Four Years Too Late: Some Thoughts On Mass Effect 3

Hannah and I completed a run of Mass Effect 3. It’ll be on a podcast in the future, but I want to get my thoughts down before yelling into the microphone. We haven’t played 1 yet. I confess the vehicle sections of Mass Effect 1 frighten me off of the game. We'll probably do a full playthrough at some point in the future, but, due to the ending, not any time soon.

I originally put this on Facebook earlier this morning. I'm refining it here and adding a couple photos.

Major spoilers, obviously, but my guess is if you’re interested in my take on this, you’ve already played the series.

 
BioWare/EA was too aggressive with the release date of Mass Effect 3. Hell, the game got another six months, it appears, and it still came out this way. Mass Effect 3 is an example of what happens when you’ve got resources but not time. There’s about five different BioWare offices credited at the end of it.  Art is never finished, only abandoned.

According to Geoff Keighley’s book, the main exposition character Javik got cut because BioWare ran out of time, and so the plot had to be reworked around that absence. The Citadel invasion was supposed to happen after Thessia. On The Illusive Man’s orders, Kai Leng would kidnap Javik, and the subsequent Cereberus invasion would make sense. Because Javik was moved to DLC because of time constraints, the story took on water.

And yet.

Despite a botched ending, DLC that was planned for the main story but got cut because the game needed to ship, and a missed shot on an open net with Omega, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 are still two of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. Maybe top five, even. If EA commissioned a game of the year edition, I suspect critical consensus would be kinder to Mass Effect 3. As it stands, though, I found Mass Effect 3 only a tremendous experience. Admittedly, BioWare and EA may not be interested in reopening that can of worms.

In any story of this scale, you have to accept plot holes. I can forgive quite a bit. I can forgive the extended ending. I can forgive that because the story set up the Reapers as an actually apocalyptic level threat beating them back will require sacrifices on a frightening scale. But the instant the Star Child shows up, the game falls apart.




In short: It’s a brutal invocation of deus ex machina alongside contradictory cues about what effects your choice will have in universe. It’s a drastic shift in mechanics and tone at the worst possible time. It’s remarkable in that Star Child spends all of my goodwill built up over two games inside ten minutes.











(The post-credits scene was unforgivably corny. I was bewildered, confused and disappointed by the ending, but only the post-credits scene made me fucking livid. Buzz Aldrin was allegedly the main narrator, and given that context, I'm shocked they couldn't find something better for him to do than reheat sf/f cliches from 60 years ago.)

Maybe Mass Effect 3 was always going to crumble. Massive stories written by many people usually do. What’s energizing is that BioWare held off crumbling right until the end. Recalling only the anger  obscures that for 30 hours of my life, I was enraptured. By remembering only the bad, I forget I said that I wanted to savor as much time with those characters as I possibly could.

I'll go back for the Leviathan and Citadel DLC, but when those are done, I don't think I'll go much further. It's a great game on its own merits, but absent an investment by BioWare or EA to right the ship, great is furthest star it'll ever reach.

Keelah sa'lai.



 

Entropy Magazine published a long piece about choice in the Mass Effect series, and it's absolutely worth your time. There's a massive chart of the choices, too. Go look. Pictures are from the developer, Kotaku and Ars Technica, in descending order. I've been listening to The 1975 singles for the past eight odd days, and the song that's currently ruling my headphones is by them, and it's called Chocolate.

Harassment and Hashtags

I'm not sure what's repeating myself, what's transcendently obvious and what's bandwagon jumping on something that every point I could make has been written about better by people directly affected and deeper in the community than I am. The first 17 minutes of this podcast are instructive.

Here goes: #Gamergate started off as a new edition of an old saw (games journalism is too dependent on personal friendships, inside sources, "exclusives," etc etc), if in fact, it was ever anything more than a way for Zoe Quinn's vindictive ex to get back at her. If I was a teenager now, maybe, if my life zigged and not zagged, I could see getting up in arms about "integrity" but as it stands, I'm not a teenager, so I don't have a lot of patience for the people that keep the hashtag going despite the persons from 4chan and random people interested in mayhem joining the hashtag.

As I did journalism in high school, I'm aware of the limitations of an enthusiast press, especially in a time when people don't want to pay for actual journalism by professionals.

I'm at a loss as to what to say about the persons who terrorize Ms. Quinn. They are the true and willful authors of her degradation, they are doing a thing they likely believe to be directly harmful to a human being. In this respect, they're bad people. I cannot see myself or any of my friends, no matter how warped by circumstance, terrorizing her.

The worst part is of course, the harassment and threats that Ms. Quinn faces hourly, if not minute to minute. The saddest part is that the people who terrorize her, if given distance and I imagine, a couple years to grow up, might be fans of her work. They're terrorizing a game developer, chosen because she's a woman with an opinion they don't like and can be brought via slander into the conversation.

Pause. The second saddest part is that the people who terrorize Ms. Quinn value the mealy and unappetizing present over the possibilities of the future.

Pause again. Were the world two degrees to the left, they're terrorizing a person who might have been their friend.

(Reminder: Terrorizing people is bad. You shouldn't terrorize anybody.)

Harassment of women with opinions will continue to be more visible on the internet, which allows us to recognize it publicly as abhorrent. Before this, the harassment of female developers wasn't so obvious. Given a timeline beyond my lifespan, the sexism will be corrected, slowly. While we live, we push the stone as far along as we can.

The rest is washing up: Ms. Quinn will live with this the rest of her life, regardless of whether she remains in the games industry. Her terrorizers will forget all about this next year. We hope that Ms. Quinn will continue to make games, we understand if she doesn't.

I suspect I'll write this next year and the year after that. I believe the year that I won't be compelled to write this is coming. I do not believe I will live to see it.

"Get the fuck out/here there's no interest in what you're about.../we're here together/we're here to stay" Three's A Party. Kid Dynamite. Short. Fast Loud. Hit play already. This post was edited at 7:30ish pm the same day it was published. It was edited again a couple hours later.

The Shadowrun And The Glory

Shadowrun Returns is an cRPG videogame based on the tabletop gaming system of the same name. Shadowrun: Dragonfall is that videogame's expansion. Like most videogames, Dragonfall is the better game, since much of the trouble in making the first game is making sure that the gears and wheels under the hood work, but also, discovering what that game is. But there's one mission of Returns that is more memorable, for the right reasons, than everything from the expansion.

The Shadowrun setting is basically Red Harvest or $106,000 Blood Money dramatized by Lord Of The Rings characters. Death is cheap, people willing to do bad things abound, people willing to do good things usually aren't. Corporations run the world, and everyone employs mercenaries (Shadowrunners) for missions, which usually involve repossessing a rival corp's technology or board member. Often killing and hacking (called decking) are involved.

(A long aside on names. Shadowrun Returns is the base game, but Shadowrun: Dragonfall is the expansion. There's no semicolon in Shadowrun Returns. Ugh. Therefore, I'm referring to the base game as Returns and the expansion as Dragonfall because it makes my life and your reading experience easier.)

I'm going to be spoiling the coolest part of the Returns game, so if you actually intend to play it, turn back now.

...

Seriously.

It's one of my favorite moments.

I am currently right at the last mission in Dragonfall, so while I have not beat it yet, I feel comfortable talking about Dragonfall as a full experience. Perhaps the story will implode just before the finish line, but so far, the story is a defter thing than its predecessor. There are actual headscratchers in terms of "okay, what am I contracted to do versus what can I do versus what is the right thing to do versus what is the decision the genre demands?" and three or four of those headscratchers in Dragonfall.

But. There's a sequence in Returns that is better than anything in Dragonfall thus far and one that I have never seen on a game table or in a videogame.

The setup is this: You're on a run (what the missions are called) and the run is grab some things from a corp's office, fight through a big headquarters tower to get there. (It's a dungeon, inverted.)

Traditionally, in Shadowrun, these things end in only a couple ways: The party escapes or the party dies. You have variations on the theme (they barely escape with their lives, they escape, but one of them's a traitor, they leave a lot of dead, but a couple get out, they get out with not quite the information they were paid to get, it was a trap) but that's how those things tend to roll.

You die or you leave.

On this run, the group doesn't quite get what they need. That won't help out the customer, but they're so close and they can't wait till the next evening. So what do they do? They have the main character stay in the tower to complete the mission when everyone else shows up tomorrow morning for work.

What you do not do in videogames or Shadowrun, or at least the ones where you're an adventuring group, is stick around. (Unless you're Viscera Cleanup Detail, which, is a game precisely about what you suspect it is but cannot bring yourself to believe, a videogame about cleaning up the corpses left behind by the successful execution of a FPS level.)

The game is get in however you have to, get out however you have to. Returns compels you to stay.

Maybe I'm hyping this up a bit much. There's a save point, so it's technically a success state of one part of the mission and moving on to the next one, but I've never heard of a run continuing into the morning. Ever. 10:30 am in the Shadowrun universe might as well be genuinely unknown territory. Every run happens at night, at least all the ones I'm aware of. You're dead or you leave. You're alive and you're still there is new territory.

Remaining there into the morning completely changes how I feel about the space. That's new! As for the contents of the mission, I won't spoil that, except that it's good genre fun and you get to see the results of your work.

Taken as a whole, Dragonfall is surer. Dragonfall is more dexterous. Dragonfall is better in genre. Dragonfall's challenges are harder and its combat arenas better designed. Dragonfall's NPCs are more textured and one of those NPCs has a genuinely surprising backstory that actually lives up to the talking around it in the first two thirds of the game.

But Dragonfall, at least just before the final boss mission (or what appears to be the final mission) had nothing so daring as a corp building at 10:30 am. Dragonfall is a better videogame. Despite that, in five years, I suspect that I will sooner remember that moment from Returns than I will anything from Dragonfall.

A stand alone directors cut edition of Dragonfall is released September 18 for $15. I think and hope you'll like it.

This song is called Hunting For Witches and it is by Bloc Party. Go.

Money. The Lovely Horrible Stuff.

Longtime games writer Simon Parkin has a solution, but first he must convince us there is a problem.

His point in a piece for the New Statesman appears to be "we need to talk about creative successes as much as we talk about financial successes so indie* devs will feel comfortable pushing the boundaries of art."

(Summary is barbarism. I know, I know.)

In context, it's just as presumptuous. The artistic temperament is a thing that will create independent of critical pats on the head. If the further argument is potential devs will get blinded by the tall stacks of indie games dollars, I'm skeptical. If the argument after that one is the devs looking for truly insane amounts of cash or a seven figure PayPal account leave after their first attempt doesn't set them up for life, I'm not sorry to lose their creative energies. If the next argument is "but devs/artists won't create without being told their work is rainbows and unicorn giggles," (and I believe it is) Parkin's got a real low opinion of devs/artists.

Mr. Parkin is wrong four times over:
1) The critical discussion already exists on social media and outlets he no longer writes for.
2) Option paralysis is real and constraints often help jog creativity. (Doom 3's flashlight.)
3) Hearing developers talk about making their business sustainable at a conference for developers is a legitimate topic of inquiry and doesn't preclude serious discussion of craft.
4) "People come into an industry desirous of easy success" isn't a sign of the end times so much as a fact of of life in any human endeavor from art to sewage treatment.

In a comment, Parkin continues, his feature isn't about insulting indie devs, but instead around "the dominant stories around games creation."  Whether that's true or not, it contains the moralizing nugget that artists shouldn't be concerned about earthly lucre, they should instead concern themselves only with the thing that will enrich our lives.

This is precisely the opposite of what we should (I used the word should. I ought to tread lightly.) be telling artists. We should be telling artists, focus on money, not exclusively, but know what you want to say and know what vehicle is most effective in allowing you to subsidize your ability to express yourself. I trust that if you're an indie dev making a game, you're making something you want to make, putting out art into the world that you believe ought to exist in it. Parkin, apparently, does not.

What can you create that you can finish, polish and still have money left over to produce enough copies to sell? Remember: Art is a misnomer. Art is a mantle put on your work by another person. Phillip K. Dick only enjoyed mainstream accolades after his death. The Renaissance masters had patrons. Greek storytellers told stories for food, shelter and coin of the realm. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. Yes, make it because it means something to you (I assume "you're" doing that already,) but don't get drawn into an art before commerce discussion.

Worrying only about art doesn't free you up to create, you'd be creating anyway. Perhaps your dreams might appear in higher resolution, but what matters is that those dreams get out at all.

Be cordially mercenary, because Art is fickle, critics even more so and the way you get to keep saying what you want to say is by releasing things. And "focusing on art" does not help with releasing games. And each thing you release, incidentally, is art. Maybe not incredible art. Perhaps not boundary pushing. But small releases grow your confidence so when you do feel your oats, you have the dexterity and experience to push your vision. But first you must get to the point where you have dexterity and experience and that requires money and stability.

To get crass: An unlimited budget without constraints gave us Duke Nukem Forever. A budget of roughly $1.2-1.5 million gave us Shadowrun Returns. It's clear which one is the artistic success, but let's not forget that it's also the financial success, too. Why? Shadowrun has less to recoup and hard knowledge about what they could make given a discrete budget. Harebrained Schemes gets to make another game. 3D Realms doesn't.

Focus on the best work possible within the deadline. Art (or a particularly elegant manifestation of your creative vision) will come as a consequence.
 

 *indie of course being a marketing term and a funding mechanism.

The title of this piece is a graphic novella by the illustrious Eddie Campbell. You know what this song's gonna be. Art Is Hard, by Cursive.

Humans! Make! Games!

Two quick disclaimers.
One: When I say assholes, I do not mean racist/sexist/otherwise dead-end beliefs and the people that espouse them. I mean people with opinions that deviate from the "Bacon is a vegetable" folks of nerdom.
Two: The article I'm responding to here is a couple months old now.

My favorite games aren't my games. "My games" are the products of the vision of a specific studio. I play Blizzard games. I play Supergiant games. I play Runic games and so on ad infinitum. But I can't claim them as mine, except in the sense that I own a license.

Ben Kuchera's article, over at the Penny-Arcade Report (these days invaluable) largely avoids this point, when talking about assholes making your games, using Fish and Teasdale as examples. Fish, for saying hyperbolically what serious games commentators have being saying for years (Japan's games for this console cycle by and large have been disappointing or worse) and Teasdale for the mortal sin of being sick of space marines and off-brand Tolkien as settings for videogames.

The article uses a weak defense of personhood to throw a veil over Phil Fish or Mr. Teasdale. "Hey, guys, Phil Fish might piss you off on Twitter, but, hey, isn't Fez great" is the takeaway. That's weak and Kuchera ought to know better. A more vigorous defense might be: This person has an opinion contrary to your own. He is entitled to it. And, given that he's a game developer and a gamer himself, perhaps their criticisms are warranted.

And even that's weaker than the point that reminds us these people are individuals: They're allowed to be wrong and speak before his thoughts are fully formed.

Teasdale is an asshole for speaking his mind about sci-fi/fantasy games, apparently. He's probably just letting off steam. But more than that? He's right. Sci-fi and fantasy are well-trod settings for videogames, some incredible, most passable.

It's not a debatable premise that a setting involving American men with assault weapons in shiny space armor is tired. That's a fact of life in 2013. Same for the post-apocalyptic genre or off-brand Tolkein. Teasdale saying that he's not interested in those settings or trappings personally shows that he's a creative, discriminating human who has made those games for 15 years of his life already. And Kuchera ought to know better than to call that unreasonable.

For an example outside gaming: Go to any big comic convention and count how many male "zombification" artists or scantily clad women in zombie makeup you can see before you start taking sanity damage or lose interest in zombies as a storytelling device.

And yes, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" is a thing Picasso said, but in the canon of videogames there's terribly few artists, or, I suppose, studios with a chosen aesthetic and the a) vision and b) talent to properly exploit it.

But beyond these comments speak to something else in life: Many people who consume art/entertainment/whatever are dismayed to learn that discrete persons with opinions create "their" media. Take any well-known creative on Twitter and they will tell you they get people telling them "why do you keep posting politics on my twitter or I unfollowed you because you had an opinion I dislike."

(We pass over the cardinal sin on Twitter, being a woman with an opinion. Whatever you do, don't do that.)

Saying: "Well, you followed me and if you don't like what I say or think the unfollow button is right there" gets you branded as an asshole. Put a different way: Asserting your right to discrete personhood in the space which you designate as yours for mental overflow is being an asshole.

You can see how that's worrisome.

And so the problem isn't with "asshole" devs, or people with opinions, but gamers ourselves. Though, I could also substitute people.

Gamers are by and large, scared of people's different, opposing opinions. I suspect it's a matter of how young the market for console shooters skews is, but it feeds into a larger human feeling that we don't know we want something new until an artist has already put in the time to envision, create and distribute it, we'd largely prefer a more precise, better variation on an idea that's come before.

Case in point: Grand Theft Auto 3.

To sum up: I hope we get more assholes making games, the same way I hope gamers can feel less defensive about a person trying to manifest their creative vision. We've got a long way to go.

It's a blog about ideas, so have a song called I've Got An Idea... by End Of A Year/Self Defense Family. Enjoy.

Metacritic: A Thing I Feel No Guilt About

In a conclusion to a well-sourced feature on the pernicious uses of Metacritic, Jason Schreier wrote something that as a longtime critic, I cannot countenance. He wrote that "[Metacritic is] harmful to critics, who have to deal with PR pressure and the guilt of taking money out of people's pockets."
 

That's wrong and I'll explain why.

 First, last and always: You're a journalist or critic. There's always going to be PR people looking to influence your opinions. It was around before Metacritic, it'll be around after Metacritic. That's the price of the job.
 

Second and more worrisome, it moves the guilt for lost wages or compensation from the people who signed a contract in good faith to the critic who isn't a party to that agreement. Critics are not responsible for a) the contracts that publishers and developers sign b) for a third party's secret interpretation and secret mechanism as to how they collate and weigh an unknown number of reviews, the end result of which they call critical opinion c) the quality of a videogame they didn't make.
 

Guilt is for when I actually did something wrong. Guilt is not for when people who aren't me secretly interpret my thoughts, then though a secret mechanism weigh it alongside 30 other reviews and spit out a number which two parties agree to use for the exchange of money. If developers and publishers want to use that for the distribution of money, the only place I have in that conversation is to remind them reviews are subjective, I am biased and the mechanism they're using changes my language and skews my intent.
 

The critic's job is to have an opinion, write it as clearly as they are able and defend it. The critic's job is to express their synthesized thoughts on an experience, whatever they may be. Good and bad in the same review. Certainty and confusion. Ignorance and knowledge. Transparency and more transparency.
 

This is not to say I am perfect. I have been influenced by PR people. I have failed in articulating my thoughts and I have failed in which ones I chose to publish. That said, critics shouldn't feel guilty for other people's use of Metacritic and anyone who makes them feel they should is not their friend.
 

To presume to speak to Mr. Schreier directly,  the next time someone blames you for not making an incentive because of a delicate score, you tell them you've got some sympathy for them, but that's as far as it goes. And you say it just like that, too, because the contracts signed by developers and publishers are things that are their responsibility, and any guilt they want you to feel is something that gives them cover. Now, if you made a factual error in your review, that's different and that's legit and you fix that. You make damn sure that fix is reflected in the conclusion or score.
 

But your score doesn't take money out of the hands of developers. Deals that make the money developers receive from a publisher dependent on Metacritic (an entity that openly admits to skewing a critic's words) do.

 











 

 

 

 

 "The Bride" by Crime In Stereo. I listened to this all of my junior and senior years of college, and not merely for the phrase "your bachelor's won't earn half the debt that you've incurred." It remains poignant today. As an aside, I had to write this blog four times before I got it to where it is now. This one is the shortest, best and most defensible, I think.

Empty Three 2013

What the phrase "hardcore gamer" means to me, the morning of E3.

Starting today, most of the major players in making expensive, traditional videogame experiences will be speaking about their newest product. (Spoiler alert: Those newest products will likely be pretty fucking awesome.) That said, most of the developers I'm interested in are either so idiosyncratic or so large that they can either have their own conventions, or will announce things on their own time for their own reasons, that E3 seems like a colorful parade every year of which I have no very strong interest in anything being shown. I think "oh, that looks cool," for  three days straight. There are worse things.

If I'm honest, half the reason I'm here is to see Giant Bomb or Revision 3 talk about games. Those folks know what they're talking about and they seem pretty charming as they do it.

And that's probably a good thing, me passing out of the target demographic for "hardcore gamers." Depending on your definition, of course. I play Diablo 3 with my friends roughly every week and I've got the Humble Bundle open on a tab in Firefox as I write this, so I'm probably still a hardcore gamer, in the sense of James plays videogames and not just the ones that everyone else does, too. But my most recent console is a PS2 and it's staggeringly unlikely now that I'll get a new one for a couple years, ports being fairly easy to do and Steam and Humble Bundles being a fairly reliable line for excellent authored experiences. E3 isn't for me. It's for "hardcore gamers."

Here's the thing: I'm not sure I know any of those "hardcore gamers." I know persons who have been playing videogames since around the time they've been in lower school, but I don't know any "hardcore gamers."

Every so often, you'd hear about "the hardcore," and usually with that phrase precisely, talking about how they were underserved by their console or publisher of choice. I remember it coming out of the Xbox 360 guys most heavily, though that could be my approaching senility. Mostly, it was around the time of the Kinect or Netflix or any of the announcements that Microsoft was making that they might just maybe want their console to do other things in addition to the videogames it already played.

"Is Microsoft paying enough attention to the hardcore" and etc etc. One must understand, this is in a console cycle in which those gamers were delivered the Mass Effect trilogy, the Gears of War trilogy, tree Street Fighters, the Orange Box, six or maybe seven Call of Dutys, Dishonored, two Borderlands, two Batman games, Grand Theft Auto 4, Portal 2, Red Dead Redemption, Spec Ops: The Line, four Halo titles, a couple Rock Bands, two Forzas, two very different Far Crys, a three BioShocks, two Fallouts, Skyrim, two Saints' Rows, a new Deus Fucking Ex, ninety Assassin's Creed titles, L.A. Noire, and oh by the way, this was the first console cycle when DLC was integrated into the experience and you had a direct line into indie games like Braid, Bastion, Limbo, Plants Vs. Zombies, the Penny-Arcade stuff, Shadow Complex, Castle Crashers and anything else you can care to name.

Given all this, they felt underserved.

Politely, I want to ask Geoff Keighley or Adam Sessler, who are nobody's fools except of course their wives', who are these "hardcore gamers?" Because I look at that murderer's row of content and the only word I have is sufficit. It is enough! Does the hardcore have nothing else to do? Do they have literally no other interests in this life that they can pursue?

Do they not read? Are they uninterested in music or television? Is the only thing they do for leisure videogames and are they completely incapable of playing a game again?

E3 is for them and all of the businesses in their orbit. And the excitement, at least on Twitter, is palpable, (An aside: Watching Twitter during the conference feels like I'm waiting for the news to come in from the wire) but it's hard for me to get excited about a bunch of cutscences with carefully scripted gameplay sequences that'll end up on YouTube in a matter of hours. I shouldn't front, though: Those cutscenes and scripted gameplay sequences look fucking cool. The trouble of course, is that it always looks fucking cool. And that's no longer enough.

I think hardcore gamer means that I can wait to be all excited and bothered under the collar about videogames after I get back from work tonight. I think hardcore gamer means if you need me, I'll be playing Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 with my friends and their fiancees. I think hardcore gamer means despite "hardcore gamers," I still love videogames.

It is enough.

Sacrosanct Space

I haven't played Sim City. I haven't played Dead Space 3. I haven't played Aliens: Colonial Marines. I haven't played any videogames except Penny-Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, Torchlight 2 and Bejeweled 3 in about a year. Wait. Maybe I've played Jamestown. I've played Diablo 3.

(Pretend I didn't list Jamestown. Shhhhhhhh.)

But I've seen a lot of people talk about DLC or "always-on" experiences and what comes to mind as a player is the idea that my experience of playing a videogame is being interrupted. In the case of always on, it means that I am at the whim of of a developer to make sure their own infrastructure is sound enough to play the experience I have already paid money for.

And that's not a thing that I should have to care about as a player. I've already put down my money. I've already showed, in some cases, sixty examples of good faith, plus tax. When I purchase a book, I don't have to worry about firmware updates to the paper getting between me and the experience.

One could make the same argument for videogame consoles before the current generation. I don't have to worry that my Playstation 2 will decide tomorrow that it needs to connect to the internet before I play a little Dragon Quest 8 before bed. I can play Dragon Quest 8, or maybe you'd prefer Burnout 3, or Persona 4 or whatever game I choose, because the architecture of the system is designed in a way to require the game and the tray and nothing else.

Anything always on changes that. Instead of needing two things, a player/customer now needs three. They need the disc to work. They need the system to work and they need the developers and publishers to be on the ball every day of each year going forward. That's a material change in the relationship between the buyer and the seller. I'm being asked going forward to take on faith that another party will have their ducks in a row.

That isn't a feature.

 

I would like whatever it is I bought to work when I have or carve out the time in my day to play it. I suspect that's why I read so many books as opposed to movies or videogames these days: I can pick up the book and it works immediately. I don't have to sit through five minutes of commercials for other products or anti-piracy warnings, I can just read the book. Books are also portable and easy to use, I say just a little bit facetiously. I can throw one in my bag and it's ready when I am.

I'm surprised I have to say this, but I'm enjoying the very retro feeling of having no popups appear on screen, whether it's an alert that a friend is playing the same game or the game announcing that "you got an achievement!"

What brings my interest in PS2 games and the aforementioned Steam games together is that at least once I'm playing, my playing experience isn't interrupted for an ad to buy more stuff. They take my time seriously.

I felt like I was in high school when I played Penny-Arcade's On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness 3. It demanded me until 3 or 4 a.m.. It accomplished this by telling me a story I wanted to know more about, by interacting with me in a way that felt familiar, but had a couple really excellent twists on the concept and least of all, not interrupting itself to sell additional content.

To a lesser extent, I had this experience with Torchlight II and Bejewled 3. These are games that respect the players. You bought the game, and now, you ought to enjoy it. I don't want to say that it's an "old-school" kind of experience, because Journey exists. But: The idea that the best ad for the next game is the one you're playing right now is a powerful one.

The cardinal sin of Dead Space 3 is not that microtransactions exist inside it, but how those are implemented into the experience of playing the game. The team has spent two odd years and thousands of hours to create an environment that scares the player and all that work is destroyed when the offer is made to you that if waiting 10 minutes to get supplies is too long, you can cut the time in half in exchange for more of your local money.

That's an offer that takes me out of the game, first. Second: Had I paid $60, I'd be furious. I just paid sixty dollars for an entertainment experience and there was something built in for the specific purpose of detracting from the meticulously crafted thing I paid sixty dollars for? Get out of town.

I don't mind DLC. Shit, I like DLC. But don't interrupt my play experience, the thing that got you in the door, to hawk me more shit. Maybe this is my recognition that I am no longer the target market for these experiences and on some level that bums me out. I don't think it is, though. I don't mind being offered DLC. But I do mind how the offer is made.

I want to support developers and publishers that view the time I spend playing their game as sacrosanct. That indicates a respect for my time and my attention, which I am happy and excited to repay with cash dollars, which I suspect is all those developers and publishers wanted in the first place.

Don't Bury Me, I'm Still Not Italian

Today, I went to a con. Yeah, one of those cons. There was a lot of Naruto. And cat girls. I don't really know. It was an anime/comic book/videogames con. Which is strange, because at least in the US, each of those have their own specific convention. But this convention was, specifically about all three. Anyway.

I left at 2:30 p.m. for something that was supposed to close at 8, clocking two buses and a metro jaunt to get to the venue. I would have left earlier, except I only found out about it last night and then, in between finding out about it, I went out and got drunk and forgot about it thanks to the wonder of whiskey coke.

So. I arrived at the con about 4:30/5 and immediately went into the dealer room to find shitloads of comics and manga in Italian and nothing I particularly wanted in English. (With the exception of an Ann Noceioti/JRJR issue of Daredevil.) Anyway. I was confused, hadn't eaten much and decided that I needed to leave, since I'd spent 8 bucks, made a quick run and saw the place was charging 4 Euro for a small box of popcorn. I wandered around the floor of the convention that would lead to the exit.

(Oooooooooh. Quick moment of explanation. The con was held in a sports stadium [holds 8-10K+?] and the dealer room was on the stage/court of the stadium, with additional dealers on a higher level/ring around it.)

Gamestop had a bunch of boxes all hooked up for network play. I think I saw Gears of War, some fighting game I wanted to believe was Marvel v. Capcom 3, but didn't recognize and some other game with guns and shooting. (Oddly enough, not Dance Central or DDR. You'd think there would be non-traditional party games but whatever. There's not.) And that's when I saw the note charts and the set up and I knew: There was Rock Band. I chose to walk over to it, I didn't feel a pull, but this whole thing would sound better if I did.

Of course there was a line. Of course I had to wait for an interminable 15 minutes. Of course they played Du Hast (twice!) and a Slipknot song (ugh!). Best part was seeing Italian 16 year olds trying to sing along Slipknot lyrics having no idea what the words mean and not knowing what they were missing. They literally did not know what they were singing and could not understand how shallow it was. It's Slipknot, for God's sake.

They also played the Ramones' I Wanna Be Sedated (Romans, Ramones. Huh.) , which was intruiging. Kid singing couldn't be older than 17 and it was clear he got about half the words, the remainder being sounds and unclear ideas. It was also clear, he was struggling with the fact that he didn't know what it meant. I, on the other hand, did know and knew what he was missing. It made me feel old and a little bit proud. I knew he wasn't missing much, and that, maybe, the kids playing the song on instruments might know better, though they'd struggle to find the words or justify their belief. I also knew, then, that the only language we shared, despite the Italian I'm taking, was the note chart for the game.

Finally, finally, finally I got near the opening and before I could object, both guitars were taken. Fuck. (The drums gave out on Du Hast play number two.) Fuck. then, they offered me a song. I saw the riverboat gamblers and fucking knew. 'Don't Bury Me, I'm Still Not Dead" had to be it. HAD TO.

The other players (one too young for his fake army fatigues) listened and said okay, sounds good. After turning on the vocal assistance and waiting for a brief moment, while the game loaded the song behind a pair of hands stapling a show flyer (all-ages! 9 p.m.!) to a telephone pole, we were off to the races.

So: I remember playing the micstand close to the vest and then deciding fuck it and rocking out with it full on (mic out, directly in front of my mouth, eyes facing the chuckling crowd) by the final chorus. As I sang "Don't Bury Me..." it felt more and more like a hallelujah. I didn't eat a particularly good lunch and didn't have anything to keep body and soul together on the two hour commute from one side of the city to the other.

And despite being malnourished, sick, not taking care of myself and any number of other things, I still was singing (well, that's generous) "Don't Bury Me, I'm Still Dead", a speedy, consise song about friends, most of them unfashionable or dead and also about being alive. It should come as no surprise I played this one constantly in 2008 and 2009. With each repetition of "I'm still not dead," energy returned in bitter, acerbic spurts, so by the time I faced the crowd, I wasn't just playing a game, I was addressing whomever was listening, the naysayers and peanut gallery in my head, the audience, the other players and maybe even God, that, motherfucker, whatever I do or whatever is done to me, I am here, alive and singing a song that means the world to me with a couple guys backing me up on plastic instruments.

Sure, I wished this was in Meadville. Sure, I wish I had James' face knotted in concentration next to me or a number of people playing drums or guitars, but, as I looked up at the crowd, who was clearly uncomfortable at the idea of a song played with enthusiasm that wasn't couched in irony or distance, I knew something: Right now, it feels really great to be alive. And that, dear readers, is a feeling I'm proud of and still surprised to have.

This should require no explanation.

Backdated: Duke Nukem Forever?

I've been checking out whatever Duke Nukem information I can find. I should not be paying attention to it in any way that's serious, I know. But: There's something about Gearbox Software's ads that I really like. It's in the use of their fourth wall breaking. I liked it when Claptrap shows up in the ads all snarky and angry and mean, like he's the most adorable foulmouthed editor ever. And now they're working on Duke Nukem? That seems like a pretty good fit!

But the last Duke Nukem game came out literally in the last century (1996) and since them times and gamers have changed significantly. Oh, right, developer 3D realms started and restarted the game over and over for 13 years, on the profits of Duke 3D, originally and later on publisher 2K's dime, until 2K got sick of their not-finishing-the-game in 2009 and pulled the plug on the studio.

Gearbox, which is another shooter developer that has basically been formed from 3D Realms expats, who also develop games published by 2K, took over the project with 3D Realms' approval and it's 2011. The game's coming out. In May. Now, in June. Don't call it another delay, but that's what it is. Anyhow. The Gearbox PR process comes out again and it acknowledges the issue and makes the audience laugh, while reinforcing the Duke brand even in the admission. "Duke never comes early."

And that's the tamest of the videos so far. What's clear from the other promo videos is that fifteen years have gone by and Duke Nukem remains unchanged, aesthetically. It's still as juvenile and immature and completely ridiculous as it ever was. Apparently, Gearbox needed time to tighten up some issues, one of which may be the butt slapping physics.

(Yeah. That was simultaneously a joke and not one.)

But. When Duke was around, gamers were still white nerds, who didn't need to be designated as male. It was an assumption. And the market understood this and catered to them. What exists now is a landscape where there is a very good argument that anyone who plays Farmville is a gamer and a less significant fraction of those people identify as white male nerds. But. White male nerds, would be willing to put 40ish bucks down on a game that they knew not to take terribly seriously, one that had chicks and guns.

The scale of videogames was different too. There wasn't the kind of money in it that there is now. There were respectable $40 games, for God's sake. And there aren't those now, or if there are, they're bargain game stuff for the Xbox 360. Even during the last console generation, the centerpiece of which was the PlayStation 2, there were great $40 games, from Atlus' Persona series to the Insomniac oeuvre.

Maybe it was the understanding, that a worthy game could be made with a budget that wasn't 8 digits, with a little bit of wiggle room. Now, there's games that legitimately cost $30 million and need to sell about 2 million copies to make their money back. For whatever reason, publishers aren't interested in smaller bets for boxed games, they're interested in going big or, I suppose, going home.

Duke, I think, with its, let's say, polarizing (and not sexist) aesthetic, works best as one of those $40 games, not as a tent pole or something. There's more heat on videogames and especially for publishers looking to make a big push on each of their products. Let's imagine Rachel Maddow with her hands on Duke Nukem. (It would probably also sell more copies because of the critical bowel-loosening.)

But the Maddow of my mind, I think, would have a point: This is a game that had a place in time and is now, well, like one of those old embarrassing uncles that didn't get the message that we're legit now. It's not like it's Deus Ex, a game that's well loved for good reason, its open-endedness and its incredible construction. Duke Nukem is known for being a foul-mouth, titty obsessed pervert who happens to save the Earth.

Is that really a tentpole game?




As a pallate cleanser, have one of the best rock songs (and best videos for it) of the 2000's, Weezer's Keep Fishin'. Weezer's aesthetic meshes really, really well with the Muppets. Everybody's smiling. It works. Plus, Animal on the drums is an inspired touch.

Japanese Influences, Part Two

Mario. Zelda. Mario made the rules of platforming. I've seen the level 1-1 repainted on a wall in a Cleveland bathroom and on tattoos and seen pictures of it in a baby's room, around the crib. Zelda made the rules of an action-adventure. There are dungeons. You fight through them. Plus, Link looks like me. Kind of. More than that, Zelda is exciting. I got scared going through dungeons in Zelda. I was worried about being killed in the labyrinth before getting to the Forest Temple.


Pokemon, might have been the only videogame I played for years and years. I think I stopped playing around college. Some of my friends still do. Pokemon is a culture unto itself, one that I left about the time that I realized I didn't care to repeat the same mechanics for creatures for hours on end. I look back on Pokemon fondly.


The Final Fantasy series is synonymous with Japanese role playing games and those also occupied a place in my heart. I bought 8 first and not 7. The ones I have played are: 6,7,8 and bits of 10. Six (whichever one is the one with the Espers, since that's much clearer) was a mindfuck that became clearer the more I played. Seven, well, it's hard to have an opinion on it without pissing someone off, but at the time, I enjoyed the game, a lot.

Two points indelibly stick out.

First and most obviously, the death of Aeris. That, in a single stroke of plot, was a shot to the gut of JRPG players who knew enough about the genre never to expect the death of a major character within the first disc of a three disc game. Of course, the minute you try to explain her assassination in ingame logic, it falls apart, but from far away, it's a revelation.

The second is literally getting into the head of Squall, finding out he's a guy who was so messed up from Sephiroth's betrayal and going crazy that he based his personality around the squad leader who'se orders he was following.

And then there's drawbacks. The padding in the game. Barrett's character. The sharp decline in humor after the first disc and the falling back on exploration tropes for the entire middle of the game.

Eight was my first. You don't forget your first, right? The combat system was eh. I don't remember much. I remember the rocket bit. I remember Seifer and Edea, vaguely. Swords. I remember the dance scene FMV. I remember Eight being more lush, but I haven't gone back to it.


Chrono Cross. My gold standard of Japanese RPGs. The story is labyrinthine and connects Cross to Trigger intimately. Bright colors everywhere. Character designs felt fresh. You could choose how you seriously you wanted to take the story with the characters (40+) you could bring along.

The battle system! Okay. The battle system works like this.

You have a set number of points (7), which regenerate. You can use them to cast spells, which take your points down by seven, or attack. So long as you have positive points, you can cast a spell. There are three kinds of attacks, low, high and medium, each of which do more or less damage, but for more points (1,3 and 5). So: if you wanted to, you could do a heavy attack and then cast a huge spell with a character but it would leave them helpless as their points regenerated from negative 6 or 7 to something where you could use them again.

It works better in practice than in words and it made battles deeper and more interesting. Also, there were different flavors of spells, that if a bunch of them were cast in a row, would do more damage or have their effects increased. Which means, you had to pay attention to what was being cast and if you were particularly good at it, use the enemy's spells to your advantage. And, if you got the spell board entirely of one color, you could drop a super attack of that color on an enemy, which, as super attacks go, is super awesome.

If I'm remembering correctly, you can even recruit a glam rock group to fight alongside you. (I think it's a play on some really random J-rock/visual kei band, but, but still.)

Beyond that? Plenty of little things to collect, if you wanted to. Plenty of secret characters, multiple ending points once you beat the game once. NewGame+, implemented well. Again.

Chrono Trigger is a grand slam.
Chrono Cross is an inside the park home run to win the game.



Persona 3 is high school, if high school was unspeakably terrifying and awesome due to fighting nightmare monsters for your extracurricular activities. If high school was fucking sweet, Persona 3 would be it. The battle system is fairly traditional. Also, I sunk 140+ hours into the universe.

I haven't touched Persona 4 yet. I'm terrified. I don't have a week and a half free to play it.


Metal Gear Solid gets ripped on, brutally, for trying to talk about war and nuclear weapons and the military industrial complex in a videogame. Kojima's hamfists, sometimes, with overlong cut-sequences for minor points, but fuck it: Dude's actually trying to say something with the videogames that have his name on them. In a culture and genre where game creators go to great pains to avoid saying anything controversial, Metal Gear Solid is a l'enfant terrible, shitting all over their silences and omissions, often not doing it well, but there is a good message in the game.

As proof: You can go through Metal Gear Solid 2 without killing a single person (and the game gives you the tools to do it.) You get guns, but there is always an option available to knock out guards instead of murdering them and hiding them in a locker. It's a degree of difficulty that's indicative of how easy it is to kill people and when the player chooses to remove the option, it reveals something foundational about violence.

Metal Gear Solid 2 terrified me when I played it. I've written about its effects on me elsewhere and I'll probably quote them at length. For half a year after that game, in real life, I peeked down hallways before walking down them, afraid I'd find terrorist minions.

Also! Terrorism! Presented in a way that was ambiguous and not clear who the real goons and bad guys are. Metal Gear Solid has a fucking point. There aren't many videogames that do. And when it fails or isn't perfect, that fucking point is still what separates from the dreck that kids call shooty games. It's not enough that Metal Gear Solid has a point, but that it's also a good one and one that goes unappreciated by the people that play it.

In short: Metal Gear Solid dares. Repeatedly and as a matter of course.

Would that it happened more often.





Have I shown this one before? I don't know. I don't think so. When You Were Young, live from the Royal Albert Hall. "Let's see what this thing can do," indeed. Play loud.

Japanese Influences, Part One

Oh, Japan.

I am…tremendously sorry to hear about the 8.9 earthquake in the country. I am a world away (maybe two or three, even) and I want to write something that talks about how incredibly influential that country's media output has been in my life. Without anime, I wouldn't be writing this. I would be a completely different person. I would be leading a completely, different life. God, high school and college and bits of middle school would have been unrecognizable to me now.

In celebration of that, I'm going to write! Japan taught me that the world could be more interesting, that the world could be stranger.

(I've been reading Planetary. Can you tell?)

There are two of these things and they are broken up into Things That Touched Me Out Of Japan That Are Not Videogames and Things That Touched Me Out Of Japan That Are Videogames.

Here we go.

Ronin Warriors and Dragon Ball Z. I think are best described as…things that showed me there were different ways of the growing up process. I latched on to those shows. Looking back now, they're corny as hell and they're borderline unwatchable and ridiculous. (The costumes for Ronin Warriors alone make me smile and shake my head.) Still. It looked really cool to me as a kid and gave me the idea that I could do really interesting things if I was willing to go against the mainstream.


Gundam Wing might be the seed of my strangeness. When I think of Gundam Wing, I think of being a teenager and being in a friend's house and watching them with him. It's the one mecha anime I got into. It's philosophy is laughable now and heavy handed and obvious. But it blew my mind all the same: Pacifism in the face of war. Weapons so terrible that could not be wielded by human beings without breaking the humans leveraging them.

Duo Maxwell (the funny teenager with the good head on his shoulders that wasn't stoic, sociopathic or terribly pliable) killed an entire colony of people trying to master Gundam Wing Zero. There was switch that was flipped when I saw that. I don't think I could ever be the same. Good people can be forced to do terrible things and..yeah. I didn't see it in Japan's timeline and it would probably have made more sense to me if I did, but that feeling of the character I loved being taken over and massacring millions of civilians drunk on power stuck with me since the first time I viewed the episode.


Cowboy Bebop is just really cool. Start here. Mixing the cowboy aesthetic with bebop was something that only makes sense in Cowboy Bebop's long, long shadow. It's immediate, it's vivid and it could be ridiculous and dramatic and painfully funny in the same episode.

It's a noir. It's a space comedy. It's a pulp. It's ridiculous and unique. It's a love story. It's an anime. It's a redemption. It's a…all of these things at the same time. It didn't have the stakes of DBZ or Ronin Warriors, but it's certainly smarter and asked, in a way no teenager could resist, "Hey, those other shows are huge, but they're trying too hard. Want to see something cooler?"


Trigun. Trigun is something I remember for individual moments. Trigun is something I remember because it got me into an argument that I couldn't admit I was wrong about (Was it with Fitzee, Sonia or Elizabeth? I don't remember. I think it was one of those three.) that was the impetus for me going into philosophy. It was the whole Knives/Vash thing and I fixated on the idea that killing things with self-awareness was kind of bad and that Knives didn't have a right to do that but couldn't explain it in those terms.

I think.

The other person was right with their point (I remember, somehow, this being on a train platform. Now we might be getting into things that are apocryphal or memories blending together.) and I was wrong. That moment made me resolve to argue better and, since 2007, there's a public record of that aftermath.

The death of the Nicholas D. Wolfwood was...surprising and almost made me cry.

I got drunk with a couple guys and we started talking about Trigun (in Rome!) and that last fight in the final episode, in which Vash has lost both his super powerful guns of death and instead uses Wolfwood's cross of guns used to stop Knives from killing him. It's Vash, an angel, using the tools of human worship to stop the extra-terrestrial weapons of Gods.


For a piece of errata: Samurai Champloo. It's here for the baseball episode. Basically, copy and paste everything I said about Bebop and replace bebop with hip-hop and it'll work. That baseball episode literally cry with laughter. Tears of joy. Tears of happiness.

The end of the series has one really great twist: One character who is a "lesser" swordsman kills another one, but not by feats of swordskill, but instead by understanding that if he took a non-killing blow to his body he could get an opening for a killing blow on his more talented opponent. It's a grisly stratagem, literally, in this case and it worked.


Mishima. I've only read Patriotism and I cried when I finished it. Reading the disemboweling of the main character was literally painful. There were parts where I had to put the book down because his suicide was so vivid. I have another Mishima book in Chicago and I want to get back to that one (I think it's the first one in his tetra logy. I think.) when I'm back.


Murakami. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running makes me want to write, myself and Dance Dance Dance I just wanted to spend more time with all of the characters. Murakami's works saved a mediocre trip to Milan and meant I got something out of the experience. (Protip: Don't waste your money. It's expensive and like an American city. Go to Florence instead.) Murakami, oddly enough, uses words I already know, but uses them very precisely and tells strange stories with them.


Envy should be clear by this point. Towering, torrential post-screamo that's gorgeous. Incredible beauty from far away. Like watching someone get disintegrated in an anime in a cool death sequence, with the volume off.



I've found my love for The Explosion's last officially released full length called Black Tape. This song was the single from it and it was amazing live. Enjoy.

Right In The Killzone

There's a video of Killzone 3 that's dedicated to the highest res version of brutal melee kills they can program, linked below and I thought, the hole time I was watching it, aside from marveling at the details in the graphics and the clarity of the presentation that, Man: you want to know why videogames are ghettoized? This is why.

I was fashionably disgusted. I say fashionably because there's a part of me which much admit, damn, that looked cool. But, that moment didn't interest me as much as I felt like it pushed me away. I understand that somewhere, there is a check being cut to a developer to make a more convincing, more shocking melee kill. It is a large check. Irrational (the guys who made Bioshock), bemoan the fact that there's not a market for a mid-level game anymore. You're either indie or you're a 20+, 30+ million dollar investment.

There's so much technology being spent on choking, slicing and stabbing a digital foe, to make it looks as gruesomely awesome as possible, so it appeals to a certain demographic that wants it gritty. Make no mistake, Killzone 3 is a game for the hardcore. And what is the hardcore? Dudes. Dudes my age who want a real experience. I am the target demographic. (I want to make that the title of a record.) Being that target demographic makes me feel hyper-aware of my purchasing power.

Speaking of my purchasing power, I bought the first Killzone and really enjoyed it. It's a very well polished shooter with its own ideas about weight and movement with exceptional level design.

But that's not what I want in a videogame, at least any more. I mean, if I want gory brutality, I can always read 2666. HEY-O! Okay, but seriously. It's millions of dollars spent to make a minor distinction between it and hundreds of games in the genre. And maybe the rest of entertainment is like that, but on a smaller scale, but it's the scale, here, that gets to me. Not that the money could be better spent elsewhere (it could, very easily, but that's a point that's been beaten to death) but that it's so much money spent on a so particular demographic that I feel connected to, whether it's apocryphal or not.

We're appealed to via millions of dollars spent on a throat slicing animation that will feel real, but anyone who'se done it will know its inauthentic. It's disappointing. But I enjoyed it when I saw it and responded to the thrill.

Enough pathos.

Luckily, Emmy Dee is going to be back and (hopefully) talking about videogames, from the perspective of a girl that's trying to live with a Warcraft kid. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to pick her brain about what she thinks of when she thinks of the hardcore videogames., given that she's a party to them in an adversarial way. Apparently, she really likes Plants Vs. Zombies, as I do.

In short: How an uninterested party look at the shootydudes genre? This is all if I can talk her into it, of course.

In summation! Killzone 3 will probably be an immaculately produced game that will have value to the hardcore gamer by virtue of well designed levels, guns and challenges. It will satisfy the need to be exciting by shooting evil people. Cheap thrills, right? At millions of dollars? I guess those thrills aren't so cheap anymore.



Anyway. Here's one person's songs, interpreted by somebody else. Diplo, a guy I have heard of, doing Sleigh Bells' Tell Em, another band I heard of. It feels huge but not heavy. Anyway. Crank loud and smile.

What's Keeping Me From Sinking

"The Disposable Culture might offer many things, but stability and longevity are not among them. I fear for the "fully digital" push--because one war, one bomb, one EMP, one earthquake, and it all can go away. Marketing idiots and future-philes want us to teeter on the edge of another Dark Age, to embrace the possibility of losing all of what makes our culture tick, all for convenience. But what happens when something goes wrong, as things inevitably do? Everything "virtual" disappears, maybe forever.

No thanks. I'll stick with printed paper and physical discs. Because this push for pretend possessions has no appeal to me, and I think it's more dangerous than we are led to think. There are points where marketing and the drive for profit winds up hurting the companies, the culture, it's trying to serve, and I think this is getting awfully close. Maybe conceptualizing future war or disaster is a little bleak, but a quick look back at history tells us war and disaster is about as common, and certain, as rain and sunrise. "

I ended up seeing something very late last night on Kotaku (see above) about how this person was fed up with what he/she referred to as "the disposable culture" videogame people had found themselves in. This person also spoke somewhat hysterically about how "one EMP or earthquake" could lead us to a new Dark Ages, and oddly enough, that if this disposable culture went to its logical conclusion by everybody purchasing more digital pieces of media, those pieces of media will be beholden to the people who'se service they're on and when that service goes under, historians will be lost as to find those media.

This person holds on to their NESs and a couple games, confident they'll be able to play them in continuing years, but the plebs who buy things on digital services can't count on that.

This person is wrong, of course. Most of the catalogs of any digital storefronts are the same, with a couple oddly timed releases here and there. Quick: Name something that Steam won't get if Good Old Games goes under. This person is also wrong about the decay of systems. I'm not sure the half life of a Sega Genesis is anything to bank on in 2020. Or a PlayStation, for that matter. And! That's assuming TVs still have the same kinds of audio/video/etc plugs in those years.

He's right in that we're going to have to pay for it again, (or not, if we go to...unauthorized digital services, to employ a euphemism.) but those digital storefronts will be purchased or acquired by others starting up.

What's the shelf life of books? This isn't a joke. Finely bound books might have a better chance of survival, but I'm pretty sure my wall of paperbacks is going to survive into 2030.

But that's not the point. What is the point is the idea of backwards compatibility and a universal file type for information. Your computer may not play .m4a files, but it sure as hell will play mp3s. Your computer may not be able to read a .doc file, but it will be able to read a .txt file. Do we have that going forward? That's what I hope we have. Because: if we're ever living in some crazy Fahrenheit 451 scenario, the entire works of Western literature, or at least three books by Dickens, can fit on a 1 TB external harddrive. (That's a joke, kids. Dickens was paid by the word so his stories are exhaustively long.)

Even if we don't have that now, look back at OINK. That was a place that had almost any piece of music you could have ever wanted, with more constantly being revealed and provided by music obsessives. Yes, OINK was shut down, but it's hard to believe OINK hasn't been entirely reconstituted elsewhere, even if it's a collective of other trackers. Somewhere in the world, there are at least hundred people who have every book ever digitized, because they literally can't stop.

It's those people that will keep books/music/video games/movies going and spreading. The obscure stuff will fade, but obscure stuff always does. Yes, everything virtual eventually disappears, but so does everything tangible. My bookshelf of books I haven't read three feet high shows that I'm unlikely to ever prefer the digital version of something, but I recognize it has an incredible value who'se upside is constantly growing.

I was going to leave a cool ending here, but I just saw that one of my friends had iTunes delete everything off of his iPod touch on Twitter. I want to leave that hanging in the air instead.




Clash covers are usually good. Here's an unusually good cover of Straight To Hell by the Menzingers. There ain't no need for youuuuuuuuuuu....

Videogames I Actually Played in the Last Decade

Lots of other websites that make things like sense and money have best of the decade/year lists and I thought I'd do the same thing. Unfortunately, as I haven't played many, many of the games they list and I don't feel like lying about what I've played, here's a top 10 of the last decade of games I've actually played.


Persona 3 and Diablo 2 are here because they took in shitloads of my hours for the last decade. Persona 3 most recently, and Diablo 2, for basically middle and high school. Diablo 2, by virtue of the loot/kill dudes cycle that Borderlands added guns and a first person perspective to.

Persona 3, I've spent 140 hours on (finished both it and the expansion) and I still have a feeling in the back of my mind that I should go back to it. Yes, there's probably youtube videos of the interactions I want to see, but the fact that the "play it again" feeling is stuck in the back of my head means that there's something in the game that worked.

SSX 3. It does for snowboarding what Burnout does, which is communicate one thing: You aren't going to win unless you go faster and take chances. Are you barely hanging onto control of your rider? Are you not going for the crazy jumps? Be content with third place. At the final peak, you don't so much play SSX 3 as guide a human-shaped bullet down a mountain that's trying to kill you and the only way you'll survive is going fucking faster.

Chrono Cross. Not a sequel to the universally revered Chrono Trigger, but instead the next game in the series, Cross did too many things differently from Trigger for fans to appreciate it, but for me, the game comes to me when I think of best RPGs ever. There were 45ish characters, who all reacted differently to the game's stimuli, which means: you could play the game as serious or as straight forward as you wanted to, with the game's approval.

The battle system has aged well, the story's vicious little twists haven't lost their punch, the music is varied and rich, but what stands out to me, to this day, is the color palate and the environments. They were all evocative, they all were stages that had their own identities and reinforced the narrative.

When people say games don't make you think, I say put this in front of a fourteen year old boy and see the blown mind when he's finished.

Rock Band 2. It's a videogame where you play music with a band. Do you read this website?

Timesplitters 3: Future Perfect. My favorite first person shooter, which plays very very quickly, with a casual disregard for plot and a focus on a so bad it's good script. It had a fantastic sense of humor but also pacing, each end of the level boss was bigger and tougher than the last one and usually, more outrageous, too.

There's time travel, zombies, Russians, KGB, nuclear weapons somewhere, a train level, but more importantly, enemy types with character, level design that made me think before jumping in guns blazing and lots and lots of guns.

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Speaking of guns, that's what the Ratchet and Clank series is known for and this iteration does not disappoint. True, there's no mind-control disco ball, but there's plenty of other oddball weapons for you to rain down murder with. Ratchet and Clank has always been a series about exploration/platforming and guns and here, they reach the sweet, sweet spot on the PS2. The weapons upgrade in an RPG like path, there's always a puzzle to break up the action and when they get to the final boss battle, it's basically a textbook on how to ramp up the difficulty in a way that's visible to the player.

Okay: That boss battle. It's in three stages. The first stage is a circular room, enclosed and it's just you and him. From there, he retreats to the sky where he uses his untouchable shield and death ray to harass you while you also fight off his elite units, using whatever you've saved up from the boss fight to get through them, culminating in a bridge where you fight two tank guys that more or less absorb ammunition every 50 feet.

Once you get past the bridge, you bring the boss back to earth, now more powerful than before, on an even smaller stage with all that copious extra ammunition leftover from going through another level's worth of enemies and a boss.

Resident Evil 4. Less jump scares, just more bad guys that you're not sure you can kill in increasingly small spaces. The terror comes from being trapped, desperately pumping bullets into enemies thinking "I literally don't have an inch I can move further backward into and the thing with two heads isn't stopping." The story isn't terribly exciting: Save a girl and get into progressively bigger trouble with higher caliber weapons, then the sprouting scythe head zombies show up and that's when you get HOLY FUCK THAT'S A TENTACLE SPIDER RUN MAN.

Metal Gear Solid 2. Say what you want about the looooooooooong cutscenes the game is known for, the Kojima Productions team knows how to set atmosphere and keep it. For half a year after I beat the game, I was so paranoid I peeked down corners to see whether there was a PMC guard on patrol. Also one of the subjects I used when I wrote about the military industrial complex in my mind: I can tell it to be terrified and produce the adrenaline but telling it to relax and think calmly? Much harder.

Super Smash Bros. If there was a gathering in college or free time in high school with other people, I was probably playing Super Smash Brothers, or one of the sequels. It's an icebreaker and something that accounted for hours of strategy practicums, by which I mean fighting Zach's Donkey Kong with my Kirby.





The title (and first track) from We Are the Pipettes. Look on the upper left, there's someone else's hand holding up the We Are sign, which I like as a subtle way of hinting at the band's post-Motown origin, "an experiment in manufactured pop," in that they manufactured themselves. The girls are out front and the male backing band is as invisible as they can get away with. There's also been enough lineup changes that I'm pretty sure the founding guitarist and that girl who sang on Pull Shapes are the only ones still in the band that recorded We Are the Pipettes, so, in that way, it's authentic to its manufactured origin. Anyway. We Are the Pipettes. Play loud.