Author: Jason

Paradise Lost… and Found!

Gaming

No, I won’t be talking about the upcoming game based on Dante’s Inferno… not yet anyway.  Instead, I’m talking about Burnout Paradise.  I’ve had the game for quite some time.  I finished the original game and all its online challenges, and even did some ranked racing (I think I got as high as 150 on the ranks at one point), and then I stopped playing.  Not because the game was boring, but that other games were new.  I kept coming back to Paradise City though.

Recently, the guys over at Criterion have been putting out new cars for the old game, and I have to say that I discovered that the right new cars can make the game feel like new again.

Sure, its still doing the same old races and the same old challenges, but I get quite a kick out of doing them all as Marty McFly, Michael Knight, a Ghostbuster or a law dodging resident of Hazzard county.  And the newest vehicles, the toy cars and bikes, make me giggle.

Much like the ongoing DLC for games like Rock Band, simple additions for small prices can totally revitalize a game.  With Burnout, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and even new DLC adopters like Fable II and Fallout 3, it looks like more and more companies are trying to lengthen the life of their products without having to put a new box on the shelf down at Best Buy.  And I, for one, think this is a great thing… well, as long as they don’t start putting out “half games” they plan to complete with pay DLC later.

Watching the Watchers of Watchmen

Reviews

Have you seen Watchmen yet?  No?  Is the reason that you read some reviews and decided against it based on all the negative things they said?

One thing I have always talked about in my life is managing expectations.  Many times when people don’t like a movie or book or some other form of entertainment or experience, the blame can be laid at the fact they went in to it expecting it to be monumental and moving, “the best ever”.  With lofty expectations like that, rarely do those movies or books or whatever actually live up to them.  So, let’s take a couple paragraphs and talk about how you can review the reviews in order to distill what you need to know before deciding if you want to see Watchmen before you let someone else’s opinion get you to dismiss it out of hand.

If the review you read spent more than half of its words pointing out the flaws of the adaptation from the book to the movie, you might be able to completely ignore them.  First, did you read the book?  If not, then why do you care where the movie failed to convey the exact same message as the book?  You aren’t reading the book, you are going to see the movie.  The only thing that matters is if the movie is self consistant and works as a movie.  If you did read the book, are you expecting a shot-for-frame transfer of the book from page to screen, or are you looking for an adaptation?  Adaptation, by definition, means change.  Books are hundreds of pages long.  Movie scripts tend to translate as 1 page of script is equal to 1 minute of film.  Watchmen, as a comic, is over 400 pages long.  And while Watchmen the movie is nearly 3 hours long, 3 hours is only about 180 pages.  The movie would need to be around 7 hours long to faithfully translate the book to the screen.  So, when you go to see the movie, expect changes.  To be honest, it is best to approach Watchmen the movie as being “inspired by” the book.  If you love the book so much that you can’t possibly accept any changes made during its translation between mediums, then you probably should avoid the movie.

If the review you read spent a lot of time comparing Watchmen to Iron Man and Spider-man and other comic book films, it shows that the reviewer entered the theater with the wrong expectations.  Watchmen is not, and never has been, a story about spandex super heroes saving the day.  When Alan Moore wrote the book, his intention was to take all the current super hero elements, put them in a “real world” type scenario and turn them of their ear.  Its horribly violent, the characters are spectacularly flawed, the world is a cynical depiction of the worst aspects of humanity.  All of those things are what made the story so great and so shocking back when it first appeared.  Twenty years have passed, and elements of Moore’s grim and gritty vision of super heroes have rubbed off in all corners of the genre, but his vision is still much more bleak than just about everything that has come since.  Spider-man accidentally let his Uncle Ben die, and his life is spent trying to make up for that mistake.  Tony Stark built weapons that killed people, and as Iron Man he’s trying to undo the damage he has done.  These characters have flaws, but they are nothing compared to the Comedian or Rorschach from Watchmen.  Most comic books have characters who are driven by their one (or two or three) flaws to be better people and do good.  Watchmen is mostly about people who are a bundle of flaws who are driven by their one (or two or three) redeeming qualities to try to make the world a better place.  If you want to see a movie like Spider-man or Iron Man, don’t go see Watchmen.  It is just not that kind of film.

Also, the movie is more dramatic than action driven, so if you get bored when people stop fighting and start talking, Watchmen probably isn’t the movie for you.  Watchmen is more of a thriller or mystery than an action film, much like the book.  The story begins with the death of a former hero, the Comedian, and it follows from there as Rorschach tries to find out why someone would do it.  This isn’t the formation of a super hero team riding out to save the world… this is the remains of a dilapidated hero team who have been told we don’t want them to save the world anymore.

It may sound like I’m apologizing for the film.  People often mistake my “managing expectations” talk for that.  I just hate it when people say that anything categorically and globally failed just because it didn’t meet their personal expectations.  When I go to buy things from Amazon, I always read the negative reviews first, because someone pointing out their expectations and the failure of a product to meet those expectations gives me far more information about how I might react to the product than someone gushing about how awesome it is.  From reading the negative reviews of Watchmen, I determined that it wasn’t exactly the book, and it wasn’t a typical spandex super hero movie, and those two facts are all I need to frame my expectations before walking into the darkened theater.

In my opinion, and from my point of view, Watchmen the movie perfectly captures the tone and spirit of the book, even if it has to deviate in order to make a watchable running time.  It isn’t the best film ever made, but it is far far far from the worst.  And in the end, I enjoyed it quit a bit.

Surfacing

Random Thoughts

With my last post being on February 26th, meaning that it has been over two weeks since my last post, I guess you can say that I went dark, or underground.  Of course, prolonged absences are not unusual for me and my weblog.  I’ve done months before.  But sometimes things happen…

So what happened?

Well, I got a job.  Nice place, good work.  I’m back at a small company again, and let me say that after four years working at BellSouth/AT&T I don’t think I ever want to go back to a giant corporation again.  Too much politics and middle management.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved my work, and the immediate team of people I worked with, and at the end of every segment of the project when the people who had been giving us hell and ulcers for months finally broke down and said they liked the work and looked forward to using it and copious rounds of attaboys for all it was sweet… but the bureaucracy of meetings and playing the blame game and jockeying around all the folks who want to make sure they get all of the credit with none of the responsibility… well… to be blunt, fuck that.  There are only so many times you can have someone hand you a problem they spent no time looking into and after you spend a few hours or days digging through it you discover that not only is it not your responsibility but that the only person with the ability and authority to fix it is the guy who passed it to you before you want to strangle someone.  But I’m out of that now, and I hope never to go back.  Getting a new job, though, does mean a bit of a learning curve as I feel out the new folks and the new company, get up to speed on the products and projects, so the first couple or three weeks are always a bit of a cram-fest.  After nearly four months of being unemployed, working feels good, especially in this economy.

On a non-work related note, a place where I normally hang out has become a place I don’t want to hang out anymore.  Have you ever had a group of people that you liked to be around, except for one guy?  Its always that one guy, the one who seems to want to be a part of the group, but doesn’t seem to know how to do it.  He joins in every conversation and drives everyone away, or into fits of anger, as he insists that he knows more or better than everyone else, despite repeated showings that he clearly does not.  Well, one of my favorite places to go has one of those guys, and in the past I have had varying levels of success in just ignoring him or putting up with his crap, but recently he just pushed a few too many of my buttons a few too many times, and as much as I love the rest of the people I just can’t handle the anger and frustration that I feel in having to deal with this monumental douchebag on a daily basis.  So, my choices are to continue to go there and feel pissed off all the time, or stop going.  It is depressing.  Perhaps I’ll return there after a nice long stay away.

All in all, however, life is good.  And I’ll be back to posting more soon enough.  I’m even going to bring back movie reviews since my idea for doing a movie review site didn’t really pan out like I hoped.  You’d think being unemployed would equate to having more free time… but looking for a job in a shitty economy is hard work and more thoroughly exhausting than actually having a job.

That Which You Must Do

Gaming

Time is running out. This describes both my entry for the February Blogs of the Round Table, and also the subject of my entry.

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

So, despite two people already choosing this one, I’m taking Living Epic’s entry on Oedipus.  Only, I’m just stripping a couple ideas out of it and mixing it with a few thoughts stolen from other games and hopefully producing a design that is unique.

What I’m stripping out of his design is in two parts.  First is the idea of a fixed timeline.  Now, this isn’t new to games.  Anyone who has played Dead Rising has dealt with this: the helicopter arrives in three days, exactly, and if you aren’t there you get left behind.  But what makes this different in the second idea: that you are not the main character of the main story.  Imagine if Dead Rising wasn’t about Frank getting on the helicopter in three days, but that someone else had to be on the helicopter, and Frank didn’t matter.  In Roger’s Oedipus, you don’t play Oedipus, or even one of the other named characters in the play.  He has a fixed timeline where some version of the story will happen even if you do nothing, but you can affect the outcome by participating.

My game based around these two elements is set in a medieval world.  At the beginning, you choose a character, of which several will be available, ranging from the village drunk to a member of the city watch, from a peasant farmer to a wealthy noble.  Each character has a brief story in which they are introduced to the other people in their immediate lives, shown how little they matter to the world around them, and informed of the upcoming coronation of the new king.  The old king died, and his son, just eighteen, is set to take the throne in three days.  Just as the player finishes the introduction of their character, a haggard old wizard appears before them.  “There isn’t time,” he says, “but time is all we have.”  He reaches for the player and upon his touch a burst of energy flows from the wizard into the player.  The wizard’s voice fills the player’s mind, “There exists a fragile balance, and there are things that must be done.  The boy must become king.”  The wizard dies and the player is given access to The Timeline.

What the player learns is that they have gained the ability to affect time in two ways.  Firstly, they can open the whole timeline and send themselves back to any decision point within the game, even all the way back to where the wizard lays at their feet.  Second, in a Braid-like fashion, they can reverse time backwards at any time, up to a few minutes.  Like it is used in Braid, the purpose of the second ability is to let a player quickly be able to undo immediate actions.  Did you punch a guard when you should have hidden from him?  The purpose of the first is to be able to jump all the way back to any major decision point (quest objective) and proceed from there, wiping out everything you’ve done since then.

There are stories going on around the player, events that if the player doesn’t interfere will happen on a schedule.  If a player chooses, they can ignore the entire rest of the game, follow the boy who is to become king around, protect him from any plots against him, and win the game in the most boring way possible.  Or… the player can explore the whole city, undertaking tasks and quests and unfolding smaller stories.  Periodically, the wizard’s voice will tell the player of an event that must happen.  “The chef should cook the chicken.”  It is left open to the player how they get the chef to make chicken instead of the steak dinner he is planning.  You can steal the steaks.  You can buy the spices from the spice seller before the chef can get them.  Physically threaten the chef?  Each character (the drunk, the noble, the peasant, etc) will have different avenues available to them for each puzzle.  With any event that does not directly stop the boy from becoming king, failure doesn’t lose the game, but simply puts the player down another avenue.  For example, if you don’t stop the chef and he cooks the steaks, later you might get an objective like “The steak might kill the boy.”  In this case, you can either prevent him from eating the steak in some way, or try to discover why the steak shouldn’t be eaten and make sure the steak is safe.  In addition to the main storyline, each player character will have their own stories.  Perhaps the farmer peasant wishes to marry the butcher’s daughter.

The game ends with the coronation ceremony.  No matter who gets made king.  The prologue of the game will be crafted out of the successes, failures and choices you made along the way.  If the boy becomes king but you didn’t reveal the conspirators, he may not be safe.  If you are the noble and you steal the steaks from the chef, the drunk is blamed and is thrown in prison on charges of theft.  Did you leave him there?  Did you admit to the theft to set him free?  If you’ve played Marvel Ultimate Alliance, you’ve seen this sort of thing, as at the end of the game the “future” is told by the Watcher based on the results of your game and all its optional quests.

And there you have my idea… an open, sandbox type world, with personal and external story lines, all of which happen on a fixed timeline, and the end of the game is built out of what you did during the fixed time.

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Dice Games

Gaming

I’ve been thinking about game design a bunch recently.  Most of it is MMO related in a “What kind of MMO would I really want to play?” sort of way as I mull over all the reasons why I have lost interest in pretty much all the MMOs on the market right now.  But outside of that, I’ve also been thinking about dice games.

A post over on Wil Wheaton’s blog reminded me of the game Button Men, and it got me to thinking about games I could make out of the giant bag of dice that I own.  (Dragon*Con, I went to a booth and bought a bucket of dice for like $20, its all in a Crown Royal bag now.)  So, as I’m thinking about what I can craft out of my dice and other things around the house, I got curious about the existence of other dice games.  In my searching of the Intertubes, I found tons of games that use traditional 6-sided dice (some that use many many of them), but very few that actually made use of 4-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided dice (the rest of the tradition role playing game set), and that is what I am after.

I’m going to keep working out some ideas of my own, and maybe even post them here.  But in the meantime… know of any good dice based games?  Let me know…

The Twenty-fifth Century

Random Thoughts

Thanks to Netflix and their streaming through the Xbox 360 feature, I’ve been watching the complete series of Buck Rogers.  The show is awesome… -ly bad.  The concept is there, but they threw in all this weird alien and spy stuff that detracts from all that the show could be.  I don’t blame them for making the show the way they did.  It ran from 1979 to 1981.

But it gets me to thinking… if I were to be in charge of production and make that show now, what would I do?

The first thing I’d do is take a cue from Battlestar Galactica in that a science fiction show can be serious.  I’d craft the tale like this: Buck Rogers is an astronaut, and while the first manned mission to Mars is being prepped, other scientists have been working on solutions for deeper space travel.  The field of cryonics has advanced and while tests have proven it can work on Earth and even in orbit, the final human test is that of prolonged space suspension.  Buck’s turn in the rotation has come up and his mission is to take a craft into space, park it in an orbit around the moon, and then seal himself in the cryonics chamber.  After one year, Buck is to be remotely revived and make his way home.

While Buck’s tale is the foreground story, in the background elements of global problems are evident.  Global warming, overpopulation and starvation.  The Mars mission is becoming more important as initial studies of water and other elements found on the planet make it possible to terraform it, but it needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Buck’s launch happens and he makes his way to moon orbit.  Shortly before settling in the ship suffers a mechanical malfunction and begins losing its oxygen.  It is decided that Buck needs to seal himself in the cryo-chamber to save his life and that another craft will be sent to recover him as soon as possible.

500 years later, Buck’s craft, long since off its lunar orbit, is discovered by a salvage crew working the “Earth Junk Ring”, a collection of satellites, crafts and other objects left to hang in orbit around the planet.  Reawakened on Earth, Buck discovers that after he was frozen a few small wars broke out, mostly over the need for food, and that his rescue mission was lost in the shuffle of taking more resources to the Mars missions.  Eventually, years later, a private organization did send up a shuttle to look for him and didn’t find him in lunar orbit.  (Buck learns from his own computer readouts that another failure caused one of his attitude jets to fire, altering his course and sending him tumbling through space.)  Eventually, after ecologic and economic disasters and more small wars, large wars broke out.  Everything collapsed.  More than a hundred years later when countries began to reform out of the rubble, many of them turned to computers and logical models for decision making.  Birthing schedules based on workforce needs and food supplies, etc.  The human race are not slaves to the machines, but they are cared for and controlled by them.

At the time of Buck’s awakening, Earth, or at least the city state he has found himself in, is finally seeing constructive advancement into retaking the damaged parts of the world, the wastelands created by chemical and nuclear warfare, and looking at moving into space again, mainly in an effort to reconnect with the lost Mars colonies.

The crux of the series would be Buck learning about and from the mistakes of the past, while the people around him learn about all the things they lost and the control they’ve given up to the computers.  The world is full of people who have only known logic and survival, and Buck is from a world where many people never thought about survival.

I wouldn’t want to have this series run very long.  In fact, a couple or three twelve episode seasons would probably do just fine (or even be too much) to breath life back into humanity, settle differences, and reconnect with the “Martians”.  You could even end the series with Buck, who has finally come to terms with his 500 year shunt through time but still feeling like this isn’t his world, captaining the first deep space exploration cryo shuttle headed for a distant star.

Anyway… those are my thoughts on the subject… but what do I know?

Good Reads

Random Thoughts

Several of my friends have been using Good Reads for a while now, and I finally decided to sign up.

This is me.

I’ll still be keeping my book list and reviews here on this blog as well, but hopefully Good Reads will turn up a recommendation or two for things to read in the future.

100 Sit-ups

Random Thoughts

It has been a bit over a month since I started my most recent run at getting in shape.  Phase 1 was 100 Push-ups, and at this point I am actually doing my 100 within ten to fifteen minutes.  I’m still a bit away from my goal of going it in three minutes or less, but I have definitely seen huge improvements.  So, I feel it is time to institute Phase 2: 100 Sit-ups.

Now, doing sit-ups is both going to be easier and harder for me.  My abdominal muscles are actually in pretty good shape… however, I have cleverly hidden them under a plump gut.  See, I actually use my abs quite a bit, getting on and off the couch, lifting things incorrectly, and other stuff, much more than I use the muscles in my arms (as a computer geek, my arms spend a lot of time resting on the desk while my fingers do all the real work).  That said, I did my first 100 Sit-ups last night in well under an hour, probably less than half an hour, but they were more crunches than sit-ups.  That gut covering my six-pack does a decent job of preventing me from completing the full sit-up (and I can’t touch my toes either).

I see getting through Phase 2 much more quickly than Phase 1, so I already need to start looking for a Phase 3… I’m thinking it is going to be some form of cardio… I do own an elliptical machine, so I might as well start using it.  The key here is that I am not currently in any life-threatening danger, but I do want to make sure I never am, so I want to add and make changes to my life a little at a time.  Small changes are easier to keep than drastic ones.

The Next LEGO Adventure

Gaming

When I first saw and played LEGO Star Wars, I was stunned.  It was just such a great idea.  Sure, it was tied in to a product, but taking the Star Wars LEGO sets and allowing players to run through the story of the new Star Wars movies was inspired.  Then Traveller’s Tales followed it up with LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy and it was also quite awesome.  Having now also played LEGO Indiana Jones and LEGO Batman, I have seen the full arc of their evolution in this particular medium.  From here, looking back at the first LEGO Star Wars, I can see how the non-verbal LEGO humor has grown and made later games even more enjoyable.  And with LEGO Batman they advanced in their storytelling since they were no longer adapting from a movie script to a game, but creating their own stories.

So, given that I love these games, I get disappointed when conversations of these games turn into listing all the other movies and superheroes that people wish they would turn into a LEGO game.

Personally, I think that Traveller’s Tales has “been there, done that”.  LEGO Batman showed that they could craft their own stories when given characters, and I think I would rather see them evolve if and when they make another LEGO game.  Rather than saying “Ooo! LEGO Superman would be awesome!” like most folks (and it could be, don’t get me wrong, and given that Warner Bros. bought Traveller’s Tales, a string of DC Universe inspire games might well be coming), I look instead to LEGOs lines of products and imagine what game I’d want to see crafted out of LEGO sets with little or no existing back story.

When I think of the next LEGO adventure, and what I would want to spend my hard earned $50 or $60 on, I’d much prefer to tackle a new genre all together.  We’ve had the Star Wars space opera (twice), and we’ve had the 1930’s adventure, and we’ve had the modern spandex superhero… next, I want to see them tackle fantasy.  They could still inject their humor, poking fun at Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft and other popular fantasy realms and elements, all while building their own lore of humans and dwarves versus trolls and skeletons.

That, in my humble opinion, would be awesome.

Yar’s Revenge

Gaming

Today is the Superbowl, which in recent years (about as long as I can remember) is little more than a program about advertising that gets repeatedly interrupted by a football game, and given that I present you with a comparison of advertisements.

This is why I game…

… this is why I hang my head in shame…