Brazilian rugs? Psych!

Having just acquired my first real job in over two years (my last one involved testing video games), I've been binging on pop culture out of the fear I'll never see it again. Don't worry; it's still high-brow stuff, but that's in the face of the impending inevitability that I will soon have to dip into the common man's pool. I need to know who the best D-list dancers are when I'm around the watercooler, or else the convo is gonna stall and Jerry will bring up that girl from accounting I bloused at the Valentine's shindig. (Seriously, what was her name?)

What this all means for you is that I have a hodgepodge of material to deliver. Nobody likes a disjointed blog post, though, so I'll tie it all together via whatever I now discover to be the #8 Yahoo! search term of the day: "Willie Nelson"? Eh, he's a bit played out at this point, isn't he? Ah well. Now that I'm an office man, I need to learn how to accept bureaucratic rules like this one about Yahoo! search terms. Fax it!

Brazil
Back in 1985, when Willie Nelson was first putting on his Farm Aid concerts, that American guy from Monty Python made a then-day version of V for Vendetta. In it, the government makes a bureaucratic error (unlike me), kills the wrong citizen, and things happen. It's weird. The female character doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Whatever. In conclusion, I liked it! Unlike the modern Terry Gilliam - whose Brothers Grimm is the most cliched, original movie I've seen - Brazil is primarily originality, albeit in a somewhat-cliched future dystopia. We all know the government's going to get really into Soviet style housing again and transport loads of scrap metal to the countryside where it will rust and breed mutated insects. That is a given in any future. The absurdity of Gilliam's future (which either takes place before the insect stuff or chooses to avoid it) sets it apart, makes it sad in a psychedelic, totally 80s way, and it has baby masks! The ideal hero in this world is not some faceless idealist who talks too much, but rather Robert De Niro - the guy who fixes the air conditioner because the government won't do it soon enough. The protagonist is that guy who is doomed to be known by our generation as Keira Knightley's dad in Pirates. And Michael Palin, one of my favorite Python members, ends up being a real creep. An odd place this Brazil is, yet it definitely makes my list of "top 5 horrible futures I might want to visit."


Psych
Psych is ostensibly another quirky USA detective show - the channel's only mined resource since the success of Monk. Whereas Monk is a one-trick, OCD pony, Psych is willing to mix it all up for the sake of a good joke. Sure, the trick that our main man is only pretending to be a psychic consistently features, but this set-up leads to a wider variety of humor than "man is afraid of touching things and getting germs." Psych is appropriately labeled a second-tier show, due to some weak production and an uninspiring secondary cast of characters. Also, and emphatically, America does not need another show where the drama surrounds whether an arbitrary murder was committed by the barber in Act 1 or the hooper in Act 2.

Psych gets a pass because it isn't trying to be drama. Again, everything exists in the name of fun - specifically, the type of fun pop culture junkies may enjoy. This show throws more random references at the audience than this blog does, which is kind of incredible considering they target an audience larger than fifty. For that, I applaud them. Nay! I sing to them! The tune is that classic Tanya Tucker/Willie Nelson duet, "Why the Psych Can't Do It." I'll change "can't" to "can," so that, you know.

This picture is purposely off-center. Explain.

Prince(s) of Persia (there's your parenthetical)
Maybe fifteen years ago I rented the original Prince of Persia for the Super Nintendo. I despised it. It literally took me tens of minutes to jump across a single pit, as the game featured a playing style my mind simply could not translate for my controller-holding hands. Almost five years ago, the series was revived in the form of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. All had been forgiven, and the critical acclaim this new version was garnering won it a place on my coveted Christmas list. Santa, however, passed it by. Either he favored the other games on my list, or he was growing resentful of my hardening agnosticism/atheism/etceratism. Its sequel, Warrior Within, made the list the next year, but the God of Chronology intervened, declaring that I could not receive a second before a first. Time passed, until two weeks ago, when it stopped passing. I bought them both for a total of $20. I am pleased with the way things worked out.

Sands of Time is a beautiful game, telling a classic story of greed and love, with some simple time travel interspliced. The time element is little more than a play on the "losing lives" standard, in that you can press a button to rewind the action if you make a mistake and fall into spikes (as is won to occur). Regardless, it feels and looks cool. I had a lot of frustrating experiences with the combat, and those inevitably continued in the more battle-focused Warrior Within, but the joy of running across walls and swinging through Iranian palaces won out in generating an overall positive gaming experience. Sands of Time is a must-play, with Warrior Within and its odd and overwhelming darkness being a maybe.

One-line soundtrack summary: I struggle to understand why the environmentally-appropriate Middle Eastern tunes of the first game were replaced in the second by (this is true) Godsmack.

Oh, and you're all going to have to get used to Prince of Persia whether you like games or not. Bruckheimer bought the movie rights and claims to be giving it the Pirates treatment. The biggest question on this front, then, is obvious: Who will play the Prince?

This entry was posted by DoktorPeace, on Wednesday, January 30, 2008. You can leave your response.