Zelda Runthrough: Four Swords Adventures (Gamecube + GBA, 2004)

The Wii U is not the first time that Nintendo would combine a television screen with a handheld.  They had that idea a decade earlier, in the GameCube era.  Using a special cable, one could connect a Game Boy Advance to a GameCube controller socket for certain games.  Although only a few games would use this for anything other than unlocking special content, those that did, like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Pac-Man Vs, made for memorable multiplayer experiences.  The best of these, by far, is Four Swords Adventures.

Although the original Four Swords game was developed by Capcom, Nintendo took the idea and really ran with it.  They kept the basic framework, such as a level-based design, with up to four players, that allows you to carry only one item at a time to make menus unnecessary.  But instead of randomly-generated levels, the sequel had predesigned ones, because it's much, much longer than the original.  Whereas Four Swords was an interesting proof of concept to add a bit of meat to a LtoP remake, Adventures is a full-length game.

FSA still doesn't have much of a story, although for a multiplayer game, I suppose it's better than most.  The black blob Vaati is back, although this time there might be a certain pig-guy behind the scenes.  This game has entire towns to explore, with plenty of characters to chat to.  Amusingly, interacting with an NPC brings up dialogue only on that player's GBA screen, which means you might want to read it out to the other players (preferably in a funny voice).  One of the levels is almost a mini-adventure game, with lots of puzzles to solve.  Speaking of puzzles, there are plenty of great dungeons in this one, with some real head-scratchers.  If you're playing with less than four people, than the extra Links will tag along behind, requiring you to master the use of formations to solve lots of puzzles.  In fact, the game is probably a bit too complex (and long) for four players.  Two seems about right.  You can play the game single player, with a GameCube controller, but I wouldn't say FSA is on the level of the best Zelda games.  It's the multiplayer, and the multiple screens, that makes it fun.

Speaking of other Zelda games, FSA is a huge love letter to Link to the Past - the world map itself is copied wholesale from that game, although each section is broken up into three or four stages.  The graphics - which are roughly the same on the TV and GBA - also appear to be 16-bit, although there are some great visual touches that the better hardware allows.  For example, bomb explosions will ripple out, causing the pixels themselves to shimmer.  It's a nice-looking throwback, and also the last 2D Zelda to appear on consoles.  Gameplay-wise, it owes a lot to LtoP as well as Link's Awakening, with lots of horizontal platforming sections, like in the later game.

So, all in all, I was surprised by how much I liked this game - Clare also enjoyed it.  My main quibble is that while the game has players working together to solve puzzles and defeat enemies, there's a rather unnecessary competitive element thrown in that tends to counter these.  You see, the game has you collecting Force Gems, which are essentially rupees.  You do this mainly to unlock your swords' extra power in each level, but also the player who collects the most gets recognized at the end (without receiving anything).  This encourages players to be dicks, hitting each other to knock out gems, and acting as vultures whenever a player dies.  (You can't hurt each other directly, but there are plenty of indirect ways.)  Worst of all, just as you're congratulating each other for beating a tough dungeon, the game informs you that, rather pointlessly, there has to be a winner.

When one of those players has beaten every previous Zelda game, it's not really a fair contest.  Kudos to Clare for winning a couple times.

Overall, though, definitely worth tracking down - if you have a couple spare GBAs handy, that is.  Yes, the hardware costs are prohibitive, but the greatness of this game makes me really wonder why Nintendo did not work any 3DS connectivity into the Wii U.  At this point, with the 3DS so popular, I'm sure they're kicking themselves for not doing so.

Lame Meal

Another Math Genius = He Ain't Smart Enough

Final Fantasy V (1992, Playstation)

For my latest Final Fantasy post, I decided to do something different.  As you may have gathered, I've been playing through the series with my wife, Clare.  In honor of the first FF to allow for 2 players, we've decided to do a "2-player blog post".  Hope you enjoy!  (We may decide to make this a tradition here at TPINS.)

Ben:  So...Final Fantasy V.  Sandwiched between the much more famous IV and VI, FFV is perhaps the most controversial game in the series.  Some people think it's a blemish on the series, and some think it's a hidden classic.  But whatever people think about the game and its strange job system, everyone seems to agree that its plot is not much to speak of, so how about we start there?

FFIV's big innovation was the large cast of characters, each with well-defined personalities that played off their fixed class in some way.  FFV, like earlier entries, has just four(-ish) characters that can be anything from healers to bad-ass ninjas to...flamenco dancers.  Unlike those previous games, however, these characters actually have somewhat fleshed-out backstories.  I actually found the occasional flashbacks to be surprisingly touching.  For instance, when Bartz, pretending to be asleep, overhears his parents arguing about his father leaving home to go on another dangerous adventure.  How do you think these characters compare with those from FFIV?

Clare:  I found myself much more invested in FFV's characters than FFIV's, because they stuck around for so much longer. After it became apparent that some of FFIV's characters were going to drop out more or less permanently, it became much more frustrating to deal with the remaining team members...were they going to disappear into some sickroom somewhere too? I also think FFV allowed for a nice mix of scripted character arcs and player input in the form of which job(s) each character was going to level up. For example, Faris is a pirate captain. Having her level up as a fighter makes a lot of sense with her scripted plot. On the other hand, the plot seemed to want Reina to be the healer -- she is the "kind" one, the princess, but there was nothing stopping us from subverting this trope and making Bartz our healer instead. Somehow, this lends more richness to the plot than there otherwise would be. Reina isn't just the kind, sweet princess out healing the team. Instead, she has a meta-narrative of trying to figure out which of the many jobs are going to work for her...for us, it turned out that alchemy and archery were really her thing. Furthermore, Bartz is sort of scripted as our lead guy. He is the first character we control, and seems to fit the wandering hero trope. But instead, he winds up being the support character to the much more physically powerful female warriors. Speaking of which, even if Bartz is one of the fighters, the game has as many female characters as male ones. It's not possible to have the girls be the token female healer -- there are just too many of them.. So what did you think of the largely female cast? Do you think it represents a real shift in gender dynamics in the Final Fantasy series?

Ben:  I was hoping you'd bring that up!  The Final Fantasy series, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the stereotypes that pervade depictions of females in JRPGs.  FFV, despite being dominated by women at the end, is no exception.  Reina is the "kind healer", Faris is the "unrepentant tomboy", and Krile is...well, I suppose she's more of a cipher, although some have suggested that she's supposed to be the "lolita".  But one of the great things about the job system is that you're free to subvert those expectations.  And except for a couple cutscenes where Bartz shows off his ninja prowess, the story lets you have it your way.

But while we enjoyed having fun with these characters, their story was hard to take seriously.  This is a game, after all, where the greatest threat to all existence comes from an ex-tree named X-Death.  If I may go on a tangent, though, there is some sense to be made of this.  The informative Final Fantasy Wikia tells us that this is actually a portmanteau of Exodus and Death.  This brings to mind the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, responsible for the exodus of Adam and Eve.  Really, recasting the villain from that story as the tree as opposed to the serpent is an interesting interpretation - I wonder if the Gnostics had something similar in mind.  Probably not something Sakaguchi was thinking about, I guess.

...Anyways, another thing about this game that nobody seems to talk about is how great the monster designs are.  Seriously, this game goes off the deep end, giving us cats wearing wings...


 ...ballerina goblins doing handstands...


 and...again, X-Death is an evil tree.

 I would argue that with RPGs pre-FFVI, the monster designs, and not the story, are the real "content" of the game.  Would you agree?

Clare:  I think one of the surprising things about pre-FFVI Final Fantasies is that they seem to have complicated and weird stories that aren't really all that different from later RPGs, but they are delivered in a much clumsier and less coherent fashion. In FFV, we have an evil tree trying to destroy the universe, yes. But there is also the fact that the world was split in two (I don't remember if it is clear why that happened), and you can travel between these worlds via meteor. There is also a strong theme of fathers passing on the torch to a younger generation, who has to step up and take their place as heroes. There's sort of a lot in there. Not as much as FFVI or ChronoTrigger, but it's still a fairly complex set of elements. On the other hand, the storytelling aspect of the games is still a little clumsy, and the individual elements don't really gel perfectly into a whole. It's much better than FFI, where everything was delivered in one near-incomprehensible infodump at the end, but they still haven't quite figured it out all the way by FFV. FFVI seems like such a huge leap forward because it knows how to tell a complicated and strange story. It has a better set up, a better reveal of the true enemy, a more solid story arc over all, and the stakes just feel much higher. So, to take a long time to answer the question, I think the story "content" of FFV is not really that different from later games, but the delivery is still clutzy enough that the really enjoyment of the game comes from things like the monster designs. And those designs are great! I loved the handstand demons. Also, this guy:

looks a lot like one of the monsters from Mother 3:

So, there's that.

There's also the fact that, unlike in previous Final Fantasies, I really felt like we hadn't fully completed this game. There were a lot of optional bosses that we didn't beat, a lot of summons we didn't acquire. We didn't level up all the jobs, or try all the alchemy combinations, or learn all the songs. It seems like there is just much more to do than ever before, and unless you are really devoted, and probably have a manual at hand, you won't really get to do or see everything. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see this as being a good direction for the series? I'm a little torn. On the one hand, it lets you decide more what you want to do (and potentially adds replay value), but on the other hand, it puts a kind of pressure to put more time into the game than you might really want to. When we encountered a lot of the optional bosses, it was pretty obvious that we were nowhere near being able to beat them, but if you let the story move on, then the opportunity to do so disappears. Is it reasonable to expect players to spend another several hours leveling up just to get a new summon?

Ben:  If Final Fantasy V gets talked about today, it's usually because it's great for "Let's Play's" - the replayability of the game, with its myriad job combinations and various collectathons (summons, blue magic, songs, etc), surpasses anything that came before it.  As a rule, the only games that I enjoy replaying are the ones, like adventure games, that play exactly the same way a second time.  And yet I enjoyed Final Fantasy V despite this, because there's so much fun experimentation that you can do in a single playthrough.  And moreover, this experimentation feels necessary.  The boring fighters that you can get away with in earlier games just don't cut it in FFV - you need to add a ninja skill like 2-swords (which allows dual wielding) or forgo a shield and use 2-handed to double the attack power, or else you're not going to be useful.  Also, the traditional elemental black magic is relatively useless against later bosses - much more useful is time magic, like Haste2.  The magic spell that allows you to restart the battle should be in every JRPG ever.

There is plenty in the game that we missed, but we did most of the optional sidequests - at least all of the obvious ones - and randomly discovered an extremely cool hidden town.  I think there's a healthy attitude to take, somewhere between speeding from cutscene to cutscene and being an absolute completionist.  I too wish that we could have beaten Omega or Shinyuu, but I think the game tried to make it clear that those battles were for masochists.  Certainly, it was annoying to stumble into them after hours without a savepoint, but I do like the idea that there are beings out there that can crush the greatest of heroes.  If Shinyuu wanted to take over the universe, we'd all be doomed.  It is true that Final Fantasies would soon pander more and more to perfectionists.  I remember the Playstation-era games containing many sidequests that seemed impossible to 13-year-old Ben without a walkthrough.  I'm very curious to see if that will still be the case.

Overall, I would agree with placing FFV in the "under-rated classic" department.  Certainly, Square's decision not to release it in America for several years seems increasingly baffling.  One final question:  what do you think modern JRPGs could learn from FFV?

Clare:  I guess all games have to walk the line between showing you too much and not showing you enough. If you want players to have a feeling of discovery -- that "Oh my god, there's a hidden town here!" feeling -- then you have to also risk that some things are going to remain hidden. And overall, I think that's a good thing. And if there is going to be some challenge to a game, then you have to risk having some bosses who are too hard to beat. I guess "hard" isn't really quite the right word. I don't think anyone is really "bad" or "good" at this style of turn-based RPG. It's more a matter of being persistent or not. In fact, I think that's where a lot of the fun comes in. The most fun thing in this game is seeing Faris deliver 9999 HP of damage with a sorcery attack, but that's only fun because before that were hours and hours and hours where a really good attack was probably only worth 200, or 500, or 2000 HP. The thrill of beating Shinyuu is probably similar. It's fun mostly because you were totally unable to do it before, and it took hours and hours of grinding to get up to a level where you could even have some kind of strategy.

So what can modern RPGs learn from FFV? I guess the biggest lesson is that there is a balance between having characters who can do everything and having characters who are too limited by their class. If all your characters are good at everything, there isn't much strategy, everyone is just an equal badass. But I hate being punished for making bad decisions in choosing classes early on, or for experimenting with different strategies later. In FFV, you can only be good at 2 things at a time, but you can learn new things and change your mind up until the end of the game. We didn't make Reina an archer until the near the end, but it was easy to switch her, and she wound up really powerful. Each character has his/her own role, but those roles can be switched up easily to allow for more, well, more play with the mechanics. The other lesson that sadly hasn't been implemented much, is that RPGs are super fun with a partner. FFV allows a second player to control half the characters in battle, and that makes it so much more fun. It is an easy thing to implement in a turn based game, and it sort of makes me sad that we can't do that in all upcoming games. But not too sad, because FFVI has the same mechanic. I call Celes!

All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

This is a movie whose Wikipedia summary is less a summary than an accurate description of everything that occurs during the film.  So let me just say that this is a movie where Robert Redford endures a harrowing ordeal at sea.  I suppose the film to compare this to Cast Away, which has slowly become the gold standard by which these sorts of survival movies are compared.  I didn't think much of Cast Away when it came out.  It seems overly fascinated with all of the different ways that a man might survive, and even stay sane on an island for years.  There's no room for fate in Cast Away - in the end Hanks' character saves himself when no one else is going to.  Yes, he gets a bit lucky with that ship at the end, but the way it's presented, it's like he earns that ship.

Redford's character in All is Lost is certainly more resourceful than most people.  Certainly not everyone could make it through what he does in this film.  But what makes All is Lost the better movie is that, ultimately, it's not up to him.  If God deals you a bad hand, then all the resourcefulness in the world isn't going to save you.  How does a man face that knowledge?  Well, the genius of the film is that Redford conveys those emotions with panache.  There's some genius touches in this movie, such as when Redford shaves while a big storm is coming in.  I certainly felt like I learned more about Redford's character than Hanks' in Cast Away, and Redford didn't need to talk to a volleyball to accomplish that.

xx (The xx, 2009)

Shortly after this album was released, The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a review, in which he discussed an early xx concert he attended on a lark.  The music, performed at a near-whisper, sounded aggravatingly sterile, and Frere-Jones left feeling confused and unusually irritated.  Then he heard the album itself, which is wonderfully intimate and emotionally resonant, and concluded that the band had constructed the record first without a thought to how it would sound live.  This is a reasonable conclusion.  It is also completely false.  The xx were playing shows for years before their debut, and developed the arrangement of each piece through a great deal of experimentation.

This basic misconception explains a lot about the xx.  Regardless of Frere-Jones' first impression, the xx is a band that fills football stadiums when they perform.  Yet there's no doubt that they do so on the strength of a single album, whose success they've had a great deal of trouble replicating.  Their second album was critically panned, and the songs on their third, forthcoming album have so far fallen a little flat in performance.  Perhaps the reason is that the band doesn't really understand why their music resonates with so many people.

The tags that we attach to this music - "minimalist" being the most important - were not intentional.  It's hard not to listen to the lead singers, male and female, and think that their music is not about a relationship, even though both are gay.  Clearly, the band deserves their success, but it's hard not to feel that there's a fundamental disconnect between them and the audience, and the group is going to have to reconcile this before they can move on.

In any case, the album is so good that they should have lots of time to do so.

Something I learned This Week

A slimline Playstation 2 can be left on for 24 hours covered in a thick gray sweater in 90 degree weather and still work fine.

Johannes Brahms

Barring especially extreme weather, I walk to and from BU every day.  Although the small amount of exercise is important, I do this mostly because it gives me a whole hour each day to listen to music without much distraction.  For the last few months, I've been listening to Brahms each morning.

Only a couple years ago, my knowledge of classical music began and ended with Beethoven.  I once had the ridiculous idea to listen to every Beethoven opus in order.  Brahms more than any other composer could be considered the heir to Beethoven, and for that reason I avoided his music for a while.  Why listen to a imitation instead of the real thing?  Well, I was being stupid.  Brahms has an extremely wide range, and though there are plenty of clever allusions to Beethoven in his music, it's very easy to enjoy on its own sake.  The key thing to remember is that Beethoven was working actively to thwart the classical conventions of his time.  Brahms, over fifty years later, was seen as a conservative, using the older (but heavily altered) musical forms while contemporaries like Lizst and Wagner had abandoned them for something more programmatic.  While their music can be hard to follow along with (without form, it's hard to keep your attention focused), Brahms' is not, but at the same time his music can be much more melodic than Beethoven's, in my opinion, and doesn't have as many "gotcha" moments, where Beethoven messes with your expectations.

Anyways, since I only listened to most of this music once, I'm not really qualified to go into any depth about any of it.  Instead, I'll take the easy road and rank what I heard into groups.  Let me first say that there wasn't anything on this list that I actively disliked.  Brahms' music is very approachable.  I would heartily recommend him to classical noobs.  Since he burned almost all of his early work in a fit of self-revisionism, what's been passed down to us is especially good and not overwhelming (four symphonies as opposed to Beethoven's nine, three string quartets as opposed to sixteen, etc).

Top Tier:

Piano Quartets 1-3:  To me, these quartets sound like piano concertos with a heavily reduced accompaniment.  Which is to say that the piano dominates these.  But the strings do their darnedest to keep up.  Most people would probably recognize the fourth movement of the first quartet if they heard it (the "Rondo alla Zingarese"), but I'm stunned every time I hear it.  Finally, I'm a chamber music convert.

A German Requiem:  I'm also a choral music convert after this one.  Brahms didn't use any existing mass for this one, but created something extremely personal and moving to commemorate his mother's death.  The melodies on this one are amazing.

Clarinet Quintet:  When you think clarinet and strings, you think of Mozart's incredibly relaxing opus.  This one is expectedly weightier.  Surprisingly, it works!

Still Great:

Piano Trio No. 1
Violin Concerto
Violin Sonatas
Four Serious Songs
Symphony No. 2
Piano Concerto No. 1: The reputation for this one is not good - the bad reaction to this piece apparently put Brahms off orchestral music until he was middle-aged.  But I quite liked it!  Sure, it's somewhat heady, but there's a great momentum to it.  I even like the much maligned third movement!

Good, but kinda disappointing:

Symphony No. 1:
This one is popularly known as Beethoven's Tenth, and it's fans say it holds up well against the ninth, which it unsubtly alludes to with a very "Ode to Joy" like theme at the end.  But I didn't find it nearly as epic and moving - in particular, the fourth movement seemed to be kind of a mess.  Overall, I would say that Brahms' symphonies just don't compare to Beethoven's.  I did like the second one better (see above).

String Sextets:
Some people wonder why the sextet was not a more popular form.  I am still not one of those people.

The End of Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

Morality in post-war Japan figure largely in Ozu's films, and by 1961 conventions had changed remarkably from when Ozu started his career in the 20's.  However, in The End of Summer, it's the patriarch of the family who brings shame to his children.  The widower Manbei, played by Ganjirō Nakamura, keeps running off to visit his old mistress, with whom he may or may not have had an illegitimate daughter.  He isn't very good at hiding his excursions either, and when he's confronted about them he brushes it off very unconvincingly.  Meanwhile, the family business is on the verge of collapse, and two older daughters, one played by the Ozu favorite Setsuko Hara, wonder if they should marry men they don't love to help save it.  There aren't many bright spots in this movie.

And yet, there's much to be grateful for - this is Ozu, after all.  Manbei seems to care deeply about both his potential daughter and his other children and grandchildren.  More importantly, he seems happy at the end of his life, and even a heart attack doesn't stop him for long.  For all the pain he causes his children (and his wife, when she was alive), it's hard to deny him that.  I do wish that the other storylines were more fleshed out - it seems like Hara doesn't have much to do in this one.

But one of the most fun things about this movie is that it's my first Ozu film in color - the beautifully maintained Japanese homes really come to life in unexpected ways.  I'm particularly struck by all of the dark wood, which I didn't expect.  Even Hara's face in color is a minor revelation.  Of course I wish that Ozu had more time to utilize it - this would be his second-to-last movie.

24 Exposures (Joe Swanberg, 2013)

In 2012, a bunch of directors collaborated on a collection of short horror films called V/H/S, all with the theme of "found footage".  Joe Swanberg, the pater familias of the mumblecore movement and one of my favorite directors, was one of these.  Though V/H/S was itself a bust, Swanberg's contribution was certainly the best of the group.  He was less interested in tinkering with horror conventions.  During most of the segment, it wasn't a horror film at all, but rather an exploration of a couple's relationship through their vacation video.  The dark twist at the end could be read as a breakup in the style of Henry VIII.  It seemed like Swanberg was just using the horror genre to allow his characters to do things that would be considered too shocking in most of his films.

24 Exposures is something of a further exploration along these lines.  An IMDB search reveals that most of the cast is shared with V/H/S.  24 Exposures isn't really a horror film, although there's lots of (fake) blood.  Rather the action centers around a photographer who films naked women in horrifically and realistically staged death poses.  Delighted by the erotic nature of death, he's placed in contrast with a depressed detective of actual homicides when one of his potential models gets murdered.  Yes, that's actually the plot.  Usually, the plots of Swanberg's movies are just window dressing, but in this case there's not much else here. 

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of interesting ideas here, but generally the acting is too poor for me to get too interested in these characters.  The man playing the detective is particularly bad; for the first five minutes or so I was certain that his character was actually "playing" a detective on a TV show.

Chiaroscuro Friday

"Watching the trailers for MGSV makes you wonder if the spirits of Dostoyevsky, Stanley Kubrick, and Caravaggio entered Hideo Kojima's body because, using the art of gaming as his canvas, he boldly goes where no one has gone before." 

- Nicholas Winding Refn, director of Drive, Only God Forgives

 

Professor Layton Series

I'm not done with Miracle Mask, the fifth game in this series, yet, but I thought I'd say a few more words about the series as a whole.

Anyone who's familiar with these games knows that they're a puzzle gamer's comfort food.  Few of the puzzles are very difficult, and there are plenty of hints for the tougher ones.  While they can get a bit tricky, they all need to be solvable on a tiny DS screen, so there's a sharp upper bound on complexity (although I'm starting to hate those damn block-pushing puzzles).

Those who haven't played the games might be surprised to learn that story is also a big focus.  I've never found any of these stories very compelling.  Some sort of mystery is afoot, which is apparently supernatural, but always has a rational explanation.  Never mind that these explanations typically involve hallucinogenic gas or robots impersonating people.  Also, most of the villains are extremely cartoonish, and speak like Liquid Snake ("DEAR BROTHER").  Needless to say, I actually have a hard time remembering most of the key details of the first four games.  I guess I'm supposed to find the anachronistic "old-English" setting charming, but unlike most Japanese takes on the west, this one sort of baffles me, what with all of the contorted Caucasian faces and strange geography (is Miracle Mask set in the midst of an English desert?).  I do rather like all of the beautifully animated cutscenes.  It's no surprise that developers Level 5 would eventually collaborate on a game with Studio Ghibli, as the Layton games have a distinct Miyazaki influence.

In any case, if the Layton games aren't rewarding puzzlers, and the story's so unmemorable, why have I bothered to play so many of them?  Well, I suppose it's because they really are comfort food.  Like the Dragon Quest series, you know exactly what you're going to get with a Layton game.  The model has barely changed throughout all of its iterations.  After Demon's Souls, this was just what I was looking for.

In fact, I'm going to go ahead and throw out the 'C' word - "casual".  In the West, we would reserve that title for games like Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga, but those games could never hold my interest, because they seemed so goal-less.  The Layton games give you much more do, and plenty to see along the way, but they flow just as smoothly, and work well for bite-sized play sessions.  I think we associate Japanese games with a certain kind of hardcore mentality, but there are plenty of examples of casual Japanese games, if we broaden our definition slightly.  Remember, even the Japanese RPG developed as a more laid-back, accessible version of the Western ones.

Playing by Heart (Willard Carroll, 1998)

This is an ensemble romantic film.  It's script has some real corny moments, and a couple of the storylines are underdone.  (Or "underwrought", as one of the characters would say.)  But holy crap, get a load of this cast:

Gillian Anderson:  When this movie came out, she was probably the biggest actress on this list.  I remember an interview she gave on Starz's version of "Inside Hollywood" where Anderson said she was looking for a role that was "as far from X-Files as possible."  Which is extremely ironic, since if you try to imagine Agent Scully in a rom-com - extremely reserved, shy, been "burned" one too many times - then that's pretty much how she appears in this movie.

Angelina Jolie:  Did you know that Jolie was in 15 movies before her breakout role in Girl, Interrupted?!  She was the lead actress in Hackers!  I remember her role in this one pretty well from when I was a kid, including many of her key lines, and I had no idea that she played it until I randomly searched for this movie on Netflix.  And she's excellent - Clare thinks it's her best role ever.  She wears incredibly distracting 90's clothes, but dang if she doesn't sell the part.  Worth watching for her storyline alone.

Jon Stewart!!!:  Liberal millenials, eat your heart out!  Stewart plays the absolute epitome of the rom-com male:  witty and sarcastic, but sweet, and can't take no for an answer.  He's even an architect, if you can believe it.  Even the frosty Anderson can't resist his charms.

Sean Connery:  Okay, this one's actually a little disappointing.  I'm a sucker for late-period Sean Connery with his gravelly voice and excellently manicured white goatee, but at one point he makes a joke about "Intercourse, Pennsylvania" and radio station "WWFU" with his wife played by Gena Rowlands.  (He also makes "little dog panting noises", and that's an image you can't unsee.)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg:  you also get Dennis Quaid (who looks like Clark Kent), Jay Mohr (in an incredibly unfunny role), Ryan Philippe, Madeleine Stowe, and "Goose" himself, Anthony Edwards.  Dang, this movie's a treat.

And even if you're not a 90's actor nerd, it's actually a surprisingly decent movie.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple (Kristian Amundsen Østby, 2012)

Escape is a board game - one that Clare and I gave her brother during our trip to Michigan last week.  Clare and I have been getting more into board games lately.  Since our video gaming habits are usually pretty anti-social, it's nice to be able to invite a friend or two over to play something other than You Don't Know Jack.  So far, the games we've played run on the complex side, but Escape bills itself as a family game.  Believe me, it's far more fun than the dreaded Monopoly or Clue.

The goal of this game?  Escape from the temple, of course, within ten minutes.  There's no competition here - either all of the players make it out or everybody loses.  The players discover new rooms, move around, and activate gems (necessary to get out) by means of dice rolling.  But if you roll a "black mask", then the die becomes cursed, and can't be used again until you roll a "golden mask".  Roll all black masks and you become frozen, until another player in the same room lets you use one of their golden masks.  This means that cooperation is key.

So far, this would be pretty dull stuff, but for the game's main gimmick:  there are no turns!  Everyone is rolling their dice as fast as they can.  This is one of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect.  Just in the last few years, there are quite a few awesome-sounding games that make use of it.  It makes the game pretty suspenseful, and to enhance the ambience the game even comes with a timer in the form of a spooooky CD soundtrack.

So how does it work in practice?  Pretty well, actually.  The rules are pretty simple, which is important, because everything has to be learned before you start the timer.  But the game is no cakewalk!  It's extremely easy to get locked without much warning, so it's a good idea to partner up and stay in constant communication.  During our playthrough, we were chattering things like "Almost locked", "Got 3 Keys", and "New Room" in a state of near-panic.  Nobody made it out in our first game, but by the second we'd figured out some basic strategies - stay in a group as much as possible, keep near the central chamber to avoid the "gongs" - and we all made it out with minutes to spare.  Fortunately, there are plenty of mini-expansions included to add difficulty and keep the game fresh.

But like any great family game, difficulty is not the point.  It's just great fun, with lots of excitement and no need to wait around for your turn.

Threes! (Sirvo, 2014, iOS)

Back from a vacation to Northern Michigan, and ready to finish off my series on puzzle games.

Dots is initially great in its simplicity, but as I mentioned last week, one can only get so good at the basic game before you hit a ceiling, where the need to move your fingers as quickly as possible competes with any technique you have for generating squares.  And while I don't object in principle to micro-transactions in iOS games, when they're used appropriately, the idea of buying (or earning, through repeated play) "cheats" totally subverts the idea of any real accomplishment.

Threes! has none of these problems.  It's hands-down the greatest "Tetris-like" ever made.  The idea is to match numbered tiles as they emerge on a grid, using a simple mechanic whereby tiles can be pressed together against the edge.  Tiles with high numbers can merge when they match each other, creating a single tile with double the value.  However, the game mostly sends you 2's and 1's, which can only merge with each other to create the titular 3's.  Although the game gives you a score, the real goal is to attempt to create the highest-valued tiles you can, before the grid fills up and you run out of moves.

As you might guess, this involves a fair amount of strategy, and a strong understanding of how the game generates new tiles.  Unlike Dots, there is no time element, which means that games of Threes! can be quite long, especially as you get better at the game.  But knowing these strategies, the principles of which can be learned in fifteen minutes, are no guarantor of success by any means.  What really floored me is that, over a series of ten to twenty games, I was getting better without
really knowing why.  I knew the strategies when I could barely make a 96 tile, but with incremental changes in my tactics and a steadily improving instinct for what a good grid looks like, I was eventually able to get a whopping 768.  If that doesn't make for a good puzzle game, I don't what does.

A couple more observations about Threes!:

1)  The developers posted an astounding wealth of information about the development of this game, which took 14 months in total.  An astonishing amount of that time was spent developing the aesthetics of the game.  Instead of desiging these aesthetics as a "shell" for the core game, the mechanics evolved along with the aesthetics.  I find this remarkable, especially I don't much care for these aesthetics.  It's cute that the tiles have faces that wink at you and such, but it's extremely irritating when they chatter away at you, even going so far as to complain when you take too long in moving (fortunately, that feature can be turned off).  Also, the idea that I would create higher-ranked tiles just so that I could read their pithy descriptions is absurd.

2)  I was astonished to discover that a number of people in my department had not heard of Threes!, but had played its clone 2048.  I have not played this game, but a quick look at its description and some reviews suggests that it is not nearly as complex or fine-tuned.  I can only surmise that its popularity comes from the fact that it's free, and also that the horribly-designed App Store means that its popularity is self-perpetuating irregardless of quality.

King John

The prevailing view of Shakespeare's histories, somewhat oversimplified, is that nation-states are driven above all by strong personalities.  King John, with its constantly shifting allegiances and treaties made and broken within hours, comes near to throwing out the nations entirely.  The play, set long before any of the other histories, begins on a strange note:  France and its king threatens England with war not for the sake of conquest, but ostensibly to restore the rightful ruler Arthur, young son of John's older brother.  The armies meet before the city of Angiers, whose citizens, in the play's funniest line, promise allegiance to the "King of England," leaving it to the combatants outside to decide who that will be.

Putting the word 'king' in quotes seems apropos, since as John himself admits, what makes the king is the crown.  Arthur may have the right of blood, but that doesn't seem to count for much in this era.  France will soon abandon him for a marriage treaty with England, which will itself be almost immediately broken due to a bit of mischief caused by the pope's emissary.

Overall, King's John is a play without much of a center, where the facts seem to matter little in the face of passion and whim.  After Arthur is captured on the battlefield, John, despite an assured victory over France, orders his death out of cowardice.  And even though his assassin can't bear to do it - for some reason, the death was to be "facilitated" by burning the boy's eyes out, which would make Voldemort hesitate - Arthur kills himself in a desperate escape attempt, and John take the blame.  This causes England's nobility to take up France's cause (although not for long).  There is no simple war between nations in this play.

Most of the play's critics think the best thing about King John is Faulconbridge, bastard son of Richard the Lionheart, common man turned knight.  Certainly he's extremely witty, and something of a predecessor to Falstaff, or even Hamlet.  But I have a hard time figuring him out.  In the first act, after he's first acknowledged by John and given a title, he gives a wonderful monologue wherein he promsies to deliver "sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth / which, though I will not practice to deceive / yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn".  I find this highly ambiguous, because throughout the rest of the play, Faulconbridge exhibits nothing but honor, loyalty, and bravery, despite his brash and sarcastic mannerisms.  Despite all the play's twists and turns, he manages to keep his head on straight.

So what are we to make of this monologue?  I like to believe that Faulconbridge has a strong streak of self-interest, and considering that he ends the play as England's foremost military commander and supporter of the young Prince Henry, then it must have served him pretty well.  Very interesting character.

Dots (Betaworks, 2013, iOS)

I have a pretty wide taste in video games, but I generally lean towards games that are naturally finite.  I like to know when I get into a game that it has a clear ending, or at least a point after which I can step aside from it without second thoughts.  The same is true of my favorite puzzle games; I like the solvable kind.  So as much as I can appreciate how great Tetris is, it was never one of my favorite games growing up, and I'm still kind of wretched at it.

The same is mostly true of it's myriad clones and descendants.  You won't catch me playing Candy Crush Saga on the T.  But I have flirted with these types of games on occasion, and since I'm on a puzzle game trip lately, now's as good a time as any to share my thoughts.

Dots, for example, is certainly pleasing in it's minimalism.  For those who haven't partaken, Dots gives you a simple grid of colored dots, and you link consecutive dots of the same color in order to remove them from the screen.  Do this for a minute, and the game scores you on how many dots you've removed.  That's it.  Shortest game summary ever.

Well, not quite.  The hidden twist is that if you remove a square, then all dots of the same color are removed at once.  This is the key to getting a high score.  Well, that's not quite all either, since the game allows you to spend your accumulated points (or real dollars) to purchase all sorts of power-ups that boost your score in various ways.  But these would seemingly make your best score somewhat arbitrary and meaningless, which defeats the purpose entirely.  So I've stayed far away from those. 

Like I said, I like games with a goal, and so I came up with a way to make this game (and other score-oriented games) worthwhile to me; the back-and-forth.  My wife and I would alternate with this game (which we played on my iPod Touch), each one playing until he or she could beat the high score of the other.  Actually seeing someone get to a certain high score gives you the knowledge that it's possible, which motivates you to work to beat it.  We actually had quite a bit of fun getting better at the game...until Clare got lucky, with a score so ridiculously high that I had no chance of matching it (or even coming close, really).

Like I said, the real goal of the game is to find as many squares as possible.  Well, sometimes, you just get really lucky and a whole bunch of them come together in sequence.  Now, if I was really good at the game, then I would know how to choose my matches, so as to create squares.  But as soon as I'm thinking about that, I'm not moving my finger as fast as possible, and my score suffers.  So the game was fun for a while, but I don't see myself getting anything better.  And that's it.  I can understand that it's still a good way to use up a free moment, but I play enough games as it is, that my time-wasters take other forms.

Labyrinth (ThePuzzleFiles, 2006)

Labyrinth is a video game in the loosest sense.  It's one many of online puzzlefests which might loosely grouped under the genre of "tower games".  Tower games, some of the most famous being NotPron or TheFirstDoor, have a simple model; they are a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, accessible by browser, where answering each puzzle correctly gives you the URL to access the next.  They are usually plotless, and rarely give you much of a reward for completion (although I wouldn't really know, since I've never actually beaten one.)  The lure is the brutal difficulty, which can be quite legendary for some of these so-called games.

Labyrinth began as a contest, a sort of puzzle marathon.  The puzzles are mostly cryptographical in nature, with the answer to each being a word or phrase hidden in something as bewildering as a knitted thread.  The puzzles are always fair.  Certainly riddles like these could be made arbitrarily difficult, but that's never the case with Labyrinth.  Usually, when the rule for decoding comes, you'll know it right away, and you won't understand why you didn't see it all over the past week.  The game does have some mean tricks up its sleeve.  Like a real labyrinth, there are even dead ends, where a partially correct answer will lead you down a fruitless series of puzzles ending with a trite message telling you to turn around and find where you were mistaken.

Only 117 people, have beaten Labyrinth - I know because the game lists all of these out in a hall of fame.  I am not one of those people.  Only two people beat the game last year - obscurity is partly to blame, but still.  This is not for the faint of heart, but for the incredibly patient.  That said, the community of puzzle solvers is not an unwelcoming one.  A forum for tower games is often provided, where hints can be found.  Direct walkthroughs are usually not available, for good reason, since they very much defeat the purpose.

However, when a puzzle leaves you entirely helpless, and the forums give you nothing but the same seemingly-useless hint repeated, then you're bound to feel a bit of despair.  What's amazing about these games is that it's entirely possible to recover from this feeling, and gain that flash of insight when you least expect it.  Today, for example, while "researching" this blog post, I managed to solve a puzzle that had put me off the game for the past three years.  Now I'm hooked again.

Certainly tower games are not for everyone, but I'm always surprised at just how small the community is.  Certainly the name I've assigned them is not canonical, and they're a bit hard to Google ("online riddle games" might be the most popular moniker, but that it doesn't really do the games any favors).  But I've always considered them, and Labyrinth in particular, some of my favorite puzzle games, so I think they deserve much more attention.

SpaceChem (Zachtronics Industries, 2011)

SpaceChem is an unappealing name for a game, but as the developers try to make clear in the tutorial, the game has about as much to do with real chemistry as Ace Attorney has to do with real law.  Which is to say, extremely superficially.  The best way to describe SpaceChem?  It's the greatest programming teacher you didn't know you wanted.

The history of "programming games" is about as old as programming itself.  One of my favorites growing up was Widget Workshop, a simpler version of Incredible Machine which allowed you to mess around with basic logic gates by disguising them in all sorts of colorful and cartoony ways.  When I was in college, we learned to program in Java by giving Karel the Robot a set of instructions that would allow him to investigate his environment.

In SpaceChem, the goal in each level is simply to turn some molecules into other molecules.  The reason that this is hilariously fake chemistry is that you do this via little robots, or "waldos," that physically pick up the atoms and carry them around.  Your job is to program the waldos, just like Karel.  However, the waldos do not walk around with their instructions, but rather the instructions are written onto each tile of the floor, like a set of street signs that the waldos must follow.  Whereas the complexity of Karel's tasks are limited by however many lines of code you're willing to write, the restrictions in SpaceChem are literally spatial, since each tile can only hold one instruction for each waldo.

But the real beauty of SpaceChem, and the thing that sets it well above other programming tutorials, is in the scale of its puzzles.  Since each reactor has limited space and only two waldos, a more complex job will require multiple reactors, with pipes between them carrying molecules in various stages of completion.  But the flexibility of the design allows you to choose how each job will be split up.  This requires some patient strategizing to say the least, since if one reactor turns out to be impossible to design, you'll probably need to start from scratch.  Even after completing one of these herculean assignments, then you have the option of trying to better your score by making your system work faster or using fewer reactors.

I suppose all of this sounds pretty boring, but let me tell you that each level of SpaceChem that I've solved has filled me with an embarrassingly real sense of accomplishment, that I've built something distinctly my own. Given the extremely open-ended design, solutions to the jobs can vary widely in ways that even the developers couldn't possibly predict, and my jaw has dropped when I saw what some SpaceChem players have managed to do with just one reactor.  And the developers were very smart, slowly introducing additions to the ruleset, and giving you just enough help to get you started.  The interface itself manages the game's complexity as cleanly as you could hope for, with keyboard shortcuts that let you build reactors quickly when you get better.  (You can also save a reactor design for future use, although I was never smart enough to utilize this feature effectively.)  Just stay well clear of the iOS version - this game demands a keyboard and mouse.

SpaceChem is a game with a weird selling point, but it's not hard to see why it inspires a great deal of enthusiasm among its fans.  I don't hesitate to say that it's the best puzzle game I've ever played and one of my favorite games, period.  My only complaint is that it's extremely long, so much so that I've still never beaten it.  (Part of that has to do with the fact that it's also extremely difficult, but that requires no excuses in my opinion.)  In fact, we'll find that to be the case with many of my favorite puzzle games.  I take great solace in the thought that there are still SpaceChem levels that I haven't beaten, and that one day I'll conquer those with ingenuity and determination.

?!

So I've fallen behind a bit on the Professor Layton series, and before I play the next one in the series, I've been finishing up all of the puzzles I hadn't finished in the previous four games.  (After all, a gentleman leaves no puzzle undone.)

The Layton games are the first puzzle games in a long while that have gotten "mainstream" recognition, and there's a good reason for that.  They're extremely friendly and accessible.  The puzzles themselves, which range widely from sliding-block puzzles to tangrams to word puzzles to plain, clever riddles, are mostly on the easier side, although there are some optional stumpers.  More importantly, they're all extremely well-hinted, and you can usually skip one if you hate it enough.

But puzzle games remain a niche genre, and many of the good ones are (ironically) still pretty well-hidden.  So I thought I'd spend a few posts outlining some of my favorites, and maybe even some of the not-so-great ones I grew up with.

You can trust me - after all, I'm a mathematician, so puzzling is more or less my job these days.

Sherlock: Series 3 (BBC, 2014)

I'm a fan of Sherlock, but I have to admit that I find its popularity a bit mystifying.  In an age where computers have effectively taken over our lives, it's strange that people would want to watch a man behave like one.  Holmes (in the show, at least) behaves a lot like Watson - the IBM artificial intelligence, not the man - in that he works not by carefully constructing logical chains, but rather collecting huge amounts of data and making free and random associations.  As such, the show would rather we marvel at Holmes' ability and hilarious personality rather than try to follow along with the mystery.

In fact, this season, the mysteries themselves take a backstage - there's barely one at all in the first and third episodes.  Instead, the show seems to focus on...bromance?  Not that I don't care about these characters - Martin Freeman is pretty good (and Cumberbatch is alright, I suppose) - but why bother with the 90-minute format in that case?  I suppose they're just trying to keep things fresh,  yet there can be only so much "personality study" before it starts to seem like they're just spinning their wheels.

Demon's Souls (From Software, 2010, PS3)

As I mentioned a few times before on this blog, I was pretty bad at games when I was a kid.  The games that I liked were the ones, like adventure games, that gave you access to cool content without much work (or at least without much work that couldn't be outsourced to a walkthrough).  When it came to JRPGs like Final Fantasy VIII, I could only tolerate the gameplay because it held the promise of another sweet, sweet CGI cutscene.

Demon's Souls nicely inverts this mentality.  Most of the beautiful content comes early in the game.  Incredibly detailed vistas, giant fire-breathing dragons majestically flying overhead, mysterious characters, and a spare, but not meaningless backstory - with a few notable exceptions, all of this can be found in the first quarter of the game.  But the real content, the real reward for investing yourself in this setting, is a series of challenging, but rigorously fair boss battles.  These bosses run a wide gamut.  Most of them require a great deal of practice with the core mechanics, as well as a not unreasonable amount of leveling.  A few of them feel more puzzly, where simple pattern memorization is more important than your level.  And a couple of the later bosses will feel quite easy, compared to what has come before.

By the time you get to the final boss, you will be so good at Demon's Souls that it will be not be nearly as challenging as you were prepared for (in my case, I didn't even realize that the final boss was final).  The ultimate reward of Demon's Souls is your own great skill at playing Demon's Souls.  There is no accidentally beating this game - you will feel no more or less than the great demon hunter that your character is.

The Moon Rang Like a Bell (Hundred Waters, 2014)

A terrific album for a rainy day like today.  The background is moody, ethereal electronica, a calmer version of Silent Shout, with a James Blake-style dub influence.  But the real highlight is Nicole Miglis' wide-ranging vocals.  I usually don't have a clue what she's saying, but I love the way she pronounces certain words, with emphasis added mid-vowel, bringing to mind classical Greek cadences.  According to Wikipedia, this group has toured with Julia Holter, and while their stuff is not heady as her's, it does seem like a pretty good match sonically.

There's also some pretty fascinating stuff going on harmonically.  "Innocent" is a real highlight.  The lyrics are about dealing with jealousy, and as the singer wonders if it's all in her head, the rhythm is lost and the key changes up into the stratosphere.  It's haunting stuff.

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alexander Payne has gradually become the new "it" director - one which critics of all different stripes have rallied behind.  My feelings about him are a bit more mixed.  I haven't seen all of his movies, but I certainly like all of those that I have seen well enough.  They're beautifully shot, well-plotted, and elicit great performances from their casts.  My problem with Payne is that I never quite connect with his characters in the way that he wants me to.

Take his latest film, Nebraska, which is about an old man, one who embodies the word "cantankerous," and a trip he takes with his son to collect upon an imaginary lottery winning.  Along the way, he is forced into an impromptu reunion with his extended family in the titular state.  The film is quite beautiful, with its crisp black-and-white landscape shots and nouveau-folk score*.  And Bruce Dern and Will Forte give great performances.  Like Emmanuelle Riva in Amour - and more famously, but in an example I haven't seen, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man - Bruce Dern's performance is a bit over-hyped simply because his character lies on the extreme of human experience.  Forte is the real lead here.  But both he and Dern do a great job.

There is a great ambiguity about whether Dern's character really believes the fiction - if you watch his expression when his wife is excoriating him, it seems clear that he knows full well what's going on.  I guess this is the aspect of Nebraska that I relate to the most; my limited conversations with my grandfather reveal that he can at times be extremely lucid, with a good memory, but there are often slips that make one question whether he isn't making things up.

In any case, what I've mentioned so far makes up the reason that Nebraska is my favorite Payne film.  But there's a lot I find unsatifying about it as well.  Certainly, I applaud the decision to cast Forte, but his character as written seems so unnatural to his environment that I immediately have trouble believing him.  (Similarly, I could never quite buy Clooney's character in The Descendants, or Giamatti's in Sideways.) 

I know there's a good reason for this:  Payne himself is a Nebraska native who doesn't fit the mold.  Yet so much of the humor of the film comes from contrasting Forte with his lethargic, simpleton family members, and that contast seems entirely artificial.  I too am a small-town kid trying to make it in the city, and like Forte's character I can't always relate to my family, yet I can still see the similarities.

*The score was actually composed by a member of Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio), a fact that I could recognize instantly.  It's excellent stuff and it fits the movie perfectly, although it's always distracting when you have a personal, separate attachment to a film's music.

The Evil of the Daleks (Doctor Who serial, 1967)

Evil of the Daleks is a seven-episode serial from the fourth season of the long-standing time travel sci-fi Doctor Who, during the tenure of the "Second Doctor", played (marvellously) by Patrick Troughton.

The Daleks, of course, are alien, fascist robots that wheel around, threaten humans with extermination, and look like a bit like salt and pepper shakers.  They are indeed quite evil.  They were also extremely popular ever since they appeared in only the second ever Doctor Who serial, and by the time of Evil of the Daleks they had already made several appearances.  Evil was actually meant to be their last, although of course, they couldn't stay away for long.

The plot of Evil is actually quite convoluted.  Suffice to say that it takes place both in modern-day (i.e. 1960's) and 1860's Britain, as well as the Dalek homeworld Skaro, and stars a 19th century aristocrat (complete with top hat) obsessed with turning iron to gold, an antiques dealer posing as a Victorian fob who sells suspiciously accurate forgeries, and a mute Turkish strongman with a fez.  Of course, it's marvelously cheesy even for 1960's sci-fi, but Troughton is a fascinating Doctor to watch, and the unusual plot keep things from getting too staid.

Unfortunately, watching the serial is a bit tricky, given that only one of the seven episodes currently exists in full.  Due to the BBC's policy of wiping their video tape archives in the 60's and 70's, a total of 97 early Doctor Who episodes are lost.  What we do have from the first few seasons exists pretty much by accident; the second episode of Evil was a fan-made recording found in a garage sale, according to Wikipedia.

But, in fact, full-length fan-made audio soundtracks exist for every Doctor Who episode.  In addition, we also have "tele-snaps," which are photographs of certain scenes made to put in the actor's portfolios.  Remarkably, Doctor Who fans have stitched these together with the soundtracks to reconstruct the missing episodes.  (The BBC has done this themselves with particularly important episodes.)  These reconstructions can be found online.  I've actually found these pretty watchable.  Where the soundtrack fails to clue us in, a bit of text scrolling will narrate the action.  Quite amusingly, there's even a few live-action shots, with actors who hide their faces, and some just to replace a shot of someone walking down a corridor.

I know this doesn't sound fun to watch, but remember that early sci-fi was filled with inventive premises that were usually quite disappointing in execution.  Consider the Daleks themselves - although the idea of a Nazi robot frightened the heck out of British schoolchildren, actually watching them roll across a floor yelling "Exterminate!" is pretty giggle-inducing.  So with these reconstructions, it was a pleasure to use my imagination to enhance what was on-screen.  Frequently, I would close my eyes, and recreate the scene in my mind, probably making something much better than the BBC could do anyways.

Does that make Evil in the Daleks an essential sci-fi classic?  Well, not really - like I said, the show is still pretty cheesy.  But it's still very cool to see fans add something worthwhile to their beloved franchise.

Unexpected Humans

At the end of the Queen's Tower level of Demon's Souls, you climb a spiral staircase to a chapel-like area.  It's oddly covered in chairs (perhaps an Almodovar reference?).  Anyways, just before you enter the area, you see a cutscene, where the ancient lord of the tower summons some kind of phantasmic human to fight you, before collapsing from agedness.  The cutscene's actually kind of annoying, since unlike most cutscenes in the game, it's quite long, and you're forced to watch it every time you die and restart from the bottom of the staircase.

Oddly, most times I began to climb the staircase, I would get a notice that a Black Phantom has invaded my world.  A Black Phantom is a human character that has come to try to kill you.  I have only a little experience with them, since Demon's Souls is four years old, and probably not a lot of people are online with me.  The Black Phantoms couldn't seem to get on the staircase with me.  They must not be allowed to interfere with this part of the level.

In any case, the first time I fight the summoned monster I'm destroyed almost instantly - he carries a giant sword and fights extremely well.  The second time he's changed to a smaller sword and shield.  I notice this but don't think much about it, because Demon's Souls requires quite a bit of concentration while you're fighting.  This time he's running around like crazy.  He's not doing a lot of damage, but he's pretty good with that shield, and it's quite difficult to get hits in.  Plus as his health goes down, he starts shooting magic bullets from around his head.  So it's still a pretty challenging fight, although eventually I get him.

When I win, I get a message "The Black Phantom was Slain".  I'm stunned.  That whole time, I've been fighting against a human opponent.  Of course, it's easy to see in retrospect.  There's no reason I shouldn't have guessed, except that the boss just didn't seem like a human opponent.  Sure he was running around like a fool, but he used the same tactics the whole time, even when he was low on health and it was clear that things weren't going well.

I've never confused a human for an AI before.  It's definitely an eerie feeling.

The Argument (Fugazi, 2001)

I listened to this album sometime last year actually, and didn't think very much of it.  Some of the songs are pretty good, and a lot of the instrumentation is pretty subtle and effective.  But much of it seemed...unnecessarily dark?  I'm not someone who thinks that music should always make you feel good or anything (although when I was in college and didn't listen to music that often, I remember saying something along those lines), but I couldn't quite figure out what the point of this music was - it was moody without being very atmospheric.

Then this week, I decided to give Fugazi another shot, and listened to an earlier album, Red Medicine.  This album was fun, creative, and a blast to listen to.  It was still nerv-y and anxious, like the best post-punk, but it sounded like the band was having a lot more fun and wanted you to have fun too.  Then I read up about the group's background in hardcore D.C. punk, and got a better idea of where they were coming from.  With that knowledge, I decided to re-listen to The Argument, fully prepared to revise my opinion.  But I didn't - I don't hate this music, but it still doesn't do much for me.

So why did I choose to talk about this album, instead of the one I liked?  Well, good question, I guess.

It just bothers me when I fully respect the talent and craft of a bunch of musicians, but for whatever weird contextual reason can't quite get into their work.  The Argument isn't really that far from Joy Division's stuff, which I love.  For whatever reason, I can't listen to The Argument without wanting it to sound more like Red Medicine.  I hate that.

Hard Games - Part 2

If my last post succeeded in encouraging you to move outside your gaming comfort zone, here are some tips on how to approach tough games.  What follows applies mostly to action games.*

1.  Find the right game for your skill level.

Pointlessly debating what constitutes a truly difficult game is one of the pernicious ways that even well-intentioned game players fail to welcome newcomers.  The truth is that most games will be hard to certain people, and that's unavoidable.  I've read many game critics say that Super Mario Bros was expertly crafted to be fun and inviting, but to my wife, who didn't grow up with a controller in her hand, it can be extremely frustrating to beat the first level.

So find that game that's right for you.  If you think it's hard, then don't let anyone tell you you're a wuss.  If you're feeling unskilled, and you want to get some perspective, then read forums about shoot-em-ups, where no matter what obscure, brutally difficult Japanese game someone brings up, there's always someone who's beaten it on one credit and doesn't understand what the big deal is.  Ah well.

2.  Make a commitment.

Games are long, and they've got lots of stuff in them.  So decide early on how much you want to do.  If it's a real toughie, then there might be plenty of satisfaction in just beating the game.  Or maybe the challenge is in the bonus levels. 

An important question to ask yourself early on is how much online help you want to allow yourself.  Certainly, it's a bit artificial to isolate yourself from all help, especially since most modern games are designed to support a community of active players.  But be careful.  While it's true that knowing tips about a game like Castlevania doesn't make it that much easier, there were exceptions.  I certainly would've preferred to find out the trick about using holy water on the Grim Reaper on my own.  (However, without knowing that trick I might've given up, so who knows.)

In any case, once you've set your main goal, really commit yourself to playing the game until you accomplish it.  Try to play it a little bit every day, if you can.  Most importantly:

3.  Manage your expectations.

I can't stress this one enough.  While an overarching goal is important, giving yourself timed goals is a recipe for disaster.

An example may be necessary.  When I was playing Contra, most days I found myself making a little bit more progress in the game than the day before.  However, there'd be days when I wouldn't make any at all, and it would be hard to justify picking up the controller at all.  But without even realizing it, I was always getting better at the game, and when I did finally beat the game I could be sure that luck didn't have anything to do with it.

So the trick is being really easy to please.  If I laid out for myself a plan, say to beat one level a day, or even to get farther today than yesterday, frustration would quickly mount.  And whenever you find yourself really getting flustered, it's time to turn the console off. 

Well that's it.  Last tip:  don't forget to have fun!

*Of course some of the more obtuse adventure games from the 90's (Sierra Online being the primary offender) can be just as or more difficult as action games, at least if you want to avoid online help.  Perhaps one day I'll write a version of this post for adventure games, but for now I'll just say that even having played many, many adventure games over the years, I still get hopelessly stuck from time to time.  That feeling's the worst.

Hard Games - Part 1

So I'm in the middle of Demon's Souls at the moment.  When the game came out in 2009, it was lauded for being a fairly difficult game, at a time when hard games were not in vogue.  Even today there are plenty of crushingly-difficult retro-inspired platformers, but nothing with the high production values of the Souls series.

Why does this matter?  When I was a kid, games were expected to be tough, and for that reason I didn't beat very many of them.  I finished a small minority of the Sega Genesis games I owned - only the easiest of the bunch, like Lion King or Home Alone 2.  I was not a kid who persevered in the face of defeat, and I hated seeing Game Over screens.  Adventure games on the PC promised a way to see more story content than those old platformers anyway.  Certainly, they could be even harder, but with a walkthrough at hand, there was nothing stopping me.  I love adventure games and JRPGs to this day, and I have to admit that a big part of the appeal is that outright failure is pretty rare.

Without realizing it, though, something had stuck with me about those old Genesis games.  On a whim, I replayed Aladdin, an old favorite, while visiting my parent's house several years ago.  This game isn't known for difficulty, but I still remember feeling shock and elation when I beat it on the first try, on hard mode no less.  That feeling is extremely addictive.  After buying a NES after college, I quickly conquered the early Mario and Sonic games, before tackling a few games that (in my mind, at least) constitute my greatest gaming-related achievements.

There are really two "flavors" of difficult games, which I will lazily call the Castlevania model and the Contra model.

The first and third Castlevania games have some of the hardest single moments I've ever encountered - in particular, the crushingly difficult bosses.  The saving grace is that the game uses a checkpoint system with infinite continues, so that one needs to make that perfect execution only once.  For that reason, there's always the feeling of slow, but inevitable progress, no matter how hard each level is.  Beating those games is a great achievement, for sure, but it never felt impossible.  (The first game on NES, unfortunately, didn't allow you to turn the system off without restarting, but that's due solely to regional hardware differences.  I recommend the Game Boy Advance port.)  This checkpoint-based model is easily the most popular today, with games like Super Meat Boy, where level playthroughs can take just a few seconds.

The individual moments in Contra are never as hard as those in Castlevania.  The bosses can be tough, but they usually have recognizable patterns.  The real challenge of Contra is that you have to beat the whole thing with a limited number of lives and continues.  As a result, the game requires you to develop traits that are not often required in today's "angry nerd" gaming culture.

Making it most of the way through the game, only to succumb to a random and easily avoidable bullet is incredibly frustrating, if you don't learn to be patient and manage your expectations.  There would be days I would play Contra and not make one whit of new progress.  But surely and steadily I was getting better at the game.  It's easy to discount the extraordinary sense of accomplishment I felt when I finally beat Contra as rather vacuous, but it seems clear to me that I had become a better person in the process.

This model of game is usually seen as a relic of the arcade era, but it's received something of a comeback recently with the resurgence of rogue-likes like Spelunky.  Even when the levels are randomly generated, there's still plenty to be learned and memorized.

Next time I'll post a few tips for playing hard games.

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

A Fish Called Wanda is certainly a very funny movie, but why?  Well, I've never been a big fan of dissecting comedies, but if I'm going to keep this blog going at such a high rate, then it seems like I'd better get used to it.  So here are just a few reasons why this movie really does it for me:

1)  It has a surprisingly strong plot for a farce.  In fact, as a heist movie, it's not really all that different in spirit than Reservoir Dogs or even Fargo.  Why does this matter?  Well, a cogent narrative gives all of the ludicrous characters some sort of motive.  I love Monty Python sketches as much as the next person, but by the end of Wanda I was laughing much harder than I was in Holy Grail, which feels less than the sum of its parts.

2)  It has excellent one-on-one dynamics.  If you look at the movie scene-by-scene, all of the best moments occur with exactly two of the four main characters, and the developing relationships give the movie quite a bit of character.  The fact that John Cleese gets to behave very differently around Kevin Kline than around Jamie Lee Curtis is a great part of the fun of the movie.  (And as good as Kline is in the movie, I do think that Cleese makes the whole thing work.  In fact, I think this is Cleese's only great role outside of Monty Python).  The only pairing that isn't really explored (outside of one very funny scene) is Cleese and Michael Palin - ironic, considering their history.

3)  It's grounded (see part 1), yet much of the humor feels particularly unsafe for a movie of its era.  Of course I'm referring to the various pet murdering, but also the fact that Jamie Lee Curtis gets to play such a wonderfully unrepentant seductress.  I suppose she does settle down with Cleese in the end, but the ludicrous final title cards take the edge off of that a little bit by making fun of our desire for a happy ending.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Ozu is known for quiet films, where great emotion lingers just below the surface of Japanese politeness and pleasantries.  Tokyo Twilight starts out in this vein, but the problems here are too big to stay hidden for long.  The story centers on a banker Shukichi and his two daughters.  The eldest daughter Takako has fled home from an abusive husband with her infant daughter.  Meanwhile, the youngest, Akiko, is spending all of her time in mahjong parlors, while claiming to be studying English shorthand.  (I'm very curious why this would be a topic of study, but can't find much information on the subject.)  It turns out that the new owner of one of these mahjong parlors is the women's mother, who abandoned the family years ago.

Takako and Shukichi are played by Ozu veterans Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu.  Ozu re-used the same cast members more frequently than Wes Anderson (who also shares a similar set design and choreographic aesthetic), and the biggest challenge of being an Ozu fan is in telling the different characters apart.  It doesn't help, for example, that Hara plays a woman named Noriko in three consecutive films.  Hara, one of the most beloved actresses of her era, is quite good in the film, but she mostly stays out of the spotlight.

It's the role of Akiko, played by the lesser-known Ineko Arima, that eventually steals the show.  At first, her dead expression makes her appear to be just another disaffected adolescent, making the movie appear at first glance to be a Japanese take on Rebel Without a Cause (released just two years earlier), with pinball and street racing replaced with mahjong and pachinko.  But she's hiding a shameful secret, and her self-hatred boils into some extremely intense scenes that go strongly against the Ozu stereotype.

Unfortunately, the overstated social message - in particular, an emphasis on the need for a two-parent family - probably keeps this from being a top-tier Ozu film.  (I don't know enough about Ozu or Japanese society to know how important a message this was for him.)  But it does have some wonderful scenes.  My favorite character in this one is actually Shukichi, the father.  The actor Chishu Ryu (who, astoundingly, appears in 52 out of 54 Ozu films), is famous for a mild, passive, demeanor that doesn't quite conceal the loss his characters feel.  I can't think of a single American actor that compares - certainly, we have our share of stoic men, but usually there's some trace of violence in the impassivity.

The final scene is especially moving - Shukichi, having just faced a great tragedy, is preparing for another day at the office.  Without any cause whatsoever, there's something optimistic about him.  As he sets off, outlined against a bleak and wintry day, we are reminded, as we are constantly by Ozu, that the world always has simple pleasures for us if we're willing to look.

Wadjda (Haifaa al-Mansour, 2012)

Is it fair to criticize this movie?  Not only is it the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, by the first female Saudi director, and not only does it directly confront the travails that women face in a Sharia society, but it's also...quite good.  There's no one I wouldn't recommend this movie to.

However, at the risk of sounding incredibly heartless, there is something odd that's been bothering me about Wadjda, and that is that Wadjda is clearly intended for a Western audience.  Certainly, the movie is enriched in Saudi culture, with all kinds of fascinating details and insights that lift the movie well above it's admittedly cookie-cutter plot.  (One absurd joke comes when the main character skins her knee after falling from her bike and cries out "I'm bleeding!"  Her mother with horror immediately assumes that her virginity has been compromised.)  In fact, Wadjda goes out of its way to point out all of the things about Saudi society that Westerners find so bizarre, and certainly there's no question in the director's mind that her audience will immediately identify with the scrappy and resourceful girl at the heart of the movie, no matter how much she pushes against authority.  One of the oddest things about Wadjda is that as transgressive as it is (as a woman, the director had to control outdoor scenes while hidden from sight in a van), the movie looks and feels like it could have been made in Europe with a resourceful set designer.

P.S. The classic movie about kids and bikes is the italian Bicycle Thieves from 1948, which the director claims as an influence.  But I think the parallels are even more striking with 2011's The Kid with a Bike, also about childhood transgression.

To Be Kind (Swans, 2014)

What did we as a species do to deserve another two-hour dark and punishing album from Swans in just two years?  Whatever it is, I hope we keep doing it.

The music itself in this one is just as good, and there are some really awesome tracks I can't wait to re-listen to.  The obvious difference to my ears is that Gira's vocals sound much wilder and unconstrained in this one.  If we take the title of The Seer literally, to be about some sort of dark future-telling cult, then To Be Kind sounds a bit like they've gotten into gyromancy.

I mentioned that The Seer seemed to be devoid of punk influences.  Well, there are definitely shades of Public Image in this one, what with all of the Dadaist lyrics.  Also, counter to the title, there are some especially cruel moments in this album.  "I need loooove," yells Gira in "I'm Just a Little Boy," and we hear derisive laughter in response.  In fact, "love" might be the most common word in To Be Kind, which makes me wonder whether John Lennon might actually be the most important influence here.

Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360, 2010) - Part 2

To start at the beginning, we have to go back to Twin Peaks, the cult TV show that aired for just two seasons in the early 90's.  The show is about an eccentric FBI agent attempting to solve the murder of a high-school girl in a small town in Washington.  It would be an understatement to call Deadly Premonition a tribute to Twin Peaks - the above plot summary would serve just as well for the video game.  In fact, the game goes out of its way to line up as many parallelisms as it possibly can.  To name one of the silliest and most unnecesary, the "Log Lady" from the show becomes the "Pot Lady," who, in a series of Crazy Taxi-esque mini-games, must be delivered to her house from somewhere across town before her pot gets cold.

All of this would only seem to add to the game's failings.  Deadly Premonition sometimes rips off Silent Hill, and sometimes GTA, so why not throw a 90's TV show into the mix?  Except that Twin Peaks is an incredible thing for a game to aspire to.  Trying to explain why the show is so excellent would require another blog post.  Suffice it to say that the show, like many Lynch creations, explores the dark and corrupt underbelly of American values, while simultaneously being a very exciting detective show, with new and bizarre clues to the mystery laid on thick in each episode.

The developers of Deadly Premonition don't have Lynch's mastery of form.  What they do have in common with Lynch is a love for the bizarre and surreal, and the game is a testament to all of the ways in which a game can creep us out, mostly by exploring the far away depths of the uncanny valley.

It's impossible to talk about Deadly Premonition without mentioning the cutscenes, which are impossible to describe without showing an example.

There's so much to point out here.  For example, note the way Polly is hunched over at the beginning.  That's a common Japanese depiction of the elderly.  It's fascinating to see the West filtered through Japanese tropes, which is part of what makes Earthbound so great.

Also, note the bizarre and over-stylized gestures, like the way Morgan smokes.  The developers gave Morgan a series of repeatable gestures like this that show up in nearly every cutscene.  That wouldn't be unusual if these actions weren't extremely poor facsimiles of a way that an actual human behaves.  I should mention that the cutscenes are (perhaps unintentionally) extremely funny - the way that Morgan smokes calmly, while the music blares so loudly that it's near impossible to hear Polly in the background, nearly brought Clare and me to tears - but they also make the game extremely creepy when it wants to be, much in the way that Silent Hill 2 uses the plastic appearance of the character models to highlight the general surrealness of the game.

Of course, there's also the hidden message in the coffee.  Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks also has a great love of coffee, and at times relies on supernatural clues (although the two are never mixed, as far as I can remember). 

But like Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition is often a fairly decent mystery - the "F K" clue is indeed a useful one.  One of the best-implemented features is the way that the myriad suspects all keep to their own schedules in the town of Greenvale, and you're free to spend as much time as you want following them around and spying on them.  This is not a new idea - Lure of the Temptress, the debut game from the Broken Sword developers, tried to do the same thing back in 1992.  But it is still incredibly ambitious, especially for a game ostensibly about shooting monsters.

Indeed, it's the sheer ambition on display that's most impressive about Deadly Premonition.  There's certainly nothing perfect about this game, but it seems clear - especially given the game's lukewarm reception - that there is and probably never will be a game quite like it again.

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

I'm not sure if Possession is a good movie or not.  In fact, I'm not really sure what kind of movie it is.  For much of the beginning, it is about a couple, played by Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, getting a very messy divorce after the husband returns to East Berlin from some sort of spy mission.  The arguments these two have very quickly become extremely destructive, and extremely loud.  The director has let it be known that he wrote the screenplay during his own divorce.

Then, at times, the movie becomes about a slimy, tentacled monster the woman is...creating...in a secret apartment.  A monster that she feeds unlucky men that chance upon her.  Also, the movie is about alien doppelgangers, mysterious espionage, and in a grand culmination, nuclear war.  Somehow, the movie doesn't feel scattered or silly with all of these elements; rather, it feels simply like the insane, overflowing amounts of energy this movie generates can't be contained in one genre.

I'm not sure if Possession is a good movie.  What I do know is that's easily the most exhilarating and electric movie I've ever seen.  There's something dangerous about this movie in a way that no straight horror film has ever seemed to me.  The insanity and hysteria on display here is raw and unadulterated.  The performances are incredible.  Isabelle Adjani is mindblowing, but even Sam Neill lets loose in a completely surprising way to any fan of his post-Jurassic Park performances.

Needless to say, I have no idea how a director could possibly elicit such intensity from his actors. 

The Seer (Swans, 2012)

"The Mother of the World," one of my favorite tracks from early in this nearly two-hour-long album by Swans, begins with the lead singer Michael Gira panting for several minutes, keeping perfect time to a rigid, droning beat.  I first heard it on a sunny, beautiful afternoon this week, as I was walking from BU along Beacon Street.  The feel of the music is exciting and relentless, and the drumming is especially superb, but very quickly I started to hyperventilate along with the singer.  I was having a hard time walking - the song continued in this way for what felt like an eternity.  The music fades until only the gasping breath remains, and then powerfully resurges.  "In and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in," Gira drones.  Perhaps The Seer is trying to keep you near the edge of reason, but it's nice enough to give you instructions for not losing consciousness along the way.

The Seer is oppressive and extremely heavy, but never brutal or punishing.  The influences stay away from the cynicism of punk; Swans sounds less like Joy Division or This Heat and more like a darker, more spiritual Pink Floyd.  The instrumentation is usually on the conventional side, but the musicianship is excellent, and the songs feel much more crafted than the "experimental" label normally attached to Swans would suggest.  The extremely lengthy songs evolve and control energy levels in a way that's not unlike classical music.