The Wondrous Mark of Wondermark

Posted in Comics with tags , , on November 28, 2009 by nickhalme

Growing up I had a reputation for being the class clown, knowledge that can be used to divine my present leaning towards goofiness.  I profess, this has happened not without great assistance.  I have just started reading comics as something akin to an adult, but as a kid I read a good deal of comics.  No Batman or Spiderman, but collections of Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, The Far Side, and Dilbert.

When I came of age to properly scour and explore the far reaches of the internet and establish favourite sites, I latched onto Penny Arcade.  But in the age of webcomics I was for a time restricted in my tastes to videogame related webcomics.  I had, through a friend, read The Perry Bible Fellowship, but no new comics are being produced on that front. So one day on Twitter I asked someone if there were any webcomics out there I had missed, not really expecting anything.  Immediately I was directed to http://wondermark.com/ and http://www.abominable.cc/.  The latter is a wonderfully drawn, sincerely written comic that attends to my adult comic needs.  The former is something that, like The Far Side, makes me grin if not laugh at every panel.

Wondermark, clearly, is what this post is about.  At some point I had foolishly established a separate blog here for my rantings that weren’t videogame related, but now my time is precious — so I’ll post whatever the hell I feel like here.  Just try and stop me!  The truth is that David Malki! (he insists on the exclamation), the creator and curator of Wondermark, has issued a challenge to bloggers — anyone who blogs about Wondermark before the end of November may get a free copy of one of his collections; Clever Tricks To Stave Off Death.  This sort of internet challenge requires one to perform, as a whore, and so I have openly complied to write about Wondermark.

It’s honestly not a challenge though.  I have a soft spot for comics like this; a good portion of my childhood was spent reading them — even reading them with friends and sharing the good jokes.  It makes me really happy to see that this new generation of human comic generators have found a place on the internet, to be supported openly by fans rather than through newspaper publishing deals and collection books alone.

So, what makes this Wondermark so special, anyhow.  Intriguingly it’s produced with a combination of editing old 19th century etchings and wood engravings and applying David Malki!’s sardonic, conversational wit.

An example can be found here: http://wondermark.com/557/

Additionally he uses alt tags (mouse over the comic) to add an afterthought.  In the case of the Lipton comic, he adds “We amass information mainly to keep it from our competitors.”

It’s the sort of sometimes dry, sometimes-too-silly ironic wisecracking that some people might get, but might still not like nonetheless.  But for some other people, every piece of it is eaten up like…like something delicious, to be eaten immediately with no questions asked.

Go eat enjoy some Wondermark.  And hopefully I will weasel a free book for myself.

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The Conundrum of the Multiplayer Mindshare

Posted in Game Theory, Industry Comment with tags , , on November 4, 2009 by nickhalme

[Cross-posted on my Gamasutra blog]

Recently I was attempting to write a review for CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars — it’s a quality arena shooter with some new ideas that work well, and was released for XBLA on June 1st.  When I got to the point where I felt I had to stop and wrap things up with the conclusion, I froze.  Why should anyone buy it?  It’s a fun game, but nobody plays it online.  Of course they don’t — what sort of caveman would be so bereft of online shooters to invest time in a downloadable console arena shooter?

So why was it made?  I have no idea.  Surely it could have been foreseen that the players would not be there waiting for it.  Right?

It’s long been touted as a fact that demographics exist; these fuzzy statistical groups who help determine who a game is marketed to, and to some extent made for.  I don’t know much about that, and my stance is skeptical, but common sense alone at least dictates that fans of something will respond to fan service.  The Dawn of War franchise serves several different groups of fans that coagulate — Warhammer 40k fans, Real-Time Strategy fans, and Relic fans.  I like to think that, mixed in there somewhere, are “fans of awesome shit and big guns”, people who aren’t 40k fans but have been attracted to the IP through Dawn of War’s presentation.

To conceptualize that, I’d like to use the idea of a large single-celled organism — multiplayer gamers.  The organism is made up of many different elements; different sorts of fan groups with their own tastes.  Every so often when a new game is released some piece of the organism breaks off and becomes its own thing — its own community.  It will probably bring lots of different types of fans with it, but they’re all multiplayer gamers.

Thing is, this organism doesn’t just split down the middle for anyone.  If a game has enough gravitas it will cause a split — Dawn of War has grabbed a small chunk of the organism, while Call of Duty 4 has requisitioned for itself a very large part of it, which still cowers before the super-organism that WoW has since developed.

Yet games are made that have little influence over this organism of multiplayer gamers.  Section 8 sought to steal Tribes fans, but the servers are dead.  CellFactor was released into a void rather than into the writhing hands of fans.

You don’t have to be an established franchise to serve fans, by the way — fans existed before games did.  I’m not sure anyone is a fan of generic, middling science fiction and nameless gunmetal machineguns, but make a game about zombies and you’ve got a starting point.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shame that some creators seem to be unaware of this multiplayer organism, because most of these games are good if not great.  I believe even a small community can foster a game and its developer.

As a kid I spent hours playing Raven’s Soldier of Fortune II, playing in clan ladder matches and playing as a regular on several clan servers.  It was at a time when, to my peer group, the choice was simply Counter-Strike.  I chose to devote more time to SoF II, along with thousands of others to Counter-Strike’s hundreds of thousands.  The community persisted for some time and I believe that sort of following helped solidify Raven as a quality developer in the eyes of fans and other developers.  Even if it turns out they didn’t make a fortune, they survived and with good marks.

Soldier of Fortune II served a niche, that’s for sure.  That niche was probably filled with different fans; maybe it was as generic as “online shooter fans”, but these certain people were attracted.  Me and my clanmates shared a definite love of the game’s level of violence, dismemberment, randomly generated maps, weapons with kick, and cutthroat arena-shooter speed.  We all gushed over it — it was made just for us.

Now, Section 8 was made for Tribes fans — maybe Battlefield fans in actuality.  But it failed to be a better version of those games; the quality here still matters, and so does market saturation.  Battlefield fans have a Battlefield game to play right now — your game will not get those players.  As for Tribes fans, you will not get those players if you don’t live up to their high expectations, if you don’t really aim to be a Tribes-like game.  Section 8 served fans a lukewarm meal while someone else had already prepared a hot meal for them.

Fans are out there, and I want to believe they’re eager to split off and find new games, to join new communities and learn new rules; get better at new games.  I believe all gamers want this.  Don’t give them something fake, find a real niche/demographic/group of fans and attack it — more importantly the developers should be part of that niche, working to fill it.  That’s when the best games are made, you can tell.  Multiplayer games require more time and investment than a single player experience, so it has to be something especially special and it has to last.

Developers should not be wasting themselves on games that people, honestly, are never going to play in the current or predicted multiplayer environment.  Woe is the multiplayer arena shooter who competes with Call of Duty for multiplayer mindshare.  But Left 4 Dead will survive, and so will Red Orchestra, Counter-Strike and I’d like to think Dawn of War.  Because those are fans that wanted something and got it, and they don’t feel like leaving yet.

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Creaking Back to Life

Posted in announcement with tags , , , on October 25, 2009 by nickhalme

A smarter man would have predicted time would be hard to hold onto after taking up a full-time job.  Me, I don’t think I thought about anything at all but the job (which, is great).  But I write for myself, it’s a very real stress reliever and I need it now more than ever.  Consider this a binding agreement to put up some more constant blog-sized content, and maybe I’ll even compile some now-ancient-to-me GDC and VIGS talks.

But as I turn the lights back on and dust this place off, an online acquaintance is gearing up for an independent project.  Borut Pfeifer (of Plush Apocalypse fame) departed EALA some time ago and is bravely setting out on his own as an indie developer.  Or so he hopes.  I have no idea what his budget concerns are, but I would suppose he’s going to have to hire an artist along with having to support himself.

He’s using a funding platform called Kickstarter to put all this together, and he’s counting on at least 15,000 bucks by December 10th.  If you can find the time and the cash, give this man a hand.  He deserves it.

Here’s some info on the game he’s planning to create, which is of the serious variety:

“The game is set in Tehran, Iran, during the post-election riots that took place this summer. You play a father and mother looking for their lost daughter, amidst crowds of protesters and police. It’s a puzzle/action game, set from a 3/4 overhead perspective in 2D. Characters on the street will react to the father and mother differently (because of their gender). You have to get past the obstacles of crowds and police barricades taking into account these differences, sneaking past police, and occasionally having to fight or avoid violence. The game is meant to be about 2 hours of play, downloadable via PC and Xbox.”

You can donate here.

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Nostalgia and Wonderment

Posted in Design, Musing with tags , , , on September 20, 2009 by nickhalme

When I was a wee lad I owned a NES.  Buying games was not on the docket, so I was stuck with Super Mario Bros 3 and Star Tropics.  I rented games from time to time, but as a five year old it could not be done on a whim.  So those were my games.  I wasn’t particularly drawn to them, but I did enjoy them.  As well, I did not understand them — and this was goddamn fascinating to me.  There was a point in Star Tropics where a snake patrolled an underground passageway.  One simply had to find the right moment to cross the path so as to avoid the snake.  I marveled at the complexity of this for hours, maybe even several play sessions that didn’t progress past that point.  Eventually I summed up my courage and hit the snake with a yo-yo.  It killed me.  I guess eventually I got past that, but I don’t remember when it clicked.  Later in the game, when I stopped playing, I was in a submarine (for reasons unknown to me) and got lost at sea, cursed to swim forever alongside pixelated dolphins in the tiled sea.

When my older neighbour showed me the secret flute levels in SMB 3, the ones with the ships and the lava, I was blown away.  It was a magical thing.  I played through a lot of that game, but I was very inconsistent.  My early brain didn’t grasp the core concepts; sometimes I blew past level 2 and sometimes I had to give up out of frustration.

One time I rented a combat flight sim for the NES.  I think I saw a plane once.  I spent the rest of the night barreling endlessly through a  depthless blue sky, sitting in a badly rendered cockpit.  I didn’t know what to think.

When I was old enough to graduate to our family’s old Mac (which was something like eleven years older than me) I finally, after grueling diplomacy, had secured for myself a copy of Warcraft II.  The older kids on my street all played it, and I was ecstatic.  I waited several hours for the game to install on the computer.  I then started up the world editor, thinking it was the game (this was my first time installing a computer game) and ended up “playing it” for about an hour.  I realized something was up.  This looked like the game, but there was some essential functionality missing.  There was no attacking, units did not move from point A to B (only when I moved them there, as per the editor’s rules), and surely nothing was fighting against me.

After some time I found the actual game.  Clearly, it became “my game”.  My first game to fully figure out, I think.  I learned the tech tree, unit costs and which spells did what.  I became pretty adept at beating the computer.  I was not even aware that it had multiplayer capabilities, but I was happy with it.  Even so, eventually I stopped playing.  I moved on to Age of Empires II and Unreal Tournament, and proceeded to figure them out.

Shadow Complex has led me to this nostalgia, because it brings me back to that sense of mystery and bewilderment.  I never played the Metroid/Castelvania games as a kid, so I don’t associate it with those respective tropes.  But it has brought to might the sense of mystery that used to bind me to games, and that led me to view them as very big things.  Because of my ineptitude at Star Tropics I inferred that, surely, it must be an endless world.  Looking back it must have been a very short game when compared to today’s norm.

I find myself backtracking, checking my map with a wrinkled brow, retrying areas over and over trying to figure out “the way” to pass the test.  I feel lost but powerful and capable as well.  I hope I never attain the completionist’s knowledge of the game and lose my sense of awe.

It is strange that this is considered “old school” game design.  Surely it is part of World of Warcraft’s artificially extended world.  I wish other games would consider tricking their players rather than putting them on track to “play along”.  It breaks my heart when I’m surrounded by urban detritus and see that rubble piles block all routes of movement besides “the path”.

To be timely for a second, I’m also ready to be somewhat disappointed with Halo ODST.  I’d rather the open world be the entire game, with new missions to accommodate it.  Instead the bulk of the game, as I understand it, will be played through “flashbacks” in the traditional Halo mission style.  Frankly I’d find it a relief to just get lost in a dark city, in enemy territory, all alone and trying to find my way back to the rest of the boys.  I’d like to just do that, for a change.  What I don’t want to do is jump in a tank and go to point B where I will fight bad guys until they stop coming.  I just played that out in my head, cut together from past experiences.  The shooting will be fun, yes.  But I have done that already, that mission.  I know the outcome most certainly.

Should it not be some tenet of game design to keep your players “in the magic circle”, unawares of your machinations?  Should it not become more important in sequels?  That’s not a knock against Halo ODST; it’s a convenient example and I can’t wait to play it for other reasons.  I just want some of that wonderment back.

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1943

Posted in Game Review with tags on August 23, 2009 by nickhalme

vgd_1943

I’m a thousand miles above the Coral Sea in a P-51 Mustang.  It’s a slow, heavily armoured bulldog of a fighter outfitted with more .30 .cal machineguns than you can shake a fist at.  I’m so high because of the physics of dogfighting; we’re in an air dominance war with Japanese Zeroes, they’re much lighter and can out-climb us.

So while my mates circle below me, small as flies, I’m upside down craning my view down through my cockpit searching for Zeroes.  When I spot one coming over the first mountain from their carriers I put my game face on.  I bring my view back down to stop looking through the top of my cockpit window and I cut the engines.  With no thrust I don’t have to manoeuvre and can enter a freefall dive.  After I right myself I gun the engines, but lightly, to position myself above my prey.  He has no idea what is about to happen.  As I dive I fly on a curve to slow myself down but keep my momentum going — slowing down in a dogfight will always get you killed, but going too fast will make you useless as you fly past enemies.  Because I’ve come down from behind, this chap has his sights set on my flyboys who are getting the business done on fair terms.  But right now, fair isn’t my game.

I spin this way and that as he does in order to get a fix on him and swoop with him, so I can get on his tail and blast him out of the sky.  I only need a few seconds.  Well, I only have a few seconds.  Once he realizes I’m here he’ll start jinking and I’ll have to follow him to get the kill — giving his guys time to gun me down as I awkwardly manoeuvre to catch him.  So I need to do this right, especially after all that time climbing, searching, and diving.  But I manage to remain calm.  This sucker is mine.  I can feel it.  I get on his tail as he swoops by a mountain, hoping I’m not close enough yet to show up as an enemy flyer on his HUD.  But he doesn’t juke, just keeps flying forward, climbing just a bit.  I climb with him and squeeze off bursts, careful not to overheat my guns, just above him.  He rises right into my stream of tracers and a second later his fuselage explodes as I fly through the twisting wreckage, victorious.

I jink and flip and fly low over the water, then twist around a mountain and climb.  I don’t know if his friends saw me, but I have to fly as if they did.  I need to make my getaway.  I get my answer as tracers fly too close to my cockpit.  Knowing I can’t out-climb a Zero I twist and enter a dangerously fast dive.  I pull up, almost too slowly against the momentum, and come up just above the water.  No more tracers.  I fly over one of our friendly carriers to patch up some of the small hits I took during my run and then climb again with Red Baron aspirations.

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Genre Re-defining

Posted in Musing with tags , , , on August 21, 2009 by nickhalme

There’s never any way to account for personal taste, but I’d like to comment on a trend I’ve always been lippy about (but I’m not sure I’ve ever committed it to writing.)  When Gears of War was announced my friends and I were excited.  I remember that on launch I had picked up my copy on my way to a game of weekly road hockey — afterwards a few of us loitered and played through the first level.  We weren’t quite blown away, but we were quite content.

Now the people who surround me (literally and in my life in general) are more or less jaded.  That’s not only a bad thing — in some cases it could be considered part of the job description.  What struck me today was the general blase attitude of my compatriots towards the announcement of a Monk class for Diablo III.  I’m not a fanboy by far (I never played it quite enough to claim that) but frankly I’m dazzled by the production quality and the “something extra” that Blizzard sprinkles into its games.  People might think my amusement is a conscious choice; a wilful ignorance towards a property I know is nothing special, surrounded by so much pomp — because I might want to enjoy it to the fullest by shielding myself.  But that’s not what’s going on.

Evil Dead.  I love it.  I love the camp, I love Bruce Campbell, and the awesomeness of slick shotgun fights is such that I’m willing to ignore the fact that there can’t be enough ammo in that shotgun to spew out all that whoopass.  But it’s not ignorance that drives my grinning love for it — it’s love of the genre.  It applies to me; was made for me.  Regardless of its status among other cult films or film in general, the Evil Dead movies are something special for me.  The same thing goes for old zombie movies in particular, there’s some charm in the low budget attempt at social commentary through horror that is comforting, and makes it easy to watch if not exceptionally entertaining.

This is why I still, to some extent, adore what Gears of War is.  To many people it’s a bunch of juvenile meathead fantasy, but to me it’s a flawless execution of an adrenaline-powered fever dream.  It’s something genre redefining not because of any innovation but because of its re-imagining of the utterly generic.  I think it takes bolder creators to add their own take to an old and worn out stereotype than to create something new — because there is always the (rightly applied) excuse that it’s new, so go easy on it.  It’s the start of something — it’s rough.  Redefining a genre is about roughing up an old dog and getting him to use a shotgun, screw old tricks.  It’s not pretentious and when it is serious it comes off as cheesy, which when applied conciously comes off as genuine.

Now Diablo III is powered by a hype machine and cradled by a seething mass of waiting fans — but that’s no reason to hate it.  Those fans are anxious because that game is made for them.  Stop picking apart the numbers, the people want it because of the execution — the remaking and updating of something they haven’t yet stopped loving.  After all, games are about execution of content, not the idea of the content.  To that end, sometimes the execution is what people love first and the content second, and both above newness.

It burns a hole in my chest when people give a lazy-eyed look when I mention the Monk is a class in Diablo III.  They can’t be excited about it, whether they’re being overly reductionist or they can’t like it on the basis that it’s a popular rpg with no chance of commercial failure.  I have no beef with people who just plain aren’t into it — they have their own genres they’re fervent about.  But there are a good chunk of very intelligent people out there who, in shaping themselves as analytical creatures, can’t think laterally to understand what the factor of attachment is that ties people to their genres.

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There is Only War

Posted in announcement with tags , on July 30, 2009 by nickhalme

vgd_war

As some of you may know I am now the multiplayer dev tester for Dawn of War II at Relic.  This blog will remain separate from all that, but I think this deserves some more attention — we’ve just launched the There is Only War update which patches the game from v1.32 to v1.5.  The multiplayer game has been completely rebalanced.  Check out the release notes here.

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The Cycle of an Aging Giant

Posted in Musing with tags on July 29, 2009 by nickhalme

Welcome to the AG Search & Destroy server.  There are no tubes, there is no martyrdom, and there is absolutely no bitching allowed.  Like the other remaining servers it’s Hardcore.  There is no crosshair and a bullet or two will put you out of the round.

I’ve just moved and switched computers.  My level 55 profile is sitting inside of my old computer in a closet miles away.  It means I have only the default classes to choose from and no option to create a class yet.  It’s also a reminder of just how old Call of Duty 4 is now — accounts aren’t stored online or tied to a GUID, they’re just a config file in a folder.

I’m getting my ass kicked.  The match starts and I run out of the spawn.  I’m shot in the stomach by a  player shooting through a car window and a smoke screen — he was just hoping someone would move to that spot, knowing that any hit would be fatal.  He was right.

I use the underslung grenade launcher that comes with the default loadout I picked.  Thunk.  It explodes harmlessly.  ”No tubes” one of the clan members says.  The next round I’m showered in “blind nades”; a tactic that harkens back to CoD 1: players throw grenades over buildings and into the enemy spawn at the start of a round.  They just know the right trajectory and are hoping the grenade lands true; hence it’s blind.  I complain “No tubes but blind nades are fine?”.  No response, I say it again.  They comment on the nice shot a player just made.  I’m ignored.

“Why doesn’t anyone play normal CoD4 any more?”

“We’re not pussies.”

I get fed up and turn on my console.  At least my 360 rank hasn’t been wiped, even if it is only level 25.  Maybe I’ll do better with at least some of the weapons available.  I join some vanilla matches, which can only be found on the 360 version of CoD4 now.  I do better with a crosshair and an M4 with a red dot site.  Eventually we move to a map called Wet Work.  Wet Work is the topside of a container ship and is a very narrow map.  Grenades explode everywhere and dark SAS figures run by firing bursts, and our team seems to be perpetually falling backwards in synchronized death animations.  Helicopters loop around the map and airstrikes fall on us as we spawn.

I turn the console off and just sit there.

Call of Duty 4 has problems that I didn’t bother looking at when it was my game of choice.  Now that I’m on the outside trying to get back in, I’m finding it’s impossible.

While the Battlefield series has been chastised for the long slog required to unlock all the weapons in the game, CoD4 hasn’t attracted any negative attention.  But it’s the same.  CoD4 seems aimed to work for players all starting at the same time, but a level one player has no chance.  It’s rare to see players under level 55 and even more rare to see players under level 40.  If I was a new player my reaction would be to turn around and leave.  Get the hell out of there.  It seems like that’s been the case.

Then there are the positive feedback loops.  Imagine if World of Warcraft rewarded a player kill with a better weapon and you have CoD4’s killstreak system.  I recall from my time playing near the game’s release that, done right, you could propel yourself to a near-perpetual killstreak.  If you get a helicopter in the air and call in an airstrike you can earn enough kills to garner another helicopter or airstrike.  That can go on for quite a while.  Rewarding good players with a cushion to sit on seems pretty strange — the players on top get a break for their efforts while the players having trouble are given a hard time.  A slippery slope.  Hell, that can be a cliff sometimes.

In Call of Duty 2 the name of the game was aiming a bolt action rifle at tiny dots moving around in a field with a bit of vital close quarters trench fighting.  It worked besides some imbalances created by faction-specific weapons (it was always better to have the German Kar98k or Mosin Nagant on large maps rather than the M1 Garand or the Lee Enfield.)  Call of Duty 4 shot itself in the foot by condensing maps and creating urban combat.  A red dot sight on an Uzi is a viable sniping weapon.  Grenade spam and blind nades are a bigger problem because of the closed nature of the maps.  Bad spawning positions are exacerbated by closer proximity to enemies.  Actual snipers are not too scary, because in a minute someone with an MP5 will have sprinted behind them.

It was always apparent that CoD was more Quake than Flashpoint, but CoD4 might actually be faster than Quake and more of a dated arena shooter because of it.

CoD4 is a great game, but that’s only the case because it exists in a vacuum.  There are no competing multiplatform shooters — CoD4 is the shooter in the spotlight.

I expect this is all intended though.  CoD4’s launch has been like a cannonball — it was shot out of the gate, sailed for a bit, and now it’s hit the dirt.  Nobody is going to pick it up; they’re just going to fire another one out of the cannon.  And it will be great, it’ll allow me to start with everyone else again.  But after a couple years the same thing will happen — new players will be pushed away and the players who stick with it will dig themselves deeper by exclusively playing niche modes like Hardcore.

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A Waste of Terminators

Posted in Film with tags on July 17, 2009 by nickhalme

Let’s not pretend that the Terminator franchise is a science fiction property.  There cannot be “Terminator fans”.  They’re trashy big budget “flicks” that feature robots and a story so incomplete it makes me want to vomit.  But I was excited for Terminator 4, or Salvation, whatever.  Whoever cut that trailer knew what they were doing.  But this whole situation should have been left to my imagination.

In the previous Terminator movies they alluded to the robot-human war and showed snippets of badass things like oceans of skulls and machines shooting big guns in a dark dystopian hellscape full of fire and sweet gunships.  When Salvation opened with A-10 jets running a sortie on a Skynet installation I perked up — will this be good?  But then the helicopters landed, and Christian Bale stepped out and jumped into a big hole.  Fuck.

What’s behind all this angst is the fact that I could imagine a better movie.  Humans fighting a guerilla war against a centrally-controlled machine race?  There are countless hours of military science fiction scenes running around my head.  You’d have to try really hard to isolate a combination of scenes where all of the amazing material would be left out, leaving a weak character drama supported by a nauseating filmmakers-are-out-of-touch style comment on the “war on terror”.  But the acronym that directed this film managed to find that combination and put it in front of my eyes, which transmitted the information to my brain, which imploded.

Before I dig in any more, there were cool bits present — the animation and FX team were a bunch of pros.  There’s a scene where we see a motorcycle robot calculate the trajectories of the debris in front of it and then maneuever cinematically to avoid it.  That’s what I’ve always felt is the meat that is never quite meaty enough for the franchise — artificial intelligence scares us when it can think better than we can; it makes us feel imperfect and outmoded.  This sort of thing is probably only dealt with for about two minutes collectively throughout the film.

What the director really wanted to do is show that he wasn’t just some guy directing a robot movie — NO, he is an auteur.  So he ignored the premise he was given and instead built up to a scene where it’s explained that the difference between machines and men is the strength of the human heart, as the engineered super-heart from a robot is transplanted into John Connor, because his heart is failing.

There are so many parts where drama is supposed and then you are ripped back to the reality that this movie is terrible, not good.  What makes it more terrible is its awareness of what good is and its continued avoidance of it.  A character rescues one of the machines and betrays her friends and is shot in the leg while escaping with him.  Again I tensed up.  Kill her; her own side has to kill her to show that the humans have gone over the edge long ago.  She escapes and Christian Bale lets her go “just because”.  Damnit.  The “friendly” terminator has his super-heart punched into little heart pieces by an evil terminator (yes, this is the same heart that is given to Bale at the end) and the good terminator is left for dead.  Bale defibrillates him and he comes back to life.  It’s as if the writers read a book on dramatic metaphor and then made an effort to do everything the opposite way.

This movie is not bad.  It’s just so not good that you’ll be depressed after watching it.

Maybe I expected too much science fiction (you know, because of the robots) and expected too much from a franchise built around an Austrian bodybuilder saying cool things with a jacket on, but it’s just…uhhhh.  There are no words.

P.S. Why is Christian Bale always Batman?  He uses his Batman voice throughout the entire film and has the emotional fidelity of a piece of cardboard.

P.P.S. Never, ever reveal who the good, human-looking terminator is in the first few seconds of the movie (or the trailer…).  There are so many lost moments that could have been good and interesting and thoughtful but are instead trite and silly because of the knowledge the audience has been given.  This movie ripped itself a new asshole before I ever got around to writing this blog.

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Contest Time!

Posted in announcement, contest with tags , on June 9, 2009 by nickhalme

I’ve been meaning to get around to this for a while, and it seems ripe to begin now.  Our previous contests have been design challenges with no prize; this week I’ll be holding a contest that doesn’t require game design knowledge, but you can win a slick gaming chair.

I was contacted by a company that sells TV mounts and other entertainment paraphernalia, and we’ll be giving away this gamer chair to the lucky winner.  It should be noted that I am a bit jealous; I’ve seen these things at conventions and they look to be pretty comfy.

Now, down to contest business.

For an upcoming Escapist column I asked game developers and journos what their favourite gaming moments were.  Now it’s your turn.  Send me an email and tell me what your proudest, worst, or most brag-worthy gaming moment is. You’ll also need to include your phone number and address, which is why I ask you email your submissions rather than posting that sort of information here in the comments.  Be sure to use your primary email address as well, you’ll be sent tracking information for the shipment should you win.

The cut-off time will be one week from now on Tuesday the 16th.

Good luck, and may the best gaming story win a comfy chair.

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