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zwolanerd

“I guess I just like liking things”

May 9, 2014 Canceled

Look, I get that making TV shows cost money. I know that studios have to be able to sell commercials to pay for all of that, and I understand that TV studios don’t exist to provide entertainment exclusively for me. But this canceling nonsense has to stop. There has to be a better way!

SurvivingJackI am speaking right now about Surviving Jack, which got axed this week, but I could be talking about Don’t Trust the B, The Michael J. Fox Show, Traffic Light, or a bunch of other things. Stuff that didn’t get much of a chance.

I’m sure the pressure to produce the Next Big Thing is crazy, but I can’t help but think about Seinfeld. The pilot was originally rejected, but a year later four more episodes were ordered because an exec thought it had potential. Season two only had 12 episodes. Yet in its 9th and final season, it was #1 all year long. (I knew most of these things roughly, but got some details from Wikipedia, just like everyone else does, but I thought you should know.)

I don’t know what’s changed in the interim years. Critical acclaim doesn’t seem to matter, nor do small-but-vocal fans. There’s got to be some way to fund good shows with the mountains of cash made by other shows on the network, doesn’t there? But, I guess, people looking at the books judge how good a show is by how many people are watching it.

In other better news, The Goldbergs and Agents of SHIELD both got renewed, so apparently my liking something isn’t necessarily the kiss of death.

 

AFTERNOON EDIT: NBC has officially canceled Community, so now everything is ruined forever.

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May 8, 2014 Operation All The Zeldas! Ocarina of Time

OcarinaofTimeSo this is probably going to be for some of you where this series peaks. Drawing from the backstory laid down by A Link to the Past, Ocarina becomes the fulcrum for the whole series’ mythology. If you haven’t played this game, you can still experience it fresh on the 3DS with some graphics enhancements. No seriously, go now. You can read my dithering once I’m not spoiling anything. Okay now that they’re gone, what is wrong with those people?

I kid.

Tough Video Games are a young medium, getting into the cannon of must-play games is pretty difficult. Ocarina is among some of the first 3D games, and among Big N’s excellent efforts at moving classic franchises forward. Like Super Mario 64, Ocarina feels a lot bigger than its predecessors. We wouldn’t see real open world games for another console generation, and we still haven’t gotten a true open world Zelda game, but Ocarina’s huge main field gave this game a lot of freedom. Though my personal favorite, mostly for nostalgia’s sake, is A Link to the Past, it’s hard to argue with the greatness of game that Nintendo has used as a basic template for every game that followed.

Much of that I think comes in the scope of the story. When Link awakes from a nightmare in Kokiri village, he is a child and has to prove himself worthy of being the Hero. Once he has proven that, making a mark on all the villages and races in Hyrule, he ends up seven years in the future as an adult. You then need to gather the spirits of the seven sages so you can defat Gannon and rescue Zelda. This was a neat idea. It draws on a similar idea of the Light/Dark World from A Link To The Past, but it shows the consequences of your actions. Once you can slide between the two times, you can manipulate things more directly.

The time feature leads to the most arcane part of the franchise’s lore, the split timeline. In the official time lines there are three separate timelines created by this game. The first is, Link is defeated leading to the original game, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Link’s Awakening timelines. (This also includes the Oracle games which came out after Majora’s Mask.) Then if Gannon is defeated there are two timelines that are created. The first draws from the child era, which leads to Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess, and the Four Swords games. The adult end of the timeline continues as well, which leads to Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks. Introducing time travel in any fiction is bound to make its cannon exponentially more convoluted.

The eponymous Ocarina may be one of the most memorable parts of the game. You learn the first measure or two of a tune and play it back to have some sort of magical effect. This includes moving forward and backward between time, summon your horse Epona, or warp around to the various Temples. It’s even used to solve some puzzles in dungeons. Though there were instruments in the earlier games, including the quest items in Link’s Awakening, but the idea of music becomes infused into the console titles from this point. Whether directly like the Harp in Skyward Sword, or more abstractly like the Howl Stones in Twilight Princess, the main console games have a musical component inspired by the Ocarina.

This game casts a long shadow over the franchise. Every game gets weighed against what arguably couldn’t be done again. 3D was the point where these games became worlds to explore, albeit in a limited fashion. While I won’t argue that the Zelda games have gotten any worse, it’s still among my favorite franchises, what I will say is that this is the last time the series really felt on the cutting edge. The same can be said for most of Nintendo’s franchises. If the games industry is a city full of skyscrapers, Nintendo is that last crazy Train Car diner that still makes hamburgers and shakes like it did in the 20’s.

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May 7, 2014 Lyn Plays PlayTown

So since I’m a person with full time employment and part time study now, I don’t have time to do the Dire DVDs anymore. I’m sorry. You must have noticed how short they were getting. Next week’s would have been “This movie is pretty terrible” and that’s it. What I do have time for is games! There’s always time for games. So while Dire DVDs is on hiatus, I will be doing Let’s Play videos. Mostly I will be playing games I have not played before, because it’s funnier that way, but this week I’m breaking that rule right out of the gate with a social MMO I’ve been playing for a month or so. Here’s a video, for your eyes.

 

 

Price: Free to download / Free to play (they say it always will be, so presumably the “Advertise Here” boards will generate some income for them, or they may go to microtransactions, I don’t know)
Client: PC and Mac
Get it from: www.playtown-game.com

As noted in the video (which you not only watched, but watched twice), the game is currently in Open Beta, so there’s a fair amount of glitches and limitations. For one thing, there’s no skin tone so everyone gets to be an odd shade of yellow. The city is currently small, but new areas are coming.  The community is overwhelmingly friendly and positive, which is a nice change. Of course there’s jerks, but there is a handy ignore function.

As an MMO, it’s entirely leaning on the social side. It’s a chatroom with minigames and levels, basically, which is no bad thing and makes a nice change from “Kill 8673 Kobolds”. It’s entirely possible to enjoy the game casually or hard core, or somewhere in between. I’d recommend dipping your toe in if you’re after something different, or would just like to look like a round blowfish for a bit.

Do you play anything fun (and free)? Suggestions are most welcome!

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May 6, 2014 Tuesday 11: Favorite Fandoms

It’s my 42nd birthday today, so I thought I’d take what that number portends and talk a little about my favorite things I’m a fan of. I don’t have the energy (or memory!) I once did to memorize all kinds of facts and figures, so my participation these days is more passive. At the same time I think I can appreciate things more now because I understand them better.

I tried putting these into some kind of order, but it’s not really that kind of list (translation: I couldn’t do it). So here are some of my favorite things:

1. Star Trek – If I was able to sort these, this would be at the top of my list. My history with Trek goes so far back and I’ve been able to enjoy so many things related to it. My first (and only until later this month) fan convention was a Star Trek convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some time in 1987 or 88. I got see Mark Lenard and Grace Lee Whitney and I bought a T-shirt and a baseball cap with Spock ears attached that I used to wear while sitting on the bench in baseball. My coach pretty much hated me.

2. Q*bert – I’m not sure what else I could say about Q*bert. The most surprising thing, probably, is that I’m not really very good at the game.

3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – I discovered these guys when I was in 7th or 8th grade. My Senior year of high school I had all four figures dangling from the ceiling of my locker in an action tableau. That same year my girlfriend gave me a trade paperback of the first Turtles comics in my Easter basket. I still have that book, I still have those figures, and two days ago I bought another Lego kit that had Leonardo in it.

4. Batman – It wasn’t until news started coming out about the 1989 movie that I really started getting into Batman. I’d seen the show and read a few comics, sure, but the movie is what really got me started. From there it was The Dark Knight Returns and on and on, and now any time someone finds a funny picture related to Batman in some way, I get sent it 3-5 times on Facebook because I’m that “Batman guy” that most people in my friend circle know.

5. Videogames – Yes, I’m aware that Q*bert is a videogame. But this is more about the culture and the systems and the history.  My first gaming machine was a Commodore 64. My first console was a Sega Genesis. The last time I counted, I came up with 20+ consoles that I’ve owned at one point or another. My favorite series of all time is Tomb Raider, but I’ve come to love Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed and a thousand other games on top of that.

6. Joss Whedon – I watched his stuff all out of order, and I still haven’t watched some of it, but I know enough now that if something comes out with his name attached, I want to see it. Firefly was my first intro, then Buffy, then Angel, then the Avengers, and now Agents of SHIELD, and I don’t get how anyone who ever watched any Whedon stuff ever was so put off by the beginning of Agents of SHIELD. First there’s the groundwork, then there’s the fireworks. Come on. Honestly, I’ve had to catch myself rolling my eyes at the “oh, finally it’s watchable” people, because I feel like they don’t deserve to enjoy it because I’ve enjoyed it from the outset. When I realize I’m starting to think that way I shake my head and call myself a hipster dork.

7. LEGO – I keep buying sets, but I rarely put them together. It’s weird, but I have to be in the exact right mood. Part of it is that I don’t know what to do with the assembled kits afterwards. I don’t really have room to display them, nor do I really want to?  I’m not sure. The basement display area in The LEGO Movie did look pretty cool… Some kits I want to assemble once but don’t want to buy. There’s a $139 Millennium Falcon kit that looks like all kinds of fun to put together, but I don’t want to spend that much on it. I need to, like, borrow it from someone.

8. Muppets – The Muppets are kind of like my happy place. I have so many good feelings and memories associated with them. My nickname in high school was “Muppet” because a Senior thought a Freshman me looked like one, and I couldn’t have been happier, even though I knew Muppets were goofy-looking.

9. Comedy – Who doesn’t like to laugh, right? But it’s more than that for me. I love watching a stand-up comic and understanding what he’s doing, how he’s leading to a punchline, or what makes that particular thing funny. I’ve performed stand-up twice, once that went over pretty well and once that bombed like you wouldn’t believe in front of 800+ people. I’m currently part of an improv group and I love doing that, too, but I dream of some day finally getting a whole stand-up act together and performing it.

10. Scrabble – My mom played this all the time with other ladies in the church when I was growing up, but it wasn’t until I got to college that I really started to appreciate it. I only like it if people are playing by the exact rules, though. I love words and seeing new places for them, and I love that I’m never really playing against anyone but me.

11. Weird Al – He certainly could fit under the “comedy” heading up there, but he’s his own thing. I’ve written lyrics to a couple of parody songs (and even recorded one), but I don’t grasp it the way he does. He’s a style chameleon, and I’m pretty sure he’s a genius. He makes what he does look easy, but it sure isn’t.

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May 5, 2014 Marvel Monday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Yes, I am taking whatever “M” words I want and turning Mondays into that particular thing. I DO WHAT I WANT.

spideygwenI went with some friends to see The Amazing Spider-Man 2 over the weekend and I liked it well enough. There’s a thing they do near the end that’s pretty  much straight from the comicbooks, and it was sad but necessary but maybe not? but I liked it anyway even though I don’t like what it means for the series. I’m trying very hard to not spoil a comic book that is 42 years old in another month, but if you know anything about comicbooks you probably already know this thing.

I don’t mind the new Spider-Man movie series, even though I loved the first 67% of the first trilogy. I liked Tobey Maguire’s sad sack Peter Parker and you’re not going to cast anyone better than J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, so don’t even bother. Spider-Man 2 is the best Spider-Man movie ever made so far.

But the new series is fine, and even has some things in it that are better. Emma Stone, for instance. Her Gwen Stacy is someone who’s getting things done with or without anyone’s permission, thank you very much. She’s got a speech in 2 that’s basically, “Hey, I’m choosing to do this, so don’t try and stop me and don’t try to feel responsible for my actions” and it’s great.  I also love Spider-Man’s interactions with the public while he’s out and about saving random folks from random dangers. He gives little encouraging pep talks and calms people down and it is some wonderful character work.

The new series is a mix of classic Spidey and the new stuff (“Ultimates,” I think it’s called), and some of it I could do without.  This is going to sound mean about fictional people who never existed, but I don’t like the “Peter’s dad had a hand in Peter becoming Spider-Man” backstory. I don’t mind the update to “genetics!” from “radiation!” but the random selection of Pete resonates more for me.  Sure, I get that they want to tie all the villains and Spider-Man into Oscorp, but that gets a shrug and an “eh” from me.

Overall I liked it. It was a bit crowded, but it didn’t feel as crowded as Spider-Man 3 or Batman & Robin did.