opinion. "Will they or won't they?" is a pure expression of "Do I like this plot?"

6. Politics - This one is almost always negative, in that if people don't like the politics, they'll won't be able to talk about much more. Most commonly, this has to do with the normal Democrat vs Republican, liberal vs. conservative nonsense, although it can take other forms in other subcultures: "THIS BOOK IS FUCKING RACIST!" for example, or the websites that grade video games based on whether they offer Christianity as a viable religious option.

5. Characters -Is he likable? Is she behaving in a consistent fashion? Are you interesting in finding out how they react after their world gets shattered? Do you want to continue hanging out with them even after it's been six seasons and it's kind of a drag now but you just have to know if they stay friends and allies?

4. Writing - Things get a little bit subtler here. If the plot and characters are convincing, then what about the creators' depiction of those things makes them convincing? And, if they're not convincing, was it a structural issue or simply dialogue?

3. Form - Does this book do anything interesting stylistically? Is the TV show putting together its serialized narrative in a fashion likely to collapse, or succeed? This one is probably my personal favorite, for whatever that's worth.

2. Historical Context - Where does this movie fit in with the rest of the director's oeuvre? Was this book representative of a movement? Does it represent its times, or even say more about its times than nonfiction would suggest?

1. Subtext & Theme - But what does it mean? Who does it come from? Are they saying something intentional with it? What are they unintentionally saying? What do we read into it now? Is there patriarchy? Maybe hegemony? Why is this worth talking about?

The Twelve Best Angel Episodes

2011-01-12T12:52:00.000-08:00

Having now completed Angel, I have put together a list of my favorite twelve episodes. Making a complete list, as I did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn't going to happen, for two reasons. First, Angel is built around 3-6 episode-long chapters, instead of specific episodes. I liked the Pylea episodes, but they all blend together to a certain degree. Separating them based on quality would be difficult. Second, I skipped half of the first season, so it would be impossible for me to rate episodes I haven't seen.

The net effect of this is that fifth-season episodes dominate the list, since that season reverted to an episode-by-episode method of storytelling, and it was also really, really good. I don't think it was as good as every other season combined, as the numbers on this list might indicate, but it was probably the best sustained run of the two shows since Buffy's third season.

Obviously, the list contains spoilers. Now, without any further ado, the twelve best Angel episodes:

12) #413 "Salvage" - Even though she had appeared in just a handful of prior episodes, Faith was always a critical character in Angel's mythology. Faith was to Buffy what Angelus was to Angel. So it makes a poetic kind of sense that, with Angel's dark side on the loose, Wesley would be reminded that Faith could make a valuable ally. "Salvage" may be the fastest-paced of the breakneck fourth season, with Lilah dead and dismembered, Faith busted out, Faith kicking Connor's ass (and wowing him in the process), the confrontation between Faith and the Beast followed by Faith and Angelus, and Cordelia revealing that she's pregnant. It's breathless and exciting, and did I mention that Faith shows Connor who's boss? Yeah.

11) #119 "Sanctuary" - Speaking of Faith, it was her arrival in Los Angeles that started to make Angel look like its own series, capable of standing alongside Buffy as more than a sidenote. This is true in a critical fashion, but it's also true emotionally, as the big B makes her second (and final) appearance on the show, with a classic Buffy/Angel argument delineating their geographic - and televised - territories. Wesley's response to Faith in the first part of the 2-parter, and this one as well, is also a turning point for his character.

10) #317 "Forgiving" - The fallout from Connor's kidnapping drives essentially every character, most notably Angel himself, batshit crazy. The sucker-punch of an ending, with Angel yelling "I'll kill you!" at Wesley, is most notable. The kidnapping plot never made logical sense, but the emotions it engendered made for some of the best stuff on Angel.

9) #516 "Shells" - I love Illyria. I think she's a fantastic creation, and marvelously portrayed by her actress. I may hate how she appeared, and I wish it wasn't an either/or proposition. But the shattered ancient evil goddess? Brilliant. Likewise Angel's speech about humanity and Wesley's response.

8) #508 "Destiny" - Spike's addition to Angel was leading to this. The occasionally pathetic Spike of later Buffy seasons is gone, replaced with the sarcastic badass that made him so likable in the first place. And with him on the show, there had to be a confrontation between him and Angel about Buffy. It was absolutely, 100% necessary. It hadn't happened with Cordelia in the third season, much to my dismay, so I wasn't expecting it here. But here it was, and it happened perfectly. Props also to the later episode, "The Girl In Question," which dealt with much of the same themes comedically compared with the drama and violence of "Destiny."

7) #410 "Awakening" - The whole premise of Angel required that, at some point, we see Angel's evil side re-emerge. We've been teased by it before, with the Ecstasy-like drug from the first season and the "beige Angel" storyline of Season Two. Eventually, the big deal had to happen, but it had to be meaningful. On Buffy, it was emotionally shattering and shocking. On Angel, it couldn't be either of those things, so it had to have its own meaning. And it did, thanks to the twist that Angelus was brought back by his friends.

Better yet, it wasn't a simple spell, but it was a spell that involved an entire episode-length fantasy. Great stuff, and to top it off, Angel doesn't say "Cordelia" when he loses it. He gasps "Buffy," just like in "Innocence."

6) #218 "Dead End" - If "Sanctuary" is the point where Angel came into its own as a show, "Dead End" is the point where it becomes a potentially great show. After almost two seasons of Lindsey as an antagonist, "Dead End" makes it clear just how much he's added to the show. It's also a perfect vehicle for Christian Kane's talents, as he gets to sing, play guitar, and in a brilliant comic setpiece, blames his evil hand for sabotaging a theoretically tense Wolfram & Hart board meeting.

5) #510 "Soul Purpose" - Speaking of Lindsey, his triumphant return turns out to be excellent stuff in "Soul Purpose," as he recruits Spike just like Doyle did Angel at the start of the series. Not only does Lindsey recognize the parallels by calling himself "Doyle," but so does first-time director David Boreanaz, who, along with the script, turns several parts of the episode into deliberate recreations of the pilot episode's most iconic (and kind of silly) moments.

It also starts bringing a wider plot into the so-far great, but disjointed fifth season, while doing something about the ever-present, ever-creepy Eve. "Soul Purpose" was an absolutely perfect episode at its point of the series.

4) #522 "Not Fade Away" - Emotionally speaking, "Not Fade Away" is as good as a finale gets. Each character gets resolution, finds something about themselves, and/or does something hilarious, like Spike at the poetry slam. The only reason it's not #1 on the list is that the larger plot involving the Circle of the Black Thorn wasn't set up terribly effectively.

3) #406 "Spin the Bottle" - "Spin the Bottle" is the most Whedony episode of Angel, in that there is a specific brand of Buffy episode, often written by Joss Whedon or Jane Espenson, involving magical altered reality, comedy, and overall excellence. This fits in with "Band Candy," "Hush," and especially "Tabula Rasa" from the Buffy canon. But in some ways, it's better, because the specific premise of the characters reverting to their 17-year-old selves works much better on Angel, where Cordelia and Wesley went through some of the most dynamic character changes possible. Seeing bitch-queen Cordelia and Head Boy Wesley is a joy, and it makes for, by far, the funniest Angel episode of the series.

2) #309 "Lullaby" - Funny is great, but comedy combined with drama is the heart of the Buffy/Angel aesthetic. "Lullaby" is arguably the most dramatic episode of the entire series, thanks to Darla killing herself to birth Connor and Holtz and Saejahn starting to directly confront Angel Investigations. But that drama is interspersed with fantastically funny moments, like Angel popping up behind the gang asking what they're staring at. Darla's final speech tilts slightly towards melodrama, but that's a tiny criticism for a wildly ambitious episode that manage to hit most everything that it aims at.

1) #512 "You're Welcome" - Wesley's journey for buffoon to badass is well-documented and beloved, but Cordelia's journey through the first three seasons was equally impressive and important for the show. Her character bore the brunt of the insanity of Season Four, which made it fairly easy to forget just how important she had been to the series. Easy to forget until her re-appearance in "You're Welcome," that is. Her easy charm and piercing humor slice right through much of the angst of the season, and it cuts right to the heart of the character dynamics of Angel at its best. It also serves as a stellar conclusion to the introduction-to-Wolfram & Hart theme of the first half of Season Five, and subtly sets up the conclusion of the season (and series) as well. It's the strongest episode from the ridiculously strong stretch of episodes in the middle of Season Five, and well worthy of being called the best episode of Angel.

Video Game History - Chrono Cross

2011-01-06T15:26:00.001-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990s on this blog. Today, Chrono Cross, the divisive sequel to the cult hit Chrono Trigger.

At first glance, Chrono Cross, the 2000 sequel to the classic Chrono Trigger, does not seem to fit the pattern of Square moving away from its strengths as a game like Final Fantasy VIII does. It is brightly colored, with magnificent music -arguably the best soundtrack in video game history – and certainly one of the greatest opening movies in video game history. Its combat system is a bit of a throwback in that it is purely turn-based, but it includes stringing moves together in a manner akin to Xenogears. On the surface level, it is a worthy successor to Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Cross also tries to make one of the biggest changes to the Town-Dungeon-Boss formula of any game since Final Fantasy IV. Instead of gaining experience points from random battles, the party only increases in level when it fights bosses. The random battles are good for practice, and they can allow some character statistics to increase to their potential, but the potential is only improved by boss fights. Results of this innovation are somewhat varied: it does prevent you from grinding and streamlines the game more, but by making random battles even less useful, it makes them more annoying.

The biggest problem with the game, however, is that wants to be deep. Its predecessor Chrono Trigger seemed to understand that it was simple and charming and that's that. Chrono Cross aspires to be more, and ends up being less. In the original game, the time travel mechanism was simply a mechanism to allow the characters and, by extension, the player, to travel to a wide range of different places for maximum entertainment. Chrono Cross, on the other hand, is far more attached to its traveling mechanism. It is interdimensional instead of temporal. In one dimension, the main character, Serge, is alive, in the other, he is dead. He finds a way to travel between the two dimensions, and in the process, discovers an increasingly complex story of scientists trying to harness interdimensional travel as an experiment, and evil beings attempting to take advantage of that. The complexity of the story and its constant references to the letter of the previous game stand it stark contrast to Chrono Trigger's spirit of fun. In essence, like many of the Square games of the PlayStation generation, Chrono Cross takes itself far too seriously.

Best Season/Episode combination

2010-12-20T22:23:00.000-08:00

I got in a discussion on Twitter about what the best "number" for an episode of a TV series to have might be. My initial feeling was that the middle of the third season was probably best: shows have settled into a pretty good groove, they know what they're good at, by sticking with the middle, that allows 13-episode seasons to work with 22-episode seasons.

So, using that logic, I poked at Wikipedia, and found several classics huddled around the 9th-12th episodes of the 3rd season of some of my favorite shows:

The X-Files might be at its best at this point. Its 3x09 and 3x10 are my two favorite mythology episodes, "Nisei" and "731." 3x12 is the excellent "War of the Corprophages," which might be my favorite overall.

Star Trek: The Next Generation has a pretty good set of episodes here, highlighted by 3x10 "The Defector," one of my favorites so far. On the other hand, 3x12, "The High Ground" is a completely ridiculous terrorist episode.

Buffy's season 3 is rightfully heralded as its best, and this is around when it started moving from good to great. 3x09 "The Wish" is a great episode, as is 3x12's "Helpless." 3x11 "Gingerbread" is very good, and 3x10 "Amends" is 2/3s of a classic, 1/3 horrible deus ex machina.

Angel's ninth episode of its third season is my favorite of the whole run, "Lullaby." Its next three episodes are good but not quite classic.

Babylon 5 has one of its strongest runs ending here, with the strong "Point of No Return" and the all-time classic "Severed Dreams" at 3x09 and 3x10. Its next two episodes are weaker, though.

I haven't gotten to this point in The Sopranos, but 3x11 "Pine Barrens" is usually considered among its best.

The Wire is finishing up one of its strongest seasons at this point. 3x09 and 3x10 build the tension to a breaking point, and 3x11 features the shocking death of one of its most important characters. All are great choices.

The Simpsons is also coming into its own, with two classics: 3x10 "Flaming Moe's" and 3x12 "I married Marge."

Arrested Development was, sadly, winding down, but included some great episodes. I really dislike the potential finale "S.O.Bs" at 3x09, but each of the next three are fantastic, especially 3x12 "Exit Strategy."

The Boondocks was very good throughout most of its third season, but has two transcendent episodes, 3x09 "A Date With The Booty Warrior" and 3x12 "Mr. Medicinal" which probably made me laugh harder than anything else that aired this year.

Finally, Battlestar Galactica may have been at its weakest here, oddly. 3x09 ("Unfinished Business") is excellent, but 3x10 "The Passage" could be my least favorite Jane Espenson script ever, and yes that includes "Doublemeat Palace." 3x11 and 3x12 have the confrontation on the algae planet, which wasn't bad, but turned the Final Five into a big thing. I didn't like that thing.

Based on all that, I lean towards 3x10 as my favorite, but I could easily be swayed to 3x09 and 3x12. Other people have suggested that 3x10 is good for Breaking Bad, Dr. Who, Lost, Futurama, and more, but I'm not expert on those, so cannot judge.

As a wildcard, I checked out 4x10, which could also contend: Buffy's "Hush," Angel's "Awakening," Battlestar Galactica's "Revelations," The X-Files' "Paper Hearts," and The Wire with a very good episode towards the end of its fourth season.

Only one other person suggested another collection of episodes, S2 E05. I don't watch most of the shows mentioned, so I can't really judge, but hey! I didn't do this alone!

Terriers

2010-12-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

When I read previews of the Fall TV season, Terriers was one of the shows I thought had the most potential. I think Donal Logue has an easy charm to him, Shawn Ryan has showrunning pedigree, and I think Tim Minear has done great stuff on a wide variety of cancelled shows. But when I watched the pilot, I wasn't terribly impressed. It was interesting enough, to be sure, and it made me laugh, but it seemed like such a trifle.

I've continued watching, though at a fairly slow pace (just finished the tenth episode) and I don't believe that Terriers has gotten much better than that initial pilot. On the other hand, I have a much higher opinion of it. Yes, I know that seems counter-intuitive.

The thing that makes Terriers work is that it totally buys into its premise. In most TV shows, the characters have baggage, but it doesn't come into play often. So-and-so might be a recovering alcoholic, but it only comes into play in specific episodes when they're tempted into it. On Terriers, being a former alcoholic informs virtually everything that Donal Logue's character does. Same thing with his partner's dark past.

Because these characters are trying so hard, and because they're so well-defined and acted, this has the subtle but impressive effect of changing the overarching narrative of the show to one about characters instead of plot. While I think novelists have realized this for generations, TV shows (and most visual media, to be honest) have tended to rely on plot to drive their narratives. The Wire, for example, is such a success because while it is a plot-based show, it's the characters who drive the plot - everything stems from them and their understandable motivations. (Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, collapsed in large part because it started letting the plot drive the characters, most notably the Final Five fiasco.)

What makes this interesting is that, in the aftermath of Terriers' cancellation, some of the statements by the FX network president indicate that audiences didn't find the show "edgy" enough, that it didn't fit the brand. The bitterly ironic part of that is that Terriers was edgy, in that I'm constantly emotionally on the edge of my seat (or the edge of a cliff) while watching it, because that's where the characters are. Its tranny hookers and cuckold-fetish husbands aren't particularly light fare either. You just have to do a couple episodes of digging to get to that point, and it seems that most people weren't willing.

This also seems especially non-revolutionary when you consider that it's generally how the best sitcoms work - they make you feel comfortable hanging out with the characters, and the characters' personalities, quirks and fears drive the storylines. Perhaps Terriers' foray into genre-bending helped lead to its demise. Still, I hope that its character-based long-term storytelling helps to influence television in the future - it's the best we can hope for after its cancellation.

Dreams can come true! And then....

2010-12-13T13:11:00.000-08:00

After I graduated from college in 2005, I spent some (but perhaps not enough) time trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. One of the goals that I came up with was writing game reviews for The A.V. Club. I was a long-time reader, liked their voice, and they covered all kinds of media except games. A few months or perhaps just weeks later, I was delighted and unhappy that they introduced a game review section. Delighted because, well, that's what I wanted, and unhappy because it wasn't me.

I should note at this point that I had no connection to the AV Club at that point other than being a reader, and I had no particular reason to expect that I should have been involved. I had no clip collection, I wasn't emailing anyone, making connections, or anything. I was entirely aware of this, but still somewhat disappointed.

A few years later, I was in Chicago with a part-time job when they posted the need for a part-time intern. I jumped on that, and suddenly had the connections that I'd been missing . I didn't utilize them all at once, as I got distracted by my college closing, but a few years later I started doing a bit more writing, had a decent portfolio, called in those connections, and I got my staff box with a few TV reviews. I asked into a few new things, got invited to join, and today, my dream came true: my review of the new Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is live on the site.

Now, as cool as this is, and I do smile when I think about it, it kind of shows the limits of realistic dreaming. I'm still a freelancer. This will help my finances, of course, and will certainly help my portfolio, but (and I hope this isn't a trade secret), the AV Club freelancers would have to work pretty damn hard and do a lot of writing to make a living. It's one down, and God knows how many to go.

I'm sure my slightly younger self would have realized this and wanted to follow this dream anyway. It's just that my current self recognizes this far more as a starting point for bigger and better things, and much less as the realization of a life goal. Onwards and upwards, I suppose.

Methodology

2010-12-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'm pondering changing my research-and-writing methods for my book on game history. So far, I've been going chapter-by-chapter. I decide to write on a genre (and time, if I break it in half), put together an outline, and try to play (if necessary - most of them are pretty firmly ensconced in my memory) and write on the games in order. However, my current chapter on real-time strategy game has exposed some flaws in this process, namely, that if I don't really like the games to begin with, it takes a lot longer. I'm pretty ambivalent about RTS games, so this chapter is in around its fourth month of work. At that rate, I might finish my first draft in three or four years, which seems a little much for me.

So I'm pondering switching writing about each game individually, and putting the segues in later. I've already kind of done this, having played and written about Half-Life while in the midst of my RTS binge. I see two major problems with this: first, it'll be harder to feel a sense of accomplishment like finishing a chapter. Second, it may just be an attempt to satiate my gaming ADD, and may make it harder for me to force myself to write instead of just play. I suppose I'll find out.

After I posted my excerpt on FF6, I had someone ask me on Twitter if I was also going to include Chrono Trigger. Ideally, the book will be mostly comprehensive, at least mentioning if not analyzing most of the influential games, massive hits, games representative of trends, cult classics, and major disasters. Here's an example of the preliminary games list for the first-person shooter chapter:

Catacomb 3-D
Ultima Underworld
Wolfenstein 3-D
Doom
System Shock
Arena
Doom 2
Heretic
Rise of the Triad
Marathon
Dark Forces
Strife
Duke Nukem 3D
Quake
Team Fortress
Outlaws
Turok
GoldenEye
Jedi Knight
Quake II
Rainbow Six
Unreal
Half-Life
TFC/Counterstrike
Thief
Trespasser
System Shock 2
Unreal Tournament/Quake III
Perfect Dark
Daikatana
Serious Sam
Deus Ex
NOLF
Elite Force
Red Faction
Halo

Some of these games may just get a mention (Dark Forces) or a reference to a different chapter they fit in better (the RPGs, Thief), some a paragraph (Serious Sam). Many of the bigger will get a page (Wolfenstein, NOLF) while others may get multiple pages of analysis on different levels (Doom, Halo). One of them will get a particular in-depth analysis using lots of screenshots. In this case, that's Half-Life and its storytelling-without-conventional-plot.

In other words, there's no way Chrono Trigger wouldn't make the book - and I hope I manage to get all the important games even when I get into genres I'm not really an expert on.

Video Game History - Final Fantasy VI

2010-12-09T14:24:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990's on this blog. Today, I pander with Final Fantasy VI, or Final Fantasy III for those of you who only played on the SNES.

In a technical sense, Final Fantasy VI offers very few major innovations over its predecessors. The most obvious is a significant improvements in character graphics, primarily accomplished by using the same intricate two-dimensional sprites for the characters in both combat and in the outside world. This allowed for plot and character developments to take place during combat - when one character uses thought-to-be-extinct magic for the first time, another character reacts with shock, bouncing around the battle screen. But this is primarily an improvement based on the creativity of the designers - more time working with the harder limits of the SNES cartridges allowed more creativity within the form.

Final Fantasy VI also added customization within the game system. Just like FF4, FF6 has several characters in rigidly defined classes. Locke is a Thief, and the only character with the Steal command, whereas Strago is a Blue Mage who learns and uses monster's skills. However, each character can also be equipped with "Espers," summonable creatures who also teach magic skills and improve certain stats when the characters level up. This would provide the model for most future Final Fantasy games, as well as games from other companies: the characters each have their own personalities and are rigid when acquired, but can be developed in many different directions.

Perhaps more importantly, Final Fantasy VI offers massive improvements in thematic elements of the game. The rough edges of the setting are smoothed into a consistent whole. The coexistence of Tolkein-esque dwarves with science fiction Moon-dwellers has become a thematically consistent steampunk setting. This mixture of science fiction and fantasy was common in early RPGs, as we've seen. The early games in Final Fantasy have D&D settings with random airships, just like Wizardry and Ultima. But in Ultima, those previous embarrassments were ignored in future installments. In Wizardry, that artificial weirdness was maintained, but it was never a major focus. Final Fantasy reveled in its setting, and built its own style of science fantasy world, where airships and magic coexist.

In FF6, that setting drives the storyline, instead of the other way around. The evil empire in this game is using corrupting pure forms of magic in order to power their war machines to take over the world. The plot of the game derives naturally from the setting, and by and large, the major characters fit into both effectively.

I say "major characters" instead of "hero" or "protagonist" because Final Fantasy VI may well be unique in gaming history in that there isn't a character who fits that description. The first character we meet, Terra, is half-human, half magical Esper, and initially seems to be the protagonist, but is soon matched and eventually overshadowed by others. Locke the Thief is perhaps the most cliched, as the lovable rogue in the Han Solo mode. On the other hand, Celes, a general of the evil empire who turns against them, demonstrates much more depth, both tragically and comically, than her rough equivalent Cecil from FF4. Edgar is the king of a small nation which is trying to resist the encroaching empire, while Cyan was a knight of a kingdom which resisted and were all slaughtered, except for him. There are a few characters who don't entirely fit in the plot consistently, particularly some of the more gimmicky later characters like Umaru or Gogo, but one of the game's greatest achievements is how its most important characters are intertwined with the world and the plot. The Town-Dungeon-Boss conceit still exists, but it works organically with the rest of the game, instead of acting as an arbitrary challenge towards continuing the game.

Video Game History - Populous & Powermonger

2010-12-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990's on this blog. Today, part of the genesis of real-time strategy games: Populous, Populous II, and Powermonger.

One major source of creative tension within the real-time strategy genre is the amount of control that you have over your in-game minions. On one side, the RTS games focus on micromanagement of each individual person (or alien, or robot, or what-have-you). They are usually intelligent enough to respond when provoked, and in some games they can be ordered to do work automatically. But by-and-large, every individual unit has to be told exactly what to do. On the other side of the spectrum are so-called “God games,” in which you exercise indirect control over your minions.

Peter Molyneaux, founder of Bullfrog Productions and later Lionhead Studios, was one of the driving forces behind the God Games of the 1990's. Starting with 1989's Populous and continuing with Powermonger (1990), Populous II (1991), Theme Park (1994), Magic Carpet (1996), Dungeon Keeper I & II (1997, 1999) and finally Black & White (2001), Molyneux and his companies released a series of games with significant similarities. All used a form of indirect control over the characters in the game; most were strategy games (Magic Carpet, an action game with strategic components being the exception); most put you in the role of a god or godlike entity who depended on worship, morale, or happiness; and most involved the altering of terrain as an important aspect of the game. They also all sounded more exciting to pitch than to play. Given the wild ambition behind them, is to be expected – they're never bad games, just perhaps disappointing after you hear the concept behind them.

Populous' concept is one of the purest in game history. You play a god with worshipers, and you have an opponent with worshipers, and your goal is to make sure that your worshipers overwhelm your opposition. You do this via two mechanisms – spells (or perhaps miracles?) and influence. You can influence your people to get stronger, to try and go to a specific point on the map, to try and expand peacefully, or to attack the enemy when they can. Your spells are more direct – you can set things on fire, create volcanoes which ruin opposing terrain, or turn your leader into a more powerful Knight.

Oddly, the single more important thing that you do in Populous is to flatten the terrain. In fact, this is what you'll spend the most amount of time doing. The more flat terrain that surrounds a building, the stronger the people who live in the building. So, click-by-click, you smooth our your land and encourage your people to expand into your opposition's land. It's a strangely mundane way of playing a god, but it's not without its charms. It allows you to constantly have something to do, instead of just waiting for the big decisions. There is an odd dichotomy between the lack of control you have over your minions and the complete, precise control you exercise over the terrain.

Populous II, released in 1991, is almost identical, but it adds a Greek mythology presentation instead of the generic setting of the original game. It also cleans up the interface slightly, as well as adding a spell that significantly sped up the endgame of a scenario.

Between the two Populous games, Bullfrog released another real-time strategy game, Powermonger. Powermonger was inspired by Populous, and looks a lot like its sibling at first glance. However, Powermonger is a more military-oriented game, and offers direct control of small armies. The game world also seems much more detailed, with various villages and behaviors for those villagers. In practice, however, Powermonger consists primarily of attacking villages, regrouping, then attacking the next one. Although it was an award-winning game in its time, its clunky interface and repetitive gameplay make it difficult to grasp today.

Video Game History - Ultima VIII: Pagan

2010-11-24T15:40:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990's on this blog. In honor of Turkey Day, here's one of the biggest turkeys in gaming history - Ultima VIII: Pagan.

The golden age of computer RPGs from the mid-1980's through the early 1990's had gone hand-in-hand with Origin's Ultima series. Starting from Ultima III in 1983, each successive Ultima raised the bar for the series, the genre, and video games overall. Ultima VIII: Pagan was no exception – unfortunately, it represented the sudden and disastrous end to the PC RPG golden age.

The RPG collapse of the mid-1990's was certainly not Pagan's fault, but many aspects of the game parallel the problems of the genre overall. The first and most important problem was time. Pagan was rushed out the door in an incomplete state. This was a more and more common occurrence as the industry grew bigger in the CD-ROM era. Origin Systems had been purchased by Electronic Arts, a company famous for applying pressure on their developers to reach release dates. Pagan was buggy and unpolished from the start, and everything about it felt smaller and less interesting than previous Ultima games.

It went against previous games in the series by changing worlds and focus. Although Ultima VII: Serpent Isle took place outside of the normal setting of Britannia, it still had strong connections to the homeland, with several characters traveling to and from the different lands. Pagan had virtually no connection, other than the Guardian as a villain and the ever-silent Avatar. This included the loss of the Avatar's companions, most of whom had worked with you for several different games. The move towards a single character instead of a party of characters wasn't obvious at the time, but as the decade progressed, it became a clear trend, with many of the most famous and best games of the late 1990's being based primarily around a single player character (Daggerfall, Diablo, and Fallout, to name a few).

Pagan also totally upended the Ultima series' commitment to an ethical system. The Avatar of Pagan is trapped in a dying world, and desperate to return to Britannia in order to prevent the Guardian from conquering it. So the game forces you to try to return home by any means necessary. This turns the Avatar from a righteous hero into a murderous psychopath, who essentially destroys one world in order to try to save another.

Yet Ultima VIII: Pagan could have survived all these flaws if it had been a good game. It had good ideas, like a magic system which had different kinds of spells and rituals, which gave spellcasting a more procedural, satisfying feel. Its game engine was one of the very first fully three-dimensional games, using polygonal constructs instead of sprites.

But it wasn't a good game. Somewhere along the line, the designers decided to introduce platformer-style jumping puzzles, with floating and moving platforms. This was a huge mistake. First of all, RPG fans of that era were used to their genre expanding into other genres, not the other way around. Moreover, the divide between PC gamers and console gamers was arguably at its peak at this point. Console games were still a few years away from respectability, and some genres, like platform action games, were almost exclusively reserved for consoles. It must be said that it wasn't very good platforming. The mouse control combined with an otherwise fairly slow-paced RPG made it an exercise in frustration. A later patch eliminated the moving platforms and simplified the interface, but the damage had been done. Now the incredibly frustrating jumping puzzles were replaced by incredibly pointless hanging platforms which provide you with no challenge, but must be navigated nonetheless.

There were more problems. Combat was equally frustrating, as you spent most of your fights hoping that you wouldn't be knocked down, which triggered a too-long getting up animation, during which the Avatar was defenseless and could easily be knocked down again. The graphics lacked the personality and charm of Ultima VI & VII. Likewise, the music, so excellent in previous Ultimas, was almost a non-entity here. It seemed like nothing went right with Ultima VIII, and for the next few years, like nothing went right for the PC RPG genre.

Video Game History - Suikoden

2010-11-18T15:40:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start excerpting bits and pieces of my book on the history of video gaming in the 1990's on this blog. First up: Suikoden.

With Square in general and Final Fantasy in particular on top of the JRPG world, expectation for the next game in the series drove interest in JRPGs on the PlayStation. However, as they took their time releasing the next Final Fantasy, Konami snuck a little game called Suikoden under the radar.

Suikoden is “little” in many ways. As JRPGs transitioned from the 16-bit era to the PlayStation, they tended to get bigger, more complex, more graphics-intensive and longer. Suikoden was proudly 2D, fast-paced and simple: combat was turn-based, like the original Final Fantasy, and built around the player choosing commands for their party between turns, and then pressing “Fight” to send them on their way. Suikoden made it even easier with a “Free Will” mode where every character in the party simply attacks, the player doesn't even select opponents to attack. A decent player can finish most of the game using Free Will, even including the final enemy! And yet, oddly, the game is still fun to play in spite of its simplicity. The designers may have realized that the player played the entire RPG world, not just the combat system.

Suikoden does two especially interesting things. Its only concession to the hardcore, completist gamers is the wide range of characters to recruit – 108 in all. A third or so are automatically added in the course of the storyline, another third or so are optional and can fight in your party, and the last batch of characters aren't usable in combat – but they are usable in your castle. Suikoden has a castle in the middle of a lake used by the hero as headquarters, which provides a sense of place to the game. The more characters the player recruits, the larger the castle grows. Some characters add fun and functionality to the castle, such as one who lets the player gamble on a shell game, or others who open up shops in the castle.

By letting the player build the castle, recruit its occupants, and explore it during downtime, Suikoden provides the player with a sense of place that most games don't. The plot, as in all games, gives the player an answer to the question “What are we fighting for?” but the castle and the range of characters inside it allow the player to create their own emotional connection and investment to answer that question.

The sense of place is increased by Suikoden's other point of interest, its plot. Although it still involves a spiky-haired young man leading a rebellion against an evil empire and an ancient evil, Suikoden tweaks the formula slightly in that the player is a high-ranking member of the evil empire, and its corruption is far more relevant to the plot than the evil magic. The empire also does not control the entirety of the world – it's contained, and other political entities are mentioned but not actually part of the game.

This may sound quite minor – and in many ways it is – but it opened a door that JRPGs hadn't yet opened in terms of storytelling. In virtually every JRPG, the goal of the game was to prevent a big bad guy from enslaving or destroying the world. The player knows, that should they succeed in the game, the bad guy's plot will be totally foiled, and the world will return to normal. In a sense, this paralyzes the emotional impact of the story, as the stakes are so high that minor setbacks and tragedies are irrelevant. By making the scope of the story smaller, Suikoden allowed for human conflicts and human tragedies. It was not a trend followed by most JRPGs in the future, but it did yield marvelous results with the sequel, Suikoden II.

Great Migrations

2010-11-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

I got to review the new National Geographic show Great Migrations for The A.V. Club this week. Check it out here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/great-migrations-born-to-move,47294/

The Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

2010-11-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Worst Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

The Rest of the Buffy Episodes

What makes for a great Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode? I think there are four important indicators, listed here in decreasing order of glibness:

The best episodes are written by Joss Whedon. 11 of my top 13 are Joss-penned episodes. Those two, interestingly, are Spike-centered episodes. Whedon seems to have a better grasp of every character on the show (especially Dawn and Tara) than the other writers, except for Spike.
The best episodes are often the most important episodes. Season finales, major character deaths or changes, and two-parters are overrepresented in my top 25. One would think that this would be obvious, but it's not always true – Battlestar Galactica, for example, was at its weakest in the big episodes.
Buffy was often at its most successful when applying gimmicks. One of the gimmicks was to have something which caused the characters to behave much differently than normal, usually using magic. These “alternate reality” episodes include “The Wish” and “Superstar” for changing every character, or “Dopplegangland” and “The Replacement” for single characters.
The show was even better when experimenting with television episode forms. Its very best episodes were formal experiments like “Hush” and “Once More With Feeling” using different mechanisms of communication, or “The Zeppo” with its focus outside of the main characters and apocalyptic plot. And the very best episode, “The Body,” utilized several formal mechanisms to disorient the viewer to approximate Buffy's grief.

The Excellent-if-Flawed Episodes

25) #716 "Storyteller" – Sometimes I wonder just how terrible Season Seven would have been without Andrew. Then I realize that I really don't want to think about it - the concept is just that frightening.

24) #511 "Triangle" – In the midst of the increasing doom-and-gloom of the fifth season, and after the unfortunate self-destructive Riley subplot, comes this gem of an episode, when Anya's Troll-God ex-boyfriend comes to town. “That's insane troll logic!” is the high point, but it's got competition.

23) #617 "Normal Again" – I was surprised to see that this episode is hated in some circles. I can see why from a characterization point of view: if you hated that depressed Buffy was a major plot point, then depressed Buffy as a schizophrenic in the “real world” isn't going to win you over. I like it for three reasons: it takes Buffy's depression and flips it into a good old-fashioned metaphor/monster-of-the-week episode, it starts to resolve the larger plotline of the depression, and the meta-commentary is clever without being too overdone. Wait, make that four reasons – doesn't Dawn get beat up in it?

22) #314 "Bad Girls" – It's kinda like “Inca Mummy Girl” in that you can figure out the plot from the title with a decent accuracy rate. It's very much unlike “Inca Mummy Girl” in that it's a really good episode. Leather pants seem to do that for Buffy and Angel.

21) #219 "I Only Have Eyes for You" – What initially appears to be a pretty standard, even weak, monster-of-the-week episode turns into something incredible when the ghosts haunting Sunnydale High bring Buffy and Angel into their world. It's excessive, but it works.

20) #306 "Band Candy" – Jane Espenson's first episode is also one of the first great comic Buffy episodes. And Giles and Joyce hooking up is the gift that keeps on giving.

19) #621 "Two to Go" (Part 1) - “Back off, superbitch!” is a pretty major misstep for an otherwise riveting hour. Giles' welcome entry at the end starts the process of redeeming the entire season.

18) #408 "Pangs" – Quite possibly the funniest single episode of the show's run. Spike's indignant “You made a bear!” is the line that made me laugh the hardest of any. Willow's foray into white liberal guilt rang true as well. And everyone loves syphilis!

17) #320 "The Prom– In order to make an episode this schlocky work, a show has to earn an incredible amount of emotional goodwill. By the end of the third season, Buffy had indeed earned it, and against all odds, it works.

The Exceptional Episodes

16) #707 "Conversations with Dead People" – The First Evil is a great idea for a villain, but the things that give it such potential also make it dangerous to use. “Conversations with Dead People” utilizes its potential in superb fashion, but it's the high point for The First as a villain.

15) #313 "The Zeppo" – While “Innocence” is the episode that made it clear that Buffy could be excellent, “The Zeppo” is the episode that demonstrated that Buffy could be genius. This Xander-centered episode is the first of the formal experiments that would give us “The Body,” “Hush”, and more. It plays a little bit better in concept than on-screen, but only a little – it's still great.

14) #622 "Grave" (Part 2) – After all the melodrama of the sixth season – most of which has occurred without Giles present – it seems to come to a culmination when Buffy confesses all the seemingly terrible issues to Giles. Who promptly breaks out laughing. For moment alone, “Grave” deserves a high rating that it mostly earns. Xander being the world-saving hero is a wonderful touch, as are Buffy's interactions with Dawn. The only really unfortunate aspect of it is the cheap threat of the world ending – it looks even less ominous than the second season's basement apocalypse.

13) #701 "Lessons" – The seventh and final season of Buffy starts with easily its best premiere (although that's not a category with much competition). The introduction of Principal Wood and reintroduction of Sunnydale High are both promising beginnings, and Joss Whedon demonstrates once against that he's the only writer who can really make Dawn likable. The throwback high school vibe is referenced by Principal Wood when he tells Buffy that clearly she shouldn't have left, and the ending with all the previous villains as The First shows that the seventh season had a great deal of, ah, potential. Oh well.

12) #214 "Innocence" (Part 2) – Many genre shows struggle to get started, and it's usually about halfway through the second season when everything starts to click. That's “Innocence,” as Buffy discovers the consequences of premarital sex. With a cursed vampire. The latter part may be more relevant than the former.

11) #308 "Lovers Walk" – After Spike joined the main cast, it became harder and harder to remember how excellent he was before being neutered. In this episode, he shows up and demolishes the Buffy-Angel relationship with wisdom, bitterness, and malice. He's also really funny, especially when fake-threatening Joyce.

10) #522 "The Gift" – Although the end of “The Gift” may be the most memorable aspect of the episode for most, I find myself more drawn to the opening. Its a scene which is designed to be iconic, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer acting out her role, while indicating just how much has changed. It's beautiful, and combined with the end of the episode, makes for one of the series' best. Unfortunately, far too much of “The Gift” hinges on the awkward Glory/Ben “argument” for me to say that it's the absolute apex of the show. Still, it's not far away.

9) #507 "Fool for Love" – As with “Lover's Walk,” this episode shows a side of Spike that becomes rarer and rarer as the series progresses. This is among the last batch of episodes before his crush on Buffy nearly ruins him as a character, and it's simply superb. Buffy wants to know how he killed previous Slayers, so Spike describes the process. They're excellent stories, along with flashbacks that show the vampire foursome together for the first time. But more than that, it describes the themes of the fifth season, with Spike telling Buffy all the reasons she has to live – reasons which are taken away over the course of the season.

The Classic Episodes

8) #607 "Once More, With Feeling" – I'll admit that I was a little disappointed the first time I saw the musical episode. I'd just finished Season Three and was checking out the special episodes. Out of context, it's entertaining, but not the classic, best-ever that many claim. However, watching it in context makes it far more emotionally affecting, in addition to surprisingly catchy.

7) #222 "Becoming (Part 2)" – The only real weakness with “Becoming” is its low-budget apocalypse-in-a-basement. Other than that, this is the most emotionally affecting of any finale, thanks to Buffy taking on Angel. The swordfight is especially wonderful, with the action and stunts matching the drama.

6) #321 "Graduation Day (Part 1)"
5) #322 "Graduation Day (Part 2)" – The graduation episodes were among the first Buffy episodes that I watched, and as such, I felt disappointed. After several hours of good build-up, I felt like the climax was tacky and cheap. I was wrong. They're marvelous culminations of the entire high school experience, in addition to tying up the storylines from the third season. I couldn't pick which one I liked better – the first has the epic martial arts fight between the two Slayers, and the second has the magnificent scene when the students of Sunnydale High stop being victims and actually fight back. It's no surprise that the show's best season ends with the show's best climax.

4) #316 "Doppelgangland" – I will admit to some bias here - “Doppelgangland” was the second Buffy episode I ever saw, and the first that wasn't in my bottom 10 (“Empty Places,” I believe, though it could have been “Touched”). It's an excellent introduction to the show, but even better in context. Buffy helped to define that fine line between comedy and horror, and although “Dopplegangland” is firmly on the side of comedy, there's enough horror to allow the comedy to build up to great heights.

3) #422 "Restless" – I would argue that “Restless” is the only episode that combines both the alternate reality and formal experimentation of Buffy's best episodes, which unsurprisingly, makes it one of Buffy's absolute best episodes. Putting characters into a dreamscape is always risky, doing it for an entire episode even more so. “Restless” succeeds beyond expectations – it's filled with humor and excellent odd character moments (“I'm cowboy guy!”) with a successful expansion of the show's mythology.

The Hall of Fame Episodes

2) #410 “Hush" – Combines some of the creepiest Monsters of the Week with some of the show's funniest moments and a fantastic gimmick. Giles' overhead presentation is a tour de force – possibly the best scene in the show's run.

1) #516 "The Body" – Taken on its own, “The Body” is a superb depiction of the grief of losing a loved one. Joss Whedon's intentionally disorienting direction works perfectly with the characters' sadness. What makes it even better is that he manages to tie together most of the frayed strands of the fifth season that hadn't been working. “The Body” covers Anya's inability to relate to humans, Tara's apparent uselessness, and Dawn's annoyingness, and it makes every one of those aspects better. It is transcendent television.

The Rest of the Buffy Episodes

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The Worst Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

The Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

If there's one thing that Buffy fans on online forums like to do, it's ranking seasons. According to averages of my episode rankings, I'd rank the seasons as such:

Season One: 112.66 – No surprise here.
Season Two: 78.863 – The emotional impact of the main plot of Season Two masks the fact that it's still pretty weak in the first half of the season.
Season Seven: 74.36 – Too many bad episodes drag S7's average way down.
Season Six: 69.18 – This season's episodes are all over the place, but it adds up to be much better than its worst episodes would indicate. That's both the math and my gut feeling.
Season Five: 68.681 – It's got no really bad episodes, a few excellent episodes, but very few really good episodes. So its average is also probably fairly close to its median and mode.
Season Four: 66.81 – I'm not surprised that it's my second favorite mathematically, because it's also my second-favorite when I list the seasons directly.
Season Three: 46.863 – I'm certainly not surprised that Season Three is mathematically my favorite, but the math is pretty astounding to me, and I'm the one who rated the episodes! Its episodes are an average of 20 points higher than every other season's average, and the other five seasons are grouped closely together. It only has one episode in the bottom 30. Eight of my top 25 are from the third season – no other season has more than four.

Early-Season Placeholder Episodes

129) #201 "When She Was Bad" – Angsty Buffy is a key component of the show, but it only works when it's well-balanced. Here, it's not.

128) #205 "Reptile Boy" - This is the anti-drinking PSA-style episode that “Beer Bad” usually gets mistaken for.

127) #202 "Some Assembly Required" – Do you remember this episode? Because if so, you're one up on me.

126) #103 "Witch" – I'm glad they got the Buffy-as-a-cheerleader plot out of the way early.

Could Have Been Good Episodes, but Weren't

125) #606 "All the Way" – It's a Dawn-centered episode. A romantic Dawn-centered episode. 'Nuff said.

124) #110 "Nightmares" – One of the first season's most ambitious episodes. But Buffy didn't have the budget – or the characterization, honestly – to really do it well.

123) #710 "Bring on the Night" – Potentials arrive, Buffy starts speechifying. An inauspicious beginning to the main storyline of the seventh season.

122) #508 "Shadow" – The escalation of the Joyce illness isn't bad, but a terrible Season One-quality special effect with a snake monster makes this hard to take seriously. And to make it worse, it starts off the rather silly “Dark Riley” storyline.

121) #502 "Real Me" – Let's all welcome Dawn to the show with a thoroughly mediocre episode. The best thing that can be said about “Real Me” is that Dawn gets so much worse.

120) #406 "Wild at Heart" – Oz's time on the show comes to a quick and forced ending. It all feels a little perfunctory, which is too bad.
Mediocre Monsters-of-the-Week

119) #220 "Go Fish" – Remember when all the baseball bigwigs complained that “nobody could have known how prevalent steroid use was?” Well, Buffy knew, and it showed it in a horribly awkward metaphor. I've still rated this episode as better than the main plot, because the subplot with Willow as an interrogator finding out Jonathan peed in the pool is both entertaining and ironic in light of later events.

118) #111 "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" – Possibly the most straightforward of the metaphor episodes, and fairly memorable for that, at least. An odd ending could be viewed as foreshadowing the Initiative...or it could be X-Files wanna-be conspiracy stuff.

117) #212 "Bad Eggs" – Has any real school class ever done the taking-care-of-eggs thing? Or is that just a trope that TV shows use in order to show that its characters are whatever needs to be shown at that point?

Nice Try Episodes

116) #715 "Get It Done" - Chloe's suicide is a decent raising of the stakes with the mostly-inert Potential Slayer storyline. Buffy chasing down the shamans who started the Slayer line is a nice touch as well. On the other hand, Buffy's speech problem is getting worse and worse.

115) #708 "Sleeper" – Spike as The First's sleeper agent isn't a terrible premise, but the show doesn't do much more than go through the motions with it. On the bright side, Aimee Mann is probably the Bronze's best musical guest.

114) #611 "Gone" – Making Buffy invisible probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But it's hard to do invisibility in a visual medium. Having Buffy narrate everything she does in a sing-song voice? Not the best way to handle it.

113) #709 "Never Leave Me" – Andrew returns – good! The Turok-Han is raised – very bad.

112) #208 "The Dark Age" – Ethan Rayne's return isn't as strong as some of his other appearances, but this is a good episode for adding some depth to Giles - the first time his "Ripper" past is referred to.

111) #210 "What's My Line (Part 2)" – I really don't like Kendra. She's just a terribly awkward character. That's most of what I remember out of this one, which is probably the most likely to change spots if I ever rewatch the series (and redo this list).

Guilty Pleasure Episodes

110) #613 "Dead Things" – The Trio storyline escalates dramatically in this episode, when their attempts to get girls ends in the death of Warren's ex, Katrina. Conceptually, I like the depiction of Warren's increasing corruption, but this episode doesn't do the best job at portraying it - and it's the most important in that process.

109) #403 "The Harsh Light of Day" – Spike's return is usually cause for celebration, but this episode is far too concerned with being a crossover for Angel's new series. Still, he and Harmony make for some excellent comedy.

108) #509 "Listening to Fear" – A perfectly serviceable monster-of-the-week episode, featuring a Queller demon that preys on the mentally ill. The major point of interest with “Listening to Fear” is that it starts to connect Ben with Glory. Ben's uneven characterization is one of the weakest aspects of the Glory storyline. In this episode, he's a flunky villain. In the rest of the season, he's a good guy, then in the finale, a villain again. Bleh.

107) #405 "Beer Bad" – I like “Beer Bad.” I really do. It takes the overserious metaphor of the worst episodes and almost parodies it. How does the villain get his comeuppance? Xander calls him a “bad, bad man.” And CaveBuffy is all kinds of adorable. “Foamy!”

Really Good Episodes with Really, Really Big Problems

106) #310 "Amends" – How to rate this episode? The good: the First Evil is a good villain; it's great to see Jenny Calendar back; and it marks a turning point in the Buffy/Angel relationship. The bad? An absolutely ghastly deus ex machina with a Christmas theme.

105) #514 "Crush" – How to rate this episode? The good: It's well-written and consistently funny; Drusilla is creepier than she ever was in Season Two; and it ties up several loose ends with the Spike crush storyline. The bad? It's focused on the Spike crush storyline. I liked what it did, but I really didn't like that it had to do it.

These Episodes Have Problems

104) #215 "Phases"
103) #419 "New Moon Rising" – Hooray for Oz as a character! But you know, in retrospect, I'm not sure much good ever came from Oz as a werewolf.

102) #302 "Dead Man's Party" – The main episode isn't that good, but the Scoobie fight about Buffy's return from LA is gold.

101) #510 "Into the Woods" – Riley and Buffy break up, finally. Buffy's single most badass moment occurs in this episode, when she tears through a group of vampires in record time using a pool cue. Xander's transition to the party member who sees and understands things begins in this episode, although his advice to Buffy to run back to Riley is somewhat problematic.

100) #303 "Faith, Hope & Trick" – I'm a big Faith fan, but this episode is pretty perfunctory.

99) #504 "Out of My Mind" – The introduction of Spike's crush on Buffy, which is not a plot I'm a fan of, as you may have noticed.

Important for the Plot, but Not Much Else Episodes

98) #112 "Prophecy Girl" – The Season One finale is a fitting coda to the weakest season of the series. It hits all the important bits, but there's not enough of an emotional core – yet – to make it anywhere near as meaningful as the future finales.

97) #413 "The I in Team"
96) #414 "Goodbye Iowa" – The main storyline of the fourth season starts going off the rails with the introduction of its villain, Adam.

95) #717 "Lies My Parents Told Me" – This episode is one of the few that feels like it's driven more by plot requirements than character development. Buffy has to break with her mentor, so a conspiracy is devised. The follow-through isn't well thought-out, though. The Freudian flashbacks with Spike's mother are also a bit over-the-top.

94) #614 "Older and Far Away" – Trapping everyone in the house is a good idea for an episode, and it generally works. But this may be Dawn at her absolute worst: “GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!”

93) #505 "No Place Like Home" – The big reveal episode of the fifth season, with Dawn finally explained and Glory introduced. It gets the job done without being especially notable other than its story – a problem for much of the fifth season, unfortunately.

92) #101 "Welcome to the Hellmouth"
91) #102 "The Harvest" – Buffy is introduced in a fairly straightforward fashion. It's very artificial in a basic television form kind of way, but you can see the potential here.

90) #209 "What's My Line (Part 1)" – A fairly effective early look at Buffy's angst over her future as a Slayer. Side note – it was never clear to me whether the assassin Buffy kills at the ice rink is a scarred human or a demon. If it's the former, well, more ammo against Buffy's argument at the end of Season Six.

89) #513 "Blood Ties" – It's an odd thing about the fifth season. The two most annoying characters, Dawn and Spike, manage to come together and form an oddly affecting friendship.

88) #305 "Homecoming" – Some good things going on in this episode. It's the introduction of everyone's favorite villain, the Mayor, and Slayerfest '99 is good fun. The Buffy/Cordelia rivalry is a little bit too forced.

87) #107 "Angel" – The Buffy-Angel roller coaster begins here! Also, Darla is killed, which in retrospect is a pretty bad move from a storytelling point of view, her being Angel's sire and companion and all. Pity that's not something that could ever be reversed.

Fun One-Shots

86) #603 "After Life" – A demon attaches itself to resurrected Buffy. It's a good monster-of-the-week episode, with some even better character-building for Buffy.

85) #411 "Doomed" – Riley's first episode as one of the gang, kind of. Also includes Spike at his funniest, and the traditional Apocalypse-in-a-basement is spoofed.

84) #501 "Buffy vs. Dracula" – A pretty weak premise is salvaged and even turned to good by consistently funny writing. “Dark Master” indeed.

83) #218 "Killed by Death" – Although I don't really like this episode's retcon of Buffy's childhood, the hospital-based monster of the week is one of the creepiest the show has ever done.

82) #703 "Same Time, Same Place" – A fairly straightforward monster-of-the-week episode made fair more interesting by Gnarl, another one of the creepiest monsters in the show's run.

Trying Hard, Not Quite Succeeding

81) #517 "Forever" – Some poignant stuff here, as the mourning for Joyce continues. It's a Dawn-centered episode, though it's largely redeemed by the increasingly interesting Dawn/Spike relationship.

80) #616 "Hell's Bells" – I was pleasantly surprised by this episode after several warnings about its crappiness. There's a lot of good comedy here, and it's not like Xander's cold feet weren't foreshadowed.

79) #213 "Surprise" (Part 1) – The ending is the most memorable aspect of this episode, but the rest of it doesn't hold up to the Buffy-Angel changes. The Judge just isn't effective enough of a threat to hold the rest together. It's not bad, but it could – and will – be so much better.

78) #519 "Tough Love" – Willow attacks Glory, in the first indication that she's become far more powerful than anyone else realizes.

77) #307 "Revelations" – The fake Watcher Gwendolyn Post shows up and ruins Faith's, ah, faith. There's also another good Scoobie fight about Angel's resurrection – with the pretty massive caveat that nobody ever mentions the fact that he didn't have a soul when he was evil and now he does. That tidbit seems like it should be relevant.

76) #421 "Primeval" (Part 2) – The conclusion of the Initiative storyline has its marks to hit, and it does so. Nothing less, but sadly, nothing more either.

75) #604 "Flooded" – The two most distinctive aspects of the sixth season are introduced here: the horror of mundane life, and the Trio as the apparent Big Bad of the season. Neither of them seem like very big deals at first, but it all adds up. I like the concept of Buffy having money problems, but the way the show glides over people who could help her - like Giles, Willow, and Tara - is pretty stupid.

74) #712 "Potential" – This is by far the best Dawn-themed episode in the three years of her time on Buffy. Plus seeing Millie from Freaks & Geeks as a badass? Good stuff – if only there were more like this in the seventh season, then the Potential Slayer storyline wouldn't have seemed like such a waste.

73) #515 "I Was Made to Love You" – I like Warren. I mean, I don't like him, but I think he's a character that the show handled quite well (though it could have been even better). His introduction here is comic with a good tragic core, which fits.

72) #520 "Spiral" – Buffy's speeches about how it's wrong to kill humans in Season Six kind of ring hollow after she spends the best part of this episode throwing axes at the human Knights of Byzantium, huh? It's an effective tension builder, and I think that Ben and Glory may have some kind of connection.

71) #106 "The Pack" - “The Pack” introduces a level of creepiness that the show hadn't had, and with the death of the principal, also said that it was willing to raise the stakes. I may be overrating it, but it's really the only first season episode I have a clear memory of.

70) #720 "Touched"
69) #721 "End of Days" – Season Seven begins to recover from the terribly vote, but it's not enough. There are some good emotions beats to hit, and the most blatant orgasm face of the series, but it's not spectacular enough to place the season among the series' best.

68) #506 "Family" – Almost a year after her introduction, Tara finally gets her own episode. Despite being Whedon-penned, it's straightforward and doesn't do a huge amount to develop her character. He'd do better in “The Body.”

67) #713 "The Killer in Me" – Since most of Willow's recovery from the end of Season Six occurred off-screen, between seasons, it was good to have this episode to show her working through it. Warren remains a dynamic character as well. But something about it seems just a little off.

66) #301 "Anne" - “Anne” is an odd little episode, taking place primarily in L.A. as Buffy recovers from the events of Season Two. It has some iconic moments, but it's still too disjointed to be really great.

Eminently Watchable Episodes

65) #605 "Life Serial" – The Trio's tests for the Slayer show their potential for entertainment.

64) #512 "Checkpoint" - The arrival of the Watchers in Sunnydale leads to some funny moments, and some great Buffy ass-kicking as she redefines the power dynamic between Watcher and Slayer.

63) #412 "A New Man" – Ethan Rayne's last appearance leads to some good comedy when Giles is turned into a demon, but not a great deal of depth.

62) #409 "Something Blue" – Willow's having trouble controlling her magic. Spike and Buffy are an item. Which season is this? It's played for temporary laughs here, and it works well, but it's an eerie premonition of the dark sections of Season Six.

61) #518 "Intervention" – Everyone loves the Buffybot. Vision quest? Not so interesting.

Effective, if not quite Excellent Episodes

60) #521 "The Weight of the World" – With Dawn captured, Buffy retreats into her own mind. It's a good examination of Buffy's growing helplessness, but perhaps a not enough happening for a single episode.

59) #618 "Entropy" – The melodrama of the sixth season peaks here, with sex used as a weapon against others, or as a way to heal what was broken, or both. The comedy and pathos of Spike and Anya doing it is almost equally matched by the tenderness of Willow and Tara reconnecting.

58) #311 "Gingerbread" – For a while, I thought that this episode was Buffy's response to Columbine, due to its damnation of mob mentality and jumping to conclusions. It's a somewhat muddled episode, though it has some interesting application of folklore to the Buffy mythology, with Hansel and Gretel as evil and the witches as good.

57) #315 "Consequences" – Alyson Hannigan may be the best crying actress in the universe. She breaks it out for the first (and best) time this episode.

56) #615 "As You Were" – How surprising is it that Riley's return marks the point of improvement in the sixth season? Crazy.

55) #312 "Helpless" – The Watchers' test for Buffy leads to a painful realization that even her teacher can betray her.

54) #319 "Choices" – The stakes are raised as Willow is captured, and her magical escape shows her growing power as a sidekick for Buffy.

Good For (Several) Laughs Episodes

53) #401 "The Freshman" – A decent introduction to Buffy: The College Years made better by the vampire Sunday. A pity she's killed in this episode, but it would be tough to have a show named after a vampire slayer who never slays.

52) #503 "The Replacement" – I really wish I liked this episode more. It has all the trappings of a classic Buffy episode, but somehow it lands a little bit flatter than it should.

51) #407 "The Initiative" – Spike's return is magnificent, and the Initiative arc hasn't yet gone awry.

50) #216 "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" – Although not quite the first “alternate reality” episode, it really demonstrated the potential excitement and comedy of putting the characters into different situations. Along with "Halloween" it started a trend. “Band Candy,” “Superstar,” “Tabula Rasa,” and more all descend from Xander's little love spell.

Serious/Seriously Good Episodes

49) #702 "Beneath You" – Insane Spike has one of the most riveting acting moments in the entire series. This episode is by-the-numbers until James Marsters turns it on for a bizarre, dark, excellent ending.

48) #718 "Dirty Girls" – The introduction of Caleb and reintroduction of Faith are well-handled in “Dirty Girls,” which promises a fantastic conclusion to the series.

47) #217 "Passion" – Shit just got real. The death of a major character says that this show isn't quite what you had expected.

46) #704 "Help" – Cassie is a fascinating character, and watching Buffy abuse her power as a counselor is pretty entertaining.

45) #221 "Becoming (Part 1)" – Effective as preparation for its stunning second part, but spends a little bit too much time getting ready without enough release. Also, Kendra.

44) #601 "Bargaining (Part 1)"
43) #602 "Bargaining (Part 2)" – A string of poor-to-competent season premieres comes to a halt with this intense, dramatic two-parter.

42) #203 "School Hard" – Spike arrives, and Joyce shows she's more than just a wet blanket as a mother.

41) #317 "Enemies" – Angel faking his soul's removal is excellently done. Faith's resentment and antagonism is just a little bit too over-the-top for me to really call this episode a classic, though.

40) #207 "Lie to Me" - “Lie to Me” is the first episode that really gets at the increasing emotional complexity of the series, when Buffy has an old friend arrive from LA who wants to become a vampire. Prior to this, the central metaphor of the show dominated. After this, the metaphor and characters worked together for more intense and more personal storylines.

39) #619 "Seeing Red" – Joss Whedon is an asshole. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from putting Tara in the opening credits at the start of the episode, then killing her off in the end. The main storyline of this episode is a little weak, with the Trio getting some magic orbs that make Warren invincible. But the ending is a shocker, and Andrew really starts coming into his own as a character in this episode. His drink at the bar is magnificent.
The Thoroughly Entertaining Episodes

38) #206 "Halloween" – An early alternate reality Buffy, and probably the first really successful one. Xander as Army Guy is great, and Ethan Rayne is an excellent guest star.

37) #420 "The Yoko Factor" (Part 1) – While technically a tension-building episode, in keeping the fourth season's general comedy, it's also one of the funniest episodes of any two-parter. Angel and Riley finally meeting is excellent, especially with everyone's insistence that Angel had turned evil. The Scoobie fight at the end is also amazing. And Giles sings “Free Bird.”

36) #318 "Earshot" – It doesn't always make sense (why would you need a sniper scope to commit suicide?) but there are good laughs and drama to be found when Buffy becomes telepathic. Cordelia stating whatever pops into her mind is classic.

35) #705 "Selfless" – Two things make this episode stand out: the opening scene of Anya's origin, with the superb subtitles, and second, the first and only mention of Xander's lie to Buffy in the second season finale. Other than that, it's an effective end to the vengeance storyline – although Anya is ill-used for the rest of the season.

34) #608 "Tabula Rasa" – A spell of forgetfulness causes expected laughs and drama. It's a good, solid alternate reality episode.

33) #714 "First Date" – By the time “First Date” rolled around, I was able to tell Jane Espenson-written episodes apart from anyone else's. First question: are you laughing much more often than normal? Second question: are there references to little things from previous episodes? Coming after a string of disappointing-to-mediocre episodes, “First Date” was a breath of fresh air.

32) #404 "Fear, Itself" – Giles' “opening spell” is one of the funniest moments in the series. It's the best moment of an episode filled with good character development and better humor.

The Overambitious Episodes

31) #415 "This Year's Girl" (Part 1)
30) #416 "Who Are You" (Part 2) – For those who question Eliza Dushku's acting abilities, this two-parter should be exhibit A that she can do well in the right circumstances. Sarah Michelle Gellar's limitations are a bit more apparent, but she doesn't blow it. Bringing Faith back seemed like it could be a gimmick, but these two episodes more than justify it – and the continuation of the story on Angel is the icing on the cake.

29) #309 - "The Wish" – Buffy goes “Yesterday's Enterprise” or Age of Apocalypse in its most alternate of all the alternate reality episodes. It's fun to see all-business Buffy, evil Xander and Willow, and the return of the underutilized Master, in addition to Anya's introduction.

28) #417 "Superstar" – Conceptually, “Superstar” should be a transcendent Buffy episode, and adjusting the credits to be Jonathan-centered is a great touch. In practice, it's a very good episode that never quite manages to be great.

27) #722 "Chosen" – Although “Chosen” isn't the transcendent experience that a series finale can be at its best, that's mostly the fault of a wobbly seventh season. The little moments that Whedon and only Whedon brings as a writer are what stands out here. Dawn is as likeable as she ever gets in the series. So is Anya, who had been largely wasted after the first few episodes of the season. The game that Andrew runs is kind of the best thing ever. Angel's face when Buffy mentions the word “grandkids.” And, to be honest, Buffy's final plan is genius in the way that it flips both the show's premise and the Buffyverse's balance of power.

26) #620 "Villains" – With Tara dead, Willow seeks vengeance against Warren. Too much of the episode hinges on Buffy's argument that law enforcement should deal with Warren, and that the good guys can't kill humans. This is not advice that Buffy has followed (and it's certainly not true for Angel) but that's never mentioned. Still, Willow's conversion into Darth Rosenberg is riveting stuff.

The Worst Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

2010-11-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

The Rest of the Buffy Episodes

Notes on Methodology: I have only watched the vast majority of these episodes once, over the past two years. This means two things: my memory of the later episodes is much stronger, and if or when I go back and rewatch the series, the list could change dramatically.

The Bottom 15

144) #211 "Ted" – Is it really the worst Buffy episode of all time? It's more competently produced than most of the first season, yes. The guest star is certainly capable. But the tonal shifts, from annoyed Buffy to murderous Buffy and back again are whiplash-inducing. The central metaphor, with something horrific threatening Buffy's life with her mom, is especially frustrating since it handles something real so ham-handedly. It's the most frustrating episode I can think of in the entire series, and that's enough to put it at the bottom of the list.

143) #108 "I, Robot... You, Jane" – We'll start with the good stuff: Miss Calendar is introduced. That's it! It's rare for the show to feel dated, but its use of computers in early episodes certainly puts it in a time and place. About the only other close-to-nice thing I can say is that it's a little friendlier to online relationships than The X-Files' “2shy.”

142) #711 "Showtime" – To this episode's credit, it manages to do the nearly impossible and have characters who are even more annoying than Dawn: the whining gaggle of Potential Slayers, panicking about the Turok-Han. In addition to annoying, it's also dour and humorless. Not even Andrew can make it entertaining.

141) #610 "Wrecked" – The nadir of the infamous addiction storyline. Amy the witch is a good character, who is totally wasted by the most excruciatingly forced (and extended) metaphor of magic-as-heroin.

140) #719 "Empty Places" – An otherwise perfectly competent stakes-raising episode leading up to the series finale, “Empty Places” totally falls apart in its final scene, when everyone turns on Buffy. Arguing with her leadership, sure, but kicking her out is mind-bogglingly stupid and out of character for all involved. Anya's speech is particularly annoying, making no sense and ignoring the entire history of the show – quite the opposite of her famous monologue in “The Body.”

139) #304 "Beauty and the Beasts" – There's a theme here with these worst-ever episodes. The central metaphor is taken too far, to the point where it's obvious and not interesting. Such is the case with this episode, which is basically an hour-long public service announcement that abusive relationships are bad.

138) #706 "Him" - “Him” seems like an old idea from Season Two that never got implemented, and the return to high school of the seventh season gave the show the opportunity to do it. It has two major problems though. First, it's Dawn-centered. Second, it's too late. It really does feel like a second-season episode, ignoring the character growth from the previous five years. It's too bad, really, as there's some funny stuff, especially once Anya and Willow get involved. But still much more frustrating than not.

137) #402 "Living Conditions" – Buffy goes to college. College is weird for her. Something bad is happening that she attributes to the supernatural. Her friends try to convince her that's it's normal adjustment, but hey! Buffy's actually right and it is supernatural! This would have been a completely serviceable storyline...had the exact same thing not been done the previous week with “The Freshman.” There are a couple good ideas here, but they're almost totally wasted.

136) #612 "Doublemeat Palace" - Tries to be a comedy about the drudgery of work, which isn't a bad idea. Unfortunately, it fails. There's some humor here, but you have a little bit too hard to get to it.

135) #104 "Teacher's Pet"
134) #105 "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date"
133) #109 "The Puppet Show" – The first season of Buffy just isn't very good. These episodes aren't bad, they just all follow the central “High School as horror” metaphor too closely to be considered as effective as those which come later in the series, when it's more comfortable with its world and its characters.

132) #204 "Inca Mummy Girl" – An episode so generic you can pretty much figure out the storyline from the title.

131) #609 "Smashed" - The Great Addiction Debacle begins here. It's bad, but boy does it ever get worse.

130) #418 "Where the Wild Things Are" – No, really, thinking about Buffy and Riley having constant wild monkey love orgasms isn't really that appealing, thanks. I do understand that the show needed to demonstrate a little more sex positivity after some previous storylines, but this is just a bad premise. There's some funny stuff in it, but not enough to salvage it all.

Science Fiction Television as a Mirror, pt. 1

2010-10-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

The Renaissance Poet and I are currently watching the full catalog of two old shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the seventh season of Buffy I was surprised by a conversation in which a teenager was talking about being scared that his brother was joining the Marines, because he might not come back. It was a somewhat jarring reminder that the show was no longer set in the 1990's, but was now post-2001 and now in the world of the never-ending War on Terror.

Such reminders are never necessary during Star Trek. One episode we recently watched, "The High Ground," served as little more than a debate about the merits of terrorism as a political tool, specifically referencing the Troubles in Ireland as well as obliquely inspiring comparisons to the Intifada in Palestine, both very much in the news during the late-1980's/early 1990's. Even though ostensibly set in the far future, The Next Generation's concerns are very much of their time.

I had a brief conversation on Twitter with The A.V. Club's (and anyone else who lets him talk about TV) Todd VanderWerff about this, since it's been on my mind and he starting talking about it regarding Millenium and The X-Files. His claim was that Millenium was very much a product of its times in ways that The X-Files was not, which I can't really dispute since I've never seen Millenium. However, I do agree that The X-Files is not as reflective of the 1990's as its premise would suggest. I think that in general on television, most science fiction (such as Star Trek) shows are very intentionally reflective of their societies, while speculative fiction (primarily horror, like Buffy or The X-Files) tends to be more timeless.

Examining the most important shows of the last three decades - Battlestar Galactica for the 2000s, Babylon 5 for the 1990's, and Star Trek: The Next Generation of the 1980's - each seems to deliberately hold up a mirror to the current events of their age.

In Star Trek it's fairly obvious. Every other episode, or more, is built around a moral or ethical statement. Those statements add up to an homage to the concepts of classical liberalism every bit as loving as the American Constitution or the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man." In one episode, a mind-reader uses his powers for personal and political gain, and he is starkly contrasted with Troi, who uses her mind-reading abilities for the good of society. In another, a planet applies to join the Federation and is rejected by Captain Picard on the grounds that they do not give their traumatized soldiers the right to be members of society nor the counseling they need to function within that society, in a scarcely concealed reference to American treatment of Vietnam vets. In one we watched just this week, Picard objects to aliens who seize him and others for experiments not merely on the grounds that kidnapping is wrong, but he specifically declares that it infringes upon the rights of the kidnapped.

Star Trek models late-20th liberal American beliefs. During the Cold War, the West explicitly advertised the rights of its citizens as a major benefit compared to the oppressive Communist regimes it was competing with. Yet it also committed its own crimes against its people and others in the Third World, and The Next Generation tries to make it clear that humanity has moved beyond oppression and hypocrisy, and uses others to show audiences the benefits of such ethical advances.

The end of the Cold War and the fall of Communist states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia changed led many Americans and Westerners to believe that capitalism and classical liberalism were inherently superior as well as the natural state of modern society. Babylon 5, set in 2258, shows a society instantly recognizable as very similar to modern American society, with the same kinds of ideals as well as flaws. Its the politics which are very reflective of the 1990's. The fall of Communism led to chaos in the geopolitics at the time, but also increased hope that international institutions like the United Nations and the European Union would lead to a better and more harmonious future.

Babylon 5 mirrors this state of international chaos and adds an epic space opera plot. Chaos arrives prior to the start of the series with the sudden rise of Humans as major players on the gala-political stage, followed by a foolish war against a more powerful group of aliens, the Minbari. During the course of the show's run, another extremely powerful ancient race of aliens starts meddling in the younger races' affairs, disrupting the balance of power.

B5's implied solution to all of this chaos is to institutionalize it. Put all the different factions in the same organization and ensure that that organization has the power to successfully resolve disputes. In case you miss the metaphor for the U.N., the commander of the station explicitly declares its Babylon 5 Advisory Council to be the galactic equivalent of "Earth's old United Nations" in the pilot.

Over the course of the show's run, the balance of power is dramatically altered, and the Babylon 5 Advisory Council is shattered, much like the toothless League of Nations. The greatest successes of the characters come when they bring the various alien races together in new, stronger alliances. An episode that shows events that occur far in the future seems to indicate that the Interstellar Alliance created late in the show's run becomes an important force for peace throughout the galaxy. Its military arm, the "Rangers," is fetishized throughout the show's run. The Rangers are given more and more power to resolve disputes and interfere with the international affairs of the various governments, and this is generally treated as a good thing. An unnecessary war breaks out when the Rangers aren't allowed to intervene in a situation. It's an homage to liberal interventionism.

Liberal interventionism, or the idea that it is good and right for more powerful groups and nations to try to fix problems in other countries to make those countries better, was at a peak during the 1990's. The Democratic President of the era certainly made the case for it at certain times (with disastrous results in Somalia), but it was the interventions that weren't made which came to dominate discussion. The Shiite rebellion in Iraq after the First Gulf War and its brutal repression by Saddam Hussein fed American guilt for the next decade. The shocking Rwandan genocide of 1994 also seemed to make a strong argument about the need for both a robust international system of resolving disputes and strong United Nations peacekeeping forces. On Babylon 5, this manifested as the Interstellar Alliance and the Rangers.

I don't think the liberal interventionism apparently espoused in B5 is accidental. After the show's conclusion, its creator and driving force, J. Michael Straczynski, worked on a comic called Rising Stars which also seemed to make a case for intervening when the cause is just - one superhero devotes his life to stealing nuclear weapons from every nation on Earth. However, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, a move favored by liberal interventionists but one which turned out to be a disaster, JMS seems to have changed his mind on the subject. In his next comic series, Supreme Power, a group of superheroes start to act as an American intervention force, but are told, essentially, "Yankee go home!" when they encounter a group of African superheroes. They also question their role as personalized instrument of American foreign policy.

The "War on Terror" and its Iraqi theater weigh even more heavily on the dominant SF series of the 2000's, Battlestar Galactica. Making the claim that BSG is a mirror to the politics of the decade is hardly controversial. In the first season, humanity, whose "Twelve Colonies" were structured almost exactly in the form of the American government and military, were attacked by implacable, totally inhuman enemies called Cylons who could take the form of humans. The focus of the early episodes was almost entirely on the difficult decisions that leadership had to make in the face of an existential threat. As if the parallels to the right-wing narrative about the War on Terror weren't obvious enough, then the episodes which specifically focused on hot-button issues like waterboarding, abortion, and the loyalty of critical media hammered it home.

Conservatives, believing that BSG was passing their ideological tests, loved it. Everyone else could admire the storytelling. But things changed in the third season, when humanity, oppressed by Cylon occupation forces, started using suicide bombers as a weapon in their war. Suddenly the politics didn't entirely match, and right-wingers howled betrayal at this plot twist. The certainty with which Americans believed that they were doing the right thing during initial stages of the War on Terror is reflected in Battlestar Galactica, but so too is the muddled mess of the actuality of the Iraq War and popular opinion of that conflict.

The most obvious counter-argument too all of this is that all science fiction is intentionally reflective of its society. I don't think this is the case, however. One of my favorite subgenres of literary SF are the epics from the 1980's and early 1990's, like Dan Simmons' Hyperion, C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station, David Brin's Startide Rising, Sheri S. Tepper's Grass, and Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. All of these novels have striking similarities that put them in a similar subgenre. They generally take place in huge, dangerous universes filled with multiple competing factions, and they focus on a small, specific part of that universe where those various tensions reach a flashpoint. In premise, they are similar to later TV shows like Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but they don't demonstrate the focus on current events that TV shows do.

So why is this the case, and what makes speculative fiction shows so different? I'll discuss what I think the answers to those questions are in the second part of this post, hopefully later this week.

A Brief Chart Illustrating the Collapse of PC RPGs in the Mid-1990's

2010-09-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

Game Series	Previous Release	Mid-1990's Release	Later Release
Might & Magic	IV: Clouds of Xeen 1992	V: Darkside of Xeen 1993	VI: The Mandate of Heaven 1998
Ultima	VII: The Black Gate/ Serpent Isle 1992-93	VIII: Pagan 1994	IX: Ascension 1999
Wizardry	VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge 1990	VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant 1992	8 2001
The Elder Scrolls	Arena 1994	II: Daggerfall 1996	III: Morrowind 2002
Krondor	n/a	Betrayal at Krondor 1993	Return to Krondor 1998
Lands of Lore	n/a	Throne of Chaos 1993	II: Guardians of Destiny 1997
Quest for Glory	III: Wages of War 1992	IV: Shadows of Darkness 1994	V: Dragon Fire 1998

Game Series

Previous Release

Mid-1990's Release

Later Release

Might & Magic

IV: Clouds of Xeen

1992

V: Darkside of Xeen

1993

VI: The Mandate of Heaven

1998

Ultima

VII: The Black Gate/ Serpent Isle

1992-93

VIII: Pagan

1994

IX: Ascension

1999

Wizardry

VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge

1990

VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant

1992

2001

The Elder Scrolls

Arena

1994

II: Daggerfall

1996

III: Morrowind

2002

Krondor

n/a

Betrayal at Krondor

1993

Return to Krondor

1998

Lands of Lore

n/a

Throne of Chaos

1993

II: Guardians of Destiny

1997

Quest for Glory

III: Wages of War

1992

IV: Shadows of Darkness

1994

V: Dragon Fire

1998

Published again

2010-09-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have a new article in The Escapist, called Out of the D&D Closet, about my relationship to the game and my first attempt at playing it.

On Writing

2010-09-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I put up a post here about the history of video games I'm writing. This project is continuing, but I'm having some conceptual and practical issues with it.

I've realized that a full history of games, in the way that I want to write it, is just too big for a book. If I have 20,000 words on Japanese role-playing games in the 1990's, and the average nonfiction book in bookstores is 80,000 words, I've got way too much detail. It needs to be narrowed down in some way. Obviously I can (and will) edit the chapter, but that's as likely to add as it is to subtract.

In a practical sense, there are also just too many games I haven't played, and playing them now is a major time-sink. It also, for the newer games, requires much more money than I have at the moment. So with those two things in mind, I've decided to simply focus on the 1990's (or more accurately, 1990-2001). I believe that it's the most important transitional era in gaming (especially from 1994-1997 or so) and by some happy coincidence, it's also the one I have the most pre-existing knowledge of.

There are still big problems, though. I have over 30,000 words in two and a half chapters (two on JRPGs, half on PC RPGs). Granted, these are the kind of games I'm most interested and knowledgeable regarding, and also some of the most timeless and continually interesting games. But I've been working on this for maybe six months, and expect the book to need about 20 chapters. Two and a half is too little for me to be at now, and 30,000 words is too many.

I feel like I'm going to have to do something to continue narrowing it down conceptually, but I'm not sure what. The most obvious choice would be to divide it between console and PC games, but I'm opposed to that for a few reasons. First of all, I've divided my work so far roughly evenly between them, so it would force me to have to ignore a few months for a while. Second, I don't think the two platform styles are so different. I don't have specific theses for the book, I prefer to see what emerges, but comparing the similarities and differences between console and PC games is one of the main recurring concepts I've written about. That's seriously diluted if I divide them.

If I do manage to complete it and start shopping it around, I'd ideally like it to be a volume in a larger history of at least three volumes, which includes the 1980's and before, and the 2000's +. This adds the extra issue of shopping around the second volume in a series without the first or third. But to be honest, I'd probably be pretty happy about getting the point where I'm shopping a completed book around.

I do think I have at least half of the title: Spoony Bards, Vespene Gas, and the Chaingun Cha-Cha: video games in the 1990s change everything something something.

Lord of the (Lich) Kings, or, There Not Back Again

2010-09-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

I can't go back to World of Warcraft.

I want to sometimes. The new expansion pack certainly appeals to me. I miss the world, the exploration, the camaraderie when times were good. I miss the setting and the storyline and the music. And part of all of that are the reasons I can't go back. Wrath of the Lich King wasn't something that I, as a WOW player and a fan of the storyline of Warcraft III, could miss. And I missed it all - lack of money and decent internet connection being the primary culprits.

For those who don't know. The second expansion pack was the culmination of the storyline started in Warcraft III and its expansion. That game was in large part about the corruption of the human paladin Prince Arthas, and his rise as the Lich King, the embodiment of evil on the world of Azeroth. Although there is some backlash now against Blizzard's overly epic, humorless storylines, I remain a fan of them.

In most story-based video games, the designers seem unwilling to have their villains actually commit atrocities or raise the stakes for the players. Not so with Warcraft III, which not only had villains who did things like kill their father then use his ashes to summon an archdemon, but actually had you, the player, control them on their destructive path. Arthas' rise as the Lich King in the final cinematic of the game represents both the player's great success in finishing the game, and a horrific experience for the game world and its inhabitants, which you also sympathize with after having completed several campaigns in Azeroth. It's a neat little storytelling trick.

World of Warcraft, of course, makes you a character within that world, trying generally to set right the horrors of its predecessor's storyline. The villains of the original WOW release and its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, were occasionally new to the universe, but they were generally progressively more dangerous villains from Warcraft III, leading inexorably to the Lich King in his expansion pack. I played some of the original game, and was a pretty hardcore raider for a few months during The Burning Crusade. I'd say I was invested in the storyline, but that's not entirely true - WOW doesn't have much of a storyline. It might be more accurate to say that I was invested in its representation of Warcraft III's storyline. I liked the feeling that it gave of being one of the small soldiers of the strategy game, but building up to become someone special, capable of heroic feats. And that part of the game was a major part of what I was invested in.

That's not all of it, of course, either on my end or on Blizzard's end. Of course they should continue making expansion packs if people are interested. They have a good game, and they're raking in cash. More power to them! And of course the storyline should continue after Lich King, and of course it's not a bad thing to have the nominal Foozle killed in an early expansion pack (did you know that Everquest has had seventeen expansions?) while your game is still relatively fresh. I will also grant that it's personal. My guild, formed towards the start of The Burning Crusade, collapsed not once but twice. Many of my best friends in the game during that time are no longer playing.

It's just that for me, the biggest appeal of going back to World of Warcraft would be seeing Northrend and fighting Arthas. And I've missed the bulk of that. Everyone will have already done this - and I haven't. The things I might want to do will be played out. Passé. Unpopular both in the colloquial sense and in the sense that the things which require a group to accomplish will no longer have people motivated to do them. It would be like a Star Wars game without the ability to take on Darth Vader, or Lord of the Rings where both Saruman and Sauron had been killed and you were suddenly supposed to believe Smaug was a bigger threat.

This is an odd feeling. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in today's media world, it's almost unprecedented. There is always a fascination with the new - seeing a movie on opening night, or seeing a band as they're starting to make it big, or playing a game system at launch, yes. But by and large, there's also a trend towards making media consistently accessible. Old books, movies, and albums have almost always been available, and games are becoming more and more consistently available due to remakes, emulation, and downloads like the Wii's Virtual Console. Virtually everything can be experienced later on, and sometimes in a better format, than it was when it was initially released.

Except for massively multiplayer role-playing games. For these, you really do have to be there. Many of them have collapsed, and no longer even have servers to play upon. Virtually all of them have expansion packs or major patches which render some or much of their content obsolete or unplayable. As someone interested in media, this concept intrigues me. As a historian who' is interested in video games, it disturbs me. And as someone who is, by nature, curious and wants to know everything about everything, it horrifies me.

So I can't go back to World of Warcraft. It's probably for the best, anyway. I'm hearing good things about The Old Republic anyway. Maybe I'll be ready for a new MMRPG when it comes out.

A Bridge Too Far

2010-08-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

I recently blogged about militarism and war in video games. It's not a subject which is often far from my mind when I think about games. It's come to fore again, which EA in the news for setting their newest Medal of Honor game in Afghanistan, and allowing players to be on the side of the Taliban in multiplayer mode.

This is kind of disgusting. Ghoulish is the word that springs to my mind.

But why do I find it ghoulish? Let's be realistic here. Video games let you play the bad guy and/or do horrible things all the time. In fictional settings, I consider Warcraft III to have one of the most interesting storylines of all time, and part of that includes what is virtually genocide against the human and elvish races. The Bioware/Fallout model of RPG includes good and evil paths for your characters to follow, with the evil path usually involving the wanton slaughter of innocents. Grand Theft Auto games are famously amoral and violent. In Master of Orion II, you can destroy entire planets of your enemies, wiping out billions of people at a time. Games like Wizardry IV, Dungeon Keeper, and Overlord cast you literally into the role of the bad guy, killing heroes over and over.

Those are fictional, of course. How many games put you in the role of playing historical evils? The entire genre of wargames puts its players in roles of dubious morality constantly. I remember how shocked my sister was when she discovered that I was playing as the Confederacy in Sid Meier's Gettysburg. Broader strategy games like Civilization allow you to play as many of history's greatest monsters: Stalin, Genghis Khan, or Mao Zedong. In Rome:Total War, every conquered settlement gives you the option to enslave or exterminate the populace - and choosing one of those is often the most successful strategy.

And then there are the Nazis. World War II-era Germany is the most morally reprehensible state in human history. Other groups or nations have oppressed and killed peoples, or started bloody unjust wars. Only the Nazis made all of those things part and parcel of the functions of the state. Only the Nazis used death camps. And yet playing as the Nazis is built into the fabric of video games. The most popular wargames have consistently been set during World War II. Panzer General, which was credited with saving the genre - for a time - wasn't merely set during WWII, but as the name implied, focused on playing as the Germans. The single-player campaign was only German! First-person shooters allow it as well, of course: Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor to name a few.

It's not merely the present-day setting, however. For over a decade now, multiplayer first-person shooters inspired by Counterstrike have included generic "terrorists" as the opponents to the conventional army in their battles. How much of a difference is there between the apparently generic terrorist of a SOCOM and the specifically named Taliban of the new Medal of Honor? Perhaps others see more of a distinction than I do. Even if you accept that specific modern conflicts should be off-limits, what is the statute of limitations? Holocaust survivors are still alive, yet obviously you can still play as Nazis. Would the first Gulf War be okay? The Rwandan genocide?

What the new Medal of Honor does in allowing you to play as the Taliban is it takes one further veil off of the constant positive portrayals of violence and militarism in video games. It says, nakedly, that video games support war no matter who is fighting. It says that there is no veneer of morality or ethics in mainstream video games. It says that major game publishers just don't care. It's disturbing and ghoulish, but look on the bright side - it'll only seem that way until it becomes normal and shocks have to be delivered another way.

The Sopranos: Season One

2010-07-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

The AV Club has started covering classic Sopranos episodes, which has finally given me the motivation to start watching. Some thoughts on the first season:

The Sopranos is built around tension, but it's a formal tension more than a narrative tension. There is a narrative tension, certainly, involving Tony Soprano attempting to navigate his life as a mob leader with his family life, amongst other things. The formal tension comes from the show's framing device and initial pitch: "a mob boss goes to see a psychologist...." The show walks a fine line between the psychological aspect of the story, which is metaphorical, and the actuality of Tony's life, which is literal.

Most art is, in some ways, metaphorical. It's designed to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. On television, for example, Buffy and her friends don't start out in high school, they start the series in "high school." Though nominally sophomores, they're played by actors and actresses in their late teens or even early 20's. Then again, the show is based on metaphor, using supernatural horrors to stand in for the horrors of high school and later, young adult life. The dialogue goes along with this. Xander, who is supposed to be the geekiest of geeks, is consistently clever and witty, but he does so in a way that represents social awkwardness.

On the other hand, a show like Freaks and Geeks takes a more literal approach. The "geeks" of the title are supposed to be only a year younger than Buffy's group, but the actors are obviously closer to their nominal age. Their social awkwardness actually manifests as awkwardness on-screen. There's still a great deal of metaphor - it's network television, after all - but the stammering and fear actually manifest as a somewhat authentic high school experience, instead of "high school." I'm not saying that a literal approach to television is necessarily better than a metaphorical one - that would be foolish for science fiction fan! - just that it's there.

The Sopranos uses both, though. Tony's interactions with his shrink, Dr. Melfi, are almost entirely metaphorical. They're "therapy" more than therapy. Everything has a direct one-to-one correlation: Tony hallucinates an ideal mother figure when his conflicts with his real mother reach their peak, for example. Tony's interactions with Melfi are generally entertaining, and the idea of 90's therapy, when random drug prescriptions were at their peak is certainly good story fodder (why is Tony on lithium? Why not!). However, the rest of the series is at its best when it's understated and literal. Tony's interactions with his family, for example, or him hanging out with his crew talking about The Godfather.

As the season progressed, I found myself more and more frustrated by this tension. The best episode of the season, "College," was totally therapy-free, and was riveting television. A couple eps later saw "Boca," which took the metaphor outside of the shrink's office, and suddenly had a soccer team, soccer coach, new friends, and a sexual abuse plotline that were all vaguely surreal - and it was easily the worst episode of the season.

The therapy sequences made sense in the pilot. The entire show was a simple pitch: "mob leader sees shrink." For a pilot, this makes sense, as it's like a movie that's asking for sequels. But over time, it becomes a device or worse, a gimmick.

Yet by the end of the series, I found myself less frustrated with the therapy conceit. The Sopranos is a show about its metaphors as well as the literal. It's going to have goofy dream sequences, ham-handed metaphors, and blatant TV-style artificiality. These things don't lessen the show, they force the viewer to watch it critically instead of simply for artificiality, and that way the viewer can see the intentional cynicism and darkness that the characters and setting exude. To put it simply, without the layers of metaphor and formal tension, it would be easy to simply declare Tony Soprano a hero or a villain, someone to root for or against. He is the reason to watch, and the artificiality makes me, as the viewer, say "Why am I watching this? What makes it good and interesting?" And usually, the show has answers to those questions.

Why Can't I Play The Seven Samurai?

2010-07-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Kurosawa Centennial going on at UC-Berkeley this summer, I had the exciting opportunity to see Seven Samurai on film, in a crowded theater. It was an excellent experience - the big screen helped bring out the best of the cinematography and sound, the audience was quite inclined to enjoy Toshiro Mifune's antics, and the film is as always eminently rewatchable despite its length.

As I was watching it, however, I kept thinking "this could be an excellent video game!" There is a distinct - and somewhat surprising - lack of Kurosawa-inspired samurai games. There's the oddity of Seven Samurai 20XX and a Diablo-esque PC RPG Throne of Darkness, neither of which I've played. I have played the 20-year-old classic Sword of the Samurai, which allows for a recreation of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, but not much else.

Kurosawa's focus on ronin and their relationships with society would make fertile ground for a game. In Seven Samurai, it's a group hired by peasants to defend the village against bandits. What makes the peasants better than the bandits, or the samurai different from the those brigands? Yojimbo and Sanjuro utilize the classic plot of a dangerous stranger coming into a town with problems, and he - despite apparently mercenary motivations and disdain for straightforward morality - ends up doing the right thing. This is pure RPG gold! Rashomon's puzzle and ambiguity regarding the truth is a good model for video games, albeit not one which is often followed. Epics like Ran, Throne of Blood, and to some degree The Hidden Fortress do deal with fallen dynasties and pitched battles, but they still focus on the humanity of individual characters.

I could see a Baldur's Gate-style RPG build about Kurosawa's samurai films. A Rashomon-like story could operate as a tutorial, and by the time the player character has skills and strengths, they could move onto villages with problems - like Yojimbo. Gather a party, and defend a village like in Seven Samurai, and more strength and followers leads to epic confrontations like Ran. It could be done, I think, but it would be quite ambitious.

I could see Seven Samurai done as a much less ambitious, fast-playing strategy RPG. Perhaps even as a board game. The player has the ability to customize or randomize the starting position - size of the village to defend, amount of food and money to hire samurai with, size of bandit force, and number of days before the attack. The game starts with the peasants in the town looking for samurai. Once they get one, they have an easier time getting more, but have the tension of time to return and train. Each samurai would be rated for leadership, charisma, sword skill, bow skill, and stealth.

Once back at the village, the player prepares by training the peasants, keeping their morale high, building defenses with fences and floods, and raiding the enemy camp. The tensions of the film could pop up in the game. Maybe the player finds a cache of defeated samurai armor. Use it on the peasants and their combat skills improve, but the samurai morale plummets.

The battle, once it begins, would have difficult-to-control peasant troops fighting the raiders in real time, but with samurai under more direct control. The wonderful graphical representation of the circles with 'x's through them from the film would be easy to transpose to a simple game. I think it could be done in Flash, and playtime would be 20-60 minutes. This is my vision - although it's not one I can make reality anytime soon. I think it could be a lot of fun to play, though.

Militarization and War in Video Games

2010-06-30T13:13:00.001-07:00

Leigh Alexander has an interesting meditation on the discomfort she feels about war in video games, which is certainly worth reading. I feel similarly, but I think there's a point in the history of gaming which made some of these war-and-violence-based games more disturbing to me. As Alexander says, war-inspired games are nothing new:

"Projectiles have been part of gaming since forever," he says, and it's true – early arcades were all about shooting galleries. Think of old-school duels and kids playing cops and robbers; weapons have, in fact, been part of play for a long time. "When you get into the first-person view, shooting continues to be what feels most natural," he says.

The issue isn't necessarily shooting, in my view. It's the creeping advance of militarism into games.

If you look at the evolution of first-person shooters specifically, they've been violent, yes, but the focus has changed dramatically. In Wolfenstein and Doom, the main character was nominally in the military, but in the game world, they were totally cut off from their nation and command structure. Duke Nukem was an unattached action hero stereotype, while Half-Life's Gordon Freeman had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (and a M.S. in KICKING ASS). These characters, whether they were in the military or not, fulfilled the role of the Lone Hero Winning Against Impossible Odds.

Starting in the late 1990's, most notably with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998), games became more overtly militarized. The solitary hero became a part of the machine. Halo is a kind of bridge between the solitary hero model of earlier first-person shooters and the soldier of later shooters. The Master Chief exists within the military, and to some degree interacts with it, but he's also very much a solitary hero. They're human, he's not, really. As the Halo series continues and its mythology becomes more complex, the Master Chief also becomes more normalized within the human military.

The militarization of the first-person shooter ramped up significantly in the start of the 2000's. In addition to games like Rainbow Six and SOCOM, which used real-world or near-real-world militaries, the real United States Armed Forces started directly creating and releasing video games like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.

This all makes sense, I think, in that widespread internet play made team-based games more appealing. The "deathmatch" of early first-person shooters like Doom, in which every player was against every other player, was replaced by squad-based team games like Team Fortress and especially Counterstrike. As first-person shooters turned into first-and-foremost multiplayer experiences, the setting and storyline had to fit this. Duke Nukem and the Master Chief don't make as much sense if there's 20 of them - but opposing army squads work perfectly. There are also already existing tactics and terms used for such combat in the military, so it's a natural fit.

Nowadays, it seems like every major FPS involves players in some kind of military or paramilitary organization. Gears of War and Halo: ODST do it in the future, while Call of Duty did it in the past and now the present, with Modern Warfare.

Although this makes sense in historical context, it also has the effect of changing the perception of the military and war in video games. The events of Doom and Half-Life are extraordinary, with a lone person taking up a gun and using it to survive. They are the solitary hero because they have to be the solitary hero. In games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, the military forces of the state are the enemy. In more recent games, as members of the military, the player is now a representative of the state. And in order for their premises, settings, and storylines to work, video games have to justify the actions of those militaries. This necessarily means that the violence of the state - war - is now the focus of most first-person shooters, instead of survival. And those wars have to be justified and even glorified for the games to work.

For some people, including myself, and apparently Leigh Alexander, this is discomfiting. It should be.

Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn't mention September 11th, which helped engender a surge of militarism in the United States. I think it was important, and possibly even hastened the process, but I suspect that the move towards squad-based, military-style combat would have happened anyway.

Angel: Season Three

2010-06-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

The first season of Angel was defined in large part its relationship with its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the second season by its increasing independence and development of its own voice. That trend continues in the third season. Part of that had to do with network politics, as Buffy switched from the WB to UPN, rendering direct crossovers impossible for Angel S3/Buffy S6. Angel's continuing independence isn't a bad thing, of course, but I can't help but feel that this season of television might have been stronger had Angel felt more connected to its predecessor.

I say this because two of Angel's biggest plot developments are things that Buffy (both the character and the show overall) would love to comment on. Angel goes through some big life changes in season three, including new family and a new flame. Since Buffy recently acquired some new family of her own, learning about Angel's addition would certainly be of interest to her, and Angel's romantic entanglement with her high school rival/friend Cordelia? Well, given how Buffy reacted to Angel giving Faith a hug back in the first season, this would likely drive her ballistic. Yet it's never mentioned.

But I get ahead of myself. Joss Whedon's shows are somewhat notorious for their slow starts, but Angel Season 3 puts the lie to that reputation with a strong set of episodes to begin the season. The third episode, "That Old Gang Of Mine," is particularly strong dramatically, as Gunn is forced to confront his, well, old gang, as they turn aggressively violent. The next episode, "Carpe Noctem," goes comedic as a horny old man switches bodies with Angel in order to score with chicks. The new addition to the team, Amy Acker's Fred, makes herself more and more useful to the team and essential to the show over the course of these episodes.

As all this happens, Angel's murderous progenitor Darla is pregnant with their child, and traveling to see him. This culminates in a strong set of episodes in which the human baby starts to infect Darla with a soul, causing her to become almost good, and Angel and Darla's old enemy, the vampire slayer Holtz, is sent through time to chase them both down. The ninth episode, "Lullaby," isn't just the confrontation between Holtz and Angel, but also Darla giving birth. This is dramatic enough, and well done, but it's a filled with some great - and surprising - laugh-out-loud moments. The combination of tension with comedy is the hallmark of Joss Whedon shows at their best, and "Lullaby" is the strongest of the season.

The middle part of the season, unfortunately, is not as strong as beginning, as life with the new baby, Connor, tends to take on either tired sitcom tropes or equally tired "Defend-the-baby!" storylines. The worst example of the former is "Provider," in which Angel suddenly decides that making money for Connor's future is the most important thing, and by the end of the episode has learned the valuable lesson that money isn't everything. The only Whedon-penned episode of the season, "Waiting in the Wings," sees the team go to the ballet only to discover - surprise! - that all is not as it seems. Angel and Cordelia are forced to confront their growing feelings for each other, and it features an always-welcome appearance by Whedon favorite Summer Glau as the cursed star ballerina.

This otherwise somewhat disappointing stretch of episodes is held together in large part by the superb portrayal of Holtz the vampire hunter by Keith Szarabajka. Holtz is played with a deep, growling malevolence, and the ambivalence of his motivation of vengeance against the vampire who slaughtered his family only adds to his magnetism. This proves important, as the previous antagonists at Wolfram & Hart are much less interesting after season 2, with Lindsay gone and Holland Manners dead. Lilah Morgan, the new embodiment of Wolfram & Hart, just isn't as interesting as Lindsay, and neither are her new rival or her new boss.

Unfortunately, the big plot twist towards the end of the season involves Wesley being deceived into thinking that Angel would kill Connor, and so he kidnaps the baby with Holtz's help. The former part makes sense, but there's no reason for Wesley's plan to involve Holtz, who unsurprisingly betrays Wes. This betrayal, and the total lack of forgiveness from his friends, leaves Wesley in a horribly dark place by the end of the season, and promises fascinating developments in his future. But that doesn't entirely excuse the incoherent kidnapping twist.

Still, Wesley's not the only character going interesting places at the end of the season. Lorne is, literally, as he leaves for Las Vegas. Cordelia is apparently recruited by the Powers That Be to become an angel, or something. Angel's at the bottom of the ocean, and the newly returned Connor has embraced the dark side. I'm looking forward to Season 4, although I know it has something of a mixed reputation.

Hardcore Maleness

2010-06-02T17:18:00.001-07:00

I have an article on gender and marketing in the video game industry up at the Escapist this week! Check it out here.

Baldur's Gate

2010-05-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Bioware, Infinity Engine, Baldur's Gate, and Dungeons & Dragons:

I have a message for you. I'm sorry,

I've talked a lot of crap about Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine in my day. I found it unplayable. I thought that Planescape Torment had many wonderful ideas, mostly rendered frustrating and unworthy of its reputation by the Infinity Engine. And Icewind Dale! Who could have been so entranced by the combat of the prior games that they'd want to play a game of nothing but? Only the most die-hard Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fans, desperate for a computerized version of their tabletop games, that's who.

This was pretty much my argument, though not always so sarcastically.

I like computer role-playing games. It's probably my favorite genre of game. The whole genre owes an obvious debt to Dungeons & Dragons. It was invented purely to simulate D&D. Naturally, I've played a bunch of games based on D&D rules: from Curse of the Azure Bonds and Heroes of the Lance to Dark Sun to Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. And I've never once said "well, that was a classic." There's always been something in the way, usually lack of plot, which makes sense, as the rules which the game is simulating are almost always combat rules. But there may be more to it than that. D&D is designed to be played on the tabletop, where the rules are simple enough that they can be accomplished through dice rolls. This isn't necessary on a computer, of course, which can process two, three, even ten dice rolls at a time! By focusing on modeling the AD&D rules, most of the games ignored the things which made video games good.

At least, this was my argument. And in many ways, it still is. But Baldur's Gate was the chief counter to this argument. Baldur's Gate saved CRPGs in the '90's, according to legend, and certainly put AD&D games back on the map after a lull that decade. It turned Bioware into one of the most respected developers in the industry. Its multiplayer options and even its single-player mode were considered the closest CRPGs had ever come to simulating the tabletop D&D experience.

Ah, but there's the rub, that last bit. I haven't played tabletop RPGs. In fact, it seemed to me that Baldur's Gate was critically acclaimed for being an accurate simulation of tabletop role-playing, something that I didn't really care about. I had no problem with people liking it, of course, but it wasn't me.

A couple weeks ago, however, I suddenly got the urge to play Baldur's Gate again. Maybe it was writing about late-90's JRPG for my book. Maybe it was the discussion I got into about whether Fallout was a direct inspiration for it or not. Maybe it was just time. But I felt the urge, and so I started playing.

I didn't hate it. Hell, I liked it. Rather a lot. Able to sit and play for hours at a time. What had been infuriating was now entirely playable and dare I say it, immersive. So. Bioware, Baldur's Gate, AD&D, and Infinity Engine: it looks like I was wrong. Sorry.

I'm not quite at the point where I'm going to declare Baldur's Gate an all-time classic. Its setting and plot are uninspiring, and it doesn't really do a good job of building and releasing tension over the course of the game. Most of fans don't put it on that pedestal either, saving their love for its sequel (all in good time, Bioware, all in good time). But now I grasp what it was trying to do. I respect it. And I even look forward to playing the other Infinity Engine games: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate II.

This normally doesn't happen. I did give the game a good honest try when it was released. My gut feelings usually stick with me. Sometimes I'll develop a more, ah, nuanced opinion, such as the case of Final Fantasy VII which left me with a bad taste in my mouth in terms of storytelling, but which I've come to love for its gameplay. So why is Baldur's Gate different? If I knew, this would probably be a more interesting blog post (yeah, read to the end for the kicker. Sorry folks!)

Riddley Walker

2010-05-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Last month, the AV Club's "Wrapped Up In Books" group read Riddley Walker, a marvelous post-apocalyptic novel written in an apparently devolved form or English.

Whenever I've spoken with social historians of pre-modern culture, especially medievalists, one of the things they always stress is that the normal state of mind for ancient or medieval was more non-linear, metaphorical, mystical, and unified. Unified in this case means that the mind is constantly in a state of drawing connections between stories, religion, music, and life. In the modern mind, we divide these things up, into different, atomic categories, like television, songs, church, and so on. We logically can draw connections between the different segments of our life, but we know that they are different and treat them as such. I can conceive of how this might affect life, but I really could make no serious claim to understanding it - until I read Riddley Walker.

Riddley Walker accomplishes this not through description or analysis, but through a brilliant use of language. As a post-apocalyptic, far-future novel, it uses a variation on English which initially appears as a devolved kind of dialect. However, the language of Riddley Walker is not a simple 1-to-1 substitution of one word for another, but instead allows the reader to understand the characters and their world in the same way that the characters understand the world themselves. Because the words used by the characters are often a puzzle for the reader, they take on expanded meaning instead of lessened meaning.

To take one word as an example, I was most confused initially by the term "oansome." It is used fairly regularly throughout the book. It means something like "being alone" on the most superficial level, but actually means much more than that. It could be derived from a variety of different terms. "Oan" is used by itself and can mean "own" (as in, "my own self") or "one." "Some" turns it into a descriptor, a state of one-ness or alone-ness. Its apparent rhyme with "lonesome" continues along that thought. However, the southeastern England dialect and tendency to swallow consonants or even entire syllables means that "oansome" could also be derived from "winsome" or "handsome," which imply sexual attractiveness. In the rapacious world of Riddley Walker, sexuality is a danger, and a winsome lass or handsome lad, traveling alone, is a target for rape and possible death.

This would be merely clever if it weren't for the stories within the story that almost overshadow the main narrative. The very first chapter has "Hart of the Wood," an immediately gripping story of cannibalism and Faustian bargains, which makes the statement, I think, that the stories-within-the-story is a necessary and important part of the work. But it's the two stories where the language is different, the "Eusa Story" of chapter six and "The Legend of St. Eustace" of chapter fourteen which make the cleverness of the book's language obvious.

Eusa is the focus of religion and society in Riddley Walker. He's a metaphorical figure whose story is used to illustrate whatever the storyteller wants from the story. He's based on a foundational text - the "Eusa Story."

I was waiting for the "Eusa Story" for the first several chapters. I wanted to know how it happened. I wanted to know who started dropping the bombs and how society was reconstituted. The "Eusa Story" wasn't that. It was better. It established, through the nebulous Eusa. Like "oansome" Eusa doesn't have a straight translation. He's everyman. He's society before the collapse. He's arrogance personified. He's humility personified. Unlike "oansome," Eusa is a religion. The entire "Eusa Story" is an elaborate set of metaphors for nothing and everything, or in the Riddley-world, the 1ce and the 2ce.

I went into the "Eusa Story" expecting to logically understand the world of Riddley Walker in a historical sense. Nothing like that happened. Instead, I came out of it understanding Riddley Walker in a metaphorical sense. Or rather, I understood that metaphor was the only way to understand Riddley Walker.

This is hammered home in the fourteenth chapter, in which Riddley confronts Goodparley, the political leader of Riddley's culture. Goodparley attempts, as his name might indicate, to convert Riddley to his point of view. Goodparley does this first with "The Legend of St. Eustace," the first modern-day text which appears in the story. After reading it, Goodparley and Riddley try to translate it. This is partially hilarious, like when Goodparley translates "hamlets" as small pigs. But as the translation continues, something fascinating and brilliant happens: they stop translating the text to make sense to them, and instead, use the text to make sense of their own world. Via this completely irrelevant little text, Goodparley and Riddley start to figure out scientific truths! The idea of using metaphor to discover scientific truths isn't all that far-fetched, actually. The structure of the chemical compound benzene was supposedly theorized by chemist Friedrich Kekulé after a dream of a worm eating its own tale - the Ouroboros myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Ring_formula).

A fact, the life of St. Eustace, became a myth and a metaphor. That metaphor lived on, becoming a fact again in the nature of the myth, written down. That factual metaphor was discovered by the Ram, who treated it as a simple fact. Their interpretation of it relied on the metaphors inherent to their religion and their language, but those metaphors led them to discover scientific fact.

Here's the thing that makes Riddley Walker so excellent, though. The same thing that makes the "hamlets" pun so entertaining also makes "oansome" meaningful and also "The Legend of St. Eustace" so illuminating to Riddley and Goodparley: the language. By narrowing the English language to fewer words, and blurring the meaning of those words, Riddley Walker encourages us as readers to project our guesses at meaning onto the words. Along with the characters, we puzzle through new ideas and new concepts to try to make sense of the world. The metaphors of the characters are our metaphors as well. In order to understand the book of Riddley Walker, we have to understand the world and mindset of the character of Riddley Walker. We have to enter a world where language, metaphor, religion and science are all intertwined - unified.

It's only in thinking like this that I figure out what Riddley's (and his father's) job is! As "connexion man," Riddley is supposed to make the world make sense to the people of his village. His job is working within these metaphors to bring in external aspects of life. He's part priest, part storyteller, part translator. It's an important role, too, as the chief representatives of the theocratic Ram are the ones who invest the power of the job in him, by scarring his belly.

I think that, while the genius of the book is that it forces the reader to get into its mindset to read it, it also, in the end, rejects that mindset. Riddley Walker, over the course of the story, seems to discover or at least begin to uncover the idea of a goddess religion of sex, birth, and life. He also discovers a Punch doll, then the Punch story from Goodparley, and ends the book in a traveling troupe of storytellers. The stories that he's trying to tell are, at least in name, specifically non-religious. He has to make that disclaimer in order to try to tell the story, and he still starts a fight with his heresy!

But Riddley doesn't understand it as heresy. Hell, he doesn't even seem to understand it as new. He believes that he's acting against power, and in a sense, is undermining the hierarchical theocrats in the Ram. However, he may be building a different kind of power, which could be even more important than the gunpowder which drives the main plot. Riddley is building literature, and with it, he may be beginning the process of atomizing the metaphors which are the foundations of his world.

Angel: Season Two

2010-04-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

The second season of Angel is a bit of a mixed bag, but in it, the show begins to find its form outside of its origins as a Buffy spinoff. In the first season, Angel was still indebted to its parent enough that its most memorable episodes and most of its characters came from Buffy. In Season Two, the crossovers are rarer, and Buffy herself doesn't appear at all. Angel has its own story now, for better or worse.

The season also marks a departure from the Buffy form of "Big Bad," single-season based storytelling. Several different stories weave in and out of the season, with varying degrees of resolution. At times, it's almost a straight-up serial with very little of the Monster-of-the-Week storylines which drove the first season.

The first few episodes are marked by Angel's lethargy, as the newly resurrected Darla and Wolfram & Hart begin fiddling with his sleep schedule. He's able to go through the motions, but his mind, and often body, and elsewhere. When Darla finally makes her physical appearance, Angel becomes obsessed. It is somewhat frustrating in that the audience knows who's behind Angel's dreams of Darla and why, but he doesn't know for several episodes. The frustration, of course, is thanks to the inherent drama of the reappearance of Angel's sire and the knowledge of their inevitable confrontation, delayed until the fifth episode.

The confrontation is somewhat cathartic, but leads to Angel's Darla-obsession coming to the fore, further alienating his co-workers. The rest of the Angel cast is increasing in both complexity and charm through the second season. The addition of the vampire-fighting gang leader Gunn to the crew is an especially good touch, as he adds a good mix of comedy and drama. Wesley's character continues his improvement, particularly in the episode "Guise Will Be Guise" in which he impersonates Angel. Later developments cement him as a leader as well as simply an expert in demonology.

However, it is Cordelia who steadily becomes the show's strongest character. By the end of the season I was about ready to declare her the best character of the Buffyverse. Her transition from Homecoming Queen Bitch to a powerful character in her own right has been almost seamless, especially once she switched from Buffy to Angel. I've always liked the dynamic that Cordelia brings to the shows, but now she's becoming likable as well, without sacrificing the humor she began with.

Angel's confrontation with Darla and the law firm lead to some of the season's strongest moments. He fights Darla, as well as attempting to turn her to good, as Wolfram & Hart continue hoping to push him to evil through her. Angel's quest comes to a peak in the ninth episode, "The Trial," in which he finally through stubbornness and heroism manages to convince Darla to accept her mortality. Naturally, this is almost immediately followed by the shocking re-emergence of Drusilla, who turns Darla to a vampire again as Angel is forced to watch, helpless.

The entire season so far built to that point, and the remainder seemed to stumble, unsure of where it was going. Angel becomes obsessed with revenge against Drusilla and Darla, turning dark - if not evil - and firing Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley. In theory, this is a brilliant twist. In practice, it's awkward, forcing Angel to go all dark and the rest to turn almost entirely comic. Occasionally it works, like when Angel smokes a cigarette and then uses it to torch Darla and Drusilla, or when Wesley solves a crime a la Cluedo. But generally it's awkward (especially when Angel resorts to clumsy narration in lieu of talking to people), and a relief when Angel gets out of his funk and the gang gets back together.

Like its sibling, Buffy's Season Five, Angel improves in quality in its last third. In its best episode, "Dead End," the primary antagonist at Wolfram & Hard, Lindsay, receives a replacement hand for the one he lost in the first season finale. Lindsay quickly comes to realize the hand is evil and has a will of its own. This tips him over the edge, finally causing a break with Wolfram & Hart, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory - slapping Lilah's ass, shooting a security guard in the foot, threatening a board room, and explaining it all away with a gleeful declaration of "Evil hand!"

Towards the end of the season, the show breaks from formula and veers into a completely different direction, offering a four-part serialized string of episodes in a demonic dimension, more akin to a fantasy movie than the L.A. setting of the show. It's a quality run of episodes, with each character's development being highlighted: Cordelia's vanity is tempered by responsibility; Angel's heroism always threatened by the monster within; Wesley's leadership role forces him to make hard decisions with clarity; and Gunn tries to do the right thing while being pulled in multiple directions. Lorne, an empathic demon with a musical soul, who had been in and out of the series all season finally starts being treated like one of the main group, and the crew also rescues Fred, a mentally damaged supergenius played by the gorgeous Amy Acker, who officially joins the cast soon after.

It's a solid, if unspectacular, finish to a season with plenty of ups and downs. The second season of Angel doesn't quite put it on a level with Buffy the Vampire Slayer just yet, but much more than the first season, it says that it's possible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five

2010-04-18T21:04:00.001-07:00

The premiere of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire serves as something of a microcosm for the entire season. "Buffy vs. Dracula" is, for the vast majority of the episode, is an occasionally weird, occasionally funny episode with a few character quirks. Then, at the end, the show pulls the rug out from under the viewer's feet:

Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"

This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.

Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.

Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.

The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.

This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.

In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.

"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.

Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.

The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.

Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.

The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.

This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.

However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.

TOP 5:

1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.

2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.

3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.

4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.

5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.

Fallout 3

2010-04-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

Fallout 3 is a game with history. It has antecedents like Fallout 1 & 2 or Morrowind and Oblivion; it has a fully fleshed out game world; it has a full role-playing system. These are all valid, if entirely obvious, points to discuss for comparison. However, playing the game itself evokes a different kind of feeling. The slow uncovering of a game world filled with interesting nooks and crannies evokes the best aspects of the exploration-based Castlevania and Metroid games, while the role-playing system successfully melds Fallout with a first-person shooter.

Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.

This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.

That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.

A New Project

2010-04-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

I am writing a book. I've been working on it for about six weeks, and I've got over ten thousand words. This is significantly more than any other book project I've started, which includes a few novels in the past, and a brief poke at trying to write on the Antioch situation. This time, more successfully, I'm choosing to write about something I've already done much of the research on - the history of video games.

It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:

The history of video games can be told in an interesting fashion using genre as a lens. It's how gamers perceive games, and it keeps the focus on the games, instead of on the designers, corporations, or technology.
I've probably played enough games to be able to do this well. Whenever lists of "The All-Time Greatest" or "The Most Influential Games" come out, I've played most all of them.
I think at this point, I have the writing ability and longevity to do it.

I've already written around 10,000 words, mostly on Japanese/console RPGs in the 1990's, at the suggestion of FF7 fan Renaissance Poet. The relative ease with which I've managed to do this may cause problems later on, as JRPGs have had maybe the most thought and argument poured into them of any genre, and likewise, I can make the claim that I've played many of the most important of them, so don't really need much research.

On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.

After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.

A History of Histories

2010-03-25T21:39:00.001-07:00

In A History of Histories, British historian John Burrow sets himself a nearly impossible task in the title of the book alone. Impressively, he succeeds, describing the general form of history in the west in a single volume, and even more impressive is the fact that he makes it entirely readable.

Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.

If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.

A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.

Obvious Influence: The Philip K. Dick Reader

2010-03-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

American science fiction is generally divided into a Golden Age from the 1940's to the 1960's or so, when the giant names of Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, and more wrote. The transition between their short, pulp novels or entertaining short stories to today's modern science fiction isn't always easy to grasp, but reading a set of Philip K. Dick stories all at once, such as the collection in The Philip K. Dick Reader demonstrates where that transition may have taken place.

The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.

The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.

The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.

The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.

The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.

The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.

Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.

Fallout 3 - Antici...PAtion

2010-03-18T02:04:00.000-07:00

I have Fallout 3 and I'm not playing it.

This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?

Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.

Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.

Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.

Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.

Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.

And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.

Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.

Promethea

2010-03-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

My rave review of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III's Promethea is up, here. I'm not posting it in full here only because Lunch's picture capacity is much better, and some of it really should be seen.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Best Kind of Sequel

2010-02-27T19:31:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to do sequels in the video game world, but the most common can be summed up as "More of the same, only better." Keep what was good about the original game, tweak the things that can be improved upon, and fix anything that was broken. By that logic, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is a resounding success.

The primary problem with the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a lack of easily accessible information. The GBA's screen was just too small and low-res to contain the large amounts of information a relatively complex RPG really needs, and the move to the DS fixes the problem as expected. It also adds more quests, more classes, more races, and a few other innovations that generally work to the game's benefit.

The worst of the new innovations are a set of quests called Clan Trials, which offer significant benefits, but can be excruciatingly repetitive. Also, the twenty new classes and two new races are somewhat weak, as many of the classes are redundant or even outright bad, although there are a few gems like Raptors and Tricksters.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also has some fun with traditional RPG tropes. The characters at one point talk about how, death is rare in the game world thanks to healing magic and resurrection items, winking and nodding at decades of RPG fans who've made the same point. Even better than that, FFTA2 fixes the age-old RPG problem of new-town/better-items by adapting Final Fantasy XII's "Bazaar" system, where defeating enemies gives the player random items which can be traded in to unlock new items. The plot, meanwhile, is trifling, and the game realizes this and happily spends virtually no time on it, recognizing that the player wants more questing, less talking.

Square Enix has their tactical RPG form honed to a science, and it shows with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Veterans of the form will find significant improvements and interesting new quests, while newcomers to the genre will discover a game that's fast and easy to play, but filled with action and complexity. Highly recommended.

Okami: This Is Not The End, My Wolfy Friend

2010-02-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

Okami is a beautiful, interesting game and will get the full review it deserves soon enough, but for now, I'm interested by its beginning. Or middle. Possibly end. I'm not entirely sure. Either way, the first major section of the game is either a bizarre, poor game design decision, or a brilliant subversion of the heroic form.

The storyline of Okami is fairly similar to most other fantasy-based games - there's an ancient evil, a rebirth of an ancient hero, a quest to discover magical items to defeat the ancient evil, and so on. That's all fairly straightforward, but what's not is that that part of the game ends after 10-15 hours of play. The Big Bad, an ancient many-headed serpent named Orochi, is the focus of the game's intro and the entire plot of the game at first, complete with prophecies and quests to get items to weaken him. Then, all of the sudden, before the player has collected all of their powers, they are suddenly pushed into Orochi's sealed cave, a long, puzzle and combat-filled dungeon complete with heroic music implying that this is indeed the final confrontation with ultimate evil.

There are a few clues that it's not quite the ending that it seems to be. The game offers a wide range of collectibles, as most action/adventures do, and the player certainly won't have a complete collection of magic, items, or the various other tchotches involved in Okami. But it's still not quite so overwhelmingly obvious that I wasn't concerned that I'd missed out on half the game.

This is, generally, poor game design. If the player feels like they've completed the game, they're more likely to shelve it. If there were a Star Wars game which involved the destruction of the Death Star and death of the Emperor, a final level involving wandering around Endor picking up the garbage probably wouldn't go over terribly well.

On the other hand, Okami isn't a terribly serious game, and there's plenty of reason to believe that the heroic fantasy faux-ending isn't so much a game design failure as it is an elaborate joke. In the game world, the ancient evil was vanquished by a legendary hero and a wolf-god sidekick. The player becomes the wolf-god Amaterasu, and the ancient hero's descendant, Susano, works alongside Amaterasu in order to defeat the Big Bad. In most games, the player would be Susano, fulfilling his destiny and defeating all evil everywhere, then hooking up with his sweetheart at the end.

The subversion comes from Susano's character. He's an incompetent boob and drunken layabout who is basically guilt-tripped into trying anything at all, and once he does make any attempt at being a heroic warrior, it's only the efforts of the player, who uses magic to make Susano appear competent, which make him succeed.

If the first part of Okami is viewed as Susano's story, it's an amusing satire of fantasy game tropes. The hero is a shiftless dreamer who is forced into action, and then, based entirely on the help of his sidekick, succeeds in destroying evil and getting the girl (his village's sake brewer). Amaterasu may spend a good 15 minutes defeating the Big Bad, but Susano skates in and does his super-secret evil-destroying technique which finishes an already-completed job.

Unfortunately Okami doesn't make its satire explicit, which leads me to wonder if the scenario creators intended to satirize generic game plotting at all, or if they just stumbled into an interesting concept and stumbled right back out with a bit of genre-savvy winking at the audience.

Genres Aren't Going Anywhere

2010-02-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

I've been running a little roughshod over the comments on this post at the Brainy Gamer, when it's really well worth a post of my own.

The post is mostly about Mass Effect 2, but makes more dramatic statements about the nature of game genres at the moment:

More than ever, genre categories seem like arbitrary labels we apply to games so they can be properly shelved.

I tend to disagree with this, and it might be in part because I'm not "in the now" in game industry terms. In general I try to step back thanks to my history-based lens, but it's even more apparent in that I really haven't played very many new games or been immersed in the gaming press for the past five years or so. It all kind of looks the same to me - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that I'm very hesitant to say that any new game will be so important that it breaks down genre boundaries.

There are a few reasons for this. First, I tend to think that genres are a necessary part of human existence. We categorize information. They're shortcuts, or hacks, which allow us to judge new info quickly, and act on it accordingly. Sometimes this doesn't work perfectly, of course, and more often it requires major caveats along the lines of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic movie that's funny, but there's no way in hell that it's a romantic comedy" sort. But these caveats, which critics like myself may focus on, don't negate the inherent use of classification. There will always be a use for if-you-like-x-you-may-like-y.

Second, as long as genres have existed, genre-bending has existed. As I mentioned in the comments, Deus Ex was a first-person shooter role-playing game, and Quest for Glory was a role-playing adventure game, and modern action sports games like Madden have long-term strategic "franchise" modes. A single example of a game isn't enough to indicate that genre-bending is bigger now than it was then. Sometimes great games which fit between-genres redefine their genres, like franchise modes in Madden, whereas in the case of Quest for Glory, they might just be interesting experiments. If you'd asked me in the late '90's which game was more likely to redefine the computer role-playing game, Fallout or Diablo, I'd have said Diablo in a heartbeat. It had the critical and commercial consensus, and was immediately accessible. Yet Diablo has barely spawned clones, let alone a genre, whereas the Fallout style of gameplay, through Bioware, has become the default for CRPGs.

Even if does demonstrate a pattern where FPS/RPGs become common, then that's not going to eliminate the concept of genres: it'll create a new genre. Way back in the '80's, there were adventure games based around using items to solve puzzles, and there were action games which were often real-time reflex-based games. When games like The Legend of Zelda started combining puzzles with reflexes, the previous genres didn't disappear, instead they created the Action/Adventure genre!

Bamboozled, or, Blackface is Bad The Movie

2010-01-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Southland Tales, calling it the most bizarre major studio movie of our era. Bamboozled is the only film I've seen that can really be considered competition. But while Southland Tales is an incoherent mess, it's still a single incoherent mess. Bamboozled, on the other hand, suffers from severe Multiple Personality Disorder.

The main part of Bamboozled acts as a kind of race-tinged Network with a dash of The Producers. Damon Wayans stars as the only black writer for a major network, who gets called out by his boss (Michael Rapaport) for his tame, Cosby-like show pitches. Wayans decides to prove...something or another by pitching a show so hideously racist that his boss will understand...I really don't know. One of the major problems with the film is that both the characters and the film itself appear to have no real concept of cause-and-effect. At any rate, Wayans' pitch is Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Because the film takes place in something that only superficially resembles reality, the hideously racist variety show somehow becomes a massive hit. Hilarity fails to ensue.

Network took a similarly absurd premise and generally made it work, based on superb over-the-top performances from its cast, thanks to dramatic monologue after dramatic monologue. Bamboozled's cast can't hold its own. Wayans' annoying affectation of an accent helps bring most scenes around him to a screeching halt, and Jada Pinkett Smith is merely competent in a film that demands insanity. The smaller characters are often better, such as Mos Def's inane radical rapper, who demands to not be called by his slave name, instead as his revolutionary chosen name: Big Black African. (note: most clips are rather not safe for work if you don't have headphones.)

When Mos Def and Michael Rapaport's characters are on-screen, the film starts to work as a satire or parody filled with outsized characters, absurd situations, and a devastating critique of the kind of institutional racism which masquerades as multiculturalism and tolerance. The high point of the film occurs when, once the New Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a hit, the network brings in a PR guru to counter claims that the show might be racist. Wayans is still operating under the impression that he's making the show to prove the point that the show is bad (or whatever), and skillfully eviscerate the consultant's defense of racism:

(consultant scene begins at roughly 8:12 and continues into Part 8)

These scenes are from a movie I'd love to see. They just happen to collide with another movie I'd also be interested in seeing, and the collision turns out terribly for all involved. It often feels like, during the creation of the film, Spike Lee came across so much intense historical footage of blackface, sambos, and minstrel shows that he wanted to make a documentary about just how ghastly this stuff was, and how it still pervades our culture. Several montages of these historical artifacts, as well as a collection of Sambo dolls Wayans begins to collect, and some beautifully tragic scenes where the actors put on their blackface in the traditional fashion show Lee's unsuppressed rage and sadness. They also never mesh with the Network-like satire or the disposable relationship drama of the rest of the film. More than anything, most of Bamboozled feels like several unrelated scripts thrown together, with actors playing the same characters while the tone, style, and plot change from scene to scene, almost totally inexplicably - it's often downright amateurish.

The end of the film, which follows Network's lead into over-the-top violence and tragedy, just makes things worse. Wayans, at some point, inexplicably changes from hating his show to being its staunch defender, and everything just falls apart from there. It ends with Wayans repudiating the entire minstrel show concept, destroying his entire collection of Sambos, and closes on a montage of minstrely and sambos. The montage is shocking and powerful, and includes thingslike tiny Shirley Temple dancing in a minstrel show, but it ends the film on a simplistic, unsatirical note: blackface is bad!

Gateway to Geekery: Babylon 5

2010-01-13T18:11:00.000-08:00

Babylon 5 is perhaps the only television show ever to have a multi-year plot structured in advance of its creation, and the follow-through for that is entirely effective. However, the plotting is so far-sighting, that it can be initially imposing - particularly given that the pilot movie and first season of the show are occasionally less-than-competent.

I was a fan when it aired, and, with some trepidation, I decided to rewatch it again recently. Happily, the show was still good, and easily held its own against other 90's SF, like Buffy or The X-Files. The Renaissance Poet watched it as well for the first time, and since she didn't have a nostalgia cushion, so I decided to blast through the crap and get to the good stuff. By and large, it worked.

There's another minor complication - particularly in the first and second seasons, episodes aired out of order. I don't know if this was fixed for DVD releases. I do know that seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu are in airing order, not proper order. Generally this isn't terrible (it wasn't gutted like Firefly) but occasionally watching in the proper order makes the show make much more sense, especially in season 2. A master chronological list is available here. Bookmark it!

Season 1

Season 1 is the most iffy of all the Babylon 5 seasons. First of all, as a television show, B5 was struggling to find its footing, especially given that no science fiction show other than Star Trek had ever aired successfully on American TV. Second, the plot of B5 unfolds slowly, and it's hard to see it as anything other than a procedural/monster-of-the-week show most of the time.

It's easiest to sort the episodes into three categories - those critical for the main story (which are also generally the best episodes), watchable episodes which bring up somewhat important character or universe background, and those which are just plain bad.

The best way to go about watching the season is to watch the first two episodes, in my view. If you think "Hey, this is fantastic!" then watch 'em all. If you think it's moderately interesting, then watch the first two categories. If your patience is tested...well, sorry about that, but it does get good. I swear. Watch the critical episodes and get to Season 2 as quickly as you can.

Critical Episodes

1-01 - "Midnight on the Firing Line"
1-02 - "Soul Hunter"
1-05 - "Parliament of Dreams" *
1-06 - "Mind War"
1-08 - "And The Sky Full of Stars"
1-13 - "Signs and Portents"
1-16/17 - "A Voice in the Wilderness" pt. 1/2 **
1-18 - "Babylon Squared"
1-21 - "Legacies" *
1-22 - "Chrysalis"

* In terms of plot, these aren't absolutely necessary. However, they both introduce important characters, and are better-quality than others.

** If you're really, really disliking the show after the first couple of episodes, skip to this one. It's early B5 at its best - good character development, interesting storyline, and for the first time, it has a successful sense of humor! If this doesn't grab you, it may be that nothing will.

Watchable Episodes
1-03 "Born to the Purple" *
1-09 "Deathwalker"
1-10 "Believers"
1-12 "By Any Means Necessary"
1-15 "Eyes"
1-19 "The Quality of Mercy" *

* These episodes are directly referenced later on, more than once in certain cases, so they're somewhat important. On the other hand, they're not terribly good, particularly "Born to the Purple." A plot summary may be the best way to go.

Eminently Skippable

1-04 "Infection" (this is pretty clearly the single worst episode of the entire five seasons)
1-07 "The War Prayer"
1-11 "Survivors"
1-14 "Grail"
1-20 "TKO"

Season 2

Most of the second season is a step above the first in quality and importance. One episode, though, just kind of raises a stink: 2-04 "A Distant Star"

The Movies

Babylon 5 had one pilot movie, and five other made-for-TV movies.

"The Gathering" - This is the pilot movie, and has several problems. First of all, it's kind of bad. Second, it was scored by a totally different composer than the rest of the series, and B5's music is one of its most distinctive and good qualities. It was later re-edited for TNT with proper music and some of the crap eliminated, but it's still not terribly good. I advise skipping it, or watching the edited version after you're sure you like the series.

"In the Beginning" - A prequel movie made for TNT. It's a little contrived, but has some occasional moments of excellence. I would recommend watching it, at one of three points: as the entry into B5; after the two-parter in season 3; or when it was produced, between seasons 4 and 5.

"Thirdspace" - Made at the same time as "In the Beginning," it's kind of a reimagining of Babylon 5 as a big dumb action movie, and reasonably successful at that. Watch after its chronology at any time (around the middle of Season 4).

"River of Souls" - Set after the end of the last normal episode, but before the grand finale. It's pretty good. Watch anytime in the second half of the fifth season.

"A Call to Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers" - Two pseudo-pilots for spinoffs, one of which came to be, the second of which didn't. I didn't like "A Call to Arms" and I heard "Legend of the Rangers" was worse. I'd skip 'em.

In conclusion, I am a geek.

Glee: It's gonna be a bumpy ride

2010-01-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

Glee has a wonderful premise for a show, and it happily lives up to the promise of that premise much of the time. Its combination of wicked humor, talented performers, the fertile setting of a high school glee club all combine to make a show that seems like it can't miss, right?

When it plays for farcical laughs, Glee is great, and when it adds songs that play off that energy, it's fantastic. However, most of the time, it doesn't do that. Glee has a big problem: it can't decide if it's Arrested Development with songs or Desperate Housewives with songs. There is a lot of melodrama. An excess of melodrama. Mostly involving babies. For several episodes in a row, the main plot was something involving one character's pregnancy. It's not terribly funny, and because we don't really know the characters, it's not terribly moving. It's like the Simpsons quote: "There is no moral, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

Glee is occasionally praised for its insane energy with regard to plots and subplots, but in the first season of a show, that can often mean burnout. It's occasionally compared to The O.C. and Grey's Anatomy, two shows that lost a lot of their drive early on, but it reminds me most of Battlestar Galactica. That too had a sensational pilot and first thirteen episodes, but it just moved so quickly that it forced the writers to come up with more and more outlandish things as the show moved on, eventually resulting in a near-complete collapse. Glee is moving faster and doesn't have as much of a core. At the rate it's going, it could be a disaster by the middle of the second season.

There is some hope, though, but only if the writers manage to pull it together. Glee focuses on the teachers and adults as people more than its teen-aged students, who only occasionally move beyond one-dimensional stereotypes into, well, two-dimensional stereotypes. If it takes some time and turns them into people instead of Wheelchair Guy or Asian Kid and Other Asian Kid, it should be able to take a deep breath and improve its quality. In roughly the same number of episodes, Freaks and Geeks managed to make its student characters three-dimensional and likable - Glee can too.

Second, Glee's music choices vary wildly, and they represent two different visions for the show. The first vision is of Glee as musical theater. This is when the show takes itself literally. A kid who's sad decides to sing a sad song. The plot exists to provide a vehicle for the characters to experience emotional swings, and sing about those swings.

I tend to get tired of Glee when it goes in this direction. The serialized nature of television, combined with the melodrama required to make the musical theater work, seems like it contrives to make every episode end on one character gazing longingly at another/into the distance, singing about how sad they are, while the energy required to maintain the melodrama simply cannot last. The songs also tend to be montages, and decidedly unrealistic in a way that musical theater just can't do.

The other version of Glee is a a comic show about musical theater. Much of the time, Glee works this way. The music is diegetic and, in order to work within the show, it has to resort to absurd and farcical situations. The best example of this is, of course, "Single Ladies:"

Making the show about a musical theater troupe, instead of musical theater itself, also allows for the occasional take-the-brakes off number, where hey! This cast is talented. Let's let them show just how damn talented they are, in exactly the kind of competition that glee clubs do. The final episode of the first 13, "Sectionals," finally allows Lea Michele and the rest of the cast to show off just how well they can sing.

I hope that Glee's show-runners get together and figure out just what kind of show they're doing, and go with it full-force. But that's just a hope. I expect that it'll burn out within a year or so. Which is unfortunate. Still, it's fun now, and it should be fun for a while.

Lust, Caution

2009-12-21T20:08:00.001-08:00

Ang Lee may be the most interesting and gifted director alive today. He's done comedies of manners (Sense & Sensibility), comic book adaptations (Hulk), martial arts epics (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), trifling comedies (Taking Woodstock), and the quintessential gay romance of our times (Brokeback Mountain), amongst others. In 2007, he branched out even further, to the near-pornographically sexy Lust, Caution.

It must be said, right off the bat, that I'm a sucker for resistance stories about the amorality and difficult choices in occupied territory. World War II, with Germany and Japan trying to take over the world, is the best recent setting for such storytelling, although it's usually in Nazi-occupied territory like Paris. For Lust, Caution, Ang Lee chose Japanese occupied coastal China, which may arguably be even more fertile territory for storytelling.

20th-century China was a nation falling apart and constantly reinventing itself at the same time. The last imperial dynasty, the Qing, had been overthrown and replaced with a constitutional republic, which was threatened by warlord-based civil war as China had seen dozens of times in its between-dynasty history. As the republicans began to win the civil war, a new communist movement started gathering momentum, and the Japanese began to attack Chinese possessions in 1937, when the film begins. The film is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai, two major coastal cities which also served as two of the main entries for non-Chinese into China. Shanghai, in particular, was one of the cosmopolitan centers of East Asia, with enclaves of Japanese, American, English, German, French, and more inside the city. The political nature of the time and setting allowed a massive importation of "Western" ideas into China - republicanism and communism being two obvious examples.

The film begins with a flash-forward in which we meet the protagonist, Tang Wei, a student in Hong Kong. She and a friend are quickly recruited by a handsome man and a theater troupe. The politics of the main characters are quickly made apparent when the friend suggests they do a play of Henrik Ibsen's. Ibsen was a favorite around the world of those inclined towards republican and bourgeois ideals, especially in China. The young actor shoots this down as too bourgeois, and recommends a patriotic play to help China win the war, a tacky little piece of socialist realism that wins instant patriotic success. The little troupe doesn't want to just be actors, however, and begins to plot against traitorous collaborators.

Although the film doesn't expressly say it, they're entirely incompetent other than Tang Wei, who is also the least willing to join in, but does so to chase a crush. She succeeds in getting into Leung's social circle, and is ready to start an affair with him in order to facilitate the assassination, when things suddenly go wrong and she sees just how violent and amoral her friends can be.

When the film picks up again three years later in Shanghai, Tang Wei's friends have found here - and Tony Leung - and recruit her again to achieve the same goal. She goes along with them again, but only after seeing that her life is even more cast adrift than it had been - her family life has gone to hell, and she doesn't appear to have any new friends, and only escapes into movies.

Once the the resistance recruits Tang Wei back into the plot to kill Leung, she returns to a world of carefully tailored dresses and endless games of mah-jong, combined with stilted flirtations with Leung, a poised, careful gentleman of the collaborationist government.

Everything in the film at this point, like Tang Wei, is brilliantly conceived, but empty artifice. There's a plot, there are characters, and it's all gorgeous, but it not real. It's an act. And when Tony Leung and Tang Wei finally consummate their flirtation, both the characters and the film tear away the artifice in a shockingly intense, brutal sex scene.

As the affair continues, Tang's alienation from her life continues - her resistance contacts prove to be shockingly incomprensive of her desperation, even when she breaks down and screams it at them. A romantic advance from her former crush proves awkward and rebuffed for being far, far too late - she is completely attached to her affair with Leung.

Tony Leung, meanwhile, is absolutely superb (as always) as Mr. Yee, the chief of police of the collaborationist government. His performance gives the impression that he is a perfect gentleman, stuck in a terrible situation outside of his control. Early in the film, it even seems like he might be likable enough that the young resistance troupe are entirely in the wrong to want to assassinate him. Slowly his character is revealed to be a despicable sadist, albeit a recognizably human one.

It is when he shows Tang Wei a moment of human kindness that everything unravels. When it occurs, it seems clear that she hasn't had a moment like that since the very start of the film, and her reaction is both entirely human and horrifically stupid. She is revealed as totally compromised, and her character is shown as starkly naked as the sex scenes for which the film is famous.

Lust, Caution is not an easy film to watch - no good resistance movie should be - but it is a stunningly beautiful, deeply compelling one. Highly recommended.

The Hidden Fortress: Flawed Experiment

2009-12-07T17:44:00.000-08:00

Akira Kurosawa is one of the most influential storytellers in the history of cinema, using primarily samurai-based films to toy with different narrative devices. Arguably the most well-known of these is Rashomon, whose method of different people telling irreconcilable variations of the same event has become something of a subgenre on its own. The Hidden Fortress tells a fairly epic story: a samurai family has been crushed in battle, and now its final heir and loyal general must try to escape to safety with the family treasure. However, Kurosawa attempts to tell the story through the lens of two peasants caught up in the middle of the war.

The idea of telling an epic story from the point of view of the little people involved is respectable, and can produce marvelous results. The primary problem with The Hidden Fortress, however, is that Kurosawa takes two characters who are usually minor stereotypes in stories like this, and expands their roles dramatically while leaving the characters as stereotypes. In this case, the two peasants are greedy, selfish cowards, concerned only with making a quick buck and saving their own skin. Kurosawa may have some insulation against charges of classism by having another lower-class character introduced later in the film, but while she is more noble, she's still primarily a trait (loyalty) over a well-developed character.

The story of a young princess suddenly thrust into full responsibility for her entire family and nation, while a loyal - but defeated - general (played by Kurosawa favorite Toshiro Mifune) attempts to deal with her stubbornness and grief is a strong core, and many of the film's best scenes focus on that. It's just something of a pity that the story is watered down by the often-grating antics of the two-dimensional peasants.

A modern description of The Hidden Fortress is somewhat incomplete without mentioning its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. Lucas is a huge Kurosawa fan, and the Criterion edition of the film includes an interview with him on Kurosawa's influence. The Hidden Fortress is most often cited as the direct inspiration for the characters of R2D2 and C3PO in the roles of the two peasants (although the robots are much less obscene and violent). The opening of The Hidden Fortress begins with the two fighting, separating, then becoming captured and enslaved before an unlikely reunion, much like the beginning of A New Hope.

It's also easy to see Kurosawa's influence on Star Wars in perhaps the best scene of the film, a duel between Toshiro Mifune and an enemy samurai.

The slow buildup of dramatic tension, followed by moments of dramatic action combined with the use of terrain and props bring to mind the best lightsaber duels from Star Wars, most notably the finale of The Phantom Menace, arguably the best section of all three prequel movies.

Although I've been fairly critical of it, The Hidden Fortress is still a fairly likable film, but it pales in comparison to some of Kurosawa's other masterpieces. Star Wars fans and Kurosawa fans should find it extremely interesting, but a Kurosawa newbie may be better off with The Seven Samurai or Rashomon.

The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1

2009-12-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

See also:

The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26

The 10 Best Albums of the Decade

25. "Run" - Gnarls Barkley
My favorite Gnarls Barkley song. Almost impossible not to throw up my arms at the background 'wah!'s.

24. "Rehab" - Amy Winehouse
The most bitterly ironic song of the decade. Although I don't think all of Amy Winehouse's stuff is as fantastic as some do, songs like this show that she can be something special. So get off the crack and into the recording studio, lady!

23. "Entertain" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney's breakup wasn't all that surprising, especially as their later albums added more and more songs like this one, dealing with the perils of fame. With its thudding drums and intense riffs, this song may have been the best combo of the fuzzed-out classic rock of their final album and the anthemic punk of their earlier work.

22. "How To Disappear Completely" - Radiohead
If it's not clear from the songs on the list, I'll say it straight-out: I like fast songs more than slow songs, anthems more than ballads, rockers more than love songs, etc., etc. So it takes a damn fine slow song for me to grasp a hold of it. The primary attribute I'm interested in is lyrical evocation - does it make me feel a certain specific way? "How To Disappear Completely" reminds me of being on my college campus as one of a handful of people over Thanksgiving break, listening to Kid A, reading Watchmen, and dealing with a massive fog bank that made everything ethereal. It's a great song for anything along those lines.

21. "Mass Romantic" - The New Pornographers
Not to get all High Fidelity on y'all, but when they talk about the top five side 1/track 1 combinations? This would be my first pick, and also my pick for the best opening ten seconds of a song.

20. "Love Lockdown" - Kanye West
Although Kanye's shift away from more conventional rapping/producing is a bit disappointing considering the quality he brings to those, his auto-tuned breakup album 808's and Heartbreaks was still good enough that I can't complain too much. "Love Lockdown" is easily the standout track thanks to its complex rhythms and intense vocals.

19. "Seven Nation Army" - The White Stripes
To call this song "anthemic" would be something of an insult both to the song and the term. This was the biggest and best rock anthem since "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

18. "B.O.B." - Outkast
Do I have too much Outkast on this list? Given that there are more Outkast songs to come, after three so far (and two more I just barely left off), that seems like it might be a worthwhile argument. But while Andre 3000 and Big Boi are most often compared to Lennon and McCartney, no doubt due to their somewhat fractured personal relationship, a better comparison might be to The Rolling Stones: would you complain about having too many Rolling Stones songs in a Best of the 60's list? Cause I'm not taking "Sympathy for the Devil," "Paint It Black," "Gimme Shelter," or "Satisfaction" out of the top 20 of THAT list.

17. "All For Swinging You Around" - The New Pornographers
Picking favorite New Pornographers songs is like picking children. This is my favorite child, then. Pity the poor cat in my lap when this song plays, cause they're getting swung around.

16. "5 Million Ways To Kill A C.E.O." - The Coup
15. "Laugh, Love, Fuck" - The Coup
Funky beats, radical politics, and wicked humor: it's like The Coup are aimed directly at the heart of my musical aesthetics. The only real surprise is how many people with similar tastes haven't even heard of them.

14. "Portions for Foxes" - Rilo Kiley
Is this song happy? Sad? Pro-relationship-with-bad-girls? It's kind of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of rock songs, in that it can be interpreted as meaning a variety of different things, but it's excellent on the surface.

13. "You Know I'm No Good" - Ghostface Killah ft. Amy Winehouse
One of my few criticisms of Ghostface is that his intensity can be a little bit overwhelming, especially over and over. One of my criticisms of Amy Winehouse is that while she has a beautiful voice, her songs often seem to lack, well, intensity. So put Ghostface together with Winehouse, and the gestalt is incredible.

12. "Furnace Room Lullaby" - Neko Case
The last slow song on the list. If I want evocative and ethereal, I really can't do better than Neko Case's stellar voice. She's great doing power pop with The New Pornographers, but songs like this are simply transcendent.

11. "My Favorite Mutiny" - The Coup ft. Black Thought & Talib Kweli
There is a specific subgenre of hip-hop song that I don't know the name for, but I'm mesmerized by. Its attributes are: 1) a medium-to-slow, simple, rhythmic beat; 2) a wide range of guest stars; and 3) aggressive, usually self-referential and -aggrandizing lyrics. "My Favorite Mutiny" fits this subgenre almost perfectly, although with its "who's who" of "socially conscious" rappers, it's much more political in nature than others of the sort.

10. "Prisstina" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is ofter heralded for their politics, a somewhat overrated trait having more to do with the historical context of the band's creation than the radical nature of their lyrics. They do have an amazing faith in music, which shows up clearly in this magnificently catchy tale of a good girl going bad for rock'n'roll.
(I'm really sorry about the video, non-anime fans. But it's all the internet gave me.)

9. "Get By" - Talib Kweli
You can tell a song is great when hearing it for the first time causes you to immediately go back and play it again. My jaw hit the floor at hearing "Get By" and I played it again. And as time went on, again and again and again.

8. "Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen
Another entry into the catchy-as-hell-pop-song-about-depression subgenre. Between Lily Allen and Justin Timberlake, amongst others, this decade threatened to give disposable pop a good name. Who saw that coming?

7. "Hold On, Hold On" - Neko Case
Neko Case, on the other hand, threatens to give country a good name. Good thing they haven't noticed her.

6. "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" - Jay-Z
It's not only an excellent song, but it's stunning cultural impact may best be demonstrated in this clip.

5. "Flip Flop Rock" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike & Jay-Z
This may be the Platonic example of the subgenre of rap that I mentioned with "My Favorite Mutiny." Any Outkast song with Killer Mike has a great chance at being excellent. Add in a superb Jay-Z guest verse, and it's about as good as hip-hop gets.

4. "Kilo" - Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon
I've called Fishscale my favorite album of the decade, and, with some very strong competition, I'm calling this its best track. The sample, swiped from an educational song about kilograms, starts it off right, and it's got Ghostface and Raekwon doing the cocaine-based storytelling they excel at.

3. "Hey Ya!" - Outkast
The most consistent criticism of "Hey Ya!" I hear is that it's overplayed. Yes, it's played a lot. A lot. But for it to be overplayed, don't you have to get tired of it? Ever? Cause I sure as hell don't.

2. "Breakin' Up" - Rilo Kiley
This combines two of my favorite types of songs: the breakup song, and the peppy song about depressing content. And it does it damn well, gospel, disco and all. The sheer joy and relief it conveys are refreshing in a world where pop songs are almost entirely about wanting to get into relationships or hating getting out of them. Listen now, and break up with someone close to you!

1. "The Whole World" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike
One of the big Outkast debates often centers on their first four albums vs. Speakerboxxx\The Love Below. Their earlier albums, though occasionally very experimental, still reside in the genre of southern gangster hip-hop, while the massive double album moves off the street and onto the stage, as it were, where hip-hop and pop mingle together. Both are excellent, but better yet is the bridge between the two: their 2001 greatest hits album, Big Boi and Dre present.... They recorded three new tracks for the album, including the standout "The Whole World" (another track of the three, "Funkin' Around," just barely missed this list).

"The Whole World" has Outkast at their best, with pop appeal but still some grime in the vocals, over a marvelous swinging beat. "The Whole World" is pretty much impossible not to like, and even grows on repeat listens. When I began putting this list together, I had it as my tentative #1, but was pretty certain that I'd pick something from the top 8-12 that would replace it. And yet, as the list took shape, I never really considered any other song better. "The Whole World" is the best song of the 2000's.