04 Aug 2008
Played on Xbox360
I’ve been doing the GameFly thing for quite some time now, and I’ve noticed that my play style has changed somewhat. Gone are the days of playing only a handful of games, but playing them so deeply that I know every last inch. I don’t think it’s correct to say my taste has changed, but I do think it has expanded. I now seek out games where the reviews criticize it for being “too short.” I often would rather have short but memorable experiences with multiple games than a long deep relationship with one epic game. I’ve shifted to be a gaming polygamist. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy deep, long-term gameplay (just look at how much MMO blogging I do), but I’ve now got a soft spot for the short but sweet weekend rental.
Conan is just that sort of game. Not to be confused with Age of Conan, the MMO, the Conan for the Xbox 360 is a simple third-person action slash-fest. You are Conan, and you kill stuff. And being the barbarian badass that you are, you vanquish your foes with gratuitous force. It’s quite satisfying.
There’s nothing terribly complicated about the core gameplay. There are three primary attack buttons and different combos for various sequences of these attacks. For the most part you can mash buttons and watch the carnage unfold. Later in the game you’ll encounter foes that require you pull off specific combos to get passed their defenses, but it never gets too intricate. All told the combat feels pretty solid.
The boss battles in Conan are appropriately grand. You fight everything from a sand dragon to a kraken to an undead elephant. Seriously, the game gets major points for memorable boss creatures. Defeating the bosses involves a mix of standard combat and Quick Time Events. Thankfully the QTEs are lenient and never immediately fatal, so defeating a boss is never a matter of repetition until you achieve perfection.
You may be reading all of this and thing to yourself, “But I’ve played this game before.” Yes, Conan is the posterchild for derivative game design. There is absolutely nothing here that hasn’t already been done in dozens of other action games. But it’s done well. Combat feels good, the animation is great, the bosses are memorable, and the whole experience only takes up about five hours of your time. This is the video game equivalent of the popcorn action flick. It won’t give you any deep and meaningful revelations, but it sure is fun.
That’s not to say that the game is lacking character. Conan may be a man of few words, but those few words are delivered well and are absolutely hilarious. The game has a charm to it. It’s a chauvinistic and violent charm, but for some reason in the world of Conan the Barbarian that’s totally endearing. For example, instead of collecting hidden packages, flags, or agility orbs, Conan seeks out topless women chained to poles. They strip off their shackles and thank Conan suggestively… achievement unlocked. It all sounds really offensive, but it fits thematically, and for some reason that makes it okay. Don’t get me wrong, this game is not for the feint of heart. But for a five hour romp of decapitations and one liners, it’s excellent.
29 Jul 2008
I’ve been having a good time with Last Night on Earth, but poking around on BoardGameGeek I’ve always been a little jealous of those swank miniatures that some people have painted. I’ve also noticed that it’s very possible to confuse the heroes while playing, so the painted figured do serve some functional value. So I decided to take up an arts and crafts project to paint the pieces from my game.
I’ve never painted anything like these soft plastic miniatures before, so I posted a query to the BGG crowd for tips. And I’m so glad I did, because those people were ridiculously helpful. Armed with pages of discussion on optimal painting techniques I headed to Michael’s to get my materials.
Supply list:
- Apple Barrel 24 color acrylic paint set - $4.99
- Apple Barrel white, 2oz - $0.79
- Apple Barrel black, 20z - $0.79
- Delta Ceramcoat matte interior varnish - $2.29
- Loew-Cornell set of four sable brushes - $6.99
- Elmer’s adhesive putty - $1.99
- Solo bathroom cups (package of 80) - $2.39
Total: $21.88 (including tax)
The first step was to wash the minis. Apparently they have some residual stuff on them from the mold, and if you don’t wash them the paint will have problems sticking. So I washed all the minis and left them to dry for a couple hours.
The next step was to prime them. I started with the zombies, because you’ve gotta screw up pretty fierce to make zombies look bad. Two coats of black paint later, my zombies were looking like freaky little tar monsters.
Someone from the boards had the excellent suggestion of using sticky tack to affix the figures to something so I didn’t have to actually touch the figure while painting. Thus the plastic cups. There are two colors of zombies, green and brown, and since I needed to preserve that in my final output I marked the cups with either a “G” or “B”.
With all the prep complete it was time to break out the color. I wanted to preserve the original skin tone difference between the two sets of zombies, so I mixed two not-quite-human skin colors. After the skin was painted on zombies I was able to go nuts applying various clothing colors to them, making full use of the 24 colors in my palette. Lastly I finished off the bases, starting with a dark-green base (to match the game board) and then accenting them with either a light green or brown to bring back the two zombie team colors.
The final step was to apply a coat of matte varnish to make sure that the paint won’t wear down as the figures get handled during gameplay.
You can see more photos of the final result here. Personally, I’m extremely happy with how they turned out. Now that I’ve cut my teeth on the zombies, the next step is to tackle the heroes. There’s more detail to worry about with the heroes, but the core steps should be the same. I’ll post photos when I’m done.
29 Jul 2008
I worry sometimes that I’m too negative. If I scan back through what I’ve written on this blog, I see more negative statements than positive statements. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with criticism, but when that’s all you’ve got to say it’s pretty darn depressing. Saying the glass is half empty is fine, but focusing on the fact that it’s one eighth empty is taking it a bit far. I don’t want to be that person.
Sometimes the most succinct way to describe something is in the ways that it differs from something similar. If you had to illustrate everything from scratch every time, building up from the base to the small details, it would take forever. It’s far easier to talk about things in relation to other things. This is a fundamental optimization of communication. But hidden in these comparisons are value statements. You say what something is, and you say what it is not. And in saying what it is not, you are often describing what it should be. And in pondering too often what things are not, it is too easy to lose sight of what they are.
This is a common problem. No one really talks about the ways in which the world’s religions and denominations are similar; we focus on (and wage wars over) the miniscule ways that they are different. We don’t talk about similarity because similarity is understood. There’s nothing more to say. Everybody likes ice cream; everybody likes bacon. It’s far more interesting to talk about ways in which we are different. But there’s a difference between knowing how you are different from something and defining yourself by how you are different.
I don’t think of myself as a negative person, and I don’t think that I’m overly negative in my interactions with other people. I enjoy a good argument, but that’s not the basis for how I relate to others. So is this disproportionate negativity just an anomaly of my writing?
I definitely know that I struggle with it constantly in blogging. Far more topics flit through my head than I have the time to put to words. So there’s an ongoing selection process for deciding what topics to write about. The topics I write about are the ones that I have the most to say about. I’ve talked before about how this leads to me writing about games. But it turns out it’s also a factor in contributing to an overall negative tone.
Concrete example: You’ll notice I never wrote about Iron Man. Why? Iron Man was freaking awesome. Thoroughly enjoyable. I’d recommend it to almost anyone. But everyone knows that Iron Man was awesome. I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone. It was just understood.
I also haven’t written anything about The Orange Box, which was one of my favorite games from last year. Portal is gaming perfection, Team Fortress is refinement of a classic, and Episode Two ends with one of the most epic gaming sequences I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s not like I decided to not write about it. It’s still totally on my list. But I’ve subconsciously preferred so many topics over it. What’s wrong with me?
I think it’s a natural tendency, and one I’ll probably always struggle with. Constant Vigilance, I guess. But at least I’m aware of it. I began this blog as an effort to help my memory, and in respect of that I think it’s important to keep my personal time capsule from becoming a depressing log of spiraling negativity.
28 Jul 2008
I have no recollection of how Paprika ended up in my queue. Maybe someone else recommended it to me, maybe it popped up on a Netflix related list. Regardless, going into the movie I really had no idea what exactly to expect. I knew from the sleeve that it was an anime, and that’s about it.
Paprika is a story about dream therapy. Not any sort of traditional dream therapy, but rather an invention that allows a therapist to enter your dreams and help you work through reoccurring dreams and nightmares. Unfortunately the device falls into the wrong hands, and a sort of dream terrorist emerges. Victims of his nightmares go insane and start throwing themselves out of windows and such. It starts strong, but the plot gets fuzzy real quick. There’s some detective work going on to track down the culprit, but it’s not told particularly well and I quickly became lost. I mean, I got the gist of it, but it wasn’t exactly crisp.
Thankfully the visuals are amazing. The dreams are appropriately vibrant and surreal. The parade of insanity is creepy, but I especially liked the first patient’s reoccurring dream sequence with everything from film noir to a circus to shrinking hallways. The waking scenes also are really well done, with a realistic style that sharply contrasts the insanity going on in people’s heads.
But overall I was left disappointed. It was definitely pretty, but I felt like the premise was squandered. Basically the plot was two stars, and the visuals were four. So it really would depend on your mood how much you’d enjoy it. When I sat down to watch it I guess I was in the mood for plot, because in the end the movie didn’t quite do it for me.
17 Jul 2008
I think zombie movies are most successful when they focus on what it means to be a survivor. Take our world, fuck it up, and then tell the story of the people living in that world. The world is some modification on ours, so we can relate to it; but the world is also changed, so it’s a little more interesting.
Zombie survival stories are distinct from other post-apocalyptic stories in that the world is largely intact. All the stuff that mankind has built for itself is still there. The difference is that all the people are gone. The stories generally revolve around being lonely and coming to understand how much we depend on each other (both for infrastructure and for emotional support). But of course we live in a world that celebrates the resilience of the individual, so at the same time the stories are about how one resourceful person can survive untold odds and carve out a life. And that of course is one of the other themes: transcending just surviving to rebuilding civilization. These are the nuts and bolts that hold a zombie film together. The monsters, the action, the gore… these things are all secondary.
I Am Legend is a zombie movie (although you might not know it from the preview). Well, they’re technically supposed to be vampires, but the vampires exist in great numbers and resulted from a worldwide infection. Whatever, they’re nocturnal zombies. Anyway, the story is most successful when it concentrates on Robert Neville’s (Will Smith’s character) survival story. It’s fascinating to watch the desolate city, his daily routine, and his bond with his dog. That stuff is all goodness. That’s what a good zombie movie is made of: a great survival scenario.
I thought everything about the movie was quite successful until somewhere around the point where he makes contact with another survivor. It’s not that adding someone else to the mix was inherently bad, it just happened so late in the film that it couldn’t be fully developed. And the ending was just plain terrible. Why do we need so many stories of needless martyrdom? There’s a place for sacrifice, but it has to have meaning. More often than not it feels like a cheap Hollywood cash-in for emotional filler. I personally like it when a storyteller has the balls to kill off a primary character when it fits the storyline. When characters survive everything unscathed it takes the bite out of their dangerous environment. But its another thing entirely to have a character take their own life in the face of danger when there were hundreds of valid alternatives. That’s just cheap. It’s not like the story of I Am Legend was lacking loss. Robert Neville loses everyone he knows, his whole family, and most poignantly his last companion, Sam. But Neville’s death is pointless.
But I digress. The ending left some large questions about the evolution of the infected unanswered. Supposedly Robert Neville is some sort of brilliant scientist, yet he is completely oblivious to the obviously evolving intelligent behavior in the infected. In the theatrical ending, none of that was addressed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but apparently that wasn’t the original ending. In the original ending Robert Neville begins to see himself through the eyes of the infected. To them he is a murderous invader; he is the villain. The meaning of the title is different: he is a legend to them, as opposed to him being a legend to the remaining human survivors for creating a cure or some crap. The role reversal is a far more interesting premise, but apparently it was deemed unpalatable by the general movie-going public.
You know, I had the same problem with Wanted last week; an interesting story adapted to film and being changed for the worse. Sure, you have to change some things to a story when it crosses mediums. But don’t change the freaking premise. In doing a little research on the original book I found out that it’s been called out as a key inspiration behind such films as Night of the Living Dead and 28 Weeks Later. This is a story that was instrumental in shaping a whole genre, and had already inspired two direct film adaptations. What about this makes a filmmaker think they can make a last minute change to the ending and have the same impact?
Okay, I’m done ranting. Seriously, I really enjoyed the first two acts. It’s just frustrating that the ending was a total cop out.
