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The Errors of Rosella

5/31/2013

3 Comments

 
I'm a fan of adventure games. I'm not as well-versed as I'd like to be, but I'm making up for lost time. I've got a few series under my belt, in whole or in part; namely, Space Quest, Police Quest, Monkey Island, and Sam & Max. I've played through Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Teenagent, Gemini Rue, Deja Vu, Hamlet, Samorost 2, Machinarium, Nightshade, Back to the Future: The Game, Peasant's Quest, and Dangeresque Roomisode 1: Behind the Dangerdesque—and that's not to mention a handful of text adventures such as Zork I and Thy Dungeonman. From fangame to Flash game to official release, I'll play almost anything.

One thing I haven't played: King's Quest. Oh, sure, I've played the original--PC Gamer magazine included it on a sampler CD of classic games while I was still a subscriber back in the '90s—but aside from AGD Interactive's fan-made remakes of KQI-II (and, as of two months ago, KQIII), I've been completely ignorant of this sprawling series that legitimately defined the genre.

Ignorance is bliss, they say.

As discussed in my review of KQIII Redux, I'm not big into traditional fantasy and folklore. I don't enjoy aimless wandering. I like clear goals and clearly defined puzzles. King's Quest, by its very nature, is not my kind of adventure game series. The fan-made remakes have shown me that a smooth interface, a well-told story, atmospheric music, and polished graphics can distract me enough so I start to forget how little I care for the setting and gameplay. Thus, I'm pressing on through the series in the hopes that KQV and beyond will make this the second half of this endeavor fun, and not merely enlightening.

Just watch. I'll be the first person in history to like Mask of Eternity.

Of course, to get to KQV, the completionist would do well to first beat KQIV. Preferably with a sledgehammer. I've spent the last few evenings working my way through the game, leaning heavily on a walkthrough (more to speed me through the ordeal than because I ever got hopelessly stuck), and I've decided that King's Quest is only as popular as it is because most of the fans played through the games before they were old enough to know any better.

I've said this about Mega Man 2 as well. It's not just nostalgia that allows a game with such glaring flaws to garner such acclaim; it's the fact that most people played the game when they were young enough to have the time and attention span to fail endlessly without getting overly frustrated and impatient. By the time they started looking at games with a more critical eye, they were able to overlook or downplay the flaws as something they took for granted, or instinctively knew how to work around after so much practice. This is how the infamous Rumpelstiltskin puzzle in KQI can be written off as merely the hardest puzzle in the game, and not an asininely obtuse roadblock for normal-thinking people who can't even spell "Rumpelstiltskin," let alone translate it into Backwards Alphabet Moon Language at the cryptic suggestion of a far-flung note.

While even the most straightforward adventure game is prone to suffer from moments of zany logic from time to time, KQIV crosses the boundary between zany logic and downright poor design on a number of occasions. Random chance, lousy feedback, being denied things that work everywhere else, and being lied to by the narrator make for a deeply flawed game that is barely redeemed by the decent story, two or three decent puzzles, and the kind of gameplay in the final area that I'd been longing for all along.

Suppose you're standing on a pier. This being a text parser interface, you type LOOK, and are told there's nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see. Very well; you're going to swim out to sea anyhow. You're adventurous like that. On the next screen, you are promptly eaten by a shark. Clearly, there is no reason to swim west. The game says there's nothing there, and you can't even make it that far anyhow. Regardless, you reload a saved game and try swimming west from another part of the coast. Again, you are promptly eaten by a shark. Well, forget this.

Then you read the walkthrough, and find that you're supposed to swim two screens to the west, where you'll find an island with a huge mansion on it. Just reload and try again if you run into any sharks, it says. They appear randomly. So...I'm supposed to interpret getting eaten repeatedly by sharks as random chance, not a sign I'm not supposed to be going this way? And I'm supposed to interpret "there is nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see" to mean, "there's a modest-sized island with a humongous multi-story mansion in the middle of it just two screens to the west"!? Sorry, denizens of the King's Quest universe; anything farther away than "across the street" is totally invisible! Good luck watching that football game from up in the bleachers; the playing field doesn't exist!

As you've determined from playing the game so far, each screen is limited to one, maybe two things of any interest whatsoever. Interacting with anything else in any capacity yields a variety of generic responses from the narrator, giving you the the distinct impression that it's a waste of time to try to soak up the atmosphere and inspect all the unique tapestries and colorful flora. You are told time and again that it's a waste of your time to do this, that there's nothing special about that thing over there. Even examining the items in your inventory simply brings up a picture, which tells you nothing about weight, texture, smell, or any other details that aren't easily conveyed in 16 colors. Not even the death messages provide any depth to the action, or any clues about where you went wrong—it's the same old warning to be more careful, Rosella. For a game that's so heavily focused on exploration, there's not much joy in exploring anything you can't figure out by sight alone.

Furthermore, there are times when you cannot access your inventory screen. You've got, what, a dozen items stashed in that dress of yours? More? Let's hope you have them all memorized, because you're forbidden from seeing the list when you're on any screen the game considers to be an action puzzle—which is, of course, where you would most urgently need to look at all the options available to you.

Suppose you've discovered a secret area behind a waterfall, and pick up a helpful-looking wooden board that's mysteriously sitting around. Having found the only thing of value on this screen, it's probably safe to conclude that you've gotten everything you need from here. Still, there's a cave to the right, so you press on. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by OH GREAT GENESTA WHAT ON EARTH IS THA—AAAAAAARGHHH!!!!! dead. So...scary cave gives you almost no time whatsoever to react to the horrible troll lurking withing. In a moment of brilliance, you remember you have a lamp. You light it, enter the cave again, and find that you are now flanked by big glowing balls of orange and yellow that...don't really do anything. They kinda look like the lantern is lit up...but they're not throwing any illumination. The only difference is that your character sprite now has these two spheres attached to her. Oh, and by the way, you've been eaten by the cave troll AGAIN while you were trying to figure out whether this was just a glitch.

The walkthrough instructs you to pick up the bone sitting at the entrance. Easy enough to overlook, what with being terrified of staying in the cave for any length of time. But wait...there's more. The walkthrough says for you to go several screens deeper into the cave—and not just in a straight line, either—to get to the mission-critical swamp on the other side. Meanwhile, IT IS PITCH BLACK, YOU KEEP BUMPING INTO WALLS, AND THERE IS A CAVE TROLL ON EVERY SCREEN. Oh, but the troll appears randomly. Just reload and try again if you run into it, the walkthrough says.

Funny, because the walkthrough you're writing in your head says, "The lamp doesn't work here, and you'll die if you enter the cave. Go do something else."

In the event that you make it through the cave—being sure to put the board down to create a bridge over the chasm you absolutely cannot see in the dark—you'll find in a matter of moments that you'll have to turn back around and do the whole thing in reverse, still in complete darkness, once you're done on the next two screens.

You will never complain about the root maze in Space Quest II again.

You will, however, complain about the unnecessary proliferation of curved staircases without handrailings. One or two, OK, fine. Six screens of navigate-carefully-or-fall-to-your-doom is pushing it. And that's not taking into consideration all the curvy and narrow cliffsides there are to fall from—try walking up and down the slope to the dwarf mine a few times and see how often you end up on your keister.

Once you're done with that, go swim in the ocean again, except this time try to get eaten. By a whale, anyhow; sharks are still bad news. Wait, no. Only get eaten by the whale if you have the peacock feather, which randomly appears on the island on the other side of the ocean. So you might get eaten by the whale on your way over to get it, assuming you know it's there to begin with. Anyhow, once you're in the belly of the beast, it's pretty obvious you need to tickle its uvula with the feather to get out. You can't reach it from where you're standing, and you're on a time limit until you die of noxious whale fumes, so scramble up the whale's tongue so you can reach the uvula. Wait, stop sliding off the tongue. Yes, it's slippery in some parts, but you're definitely supposed to climb it. No...not over there. Try the far side. Yeah. Now—stop, you fell down. Try it again. No, of course there's no way to tell which spots are slippery and which aren't. Hey, don't even think about reloading to before you got eaten by the whale. This is totally different than the random sharks. This is supposed to happen. Because once you solve the puzzle, you emerge near an otherwise inaccessible island that has the—STOP SLIDING DOWN THE TONGUE.

To its credit, this is the first adventure game I've ever played with a female protagonist. This is also the first adventure game I've played where day turns into night if you wait long enough (six hours, apparently), allowing you to solve more puzzles you didn't realize were dependent on the time of day. Yaaaaaaay. This important game mechanic isn't mentioned anywhere in the manual; in fact, the manual doesn't tell you much of anything—the "getting started" walkthrough, for example, instructs you to LOOK AT, TALK TO, or DRINK about two dozen different things, none of which accomplishes anything!

DRINK COFFEE. "You don't like coffee." WHAT AM I PAYING YOU FOR, WALKTHROUGH!?

Alternately, you can force night to fall by completing all the other puzzles available to you.

Somehow, I managed to finish the game with 230 out of 230 possible points—which means I never need to play this game again. The cave troll section alone is enough to discourage me from ever bothering with it a second time. I'm pleased to report that I was able to break free of the walkthrough for the endgame section, where most of the optional points are (I'm actually pretty good at adventure games when there are sensible challenges at regular intervals), so I can say I mostly earned my score. Locking Pandora's Box back in the crypt was all me. The fun, walkthrough-free hour I spent tonight is already making me forget about how tedious, frustrating, boring, and unpleasant various other parts of the game are.

I'm only four games into the series. There's still time for it to get better for me, right? Maybe KQV, with its VGA graphics and point-and-click interface, will be different enough for me to start seeing this series in the same positive light everyone else seems to.

Maybe it's time to bust out Deponia instead.
3 Comments

Consumer Consideration

5/28/2013

6 Comments

 
I wonder how much thought really goes into the decisions made by the entertainment industry's current generation of policy-makers. From where I'm sitting, the prevailing attitude seems to be, "We're doing things this way, because we said so. There's no need to consider our consumers, because we know what's best for them. They've supported us in the past, therefore we have their guaranteed support for the future. Our happiness is their happiness."

Example: Nintendo is identifying videos on YouTube that feature Nintendo-created content (e.g.: "Let's Play" videos of Mario and Zelda games) and is collecting any advertising revenue on those videos that otherwise would've gone to the video creator. All discussions of "Fair Use" aside, has Nintendo considered the ramifications of their actions?

Yes, this allows Nintendo to make a profit while protecting its intellectual property. But what happens when reviewers stop posting video reviews of Nintendo games, claiming it's not worth the effort to review something (no matter how good the game may be) when they can't make money off the video? What happens when fans whose enthusiasm for Nintendo is infectious—often inspiring their subscribers to go out and buy more Nintendo games—stop making "Let's Play" videos because they're afraid of having a copyright strike on their account? What happens to fan loyalty when Nintendo, in effect, starts stealing the ad money that allows its biggest fans to avoid working a traditional job? Is the obvious gain worth the potential loss of your fanbase? Or was that not part of the discussion to begin with?

Another example: Microsoft announced the Xbox One.

Yet another example: YouTube is forcing its users to switch to the new "One Channel" design on June 5th, citing an increased focus on content and the ability to reach a broader audience. It's telling that one of the top four autocomplete options for a Google search on the topic is, "youtube one channel sucks." I say this every time YouTube, or Facebook, or anybody at all introduces a so-called "upgrade": Make it better, not different. One Channel strips away much of the individuality of the old channel designs, introduces obnoxious new restrictions for making a channel banner that has to double as a background (depending on how you're viewing the site), and leaves little or no way to keep things THAT WORKED PERFECTLY WELL arranged as they were before. One Channel is targeted at a very specific type of YouTube user, which is great as an option when choosing how best to set up your channel for yourself and your audience. You might be the biggest game in town, YouTube, but you're not the only one—and especially with Nintendo making all those copyright claims, it's not outside the realm of possibility that gamers such as myself might find a more user-friendly site to call home.

I have to wonder whether anybody at Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, or anywhere else is thinking about the people keeping them in business as they pave the roads no one wants to drive on. And I have to wonder what kind of consumers we are to let them get away with it.
6 Comments

Delving Into Darkness

5/18/2013

2 Comments

 
Four years. I've waited four years for this. Four years of inner turmoil. Four years of disappointment, denial, and anger.

Four years since J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot. If you couldn't tell, I was not entirely pleased.

After four years of discussing, debating, and speculating, I finally have the resolution I've so desperately craved—I finally have a sequel. It's called Star Trek Into Darkness, and it's allowed me to sort out these conflicting emotions and make peace with my beloved entertainment franchise.

If you're familiar with my work at Exfanding Your Horizons, you know I've written about this at length. No need to click on all of these, but they're here if you'd like a refresher or some background on the matter. Plus, I really like some of these titles.

- Star Trek RIP, Part 1
- Star Trek RIP, Part 2
- Reconnecting with the World
- Abandon Fandom!
- J.J. Abrams, Please Stop Killing People
- Star Trek by the Minute
- (Re)Star(t) Trek
- New York Comic-Con / Anime Festival 2011 Recap: Part Two (scroll down a ways)
- Star Trek Into Darkness of the Movie Theater Again
- Lastly, from this blog: A New Hopelessness

Now, brace for impact, kiddos; sensors are detecting spoilers on a collision course.

First off, let's review my predictions for Star Trek Into Darkness, based on what transpired in the first movie (discussed in the penultimate post above):

Things We'll Probably See:

Nurse Chapel, whose only function is to scream at scary things, and give McCoy somebody to talk to, 'cuz he really doesn't seem that tight with Kirk - Close! We got Carol Marcus, who screams at scary things and has her biggest scene together with McCoy. And she mentions Nurse Chapel, so there you go.

An impromptu Gorn battle that completely interrupts the flow of the story
- There's a brief moment at the beginning where Kirk shoots a big animal that appears out of nowhere, and they do mention the Gorn...so I'd say that's close enough.

Vulcans behaving completely out of character - Actually, I think the writers understand Spock better than anyone else, and Spock's the only Vulcan I saw...so I guess I whiffed on this one. Blame it on the scuttlebutt I'd been hearing about the videogame tie-in.

A reference to a classic Trek scene or quote, which inadvertently devalues the scene or quote if you think about it too hard - "Reference" is putting it lightly. Half the film was a remake of Wrath of Khan, though that devalues this film, and not the one it's referencing. More on that later.

LENS FLARE - PROBABLY. MAYBE I MISSED IT.

An incredibly important plot point that's barely explained and/or makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard - If you want to avoid detection by the indigenous people of a planet, why fly your starship into their ocean instead of staying in high orbit and sending down a shuttle? Why did Kirk steal that scroll that got everybody chasing after him? And let's not even start on haphazardly promoting crew members (seriously, your tactical officer who has been shadowing the chief engineer is a better candidate for a replacement than anyone else who works in engineering?), Marcus loading cryofrozen war criminals into torpedoes, plotting to sabotage the Enterprise, and escalating to wanton murder of Kirk and his crew in a matter of moments.

Adults who are absolutely useless in crisis situations, leaving the young'uns to take matters into their own hands
- I'm pretty sure Kirk was the only person at that staff meeting who didn't stand there and wait to get shot.

Petty bickering over a woman (I'm already blaming Uhura) - What? A lovers' quarrel between Spock and Uhura? Couldn't be!

Someone getting killed off for plot convenience and/or a cheap emotional response - We didn't need Pike anymore, right?

No Klingons, or worse yet, pointless Klingons - Or, worse yet...actual Klingons. But they all died like punks.

Really awesome action sequences that make you forget about everything I just mentioned
- The Enterprise rose out of the ocean! Stuff blew up real good! Lots of punching! ...What were we talking about?

Needless to say, Star Trek Into Darkness was very much what I expected it to be. The original press release was a bit misleading, talking about someone "from within their own organization" (not really) who "has detonated the fleet" (not really), but I still laid my money on Khan as the villain well before the speculation took off. As a side note, the teaser trailers were misleading as well; try watching any of the later ones after seeing the movie, and note how cleverly they took scenes out of context and out of order, showing you just enough to make you think you know what will happen.

So I've gotten pretty good at figuring out how an Abrams/Orci/Kurtzman production is gonna pan out. The question is, how does Into Darkness compare with its predecessor?

Let me put it this way: I might be inclined to watch this one again. It's been four years, and I have yet to rewatch the first one.

I'll break this down the same way I did with Oblivion: by reviewing the lessons that subsequent films in this new Star Trek continuity could stand to learn from Into Darkness—and from any other Star Trek, for that matter.


Lesson #1: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Make references.

Carol Marcus. Christine Chapel. The Gorn. A tribble. The NX-01 amongst the model ships lined up in Admiral Marcus' office. Uniforms in the style of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's. Klingons. Adaptations of the main TOS and TNG themes in the end credits music. Section 31. The destruction of Vulcan. "The Mudd incident." Star Trek Into Darkness makes references of all sizes, some more obvious than others, and they help form meaningful connections with the franchise as a whole. A well-placed reference can be a rewarding treat for attentive viewers, and it's an acknowledgement that there's more to Star Trek than just this film.

However, some discretion is required, lest we forget the quotes and references that were ham-fistedly crammed into the first movie: the Kobayashi Maru scene trivialized one of Star Trek's best untold stories for cheap comedic effect, some random planet nowhere near Delta Vega was called Delta Vega just to reference "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and Spock Prime's first interaction with Kirk was peppered with familiar sayings that ring hollow without the emotional context originally associated with them. Simply dropping a reference isn't good enough; it needs to fit with the story, regardless of whether there's an audience watching.


Lesson #2: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Treat it with respect.

One of the reasons I got so angry at Star Trek (2009) was the lack of reverence for the source material. With such a long and rich history, you'd think there'd be no shortage of plot threads to follow and new aspects of the galaxy to explore...but instead of building on the foundation already in place, the film proceeded to destroy everything from Romulus to the core personalities of some of Star Trek's most memorable characters, merely to have a fresh slate to tell a (mediocre) story.

Uhura went from a strong, subtly sensual communications officer to a floozie who probably served some function on the ship (my guess: Flirts Officer. Ha ha.). Sarek, a true Vulcan of commanding presence and profound wisdom, was relegated to a generic fatherly role. McCoy's nickname of "Bones," previously derived from "sawbones" (old slang for a surgeon), lost its meaning when Kirk picked it up from McCoy's passing comment of being nothing but "a bag of bones" after his divorce. The list goes on. The names are the same, but they're not entirely the same people.

Perhaps because the film is only accountable to its predecessor, which did all the dirty work of introducing characters and severing almost all ties with the previous continuity, Into Darkness has some breathing room to (a) insert references without trying so hard to appease any dubious diehard fans, and (b) let these versions of the characters develop more naturally.

Scotty has gone from "happy comic relief Scotsman" to "friendly, expert engineer who cares deeply about his ship," for example. However, I still have no sense of this Uhura's personality other than that she's Spock's girlfriend, and that she speaks Klingon more fluently than she did in Undiscovered Country, where she was condemning food, things, and supplies. (That has to change.) There's certainly room for interpretation when a new actor or director is working with a character, but especially when dealing with an alternate timeline, that core personality should remain intact—after all, as far as the story's concerned, it's only the appearance and aftermath of Nero that should account for any differences in a character's character.

Into Darkness does a better job than its predecessor of respecting Star Trek continuity because it works within the boundaries of what the previous movie established. Instead of bulldozing the foundations and framework to make way for something new, it fleshes out what's already there—and because it pulls so much of the story from "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan, Into Darkness naturally feels more like Star Trek than last time.

That's the kicker: It's not just adherence to canon, but embracing what it means to be Star Trek. It's the interplay between characters. It's the strange, new worlds. It's the new life and new civilizations. It's the thought-provoking questions about social issues and human nature that arise from combining all of the above. Into Darkness seems to get more of its details straight about who these characters are and what their universe is like, but it's still missing the heart—or the brain, if you will—that elevates Star Trek above any other sci-fi action movie. We're getting there, but we're not there yet.


Lesson #3: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Boldly go where no one has gone before, for cryin' out loud.

The purpose of a reboot, as I see it, is to do things differently—or better. To its credit, Into Darkness features some great action sequences, turns Spock's iconic death scene on its head with a clever role reversal, and utilizes the full potential of Khan's genetic enhancements (something I've always felt Wrath of Khan skimped on a bit—"Khan, I'm laughing at the superior intellect!"). There's a lot of good in this movie, and a lot we haven't seen before...but not enough.

For starters, it would've been brilliant to have Khan, defeated on the bridge of the USS Vengeance, shouting "KIIIRRRRKKK!!!" at the top of his lungs.

I wanted to see any other antagonist—Gary Mitchell, those mind-control parasites from "Conspiracy," the Suliban, Trelane, the Borg (Kirk versus a female foe, particularly the Borg Queen, would've been interesting...), even Gary Seven could've somehow been worked in as a villain in this alternate timeline. A reboot offers the freedom of choice, and they chose a bad guy and a situation that led to all the same major plot points that were hit before. Nemesis already rehashed Wrath of Khan to a certain degree; now we're doing it again?

How was it that Khan put it? "You should have let me sleep"?

Reuse villains. Recycle familiar plotlines. But do so in a way that's worthy of a reboot. Take the story in wildly unexpected directions; combine elements that couldn't possibly have been combined before; give the old stories and characters the kind of depth and complexity they've never had. Into Darkness offers some of that, but it squanders the opportunity to offer something truly novel to the Star Trek universe, opting instead to flesh out and fudge some of the details of an existing story.

There's an excellent comic miniseries called Star Trek: The Last Generation. It plays out a "What if?" scenario, wondering how TNG might've looked if, at the climax of The Undiscovered Country, Kirk and his crew had failed to foil the assassination attempt at the Khitomer conference. It's a rough-and-tumble, post-apocalyptic kind of setting in which the Klingons have conquered Earth, and the Federation looks more like the Rebel Alliance. Due to the situation, certain characters find themselves in very different roles, and interacting with very different people—Worf is a villain; Sulu is an almost mythical freedom fighter; Ro Laren and a decidedly not-dead Tasha Yar are a couple—yet they are the same people. Picard is Picard, Troi is Troi, and Data is Data, just in radically different circumstances. Their universe is almost unrecognizable, but it still feels like Star Trek because the characters, technology, and flow of history stay true to their roots.

Compare this to a bunch of irresponsible brats who get their own starship and redo Wrath of Khan.


Lesson #4: You are not Star Wars.

Lobot doesn't belong on the bridge. And only Imperial officers are allowed to wear those doofy hats. Knock it off.


Lesson #5: Separate your heroes from time to time.

One of my favorite seasons of Deep Space Nine allows something to happen that I'd never seen before on a television show: the heroes go off to war, and they don't immediately come back! For the majority of the season, half the main characters are on opposite sides of the quadrant, and it's fascinating to watch the story and character development when everyone is so far removed from each other, and from the space station they call home.

Into Darkness has the guts to kick Scotty off the ship before it leaves Earth, yet he remains as involved in the story as anyone else, ultimately being in a unique position to save the day because he was separated from the rest of the crew. Uhura faces a group of armed Klingons with no one beside her as backup. Spock finds himself trapped in an active volcano. Being alone is one thing; being separated is another entirely—there's dramatic potential that's difficult to tap any other way.


Lesson #6: Blend the comedy and action into the story.

Star Trek (2009), like most any Star Trek movie, has its moments of levity. Unlike any other Star Trek movie, the flow of the action grinds to a halt as neon signs light up, saying, "THIS IS THE FUNNY PART! TIME OUT FOR COMEDY!" and/or, "HERE'S THIS COOL THING WE WANTED TO DO! LOOK! HERE IT IS!" Scotty getting stuck in the tube in engineering. Random monster battles in the snow. Kirk's anatomy inflating. (Side note: I should probably be more specific; that could be misconstrued.) Into Darkness works the humor and whiz-bangery into the story, smoothing out the edges so there isn't an abrupt shift between storytelling and technically unnecessary digressions. The movie as a whole flows much better this way.


Lesson #7: Big ships are cool. Don't overdo them.

The Scimitar was a big ol' beastie of a ship. The Narada was a big ol' beastie of a ship. The Vengeance is a big ol' beastie of a ship. Impossible odds are easy enough to find; be careful not to fall into a rut, no matter how cool that rut may be.


Lesson #8: Make sense.

Look, we're talking about a science fiction franchise that once had Spock's brain telling McCoy how to do surgery on it. Suspension of disbelief is a necessity. But there's a fine line between "makes sense in Star Trek," and, "buh...WHA!?" With the first ten films, you were supposed to think about them long after the credits rolled—give those Big Ideas time to simmer. With these new films, the pacing is such that you don't have the chance to think about what's going on; consequently, the writers aren't held as accountable to craft a coherent plot. As long as it's entertaining, who cares whether anything gets a proper explanation?

I'm not saying the films are completely unintelligible; I'm saying they don't seem to stand up to scrutiny as well as most of the other films. "Because it's cool" is a better explanation for much of what happens than, "because it makes sense within the context of the story." Refer to any of the items mentioned in my one prediction above.

"Because it's cool" is not inherently a problem for me—after all, I've run plenty of D&D campaigns where logic was relegated to the corner just so I could drop an ethereal filcher on the party—but it's a concern when it becomes the primary explanation, especially in a Star Trek film. Deliberately masking incomplete or incoherent plot points with grand set pieces and special effects is tantamount to lying to the audience; inadvertently doing so is a demonstration of carelessness or incompetence. When a franchise is defined by the intelligence and integrity of its characters, it's not unreasonable to want the storytelling to share those traits.


Lesson #9: Get the dialogue right.

There's a Next Generation comic miniseries called Atonement. I don't remember much about the story—something having to do with the inventor of transporter technology being a man out of time—but I do remember the dialogue. At least, the style of the dialogue. Throughout the entire story, something felt "off," and I couldn't put my finger on it...until I realized the lines Picard and Data were saying were written for Kirk and Spock. Star Trek feels inauthentic when the dialogue doesn't fit with the characters; voice is just as crucial as plot when it comes to a character-driven story.

All throughout Into Darkness, I tried to imagine what these lines would sound like as spoken by Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, Nichols, Takei, and Koenig. (I gave up with Besch and Montalban, as they themselves sound nothing like Eve and Cumberbatch.) Sometimes, the lines felt right. Sometimes, I had flashbacks to my high school English classes. The words got the point across in those cases, but the characters didn't own them.

Example: If memory serves, Scotty calls Kirk "Jim" at least twice in the film. I've heard Scotty refer to him as "Jim Kirk" when talking about him, but when talking to him, it's always been "Captain." It's that lack of nuance that's making it harder for me to buy into the assertion that these are the same characters I grew up watching. The preponderance of modern vernacular doesn't make these characters sound more relatable; it makes them sound like they've got script writers who planned out all the action sequences and a couple of quotable lines before realizing they needed more dialogue to pad the empty space between them.


That's all for now. I have no doubt I'll continue to ruminate on the new movie, and the old movie, and all the movies—this is merely my first stab at putting my thoughts down on virtual paper. Ultimately, I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness. It's fun, it's a neat twist on a familiar story, it's a visual spectacle. It's almost Star Trek. I still have my misgivings about the film and the new continuity as a whole, but I've mellowed considerably since I first saw the trailer that heralded a new era of the franchise I hold so dear.

Having seen more of Abrams, Orci, and Kurtzman's films in the past four years, I've come to understand how they operate. Abrams doesn't make the kinds of movies I like, plain and simple—but he keeps attaching his name to films that sound right up my alley until I find out he's involved. Orci and Kurtzman write movies like they're comic books; like George Lucas, they need somebody to act as a creative filter to translate their ideas into something more cinematically structured. I see Damon Lindelof's name in the writing credits; knowing absolutely nothing about him, I'm already attributing the more cohesive and Trek-like feel of Into Darkness to his influence.

As a side note, I'm noticing an alarming trend in the movie and TV previews I've seen in theaters recently. See if you can detect a theme here: Defiance. Olympus Has Fallen. White House Down. After Earth. Oblivion. Elysium. World War Z. There's only so much "fall of civilization as we know it" I can handle, you guys.

So anyhow. Star Trek Into Darkness. Better than the last one. Good enough to want to see the next one. Still hasn't convinced me this reboot was necessary, though. Kick off the training wheels, take off the parking brake, and make the next one the best one.

Boldly go, Star Trek. I'm looking forward to welcoming you back into the family next time.
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The Objective Objective

5/8/2013

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Last night I sat down and recorded the first good, usable take I've had in months for my YouTube playthrough of Mega Man 7. To illustrate how much of an accomplishment this is, let me give you a timeline of this video series' development:

March 10, 2012: The final bonus video for my Mega Man 6 playthrough is released. I'm free to start on MM7 whenever I please.

March 15, 2012: Preliminary practice begins for my playthrough of MM7. I haven't played this one as extensively as some of the NES games, and logistics are trickier with all the optional items and multiple paths, so more prep time is required to get this one to be on par with my other playthroughs.

March 31, 2012: I upload a fake teaser trailer for MM7, just in time for April Fools' day. The gag goes over pretty well, even though it's not the real trailer.

June 9, 2012: I record a good, useable take of MM7's intro stage. Seriously, it's taken me three months to get through the intro stage. This is gonna be a long one.

July 1, 2012: On a whim, I take a break to spend an afternoon recording a relaxed playthrough of Space Quest 0: Replicated. No showing off; no recording audio one section at a time until it's perfect; merely a casual "Let's Play" with quick-and-easy post-commentary. I'll spend a few days putting SQ0 together for GameCola, and then it's time to get serious with MM7.

January 13, 2013: The last installment of my SQ0 playthrough is released. I'm the best at what I do.

January 20, 2013: Recording resumes on MM7.

January 22, 2013: Negotiations begin to replace my aging computer with my friend's aging computer, which is something like two or three times as powerful. This is especially timely, as I've started to notice my computer struggling with recording some of the video footage for MM7.

February 22, 2013: I record a good, useable take of Burst Man's stage. But upon closer inspection, the footage is not so useable—the video gets choppy during some of the most entertaining moments, completely ruining the showoffery. Several retakes confirm that my computer cannot handle recording this stage, and there's nothing else I can do to tweak my settings to fix the problem without making the game window eye-strainingly tiny. Recording is put on hold until the new computer arrives.

April 1, 2013: I upload a fake "Part 1 of my MM7 playthrough" video for April Fools' day. Due to a massive technical issue, the initial release of the video does not go over well, and even once a correction has been made, there are still a number of very upset viewers demanding the real playthrough.

April 14, 2013: YOU GOT: NEW COMPUTER. In an ironic twist of fate, there's no place to plug my monitor into the new computer. I make arrangements to acquire an adapter plug, and begin the slow process of transferring all my data to an external hard drive, setting up the new computer, and transferring everything over.

April 27, 2013: New computer is up and running with a skeleton crew of programs and files.

May 6, 2013: The video recording shakedown cruise is a success. On a technical level, my video footage should be acceptable enough to make public. MM7 can now resume.

May 7, 2013: I record a good, useable take of Burst Man's stage.

But...

Now I'm paranoid the take I took isn't entertaining enough. Overall, it looks great. But some of the individual moments from previous takes were better. So I'm considering re-recording. At this point, I can no longer tell the difference between what's a genuinely good, useable take, and what's merely "good enough." I've lost all sense of objectivity. I can't see the footage the way a first-time viewer would anymore; I see it as a guy who's played this stage into the ground, knows what some of these sections usually look like, and is focusing more on the parts that should be better than on the ones that are better.

Until I'm back in the groove of recording new stages regularly—and not replaying the same stage I've been struggling with off and on for a year—it looks like I might have to outsource my objectivity. I think I'll let my wife have a sneak peek at the new footage and see what she thinks.
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Retrospective: April 2013

5/1/2013

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April brought everything back into balance for me. I found time to write, play, record, and do all that other cool off-camera stuff the rest of the world can only guess at (though if you guessed, "making an impromptu trip to the grocery store because you had an uncontrollable craving for salad," then you are correct). Here's what happened as it pertains to the Internet:

This Blog:

Groovy. A little bit about YouTube, Facebook, geeky gifts, and cinema, plus something more philosophical. Yay variety.

- Retrospective: March 2013
- Debacle, Explanation, and Apology
- About Face(book)
- Good Things Come in Threes
- When I Die
- On Oblivion
- Series Opinions: Mega Man series: Mega Man 6-10

GameCola:

Groovy. A totally esoteric comic, admission of a videogame crush, a new format for the podcast video posts, and coverage of a game genre I don't talk about nearly enough. Yay variety.

Columns:
- Q&AmeCola: Your Videogame Crush

Comics:
- Sprite Flicker: Middle-EarthBound

Reviews:
- King's Quest III Redux: To Heir Is Human

Videos:
- GC Podcasts #41-43 on YouTube: No More Turnabouts
- GC Podcasts #44-46 on YouTube: Let's Not Get Too Limited on Saramail

YouTube:

Footage from the livestreaming 2012 Megathon continues to trickle in, and I made an honest-to-goodness video (referred to in one of the posts above).

GeminiLaser:
- [April Fools'] Mega Man 7 - Part 1: About Time!

DashJumpTV:
- Megathon 2012: Rockman 6 (Famicom) / Mega Man 6 (NES)

The Backloggery:

After seeing the frighteningly long list of additions to my Backloggery back in February, I swore I'd cut back on collecting games and start playing more of the ones I had. This went exceptionally well until I was gifted with a mega-pack of fantasy roleplaying games from GOG.com. Only my Backloggery is complaining, though; a lot of these are games I've been curious about, and the rest seem right up my alley.

New:
- Dungeon Keeper  (PC)
- Dungeon Keeper 2  (PC)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard  (PC)
- Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir  (PC)
- Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness  (PC)
- Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress  (PC)
- Ultima III: Exodus  (PC)
- Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar  (PC)
- Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny  (PC)
- Ultima VI: The False Prophet  (PC)
- Ultima VII: The Black Gate  (PC)

Started:
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)
- Mega Man X: Command Mission  (GCN)

Beat:
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)
- Tomb Raider  (PC)

Completed:
- Boing! Docomodake DS  (NDS)
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)

Lookin' good, me.
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