Tacoma is is absolutely a “Fullbright” game. The cynical call their games “walking simulators” but I don’t understand that mindset. This term is supposed to imply that the game is “lesser” because it doesn’t involve twitchy combat and thus doesn’t require what munchkin players call “skill”. This is an immature line of thought; a game is good if it is fun and engaging, and Fullbright manages to directly engage me every time.

Combat doesn’t make a game good. The absolute best parts of Witcher 3 do not involve combat. I love that game but honestly W3’s combat is weak sauce. It’s fun, but there’s not much to it. No – the best moments are the emotional crescendos that the game is capable of producing inside of you, and those crescendos come only after you invest time in understanding the characters.

The best games are great because they have great story.

Tacoma takes place on board an empty space station. You are a contractor sent to recover the station’s artificial intelligence named ODIN. Along the way you discover what happened to the crew. The way this happens is so well done I am in awe.

Nearly everything is handled through augmented reality (AR) systems. You will see digital overlays all over the place. Pick up a book written in Russian, and a translation is automatically overlaid on it that you can read. Email is read through AR. You can find an AR yoga instructor.

How you discover what is happened is by viewing recovered AR recordings of the crew that the station recorded. They download into your AR device and then you can view them in a kind of holographic “playback”. You watch the crew interact and sometimes even access their own AR systems. It is through this mechanism that you unspool the puzzle.

It’s not overly complex but it takes some ingenuity sometimes. You’ll have to follow people around station as they split up inside of a single recording and sometimes figure out how to unlock doors so you can follow them.

The game affected me. I felt several moments of happiness, sadness, and fear for a bunch of people that I only learned about through old recordings and snooping through their email folders. At one point I feared I was witnessing the death of a crew member and I felt my chest tighten.

It doesn’t take a long time to complete – maybe three and a half hours to suck the marrow out of it. It’s cheap, too – twenty bones right now – so well worth your time.

I wish that Roger Ebert were still alive so that he could play Gone Home and finally experience a video game that can be clearly and unequivocally called “art.”

I wrote a thing once that attempted to tackle his statement that “video games can never be art.” Basically I said that the definition of the word “art” is what we have disagreement on and that a lot of what gamers think of as “art” isn’t so we should all just get over ourselves.

(Only I used a lot of swear words and I made a lot of references to pornography.)

Gone Home is art. I cannot think of a better word for it as it matches both the definitions I hold and the way Roger described what art is. Gone Home is an experience, but it is one that changes based on how the game is played but most importantly around who the player is. It is a series of layers, each one altering your understanding of the situation.

In Gone Home, you take the role of Kaitlin Greenbriar, a young woman who, on June 7th, 1995, has returned after spending a year abroad to the house where her parents and younger sister, Sam, live, near Portland, Oregon. She takes a shuttle from the airport to the house only to find it deserted – her family missing – and with no explanation for the events.

Determining what happened is the goal of the game. Throughout the game, you search the house. You find clues – papers, photos, tapes, etc. – all of which help you to piece together a puzzle. Not all clues are essential to “finishing” the game but missing one will alter your understanding of what exactly happened. In fact, there are clues that can be missed that will radically alter your understanding of the picture, to the point where it becomes a Romeo and Juliet level tragedy.

And that, right there, is the essential part of the game’s mechanic and why it meets Roger’s definition. With most “story” games like Grand Theft Auto IV or Red Dead Redemption, it is true that player choice largely does not affect the outcome. In many cases you might as well be watching an exceptionally long movie: the story is meted out in fashion, we are shown all of it, and we are told what the story means.

However, in Gone Home, the story and its meaning are absolutely dependant on your actions. It can be a story of happiness or tragedy or one of any point in the continuum of emotion. Best, its position changes as your understanding changes, and it is this mutability that gives the game its magic.

Further, the experience is one that will change you as a player. You may identify with everything that is happening (echoes of nostalgia) or you may find yourself understanding foreign experiences with empathy.

No game has ever left me in tears at the end. This one has, and I am glad for it.

Play this immediately. It takes about 2 to 4 hours. Do it in one sitting.

This will be filled with spoilers. Look away, ye weak-hearted.

Bioshock Infinite was billed as being the best game that has come along in years. The hype machine was turned on and the volume kept increasing: past ten, past eleven, up to fifteen at least. And then it was hyped some more.

I bought, played, and finished the game during launch-week and for the most part I enjoyed it. I thought the story and the environment it was set within was absolutely amazing – quite simply a triumph. I also found it wildly schizophrenic.
I felt that its over-reliance on straight up, balzout combat was out of place and off-putting. It was the drunken, racist guest who won’t shut up at Thanksgiving dinner and you wish would just fucking leave.

From here be spoilers.

Bioshock Infinite takes place in the early 1900s. We, that is, the player, a character named Booker, are tasked simply: “Bring us the girl and we’ll forgive the debt.” Ah! It’s a kidnap/rescue mission? Okay. On with the show.

In this game, there exists a floating, idyllic city named “Columbia” and it is there that we must find the girl. The city silently and secretly makes its way around the world, held aloft by the will of mind-bending technology and hot-air balloons. It is a city we are not allowed to enter until we are baptized (though in whose name, we know not).

Once out of the waters, we are treated to a wonderful, enchanting spectacle. It’s a carnival, replete with booths selling candy and allowing us to play fairground games. We learn a great deal about Columbia and her history. Everything is vibrant and alive: the colors are deeply saturated, the citizens are laughing and happy.

There are no monsters. This is a paradise. We can see why one would choose to live here.

Oh, sure, there are signs that all is not well in fairyland. Subtle indications of racism abound (this is, after all, 1912). There are marks of a poor underclass. But these are fleeting glimpses, and we are on a mission to find a girl.

We play games. We pass vendors selling popcorn and cotton candy. Barbershop quartets anachronistically singing Beach Boys songs.

Eventually we find ourselves engaged in a kind of “lottery” game. We pick a baseball out of a basket with a number written on it. Lo and behold, our number is called, and we are the winner!

What is our prize? We are given the honor of firing a fastball at two living, breathing, captive humans – two people whose crime is only that they love each other.

Oh, yes. They’re an interracial couple. The game is “let’s chuck baseballs at the black woman and her race-traitor boyfriend.”

Charming people.

I, of course, chose to launch my baseball at the master of ceremonies instead.

In that instant, a police-person grabs my arm, pointing at a tattoo there, shouting that I am the devil come to Columbia! Holy shit! I’m the bad guy? This is crazy!

Well, you better fucking bet I’m the bad guy. Because in the next ten seconds I, the character, will have literally used a hand-held chainsaw device to chop off the face of one of the policemen trying to arrest me. I’m not even kidding: blood and brains and chunks of bone will fly away in high-fidelity as I am forced to butcher around five dudes, all unarmed.

There are no other options. I have to kill them.

That’s when I get a gun. And I have to kill more people. And keep killing them.

Let’s take a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of the police.

From their perspective, I am a fucking terrorist. They can’t have a clue who I am (even if I am the devil) because I’ve already killed everyone who thought that. I’m just a guy going around and killing cops. All the cops.

Going forwards, Bioshock Infinite ceases to be a game of wonder and exploration. It is now a game of mega-violent, gory combat (usually versus innocent, albeit racist policemen), punctuated by bits of wonder and exploration.

It’s a fucking shame.

I really wish I could describe the joy and beauty of the story and how aggressively polarized the combat is. If you have played the game, you understand.

Most people do not have the capacity to flip a switch in their heads that turns them into murder machines. Our character, Booker, is a war veteran (from Wounded Knee, no less), so it is plausible that this violence lurks within him. However, we aren’t given to know this about him for some time, and the Booker we are born into seems a peaceful, melancholy man.

A rattlesnake sheds its skin in a painful process that lasts days. Booker sheds his peace within moments, revealing a beast. It’s quite unnerving.

Another game I played recently was the reboot of Tomb Raider. In that game, we start as a young, 23-year-old woman, who literally screams to the men assaulting her that she doesn’t want to hurt them, she doesn’t want to kill them – she just wants to go home. Her journey from a peaceful student into a rage-filled killer exists but it happens naturally: only when we see exactly how brutal and vile her enemies are can she make the switch. It feels plausible.

Not so much with Infinite.

This bothers me. It bothers me because the schizophrenia of the game is so telling. It’s clear that we have a team of artists and writers who desperately wanted to tell a tantalizing story of great importance and weight. Somewhere on the line, someone said “we must insert combat of this nature because REASONS.” Because it won’t sell, maybe. Because we need to have a “hardcore mode.”

Because REASONS.

Now, to be sure, in the course of the story of Bioshock Infinite there is a switch: one in which we are justified in rage and killing, and that feels true and right (it is when we return from the “other world” and the oppressed have decided to start butchering civilians). But that could have been handled differently.

In the version of the game that exists in my mind, this is the story:

Booker comes to Columbia. He discovers that there is an oppressed underclass, yearning to be free. We tell the story as a mirror of the civil war and the freeing of the slaves. We find the girl, Elizabeth, and she helps us to free the serf class.

This is handled with as little violence as possible. Elizabeth can hop between worlds and travel in time! What fun puzzles can be made by jumping back and forth between worlds and years, stepping on butterflies, to see what changes?

Eventually the right events collide and the revolution unlocks. At this point – and only at this point – do things switch. Revolutions are watered by blood, so of course blood must run, but at what cost? The serf army goes rogue and starts killing the civilian populace in anger. A populace who, though racist, do not deserve death in this manner.

Now we fight. We fight to save the lives of children and their mothers, protecting them over the corpses of their fathers. We rush to get lifeboats working. We disconnect the islands from one another to slow the advance of the mob. We close gates and raise bridges. Destroy gunboats and ultimately make hard choices about life and death.

Then is when we come to the kernel of our story, and the light of the myriad-verse comes to play. We then make our fateful choice once again in the baptismal waters, and the story ends.

Discuss.

I’m also spoiling other stuff: The Sopranos, Lost, Hamlet. This is rant about story consistency.

Then I explain how ME3 should have ended.

Short review: If you liked the previous games, pick this one up. Play it, get enraged at the ending, and then come back here. I have candy for you.

Spoilers from here on.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 has been called “controversial” in a lot of places because, frankly, nearly everyone hates it. These people are gamers who have invested possibly hundreds of hours into the storyline of the universe and the trilogy – a fact that speaks to the overall awesomeness and engagement of the world and the story (thus far).

The background and events approach Tolkien-level obsession to depth and detail. The developers crafted a grand space opera:

In the future, humanity discovers it is not alone. The galaxy is riddled with alien species, and, for the most part, the various species co-operate with each other, despite histories of war and tension.

All of these alien races are inheritors of grand, almost magical technology that was left behind by a long-dead spacefaring empire. This empire, the Protheans, were wiped out some 50,000 years ago by the Reapers, who are basically the Borg as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.

The overall arc of the trilogy is this: the Reapers have returned. They are destroying everything. They are taking all living creatures and turning them into borg zombies. They are “glassing” planets. We don’t know why: it’s one of the great mysteries.

There are several factions with different ideas as to what we should do but basically there’s the Alliance (which wants to fight the Reapers) and then there’s Cerberus, which is a kind of shadowy, human-centered (and racist) cabal who think that the Reapers should be controlled. Cerberus is led by the Illusive Man (read: Martin Sheen).

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s storyline is that of tolerance. All the species learn to tolerate each other, to make peace, to work together to raise the floor of all societies.

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s gameplay is that of player choice. Decisions you make in the first or second game radically alter the story in later games. Characters may be killed. Your choices – even from the first game – have an effect on everything.

One of the reasons I played ME2 so many times was because I wanted to see what different choices led to. The ending of that game was heavily dependant upon the choices I made as a player.

Not so much with Mass Effect 3.

Without going too much into the minor changes that can happen, there are really only three endings, all of which are a choice that happens in the last 10 minutes:

1) You decide to control the Reapers, or
2) You decide to destroy the Reapers (and all synthetic life, including your AI friends), or
3) You decide to create some sort of synthesis beteween organic life and synthetic life.

Regardless of which choice you make, the following things happen:

1) Your character, Shepard, dies, and
2) The Mass Effect relays are all destroyed, ending any kind of galactic travel, and
3) Trillions of people die (because of said relay destruction)

To make matters worse, the ending is sewn up in the most awful way possible: we are introduced to a new character, some sort of god-like alien, who controls the Reapers. This alien takes the form of a little human boy to communicate with you (we aren’t even given the stupid cliche from Contact where the alien says “I chose a familiar form to speak to you with”).

This alien tells you why he sics the Reapers (a synthetic lifeform) on the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Here’s his reasoning:

After a certain point, every galactic society creates artificial intelligence that rebels against its creators and causes wars. That, in its mind, is a bad thing. What’s its solution? To send a fleet of artificially intelligent, synthetic constructs to annihilate everyone. So that they don’t get destroyed by synthetic lifeforms.

Yo dawg! I put some world-eating synthetic lifeforms in your galaxy so you can be destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms while you get destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms!

Now, I’ve got no problems with uncompromisingly bleak endings. Especially if they are consistent with the story as it has been told.

For example, the ending to The Sopranos has Tony Soprano, the main character, presumably getting shot in the back of the head while eating dinner at a restaurant with his family. We see him smiling and laughing with his family while Journey plays on the jukebox. In the background, there’s a man wearing a Members Only jacket – a subtle nod to a previous episode about mob killings.

Suddenly, the screen goes black and the audio cuts out, mid-song. We get the blackness for a long, long time until finally the credits roll.

That ending? Perfect. It’s exactly how Tony lived. It’s completely consistent with all the storytelling that they had done. It was uncompromising and brutal but that’s what The Sopranos was about.

Some will argue: “Well, who killed Tony? That’s unresolved.” Those people miss the point entirely: Tony killed Tony. That was the major theme throughout the entire show: that Tony’s lifestyle was self-destructive.

Compare that to the ending of Lost, which was just a muddled mess of conflicting, under-edited ideas. Further, new concepts were introduced at the end, concepts that are brand new, things that we, as an audience, should probably have been aware of before (I wrote a thing about this previously).

The only person who has been able to introduce characters in the final act and have it work was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet, and that was essential because we need someone to explain what happened because everybody dies. Pro tip: If your name is not, in fact, “William Shakespeare”, you should probably try to avoid this storytelling trick.

So, adding a new alien species at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy is cheap and amateurish. There are better ways. There are always better ways than hail-mary deus ex machina plots. It felt tacked on because they ran out of ideas.

BEGIN TANGENT

Here are other things that don’t make sense:

First, the “synthesis” ending is just fucking stupid. Seriously? A pulse of energy can suddenly add circuitry to all living creatures? Are you shitting me?

Second, how the fuck did all those characters who I just saw on the planet Earth not five minutes ago get aboard a starship that crashes on an alien planet? I know that they wanted me to see that those characters survived but let’s not break the story with Fridge Logic. Show them celebrating on Earth.

Third, now that the Mass Relays are destroyed, well. Whupz? All those aliens are now stranded in the Earth solar system. They probably didn’t bring enough food to eat (you know, alien biologies and all), nor did they probably bring the stuff to settle planets with, so, uh, good luck?

That’s to say nothing about the trillions of people stuck in other star systems that depend on shipments of things from other star systems to survive. Scarcity of resource creates war, so I guess the entire “trying to save the galaxy from war” bit gets thrown out, too.

END TANGENT

So, here’s my “rewrite” of the ending:

Make it all about the Illusive Man. He was set up as the bad guy from very early on. An ambiguous bad guy, a complex bad guy. A bad guy who had a motivation: he wanted the human race to be the top dog. He nominally wanted to protect humanity, which is why he sought to control the Reapers.

Make the Reapers just what they were: Borg-like things who just rove the universe. Every 50,000 years they make their way back to the Milky Way. That’s fine. They don’t need deep motivations.

But then let’s say that the endgame has it that the Illusive Man has succeeded: he figured out how to control the Reapers (presumably during the time between ME2 and ME3). Rather than ordering the Reapers to fly themselves into a star, though, the Illusive Man decides to use them as a weapon to eliminate all other advanced species from the galaxy.

He has to elminate the current human alliance, of course, because they won’t understand and they traffick with aliens too much. Thus, the Illusive Man is a threat to everyone.

The final showdown is then about him, and how corrupt he’s gotten, and how wrong he is. The overall theme of the story remains about tolerance and growth, about co-operation and sacrifice. It remains consistent.

So that’s how I’m going to say it went down in my mind.

It is not his best work but I daresay it is his most engaging.

Mr. Stephenson and I share a mutual friend. He came over on Thursday evening and thunked a hefty tome down on my dining room table. It had this printed on the bottom: “Advanced Reader’s Copy • Not For Sale”. I had written a review of his previous book; would I like to write one for this?

Well. Of course. Neal is and has been one of my favorite authors, starting back in 1992 when my friend Dave lent me his near-mint copy of one of the Nerd Bibles: Snow Crash.

The plot of REAMDE (and I will continue to use all-caps for the title) is both simple and complex at the same time. There are many characters with many stories, and all of them weave around and through each other. As is typical of Stephenson’s writing, the threads seem at times to be unrelated and only at the climax do they bind together again to display a cohesive tapestry to the reader.

REAMDE is a story that combines massively multiplayer video games, the Russian mafia, Chinese gold farmers, draft-dodging drug smugglers and Al Queda terrorists in a post-Osama world.

The title of the book comes from a gold farmer’s virus that has infected thousands of players of World of Warcraft-style video game. The virus works like this: if you are infected, it will encrypt the contents of your hard-drive with a key that only the makers of REAMDE possess. The victim must then pay a ransom – in the game – of 1,000 gold pieces (about seventy-five real dollars value) in order to get the decrypt key (and thus recover their files).

Purely by accident, The Wrong Kind of People get their shit trapped by this and the virus locks up some super-valuable data. The Wrong Kind of People have Muscle of the ex-Spetsnaz variety. Hijinks (read: murders) ensue and the stakes, in a series of co-incidences, keep growing higher and higher.

Neal’s strongest characters arise when he writes in “time-local” settings and the cast of REAMDE is as well-written as it is diverse. We travel the globe with this yarn and accumulate characters from several nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, and color while doing so.

The cast is also large – on the order of six or seven main characters and about ten secondaries. In the hands of a lesser writer this could easily have fallen apart but Stephenson manages to split the party up in such a manner that the reader need only concentrate on three or four at a time.

REAMDE hits the ground around page fifty and maintains a relentless pace thereafter. The final act ran a bit too long for my taste but this is mostly an artifact of the huge cast size: every thread must be tied off in some way or another.

Reading this book made me want to write games again.

Oh, yeah. What do I think is his best work? The Diamond Age, natch.

Here’s a nutshell review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is all the good bits of the original Deus Ex without all the tedious and masturbatory pseudo-intellectualism.

But let’s dig deeper.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game by Eidos: Montreal. It’s a modern action role-playing game, very similar to the popular Mass Effect series (which is produced by my former masters). It could be easy to call DE:HR a “Mass Effect” clone, but to do so implies an ignorance as to the title’s history.

So let’s pause and talk about that for a moment.

1999 and 2000 were watershed years for the action RPG genre, giving us first the seminal System Shock 2 (my ten year retrospective) and then Deus Ex itself, designed by Warren Spector (who also gave birth to such gems as the Toon and Spelljammer pen-and-paper RPG games). This is to say nothing of other games that walked in the edge of the genre (such as Half-Life).

The original Deus Ex, set in the year 2052, was a fantabulous game for its time.

To be sure, it had some really hokey shit going on. For instance, the future’s equivalent to Homeland Security was headquartered in a secret bunker beneath Ellis Island. The overall plot (the world is really a crazed knot of intrigue and backstabbing) was told and not shown (via found ebooks that you could read, each holding several thousand words of rather boring text). It gets further confusing because once you get a grasp on the conspiracy (which looks to be a war between various “Illuminati” factions) the introduce some motherfuckin’ aliens up in the mix and everything gets even more confusing.

However, the gameplay was amazing. It centered around stealth and conversations and had an open-world exploration quality that was new and exciting. Further, it had some absolutely excellent mission set pieces (such as the airport and airplane levels, or even the Statue of Liberty).

It spawned a less-than-stellar sequel set in 2072, Deus Ex: Invisible War. Invisible War possessed an even more confusing plot (especially since the end of the first game left the world in fairly dire straits), and even more volumes of text that had to be collected and read just to understand wtf was going on. DE:IW ended with what can only be called an “apocalypse” so there really can’t be further games after that.

Enter our current game, which is actually a prequel, and is set in the year 2027.

I want to step off the game review for a moment and talk about “cyborgization” as a whole in games and in literature. I’ve played various “cyber” games on and off since the 1980s, starting with Cyberpunk 2013 (later Cyberpunk 2020). Even back in 1988, I laughed at the idea that humankind would be able and willing to undergo voluntary limb replacement and cyborgization within twenty years.

It’s 2011 now. While we actually have crude bionic hands that can actually be controlled by thought, this kind of technology is at least twenty years out and will be another twenty before it’s cheap enough to be affordable as “voluntary augmentation.”

It’s like the mythical flying car. Futurists have been saying that we’re only 10 years away from them for over sixty years. So I put this stuff into the same bucket as I do goddamned mecha and consciousness downloads: neat fictions, but entirely implausible.

But let’s just say we eat this Red Pill, accept this fiction, and see how far the rabbit hole goes.*

Human Revolution is a grand-old Deus Ex game. There’s a rich back story filled with intrigue and betrayal told to you via ebooks and hacked email accounts, but the back story never feels overbearing and I was able to follow it without referencing a handwritten notebook. The main plot is relatively simple: avenge and/or find your kidnapped girlfriend.

The interface and gameplay have been polished to a shine. I absolutely love the art direction (which can be summed up as “everything glitters with gold”). The voice talent is strong (though after a while I could only hear Clint Eastwood’s voice when the main character speaks).

One of the things Human Revolution does well are conversations. At many points you will find yourself having to convince someone of something, and the way its handled is well-done. The outcome of conversations will affect everything in the game afterwards, too, which is a nice touch (sometimes people come back to haunt or help you). Cybernetic upgrades can help you read and influence people through subtle application of pheromones. This game mechanic was well-done, too.

Human Revolution manages to marry 3rd person “cover” mechanics to 1st person combat very well. I’ve not seen a stealth game that pulls it off this well (not even Arkham Asylum or Assassin’s Creed 2).

The city hub maps are delightfully crafted and full of life and detail. They never feel small, even though my game designer’s mind knows that they actually are. The future vision of Shanghai is absolutely phenomenal (but again, one of those things that certainly can’t happen in sixteen years – you’ll understand when you see it).

However, there aren’t any individual “mission” maps that stand out in my mind as being particularly awesome – there’s nothing that approaches Deus Ex’s “airplane” level, for instance. Most of these maps boil down to a practiced “you’re in a warehouse and need to escape” look-and-feel, which makes me sad because there’s so much that could be done there.

There’s another thing: the names, man. The names. Every name is symbolic in some way. Your character is supposed to be the progenitor of a new kind of augmentation and is named “Adam”. There’s an AI you’ll meet named Eliza. I found emails from a hacker named Kevin Mitnick. There are also names that will be familiar to fans of the original games.

The game ate my brain. If you’re into this kind of thing, it will eat yours, too.

I say check it out because you know there’s going to be another sequel.

(And now I want to figure out how I can play the original again.)

* Yes, there really is a Wikipedia article dedicated simply to the Red and Blue pills.

Holy fuck was this filled with awesome.

“Kicking the ever-living shit out of Nazi ass” has always been a favorite fantasy of mine, and Captain America delivers that in spades.

Well. Sort of. There are Nazis, but the main enemy is Hydra, one of Hitler’s secondary research arms. What would happen if there were super-humans during World War II? Well. That’s what we get to find out.

There’s a strange mirror here. We all know that the Axis powers were the ones concerned with “ubermensch” – supermen – and tried to find ways to create them. In the movie, the Allies succeed where the Nazis fail.

The story concerns itself with one Steve Rogers. Steve is a 90 pound weakling from Brooklyn. He has asthma and a host of other ailments that prevent him from protecting his professed love: America. He continually gets given the boot whenever he enlists to fight overseas.

However, Steve is a plucky duck – rather unique, in fact. He never quits. He hates bullies. He is willing to lay his life down, however meagre it is, to save others – and demonstrates this.

All of which proves that he is The One.

Steve is given a Serum by a Scientist. It makes him stronger. Faster. Taller. Muscles throb under his skin afterwards.

And then he goes out to kick an unholy amount of Nazi^H^H^H^HHydra ass. That’s pretty much what this movie is about: ass kicking in the 1940s. Captain America is to “ass kicking” as The Wire is to “thoughtful examination about the war on drugs”.

Being a comics nerd, I am familiar with Cap’s origin and all the weird (and campy) details involved (such as him clocking Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first issue). The movie pays homage where needed and does its level-best to incorporate some of the more difficult elements into its baseline (such as Bucky). It is a solid story, well told.

We saw it in 3D, so the colors were muted. See it in 2D.

Recently, Ubisoft unlocked its cage, put it under the knife for a high-definition make-over, and then trotted it out as a downloadable for XBox Live. I snapped it up – err, down – and over the past week or so finally managed to finish its twelve hours of gameplay.

Spoiler: It’s not all that.

The premise of Beyond Good & Evil is everything you could possibly want: an open-world adventure wherein you play the part of Jade, an investigative reporter. Jade wears green lipstick and her adoptive father is a talking pig. Half of the inhabitants of this world are anthropomorphozitroned animals: sharks, birds, goats; some of her best friends are Rastafarian rhinoceroses.

This is a stealth game: getting into combat is not the idea. Your job is to break into places and take photographs of Very Bad Things to expose a Very Bad Conspiracy.

There’s also some hovercraft racing.

The game has a lovely, whimsical art direction that borrows from the Zelda series. The style suits the limitations of the engine well, and its voice acting is top-notch.

However, it feels like its only half of a game. The stealth components are creative but sometimes overlong. Combat (which shouldn’t be the focus of the game) shows up at irritating times. There are only two or three minigames. Character advancement is virtually non-existent.

I didn’t really feel any empathy for the oppressed people I was supposed to be saving. Jade and the Pig are supposed to be foster parents for a bunch of children who were orphaned in a war. Okay, fine. But later, (spoiler) those children are kidnapped by aliens to be used as food. I didn’t care because I had no sense about their character at all. They were introduced in act I and I promptly forgot about them as I went globe-trotting.

The greatest sin, however, is the lack of any real plot. There is a conspiracy, and there are Events That Happen, but at the end of the game, when all is revealed, I couldn’t find the capacity to care about anything that was happening. Mostly this was because it didn’t make sense.

There was some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo shit that felt tacked on at the very end. Jade is somehow immortal? Or has some magical life-force inside her? And she can bring people back from the dead? These are revelations that happen in the latter half of the final act. I can’t help but think that the game would have benefited from some hints and clues to this being spread about during the previous ten hours.

Worse: I don’t really remember what happened in the game. I remember enjoying it while the controller was in my hand, but ultimately the story is lost. It is unlikely I’ll replay it.

It’s ten bucks. Take it or leave it.

A Perfect Album is a disc that has few, if any, flaws. They are best listened to whole and each track can often serve as a solid single in its own right. These albums are quite often the magnum opus for the artists that produce them. Equally, they often define (or redefine) musical genres and, in some cases, all of the music that comes after them.

Here is a handful of albums that I consider perfect. It is in no way an exhaustive list.

You should listen to each one of them at least once in your life.

XTC, Skylarking, 1986

Released to little fanfare in the mid-80s, Skylarking was an attempt by Andy Partridge to find his mojo again after his wife threw out his Vicodin. The artists clashed heavily with the album’s producer, Todd Rundgren, but the end result is a sublime experience.

Listening to Skylarking is like drinking a memory. A beautiful day spent in the park with someone you love, watching clouds and simply being in each other’s presence. A day where you really and truly learn the mind of your parter, sharing joys and grief and speaking of philosophy.

The track most people know, Dear God, was originally intended as a B-Side but its popularity thrust it into the limelight. It’s a pity, actually: it’s one of the weaker tracks.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, F♯ A♯ ∞, 1997

If Skylarking is a pleasant memory of a beautiful day, F♯ A♯ ∞ is its dark opposite. Primarily instrumental, it smells of the icy memories of mourning, a brutal nostalgia. This album is the soundtrack to the apocalypse.

It opens with a voice over:

“The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows.”

The album’s funereal tones inspired Danny Boyle’s vision for 28 Days Later. There were rumors that he wanted to use this as the film’s soundtrack, but Godspeed refused to allow commercial exploitation.

It is only three tracks long but the shortest clocks in at a mere seventeen minutes.

Slayer, Reign in Blood, 1986

There exists no more pure an album in all of Heavy Metal than Reign in Blood. There quite simply isn’t room for discussion on the matter. At just under twenty-nine minutes, each of its tracks are tight toned, expertly executed, and sinfully succinct. Despite the band’s reputation for “speed metal,” the songs are actually rather slow by later standards but the energy of the music drives an impression of brutality with more power than the largest of diesel engines.

For many years the band would perform the album in its entirety during concerts.

It is my belief that modern music as we know it would not exist without Reign in Blood. You see, the album’s producer was a man named Rick Rubin and this band helped him to launch The Beastie Boys into the stratosphere. It was Kerry King, guitarist for Slayer, who laid down the licks on Licensed to Ill, helping to give birth to Rubin’s trademark metal/rap fusion and cementing him as the “go to” producer.

Seriously, look up Rubin’s discography. See how many of your favorite albums he produced after this.

I first owned this album on cassette tape. Since it was so short, we would listen to its entirety and then simply flip the tape over and listen to it again.

Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction, 1987

Nearly every bad decision I’ve made in my life can be traced back to the moment I first heard this record.

I’m a man with a fair number of sins and bad ideas and I regret none of them: they make me who I am today. Those events were part of a journey – a journey that began with smoking my first joint, which happened while listening to Appetite for Destruction.

Often unacknowledged for its place in music history, Appetite served as an intervention for rock n’ roll. Music at the time was becoming over glammed and less aggressive^[1]. Appetite, released in the same time period, helped to reverse this trend and usher in a new age of garage-driven music.

Jane’s Addiction, Nothing’s Shocking, 1988

While Guns N’ Roses were busy redefining what “hard rock” meant, Jane’s Addiction was toiling to lay the foundations for “alternative rock.”

Nothing’s Shocking seems to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the late 1980s, a kaliedescope of the good and the bad. It is a dream of Los Angeles, possibly a version that never existed.

The album’s follow-up (Ritual de lo Habitual) arguably had more impact on the alternative scene but is not as solid of a record. While Ritual blew the door off its hinges, Shocking weakened the walls.

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, 1966

When Brian Wilson first heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, he decided he needed to step up his game. Rubber Soul was an album that existed in a new space for him, a space of unity and completeness.

He spent the next two months and came up with an album that is arguably one of the greatest albums of all time. Pet Sounds is a masterwork through all tracks, weaving a vision of joy and love for simply living within the moment. It introduced instruments and composition techniques that have dominated popular music ever since.

The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969

If Brian Wilson was blown away by Rubber Soul, the Beatles were equally blown away by Pet Sounds – so much that they cited it as the driving force behind the experimentation they employed on Sgt. Pepper. However, while Sgt. Pepper is a masterwork, it is eclipsed by the perfection that is Abbey Road.

The second half of the album is meant to be taken as a single medley. Voices and songs blend together, a final, unified hurrah for a band that had been fractured and broken apart by the stresses of fame, family, and drug abuse.

While Let it Be was the final Beatles album to be released, Abbey Road was the last one recorded. Taken in that context, “The End” serves as the ultimate capstone to the band’s musical career, including the only drum solo by Ringo and a combined, three-part guitar solo by Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. The album’s final coda – “Her Majesty” – was a happy accident and typical of the joy that the band was capable of generating.

AC/DC, Back in Black, 1980

“Never trust the music taste of a man who does not own a copy of Back in Black,” is one of my cardinal rules in life.

AC/DC’s singer, Bon Scott, died in February of 1980. Rather than disband, they found a new singer, Brian Johnson, and worked through their grief to produce and release Back in Black just six months later – an album which would become the second-best selling album of all time.

Bon Scott died of alcohol poisoning after being left alone in a car in South London. According to legend, the last sound he heard was the chiming of Big Ben. Accordingly, and in tribute, Back in Black opens with the chiming of bells and renewed energy: the band is not finished with us yet.

When taken in that context, the entire album is a furious attack upon the idea of grief. It becomes an anthem for life.

The Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream, 1993

The sophomore effort from the Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream is exactly what it claims to be: an ethereal experience, a shared moment, a whispered conversation between yourself and the secret, silent twin that you keep inside your heart.

A siamese dream.

Billy Corgan’s multi-layered, heavily-fuzzed guitar work combines with half-mumbled lyrics to produce a half-remembered sound. It flows from ear to ear, singing about secrets, a lullaby listened to as we lay our childhoods to rest.

Michael Jackson, Thriller, 1982

Despite the success of Off the Wall, Michael Jackson could very easily have slipped into obscurity as a has-been child star were it not for the efforts of one man: Quincy Jones. In the same manner as Rick Rubin, Quincy applied the magic of sound production to Michael’s vocal work in such a way that the whole of the album was greater than sum of its parts. Thriller is a perfect pop-record, releasing seven(!) singles out of its nine tracks.

Say what you will about MJ’s off-album antics, the man could sing. His charisma drips through the grooves of the record leaving the listener in need of a towel. The tracks themselves betray a breadth of musical talent that Michael was never able to recapture and redefined the largest genre of music in existence.

1) Yes, “Wild Side” is pretty goddamned hard. But the rest of the album fits the pattern.

While I will read everything once, there are things I will not read twice. For instance, the works of Ayn Rand (shrill satanist screeds masquerading as “feminist” philosophies) or the over-hyped Illuminatus Trilogy (which boils down to a 3,000 page practical joke on the reader) will never grace my bedside table again. However, the books remain loved because they are books, and have a place within my library.

From time to time, someone new to the genre of “science fiction” will ask me for recommendations. “What’s good?” is a common question, followed by “What should I read?”. A difficult question. Science fiction is rarely about “the future.” These stories are typically metaphors for social issues that we, as a species, are facing now – just wearing clothes that have yet to be invented.

The following is a list for nascent science fiction readers.

It is in no particular order. Works were chosen for several reasons. Some because they are exceptionally influential in style, spawning new sub-genres. Others because they are simply well-written. Others because they are fun. I have included some notes that I hope will be helpful.

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester, 1952

Alfred Bester is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of sci-fi. He is an unsung master of the genre; few people know of his existence or his stories but everyone has been exposed to his ideas. In much the same way that Citizen Kane changed cinema, Bester’s works changed speculative fiction. The Demolished Man asks a simple question: In a world where people can read thoughts, where criminals are apprehended before their crimes are committed, how does one commit murder?

A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, 1960

Another “lost” author, Walter Miller wrote two novels – Canticle in 1960, and a sequel that he died finishing (Saint Liebowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, 1995). Miller finished Canticle, won several awards for it, and promptly vanished from the writing scene for 35 years. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic story about how the Catholic church strives to retain human knowledge after a nuclear holocaust. I sometimes think that this story drives a large part of my dedication to the mission of Wikipedia.

Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling, 1985

In 1985, the sub-genre of cyberpunk was being invented. Schismatrix is, in my opinion, Sterling’s magnus opus: it is a story about a future war between two factions of posthumans: shapers (those who are genetically modified) and mechanists (those who are bionically augmented). There exists a “special edition” of the book entitled “Schismatrix Plus” which includes the core novel as well as several short stories that take place in the same universe.

Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965

Dune is a story that is many things to many people. Primarily, it is a discussion about politics and the philosophy of, and how economic scarcity affects social change.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein, 1966

Heinlein was one of the masters of science fiction. Sadly, as his health deteriorated, his writing became . . . erratic . . . in quality and metaphor. Harsh Mistress, however, is a wonderful space adventure. Its science is, quite simply, bad – but Heinlein never really cared about that as much as he cared about describing esoteric societies. In this case, he deliberately chose the harshest environment he could imagine a society thriving and wrote about it. It is a fun read.

The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson, 1995

Stephenson has been criticized by many (myself included) that his endings are flawed. However, the end is not the beginning or the middle. This story is about an experiment: can free access to knowledge change a person’s life? Is education a silver bullet, the way to effect true social change? To say nothing of the neat ways he uses the idea of nanotechnology.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, 1961

Master Heinlein’s second entry in this list. Many people assume (incorrectly) that Heinlein was a rabid conservative, bent on social fascism. Nothing could be farther from the truth: he wrote about stories that would piss people off. Stranger in a Strange Land is the exact opposite of right-wing ideals; the hero of the story is a poly-amorous hippie, a “Tarzan” raised by Martians. I will say that Stranger does a lot towards cementing his reputation as being hyper sexist.

The Number of the Beast, Robert Heinlein, 1980

Heinlein’s final entry on this list is the story in which he explores the idea of alternate dimensions and universes. The title of the book takes its name from the number of known parallel dimensions: six to the power of six, to the power of six. It is a fantastical yarn, and one that isn’t particularly well-written – but its influence has been massive.

Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984

Neuromancer is but one part of Gibson’s famed “Sprawl” trilogy. It is a dark work, often confusing, and written as if the reader is a contemporary. It, too, is excessively influential, and can be considered the progenitor of modern science-fiction.

A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick, 1977

This is a story about drug addiction. At its core it asks questions about what “identity” actually means. It’s a dark story, all the darker because of a heavy injection of autobiography.

Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, 1963

A darkly humorous satire, Cat’s Cradle pokes fun at religion, the nuclear arms race, and our inevitable technological apocalypse. Vonnegut earned a master’s degree in anthropology for this work. Its an easy read and well worth your time.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

Le Guin is probably the master feminist writer in science fiction. It is a story about sexual identity precisely because the inhabitants of one of the worlds do not possess gender (save for a short period once a month).

Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1985

A difficult book to locate, Always Coming Home tells less of a story and more of a way of thinking. Like most of Le Guin’s works, it is heavily focused on Taoist philosophy. She refers to the work as “future archaeology,” and many people will say that it is not science fiction. I am willing to engage in fisticuffs with those people.

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke, 1972

Clarke’s works are classically “hard” science-fiction. They are often thin on overall plot but extremely thick with atmosphere an potential. Clarke is at his best when he explains very little and leaves the reader to ponder the vastness of space. Rama is a perfect example of this. Clarke would later revisit the world of Rama with three additional sequels (written with the help of Gregory Benford). A word of warning: either read Rama and quit, or read them all.