Miserable Pile of Secrets

What I've Been Watching #1

2012-02-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

Previously on The Vampire Diaries . . . .

Season 3, Episode 13: "Bringing Out the Dead"

Stefan looked to be in trouble, at the mercy of an angry Klaus, who has no mercy. But Klaus's brother Elijah, already once betrayed by Klaus, decided he would be the one doing the fooling this time. After Klaus sent him to retrieve the mystery casket, Elijah instead returned with . . . two daggers! Then, from behind him, out stepped an undaggered Kol, one of the remaining two original vampires and brothers of Klaus who had yet to be revealed on the show.

Even Klaus, despite being the unkillable original/hybrid, could not remain calm at the prospect of answering to two pissed off original vampires with scores to settle against the brother who had betrayed them. Forgetting about Stefan, he makes a vampire-speed dash for the exit but is vampire-speed cut off by Finn, the last remaining brother, also undaggered! So cool!

But it's not over yet! Klaus starts to flee in the other direction but is cut off this time by . . . Rebekah! And she's also undaggered! The original sister, last seen daggered and stashed away by Klaus a few weeks ago, stabs Klaus with her own dagger, at which he staggers back into the restraining arms of his brothers. Klaus may be unkillable, but he's never seemed otherwise significantly stronger than any other original, so I'm thinking, if he's outnumbered like this, they could just stick him in a vault somewhere and he'd be done.

Elijah then tells our heroes, Damon and Stefan, that they're free to go, informing them that "This is family business."

My first impression: Damn, that was awesome.

My second take: Damn, this stupid vampire show is the only thing I have that I still look forward to in my life.

. . . .

Can't wait for tonight's new episode!

The Double Eyelids Nonsense

2012-01-30T23:19:00.000-08:00

My coworker was sharing with me her feelings on the Korean pop star and actor Rain.

"I used to think he was ugly, but now I think he's handsome."

Um, sure, that's great.

She then proceeded to relate to me this Rain guy's sad story of having been born with single eyelids.

"A lot of people get surgery to make double eyelids, but he didn't want to get the surgery. I don't think people should have to get the surgery. That's not right. You know?"

I nodded.

Actually, I had no idea what she was talking about, with these "single eyelids" and "double eyelids." But it was too late in the workday, and I did not have sufficient mental energy left to endure one of her typically meandering, broken English explanations. So I simply nodded.

Afterward, I went home and looked up this "double eyelids" nonsense. Turns out, my coworker was not making this up at all, as the "double eyelid surgery" is, according to Wikipedia, one of the most common cosmetic procedures in Taiwan and other parts of East Asia. I had to look up some photos even to see what the difference was, and I found that the "double eyelid" description was apt. All my life, I had never before been consciously aware of the difference between single and double eyelids, although I suppose I had always intuitively noticed that different people (and, to generalize, different races) had different-looking eyelids. My coworker was also right that it was a pretty stupid and needless surgery, the cultural prejudice against single eyelids entirely unjustified.

As for this Rain guy, it's also true that, early in his career, he was repeatedly rejected in auditions because he did not have double eyelids. It says so right in his Wikipedia entry, so it must have been a big part of his life story.

Reading that, I found myself seething, but not because of the injustice done unto Rain. Rather, it was because the whole thing sounded like the most unbelievably ridiculous nonsense I had ever heard, and yet the guy's fans, including my coworker, apparently take it as a very sad "aww"-worthy story.

So, let me get this straight, this Rain guy's MAJOR ordeal . . . IN. LIFE. is that he was born without the double eyelids? No, don't even deny it. It's right there in his Wikipedia entry, under the "Early life" section. And now he's a millionaire pop singer and movie star, adored the world over, probably lives in a mansion. And I'm supposed to feel sorry for this guy?

Okay, okay, I kid. No, I don't feel sorry for Rain, but neither would I want to trade lives with him. It's ridiculous to me that this "double eyelids" obsession is such a thing that for him to not get the surgery was a big deal. But I don't suppose that's in any way his fault.

The Gay Friends Episode

2012-01-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

(Names changed to protect the innocent.)

I had the most uncomfortable workplace conversation ever the other day. It was the end of the day, and people were getting ready to leave, or else had left already. Susie, my neighbor at work, was telling me about some Taiwanese drama. Apparently, there's a homosexual character on the show, which led Susie right into asking me directly whether I had any gay friends.

The question took me by surprise, although it probably shouldn't have; my coworker is always asking me these very direct, often personal, and entirely random questions. I mean, I like her very much, but sometimes it's as if she has no filter, and so expects other people to be just as open and forthcoming with every detail of their lives.

I pretended to reflect, but I actually knew very well that my answer would be no. No, I don't have any gay friends. This is not due to any homophobia on my part, but more so it reflects the special value I invest in the word "friend," which I personally reserve for only a very select few individuals with whom I have felt a strong sense of camaraderie. By that definition, I would say that I can probably also count on one hand the number of heterosexual friends that I've had in my entire life.

I was probably considering the question more deeply than it deserved. I've had gay classmates and coworkers with whom I've been on friendly terms. I suppose, in the broader sense of the word, they would qualify as "friends."

Anyway, it hardly mattered. Susie was a little surprised that I didn't have any gay friends. Then, as if conducting a survey, she turned to another coworker, Colleen, and asked her if she had any gay friends. Colleen, not quite understanding the question, raised an eyebrow and turned to me. I just shrugged and restated the question: "Do you have any gay friends?" No, we're not at the uncomfortable part yet, but almost.

Colleen, now realizing that this was not a joke, casually named one of our male coworkers.

"Who?!" asked Susie quite loudly.

Colleen repeated the name, only this time she leaned in and whispered it, whereas she had spoken it in a normal tone the first time. I couldn't understand it at first. If our male coworker was openly gay, then why were we whispering as though it were some shameful secret? If it was a secret, then maybe it wasn't such a good idea for Colleen to be outing this guy to the one person in the office with almost no filter nor any sense of boundaries.

Sure enough, upon hearing the name more clearly, Susie responded, "Kevin is gay?!"

As she practically yelled out her question in astonishment, I immediately wished we could go back to whispering. And as Susie proceeded to repeat "Kevin is gay?!" several more times, mixing things up with the occasional "I didn't know Kevin was gay!" as well, I did not want to be anywhere near that conversation anymore.

Of course, Colleen didn't help things much. Even though she appeared to be just as embarrassed as me, that didn't stop her from naming all the other gay guys at our workplace. Some were news to me, some I already knew. Somehow all of it was shocking to Susie, who continued to loudly express her astonishment.

I wondered under what circumstances Colleen even came by all this intel. And as for Susie, she seemed so out-of-touch with who was and wasn't gay in the office, I seriously wondered whether she herself had any gay friends. I might have turned the tables and asked her, but, really, I didn't want to prolong the conversation any further.

Blind Spot

2012-01-27T23:40:00.000-08:00

Was driving to work this morning when I passed a Braille Institute truck. My first thought: "My God, they let these people behind the wheel?"

Sorry.

And before you even ask, yes, I also think the Budweiser truck driver is drunk.

Beastiality

2012-01-21T18:22:00.000-08:00

A coworker was telling me how she wanted to see Disney's Beauty and the Beast 3D. She hadn't seen it since her childhood, and she remembered it as "the most romantic cartoon ever." I could agree that it was a fine film, but I remembered it somewhat differently . . . .

Me: No, I don't think Belle had romantic feelings for the Beast.

Coworker: But that was the whole point. He had to make her fall in love with him in order to break the curse.

Me: Did it say she had to fall in love with him? Or just that she had to love him? Like, as a friend? I think they just became friends.

Coworker: OH. MY. GOD. That was the whooooole point. You missed the whooooole point of the story, Henry!

Me: I don't think so. First of all, there's no way she could have been attracted to him. Also, I don't remember them sharing a single romantic moment together. I certainly don't remember her singing any songs about it.

Coworker: THEY KISSED.

Me: Well . . . I don't remember that . . . . I could be wrong. It's been a long time since I've seen it. I was a different person then.

Coworker: *groan*

Yes, I could be wrong. But I don't think I am. If my coworker is right, however, then it was a lesser film than I remember. Thoughts?

No, Darkside Chronicles doesn't count . . . .

2012-01-19T19:41:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't seen it yet, Capcom recently released an extended version of Blur Studio's Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City short:

I wouldn't expect the actual game to be anywhere near as cool as this movie. Honestly, I don't even really expect the game to be good. Even so, just hoping for a lot of fanservice, I'm probably looking forward to it more so than to any other releases scheduled for this year. At least, I was until today's Resident Evil 6 reveal:

Trailer is fairly incomprehensible, obviously not as slick as the Blur video. But, hey, it's got Leon and Chris in the same game, at long last. That's gotta be worth something . . . .

What I've Been Reading #2

2012-01-19T00:11:00.000-08:00

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Ch. 114 - "The Gilder":

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

I neglected to mention in my last Moby-Dick post that it was actually not my first Melville. In high school, I had read White Jacket and Billy Budd. For whatever reason, my AP English teacher in 12th grade thought I might enjoy Melville, and so she suggested I pick two of his works to analyze for an assignment. Naturally, I picked Billy Budd because it was the shortest. Then I picked White Jacket somewhat at random, but probably likewise because the copy at the library looked slimmer than the other titles next to it. Moby-Dick surely would have had the most published criticism available to consult (White Jacket basically had none), but maybe I thought it would be too predictable a choice.

In hindsight, it was a lucky thing that I ended up picking the two works that I did. Despite Melville's having written them practically at opposite ends of his career, White Jacket and Billy Budd were very nearly the same story, making for an easy 10-page paper. I got an A on that paper, and it was probably the best work I did that entire year. Although that class was more than 10 years ago, still I thought I had a fair idea what to expect going into Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick, surface-level similarities aside, proved to be very much not the perfected White Jacket nor proto-Billy Budd that I had anticipated. Even at my most glib, I would never be able to summarize it in some 10-page paper.

I said before that I was not enjoying reading through Moby-Dick, and I do not take that back. I felt that it was a self-indulgent work, produced by an egomaniac, to be consumed by other egomaniacs. Perhaps all high art is, but I digress. As I read Moby-Dick, and endured its interminable series of interludes, I would think back to how comparatively elegant White Jacket was, and how pure Billy Budd, and I would wonder where had gone that Herman Melville who actually had a point to make.

And yet, now that I've finished Moby-Dick, somehow it is those other works that now seem fake and shallow to me by comparison.

It's hard for me to quantify, but White Jacket and Billy Budd, at least to my high school self, were like most good books, in that, when I finished them, it was like attaining the night's repose following the day's labor both exhausting yet gratifying. On the other hand, when I came to the end of Moby-Dick, it felt like dying. More than that, when I came to the end, I caught myself looking back over the whole of it, and it seemed to me I had been dying the whole time, only I had not realized it until it was all done. Frankly, I don't know how else to put it. When people speak of that phenomenon of your life flashing before you as you die, I imagine now that it would all play out rather like Moby-Dick.

What I've Been Reading #1

2012-01-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Ch. 36 - "The Quarter-Deck":

"But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?"

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow."

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again,--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines."

I watched the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick in high school, and, at the time, I was principally impressed with Gregory Peck's performance as an uncannily formidable Captain Ahab. Reading the original novel now, after having previously read two lesser Melville works, also in high school, this thing is a real slog. The monomaniacal Ahab remains a compelling character, but truly his appearances collectively comprise only a small fraction of the novel. Much of the book is just episodes about life and the people aboard the ship, but even that quickly gives way to lengthy encyclopedic non-narrative chapters about whales and whaling. Most chapters exist more to provide flavor than substance.

In a classroom setting, it's great to be able to dialogue with classmates and the instructor to interpret the text critically. But now that I am and have been many years alone and outside the academic circle, it seems silly to think that a mere novel could ever meaningfully affect how I live or understand the world, and reading critically seems almost a pointless endeavor. Thus, whatever does not grip me immediately feels consequently like a wretched waste of my time. That includes most of Moby-Dick, and, despite its prominence in the Western literary canon, I would never recommend it to anyone who is not presently a student studying English literature, or maybe whaling.

The above quoted dialogue does contain what was my favorite line from the movie, and now one of my favorite lines in all literature: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

Now, what would really happen if he were to strike the sun? Well, he could no more do that than that the sun would be able to insult him in the first place. But, supposing such a thing could be arranged, it doesn't take a genius to figure that, when man and hot plasma collide, the sun is probably gonna win. But it is precisely such talk that makes Ahab so uniquely compelling a character. Because what he is suggesting is so clearly insane, and yet he speaks it, not only with such conviction that you believe he truly means it, but as though he wouldn't even have any choice in the matter; whether by destiny or his own nature, he cannot be less than he is.

'Tis the Season

2011-12-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

I mentioned previously my daydream about winning the lottery and then donating it all to charity, after which the deed, having made national news, would have inspired millions of people to follow suit in giving a little, their combined donations adding up to a lot. Well, that dream has now partially come true.

No, I didn't win the lottery; I don't even play. But I read this rather inspiring news story recently, about three money managers who won a $250+ million lottery and are now moving forward with plans on how to distribute the money toward philanthropy. Speculation is that these three men are actually representing an anonymous client, the true lottery winner, who had the heart to give and needed their brains to figure out how to do so most effectively. But no matter. Whatever the case, it's an inspiring story.

It's already old news, however, and it didn't change the world. Even so, I've decided to follow through in doing my part, letting the story inspire me to make a modest donation this season to Invisible Children.

The San Diego-based organization "uses film, creativity and social action to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony's rebel war and restore LRA-affected communities in Central Africa to peace and prosperity." They were also a participant in the San Diego Foundation's giveBIG matchday event this past week (sorry, it's over now, folks). You can go to their website for more info or to make a contribution.

Long Live Play

2011-12-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me the other day that my post on the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance reveal was the first truly gaming-related blogging I'd done in almost a year. But I'm guessing the majority of the legitimate pageviews I get are still for my old posts on gaming.

Anyway, I saw this PlayStation ad on TV the other day (it's not new, but I also don't watch as much live TV as I used to, so it was new to me):

It's pretty cool, very meticulously detailed. But it kind of saddens me that I can't ID probably half the franchises represented in the ad. And of those that I do recognize, I think Metal Gear is the only one I've played. Oh well. So it goes . . . .

Revengeance

2011-12-13T23:17:00.000-08:00

Sounds to me like somebody has just dethroned Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for "worst video game title ever." Tetsuya Nomura's esoteric titles at least usually make you pause for a split-second before determining that they are complete rubbish. This, on the other hand, is immediately and aggressively stupid. It's Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, folks!

I have little doubt that this title came directly from the top, Hideo Kojima himself, the man who brought us "Transfarring." I sincerely believe that Kojima, with his limited grasp of English, doesn't realize how stupid a title this is. But this is one of those (many) times when one of the many native English speakers working for him should have the stones to speak up and tell him it's no good. It's a sad testimony to just how bad it is that I'm actually hoping that "Revengeance" is an intentional reference to the 1969 Supreme Court case involving the Ku Klux Klan.

A poet once said . . . .

2011-12-06T19:32:00.000-08:00

Why is the mainstream media only now picking up on the fact that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain had been quoting the inspirational lyrics of a Pokemon movie theme song throughout the course of his campaign?

Personally, I respect Cain more now than I did a week ago. That's what I call "owning it." Of course, that still leaves all that other filthy stuff that he won't own to . . . .

By Grabthar's hammer

2011-12-02T23:59:00.001-08:00

Was listening to an interview with Alan Rickman on Tuesday's Talk of the Nation. It reminded me of my high school government class. The teacher, Mr. Baldwin, was a personal friend of Alan Rickman. I don't remember the context, but I don't think Mr. Baldwin meant to brag; somehow it was relevant to the study of government, though that's hardly meaningful now.

Anyway, he was mentioning one day in class how he had had lunch with an actor, whom most of us would probably have recognized. It was someone who was known especially for playing villains. Mr. Baldwin seemed to have to think hard to come up with a specific movie. Finally he remembered that his actor friend had been the bad guy in Die Hard.

I have never seen the first Die Hard, but I knew for a fact that some of my classmates had, yet the title elicited a complete non-reaction, which seemed to somewhat take the wind out of Mr. Baldwin's sails. He then dropped the name "Alan Rickman," which I did recognize.

Ah, you mean the bad guy from Quigley Down Under, I thought to myself. The Sheriff of Nottingham! Rasputin from that HBO Rasputin movie! Galaxy Quest! 'By Grabthar's hammer'--you know the rest!

I didn't say any of this aloud, of course. In fact, nobody said anything. I gathered that we were instead playing the game of "Let's all pretend never to have heard of Alan Rickman, nor anything else Mr. Baldwin references, so as to make him feel very old and out of touch." And so, Mr. Baldwin, sounding a tad deflated, moved on with his anecdote, whatever the hell it had to do with government class.

The interview itself was not great. The questions were not the best, but neither was Alan Rickman an especially cooperative guest, and so a lot of time (my time) was wasted on defensive clarifying of trivialities. Somehow I would have expected the man now best known for playing Severus Snape to be a more fun interviewee. And yet do I sense some resentment at being typecast as a villain?

Honestly, the most exciting part for me was when they opened it up for callers to contribute their acting experiences, specifically with villain roles. The first caller was a voice actor identifying herself as "Mary Mac," AKA Mary McDonald-Lewis, voice of Lady Jaye from the 80s G.I. Joe cartoon (and more recently the voice of the OnStar system). I didn't recognize her name or voice, but somehow I guessed immediately who she was, just because there are only so many female voice actors of that generation (do cartoons these days still have chewy villain roles?) who regularly speak publicly about their careers. Not that she had anything very insightful to contribute to this interview either. I just thought it was cool to hear Lady Jaye on the radio.

Where a Kid Can Be a Kid

2011-11-27T10:49:00.001-08:00

A coworker was telling the story some time ago of how he used to work at Chuck E. Cheese, the miniature family fun center fronted by a pizza-loving anthropomorphic mouse. It was one of the first jobs he ever worked, and among his responsibilities was having to dress up in the Chuck E. Cheese costume to greet and pose for pictures with patrons. Great fun for the kids, of course, but the job could be brutal on the employees. For the germaphobic, it's disgusting enough having to maintain all the coin-operated arcade games after they have been pawed at with the unwashed hands of children coming directly from eating pizza on the restaurant side of the establishment. But there was apparently nothing more nightmarish than being the guy in the mouse suit and being abused by unruly children. I can well believe it, because, once upon a time, some twenty years ago, I was one of those kids making it a nightmare.

Chuck E.'s was initially kind of a scary place to me. In my memory, it was a dimly lit and uninviting hole, filled with strangers—mostly kids and teens, yes, but also oddly with some gruff-looking biker types there for the video arcade games. The entertainment was pretty awful, too; the animatronic stage show was just creepy. Even today, I still find these singing robot puppets to be disturbingly inhuman simulacrums of life that only leave me yearning for something real.

The “live” Chuck E. was a different matter, however. It wasn't that I cared much for Chuck E. himself, and I understood very well that it was just a man in a costume, but at least that meant he could walk and behave like an actual human, which made him not scary, unlike the animatronic version.

Almost as soon as he appeared and began waving to the guests, he was mobbed by kids who, for some reason unfathomable to me, were overflowing with affection for this character that seemed to me nothing more than a second-rate cartoon mouse. As he was high-fiving and hugging as many kids as he could while making the rounds, my mother urged me to get in there as well and lay hands on him before he disappeared, as though just touching him (or, rather, his gnarly costume) were supposed to produce some magical result. It was hard to grab his attention in that swarm of children, however, so my mother suggested I grab his tail instead. I gripped that tail and pulled with all my seven-year-old might. And in the next split-second, I witnessed something real yet simultaneously unbelievable.

It was one of those moments where time seemed to slow, when my senses seemed to operate a thousand times faster than my reflexes, so that I could glimpse every inevitable microsecond across a seeming eternity, yet I could not move at all to affect it, my own body frozen helplessly along with everything else before me. Chuck E., taken by surprise by being pulled from behind, reflexively stretched out his arms in front of him, as if to balance himself. But it was no use. The pull was irresistible. One foot followed the other backward too quickly. Arms now flailing frantically, he was tripping over himself, stumbling, his behind outstripping his feet, the rest left to gravity, a dull thud as he crashed to the floor.

Poor Chuck E., after struggling to get back to his feet, spun around quickly to see who had been behind him, but I had already retreated back a ways, and there were tons of other laughing children in the same direction. There was no way for him to know who had made such a fool of him.

I know I should have felt sorry for him, but I couldn't. I still can't force myself to feel bad about the memory now. It was as though it were the funniest thing I had ever witnessed, so overcome was I with laughter.

Twenty years later, I finally went back to Chuck E. Cheese. It was not the same location that I went to as a kid. I don't know if that place is even still around, but I know that it was in a part of town that I don't travel anymore. This facility was much brighter and probably cleaner than the one in my childhood. But, either because of that or maybe just because I'm not a child anymore, it was missing some of that mysterious quality that made Chuck E. Cheese both scary and exciting for me as a kid. This just seemed like a pretty sparse restaurant with a very small selection of arcade games. This location as a whole was smaller, I think, than the one in my memory, or at least it seemed that way.

It was actually pretty dreary and depressing. Granted, it was the middle of the week and at night, but there weren't a lot of kids there. It just didn't seem like a very happy or lively place. The pizza was way overpriced and mediocre, and the animatronics show was as creepy as ever, yet now made additionally obnoxious by the weird pop songs that the puppets sang. Most of the amusements were just random games of chance, little different from slot machines, yet they were not only legal but targeted toward children. The selection of coin-operated rides was especially meager. (Yes, I realize there's no way I could enjoy the kiddie rides now, nor did I want to, but it was disappointing all the same to see this part of my childhood disappearing.)

But the most disappointing aspect was Chuck E. himself. Examining the artwork for the character, one of my companions noted how much "cooler" the modern Chuck E. was, dressed now in his cargo shorts that were quite a departure from the rodent she grew up with. Later that night, the live Chuck E. made his much anticipated arrival, but indeed this was no longer the mouse I remembered. He was decked out in the skater outfit, yes, but, more importantly, he no longer had a tail! Thinking back, both to my coworker's accounts and to the incident from my own childhood, I could understand why maybe they had finally removed the tail from the costume—after all, even a seven-year-old child could have a grown man at his mercy if he got hold of that glaring weak spot—but, even so, there was something lost there, something to be lamented. Alas, you really can't go home again.

Yesterday

2011-10-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

“No, Henry, you live every day like yesterday was your last.”

It was meant more as an amused observation than a criticism, yet still it wounded me.

I often replay conversations in my head, always far too late realizing what I should have said, instead of whatever useless vapor actually escaped my lips in the moment. Yet, even almost a year later in this case, I can't come up with any better response than “No, you're wrong!” or “So?!” My actual response—a weak smile and silent nod—probably served as well as anything else I might muster. Perhaps I might have reminded her that she had only known me but fewer than ten scarcely overlapping days in our lives, and the most recent had been more than five years ago, so she was in no position to be drawing conclusions concerning my person. But, truth is, she was right, partly so, and I think I recognized it even at the time, though maybe I couldn't quite comprehend it.

Never Let Me Go

2011-10-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I met up with an old classmate I had not contacted since college, that business having been concluded some five years prior. I could not call this person a close friend, neither back then nor now. We had had only one class together freshman year, which she rarely attended, and during which we barely spoke to one another. But, during the course of the next three years after that, we would sometimes run into each other at the library or the literature department, and, for whatever reason, she would always remember me and strike up a conversation. These conversations were not altogether profound nor altogether regular—I can count on one hand the number of times we spoke—but they were pleasant and they were easy, unusually so for me.

So, as I was saying, I met up with this person for the first time in many years. A lot had happened in that time for her, though perhaps not enough, even less so for me. We did some catching up, had some good talk, mostly about those intervening years when we weren't following each other's lives. She told me where she was with life now; I had much less to report on the topic. She also talked about the future, about where each of us was or should have been headed. My life, if anywhere, was pointed backward, however, as I seemed to be stuck in dwelling on the past, whereas she was living through today and trying hard to glimpse tomorrow.

She seemed far less interested in reminiscing, which was odd to me, because, our lives having grown so far apart—hers having been much fuller than mine—what else had we in common to discuss except those few experiences we had shared in college? My mind was fixated on that before, back when we were not such strangers. A part of me was stuck there in that past, and an especially foolish part of me thought I could take her back there with me.

Midway into the conversation, I tried to subtly reference an inside joke that we had once shared. It was a reference so particular to the context of our acquaintance, so “inside,” as it were, that I can't even repeat it here, because it wouldn't be funny, it wouldn't make any sense, it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else in the world but the two people who were there in that exact moment those several years ago. As it turned out, it didn't mean anything even to the other person who had been there.

She didn't seem to catch it. She didn't respond in any way. Even if she didn't remember it, she should at least have asked what I had meant by such a bizarre rejoinder, since it was again something that should have made no sense to anyone who didn't already know what I was talking about. Not only did she not seem to know what I was talking about, but she didn't seem to care. She did pause for an instant, reflectively I might dare hope, but there had been plenty enough such brief pauses on both sides throughout our conversation that it would not do to read too deeply into this barely perceptible, perhaps wholly imagined one. It came to nothing. Her eyes rather seemed fixed on something far beyond the moment, far beyond me, and there was no verbal recognition, no acknowledgment even that she had heard me, before she moved right along. And, in that instant, I realized that my life had shrunk to virtually nothing.

I couldn't blame her. She had been busy living all this time, and, for all my self-pity, her weary eyes and voice told that the years had been harder on her than they had been on me. Amid all that experience that she had absorbed and accumulated, such a small and insignificant moment as ours could understandably have become lost. It was not, after all, anything especially clever that I had said all those years ago, although she had laughed at the time. It was nothing to be proud of, nothing memorable, although for some reason I did remember it, and I was proud of it. All the same, once upon a time there was this moment—rather, this small piece of irrelevant information—shared between only two people in the entire world. Now the other person no longer remembered, and suddenly I felt like the loneliest person in the world.

What did I have riding on this, on her remembering, I wondered. Why was I so disappointed now by her non-reaction? It was as though I had invested everything in that memory. As though getting that chuckle out of this one girl years ago had been the best thing—the only good thing—I had ever done, would ever do in my life. Now the one witness to that moment could not attest to it. It was as though it had never happened in the first place. And with the loss of that memory along went any meaning to my tiny existence. She was to have been my proof. How else was I supposed to know that my life wasn't all a dream?

And then I wonder, why did I go through that? Why was I made to hang on so long to this small moment, if it never really mattered? What is the point of all these fleeting dreams and forgotten ideas, all these vanishing thoughts and unexpressed emotions? No one will know them. They do not change the world.

And yet they matter to me. Indeed, I realize now that they are me. Waking up in the morning, brushing my teeth, going to work, pumping gas, buying deodorant, melting into the couch exhausted—such has become my day, and perhaps you could say that is my life, but it is not who I am. Who I am is that inside joke, that laugh shared with this girl who was not quite a friend, but who, for the duration of that laugh, was my entire world. Who cares where it led or didn't? That was more than seven years ago, but it is also today, it is tomorrow, it is all the rest of my days for as long as I live. As I live and as I feel, I myself am the proof that it happened and that it matters. No one can take it from me, no more than they could remove dough from bread. So what more could I possibly require?

We parted ways again after our chat, and, a year later, I haven't spoken to her since. Perhaps in another four years, another moment of weakness will strike me, and I will again be driven to try. But I wouldn't count on that; I don't intend to make the same mistake twice. But someday, very far off I hope, perhaps we will run into one another. In another world perhaps. Yes, a better world.

And what will we say then to one another, in this better world? Perhaps I'll say, “I have so many things I want to tell you”? And then you'll say, “I want to hear all about it”? No, that will never do.

Let It Be

2011-09-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

"Let It Be" has never been one of my favorite Beatles songs. I've always found it somewhat cheesy, and I never actively seek to bring it up on my mp3 player. Sometimes, when I play the Let It Be album, I'll even skip that track. And yet, whenever it comes up on the random shuffle, I find myself stopping whatever I'm doing in order to raise the volume. Yes, that's right--of all songs, "Let It Be" is the one that I crank when it comes up. Maybe the volume level on that file has not been properly normalized to the rest of my collection . . . .

You perverts

2011-09-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

Just logged in to Blogger today to find that it has a brand new interface, with spiffy new features!--most notably a stats tracker to tell me who's viewing which posts on my blog. The most illuminating part is probably the "Search Keywords" data, which tells me what words people are plugging into search engines to end up on my blog posts. And by "illuminating" I mean incredibly depressing.

Here's this past week's data:

Coming off his US Open victory this past Monday, Novak Djokovic unsurprisingly gets a bump this week, and the, erm, specificity of these particular Djokovic-related searches is a heartening testimony that I am not the only one keeping score where it counts.

Actually, "djokovic is a douche" ranks pretty high on the all-time list too:

But Novak Djokovic is no Shannon Tweed, I guess. And, considering I only mention her name once in the title of a post that has nothing really to do with her, I can't imagine that my blog ranks highly on Google's listings for her name, which means that it must be some truly, ahem, dedicated fans of hers who are wading deep into the search results to end up here.

So, alas, most of you readers are probably Shannon Tweed fans, who are now, I imagine, quite disappointed to find that this is not, nor will it ever be, that kind of site. But I hope you'll take a look around and find something I have to offer that might interest you. Apparently, once upon a time, I wrote something about a "brown m&m character."

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2011-08-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Saw this several months ago. Woke up this morning and confession: I don't like this movie, but I love this movie.

"I hate this place."

2011-08-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

In the immortal words of Hugo "Red Skull" Weaving. Or, I guess, the words were Agent Smith's. Dialogue presumably written by one of those Wachowskis. Maybe the shemale. Is s/he even a shemale? Is "shemale" even the correct term? Probably not. Oh well.

Wish I had a rocket ship

2011-08-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Moon was big again. And low tonight.

Still Going Nowhere

2011-08-17T22:14:00.001-07:00

Just noticed today that the odometer on my 2006 Camry has passed 100,000 miles.

The Remains of the Day

2011-07-26T23:44:00.000-07:00

I originally read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day for a class in college. It's about an English butler. It's definitely one of my top 5 favorite novels. But not everyone in the class liked it so.

"I cannot believe that anybody could be so without ambition," said the student from Africa. To this day, I remain unsure to what extent he was talking about the butler, and to what extent the novelist.

"In the village where I come from, this could not happen," he continued. "I come from a village where the people all take care of each other. In the village where I come from, we would not let this happen to anybody. The people are very loving and care about each other like a family. It is unbelievable to me. I cannot believe that anybody could be so without ambition."

Was he saying that the book was objectionable, or that Western civilization was? It wasn't clear to me. When the professor tried to ask him for clarification, he would not elaborate but merely repeated his statements about his village and about ambition. None of our other classmates had any response, so we just moved on while he wore a smug grin, arms crossed, as though he had made some undefeatable point.

I didn't like it. Whatever he had meant to say, I took it as an assault on my culture, on my hemisphere, on my very person.

Seated directly behind this native of Kokovoko or Rokovoko or wherever, I wanted to give him a tap on the shoulder and say to him, "Dude, I live in a house." Surely that would have brought him low and made him think twice before boasting about his savage tribe again.

Granted, it's actually my parents' house . . . .

Good Samaritan

2011-06-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

After having worked for about a month as a software tester, I had come to the end of my first assignment. At around 10 PM, the project lead gathered everyone together for an announcement. Thanking us for our hard work, he let us know that we had finally made it to the finish line. After three weeks straight of 12-hour shifts, we had earned some time off, so he told us to go home, rest up, and wait for a callback for the next assignment. Since most of us were temps, and this was actually kind of a competitive position, I knew the reality was that many would not get called back, and for them this was essentially goodbye. I wasn’t even sure where I stood, since I had received only minimal feedback from my supervisors.

Before he let us go, the lead asked for a few able volunteers to help out with another project that was just about to wrap up. All that was really needed was some warm bodies to fill seats, so that the company could record that a certain number of eyes had inspected the product for a certain number of hours. But these bodies would have to be in those seats from 9 AM to 4 AM over the next two nights. He didn’t expect a lot of people to jump at this opportunity, after having just been told that they had finally earned a return to a regular sleep schedule. I recognized this as a chance, however, to stand out from the crowd by showing my commitment to the job, and so I raised my hand along with three other guys.

The lead thanked us, told the four of us that this would be remembered, and then dismissed everyone. Only one other team still working on that one project, the building cleared very quickly; people were ready to start living again.

Knowing that my longest nights were yet to come, I intended to get a good night’s rest. Having parked in the relatively empty back lot, I got into my car, my father’s Cadillac, and turned the key for the ignition. Nothing but a pained wheezing sound. I had never experienced this before, but I knew it was no good. The engine wasn’t starting. I tried it a few more times, but it was a no go. I knew just enough about cars to guess that the battery was dead.

What was I to do? I needed a jump-start, but the parking lot was emptying rapidly, and it was a bit late in the night to be calling anybody. I supposed my only option was to go back into the building and find someone.

Still in the driver’s seat, I turned to open the door and get out, and I was startled to see that there was somebody standing right outside my window. It was one of the guys who had been working on the same project as me, although I didn’t know him too well. Like some kind of ninja, he had snuck up on me, or perhaps I had just been so rapt in my own predicament that I had failed to notice anything going around outside my vehicle.

Opening the door—one of the things I sure missed about older cars was the crank handles that let you roll down the windows even when the car was not running—I asked him what was up, even though the question probably should have been his, and the answer should have been obvious. Apparently, even though he had parked a ways away, he had heard my car struggling, and so he had walked over to see if I needed help. I explained the situation to him, and, agreeing with my assessment that it was probably the battery, he offered to give me a jump-start, for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Besides being personally grateful, I was impressed, humbled, even inspired. Now, I was not a complete cynic when it came to human nature; I fully expected that, had I gone back into the building to ask for help, someone would have obliged. But what shocked me was that this guy had taken the initiative to lend a hand without having been asked. Had our roles been reversed, I honestly think I would have just ignored his wheezing car and abandoned him to go home. And I would have thought that a normal reaction. But his act of good Samaritanism changed my mind, and it made me want to better myself toward that example.

Three projects later, I was still working as a tester, and I had by this time established myself as a strong contributor, such that I never had to worry about getting callbacks. For my next assignment, I found myself seated next to that same guy, Murphy, who had saved me months earlier with that jump-start. It was the first time, since that first project, that we had been assigned together.

Seeing each other for the first time since that night, we shook hands, and immediately he asked me how my car was. Yes, that was our shared moment that, at the time, I should have hoped would bond us for the rest of our lives. Indeed, I will be forever grateful to him for what he did for me, but unfortunately that had little bearing on how we got along as coworkers.

Over the next three months, I sat next to Murphy and got to know him as a tester. The truth was that he seemed to do hardly any work. By the end of that project, he had submitted only 5 bug reports. The average, consistently employed tester, over the course of three months, would have turned in about 50. I had over 200 to my name. And, even as pressure increased as we got closer to deadline, his lazy attitude never changed. Instead of stepping up and getting serious, he only continued to distract people with his bizarre hickish stories.

He was eager to remind us regularly, for example, that his father owned a gun shop. And, on one occasion, when someone attempted to break in and rob them in the middle of the night, Murphy, who was sleeping at the shop, caught and shot the burglar in the leg. Sure, I had heard ghastlier stories from the military veterans at work, but those were actual war stories. Here was a nineteen-year-old civilian, who was apparently shooting people and later describing it, totally unmoved and matter-of-fact, as though it were every bit as routine to him as purchasing deodorant. Of course, many others believed that Murphy made the whole thing up just to sound hard. Either way, it made me hate him a little.

He also told us about his girlfriend, a farmer’s daughter, who was strong enough to literally lift him off his feet—he was 5’9” and over 200 pounds—yet was also petite, pretty, and “far too good for anyone in this building,” hence why he adamantly refused to show anyone a photo of her, lest we picture her with impure thoughts. That didn’t stop him sharing with us how her mom would stop by their apartment once a month to supply them with condoms, which made us picture things that none of us wanted to imagine.

Most annoying for me personally, as the guy who had to sit next to him, was his peculiar disorder that led him to make “bleep” and “bloop” noises with his mouth throughout the day whenever he wasn’t speaking. When I asked him about it, he told me he couldn’t help it. If it was a legitimate psychological issue, I had to be understanding, but, even so, it did get on my nerves.

It all left me in a very conflicted state. On the one hand, I could never forget what he had done for me, and I was forever in his debt as a result. On the other hand, I found it hard to tolerate him, and a part of me hoped never to see him again once this project was over.

On my next project—a much smaller one, with only five testers assigned to it—somehow the others got into a discussion about what an annoying fellow and sorry tester Murphy had been. I never joined in on such gossip, but neither could I work up the courage to speak up for the defamed, and so I just kept silent. When our project lead walked in and joined in on the slander, however, things got more serious, because now they were actually deciding upon this guy’s future with the company.

I should have thought that Murphy’s work (or lack thereof) should have spoken for itself, but the lead proceeded to take an impromptu poll of his peers on whether he should get a callback. The other four guys had only negative things to say. I had planned to just keep my mouth shut, but then the lead asked me directly what I thought. I still couldn’t understand why my opinion mattered, especially as there already seemed to be consensus among everyone else in the room, but suddenly I felt the weight of having Murphy's fate hanging upon how I responded. Was it my turn to go to bat for this guy and save him as he had once saved me? I still owed him, but I also couldn’t deny that he was objectively a poor fit for this job. Finally, I tried my best to be diplomatic, speaking about him as favorably as I could without lying.

“He’s dependable,” I said.

Then, when asked in what way, I related the story of the time he jump-started my car.

“But what does that have to do with his work here?” my lead asked me.

I had to admit that there was little connection between the two, and so that was that; I never saw Murphy again.

The Princess Bride

2011-06-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

My coworker stationed across from me had an amusing/annoying ritual of saying random words with a fake speech impediment throughout the day. She joked that it was a coping mechanism of making fun of herself in order to get over her own traumatizing past of having to wear a speech-crippling retainer. Usually it would just be any random long “s” word that she found funny to say with a lisping “th” instead. But other times, again for no apparent reason, she would go into quoting the clergyman character from The Princess Bride, who memorably could not pronounce the letter “r.”

Again, these were not conversations. She would just utter things randomly without any provocation. Headphones on, I made every effort to appear as though I was paying attention to my work and not to her. Yet the less distracted I made myself appear, the more she would try to directly distract me, waving her hand and yelling "Hey!" to get my attention, then saying, "You get it, right?" as if there were anything really to get from such surface-level humor as pronouncing words incorrectly. And so, just to make sure that I was on the same page with the Princess Bride quotes (as if my following along with her running gags was somehow of more importance than either of us getting any work done), she asked me whether I was familiar with the movie.

Indeed, I had seen the movie many times as a child and had once counted it among my favorites. It has probably been close to twenty years since I last saw it, however, and I don't remember too much from it.

What most struck me as a child (and what I most remember now) were the darker moments of the Cary Elwes character being tortured, apparently to death, and of the Robin Wright character, believing her love and all hope lost to her, resolving upon suicide. These moments of despair made it all the more blissful, of course, when the heroes were reunited, and love and goodness prevailed. And yet, I'm not sure whether it was that final promised hopefulness or rather the despair itself that so drew my young self. But even at that age, I could recognize a thematic trend in the material that most consistently engaged my attention.

There was that similar moment, previously discussed, in Disney's Robin Hood, for example, when Robin Hood appeared dead, and these anthropomorphic cartoon animal characters were so masterfully drawn and animated that one could precisely discern, just from their exaggerated facial expressions, the very moment of their hearts breaking at the realization of the loss of their leader and dear friend. No matter how many times I watched these movies, no matter that I knew that of course there would be a happy ending, nevertheless these scenes never lost any of their emotional power over me as a child.

Perhaps it was because, for me, it was in those moments of witnessing the despair of those left behind that I understood best and felt most acutely the intensity of their love for the one they believed lost to them, as though pain and grief over the dead were just more “real” to me than romance and warmth between the living. Perhaps this reflected a secret wish that, like Tom Sawyer, I could somehow attend my own funeral, and only then determine how people truly felt about me. Or perhaps there was a sadomasochistic streak in me that demanded to see people in pain, because grief was the only emotional high that could move me one way or another . . . . Hrm, no, let's go with the first theory.

What's he on about?

2011-05-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

Just received my copy of Nozomi Entertainment's new edition of the first twelve episodes (the "Student Council Saga") of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Haven't watched the DVDs, but the packaging is very nice, the real highlight being a 40-page booklet containing commentaries, art, and interviews with the staff. It's all quite good, worth picking up for any serious fan.

Despite his reputation for being coy in addressing fans' questions about his rather enigmatic creation, I think that director Kunihiko Ikuhara has actually been more forthcoming with substantive insights into his work than anyone else in the industry, having provided commentaries and interviews on many occasions. They're not always enlightening, but neither are they the typical weirdo Japanese metaphysical generalizations that you often get from would-be auteurs, and he usually at least has funny stories. Here's a sample from his commentary on episode 2, "For Whom the Rose Smiles":

When I was in middle school, my classmate T. recommended to me a book by Hesse.

He said, "Inside this book is everything about me." I didn't know what he was on about.

However, that particular quote stuck with me. One day long afterwards, T. and I met up again after not seeing each other for over a decade, and I brought it up.

"What was that again?"

He didn't even remember the book existed, let alone that he'd recommended it to me. To think he'd just forget "everything about himself" . . . . I wonder if Hesse wasn't needed in the world T. lived in after middle school. In which case, I wonder why I didn't forget.

I probably won't be watching Utena again until I get the full set of re-releases. It would be nice then if I could find some time to set aside for a marathon.

A.I.

2011-05-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

Back when I still cared about the NBA, my favorite player was Allen Iverson. When I tell people that, it sometimes takes them by surprise. First they're surprised that I ever followed the NBA to begin with, since I don't come off as a sporty person myself. Then they're surprised that my favorite player would have been such an outspoken thug type as Iverson and not more of a respectable straight shooter like Ray Allen or Tim Duncan. True, my all-time most admired (former) professional athlete is probably David Robinson, because of his well-documented humanitarian efforts. (If you don't know David Robinson's story, I won't get into it, but please read about it here, because he is one of the few true role models in sports.) But as a player—we're talking what happens on the court—there was, for me, no one more exciting to follow than Allen Iverson.

In a league largely populated by freaks of nature (relative to the rest of humanity), Allen Iverson was one of the most anomalous players precisely because he wasn't abnormally tall. By many accounts 5'10''-5'11'', he was officially listed at 6'0'', which is admittedly still taller than the average person. But he was nearly a midget by NBA standards.

Most boys, growing up, at some point dream about becoming a professional athlete. The dream doesn't usually last long or grow serious enough to make it too heartbreaking when they have to give up on that to set their minds on something more practical. Basketball can be harsher in that respect, however, because kids can make it all the way through high school as the best player on their local squad. They may feel themselves able to compete, and their game may even be legitimate to an extent, but if they're not a certain height by a certain age, then they have no realistic chance of making a career out of it. Their best prospect is to make it as a point guard, playing more of a supporting role by knowing when and how to pass the ball to the team's designated scorers. This is more of a specialized position that virtually does not exist in the schoolyard, where most kids just want to hit the big shots, and nobody keeps track of the assists stat. To be an effective point guard in the NBA also requires a strong grasp of the fundamentals of court vision and ball-handling, which most young dreamers are unlikely to practice to the same extent as their jump shot and layup.

It is a rare and driven personality that is able to commit from an early stage to develop toward becoming a dedicated point guard. But what is rarer still is the six-foot-nothing hopeful who can aspire toward anything else and actually succeed. More than any other player in history, Allen Iverson was that rare individual who had what it took.

Iverson was technically his team's point guard, yes, but he never played the supporting role. No, he was his generation's most prolific scorer, four times the league's scoring champion, sixth all-time in terms of points-per-game average in the regular season, and second (only to Michael Jordan) all-time in points-per-game average in the playoffs. These results were absurd, unthinkable for a player of his size and physique. And the numbers alone don't do justice to the reality of his scoring ability. Seeing him in action was to witness quite possibly the sport's most unstoppable phenom on the offensive end, able to drive and penetrate at will. He was incomparably quick, the rookie who made the still-dominant Jordan and Pippen look foolish when they tried to take on the impossible task of defending him. In the post-Jordan era, I truly believed Iverson was the league's brightest light and its future.

I was never more mesmerized by the game than when watching his duels with fellow rising stars Vince Carter and Ray Allen in the 2001 Eastern Conference playoffs. Then, when his Philadelphia 76ers managed to steal game one from a stacked and believed-to-be unbeatable Los Angeles Lakers team in the NBA Finals, it was one of the most inspiring efforts I ever saw. Of course, Iverson and the 76ers would not manage to win another game against the Lakers, but his one win still meant more to me than the Lakers' four.

No, not even Iverson could single-handedly stop the unstoppable Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers. Ultimately, only Shaq and Kobe themselves and their infighting could bring the Lakers' winning days to an end. But, even in losing, Iverson suggested that maybe “impossible” was not always what it seemed, because his own career was something theretofore unimaginable, and if he couldn't quite tear down its walls, he at least chipped away at “impossible” and inspired me at times to believe in the unbelievable, which, really, is what is best about sports. He defied the odds, defied common sense, defied nature itself, defied what everyone else thought it meant to be an NBA superstar.

And this tiny David, in a sport of Goliaths, so upset the established order and balance, so upset everyone's preconceived notions of what the NBA was supposed to be, that the league actually changed the rules of the game specifically to contain him by lifting the prohibition on zone defense, after he had proven consistently that no single player could defend him man-to-man. Yes, for some reason, thinking that the natural handicap of his small stature was not enough, they felt the need to institute additional artificial handicaps to keep him low. Maybe I'm an Iverson apologist, but I still believe that they did it just because they didn't have the guts to face what he represented, which was an overturning of basketball as they understood it. He had changed the game, but everyone was so stuck in their old ways that, instead of embracing that change, they just tried to shut it down and forcibly fit him into the old system they already knew and understood.

So what did Iverson have that made him so exceptional? Yes, he did have extraordinary God-given talent and athleticism, regardless of his size. But the qualities that really drew me to him, made me admire him as a man and not just a spectacle, were his indomitable will, his unflagging ambition, and, perhaps most of all, a certain unbreakable pride, stubbornness, refusal to compromise on his ambition. Yes, it was his pride that appealed to and touched something within me in a way that Tim Duncan's cleanness never could.

Duncan is the quiet and steady giant, who plays within the rules and exemplifies the game's fundamentals. He tells us how we should play, modeling the game perfectly by being the model student of the game. Iverson, on the other hand, was the brightly burning candle lighting a view beyond any existing model and toward new frontiers of what a person could be, if only they wanted it badly enough and, against all reason, never stopped wanting it. His ambition was to be the best, and nothing—not his physical limitations, not the common sense offered by armchair analysts, not any amount of coaching or advice from others—could ever deflate his dream or his ego. Simply put, he was too stubborn to submit to his own limitations, and so instead he overcame them. It was in that way that he “had what it took.” Well, at least for a while . . . .

Where is Iverson now? Well, his 76ers were never again able to equal the success they had in the 2000-2001 season. What followed instead were a number of disappointing years where he butted heads with coaches and management and got traded around from one mediocre team to another until virtually no one was willing to take him anymore. Although his skills were still elite, his personality made him intolerable, and nobody cared any longer to build their team around him. In 2009, he announced his sudden and premature retirement from the NBA, following his statement that he would rather retire than play off the bench as a support player. He came back briefly when his old 76ers gave him one more chance, but he lasted only 25 games before departing the NBA again. By that second time, seemingly everybody had given up on him, even the news, and this former league MVP just quietly faded into oblivion. Now he's off in some second-tier European league in Turkey. I wouldn't even know if he's getting playing time, let alone starting over there, because nobody cares what goes on over there.

Seeing him wasting away the last vital years of a once luminous career is frustrating. He just seems like a fool now, a petulant child who refused to grow up. Reading his comments about refusing to come off the bench—basically, refusing to operate according to anyone's plan but his own—my initial reaction was that he was being ridiculous. I thought that he should have been more willing to compromise for his own sake, to simmer down and listen to reason. It was better than not being able to play at all, right?

And yet, wasn't it his refusal to compromise that made me admire him in the first place? His pride made him unreasonable and eventually impossible to work with, but wasn't it also what drew me to him? If he had been less proud and more willing to compromise at any point earlier in his career, he never could have become that favorite player of mine. He's just being consistent now with those same qualities that made him strong originally, sticking to his guns all the way to the ultimate and bitter end. A part of me wants to insist that pride is the young man's stimulant, but humility the mature man's sustenance. It's sad to see what his hubris has led him to. But another part of me would actually be disappointed if he did change now, if he did compromise. Because there's a part of me that values the personal commitment in one's own pride over the chance of success won through compromise, over the possibility of peace, over hope, over happiness, over anything else. And that part of me wants to see that a man will break before he bends.

The Fool

2011-04-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

I breathed a muffled grunt at the overheard joke now forgotten. Although I had thought my exhalation barely audible, it did not go unnoticed.

“Darn!” said the guy who had made the joke. “I almost got Henry to laugh out loud!” As if getting a chortle out of me were some magnificent achievement to aspire toward.

Somehow or other, I had gained a reputation for being a humorless drag. Perhaps it was because I never shared jokes of my own, never laughed nor hardly acknowledged anyone else's funny stories, almost never even spoke to anyone on matters unrelated to business, and basically expressed no interest in anything at all. I don't think I had a negative presence, more just a blank or neutral non-presence. People were kind and respectful toward me, though they generally left me alone. But perhaps there was a certain strangeness of character to me that occasionally excited others' curiosity.

At any rate, my eyes fixed on my work (since we were supposed to be working), I did not offer so much as a glance of recognition in his direction. He took this correctly to be a sign that the business was concluded, that he would get nothing more out of me, and that work was to resume without further deliberation on the matter.

And yet, after a pause, something compelled me to keep it going. I was the one not quite ready to let it go.

“It happened once,” I said.

“What happened?” he asked. The pause had gone on long enough that nobody was sure now to what I was referring. (Yes, I'm a bit slow.)

“Me, laughing out loud,” I clarified.

“Oh, I've got to hear this!” he said.

And suddenly the entire room was focused on me. But this was what I wanted, right? It was why I couldn't let the moment just pass.

“Have you ever read My Brother Sam Is Dead?” I asked.

The only responses I got were some raised eyebrows, a few reflexive grimaces, and the guy next to me backing up a bit in his chair. Perhaps your reaction is the same at my bringing up this grim title to a grimmer novel as the introduction to my “funny” story. But please allow me to continue.

“It was back when I was in fifth grade. We were studying the American Revolution. My Brother Sam Is Dead is a novel about this guy whose brother, Sam, joins up with the Patriots. At the end of the book, Sam is executed by his own army for being a deserter, or some such thing. It's a bogus charge, but the general is determined to make an example of him as a warning to other soldiers. In the end, the narrator just has to watch helplessly as his brother is gunned down by the firing squad. So, it's a book about the Revolution, but it's not black-and-white on the side of the Americans. It's also a commentary just on how ugly war is in general.

“Anyway, after we finished the book, our assignment was to write about how we would have felt or acted in the narrator's place, knowing that our brother was going to be executed on false charges. We were just writing in our journals during class, and, when time was up, the teacher asked for volunteers to read theirs aloud.

“Now, the thing is, I don't remember anything at all about what I wrote, and obviously I didn't read mine aloud. But the kid next to me did. And I will NEVER forget his.

“He came up with this entire alternate ending, where, as the narrator, he and his brother's girlfriend would have somehow devised this miraculous rescue plan to bust out Sam in the middle of the night before the execution. And, some time immediately before or after—I can't remember which exactly, though I don't think it matters much—he would have burned down the house (or was it office?) of that evil general, with the general still inside. And not only that, but he would have made another stop, in order to burn down the house of the other commander—the nice one who had been sympathetic to Sam's situation but had, in the end, been useless to stop the execution. Then he, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend would have made a run for it. God knows where to.

“Anyway, maybe this guy's story doesn't sound that funny, but it must have been the funniest thing I had ever heard, or maybe it was just the way he told it—so earnest and enthusiastic—that was so funny to me, because I started laughing out loud almost as soon as he started, and I couldn't stop myself at all until he had finished. Basically, I was sitting right next to him, laughing uncontrollably through his entire story. This must have lasted close to five minutes.

“Now, to give some context, this shouldn't surprise you, but I had a reputation back then as 'the quiet kid.' And I don't mean it the way a lot of people look back and remember themselves as being a quiet kid in class. I was THE quiet kid. Freakishly so. Like, I literally almost never spoke a word unless called upon by the teacher.

“But I was also known somewhat as 'the smart kid.' That reputation wouldn't last, but, in elementary school at least, I was still top of my class. So maybe the other kids saw my quiet as of the more dignified sort, rather than of the arrested development sort. So they respected me, and they respected my silence, as if it were a valid stance, instead of some personality deficiency, which was really the case.

“But that was my identity. I was the quiet kid, presumably focused on his studies, who never spoke, never acted out, never joined in. And this was many months into the school year, and most of my classmates had known me even longer from previous years. They knew (or thought they knew) what I was about, what to expect from me. I never 'broke character,' so to speak, and it was one of the reliable truths of their world that Henry was 'the quiet one.'

“So what did it mean that I was laughing like a drunken lunatic in that moment in the presence of all my classmates? Well, it was certainly uncomfortable for me. I mean, I was laughing because I genuinely thought what I was hearing was funny. So, in that sense, I was enjoying it. But I didn't mean to be laughing out loud, drawing attention to myself. I was really trying to suppress it, which was usually not difficult for me. My self-control was always a point of pride for me. But, this time, I just couldn't seem to help myself. Maybe it was just too funny. Or maybe I was experiencing a nervous breakdown.

“I don't know how it came across to everyone else. Even as I was laughing, I was also nervously looking all around me. Not a single other person was laughing, but everyone was staring at me. No one else was even smiling, except for the guy reading. I'm not sure if he appreciated my laughter, or if smiling was his own way of coping with the embarrassment. But everyone else looked mortified. And, like I said, this lasted for a few minutes.

“When it was over, what was the reaction? The girl across from me pointed at the other kid and said to me, 'He's crazy.' She was referring to the kid who had been reading, not to me. And she wasn't smiling as she said it, but seemed actually kind of disgusted. Aside from that, nobody else made any comment whatsoever on what had just happened. The teacher said nothing about the kid's story, said nothing about my laughing, and moved right along to the next volunteer. Nobody asked me to explain myself. Not then, not the next day, not for the rest of the school year. None of my classmates ever mentioned it to me ever again.

“Honestly, I think they were all just too afraid to acknowledge it. The teacher too. Like I said, it was one of the fundamental truths of their world that I didn't talk, didn't laugh, basically didn't show emotion. If what just happened really happened, then everything they knew and understood about the world was thrown into question. Suddenly, up was down, left was right, the Earth orbited the Moon, cats barked and dogs meowed, Mommy and Daddy didn't really love each other, Jesus never gave a damn! . . . Bigfoot existed. In short, if that really just happened, then maybe the world was not what they all thought it was. And I don't think anybody was ready or willing to face that possibility. So they all just collectively agreed to pretend it never happened. Obviously, I was more than happy to go along with that.”

Perhaps my story sounded a bit rehearsed. It surely was. For, although I myself had had no occasion in a long while to discuss that moment in my life, it was nevertheless a singularly poignant memory for me—the only time I ever so lost command of myself in a fit of genuine laughter. Perhaps it was the most honest I had ever been in public. Indeed, were I to reduce the story of my life to just a few key moments, I believe this would easily make the top ten. And so I had rehearsed it many times in my mind. You never know, after all, when you may be required to give an account of your life before some cosmic panel or for the ultimate interview, and you had better be ready to present your own best self when that time comes. I dare say I told my practiced story well, and it was met this time, not with mortified stares, but clapping and good cheer.

“I'm gonna get you to laugh out loud. Just like back then,” said the guy next to me.

He sounded quite determined, but, despite his best efforts, he never did get more than the occasional audible breath of amusement from me. Indeed, I'm proud to say that the My Brother Sam Is Dead story still stands alone, and I have never since so lost control of myself.

The Other Scholar

2011-04-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

Her name was Natalie. She was not my friend; I hardly knew her. I met her only once, and, at the time, she was still going by Natalya.

It was right at the start of my freshman year at John Muir College at UCSD. The quarter had not yet officially begun, and I, along with my fellow first-years, was there for orientation. A more senior Muir student was showing us around campus, describing college life, letting us know what to expect.

We had stopped for a moment to rest at some stone seating walls. In order to help us get to know each other better, our guide proposed the classic icebreaker game “Two Truths and a Lie,” wherein each person was supposed to reveal three things about themselves, two of which were true and one a lie. I distinctly remember one guy, after telling two truths that I’ve long since forgotten, saying, for his lie, “I’m from Mars.” This was met with dead silence as nobody seemed to appreciate his joke, which most people just saw as him not even trying. Myself, I think I would have come up with something similarly lame, but, luckily, before my turn ever came up, a pretty brunette with clipboard in hand came and, after whispering something to our guide who then pointed right at me, pulled me away from the group, saying, “You’re going to see the provost.”

Telling me nothing more as we walked in silence, she escorted me to the office of the Muir College provost, Patrick Ledden. Before leaving, she introduced me thus: “This is Henry, the other scholar.” This cleared things up a bit, as it became apparent that I had come to the provost’s attention on account of the fact that I was a scholarship recipient. And I was “the other scholar” because the first one was already there, seated across from Provost Ledden at his desk. That was Natalya.

My story was a non-story. Truthfully, I had been a mediocre student in high school. I took the advanced classes, but my non-weighted GPA was not even a 3.5. I participated in no extracurricular activities. It was curious that I should even have been accepted into UCSD, let alone received a scholarship, but I think what it all boiled down to was my SAT scores. I was in that office on that day only because I had scored on the high side, and those numbers for some reason suggested to Provost Ledden that maybe I had some potential worth cultivating.

Looking back now years later from the outside, it seems so ridiculous to me that anybody should have assigned such significance to a standardized test score. It certainly doesn’t mean anything to my life as it is now. So don’t even bother asking what I got; it’s nothing worth boasting about, any more than the rest of my life. And if I had any advice for high schoolers about to take the SAT now, it would be not to stress out too much over the results, because, in a few years, none of it will mean anything.

Natalya was a different story. I don’t know what her SAT scores were, or even what tests she might have taken—she had grown up and studied in Russia before having just moved to the United States with her parents—but she seemed like the real deal. As we sat next to one another, I don’t think the contrast could have been any greater. I was inexpressive, aimless, lacking deep thoughts. She was almost overpoweringly enthusiastic, highly articulate, and seemingly had her entire future planned out before her.

As different as we were, when the meeting began, Provost Ledden tried to address us equally in turn. He apparently already had some documents detailing our academic backgrounds—test scores and whatnot—but he wanted to know a little more about our interests. As he explained, he was here to help guide us along in realizing our potential, so that we might get the most out of our college experiences, that we might subsequently make the most of ourselves. Turning to me, he asked what my favorite subject had been in high school.

“English,” I answered.

“Any favorite books?” he asked.

“Catch-22?” I said, as though I myself were unsure.

“Have you read Ulysses?” he asked.

I hadn’t.

“Well, it would be your favorite if you had.”

I nodded.

Clearly, he was not getting a lot out of me. As if at random, he then crumpled up a piece of paper (perhaps my academic history?), and, aiming toward the wastebasket in the corner, he asked if I wanted to bet whether he could make the shot.

“I don’t gamble,” I told him.

He fired and missed. “Should’ve taken the bet,” he said.

He then turned to Natalya.

I deeply regret that I cannot remember in greater detail any of what she said, only that there was much energy in her voice and many words. As far as her interests, she had already decided that she would double-major in biology and art. My own experience with those subjects had been incredibly shallow—just one year of each in high school. Really, there was no subject that I knew well enough to be declaring it my major before even having begun college. I could only imagine that she had been through some intense Russian schooling that had made her so ready to conquer both of these two unrelated fields.

Even Provost Ledden seemed a bit awestruck by the vigor and determination with which she spoke. But he was still the wise one in the room, and he recognized that she also could have benefited from some guidance, though of a different sort than me. Whereas he had tried to excite some direction in me, in her case he seemed to want to dial back her focus and make her consider a larger perspective of a future still full of many different doors for her to open and explore.

Having gotten through personal introductions, Provost Ledden proceeded to tell us a little about the particular focuses of the John Muir College at UCSD. I’m afraid I don’t remember much of this speech either. I do remember him informing us, however, that Muir’s most famous alumnus was probably Mike Judge, creator of the animated series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill. Provost Ledden paused then, as if in anticipation of our “oohs” and “ahs” of recognition. I merely nodded, while Natalya frowned and shook her head.

“Somewhat offbeat television programs,” he clarified. “Maybe not the sort of thing you would watch.”

Disappointed by the lukewarm response, he moved on to the main task of the day, which was to help us select the classes that we would be taking for the quarter.

There was a mandatory Muir-specific writing course that he quickly signed us both up for, but otherwise we were quite free to explore the fall 2001 catalog. I selected Chinese for my language requirement, and I also expressed an interest in psychology, and maybe earth science to fulfill my mathematics/natural science requirement.

Provost Ledden, himself a mathematician, seemed thoroughly disinterested in my selections and particularly frowned at the lack of a math class among my choices. This was by design; I had struggled through high school calculus and was ready to be done with math, as it was clearly not where my future lay. The provost, though recognizing my reluctance, wouldn’t let it go. Looking at the catalog, he insisted that I sign up for calculus (and the more advanced sequence at that!).

“Baouendi’s teaching this quarter,” he said. “He’s excellent, and this might be his last year. You can’t miss that!”

I honestly could not have cared less who was teaching it. Every fiber in my being told me that more calculus would be a bad idea, but I lacked the will to stand my ground and say no. And this was not just one quarter that I would be giving up; once begun, no matter how much I hated it, I would be committed to another two quarters more of it, for the sake of fulfilling that mathematics GE.

“With your SAT scores, there’s no way you shouldn’t get an A in the class,” he assured me.

And so finally I acquiesced. In a short time, he would indeed be proven wrong, as I struggled bitterly through one final year of mathematics. To be fair, I did even worse in psychology, which I had chosen all on my own, and maybe I would have hated earth science too. It’s impossible to say now, and, honestly, I don’t think my choices then could ever have greatly impacted my life today. In any case, it was not worth bearing any resentment over.

With that, my part in the meeting was effectively over. I became a practical nonentity in the room as Natalya completely took over, demanding the much greater share of the provost’s attention. Again, I’m sorry that I can’t remember more clearly any of their discussion. I only remember him trying to get her to loosen up and broaden her horizons (though I didn’t get the impression that they needed much broadening, so varied yet uniformly intense were her myriad interests).

“I want you to take some chances, try something fun and different while you’re here,” he told her. “Maybe anthropology—”

“Oh, I looooove anthropology!” she immediately responded.

I must confess, I wasn’t even sure which “-ology” anthropology was at the time. I certainly hadn’t studied it at my high school, and I knew I didn’t love it.

As for Provost Ledden, he just sounded more and more as though he were scrambling to find some lesson to impart to someone who already knew everything about everything (except who Mike Judge was).

I remember nothing more specific about that day. By the time Provost Ledden let us go, it was too late for me to rejoin the orientation tour, so I just went home. But I came away from that meeting feeling even more inadequate than usual. I was in over my head, I thought. Natalya looked to me the model of a scholarship student, which meant that I was just some horrible fluke, due in time to be exposed for the fraud that I was. Because I was never going to be able to get to where she was, no matter how hard I worked. Because it wasn’t even the working hard that was the crucial difference between us. She actually seemed to care. She seemed to want this. Wanting, caring—those were the things that I didn’t “get.” Already I was a worthless nowhere man floating through life. Nothing meant anything to me, whereas she seemed to crave everything.

But the world didn’t stop for me even as I stood uselessly in place. Time rolled on, and I had a reasonably good year, I suppose, calculus notwithstanding. I never saw Natalya again, but I remembered her occasionally, not as some standard to strive toward, but as an example of true talent and ambition to humble me. I suppose also there was a small part of me that was relieved to know that there were such people in the world, who were so much better than me. It meant to me that I didn’t have to work so hard, because the world was already in good hands with people like Natalya.

And time rolled on. Until February 7, 2003.

The headline was “Student found dead at Pac. Hall.” UCSD’s student newspaper, The Guardian, reported, “John Muir College junior . . . found dead in a loading dock behind Pacific Hall on Feb. 7. UCSD police officials are calling the death an apparent suicide.” A followup article would clarify that this student, a nineteen-year-old sophomore named Natalie, with junior standing majoring in visual arts, was actually the very same Natalya that I had met in Provost Ledden’s office. She had only just changed her name after becoming a U.S. citizen.

It was like I had just taken a punch to the gut, had the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t believe it. The world was unrecognizable, incomprehensible. Natalya was dead? And not only that, but suicide?

Like so many other students, I wanted a reason, but none was ever produced. There was no note, “I leave the rest to you, Henry.” It didn't happen that way. I'm sure I never crossed her mind in her final moments. I'd wager I never crossed her mind again after we parted ways in Provost Ledden's office.

There was no way to know how long she had been planning it, but apparently nobody saw it coming. Nobody saw well enough to stop it, anyway. One witness claimed to have heard her screaming as she took her fall off Pacific Hall, as if Natalie herself wasn’t quite prepared for the finality of the decision she had just made.

Time passed again, and I very quickly stopped hearing anything further about Natalie. Suicide is unfortunately not an altogether uncommon thing at UCSD, or in college in general, for that matter. I don’t mean to imply that she was the only one, or that her death mattered more than others. But, even though I hardly knew her, I was bitterly dissatisfied with the lack of closure. And so I remain to this day.

The story of Natalie was tragic, but that word alone could scarcely encapsulate all the feelings that haunt and torment those of us who, like it or not, had to walk on into a tomorrow without her. I still find myself asking why. And I don’t just mean what her reasons were for jumping. I want to know why she had to die, while I am still alive. Where is the sense in that? She was the good one, the talented one, the one who gave a damn. She might have made the world a better place, whereas I only stand apart from the world, lest I drag it down.

I struggle to understand what she might have gone through that led her to that final moment. Was she stressed out? Was life too hard? Were the expectations too great? Did she feel alone? Unwanted? Unappreciated for who she really was? Did we kill her with the burdens we placed upon her? With our failures to understand her? It is impossible for me to know the answers, and so the questions go on forever.

A few months after Natalie’s death, I saw Provost Ledden again for the first time since that meeting in 2001. I never went back to his office or anything, and, with my disappointing academic performance in my first year, I would not have wanted to face him again. But I was walking across campus to class one day, and he just happened to be walking the same path in the opposite direction. Eyes cast downward and hair disheveled, he looked stressed out and exhausted, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders—a far cry from the proud mathematician and James Joyce devotee who had shot that wad of paper at his wastebasket (and merely shrugged and left it on the ground when he missed).

I didn’t think he’d recognize me, but, as we passed, he raised his head just enough to look me in the eye and offer a tired hello. Neither of us slowed even a step, however, and we had our backs to one another before I could respond. I still don’t know if he actually did recognize me, or if he was just being friendly in saying hello to a random student. I never saw him again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was battling stomach cancer. He would lose that battle on October 28, 2003, at the age of 67.

And so I found myself suddenly alone in that room in my memory. And it kills me that my memories are so incomplete and inadequate, for there is no one else now to fill in the blanks. The only other people in that office are now dead, and I alone survive to carry on the memory of that day.

I am sorry, Provost Ledden, that I was never able to pay off your investment in me. I am sorry, Natalie, that I never got to know you better. I am sorry that I cannot do justice to your story, that I cannot share your life with the world, because I just don’t know it. I only remember that you loved art and biology. And anthropology. But maybe none of those things were even true. Maybe you were forcing yourself, and I was too dense to realize it. I excused my own shortcomings by convincing myself that you were simply of a different class—a genius and a natural. I thought I was isolating myself, but I didn’t realize that I was isolating you too by setting you apart on some pedestal.

I am so sorry, Natalie, that I don’t have what it takes to live your life for you. I’m only just surviving my own. But I swear to you that, though what memories remain to me may represent only the merest fragment of who you really were, I will cherish them and hold onto them for as long as I live.

Last Time

2011-03-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

Went out for a hot dog from Costco the other day. I'd had Costco's pizza many times, but never a hot dog. It was all right. Pretty big. $1.50 includes drink. Condiments are help yourself, including relish and onions.

I tried to remember the last time I had a hot dog. It probably wasn't that long ago. I've probably had dozens of hot dogs just over the last decade. Hundreds even? Erm, maybe? I don't keep count. But whenever I think "hot dog" and "last time," I go back, not to the forgettable actual last time, but to a specific memory from many years ago.

It was probably about twenty years ago. My family was staying with a friend of my mother's in the Bay Area. For lunch, my brother and I had microwaved hot dogs at this friend's home with her two sons. Don't remember the brand. They were good but nothing special.

Later that day, we went out walking (sightseeing?). Don't remember where we went or what we saw. I vaguely recall a museum, but that doesn't seem entirely likely, since I've never been much of a museum person. Maybe we just walked by a museum or museum-like building. But I remember we stopped at a hot dog vendor on the way. Our host's two sons decided to get hot dogs from this street vendor. All the fixin's, including relish, which I used to think was gross.

I remember thinking it very odd that they were stopping randomly to get hot dogs off the street. Just the impulse fooding seemed a foreign concept to me, not something I ever personally considered. But to go for such a cheap food as hot dogs, which could easily be had with little preparation at home, and which we, in fact, had had earlier that very day. It did not seem sensible.

But I was not above trying new things. I shrugged, went along with the others, and had another hot dog. No relish.

Living the Dream

2011-03-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

It is maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe even forty years in the future, though I do not feel physically any older. My life is much the same as well, with one major difference: there is no one else in the world but me.

And yet I do not alter my routine in any way. I go to the same workplace every day that I do now, although, in this future, it is completely abandoned. There are no people inside, no cars in the parking lot, not even any security personnel. Yet somehow I am still able to get inside. My keycard still unlocks all the doors. The lights are on inside. I go to my desk and turn on the computer, which still runs, for some reason. But there's no one to actually assign me any work, so I just sit at my desk and wait.

This being a dream, there is no proper observance of the passage of time, and though my body rests for only eight hours, it feels infinitely longer for my sleeping self. In the dream, I sit there for hours, day after day, for what feels like years. What am I waiting for? I don't think the question ever even occurs to me. In the dream, it all just seems to make sense to me. This is my life.

When my “shift” ends, I go home, just as I do now in my real life. The house is also empty. There are no messages. I sit and wait some more. The process repeats, day after day, as it does now in my real life.

Yes, it goes on for years. Then, randomly, someone else finally shows up at work. She walks by toward her old desk, then, a few seconds later, is headed back out. As she's leaving, she notices me. She smiles and tells me she came to pick up her jacket (left there years ago?). I notice that she's accompanied by a small child. She introduces him as her son. Or maybe it was her grandson, although she herself looks exactly the same as she does today. I never say a word, but I wave. The kid waves back. Then they're gone, and I'm back to waiting.

This goes on for years. Nothing else happens. There's not even an end. I just open my eyes eventually and wake up to a life that is maybe not so very different from my dream.

Comrade

2011-02-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

For no real reason, I submit the following piece that I wrote back in 2003. This was for a short fiction class led by Laurie Weeks, self-styled rock star lesbian feminist writer who contributed to the screenplay for Boys Don't Cry. Well, she was pretty cool, I guess.

The prompt for this assignment was to consider how other people perceived us, or how we wanted others to perceive us, and then to introduce ourselves as though from the perspective of a fictional other person. As was typically the case, I didn't follow the prompt exactly, and so my piece actually revealed practically nothing about me. Unless you think perhaps the narrator is actually a stand-in for me . . . . (He's not.)

* * * * *

Comrade

Just the other day, I met a most remarkable person in class. The fall quarter had just begun, and I, in my third year at UCSD, found myself in the position of being a recently-declared literature/writing major. I had been making steady progress as a linguistics major previously, but I eventually found that linguistics bore no interest for me, so I simply gave that up, because, after all, my time and talent were precious, and I could see no sense in wasting them on anything I didn't personally care for. Meanwhile, I had already been taking the lower-division writing series to fulfill a general education requirement in humanities. The writing classes did amuse me, so, following my estrangement from linguistics, I chose to lend my abilities to the writing department a while longer.

Returning to the topic at hand, I happened to meet this remarkable kindred spirit in one of the upper-division writing courses that I had, for this fall quarter, enrolled in. This man was, evidently, a writer, like myself. Now, it would be natural to simply assume that, in an upper-division writing class filled, not so surprisingly, with writing majors, one might find oneself surrounded by, at the very least, the writing elites of the local sub-community, but, generally speaking, I have found that this is certainly not the case. Rather, most of the students in these classrooms are little more than trained gorillas, with a knack only for mimicry, lazily emulating the most boorishly irreverent yet sensationally sentimental material that manages to shock and confound its way into official favor. True, a lesser ego could easily find itself drowning in such a homogeneous sea of perverse ambition, but the true writer is one who stands firm and unbreakable against the withering waves, aspiring to be unique, and better, rather than the same. So it was that I came to notice this man, who stood out from the crowd, a fully-formed human, like myself, apart from and infinitely above the endless puddle of primordial ooze that so bitterly resented us as it still indignantly maintained its defiance of evolution.

As I listened to him read from his assigned "life story" piece about his declination of a high school counselor's juvenile offer of pseudo-wisdom, I alone could simultaneously infer from his account that he possessed an uncompromising soul that truly made him the same as me. After class, I made sure to follow him, which was easily done, since he walked so coolly and methodically, unlike everyone else on campus who simply raced maniacally from one destination to the next. I soon caught up with him and wasted no time getting to know him, although, of course, I already knew and understood him quite well, I thought.

As we proceeded to walk, side-by-side, I began by asking him how his parents were. He turned, briefly raised one eyebrow, and then replied that they were just fine. That brief moment of hesitation before answering undoubtedly confirmed, to my delight, that we were indeed kindred spirits, for I too hated my own parents. Having established that we were the same, I felt comfortable pursuing more serious discussion with my new friend, so I next asked him what he thought of the writing classes. He curtly responded that he was having some amount of fun with them, though he still wasn't sure where exactly these experiences stood in the grand scheme. Naturally, he also wanted my opinion, and I told him exactly what I thought, about the gorillas and whatnot. He gave a few subtle nods and seemed to form a mild grin. Perhaps he had doubted before the existence of another writer in this world, but I could tell now that I had definitely impressed him. He had to leave shortly afterward for another class or some such thing, but I am certain I will be hearing much more from him in the time to come.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3

2011-02-22T22:53:00.000-08:00

I was pretty disappointed when Capcom revealed the full roster for Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of laudable additions (and deletions) compared to previous games, and the Capcom side especially was much better than what we saw in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.

The Capcom library is much more broadly represented than ever before with such welcome additions as Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins, Spencer from Bionic Commando (granted, it's Bionic Commando '09), Dante from Devil May Cry (granted, it's young Dante from DMC3), Amaterasu from Okami, and Mike Haggar (finally!) from Final Fight. It's also great to see Viewtiful Joe back from TvC, and especially cool to have Zero—not only the best, but the dominant character in TWO fighting games that nobody cared about—finally getting called up to the big leagues.

But where is Strider? Where is Captain Commando? They don't even have Mega Man in there!

The Marvel side is of comparable quality, although, since these are not native video game characters, I can more readily forgive Capcom for the hard decisions it had to make in choosing between recognizable names and designs that offer unique gameplay potential (or even just characters that look cool and animate well in computer-generated 3D). I'm not a fan of Deadpool, but it's nice to see heavyweights Thor and Phoenix added to the mix, while Dormammu and Taskmaster are somewhat obscure (and therefore novel) yet also completely awesome, both visually and mechanically. Among the returning characters are most of the rest of the biggest Marvel names, as well as characters such as Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel, who were ubiquitous within the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 tournament scene (and thus integral to the game's identity).

For me, the real disappointments were the inclusions of Akuma (ugh), She-Hulk (sigh), and X-23 (huh?). Superman here captures my thoughts perfectly on the matter:

For that matter, as much as I like Resident Evil, do we really need Chris and Wesker AND (coming soon) Jill? Or do we really need a second Devil May Cry character? Or both Felicia and Hsien Ko? Or Crimson Viper?

But this is a serious fighting game first, fanservice second. Soon enough, nobody will care too much that X-23 was some bad fan fiction dream that should have been buried and forgotten somewhere. After all, even most of the characters in the game will probably not prove viable in tournament play, and those that are may not be the most recognizable in the mainstream. I mean, who was really asking to play as Cable before MvC2? What matters is that X-23 and She-Hulk, despite their comic origins, actually offer unique gameplay options that make them fun additions to the playable cast (though time will tell if they can compete).

On the other hand, it is precisely while playing the game that the lack of certain characters disappoints me personally. Before getting my hands on the game, I could only wonder where Mega Man was. After ten seconds of actually playing, I was asking, where is Cable? Where is Spiral? Where is Captain Commando?! Without those characters, I was hopeless in MvC2, and, man, I sure suck at this game now . . . .

Watson Fights for the Users

2011-02-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

Or at least we better hope it does, because I don't think we'd stand much of a chance against it.

To recap, Watson is IBM's new supercomputer designed to take on the best human players in the world at the quiz show Jeopardy! For specifics on how it works, you can refer to IBM's official website. Earlier this year, it was pitted in a two-game match against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two greatest (human) Jeopardy! champions of all time, in the first ever man-versus-machine competition in the show's history. The games were broadcast over three nights this past week, and Watson proved itself not only able to play, but able to dominate humanity's best. In the end, its total winnings were well more than Jennings and Rutter's combined scores.

It was the most significant development in the ever-evolving “man vs. machine” saga since IBM's Deep Blue trounced grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess back in 1997. I was in eighth grade when that chess match went down, and I still remember what a big deal it was. Of course everybody recognized that computers could process faster than us. Even a weak computer could crunch numbers faster and longer than any human, but that sort of “intelligence” was one-dimensional. Chess, on the other hand, was a highly nuanced and intellectual game, long considered by some to be the finest and deepest test of complex strategic thinking. Champions such as Kasparov and Bobby Fischer had been respectfully regarded as geniuses, representing the pinnacle of mind. Thus, when IBM produced a computer that could outplay humanity's champion at its noblest game, it was almost as if to say that human intelligence had run its course, and any forward progress lay in the hands of machines. Chess matches played between “mere” human players, of any level, subsequently seemed to lose all significance.

Bringing things forward to today, many of those following the Watson story, fearing the larger implications of an AI once again making a mockery of human will and wisdom, hoped for a human victory in this real-life John Henry scenario. It was not to be. Not even close. But the results are hardly as conclusive even as the Deep Blue match. Jeopardy!, after all, is not just a test of one's knowledge but also one's finger speed. I've seen both Jennings and Rutter play before, and they are exceptional competitors, capable, on any given night, of running the board with displays of extraordinary breadth of knowledge. It is likely that, in this case too, either man could have provided as many correct answers as Watson, if not more. Watson just didn't give them the chances. As a computer, it can manage perfectly and consistently precise timing on buzzing in, which no human could ever hope to match. I think everybody was willing to concede that much coming into this, and if all this contest proves is that a machine can time a buzzer click more perfectly than a human can, well then that's not portentous at all. It's not even really news.

What is news is that IBM has created a computer that can play Jeopardy! at all. Were Watson merely a vast database of facts and a quick trigger finger, it still could not be regarded as intelligent, and it would not be enough to play Jeopardy! The achievement is Watson's unprecedented ability to actually comprehend the game and the questions, and to (usually) provide a correct answer in the appropriate form and in real time without assistance. It had its moments of weirdness, as more complex, multi-part clues sometimes tripped it up and prompted bizarre responses that were nowhere close to correct. But those moments, though not infrequent, did not keep it from competing on a level with the best players in the world. More often than not, it was able to understand the clues in their written, plain English forms, and that's impressive. After all, have you ever typed a query into Google and received in return thousands of results that do not appear in any way relevant? I certainly have, and, based on that, I would have thought that the Watson tech was generations away.

That said, we're still a long way to go from being able to carry on conversations with machines. Watson doesn't really so much comprehend language as analyze it. And it can only look up simple answers out of its database of facts. It can't provide deep reflections or produce new thoughts. It could still make life easier, much in the same way that a search engine does, but if anybody's seriously worrying (or hoping) that human culture and society will make way for robots, you can probably rest assured that we're not quite there yet. (Then again, a year ago I would not have imagined that we'd be here yet.)

The Little Things

2011-02-12T13:09:00.000-08:00

Back when I worked as a game tester, I remember there was one guy, nicknamed "Speaker Box," who would consistently refer to the stock PS2 DualShock 2, a wired controller, as a "remote."

"Hey Henry, this remote's not working."

For some reason, that always really ticked me off.

To Be a No. 3 Man

2011-01-30T03:21:00.000-08:00

I said it here on this very blog two years ago: "I must admit, a Djokovic-Murray match suddenly sounds more exciting than a Nadal-Federer final."

At the time, Federer and Nadal seemed immovable as the No. 1 and No. 2. For Novak Djokovic, holding at No. 3 was something to be proud of--as much as any player could hope to achieve in the Federer-Nadal era. But No. 4 Andy Murray was the hot man, breathing down his neck for that No. 3. He would get it, then lose it, then drop to No. 5. But the question of "Who is (third) greatest (in the Federer-Nadal era)?" could only truly be answered by a one-on-one in a major, which seemed unlikely to happen, as the two men, always on opposite sides of the draw due to their rankings, could only possibly meet in a final, and Federer and Nadal were determined to own one or both slots in every major final.

Well, I finally got my Djokovic-Murray final, but it's about two years too late. Murray may well go down as the greatest men's player never to win a major. Having watched him now in three Slam finals, I can say that he just hasn't got the stuff. Not even a single set in three finals. The guy is mentally hopeless on the grand stage. And the writing was on the wall well before Djokovic owned him for the second set. Murray wasn't even trying. By the third set, neither was Djokovic. Lame.

La Pucelle

2011-01-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

You wanna know what else I dreamed once upon a time? Well, when I was a teenager, I used to dream that, if I ever became successful, by which I mean filthy rich—multiple billions rich, and continuously through my own achievement, not some lottery—I would use the money to pay off the taxes in Domremy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc.

For those who don’t know the story, when Charles VII wanted to offer Joan of Arc some reward for winning him his crown, her only request was an exemption from taxes for her home village of Domremy. Charles granted the request, but unfortunately, after the French Revolution more than three centuries later, the exemption was revoked. I always thought this was shameful, as Joan of Arc was kind of my hero, and granting that one request in perpetuity seemed to me the least they could have done for her. And so, in my adolescence, I thought, If the French government will not take care of Domremy, then I shall! Another silly dream, yes, and one rather of vanity. But such are dreams . . . .

If I ever get out of here

2011-01-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

While at work the other day, I overheard two people discussing the lottery. Earlier this month, the multi-state Mega Millions lottery, having reached a jackpot of $380 million, was split between two lucky winners. Even split in two, that is, of course, more money than the average person would even know how to spend over their lifetime. It’s something to dream about. I’m not sure, though, whether the dream is made any more or less tangible by the fact that, a few years ago, someone at work actually did win the lottery. It was a much smaller jackpot—about $4 million, I think—but still several times more money than most of us will ever see at once.

I must admit, the moment I heard the news, my heart began to race as I considered what his winning could possibly mean for me. It settled down quickly enough, however, as I recognized that it didn’t mean anything for me. I could only try to feel glad for my coworker, actually a supervisor, who had often loudly complained about being too old to stay until 5 PM, about his arthritis in both hands, and about wishing he could work from home, “minus the work part.” I don’t really know what he’s doing now, but he certainly didn’t stick around long after winning. From conversations I overhear, I gather that he’s basically using the money to enjoy retirement, still occasionally having lunch with former coworkers, inviting them to shoot pool, letting them bask in his newfound fortune and comfort.

Yes, I think being so close to that money, without actually being able to touch it myself, does encourage me to dream a little more, despite the fact that I didn’t play the lottery then, and still don’t play it now. Maybe it’s the same for some of my coworkers, or maybe they don’t need extra encouragement to thus fantasize.

The guy who brought up the jackpot the other day is actually also a supervisor, of a higher rank than the guy who won the $4 million. I used to sit next to this guy, and I would overhear his conversations about buying vintage cars and parts to work on, or about his thirty acres of land at home for the dogs to roam. I couldn’t really picture it, but thirty acres sounded pretty big, and I got the impression that he was rather well-to-do. On the other hand, he also works much harder and much more than I do. Also, our company is officially a non-profit, so it’s hard to comprehend how anyone could get rich doing what we do. Maybe his money, if indeed he has any, comes from his wife. Even if they do have money, however, it’s not so much as to spare him from dreaming of a more comfortable life. Reflecting on that $380 million jackpot, he mused, “With that kind of money, I could probably disappear.”

It got me thinking too. It was an appealing idea. Years ago, working the late shift at my previous job, my coworkers got into a discussion over our ideas of “the perfect day.” It took me a good long while to come up with an answer—I’m a guy without any goals or prospects, after all—but in my very uncertainty lay my answer. For a man who could not think of anything to desire, perhaps the dream was really a life apart from everything. I would find a place far from other people, and I would just stare out the window all day with a glass of juice in my hand, caring nothing about the world, and the world caring nothing about me.

I don’t know if my supervisor was thinking along the same lines when he spoke of “disappearing,” but that’s what I pictured as my own dream. I thought to myself, if I ever had enough money, I would find a nice house out in the middle of nowhere, to spend the rest of my days doing nothing, seeing no one. It’s merely a dream, not a plan, and probably, if I ever did come into such a large sum of money, my conscience would forbid my spending it so wastefully.

I read a news story recently about a man who wrote a $10,000 check to the state of California. Dennis R. Ferguson was retired and living in South Carolina, but, seeing California in its current budget crisis, he felt compelled to give a little as “repayment” to the state that, almost fifty years ago, helped him through a tough couple of weeks with unemployment checks.

I thought it an extraordinary story, though it didn’t make “front page” news and was quickly bumped by other articles. Of course, practically speaking, that $10,000 is nothing against the state’s budget issues. Even $380 million would hardly put a dent in our deficit. But it made me think. For it will never be the money that solves our world’s problems. Money has been the source of our problems, not the solution. Truly, Ferguson’s newsworthy gesture is of greater benefit than the actual dollar amount of his contribution. By that, I mean that, in showing such admirable character and selfless generosity, Ferguson might have inspired a lot of people, and the fruits of his seemingly small act might ultimately have been much more than his $10,000 check.

Daydreaming about the Mega Millions lottery at work, and recalling Ferguson’s check, I thought about what an inspiring story it would make, if someone were to win some $380+ million and then donate every last cent to charity. In fact, my imagination perhaps got a little carried away, as I began to think seriously about how it would go down.

Ferguson’s story certainly inspired me, but unfortunately it did not make huge waves in the media. Sadly, I don’t think he made any practical difference. But a man donating the entirety of his nine-figure lottery jackpot to a good cause—surely the world could not ignore such a deed. At least, I would hope that people would be inspired and motivated. Because, again, even nine figures is practically nothing against the bigger issues of today’s world. But it would seem a lot to the average person. It would make headlines, hopefully for more than one day. Hopefully, people would see that this man, being not some exceptional genius, was no different from them, but only luckier. And if he could give away all of luck's spoils separating him from them, then surely they too, having hearts, had the capacity for charity. And if everyone gave just a little, the amount would quickly dwarf the original contribution. More important than the money collected, however, would be the good feelings cultivated, that positive drive to do for one another. Much more than any amount of money, to generate and then spread that kind of active positivity would go a long way toward fixing our world.

I suppose I’m still dreaming. But as I sat there grinding out the day at work, I made a silent commitment. I don’t know to whom, but I vowed that, if I were to somehow win that jackpot, I would do exactly according to that dream. I have no idea to whom I would give all that money, but again the gesture would be more important than the details. If it made the news, then people, seeing the gesture, and having their hearts magnified by it, would in turn magnify the details by spreading more money to more causes. But I would have to give every last cent. If I kept even a little for myself, it would be a very different story. People would see the giving, but they would also note the saving for self, and I think it would give them sufficient excuse not to follow, but to instead conclude that I, being so lucky unlike them, could afford to give, because I had plenty to spare. No, in order to make any real difference, the sum would have to be massive, first of all, in order to make people notice, and it would have to be everything, so as to leave no easy excuses.

And I continued to think about it. And I realized that, truthfully, I couldn’t be that guy. I have too many flaws, too many weaknesses of character. The media, after raising me up for my good deed, would then dig up dirt to tear me down, as it ultimately tears everyone down. And, once again, the people would have their excuse not to follow, not to change, not to try. Martin Luther King, Jr., great American that he was, also had his weaknesses. Just the other day, my brother, responding to a news segment reflecting on King’s achievements, again pointed to the man’s philandering, which is not very much disputed. Does it take away from the good that King did? I guess not really. But it’s pretty bad. And it made me think, when people can point easily to such flaws in their would-be heroes, as my brother did with King, that again grants them an excuse. They see that they are justified in being as bad as their heroes, instead of trying to be as good.

Well, it’s only a dream.

Never Again

2011-01-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

I was discussing with my sister, not for the first time, about what Disney properties remained for the Kingdom Hearts series to explore. In the recent wake of the release of yet another "fake" Kingdom Hearts game--it's so obvious which are the fake ones, and which are the real, that they might as well be upfront about it and explicitly label them as such--there was much groaning about how tiresome it was to have to revisit Aladdin world and Hercules world yet again. No doubt, they are saving any new worlds for the next real Kingdom Hearts game.

But, even supposing that, how much is there really left in the Disney vault for an action-oriented, heroes-versus-villains story such as Kingdom Hearts to mine? The idea seems necessarily finite, perhaps not even sufficient for more than one more major console release. And even supposing that next installment is composed mostly of new worlds, which is what we want, we'd kind of be scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.

For fantasy action game-appropriate worlds, I basically came up with The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, and The Princess and the Frog. Only those first two might make for exciting headliners (how many people even saw Treasure Planet?), and I don't personally imagine that I would enjoy a Jungle Book world very much. There are plenty more borderline cases, such as Pocahontas or Hunchback, that they maybe could make work, but neither are these very exciting. No, in all likelihood, we should expect to see Aladdin world and Hercules world many more times. And maybe they can do Tron world and Pirates of the Caribbean world again, and we will not yet find those stale.

Well, there is one more movie that could work. I just recently slept through most of The Black Cauldron, but what I saw of it seemed usable. But what I mainly recall is that there was this really annoying talking dog thing named Gurgi, who "spoke" in some Donald Duck-esque barely intelligible voice. And I considered how awesome it would be if Gurgi and Donald could actually meet and share a scene (or several). Really, is it not for possibilities like that that Kingdom Hearts as an idea exists?

Tron: Legacy

2010-12-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

Tron: Legacy is quite possibly the coolest movie I have ever seen.

Mind you, I'm not some die-hard Tron fanboy, and I came into this sequel with low expectations. I tried watching the original when I was a kid, but I just found it terribly boring. Coming to it recently as a more cultured adult, I found it still boring, and furthermore ridiculous, but I could at least appreciate that it was unique, at the time new, and unlike anything else people had ever seen before.

Like its predecessor, Tron: Legacy too is something new and unique. But it also looks good and is entertaining. Indeed, I think the new world of Tron: Legacy is what Tron was supposed to have looked like all along, only the technological constraints of the time having distorted the vision. It creates a world wholly and deliberately unreal, yet makes it as convincing as it is attractive. Yes, it is somehow, paradoxically, convincingly unreal. Credit must be given, of course, to the original Tron, whose basic design laid the groundwork for the sequel. Whenever, God forbid, I should imagine what it is like to exist inside a computer, the image shall hereafter forever be informed by both movies. But, whereas everyone remembers the original as a technical marvel, I don't imagine that Tron: Legacy is the result of considerably more supercomputers at work than any other current special effects-laden flick. Rather, the singular aesthetic of the movie is, first and foremost, a work of art that sets it quite apart from any other blockbuster.

Equally essential, if not more so, is the film score by Daft Punk. Even before the film transitions to the virtual world, the urgent soundtrack takes hold and has you surrendering your emotions to the groove. The hypnotic score remains in the foreground throughout, and the otherworldly visuals later seem almost more an illustration of the movie's sound. The sublime marriage of audio and visuals is truly what makes Tron: Legacy, nearly a feature-length music video.

Writing is also improved over the original, although the story is definitely a sequel, and depends heavily on the first film's. All the ridiculous explanations from the first movie remain in effect, but they seem less ridiculous this time, mainly because the sequel doesn't even bother explaining how flesh-and-blood humans are able to enter the realm of digital data. Tron: Legacy also doesn't tell viewers much about who Kevin Flynn and Tron were, though both characters return, the latter being more welcome than the former.

On that note, I should make mention of the special effects used to make Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner appear young again, whether because they appear in flashbacks or because data isn't supposed to show wrinkles. By some accounts, the digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges is the one blemish on an otherwise visually impeccable film. To be honest, I wasn't much bothered by it. Rather, when I watched the original Tron just a few months ago, I was startled by the genuine image of the young Jeff Bridges, since I had only ever really known him from his work as a much older man. So, perhaps because any young Jeff Bridges is, by its nature, a strange sight to me, I did not regard his CG mask as itself deficient in Tron: Legacy.

It is somewhat the opposite case with Bruce Boxleitner. Playing Tron would be the highlight of his career, so for most people, having not watched him age through his later roles, he has remained frozen in that image of him as a young man in Tron. So when I saw him as the young Tron again in Tron: Legacy, it seemed right (and, in this case, I have met little disagreement), whereas it was the scenes featuring the old Bruce Boxleitner's real face that kind of unsettled.

At the risk of spoiling things, I will say that Tron's role in the movie is brief, and his face shown only from a distance and through some distortion filter for most of it. So maybe the filmmakers themselves did not have complete confidence in their tech to do justice to the series's coolest and most beloved character. It makes me wonder about the possibility for future sequels. Without both CG assistance and shrewd editing, Bruce Boxleitner is already too old, not only in body but in voice, to convincingly play the same character from thirty years ago. I'd wager that limiting that character's minutes in Tron: Legacy was simply a practical necessity. But, going forward, would a Tron movie without any Tron at all even be worth making? Well, I suppose as technology advances, the Tron character may yet endure, and now truly as just data.

The Last Unicorn

2010-12-26T12:53:00.000-08:00

"And where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to? How dare you? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?"

The Last Unicorn was not so vivid in my memory as Robin Hood. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of it before, let alone seen it. But there was something vaguely resonant about the title and DVD cover art, and as I read the synopsis, I felt certain that this was the very movie I had been searching for for years.

It was back when I was a kindergartener. At my elementary school, I remember, at the end of the last Friday of every month, all the kindergarteners would gather into one classroom to watch a movie (usually a Disney animated classic—Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians, etc.).

To be honest, I didn’t really like “movie day,” mainly on account of the fact that it was always hosted in the other kindergarten class, where I would have to sit on the floor and be surrounded by strange kids I didn’t normally see. Looking back, I also wonder why we even had a movie day. What educational value was there to be had from watching Disney movies during class time? As heavily criticized as California’s under-budgeted education system is nowadays, I suppose it’s easy to be cynical in retrospect and imagine that the underpaid teachers were just idling the day away any way they could.

But, no, I really did like my kindergarten teacher, and though I can’t remember much of the day-to-day in her class, everything I can remember tells me that she had the students’ best interests at heart. It is neither easy nor profitable being a teacher, especially for the very young kids. I have to believe that anyone who would take on that job would do so from the heart (though that speaks unfortunately little of their qualifications). And maybe, for us young kids, movie time existed for the same reason as nap time—we could only handle so much and needed periods to unwind.

But I’ve no expertise to comment on such matters of education, and, anyway, I digress. The Last Unicorn was not even screened on movie day, but rather came presumably from our teacher’s personal collection. Near the end of the school year, she would end every day by playing a bit of the movie. I don’t remember her introducing it in any way or even discussing it at all. When the work was done for the day, she would just turn the lights down, pop in the tape, and have us watch quietly until the bell rang.

Trying to sort through the memories now, it’s hard to make sense of the math. I feel like we must have watched The Last Unicorn for at least a week, but, in that case, we must have only been watching for a few minutes at a time, because it was not a very long movie after all. Yet each viewing must have been long enough for me to become quite engrossed, as I definitely recall being the case. But what I mainly remember is that the school year ended before we could finish the movie (and, yes, we were still watching it up to the final bell of the final class day).

I was, at the time, still quite new to this “school” thing, so I didn’t really appreciate what “summer break” meant, even though my older brother seemed very excited for it. I gathered quickly enough that it was a long break from school. But, to be honest, through that whole enjoyable summer, there was a small part of me that was still anxious to find out how The Last Unicorn was going to end, and, in my naivete, I actually believed that, once school started up again, we would pick up right where we left off. Once first grade did start, it did not take me long to realize how stupid I’d been to think that I’d be resuming The Last Unicorn with a different class and different teacher. But I was still a tad disappointed.

For years after that, I continued to wonder how the movie was supposed to end. I might have just asked my parents to buy the movie for me, except that I actually couldn't remember the title of it. And in those pre-Internet days, it was not easy to look up and identify a movie based on some recollected description. Over time, I would forget almost entirely what the movie itself was about. I would only remember, now and again, that there was some animated fantasy movie that I had watched in kindergarten, which I did not get to see the end of.

I might have asked my kindergarten teacher, except that she left the school after my year. I was told that she had moved away with her husband, who was nothing less than a Harlem Globetrotter. I knew that athletes had to do a lot of traveling, so I supposed that she also had to move around a lot to be with him. Only much later in life did I do some digging and find out that her husband was actually David “Smokey” Gaines, a former Globetrotter, who was already long past his performing days by the time I was in his wife’s kindergarten class. He had become a basketball coach, and he had received an offer in another state, so that was why they had moved.

To be honest, I actually managed to track down Mr. Gaines’s current office, and I almost considered giving him a call just to ask how his wife was now. Of course, I didn’t know if they were still married, or if she was even still alive . . . . But, even in the best-case scenario, I seriously doubt she would remember me, just as I can no longer remember much about her. And what would I even say to her?

Hello, Mrs. Gaines, I was in your kindergarten class some twenty years ago. Chinese kid. Kind of quiet. You asked me once how I would feel about being selected for a “good citizenship” award, and I told you to “let me think about it.” You laughed and said okay, but later you gave me the award anyway without ever asking for my answer. Thank you for that. And how are you these days?

Yeah, it probably wouldn’t go down like that . . . .

Anyway, I digress again.

As for the movie itself? Well, I actually bought the DVD about three years ago, but, even though I'd already waited twenty years to see the end of it, I kept putting off watching it until yesterday. Or maybe, precisely because it had been that long, I was afraid to watch it, for fear that it could not possibly live up to my childhood feelings about it, those feelings being about all that I could remember, in lieu of any details about the movie itself.

Well, now having seen the whole thing finally, I don't think it's a particularly great movie, worthy of all that I've invested in it over these more than twenty years. But there is a certain haunting beauty and an earnestness to it that is seldom found nowadays in children's pictures. I would say that the filmmakers grasped rightly that a child can more deeply feel than think. Truly, there is little of sense to the movie, but the characters' ever guileless (and seemingly always unprovoked) expressions of love, longing, frustration, sadness, and dread would have been keenly resonant to younger audiences, children being all emotion before reason. Or perhaps I speak only of my own younger self.

Robin Hood

2010-12-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

While shopping the other day, I happened by the movies section of the electronics store at the mall. And, for whatever reason, I quickly gravitated toward the animated shelf. Perhaps I was looking for some comforting reminder of my childhood, back when I could watch a movie more earnestly, even if it happened to star talking cartoon animals. I passed by a number of older titles that I could remember liking—An American Tail, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound—though I could not otherwise remember anything about them, so long had it been since I’d seen them.

One that caught my eye was Disney’s version of Robin Hood. It had been a particular favorite of mine growing up, though again I cannot remember it well enough now to determine where it would stack up against more recent pictures. But I remember, back when my parents, who used to work days and nights, would drop me off at the daycare, Robin Hood was one of the handful of VHS tapes on hand to entertain the kids.

I probably watched Robin Hood at least a dozen times there, yet somehow the twelfth time was as engaging as the first. I suppose, being a child, maybe I was just easily diverted. It has now been many years since I last saw it, but there is still one scene that I can vividly recall.

I believe it came near the end of the movie. I don’t even remember the exact context, but Robin Hood was attempting to flee Prince John’s burning castle. All avenues of escape were cut off, however, and he was forced to turn from one dead end to another, meanwhile having to evade relentless guards and arrows fired from all directions. Although Robin Hood had been a charismatic and cocksure hero up to that point, the panic and desperation were now clearly drawn on his expression, as though he were for the first time confronting a situation he wasn’t sure he could get out of. And as his seemingly futile escape attempt stretched on for interminable minutes, it became all the more agonizing to watch him get boxed in, his options shrinking along with his chances, until he was driven to flee deeper inward and upward into the castle (which, in my five-year-old experience, was never a good idea).

The climax came when finally Robin Hood dove (or fell) into the moat. He sank beneath the surface of the water almost upon landing, a hail of arrows following immediately behind, while both Prince John and Robin Hood’s own merry band looking on waited expectantly for him to rise again. But there was no stirring in the water, and as the bubbles stopped floating up to the surface, what followed was only his hat, an arrow running through it. Prince John was exultant, while Robin Hood’s friends were in disbelief, then pained resignation, the depth of their grief itself, more than anything else, serving as seeming proof of the cruel fate handed upon their heroic leader.

Of course that wasn’t the end of the movie, and Robin Hood did survive, and there was much rejoicing as good triumphed over evil. Yet somehow that whole sequence was, every time I saw it, as vital to me as though I were seeing it for the first time. Even though I knew he would make it out okay—in fact, I probably knew that even the first time I watched it—somehow it was still terrifying for me every time Robin Hood sank beneath the water. Somehow I got anxious every time waiting for him to surface. And the anguish of his friends, as they believed him perished, especially tore me up inside every time.

Anyway, that was Robin Hood to me.

Maybe for charity

2010-12-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

You know how they sometimes have Celebrity Jeopardy!, Celebrity Apprentice, etc.?

Well, maybe they should do a "Celebrity" edition of Dancing with the Stars.

.

.

.

You know, just to shake things up for a season.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

2010-11-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

I feel about Modern Warfare, as a video game, much as I do about The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. I think both are technically well-made, but I have little personal affection for either. I probably enjoyed playing Modern Warfare more so than I did watching Lord of the Rings, but I think parts of me also despised the game much more so than those movies, toward which I would describe myself as more lukewarm. In all fairness, I am not a particular fan of first-person shooters, so Modern Warfare may have started at a disadvantage for me, but truly I must say that playing it was one of the most soul-numbing experiences I ever had in gaming.

The game was sold to me as the modern exemplar of its genre. If you were to play only one FPS in your life, in other words, it should be this one. I might actually be inclined to agree with that, although I have admittedly not played that many examples myself. But Modern Warfare does include just about everything one should expect from an FPS, and most of it done better (if only slightly so) than in any other game I've played.

There is fun to be had here, as well as some of the most exhilarating moments I've had in gaming. Truly, what make the game are the explosive set pieces and scripted sequences that leave the player feeling as though they are acting out a Hollywood blockbuster. There were occasionally stunning images, such as the sight of a helicopter spinning out and going down in real time (no cut to cinematic, pre-rendered or otherwise), while my character sat watching from another helicopter alongside. Even more impressive were the interactive moments that, although obviously scripted, gave the player just enough of an illusion of agency to feel like the hero of the script, as in the game's most adrenaline-fueled scene, when the slow motion kicks in, and you know you've got just one clip in your sidearm to make count, or else.

My favorite mission in the game, essentially a series of scripted encounters, had me playing as part of a two-man sniping team. The operation takes place indoors and outdoors, moves from the foliage to an urban environment, and encompasses just about every gameplay type--stealthy infiltration, long-range sniping, escort mission, and hectic standoff while awaiting rescue. Had that been the only mission in the game (actually, it was spread across two campaign levels), it might still have been the most perfect FPS I would ever have played, despite also being the shortest.

But then there were the other five hours of the roughly six-hour campaign. Most of the game, unfortunately, is just tedious room-clearing, practically indistinguishable from the basic gameplay found in Haze or Perfect Dark Zero, which are regarded as among the worst FPS titles of this generation. You just march forward, unload a clip into any enemy combatant that pops up probably out of nowhere, reload often, retreat to regenerate health, and probably die many unforeseen deaths before it's all over. The formula repeats several times, until there are seemingly thousands of nameless dead left behind on both sides, and there is almost no discernible narrative to let you know where you are, who you're fighting or why. It's unsettlingly impersonal, one of the most emotionally and spiritually deadening experiences not just in gaming, but in my life in general.

The game is assuredly better than Haze or Perfect Dark Zero, yet in some ways it made me feel worse. It may be the game's attitude in the face of its own realism. The game's action is, for sure, very over-the-top, but the overall aesthetic is still starker by far than the cartoony Perfect Dark Zero or even a rugged sci-fi shooter such as Gears of War. Even in the aforementioned favorite mission of mine, there was something eerie about the way, every time I sniped a guy in the head, my AI partner would compliment me with a mesmerized "Beautiful." In Haze, these sorts of war-intoxicated hollow men were the bad guys. Even Army of Two, with its mercenary protagonists, was less unnerving, because it actually came across as satirical at times, whereas Modern Warfare seems sincerely gung ho in its militarism.

The very worst (and most impersonal) mission in the game, "Death From Above," has the player staring down the sights from an AC-130 gunship that is providing cover fire for friendlies on the ground. Everything is black-and-white, and your job is to fire upon the many tiny, noiseless enemy silhouettes below until they just stop moving. Your mostly dispassionate pilot will periodically mutter a "Nice shooting" to let you know that you hit your targets. Although Modern Warfare was released three years ago, the stage bears a remarkable resemblance to the infamous WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video that came out earlier this year. Even the pilot audio is almost identical. It all suggests that, compared to Haze or Army of Two, Modern Warfare's representation of war is probably the more realistic. It's also uglier. What's furthermore baffling is that, come end credits, developer Infinity Ward chose to roll more of this type of footage, before closing with an irreverent rap anthem that samples, among other things, the developer's own pre-release hype for its game.

So did I ultimately have fun with Modern Warfare? I guess. I'm really not sure, however, because by the end I had kind of stopped feeling.

No Such Thing

2010-11-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

Stopping by the workplace commons to refill my water, I spotted the off-duty older security guard sitting by himself and staring out the second-floor window. Alerted by the gurgling of the water cooler, he turned to stare at me. I smiled and nodded in acknowledgment, as is my usual response, and prepared to make my exit back to work.

He had other ideas, however, and stopped me to ask whether the office would be open on the day after Thanksgiving. Employees are of course given that day off, but in past years, when the workload has allowed, management has encouraged people to come in and earn overtime. There had been no official word yet for this year, and it was highly unlikely that I, as unconcerned low man on the totem pole, would be informed before security, for whom, if operations are running that day, coming in is maybe not so voluntary.

I told him that I hadn't heard anything, but that, in any case, it hardly mattered to me, because I would not be coming in either way.

"Lucky rascal," he said. "Going home, or staying local?"

For me, home was local, but he didn't need all the details. I answered, "I'll be here. I just won't be here."

"But you're still single, right?"

This seemed to me rather a non-sequitur, but I indulged him and answered in the affirmative.

"Lucky rascal," he said again.

He was being playful of course, and now looked away as if to indicate that he had had his fun and I was free to go. But something compelled me to carry on a little longer.

"Are you married?" I asked him.

"Thirty years," he said.

"Happily?"

"No such thing!" he answered triumphantly, as though he had been the one all along steering us to this punchline.

But I was heading in a different direction: "You know, I think maybe you're the lucky one."

He straightened up and smiled more sincerely then. "You've got time," he reassured me, and we both left that as the final word.

And I went back to work and he went back to staring out the window of the empty break room.

No, of course I didn't mean it. I would not trade my life for his for anything. But it seemed like the right thing to say at the time.

Drawing the Line

2010-11-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard by now that, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., Nintendo will be releasing a Wii port of the 16-bit Super Mario All-Stars next month. And, I ask, people are supposed to be happy about this? I've been a sucker at times, but I will not be giving Nintendo thirty dollars for this. No, sir.

Let's take things back a bit to 1993, when Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars for the Super NES. The compilation was one of the sweetest packages in gaming, bringing together three of the NES's most celebrated platformers on one cartridge and giving them new life through completely revamped graphics and audio and the ability to save your progress. It also threw in one additional full game, The Lost Levels--actually the original Japan-only Super Mario Bros. 2--which many Western gamers had for years been curious about. It is perhaps not widely known that, a year later, Nintendo even added a retouched Super Mario World to an updated version, Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World, which was distributed as a console pack-in. Like I said, pretty sweet, eh?

Now fast-forward some ten years to the Game Boy Advance era, AKA "the dark times." With the GBA proving more than powerful enough to handle ports of SNES games, Nintendo set to granting many players' wishes by portable-izing some of their 16-bit favorites. Near the top of the request list had to be Super Mario All-Stars and its collection of evergreen titles. Maybe Nintendo would even be extra cool and give us the + Super Mario World edition. Well, we got it all right . . . as three separate $20-30 cartridges.

Somehow, as the games got older, what was once one of the greatest deals of the 16-bit era was now, ten years later, being sold to us again, no longer a collection nor a bargain. Why? Seemingly for no other reason than because Nintendo had figured out how to squeeze its fans for their every last drop of passion and especially money. The Super Mario Advance series, so nonsensically ordered, didn't even look good on the shelf as separate titles. We got Super Mario Advance (Super Mario Bros. 2), Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, and Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (Super Mario Advance 3 was Yoshi's Island).

Where were Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels? Well, the 8-bit versions had already been ported and enhanced for the Game Boy Color as Super Mario Bros. Deluxe in 1999. Even Nintendo wouldn't have tried to sell us those games yet again so soon, right? Not at all! In 2004, as part of the "Classic NES Series," Nintendo gave us a straight port of Super Mario Bros. for the GBA for $20. This was, of course, the same mercenary line that included the 8-bit Metroid, which had already been featured as an extra in both Metroid Prime (later removed from the Wii version) and Metroid: Zero Mission. Other games in the $20 "budget" series included Excitebike, Donkey Kong, and Ice Climber, all of which were available both as extras in the GameCube Animal Crossing and as much cheaper cards for the e-Reader.

Speaking of Animal Crossing for the GameCube, did you know that it included complete emulations of both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, because to this day Nintendo has never given players any means to unlock them. You can find any number of lesser NES games quite easily within Animal Crossing, but Nintendo quietly backed away from even acknowledging the existence of these most prized items, even though hackers have confirmed that the games are right there on the disc. Why were they coded into the game if Nintendo had no intention of letting us find them? Well, probably the Animal Crossing developers started with a cool idea, which then went out the window as soon as Nintendo realized that fools would pay $20 for what might otherwise have been offered for free. That is surely why no subsequent Animal Crossing game has included emulated classics, which were practically the only thing I liked about the GameCube game. After all, how can Nintendo afford to be giving away free games, when people are willing to pay money yet again for Excitebike on the Virtual Console?

I'll concede that the Virtual Console is a cool idea with a lot of untapped potential, but sometimes that potential seems deliberately untapped. And that brings us to now, when, instead of bringing Super Mario All-Stars to Virtual Console for 800 points (the standard rate for SNES titles), Nintendo is charging us $30 for a retail disc that is, by all accounts, nothing more than the original ROM with only maybe updated copyright dates and legal screens. There's no Super Mario World, none of the GBA or e-Reader extras, no four-player Mario Bros. remake, and certainly nothing brand new to this edition. It's just 17-year-old versions of 20-25-year-old games, the originals of which have long been available on Virtual Console, among myriad other formats.

DOESN'T IT MAKE YOU ANGRY?!

*sigh* You wonder why Nintendo isn't cool anymore? It's not because they make baby games now. It's because they pull stuff like this.

His Sour Grape

2010-11-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Well, there hasn't been any recent news on the Contador front, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten.

Alberto Contador, three-time Tour de France winner, revealed in September that a urine sample he had given during his victorious 2010 race contained minute traces of clenbuterol, a banned performance-enhancing drug. The Spaniard attempted to explain it away as due to food contamination, also pointing out that the amount detected was so miniscule that it could not possibly have aided his results. The World Anti-Doping Agency has rejected this defense, however, saying that it has heard it all before. Contador’s case is further damaged by the revelation that a brand new test found him also positive for plasticizers—almost certainly residue from plastic IV bags, which could have been used for blood transfusions to boost endurance.

Contador has been provisionally suspended by the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), although no hearing has been set yet, and his 2010 title presently remains on the record. An official ruling could be a long way off, judging by the doping case of Floyd Landis, who was only finally stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title more than a year after the race had concluded.

While Contador must remain innocent until proven guilty, some would say the damage to cycling’s reputation has already been done. Even if his test results cannot be definitively linked to doping, the mere fact that such evidence has been found casts further suspicion on a sport hammered by drug use over the last decade at least. Far from being surprised by allegations that their champions may be dopers, many people now expect that any Tour de France winner must be on something, the stinging disgrace of Floyd Landis perhaps justifying their cynicism.

Personally, I never followed cycling with any passion, and I really couldn't care less about Contador or Landis, except insofar as their cases add further fuel to the hunt for the alpha, the only truly newsworthy person or topic in the world of cycling. I'm talking, of course, about Lance Armstrong, the big dog himself.

The ever-popular Armstrong, self-described as the most-tested athlete in the world, won the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times, never once having been found guilty of doping. But the allegations persisted throughout his period of dominance, and he has been indirectly linked to drug use through guilty associates and teammates, including Landis, who has, in the aftermath of his own admission of misconduct, named Armstrong as a fellow doper. Armstrong remains the focus of an intensifying investigation into cycling that is now being assisted by Jeff Novitzky, who played a key role in the BALCO case that implicated Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, among others.

I’m reluctant to judge the man until an official verdict comes out, but as with Alberto Contador, I must admit that Armstrong’s case practically begins in doubt, and any evidence as has already been gathered tips the odds severely against his being innocent.

What concerns me is the larger repercussions, beyond cycling or even sports in general, that might accompany the ruination of Lance Armstrong. I fear the outcome of this investigation because I know that, even as his sport has been tainted in the eyes of many, Armstrong himself remains a hero to even more people, on account of the things he has done outside of cycling. Just prior to the start of his seven-year reign at the Tour de France, having himself beaten the odds to triumph over testicular cancer, he founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose LIVESTRONG movement has supported and inspired millions of cancer sufferers. Already thus recognized as one of the most philanthropic professional athletes in the world, Armstrong also co-founded the Athletes for Hope organization to get other athletes involved with charitable causes. He’s also one of the more active celebrity Twitter users, and his more than 2.5 million followers are proof of his public sway.

What would it mean, in the larger scheme, for Lance Armstrong to be toppled by a doping scandal? What would it mean for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, for LIVESTRONG, for all those who have been inspired by all that he has done? These are the questions that worry me.

I value truth perhaps beyond any other virtue, and I cannot abide cheating. I await justice in the trials of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who continue to tarnish baseball with their flimsy assertions of no wrongdoing. But Armstrong, as a public figure—a hero even for many—means so much more than those men, and it’s very hard for me to reconcile the possibility of his guilt with all the genuine good that he’s done. Personally, if I were to weigh the good against the bad, then I suppose I’d say that raising millions for cancer care and research should outweigh use of a banned substance in the Tour de France, which is, after all, just a sport. But is that to say that his good deeds excuse his (alleged) misconduct, and we’re just supposed to look the other way? That the ends justify the means, in other words (because his cycling career was what made all else possible)? Or, more cynically, that he should be allowed, through good works, to buy the adoration of the public and seven ill-gotten Tour de France titles? That’s a difficult philosophical question that I am woefully unqualified to tackle. But it’s also the issue that the public will have to face, if the reckoning promised by Novitzky comes to pass.

Bonds and Clemens too were heroes of a sort once, as were Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Now we know that their era was a shameful period in baseball’s once proud history, their dubious achievements leaving question marks all over the record book of America’s pastime. And the damage extends into today, with active stars such as Alex Rodriguez admitting to having used anabolic steroids in the past, sowing cynicism and doubt as to how much of his career is real versus enhanced. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure, and that constant uncertainty is enough for many, myself included, to dull the pleasure of professional sports.

Men such as these, through their lies, stole from us the innocence to believe in and be inspired by professional athletes. From my perspective, they stole Major League Baseball itself from us, and it is now impossible for me to take the sport seriously. But again, that’s just sports. Lance Armstrong is bigger. I was never a fan of cycling, nor have I ever had cancer, so I’ve never had much reason to follow Armstrong’s name in the news, but even I can appreciate the things he has done for people affected by cancer. I would see the value of it every time I saw a random jogger sporting a yellow LIVESTRONG wristband to raise awareness and support for cancer research, as well as the resolve to live life to its fullest. The idea inspired other charities to produce their own variously colored gel bracelets, and these too would catch my eye as I spotted them everywhere on people who, even if only in a small way, were trying to inspire others as they themselves had been inspired to noble causes. But if Armstrong too was a cheater, then was his message a lie, all this hope that he gave people false? Take Lance Armstrong away from all the good men and women who believe in him, and it could amount to taking hope itself away from them.

Perhaps no sane person should confuse the man with his foundation, for which he may be merely a figurehead and not an active contributor. But I just don’t know. The foundation originated with him, it still bears his name, and Armstrong remains the face to draw people in. However little he may be involved with the day-to-day goings-on (and I honestly have no idea to what extent he is or isn’t), I imagine that, in the public perception, he is the foundation, and there is no separating it from him.

So am I a fool because part of me wants to keep LIVESTRONG going, even if it is rooted in a lie? Is a false hope better than none at all? Before, I would have said no. I would have argued that people are only really living free when they are allowed to make choices informed by the complete truth, blissful ignorance being but an illusion. But I don’t think I ever had to consider the question seriously before now, and suddenly I find myself without answers.

The truth is all well and good, but it can also be devastating. What good came of learning of Tiger Wood’s extracurricular transgressions—cheating of an altogether different sort? Or, moving from sports to the entertainment industry, what about Mel Gibson? Yes, we got the truth, and now that we are able to see these false idols for what they are, we realize what fools we were to have ever followed them in the first place. A valuable lesson learned, no? Yet, as one celebrity role model after another lets us down, soon enough we will stop believing in heroes altogether. Having been stung by these unworthy men for having believed in them more than what they are, we now exchange betrayed hopes for cynicism, believing in nothing and assuming the worst in people. I think that’s a shame. What’s more, I think that within that cynicism lies the true damage inflicted upon society by their exposed lies.

Perhaps we just had unrealistic expectations. Should we really be so disappointed to learn that our beloved celebrities—the figures most prominent in the public eye—are only men after all, as fallible as the rest of us, only their mistakes may well be greater in magnitude, as are the rest of their lives? I suppose we wish for our heroes to be wholly heroic and to never let us down. And yet I don’t see why that is so wrong. Perhaps people believe in Lance Armstrong because they need to, but why is there seemingly no scenario where honesty and inspiration intersect? Don’t people need truth and hope both equally? Don’t people deserve a hero who can deliver both? Personally, I still wish for that.

Of course, no one has caught Armstrong yet. Given all the tests he had to pass, maybe he really was clean through all those victories. I can only continue hoping that he was.

Where do we go from here?

2010-11-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

As far as I'm concerned, the biggest story in gaming right now is Keiji Inafune's shocking resignation from Capcom, where he had spent the last 23 years, and for whom he had still been doing press and promotion within the past month.

Best known for his involvement with the Mega Man series, he eventually rose to become head of R&D and global head of production at Capcom. To many, however, more than being the head of development at Capcom, Keiji Inafune was Capcom. A Capcom without Keiji is almost as unthinkable as a Nintendo without Shigeru Miyamoto. We've still yet to get the full picture, and for now we can only speculate as to what it all means, how it came to this, and where Capcom and Keiji each go from here.

Looking back, it's not as if there weren't signs. A famously candid interviewee, he has many times made clear his dissatisfaction with the gutless direction of the Japanese games industry, even criticizing Capcom specifically. Of course, he was hardly the only one, and I just thought it was his way of lighting a fire under his subordinates.

As a mere consumer, I mostly just shrugged any time I heard talk of the Japanese games industry collapsing. But this is Keiji Inafune himself, securely the number one man at one of Japan's most distinguished publishers, leaving behind the company and property that have been his career, and I think this drastic move is undeniable proof now that things are not well in the Land of the Rising Sun.

It seems he was truly and deeply unhappy with his job. Although he was the number one man on the development side, he still felt constricted by the way Capcom ran the business end of things. But Keiji says he's not done with games, and apparently he's looking forward to becoming more involved again with the creative process.

It's hard for me to imagine what he might do without Mega Man, which I think he needed more than it needed him. I don't know how involved he was with any other titles that bore his name, but I've mostly thought of him as an executive producer of late. I am reminded of Hironobu Sakaguchi, father of Final Fantasy, who gambled as big as anyone, only to lose almost everything. Far from shaking things up, he now persists in obsolescence and irrelevance. Or perhaps we can look to Yuji Naka's career, post-Sega and Sonic.

I'm as lost and clueless as anyone, but I felt compelled to say a few words, because I honestly think this is the end of Keiji Inafune as a meaningful contributor to the games industry. Is it the end of Japanese games as well? Well, also within the past week, we've seen Shinji Mikami's studio get bought by an American company, and there's also the very reliable rumor that SOCOM developer Slant Six Games is developing some kind of squad-based Resident Evil. So these people are all now working with and for one another anyway, and I'm guessing that, in time, the distinction of "Japanese game" versus "Western game" will simply disappear. Frankly, I'm already kind of over it.

Romeo and Julia

2010-10-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you the story of the day TV's Jeopardy! became my enemy. No, it wasn't the Vilnius/"Vilnuis" controversy, though that guess is not far off.

Not long after the Ken Jennings period, I believe, there was an episode with a clue seeking the name of the actress who portrayed "Elaine" on Seinfeld, a '90s NBC sitcom. One contestant immediately buzzed in and answered, "Julia Louis-Dreyfus," which earned a nod from me. Instead of awarding him the money, however, Trebek left the dude hanging and befuddled until his time expired. Then another contestant buzzed in with "Julia Louis-Dreyfus," which Trebek acknowledged as the correct answer.

You see, the first guy had actually pronounced it "Louise-Dreyfus," and the judges had determined that the mispronunciation made the answer unacceptable. The second person had correctly pronounced it more like "Lewis-Dreyfus," which was judged the correct pronunciation.

I didn't entirely agree with the decision, but I was not going to argue against the Jeopardy! judges on the arbitrary rules of their own game. Rather, my complaint at the time was that I didn't think "Lewis" was the correct pronunciation. I could have sworn that I had only ever heard it pronounced "Louise," and I had never really paid it much mind that it didn't match the spelling. I thought maybe it was some odd preferred, or at least commonly accepted, mispronunciation unique to this actress. I figured the judges were adhering to conventional phonics and had never heard "Louis" pronounced in the context of her name specifically, and I awaited a correction and apology from them after the commercial break.

Well, the correction never came, the poor guy who said "Louise" lost the match by a narrow enough margin that it could have been the difference, and I could only sit at home feeling powerless to correct what I still perceived to be a grave injustice. I watched the next week's worth of episodes just anticipating some kind of apology, but it was never mentioned again.

Mind you, I didn't care enough to actually do research and confirm the pronunciation of her name myself. It was only when the actress appeared recently on 30 Rock, and I again thought I heard her name pronounced "Louise," that I finally decided to do some digging.

As it turned out, I was wrong, but so too was Jeopardy! According to the actress herself, her name is actually pronounced "LOO-ee," like the French monarchs. It's quite possible that, all those times I thought I heard "Louise," they were actually saying "LOO-ee." But it certainly wasn't "Lewis." In any case, according to their rules, the judges were correct not to award points to the first guy. But what about the second guy, who said "Lewis"? He didn't pronounce it correctly either. All he proved was that he had seen the actress's name in print and knew how it was spelled. And he didn't even really prove that! Maybe he thought it was spelled "Lewis." (And maybe the lady who was dinged in "Final Jeopardy!" for misspelling "Vilnius" as "Vilnuis" actually knew the correct pronunciation, but just had poor spelling.)

If the show were really testing knowledge (and pronunciation), then neither guy was truly correct. For that matter, the judges proved to me that they didn't know a damn thing themselves, and they were not fit to be deeming one wrong answer less incorrect than another.

No, I'm still not satisfied.

Dead Man Talking

2010-10-25T23:20:00.000-07:00

Back when I was doing "The Essentials," I tried not to adhere too strictly to any self-imposed guidelines, but I very quickly found myself holding to scheduling an installment for every Saturday. The thing is, sometimes I would write them days, or even weeks, in advance, not necessarily composing them in the order they went up. In such cases, I would just use Blogger's scheduling feature to set them to auto-post at the proper date and time.

It never occurred to me while I was doing it, but now that I think about it, if something unfortunate had happened to me before one of those posts went up, it might then have been just a tad morbid, or at least perplexing, for my readers to have "new" posts coming from me while the world knew me to be dead/kidnapped/in a coma/whatever.

Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be doing that anymore.

The Game Has Changed

2010-10-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

EVO 2010 ended unsurprisingly with defending champion Daigo Umehara's Ryu triumphing again over a top American Rufus player in Super Street Fighter IV. But the real story of the tournament was Taiwanese player GamerBee. When he came out of nowhere with his Adon to stunningly upset Justin Wong, en route to a 5th place finish that made national television news in his native Taiwan, it sent shock waves through the community.

If what happened really happened, then everything was thrown into question. It had been one of life's understood truths that Adon was among the most hopeless characters in the game. What did it mean that a virtual unknown from nowhere could take this bottom-tier fighter and defeat several of America's top players in convincing fashion? Suddenly, up was down, snow fell in the summer, two plus two equaled five, and horses rode people. Okay, so maybe the situation was not so dire, but it at least suggested that the tier list was not so figured out as we believed.

The repercussions of GamerBee's run could be seen at last weekend's Season's Beatings: Redemption, the first major international tournament since EVO. Perhaps it was not as big as EVO (and maybe EVO still isn't Japan), but most of the top players were in attendance, including Justin Wong, Daigo, and GamerBee himself.

This time, GamerBee entered as a legitimate favorite, so perhaps it was not so surprising to see him win it all. Well, no, it's still hard to come to grips with an Adon player winning a major competition. But Season's Beatings was full of unexpected results that would have been thought inconceivable just a few months ago.

The first stunner was Daigo's early exit. Who took out Umehara's Ryu? His first loss came at the hands of TwistedJago, by some accounts the best Bison player in America. It was a close match, and with this being a double-elimination tournament, Daigo still had a chance to come back by fighting his way through the losers bracket. His first opponent in losers was Marn, one of the East Coast's top SFIV players since the original version's release. Ever since Super came out, Marn had been maining new character Dudley, and he had not had very impressive results to show for it. Sticking to his guns against no less an opponent than Daigo, would he pull a "GamerBee" and manage a major upset using an obscure low-to-mid-tier character?

The other highlight of Season's Beatings had to be the much anticipated rematch between GamerBee and Justin Wong. The tournament's "Redemption" moniker seemed specifically chosen to hype up a possible match between Justin and his unexpected EVO vanquisher.

Actually, before they could meet in the tournament proper, the two would face off as members of opposing teams in the 5-on-5 "USA vs. The World" exhibition. Once again, it was Justin's Rufus against GamerBee's Adon, and instead of Justin avenging his EVO loss, it was GamerBee winning in commanding fashion, proving that his last victory was no fluke.

Of course, the top American players tend to regard these exhibitions as merely arenas for sandbagging. Most experts will tell you that winning is a matter of knowing your opponent, more so than knowing the game. But even in this online age, it's not exactly a simple matter to arrange a sparring session against a player even just from another state. So an exhibition with no money at stake is a good chance to feel out a foreign opponent who might later prove an obstacle in the main tournament. A shrewd player like Justin has been known to use such opportunities to get a read on a potential threat's tendencies, while he himself holds back and saves his best for the money rounds.

Sure enough, when he inevitably ran into GamerBee in the main tournament, Justin revealed that he had been saving something especially for his Taiwanese rival. This time, he would turn the tables and leave GamerBee scratching his head. For this opponent, Justin swapped out his signature Rufus for his own eyebrow-raising character choice of Makoto, another one of the game's worst characters, who is virtually unrepresented in the competitive scene.

Now, you might think that Makoto should be the sandbag character and Rufus the money character, in which case Justin was seemingly disrespecting his opponent. But Justin Wong is a guy who lives off his tournament winnings, and even if Season's Beatings isn't quite EVO, he's in it to win it, especially up against the very guy who eliminated him in EVO, thus robbing him of both prize money and pride. And Justin has shown before that he actually has rather a large and eclectic bag of secret weapons. After his Rufus lost badly to Daigo in their first SFIV match, Justin experimented (unsuccessfully) with Abel, Balrog, and Fei Long against Daigo's Ryu in subsequent major tournament situations. There aren't many players who could thus push Justin to stray from Rufus just to counter them, so his resorting to Makoto here was truly a testament to his respect for GamerBee's skill with Adon. It also meant that he truly believed Makoto had potential, and he came in fully prepared to prove it.

So, a match between an Adon and a Makoto as the most anticipated bout of a major tournament? It sounds just a bit ridiculous, yet there it was, real and competitive, and perhaps it was time for everyone watching to forget what they thought they knew about "tiers."

Of course, that was not the end of it. Although Justin had avenged himself, this was, once again, a double-elimination tournament. Unlike Daigo, GamerBee would fight his way back through losers, and Justin would find himself having to try and finish what he started, facing GamerBee once more, this time in an elimination match in the top 3, which was perhaps only proper.

Again it was Makoto versus Adon, but this match perhaps revealed the difference between the two users of these low-tier characters. GamerBee is old school. He doesn't pick Adon just to take advantage of his opponents' unfamiliarity with the matchup, but because Adon truly is his character, whom he'll live and die by. Meanwhile, Justin's choice of Makoto may have been somewhat of a gimmick, due to run its course, once his opponent caught up to his own rudimentary knowledge of the character's tricks. Yes, as both players proved, there are more characters than just Rufus and Akuma, but the deeper lesson that GamerBee teaches us here is that it really does come down to the player, not the character.

Ultimately, GamerBee managed to adapt to the Makoto matchup, leaving Justin to reconsider his character choice. Unfortunately for Justin, he didn't really have a backup plan, and you can see at the end that GamerBee just beat the fight out of him. He would do very much the same to his final opponent, Momochi, another top Japanese player on a par with Daigo.

Momochi plays Ken, another mid-tier character that is rarely seen going far in tournaments, but he is himself as technically solid a player as anyone in the world. Even so, GamerBee made him look ordinary, and although their match started close, by the end Momochi looked lost and desperate against a character that no one even in Japan plays to half the level that GamerBee does.

So, an Adon, a Ken, and a Makoto as the top 3. Daigo "The Beast" Umehara going out to a Dudley. Usually, as players grow more experienced with a game, the tournament results narrow toward a list of three or four proven top-tier characters. With Super Street Fighter IV, however, I suspect we may only now just be getting started plumbing the depths of this game.

T.I. Joe

2010-10-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

In my more cynical periods, I sometimes feel that we can only be as great, or as good, as the occasion permits, and for us living in these easy times, there are few opportunities for anyone to be more than mediocre. Of course, the truly great ones are those who do not wait for life to happen, but make their own opportunities. So who are these "great ones"? Well, I could name a few in the realm of sports or the entertainment industry, but in "real life"--things that matter--I don't really know.

For most people, it's back to being as good as the occasion. So it was for rapper T.I. this past Wednesday, when he helped talk a suicidal man off a ledge.

T.I. was driving to a video shoot when he heard the news, over the radio, that a man was threatening to jump off the 22-story building that housed the radio station. Though "breaking news" every time, such incidents are not altogether uncommon and do not typically attract more than local attention. With the police already on hand, T.I. could have done nothing and still remained blameless, a mere civilian. Like most civilians, he could simply have shrugged and gone on with his day, or he could have become just another spectator anticipating either a heartening resolution or a thrilling disaster.

But something in him told him that he was the right man at the right time and the right place. He stopped what he was doing, went to the scene, and did what he could to help, recording a video message that police used to talk the man off the ledge.

It wasn't something that he had to do, but it was maybe something that only he could have done. Or maybe the suicidal man would never have gone through with it anyway. But the point is that T.I. did not just wait and watch, leaving the outcome up to chance. He heard the call for him from heroism, and he accepted the charges.

I'm not familiar with the rap music of T.I. I don't imagine I would like it. I'm not calling him any kind of role model. Two days after the incident, he was sentenced to eleven months in prison for having violated his probation, after having been released only eight months earlier following a year behind bars on federal weapons charges. But in his moment of recognition and subsequent action, T.I. was as good as any man. He did what nobody else should have expected of him, but which maybe we should all expect of ourselves. We need not all commit our lives to saving the world, but when occasion summons us, however seldom the call may come, will we hear it and be ready to answer, as T.I. did, with our best selves?

Maybe Kanye got it right . . .

2010-10-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

I dreamed that Taylor Swift secretly owned slaves. The story was broken by TMZ or some such thing, and of course it was a big scandal.

A silly dream, certainly, and I mostly forgot about it as the day progressed.

Then, hours later, on the drive home from work, a Taylor Swift song came on the radio, and for a second, I actually felt angry. How dare they play this trash on the radio? I thought. What next, readings from Mein Kampf?

Haha, a silly dream indeed. But such is the power (and danger) of the false memories left by even silly dreams.

Sabre-metrics

2010-10-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

As seen at Big 5 Sporting Goods:

Seriously? Okay, I may not know baseball, but in my world there is right and there is wrong, and that distinction is not difficult to make.

The Lion and the Lamb

2010-10-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

Does an isolated episode of NBC's mediocre new procedural, Chase, really merit its own post? That is not the sort of question that I can be bothered with around here at this blog. But be warned, there will be spoilers for episode 3, "The Comeback Kid," and what follows won't have much meaning if you haven't already watched it.

I am not a regular viewer of Chase, having in fact only seen the third episode. I tuned in that night because I saw previews indicating that Robert Knepper would be guest-starring. As Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell on Prison Break and Samuel Sullivan on Heroes, Knepper has previously played two of my favorite TV characters in recent years. Both those shows have ended, however, and Knepper does not yet have a new regular gig. So I turned on Chase to get my fix in the meantime, even though I understood that he would only be playing the villain of the week. There was also perhaps some question of whether I was really expecting to see Robert Knepper, or if, rather, it was T-Bag/Samuel Sullivan that I wanted to see. Either way, I was not disappointed, and this latest performance, although a one-shot, forms a nice arc along with his previous two most famous roles.

To recap (or in case you simply refuse to watch Chase), Knepper stars in the episode as Jack Druggan, fugitive of the week, who after living peacefully for years under a stolen identity, one day seems to snap shortly after turning fifty. He seeks out and guns down the punks who mugged him and his longtime domestic partner, and this bloody vengeance apparently rekindles his glory days, back when he was a lion among lambs, robbing banks at will and enjoying Harvard-educated hookers. Giving up his stable life of the past seventeen years, he does nothing to cover his tracks, even seeming to deliberately attract the attention of the Chase crew of U.S. Marshals.

At first, Druggan rather seems the opposite of T-Bag/Samuel. Whereas his previous characters were monsters trying to be men, Druggan seems to have grown tired of playing house and wants to be once more a lion. Even with the law hot on his heels, far from seeming desperate, he sees the gangster lifestyle as the most glamorous and adventurous existence there could be. When he sees his photo printed in the newspaper, he offers a better, more recent picture, as if to taunt his pursuers, for he is proud of what he is and uninterested in hiding it. The self-involved U.S. Marshals, peripheral players on their own show in this episode, try to get inside his head, and they determine that he is the bold, showy sort of criminal, who cannot help himself going for one more big heist, which indeed is his plan.

Maybe the Marshals are right. Even by the episode's end, there is never any dialogue from Druggan or any other character to explicitly identify him as anything but a monster addicted to bank-robbing. But there's a lot that doesn't add up with that interpretation. The Marshals theorize that he went into hiding originally because things just got too hot and he didn't have money left to blow while on the run. But in my mind, one does not spend seventeen years carrying on a relationship, working a humdrum job, and getting involved as a counselor at the halfway house for recently released prisoners, all simply as a cover while planning out the next big score.

Again, the Marshals connect the dots, seeing his position at the halfway house as the perfect avenue for him to groom and recruit his next crew, which indeed he does. But his recruitment pitch surprises even one of his prospects, who seems to have been on the road to reform, thanks specifically to the good advice that Druggan always gave him as a counselor. Druggan's lover also attests that, for those years they were together, he was a good man. And when he turns, he doesn't turn on her, but invites her to join him. She rejects his life on the run, of course, and he accepts her answer amicably, saying only that he had to try.

So, for seventeen years, Druggan had a steady job, the love of a fine woman that he loved back, and the admiration of his community for doing God's work. For seventeen years, he had exactly the life that T-Bag and Samuel seemed to always want but could never make work because they could never escape themselves and their pasts, as men brought up into worlds with few honest options. Perhaps Druggan was the same--a man who could not escape who he was. It's hard to say for certain how hard he tried; his turn would have occurred before the action of the episode, most likely when the muggers attacked his lady, enraging him into a realization of his essential nature that he had been repressing. But, again, seventeen years is a long time to be living a lie, unless that lie was what you wanted more than anything else. In other words, perhaps he wanted to be a lamb all along, and the lion was the face that he showed again only once he was already defeated. Defeated by a truth about himself that he did not think he could escape.

For all his proud talk of being a lion, he's not especially vicious by TV murderer standards. He only kills people that, in his mind, robbed or tried to rob him. He leaves several witnesses unharmed. Even when one of his subordinates abandons him, Druggan simply accepts it and lets the man walk away. He releases his picture to the papers supposedly because he is cocky and wants to be recognized, but perhaps, as much as he wants the world to see who he is, he also needs to be told who he really is by having the paper report back to him his crimes. And his big score at the end seems uncharacteristically poorly planned, with no other possible outcome but a hopeless firefight.

On the surface, Druggan seemed much more self-assured than either T-Bag or Samuel, but perhaps he was actually a more resigned and knowingly self-destructive version of the same man. T-Bag and Samuel were men who wreaked havoc on a world they felt left them no other options. Druggan, who actually spent a long time living the life they could only dream of, ultimately discovered that his dream did not match his nature, and eventually he could be neither man nor wholly monster, and there were no options, period. Although they were villains, I always found myself rooting for T-Bag and Samuel, hoping that things could somehow go their way. But perhaps Druggan shows what T-Bag and Samuel would have become, even had they gotten the lives they thought they wanted.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

2010-10-03T13:50:00.000-07:00

Saw this in 3-D. Nothing amazing, but I honestly enjoyed the 3-D better here than in any of the animated features I've seen, save for Beowulf. Paul W. S. Anderson does not waste the tech on subtle effects; his idea of 3-D means bullets and axes flying toward the audience. Even so, there are lengthy spaces without any noticeable 3-D, and I suppose, on the bright side, I can say that, during those moments, I honestly forgot that I was wearing the glasses. In other words, whenever the glasses were not enhancing my experience, at least they were not detracting from it either, as has been the case in the past. Perhaps I'm just getting accustomed to them.

As for the movie itself, it was what I wanted and more than I expected, which is not to say that it was very good or very surprising.

The first Resident Evil was a movie that I enjoyed more so than I would like to admit that it was good. In fact, it was not very good, but its appealing lead actress and basic laundry list of zombie, sci-fi, and thriller tropes kept things sufficiently entertaining. The second and third films then gave Milla Jovovich telekinesis, becoming very ugly superhero flicks in the process--a bit like Blade but with none of the wit, stunt work, or costuming. They were wretched.

Afterlife sees Paul W. S. Anderson back in the director's chair for the first time since the original (though I don't know if that's actually significant, since I'm pretty sure he's never directed a good film). More inspired by the latest games, it's much more a straight action affair. There are still zombies, but there are also tons of bad humans, and Wesker, the main antagonist, is basically the superhuman Wesker from the games. Milla, meanwhile, loses her own special abilities early on, becoming just a regular, albeit ideal, human, overcoming her enemies with skill, experience, and attitude, instead of conveniently timed and vaguely defined superpowers. Thus freed of its predecessors' most unbelievable element, the movie is by far the most exciting in the series, with action set pieces on a par with the Blade trilogy's. In my opinion, Milla is also better-dressed and better-armed this time, and the whole affair just looks cooler all around.

I had fun. In fact, 3-D or no, I enjoyed it more than The Expendables. And between these movies and Ultraviolet, I'm ready to declare Milla Jovovich the most exciting action star of the last ten years, probably her only rival being Angelina Jolie.

Perchance to Dream

2010-10-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

Had a dream that I was watching Chuck on Hulu. Instead of the usual sponsor's message and short ad, however, the video was preceded by an initialization sequence listing off all the files and processes that Hulu needed to start up. What particularly caught my eye was the line "loading the_dolf_lundgren.cf . . . ," as if the program had to load individual actors into the video.

After I woke up, I was of course reminded of that Batman: The Animated Series episode where Batman figured out that he was in a dream after he tried to read a newspaper and found the printed text nonsensical. According to Batman, the part of the brain that we use for reading is inactive during sleep.

Well, even though my nine-year-old self thought I could remember being able to read in my dreams, so authoritative did Batman sound, as voiced by Kevin Conroy, that I naturally assumed he had to be correct, and for many years I went on believing that we could not read in our dreams, even if I seemed to remember doing so.

But this time I was certain that I had been reading in my dream, because I specifically remembered Dolph Lundgren's name being misspelled "dolf." And after a quick bit of overdue research, I couldn't find any real scientific evidence to support Batman's explanation. In fact, when I Googled "reading in dreams," the first results were questions that turned out to be inspired by that very episode of Batman, and the only answers supporting Batman could actually be sourced back to him.

Well, Batman, you've let me down, but I suppose you did teach me a different lesson: I probably shouldn't believe everything that cartoon superheroes tell me, no matter how convincing they may sound.

The New--What the Hell?

2010-09-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

Up above is the man in charge of the new UK-developed Devil May Cry. You can go to GameTrailers to hear him talk about the inspirations behind Dante's radical redesign. Or you can not waste your time, and instead just take a look at his mop.

Funny Name of the Day

2010-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Gugu (short for Gugulethu) is the star of NBC's new spy series, Undercovers. I'm not sure whether s/he's the dude or the chick. Show's lame anyway, so what does it really matter?

(In all seriousness, please forgive my lameness, Gugu, even though I bet you're a good sport and perfectly cool with it.)

3 Games That Would Play Better In 3-D

2010-09-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

I don't personally view 3-D as a revolution in visual media, but I'm also not ready to just glibly dismiss it as a passing fancy, and I firmly believe that it still has a lot of as-yet-untapped potential. I think 3-D should hold more meaningful applications for gaming than for film, and I even believe that it could be more gracefully implemented than motion controls. Motion controls tend to be a disaster when lazily forced into traditional gameplay models, and even the more groundbreaking Wii Sports titles haven't really entertained me as well as good traditional games. But I can think of a couple existing games that could be subtly yet significantly improved by 3-D.

Contra 4
(This can probably be applied to the original Contra as well, but I'm sticking with Contra 4 because it's fresher in my memory.)

As in the first Contra, there are stages in Contra 4 that switch you to a behind-the-back perspective. Forward progression is automated, so the player is only really running or jumping side-to-side while fighting the enemies ahead. Most enemy attacks are best avoided by dodging left or right well in advance, but there will be moments when you're faced with a row of barrels rolling toward you that spans the entire length of the stage.

Ideally, you should just fire on and destroy the barrel in your immediate lane, but if you're too slow on the draw and don't have enough firepower, you may have to jump the wall of barrels as it passes into the foreground. This can be somewhat tricky because it is harder than it should be to spot how near or far the barrels are from you. You know that the player character is in the foreground and the barrels' origin point in the background, but with only the illusion of depth achievable on a flat image, it can be difficult to track the barrels as they move between layers. If you jump too early, you may just land on the barrel, whereas if you wait too long, you'll be dead before you leave the ground. Also keep in mind that there will more than likely be additional pressure coming simultaneously from enemy soldiers firing bullets at you. With 3-D to make the barrels and other active elements pop out better, there would be less needless guessing and, consequently, less frustration.

Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader
This is like the previous example, only to a much greater and more serious extent.

In the Rogue Squadron games, you are always flying forward from a behind-your-craft perspective, so that false depth is an ever-present issue. But it is never more a hindrance than in the Death Star stages in Rogue Leader. The first one has you making the classic trench run, just like in the first movie, only now they've added all sorts of pillars and crossbars to get in your way.

Death usually accompanies any impact, and, at the speed at which the game moves, you're not left with much time to gauge where these obstacles are and dodge accordingly. Unfortunately, even though Rogue Leader is built on polygons, everything still looks pretty flat on the TV screen, and thus it's harder than it should be to pick out those hazards as they approach. Essentially, they are like the barrels from Contra 4, but faster and more numerous.

NBA Jam
Actually, any basketball game could benefit from 3-D.

Back in the day, in most any basketball game out there, I could probably have gone through the season mode and averaged 200+ points, 40+ steals, and maybe even 4-5 blocks (that's only counting blocks by me, not my AI teammates) in five-minute quarters. The one category where I always performed below what was realistic, however, was rebounding.

In my defense, I tend to have a high shooting percentage, so there aren't many offensive rebounds for me to go after. Meanwhile, on defense, I try to always get the steal before my opponent can even attempt a shot. But the real problem is that, once that ball graphic is in the air, it's always very difficult to track its position in the pseudo-3-D space. In the older 2-D games, part of the problem was that the ball sprite itself often would not scale according to its distance from the foreground, but even in the polygonal games, it's again that issue of multiple planes of play effectively having to be pancaked onto a flat screen.

Of course, I have no desire to see 3-D completely take over, or even to see games that require 3-D. It should never detract or distract from the core experience of a traditional game. But 3-D can help sometimes, or at least it can be a nice bonus, should the player choose to take advantage of it. Like surround sound.

The New Whatever

2010-09-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

It was not long ago, on this very blog, that I was saying that I didn't think Dante was cool anymore. Now, as if in response to that, Capcom has unveiled a brand new Dante.

This emaciated, vampiric Dante will be starring in DmC, a series reboot from English developer Ninja Theory (Heavenly Sword, Enslaved).

At this stage, it's really too early to tell if this is an improvement or not. I kind of dig the new, more urban duds. His signature bold red is still there, but it's more subdued, and the overall ensemble is sleeker and less showy, more casual--a good fit for his lankier frame. Check out the trailer, and you'll see that Ninja Theory's take still has all the right moves (no actual gameplay footage, however) and retains at least some of that swagger that DMC2 Dante was so sorely lacking. The hair and face are startling, however, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Setting aside good or bad, it's just shocking that Capcom would essentially jettison (or allow Ninja Theory to jettison) the iconic look of one of its most recognizable characters. That they had to bring in Nero with DMC4 already suggested that maybe the material had run its original course, and the series was due for a hard reboot. I would have been okay with tossing all the existing mythology and supporting characters (Trish, Lady, Nero, Vergil), but here they have seemingly gotten rid of Dante himself, replacing him with a different guy who only happens to have the same name. What makes this weirder is that the old Dante (in his DMC3 incarnation) and Trish are going to be in next year's Marvel vs. Capcom 3, giving the impression that Capcom itself isn't clear on its direction for the franchise.

The trailer is somewhat ambiguous, so I suppose it's possible that this guy is just some psychotic who only thinks he's Dante. If the "real" Dante shows up later, in a similar capacity as he did in DMC4, then that could even be a cool twist. Of course, Hideki Kamiya will tell you that the only "real" Dante is his DMC1 self (although I'm not sure how much of a hand Kamiya really had in designing Dante in the first place).

Whatever. Mixed feelings on new Dante aside, the trailer looks, yes, cool, and I'm looking forward to seeing more. Honestly, I'm more worried whether Ninja Theory will be able to capture the deep combat of the series's better installments. I played a bit of Heavenly Sword, and it seemed pretty shallow to me. On the other hand, a more mainstream, casual Devil May Cry might not be a bad thing, so long as it's not like DMC2.

The King of Fighters (2010)

2010-09-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, someone actually went ahead and made a live-action The King of Fighters movie. Yes, I've seen it. Yes, it's awful.

The Good (or just okay):

Being such a fan of fighting games, I've occasionally daydreamed about how I personally would faithfully adapt them to film. The biggest hurdle has always been how to handle the tournament itself. How are the characters even supposed to survive taking on these brutal fights one after another? Without weeks of rest and medical attention between bouts stretching the tournament into a yearlong affair, what shape could the finalists even be in to present an exciting match? The King of Fighters actually provides a somewhat clever solution, having the fights take place on some sort of astral plane. That is where the characters don their wacky video game costumes and attain superhuman abilities for clashes that may take only an instant in the real world, which they then return to uninjured. (Of course, it's never explained why the tournament exists in the first place, but the movie is no more ridiculous than the games in that regard.)

(SPOILER) Rugal, played by Ray Park of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation fame, making his entrance by walking up to a security guard and, without warning or explanation, exploding the man with seemingly just his raw aura.

The Bad:

Rugal resorting to machine guns in the very next scene.

Everything else.

The Ugly:

Forty-year-old stuntman David Leitch as CIA tool Terry Bogard, who becomes, in the fight dimension, a buffoonish yet preposterously mighty Dan Hibiki-esque comic relief character.

Dear Nintendo Power

2010-09-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Future Publishing,

In Volume 222 (December 2007) of Nintendo Power, on page 17, the "News" section reported that The King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga for the Wii would contain KoF '95, '96, and '97. As a long-time fan of SNK's historically underappreciated fighting games, I was certainly pleased to hear this, especially since, as your well-researched story noted, '96 and '97 had never been released on North American consoles outside of the prohibitively expensive Neo Geo.

I was disappointed, however, at the glaring error of the accompanying screenshot. The featured shot is not of any of the titles comprising The King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga. Rather, it is a picture of the first Fatal Fury, one of the Neo Geo's earliest titles, which is four years older than the oldest title in the collection.

You can tell by the archaic graphic of Terry Bogard's "Power Wave" attack, the very same sprite that appears on page 24 in a screenshot for the Virtual Console release of, you guessed it, the original Fatal Fury. Even more telling is the fact that Terry's opponent on page 17 is Richard Meyer, one of SNK's lesser-lights, whose only other playable appearance was as a bonus character in the recent The King of Fighters 2006.

Although the titles in The Orochi Saga are themselves plenty old now, they represent the prime of the Neo Geo hardware's life, and this erroneous screenshot is misrepresentative in an unflattering way. While I am glad to see any mention of SNK in my favorite gaming publication, it was unfortunate that it had to be accompanied by such an obvious mistake. Hopefully, upcoming releases on the Wii will give SNK some deserved exposure that will help to prevent such oversights in the future.

Sincerely yours,

Henry

Death of the Cool

2010-08-31T18:48:00.000-07:00

Gameplay should be what counts in a fighting game, yes, but one of the reasons I have not been able to deem Street Fighter IV the definitive Street Fighter actually has nothing to do with how it plays. It's the art. More specifically, it's the character design, which is and always has been the other crucial component of a fighting game--that element that can earn a title tons of devoted fans who will never compete at a tournament level, but who will cosplay as their favorites and build shrines to them.

Obviously, SFIV contains mostly characters that were designed more than a decade ago, but these are still new takes, some of which I find to be quite disappointing. Ryu is a bit thick, Sagat looks like a dummy, and none of the females are attractive. To be fair, many of the other characters are spot-on, but the goofy Chun-Li and haggard Rose are probably the worst they've ever looked.

None of that really compares, however, with SFIV's wholly original additions to the franchise. Hakan would be the most acceptable if he weren't inexplicably orange, but Abel, El Fuerte, Rufus, and Seth are all hopelessly lame. That leaves the girls, Crimson Viper and Juri. These are two characters who could look good someday, but my initial impressions of both were that they were uninspiring attempts by Capcom to create King of Fighters-style "cool" characters, and they simply lacked that SNK magic--that certain je ne sais quoi--that identified a true original.

But, y'know, since thinking that, I've gone back and replayed a lot of SNK games, and I've come to the conclusion that those originals were not that cool either. Or, at least, if they were cool once upon a time, then that time is long past.

Sure, King of Fighters has always had its dud characters, but I seriously used to think that its better characters were the coolest in any video game. The unyieldingly derisive Iori Yagami was a particular favorite of mine.

Looking at him now, I have no idea what I ever liked about him, and I just feel embarrassed. Even among the official art, there is almost no piece that manages to make his hair work. And why are his knees tied together? How is anyone supposed to run like that, let alone jump and kick? He doesn't seem built for street fighting, though he's hardly alone in that.

What is wrong with Iori is pretty much what is wrong with all of the characters in King of Fighters; these designs were made for the runway, not the ring, and their obsolescence was built-in. Unfortunately, SNK Playmore hasn't really kept ahead of changing fashions, and the latest designs are among the series's worst. Or maybe I'm the one that has no fashion sense. Actually, there's no "maybe" about it. But I think I'm just tired of the whole blasted fashion model street fighter aesthetic. Now I just want fighters to look like fighters, as they did back in Street Fighter II.

To be fair, it's not just SNK that has failed to age with grace. As another example, take Dante from Devil May Cry. Here's another guy I used to think was badass. But lately I've been playing a lot more Western-developed shooters, and when I put him next to a guy like Marcus Fenix, I realize that Dante is truly not that far removed from the typical effeminate JRPG hero. He's stupidly good-looking, wears flashy clothes, and spouts some embarrassing dialogue. I wouldn't call Marcus Fenix "cool," but in the context of a gaming landscape filled with space marine-type characters, Dante seems less than manly, and surely that isn't cool.

So what is cool now? I have no freaking clue, and I'm not sure I care anymore.

My Top 5 Video Game FMVs

2010-08-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Yes, we've arrived at that point in this blog's life. No more joking, I now make "Top 5" lists in earnest. It's either that or I start playing weekly games of Madden 11 . . . demo (Colts vs. Jets all day!) and posting the ~~play-by-play~~ box scores.

Anyway, I was inspired after recently viewing the cinematic trailer for DC Universe Online. DC Universe Online, being an MMORPG, held no interest for me as a player, but I am now glad that it exists, if only because it has resulted in the commissioning of Blur for this amazing mini-movie that will surely be the best thing about the entire game.

Blur may not be a household name, but it is one of the hottest computer animation and design studios around, its skills allegedly commanding per-minute charges in the $1 million range. Blur does a lot more than just video game work, but its CG talent is undeniably a perfect fit for gaming, and it has done much to class up a number of otherwise mediocre products. Before DC Universe Online, the studio caught my attention with a pair of similarly awesome cinematic trailers for the similarly yawn-inducing Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Well, Blur may be the king now--frankly, it doesn't have a lot of competition, as many developers have opted this generation to rely less on pre-rendered assets--but I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the past and pick out five of my favorite pre-rendered video game cinematics.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - Opening

The Resident Evil 2 opening movies were, in their own time, the most technically impressive CG FMVs on console, and Code: Veronica's roller-coaster intro is always a crowd-pleaser, but my personal favorite Resident Evil cinematic is the opening for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

RE2 allowed us to play in the aftermath of Raccoon City's fall to the zombie apocalypse, describing in journals how it all went down, but here we finally got to see the citizens making their hopeless last stand. No longer contained within some mansion in the woods, the zombies were taking over the city streets, and the nightmarish spectacle was consequently more real than ever before.

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix - "Deep Dive"

The famous "Deep Dive" video was a secret movie contained in the Japan-only "director's cut" of Kingdom Hearts. As a teaser for Kingdom Hearts II, it was as oblique and enigmatic as you would have expected from a Tetsuya Nomura production--even four games later, fanboys are still trying to decipher all its hidden messages. But it also established another Nomura signature.

Considerably darker and more violent than anything else in the game, it was also plain cool. Its significance to the story would remain unclear even hours into Kingdom Hearts II, but this non-interactive movie surprisingly provided more meaningful clues as to how future games would look and play, with its near-weightless style and balletic combat. Here also were planted the seeds of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and you can even follow the lineage onward to the upcoming Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

Kingdom Hearts II - Opening

Many Kingdom Hearts fans, drawn to the series for its high production values and exciting combat, understandably skipped Chain of Memories for the GBA. That posed a bit of a problem for players hoping to jump directly to Kingdom Hearts II, however, because although not a lot happened in Chain of Memories, the story definitely did not end in the same place it began. To get these players up to speed, the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II recapped the story thus far in virtuosic music video form.

Actually, as a recap, it was almost useless to anybody who hadn't played the previous games. But it was gorgeous, full of inventive imagery and editing (especially in the Chain of Memories section), and it rewarded players of Chain of Memories, bringing their imaginations to life by highlighting resonant moments that the GBA simply could never do justice. My favorite part has got to be the shot of Sora and company racing up a staircase while Riku progresses upside down along the underside--a sublimely literal representation of their parallel journeys through the castle.

Onimusha 3: Demon Siege - Opening

This one requires little introduction, as it is regularly at or near the top of almost everybody's list. The Onimusha series was originally conceived of as a cinematic game, and all of the core Onimusha titles have had ambitious opening movies, but Onimusha 3's by Robot remains the best.

I think all of the videos on this list are ones that I come back to because they are so replayable and stand well even out of context. Onimusha 3's intro, better than everything else in all of the Onimusha games combined, is the epitome of that--essentially a CG short film with its own complete and perfectly self-contained narrative arc. Indeed, you would be best off just watching this and then skipping the rest of the game. Not only is it all downhill from here, but nothing that follows even has anything at all to do with what is seen in this video.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon - Opening

Bringing together almost every fighter ever to have appeared in MK up to that point, it was the slugfest to end all slugfests. In my opinion, this is even better than the DC Universe Online video, for the sheer number of distinct characters that it is able to juggle. If you were ever into the series, this was a glorious celebration and culmination of its entire history. Even if you couldn't name even half the characters, it was just an awesome battle royal, rendered in astonishingly accomplished CG that was probably more than MK and Midway deserved. Also, as will likely be the case with DC Universe Online, watching the opening movie is vastly more exciting than actually playing the game.

Hot-N-Ready

2010-08-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but there was a stack of pizza boxes, presumably empty, in the corner of the restroom at work. It made the restroom smell like pizza . . . topped with the usual urine and feces. I don't think I liked it.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game

2010-08-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know the comics or movie, but I did download the Scott Pilgrim video game on PSN. I had heard it described as being heavily inspired by River City Ransom, and a modernized RCR was something I'd long wanted.

In many ways, Technos's River City Ransom for the NES remains the most evolved beat 'em up to this day. The game basically played like Double Dragon (also developed by Technos), but it also included many RPG elements. You could earn money by defeating foes, then go to shops to spend that coin on new moves, items, and stat boosts. The hip city setting was also slightly more realistic than in the average brawler, populated as it was by occasional friendly NPCs, who would offer hints to get you through the story. Instead of the typical series of straight-line stages, River City Ransom had a unified world that players could travel backwards and forwards through as needed.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is more linear than River City Ransom, but it has most of the rest of that stuff covered. Its debt to RCR is most immediately evident in the ability to pick up downed enemies or allies and use them as melee weapons. The controls are at least more sensible than Technos's two-button classic, but the feel is frustratingly nowhere near as sharp as the best Capcom arcade brawlers of the 90s, and the hit detection is punishingly specific. The game is also extremely buggy, and the very real glitches kind of take the humor out of the "Subspace" zones filled with flying piggy banks and fake graphical corruptions. A word of advice: if the music drops out suddenly, that's probably a sign that everything is about to go to hell, so you might want to just quit while you're ahead. Also, try very hard not to fall in any pits or throw enemies into them.

Like all beat 'em ups, the game is ideally played with friends, and Scott Pilgrim even allows for two players more than River City Ransom. Not only does it help to have other guys fighting on your side, but the game allows players a chance to revive downed comrades, thus saving them from having to lose precious lives. Even with two other players, however, I find that the aggressive enemies make it pretty hard to successfully resuscitate an ally before their countdown to death expires. In fact, the game probably throws larger groups of enemies at you than any actual vintage beat 'em up. Sometimes they'll even pile on top of you, and bursting them off you is one of the game's more memorable gags.

Even on the easiest difficulty, the game can be quite challenging. It does save your progress between stages, and you can revisit past levels to grind for money and experience, although it is annoying that the shops won't tell you what items do until after you've bought them.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World's actual fighting is merely passable, but the music and art are impressive, and it is a new 2-D beat 'em up in 2010, which is nice to see. With more players, more characters, and a real save system, it may indeed be a better version of River City Ransom.

The Expendables

2010-08-21T11:37:00.000-07:00

I was watching Commando again on TV a few years ago with my parents. The final act of that movie has Arnold Schwarzenegger single-handedly taking down a private army in South/Central America, the death toll surely well into triple digits. The carnage wrought by this one-man army led my father to joke that, if we just dispatched a team of Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, the Middle East problem would be wrapped up in a day. My mother then added, "And Demi Moore's ex-husband!" My parents' views on the Middle East aside, it at least had the makings of a good movie.

The Expendables is not quite that movie, but its dream team assemblage of Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, and Dolph Lundgren is the closest we've ever come. Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sadly appear only briefly and do not get in on the action, but hopefully we'll see more of them in a sequel. For now, The Expendables may not be the greatest action movie of all time, but it has some damn amazing action moments rekindling that childish glee I used to feel when watching the more mindless Stallone and Schwarzenegger flicks of the 80s and 90s. If you don't have a soft spot for that generation of film violence, however, then be warned that The Expendables is not slick, not topical, not a satire or a deconstruction. Although it knowingly recycles the plot, structure, and every cliche of action movies past, it does so in earnest, delivering a decidedly pre-Bourne Identity experience that feels like it could have come ten or even twenty years ago.

The opening scenes develop at a glacial pace while setting up the characters' motivations and mission. The movie is less than thrilling when the characters aren't killing, and during the stretches between, Stallone's brand of macho humor rarely works. The movie is only 103 minutes, but it felt to me like 20 of those were Mickey Rourke describing some tattoo he wanted to ink on Jason Statham's dome. There are also some attempts at sentimentalism, but Stallone never finds the heart that he got in Rocky Balboa and Rambo, perhaps because the Expendables do not have that sort of history with the audience, even if the actors portraying them do. In fact, the characters at times refer to previous missions, and I wished they would have simply described their old movies as a sort of in-joke, but that probably would have been too cute.

Stallone does do an admirable job of managing the unprecedented roster of action stars, although again, to be fair, he didn't have to direct any egos equal to his own. Dolph Lundgren, Stallone's Rocky IV co-star and only real contemporary among the cast, features prominently and seems perfectly cast as an unhinged veteran merc. Supposedly, Lundgren only made it in after Jean-Claude Van Damme passed on the role, although, the way Van Damme tells it, the part hadn't even been developed into a character yet at the time it was offered to him. Van Damme, whose recent characters have all been defined by regret that has seemed more than a performance, would probably have taken this movie truly into Unforgiven territory. Lundgren seems a better fit for this old, cracked soldier--haunted yet amused by his own joke of an existence.

As for the other stars, if you're a Jet Li fan, then this is certainly not the best display of his abilities, but it is cool to see him in a supporting role where, no longer having to carry the dramatic burden with his limited acting range, he is in his most no-nonsense, surgically lethal form. Jason Statham, the young buck of the crew, as the only Expendable under 40, is meanwhile as abrasive as ever while speaking, but Stallone has a good handle on the Englishman's performance style, building the character around that in-your-face attitude. As the team's knife fighter, Statham is the most spectacular killer of them all. And while I'm sure nobody is going to the theater for role-players Terry Crews and Randy Couture, they too get their action moments.

But the whole point of this movie is to show these guys operating together, not separately, and the final act is where The Expendables really lives up to its promise, piling on more action and action stars than the screen seems able to contain. There is an instantly classic shot of these icons all charging out together, guns blazing, but my favorite scene had to be Jet Li and Jason Statham double-teaming an enemy lieutenant. In the past, pitting a foe against a single John Rambo or John Matrix was already a bloodbath, but here the guy doesn't even have time to feel the first fist against his face before he's spun into a kick from the other side.

In one key departure from the 80s and 90s, Stallone, now mindful of his age, or at least his mortality, tries to get across that the Expendables are human, that the odds are against them, that they only succeed because they work together. Schwarzenegger's character in The Expendables turns down the mission because he says only an idiot would take it on, even though it is basically identical to the scenario that he yawned his way through in Commando. There's no yawning from the Expendables, who would all clearly rather be enjoying their money. These guys are ruthlessly efficient once the fighting begins, but they do not revel in their own destructiveness with gratuitous one-liners, and in the hairier moments, there is actually a tension that was never present in the likes of Commando or Rambo III.

The most disappointing thing about The Expendables is, of course, that we still don't get to see Schwarzenegger in action alongside Stallone. That remains the dream. Lately, Stallone has been waffling over whether The Expendables will be his last acting role, but hopefully he can make this happen in a sequel. For that, I'll also want Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes, maybe even Hulk Hogan in there, and then we'll really have the ultimate action movie. In the meantime, I'll next be looking forward to Seagal's return in Machete.

Forward

2010-08-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Darjeeling Limited

2010-08-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

Somebody told me this was a good movie. Now that I've seen it for myself, I say that these are the things that make you feel like the loneliest person in the world.

It makes me wonder if this somebody really watched the same self-indulgent malarkey that I did. I mean, I want to know if they really watched it. I would ask them to imagine themselves as someone with no friends whatsoever, who comes home, after another unfulfilled workday, to an empty home, to spend the evening watching The Darjeeling Limited alone, for pleasure, not as some academic exercise with notebook and pen in hand for jotting down all the observations to be discussed later with hipster pals that don't exist. Does the movie have even a shred of charm or humor in that hypothetical scenario? Should it not? I think, if you didn't already know that your life was a misery, you would realize it during the course of the viewing.

That's not the way it is, but it's the way this movie made me feel while watching it.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration

2010-08-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

Action movie fans were crushed to hear that Jean-Claude Van Damme would not be among the cast of dream project The Expendables, which will feature appearances by nearly every other action star of the last three decades. Before the limited theatrical release of 2008's JCVD, Van Damme had not appeared in theaters since 1999's universally panned Universal Soldier: The Return. Following up on the positive press he won for JCVD, even a supporting role in such a sure blockbuster as The Expendables would have been the perfect way for him to get his career back on track. But "The Muscles from Brussels" seemingly thought the project was beneath him, which, given the direct-to-video trash he's been putting out for over a decade, struck most fans as ridiculous--all the more so when it was confirmed that he would be appearing instead in another Universal Soldier sequel. According to some reports, he was doing "Universal Soldier 3" only under legal duress, but if that was minor consolation as regards his character, it also seemed to dash any chances of the film, or Van Damme's comeback, turning out well.

Well, I'm still looking forward to The Expendables, but in the meantime, I have seen Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which was not able to carry Van Damme back into theaters. I can tell you it was not what I expected, and I am probably one of the very few people who has seen every other Universal Soldier movie--both Van Damme theatrical releases and the two direct-to-video non-canon productions (not to mention Soldier, starring Kurt Russell).

The original 1992 Universal Soldier was Van Damme's Vietnam picture--his First Blood, or even his Platoon--maybe crossed in earnest with RoboCop. Coming after Lionheart and Double Impact, it was a surprisingly bleak story, featuring a Van Damme without his usual virile charm, as confused lost soul Luc Deveraux, brought back from the dead to serve as a perfect killing machine. Ultimately still pretty schlocky and generic, it was no masterpiece, yet somehow it spawned two non-theatrical 1998 sequels that continued the story directly but with none of the original cast. Not only that, but Van Damme himself returned in 1999 for the sequel that nobody asked for. Universal Soldier: The Return, altogether one of the most gratuitous (but enjoyably so) movies I've ever seen, wisely ignored the direct-to-video sequels, but it also mostly ignored the original film, abandoning both continuity and sense in the process.

After an even longer hiatus, this year's Universal Soldier: Regeneration brings Van Damme back for a third go as Luc Deveraux and, better still, reunites him with original film nemesis Dolph Lundgren, who was able to make time for both Regeneration and The Expendables. Given what I'd heard about how this third movie came to be, I expected some cheap and exploitative production desperate to cash in on the diminishing stock of the title and stars. That was exactly what The Return was, so I could only hope that Regeneration would be as much fun.

"Fun" is not a word I would use to describe Universal Soldier: Regeneration, but neither is it depressing in the manner of In Hell (2003) or Until Death (2007)--sad swipes at action movie tropes, with sub-theatrical production values and budgets sopped up by an unmotivated lead actor. Regeneration is a real movie, deliberately cold, and the most legitimately quality production Van Damme has ever starred in. Not at all what I expected.

Seriously, after watching Regeneration, I can believe that Van Damme passed on The Expendables for artistic reasons. Whereas The Expendables looks to be a throwback--a last hurrah for Stallone the action hero, who wants to go out with the same sort of ultraviolent live-action cartoon that made his legend--Universal Soldier: Regeneration, despite being a sequel to one such film, is not content to evoke the experiences of two decades ago. This is a startlingly competent, sometimes even avant-garde work that fuses some bloody-good action with a less drunken tone and more modern cinematic technique. The desaturated palette and impressively long takes paint an unnervingly vital picture, and the sound is even more minimalist, with a musical score often absent, making for some starkly sober action sequences that are light on pyrotechnics and high on brutality, as when an expressionless Van Damme goes to work with just a knife against an army of terrorists. Set in the abandoned Chernobyl plant and opening with a gut-wrenching kidnapping and chase sequence, the storyline is heavier in tone and less campy sci-fi, but the movie remains fast-paced and consistently exciting.

Van Damme and Lundgren are the only "stars" in the film, and neither receives as much screen time as one might expect, but they appear when needed, and the sparing use of their skills makes them seem that much more special when they are unleashed. 1999's The Return having been removed from continuity, Van Damme's Deveraux is right back to his 1992 self--stranded and cold on the surface, but with simmering yearnings beneath. The older Van Damme furthermore sells the character's weariness and resists any temptation to overact beyond that. Lundgren is surprisingly less intelligible than Van Damme, yet his performance seems appropriate, as a man who has perhaps seen the other side and come back not quite whole. Their characters' anticipated rematch lives up to any fan fiction fantasies, and it also exceeds most any slugfest you'll find in theaters.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration is not a great movie, but it is unlike any action flick I've seen. Although it was shocking at first, I can now say that it's refreshing. It's something new and different, not generic, and leaves a stronger impression as a result. I don't know if it takes the genre forward, but it at least makes it feel alive again, where other films are so content to leave it stagnant with formulaic rehashes and unimaginative direction. Suddenly an affirmation, rather than a contradiction, of JCVD's newfound artistic integrity, it makes me just a little ashamed that all I wanted was another Timecop. I'm not sure if The Expendables is going to do it for me after this.

Battle of the Sexes

2010-07-30T00:13:00.000-07:00

"If Muggsy Bogues could play in the NBA, then why shouldn't women be allowed?" asked the guy across from me. "Are you telling me that Muggsy Bogues is better at basketball than Lisa Leslie?"

What had begun as an already depressing discussion concerning the legitimacy of women's MMA had somehow come to this. Some coworkers around me had begun to debate whether there should be more cross-gender competition in professional sports, since evidently nobody cared about the women's leagues. While certainly no one wanted to see Brock Lesnar beat up Gina Carano in the ring, I personally felt that, if Serena Williams wanted to enter the men's tournament at the US Open and was able to qualify, then she should be allowed in. My feelings were somewhat different, however, when it came to team sports.

The guy did have a point about Muggsy Bogues and Lisa Leslie. The 5' 3" Bogues would be considered short in civilian society, yet he was able to compete at the highest level in a sport of giants. He worked well with the diminutive frame he'd been given, but even though he was the same gender as the 7' 1" Vlade Divac, surely they were nowhere close to being in the same division physically. Lisa Leslie, at 6' 5", should theoretically have been more a peer than Bogues for the average NBA player.

Yet when the dude posed the question, the first thing that came regrettably to my mind was that awful John Travolta movie, The General's Daughter (1999). I decided not to bring it up, however, for fear that I might have had to explain it, in case nobody else had seen it.

The Princess and the Frog

2010-07-28T20:42:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to seeing Disney's The Princess and the Frog, which I missed in theaters last year. I liked it better than either Up or Ponyo, both of which I did catch in theaters. I wouldn't rank it among the great Disney animated features, and it surely was not the prestige picture that Disney needed in order to mark a momentous return to traditional animation after a five-year slumber. But I think it fits well enough within the whole Disney animated canon, and future generations of children, coming to this as just another in the vault of classics, should be able to enjoy it as exactly that. It's a good story, thoroughly entertaining, possessing both beauty and personality in its visuals, and it imparts a fine moral. . . . Or does it?

Bear with me, dear blog readers, for though I previously spared you having to take in my revulsion at Jake Sully sleep-banging some giant blue thing in Avatar, and I tried, for my own sanity, to think as little as possible about the prepubescent boy-fish romance in Ponyo, it was regrettably only a matter of time before another movie finally drove me to composing this post.

The Princess and the Frog tells the story (SPOILERS) of the romantic love between a young woman and a prince who has been cruelly voodooed into a frog. What I find icky about it is that they only fall in love after they have both become frogs. Perhaps you could argue that they are simply that confident that they will undo the curse, and so they are all along looking forward to their life together as humans. But the heroine, Tiana, only meets the prince after he has been transformed into a frog. She shouldn't even know what he looks like as a human. So her only image of her lover is of him as a frog. And that's supposed to be how she falls for him? What, does she have a thing for amphibians?

Perhaps you think I am taking things too literally. I know, the lesson is supposed to be simply that true love transcends all barriers, right? But I think there is a limit to the scope of the lesson--love shouldn't transcend all barriers--and this story crosses the line into perversion. Consider, what if this were not fiction, but the true story of a human woman falling in love with and wanting to marry a frog? Would that be a case of true lovers seeing beyond the surface into the soul? Or would that just be bestiality? I pray the answer is obvious, and I wonder, isn't that the story that The Princess and the Frog is effectively promoting, even if not intentionally?

I was similarly disgusted by Avatar and Ponyo. Ironically, the one story that truly gets it right is a much older Disney animated classic, The Sword in the Stone (1963). Recall that, at one point, Merlin transforms himself and Arthur (AKA Wart) into squirrels. The transformed Wart quickly attracts the unwanted advances of a female squirrel. He tries to turn her away, but she seems beyond reason in her infatuation. Then, when Wart reverts to human form, much to his own relief, he tries to make friends with the female squirrel, but she won't have it. She runs away, heartbroken but realizing at last that her feelings were a lie. She is not sad that she cannot be with the human Wart. She is sad that Wart is human, that the squirrel she fell in love with never really existed. There is no such thing as love between a squirrel and a human. That's what The Sword in the Stone says. That's real.

Billionaire Fighting

2010-07-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

Street Fighter X Tekken? It's a bit like pitting the Yankees against the Lakers. What form would the contest even take? What could the rules possibly be to keep it from becoming a complete farce? Ed Boon has had to explain many times that, however cool fans might think the idea sounds, a Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat crossover game wouldn't make any sense from a design standpoint. The games play by different rules, and any compromise would end up satisfying no one. And that's coming from Ed Boon, mastermind of a series that has been historically much more open to mechanical overhauls than either Street Fighter or Tekken.

Capcom vs. SNK worked well enough because SNK's fighting games were mostly all Street Fighter derivatives to begin with. And still some hardcore SNK fans were not satisfied with the results. Meanwhile, Tekken is a game without special moves, super meters, any real air game, or even much of a range game. Does that sound like something that would match up very well against Street Fighter?

Capcom will do its best, of course, to adapt the Tekken characters into a Street Fighter-style engine (compromise, in other words), essentially creating a set of new characters that will only look like Tekken characters, while playing more like Street Fighter characters. The early footage suggests that the Tekken characters' bigger signature attacks will become their special moves, they'll have super combos, and all characters will have rudimentary chain combo abilities as maybe the one nod to Tekken's style of combat.

This will not be the game to unite the Street Fighter and Tekken communities, bringing together the top Street Fighter players to battle it out against the top Tekken players for the title of "undisputed grand master." At most, those Tekken players who happen also to play Street Fighter will just play this as they would any other Street Fighter title. But mostly I think it will just be Street Fighter players playing this.

That's still reason enough for me to get excited. At the very least, this should be another solid 2-D fighting game from Capcom--one where half the cast will effectively play as brand new characters. And while I may not know how to play Tekken, I do think the series has some pretty cool character designs. Super Street Fighter IV may have, in my opinion, the best roster ever in a Capcom fighting game, but I would still gladly trade some of those characters (mostly the SFIV new bloods) for Tekken's best. And it will have tag team gameplay!

And then there's also Tekken X Street Fighter coming from Namco. Instead of the two series coming together for one title, we're still getting two distinct games from two different developers, just as we always have. By far the shakier concept, this is even less likely to achieve crossover appeal. I suspect the Street Fighter characters would stand to lose a lot more from the transition to the Tekken engine than the Tekken characters would the other way around. Will Ryu be allowed to keep his fireball? Projectiles are not exactly common in Tekken. But what is Ryu without his Hadouken?

Toy Story 3

2010-07-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I was twelve when Toy Story came out in 1995. I originally didn't care for it. I thought the CGI visuals looked very ugly compared to the traditionally animated Disney films that I had grown up on. Moreover, I resented that everybody else seemed so insistent that it was a revolution, and I was terrified that its arrival signaled the end of hand-drawn animation. My anti-computer animation prejudice endured for a few more years, as I passed on A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Monsters, Inc. (2001). It was in 2001, however, that I happened somehow to catch Toy Story 2 on the Disney Channel, and I had to admit that I had been wrong.

It was the rare sequel that surpassed the original, although that didn't mean much to me. I was simply entranced by the sharp humor, inventive set pieces, and astonishing emotional potency. It was perhaps the most nearly perfect film I had ever seen. It also encouraged a better appreciation of the first film, although I still didn't quite love the original Toy Story--a cruder work in every way, more notable for its technological advancements than its script. But Toy Story 2 remains the only movie that, on any given day, when I am asked what some of my favorites are, will always spring to mind. I'm not sure yet whether Toy Story 3 quite reaches that pinnacle, but it is no disappointment, which is saying a lot, considering what it had to live up to.

Toy Story 3 is not so nearly perfect a film as Toy Story 2. To a large extent, it feels like a retread of Toy Story 2, only slightly more cynical. In the last movie, Andy's toys were already made to consider that, one day, Andy would outgrow toys altogether. But the mere painful suggestion of the idea was apparently not enough; in Toy Story 3, that scenario has finally come to pass, as the now seventeen-year-old Andy is preparing to go to college. And however much his toys tried to brace themselves for this inevitability, nothing could have prepared them (or the audience) for such a heartrending farewell.

I must say, I never gave a damn about the Andy character in the first two movies. I wonder if anybody really cares about the human characters in these stories where the toys are the stars. So it was very easy for me to hate Andy for his abandonment of the toys. But then it seemed to me that maybe, by proxy, I was hating myself for outgrowing my own toys, and I wondered if maybe Toy Story was losing its point with this movie that was, more than ever, about the fictional lives of toys themselves and no longer so much about how kids play with them. But, of course, it's about more than that. The toys aren't really just toys, after all, and it's okay for the viewers to identify with them instead of with the human bit players, because they are certainly more relatable than, say, the characters of Inception. From people who have now spent large portions of their lives working on this series, this is a story about life, about change, the things we lose, the things we find, and the things we hold forever dear on this journey.

And it's also kind of brave, which is not a word one expects to apply to a second sequel. Although it easily could have been just cheaply sentimental, Toy Story 3 is as robust an adventure as any of Pixar's works. It pulls few punches, plunging the toys into great peril and great sadness (too much for some of the very young audience members at my screening). It features a truly irredeemable villain, whose hilarious origin story, as presented in flashback, is practically a travesty of Toy Story 2's most affecting scene. And in the end, it brings it all back around and goes straight for the heart. As the story drew to a close, I must admit that I was fighting back tears, yet as I sat there in the theater, I wasn't even sure what I was so torn up about.

I know that a lot of older viewers said of the first two films, ostensibly pictures aimed at younger audiences, that they were experiences that reminded them of how it was to be a kid. For those of us who were still kids (or at least teens) when those movies came out, I don't think the effect was quite the same. But I think, with Toy Story 3, we get to experience something very unique to our generation. While many movie years have passed for Andy and the toys since Toy Story 2, eleven real years have also passed for us viewers. It went by quickly--too quickly, as it always does--but it is a long time, and seeing Toy Story back again after such a time, like meeting up with a friend you haven't seen in years, really puts things in perspective. It's an effect that is not easily achievable in film--not something you could get, for example, by producing the back two episodes of a trilogy concurrently. In the case of Toy Story 3, even days after viewing it, I found myself at work, suddenly emotional while still deep in thought (or feeling) over the movie. I would recall the opening scenes showing Andy growing up with his toys, and I would reflect on how much had (and hadn't) changed in my own life during the same span of most vital years between films. I knew then that this was something rare and powerful.

Distant Worlds

2010-07-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

I was able to attend the "Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY" concert in San Diego last night. I thought the set list could have been more diverse (too much VIII and XI, not enough IX, nothing from I-III, V, or XII), the selections from XIII and XIV were less than inspiring, and the very poorly edited video presentations dragged down the legitimacy of the event, but ultimately it was still cool to hear Nobuo Uematsu's music played by a live orchestra (with Nobuo in attendance!).

In honor of the event (but mainly just for the hell of it), I thought I'd offer my personal rankings of the first ten (because that's as far as I've gotten) numbered Final Fantasy games.

Ranked by story:

1. IX
2. VII
3. VI
4. IV
5. X
6. V
7. VIII
8. I
- II
- III

Ranked by systems:

1. VIII
2. V
3. VII
4. IV
5. X
6. IX
7. VI
8. III
9. I
10. II

(I still haven't finished FFIII for the DS, but I'm pretty sure its placement won't change.)

Inception

2010-07-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

Set in the dreams of professional information thieves who are able to share and shape their dream worlds to ensnare their unwitting victims, Inception is visually and thematically evocative of The Matrix and Dark City. For me, it falls short of those films because it doesn't go far enough in exploring its dreamscapes, which should be the most interesting part of any story about creating worlds. The image of a city folding in on itself, as seen in the trailer and TV spots, is awesome, but the movie almost immediately pulls back and warns its characters against that sort of godly mischief. Ideally, the thieves' targets are not supposed to realize that they are in a dream, so the dream architects strive to create convincingly realistic worlds, which are certainly less fantastic (or horrific) than the things I usually dream.

At its core, Inception is really a heist film, however, and a pretty remarkable one. As with any good heist film, it is fun to watch the protagonists' intricate scheme come together (or unravel) through the stages of infiltration, extraction, and getaway. But the challenge that Christopher Nolan takes up with Inception goes beyond the average caper, as the scheme operates according to a set of science fiction rules that the movie entirely makes up. It necessarily walks a fine line, but the great achievement of Inception is in how far it is able to get the viewer to follow along with this fake science that doesn't always feel like the pure fiction that it is. The actual heist does not even begin until about an hour in, but by that point, I understood perfectly what a "kick" is, how time expands within a dream (and again in a dream within a dream), and how another person's subconscious is no place for tourists. Once the action got started, I scarcely raised an eyebrow through brilliantly layered sequences that probably shouldn't have made sense.

Of course, the movie does commit a few cheats, and the experience is not devoid of eye-rolling. Remember how, in The Matrix (or, heck, A Nightmare on Elm Street), dying in the dream meant dying in the real world as well, because the body could not survive without the mind? Well, Inception's characters early on rather proudly try to correct Wes Craven, explaining that death in their dreams is not doom but actually one sure way back to reality. Er, until the movie decides to change that rule with little explanation. But at least the new rule is established early in the heist.

Finally, Inception is like a non-interactive video game. That first hour is essentially a lengthy tutorial, setting the stage, introducing the characters, and establishing the fundamental mechanics. As with many video game tutorials, I grew impatient with it, retaining less and less as the words grew more numerous. I wanted to get into it already, and finally the meat of the experience arrived as three distinct maze-like (and typically senseless) levels filled with deadly hostiles, but most notably a recurring Nemesis-style stalker (or perhaps a Pyramid Head) with seemingly a vindictive grudge against the protagonists. And it all culminates in an apocalyptic final confrontation. You're even told that the fate of the world somehow depends on the heroes' success.

Dang, now I kind of want to play Inception. Well, maybe not that third stage. That snowy fortress was so 1998.

Welcome to the PS3

2010-07-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

Felt like playing LittleBigPlanet again for the first time in over a year. On load, was informed that I needed to download and install ten (10!) updates. PS3 useless while installing, so decided on a whim to ease the wait by playing some of Konami's arcade classic, Sunset Riders.

Before I knew it, I had beaten Sunset Riders. Turned back to my PS3 to find that it still had not finished updating. This is garbage.

Yeah, I know--"welcome to four years ago," right? Still, this is garbage.

One More Ride

2010-07-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

Super Street Fighter IV was not the only game to be fought at Evo 2010. I thought I'd highlight some play from two titles that will most likely be replaced at next year's Evo by the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

First up is the grand finals between Justin Wong and Sanford Kelly in Marvel vs. Capcom 2:

There's not a lot to say about the match itself. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a ten-year-old game at this point. It's been a fixture at Evo since before Evo was Evo, and this is how it has looked for the last several years--Storm, Sentinel, sometimes Magneto on acid on the front lines, while Cyclops and Captain Commando jump in constantly with anti-air assists off the bench in near mirror matches.

It was probably the most popular fighting game to come out between Street Fighter II and Street Fighter IV. For many years the marquee event at Evo, it was the game that Justin Wong made his name on, and a day after falling short in Super Street Fighter IV, he went on to win his 7th MvC2 world championship in 10 years. The game's depths have been plumbed further than perhaps any other title, and most players would agree that it's about time to retire it. If you've never witnessed high-level MvC2 play before, however, it's worth marveling at how these players are able to maintain complete control over their characters moving at such blistering speeds. The number of button presses they must be inputting per second, without it ever devolving into button-mashing, is mind-boggling.

It wasn't always this way. Before Justin showed off the truly dominating potential of Magneto's flying rushdown, the most popular characters in competition were methodical lockdown fighters such as Cable, Doctor Doom, and Spiral. Cable still shows up on some teams, but Doom and Spiral are almost never seen nowadays. One player at this tournament, however, had the guts to bring back, not only Doctor Doom, but Strider as well.

Strider (with Doom assist) was once considered by some to be theoretically the best character in the game. In practice, most players found that the guaranteed damage offered by his orbs summon super did not offset the high risk posed by his low health and the ridiculous level of execution required to play as him. He pretty much died off in competitive play even before Doom and Spiral did. It didn't help his case that Storm, a ubiquitous character in the post-Spiral era, also happened to be the perfect counter to Strider, foiling his trapping game with her ability to fly off the screen and out of his range. One guy never afraid to rep Strider/Doom, however, is Daniel "Clockw0rk" Maniago, an OG player who has been utilizing that combination almost since the game has been out. Seeing Clockw0rk crawling out of the woodwork with this team to make it all the way to 3rd place at Evo 2010, beating modern Storm and Magneto masters along the way, is perhaps a bit like the idea of Pete Sampras coming out of retirement at Wimbledon to mess some fools up with his now nearly extinct serve-and-volley style of play. Alas, Clockw0rk's 3rd place was still a distant 3rd.

MvC2 was, appropriately enough, followed by the Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars tournament, probably the first and last time that most of us will be seeing high-level play in this game. Before Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was announced, some people had pegged Tatsunoko vs. Capcom as the game to replace MvC2, but the Wii fighter didn't quite take off. More comparable to the turnout for a Guilty Gear or BlazBlue, the pool of competitors at Evo was composed mostly of TvC specialists.

Although I originally perceived TvC as a regression back to Capcom's earlier Marvel crossover titles, the Evo play reminds me of Guilty Gear in other ways as well. Even without MvC2's constant assists, it's a very fast-paced game with a heavy emphasis on meter management, and unlike MvC2, it still exhibits great variety at the highest level, with its roster of quirky characters committed to diversely intricate and extreme fighting styles, ranging from Yatterman-1's aggressive rushdown to Doronjo's elaborate zoning game. Granted, TvC has not been around long enough for players to exhaust and distill it the way they have MvC2, but it's a fresh and exciting game that maybe could have lasted a couple more years.

On the other hand, maybe we have seen enough of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom:

Evo 2010

2010-07-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

For fighting game enthusiasts, this past weekend was Evo 2010, this year's installment in the biggest fighting game championship in the world. Over the course of three days and nights, thousands of players and spectators gathered in Las Vegas for this fan-run tournament showcasing the highest level of competition in Super Street Fighter IV, Tekken 6, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Katsuhiro Harada, director of the Tekken series, and Yoshinori Ono, producer of Street Fighter IV, even made guest appearances--separately and together--to show their support for the community, and Capcom also gave attendees a sneak peak at the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

But the main event had to be the Super Street Fighter IV tournament. Approximately 1,800 competitors battled it out for a hefty pot and the title of "world's greatest" in the most popular fighting game since the glory days of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. In the end, it came down to American Ricky Ortiz as the challenger against defending champion Daigo Umehara from Japan.

Ricky was, once upon a time, the nation's best overall 2-D fighting game player, but he was never able to win Evo. His most memorable match was probably in the Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike tournament at Evo 2003, when Ricky played Daigo to a controversial time over with equal health in the second round, which the game's virtual judges then randomly ruled in Ricky's favor. Because Ricky had won the first round and the players had already split two games, this decision would have given Ricky the game AND match over Daigo. The Evo committee, however, never anticipating such a scenario occurring in actual tournament play, let alone in such a critical match, felt this was a bit bogus, as nobody even understood the in-game judgment system, so they forced both players to replay the round. Daigo won that round and the next, officially winning the match. But seeing Ricky's dissatisfaction with the overrule, Daigo offered to play one more decisive game, which he then proceeded to win handily, performing many taunts as well. And that was Ricky Ortiz. When Justin Wong far superseded him as the top American, representing his country admirably on the international stage, Ricky kind of just stepped aside and joined Justin's cheering section.

But Justin was denied a rematch against Daigo this year, and suddenly Ricky found himself once again, for the first time in years, the last American standing, with only Daigo and a Korean player in the way of his winning the most coveted title that had so long eluded him. As the crowd began cheering his name upon his clutching out a victory against the tough Korean player, securing America's position as at least the number two Street Fighter power for one more year, the camera captured the elation clear on his face for the nearly 30,000 viewers watching the online stream. He had missed the spotlight, if not the pressure. One more hard-earned chance to win it all, it was the moment that every competitive player dreams of--playing on the biggest stage for the highest stakes, more than his own pride on the line, the home crowd cheering him on to become, not just a winner, but a national hero.

For Daigo Umehara, it might as well have been Tuesday.

The real story of this year's Evo was, of course, Justin Wong's failure to make the finals. The biggest upset of the tournament came probably in the round of 32, when Justin found himself matched against Vance "Vangief" Wu, a relative newcomer who plays Zangief on a stock PS3 pad. (Actually, there were two pad players in the final 8 this year. Not only that, but HD Remix, the most classical game at Evo, was actually won by a new player using Zangief on a MadCatz FightPad. Yes, the PS3 one with the bulging battery slot and the unreliable wireless dongle. The moral of the story is, as I've said before, only scrubs would still insist that the only way to get good is on a joystick. The actual top players find ways to win with whatever they are comfortable with.)

Justin is reportedly proficient with multiple characters, but his tournament main since the original SFIV has always been Rufus. After Daigo swept his Rufus with Ryu at the GameStop championship last year, Justin tried to surprise Daigo with some different character choices during their last few encounters, but he still sticks with Rufus against most other players. And with the new Super edition, Rufus, already a very solid character in the original SFIV, has become widely regarded as the strongest character in the game, largely on account of his new Ultra Combo II, the Big Bang Typhoon, which allows him to spin through projectiles, tipping the odds in his favor now against formerly troublesome fireball characters such as Ryu. So Justin should have been coming into this tournament very confident for his expected rematch against Daigo's Ryu. That said, even Rufus has weaknesses, and one of them happens to be Zangief.

The Justin vs. Vangief match is actually not very exciting to watch unless you have a highly advanced appreciation for the game, so I'll just summarize. Like two taekwondo experts "respecting" one another, both players spend eternities just dancing in and out of each other's ranges, each hoping to bait the other into making a mistake. It's competitive Street Fighter at its most fundamental and usually where Justin shines. He wins the first game, but Vangief adapts to take the second. In the first-to-two-games format, Justin has an opportunity to switch characters after losing the second game. Zangief has the advantage against a close-range character such as Rufus, but he himself also faces more nigh impossible match-ups than almost any other character. As confident as Justin may be in his Rufus to overcome the mismatch, surely the safer bet, after having already lost one to this Zangief, would be to counter with Sagat or Akuma and zone the Russian out. Instead, in a decision he'll long regret, Justin sticks to his guns with Rufus and pays the price, losing the decisive third game.

All that was really prelude, however, to the best match of tournament. In this double-elimination tournament, the loss to Vangief merely sent Justin to the losers bracket, where he had one more chance to qualify for the final 8. In an elimination match, he needed to defeat "GamerBee," a Taiwanese Adon player.

For a player on the verge of elimination, it is almost a worst case scenario to be matched up, in a first-to-two format, against an unknown player using an unknown character this deep into a tournament. You've got only a few games to figure out an opponent--both player and character--that you've probably never seen before, and even though, in theory, Adon should be easily beaten, the truth is that nobody knows how to approach the Adon fight. Why would you need to know? Nobody would be fool enough to bring Adon to Evo, right? Nobody with skills enough to matter, anyway.

Actually, some of the cooler things to see in these huge international tournaments often come during the early pools. Although the final rounds invariably come down to a handful of familiar selections (Rufus, Ryu, Akuma, Honda), it's a guarantee that, with so many players in attendance, there will be at least one mysterious entrant showing off his mastery of an obscure character. Maybe somebody will get to take Gen onto the big screen and come away with a crowd-pleasing victory using the one nasty Gen trick that nobody else knew about. For a game or two, he'll have people believing that Gen can actually contend, or at least that "it's the player, not the character." Then an established player using a better character will see through the parlor tricks, declare "We've let these humans win enough," and send the briefly inspiring Gen player packing.

One would have expected the same thing to happen to GamerBee and his Adon, rarely seen but generally considered a low-tier character. Instead, he proceeded to progress deeper and deeper into the tournament, toppling many solid players along the way. He wasn't exploiting any secret combos either; on paper, Adon still looked like a weak character. Yet many a favored top player must have been quaking in his boots as GamerBee frustrated one opponent after another with his repeated Jaguar Kicks (the hopping axe kick) and perfectly timed Rising Jaguars (Adon's equivalent to the Dragon Punch). These should have been moves with obvious counters, right? Yet GamerBee was playing Adon as though he were the best character in the game, and nobody seemed to have an answer. Hell, even I got nervous watching him win--I've spent about half my life, after all, believing that Adon is a pretty worthless character.

By the time GamerBee drew Justin, the Adon shenanigans were far past being cute. With all the pride to lose and probably none to win, you definitely did not want to be a top player losing to some Taiwanese Adon on the big screen at Evo. It would be competitive Street Fighter's equivalent to getting struck out in schoolyard baseball by a girl pitcher (even if that girl's skills are legit and your bros, even as they laugh at you, are secretly praying that they won't be next). No, the gag had gone far enough. Or had it?

Actually, although I say GamerBee is unknown, he had actually won a bit of Internet fame already for the YouTube videos showcasing some of his tight online battles against top Japanese players, including Daigo himself. I'm sure Justin and other top players were wishing during Evo that they had studied those matches more closely.

Nozomi Entertainment rescues Utena license

2010-07-07T22:13:00.000-07:00

Only in the realm of anime could one find excitement in the announcement of a new domestic edition, in standard-definition DVD format, of material already previously released on Region-1 DVD. But, yes, this is exciting because, after all, it's Utena, one of the most literary works of serialized moving-picture storytelling.

To clarify the headline, word came out of Anime Expo last week that Nozomi Entertainment had secured the North American license for Revolutionary Girl Utena--both the 1997 television series and the 1999 film.

Central Park Media originally released the first 13 episodes of the series to home video here in 1998, but contractual difficulties held up the rest of the series until CPM was able to release the remaining 26 episodes between 2002 and 2003. After protracted financial problems, CPM filed for bankruptcy last year, although their Utena license had likely expired before then, as the DVDs had long been out of print.

Although most of the CPM DVDs are not all that hard to come by in the secondhand market, it can take some doing to assemble the full set of 10 discs (plus the movie, which is still available new from a handful of retailers). For such a critically acclaimed series, one might have hoped that another company would pick up the rights and offer a reprint. Many fans, however, had resigned themselves to the reality that, as it was in CPM's days, the TV series was still an exceptionally difficult license to negotiate. Since it also now qualified as old and was never mainstream in America to begin with, it was doubtful that the hassle and expense would be worth it to any of the potential distributors.

A smaller, enthusiast-oriented operation, Nozomi Entertainment is actually just a division of The Right Stuf International, which operates principally as an online retailer. TRSI stands to profit on the merchant side, no matter who releases a title, so it usually only picks up licenses that the bigger companies have already passed on. These are niche or older titles that have merit in TRSI's eyes, even if they are not likely to be big sellers. These people are clearly themselves lovers of anime, in touch with fans and treating them to premium packaging and occasional bonus goodies. I've been happy to support their work thus far (you can look for my name (among a thousand others, ahem) in the "special thanks for pre-ordering" section of the Emma: A Victorian Romance box sets), and I'm obviously very excited to see what they have in store for Utena fans.

The one thing they don't do is produce English dubs, but they've already stated that their Utena release, due sometime next year, will include CPM's old English track. Hopefully they will also carry over CPM's notable extra features--exclusive interviews and commentaries by creator and director Kunihiko Ikuhara--which were uncharacteristically substantial for an anime release.

But I'll be happy just to see Utena available again in America. It is too great a series to simply fade away, and I would encourage everyone to support Nozomi's release. If you've never seen it before, then this is a second chance to experience probably the finest television anime of all time. (No, I don't guarantee that it will change your life. I'm not a sucker.) For fans who already own the CPM release, this new edition will be sporting much improved remastered video taken from the 10th anniversary Japanese DVD release. (Yes, it's still only DVD, but I should at least be able to get a better screen capture for my profile pic.)

Kings

2010-06-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

2007. I've just started training at my new job. My fellow trainees and I are chatting idly during a break.

Jewish male: Russian women are not to be messed with, huh? Like Maria Sharapova.

Russian female (who, no offense, looks nothing like Maria Sharapova): Giggle giggle.

Jew: Do you like tennis?

Russian: Oh, yes! You know Marat Safin?

Jew: (blank stare)

Russian: He's a Russian tennis player. He's sooooo handsome. Of course, I like Andy Roddick too.

Jew: (bored expression on face)

Me: What about Roger Federer?

Russian: Who?

Me: He's the number one player in the world. He's Swiss.

Russian: Oh, he's okay.

Me: Hmm . . . Nikolay Davydenko?

Russian: Eww, he's nasty.

Bayonetta

2010-06-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Bayonetta is like "Ultraviolet: The Video Game," only not quite as cool as that sounds. But Bayonetta's eponymous heroine does have Violet's inhuman fighting abilities that test even the camera's capacity to keep up, her proficiency with the blade, her wicked gravity powers that allow her to walk on walls and ceilings, an outfit of comparably temperamental fabric, a motorcycle, and a somewhat annoying and unwelcome child tagging along. I'm pretty sure there's even an amateur "Gun Kata" moment in there. And Hideki Kamiya's latest game is even more frenetic and nonsensical than Kurt Wimmer's 2006 film.

Bayonetta is, of course, the latest work by Hideki Kamiya, the creator of Capcom's Devil May Cry, which in 2001 established a new standard and mechanical vocabulary for 3-D third-person action games. The seminal game was a critical and commercial success, but Capcom then shockingly handed development on the sequel to a different team. Kamiya was disappointed with the decision, players were disappointed with the new team's product, but then the series rebounded as the DMC2 team found its way with DMC3, after which most of us moved past the fiasco, and so too seemingly did Kamiya, as he went on pouring his passion into Viewtiful Joe and Okami instead. By the time DMC4 came out in 2008, this was all ancient history to most fans. But then came the unveiling of Bayonetta, Kamiya's first project since leaving Capcom. The similarities to Devil May Cry were impossible to ignore, and players were once more intrigued by the idea of what could have been, had Kamiya been allowed to make the sequel to his game. Now that we may finally have the answer, was it worth the wait and the heartache?

Kamiya's spiritual successor to Devil May Cry is leagues better than DMC2. Put it next to the original Devil May Cry, stellar in its own time, and you'll find Kamiya's new game to be a more robust, vastly more refined experience. Indeed, had we gotten Bayonetta back in 2003 instead of DMC2, I'm sure it would have been amazing. But that's not reality. The reality is that this is 2010--nine years and three Devil May Cry sequels since Kamiya's PS2 hit.

The near-flawless DMC3, which I consider the peak of the genre, captured most of what made the original great, then made significant tweaks and additions--most notably, the chapter select system encouraging replay--to produce an overall more solid, more playable game. Bayonetta is a very good action game, as was DMC4, but its only substantial evolutions upon the original Devil May Cry are features that were already implemented in DMC3. Technological advancements allow for some flashy new set pieces, but the gameplay feels fundamentally just like DMC, now a somewhat tired, distinctly last-generation game.

Even taking these games out of their respective historical contexts, I think Bayonetta would be merely on a par with DMC3 and DMC4, but not necessarily better. The real-time weapon switching is nowhere near as tight as in DMC3, and without DMC4's handy Devil Bringer to reel enemies in, it is again sometimes cumbersome having to chase enemies down. Despite possessing a ton of weapons, each with accompanying massive move lists, Bayonetta also doesn't seem to have as many impressive or obviously useful special attacks as Dante or Nero. Devil May Cry is similar to a 2-D fighting game in that respect, outfitting its characters with big utility maneuvers--the lunging Stinger, for example, or the enemy-launching High Time--whereas Bayonetta, despite feeling very similar, is more like a 3-D fighter such as Tekken, where instead of having special moves, the player is supposed to string together regular punches and kicks in different sequences to different effects. It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but just as I will always take Street Fighter over Tekken, so too do I prefer Devil May Cry to Bayonetta in this respect.

As in Devil May Cry, there are additional moves to be purchased in Bayonetta, but whereas Dante never felt "complete" until he had his full arsenal, somehow I never felt, in Bayonetta, like I needed to exert myself even so far as to utilize all of the weapons I found incidentally. I beat Bayonetta on normal difficulty--the highest default setting--never spending a dime except on the air dodge maneuver. I did not buy any other items or abilities, nor did I go out of my way to search for hidden items or optional challenges. Even with my Bayonetta at less than half of her maximum potential health, I never felt greatly challenged. I must credit this to the game's very generous checkpointing, which will sometimes even restart the player in the middle of a multi-phase boss fight. There was only one boss--the second fight with the giant infant whip-head--that somewhat confounded me, but instead of slowing down to figure it out, I just used a single healing item--the only one I would use during my entire playthrough--and powered my way through. I know that's not how these games are meant to be enjoyed, and I'm sure I did miss a few things by not shopping, but the game itself didn't really encourage that.

The most significant point of divergence from DMC is in how Bayonetta stresses defensive play. The DMC sequels were all offense except in boss battles, but Bayonetta requires a more attentive, defensive mindset even against regular enemies. It's nothing as severe as Ninja Gaiden, but the central mechanic of Bayonetta is the dodge maneuver. Nearly all enemies have attacks that cannot be interrupted and will, in fact, deflect any attack of yours. The goal is to sidestep these attacks, and if the dodge is performed just before an attack is supposed to hit, Bayonetta will activate "Witch Time," completely freezing all enemies for a short period, during which you can assail them without reprisal. The timing required to activate Witch Time is much more generous than for similar mechanics in other games, such as DMC3's Royal Guard block ability, so even mediocre players should be able to pick it up within a few minutes of play. Pay attention instead of mashing buttons, and you'll find yourself stopping time with regularity against even imposing boss enemies. When you do manage to thus neuter a boss, it's uniquely empowering, but that feeling comes at a great cost. In requiring that you make such specific use of the dodge against even basic enemies, the game forces you to play a certain way, meanwhile discouraging the sort of experimentation and improvisation that are so much the heart of Devil May Cry's combat. That's probably why I didn't bother shopping for moves or exploring the combo system more deeply, instead mostly just relying on dodging and the basic punch-kick-punch combo throughout the entire game.

I did mess briefly with the one-handed Easy Automatic mode. It's pretty cool and does genuinely allow even the feeblest of players to make it through the game, so that they can, ahem, just enjoy the story. DMC3 and 4 may not have been sophisticated literature, but they were pure narratives that presented their themes cleanly and effectively. Bayonetta's story is complete bunk. Neither is the plot ever even vaguely comprehensible, nor the cinematics sufficiently impressive, outside of maybe two or three noteworthy action cut scenes. Most annoyingly, for a story so devoid of sense, there are some surprisingly lengthy and dialogue-heavy scenes to be had.

Another area in which Bayonetta differs from DMC is the camera. Kamiya has traded the fixed camera locations of the DMC games for a user-controlled, character-centric camera. This has a subtle effect, more so on level design than on gameplay. With the fixed cameras, DMC was often constricted to filling its maps with lots of corridors. Many of the more open environments, meanwhile, were just three-layer constructs, with a clear background and foreground, while the audience formed the fourth layer viewing from beyond the performance area. Bayonetta doesn't have to thus take the audience's limited viewing angle into consideration, so its stages can be more fully three-dimensional. So that fountain, for example, can form a more organic piece of an interactive environment, rather than being strategically placed for best eye-catching effect. What this camera really exists for, however, is the "Witch Walk," Bayonetta's single coolest mechanic, which allows you, at specific points in the game, to defy gravity and walk on walls and ceilings. As you transition from one surface to a perpendicular surface, it is the world itself that appears to rotate around your character. The game's highlights are the battles with Bayonetta's rival Jeanne, during which both characters Witch Walk from surface to surface as they trade blows.

The anti-gravity business contributes to a perhaps deliberate softness in Bayonetta that, along with its vivacious new heroine, gives the game a personality subtly distinct from the harder-edged Devil May Cry. This can be felt in the jumping, which is floatier, ironically closer to DMC2. In the rest of the DMC titles, Dante could buy a second jump, but with or without it, he still had to rely heavily on his handguns to give him some extra hang time against ground threats. It made for one of the coolest effects in DMC, the idea being that it was only the recoil from his pistol fire that kept him afloat against ever-present gravity. DMC2 Dante's double-jump, on the other hand, involved some kind of magical float ability, as though he were conjuring wind beneath him, and Bayonetta similarly is able to sprout wings to gently glide short distances. As for Bayonetta's handguns--functionally closer to machine guns--they deal more damage than Dante's, but they don't integrate very naturally into melee combos and are hardly necessary for combat, which makes them hardly necessary at all, since they aren't needed to augment Bayonetta's jumping. Witch Time, meanwhile, is functionally similar to Viewtiful Joe's VFX Slow ability, though also somewhat the opposite. Joe used his ability to slow down time in order so that he could dodge bullets and other fast attacks. For Bayonetta, time slows as a result of dodging. In the former case, Joe is having to make the most of his powers in order just to survive. Bayonetta, meanwhile, is practically baiting attacks so that she can dodge them and activate Witch Time as a reward. Whereas Dante and Joe seemed to always be walking a razor's edge, Bayonetta seems more out on a casual stroll. (It also feels counterintuitive, to me, for time to slow after you've already dodged that (figurative) bullet, although I'm obviously nitpicking to call the game out on that.)

Finally, if you're one of those Devil May Cry fans who loved the first game but wondered where all the really zany stuff went in the sequels, then Bayonetta may be the game you've been waiting for. What Kamiya offers that the DMC sequels have not is the completely random gameplay non sequiturs--points where the game will suddenly depart from the regular action gameplay and instead switch to some extended mini-game. There's a motorcycle stage, a rail shooter stage, and other wackier sequences. When Devil May Cry pulled this in critical, even climactic, moments, it was shocking, but a part of me had to smile and tip my hat at the sheer nerve of Kamiya to simply discard all the deep combat mechanics that the rest of the game had spent hours drilling into the player. The rail shooter stage in Bayonetta is unfortunately much longer and more full of distracting special effects than Devil May Cry's, however, and whatever novelty there is to it wears off well before it's over, leaving the player just a pretty shallow and annoying shoot 'em up segment to endure.

If all you've been waiting for is an action game as good as the original Devil May Cry, then you've been waiting needlessly, because Devil May Cry 3 already was that game. Bayonetta, like DMC4, is just more of the same, and the amount of enjoyment you derive from the experience will depend on your appetite for that kind of comfort food. But if you are a hardcore fan of this hardcore genre, then the emergence of a worthy new contender in Bayonetta--much more a direct Devil May Cry competitor than Ninja Gaiden or God of War--is surely welcome, even if it doesn't revolutionize the formula.

The Distance

2010-06-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

59-59. That's where the score presently stands in the fifth set of the first-round Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut.

For reference, the previous longest tennis match, by number of games played, lasted a mere 112 games. That was Pancho Gonzales's first-round Wimbledon victory over Charlie Pasarell in 1969, in an era before tiebreaks were introduced to limit the first four sets of a five-set match. In fact, that match played a large part in the adoption of the tiebreak into Wimbledon. But that longstanding rule is of no benefit to Isner and Mahut now. This being a decisive fifth set at Wimbledon, there is no tiebreak, no clock, no mercy rule to determine the winner. It goes on either until one man pulls ahead by two games, or until someone opts to retire.

After two days of play, neither player has backed down yet, and today they played more games, in the fifth set alone, than Gonzales and Pasarell did in their entire legendary match. The length of this match has already so far eclipsed the previous mark that those stats need not ever again be brought into the same conversation. This record shall hereafter reside in its own category. To provide another perspective, these men have been playing for ten hours. After over seven hours today--longer than the entirety of the next longest match--play had to be suspended due to darkness, to be picked up again tomorrow.

I didn't get to watch any of today's action, but I will be taking tomorrow off to witness day three, even if it should last only two more games. When I received my brother's text message at work, informing me that the score was tied at 59 all, I thought for sure he was either joking or had mistyped. I've watched some sports, seen some records broken, but never have I heard of anything so improbable in my lifetime. Whatever the outcome, this match will obviously be the highlight of the tournament, definitely the greatest moment in both players' careers, if not their lives. But even more than that, I say, all sincerity, that this is bigger than the sum of all the other tennis matches recorded since I've been alive, bigger than 10 Olympics, plus as many World Cups, 40 Super Bowls, and 3 Gulf Wars. This is tennis's own equivalent to Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. Like the moonwalk even, this is an event for which time stands still, and it feels wrong that anyone in the world should be otherwise occupied. In the face of such a singular feat, I realize what hyperbole it has been to toss around words like "marathon" and "immortality" when covering other matches. Isner and Mahut are not even contenders, and their play is probably not the most scintillating tennis, but this is something that has never happened before, will probably never happen again in your lifetime, your children's lifetimes, or their children's lifetimes. Truly, it is for moments like this that sport exists.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

2010-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Since completing Pokemon, I've mostly been playing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the DS. I actually started playing it back when it came out last year, but it fell by the wayside because, frankly, the game is a chore.

I had a lot of fun with the major console Kingdom Hearts titles. The original was a very refreshing new spin on the JRPG, crossing over Final Fantasy's menu commands with a 3-D action game. Mixing Disney with Square may have been unexpected, but it was much more a Disney experience, with the world-hopping Sora character more a story contrivance to guide the player along a tour of all the classic movies. Kingdom Hearts II then streamlined the gameplay experience, cutting out a lot of the horrendous platforming, while amping up the action with greater combat speed and the sort of gravity-defying battle cinematics that would henceforth become a signature of Tetsuya Nomura's works. The Square-Disney crossover stuff really started to get weird at this point, however, as Nomura's team started to go nuts developing their original storyline into something incredibly convoluted that had practically nothing to do anymore with Disney.

Between those two major releases, I also played through the original GBA version of Chain of Memories. Its card-based take on the part-menu, part-real-time combat made random battling more methodical in the most aggravating way, but the boss battles actually got pretty intense. Honestly, I don't know if my fingers ever moved faster than during those deck shuffles against the final bosses of that game, and developer Jupiter would later experiment further with that idea of multitasking gameplay, doing great things with The World Ends With You. But Chain of Memories had major story problems, and worse than being an odd fit, the Disney stuff had already grown stale.

The whole "tour of Disney" idea sounded like a great idea for a one-off, but a series is going to very quickly run out of Disney movies in which to viably set an action-oriented video game. Even Kingdom Hearts II, although it managed to dig up a few random new and interesting worlds to explore, had to rehash a lot from the first game. The staleness has been considerably worse, however, in the outsourced portable projects, which have thus far apparently not merited Square Enix's effort in producing new assets. Birth by Sleep for the PSP looks like it will be a legitimate new experience, but Chain of Memories was rehashed art design, reused music, and tired story retreads. 358/2 Days spares us having to experience the plot of Aladdin for a fifth time, but it still forces players to return to Agrabah, which is otherwise the same as ever and overly familiar. Because 358/2 Days is set before Kingdom Hearts II, players don't even get to visit any of the newer additions from that game. Instead, it's nearly all stuff that was already in both the original game and Chain of Memories.

Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts problem is actually comparable to the Parasite Eve situation that I discussed in my last post. The scope of Square Enix's game has clearly exceeded the original concept founded on its licensing agreement with Disney, to the extent that, by Kingdom Hearts II, not only did the Disney elements feel out-of-place within the original story that Nomura and company were going with, but the mad juxtapositions of Mickey Mouse with Nomura's menacing robed figures even began to detract from the experience. Kingdom Hearts and Sora belong as much to Disney as to Square Enix, however, so there really is no divorcing the series from the Disney elements. Perhaps Final Fantasy Versus XIII is to be the Kingdom Hearts team's own The 3rd Birthday, allowing deeper exploration of the action gameplay, intense cinematics, and dark story, away from the obligations to Disney.

So, besides the fact that I'm sick of revisiting these Disney worlds, what else is wrong with Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days? Well, personally, I don't enjoy exploring 3-D space on handhelds. On consoles, 3-D (polygons, not glasses) is supposed to draw the player into the TV screen, providing an extra dimension of immersion over old 2-D side-scrollers. For me, that doesn't work with portable systems because the screen is too small, so I cannot help but notice the real world beyond and around it. That has always been my biggest issue with the PSP. But the DS is even worse for 3-D because it additionally suffers from a lack of an analog stick. Playing Kingdom Hearts with the DS Lite's squishy D-pad is a thumb-blistering nightmare. That said, I'm still excited for the Nintendo 3DS. The analog slide pad looks promising, the specs seem powerful enough to make polygons look good on a handheld, and maybe the stereoscopic effect will provide a new level of immersion. (As an aside, I also find it interesting to see that, with Kirby's Epic Yarn, yet another venerable Nintendo franchise is going 2-D for a major console release. And with sales of New Super Mario Bros. Wii having shown that consumers don't so much care about 2-D vs. 3-D, maybe there no longer needs to be this generational divide between the two, and developers will just go with what is right on a case-by-case basis, without having to use either polygons or "old-school" as selling points.)

Moving on, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days simply isn't a fun game. The mission-based structure is just poorly designed. Like the PSP entries in the Metal Gear Solid series, this handheld take on a traditionally triple-A console game breaks up the story into "bite-sized" episodes for easier consumption on, I suppose, the short breaks or bus rides for which portable gaming is ideal. You choose missions usually from a short list, then get a bit of story upon successful completion, before returning to the hub world to receive your next assignment. The problem is that these missions, in my opinion, are not short. For me, 5-10 minutes is short, but some missions in this game have taken me 30 minutes or more. Maybe I'm slow, but it doesn't help that the vague mission objectives often leave me wandering and wasting a lot of time.

Because the missions do not proceed in a strictly linear sequence, they cannot involve a lot of plot, the story sequences instead taking place between missions. Furthermore, instead of making progress through a world as in a more linear game, each world is actually fairly small, and the player is required to explore each fully multiple times, each time completing missions with very slightly different objectives. Usually, you just have to kill everything until you find and kill the right thing, which is always just a thing, never a named villain with any kind of personality. So the game offers slow combat with poor controls to fight repetitive waves of monsters in a limited number of environments, most of which were already old two games ago, and in which you must effectively replay the same mission over and over again. And, boy, did they pad the length of this game with a ton of repetitive missions, some optional, most not.

Finally, there is the multiplayer, which could have saved this game, had it only been integrated better. It's cooperative play for up to four players, and you actually get to play as characters other than Roxas. Unfortunately, you cannot progress through the story in multiplayer, even though the multiplayer missions are just stripped-down versions of story mode missions. Also, a player cannot join in on a multiplayer session unless they have already unlocked that mission through the story mode, so you can't realistically play this mode except with other hardcore Kingdom Hearts fans who would independently make steady progress through the story.

If you are one of those hardcore Kingdom Hearts fans, then 358/2 Days, like Chain of Memories, at least does fill in a few holes in a story that is full of them. In fact, the story chronology actually overlaps slightly with Chain of Memories, and the two games can occasionally fit together in clever ways a la Resident Evil 2 and 3. But I'm about ten hours in, and there hasn't been a lot of story, or at least not much of interest. And considering that I'm on Day 99 and the game is titled 358/2 Days, I'm guessing I've got a long way to go. I don't know that I'll have the dedication to see it through this time, and the game so far hasn't made a very convincing argument that I should.

The Return of Aya Brea

2010-06-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't say it was the most exciting or most surprising thing at E3, but I was personally interested in seeing anything new on Square Enix's The 3rd Birthday.

It's a PSP game, hence the trailer is not very exciting, but in case it's not clear, The 3rd Birthday is the third game starring Aya Brea, the third game, more or less, in the Parasite Eve series. Originally announced three years ago (via some pretty wicked poster art) for Japanese mobile phones, it was bittersweet news for fans who were sure the series had been laid to rest after 2000's forgettable Parasite Eve II. Like many players, I had enjoyed the first game but knew very little about the second, yet I still wanted to see more done with the Aya Brea character. The announcement of a third entry after a seven-year hiatus at least proved that Square Enix still remembered, but being consigned to cellphones was almost a fate worse than death. The outlook brightened somewhat when, a year later, The 3rd Birthday was, along with Final Fantasy Agito XIII, moved to the semi-legit PSP. All Square Enix showed was a short and cryptic pre-rendered movie trailer (and more nifty promotional artwork), but the news of composer Yoko Shimomura's return to the series made it instantly more promising than Parasite Eve II. Then two years went by with nothing else shown.

According to one interview, development is now in full gear, with many key staff from the Final Fantasy XIII team having joined up since completing that game. I suppose one could alternatively take that as meaning that production on The 3rd Birthday had been placed on the back burner while its key staff worked on FFXIII. Given how unexpectedly long that game took to finally make it out, that would explain the two years of no news on The 3rd Birthday. Of course, the long-in-development Final Fantasy Versus XIII had been similarly put on hold so that its team could help out on the increasingly elephantine nightmare project that was FFXIII. Now a new console Kingdom Hearts is being held back because Tetsuya Nomura's team is back to working on Versus XIII, which apparently still wasn't ready to be shown at this year's E3. And Agito XIII, headed up by Hajime Tabata, also in charge of The 3rd Birthday, has been in limbo for even longer. Given all that, I can actually take Square Enix's word for it that an HD console remake of Final Fantasy VII, of the quality that fans would want, would not be feasible at this time. I'm probably repeating myself and stating the obvious, but Square Enix ain't what Square used to be, and the days of getting two Parasite Eve games in one console generation are over. In fact, did you know that, besides FFXIII, Square Enix has to date released only one other title that it itself developed for HD consoles, that being the underperforming The Last Remnant for Xbox 360?

Back on the topic of Parasite Eve, it is significant that, despite it being the third Aya Brea game and having a very prominent "3" in the title, The 3rd Birthday is not being called "Parasite Eve 3." Tabata insists that it is not a Parasite Eve sequel. Perhaps he means that it is more of a spin-off, and maybe fans can yet hope for a "Parasite Eve 3" for consoles somewhere down the line. But I suspect maybe this is just Square Enix's way to get around licensing issues. You may recall that Parasite Eve was actually based on a Japanese novel, and in Japan, the game was just one part of a multimedia J-horror sensation. There were no book or movie sequels, but novelist Hideaki Sena still received a "based on a novel by" credit for the Parasite Eve II game. Maybe it's taken this long to bring back the game series because Square Enix didn't want to pay licensing fees to the book people. This would also explain why Square Enix has yet to offer either of the PS1 Parasite Eve games for download on PSN.

I actually read Sena's Parasite Eve novel, because I was curious, as a fan of the game. It's not very good. It also has very little in common with the game. The concept of the Eve character is much the same--she is a mitochondrial life form, silently evolving in humans until the day she might take over, using a female host who had received Eve via an organ transplant, to give birth to the ultimate being. Also as in the game, her main power is the ability to ignite human beings, giving the appearance that they are spontaneously combusting. But Aya Brea, the mitochondria-powered heroine of the games, is entirely a Square creation, and the first game's plot, handled by Takashi Tokita of Final Fantasy IV, also traces a very different arc.

In the game, Eve possesses an opera singer and, in the opening minutes, sets the entire audience on fire. From there, she infects and mutates animals that lay siege to the city, and it is up to Aya and her fellow NYPD cops to wage a six-day war against the mitochondrial menace. The novel proceeds at a much more languid pace and is devoid of cops or much action. The central characters are the civilians who are in various ways connected to the Eve hosts, the organ donor and recipient. Eve herself doesn't really emerge until the final third of the book. Before that, nobody even suspects her existence, and most of the book is passages describing biological research procedures, including going into detail on the work that goes into putting together and presenting a graduate thesis. Sena's characters even dialogue about which scientific journals, in order, are the most prestigious and hardest to get published in. At these points, I suspect that Sena is not really writing horror, or even fiction, anymore. Periodically, he attempts to build suspense by having characters remark on how suddenly hot it is or how unnatural some research samples seem. Then Eve appears, rapes a man and a little girl, and melts maybe a half-dozen people, before dissolving that same night due to her own deficient grasp of the science.

I must confess, I haven't read a lot of pop horror, so I don't know what is standard in the genre, but I don't understand how this became a sensation in Japan. Maybe if I understood the science better, I would find the characters' research more unsettling. From my perspective, however, Square shed a lot of the source material to the game's advantage and constructed many more spectacular sequences, all framed within a narrative more thoroughly laced with dread. At most, the game could be taken as a semi-sequel to the book, rather than any kind of adaptation. But Parasite Eve was so much better as a game than as a book, and even the first game already expanded so far beyond the scope of the novel, that it would have been a real shame to have Aya forced into early retirement due to licensing hassles. So if Square Enix's compromise is to forget about "Parasite Eve," forget about Eve altogether, and move forward with just Aya, then I'm perfectly fine with that.

Sorry

2010-06-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

Me: I'm sorry I'm not Superman.

Old Man: So then you're not working Saturday?

Me: No. I am not. Also, I'm taking tomorrow off.

Old Man: *sigh* Kids these days. What ever happened to taking pride in your work?

Me: Well, there is that. On the other hand . . . "Don't hurt yourself."