Chaos

Like usual I haven't updated this blog in ages and so I'm starting this post talking about how I haven't updated. And now I'm talking about how I usually talk about it, which sadly isn't the first time it's happened. Before things more recursively meta let's just get to the point.

I had no idea in mind when I started this, no well thought out thesis about why something sucks and how everyone should listen to me. No this post is just going to be another one where I have several topics with no coherent train of thought between them. They're just stuff that I've been thinking about (and hopefully someone else wants to hear about).

(Like last time, some of you may have already heard me prattle on about these already)

First off: Just Cause 2, in particular the end.

JC2 is a sandbox, third person shooter with vehicles. If that sounds familiar to you it's because it's one of the most frequently used combination of genres in games at the moment. It's like unnecessary sequels for films in that they are both ridiculously common and hopefully in a decade we'll all shake our heads and laugh at how things were.

But I digress. You play as Rico Rodriguez, an unstoppable god-like action hero who works for the CIA the Agency. Rico is sent into the fictional Asian island nation of Panau which is run by an oppressive regime, to locate your fellow operative/mentor Tom Sheldon who has gone dark and possibly rogue. To track him down you must generate chaos to weaken the governments hold and win the trust of various terrorist factions.

Pictured: espionage

A couple story missions in and you find Sheldon who tells you that he had to go as deep undercover as possible as things are serious; you're just told to keep doing what your doing (fun enjoyable sandbox-based destruction).

Fast forward to the end and it's time to take down the dictator Panay and hopefully replace him with a US-friendly puppet. You seemingly take down Panay and then it turns out that it was all about oil. That's right oil (admittedly it's a lot of oil). Without Panay suddenly Russia, Japan and China are all making their move to try to get control before the US.

And then Panay (whose somehow still alive) launches a nuke at each of the four countries. For the last mission you must grapple onto and disable the nukes. For the last one Rico reprograms it (apparently that's possible) and sends it crashing into Panau's oilfield, destroying it so now one gets it. Rico, Sheldon and associates sit back content that there won't be a world war and I bang my head on the desk at the stupid third act.

There are several things that really irk me, and hopefully you too. The developers had all the pieces to make a coherent, adequately logic end story and then they sudden;y drank paint thinner and put it together wrong.
You'd think that since Sheldon had to go dark for big important information gathering it would be because he was trying to track down where the nukes were. That's reasonable, nuclear weapons are high stakes and anyone would be secretive about them. But no, he was just trying to track down Panay or something, and the nukes caught him and EVERYONE ELSE by surprise.

And then there's Rico taking out the oilfield. This pisses me off on every level, to the extent that if we added another level I would pissed off on that too. But enough tortured metaphors, there's a bad climax to criticise.
Firstly there's the obvious safety concern. Nuking an offshore oilfield (one with more oil than the rest of the world combined!) is not going to end well. Rico and co end the game sitting on a boat with their backs to a huge mushroom cloud, discussing what to do now. They figure that the Agency will be rather mad that Rico destroyed more than 50% of the world's oil but they've got this nice tropical paradise to retire to or something. Except that they don't as any of the following might now befall Panau: nuclear fallout, tidal waves, poisoned water, oil fires, economic depression, collapse of government and order.

About the only disaster that won't befall Panau

And then there's Rico's reasoning. Sure any of the four countries involved getting control of all that oil would shift the balance of power and could quite possibly result in war. But Rico isn't allowed to gain any good karma points from this. You see when generating chaos not everything you do is destroying military bases and propaganda, this also things like water towers and transformers for tiny little villages. So Rico isn't allowed to do anything redeeming. He's a horrible person with the facade of a good guy. I suppose in retrospect his final act is perfectly in character, causing destruction for a weakly justified goal.

So remember way back at the start when I said I'd cover several things. Yeah well...I'm not.

Generic Title

Okay my guilt for leaving this blog dormant has reached the point where I'm actually going to finish a post so let's do this. I've been wracking my brain to find the nice middle ground between things I can talk about at length and things that people might actually care to read about.

So instead of a post about anime no ones heard of or games no ones played I'm going to rant about particular scenes in moderately well known films, Iron Man 2 and Sunshine.

(If you've watched these films with me then you probably will have already heard these thoughts)

Iron Man 2

It's the final fight of the film, Iron Man and War Machine have taken out all the Hammer drones in an adequate fight sequence. Ivan descends from the sky in a tougher looking suit, ready to wreck their shit up as only the main villian can (or rather should). War Machine steps forward and launches his trump card superweapon the Ex-wife, basically a super bunker buster. It bounces off Ivan's armour and Iron Man asks derisively "Hammer Tech right?".

Seriously what the fuck?

The joke is supposed to be that Hammer and his company are incompetant and can't build decent weaponery. But the joke falls apart if you think about it at all.

Only minutes ago War Machine's armour had been under Ivan's control and Iron Man had been desperately trying not to get his face blasted off by WM's chainguns; which happens to be Hammer Tech.

And what if the Ex-wife had worked? Sure it would have blown Ivan away, as it would have IM and WM. Why would you fire a high grade explosive in close range? And how come none of the characters make any attempt to escape/avoid it?

While this all probably sounds trivial and nitpicky, my main point is that our supposed heroes show a worrying lack of perception or foresight, which given that they are wearing power armour, is kind of a big deal.

Sunsine

While the IM2 bit was me raging at plot holes, for Sunshine it's more about missed opportunities.

Let's look at the final couple scenes: Capa (the protagonist) blows the airlock, venting all the air in the spacecraft, presumably killing Pinbacker (the psycho killer). He releases the bomb, jumps through empty space from the ship to it and gets inside. There he finds Cassie (the only other survivng member of the team) and Pinbacker, who inefficiently tries to kill them. During this time the bomb is INSIDE THE SUN. Capa and Cassie escape Pinbacker, Capa sets off the bomb, and any of the budget remaining is spent on special effects.

While I do like this segment, it seems like they went overboard making Capa the hero (he does more in the last act than most of the characters in the entire movie), Pinbacker the villian (did we need him showing up one more time in the bomb, isn't being inside the Sun enough danger?) and Cassie the useless woman (her only contribution to run to the bomb thereby leading Pinbacker there). Here's how I would have preferred the sequence to go.

Capa blows the airlock, explictly killing Pinbacker. He releases the bomb and jumps from ship to bomb. He doesn't get inside, let's say because of safety restrictions eg no opening doors this close to Sun. He remains on the outside and watches as they went the Sun, thus referencing his recurring dream of being on the surface of the Sun which is mentioned earlier in the film. Meanwhile Cassie realising the situation activates the bomb, given that in an earlier scene Capa explains to her how it is done. The bomb goes off, this time without having as much time engulfed in nuclear fusion.

Bear in mind I do like these films, and as a result I hold them up to a higher standard. In my mind the better something is, the more jarring a bad bit is.

Remember when I had a blog?

Well all my tests are done for the year so now I'm out of excuses for not updating this blog. Since there's no single topic sitting on the top of my mind like some horrifying spider I'll do another one of those weekly updates I did last post (you know, at the start of October).

First and foremost, the game I could talk about for several hours and my friends can listen to for several seconds: Minecraft. One of the main reasons this game appeals to me so much is there are just so many potential anecdotes. For example between the last post and now I've:

-Carved a valley through a mountain (because I could). I then roofed the entire thing in glass and started to send lava over the top.

-Discovered my first underground cavern. I had been expecting it to be the size of a house or two like the ones that are topside, only to find it was the size of the shopping centre, full of monsters and ores.

-Started multiple forest fires.

-Opened a portal to hell, a world full of a stone that burns eternally and monsters that manage to be worse than Creepers. What's worse than a silent creature that spawns in the darkness and suicide bombs you? How about a something that flies, spawns everywhere, shoots fireballs and screams constantly.

-Used the hellstone to create walls of fire for defence, lighting and just sheer fun. Fortunately there were no trees left nearby to burn down.

-Lost the entire save file......

.....moving on.

I finally got around to watching Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Going in I didn't have strong feelings either way; I liked the comic but I wasn't convinced they could be adequately adapted. Here's an abridged summary:

Pros

-Good implementation of title cards, narration, scene transition etc, as both a throwback to the comic and as just creative film editing.

-The final fight. While I preferred the comic's version, how the 'extra life' part was handled was a unique twist that caught me completely off guard.

Cons

-Michael Cera. I know it's mean-spirited and heaps of other people have already complained but he didn't have the manic energy I associate with the character.

-The various comments by onlookers during fights just don't translate well. In comics talking is a free action, but in any other medium you can't have dialogue without affecting the scene to some degree.

-Uninteresting action scenes. Despite (or maybe because of) the flashy visuals I felt no rush, no excitement while Scott was fighting. I've heard plenty of people over the years talk about special effects-centric scenes being incredibly dull but until now I'd just written them off as stuffy critics and nerds nostalgic about older films.

Neutrals

-I didn't care about Ramona in the slightest, but I can't hold that against the film as I felt the same about her in the comic.

-Negascott lost all of the emotion depth (it was one of my favourite of the actual serious scenes) that he had in the comic. However what they did do with him was both funny and unexpected so the two points cancel out.

In the end I'm apathetic about the movie. Shocking, me displaying that emotion, but what more can I say? There's nothing substantial that either excites or aggravates me to any significant degree.

There was going to be a third thing but I'm tired now, so just imagine me saying whatever you want to hear.

Odd Picture Choice

Foreshadowing!

I had this idea to help myself update regularly by doing a weekly post that just talked about the various media I had consumed recently. This was a week or two ago. As you might guess, I've already let the schedule slip before it even really began. But Apple just crashed TF2 and I'm too bitter to play anything now.

The first order of business is Minecraft. After hearing good things about this game from multiple sources I gave it a go. And for a couple days I thought it was freaking brilliant.

You are placed in a world made up of cubes of various materials that can be harvested and turned into various items. Also at night monsters spawn and murder you rather effectively if you haven't built some shelter. Beyond that you are left to make your own fun (like Garry's Mod) in a world where basically everything wants to kill you (like Dwarf Fortress). Unlike these two games however, Minecraft is a lot more accessible (once you've browsed the wiki).

Here's some of the shenanigans I got up to while I played.
Since monsters spawn in darkness I decided to convert my house to glass in my spare time when I wasn't doing things such as...
...building a tower to the top of the sky. Unfortunately you cannot walk on the clouds. Naturally the next step was to dig to the bottom of the world which was considerably more difficult. At the bottom there's several nearly complete layers of unbreakable stone. If enough gaps line up the can reach the void beneath the world. So naturally I decided to link the tunnel containing the infinite abyss to the ocean of infinite and see if I broke the game:
Nope, but apparently stairs break the water physics.

I found a strange level of enjoyment linking the ocean to the tunnel. The inability to tell where you are in relation to everything lead to me making a series of tunnels coiling all around the place, and there was a sense of suspense because I never knew when I would strike a another tunnel, which may have been full of water.

Ultimately what turned me off the game was the lack of goals as I'm not obsessive enough to be one of those people that make huge scale structures and models. Once the multiplayer gets stabilised (the game is still in alpha) I will give it another look.

Since I'm running longer than intended I'll finish up with Highschool of the Dead. When visiting the Madman site for an unrelated reason I came across this show andwas intrigued by the idea of the Japanese take on the the standard zombie apocalypse scenario. Turns out it is the same as the western one except with lots more fanservice.

No seriously, lots of fanservice.

After getting over my initial disappointment that this wasn't a dark and slightly serious work that the first episode made me believe, I came to except the show for what it is: an entertaining romp full of bloody and breasts. It's not a work of genius but it still rates higher to me than most zombie fiction.

Oh right, I haven't actually really said anything about the show itself: great animation, adequate attempt at plot, one brilliant musical homage, serviceable action, mostly fast paced, no gore despite excessive violence and blood, fanservice (cannot stress that enough), possible second season.

The Silver Age Begins...

Now that I've got a scanner I can subject you all to the various pictures that I can't reproduce in MS Paint. Here's a brief comic showing my standard reaction to the presence of a cat:

Audiosurf Vs Beat Hazard

While working towards the last achievement in Beat Hazard it occurred to me that I'd never got around to doing a comparison between Audiosurf and Beat Hazard despite there being no good reason not to. After all I frequently lament the fact that I find it difficult to rate media in a vacuum or in relation to it's context at large, but not in a direct comparison. So why the hell haven't I done this yet?

Anyway, AS and BH share the same premise, using your music to generate the level, but take it in two different directions genre-wise. AS gives you a track the length relative to your song choice and you 'race' do it, collecting coloured blocks to make groups of 3+ whereas BH gives you a top down space shooter where the firepower is determined by your music. These are both games were basically the entire goal is to get a high score. For convenience I'm going to harness the ultimate power.....of subheadings.

Visuals

The great thing about superficial things is that they're generally easier to discuss. AS' visuals could be summed up as simplistic. There isn't much in the way of textures, so everything is rather blocky and reminiscent of virtual reality in older films. Not that there is anything wrong with this; you're a car collecting blocks for points, not some war-wearied soldier or something. While the objects may be plain, the colouring is actually important. The blocks are colour-coded for value, with hotter colours being worth more. Further more, the track and background take on a hue relative to the speed of song/track, with the slow sections being blue or purple, and the fastest, most intense parts red.

BH is probably the better of the two games in terms of actual visual quality. The spaceships have some detail, and there's plenty of bloom. The catch is there's too much bloom. You see, visual distortion is a deliberate game design choice.

Artist's representation of a climatic boss fight, probably.

Unfortunately BH doesn't take a note from AS and so colour is meaningless in the gameplay. With the exception of the grey ships and the yellow missiles, the colours of the various explosions, lasers and so forth all alternate through a neon spectrum with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Gameplay

AS can be rationalised into two different styles: combo and evasion. In combo you collect the various coloured blocks and the challenge is not getting yourself in a position where you can't make groups of 3+. You can select from several racers each with their own unique abilities which further varies the gameplay. In evasion there is only one colour to get, but there are also negative grey blocks, which hurt your score noticeably, so the challenge has a lot more focus on fast manoeuvring and less quick decisions. There is only one racer choice for this (because evasion style is really just a racer's ability).

BH has several actual gameplay modes, but the core challenge remains the same: you continuously shoot while dodging oncoming objects. Beyond that there's the choices of when to use a screen-clearing bomb and when to stop shooting to raise your point multiplier. This is what kills a lot of BH's longevity for me as all rounds play out basically the same, whereas AS as some variety.

Music Relevance

Despite being a fundamental part of both games, there isn't too much depth to the effect music has on the games. In the end it is really just the speed of the song that does anything. AS changes the gradient of the track based on the song, with slow parts being uphill and fast naturally being down.

In BH your musics speed effects both the size and power of your shots, and the frequency of the enemies. Your weapons will vary between a pea shooter and a death-beam that covers a quarter of the screen, and the idea is in the lulls where you guns are useless, the idea is to play evasively and raise your daredevil multiplier. Sounds pretty cool right? Just like communism, in theory it works. As far as I can tell which enemies spawn and in what amount seems to be all determined by the difficulty and not be the music at all. I've had plenty of times where I've had massive lasers but only a couple asteroids to destroy, and other times have been stuck with the pea shooter and had to survive against two bosses.

Longevity

These are both score-based games. There are no definite goals and accomplishments, as any success just means that now the bar is higher. Personally I'm really not interested in games like this; I want to have more concrete goals, and I can't stand that feeling that there is no ceiling, I could always do better.

AS has a noticeable lead over BH in this area, as each song has its own global leaderboard complete with comment, whereas BH has just a leaderboard for highest scores in general or something (I really don't know exactly, BH doesn't present it after a song unlike AS).

Conclusion

Whether these games are worth playing depends on how into the whole 'your music makes the game' idea. If you really like that then you'll probably be disappointed, but if you already like the genre of either game anyway, then you might get more enjoyment out of it than me.

What I would like is a game that is a cross between AS and Mario Kart. I like the idea of a song making the track but I hate the implementation. I want people to race against, I want weapons, I want the track to be a circuit rather than a straight line. But that's not going to happen. Or is it?



No.

Epic

It's been too long since I've actually finished and published a post.
It seems like a weekly ritual that I must start typing something, my head swimming with awesome sounding sentences, only to realise that I have no idea how to tie the increasingly mundane sounding sentences together, and that my central idea is flawed and limited. And then I close the window and another draft is orphaned.

But enough of that, I want to talk about James Cameron's Avatar.
First off I'll say that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I was well aware of the cliche storm (and in fact knew the entire plot) and was prepared for a long unnecessary film full of visuals that I would not care about. And I got all that I had expected: weak plot, stupid message, CG vistas.
But what I didn't expect was the level of quality. Everything may have been unoriginal but at least it was adequately done. For instance I initially groaned when there was a voice over at the start, but it had both an in universe reason (instead of say some all seeing disembodied voice) and was present through out the entire film (none of that very beginning and then very end when the audience has forgotten crap).
If I had to give it a rating on the fly, I'd say 3/5. Not worth the decade of work or deserving of the hype, but much better than I had expected.

Now that I've got that done, I can get to the meat of this post: discussing the setting. Bear with me, this will be awkward.
When you look at sci fi worlds you can often hazard a guess as to whether they are built around established rules and their consequences, or whether it just follows the rule of cool. Avatar is an interesting film as I think it was conceived as just a bunch of awesome ideas (floating mountains, world trees, pterodactyl mounts) that then had reasons made to hold them all together. It's contrived but it's better than no reason at all.

So the planet Pandora is rich with Unobtainium, which is a multi-purpose material that is incredibly valuable and a tradition trope of sci fi universe. The presence of this substance (I assume, it better be fucking canon or else they've got one hell of a contrived coincidence) allows the development of basically a tree-based network that connects living creatures, acts as a pseudo-afterlife, and contains an alien god-mind. It's the cross between the internet and the Farplane.

What's the problem then? Remember the end battle, with the military about to win only for the forces of nature to arrive and wreck their shit up. Sure it's a deus ex machina but at least there's some foreshadowing; it's not completely out of nowhere.

No what bothers me is this: how does Eywa communicate with all the predators? Does the wildlife just plug into trees in their spare time? One could argue that there was some sort of wireless communication but that completely undermines the whole premise of the bio-USB's and is not hinted at what so ever. It happens purely because the plot needs it to.

This same level of reasoning occurs in two other situations. The first is the mind transfer bit at the Tree of Souls. Apparently Pandora's plants can connect to the human mind via our skin, kind of like how when your put a book next to a TV, the story is shown on the screen. Fine I'll ignore this one, it only happens twice so it's not in your face all the time mocking logic. The next point is though: the freaking avatars.

The drivers get in their tanning beds, see some stock swirling vortexes, and then bam! they are controlling an alien body. How is this possible? Are their brainwaves being broadcast between bodies? If so wouldn't the floating mountains interfere? A side effect of this slopping planning/design is that it trivialises the whole Pandora USB thing. Who cares about wired stuff when there's wireless.
Something I don't understand is how this problem even came up. They could have made it that the drivers have to get body modifications done on them, namely a one of the neural links. The drivers could be hooked up to their avatar and transfer bodies. We'd lose the possibility of a driver being disconnected whilst in their avatar, but we'd gain the threat of their human body being killed when their are out playing space elves.

I came up with this in idea in like ten minutes; Avatar was being designed years ago. Go figure.