Will be off in Turkey starting tomorrow night, until the 22nd. Have packed the curiously apt Black Powder War. It will be epic.

Stay awesome, folks.

A lot has been said about Modern Warfare 2 recently (a game I don't plan on purchasing), and everyone else has put its recent controversies in better words than I could ever muster. I won't spoil anything, but this covers it pretty well, and this compilation of posts has several more links discussing it.

That said. When a recent survey reveals almost universal demand for the game from an age group well below the game's targeted audience (males aged 11 to 17), combined with the general ignorance in regards to ESRB ratings... it's got media backlash written all over it. And yet MW2 might be the biggest step taken thus far that doesn't reduce violence in games to ketchup-stained ragdolls being tossed about.

Whatever happens, tomorrow will be an important day.

"Dear Disney Shareholders, Why the Heck is Donald Duck Stabbing All These Negros With A Giant Wand?" by The Recently Thawed Head of Walt Disney

Hardcasual is my new favorite website.

There's a story to be told in Gearbox's recent shoot-and-loot FPS Borderlands. It isn't related by your deus-ex-machina visions that fabricate motivations for your actions and strongarm you into finding the game's fabled McGuffin, the Vault. It can't be found in a good deal of your missions, nearly all of which involve the standard MMO drudgery, an indiscernible haze of killcounts and collect X of Y fetchquests that only serve to crank a few more drops out of the dopamine drip of character progression, junk food for players who have fallen victim to the siren song of another level-up. It isn't to be found in any of the game's numerous NPCs, talking chore dispensers that they are, or in the babblings of one persistent garage-operating yokel possessing an Oedipal obsession with their mother's vagina.

There is a story to be told in Borderlands, and it is written in the dead wastelands full of mutant dog vomit, in rusting factories, in shanty towns surrounded by mountains of cheap plastic and scrap metal. In the midst of its cartoon-violent Itchy & Scratchy amputations and the onslaught of psychotic midgets and the sheer perplexity of healing bullets, there's something going on behind the scenes that's more than a little real.

( Snip for length, middle-to-late game spoilers. )

On Namco's Ace Combat series (edited some for crosstalk):

raiblu: every game in the series boils down eventually to
raiblu: 'can you fly your plane through.. HERE?'
me: XD YES
me: I also like the one where the Cool Old Guy runs you through a bunch of cave formations in civvie planes
raiblu: I used to take out the 8492nd on Ace for fun. xD~
me: Again, chiming in with AC's constant fascination with flying planes through tiny places
raiblu: and yeah that was rockin'
me: Something vaguely sexual about it all
raiblu: haha
me: I mean, that megalith mission
me: Looooong tunnel
me: Twisting towards the end where you deliver your payload
me: tell me that ain't sexual

"Putting on a great rock show is the most important thing you can do; one great rock show could change the world!"
~ Dewey Finn, School of Rock (2003)

One can argue that the days leading up to Brutal Legend have been one long string of events practically engineered for the sole purpose of its ruination. Just look at the demo that forecasted the game as a no-brainer brawler and open-world Sunday drive, or the gushing reviews of Uncharted 2, or the unstoppable hype machine that had Jack Black dressing up in a foam suit, or perhaps the most dreadful of them all, the shadow of Psychonauts' critical acclaim hovering over Tim Schafer's most personal work yet. (No pressure or anything.)

The net result is a disparity in opinions across the board, and all of them contain some truth. There is one thing that everyone can agree on, however.



( It's pretty fucking metal. )

In summary:

F'ing metal:
* It's got some of the best (and funniest) facial animations you'll see all year.
* An understated performance by Jack Black and company lends Brutal Legend's silly world some creedence and poignancy.
* The licensed music fits the game like a glove. (Yes, even the Dragonforce.)
* For those who get them, the little in-jokes will make your day.
* It's a metalhead's daydream brought to life.

Unfortunate:
* That daydream looks kind of like a more ludicrous Azeroth.
* Having the demo paint the game as a brawler/open-world driving game as opposed to an its action-RTS reality telegraphs the wrong expectations.

Not very metal:
* The game is short, and the story ends a little abruptly.
* No tutorials for other factions.
* Controls are ill-suited to frantic RTS gameplay.

Even if you never touch the game's multiplayer mode, by the time you're done with the game's relatively short story, it already has its hooks in you one way or the other. The fact that it's flawed only makes you wonder what it would have been with more time and more polish, yet it remains distinct in its ambition and its raucous setting. Double Fine hasn't crafted a game so much as an experience, a theme park ride through a metal album cover, and you just won't find that anywhere else.

EDIT: Boingboing has a post with tons of concept art from the game. Go check it out.

Because it is becoming highly likely that I'll be getting Borderlands soon (and would like people to play with that won't ninja-loot every gun in sight), and because my PSN contacts list is distressingly empty... anyone around here with a PSN account here that I can add?

Like everywhere else, my tag is 'aqouli'. O before U, people, O before U!

Their name is Peelander-Z.

They want you to learn Japanese.

Peelander-Z - Learn Japanese

You know, for all the hiccups and the melding together of the days into one big indiscernible mass, separated only by public holidays and long weekends... it's been a pretty good year.

Playcount: 28 & rising

Earlier in the year, Peter Bjorn & John released Living Thing, a followup to their 2006 album Writer's Block, after a brief foray into the experimental with last year's Seaside Rock. Here is your one sentence review: it does not come anywhere close to Writer's Block. But can you blame them? When the world is counting on you to make another Young Folks, the pressure is bound to affect you one way or another, and the results on Living Thing are unfortunate. In an attempt to beat Kanye West to the punch (he sampled Young Folks on a track), a lot of rappers have taken to sampling first single 'Nothing To Worry About', on its own a fairly cheery, stompy track, in a vapid sort of way.

There's your background. It doesn't matter - what matters is that there's a rather disconcerting void that our good sandwich spread friends PB&J have left. Seeing that PB&J are Swedes, a nation known for - if nothing else - continually pumping out quality pop year-in and year-out, it makes sense that their own countrymen would step forward to fill it in.



Enter Miike Snow. In a world where Rilo Kiley is a four-piece band and Iron & Wine has a grand total of exactly one person, it isn't surprising that Miike Snow (it's pronounced 'Mike Snow') is a collective of 3; 2 producers and one very hairy vocalist. They have a self-titled debut that I've not had the chance to listen to, but even if the rest of it is rubbish, at least they have Animal.

The lyrics might not mean anything. Or they might mean a whole lot; there's romantic wistfulness, there's the foibles of wealth, there's mental bondage, and the chorus is an incessant, neverending parade of facades just to remain where you are, concealing our primal natures all the while. Kids love that stuff, right? Or maybe it's more Savage Garden and they just want to rip their shirts off and run on all fours. It doesn't matter in the end; it's an expertly crafted pop anthem, through and through.

MP3: Miike Snow - Animal (Peter Bjorn & John remix)

And as though redemption was required of them, Peter Bjorn & John crafted a superb little remix, kicking the tempo up a notch, layering it with some nice percussion that will get armchair dancers (like yours truly) nodding along. And if you've been listening to this as long as I have, it's almost as though I am listening to the PB&J album that should have been.

Miike Snow on MySpace

More MP3s on HypeMachine

Posting that last cartoon*, I was reminded of my favorite thing this year, and I'm surprised I haven't said anything about it yet.

I don't think I will, because honestly, David O'Reilly's already said it a whole lot better.


Click for fullsize



It's not exactly kids stuff, consider yourselves forewarned.

* (I don't feel like calling it 'animation', for the sole reason that I think 'cartoon' should never, ever be a bad word)

David O'Reilly's site

The Cat Piano, directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson, narrated by the inimitable Nick Cave (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Grinderman).



It's dark, it's noir, it has torture and kitties and frickin' Nick Cave fer chrissake, what are you waiting for?

Watch it in HD

Official site

'I had, uhm, made a costume that looks like Eevee the pokemon... the cutest part was that I was walking around and kids would come up and say, "Eevee, what are you going to evolve into? ... You should be a Vaporeon!"'
~ Kellie alias WickedKitty, cosplayer

To say that fandom does strange things to people is something of an understatement. The internet often comes close to buckling under the weight of the fanatical, joining the obscure and the oblique and the just plain obscene into one writhing mass that can inspire both brilliance or madness or a bastard combination of them both.

I realize that I've failed to talk about Who Are You People, one woman's long trek through various forms of social communion gone horribly, horribly wrong, weaving through Barbie doll collectors and Josh Groban fanatics and furries in a valiant attempt to understand the common factors which inspires such passion.

This particular episode of A Life Well Wasted treads similar territory. A Life Well Wasted is a sometimes-monthly internet podcast by one Robert Ashley that's less about videogames and more about the people who play them. It's got the production quality of something you'd find on NPR, with none of the FCC restrictions - so littered in between thoughtful insights are moments of sheer delirious perversity (more on this later). They've got four episodes up, and you can find them all here, but the one I really want to point out is its most recent episode about enthusiasts, by far the most entertaining of the bunch, with its wacky cast of cosplayers and artists and chip hackers and scriptwriters for fan-fiction radio dramas.

Fan-fiction radio dramas about Kingdom Hearts that are probably unsafe for kids. Or the sane.

An excerpt:

A: "What have you got this time?"
B: "Peanut butter, doggy treats, condoms, and a nubile boy."
C: "When did you get a dog?"
B: "His name is Pluto. And he does wonderful things with peanut butter."

There are less brain-hurty segments in the podcast that are even sobering at times, but there isn't one person interviewed throughout the entire episode that isn't enthusiastic about what they do. Most folks walk away from videogames without so much as a by-your-leave, content to leave them as they are, to be discussed in forums or reflected upon in nostalgia. So it's reason enough to take notice when someone, anyone, takes what they've been given, be it a single character or an entire canon and runs with it, off the side of a cliff ala a certain cartoon coyote, headlong into the extremes of obsession and all that it entails.

And the results are something to behold.


Direct link to ALWW Episode 4: Artists, Fans & Engineers

A Life Well Wasted

Malaysian Physician Claims Masturbation, Homosexual Activities Exposes You To Swine Flu

Three things:

1) I don't deny that I live in a country that is both conservative and religious, qualities which I do not quite share, but it is reporting like this (from a government-run news agency, no less) that leads me to think that Malaysia is steadily growing less and less liberal. I remember back in my teens when I was able to read frank discussions of homosexuality in the youth section where even local celebrities would chime in with their thoughts, and the one thing I noticed then was an immense amount of tolerance - something I do not see anymore, something I barely even hear from politicians anymore, despite their constant braying and finger-wagging about race politics, which is like throwing dirt on top of a patch of oil in order to stop it from poisoning the well.

2) I find it disappointing that this would appear in a local paper that I have come to trust, but perhaps I have become a little too naive when it comes to their editorial ability to not pounce on an article loaded with misinformation and convenient keywords (HOMOSEXUAL! H1N1!) in order to sell newspapers. Except that this paper is distributed for free in most of the Klang Valley area anyway. So long as people keep reading this crap, right?

3) There is some truly Bad Science at work here, what with some bugfuck quack with a mail order PhD claiming that the body's 'acidity' has an effect on the immune system and name-dropping the H1N1 virus in order to propagate his backwater theories and to sell miracle pills with his picture on it. What does a fraction of a pH level have to do with contracting disease? How is heterosexual sex excluded from generating these scaaary naaasty acids? It is never explained, because this is a 400 word soundbite, and instead of backing these claims with, oh, I don't know, published research, we are given a link to this quack's continued sales pitch and psychotic ramblings.


I think Ben Goldacre put it best.

EDIT: Same newspaper printed an article about a professor refuting the above doctor's claims. Unbiased reporting GET!

So here's a subject not nearly explored enough in video game "literature" - all those games targeted at tween girls that consistently show up on the Nintendo DS covered in pink or glitter or the words "Hannah Montana". Sometimes all three at once. It's a genre that is virtually ignored by all the big game blogs, so it's refreshing to encounter an article that takes a stab at discussing exactly what's being imparted by them.

Here's Wired's go at it, Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games, which mostly points out the obvious. There's also this counter-response from the blog Nerd Balloon, Wired: Taking New Girl Games Too Seriously?, which bluntly points out that Princess Peach's videogame powers consist of violent mood swings.

Yeah.

Happily, there are exceptions, though few: the first thing to pop into mind is the sepia-toned and board game-inspired Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, about life at a ferociously tyrannical boarding school. There's also the recent art game The Path, playing on variations of the Little Red Riding Hood story. Yet, neither of these games are targeted to the Miley Cyrus crowd.

Traditional business models in mind, it seems unlikely that we'll see less games playing on vacant female stereotypes, but my gut feeling says that these types of games are bought by parents with only a cursory interest in gaming and who don't know any better, with a healthy dose of brand-name marketing spiel to help push copies. The latter of the blog posts I linked above points out the similarity of the discussion to the whole "Do video games cause violence?" argument, which summarizes it thoroughly; girly games don't turn your kids into little socialites overnight, the same way GTA doesn't inspire kids to shoot a pedestrian for kicks.

And it means I can sleep a little easier every time I play Cooking Mama.

In a parallel universe, Snow White hails from Oklahoma, and lies imprisoned in a booth inside a recording studio with Maleficent sitting behind the mixing console along with an army of guitars and distortion pedals.

If they made an album, it'd probably sound a lot like St. Vincent's "Actor".



It's a little bit Disney, a little bit sinister, and every bit one of the finest pop albums this year.

( Two more behind the cut. I saved the best for last. )

St. Vincent's Actor and Florence + The Machine's Lungs are out now.
Imogen Heap's Ellipse is out August 24th in the UK and August 25th in the US.

DM of the Rings taught me everything I needed to know about GMing.

GMing is only relevant here because for the better part of the last four weeks, I've been running a Mouse Guard game for a few friends (vestapx150, raiblu and friends of theirs). It's been fun so far, if somewhat bumpy at first - I'm fairly new to this whole GMing thing.

I won't talk much about the game itself besides the fact that you play mice with swords - you either think this is kind of childish or frickin' awesome. Whichever camp you belong in, the game bears mention nonetheless for being less about the stereotypes I've associated with tabletop gaming, like the consultation of accuracy charts and matrices and the like, shirking that for a system that lets players go "Here, Mr. Game Master person, these are my buttons. Push them."


Ironically, the game only uses six-sided dice.

As always, I tend to get pretty introspective when recounting these things. Amongst my observations;

1.) I'm pretty egomaniacal
Most of the time, when RPing, I'm often doing nothing but thinking about my own character (and myself, by extension), and that remains a hard habit to give up even when I'm not actually playing an established character complete with coffee-stained character sheet. Instead, it manifests itself in overarching plotlines that the players may or may not care for, in pet NPCs, in taking everything a touch too seriously, and all sorts of other details. And though I attempt to work their characters in as best as I can, it sort of feels like I'm shuffling about little mousy pawns across a chessboard that only I can see.

2.) My imagination's gone to pasture
I was never a font of creativity to begin with, but it's clear to see from these sessions that I'm beginning to rely on cliches and culling a plot together from ideas I've seen elsewhere, often lifting them directly from where I read them with bare few modifications. It's a bit hard to drum up the enthusiasm I need to get myself into gear and do prep work, but then again, this is true of more than just GMing.

3.) This is still pretty fun
It might be one of those phases, but I'm going through a time in which escaping into fantasy seems less and less endearing by the day. Videogames provide instant gratification, but not the immersion that I'm typically drawn to when roleplaying, which takes time to develop. Even the books I've been reading as of late seem to reflect this (Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, and more recently, Who Are You People: A Personal Journey Into The Heart Of Fanatical America, which warrants its own discussion in a future post). But I digress. I may not have the time to roleplay much anymore, but I've never stopped either. Pretending to be someone imaginary never gets old, even if I only get to do it once a week.

The Mouse Guard RPG recently won the Origins Award for best role playing game.

Mouse Guard RPG

Official Mouse Guard site

I remember some time back when I was engaged in a little discussion while playing Skyrates (psst, join green) in which we threw Eleanor Rigby and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction into a metaphorical cage match to determine once and for all, who the better band is. (We later replaced Satisfaction with Paint It Black to put the fight on a more even keel, but there was no clear winner all throughout.)

Unsurprisingly, deja vu pretty much backhanded me about when the chorus for Metric's Gimme Sympathy flowed into my headphones.



The song is a reminder in more than one way. Every so often I need to be told that, yes, I'm still a young fart, and that you'll be laughing at yourself when you're 47 for even thinking that you're old. It's funny how songs usually are the ones doing this for me.

And boy, do I need the reminder. Surging, anthemic, rousing - never mind the naive (one could spin it as 'direct') message about leaping before you look, about screwing things up and not giving a toss if you do because "you're gonna make mistakes; you're young". Never mind the liberally sprinkled band references. The question it poses (see title) is a red herring; both bands are variations on a dubious idea of success, as loved as they are. As band member James Shaw aptly answers it, "Neither. One is dead and the other is corporate."

Never mind any of that. It gives me chills, it lifts me right off the floor, and that's all I need to know. Song of the year? It's in the running, that's for sure.

(And when you're done with the video, check out how they made it.)

Jesse Thorn: "A metaphor is like, uhm, if you say 'here's an apple' and then you hand me an apple."
Jonathan Coulton: "No, that's, that's just me handing you an apple - a metaphor is like, if I say, 'this apple is my soul. Here, Jesse Thorn, eat it.'"
JT: "Can I have an apple?"
JC: "No."



Jonathan Coulton on The Sound Of Young America

Tracklist:
You Ruined Everything
Shop Vac
I Crush Everything
A Talk With George
Space Doggity
Skullcrusher Mountain
Always The Moon

I've always held the assumption that Jonathan Coulton was a joke-song musician. He's definitely worth the listen, but at the same time, it feels a bit hard to relate to, oh, making fun of Tom Cruise or the thought processes of a deranged AI. So it's a bit of a wake-up call when I realized that JC is much like any other thirtysomething - there's a bit of that suburban angst that trickles out of him and into his songs. Even the silly ones - I Crush Everything, for instance - reverberate with this wonderful sense of pathos, even as they conjure up diversionary mental images that lead one astray at first with amusement. "Haha, it's about a giant squid with self esteem issues who hates himself - oh wait, it's about me."

It's very eerie to hear him echo the same sentiment that I heard Neko Case share last week; that a great song is one that makes you laugh, and then makes you cry, and then makes you cry some more.

Regardless of whether or not you play videogames, like The Beatles or happen to be a fan of some fine, surrealistic animation, this is something you have to watch.



You can find a higher quality vid here at Harmonix's website.