Top 10 Games of 2011

10. Bastion
After playing the demo, falling off the edge of the map, and having my misstep cleverly detailed by the omnipresent nattaror, I expected him to slickly respond to all of the actions I performed, thus delivering a inspired new take on game presentation. Turns out I was kinda wrong, as the game stretches into a fairly lengthy and directed journey in which the script improvises more in beats than measures. Nevertheless, I had a good time trouncing through an inspired (if not entirely interesting to me) adventure, killing… er, I don’t even remember anymore. It’s been three weeks. Whatever. I hit guys with hammers and had fun.

9. Sonic Generations
I already wrote about how Sonic Generations is “better” than Uncharted 3. It probably wasn’t very well written as I went in with the expectation that nobody would read the whole thing even if it were posted at The New York Times blog because nobody goddamn reads anymore unless they’re on the squat and even then they’re playing that saccharine piece of gizzard’s gooze Angry Birds…, but it’s written nonetheless. The same goes for the sentence I just wrote, which I hold as my firm opinion as strongly as I hold any opinion, which is to say fairly strongly, in that uncertain kind of way that’s perpetually unsure of its intent, ya know?

8. Child of Eden
Just look at it.


7. You Don’t Know Jack
As an aspiring comedy writer (you wouldn’t know it from here*), this game impresses me all the time. Lines are amazingly delivered by the host Cookie Masterson, and are more clever and punny than the popular gross, with one series of questions for instance asking whether “Something Something Ranch” is the name of either a salad dressing or a Nevada brothel. When my mom got every one correct, my Catholic-rooted family had the biggest, most innocent laugh about prostitution we’d ever had. And that’s saying something.
*"You wouldn’t know it from here” line taken from Beginner’s Guide to Yuks.

6. Portal 2

Portal 2 is the expansive sequel to the breakout hit of a few years ago. Adding more levels, more gameplay elements, and way more background story for those crazy folks at Aperture Labs, Portal 2 is an awesome follow-up to the first game. My personal favorite new element is the addition of the moon-paint dispensers which let you coat the walls in new Portal-ready material.

In case you aren't familiar, here's a brief overview of the game: You're a subject in a crazy lab where the loony AI computer system is trying to destroy you and you want to escape and the only weapon you have is a gun that makes portals so you can sneak past enemy turrets and move boxes to solve puzzles to advance until you find a way to escape. There are also a lot of jokes about potatoes in science fair projects and this real cheeky little AI guy that helps you along the way.

The gameplay is some of the most addictive I've encountered in an FPS. Because the levels are strung together like individual puzzles, it's so easy to tell yourself you'll solve just one more puzzle. Next thing you know it's five hours later and you don't mind at all. You were having too much fun. Awesome. [Sean]

5. Dead Space 2
The original Dead Space may be my favorite game of this generation. I felt like I was walking through a finely-crafted haunted house while being fed an expertly-contained sci-fi story. Since then, I feel the series has veered a bit, with unnecessary universe expansion detracting from the simplicity of the original adventure. Add in a now-voiced protagonist who shouts the same f-word as every other hero, an emphasis on a multiplayer mode that already lies barren, and the most immature ad campaign in modern gaming, and you’d think I wouldn’t be talking about this game at all. Nah. I can’t stop shooting the limbs off dead stuff. I can’t wait to move out of my parents’, then out of my crowded co-op, and then out of my paper-thin townhouse so I can finally blast the volume on this audio-video spectacle. Only fifteen more years!


4. Batman: Arkham City
As a fan of old beat ‘em ups (especially racist ones like Sunset Riders) I can’t help but love the single best hand-to-hand combat system ever created in games. Whereas Uncharted 3 lists as one of my greatest disappointments of the year thanks to the fact that I dreaded every single enemy encounter, I love taking down henchman after henchman in what-appear-to-be-choreographed fight scenes directed through my fingers. The story gets a bit too comic-y for me at times, but the uniquely dark aura of Gotham drips into Arkham City to create the perfect open-world environment for either a bat to cat around in, or vice versa.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
My wallet is a map of the original Legend of Zelda, and I wear a Zelda wristband out in public. This game had to really screw up not to make my list. It did try at times, with slow-scrolling text and constant descriptions of items you’ve already picked up 100 times testing my patience, and both I and my bitey cat were resistant to getting back into the (improved but still imperfect) Wii-flailing groove. But just like in Space Channel 5, the groove got me. A simple walk through the bazaar is all it takes to recognize the richness of personality that still sets this iconic video game adventure apart from the rest.


2. Fortune Street
Out of nowhere, this somewhat Mario Party-ish looking game sprung up at me from the review pages of Game Informer. It’s rare that any property (especially one starring both Nintendo and Dragon Quest characters) can sneak by my internet eyes, so I read on, intrigued. Weeks later, cut to the living room of my friend Andy, where a newly-purchased copy of the game entertained a bunch of sober twenty-somethings for four hours plus. That night alone shot Fortune Street to the top of the list. It’s Monopoly with a stock market, and it’s the most pure, refreshing experience I’ve had discovering a game with friends since the arcade was still a thing.


1. Skyrim
I fell asleep during every Lord of the Rings movie, but ya know what? NO ONE CARES! A game is different from a movie, otherwise I would’ve just copied and pasted our top movie list and put “Colon The Game” after every title (The Tree of Life: The Game is particularly good). Skyrim triumphs in the major aspect that does attract me to high fantasy by creating a vast medieval “Europe” where I can hang my post-industrial stress at the door, take in a dragon story if I wish, or just wander an often beautiful, rewarding landscape. There is a bevy of lore to discover that I appreciate for creating an aura of verisimilitude, yet personally don’t care about for beans. The stories I need are found in my Xbox inbox, where real-life friend Pat insults me as “Argonian street trash.” I don’t know what it means, but I love being involved in a world where vitriolic jibberish about an imaginary place still stings. Curse you, Pat, and may the Gods punish you in years hence.

Played Out: Video Game Stand-Up

With nerd culture being so hot in comedy today with things like The Big Bang Theory and Dane Cook dominating the headlines, I've decided to draft the beginnings of my own, game-inspired routine. Check it. Here is exactly how it will play out:

The host begins: "Our next comedian is..."
(I jump on stage) Me! Sonic the Hedgehog!
(Audience murmurs): Is that really Sonic the Hedgehog? I thought he was a hedgehog not a human? This drink minimum is a total rip...

That's a brick wall behind me.

Just kidding. It's me, DoktorPeace.
(Audience sighs before transitioning into impressed applause).
I'll be your avatar for the evening.
(Laughs)
Seriously, though. Have you seen those XBox 360 avatars? They actually look like people... except that last time I checked, I don't really wear cowboy boots! I don't know why I put them on my avatar!
(Applause)
Anyway, thanks for having me tonight. I have to admit, I was afraid I'd come out here and lay an egg. Once I got to the dressing room, though, I looked in the mirror and realized, "Hey! I'm not Yoshi!"
(Uproarious applause).
I met Tino the stagehand backstage. He reminds me a lot of those New Yorkers in Grand Theft Auto IV. You know, the ones I run over with my car!
(Even more uproarious applause. A couple people fall into the aisle).
Have you guys been following the news? Herman Cain is a guy, and he's a lot like Bowser, don't you think?
(Laughs).
No no... I shouldn't say stuff like that about other people. I actually feel really good today. I met Ulala, the dancing reporter from Space Channel 5 at a Starbucks this morning. All I can say about her is... "Ooh La Larection!"
("Yes! Yes!")


Honestly, though, I don't think it's gonna work out. The only regions more uncharted than the game Uncharted 3 are my nethers! No wait... Kirstie Alley's nethers!
(The cops arrive. They immediately crack up.)
How many of you have kids?
(Some raised hands, but not too many cuz my crowd is young and cool).
Tell me: Are they all really as annoying as Baby Mario? Crying all the time? I mean, it's gotta be tough. I haven't even unlocked the code to the wahhhmbulance yet!
(Every safety code is violated).
Baby Mario is a pretty good kart racer, though. Anyway, that's my time. Gotta jet!
(I put on red sneakers like Sonic and run away.)
(Audience whispers): Wait... That really was Sonic?

Played Out: Uncharted 3: Sonic's Deception?

About a month ago I served my American duty and took advantage of a buy-2-get-1 free offer at Target, with the main target of this patriotic venture being Uncharted 3. The new Batman game was my high #2, and the third was a toss-up until I got to the store. A myriad of new sports games shone at me from the shelves, offering countless hours of entertainment... hours that ultimately turned me away. I simply don’t believe I’m currently in a place where I should be giving video games in general that many hours, so I turned to the hedgehog instead.

That’s right. Despite my recent posts attacking Sega for its complete obliteration of the Sonic series and collateral disillusionment of sexy animal fanfic, I bought the new Sonic Generations. What can I say? The demo convinced me that it would offer something a Sonic game hadn’t offered in a while – a legitimate, tight platformer; and, most importantly, one with minimal story.

I did get stuck with some crappy scenes about Sonic and his friends having a picnic, but otherwise the decision has proven to be one of my best. Note: I make a LOT of good decisions (I ate broccoli tonight). I’ve ended up dedicating a ton of time to this game –- not sports game time but still life-dying time -- , and mostly enjoyed myself doing so. It’s meant to serve as a celebration of Sonic’s 20 years, and there’s a lot of good nostalgia to be had, with every stage an iteration of a previous one, the ability to play old chiptunes over the new, and those sweet red sneakers. Some areas are still messy, with bizarre deaths punishing you for straying even an inch off the directed path, the controls still feel a bit heavier than they did way back in the original Sonic, and the final boss is absolute garbage; yet this appears to at least be the beginning of the evolution that always should’ve happened.

Window dressing. That’s the evolution. Beautiful, relevant, rewarding window dressing that serves to elevate the same gameplay that worked twenty years ago.

On the opposite side, we have Uncharted 3. Oh, I finished the game in three days and generally had a decent time, but this former the apple of my eye far too often succeeded primarily in demonstrating what happens when all the window dressing of so many modern games fades away. What remains is a semi-interactive experience far more dependent on entertaining you through its storytelling than its mechanics.

I didn’t love this new Nathan Drake adventure – it’s all becoming a bit too National Treasure for me, where the characters simply bounce unbelievable historical revelations off each other until they figure out the next place to go – but riding through the amazing set pieces Uncharted delivers is still a treat. Unfortunately, the main attraction is so finely produced that every inadvertent death is a literary disaster, completely removing the player from the adventure as they restart from a checkpoint and try to determine where they should have run slightly left instead of slightly right. In Sonic, everything is very obviously a game, and your remaining life cache is proudly displayed in the corner of the screen. Uncharted has the burden of offering the opportunity for failure without disintegrating the illusion of verisimilitude, and I just don’t think they know how to do it.

Whereas the original Uncharted was a decent Tomb Raider clone – supernatural craziness and all – I feel the series has progressed past the polish of Uncharted 2 and into a zone where the series' primary gameplay mechanic weighs down the game. As confessed by its multiplayer, this game wants to be a shooter, yet every battle ends up a bothersome interruption. I won’t get into the control problems I had this time around, as the developer has already released a huge aiming patch in response to user feedback. However, as I did get myself constantly killed, I found myself exasperated at the logic behind what was happening onscreen. Where are all these enemies coming from? Why do they keep coming? Why is the insane number of guys I’m killing never addressed in a story that still seems to accept a premise that every life is sacred?

I don’t know if this is any more of an issue than it was in previous games or than it is in any product of the James Bond archetype, but the more I had to replay the same shootouts, the more I realized just how silly it all was. And unlike Sonic, silly in Uncharted feels wrong.

There's no grand conclusion to make beyond my own bafflement in preferring one to the other. There's also no grand conclusion to make because I'm going to play the new Zelda now. It's one of those great decisions I make, in absentia of real decisions. Note: I'm going to drink some apple juice, too.

Played Out - Tommy Wi-Show

I have another confession to make: One reason I haven't been so prevalent around here of late is because I'm torn over the role of pop culture in my life. Now don't get me wrong: The Blogulator still provides a valuable -- nay, essential -- service within a social spectrum in which media has become so reflexive that even the most amazing bloggers are stuck using Foo Fighters lyrics to introduce their feelings. I'm no neo-Luddite. I'm simply concerned that life is passing me by while I watch old Star Trek episodes.

That said, I've really enjoyed what I've seen so far of a web-series in which The Room guru Tommy Wiseau plays video games.

On the surface it seems like the exact brand of self-consumptive garbage I wouldn't want to introduce to my palette right now. A guy who's famous for making an atrocious movie playing popular video games? It sounds like too much. However, I'm here to attest that it kind of works, in fact, because it's not really much at all.

The concept is basically Mystery Science Theater, with short vignettes that bookend the episodes explaining that an alien has capture "T W" for the purpose of making him play these games. So far, this frame story is refreshingly cheesy, thanks to the star's iconic "acting" style and a distinct absence of memes. Audiences don't need a history lesson in cheese to enjoy the ham, making it that special kind of humor that only goes stale when the fridge is broken.

High marks go to the creative team behind this show, who I feel have a good grasp on minimalist production. The series is by no means under-produced; it's very easy to see and hear and follow the action, even in a small youtube window. What I mean is it avoids the pitfalls of trying too hard to be something that it isn't, aka a "real show." Real shows struggle with formulas and time-fillers, whereas The Tommy Wi-Show can simply be what it is - 6 minutes of watching an idiot act stupid and play games.


Regarding the idiot, it's another testament to the producers that they can extract entertainment from a man whose fame is almost definitely beyond his ability. The Room is amazing for what it is, sure, but Tommy Wiseau is so incapable and, as evidenced in these videos, so unaware of basic sentence structure, that the editors really have to monitor how much they reveal of their mentally-deficient star. I can't help but laugh when Wiseau runs his game character into the same wall over and over again because I think the man is sane enough and, you know, modern controllers do have a lot of buttons; but I'm not gonna keep smiling if I ever start to worry that the freak is in a cage.

For what it is right now, though, I can't help but recommend the simple, stupid, and sufficiently self-contained Tommy Wi-Show.

And now I'm off to live free of these media boundaries! To the city! For the Yellowcard concert!

Classic Episode Rundown: Salute Your Shorts, Episode 1-6; "Toilet Seat Basketball"

Three very important issues arose during my viewing of this sports-centric episode in which the camp holds a basketball tournament to determine who will be remembered as legends and whose picture ends up on the cafeteria wall on a toilet bowl labeled "LOSERS."

1. The America in which camp counselors can teach kids about the true competitive nature of a capitalist society by plastering their photos on old toilet bowls is likely over. There are lessons to be learned in losing, including the inefficiencies of selfish play versus teamwork, as Bobby Budnick and his diminishing candy stash could tell you. There are also lessons to be learned in cheating, including its effectiveness until confronted with moralizing do-gooders like Telly who refuse to steal the opposition's playbook. And there are also lessons to be learned in interior design, including the obvious charm of a toilet bowl on a campground cafeteria wall. We will never progress if every kid gets a ribbon, and only the truest douches who see through all this crap will succeed in business as adults, creating an even more total douche-ocracy than already exists.

2. The America in which roving black-and-white handycams makes sports look more awesome is likely over. Sports are always cooler when shot gonzo, without color, from the ground-up. I mean, how else are those color graffiti graphics plastered over your Ollie gonna make it look so sweet? Today's kids are raised on iCarly's top-down MySpace angles that oversaturate everything in false coolness that we '90s kids can totally see through. I dare you to try to look as extreme on your webcam as I did flying around in rollerblades with the wrong date at the bottom of the screen.


3. Booger culture is a shadow of its former greatness. Remember when mucus was so gross/hilarious/great that companies invested in video games like Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure and toys like plastic-head-filled-with-fake-snot Gooey Louie? I was reminded when Sponge got caught digging for gold at basketball practice and was called out for practicing his "pick-and-roll." Ha! Admittedly, I have no idea if today's children understand the appeal (I imagine it's human nature that they do), but it seems like lame adults have filled family movies more with dumb pop culture references and farts than our old, runny friend. Europe may now be the last bastion of snot, and that, citizens, is truly gross.



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Memorable Quotes

Dina - "For your information, nature is out this year. Neoprene is in."

Michael - "Why'd you just stand there?"
Z.Z. - "I was thinking how much I liked birds."

Played Out - El Shaddai (Addendum)

The morning after my last post, I read it over in the hopes of being awed by my own lexical splendor, as I am wont to do. Instead, I discovered some underdeveloped opinions that would surely shun me from the prestigious world of new games journalism. I would like to address said shortcomings here, with the simple caveat that I become a literary hero after doing so.

What's that? Literary heroes are better defined as people who are able to convey an authentic human experience through story? They don't simply beg you to accept their point-of-view by arguing it in a blog post? Well, I don't want to brag, but I just read Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and it was totally sad, and that's gonna make this two point add-on to what I wrote last week really good.

The first point I stumbled on was being a bit too whiny about the confusing plot and lack of substance in purely mythological tales. Granted, it's in my nature to be whiny as an overexposed American; yet I feel the game deserves more credit than I seemed to give it. El Shaddai succeeds automatically through its exclusion of aliens and the military, and it's probably the only surreal, anachronistic take on a Bible story any medium is going to see for years. Whether or not that experiment works on an emotional story level remains debatable, but it definitely works on enough levels to warrant a play test.

This playing part segues into my bigger failing, which was to curtly dismiss the fighting mechanics. I said something about not feeling comfortable translating my button inputs into onscreen actions, and this concern is legitimate; however, its legitimacy may be largely personal. I have played a number of 3D action games, yet I've never excelled at executing the complicated combos that ostensibly determine the player's success against various opponents. I over-rely on techniques I find to work early on, sometimes struggling to adapt to enemy pattern changes later. El Shaddai seems to react against these possible complexities through a limited control scheme and a simple 3 weapon, rock-paper-scissors... but it adds a different layer of complexity by not clearly revealing the success of your attacks. Enemy armor does break off during the battle, but between these strict visual changes progress can be hard to decipher. I don't even know whether I would have figured out the rock-paper-scissor mechanic without reading the instruction booklet.

In comparision, I've been playing Zelda II for the NES lately, which -- despite its limited technological capabilities -- delivers obvious and pleasing visual and audio cues that you're damaging your opponent. Sure, doing so makes the game more gamey, and El Shaddai does not want to distract from its immersive art environment. However, I don't think inserting some aesthetically appropriate effects to demonstrate that you are effectively fighting would have been distracting or difficult, and it would have personally encouraged me through some of the dragging battles. Interestingly, after beating the game, the option to display the enemy's health status does appear, suggesting that its absence during the initial playthrough is an entirely creative decision.

Regardless of the effectiveness of this decision, knowing that such a decision can be made in so profit-dependent an industry made me happy enough to feel guilty enough about the resultant feel of my last post to return here. And maybe I failed and ended up whining again, but it doesn't matter, because A Farewell to Arms is really good, and I read it, and you effectively read it too by reading the above, awesome prose.

Played Out - El Shaddai

In my boldest move yet towards beatification, I recently tithed my paycheck towards the teachings of an ancient Biblical book. Sure, the Book of Enoch may only be canonical in Ethiopia and Eritrea, yet I am now certain that this Dead Sea Scroll starlet has more to offer than the papal tabloids want to credit. I mean, some Japanese guy made a video game based on its story. And yea, God spake, that is totes cool.

The game of which I speak is El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, the meaning of which I have absolutely no idea despite having finished the game just last night. The good/bad of that ambiguity is pending, before which I'd like to specify the aforementioned Japanese guy to be Takeyasu Sawaki, who was also a lead designer on Devil May Cry and Okami. The lineage is obvious, with El Shaddai being very much a 3D-technique brawler (Devil May Cry) encased in a stunning cel-shaded atmosphere (Okami). In other words, I shouldn't be at all surprised with the feeling left me by El Shaddai.

That feeling is... I liked it?

Question marks signify uncertainty I possess about the fighting mechanics in all of these games. Even though Devil May Cry is ostensibly the prototype for modern brawlers, I have serious trouble latching onto exactly how my button presses are playing out on screen. I generally adapt well enough to succeed, but I'm constantly frustrated when I believe I've blocked an attack or nailed a combo in accordance with the established norms and find myself flailing against the ground (in real life, in front of my chair, after throwing my half-empty soda can across the room). El Shaddai never drove me to this level of fury, as I trounced through the game on "normal" difficulty only having to replay a few sections, and only once each time; but I'm just not sure how much fun I'm deriving from these key battle components of Sawaki's games.

It's the worlds that keep me coming back, and not even in the narrative sense. Devil May Cry is good, campy neo-punk, but Okami and El Shaddai are heavily influenced by religious mythologies (Japanese and Judeo-Christian respectively) which I'd hardly classify as good storytelling. Tightening the focus back down to El Shaddai and its retelling of the Book of Enoch, what we find is a number of fallen archangels who, for one reason or another, are f'ing with the Earth and humans instead of staying up in Heaven where they belong. I dunno. A lot seems to be going on, but it never really coagulates into a purposeful story that made me believe my plight was against anything more than a series of video game bosses. One is a giant pig, one transforms into an insect... There's something about the fall or rebirth or loss of innocence or gaining of free will or something going on around it all, but I really don't see how anyone would figure that out by playing this game...


Not that this shortcoming is specifically El Shaddai's fault in any way other than its source material selection. My 28-year familiarity with ancient religious texts seems to reveal a genre heavy on mythological battles between superbeings, somewhat interested in humanity's physical and philosophical status below these battles, and loose on finalizing -- or even recognizing -- meaningful story arcs. Think about all those Greek and Roman stories about the gods and Titans and stuff... Are they really any good? They're attractive, in a way, because they truly are "classic," hearkening to the most base human interests of blood and romance and the like, but I contest that few of them really leave the audience with anything more than, "Gods, huh." The stories aren't necessarily purposed towards satisfaction. They're largely purposed towards simply emphasizing the power or insanity or whatnot of the deities, just as a banal action movie today would be purposed towards instructing the audience that cool, good guys always beat the baddies. It's a reaffirmation of faith in something, and therefore does not require logic. It simply requires that characters exist and do things.

To give an example, consider the idea that the fallen angels featured in El Shaddai are attributed with fathering the Nephilim, which are Titan-like giants who stomp around and have a bunch of sex and, in some interpretations, therefore inspired the great flood of the Old Testament. This is intriguing on the surface, yet there's no real reason for any of this to be happening, is there? It can provide cool visual options for storytelling -- which is the major triumph of this game -- but emotionally it falls flat. El Shaddai also features a female human named Ishtar who appears once in a while and whose bones you're supposed to collect in some hidden stages. I have no idea who Ishtar is or how she relates to Enoch. Ambiguity can be cool, but it's not gonna make me care.

The most captivating story tool the game features well is its use of Lucifel aka Satan before he fell from heaven. He's the only "friend" in the world with Enoch, and, although he appears very superficially as a save point, he is constantly injecting the world with the life it needs to be at all relevant as anything other than visual art. You can often hear his cell phone (yes, Satan's cell phone) ringing before you see him, which he then picks up and carries on a one-sided, nonchalant conversation with God. The snippets of chat seem so casual that you almost get the impression that neither God nor Lucifel could really care less what happens to Enoch or the fallen angels or even humanity.

Maybe the game is about a game that God himself is playing with His minions and creations. It's a deity-type that Mark Twain touches upon in "The Mysterious Stranger," in which an angel named Satan (actually the nephew of the his more famous uncle Satan) visits Earth with so little empathy for humans beyond anything as toys that his disinterest comes off nearly as contempt. Maybe God really doesn't care what happens, so long as something does happen, because that, in itself, is entertainment.

For me, I can only empathize with this version of God because El Shaddai is so beautiful to experience. It's like The Science of Sleep of video games, in which you want to keep looking, but your eyes keep closing on you. There's some kind of interesting message to latch onto (probably), and it pops out now and again in a phrase or movement that genuinely means something, but it never forms into much more than an astounding piece of visual architecture. Things are happening, and they're wonderful to see, but I'm not sure they're leaving me with any genuine human emotion. Yea, the emotion may merely be God-like.

Played Out - Cream the Rabbit

As you may have noticed, I've been absent much of the summer, justifying myself to the powers-that-be with stories of sun and theater. My true preoccupation is, as usual, much darker.

I began the summer by bashing those Sonic the Hedgehog fans who helped drive the franchise into the ground through their romantic obsession with the crappy, lifeless B characters who litter the modern games.

I did that before I met Cream.

"Cream is a princess-like figure; she is polite, just, follows manners (and never forgets them) and does what she is told. She's very friendly and tries to be close to everyone she meets. She is brave as well, usually not afraid to go out on an adventure. She’s a bit naive however, and doesn’t always see things right away. " (Sonic News Network)

All I know is that summer romance is the best. Especially when you're nibbling on the forbidden lettuce of love that's forbidden cuz it's over in the neighbor's yard and they get real mad about that stuff.

I made this:

Classic Television Rundown: Salute Your Shorts, Episode 1-5; "Bunk Chief Elections"

Come to write of summer;
See it out my window, through the glass.
Instead I stare at shorts,
Remembering the past.

3 girls in a bunk,
Voting for their chief.
A plot, so it's full of beef.

B plot:
Goats eating clothes.
Cleaning with toothbrushes.
Crying over onions.
Kid stuff.
Especially the goat.

Years pass, and summer turns to school.
Democracy is serious.
Goats still aren't.

More years.
Camp is a memory.
The kids are powerful.
No more goat jokes.
Everything is serious.
The kids forget to B.


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Memorable quotes

Donkey Lips (to himself) - "I think relish is my favorite condiment. Mayonnaise next, then mustard."

Telly - "You know what I call this? I call this 'Shove a Pie in Your Face!'"

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Iconic Insults: "Tough nuggets!", flunk-a-roo, dorkette

Played Out - Timeshift (sic Sonic the Hedgehog)

Video games being my medium of choice, I believe in experiencing the entire spectrum - good, bad, and mediocre. If I'm perusing a store and see a game for $5 that I remember hearing something remotely interesting about, I'll probably buy it, even if that point of interest was its absolute terribleness. Such is the reason I own a copy of Superman 64. The bad is equally a part of history, and it makes the good that much better. Plus, it's not like I'm going to spend the x number of hours necessary to play the bad games to completion, even if this was my recent intent upon purchasing Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). I wanted to be able to tell people that I'd played the game in which Sonic ends up making out with a human girl, voiced by Lacey Chabert. Disappointingly, the game is fundamentally broken in almost every way and not worth that already inherently worthless story progression. Did I waste my money, though? I think not! I'll always have this great story to tell, as well as an instruction booklet with totally hot pics of CGI Lacey, which is a joke I'm posthumously retracting in the interest of what I've written below. I was going to insert a video here of Sonic and "Princess Elise" kissing, but I ran away from YouTube after discovering that almost every result of my search was a fan-made music video commemorating their love. To each their own, but this is an embarrassment for all mankind. And hedgehogkind, and also I guess whatever the offspring of this unholy pairing would be.

As usual, most of this text strays far from the original intent of my post, as I have sitting next to me a list of talking points I meant to breach regarding both the promises and pitfalls of mediocrity vis-à-vis the 2007 first-person shooter TimeShift. I was even going to have myself a great time bashing Avatar in my discussion of environment versus life and motivation. Nevertheless, if my summer reading of Mark Twain's autobiography has taught me anything, it is to talk about what your mind wanders to at that moment, and my mind right now is on the sick section of the gaming public that has allowed a once-great video game icon to descend into one of the worst examples of modern storytelling in any format. It's been decried elsewhere, ad hominem, but now it's my turn.

I know I said "To each his own" before, but I was lying. There are valid alternatives in lifestyle, founded upon reason and logic, and then there is blind idiocy. It's probably our education systems's fault or something, but Sonic and his Shi*tty friends (as Tails and company have come to be called) are a plight upon pop culture. I'm not even going to start on some of the deviancy his anthropomorphic evolution has inspired on the internet. Peruse at your own risk. Rather, let us here simply study the legacy of his love for Elise.

First, an example of an actual interaction between the two during a cutscene:

Please note, in case you missed me mentioning it or missed the visual section of the video, that Elise is a human, whereas Sonic is a blue hedgehog with big shoes and no other clothes. His head is also five times bigger than hers. True love has overcome greater odds, to be sure, but without a drop of irony? Impossible.

Or so you'd think. I am going to spend the remainder of this post listing songs that have been set to a montage of Sonic and Elise's scenes from the game - scenes which involve the same intensity of relationship witnessed above.

Song: "I Still Believe" -- Hayden Panetierre.
Top-rated comment on the video: "This is a very beautiful, very true song. It certainly does express Elise's emotions for Sonic in a very romantic yet beautiful way."

Song: "Can I Have This Dance?" -- High School Musical 3
Comment by SONICandELISE4everAJ: "Your girlfriend appreciates all of the beautiful and wonderful videos you make for her ;) thank you my sonic :)"

Song: "Sweet Dream (Japanese)"
Top comment: "Sonic doesn't like Elise or Amy. He hasn't girlfriend because he lives for his own rules. So the title is inadequade."
Ed. note: Amy Rose is a pink hedgehog infatuated with Sonic and soft-serve ice cream. There is a huge divide between SonElise and SonAmy fans, I'm learning.

Song: "Miracle" -- Cascada
Comment by Midnightsbeautiful: "I LOOOOOOOVEEE SonElise so MUCH!! It's the best couple!"

Song: "One in a Million" -- Hannah Montana
No more comments. It's too sad. These are not kids having their fun. These are developed minds devoting effort to a couple that exists in a single Sonic game that, once again, is damn near broken and unplayable.

There is a serious thesis to be made here regarding societal arrested development facilitated through media, and I think I just wrote it.

Played Out - E3 2011

I've been waiting anxiously for the sun to come out this year, so of course it finally did the days I'd already set aside to sit inside and watch corporations put on stilted performances meant to convince me to buy their products. This week is the video game industry's biggest circus - the Electronic Entertainment Expo - and circuses often feature stilt-walkers, hearkening back to the adjective used in the first sentence. Last year Microsoft even hired Cirque du Soleil for the unveiling of their controller-free motion device, the Kinect, and Cirque means "circus" in French...

So yeah... I watched all the big company conferences, and I'm going to summarize them here for you, the non-gaming audience. Or at least that's what I intend to do before I inevitably veer off into some crappy philosophical diatribe against my own derivativeness, blogging on the same subject half the internet's already rambling about, with the same, nonexistent level of direct perspective on the matter. You know what everyone has a direct perspective of? The sun! I should really be recording my personal tale of weather, and thus contributing real, experiential, anecdotal evidence to the human archive. Yet instead I've chosen to bypass atmosphere for the vacuum of opinion, relaying to the reader information already infinitely accessible through modern media. I am not a reporter. I am not a recorder. I am little more than a self-fulfilling rambler, only just now beginning on what he purportedly intended a paragraph before...

MICROSOFT
Microsoft's conference got me super-excited. For books. The only exclusive, non-Kinect game I recall being featured was Gears of War 3... a game that is already finished and admittedly delayed to serve as this year's big holiday release. Meanwhile, the entirely too long Kinect section of the show seemed to be aimed at really young babies who have had their brains removed. I'll admit that, almost 5 years into the Wii generation, I've grown skeptical of motion gaming's potential... or at least its potential to thrill. Yet Microsoft approached the subject as if nobody knew the Wii existed, hiring a bunch of ham-fisted Kohl's models to demonstrate incredible innovations like *gasp* sports games! Please watch this video, especially the football part. It demonstrates the complete contempt Microsoft's conference planners must have had for their audience's intelligence.
Undoubtedly some great motion and voice applications remain for gaming. Microsoft seems to believe its greatest potential lies in generating internet memes.

ELECTRONIC ARTS
EA started out by poking fun at the conference cliche of bringing celebrities on stage to sell, when it should be all about the games, right? Fast forward 30 minutes...


UBISOFT
Hosted in previous years by a Joel McHale whose asking price surely jumped, Ubisoft this year put their show in the hands of a character titled "Mr. Caffeine." I DON'T UNDERSTAND!!! This is your multi-million (billion?) dollar company's biggest public platform of the year, and you put your message in the hands of a man who opens with a Wii dick joke.

On the other hand of the spectrum we have the absolute public speaking ineptitude of so many of the presenters across all the conferences, with much of the problem arising from detached over-scripting, but there has to be a happy medium. You know, maybe someone who can talk normally and sincerely about their product? Smile when a normal human would smile? Realize that people stopped laughing at Wii dick jokes a long time ago? Jesus. It's not that hard. Hire me.

SONY
Although Sony was the last of the major console manufacturers I patronized, I've actually come to anticipate their announcements the most (especially since Nintendo's never gonna give me another Earthbound). Sony seems to be the company most willing to invest large amounts of capital into niche products such as Flower and the upcoming Last Guardian, aka the products self-conscious gamers constantly bring up in the fish market when you're trying to pick out the day's best haddock and they're screaming in your ear, "Games are art, man! They're Dicaprio's, or DaVinci's, or whatever! Art!"

That said, Sony didn't really didn't inspire with software this year. Games such as Uncharted 3 expectedly impressed; however, the remainder of the presentation was hardware heavy. They're still pushing their Wii variant -- Move -- for no discernible reason. They have a new handheld coming out this winter, which is called the PSVita and is impressive in most aspects other than its name (including a $249 starting price point). And, being the television manufacturers they are as well, Sony continues to push 3D, something in which I have no interest at all...

Or don't I? If the goal of E3 were to sell me on something I otherwise wouldn't have bought, Sony comes out the victor. Two aspects of their 3D presentation impressed me. One was their offering of a $500 television package later this year, and the other was the possibility that multiple players, each wearing their own set of glasses, could essentially play split-screen on a single television without splitting the screen, through polarized imaging displays or something. If it works, it's cool, and it's totally future.

NINTENDO
Here's the narrative, in short: The surviving forefather of modern games simultaneously has to play catch-up with (above all) the processing power of its competitors whilst offering something worth a new investment, and it already announced it would be attempting to do so Tuesday with the reveal of its next-generation Project Café. Interesting branding, eh? Well now that Tuesday is over we know that it's actually going to be called WiiU. All I can think about is how that name rhymes with Peeu, as in "That stinks!"... whether it actually will or not.

And I truly hope it won't. After all the fun I have with every other system and every other game, Nintendo is my Cameron Richardson - the one to whom I want to come home and not have reject me for constantly and creepily referencing her in every one of my posts. I can't help it that they're replaying Harper's Island on the Chiller network! We're all watching it!

Not too much is certainly known about the console itself, but journalists are already getting their hands on the WiiU controller, which is generally agreed to be the love child between a classic controller and an iPad.

The high-def screen in your hand can be used to display alternate images, or to completely absorb the image from the television in the case that your naggy wife comes in and demands to watch The Voice. I don't really think the latter example is something Nintendo should be focusing its design around. Real gamers have dedicated televisions and learn how to control their wives, or can at least tell them to watch the DVR feed via the cloud or something.

What I care about is/are games, and the WiiU is far too early to speculate upon in that area right now. Buzz surrounding the controller functionality is good, and third-party developers seem to be on board -- a welcome presence in the face of the Wii's desolate software decline -- but Nintendo has nothing to show so far beyond a few inconclusive tech demos. Here's hoping...

And if I were to make any grand conclusions about E3, from my aforementioned distant throne of irrelevant judgment, it probably would be, "Here's hoping." The potential is there for everyone. This is still a major growth industry with tons of money to be made. All the game-changing risks being taken right now, however, seem to be with hardware, leaving the same crop of games to be remade with different shades of polish. They're good games, to be sure, but I've yet to see a new intellectual property this year with any sort of intellect. It's mix-and-match style with shooting and slashing, with almost nothing to be seen on story.

In other words, I hope there are surprises waiting for me beyond the press conferences, when I'm actually playing the final game products. And I hope those surprises don't include Mr. Caffeine.

Hottie Count - Christina Ricci

Those of you who've already listened to our most recent podcast are keenly aware that The Blogulator crew almost broke up last week. Our disagreements are usually of a political or economic nature -- those being easily resolved by deferring to my 8.5 x 11 Master's Degree -- but this was bigger than all that. Brigitte said Christina Ricci was ugly and had a big forehead, whereas the boys all looked beyond her outer beauty, past those gigantic breasts, and into her very soul to agree that Ricci is hot.

And this was after Brigitte spent 45 minutes stumping for strong women, by the way. Pshah! Sounds like the same hypocrisy demonstrated by the Prussian aristocracy, don't you think? At least that's what I read in some article during my post-graduate education...

Here let me demonstrate to you my smarts by supporting my Ricci position with 3 points. Then I'll finish with a conclusion and get an A plus! Unlike that Western country's environmental record, amirite?!

Omnipresence
Like the ancient Gods, Ricci managed to persevere throughout the entire decade spanning my Hottie Count. She was always there, and almost always at perfect visibility -- not interfering with our free will, mind you, yet reminding us that Hollywood can, in fact, allow decent actresses to persist over long periods of time with minimal craziness. Do you know anything about Christina Ricci's dating history? I don't, and that's pretty amazing given the modern press machine. A cursory search reveals that she was once engaged to actor Owen Benjamin (?) and perhaps had a fling with the much older Michael Stipe when still a teen (Then again: Who didn't drink his orange crush?) (?)

According to my personal awareness spectrum, she seems to expose herself to almost the perfect degree, and that's including Black Snake Moan hahhahahahahahahot! Her biggest box office effort of the decade was probably Speed Racer, and that was an odd case in its own right. I suppose her "different" look -- as Brigitte might put it if she ever decided to be nice -- may be a factor in her more indie output, and I honestly can't say I've seen enough of her work to judge its quality; nevertheless, my initial instinct is to proclaim she done good. I always go with my instincts, of course, to which my stock portfolio would proudly announce, "Good choice, Doktor." This is another comment about how school has made me successful.

Enigmatism
Sound like an eye disease? Brigitte would probably say the same thing, claiming that "big-eyes Christina has it" or something, in her rudest tone. Those doll-like peepers set upon Ricci's porcelain face are part of the allure, though, in whatever good/weird ways you could imagine that be true. I don't think anyone would define Ricci as classically or modernly hot, yet a level of cuteness always existed, its public development reflecting a generation's own movement through puberty... and beyond! Even though her films are of little meaning to me, I feel like I've always known her. She's the girl from that neighborhood over there, who maybe goes to your school? Maybe she doesn't? Maybe she started smoking cigarettes? Maybe she's dating that other guy you kinda know? Maybe you saw her at that Ashtray Babyhead concert? I dunno, but she definitely exists, and, for whatever reason, one night with her seems like a good idea.

That said, she'll probably make you cry afterward. The interview I chose to watch was one for Sleepy Hollow, from 1999 - outside the time boundaries of the Count, sure, but I find old talk show clips more interesting, so deal with it.
After that, I still have no idea how she'd actually act in person. She seems somewhat serious, yet disinterested at the same time(?) Not rude or pretentious exactly; however, I feel like she might call me out for that stupid canary joke I just told and tell me I'm stupid for saying it. Honest enough to hurt, yet without the intention. She wouldn't really care how stupid I was and would just go on living with the same dispassion towards me as before. I wouldn't have lost any points, at least, so in my book that's a net gain.

Bird Jokes
A few years ago, my life changed when friends Pat, Mike, and I sat down for a viewing of Ricci's Cursed. We all fell asleep out of boredom, woke up halfway through the movie, left it on, got bored again, and started telling bird jokes to entertain each other. To this day, I tell those jokes at weddings, travel the world tirelessly searching for new ones to add to the repertoire, and generally owe all of my social success to that night of poor cinema. My academic success, on the other hand, is due to my parents giving money to universities so I can say I went there and did things of which I'm proud.

Q. What organization did the racist bird join?
A. The Kuckoo Klux Klan!

Conclusion
This Hottie series is all about progress, as you know, and I find Ricci to be a lighthouse to which the past decade can always refer for reassurance. Is there a lighthouse in Mermaids? Cuz then that would be really appropriate, plus I made that comment about perfect visibility before, which inspires some shoreline motifs... except for the fact that I want to change my metaphor now. Lighthouses don't really represent progress at all, do they? Railroads do! Ricci is like one of those ceremonial spikes that you lay down when setting up a new station or something, for the same reason that she was a lighthouse, except forward movement and all. I can't really quantify her value, but I'm happy and relieved that she exists, and I want to kiss her in a weird way. Just like the railroad! Isn't education great? I don't know, but I do know that those 3 points I wrote about and my thesis say Christina Ricci is a lock for a high spot on the Hottie Count.

Hottie Count - Zooey Deschanel

There was a time when it seemed the internet would open the world to opinion, offering individuals the platform upon which their unique worldviews could be displayed. I believe that time is past. What is left is fractured, sure, yet fractured into distinct paradigms where unlike ideas are treated with the same scorn they always were. Sometimes the black sheep is a tweet by an NFL player concerned with the nation's euphoria over a terrorist's death. Other times, it's a blog post discrediting the hottie factor of Zooey Deschanel.

Baaa.


Within the web paradigm I subsist, there seem to be some very definite opinions I'm supposed to have about famous actresses. One is that Megan Fox is annoying, not hot, and sucky, all of which is confirmed by Jennifer's Body. I liked that movie. Another is that Zooey Deschanel is a paragon of new age woman, multi-talented with confidence to boost.

Nooo. (intoned sheepishly)

I'm not usually one to disparage acting talent - as I believe the role often determines the quality of the product at the Hollywood level - but Deschanel is as wooden as the wall paneling for which her hipster fans yearn. Her sister (Emily aka Bones) is the talent, yet Zooey has managed to ride the coattails of her show business family into the spotlight as America's choice "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" (MPDG).

"But she is!" you scream. "She's just got the aura that makes her it!" Well, it all feels produced to me. She's the hipster version of that character ideal, and again I use the adjective "hipster" in the derogatory. Hipsters -- or at least the ones who've transformed our generation's meta-nostalgia fetish into a negative -- attempt to grasp onto an image that makes them cool because it made somebody else cool, and in doing so end up merely the reflection of a shadow. There is more emptiness than content, and it simply becomes an elitist niche of the same groupthink occurring everywhere else.

Zooey is not to blame for any of this. I believe she's trying. I have no reason not to believe she's a nice person. And I don't particularly care if people enjoy her acting and singing when I find them so bland and mediocre.
Nevertheless, and to bring things back around to the relevant topic of hottiedom, the fact that this maelstrom of what-I-perceive-to-be myth persists invariably turns me off to what may otherwise be a totes doable bod.

I don't necessarily blame the indie internet circle for any of this, either. It'd be nice if they always shared my opinions so I wouldn't have to write anything and could just read what I think, but alas, my rebel streak was ignited upon listening to a promotional interview on NPR for the party I do hold responsible for all of this...

I blame (500) Days of Summer. While the movie's hipster mentalities do bother me (e.g. the "check this tune out" soundtrack and ambiguous time setting also cherished by 2009's Whip It and Youth in Revolt), the seed of my bitterness was planted well before I watched it. The radio was interviewing either the director or one of the writers of the movie, and whoever it was kept reemphasizing the fact that the film most definitely was not a love story, or anything like that. It was its own entity, unclassifiable as a genre, or so the pretentious sell line echoed over and over again. It was something new. It presented a fresh perspective, just like the internet once did.

Well I ultimately did watch it, and it definitely was a love story. It was simply the hipster variation thereof, in that it was claiming to be something it wasn't.

Deservedly or no, Zooey exists to me in that same paradigm. So as I cling to my own contrived sense of self, I have no choice but to exclude Ms. Deschanel from this list. Alert me to an alternate and authentic MPDG if you know of one; in the meantime, the animated Ramona Flowers will hold her place.

Played Out - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game

It was nary over 9 months ago that the Scott Pilgrim media blitz swept upon us with the finale in the graphic novel series, a high profile movie, and an arcadey video game tie-in. Sadly, the public at large sloughed it aside, and the pop culture creation most hilariously reflective of so many of our lives remains the largely undiscovered gem it was before...

Except that it's probably not sad at all, given the tragedy befalling so many pitch-perfect series upon their transition to "franchise." It's certainly disappointing, however, that Hollywood is, as a result of the box office flop, unlikely to greenlight many more experimental blockbusters...

Or is it? I mean, Watchmen could be considered a similar sort of project, and I'm with creator Alan Moore in the opinion that the book should have been left well enough alone...

THEN AGAIN, Scott Pilgrim always was a specific fiction concerned with our world of metafiction, and therefore almost begging some sort of video transformation...

Bah. Just ignore all these ramblings and read the books. Here's an awesome image excerpt to convince you to do so:
{Insert creative segue that doesn't make it obvious how detached my thoughts are.}

Downloadable on XBox 360 and PS3, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is a circular mash-up of inspiration whose three main strengths originate in the same source. The books from which the material is drawn, the pixel art informing the visual design, and Anamanaguchi's chip-tuned post-rock all derive first and foremost from video games themselves. It is the informed child of beat-'em-ups the likes of Double Dragon, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, and, most directly, River City Ransom, in which some sort of non-linearity grants the player reign to explore the side-scrolling world and improve their skills by spending the money that inexplicably emanates from defeated enemies.

It really is the perfect game to play with your friends... which is why I follow the many before me (including Scott Pilgrim's creator, to a degree) in absolute pouting over the lack of online multiplayer. Sure, I can sometimes lure my brother to play in-house with me; other than that, however, I really have no chance to play this game with as many people as I want to when I want to the same way I would in the halcyon world of the '80s pizza parlor. The internet is the closest thing we have to Chuck E. Cheese without having to rent kids from craigslist.

A number of bugs also hold the game back from perfection, including noticeable, inexplicable lag any time you're perusing menus. It stinks of a rush job for release in time with the movie, further condemning franchising strategy at large. With Ubisoft choosing to hire one of the best pixel artists in the business (Paul Robertson) to emulate the best pixel-inspired graphic novels set to the best pixel-resonant music, it makes little to no sense that they wouldn't strive for perfection on the gameplay side as well. Gameplay, you know? The fun part that actually inspired all those other creators to be as awesome as they are?

I really do pout too much, though. Outside of the menus and a few of the many moves, the punching and kicking is as fun as it ever was. It just hurts when you've grown to love something as much as I love Scott Pilgrim and see little things holding its film and game counterparts - counterparts I very much enjoy - back from the greatness it all deserves.

That's another side effect of franchising, by the way. Whiny, ungrateful fanboys.