A Massively Rhetorical Experience

Following the close of the semester, I went ahead and reactivated WoW. I know, I know, all my criticisms are the same, but the problem is that I found myself frustrated, when discussing the game with other people, that I hadn’t made it to the new end game. I’ve said it to several people who have played and who have taken their time leveling: the end game is the heart of World of Warcraft. Most of the time spent in the game is spent in end game, when a character has his or her powers and abilities at maximum and then is working to better one’s playing ability and teamwork (while collecting better and better loot, but that’s another story). In terms of the classic FPS, Doom really doesn’t become the game it should be until all weapons are made available and the challenge scales to that level of weapon ability (and death match is introduced, giving the game its so-successful social element).

WAR (which is still inactive, not because I don’t want to play again but because I’m only going to play one of these games at a time), because of its Tier system, isn’t quite the same, but that’s another point. I do like WAR‘s design over WoW‘s in that in WAR, your contribution to the overall war between the factions matters even when you’re doing it at level 1. In WoW, not only is the war between the factions pretty much just a side element, but it’s clear from early on that what is going on at the end game is more important than what is going on at the lower levels.  The ability of the higher levels to come support the lower levels (with the exception of BGs) keeps this focus on getting to the end game as a constant goal (with the willful exception of perfection a twink, but that only exists in the context of BGs and is usually done once one has reached the end game and is looking to perfect one’s play abilities with a reduced set of abilities).

Anyway, so I’m back, attempting (somewhat half-heartedly) to get to the new endgame with Kruggin, my priest. I’m not even touching Kurrager, my hunter, because this process is so far annoying enough with only one toon to worry about. Part of that annoyance, which I resolved last night, was Blizzard’s impossibly dumb decision to take away a significant portion of the game because, as posted, they wanted me ” enjoy the scenery.” I’m talking, of course, about their lazy design decision to remove the flying mount until level 77.

I’ve written on this before, but I think it’s important to come back and comment on it again, because it speaks to some really frustrating design decisions on Blizzard’s part. What are they?

1. Assuming that travelling, aka “the running game” portion of any MMO, is part of the enjoyment of an MMO. Yes, I’m glad you’ve made some bold graphical decisions, Blizz, and yes, I can admit that your zone design remains wonderful, but I’m not playing the game to look at stuff. I could play Second Life if that were my goal. No, it’s the level design with a context that matters, which is why the design of an instance is SO much more important than the design of a zone (unless that design relates to a quest). Travelling in a MMO isn’t fun. It’s tedious, boring, repetitive; it represents all the worst things that are possible in an MMO. It’s why Blizz changed the Meeting Stones at instances into summoning points rather than ways to enter a queue – they recognized that the instances are the real content that one wants to explore (and note that most instances are now pretty darn small in comparison to what preceeded them. Compare Mauradon to the Nexus). The faster one can get through the travelling and to the real content, the more enjoyable the experience will be. If there are to be obstacles to one’s travelling, they should be meaningful ones.

2. The lack of flying mounts takes Blizz back to its wonderful “go kill X named mob, which of course is behind a cluster of unnamed mobs that you must fight to get to X named mob and then to get back from X named mob to the quest giver” quest design. Of course, one could say that such things exist in instances as well, and they do, but at least in an instance they have a reason for being there (after all, the player is invading a defended lair) and typically, after you kill something, it stays dead. Sometimes, it’s even more meaningful, as it is in the Steam Vaults instance where defeating bosses makes it possible to open the door to the final boss. It’s not a complex mechanic, but it’s a meaningful mechanic. Killing your way through ten mobs with the same name who are just wandering around to get to their boss (who also seems to be wandering around for some reason, although it would seem that he or she could afford shelter), killing that boss, and then killing the same ten mobs with the same name to get out of the area (because, of course, they respawned), gets really boring. Flying mounts made this mechanic pointless (except when meaningful obstacles like flak cannons, caves, and other elements were added) because a player with a flying mount could hop over the cluster of same-named mobs and get to the purpose of the quest. Not only that, it made level design more interesting because of the challenge of designing an area for all dimensions of movement.

3. The return to previous design represents laziness on Blizz’s part. Although I’m now beginning to see the really good parts of Lich King (how areas open up, how the world does change for players who have completed quests), the first two starter zones  (the Fjord and Borean) are really just more of the pre-BC style content, with a few interesting variants thrown in (surf that harpoon!). The instances and the quest leading up to the instances are interesting, but for the most part, the two zones are full of repetitive kill-X-X-times quests, and Blizz could have done so much better. How? Well, the smartest thing that Blizz could have done would be to do what it does best: see what others have done, steal it, and make it better (the entire Orcs vs Humans concept was, of course, ‘inspired’ by Warhammer). What game does this better than Blizz? D&D Online, a game that I haven’t played that much of it but was fun in a trial three months or so ago (not fun enough to get me off WoW at the time, though). D&D Online features solo (or group, depending of the level of difficulty selecting) instances that allow for leveling to occur in a meaningful (if oh-so-slow) way, but also remove the worst elements of the kill-named-X quests that I discussed in point 2. Even Asheron’s Call 2 used a version of this (though not enough at launch to keep people interested – the game was so unfinished at release). What would it have meant had Blizz introduced solo or duo short (REALLY SHORT) instances into Lich King and used these as the bodies for most of the quests (including returning to the instances to find things changed by the last quest, IE reinforcements arrived based on the killing of X unnamed mobs before)? Travelling could have remained largely improved by flying mounts and there would have still been an authentic reason for questing to work without mounts.

These reasons, kinda briefly, explain why I think Blizz’s decision to take away flying mounts until 77 basically demonstrates a lot of laziness and return to pre-BC style content that wasn’t necessary. Instead, they could have never taken them from players, been bold, and combined them with the bold decisions they made in other areas (including the Wrathgate quest series, which was awesome).

This review is a bit late, I know, well, a lot late since this movie is basically disappearing from theaters (and it should be). I was one of two people in the theater this afternoon watching this schizophrenic, bizzare, oh-my-god-horrified-hyperviolent racist movie without a soul this afternoon, and the other person in the theater was my friend who had agreed to come along (sorry, Aladin!).  I’m going to keep this review pretty brief, because the film doesn’t really need that much feedback (it will, shortly, disappear from theaters, though the amount of violence in this thing might earn it a spot in cult fame…. though I hope that it won’t).

First, I’m going to focus on the good news: unlike Thomas Jane, who never really seemed to get into the Frank Castle character (his character seemed like a version of Thomas Jane for the most part), Ray Stevenson gets the part right, at least from what I want the Punisher, if he must exist in cinema at all, to be. His Frank Castle is a psychopath, a man who has traded in his identity for this archetype, this non-being, this all-consuming thing that is the Punisher. He acts and feels, but above all he mourns – for his family, for his own morality, for the world where his violence wasn’t necessary. He is the mythic haunted warrior, doing what he thinks he must but still barely functioning with his awareness of his acts. No matter how horrible the violence was, I believed that Stevenson’s Castle was capable of committing those horrible acts without forgetting the horror of those acts. Although his Castle is clearly not a ‘good’ guy and there is no real way to cheer him on during this film, Stevenson gives his Castle the necessary emotional depth that could have made this film work if it had stopped trying to be a superhero movie and instead accepted itself as a character study with action.

What I mean by a character study is this: there’s a point in The Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne says something to the effect that he can no longer be Batman because he believes that to defeat the Joker, he will have to surrender the core principle which he knows keeps him separate from the criminals he pursues: his refusal to take a life. The Punisher is the character on the other side of that coin, the man who crosses that line in a horribly pragmatic way (which does appear in the film when he destroys the acrobatic trio who exist for no real reason other than to make a plot connection) and accepts the damnation he feels will come at the end of it. Spending time with that figure, that monster – because, above all, let us understand that the Punisher is a monstrous man – with an actor capable of inhabiting the monster… for all its problems, there is something compelling there. It’s why Downfall is such an amazing if troubling movie despite having one of the greatest monsters of all at its heart.

And that’s what leads me to what is really terrible about Punisher: War Zone, why it’s more than simply a bad movie but something that is almost cinematic scum, a monster of ignorance and stupidity in its own right. It’s a movie that doesn’t know what it is about, and most of that goes back to the writing. Kurt Sutter, the first writer (and whose script is still probably the core of the best parts of the movie, given what else he’s written), refused to have his name attached to it because of the shape of the film’s final script. And I think that’s the smart move, because for some reason, this movie attempts to excuse Castle – and that’s now what this film is about. Castle isn’t meant to be redeemed or excused for his actions; he doesn’t excuse himself. He knows the line he has crossed and cannot forgive himself for it. He pushes himself away from the rest of humanity not just for security, but because he knows he is now monstrous. But the script somehow thinks it must come back and redeem him and make him a superhero. He is not.

First, their script gives the audience the psuedo-family, the daughter and wife of the FBI agent he mistakenly kills in the first act of the movie. At first, he attempts to redeem himself by giving the family money he has taken from criminals; when confronted by the widow (Julie Benz, who must, after working as Dexter‘s squeeze for three seasons with more to come, be really tired of being the love object of psychopaths), he recognizes that she knows how to shoot and aims the gun for his heart. These are scenes that feel natural to the character and the film because these are the actions of a haunted man who knows that the moral ground of his ‘war’ is quicksand. He wants to die, just as much as he wants to avenge the wrongs of “the corrupt.” His life is the death urge in a sloppy, pop-Freudian way. But later, when the daughter for some reason decides that Castle is her new father figure and grabs his hand to say, “Don’t go,” there is nothing more false except for Benz’s final line (“We talked about you, my husband and I. He said you were one of the good guys.”). The clear attempt is to recast Castle as the Family Man, which is what he is before his family is killed and the central ethos of his character (such as it is, since it is destroyed by his actions). The problem is that Castle certainly knows that whatever the Punisher is, he’s far beyond an understandable if not acceptable vengeance-seeking father. He is not one of the good guys, and all these cheap attempts to make him into one come off as dishonest and false. They ruin the horrifying element of the violence, removing any social value it could have possibly had (showing how violence dealt ruins the one who deals it) and somehow attempting to sanctify it.

Even worse, this concept of the Family Man Frank Castle gets rendered into something far, far worse: a symbol of middle-class white American values reacting against the dreaded Other. When Jigsaw (played by Dominic West, who like the film can’t really get a sense of his character, since he goes from serious to over-the-top) becomes a clown version of himself and goes off to recruit his ‘army’ for the “Punisher party” ‘climax’ of the film, he goes around, talking in front of a projection of an American flag, spouting cliches, talking to racist stereotypes of other human beings, building an army of the Others that make certain people who watch Fox News a lot very, very afraid (and I’m not talking about all Fox News viewers, but there is a faction who sympathized with the woman at the McCain rally who described Obama as an “arab” and got a thrill out of Ann Coulter saying “B. Hussein Obama” over and over again). The whole battle sequence, then, instead of being about Frank Castle the monster against Jigsaw, another monster inextricably tied to Castle’s violence, becomes some distorted form of race warrior akin to the Death Wish films (which, of course, does have a lot of connections to the Punisher character). It’s almost unwatchable at this point, and anyone who simply is thrilled by that really, really needs to think about what their media is negotiating for them a lot more. There are very few films that are as obvious in their racism as Punisher: War Zone is during its ‘climatic’ battle.

I’ve written far more than I intended, so I’ll sign off there. I’m not going to give it a rating because I don’t think it deserves one. I don’t think even a single star captures how much could have been right about this film but how much is so terribly, terribly wrong. In short, I think that the best thing I can say is that I saw this film so you don’t have to. It is, quite simply, a toxic film that gets worse the more I think about it.

After reading this apologetic updated post written by Helios about the now-infamous “there’s no such thing as free software” comment and seizure of Linux distribution disks by a teacher, I’m left with some sympathy for the teacher and the situation, but I don’t think my reaction is quite as sympathetic as much of the community seems to be feeling. I understand that teachers have a tough, difficult job, but part of the reason they HAVE such a tough, difficult job comes from their basic status as normalizers who work, typically, from the middle-class white worldview and believe that obedience to – rather than pragmatic alliance with – the system that is their understanding of “the real world” is an important attitude to develop in their students.

The reason the students were in the corner, laughing over the spinning cube of a Linux distribution, is that they were engaged in their own knowledge construction, a knowledge that they knew didn’t fit into the expectations of school… and that’s the part that really gets to me. Why didn’t the students believe this knowledge was just as valid for school as all the other things they do in the classroom? What kind of pedagogy is being practiced when students actively feel that something as valid and important as learning what they can learn through playing with free software (and not only the technical level, but the obvious political science lesson this experience should have taught them and their teacher) is rebelling? Maybe the answer is obvious (I mean, I loved computers too during that rebellion period, which may have never ended considering the work I did this semester), but why does it have to be?

Her actions were not just ignorance on her part about “the tech world”; they were her striking out from a whole world view of order and control.  And that, more than anything, is what is worth disrupting and why it was important that her ignorance, even at the cost of emotional distress, was worth ‘throwing to the wolves.’ I’m not saying she’s a bad person, but her reaction was ‘bad’ in that it is sympomatic of an entire system of control that isn’t ‘education’ in the way that matters the most.

I just got finished watching the new version of Death Race, a film about which Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post had this to say (after calling the film a knuckledragger, which seems to be really more about class definitions of masculinity than anything else):

“The saddest thing about Death Race is that it has nothing to say about the present. It isn’t just a remake of a 1975 film, it’s a time warp back to 1975, to the anxieties sparked by the gas crisis, rampant inflation, woman’s lib and the decay of American industrial might. A remake might ask, what are today’s anxieties? And how can a death race address them? But this isn’t a film that asks questions.

I think, after watching the film, that he’s wrong. Given the recent television representations of mainstream masculinity (from Howard Stern, The Man Show, Man Caves, Man vs. Food, Jeff Dunham [who draws much of his popular humor from operating within a framework of middle-class white male Americans, including mocking previous generations of middle class white males, lower class white male Americans, and non-white males with what should be really offensive stereotypes but which seem to be accepted by his audience], Hell Date, Kanye West’s videos, and even, yes, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, as well as all commentators on his show [note that Rob Riggle is getting rewarded for his hypermasculine character with his own show on CBS]), much of those same questions are still being asked, still being worked through. I think that Kennicott is working a bit too much from his own habitus if he thinks that people AREN’T still concerned with the loss of America’s industrial power. It’s a lot like the senators who could, with some reservations perhaps, hand out $700 billion to a banking industry that makes nothing physical, but who call (something rightfully) the automotive industry, with its actual understandable product, a ‘dinosaur’? (See Jon Stewart’s plea to just give the Big Three the money they want because at least we’ll get cars out of the deal.)

Another reviewer, I can’t remember whom, stated that unlike the first version of this film, it lacked any social commentary. I disagree. This version, although it buried its commentary deeper into the surface form of a “standard action movie” (which, given what has come out recently, seems to have disappeared), carries even more commentary, some – perhaps most – of which is certainly problematic, carrying (as Fight Club does) an ever-present touch of misogyny (and, though it is less complicated, misandry). But it also complicates an understanding of misogyny, an understanding of the constructions of masculinity, misogyny, and misandry at work in the world of middle/lower class white males (and, possibly, other groups, though if it does so, it does it through the lens of a white male).

I’m not certain what I think of the film yet, but I think it’s certainly one that deserves more than the outright dismissal many of the film’s critics gave it upon release. I suspect this film might become as much – perhaps even more – of a cult film as it spreads through Internet downloads, DVDs, and repackaging on television. It’s not as complex or overt as Fight Club, but I think that those interested in complicating the way what ends up becoming young white American male hegemonic masculinity should probably take a look at the film.

Although many might disagree with me, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are secretly – perhaps not so secretly – loathed by many in the humanities. Why? I mean, one might think that learning more about how the brain works would be useful for those interested in pedagogy; also, one might want to know what the tendencies for information processing are and how our experiences have shaped them as our species has evolved. However, one only has to look at articles like this one to get an idea why the so much of the humanities, with its long-term committment to questions of social justice (see Gramsci and the legacy of Gramsci’s thought).

\Although this specific article does a very good job of emphasizing (near the end of the article, which is problematic concerning the reading habits that are being used by many users of the Internet [as well as newspapers for that matter, which is why the first paragraph is always the most loaded]) how social forces are engaged in forming the brain, it isn’t too much of a stretch, I think, for someone to look at this article and think, well, that explains why things are the way they are – and then think that it means that nothing can or should be changed. There are times, as much as I hate it, when cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary psychology are used by people to frame the same old discrimination of Social Darwinism (which, of course, is partly behind the rhetoric of the ‘free’ market where $700 billion can go – without a promise of payback – to intangible banking firms but $37 billion can’t be loaned to our automotive industry).

But I think that’s a profound misunderstanding of what these types of discovery are leading us into, which is a better understanding of how multiple intelligences are shaped, encouraged, and adapted through social interaction (although biological predispositions to how those different intelligences work together to create the ‘I’ of the aware/reflective human experience). It can lead us to a more just pedagogical structure where we create more situated education to provide adaption strategies to all those people who might not do exceptionally way in school (which emphasizes specific cognitive styles) but are perfectly capable of doing work, creating art, or otherwise producing in a meaningful way.

What doesn’t help anyone, though, is going around in fear and letting those who would rhetorically shape these findings against purposes of social justice. I don’t accept the outright rejection of empirical epistemology; I think anyone who does should never be allowed to take any form of medicine or ride in a car. For that matter, they should never be allowed to turn on a light, since they doubt that it might work again (or that if doesn’t work, a reasonable reason exists that can be corrected). We must engage in a discussion of these findings without an anti-scientific worldview getting in our way, or others – who will use the findings of science to fuel a rhetoric that applies the findings too far – will.

After writing that post last night, I decided to put my money where my blog is. I think Blizz failed in the expansion, and so I’m done with it. I may get lured back by social people at one point, but for now I’m just going to play some Left4Dead.

I also canceled WAR some time back. That was harder for me to do, but after weeks of doing every PQ solo and playing the same SCs over and over again, I’d come to the realization that the PvE experience in WAR has such little reward that people don’t play it, and so the game has become too one-sided to really be fun. I *LOVE* their RvR, LOVE IT, but it needs to be part of the game, not the only thing that matters.

So… no MMOs for me right now. Just some good ole solo games, TF2, and Left4Dead. It’s probably better anyway.

I haven’t written on here in forever, so I’ll just go ahead and resume where I left off: avoiding the real issues and writing about video games. I had nothing to add that wasn’t said well by other people regarding Obama’s victory, and so…. I’ll just write about this triteness, shall I?

My first impressions are as follows, which I’ll write succinctly:

1. The entire game is simply easier than it ever was. That’s probably a good thing, but here it is, a week later, and my server has like 100+ level 80 characters on it already. I don’t know whether this means that people have simply gotten so good at beating the game mechanics that they’ll simply launch past all challenges or whether it means that WoW is now as easy as people who complained about it always said it was. Considering that I can now, as a holy priest, solo like 5 yellow things at once without too much difficulty, I think that it’s probably the latter.

2. NO FLYING MOUNTS UNTIL 77. WTF is that? It makes no sense. None at all. You introduce a new mechanic that changes the entire way the game is played, allows for new and interesting level designs, and then – for the sake of something – decide that you’re going to surpress that part of the game for all previous players for the first two thirds of their level up process. It’s some lazy, lazy development. If they were concerned about people not having flying mounts, see point 1. Make it cheaper, like they did with regular mounts. There is no reason to simply surpress a popular, successful mechanic because you’re not certain how to continue to use it well.

3. They’ve decided that the best way to solve economic problems in the game is to soak a lot of money out by raising the price of everything. The last jump in thread was from like 10 silver to 50 silver per piece. Current price? About 3 gold (that’s 300 silver). Combine that with flight costs (since you now HAVE to pay for the flight master) of about 75 silver to 1.5 gold, and you’re watching the money that’s been piling up due to dailies in Burning Crusade going away.

4. The new content is fun in that WoW way, but it’s still WoW. It’s just now an easier, more expensive, no flying WoW, and right now my honest feeling is that I regret purchasing the expansion pack. I think Blizzard basically made a game that was accessible downright dumb, removed meaningful challenges from their players and their level designers, and made some bad decisions about how to handle the economy (right answer? Rare materials. It transfers the wealth between players, especially if you don’t tie to too closely to specific types of mobs so farming isn’t an issue. World drop rare mats. It’d make the economy shift rather than simply absorb new government-issued prices).

5. Death Knights are overpowered, they have advantages no one in the game should have (riding around on their mounts on water is annoying enough, but the zero downtime, any spec-can-tank features are simply too much). They might be fun, but they diminish the roles and importance of other classes while requiring no sacrifice or introducing major weaknesses. Hero classes should be about committing to a path permanently, a way of speccing that cannot be reversed. Instead, it’s just a way to get a faster alt who is overpowered.

For those who don’t know, there was a period of time where I wrote video game reviews in exchange for free video games. While that got really odd really fast, I think I’m going to add reviews back to my current site. Why? Because. It’s an excuse to write, and I need more of those. Otherwise, I’m just going to write because school tells me to do so. I can only do so much of that before I start to lose the love of writing… so… video games. That’s the ticket.

What, you want me to write some fiction again? Yeah, I’m doing that too. Just workshopped a story with Junot Diaz and got some really good feedback. I’m working through the new scenes, but the damn story is getting looooong. I’ll come back and trim once I’m done with these new scenes, but I can’t lose too much of the shape of the story. I just need to reduce the exposition a bit.

Someone, somewhere, is going to ask: Why are you playing a game that clearly is a console game on the PC? The answer is that I’m not a console player. I’m old school, I’ve played PC games for years, and I don’t want to play on consoles. With the exception of the Wii, I don’t really enjoy it. There are some games (Madden) which seem to be superior on consoles period, but for the most part – give me the keyboard and the mouse and you can keep your controller with its too many buttons.

Yeah, I said it: I’m old as dirt. I mean, my age begins with a 3 and it’s not 3. Ooooold.

Anyway, onto the subject: Dead Space, the new survival horror semi-FPS (it’s really the best third person limited omniscient approach ever, but it mostly plays like a FPS) from EA Redwood. Immediately, this should tell you something: no matter how cool the ads look, no matter how interesting the game is (and it is, as I’ll explain later), no matter how close it comes to almost having a really good plot, don’t buy this game for the PC. EA insists on being the assholes of copy protection and this thing comes with more evil SecuROM. Sadly, I’d already installed it to play Spore (and what a giant waste of time that was with its purposeless evolution and really shitty space levels), so it’s on my PC and there was nothing I could do about it. If you’re in the same boat, then maybe you can buy the game. But if you aren’t, then don’t let EA infect your PC with evil when you don’t have to.

It’s really sad that I have to write that because otherwise, Dead Space is a worthy title. In what ways, you ask? Well, I’ll break it down into sections: Graphics, Gameplay, Plot/Lore (depending on whether the game is plot based, after all), and Other Stuff. Yes, Other Stuff. Not intangible stuff, just other stuff. I’m too lazy to come up with better categories. Screw it.

GRAPHICS Rating:

Boy, Dead Space is pretty. Repetitive, but pretty and surprisingly distinct. I mean, it has a problem in that it’s basically survival horror in space (as you get from the title), and so it has to figure out how to represent much of the same world that is imagined in DOOM3 while still being its own game graphically, and Dead Space pulls that off.

It does so in two ways: its monsters and its understanding of technology. While DOOM3 had to adjust its presentation of a biological/biomechanical nightmare to work around its legacy and its specific artistic representation of hell, Dead Space is free to make things a bit more interesting. There’s no real sense of the demonic in its beast designs, but tentacles abound. Quite Lovecraftian, really, without all the suckers, but its got its share of tentacle and talon/claw-like thing loathing going on. Nothing, however, tops the fat men who give birth to little tentacle things that jump all over you. I really loathed them. Nothing really ‘new’ here, but some really well executed variants on standards. After the Shock games, DOOM3, Half-Life (to an extent) and other games, however, I think I’m starting to lose my fear of biomechanical necro-active creatures. Maybe it’s time for a new paradigm in space monsters, ya know? Still, it does work for ‘em here and in the genre, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess. Just saying, there’s some room for some innovation here.

Second, its understanding of the technology involved certainly isn’t new at all, but the suit your character wears is pretty nifty. Instead of a HUD appearing on your screen, it’s projected outside the character’s suit, and the interface is so clean and effective it’s downright beautiful to use. A triumph for HCI. While I think this could have been pushed further (I’d really like to see a game push the bio/mechanical paradigm in the same way that Existenz did), the technology of the suit and its interface gives the game somewhat of a different look.

One especially nice feature is that this graphic engine is very well tuned as far as its performance. It runs like a dream on my machine (which is about mid-range these days) and loads faster than any 3D game I’ve ever played. I’m amazed how quickly one can get into the game, load a level, and start playing. It’s some nice coding there, guys.

GAMEPLAY Rating:

The whole dismember thing? It’s a gimmick. It’s a fun gimmick, but it doesn’t really mean that much. It’s cool to do, I guess, and the genre loves gore, but it doesn’t add that much to the game. Stasis, however, does. It’s fun to freeze your enemy, then sever its legs, and then take off its head. Something about doing that in slowmo, that’s a treat.

Weapon design is all based on using the gimmick, and sometimes this works (I <3 a fully modified ripper). Other times, however, the weapons are just… weapons. The alternate fire on some of them is really nice, but in the end I found that all I needed was the plasma cutter fully modified and a fully modified ripper. Between the two, I could beat any challenge (at least on medium).

Level design, game variance, little treats like Z-ball and the targeting range, other small things: all treats. However, some levels do seem a bit tedious (did I really have to drag the Marker through that many bridges) and the relatively small differences between the different monsters you fight makes fighting them a bit boring as well. Near the end of the game I was aware that I was going through it just to see the end of the game – not because I was having fun anymore. Also, the bosses are…. pretty lame. Given the difficulty in some of the fights because of the number of opponents and the speed at which I needed to react to handle them all, the last boss seemed like a disappointment. He was big, sure, but he was really also a throwback to the bosses of yore with the need to strike the sensitive spots. Coulda done more with that, guys.

PLOT Rating:

Here’s a tip, guys, based on what I’ve learned from Lee Abbott and Junot Diaz about suspense: that end fucking sucks. Really? Characters are going to completely switch without any precedent and madness is going to be established by revealing something you cheesily withheld from the player? BS. Just total BS.

It ruins what is a pretty decent plot up until that point, a plot based on the good old standards of bad luck, religious conspiracies, government conspiracies, doubt everywhere, people seeking forgiveness, etc. It’s some good stuff, and then – it all goes to hell. The end of the game is just annoying. I won’t spoil it anymore, but it doesn’t come from the plot up to that point. Why are you being set up to hate the doctor who has built the Creature that Will Not Die if he’s going to die in such a pointless manner and then be replaced by someone you have no reason to hate, someone who had no hint of a dark personality before that moment? This wasn’t like the critical “Would you kindly” sequence in Bioshock. That brilliant sequence came from the plot, made sense in the plot, and was simply wonderful (though the all good or all bad ending of Bioshock was problematic as well). This… eh.

OTHER STUFF Rating:

Z-ball could have been more fun, but the inclusion of minigames at all was a bit surprising and well done. Voice acting was superb and the backstory was well placed in the game. I just wish more had been done with the actors to give the story a twist that was meaningful.

OVERALL Rating:

In the end, Dead Space is worth your time if you’re already infected with EA’s copyprotection evil. If you’re not, you can avoid it and not feel too bad. It does everything right on the technical level: great graphics, a great engine, great coding, and solid gameplay. But it lacks the heart and ability to play with ideas that make the Shock games so much better. It feels too much like a corporate game. It’s ‘edgy’ and ‘slick’ and smart in many of the right ways, but it can’t take Ayn Rand beneath the sea and give us the complex morality of the Little Sisters in the framework of biotechnology.

So, despite being under the weather (though I’m feeling better right now, as I’m right on the brink between when the Dayquil makes my brain go crazy and when it wearing off makes the symptoms worse), I took myself to see Choke today as it was the last showing at the local theater that carries movies like that one.

And…. ugh. I mean, really. Ugh. It’s a film that’s always at the brink of figuring out what greatness it could possibly be and then NEVER EVER GETS THERE. If it were a student, it’d be the student you knew could have gotten an A if he’d only managed to push his work just a bit harder but then ended up with a C because he phoned in all the really important parts of it. It’s just frustrating.

The worst thing of all the almost good things, the one truly bad thing, is the ending. I don’t know what the fuck the director (who was also the writer, so I’m blaming the right person here) was thinking in changing that ending. He had all the elements of the ending, all the Jesus elements, all the Denny-getting-stones elements, all the need to be the sacrifice in a postmodern time to actually MAKE something for once elements, and then he decided he didn’t care and gave us some shitty ass version of Catch Me If You Can. Ugh. It was so wrong I wanted to vent right there in the theater.

So…. most of the movie seems to have some idea of why Choke is probably Palahniuk’s best book, the book that balances between his exploration of ideas and the meaning of transgression, and the post-9/11 shift-to-horror-to-avoid-charges-of-terrorism, post-emergence of the cult of Fight Club that created a mythos about him as a writer that, as least in my opinion, has limited the directions of his output (and the fact that he’s now a one-a-year writer, which is something he probably shouldn’t be). The actors mostly get it, but I don’t think the writer/director ever really understood a) why the book was so damn funny and b) why the book was so damn compelling in a way a mere comedy never would be.

It’s not terrible. It has some chuckles, sure, and some of funniest parts are still there. But that ending, that god-awful change in the ending made NO SENSE after one thinks about what elements he kept active from the book that find their ending in the book’s ending.. it just ruins the overall film and makes this something I can’t recommend.

It also really needed a soundtrack. Really.

Rating:

So… while I deeply love Warhammer Online (so much so that this weekend I hung one of their propoganda posters on my wall [it reads Kill. Drink. Dig. Join Order. Dwarfs. How can you not love such a faction?]), I’m really getting frustrated by the ways in which players are spread out. Quite simply, there are too many damn servers right now and not enough players, and since so much of the game depends on player versus player interaction, everyone wants to be on a higher population server (one that is hopefully balanced between population and queue time).

So this weekend, the biggest guild on my (now former) server decided they were frustrated, and so they all gave up on all the progress they had made on their characters (some of these characters were into Tier 4 already) and rerolled on a different server – Wastelands. The guild I’m a part of decided to follow them. So I’m left with little choice: I can play on my server with very few people or join them and re-level my runemaster (once again, since I did this before when my first server had almost no population).

So here I am, level 3 again, doing all the same quests once again. This time, however, I think I’m going to do most of T1 in the Empire lands, just to have different quests to do. It’s still frustrating, however. Mythic needs to offer a move tool and they need to offer it soon.