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zwolanerd

“I guess I just like liking things”

April 19, 2013 Storytelling

A friend of mine writes poetry and sends it to me now and again for me to respond to.  Honestly, I don’t generally understand poetry. I can appreciate imagery and word use, but I don’t get allusions and hidden meanings at all.  I would be the worst detective. Often I’ll enjoy the poem, but won’t really know why and certainly can’t explain it to him.  One day, though, I hit on the word “evocative,” and that’s become my go-to word. I doubt it’s particularly helpful to him, but it does the best job at conveying what I mean: it moved me, but I can’t explain how or why exactly.

Elizabeth doesn't really need you to take care of her, but you'll want to anyway.

Elizabeth doesn’t really need you to take care of her, but you’ll want to anyway.

I finished BioShock Infinite yesterday, and had basically the same reaction. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything for you – for once I’m glad I went into this one unspoiled myself. Hidden among the violence and shooting and bludgeoning and fire and falling and everything else was a compelling story I really wanted to uncover. Sure, there’s plenty of looting and buying upgrades and finding your way around and all the normal stuff you have in games, but the gamemakers did a fantastic job of making me want to know “What in the world is going on around here?” Now, I’m sure at least a part of that comes from having played the first BioShock game, so I was expecting something more than the usual business, but most of it was the presentation of the mystery.

By the end of it, once the mystery was as unraveled as it was going to get, I just sat there, mulling it over. There were a couple of things I wasn’t sure I really got completely, but for the most part I was all right. I really enjoyed the story and the way it was told, and I’ve said to a couple of people, “I think I loved it.”

I don’t read books near as much as I used to. As much as it would pain any English teacher I’ve ever had, movies and games have become a type of literature for me. I would still call books the superior form, certainly, but a movie or game that tells its story particularly well can have much the same effect on a person. (This is, of course, the part where I disagree with Roger Ebert’s “games can’t be art” argument, but I’m not going to get into that today.) Even games I find out that I don’t particularly enjoy once I’m into it a ways are things I feel compelled to finish, just so I can see how it ends up. The most recent example for me is Hitman: Absolution. I didn’t really know much about the series going into it, I was more interested in the gameplay mechanics of sneaking around and using “any means necessary” to get the job done. Somewhere along the way, the gameplay got really old and frustrating for me, but by that time I really wanted to see how the story played out. And that’s for characters who have a couple of other games as backstories already but were new to me. Throw a Lara Croft in my direction and I’m even more interested in the story because I have a strong connection to the character already.

A good story does so much more than entertain. I have gained countless perspectives from stories that I would never have gotten any other way: this is the power of stories, whether they be fiction or non-fiction. I can learn a point of view from a biography on Martin Luther King, Jr., and I can also learn from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just, you know, probably not the same things. The more well-read you are, the better informed you can be and the better prepared you can be for dealing with your neighbor, your coworker, and Random Guy at the store. I would change “well-read” to “well-storied,” I think, to more accurately describe what I mean, but the outcome can be the same.

The beauty of storytelling is that different people will react in different ways to the exact same story. You might play BioShock Infinite and hate it. You might like parts of it and not other parts. You might come away from it with different feelings about organized religion than you had before you played, or your beliefs will remain the same, or you might not even care about that aspect.  That last part was me, by the way. Sure, the game goes a long way to couch the goings-on in religion and prophecy, but for me the story took on its own life outside of that, and that’s a perspective you’re likely to find weird once you’ve played the game. For me the story was Booker and Elizabeth, the journey they’re on together, thrown together for reasons we don’t exactly know. I came to care very much about what happened to both of them, whether it was together or separate.

At the end of it, this is a game that will stick with me. I’ll read articles and theories about it, and I’m sure that will help shape my ultimate opinion on it. But for right now there’s a kind of lovely mist surrounding it, where I’m pretty sure I loved it even if I can’t exactly explain why.

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April 18, 2013 Wonderfalls S01E05: Crime Dog

SUMMARY
Jaye, Aaron, and Sharon are in a police station being questioned. In a series of flashbacks, the story unfolds about Yvette, the Tyler’s housekeeper, being deported to Canada after it is discovered that she was in the USA on an expired visa for 20 years. Aaron and Jaye go after her when Jaye is told by a cow creamer to “Bring her back”. Aaron begins to suspect that something is going on between Jaye and the creamer.
When the Tyler siblings find Yvette, she dissuades them from bringing her back to Buffalo, but on the way to a hotel, Jaye follows the cow creamer’s directions and ends up on the front lawn of Yvette’s — or as it turns out, Cindy’s — parents. Yvette/Cindy reveals that she ran away from home and her parents never bothered to look for her. She decides to go back to the Tyler’s, but Sharon has tipped off the border patrol and several officers meet them on their way back to the USA. Darrin Tyler has already made a call to some politician friends and the Tylers, plus Yvette/Cindy, head back to Niagara Falls, where they share breakfast together as a family.
The plot device where the central plot serves as a catalyst to develop the recurring characters is called The Client. The Client, in this episode, is Yvette/Cindy and her struggles with her family. The parallel is that Jaye feels out of place in her family, but Yvette was so out of place that she wasn’t wanted by her parents at all. So the happy fuzzies are when Jaye realizes that her family isn’t so bad. And, scene. I don’t recall this being so boring when I first watched it, but after looking at the previous episodes and seeing how formulaic they are, it is quite lame. It seems more like sitcom writing than an hour comedy-drama.
Other than that, the dynamic between Jaye and Aaron in this episode is great. He is starting to catch on that Jaye is acting strangely, and he correctly notices that it is because of animal-shaped objects. He doesn’t attribute it to her ‘sode, but is very concerned and/or interested in this development in his sister.
While the relationship between Jaye and Sharon is further explored here, I would say that it seems to be unfair that Jaye is portrayed as the “bad guy” in the relationship. She is pretty antagonistic and cruel towards her sister at times, but there’s also a very real lack of connection from the other side. Aaron noticed that Jaye was communicating with a porcelain creamer, but all Sharon noticed was that Aaron and Jaye had teamed up against her. The “me vs. them” idea gets reinforced by Karen too, as she says that Sharon is Darrin’s favorite, and then immediately takes it back. I still feel that the poor relationship between the sisters is not adequately portrayed. There is a lot of telling, but very little showing.
The muses in this episode are the Crime Dog and the Cow Creamer. The Crime Dog is at the police station where Jaye and her siblings are being questioned, and says “Hey, doll, I’ll talk to you,” to Jaye, and later tells her to say yes to Sharon asking to be her lawyer. The cow creamer tells Jaye to have a pancake, then says a few variations on “Bring her back”, “bring her home”, and “bring her back home”. At first, we are led to believe that the creamer wants Jaye to bring Yvette/Cindy home to the Tylers, then that the plan was to bring Yvette/Cindy to the home of her parents, with the frantic “right on red!”. At the end, we realize that the place that is truly home to Yvette/Cindy is the Tylers where, although she is the housekeeper, she is valued.
"Moo! Have a pancake!"

“Moo! Have a pancake!”

TRIVIA & REFERENCES
  • The BCIS agents are named Arnold and Donikian, which is a homage to friends of the creator.
  • During the commentary, when the officer asks Aaron about the cow and he says he hoped it was one of those “odorless cocaine cows”, Bryan Fuller says that it is a reference to the film Traffic.
  • When Aaron surprises Jaye at Wonderfalls with the cow creamer, he asks if her pupils are dilated. This is a symptom of drug use. He also brings up the pig shaped salt and pepper shakers, which is a reference to the previous episode, when he was talking to Jaye and Sister Katrina in the Tylers’ kitchen.
  • Sharon says in 1982 Yvette brought her to see E.T. and told her she had boobs. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial did indeed come out in 1982.
  • Darrin is wearing an elephant pin on his suit jacket, which is another reference to him being a Republican.
  • The car that Jaye is driving is a 1966 Studebaker.
  • Aaron says that Jaye wears her trailer park home and her “hillbilly-ness” like a ring of garlic, to ward off the family. This is a reference to vampire lore, where they are repelled by garlic.
  • When showing Yvette the bed they made for her in the trunk of the car, she exclaims over the cute “teddy bear” blanket. Aaron replies that they are Ewoks, and the blanket shows the title Return of the Jedi, the Star Wars film that the Ewoks are from. The linens were found on eBay by the costume department.
  • Aaron laments that they only have $144 to give Yvette for a hotel, but she says that since it is American money, it will go farther. In 2004, the exchange rate was 1.35. It is currently 1.02, although it dipped below parity in late 2007 and again in 2011.
  • The living room set at the Bradley’s house (Yvette/Cindy’s parents) later became Dr. Ron’s office. It was supposed to be Karen’s home office but never got used for that.
  • Jaye refers to her sister as The Smoking Man from the X-Files, which is a villain who appears in several seasons with a variety of aliases.
  • Karen is upset that Aaron broke the cow creamer, because it was a Limoges. That does not refer to a particular manufacturer, but to a collection of factories in Limoges, France, that produce porcelain items.
  • Fox, the network originally airing the show, hated this episode, and cancelled it right before it was supposed to air. They felt it was confusing. They also didn’t like the rewind effect in this episode, which the creators had wanted to use in multiple episodes, but decided not to because of the network’s dislike of it.
  • Unfortunately, the actress who played Yvette/Cindy does not make another appearance although the creators loved her. There wasn’t enough budget to bring her back.

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April 18, 2013 How I Think Pokémon Works

Arranged in order of how much I've heard of each of them.

Arranged in order of how much I’ve heard of each of them.

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve never played a Pokémon game. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy Pikachu, because, come on, Pikachu is adorable. How did I come to enjoy Pikachu when I haven’t played any Pokémon? Dude, Pikachu was everywhere for a while there. I think I even have a stuffed Pikachu somewhere.

I’m intrigued by the fact that I know so much about Pokémon without ever having played it. I tend to be a guy who knows a little about a lot of things, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how I came to know many of those things. I think in the case of Pokémon it’s a matter of cultural osmosis. I’ve seen GIFs and a few video clips and heard the Weird Al song and heard people use “I choose you, _________!” so many times that I’ve cobbled together in my brain how the game works. I’m sure some of it comes from the games and some from the show and some from people’s fevered imaginations, so it’ll be interesting to me to some day play one of the games and see how close I was. The closest I’ve come to seeing it in action is the beginning of an episode of The Norm Show where Ian Gomez was dressed up like Squirtle. For the purpose of this entry, I am not looking up anything other than the picture I’ve included here and the Weird Al video, and that includes how to spell any Pokémon names, so they will be mangled, I’m sure.

So here’s how I think it goes:

It’s a world where being a Pokémon trainer is the best thing ever, something to aspire to, but few are successful. Our hero, Ash (who doesn’t have a chainsaw hand, which is weird), wants to be the best Pokémon trainer, the best there ever was. In some way I’m unclear on, he’s able to get started on his path and he has to go to a Pokémon gym to train. Ash has to choose a starter Pokémon, and it doesn’t matter what he picks because nobody uses their starter Pokémon anymore once they’re able to capture and use other cooler Pokémon.

(Side note: I like to imagine Bill Cosby saying “Pokémons” with the S on the end. It seems like it would be fun to hear him say that. Pokémon (the word) is both singular and plural, though, I think, so it would be incorrect for Mr. Cosby to use the word that way, sadly.)

Pokémon are named after the sound they make, the ONLY sound they make. They can use parts of the sound they make, but usually only use the first part (“pika!”) or the whole thing (“pikachu!”). Pokémon each have a “type,” which is kind of like a class. They can be earth, air, water, fire, electricity, and any number of other things (but not Pop-Tarts, which is too bad, I think). Different types do better against certain other types, like electric types should do pretty well against earth types, because of grounding, but electric types would be really bad against electric types.

The main thing that happens is fighting. You run into a random Pokémon out in the world while you’re wandering, and if your Pokémon beats the wild Pokémon, you can capture the wild Pokémon (using a Pokéball, which is also where the Pokémon live when you aren’t using them, so Pokéballs must be kind of like the TARDIS, inside-space-wise) and start training it. There are also tournaments you can enter with your Pokémon, but you don’t capture the opponent’s Pokémon, you just defeat them.

The more you use and train a Pokémon, the more skills it can master, but it can’t learn more than four at any one time. If a new skill becomes available, the Pokémon has to “forget” one it already knows before it learns the new one, so hopefully it wasn’t like “Breathe” or “Remember its mother’s birthday” or something important like that. In a battle, Pokémon don’t die, they “faint,” which I’m pretty sure is code for “gets knocked out.” I kind of wish boxing used this terminology instead, as it would fun to hear about Ali making Frasier faint, because then you could imagine that maybe Frasier just swooned or was overcome by the vapors or something. And now I’m starting to think I don’t understand boxing very well, either.

There are two main goals in Pokémon: becoming the best trainer there ever was (accomplished by advancing through all the official tournaments) and catching one of every kind of Pokémon, which is very difficult because some of them are very rare. You keep track of which ones you have by using a Pokédex. There were originally 150 Pokémon, but now there are many, many more. My guess is at least 300. I guess scientists in the Pokémon world have either been very busy researching or (more likely) very busy fiddling with genetic material in the lab.

Along the way, Team Rocket is going to try and steal your Pikachu, even though there a bunch of Pikachus all over, so I’m not so sure why your Pikachu is so important. You will also meet a bunch of Professors (each one named after some sort of tree) who will teach you new techniques on training and capturing Pokémon.

By the time you have achieved both of the main goals, it shouldn’t be too much longer before the next game in the series is available, but don’t hold your breath for a fully-3D version (that isn’t Arena or Stadium) , even though that’s what everyone who has ever played Pokémon really wants.

(Side note: One of my favorite Pokémon is Snorlax, both because it is fun to say and because he looks so peaceful, lying there in the path sleeping and blocking your way.)

How close am I?

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April 17, 2013 Advertising Idea

Remember, as we learned in Wreck-It Ralph, he isn't swearing, that's just his language.

Remember, as we learned in Wreck-It Ralph, he isn’t swearing, that’s just his language.

 

Frankly, I’m not sure why they haven’t gotten this done already. You’re welcome, ad agencies.

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April 16, 2013 Tuesday 19: Gaming Gaps

GamesRadar posted a list the other day of The 50 most important games of all time. You’ll never see a list like that here simply because I haven’t played all the games ever, so I don’t feel like I could make a list like that with any sort of confidence. I could do a “most important to me” list, I suppose.

I consider myself a mostly well-rounded gamer. Even stuff I haven’t played I’m familiar enough with to understand their importance. Apparently, though, I am not a well-rounded gamer and should feel bad about myself, because I started making a list while reading their list, a list of things I haven’t played (or haven’t played much of), and 62% is a failing grade.

I decided to leave the numbering the same as they have it on their site, both so you can see where they listed it in importance and so you can find it easily over there if you want to read their comments on it.

50. Zork (1980) – I have played a few text-based games (most notably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but never did play any Zork. However,  do still like to say “You have been eaten by a grue,” so that should count for something.

47. FarmVille (2009) – But I have played The Simpsons: Tapped Out, so I think I understand.

45. RuneScape (2001) – I had heard of it, but wasn’t very familiar with it at all. Seems like the sort of thing I might have enjoyed once upon a time.

41. Gears of War (2006) – I actually tried this one. I played for about a half hour and just didn’t care to go any further with it. I have used a “cover system” in other games, so I guess I owe it some credit, but I just can’t seem to work any up.

40. Starsiege: Tribes (1998) – Again, familiar with it, but never played it. Honestly, I had a small window of time in which I enjoyed multiplayer shoot-em’-ups, but even during that time I don’t think I would have enjoyed one that required jetpacking all over.

37. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) – I have played Warcraft and Warcraft II a little, but never played III. I am completely inept at playing resource-gathering-so-you-can-build-stuff games. I used cheats in Starcraft so I could see the rest of the story, and I still had trouble finishing that one.

"And you call yourself a gamer? Tsk."36. Shenmue (1999) – To me, this is the most embarrassing entry on the list. I was a die-hard Dreamcast fan, for one, and for two, I actually rented this and played a little of it, but I didn’t really get it. I hadn’t ever played anything quite like it before, so I was confused. I think if I were to play it now, I’d probably like it… and that leads me to a third embarrassment about this one: I saw it for sale this past weekend for $15… and I didn’t buy it. Ever since, though, I’ve been wishing I had, so that counts for something, maybe?

35. Myst (1993) – Tried it, hated it. I’m no good at puzzle games, anyway, and the puzzles in this one seemed even more ridiculous and random than usual.

34. Metroid (1986) – I’m not a Nintendo guy and I have always been bad at platformers. Sorry!

33. League of Legends (2009) – As mentioned above, I think my window for this one has passed.

32. Minecraft (2011) – This one intrigues me, and I enjoy hearing my friends talk about it, but my enjoyment of building my own fun begins with The Sims and ends with The Simpsons: Tapped Out. I still occasionally think I’ll try this one, but I haven’t so far.

31. Diablo (1996) – I have a non-gamer friend who says she was obsessed with this game when it came out, to lack-of-sleep-and-shirking-responsibilities levels. I don’t see the appeal, but I don’t know that I’ve actually played any game in this genre, so maybe I just don’t know.

22. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) – Yeah, yeah, I know: I’m the worst. The Zelda games sound like they’d be right up my alley, if that means anything to you.

17. Super Mario 64 (1996) – I have played this one, but not much. In fact, I played this game for about a half hour in Denver, Colorado, about two months before it was released in the U.S. I was in town for just a couple of days and wandered into a used game store to see what they had in the way of  Sega Genesis games. They had a Japanese N64 set up with this game running and he let me try it out a bit. I’ll admit it blew my mind at the time to see Mario running around in 3D, but in the end it’s still Mario, and Mario doesn’t do much for me.

8. Pokemon Red & Blue (1996) – Again, the Pokemon series seems like something I’d like, and if they ever release a version for my phone or Xbox, I’d give it a try. I just doubt at this point I’d be willing to buy, set up, or carry around a separate piece of hardware to play it.

7. EverQuest (1999) – “More like ‘Neverquest,’ am I right?” I skipped a lot of the precursors and just did the World of Warcraft thing for a few years.

6. The Legend of Zelda (1986) – Go ahead, keep hating me.

3. Super Mario Bros. (1985) – Yes, I have played this, but not much and I never rescued the Princess, so I don’t think it counts. For what it’s worth, this is the one videogame my wife admits to playing and liking.

1. Spacewar! (1961) – None of you has played this one, so you can’t judge me.