The Meteor on the Mountain

I stumbled upon Mountain while perusing the Game of the Year lists.  Nothing in particular really stood out to me; in fact, it was the simple fact of its GotY win, for landscaping no less,that drew my attention.  So I bought it.  It was about 66 cents, less than the spare change bouncing around my purse, so I wasn’t exactly worried about the investment. 

I never suspected the can of worms I was opening. 

Mountain is a very chill game.  Very little happens; your mountain sits there, floating in its little bubble of atmosphere, gently spinning in space, and that’s it.  There’s no ‘gameplay’ to it at all; I can rotate my mountain so it spins faster for a moment, and I can zoom in or out, and if I really want to, I can rotate it down to see the rocks and such that make up the mountain’s base.  In that way, that absence of control or real interaction, Mountain is a very peaceful game. 

the view from space

Right now, it’s raining on my mountain.  The air is a little foggy, and the trees are gradually changing color as whatever passes for fall occurs in this tiny universe.  Whatever ‘entity’ the mountain is appears to have feelings as well.  “…. BORRRRRING….” just flashed across my screen, I assume a reference to the calm of the game. A little while later, as the sun rises and sets in the background, the trees start to sparkle with Christmas-esque lights and a gentle song steals out of the speakers, accompanied by the sounds of snowflakes padding down onto the mountaintop. 

This game, wherein you literally do nothing, taps into some deep voyeuristic part of human nature.  I have no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the game -- all I can do is zoom in or out or rotate the mountain, nothing else -- and yet I am unmistakably compelled to find out what's coming next. I don’t want to get up; I am instead absorbed into this world and unable to look away. 

When I finally tore myself from the computer about twenty minutes ago to take a shower, it was snowing gently on my mountain, the evergreen trees covered with a thin layer of snow and the atmosphere slightly cloudy.  Now, upon returning (because of course I couldn't turn it off), I find that my mountain has not only changed shape slightly, it now sports a random, giant phonograph near the summit.  

See it up there, near the top?

I have no idea where this came from -- I missed it when I stepped away. And the curiosity is making me crazy.  Where did that come from? Did it randomly appear or was the mountain lonely for another inanimate object? Does it play music if I wait long enough?? I will never know.

A sailboat showed up later too – I left it on while I had dinner, letting it go in the background of my life (as the official description suggests on its Steam listing), and this sailboat just popped up. 

Later the mountain had another random thought, this time saying "I AM ABSORBED BY THIS WONDROUS NIGHT."  (The mountain experiences life in all caps, apparently.)  

It's pretty cool.  I'm enjoying its peaceful atmosphere, and the ability to just sit and observe is more powerful than I expected.  

 

... didn't see that coming... 

And now, holy shit, a meteor just hit my mountain!  I have to go… and watch, I guess.  What a weird and wondrous game! 

  

Sandboxes and Skyrim

Fall is slowly drawing to a close, and that means the market is flooded with good, nay great, games to be absorbed into.  Shadow of Mordor looks amazing as does Civilization: Beyond Earth, and it's difficult for me to express just how badly I want to be playing Dragon Age: Inquisition right now instead of typing this.  A slew of other good games came out this year, along with some whose releases were marred with production errors and bugs (those shall remain nameless, though I bet you could guess).  But despite all of these awesome options, I have spent much of Fall 2014 playing Skyrim, and let me tell you, it's been a weird experience.

I totally loved Skyrim for at least the first 10-12 hours of gameplay -- I was totally hooked right from the start.  All the race choices, the semi-realistic options for characters to have scars, or tattoos, or even just not drop-dead-gorgeous hairstyles, the way your character starts as a prisoner, with nothing, you have to take advantage of opportunities to break into the world: I loved all of it.  I dove in and did not turn it off for what felt like days.

With such an immersive world, it was easy to get sucked in.

The plot, to begin with, is pretty cool: you wander around as a warrior for hire for a while, honing your skills in whatever category you please. I could learn how to use a broadsword and become a wizard if I wanted; the class system doesn't limit play at all, which I found particularly freeing.  Soon, you become revealed as the Dragonborn, the last of an old race, and you head off for Dragon-speak training.

However, what I soon realized is that this plot isn't all that important to the game.  I could participate or not; nothing changed, nor was there a sense of urgency that I really needed to get moving on the next part of the Dragonborn story before something bad happened.

Instead, I hopped from town to town, city to city, playing through missions as the mood struck me.  I spent hours just wandering the wild, locating places to explore and new, more interesting things to kill.  I gathered dragonbone and scales and more random armor than I knew what to do with, and eventually I would wander into a bigger city than the last and get sucked into its story.  I spent hours fighting through Markham, only to get stuck when the Jarl had no more quests to offer me but without ever getting the offer to become Thane, and so I had to move on.  I bought a gigantic house in Solitude and briefly mourned just how easy it was to decorate a house in a fake game as opposed to logging out and going shopping here in the real world.  I argued with people, prevented evil and very dead empresses from coming back to life, managed to get every follower I ever earned killed, found and then got attacked by a pony, and even jumped off a boulder and accidentally killed myself. 

But in between these adventures, though, I found myself bored.  I could play for hours it seemed, days on end, and then step away and not touch it again for two weeks without feeling any urge to delve back into the world.  That’s never happened to me yet; I started my second play-through of Dragon Age: Origins within hours of beating it for the first time, for god’s sake! Skyrim, though…

... as beautiful as it is... 

There just isn’t a plot.  I mean, yes, there is a plot somewhere in the game, sure.  It’s not quite like WoW, where there isn’t a plot at all and you just have to grind until you get high enough to PvP or you just roleplay and that’s the end of it.  Skyrim has two small plots: the rivalry/war between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks, and the Dragonborn storyline where (I assume) you eventually end up as some huge hero. 

I have yet to get even halfway through either of these stories.  At about 40 hours of gameplay, I’m pretty much over it.  I just end up bored; I’ll throw myself into the world for a few hours at a time, a few days at most, and then I end up feeling very unfulfilled and I turn it off again. 

I may finish it eventually.  Well, finish it as much as any person can finish Skyrim – I will never FINISH Skyrim, but I might actually finish the Dragonborn storyline.  Or not.  Even if my character does end up as some huge hero/warrior, I doubt it will have any impact on the world itself. 

 I like Skyrim: I like the world, I like the NPCs, and I like that I can basically do anything I want, no questions asked.  The sandbox style is truly amazing. 

But I’m bored without a story to follow, a mission to fulfill, a drive to push me through the game.  I can’t deny that the world of Skryim is an amazing accomplishment, but long-term, it’s not for me. 

The End of How I Met Your Mother

... also titled: How, Even After 20+ Years, I Still Want to Bang My Best Friend.

Bishop and I finished How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) yesterday.  We had finished the rest of season 9 days ago, and I had read about and consequently spoiled the ending for us back around April, when the episode first aired; we put off the last two episodes as long as we could.

But it's finally finished, and I'm struggling to come to terms with the ending.

I have long despised the title of this show: I think it is wildly mis-named, and after seeing the ending, I still think that.  I always say, hey, if Bishop and I ever have kids, I'm not going to start the story of how we met when I was eight (since we met when we were around 15)! That's insanity! I also would not include all the people I have banged prior to meeting Bishop (spoiler alert: it's zero), like Ted chooses to do when discussing his journey to their mom with his kids.

Those issues aside... I don't hate the ending to this show.  There are certain aspects of it that I find ridiculous, but frankly, it seems worse on paper than in the actual show.

My biggest issue with it, as I was watching Barney and Robin prepare for their wedding throughout the last season, was the foreknowledge that they were going to break up. They are consistently a cute, growing couple who are learning together how to make their relationship work -- that's so realistic, even if most relationships don't involve climbing around through heating vents, booby-trapping elevators, or inviting bears to a wedding.  Everybody struggles to make their relationship work at times.  And frankly, the wedding represents so much growth for both characters, and I always thought it was so neat for them to go through that together.

The last two episodes show the gradual break-down of their relationship, and frankly, on paper, it sounds awful: they get divorced because Robin travels too much.  But the direction of the actual events is fairly realistic.  They start out seeming really happy, having adventures, etc, and slowly, as they travel to more places, as Robin's job starts to be all-consuming, you see their foundation start to crack.  When they do finally decide to get divorced, after three years of marriage, it's sad but it makes sense.

Their break-up infuriated my brother, who spent our discussion of HIMYM's ending ranting over how the writers fucked over Barney, who experienced so much growth and then, after the divorce, goes right back to being an insane womanizer.  After watching it myself though, I kinda get it.  They did screw over Barney, it's true; he's been the primary character to experience growth throughout the show anyway, since Ted has a totally one-track mind and the rest of them are static too.  But I wonder how realistic his return to screwing everything that walks might be.  After all, he tried really, really hard to make things work with Robin; he changed his own life so they could be together and happy.  If I had done that, and then it ended abruptly, I bet I would probably revert right back to that old behavior too.  At one point, Lily says, "Barney, really??" when he starts up his old habits again, and Barney even says, "Lily, I tried.  If it wasn't going to work with Robin, it's not going to work with anyone," and asks them to just let him be himself.  I don't love it, but I think it is fairly realistic.

Bishop and I were both really upset that they decided to kill the Mother too.  She's present throughout the season, and she's absolutely hilarious -- there are a lot of moments where you kinda go, "so... she's just a carbon copy of Ted..." but she's written to be so clever and smart too that you can't help but like her.  The whole season is interspersed with big moments in her and Ted's relationship: their first date, special trips to celebrate things, their engagement, the birth of their children, etc.  And they seem so happy together, like I picture so many perfect-for-each-other couples as they grow together.
The choice to kill her was a terrible one.  The show could have been so cute and perfect to end with their wedding day and a flashback to them introducing themselves (which is one of the last moments of the final episode).  Audiences would have been happy, I really believe that.

AND it would have given Ted some growth as a character! It would have shown his ability to grow up, to give up on ridiculous ideas and focus on living his life in the present instead of in the realm of "what could have been."  He really needed some: he fell in love with Robin in the first episode and never gave that up, going back to her countless times in his head and a lot of times in the show's events too.  Frankly, I feel like going back to her at the end treats audiences like they aren't capable of understanding anything else, like they needed Ted to go back so the show could make sense -- which is bullshit! Ok, deep breath.

The moment I read that the writers/directors of HIMYM had filmed the ending of the show in advance so that the kids didn't age 10 years in the process of making the entire show, I knew he would go back to Robin.  I wasn't happy about it, but I absolutely knew it.

The parts I struggle with the most about the ending are the last 3-4 minutes.  The Mom is dead, Ted is 50ish and going gray, and his kids are roughly 15 and 12-13.  He finishes his story, and they both react the same way: "Nope. You wanna bone Aunt Robin."  And within about 35 seconds, they've got Dad-Ted convinced, and off to win Robin's heart he goes.

That is nonsense.  Those kids would have been little when the mom died -- she's been dead for 6 years by 2030 (when Ted is telling the story), which means the girl would have been 9 and the boy about 6-7. I feel like, if you lose a parent that young, you are probably traumatized by the idea of your parent dating. I don't know for sure, but that's what I would guess.  That's my first problem with it.

My second problem is this: I can buy into the idea of the kids saying, "Dad, you should be happy." I really can; they're young, but I remember being around 15 when I first realized my parents should definitely be divorced, and when that finally happened when I was 19, one of my primary reactions was, "Thank god, now maybe they can both be happy [since they hated each other's guts while married]." So I don't have a problem with their ages there, though given argument #1, I still think it's a little far-fetched.

That thought aside, I really just find it sad that Ted gives in so quickly.  It doesn't take long, almost as if he told them this long elaborate story just to get them on his side, just to get them to think it was their idea that he chase after his long-lost love.  The way the end is written makes Ted seem incredibly manipulative, not sweet or loving about his dead wife.  Their relationship throughout the last season is so sweet; they are so clearly written as being perfect for each other, and perfectly happy together, as if no one else could ever come close.  That's supposed to be the idea: Ted's been waiting for his perfect woman to be his wife, and he finally finds her.  But then they're together for 11 years, she dies, and he just goes, "Well, back to Robin then!" As if she was never even there!

That's what I hate about this ending.  My husband is my best friend, my soulmate; if, god forbid, he passed away, I would be destroyed, probably forever. It would take years of convincing to move on, not minutes.  And if we had kids, the convincing certainly couldn't come from them; I'd feel like I was betraying his memory.  Apparently, Ted feels none of that, and I find that incredibly unrealistic.

So now the show is over.  There were so many 'legendary' moments, and there were a lot of duds too.  But it was worth watching, even with the not-quite-satisfying ending.

Now I need another comedy to obsess over...

GamerGate? Really??

Over the weekend, a friend of mine expressed a lot of super-heated arguments and complaints over the recent phenomenon of "GamerGate," and I have to say, I just don't care.

I am most definitely a gamer, but I don't consider myself a part of gamer culture -- that is to say, I don't spend any time in gaming forums discussing characters or plots, nor do I really concern myself with the Internet's general opinion of games.  Sure, I might check Metacritic for a rough idea of how good the game might be, and I'll certainly poll my friends, but that's about it.  I don't feel the need to immerse myself in that flood of other people's opinions (plus, with a 50-60 hour per week job, I don't have the time even if I wanted to).  I'm involved in games in as much as I play those I think sound good, and that's it.  Occasionally I post about them here, and if you're reading about my opinions and even somewhat caring, then I thank you greatly.

My point is this: until my friend brought it up, I hadn't given this topic a single thought.  According to him, here's what happened (please note that I have no idea if this is actually what happened; I'm just reporting what I was told):

Zoe Quinn, a game developer, slept with a bunch of game reviewers in exchange for positive reviews of her most recent release.  One of them got pissed when he realized she'd slept with lots of them and lashed out; she claimed they were all boyfriends, but since there were about five of them at a time, the internet does not believe her.
From there, a lot of people inside and outside the gaming community tried to 'hush' things up by deleting posts or comments in forums like Reddit.  Pretty soon it started to explode and what sounds like some femi-Nazi got hold of the story.  She raised a shitload of money on Kickstarter to make 6 videos critiquing the video game world, spending most of those videos calling games misogynistic and citing obscure moments as evidence, such as in Bioshock when there's a pile of naked dead bodies in the background and some happen to be women.  She apparently calls this "intended to titillate men," while my friends who have played Bioshock don't even remember this moment because they were terrified by whatever else was happening in the game at that moment.
True gamers find this woman to be full of shit, not least because she admits she's not a gamer.  People like David Wong, one of the head writers for Cracked.com, find this woman to be a visionary.  The internet community is thus in an uproar because of all the attention she's getting, which apparently is too much bad press for a community that's already persecuted (?) and they're upset about it.

I'm sorry for any inaccuracies here; this is how my friend explained it, and I wrote it down before I did any additional research.
Frankly, I think this provides an insight into how a devoted member of the online gaming community sees the issue, as when I googled "gamergate," I got a lot of Forbes and NYTimes stuff, which is unlikely to come from within the community.

Still, and I'm hesitant to admit it, but here goes, my primary reaction is this: who cares???

Now that I've done a little research, the story doesn't seem any less ridiculous.  It's still a lot of people shouting about stuff and few real points.
The starting argument seems pretty straightforward: don't trade sex for game reviews.  From what I understand, no one seems really sure if that's what actually happened or not; I've read things that claim both sides.  But "Don't trade sex for ANYTHING" is a generally accepted piece of advice, so regardless of what Zoe Quinn actually did, I'm sticking with that diagnosis.

That apparently set off a lot of other close-to-boiling bad blood, with a feminist charity and 4chan setting up camp together and a lot of vicious internet-anonymous name calling and personal attacking on both sides.  There are even some claims of hacking Twitter and YouTube accounts, which seems unnecessary to me.  What all that boiled down to is that gamers aren't sure that the media reviewers and the developers aren't in bed together (pun definitely intended!).

All of sudden then, this erupted into an overall indictment of gamer culture as misogynistic and the stereotypical gamers (fat, white nerds who are afraid of women) as dead.
Frankly, I would think that the end of gamer stereotyping is a good thing; after all, I see gamer kids get stereotyped at school on a daily basis, and I would think they'd embrace the opportunity to hang up the basement-dweller title and get laid.
Apparently not.  The death of the stereotypical gamer is, according to those writing many of these articles, a point of sadness for gamers, who are thus lashing out at Zoe Quinn and this feminist charity in as direct result.  Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'm missing some of the evidence being used to make that connection, but whatever.

Do gamers want to be stereotyped? That seems to be one of the suggestions I'm getting from that, and I imagine it's wrong.  Who wants to be stereotyped, lumped into a one-size-fits all box and left out for others to interpret?  But as I continue researching, I'm seeing that this suggestion is part of what's pissing gamers off so much.

What seems to have happened is that actual Social Justice Warriors, the kinds of people who take to Tumblr to accuse basically anything of hurting some small group (which they probably don't belong to, in my experience) in order to benefit, got hold of this topic, hence the Kickstarter videos calling all games misogynistic and adding fuel to this insane fire.  Others who genuinely care about social issues, without benefiting, those who just care about others' rights and well-beings, then got lumped in with the SJWs and shot down along with them.  As a result, everyone is pissed at everyone else, whether it's SJWs yelling at gamers for participating in what they see as perpetuating the issue, gamers are pissed because everyone is accusing them of something they didn't really do, and the people who want things to be better are caught in the middle.

My apathy comes in roughly when I get to this point, because both sides are right.  There is misogyny in some games, no question.  When the Assassin's Creed people bitched about how many extra hours it would take to make a female character, only to have one of their former developers pop up online to go, "yeah... not really..." that's an issue.  Bishop tells me that a lot of Japanese games have gender-related issues as well, which I already knew since I've read the Cracked.com article about how many Japanese dating games are essentially "you are a girl dating a pidgeon" or something similarly ridiculous.  So the people who want things to be better, and the SJWs who aren't just creating click bait, do have a point.

But the gamers do too, and that's this: Not every single game is like that, and not every single gamer holds the "misogynerd" title.  There are plenty of gamers, guys and girls, who have issues with Grand Theft Auto's beating the shit out of hookers or the fact that Lara Croft, even in 2014, still has an anatomically impossible figure.  Naturally, those gamers want to be acknowledged, not tossed into a giant melting pot of asshole as the internet has apparently done.

So if both sides have points, then what's to be done?

The answer is this: nothing. The only way to solve the issues at hand is for future game developers to try to avoid targeting women, and for the current media to shut the f*ck up about GamerGate.

At its heart, that's the bigger issue of GamerGate.  On both sides, everyone is suspicious, and on both sides, they are left with the same source of information: the media.  And no one trusts what information they're getting.

The media may be the most successful click-bait creators I've ever heard of -- every day, I pull up msn.com, yahoo.com, GoogleNews, and a host of other news or social media sites to the same results: small stories blown into sensational crises designed to get people to open up that page.  Facebook is covered with "This started small. What happened next will (choose one: surprise, shock, warm your heart, scare, etc) you!" pages meant to get clicks.  That's it.  When you do click, there's only rarely legitimate content and usually just a bunch of ads and maybe 10 sentences of story.

And that's why I don't care.  The media today is less about news and more about pageviews.  So if this has turned into some giant mess, I know the culprit.

I understand that gamers are very upset by how they're being portrayed, and I can empathize.  But ultimately, I have to ask why they care about what people outside the community think about them.  One of the first things I learned about being a nerd was that not everyone gets it, and they'll offer you their negative opinions with almost no prompting.  I just had to get over that; if I let it bother me, I'd sink under all the misunderstanding and hatred and BS spouted at me and my community.

Plus, I'm not that concerned because it sure sounds like most of the 'opinions' circulating are just parroting the first ones: games are misogynistic, and so are those who play them.  A parrot can't think; all they can do is repeat.  So if you repeat someone else's argument to me, without evidence to back it up, or any sense of your own thinking added to it, I just don't care about your opinion.  The original authors don't seem to be trustworthy in this case, or really capable of finding anything other than exactly what they were looking for.  A self-fulfilling prophecy isn't necessarily the truth.

Like all other issues, the argument will peter out eventually, and I'm sure it won't get resolved to anyone's satisfaction.  Louis C.K. puts it best when he says, "Nobody ever wins an argument. Nobody ever goes, "oh, I'm wrong." Somebody eventually just goes, 'Shut up. We gotta eat, so let's shut up for a minute.'"

I realize that I may get some flack over this post, and quite frankly, I'd have to say that as someone both only marginally informed or invested in the topic, I don't really care. (The irony of how much I had to say over a topic I don't care about has not escaped me, never fear. :))

The Plight of the Motion Sick

I can't play first-person shooters.  It's not that I don't like them, or that the game titles don't appeal to me; it's that they make me motion sick.  I nearly puked the first time I tried to play Portal -- the second I made an infinite loop and jumped in, I had to turn it off -- and Bishop tried for almost an hour to teach me how to play Half-Life 2, but to no avail.

I don't get motion sick normally.  Cars don't bother me, and planes only make me nauseous when I'm travelling with certain family members.  The only time I can recall a vehicle making me sick was when I went on a cruise during high school, wherein the ship spent approximately two days in the midst of a crazy storm that made it swing from side to side like a teeter-totter.  I spent most of that trip lying in my bed, unable to stand up without vomiting.

But nothing else really upsets my stomach.  Until I crank up a first-person video game, that is, and then I'm sick in minutes and down for the count for the rest of the night.

This has never really bothered me: sure, I would love to enjoy Portal or Half-Life, but I understand their stories enough to participate in discussions about them. But so many first-person games are ones I have no interest in, like Call of Duty or Left for Dead (to be fair, I'm not interested in Left for Dead partially because the witch music scares the shit out of me, but that's a different point).  Bishop desperately wants me to play Battlefield 4, his current obsession, but I figure, hey, WWII is over and I don't want to live it.  Other than me holding out hope that someday this affliction might abate so I can play Bioshock, getting motion sick from games has never bothered me too much.

Then three days ago, I started Alan Wake.

I didn't get very far when I first booted it up.  After about 30 minutes -- enough time to make it through the first nightmare -- I had to shut it down to go do adult stuff like laundry.  Game play is a little clunky: the way you're supposed to fight/duck isn't exactly intuitive and while changing weapons just takes the tap of a button, firing said weapon is luck of the draw; there's no aiming or anything, just pulling the trigger and assuming the gun will fire at the bad guy ahead of you.  The story, though, is really cool, especially for a Stephen King fan like myself.  Alan Wake is a novelist (who quotes King in the opening lines of the game!), vacationing in Bright Falls with his wife, who is trying to help him overcome his writer's block.  However, his wife vanishes, and he starts discovering novel pages credited to him but with no memory of writing them.  The whole game, thus far, has a dark, mysterious tone enhanced by the isolated forest setting and the battles against 'the darkness,' a force from the opening nightmare that hasn't yet been fully explained.

Fighting the forces of darkness takes pistols, flare guns, and apparently, lots and lots of flashlight batteries.  

I'm not very far into it, so I don't know what's coming or really any more than that.  I'm enjoying it -- it has the thriller atmosphere of many King novels without the jump-out-and-scare-you factor that I hate about scary movies.

The problem is this: this game makes me feel like throwing up.  It's third person, like so many other games I love, so I wasn't expecting a problem; when I started feeling nauseous after about 45 minutes of playing, I assumed it was something I'd eaten for dinner and ignored it.  When it didn't get better with some Tums, I wondered if maybe it was the camera movement -- I normally turn the camera sensitivity down on games so I don't feel like I'm being whipped around all the time -- so I turned this one's down as far as it would go.  No luck.

After that, it didn't take long for me to realize that this game was making me motion sick.

I still don't totally get it, even after figuring out the cause.  Sure, the weapons handling is clunky and there's this odd 'focus' feature that zooms the camera off to some far away action without warning, but that shouldn't that big of a deal.

The main character being off-center might be the culprit.  Sure, lots of games have this; Resident Evil 5 and Mass Effect both keep your character slightly off to the left when armed, a body movement that feels natural for me, since I'm right-handed.  But Wake stands waaaaay off to the right, more peripheral than merely off-center, and that's hard to get used to.  He's difficult to control as a result; I'm constantly walking him into things or having to turn him around.

You can see his location during play here. And really, I think this image is with the camera rotated toward him, because he always seems even further to the right from my perspective.  

And even with the sensitivity turned all the way down, the camera movement in this game is really fast, both horizontally and vertically.  All I have to do is barely tap my mouse and the camera goes flying all over the place. Combined, these two features are too much for my brain, and I had to turn the game off.

I did some research. Apparently, game play is a common complaint for fans of this game, and plenty of others seem to get motion sick too.  A lot complain about the movement speed, and there is even a mod for adjusting the "blur effect" of this freaking game to try to make it more palatable:

I might need to download it if I want to continue playing... which, at least right now, I really do. 

Maybe that's what the creators wanted this game to do: disorient you so badly that you feel sick so you can truly empathize with Wake's mindset in the game.  If that's the case, then bravo! Mission Accomplished.

It seems silly that motion sickness should be so restrictive, that it should be a deterrent to game play when it affects basically nothing else in my life.  I really like the game, and I want to continue playing it, but for now... I'm not sure I can handle it.

The Hobbit: Needs More Desolation

Let's face it: there is very little actual desolation happening in The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug.  I admit, it's an intimidating name for the second movie of a trilogy (the second movie always needs whatever help it can get -- I'm looking at you, Matrix Reloaded).  But Smaug doesn't even eat anyone, let alone destroy anything.  Erebor survives with some minor wear and tear, and Peter Jackson couldn't even write in the death of one of the lesser dwarves?? I mean, seriously, of the 12, there are at least three that even an uber-nerd like me can't name; I would have happily sacrificed a little literary accuracy for Smaug to live up to his name.

And truly, a little more inaccuracy really wouldn't have changed much.  I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings books immensely -- I can even slog through the chapters where Tolkien pretty much just describes Frodo and Sam walking for several hundred pages -- but there's no arguing that they could never transfer perfectly to the screen, no matter how good the screenwriting is.  It's pretty damn good here too: Peter Jackson of LOTR fame combined with Guillermo del Toro of Pan's Labryinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army make for a legendary duo, and then you add Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh, both of whom helped adapt the original trilogy of the screen as well.  That's no shortage of writing power right there.  These writers clearly worked their asses off to make these movies work as adaptations of the books; they cut the right stuff, added the right characters (such as Arwen, who only appears in the Return of the King appendices but makes a beautiful, emotional addition to the trilogy), and managed to keep the right tone for all three movies.  The addition of del Toro in The Hobbit series clearly changed some of the art and costumes -- just compare the Goblin King in the first movie to the terrifying creatures of Pan's Labryinth -- but Tauriel and Legolas serve as solid evidence that accuracy doesn't need to be perfectly maintained here for the stories to work, to still be told with respect and beauty and awe.

And even with all that, the desolation promised in the title remains merely a hint at what's to come in the final movie, The Battle of The Five Armies.

I don't yet know what to think about the final movie of the Lord of the Rings.  I'm excited for it: it's the end of the series, the end of an era really. After December, there will be no more LOTR movies.  (Yes, it's possible someone, somewhere, will make another. But books like The Silmarillion are such dense high fantasy that I have trouble believing someone will undertake the task. Don't forget that originally, Peter Jackson wasn't even on board to make the Hobbit movies. Plus, apparently there are some legal issues with the Tolkien estate anyway.)  After December, The Hobbit will end and the stories will come full circle.

I'm also worried about it.  So far, I'm unimpressed with the trailers I've seen.  The main one features a lot of dramatic, eerily quiet scenes while Bilbo narrates rather sadly over them before transitioning into Pippin's song from The Return of the King.  Now, I might be alone in this and I'm fine with that, but I hated that song.  I know songs are an important part of Tolkien's writing, his world-building, but that song just irks me.  Its lyrics come from a poem in the first book, and I don't find that the song adaptation does the poem justice, nor does it offer any additional emotional depth to the movie.  If anything, its placement as a background to Denethor feasting while his son Faramir's forces get pummeled makes it seem cruel and hopeless, carrying no value at all.  So adding it to the trailer makes the whole movie seem dark and depressing and only vaguely worth watching.  I usually love the LOTR soundtracks; in fact, I own several of them.  Their music always washes over the films in such epic beauty, composed to carefully mimic the mood of the story, like the Misty Mountain song in the first Hobbit movie.  My god, I'm not sure there is a better example of a perfectly matched story and song (go listen if you haven't heard it, it's incredible).  So the music for the trailer, to me, sets it up for potential issues.

I'm also wondering about the reception this final movie will receive.  Bishop has been on a movie review conspiracy streak lately, convinced that movie people are paying off the Rotten Tomatoes people for excellent ratings; his primary evidence is that Guardians of the Galaxy has a higher rating than The Godfather, which, while I'm sure isn't a conspiracy, is pretty damning evidence that something sure is amiss.  With that in mind, I've been thinking about The Return of the King.  When it was released in 2003, it basically swept the Oscars, winning everything from Best Sound Mixing and Costume Design to Best Picture and Best Director and tying with Titanic (and Ben-Hur, oddly enough) for most Oscars won ever (11).  It's considered the only fantasy movie to have won Best Picture (I haven't fact-checked that, just IMDB'd it, so I'm not positive) and IMDB users have it listed as the #9 movie ever made.

I don't think that's going to happen to The Battle of the Five Armies.  Thus far, The Hobbit movies haven't received great reviews;  the first came across as a little too Disney for more serious fans, and the second got a lot of "this is just more of the same."  Neither bodes well for the final movie.

I don't know where my expectations are for this, the 6th and final LOTR movie.  I am so excited about it, I really am, but I am trying hard not to set myself up for disappointment.

The Hobbot: The Battle of the Five Armies opens December 17, 2014.  Hopefully, we'll end this thing right.

Benedict Cumberbatch Might Be the Best Actor Ever

I'm sitting on my couch, watching the last hour or so of Desolation of Smaug.  I love this silly movie; I probably rent it from the library or borrow it off friends once every two months or so.  In particular, I love the conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, deep under the Lonely Mountain just before Smaug breaks free and heads for Lake Town.  Even when the rest of the movie(s) didn't live up to my expectations, this conversation is eerie and dark and spine-tingling every time -- exactly as I pictured it years before when I first read The Hobbit.

It is surprisingly hard to find a good picture of this conversation online -- lots of fan art and old animation

Their conversation is just starting to heat up -- Smaug has started his "My claws are daggers" speech, that deep rumbling bass voice stirring into anger -- when Bishop's friend joins me.

"Did you know," he says, "that Benedict Cumberbatch did motion capture stuff for Smaug?"
I'm a little surprised at this. "Like Gollum?"
"Yeah! But... he's a dragon. So why did they need the motion capture?"  We debate this for a while, finally settling on the fact that a) Benedict Cumberbatch tends to move his face a lot, and b) so does Smaug. Particularly his dragon-eyebrows.  That's got to be the reason for it.

Of course, my next stop is the Internet, where I quickly discover that not only did Cumberbatch do this, he apparently spent roughly 3 or 4 days doing the motion capture, complete with dialogue and rolling around on the floor.  Observe:

There are websites out there devoted to all the gifs from this event!

This is seriously the best thing I've discovered on the Internet in a long time. 

 The interviews I read and watched all convey the same idea: Cumberbatch really wanted to get into character, and the CGI masters who created Smaug wanted some rough ideas for realistic movement.  Put them together and you get not only Smaug, but also the most amazing and hilarious images of a man truly devoted to his craft.

Some of the pictures, like this one, are decidedly psychotic -- and that, to me, gives Smaug's variation in emotions so much depth.  He's already a well-written character, thanks to Peter Jackson staying fairly close to Tolkien's original creation, and being voiced by someone as talented and involved and really okay with putting himself out there as Cumberbatch truly brings the character to life.  I mean, I'm a little scared of him as I watch some of those scenes, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien was going for.

It's obviously not a perfect match -- one of the CGI guys talks about how the differences in physiology between dragons and humans make using motion capture a little irrelevant. But it doesn't change just how cool this is -- and how much more real it makes Smaug feel.

As always, I am looking forward to whatever Benedict Cumberbatch does next. And to The Battle of Five Armies (trailer here), of course.

As if I really needed another reason to love him...

Edward Elric: A Fangirl's Dilemma

I first developed a crush on Edward Elric when I was about 16.

Back then, when Ed and I were approximately the same age, his being animated was no boundary to our love.  I read the manga religiously, watched the anime on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim as often as I could, and kept my Fullmetal Alchemist calendar hung up long after the year changed over.  The series contained so many interesting, well-developed characters that I pretty much developed a new crush every time I opened the manga up -- for a long time, far longer than I want to admit, I even slept on a Roy Mustang pillowcase.

sleeping with Roy all night long... ;)

As I started college, FMA gradually slipped out of my life.  One week I was reading the manga, the next I couldn't locate the latest issue in my tiny college town, and soon I'd forgotten all about it.

Until a month ago, when I picked up Attack on Titan.  Instantly, with the addition of anime to my 'recently watched' list, Netflix flooded me with options, and Fullmetal Alchemist caught my eye -- this time though, it was FMA: Brotherhood, a re-make of the original anime that followed the manga exactly.  It sure didn't take long for me to get hooked again.

You'll have to look up the plot basics if you aren't familiar with it.  It's too complicated to explain quickly.  

What I quickly realized is that now that I'm an adult -- complete with job, mortgage, and husband -- having a serious fan-girl crush on Edward Elric is .... almost gross.  I mean, he's 15, maybe 17 by the end of the show! I'm almost 26! Ed might still be drawn as damn sexy, with his chiseled physique and earnest smile, but now he's a child compared to my adult.  I am so not cool with this; if I was Winry, as I remember picturing myself back during Round 1 of this obsession, I'd be in some serious trouble.

It doesn't help that he still has the "hair boner," that little piece of bang that just won't fall down with the rest of his hair.  That little blonde spike was totally adorable when I was 16, back when boners were still a hilarious and un-encountered concept.  Now that I've grown up and learned how adult and fun boners can be, I still find the hair cute, but now it had a side of "inappropriate shudder" accompanying it.

Nor does it help that my students are actually OLDER than Edward.  I teach seniors in high school -- they're usually about 17 or 18 years old -- and let me tell you, there is nothing attractive about any of them.  They're teenagers for god's sake -- they're smelly and immature and generally out of control (the girls too!).  This is not a winning age group.  But Ed, in his animated and dear-god-you're-young youth, is totally enticing.

I get it: he's animated.  They can draw him to be whatever they want -- most of the time he looks and acts like he's in his early 20s, anyway, with his ripped up arms and agile combat abilities.   Frankly, I wish they'd written him in his 20s because then I wouldn't feel so dirty for having a crush on him.

I can try to transfer my love to Roy, a more age-appropriate choice even if he's a little too intense for me.  With his being a much more subtly motivated character, he's hard to piece together and truly appreciate, so it's hard to feel connected to him.  Ed might be young and angry, but his motives are pure and his actions always geared toward good -- and deep down, I don't want to give him up.  He is an easy character to love, age difference or not, and I'll stand by him to the end.

The REAL Movie Event of the Summer

The smell punched me as soon as I walked into the theatre.  I had already been hesitant about this experience, and now I was grossed out too. Perfect.

I loved Dragon Ball Z as a kid, but the movie sounded less than compelling, especially as an adult.  I gave in when Bishop's friends begged us, more out of nostalgia than anything else.

Tickets sold out several hours in advance; luckily we'd purchased ours that afternoon, or we really would have been screwed.  Eau du Basement Dweller washed over me as we tried to find our seats in a surprisingly crowded theatre, our friends waving frantically for us.  They -- and all the other guys around us -- radiated excitement, like this was the best movie to hit theatres since Desolation of Smaug last Christmas.

Still skeptical, I sat and began people watching.  The first thing I noticed? This theatre contained, no joke, 98% men.  I think I saw maybe 5-7 girls in the whole place, including me.  The second thing was that we were surrounded by some truly out-of-date people: the group sitting behind me was having a Trigun argument (the anime was released in 1998) and when one of those Snickers commercials aired, I heard several "I am Jack's aggressive appetite" jokes, a 1999 Fight Club vintage I was surprised to find still irritating.  The third thing I noticed, before the lights dimmed, was the stranger sitting next to me; he was waiting for the movie to start by playing on his phone, complete with Goku (the DBZ main character) background.  We are talking high-level Nerd Achievements here.

Here's the poster. You now know more about this movie than I did when I agreed to see it. 

When the lights dimmed, everyone instantly hushed.  There were no trailers -- maybe when a theatre is showing a relic from the 90s, they can't use their standard previews? I'm not sure.  It got as far as that 'digital picture brought to you by whoever' ad (that one that always looks way prettier than the actual movie) before even the projector couldn't handle it and revolted; the movie stopped, the sound died, the lights came up, and the theatre went nuts.

About 3 minutes later, a blue PlayStation3-esque loading screen appeared, to shouts of "They're using the torrent file!" and plenty of laughter.  We were back on track.

The opening few minutes of any truly nerdy movie are filled with inside jokes that only those who faithfully followed the origin material gets; this remained true of the Dragon Ball Z movie. As soon as Goku and King Kai show up in the opening scene, complete with video game-style sound effects, the theatre went nuts.  Again. Since it'd been an appropriate number of years since I'd seen this show, I had no idea what was going on.  As the dialogue went on, it became clear that there some things I just wasn't going to get; Goku would say something and everyone would laugh, including Bishop, and I just had no idea what was going on.  That's actually unusual for me -- I have a great memory for quoting movies and TV shows, and I really did love this show.  Apparently too much has happened since my last viewing and I'd lost all the really important information.

There is an actual plot to this movie.  Lord Beerus, a god who looks strikingly like a large, angry, purple cat, has heard of something called a Super Saiyan God, and he's seeking out the remaining Saiyans in order to meet one.  In doing so, he crashes Vegeta's wife Bulma's birthday party, where he ends up enjoying time with his minion/trainer, Whis, Vegeta and family, Gohan, and the rest of the Dragon Ball Z gang.  Goku crashes later, having had a disagreement with Beerus before.  Eventually, Beerus gets pissed and demands a fight with the Super Saiyan God, so they have to figure out a way to find one so he can meet him and thus leave the party/Earth alone.

This can be summed up more accurately here:

At the party, Beerus wants to try pudding but Buu won't share. 

His totally sane reaction to Buu's selfishness. 

With some help, Goku goes from this 

to *fabulous* (check out that pink hair and those delts)

 so he can stop Beerus from destroying the Earth. Over a pudding cup. 

I swear that's the plot.  A few minutes of obligatory bad Japanese pop music during the fight scene, and the movie is over.  Bulma even invites Beerus back to her birthday part next year and Whis gets a sushi to-go box to take back to his and Beerus's training planet/tree thing.  (Spoiler Alert: Beerus is ultimately defeated by wasabi -- he eats a whole chunk of it in one bite and his head just explodes.)

It surprised me, but I actually had a lot of fun. The movie was really funny -- Trunks finds Mai, who now looks like a little kid (a throwback to the show? not sure) and wants her to be his girlfriend, and Emperor Pilaf keeps trying to steal things and getting caught, but no one's concerned because he also looks like a little kid.  Goten and Trunks run around together, and Piccolo looks on with his usual cool detachment while Vegeta gets super pissed at nothing and keeps blowing up at Beerus or Bulma.

The dialogue and animation are pretty much still kid-level, just like the anime, so going in with no expectations helps :) And anytime anything even remotely subtle happens, everyone immediately shouts about it for the next five minutes -- an old anime tradition.  Watching with someone you can make fun of it with helps too.

Somehow, I doubt I'll be purchasing this gem, but for a night, it was fun to re-live being a kid with Dragon Ball Z.

More Like "Attack on My Free Time"

I start back to school next week, so naturally I decided to start a time-consuming TV show in the meantime.
Everyone from friends to students to random strangers at cons has been telling me I needed to see Attack on Titan for months now.  I was hesitant: skinless giants? semi-medieval human society? subtitles??

But now that I've finally started watching it, I can already tell it earned all those recommendations.

That skinless giant I mentioned.  I was under the impression that all the Titans were as big as this one and just as skinless, but it turns out that isn't quite the case! 

The basics are these: in an alternate human history, giant humanoid monsters called Titans have essentially destroyed/eaten most of humanity.  They range in size from 60+ meters tall to a mere 3-4 meters tall, and very little is known about their origins or physiology other than that they are extremely hard to kill.  They don't seem to need to eat, judging from their lack of interest in eating wildlife, and the reason behind their eating humans is described as "pure bloodlust" at one point.  Most of them are male, and they lack any semblance of junk (think a giant, hungry Ken doll).

At the start of the show, humanity has been clustered behind a series of 50 meter high walls for 100 years, and where, exactly, those 100 years are in human history isn't quite clear. They have guns and cannons, but only primitive ones.  They travel via horse and carriage, but have 3D Maneuvering Devices (how the military moves to fight and kill Titans) that are gas-powered.  No one seems to have any idea what's outside those walls either, other than Titans.

During those 100 years, the Titans don't seem to have eaten anyone (or anything, as far as humans can tell). Many humans have never even seen a Titan and thus question the heavy military presence in the cities.  But of course, that military is immediately necessary in the first episode, as the Colossal Titan appears over the walls of the city and the attack begins.  Other than the Colossal, most of the Titans seem to have skin but are just as largely invulnerable, hungry, and terrifying to humans.

The show starts focused on three friends: Eren, his adopted sister Mikasa, and their wimpy buddy Armin. Eren seems to be the leader; he's loud and angst-y but very, very motivated to kill the Titans, thus driving a lot of the show.  Mikasa, who was adopted by Eren's family after hers was murdered, is an understated badass; she works to protect Eren at all costs and doesn't tout her own abilities, but as soon as they start military training, it's obvious that she's the most deadly of anyone on the show.  Armin started as a common bullying victim, but his character evolves a lot as time passes and training takes over; he ends up basically a tactical genius, which is pretty cool.

After they escape the Titan attack, they join the military and the pace of the show really picks up.  More characters get added, more complications arise, and the abilities of the writer really show as each character has depth and emotion to him or her.

There is a brief period of peace wherein everyone relaxes a bit and Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and the others can focus on their training.  Then the Titans appear again, and all hell breaks loose.

Mikasa, being a badass as only she can

I admit, it's a weird concept for a show, but hey, that's anime.  There are some obvious anime-only issues that go along with it -- the wiggly eyes that anime characters get to indicate strong emotion stand out a lot, especially if you're like me and haven't watched anime in a few years.  And the dialogue, which is all in Japanese and apparently 100% shouted, has a sometimes wacky, stilted English translation that makes it clear the show was translated in a hurry, as opposed to written to convey the same ideas/emotions but in a more natural way.  In one early episode, Eren kicks a guard and Armin jumps in to defend him, saying literally, "I am sorry he kicked you, one of the adults. He is hungry and thus irritable."  Obviously a translation and not real writing --which is okay! It's not an English show in writing or origin, so whatever.  Actually, as it goes on, the translation tries to make the English more fluid and natural by throwing in a bunch of "ain't"s and "gonna"s, thus adding a humorous redneck element.

Those are about the only details I can pick on though; it's a really good show, with really (thus far) consistent characters and creative conflicts. It's also absolutely beautiful, and the music rocks, if that helps.

I've heard that the show evolves to include political subterfuge and more mysterious elements as it goes on, which I'm really looking forward to.  It's clear even now, only about 6-7 episodes in, that there is more to the Titan story than what Eren, Mikasa, and the rest of the squad know.  Little hints -- like how surprising the appearances by the Colossal Titan are (considering he's 60m tall, you'd think he'd be easy to spot) -- abound that something dangerous and secret is going on.

I'm not yet far enough in to know what that something secret is, and I don't want to spoil anything if my speculations are correct, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Let the binge-watching commence!

It's on Netflix. Go watch it. Now.

The End of Mass Effect (*Spoilers!*)

I'm about to finish my second play-through of Mass Effect 3, and I really, really don't want to do it.

I've done it before.  Most likely, I'll do it again eventually.  But the ending crushes me every time -- last time, the first time, I ended up sitting in bed, unable to sleep and occasionally crying, over the gut-wrenching agony of the end.  That probably won't happen this time; I'm better prepared, having done it before. Last time I knew what was going to happen though and I still lost it.

The ending is always catastrophic, no matter which end I choose or how my actions play out.
I know, I know, there was a big dispute between fans and Bioware over how the game ended vs. how Bioware said it might end with regards to personal input and all that. Some friends of mine won't even touch ME3, even if they loved ME2, because of that mess. I don't care -- I thought the ending as perfect.  The series has never pretended to be anything other than a tragedy: characters can and sometimes do die in every game. So the end was no surprise, even if that doesn't make it less painful.

The end never gets tough until I reach the Forward Operating Base, after Shepard has taken out the Hades cannon and they're getting ready for the final run to the Beam/Citadel.  All those goodbyes...

Shepard can call each of her (I play as a paragon FemShep, for the record) old squadmates from Mass Effect 2, like Samara and Jack, people she's encountered throughout ME3 but never joined her.  All those calls are short and to the point: no elaboration on events or stories, they're mostly just quick "good luck"s and then it's over.  But seeing some of my favorites -- Samara, for example -- again just for a quick moment brings home that this game is over, the trilogy is over, and who knows what's coming next.

Some of the longer conversations are even worse.  Some, like Tali's or Kaiden's, aren't that bad, even as much as I love Tali, and Liara's offer to blend minds one last time can be rough to watch: I teared up a little at that this time through.  Others, though, brought so much more up to the surface.

I didn't have the From Ashes DLC the first time I played, so I didn't have Javik and didn't know what to expect.  Javik made an interesting contribution to the crew in ME3; as the last Prothean, he can be kind of a douchebag with his focus on victory at any cost, but there's compassion mixed in there for him as well.  They're both warriors, but with a weird dynamic: Javik approaches everything ruthlessly whereas my Shepard has more of a heart. My Shepard and he are always getting into fights over the morality of her choices, and I had to break up more than few fights between him and others. By the end though, they respect each other. When he tells Shepard that she's standing for all people who have faced the Reapers, that all souls are watching her... I was destroyed.  The whole conversation was heartbreaking in its sincerity.  (Those writers/voice actors deserves some serious awards).

And EDI.  oh EDI... I know I'm going to kill her, I do every time because that's my final choice for the Reapers, the choice I think Shepard would really make, given the circumstances and the motives of the game: destruction.  And that kills EDI too, since she's an AI (artificial intelligence). When she talks Shepard for helping her feel alive... my heart breaks.  I miss her, every time, and the prospect of having to explain it all to Joker (assuming I live...)...

In a weird way, I am glad that so many of my favorite characters were already dead.  Mass Effect 3 is a tragedy, an intense, talented one that invests you deeply into the characters even when you know they are doomed, and I got sucked in completely.

Thane's death is expected, though the short prayer he gives for Shepard made me weep.  And Mordin... I don't think I would have been so upset to see Mordin go if he hadn't started singing on the way up to the top of the Shroud.  Legion's death for his people provides an honorable way for Tali to come to terms with the geth, and I appreciated that element of her story.

I hate that I can't save during this whole process -- it means I can't go back and re-live Shepard and Garrus's goodbye without playing through the first part of Priority: Earth again (which takes a while).  Their goodbye is one of my favorite moments in the game; I cry every single time. The Shepard-Garrus romance feels so real, so tension-filled and desperate as they fight the end of their worlds.  Garrus is written as a deep, complex character throughout the whole series: Shepard is constantly helping him through moral crises, romanced or not, and each one adds layers to his complicated character.  In that way, he feels real to me.  I've always been drawn to people who have a past, who don't just coast through life without getting deeply, intimately involved in something along the way.  Garrus is like that: he's invested in his life, in his world, and I love that about his character.  Throughout their romance, he and Shepard are trying to find a lighter side, trying to enjoy each other in the face of death and destruction.  Their Citadel date about halfway through ME3 highlights that, especially their shooting contest on the top of the Presidium.
So when they have to say goodbye... I love it, even as I'm crying over how desperate those last few exchanges are, how much they are still trying to stay positive and together.

The last moments of the game.  Shepard looks so pissed, so ready to be over and done with the Reapers, so determined to take them down.  I love it.  

The end of Mass Effect 3 depresses me, and not just because the game's over and I have to say goodbye.  It's just that nothing I do will be ever be on that scale -- no matter what I do with my life, I will never save the galaxy.  I will never be the one to make those kinds of sacrifices.  I can choose to make small ones, if I want to, but the world isn't tailored for me to be Shepard.

I knew this before Mass Effect.  I read a lot, and I play enough games, and so many stories hinge on heroes.  Stories with this kind of scope happen a lot in fiction, and let-downs when they're over happen a lot too.
But something about Mass Effect feels different to me.  Maybe I just love Shepard and her world so much -- maybe I see how my life could be, given that several fundamental things about the world/universe were a little different... I believe I could have her kind of courage and determination, if faced with that situation. If saving the world really did come down to me, I think I could do it.

I love this game.  I don't care what other people think about the ending(s), nor do I waste time analyzing all the tiny flaws that no doubt exist.  That doesn't matter to me.

I will always do all the extra work so Shepard can breathe one last time, in the last moment before the credits role.  I don't want her story to end, in the game or otherwise.

Obviously, no one is forcing me to make that final run.  Only the fate of the galaxy is at stake, after all.  And it's time to take back Earth.