Tag: review

This Game Has No Warp Zone: A Review of Pipe Trouble

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 3 Comments

Pipe Trouble

“I like games with consequences.”

This is what a friend of mine told me not too long ago with regards to online games, but it is a sentiment that can easily be applied to video games in general. I know that I–and many other more eloquent and informed people on the matter–have stated that the medium of the video game can be used for more than just entertainment value. The medium of a video game is as its very core an interactive experience that, like any other art form, can get us to relate to the world around us in a different way.

However, with regards to Pipe Trouble, there is also the matter of responsibility to consider as well.

Pipe Trouble is a game created by Pop Sandbox Productions, produced by Alex Jansen, and co-designed by Jim Munroe. It was apparently made as a companion piece to the TVO-commissioned documentary Trouble in the Peace: a film directed by Julian T. Pinder and produced by Six Island Productions about gas leaks affecting Northern British Columbia farmers in the Peace River region and in particular one man and father, who has decided to do something about it.

Before I decided to write this article, I did not know that Pipe Trouble was a digital complement to this documentary. In fact, the entire subject matter that both the film and the game seem to encompass–Canadian farms encountering potentially lethal gas leaks from pipelines of gas companies in their regions–is not usually something I tend to focus on with more than passing attention. After a while, and as cynical as it gets, news of “corrupt corporations, victims and innocent bystanders, and eco-terrorist reprisals” tends to become oversimplified by the media.

It is one thing, however, to hear and watch something about a matter that seemingly doesn’t concern you as an individual. It is a whole other thing to find yourself in a situation–even if it is a simulation with a satirical veneer–where you are in a position of great responsibility.

What Pop Sandbox is attempting to do to this regard is not something new, but rather it is a very familiar idea they have worked with expressed into a different medium. While I did write an article or two on Kenk: A Graphic Portrait a fair while ago, what I might have neglected to mention is that one major theme in the graphic novel–also made by Pop Sandbox–is that everyone has a part to play in a particular social action. In the case of Igor Kenk and his stolen bicycles, it is made clear that everyone–to the people who bought bicycles from him, to even the people who purchased their stolen bikes back, to law enforcement and Toronto City Hall–knew about what he was doing and, just as they condemned it, they also tolerated and even to some extent accepted it a part of their social system. With regards to Kenk, Pop Sandbox illustrated–quite literally–how Igor Kenk was just part of a social dynamic–of a collaboration–in which the rest of the city was also a part.

But Pop Sandbox goes even further with Pipe Trouble. While Kenk simply observes a social structure and interaction, Pipe Trouble makes the player-audience interact immediately and directly with the issue as clearly, and as simply put, as possible.

In other words, you–the player–are placed as the manager of a gas company apparently situated in the Canadian Province of Alberta and you must please your superiors and make them money, keep the people who need your corporation’s services in mind, do as little damage to farmland, animals, humans, and the environment as possible, and try not to piss anyone off.

It is very clever. It is very easy to vilify a company or a corporation as a soulless entity that only caters to the very rich, squashes agriculture and “the lower classes,” and pollutes the environment without any understanding of what it might be doing or–worse–even care. It is just as easy to lionize a pipe bomber as a freedom fighter against a tyrannical force even as it is to denigrate them as a terrorist that likes to destroy human lives and a Western way of life: whatever that is.

However, natural gas is one of those resources necessary for a modern society to function and a corporation is made by people. As such, someone has to be in charge of providing that corporation’s service, making a living from it, avoiding bad press and blame while attempting to integrate their industrial system into the environment and those existing within it with as little damage as possible. It is no tall order and not an enviable position: especially when you are forced to do it in a game.

It is no coincidence that this game is modelled after the 1989 puzzle game alternatively called Pipe Mania or Pipe Dream. And even though the title itself brings to mind some bad bodily jokes, even that connotation has its point when looking at the game. In Pipe Dream, you have to build pipes to direct the flow of filth inside of a sewer. Pipe Trouble takes a similar mechanic and makes the oncoming substance also toxic, but also worth money. One person’s poison is another one’s livelihood.

You have two men on either of your screen. I would be tempted to call them “the angel” and “the devil” on either of your shoulders, save that both of them aren’t necessarily “good” or “evil.” The man on your left is a farmer that is watching your progress in placing down pipes with oncoming gas with great interest and caution. If you destroy the land too much, there will be protesters that will block your pipe route. How long they stay in front of your progress will all depend on just how much damage they perceived you to have done. This farmer will keep watching you and will warn you only once not to mess with his land.

Then you have the man on your right: your boss. He is the one informing you of when the gas will start flowing (right when you place a pipe down to get from Point A to Point B) and he will keep track of the money you are making … and losing with delays. That’s right. If you do not place your pipes fast enough, not only will you risk a gas leak poisoning a lake, killing animals, and other horrors but you will lose your company money and your boss will sure as hell hold you responsible and, if we are going for realism, probably put it all on your head when the bad press comes out.

I swear: when I first played this game and that gas started to flow and sometimes I didn’t move fast enough, or have the right pipe piece to place down or even put it in the proper place, that sense of panic sets in. Then you add the pixilated animals that prance and eat in the woods and you are thinking real hard about how to not disturb them: never mind potentially kill them. And that is not even including the fear of getting more protesters in your way that will get more organized and then sometimes even use some nice industrial sabotage against your pipeline: causing more death, destruction, money loss, and bad press. And guess who would probably be held responsible for all of that?

You’re looking at yourself.

It’s like playing Tetris … only with people’s lives. And remember how I didn’t make any bodily function jokes? Well, the ideal is to treat the entire process like the human body. The release of energy, the disposal of waste, and the structure of what you are trying to build is supposed to create a balance with the ecosystem, agriculture, and animal and human health. But as you play and it gets harder, you will become aware of the fact that this game is an idealist’s nightmare. You will have to make some very difficult decisions as you realize that you might not have time to build around that forest to your pipeline’s destination or you might have to be innovative and make some alternate routes in a very set time frame, but in the end you will have to make some very hard choices.

Do not let the game’s cheerful 8-bit pixilated graphics and basic soft-edged square shaped sprite characters fool you. Jim Munroe was also co-designer behind this game. He is an independent Canadian science fiction and comics writer, among other things, that likes to take grandiose topics like haunted TTC Stations, North America becoming destitute in a futuristic era, and a post-apocalyptic world after the Christian Rapture and completely twist them upside down and make it about human characters and life going on. More than coincidentally, Munroe is also the Hand Eye Society’s Project Coordinator for the development of the Torontrons: essentially retrofitted arcade cabinets that play newly made video games. He may have been involved with the pretty nifty creation of the Pipe Trouble game cabinet as well: which, as the link explains, will be placed in areas of high traffic such as universities, city centres, and tourist attractions.

I don’t know what else to add here. Inter-dispersed between levels are radio segments from news anchored events dealing with natural gas industry controversies which I didn’t originally hear until I played the game again at home on the free trial demo. Also, not too long ago I found out that the game itself has created a whole lot of controversy. Apparently TVO–one of the game’s sponsors–has been accused, among other things, of potentially giving eco-terrorists “ideas” by supporting the creation of the game. TVO has apparently removed links to Pipe Trouble from their website with pending investigations into the matter on their end to see if they were in “the wrong.” There seem to be some definite misunderstandings over various issues, but if one goal of this game is to encourage people to think, then controversy–though unfortunate–is one way of getting there. Either way, it definitely hit a nerve in that intersection where art and politics clash.

I think my concluding thought about this entire game is that the title “Pipe Trouble,” again, can mean a lot of things. And it wasn’t until I read the above article that I began to think about it a little more. I don’t generally look at these kinds of games, never mind write about them–especially with how close it comes to politics–but there is something really fascinating about the dynamics that Pop Sandbox attempts to create, identify, satirize, educate and help people relate to. And politics itself is an exchange of power and watching how and through what medium that power is ultimately exchanged through.

You see, I’m looking at pipes as symbolic of devices that link us together and support a communication of ideas. They can create a very interactive and comprehensive system of healthy self-regulation but when there are so many elements in play, things can go wrong, words can break down, and people and the world around them can suffer for it. But whatever else this game accomplishes, it definitely makes you think about these issues and how they are not entirely separate after all: neither from each other, nor from you.

Film Review: Oz The Great and Powerful

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 3 Comments

So I went off to see the Wizard this past weekend.

I was very eager to see it. I’ve loved The Wizard of Oz for most of my conscious life. I was introduced to it through the famous 1939 film that many know and love. Then I read as many of the books as I could to stay with my friends as much as possible. I also read and saw the Musical version of Wicked: the former of which I respected, and the latter of which I utterly loved.

Now, my two favourite Oz characters have always been the Scarecrow and The Wizard himself. I liked The Wizard because he, well, had a hot air balloon that took him into a magical land. I actually tried weaving a balloon (out of felt and other cloth, not completely aware of what materials a hot weather balloon actually required) but it never got far. Even then, in those days, I wanted to escape this world and go to a better one.

But later on, I liked The Wizard for other reasons. He lacked any magical abilities, but he was a master of sleight-of-hand, illusions and artifice. And for all of his manipulative and deceptive aspects, he just seemed like a kindly old man that actually helped Oz through making himself a symbol if nothing else. He was the one who taught me that the seeming of power can create the greatest form of hope to others. Also, I would like to posit that he was in addition to being a highly flexible thinker and canny stage magician that tricked others–including beings with actual magic–he also was a brilliant artificer: because I am pretty sure the Emerald City’s technological innovations were his doing from his knowledge of late nineteenth century Earth life.

Suffice to say, he was a crafty old man that created a brilliant show as The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard has been depicted in a few ways: as a charlatan, as a villain, and a hapless man trying to figure out what to do in a strange magical land. So I wanted to see what he would be like, as the main character and hero no less, in Oz The Great and Powerful.

Now, I would suggest that, if you do not like Spoilers, you stop following this yellow brick road any further.

All right. So when when we first come across Oscar Diggs, or The Great and Powerful Oz as his magician stage name goes, he is in this black and white world representing 1880s Kansas and looking not unlike the Impressionist world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

As for Oscar Diggs … what can I tell you? He is supposed to be a complicated man: a rogue and a con artist, a consummate huckster, illusionist and magician, a master of misdirection, a womanizer, but also someone who knows that he is a bad man and feels powerlessness when he can’t help a child and acceptance when a woman that he actually loves is going to marry a better man.

Unfortunately, for the most part the slimy elements outweigh the charm and … he really just comes off as rather, well, less than endearing. Think … less humbug and more … scumbag. Even his jokes, and indeed a lot of the jokes in the world movie situated around him fall a little flat when you right down to it: so much so that you have to force yourself to laugh at them.

Structurally, the film is clever and deals with a lot of misdirection and hood-winks. Aside from the change from black and white to colour–a homage to the 1939 version of Oz–there is also the fact that most of the Wizard’s companions are Oz versions of the people he knew and met in Kansas: much like Dorothy, the farmhands, the travelling conjurer and the mean old woman Elmira Gulch. And then there was the matter of the villain, as far as I’m concerned the person who was becoming the star of the antagonist role …

All right. I liked the scene with the China Girl, Oscar laughing at the people pursuing him as he escaped in a hot air balloon, the little bit of misdirection that Evanora used to try and get Oscar Diggs to do her dirty work for her, Evanora’s green Force lightning, Glinda’s cleverness with the wind and the field of poppies, the Wizard’s scheme in making himself appear to be much more than human towards the end through his old friend misdirection, and some of the more touching scenes like Oscar admitting to what he is. I also really like the parts where he realizes that he has a great advantage over the Witches in terms of technological knowledge and trickery. Oscar asks Glinda, who helps him gather a group of farmers, bakers, inventors, and munchkins together how he is going to defeat the Emerald City’s armies with what he has. But the good Wizard, given the time period where he came from, should have remembered that the most powerful empire in the world at the time was at one point “a nation of shopkeepers”: carrying or having access to most of the resources to not only win a war, but rule a kingdom.

But there were points that really annoyed me. I mean, really annoyed me. For instance, when Oscar finds himself in Oz and hears Theodora talking about how she is a Witch, and then later seeing that she can throw a fireball, my first thought would have been acted out something like this.

Diggs: So … you are a Witch.

Theodora: Yes.

Diggs: And you can use magic?

Theodora: Yes, well, I can.

Diggs: Well okay. I showed you mine. Now show me yours.

Theodora: Um …

Diggs: Show me some magic.

Theodora: Oh ok.

Theodora throws a fireball at something. The Wizard’s jaw drops.

Diggs: That was … incredible …

Theodora: Oh, really?

She blushes.

Diggs: No I mean, you can throw fireballs. Effing fireballs. I mean, pardon my cussing and all, but … just … wait a minute. Just wait one moment. You mean to tell me that you could have thrown fireballs–fireballs–at the winged monkeys attacking us at any time–any freaking time–and you waited for me to sacrifice my poor bird instead?

Theodora: And it was brilliant magic. As expected from the Wizard of prophecy.

Diggs: Yes but … oh dear god, I faced a lion down with a parlour trick and you could have just thrown a fireball at …

The Wizard of Oz spends most of the time walking back trying not to bite through his own tongue at Theodora’s stupidity.

Or something like that. Not that I have anything against Theodora, mind you. She was naive, but really nice: almost unrealistically innocent and Oscar screwed that trust up pretty royally. In fact, I had more sympathy for her than I did for him and turning into the fucking Wicked Witch of the West with a green apple seemed almost as much of a cop-out–and an excuse to place another major iconic Hollywood fictional figure into a movie to give it credence–as it was magically putting Anakin Skywalker into a freaking Darth Vader suit that just happened to be there in case he got amputated and burned alive. I mean … Gah!

I do like the hint of her nature and it works: that her own tears burn her like acid and she wields fire. There were hints and I erroneously believed she would be the Witch of the East at that point and Evanora was the Witch of the West.

In fact, I thought that Theodora was the North Witch and Glinda the South and Evanora the West with the evil Witch in the outlands being the Eastern one, but Disney decided–like the 1939 film–to just have three witches instead of the four from the books. What I can say: even before this film started I over-thought it.

But anyway, aside from the fact that Evanora could have probably had Glinda killed whenever she wanted, given that she could probably find her in the Crystal Ball, and waited for a man who she knew was a fake Wizard to do it anyway, and the fact that her winged Monkeys are freaking incompetent in not following Glinda and the others off the cliff they jumped from, I have another “What the hell are you doing, you are a Witch!” moment.

So yes, speaking of Glinda. She, Oscar, the China Doll, and Finley the Winged Monkey (what is he anyway, a less feral version of the Winged Monkeys of the Witches or another more docile species?) find themselves surrounded by Winkie soldiers and then the monkeys. So here is another hypothetical scene.

Diggs: So, we’re surrounded by soldiers and flying monkeys.

Glinda: Yes. That seems to be the case.

Diggs: Well, you are a Witch, right? I mean, I know you ladies aren’t warty or fly broomsticks but … you do have powers right?

Glinda: Well yes. Perhaps you have a power we can use here Wizard?

Diggs: … um, my powers work a bit differently from where I come from. Maybe you can do something?

Glinda: Hmmm …

So they run to the cliff and the Wizard freaks out about having to jump off a cliff after Glinda jumps. Then he follows them all and they come up in floating bubbles.

Diggs: Wow! Now this is impressive trick! Woooo! Hey wait … couldn’t …

He dodges a cloud.

Diggs: Couldn’t you have done this before!? You know, like when we were all on the ground running from enemies in the fog?

Glinda just smiles at Diggs.

Or later when we see that Glinda’s wand can Force push or block magic. You know, a good Force push might have been excellent against, well, an army. Of course, we can be nicer about this. Glinda did mention later, much later, that no citizen of Oz can kill anyone. I would imagine that the Wizard and anyone outside of Oz is exempt from this geis: this magical rule that keeps all of this from happening? Maybe Theodora also knew this or was too self-conscious to use her destructive magic to defend her and the Emerald City’s potential saviour. If she did, she and Evanora neglected to tell him that. And, for that matter, if no one in Oz can kill anyone, doesn’t that just neutralize the point to an army of Winkies or Winged Monkeys? Does Glinda mean that Oz is a world that prohibits killing, or is Oz just concerned to be the land around the Emerald City and killing happens everywhere? Also, wouldn’t the destruction of the China Girl’s whole village be considered killing? Or the murder of the original Wizard King of Oz?

Perhaps I was missing something. I have been told that the Witches, while they are also citizens of Oz, are also exempt from this rule due to their unique nature. But let’s operate on the assumption that Oz–in this film–prohibits killing from its residents and the Wizard can in fact kill. There is one scene where the Wizard is teaching engineers how to make black powder. Black powder is used–as it was in the film–in fire works, but also as gunpowder and … explosives.

If the Witches’ army if hand-held ornamental weapon wielders and winged monkeys encountered a group of people with muskets and hidden explosives, they would have been decimated. Period. If I had been Diggs and I was being threatened by Theodora *coughtheWickedWitchoftheWestcough* I would have shown no hesitation in destroying their armies. And maybe Oz Witches are immune to explosives or guns, but considering how the Witch of the East got squashed by a falling house and the other one would have to avoid rainfall and I am sure that Glinda knows their weaknesses (such as she did with Evanora), this could have been a whole other kind of story.

Of course, this was supposed to also be a child-friendly film and Disney had to follow certain legal matters. You know, the ones that kept the ruby or silver slippers from being on Evanora: the Witch of the East. It also makes me wonder if that’s why she didn’t have the Golden Cap: the artifact that allowed the Wicked Witch of the West to even control the Monkeys to begin with … although the 1939 film didn’t have that one. I also feel somewhat sad about those cynical ideas above because I would never have suggested them being implemented in the books or the 1939 film.

But this film just … I really wanted to like it. But it is getting a 3/5. I liked the art and the structure and I recognize what they tried to do, but the Wizard was less a lovable scoundrel and more of a douchebag, Theodora’s transformation was forced, and as a friend of mine stated it didn’t have that resonance of a gauche “camp” feeling that is identified with the film and the Wicked Musical too. It is its own world and it wouldn’t really fit into the main series of Oz, but it was an interesting attempt to make a new story.

Even so, I have to state that in the end, if you have followed the old film or the books, there is no place like home.

Make-It Me: A Film Review of Wreck-It Ralph

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 4 Comments

File:Wreckitralphposter.jpeg

When I first saw previews for Wreck-It Ralph, I admit that my expectations were not very high. I immediately thought two things: first that the CGI would be an excuse for a poor story-line and that, second, it would be a rip-off of Donkey Kong. I mean: just look at Ralph and Donkey Kong, or even Fix-It Felix Jr. and Jumpman/Mario.

Then after a while, I heard good things about it and there was one commercial that I saw which really got me attracted to it, namely this one:

After that, I couldn’t not see this movie, seeing as I am interested in super-villains and video games and … I admit I imagine having a Boss musical theme. =)

So I saw it and I’m just going to tell you now, that I will be focusing more on how the world of Wreck-It Ralph works more than really going into the story-line: though the two are very neatly together and excellent. As such, I feel obligated to place a Spoilers warning before I continue on.

So the spoiler warning having been said, I do have to go into the plot a little bit. Essentially, there is this video game boss named Wreck-It Ralph whose role it is to destroy a penthouse building while his heroic counterpart Fix-It Felix Jr. (whom their world and game is named for) fixes what he destroys. However, these are just roles. They, and other video game sprite denizens live their lives and even interact in a hub that exists at an internal intersection between their arcade cabinets. Everyone in the world of Fix-It Felix, Jr. loves Felix, but they do not like Wreck-It Ralph: though all he is doing is essentially his job which is just important as the hero’s job. Wreck-It Ralph decides that he wants to become a hero so that he can live somewhere better than his garbage dump home and also gain friendship.

That is essentially how everything begins. Now let me go into how their world works. So each game is its own world and there are borders that need to be crossed in order to get to the central hub where different game sprites can interact. This particular world exists in an arcade: which is now almost an anachronism given that arcades are not as popular (at least in North America) as they once were. Each world continues to exist so long as their game does not malfunction. That means that all heroes, villains, and supporting characters need to maintain their roles and stay in their games when someone from the arcade is playing them. Otherwise they get a dreaded “out of order sign” and their game is shipped away while they either become homeless in the hub or cease to exist entirely.

So far so good right? Well there are also the existence of beings known as “glitches”: characters that “shouldn’t” exist and are somewhat buggy. They can’t even leave their game world and go into the hub: which is something that plays a larger role later on. Then there is one more rule in this world which is very important. Never go Turbo.

I admit, I felt like I knew that I should know what that term meant. I thought it was a reference to a game that didn’t work out or some homage to some really bad character or video game idea from our world. But essentially, Turbo was a character created solely for this film. He was a racer character that was jealous over a new arcade game brought in that was taking attention away from his game. So he essentially left his own game and hijacked the other one. This caused it to malfunction and as a result both his original game and the one he invaded were declared “out of order” and thrown away. Essentially, because of his selfishness and his inability to accept his role he destroyed two worlds. So he is used as a cautionary tale for other sprites that might have similar ideas. It’s actually a really creepy idea and story when you really think about it: but also really cool too.

It also seems like only the really old arcade games were exposed to the “going Turbo” phenomenon while some of the new games with their more graphically-advanced sprites have either never encountered it yet or never thought of it. And some characters, like Sonic Hedgehog, are apparently so important that they have billboards with automated advertisements coming from them. They are “too good” to show up in this world: though I don’t know what that says about the Bowser and Princess Peach cameos. Maybe Mario himself wasn’t even mentioned either because of copyright or because he would take too much attention away from the protagonists. Yes, I am such a world-building nerd. I know.

Aside from said world-building, I think I really liked this movie because–in addition to drawing on the nostalgia and the video game culture my generation grew up with–I could really sympathize with Ralph. It is ironic that while the film is called Wreck-It Ralph, the game he lives in is called Fix-It Felix, Jr. This is essentially a film about a video game super-villain and boss character: made solely for this movie of course. It shows him subversively overcoming his “villain” role to be a real hero while, at the same time, accepting and coming to peace with his true nature and being a villain again: with everyone else accepting that it is just a role and not everything he is.

The character of Vanellope was also excellent. She is essentially a glitch that Ralph grudgingly befriends in another game. What she sees as a liability ultimately becomes a strength of hers. As a glitch, she flickers in and out of existence, or appears from one spot to another. She looks really cool too with glitter in her hair and a no-nonsense but mischievous attitude. She looked like her game’s main character and, well … 😉 She was also made an outcast because she wanted to get into a race with the main characters of that world: showing a caste-system between “sprites” and “glitches”: although I’m not sure if this distinction is only in her game or in the others as well. I relate to her because I knew that her “weakness” was actually a strength if properly applied.

But I think my favourite part of the whole film was that I couldn’t really predict it. I mean, first you have the danger of the Cy-Bug–a creature accidentally taken by Ralph from a first-person shooter Hero’s Duty world to Vannellope’s kart-racing Sugar Rush game–multiplying and spreading throughout all games. You have Ralph trying to get his Hero’s Medal. And then you have King Candy–who looks like a combination of the Mad-Hatter and the Wizard of Oz–tyrannizing Vanellope and keeping her out of his car race.

And then, then you realize that … Turbo is not quite as gone as the video game urban legends around him make you believe and that he has had a lot of time to … hack other games for his benefit. Thus the roles of hero, villain, player character, protagonist, and glitch get subverted and changed in awesome ways while strange new rules are made for strange playable universes.

That is Wreck-It Ralph for me. Aside from what I mentioned, I think one other reason I really like it is because it reminds me so much of ReBoot in concept: a world called Mainframe that takes place in a computer where sprites and binomes live and Guardians (anti-virus programs) from the Net fight against Viruses and other threats as well as Game Cubes (chortles, and the Nintendo Game Cube, not really related to anything here, didn’t exist at the time of this show) that were sent down by mysterious entities known as Users. I always wondered what sprites would be like in console universes: realities totally dedicated to the playing of games. Perhaps they would be something along the lines of “career game sprites.” 😉 Another Hunger Games reference and show parallel aside, the meta-narrative aspects of both ReBoot and Wreck-It Ralph make me very happy inside. I also had to stop myself at one point from saying, “Game over. User wins,” especially when one arcade winner didn’t in fact win. ;P

The fact is, I hope they make more films set in the world of Wreck-It Ralph. I would love to see how they would handle video game consoles and PCs. But I think what really intrigues me is a character like Turbo that can hack into other game-realities, but instead of doing it to gain attention or simply subverting a pre-existing game, they can actually use all existing information and code in that world as part of a pre-made kit in order to create their own game entirely. Think about that: a sprite can use code to rewrite and make their own world where they are the protagonist or the god of their own game. Maybe it is a homage to the Do It Yourself gaming literature I’ve been reading and watching lately. But essentially, what I’m saying is that Turbo was thinking too small and too petty, and with the skills he learned he could do so much more.

I learn the wrong lessons, it seems. This movie was all about accepting a role but also having the flexibility to go beyond and here I am sounding like I want to be a super-villain.

No comment.

But anyway, this movie gets a 5 of out of 5 and I want to see more of them. This is Make-It Matthew continuing on: to the next level, and the sequel that I keep getting promised. And no, I am not going Turbo.

I am going Make-It. 😀

Sea Shells, See Shells by the Sea Shore: A Review of C. Anthony Martignetti’s Lunatic Heroes

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 5 Comments

I have been looking forward to reading C. Anthony Martignetti’s Lunatic Heroes: Memories, Lies and Reflections for some time, and now that I have finished reading it, I find I have a lot of different things to say. In fact, what I think I’m going to do is the following.

I am going to write two sections to this review. The first will be an attempt at a more literary perspective of Lunatic Heroes, while the second will deal with my own personal reactions to the stories themselves. Before I go on, however, I just want to say that I will be referring to Anthony by his first name due to the way that I was introduced to him. I will elaborate on that later, but I just want to say that it would feel weird after reading about him and his own work to call him anything else. It’s the not first time I have done this with an author and it probably won’t be the last.

Lunatia heros is a species of Northern moon-snail that likes to live close to the shoreline of bodies of water. They are large gastropods that like to eat clams and other snails: including members of their own species. They consume their prey by drilling holes in their shells, releasing digestive enzymes, and sucking out the partially digested contents of their victims from within those shells. In fact, the only thing left of their fellow snails are these empty shells. According to Wikipedia, these moon snails hunt other mollusks down by searching for those that bury themselves in the sand of the shoreline.

Of all the titles Anthony could have given his work, Lunatic Heroes is by far the most apt. This book is essentially a collection of fifteen short stories or, technically written recollections, of some of the major events in Anthony’s life. Even though the book itself is categorized as a memoir, which it is, each narrative is both interrelated and self-contained.

At least twelve of these stories deal with Anthony’s childhood with his Italian-American family in Boston, while the remaining three focus on Anthony as a developing independent adult all the way to contemporary times. I don’t want to make too much of a generalization, but each story is about the insanity of the human condition. After all, the word lunatic is derived from the Latin word Luna and it was once thought that someone suffering from madness was “moon-touched,” while at the same time the moon itself has always been associated with the other world of the night, creativity and intuition.

In this, the metaphor of Lunatic Heroes functions in a few different ways. On one hand, most of Anthony’s stories are about the dysfunctional elements of his own family and his 1950s childhood: about the way each character would attempt to devour Anthony’s extremely introverted essence, digging under the sand where his self hid in order to successfully–or unsuccessfully–get at it.

On the other hand, Anthony’s narratives also take many of these same characters and portray their other more relatable sides. It is no coincidence, after all, that the heroes of ancient literature–for all of their deplorable moral behaviour by contemporary standards–still possessed a spark of divinity and managed to perform great deeds. In a fiercely passionate and witty voice tempered with a nostalgic unsentimentality not unlike that of Will Eisner, Anthony manages to show that these characters from his own life aren’t always monsters, but are very fallible human beings with some moments of relation, levity, and downright comedy: even and especially in some of the worst situations that he depicts.

What drew me in as a reader were the very mutable archetypes that Anthony managed to identify in his life: specifically with regards to how they transferred and inter-lapped throughout each story that he gathers together into a strange whole. Sometimes each narrative doesn’t always fit in a straight-line–which is more than fair given how a life of human interactions is generally never shaped that way–and he occasionally repeats a sentence from a previous story. But the archetypes really drew me in. Certainly, the whole Scylla and Charybdis parallel childhood dilemma in “Force Fed” was made very uncomfortably clear, just as the figure of a Far Eastern form of enlightenment and a symbolic place of personal transformation is within “Swamp.”

So thus ends the very brief and relatively spoiler free part of my review. Now I am going to talk about my personal reaction to Lunatic Heroes. I will say that I particularly related to “Force Fed.” When I was a boy, I was a very fussy eater and after I started to lose weight at twelve, my family thought that I had some kind of eating disorder. I didn’t really see a problem: in that when I stopped feeling hungry, I simply stopped eating. I was also lactose intolerant and I didn’t know that until my doctor and a slough of very uncomfortable and embarrassing tests happened. I lost a lot of weight from simply no longer eating dairy and then having a growth spurt. It also didn’t help that I was a very nervous child and my stomach suffered for it. But I could definitely relate to Anthony’s account of being made to feel like there was something wrong with you just because you simply weren’t hungry enough by the standards of others or the fact that you didn’t want to become sick.

I could definitely relate to the moments of introversion and hyper-sensitivity from Anthony’s depiction of his childhood self and that paradoxical need to have your parents always in your life, but at the same time that need to keep that bubble of personal space around you from being violated by the rest of the world: sometimes in vain. That is why I particularly related to–and if anyone knows me and is reading this they will be laughing by now–the last story “Hate.”

I admit that I was actually concerned when Anthony ended his memoir with a story entitled “Hate,” but it made sense. The thing is, Anthony is a psychotherapist and there are some things he talks about throughout the entire book–mindfulness, being in your head and needing to be in your body–that is very reminiscent of what my own therapist has been telling me for quite some years now. In “Hate,” Anthony even mentions how he still has snap judgments and immediate–and sometimes unfavourable–superficial impressions of people. They can bring up various associations his life: not all of them pleasant. But he also mentions how by realizing that these same people have pain and loss in their lives, it makes them relatable as human beings. It is still a lesson I have to keep reminding myself of during some of my more misanthropic world-obliterating moments of glee.

I also totally understand where Anthony is coming from in “The Head,” when he writes about the darkness and anger that he is feeling in himself even while he is with his wife and dog at a peaceful retreat: the knowledge of this fact that just made him feel worse until he has one moment of mindfulness. I think Anthony really hit home for me that you can mentally and emotionally awaken many times in life: and for different reasons. In that, “Swamp” and the events with regards to the freak show in “Carnival” really come to the fore. In addition, the story “Nonno” made me really miss my own Zaidy while I can more than sympathize with the need to belong and centre yourself and finding a place like “Harvard Square” home.

I am almost finished this strange review. But to make it even stranger, I want to write down some very notable lines, or moments of text that just made this entire book for me:

Anthony writes about longing: “But this time I felt the ache you get when longing for something you don’t think you have, coupled by the fear that you’d blow it if you did” (107).

He also describes the process of maturity, stating, “I was pulling off the heist of the decade, stealing the truth about myself from every encounter” (108-109).

Finally, there is this: “I imagined eventually befriending the Devil and getting promoted to demon status, sharing the power of evil and control over an infinite number of she-devils who would hungrily do my bidding” (129).

These are just such universal impulses and feelings, and as a writer I kind of wish I had been the one to express myself in such a way. The metaphor of the Lunatic Heroes is even more ingenious because in addition to moon snails being predators, Lunatia heros always leaves perfectly preserved husks from all of its feedings. Think about that for a few moments: even though the snail is gone, like the imprint of a lost self or Virginia Woolf’s spot on a wall, its shell–the testament to its existence–is left unearthed in the sand. It’s left there for others to find and see and marvel in the patterns that they created. In other words, we are the predators and the prey of our selves, but by simply living we take the selves of others with us, and we leave a testament to their existence. It is an excellent extended metaphor for a writer, the act of writing, literature itself and the state of being human.

Now I am finally going to tell you the reason why I refer to Anthony by his first name in this review. Through reading Anthony’s book, I feel like I know him a little more. But that is only part of it. The rest of the reason has to do with how I discovered him.

It was mainly by accident. I was searching for Amanda Palmer’s Blog and I came across her entries about Anthony and just some of what he means to her. I will let you read that entry should you so wish. But what I will say is that Amanda wrote the “Introduction” to Anthony’s book and she said something that really got to me.

Amanda wrote the following, “I had a small glimpse into the act of writing as a direct escape from pain. For the first time, I experienced the physical truth of what it felt like to dwell in the act of creation as the only viable escape from an unbearable, unfaceable reality” (ix). I read this statement and I took a look at myself. I took a look at my notebooks around me in my room. And then I looked at the one hundred or so posts I’ve made on this very Blog. I took a look at what I try to do every single day now and I thought…

Yes. Just … yes.

Amanda also went on to talk about how she and Anthony delve into the uncomfortable, and awkward, and painful moments of clarity that is life. And you will find that and more in exquisite detail if you read this book.

Now I am going to end off now by doing something even stranger. I am going to give Lunatic Heroes a four out of five.

And here is why.

After reading “The Introduction” and Anthony’s “Acknowledgments,” and just hearing about him and some of his life from Amanda’s Blog, I wanted to know … more. Even though the way he describes his childhood, sometimes blatantly and sometimes tinged with hazy mythical half-memories is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases, I want to know about the rest of it: the adolescent rebellion you see forming in the latter stories, what happened in the rest of his travels, what his other fights were about, and more about his exposure to other philosophies and other relationships.

When it comes down to it, I want to see more. And as one lunatic hero to another, Anthony, I sincerely hope to.

Film Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 4 Comments

So now I’m going to do an actual review of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey. And yes, there will be spoilers in addition to Middle-Earth references. So watch the movie first please, and I will try to be more specific with my Tolkien knowledge as well.

Anyway, let me start this off by stating that the last time I’d seen so many singing Dwarves was back when I first watched Snow White.

File:Snow white 1937 trailer screenshot (2).jpg

But all joking aside, I really liked this film and the entire world, the story thus far, and even the singing elements were incorporated well. The narrative begins slowly and much in the way that the multitude of trailers suggested that it would. I smiled when I saw Bilbo on the screen writing in what would become the Red Book of Westmarch.

I was puzzled, though not completely surprised, to see Frodo in those initial scenes as well. I know that many people have had some issues with him being there: saying that his and Bilbo’s interactions were superfluous to the plot and point of the story. But it was refreshing to see Frodo there: young and unburdened by the absolute hell he will be thrust into much later on in his own saga. He also provided a nice counterpoint to Bilbo as an old, and as a young Hobbit.

So now let’s get to the adventure. I’ve not actually read The Hobbit in some years, or read all of The Unfinished Histories and Tolkien’s notes, so you Tolkienites please bear my ignorance as much as you can. I really liked the encounter and banter between young Bilbo and Gandalf. But I think what I caught my eye in particular were two things in this beginning. First, I appreciate how each Dwarf that comes to Bilbo’s home looks and acts differently from his fellows. They looked very different from my kind of generic view of Dwarves in my head when I first read the story.

And then there is Bilbo. I’ve realized now that Bilbo has always been my favourite Hobbit for a variety of reasons. I guess I can relate to him: as the unwanted person thrown out of his comfort zone and not always wanting to be there. But there was one part in the beginning of the movie that Gandalf states: namely about how once Bilbo used to take after the adventurous Took side of his family before his mother died. And that really turned my head because, from what I inferred from that comment, Bilbo almost seemed to become sedentary and stuck in his ancestral Hobbit-Hole after his parents were gone. For a few moments, it made me wonder if it was a bit of fear or grief that changed Bilbo from a child to a more conservative Hobbit at the time. Even if it was unintentional on Jackson’s part, it was a nice detail.

The Dwarves, like I said, were fleshed out well and their singing more than appropriate given the nature of Middle-Earth as we have seen it through Jackson’s perspective and the gravitas of their quest. I talk about some scenes that really touched me when I watched this film and made me really relate to it, so now I can go on and mention some things I didn’t talk about in my previous post.

The panoramic views of the Shire and the path the company of fourteen (or thirteen and a half) take are breathtaking as always. I think that sometimes the film compensated for certain aspects by adding a lot of battle scenes. I don’t, for instance, recall Gandalf being involved with Bilbo’s dealing with the Trolls quite the way he had. At the same time, I loved how other things were inserted into the film narrative.

I absolutely loved Radagast the Brown. He is so unlike Gandalf or Saruman. He is kind of goofy and ridiculous, but he is still an Istari–a Wizard–and he acts like one when he needs to. There is something very shamanic about how he looks: especially with his fur robe and hat, and his sleigh of rabbits. I loved the nod to Middle-Earth lore with the mention of Ungoliant being the ancestor of the giant spiders of Mirkwood, and also Gandalf mentioning the two Blue Wizards whose names he … can’t particularly recall after two thousand years (which is fair because even now not everyone who has read the Middle-Earth books is sure what they were called or really whatever happened to them in the East). Now, what really intrigued me was the White Council. You know: Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and our favourite White Wizard-before-he-becomes-an idiot-Saruman.

I do recall Gandalf disappearing, or not appearing, in the book’s narrative at various points and apparently Tolkien’s notes and The Unfinished Tales have explanations as to what the Grey Wizard was up to during those times. And believe me, he was not just smoking pipeweed or drinking red wine or … letting Galadriel stroke his hair. I like how they draw The Necromancer into this saga and even how Saruman has some hilarious lines. Really, he was so serious in the Lord of the Rings films, but his comment about Radagast, as short-sighted and arrogant as it is, is really kind of funny. It also makes some matters clear with regards to what might happen in the other two Hobbit movies, and I will get to that later.

Before I move on though, I really like that gesture between Gandalf and Galadriel. All I can say is that Elves have a very different culture from the race of Men and a very radical understanding of the world. Galadriel actually has a husband and consort–Celeborn (who is known as the wisest Elf on Middle-Earth, take from that what you may)–so the gesture between her and Gandalf could be as an old friend and colleague comforting another.

At the same time, it should also be mentioned that Gandalf is not human, nor is he an Elf. He is a Maiar spirit: one of five sent from the Undying Lands by the Valar (or gods) of Middle-Earth to help the land deal with Sauron: who is also a Maiar. He is a powerful spirit that has been manifested, or chose to manifest in flesh. Galadriel herself is thousands of years old, but Gandalf is much older. He could have looked very different back in the day and they both lived in the Undying Lands once. Also, he has worked with her and the White Council closely and Galadriel herself is probably the most approachable consolatory member of the rest. So whatever the case, there is definitely a history there between them and it is fun to think about.

Now onto other matters. I must say that I have never heard of, or really recall the stone giants in The Hobbit or anywhere in Middle-Earth and it makes me wonder if Jackson simply put them there. They look like animated humanoid rocks that throw each other, and I will avoid making a pretty self-evident crude joke about the matter, but they were jarring to see in an otherwise seamless film.

I really appreciate the rapport of riddles and then the subsequent treachery between Bilbo and Gollum. I never get over how sorry I feel for Gollum and the way that he is almost friendly but vicious with Bilbo, ultimately insane when his ring is gone, and then completely despondent. That last is actually heartbreaking to watch.

So … now for the end. My brother wondered just why it is that the Great Eagles took the whole company only halfway towards the Lonely Mountain and not directly to the Mountain itself. I also wondered about this and I’m pretty sure that How It Should Have Ended would have addressed this much in the same way they did Lord of the Rings. But it actually makes sense when you think about it. Gandalf and the White Council were very reluctant to let the company go to disturb the Mountain because of the Dragon Smaug. Even Gandalf was concerned that Smaug might awaken and ally himself with Sauron.

Now, if you’ve seen that ending and you see what one bird managed to do can you imagine what would have happened if a whole flock of giant Eagles with twelve Dwarves, a Wizard, and a Hobbit with a Ring of Power (that he might not put on as of yet) came to the Mountain right away instead? Place your bets as to who would actually prevail in that immediate struggle. Then wonder what Smaug might do after that. He might just go back to sleep. Maybe. Anyway, it’s kind of a moot point at this time considering.

All in all, it was an excellent movie. I suspect that the second movie will deal with Smaug himself, and then the third will focus on the aftermath and the Battle of the Five Armies. But for now, I give this film a five out of five because, I think I am quite ready for another adventure.

P.S. And my answer to How It Should Have Ended‘s Lord of the Rings are Nazgul … on Fellbeasts.

Peering at the Plumbing of a Classic: Super Mario RPG

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

From what I could remember, I’d never played a video game RPG. It was the mid-nineties and I’d played a few adventure games, but I never really thought of them at all. Whenever I did, I heard mostly about Secret of Evermore, Legend of Mana, or the Final Fantasy games. But it was still the era of Nintendo Power Magazine and I really loved its Epic Center section: a place where they discussed new and upcoming RPGs.

I actually loved the descriptions of these games and the wonderful illustrations that found their way into the magazines more than anything. It was just a pleasure to read through these hints and images of games. So in a way my game voyeurism–of watching or seeing games as opposed to playing them–started around that time. And then, one day, two years after Nintendo and Rare’s Donkey Kong Country and its very exciting “32-bit graphics” (I’d got a video cassette with previews of said game), another game came out for the Super Nintendo.

It was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

I don’t even know where to begin with this game. You might wonder why I would be talking about it on this Blog and what it has to do with the spirit of Mythic Bios until you realize that until this point I’d never played a video game RPG. So my brother and I rented it from Hollywood Movies–an old store that used to exist in the plaza closest to us–and we kept it in our possession for a while.

What can I tell you? Mario RPG–as Nintendo and Square’s baby–had the same graphics as Donkey Kong Country, except instead of being a two-dimensional side-scroller venture–or a 2D game–it attempted to simulate a 3D environment. But it was more like having a bird’s view of a well painted clay animated demented doll’s house diorama that was always on an angle. I can’t begin to tell you how that strange perspective both awed and pissed me the hell off.

If you’ve ever played this game, and you have hand-eye coordination issues you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The endless times I would fall through the gaps of floating platforms, or had to manoeuvre the platforms by jumping properly, or just missing something by inches but the perspective or parallax didn’t register properly in my brain. Also, like I may have intimated, my hand-eye-coordination was not that good in those days and it led to swearing. A lot of swearing.

However, once these hurdles were passed, it was a brilliant game. Now that I have my complaining out of the way, I want to talk about what really struck me. First, you start off playing as Mario as a distant third-person character. You go to rescue the Princess from the bad guy as per usual and then …

Shit goes down.

A giant Sword plunges into Bowser’s Keep and throws Mario, Princess Peach, and Bowser in all different directions as the Mushroom Kingdom and the world face a whole new danger … and a whole new game.

That is how Mario RPG begins. Then it gets helpful. There are mushroom-headed Toads and various other beings that are more than willing to give you tutorials as to how to navigate in a RPG. I mean think about it: Mario has always been in a side-scrolling platform world and now he finds himself in a turn-based role-playing world with a fairly structured story. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that his world had changed, and so has your playing experience with him.

You also begin to realize that the Mushroom Kingdom is only a small part of a much greater world of weirdness and old enemies, and new ones come into the fore. You also get new allies as you realize that Mario can’t fight this new enemy and undertake his new quest on its own.

Remember when I said that Mario RPG reminds me of a weird angled doll-house? I think it would be more appropriate to compare it to a interactive reality bento-box. Yes, that’s right. A bento box. Not an Italian plumber’s feast. I went there. 🙂 At first the jumping and angling can be as awkward as learning how to use chopsticks for the first time (and in my case you never learn how to use them properly), but when you learn the basics you realize that the contents of the open-lidded box are compact, well-organized, elegant, and heart-warming.

This seemingly simple game is complex. There are so many in-jokes and easter-eggs–hidden secrets–it is positively ridiculous. And when actually sit down and take the time to think about Mario RPG, it influences me to add another criterion to what I think defines a classic game. This criterion is replay value and a different experience each time you play it. I can tell you now, if I replayed this game, and I have seen others replay it, my knowledge of some of its secrets now as an adult would change how I played it when I was much younger. Hidden chests, and puzzles, and knowing how to fulfill certain tasks changes a lot of things. You can tell, just by watching someone interact with this strange little world, just how skilled and experienced a gamer they truly are. I feel like was–and is–one of those litmus tests.

When you get past the awkwardness of navigation, you have something really compact and very dynamic. You are not attacked randomly. You either run into enemies, or you don’t: which is awesome because while Final Fantasy VI is an awesome game, the random enemy encounters got annoying fast: just yanking you rudely and obnoxiously out of the immersion of this world you find yourself in. Mario RPG doesn’t have this as much. Moreover, if you press a button– and you time it just right–in combat, you can double hit your opponents, block damage, and even get extra items.

The timed hit mechanism made it seem like the characters have actual reflexes: which was a brilliant piece of innovation in what can become an almost robotic and boring turn-based fight of dealing damage. And then there is also a very personal touch in healing your characters–like Mario–with an item in battle and having him turn to the screen with a dialogue bubble of “Thank you” coming out of his mouth. There is just something really nice about your character thanking you for helping them: especially some you’ve known since childhood.

As the Mario games have continued, they seem a lot like interactive slapstick comedy and this was definitely in Mario RPG: especially with the hilarious dialogue, the Mario-pantomiming that would occur from time-to-time, and the game’s often lighthearted and alternatively epic carnival-toned music box soundtrack.

This game influenced me a lot in more ways than I care to admit, or even know. I was very disappointed when the other Mario RPG games were not direct sequels, but–while really good in their own rights (having played Paper Mario and–even more enthusiastically– Super Paper Mario)–were their own standalone worlds. I mean, they brought all these new characters into play: Croco (who was the humanoid alligator equivalent of the octopus Ultros from FF VI who pissed me to no end in those early days), the sentimental marsh-mellow weather-controlling Mallow (who I didn’t mind), Smithy (who was a bad-ass villain) and his minions, and–of course–Geno: the animated wooden walking puppet guardian seeking to restore the Star Road so that people could have their wishes granted again. I guess at the very least, the game was not going to cop out by stating that it was “just a dream” like another Mario game we all know. ;P *Cough*Mario 2*cough*

I loved to play with Geno and Bowser in my team: Geno because of his powers, and Bowser because he was strong and scary. But they were all awesome and especially Mario. You know, Mario RPG really hit home just how unlikely Mario is as a hero. A plumber that finds himself in a weird world almost defying Alice’s Wonderland who turns into a giant from eating mushrooms, throws fire after finding a flower, and becomes invincible for a brief time with a star and jumps so high. This plumber goes to save a princess and fight a monster. He is quiet and he looks one of the least menacing figures ever. He never speaks but he has a definite affable personality.

In fact, aside from Kirby from Kirby’s Dreamland, the only other heroic figure who is so unlikely is The Doctor from his own television series. But he has that same heart-warming quality and care along with his enemies–even Bowser–and they have continued throughout the years to the point of having their own epic role-playing game. I would have once laughed and found this silly–which it is–but there is just so much packed in just this one little game that it is simply incredible.

So yes, tangents aside I give this awesome classic a five out of five. It was well-made and a joy. As Boltage McGammar in his own “Let’s Play” of this same game liked to say, “later plumbers.”

Going to the Moon With Kan Gao

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

“To the Moon, Alice! To the Moon!”

The obligatory Honeymooners reference aside– a bit of humour which Doctor Neil Watts, one of the game’s protagonists, would truly appreciate–I would like to talk a bit about Kan Gao’s video game To the Moon.

Before  last Saturday, I’d heard of neither Kan Gao nor his creation. I actually saw him at the Writing for Video Games Workshop organized by Gamer Camp and the Toronto Public Library. I am interested in writing for video games and so I attended both that Workshop and the Journalism for Games Workshop as facilitated by Jamie Woo, Perry Jackson, and Emily Claire Afan: all writers for the online geeky magazine Dork Shelf.

Both Workshops were very important to me: if only to create this review. I’ve made a lot of ad hoc video game reviews–mostly with regards to Super Nintendo classics–but there was one comment that was made in the Journalism Workshop that really hit something home for me. I believe it was Jamie Woo that stated that whenever video games are written about or reviewed, a lot of the history behind the creation of them or the culture surrounding them is almost never mentioned.

I myself find that really unfortunate and makes me look at some of the reviews I’ve made as a result. I’m not going to claim that this review will be any different but, like my others, I will give you a bit of background: if only to my own introduction to this game.

I came to the Writing for Video Games Workshop thinking that Kan Gao would talk about script formats and precise ways to segment your world for potential game company evaluators. Instead, in a soft-spoken but very direct voice he talked about how to tell stories. More specifically, he talked about finding that balance between game-play–actual interaction–and a coherent story-line balancing serious emotional gravitas and the levity of humour. This preview is best symbolizes the spirit of this game.

And this is exactly what he did in To the Moon. He showed us some scenes from the game: where the 16-bit pixel characters and background immediately reminded me of Chrono Trigger: of the graphics in the last days of the Super Nintendo before the push to 3D. You’ll find that happened a lot. Older consoles would continue to coexist with newer ones and improve on the design of some of their game graphics. Look at Kirby’s Dreamland 2 on the original Nintendo Entertainment System and all the variety and sharply defined colourful sprites as another example. Gao’s work seems to borrow from that last bit of graphic grandeur and expand on it into something else and new. This, however, will be the extent of my tangential parallels and where To the Moon is completely different from even the 16-bit reference I used.

To the Moon is an interactive psychological adventure RPG story created by the Independent company Freebird Games. It is about two scientists, the empathic and grouchy Dr. Eva Rosalene and mischievous slacker Dr. Neil Watts, who enter the mind of a dying old man named Johnny to “grant his wish” before he dies. They attempt to do so through using an advanced technology that allows for altering memory from childhood. Essentially, altering memories this way is fatal and that is why it is only used on terminally-ill patients who want to have a wish granted: to do something in their life over again if only in their mind.

Johnny’s wish is to go to the moon: but he doesn’t remember why. A few days after the Workshops, I downloaded the game for Steam and played it all the way through. If I had to sum up this game, I would say it has 16-bit graphics reminiscent of the Super NES’ last days, a lot of mystery, puzzles, a very intricate pattern of linked objects and events, a whole lot of incredibly poignant tear-jerking moments, and occasional interludes of hilarity.

Kan Gao is a masterful storyteller and musician. He and Laura Shigihara–the lead composer of Plants Vs. Zombies–created a soundtrack of haunting melancholic and heart-warming musical themes that represent memory and the past. What I really like about Kan Gao’s work here is how he integrates all of it together: to find that balance that he was talking about in our Workshop. In addition to combining a fine mixture of pathos and comedy, he interlaces his narrative with a whole lot of popular cultural references from the mid-nineties and beyond, and then even goes as far as to parody aspects of the video game RPG medium. If you have played the game, I am only going to mention two words: squirrel battle.

Gao doesn’t stop there however. He also really loves meta-narrative: placing moments where you can tell the video game creator or writer is winking at you through the characters. Essentially, as far as I consider it, one of the main criteria of a classic or a masterpiece is something that comments on the medium that depicts it. In other words, there is a very self-aware element to the storytelling of this game and it is very poignant.

I will say that it took me a while to get the hang of the puzzles. Essentially, most of them were Mementos: physical representations of way-points to travel farther back into Johnny’s memories. You have to decode them and take blocks away from them. I did figure it out after decoding the first Memento. Then there was the latter part of the game where suddenly there was combat and it confused me to the point of being very uncoordinated. It felt a bit like a break in the spirit that Gao was trying to make, yet at the same time it makes sense.

If someone were to ask me what my favourite part in this game was, I would say it is the place where things started to become fragmented and cyclical. If you have played this game, you will understand. Another thing I liked was the various ways that Gao graphically depicted memory. Sometimes you would see sprites interacting, and other times you would see duplicates of them frozen in sequential order. In a way, this game is also reminiscent of Chrono Trigger in that there is “time-travel” of a sort, but you are travelling through one man’s memories and not actual time: whatever that is.

But my favourite thing about To the Moon is how it really makes you think. I know very little about Game Theory, but I am intrigued by the idea of perspective in a video game. What perspective is this story being told from? I know that I said that Drs. Rosalene and Watts were the protagonists of To the Moon, but you could also argue that Johnny is as well: or that his character becomes the mindscape they traverse. You can even say that the game is a third-person limited narrative: a kind of sustained consciousness where we don’t see into the Doctors’ intimate perspectives, but we do see and determine what they discover about Johnny. Looking at perspective in a video game narrative always an intriguing thing to consider.

It also makes me wonder, if I were like Johnny–an old man on my deathbed–what kind of new memories I would like Rosalene and Watts to place in my mind and how I would feel if they had to go throughout my original memories to place that “seed” of a new one. If I really had to pick what my favourite element about Kan Gao’s storytelling in this game is, I would say that it is the characters and how he depicts human nature. I mean, he takes 16-bit sprites and he uses them as the litmus of human behaviour: as both flawed and incredibly beautiful. The relationship between Johnny and his late wife River–in how at times they don’t relate and yet at the same time actually do–and thinking about Johnny dying alone after a life of all these good, bad, awkward, regretful, joyful, and ultimately human choices he makes is just … humbling. I can’t think of any other word to describe that.

I will also add another comment that doesn’t make sense without context: Kan Gao is such a great storyteller that he made me cry over a platypus. A freaking platypus.

I will add a concluding note. In retrospect, I think it’s no coincidence that Kan Gao gave us the assignment he did in the Workshop. It was funny actually: here I was thinking the Workshop would be like a seminar with questions and references to new Indie games I had no idea about because I’m “out of the loop” (of which there were several references anyway) and that was it. Instead, Gao challenged us. He challenged us to take a memory of ours and make it into the last scene of a video game.

It was hard. I pride myself on being a writer and I had this challenge sprung at me. The trained perfectionist in me wanted it to be good. Gao also told us that when he created To the Moon, the last scene was the one that he wrote first and the rest of the story came from it. The Workshop and the game actually makes me want to do something. I’m not sure what yet–because I have a few projects already in the works–but we shall see.

To say that I would give this interactive story a five out of five is a foregone conclusion if you’ve read this article up to this point. Its atmosphere also makes for an excellent autumn game: something you can play on your desktop or laptop computer at home with a cup of tea at your side as the leaves change colour, the air outside turns cold, and the light of the sky becomes a faded gold. I would suggest that anyone that likes games with a powerful story-line should totally download this game: if only to play through Part One of what promises to be a transcendent epic story cycle.

So To the Moon, my friends. To the Moon.

I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren’t For Those Meddling Squids! A Review of Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I played this game for one day–just one day–and I hate green Squids.

Not the luminous blue ones, or the black ones. Not even the exploding fiery orange ones. The Greens. Just the Greens.

So I made an unexpected trip to Canzine 2012 this past Sunday: where I was reintroduced to the Comics Vs. Games-premiered The Yawhg, given a paper ninja-star, and talked with a few artists and game creators before finding The Hand Eye Society’s Torontron game cabinet arcade machines outside. I always loved arcade games when I was younger and I never got to play with enough of them. So finding these there was just an added bonus.

My friends and I started to play this game that I later found out was called Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence by Spooky Squid Games. At the time, however, I found myself controlling a 16-bit sprite with a shotgun in a house along with my hammer-wielding friend as we were being surrounded by floating Octopi.

I didn’t have time to admire the Lovecraftian settings of the house’s interior: such as the book with the Squid imagery or the almost Victorian laboratory feel. I also didn’t realize that the hammer-wielding sprite–that the character was a female scientist–nor that her clearly non-human shot-gun wielding companion was a clockwork automaton of her own creation. All of these revelations came later when I looked at them online.

No, instead I was either killing mass-Squids that electrocuted and devoured heads, or hurriedly knocking Squids unconscious with my hammer as I was trying to repair the walls of the house to offer us protection against these tentacle-armed hordes.

This game was fun. I admit, I really liked killing those Squids. I also felt some satisfaction in repairing the walls and seeing those plus numbers come up: which probably represented how much time or durability it had before it fell again. There was another quality to the game in that, aside from the two-player cooperation that is utterly necessary to your survival, you also need a certain amount of coordination as well. Essentially, it is integral that your gun-shooting companion fires as the most of the Squids while you repair the most isolated of the walls: such as the walls that are not being massed by tentacles of doom coming to suck your face in the middle of the night.

However, there is also the option of exchanging tools: throwing your gun or hammer to your friend. It takes timing and coordination and, sadly, we did not manage this. Sometimes the sprite’s maneuverability was a little awkward and stiff. I remember at least a few times I tried repairing a plank and not realizing I had to get very close to it to do anything with it. Apparently, according to the Game Over text, we had something to the effect of having as much coordination and teamwork as a bunch of “golden weasels.” Suffice to say, it wasn’t complimentary, but certainly made us laugh.

But then, as the game went on (after each time we died I mean), it began to occur to me that something was very … eerily familiar about it. It was the Squids that obviously made me start to think this. And I knew I had seen them somewhere before: these 16-bit luminous deceptively cartoonish tentacled monstrosities. I knew it was from some research I did before but I didn’t know the name of the thing. Then much later I realized they were related to this:

Night of the Cephalopods was something I had read about when I was looking at Spooky Squid Games (god I love this studio’s name) for my article Dreams of Lost Pixels and if this is anything like the game I played tonight–and the voice-over narrative actually happens in this game–I may well download it. This is a big thing for me because, like I have said many times before, I don’t often play games. I watch them being played sometimes, and I play a lot of selective games on older Nintendo consoles, but this game makes me happy. In fact, Spooky Squid Games seems to really love H.P. Lovecraft as a thematic influence of theirs and it is one of those influences that makes me want to write a Lovecraftian story tribute of some kind.

My friend today was talking about going to some Indie (Independent artist) Jams sometime: to make ad hoc independent creative collaborations together. I remember Comics Vs. Games and I’d love to collaborate as a writer with a video game artist. I would really love to do a Game Jam sometime. Just as long as it is not a slime. If Cephalopods has taught me anything, it’s that I hate being stuck in slime … and Green Squids.

Oh, and even though I only played the game today and for a little while, I want to give it a five out of five.

Art Consumes Life: The Shadow of the Vampire

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I wrote this review in 2009 or 2010 in another Journal while I still lived on campus. I’ll just warn you now that I liked to use big words then: especially back in those days. When I use the word intertexuality, what I’m referring to how different sources and references–like quotations and characters being mentioned in a film, or even how different media–can actually overlap in some really cool ways. I also really love meta-narratives and stories within stories. The metaphor of Achilles’ Shield and its little moving world comes to mind again. Also, it’s the season of Halloween and I feel evil. So enjoy, fellow horror-watchers and blood-drinkers. 🙂

So two days ago I watched the whole of Nosferatu for the very first time. Then yesterday night, I watched Shadow of the Vampire. And then I watched it again in the same night with the Director’s commentary.

There is a lot to be said about this film, and I’m still trying to absorb a lot of what I got out of it. First of all, the blending between Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film and E. Elias Merhige’s creation is almost seamless. Certainly, the scene towards the end of the film where Max Schreck transitions from a black and white scene into the subdued glowing light of colour is nothing short of awesome. I also liked how when they were originally filming Greta Schroeder’s scene as Emma playing with her cat, they mentioned how they had to put it on laudanum to get it to be still in front of the camera.

But that in some ways misses the point of what I really do want to talk about. When I first saw the film without the commentary, I wondered why it was that they had the diagrams at the film’s introduction, and what they possibly meant. The images displayed there made very little sense to me, while at the same time there was a strange … familiarity about them and their arrangements as well. It was only really when Merhige gave his commentary that I started to understand what he meant by making the introduction like this, and what he was attempting to do with this film.

Basically, he explains that the illustrations in the beginning of the movie represent a hybridization of ancient and medieval art along with 1920s cubism. In this way, he attempts to show how humanity has depicted itself and the world around it throughout the millennia, incorporating time all the way to the point of the 1920s and its new expressive medium — namely, film. By the very end of the film, Merhige explains how we have always tried to capture what is around us, what is magical and timeless, on our “cave” — in our cave drawings. We are all mortal, and the materials that we have used to try to capture these moments and life itself are just as frail and brittle.

Enter the camera.

The camera, as Merhige explains, is the new “cave” — the new mechanized interior where we can record these moments for posterity. All moments. It sets a new tone in the world. At the very beginning of Shadow of the Vampire, you see first Murnau’s eye, then the dark lens of a 1920s camera recording Greta’s domestic scene with the cat, and then the crew in the very cool vintage white lab coats and film goggles of that time. From this point onward, this is the entire tone of the movie — this need to capture something in the gaze forever. Once, in a third year University class I watched part of a movie called Ulysses’ Gaze, which I barely even understood. But what I do remember was our professor explaining the idea that through the gaze one attempts to capture everything — to understand and preserve it, and to some extent even possess and control it.

It is, arguably, a visceral and in some ways very patriarchal need. Enter Murnau. As this film would have it, Murnau — played by John Malkovich — is a film pioneer in a medium that is not being taken quite seriously yet. It is still in many ways a novelty. But in his own obsessive and very tightly controlled way, Murnau sees the potential in film and what can be done with it.

Enter the 1920s, a time that I’ve been told I could have fit into rather well. It is 1922, and the first WWI is not that far behind the world, especially not Germany and its humiliating Treaty of Versailles verdict. However, at the same time a whole new decadence and vitality has filled this world, and in this case Berlin. From the culmination of twisted Victorian nationalisms, and the peak of the Industrial Age’s penultimate achievements in creating mechanized death come more advanced pain-numbing drugs, along with looser morals, and social inhibitions.

Society loosens up, but the shadow of death — of the figurative vampire, if you will still lingers. It is a demon that has to be exorcised from Europe and particularly Germany. This much is something you can understand without this film or the director’s guidance. But this is the backdrop of Murnau’s world, and Murnau himself (who was actually a fighter in WWI and needed his laudanum to deal with the physical and possibly psychological pain of his injuries). So there is already this dichotomy between innovation and a new pioneering spirit of the age, of new ideologies and ideas breaking out of social stratification and, at the same time, there is still the dark spirit of the chaos not long left behind. In all of this, a few films are being created to express both principles.

In the film, Greta Schroeder, very much more sassy and sultry than her character Emma Hutter tells Murnau about how much she dislikes film — that while Theatre gives her life, Film seems to steal it away from her. Like a vampire would. But as Murnau very ominously tells her, she will get her chance at fame, and immortality. This is something that can best be expressed from the words of Murnau himself when he says:

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory… but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

In essence, Malkovich’s Murnau wants to create an ever-present, something that all people can see happening forever and all be a part of. Of course, there is a price to be paid for this innovation — this enlightenment. The Industrial Age has already cost many lives, and the camera — this neutral dispassionate lens that can supposedly capture everything (including, as some societies would have it, the soul) is but a child of this process. As Merhige attempts to explain again, the old is always replaced or supplanted by the new. And what is the old? The old is nature. It is mystery and magic. It is power, and immortality. It is fear, and it is the unknown.

This is where, finally, the Vampire fits into this structure.

Enter the Vampire. It is difficult to describe all of this without talking about Nosferatu and the novel that loosely inspired it — Dracula. Nosferatu was an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s story that his widow did not grant the rights to. She, like many of that time believed that the Theatre was more professional and hallowed than film. This in fact cost Murnau’s company a lot of money in terms of lawsuits, and Nosferatu itself was very nearly destroyed. At the same time, even Dracula is the child of older, much older sources. This is one context of intertextuality that is very interesting to this regard.

In Dracula, the Count is portrayed as a foreign alien menace, something beyond England and “the civilized” world. He is powerful and seductive and almost “Orientalized.” Whereas in Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, the less attractive figures of Count Orlock and Max Schreck respectively live much closer to Germany, and while they do embody something “primitive, ancient and horrible,” they are not so much a foreign terror as much as an old familiar horror just below the collective unconscious of the people living in, or close to the land that they come from. These narratives neither have the luxury of thinking that their monsters come completely from elsewhere, nor that they do not have any role in the human world.

The fact of the matter is that there have always been stories about vampires or things like them — about immortal creatures that feed off of the blood and energies of the living. The analogy between the vampire and the camera can be very apparently seen here. Both feed off of the present and life. Traditionally, a vampire can even preserve a life form in a parody or imitation of the life they once had.

Willem Dafoe’s Max Schreck cannot create other vampires. He is alone and awkward, and twisted. He barely remembers how he became what he is, or what he used to be. He is a monster that unapologetically and unrepentantly feeds off of blood. It is his nature and what he is. At the same time, he is sad, and lonely. This vampire has lived too long, misses the light of the sun, and he reads the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson about immortality at the price of always aging. He above everyone in this movie knows how beauty can truly fade and has paid the price for this knowledge just by existing. Of course, every thinks that Max Schreck is merely a character-actor and is always in his role for professional reasons.

To me, in this situation the vampire represents something dark and ugly, but also mystical and incredibly truthful. He does not lie about what he is, or how he feels about what he is. If anyone is the liar, it is Murnau who is willing to risk and throw away all life in order to use this actual vampire in his film — a truth that isn’t revealed until it is all too late. He is the power that Murnau wants to capture, to use a figure of actual immortality to make his film even more timeless. But as I said, there is a tradition to be followed here. Like Grimm’s fairy-tales, like the Germanic folktales before it there is a price for mortals to pay for achieving any form of immortality, for dealing with any kind of it.

A sacrifice. A human sacrifice.

I will not say anything more on that matter, save that despite the theme of the modern overtaking the ancient, there is still a sacrifice — and if anything the modern makes it more clinical, and even more chilling. And the camera lens captures it all. Even as mortal life fades, and immortality ends, and all sanity is lost, the camera continues to take everything in — cold, detached, dispassionate, and hungry. It creates a story for all people to experience for ages to come. Merhige tells us that originally he wasn’t even going to name this film after a vampire: that his film was not about a vampire at all. A vampire is in it, but so are a lot of other people and in many ways they are all equal in how they captured in this narrative. No one escapes it. Not even the vampire. Especially not him.

But after viewing both movies, I felt this deep calm that I haven’t felt in ages. Like it all made sense and something was now gone from me. Perhaps it was catharsis: a powerful combination of pity and fear that are both the essential components of awe. But I wonder — was this ever-present Shadow and all it represented really purged through pity and fear? Was it in fact exorcised or dealt with?

Somehow … I doubt it. Not in the 1920s. Not here. Not now. Perhaps it will never be. But maybe … just maybe, as Merhige stated, through understanding that such living stories could last generations, this is something that can be encountered both consciously and responsibly — through film or any other medium.

Book Review: Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

One evening, when I was living downtown, I came across a book in a church-run thrift store. It was this big thick-paged book with a very luminously colourful ornate cover. I’d never ever heard of The Invention of Hugo Cabret before this point, but I saw that Scholastics had published it, and it was about five dollars or so. So I bought it and it sat in a cupboard for a while until I finished my initial draft of my Master’s Thesis. Then a day or so before leaving on a trip, I began and finished reading it.

Hugo Cabret is the story of an orphaned boy of the same name who finds himself operating and maintaining the clocks of a Paris train station while attempting to fix an old and broken clockwork automaton. It is when he attempts to steal some parts from an old man’s toy booth at the station that he reveals a far greater story and his life changes forever.

I really don’t want to spoil this book. I will tell you now, though, that it is excellent. Brian Selznick is not only an excellent writer that knows how to pace and flesh-out his characters, but he is a brilliant illustrator. Hugo Cabret is essentially an illustrated novel: with pages of text inter-dispersed with sequential pages of softly shaded drawings and stylistically-faded copies of sketches and photographs. It basically looks like a notebook or a journal: especially with the image of a lock on its cover. Given that there is a notebook that features somewhat heavily in the plot–once belonging to Hugo’s inventor father–the aesthetic follows the form well.

What I also like about Selznick’s aesthetic form is that it is on that border between an illustrated novel and a comic: in that while there are pages of words, and pages with pictures and words, there are also entirely silent panels that display interrelated sequences. It’s a nice borderline form and it adds to the content nicely.

In terms of content, this book is apparently labeled a work of historical fiction. This is an interesting designation because while there is definitely one central character that is real and historical, Selznick has taken some creative liberties. I also wonder in light of this if the other characters may be conceptions of this particular character’s work made into real personalities in a meta-narrative sort of manner. I love that kind of thing, in case you didn’t already get that, but even if it’s not true there are definitely moments where the concepts of the characters could very well fit into … other conceptual places.

But what really intrigues me about this book, aside from its liberties and ambiguities as “historical fiction,” is how it eventually focuses on the medium of film. In contemporary times, we often take moving film for granted. It had to develop from somewhere after all: both technologically and artistically. Even Hollywood itself was a small independent pioneering workshop studio at one time before it gained more resources and popularity.

While this story seems to take place in the 1920s, it refers after a while to the turn of the century when film was being developed: as well looking at the kinds of people who helped to create it. And who were these people? Some of them were magicians. I am not being figurative here. Some of them, including one of the characters in this book, were artificers, artists, and stage magicians before they became directors and creators. And it makes sense. After all, aside from the fact that vaudeville and its acts, along with theatre, and opera preceded a night at the movies in terms of prestige and guaranteed entertainment, film is kind of like watching a magician’s shadow-play on a thin skein of reality. It is a concept that reminds of Clive Barker’s short story “Celluloid”: where the silver screen is a more permeable layer of existence with our world than we would be comfortable to believe.

I love the image of the magician as film-maker and inventor, and if you read this book I assure you, you will understand what I mean. A friend of mine once said to me that if I embodied any kind of film, it would be the black and white 1902 A Trip to the Moon: something that is extremely symbolic, experimental, even comic, but also parodies and is self-reflexive and aware enough to know that by consciously parodying things, it reveals its opinions on what these things are. I mention this film for a reason that has to do specifically with one aspect of the book. What’s also interesting is that not long after I read this strange and awesome artifact, a film was released based off of it: one I’ve still have yet to see.

That digression aside, I give Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret an unambiguous five out of five. Until next time, au revoir. I seem have something in my eye.