Movie Round-Up: May 15th, 2009

Angels & Demons:

Unlike most of the world, I actually read this before reading The Da Vinci Code.  I hadn’t heard of it prior to the explosion of The Da Vinci Code, but I have this habit of wanting to read series/characters from the beginning, so I read Angels & Demons first.  I also liked it more than its sequel.  I felt the story was tighter, the characters more interesting, and just all around a better book.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying The Da Vinci Code sucked, but it just wasn’t as good.

The movie of The Da Vinci Code was worse than the book.  Given that I liked the book Angels & Demons more, I’m hoping to like the movie more, but seeing as how the movie will be treated as a sequel and not properly as a prequel, I know there will be things about the film that annoy me.  However, after my disappointment with the prior film, I do know that I won’t be rushing to the theater to see this one.  I’ll wait for the DVD.

FreeRealms Freeloading

So I have joined FreeRealms.  If you want to find me in game, I’m Jhaer Buegren.

Thus far, I’m entertained but disappointed.  As many people across the blog-o-sphere have pointed out, the game is fun.  Or rather, the games are fun.  I put it that way because the individual mini-games in FreeRealms for each of the classes are fun.  However, “the game” as a whole, to me, isn’t.

What’s lacking are the social aspects.  Finding your friends and getting them on your friend list is far too poorly implemented.  Its hard.  As of yet, I have none of my friends on my friend list because I haven’t been on at the same time as them, in the same place, so we can do that.  With my Xbox360, I can add friends from the webpage.  Why can’t I do that here?  Also, no one talks.  They are far too busy playing mini-games, which says something about the mini-games, but it also makes the game feel like I’m playing next to people rather than playing with people.  I quit WoW because all of their social interactions take place in guild/group, auction, or Chuck Norris jokes (not really, but the innane quality of the general chat when it does exist floats around that level).  FreeRealms won’t be really appealing to me until that changes.  Puzzle Pirates has more social interaction than FreeRealms.

In any event, seeing as how, for now, FreeRealms is not something I’d be willing to put a single dollar into, I’ll be freeloading.  I’ll keep posting about what its like to play a game with a velvet rope and RMT when you don’t participate in either.  In Puzzle Pirates, I play on a doubloon ocean which allows me to do “everything” for free as long as someone buys doubloons and sells them to me for pieces of eight.  So far, FreeRealms doesn’t offer a way I can grind past the monetary restrictions of the game.  At least not one I’ve seen.  We’ll just have to see how it goes…

Niches and Peaks

A few days ago over at Kill Ten Rats, Suzina put up a post about Niche MMOs.  It sparked a bit of discussion, and I even threw in a comment, and I just felt it was an idea I wanted to put here and maybe expand on a little.

The fact is, everything starts as a niche.  The first MUD was a niche to the uses of the Internet that existed at the time (hell, MMOs today are still a niche of the overall gaming market, and games are a niche of the entertainment industry, I’m pretty sure books and movies outsell games – for now).  Every iteration of what we would come to call MMOs evolved, taking what came before and tried to improve it.  From MUDs to UO to EQ to WoW (and before anyone gets angry that I left out their favorite game in there, I’m being short on purpose, I realize there are tons of games that fit), each game wanted to be better than the last, and with a few exceptions the one thing most MMOs had in common was a fantasy setting.  There are lots of companies out there that have seen WoW, seen WoW’s numbers, and decided they’d like to be WoW.  But trying to out-WoW WoW is a losing proposition.  If you spend $100 million on a fantasy game and expect to get millions of subscribers, you are going to be disappointed (and probably broke).  In the post WoW fantasy genre, the best you can really hope for is a niche game that fills a need that WoW doesn’t and hold enough players to make a profit.  If you take a look at Lord of the Rings Online, they aren’t trying to beat WoW, but they did take a number of lessons from WoW and then said “What if we built a fantasy game on a well known intellectual property and kept the story content high?”  If you’d like to play a fantasy MMO with heavy story, LotRO is your game.  EQ2 is over in their corner nurturing their niche too.  Even EQ is holding on.  WAR is in the process of recovering, slapped with the realization they didn’t out-WoW WoW on launch.  AoC is in the same boat with WAR.  And since WoW is still climbing, still putting out expansions that expand the player base, its not yet time for someone to take over the crown yet.  WoW, being as successful as it is, needs to falter before that.  In the meantime, the fantasy genre is dead except in the niches.

But fantasy isn’t the only game in town.  EVE Online has been trucking along in the Science Fiction arena for a while, growing slowly and steadily.  If I had to define EVE I’d classify it as the “UO of the Ship-based Sci-Fi genre”.  Right now there are a few new Ship-based Sci-Fi games set to hit the market.  Black Prophecy and Jumpgate Evolution are the two big ones, with Star Trek Online taking a middle ground with both ships and ground game (hopefully they won’t fall into the same pit that Pirates of the Burning Sea did), and I suspect Star Wars: The Old Republic might have some space ships in it (but I also suspect the game will heavily favor the ground based side).  Assuming none of these games screw up too badly, one of them might be the EQ of the genre, breaking open the market.  If that happens, in about five years we’ll probably have a WoW-sized success in the Sci-Fi MMO market (maybe Stargate Worlds will recover enough to make a showing, but I think that might be just wishful thinking on my part), at which point Sci-Fi will be in the same boat that fantasy is currently: one clear “winner” with everyone else either failing or nurturing their niche of the genre.

My thoughts on this aren’t completely pulled out of thin air… just look at other entertainment sectors.  In movies, the out of left field blockbuster doesn’t really happen often.  Usually a blockbluster is preceded by several failed attempts, minor and moderate successes before landing the perfect storm of funding, story, directing and acting to blow the lid off.  After a blockbuster explodes, movies and games experience the same effect: attraction.  Once the market showed that people would pay to see a well done movie about comic book superheroes, all the sudden you had all the big name directors, writers, actors and movie producers looking to cash in.  The difference is that movies leave the theater, they last anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours, and its easy to watch a bunch of movies, a different one every weekend.  In MMOs, every game is like an extended run film of 50 or 60 years ago.  Nowadays, new movies open at the multiplex every weekend, and there are 24 screens, but “back in the day” people went to see Gone With The Wind over and over, and the theaters (which often had only 1 screen, maybe 2) kept it because it made money.  A new movie had to prove it was worth getting rid of a money maker.  That’s what the MMO market is like.  You can’t just release a game and expect people to come running.  The majority of people will only subscribe to one game at a time over the long term, with two subscriptions overlapping as they decide which one to keep.  They might buy your box and use your first “free” month, but you have 30 days to convince them not to go back to their other game, the one they’ve already invested time into, the one they’ve already had fun playing.  In 30 days you have to prove to them that they need to subscribe to your game, and you need to prove to them that if it comes down to a choice they should cancel their other accounts and not your game.

The Free-to-Play model is working to change this.  With a F2P MMO, you only need to convince people to keep your game installed and come back from time to time, and maybe throw a few bucks your way every now and then.  Sure, you’d like for them to dump money in, but (hopefully) your budget and business model is actually designed around a minority of players doing that, with the majority spending nothing or spending rarely.  It remains to be seen if this model with be a success and if it will have a profound effect on the subscription based gaming sector, or just another niche outside of tween-based casual game social spaces.

Anyway, at this point I’m just rambling, so I’ll stop.

Movie Round-Up: May 8th, 2009

Next Day Air:

I didn’t get a chance to see a screening of this one. It does look funny though and I’ll probably see it at some point…

Star Trek:

… but let’s face it, the movie to see this weekend is Star Trek.  I did get to see a screening of this one, and to let you know what I thought, I plan on seeing it again in the theater.

When I first heard they were going to reboot the franchise by heading back to the academy days of the original crew I couldn’t think of it being worth seeing in any way.  Too many reboots have just waived a magic wand, ingored everything that came before and started over, usually poorly.  Of couse, Batman Begins showed that a relaunch could be good, even awesome, and Star Trek follows that mold.  The team behind the new Trek have crafted a tale that starts at the beginning, but in a way that remembers and even honors the past films and TV shows.  In a word, it is fantastic.  Completely worth the price of admission.

Movie Round-Up: May 1st, 2009

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past:

So, the movie is Scrooge, only with a womanizing bachelor instead of a miserly money lender.  His uncle takes up the Marley role and sends this poor guy on a journey through his relationships, past, present and future to show him the true meaning of Christmas… I mean, love.  Overall it was a decent movie despite the predictability of it.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

To be honest, I had little hope at all for this film.  From hearing the changes they made to Deadpool and more, I just assumed this movie would be action packed garbage… and I was right about the action packed, but wrong about the garbage.  It won’t satisfy long term comic fans because of all the changes, but then Wolverine’s origin has always been a muddled mess.  If you loved the other X-Men films, you’ll probably enjoy this too.  Decent, but not great.

Battle for Terra:

I like seeing movies in 3D when the 3D helps the movie and isn’t just a gimmick.  I loved the new Journey to the Center of the Earth, but I hated Fly Me to the Moon.  The reason is because Journey was a good movie even without the 3D, while Fly Me was bad no matter how much 3D they crammed in it.  I haven’t seen Battle for Terra, but the trailers look interesting enough that I think the movie might just be good without the 3D, so adding in 3D ariel combat in on top of that should be awesome.

Remembering GeoCities

If you haven’t heard, GeoCities is being shut down by Yahoo.  Back in 1998, after a short period of putting updates in a finger file on my mIRC client, I decided to build my own web page.  GeoCities was the leader in free web space, so I signed up with them.  I honestly cannot remember the account name I used or the URL I had.  But I remember the page, and somewhere on a CD I burned a few years back I still have some of the graphics I used, though I’m not 100% sure I could find that CD.

The thing I remember most about GeoCities was in trying to comply with their advertising requirements without making my page design look like garbage.  They had various schemes of watermarking and drop downs and popups and floating toolbars and other things, and each of those could be avoided by putting certain branding on your pages.  If you threw a GeoCities graphic on the page some stuff would go away, if you included links more stuff went away, and if you voluntarily put a static version of their ad panel on a page on your site then most of the rest of it would go away… at least until they changed the rules and the hidden branding you put on your site failed to comply and the annoying elements returned.  But then again, GeoCities wasn’t meant for real professional design, at least not for free.

Ultimately, the branding and the ads and the bandwidth limits drove me off to find my own space on the net, a trail of providers and domains that would eventually lead me here.  As much as I disliked working with GeoCities, if there had not been a GeoCities its possible I might have never started a web page, and I’ve enjoyed the last nearly eleven years of posting junk to the Internet.

So, farewell GeoCities, I may have hated you, but I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.  Thanks.

Movie Round-Up: April 24th, 2009

Fighting:

This is the only movie opening this week that I have seen, and I wish I hadn’t.  I’d seen the trailer and I was actually interested in seeing this one, but it just didn’t live up.  Every actor in this film, without exception, has given better performances.  With the exception of one scene this movie lacked emotion, and never made me care about any of the characters.  Largely this is because they did so little to make me want to care.  Why is this kid from Alabama in New York? Don’t worry, they don’t tell you.  Why is there animosity between the street hustlers?  Don’t worry, they don’t tell you.  Most of the movie just feels random and messy and filled with bad dialogue.  The fight scenes are fairly well done those, so kudos to the fight choreographer, but just not worth the money to see in the theater.

Obsessed:

In my opinion, Beyonce is a horrible actress.  She makes every movie she is in worse by simply being in it.  The wife and I have been having fun trying to guess what the twist in this film is going to be.  I will, however, wait until I can watch it for free or something.  I will not encourage Beyonce to continue acting.

The Soloist:

I think Robert Downey Jr. is a great actor.  I’ve never been very interested in Jamie Foxx.  So I’m torn.  Being a drama though, and one that might likely make me shed man-tears (the rarest and sweetest kind), I just don’t have much desire to see this on the big screen.  But it will definitely make it into the rental queue on Netflix.

Good News, Bad News

The good news is that I am writing.  The bad news is that most of it isn’t for Script Frenzy.

See, I had this idea.  I was going to take a graphic novel and write a screenplay out of it.  Its actually coming along quite well, but a lot more slowly than I had hoped.  Ultimately, since the graphic novel is from the early 80’s there is actually very little dialogue that I can steal directly from the text.  Did people actually talk like that?  Did people actually think street thugs and criminals talked like that?  Wow…  Anyway, there are also plot elements I can’t use, either because they don’t make sense, or because they can’t be made to make sense in 120 pages or less, or… well…

Oh hell, its not like I need to be secretive… the graphic novel I am working on taking to screenplay is The Punisher: Circle of Blood.  In my opinion, taking the Punisher to screen should be done in three parts: An origin story, then Circle of Blood, and then Suicide Run.  The reasons for this are simple.  The origin story, or at least one set near the beginning of his career sets up the character and puts him on the road of killing bad guys.  Circle of Blood involves Frank dealing with the consequences of his actions.  Suicide Run puts Frank in a place where he has to seriously consider whether he’s actually helping anymore.

The 1989 Dolph Lundgren film was a travesty.  The 2004 Thomas Jane film actually told the origin well, but it changed the origin a lot and the villain was lame.  The 2008 Ray Stevenson film actually got Frank as close to right as I think they could, but then they ruined the film with a terrible misuse of Jigsaw, horrible accents and dumb ultra-violence.  However, when it came to approaching my take on Circle of Blood, I didn’t want to be stuck with the legacy of these films, and yet I also didn’t want to ignore them.  The first scene in my script doesn’t exist in the book.  My version opens in a courtroom where the DA is laying out his closing arguments against Frank Castle, the Punisher.  Its important because this DA’s monologue touches on the idea that legend and rumor are a factor, and it is the job of police detectives to sift through that to the truth.  This opens the door to allowing the audience to feel like maybe they haven’t seen 100% of the truth so far.  That maybe the other three films were just versions of the truth, stories told and retold, much of the details being filled in by the tellers since real witnesses are few and far between.  It even opens the film up to allow a fourth actor into the role of Frank if that is something that has to happen.

The next major hurdle for me was in trying to decide if I needed Jigsaw.  Circle of Blood makes use of that character, but the makers of the 2008 film saw fit to kill him off.  So now I am managing two versions of the script going forward.  One is Circle of Blood without Jigsaw, which just seems a little off, and the other is Circle of Blood with Jigsaw’s introductory scene including a jab at the previous film as Frank says, “I thought you were dead” and Jigsaw replies (without a lame cartoony New York accent), “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” alluding back to the courthouse scene as well as setting Jigsaw up to be more than the semi-brainless thug of the 2008 movie by actually having him quote Mark Twain.  I really like the second version, but I’m not sure other people will be so ready to buy it.

The last hurdle is in taking some of the extraordinarily fantastic action of the comic and trying to ground it more firmly in reality without losing the spectacle of it.

All of this, as I said, has been tougher than I first imagined, mostly because it had been years since I’d actually read Circle of Blood and I didn’t realize how much of it I wasn’t going to be able to just take from the page.  Due to this, I’ve found myself wandering off and writing other things while I ponder decisions.  I’m afraid I won’t make 100 pages by the end of the month, but this has been a good experience none the less, and I plan to try to finish this screenplay even if I miss the deadline.