82nd Annual Snooze Festival

The Academy Awards definitely sneaked up on me this year.  I didn't even know they were going to be tonight before I checked my e-mail and saw an announcement on the Yahoo homepage.  For some reason, I wasn't really looking forward to them enough to keep track of the date.

However, I tuned in at 5:00 sharp and watched the whole thing.  Now that I have endured the three-plus hour award ceremony, I know why I wasn't excited for this.  To put it lightly, it was a load of bore.

It's often exciting when you see a movie or several movies that you really liked snatching up awards left and right. Here, this effect only really applied when "Inception" started sweeping the technical awards.  The rest of the awards were distributed amongst movies I either haven't seen yet, don't ever want to see, or just plain didn't like.  

The effect I described worked in the opposite when I saw movies like "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wolfman" getting awards.  Sure, they were for things like costumes and art direction, but still.  Those movies were awful, and their names don't even deserve to be uttered alongside this year's greats.  By the way, how the hell did "Alice" win for Best Comedy/Musical at the Golden Globes?!  There were way better comedies that came out this year (*ahem* Scott Pilgrim *ahem*).

Now, let's run down the major award winners.  "Black Swan" surprisingly only netted like one award that I can remember, a long-overdue Best Actress nod to Natalie Portman.  Out of all the Best Picture hopefuls, this is the one that I have the most interest in seeing.  "The Social Network" is up there, but I probably won't see it just out of defiance of this movie about Facebook being the movie for my generation.  That one really locked horns with "Inception" over the technicals, and it ended up being a pretty even split between them.

"True Grit" is one that I want to see, "The Kids Are Alright" and "Winter's Bone" are ones that I can take or leave, but the one that I really have no desire to see, at all, ever, is this year's Best Picture "The King's Speech."  Blah blah blah, the King has a speech impediment, blah blah blah, historical significance, blah blah blah, overcoming adversity, blah blah blah, blatant Oscar baiting, blah.

There were several notable snubs this year.  The only recognition Chris Nolan's film-making genius got this year were shout-outs in special effects editors' acceptance speeches, and Daft Punk was never even considered for their radically cool and different score for "Tron: Legacy."

Even more notable were those that we lost this year.  Leslie Nielsen?!!  Pete Postlethwaite?!! IRVIN KERSHNER?!! DINO DE LAURENTIIS?!!! Hollywood lost a lot of great, talented people this year.

So there you have it, last year in cinema.  A lot of people failed to get recognition, even more people died, and the best picture of the year was the same movie it seemingly always is.  The prospects for this year seem much better, but we won't really know what the Oscar lineup will be until those movies start coming out the month before next year's awards.  We can only hope.

And now, I took my laundry downstairs during the cheesy grade-school song sequence at the end, so I better check on that.

The GameFly Rundown

Well, I've returned my Valentines presents to GameFly, and am drumming my fingers eagerly anticipating the next two games they'll send me (hopefully Bulletstorm and Killzone 3 if all goes well).  Now that I've played a little more of 3D Dot Game Heroes and Crackdown 2, I'd like to give my thoughts so far after bidding them farewell.

3D Dot Game Heroes is ... is ... well, it's Zelda.  Sure, some of the details have been altered, it has a really unique 3D cubist art style, and is packed with referential humor, but it's pretty much just Zelda sans Link.  Not much else to say about it: I would definitely buy it if I ever found a copy in stores, moving on.

I actually have a lot to say about Crackdown 2 now that I've gotten into the meat of what the game is.  Essentially, it's an open-ended sandbox taking gameplay cues from both Grand Theft Auto and a Prototype/Infamous-type super-powers game.  Your guy is super-powered, indeed, but the actual powers are not all that expansive.  You can run full pelt at 40 miles an hour (more or less) and jump 20 feet straight in the air (more or less), but there's not much in the way of interesting powers other than that.  The "more or less" here comes from the fact that your guy's agility can be upgraded by hunting down special orbs or completing rooftop races.

This leads me to the one interesting thing I can say about the game, the levelling of skills.  By killing enemies in different ways, doing special maneuvers, and collecting orbs scattered throughout the city, you can increase your strength and agility and unlock different weapons and vehicles.  It's something that genuinely not seen in very many other games in its genre, and something I'd like to see more of.

With that out of the way, the rest of the game is competent but uninspired.  The combat boils down to either shooting, exploding, running over, or beating up enemies either with your fists or with a nearby environmental object.  There's enough variety, but not anything that the game can call its own.  The acrobatics are not all that fun, either.  Getting around the city via the rooftops, an act that is made interesting to look at with the parkour stylings of Assassin's Creed or the electricity-powered flair of Infamous, comes down to either running, jumping, or grabbing something in Crackdown.  Climbing a building is especially yawn-inducing: "jump, grab, jump, grab, jump, jump, grab."  No real climbing, no swinging, and very little shimmying on ledges: it's just jumping and grabbing.

Overall, it's just kind of okay.  The skills levelling is somewhat unique, and the commander's voice you hear throughout the game adds an almost Verhoeven-esque tone to the whole experience, but it's dragged down by uninspired combat, unengaging acrobatics, and a clear lack of focus in its overall design.  It all amounts to a heaping amount of side missions that eventually results in some kind of game progression, without the benefit of a clear plot to move things along.  5/10: A good 10 to 20 dollar game, there you go.

Happy F***ing Valentines Day

Well, here it is: the holiday dedicated to love and devotion to that one special someone. Ya da da da da, point is, I hate it.  Not the concept of the holiday, but what it represents to me and all others like me.  On any other day, I can see a happy couple and not be bothered by it, but now that it's f***ing Valentine's Day, happy couples are everywhere, and general lovey-doveyness is all over the place.  It ironically makes me pissed off to the very core.

Antipathy towards Valentine's Day is fairly easy to explain.  For every one of the happy couples out there that fortune smiles down upon, there are a few dozen sorry losers that are still wiping off the blood and scat from their last meeting with fortune.  Yeah, I know, "fortune" and "fate" are basically just excuses for us to not try, but the thing is that a lot of us have, lots of times.

Let me tell you about the 600 foot wall.

Everyone who's ever felt any amount of social anxiety knows about the 600 foot wall.  It's that feeling you get where, with every fiber of your being, you want to go and meet someone and/or get to know them, but you are at the complete mercy of a barrier made of excuses and self-doubt.  I know this feeling very well, because it happens to me all day, every day, and I have no way that I know of to stop it.

It's funny that the acronym for Social Anxiety Disorder also describes what it does to your psyche.

For all the S.A.D. people out there, Valentine's is the time for anger and apathy.  Particular emphasis should be placed on the apathy part, because that's the only way a lot of us get through the day without going hair-pullingly, teeth-gnashingly, screaming-profanities-in-publicly insane.

It was looking like one of those days today.  I walked down to start classes in the morning met by a chilling wind and a thick blanket of dark grey clouds neatly conveying my mood most mornings.  After a few sessions of trying to stay awake during lectures, I walked over to my mailbox, and what do I see but a very special Valentine's gift courtesy of GameFly.

Yay for temporary distractions.

Might as well give my first impressions of what was in those special envelopes.  Crackdown 2 is a super-sprinting, moon-gravity-jumping third-person shooter developed by Ruffian Games for the Xbox 360.  At first glance, it looks a lot like another game published by Microsoft Game Studios, with the energy shields, power armor, and regenerating health.  However, when powerup orbs, auto-aiming, and going all kung-fu on people's asses are introduced, these comparisons are immediately thrown out.  The controls are rather slippery, and the platforming rather imprecise, but it almost works for this kind of game.  This would be a fun game for multiplayer, definitely.  I could just imagine opening fire on one of my friends from 60 feet in the air, and engaging in good button-mashing fisticuffs when bullets fail.

The other game is 3D Dot Game Heroes, developed by From Software and published by Atlus in North America as an exclusive for the PS3.  It features a hero who must collect six power orbs to free the land from an ancient evil force, and starts with you getting pulled out of bed and sent to the king, who gives you a weapon and says "It's dangerous to go out alone - take this."  Yep, this is a 3D pixelated homage to the 8-bit action adventure classics, especially one in particular put out by Nintendo.  From what I've played of it, it's just great, and I'd totally recommend it to any fans of the old-school Zelda games.

Well, the day is almost over, so I shall spend the rest of the night in solitude playing more of the awesome games that GameFly was nice enough to finally get to me today (I sent in the previous two games on Sunday, last Sunday).  Good night, all, and have a happy f***ing Valentines day.

EDIT: Turns out "the rest of the night" was wrong, because I got called in to work at around 6.  Blast!

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Anger

Every Yahoo article on higher education pisses me off!  Not that anything else on Yahoo is much better, but the higher education articles take the cake.  It isn't that they are necessarily worse than the others, it's my perspective when reading them.  Want to have a rewarding career with a good salary?  Guess what?  You're in the wrong major!  You're gonna have to get into Accounting or Nursing while there's still time.

The article I found yesterday was no different, but was slightly more thought provoking and less shallow.  Business blogger and author James Altrucher's controversial stance on the transition from high school to college was profiled.  Altrucher believes that this transition shouldn't be instantaneous, as it often is, but that people should have some time in between to develop crucial skills and figure out their place in the world.

Great, I initially though, something else I got wrong!  I'm three years and most of Grandpa's college fund deep, and now I'm realizing I really should have taken some time off to figure out what I wanted to do with my life before I took the plunge.

Granted, I was simply doing what my parents, teachers, peers, government, and society instructed me to do.  Altrucher's views are controversial because they go against everything about the role of college that has been viewed by mainstream society as just how it's done.  In fact, the general pressure we're getting from who are supposed to be our role models, especially President Obama, is that we need as many people in college as we can find.  Sorry if your message seems a little misguided when there's all these college graduates stuck in the unemployment line, Obama.

The alternatives to immediately going to college discussed by Altrucher are starting a business, doing some world travelling, creating art, trying to make it as a stand-up comedian, writing a book, working for charity, and mastering a game or sport.  I actually tried the "writing a book" route while in high school, but trying to take the summer off to do it in my house was met by considerable pressure from the parental end.  I felt like I was in the R&D division of a major corporation: "Give me some results or we're shutting this whole operation down!"  Also, I have done some travelling: not all that much, but enough to learn lessons that many of my countrymen live their entire lives without learning.  I have no qualms with what he is suggesting.  They teach people what they need to know to figure out who they are, and none of them require searching for a job in the bone-dry unskilled labor market.

Doing much of this on the scale that Altrucher suggests is risky, though.  There's still a considerable monetary investment needed for many of the alternatives, and many parents still would feel better about their kids being in college knowing that they're getting something accomplished rather than fucking around for a few years "finding themselves."

Altrucher's way may be the only way right now considering current education policies.  High schools seem to want nothing more than to have a good enough percentage of their students pass the state standards tests, and colleges seem to want nothing more than to be either free-form knowledge dispensaries or highly-specialized career generators.  The only time people have to find themselves is their own time.

Perhaps this can be changed.

The change could come from the high school end.  Why not?  The ridiculously broken compulsory education system in America needs a complete overhaul anyway.  Why not build career exploration deeper into the curriculum rather than just being a token add-on in the current system.  There's a million other problems that need fixing, we could definitely fix this one while we're at it.

Perhaps colleges could change.  It wouldn't require as much from the government, and could be implemented and tested in private colleges almost instantly.  They're halfway there as is: they just need advisors who advise rather than just sign off on classes for next quarter.  The expectation in today's culture is that college is the place to find yourself, anyway.  Why don't the colleges really aspire to help with that.

Maybe it's easier than it's made out to be, and we don't need a drastic Altrucher-level plan to gain all the life skills and self-exploration we need.  Wow, I'm already a lot less pissed about an article I was only mildly pissed off about to begin with.  Maybe the next Yahoo article will be even better.

Or not!

Why Do We Care

The Super Bowl is here: in fact, it's going on right now.  You probably didn't need me to tell you that.  Unless you live in any country other than the U.S. or are living under a rock, you'd know that the country is going  through its annual football fervor.  The commercials, the promotions, the constant, incessant hype!  Packers this, Steelers that!

And I could care less.

I'm not even watching it right now, and I don't plan to.  Truth is, I don't give two flying shits about football, especially NFL football.  There's no NFL team here in Oregon, so the whole "local pride" thing doesn't really cut it.  Hell, the college I go to doesn't even have a football team (we're big on basketball, though).  The only sports I have even an inkling of interest in are NASCAR, MMA, and whenever they show poker on TV.  With NASCAR there is always the possibility of an epic crash, MMA is basically two people beating the snot out of each other which is always viscerally fun, and I feel like when I watch poker I'm learning skills that can make me some money sometime in the future.

Football, however, I find painfully dull.  It's incredibly slow, horribly repetitive, and since all the players are decked out in insane amounts of padding, the chances of anyone getting seriously hurt while playing it are ridiculously slim.

Why do we even care about it, though?

This has more to do with culture than anything.  Football is right up there with baseball and basketball in the Holy Trinity of American Sports.  It doesn't have to be better than soccer, rugby, hockey, lacrosse, tennis, or the rest of the myriad of sports with huge international followings that Americans don't give a shit about.  As long as it's made in America, we're more than happy.

American culture is pretty much what happens when you mix exclusivity with a superiority complex.  We don't care about anyone else's stuff, and no one else cares about our stuff, whether it be sports or systems of measurement.  And since we're the only nation that measures their football plays in yards, we get the impression that we're better than everyone else.

Since the time of America being a global superpower will draw to a close (it will happen, people), it's about time we started taking steps to join the international community on an equal footing.  Back when we were waffling on whether or not to sign the Kyoto accords, I though that we should, not because it would have any significant impact on our carbon emissions, but as a sign that we were willing to submit to the same rules as any other nation, that we had grown out of the "AMERICA!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!" mindset that has stuck on like an ideological cancer at least since World War 2, and that when someone else started doing way better than we were, we were willing to pass the torch.

Wow, this really ran off course didn't it.  To wrap up here, Americans like football and the Super Bowl and all that because they're American and nothing else.  Have fun watching the Steelers win again!  Peace out!

The Siskel and Ebert Effect

Happy February!  I took last week off from posting to this blog since it was midterms week were at OIT and I couldn't get a minute in edgewise between writing a 5-page paper and writing several more.

Today, I observed an interesting phenomenon in the comments section of a YouTube video about Mass Effect 2.  The game, which came out for the Xbox 360 last year and was just recently released for the PlayStation 3, is an RPG with third-person shooter trappings, or the other way around.  This really bothered some people, but didn't really phase others.

What I observed was what I call the Siskel and Ebert Effect.  There are two kinds of people in these kinds of arguments: Siskels and Eberts.  Siskels are all about details, focusing on all the little pieces which, to them, make or break an experience.  Eberts, however, are more about the big picture, viewing the experience as a whole and judging it based on whether it lived up to what it was trying to do.

To the Eberts, Mass Effect 2 was nothing to bitch about.  It had a decent amount of flexibility in the gameplay and forced to player to make very tough decisions that shaped the entire game.  The Siskels railed on about how it was a "shooter with plot choices" that didn't offer the complex skill selection or strategic combat they were looking for.

Neither of them are wrong, they are just coming at it from different perspectives.  This game was the perfect one to put these two perspectives at odds with each other: An RPG at heart, but a shooter by design.  

As for me, I enjoyed the game from both of these angles.  It feels very much like an RPG, including the initial struggle of finding the "right class."  This is something I have to do for pretty much every RPG I've played that has pre-set classes: play a selection of them to find the one that feels right for how I play the game.  For example, the "right class" for me in WoW is a Paladin, a Rogue in Dragon Age, and a Vanguard in Mass Effect 2.

The shooter aspects are refined and solid, with no major hiccups, and the RPG aspects are naturally flawless. This is Bioware, after all.  Judging by the experimentation the games has gone through from 1 to 2, it's not quite clear how the series will progress gameplay-wise.  Hopefully it will be another one of those genre contradictions, because it's just too damn fun to watch people bitch about those.