Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Games
Up and coming
and eagerly awaited by my son and I: the sequel to American McGee’s Alice.
They’ve made three teasers, all of which are worth watching full screen. This one is gorgeous:
I’m hoping they bring back Chris Vrenna for the score, or someone of comparable quality. The teasers don’t give us much idea of the game play, but given the fact that the original (released in 2000) is still very playable, they’d have to work at it to ruin the game play.
But next up for me is Dragon Age 2. Shameful to buy the sequel when I never finished the first game, but it’s just too much fun to start new characters and work through each one’s origin story (they’re very different for different races, classes, etc.) Why, just the other day I sweet-talked an elf maiden into my bedroom. Then we heard a ruckus beyond the door and she stuuupidly said, “Oh, hey, I’ll go see who it is!”
Hmm . . . my romantic conquests usually don’t meet such gory ends.
D.
High concept game review from BoingBoing
Just brilliant: Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein got three real-life yakuza to review the Sega USA game Yakuza 3.
I enlist the aid of a teenager to show the yaks how to actually play a videogame. Even then, it’s tough going. Of the three reviewers, only Kuroishi manages to play it all the way to the end. Two of the three are missing their pinkies — in the old days, when a yakuza or his subordinates screwed up, they chopped off pinkies as an act of atonement — and this seems to affect their gameplay.
Hey, Mr. Adelstein: Mafia II is coming out soon. Do ya think . . . ?
D.
This is going to be AWESOME!
What Bioshock did for Ayn Rand’s objectivism, Bioshock Infinite promises to do for American exceptionalism:
The primary setting of BioShock Infinite is a city suspended in the air by giant blimps and balloons, called “Columbia”. Unlike the secret development of the underwater city of Rapture, Columbia was proudly boasted by the American government when launched in 1900, centralized on the idea of American exceptionalism; the reveal trailer for the game alludes to the 1893 Worlds Fair which is historically considered to be the emergence of American exceptionalism. Between its launch and the game’s events, the well-armed city became involved in an “international incident”, and the location of the city was soon lost from everyone else. Like Rapture, Columbia is considered a failed utopia, with signs present suggesting a theocratic government taking control at some point, and similar racial-purification concepts such as nazism and xenophobia.
And the artwork looks appealing, too.
Slated for release in 2012, which means 2013. If we’re lucky.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Diablo III . . .
D.
Top ‘o the world, ma.
I don’t write anymore, save for emails and blog posts. The drive isn’t there. I would like to know where it went, but no one’s talking.
Of course, this leaves me with spare time. Lots of it. And lately that time has been funneled into a brilliant little gem of a game, Civilization IV. Now, the Civilization series has been around a long, long time; the first version came out in 1991, and I remember, during my second or third year of residency, staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning, hooked by the “one more term” hunger like a junkie jonesing for his next fix. The AI is always asking you questions and it’s hard not to answer. What do you want to build in Constantinople? What do you want to do with this pikeman, with that panzer? Your stack of six tanks are at the walls of Moscow. Do you attack, or do you wait for your artillery to arrive next turn? You’ve finished researching Liberalism. Is it time for a revolution? Or would you rather research Fascism, first? Build the pyramids in Paris or use your resources to build an army of swordsmen instead?
One. More. Turn.
One thing I haven't done yet: nuke my enemies into submission
Civ IV has a much different feel to it than the original Civ. Civ III was yet another variation on the theme. Oddly enough, I skipped Civ II altogether, but Civ III consumed me for more hours than I care to recall. Thing about Civ III was that the games were long. Hellish long. Long enough that I finished very few of them. Oh, and then there was Alpha Centauri, the franchise’s science fiction version and one of my favorites because when you conquer a civilization, they don’t just vanish from the screen; no, you get a brief animation of the leader of that civ being “interrogated” (tortured) as a door slams shut much like the end of The Godfather (or The Prisoner). In Alpha Centauri, the game creators had the brilliant idea of giving each leader a unique political philosophy, so that when you conquered Sister Miriam, for example, you weren’t just wiping her smug prissy smile off the planet, you were destroying religious fundamentalism, too. Aah, so satisfying.
One of the improvements of Civ IV is that time flies by rather quickly, such that you’re in the 20th Century before you know it. And if you play a tight game with relatively few cities, say if you’re going for a diplomatic or cultural victory (rather than a military victory), your turns are not time-consuming.
My most recent game, however, was a big one. Large map, and I set out to achieve a domination victory. I had something like 67 cities by the end of it, and I had crushed the Mongols, the Egyptians, the Indians*, the Chinese, and most of the Roman Empire before the rest of the world acknowledged the inevitable. I only remained at peace with Huayna Capac of the Incan Empire.
At the end, you get a number of screens showing your progress in the game you’ve just completed. My previous game took 10 hours. This one seemed a little longer. Had I spent 12 hours at it? Fourteen?
Try forty.
My wife is a Civ IV widow.
But the best part was the animation screen showing my progress relative to the other civs. I played as the most ruthlessly bellicose civilization in human history, the Americans. FDR to be exact. And my color was blue. On the world map, you at first see small blossoms of color: my blue Washington, China’s purple Peking, and so forth. Additional blooms appear as we founded our secondary and tertiary cities. The color spreads like ink stains as our cities extend their cultural boundaries. Soon, each of us had our fair share of the globe.
And then FDR went ballistic. I began nibbling away at the Kublai Khan (muddy brown) and Hatshepsut (yellow), gaining momentum, until my blue wave grew to consume one-third, one-half, finally two-thirds of the screen. Like Pac Man on a binge. Like metastatic melanoma.
I rule.
D.
*Don’t worry, it was Asoka I crushed, not Mahatma Ghandi.
Hey Jake! You’re learning.
Huffington Post reports on a new study demonstrating the learning benefits of video games:
“People that play these fast-paced games have better vision, better attention and better cognition,” said Daphne Bavelier, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester.
That’s the meat of the article. The rest is sprinkled with tired old canards — first from the game-haters,
Gavin McKiernan, the national grassroots director for the Parents Television Council, an advocacy group concerned about sex and violence in the media, said that when it comes to violent video games, any positive effects are outweighed by the negative.
“You are not just passively watching Scarface blow away people,” McKiernan said. “You are actually participating. Doing these things over and over again is going to have an effect.”
and then from Bavelier herself, who turns out to be, um. Well, um . . .
Bavelier said games could be developed that would harness the positive effects of the first-person shooter games without the violence.
“As you know, most of us females just hate those action video games,” she said. “You don’t have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess which has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles.”
Oh, yeah, that’ll sell.
D.
Alice vs. Alice
I suspect few of my readers are familiar with American McGee’s Alice, a ten-year-old video game which was in the opinion of many* an instant classic. Tim Burton’s Alice will, naturally, garner far more attention; it’s big box office, features “sexiest man alive” Johnny Depp, and has twin virtues of being an expensive special effects flick and the product of Tim Burton’s mind. But does Burton’s Alice really deserve such a disparity of focus?
Consider:
1. McGee’s Alice: badass. Burton’s Alice: nice ass.
Maybe. It’s a Disney movie, after all — we see a bit of Mia Wasikowska’s neck and that’s about it.
2. McGee’s premise: an insane Alice returns to Wonderland to regain her sanity. Burton’s premise: an inane Alice returns to Wonderland to dodge a marriage proposal from a chinless lordling.
3. McGee’s message: Guilt is a bitch. But find some way-cool weapons (such as the brutal croquet mallet, jackbombs, and the ever helpful vorpal blade) and you can slaughter physical manifestations of your guilt to your heart’s content. Burton’s message: It’s okay to be your own woman.
Yes, it’s a feminist movie, and I would have cheered the ending had not Burton (through the proxy of Johnny Depp) indulged in that cretinous dance routine.
4. McGee’s soundtrack: from Chris Vrenna — dark, moody. Unforgettable. Burton’s soundtrack: um . . . forgettable.
Okay, I’m running out of compare-and-contrast steam. Alice wasn’t a bad movie, just a disappointing one. I’m of the same mind as critic Amy Biancolli, “But its single biggest failing — an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature — is the fact that it makes sense.” Biancolli doesn’t quite get Carroll’s Alice, though. For me, the charm of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was the delightful conflict between the hallucinatory action and Alice’s proper, no-nonsense response to it. McGee captured that aspect of Alice; Burton didn’t.
There was a lot of bizarreness in the movie, but not the good kind of bizarreness. Why does the White Queen prance and mince? Why do the Mad Hatter’s eyes keep changing color? And why the strong sexual subtext between the Mad Hatter and Alice? If Burton had run with that, well, fine. Instead, he gave us bits and clues, as if an entire plot thread had been edited from the screenplay — but not completely.
Oh, one other thing: it strikes me as wrong, somehow, for any Alice-inspired story to be predictable. This movie wasn’t 100% predictable. 98%, perhaps?
I know, I know. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.
D.
*My son and me, to name two.
Dragon Age meta
First, a hat tip to Portal:
The writing on this game rocks.
Sexuality here is pretty open-ended. Here’s a conversation between the protagonist (you) and Alistair, the future king.
Oh, and if you go to the local brothel, whatever you do, don’t tell the madame, “Surprise me.”
D.
Musical interlude
Video game music wasn’t always this good. Remember Pac Man’s tinny soundtrack? But things have come a long way since Pac Man.
For a quick eye-opener (ear-opener?), try Tin Hat Trio’s “The Longest Night,” from the game Triachnid. Then listen to Jami Sieber’s “Undercurrent” or “Maenam”, both of which you’ll hear while playing Braid. You’ll even hear “Undercurrent” backwards (Braid is a time-manipulating game), and it’s intriguingly good.
Even Civilization III had some decent music, although when you hear something ad nauseum, it still gets tiresome.
On the other hand, I can listen again and again to Portal’s “Still Alive,” the song that introduced us to Jonathan Coulton, and it never fails to make me smile. (Or maybe it was his, “Re: Your Brains.” Also good for grins.)
D.
You know you play too much Oblivion when . . .
. . . you find yourself coveting Benirus Manor.
It’s in the coastal city of Anvil, and it’s a steal at a mere 5000 gold pieces. The place is a mess (hey, it’s sounding like my OTHER coastal home!), but once you rid it of its curse (rats in our Oregon house, ghosts in this one), it repairs itself (sadly not applicable to our Oregon house).
Why do you need a house in Oblivion? To store all of your crap, naturally. You know, the loot you find that you don’t want to use right now but don’t want to sell. Books that might turn out to be quest items. Various herbs and vegetables used in alchemy.
I was playing Dragon Age, and I think I’m about 5/6 finished with it, enjoying it very much — tremendous writing; the banter between characters is so good, I’m tempted to post a video — oh, hey, what the hell:
The woman, Wynne, is about 90 years old, but she looks pretty decent for all of that. She’s sort of a priestess mage and rather preachy. Zevran is the elf with the Ricardo Montalban accent. He’s an unrepentant assassin and he’ll screw anything with a heartbeat.
Anyway, I was playing Dragon Age, but got a bit of Dragon Age fatigue and decided to reinstall Oblivion. It’s a 2006 role-playing game with this rather novel plot about saving the world from the gates of hell blah blah blah. Terrible voice acting, mediocre writing, and yet there’s something about the world that draws me in and won’t let me go. It’s a huge world and you can explore just about every square inch — unlike Dragon Age, where your ability to explore is nonexistent.
Sometimes, a guy feels like exploring.
I want that house. And I can almost afford it. Right now, all I can afford is this shack:
. . . which is also on the waterfront, and looks a good deal like our house in Oregon when we first bought it.
I bet the shack has rats, too.
D.