There are so many reasons to dislike this film.
The documentary-loving responsible historian voice in my head is offended by its cavalier attitude toward the actual sequence of events. Granted, I didn't know this for a fact while I was watching it, but I felt confident in that assessment at the time and it tuns out I was correct. Not only that, but it invents entire exchanges which never happened for dramatic purposes. These things are rather important to me. I couldn't let myself see Kingdom of Heaven because that voice would probably land me in jail for assaulting the poor theater employee operating the projector and then lecturing the terrified movie-goers about the Crusades at gunpoint.
The voice that sounds like Patrick Steward wonders why we aren't watching Sci-fi or playing a video game. I respond that maybe this review blog project shouldn't be a total nerd-fest but then I realize I'm fooling no one.
The militant anti-establishment voice wonders why we should even care. I've got enough context to know that getting caught doing something wrong doesn't make a politician a demon any more than a bullet in the brain makes him a saint. Nothing against Nixon-bashing, it's fun for the whole family. He's still the poster boy for American despotism despite the fact that the United States' system of governance was abused worse under Lincoln. It's just old, isn't it? Why celebrate our one minor and rather belated victory over political corruption over and over ad nauseam when we are clearly losing that war?
There are times, however, when you have to take a stand. You have to say to the voices in your head, "Enough! I'm in charge here!" Just don't say it out loud in a public place because most people find spirited discourse with entities inside your own mind a little disquieting.
The point is, I enjoyed Frost/Nixon despite those problems. It's well-constructed and compellingly presented. It is adapted by Peter Morgan from a play he penned with the same name, and directed by Ron Howard. The source material's influence is evident throughout the film and is one of its major strengths. Frost/Nixon is about a contest of wits, after all, a verbal duel between the titular figures. The film manages to channel some of that raw actor versus actor energy you would expect to find on the stage, but uses cameras to get us even closer. Morgan and Howard manage to make it candid and human when I had pessimistically expected over-dramatization.
I have heard the complaint that Frank Langella looks nothing like Richard Nixon. While I suppose I agree with it, I fail to see why this is a deal-breaker for so many viewers. Do they expect Ron Howard to go to some evil magic university and major in necromancy so he can raise a zombie Dick Nixon from the grave to star in his retelling of the interview with David Frost, but then everything goes horribly wrong when zombie Nixon kills the film crew and turns them into undead slaves who then go out and make even more undead slaves all in the name of President Zombie Nixon?
I think I have a script to write.
Anyway, Langella's portrayal is heartfelt and genuine. He easily surmounts his jowl deficiency while playing the role accurately and honestly. His Nixon is not a monster. He puts a human face on the biggest bogeyman in American politics and he does it with admirable grace.
In the interview which is the subject of Frost/Nixon, the advisers, producers, and even its contemporary viewers were looking to get something out of it. In most cases, they wanted to give Nixon the trial he never received. They wanted him to answer for his transgressions. The film, however, has the advantage of being able to look back on the events it depicts, and the Nixon years in general, with some context. Conveniently, it does this just as another corrupt administration retires to mansions rather than prison cells.
Frost/Nixon is thus free to open up the conversation, to look at the events through a different lens. After all, it wasn't a politician who got the famous admission out of Tricky Dick. It wasn't a freedom fighter or a judge or an ideologue of any stripe. It was a British talk show host and a camera.
I like to see it as a grand statement about the nature of politics. It's all theater, really. The film shines a light on the inner workings of a television interview that meant so much more than an evening's distraction for those who witnessed it. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I do have voices to appease over here.
The Twelve
If you're a fellow nerd (and I don't know why you would be here otherwise, unless it's just to reaffirm your mainstream aesthetics by having a chuckle at the dork before you put on your polo shirt and go back to your dull, gray life), you know that it's a special science fiction geek who likes Babylon 5. I never really understood the reasoning behind this. It's okay to like Star Wars in most circles and you can occasionally get away with Star Trek (contingent upon the series, of course), but Babylon 5 is for losers. I always felt it was to be lauded for its realistic, multi-faceted depictions of both characters and alien species. I also appreciated how concise it was. The five-season story resisted the artificial lengthening and fluff often found in serials of all kinds. Sure it was a little over-the-top sometimes, but come on! Have you even watched The Next Generation?
Sorry, I'm getting off-topic.
In the midst of my often arduous, only occasionally rewarding quest to catch up on the major events of the Marvel universe since the House of M (because I'm a sucker for alternate timelines), a little series called The Twelve was brought to my attention. It's the currently ongoing twelve-issue story of twelve (12) golden age heroes and vigilantes cryogenically frozen by Nazi scientists in the final days of the war in Germany, lost in the shuffle and thawed in the present day. It sounded pretty safe, but then I found out it's penned by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. Not only am I a fan of his work, but I wanted to review a comic series and I was completely unprepared to write the Marvel universe retrospective I'm planning.
After all, I thought, there is no way it can be worse than World War Hulk.
I have to say I'm glad to be reviewing just the first volume, issues one through six, because I can refuse to finish it and pretend that the second half is an opus which completely subverts my expectations and the series rises like a phoenix from the stale, derivative ashes the first half crumbled into after I read it. I can pretend that I don't have to go back and re-watch Babylon 5 just to make sure I really did enjoy myself the first time.
It's the Captain America story. Although technically resurrected in the sixties, taking Marvel's rolling timeline into account, he could have been revived in the mid nineties, putting his inconsistent time-influenced culture shock somewhere between "What, no jetpacks?" and "What is this... iPod?" However, Marvel was happy to milk Steve Rogers' quaint, simpler time background throughout the relatively recent Civil War, and in The Ultimates, Mark Millar saw fit to cover the postmodern, information age reawakening story (albeit with his usual ham-fisted macho tough-guy characterization). The point is, I think it's safe to say that it's been done before, I dare say to death.
The Twelve begins by flashing back to 1945 Berlin. If you're not familiar with the history of Marvel comics, this means a whole load of ridiculous heroes and guys in masks and what-have-you are ending World War II by punching Nazis and firing guns at something outside the panel. The premise is that many of the failed and one-shot comic heroes from Marvel's early incarnations fought in the war. Twelve of them who were assumed killed in action or fallen off the planet or whatever were actually trapped and frozen by Nazi scientists who wanted to study their powers later. The scientists never returned to the bunker, however, and the twelve remained hidden until unearthed by a construction project in 2008.
How compelling. It's the story of gifted individuals trying to find their way in a world they do not belong to. The problem is that it's the premise for most comic books since the golden age--no, scratch that, it's a staple of a a large portion of fantastic or magical or not-exactly-realistic storytelling of any kind. Only this time, it's cluttered and has terrible pacing.
The recovered heroes represent most of the different types of characters found in Marvel's sprawling continuity. Five of them are just vigilantes without powers (most of whom dress like The Spirit) and tend to be moody detectives. One is a remote-controlled robot, but since the guy who piloted it died in the 40's, it has yet to do anything. I imagine it became self-aware or something to that effect. The only woman in the group has mysterious, dark magic powers and is obviously delighted to discover the goth/industrial scene (I wish I was joking). The tank is an outsider who claims to hail from a hidden underground society Namor-style. You have your scientist who accidentally gives himself powers and uses them to fight crime, your scientist who is accidentally given powers by another scientist (who is evil) and uses them to fight crime, and the artificial "perfect man" created by a scientist who goes off to fight crime after his creator dies. The only character I found interesting was the final lost hero, Master Mind Excello. He is exceptionally strong, but his primary powers are his excellent senses. This guy is so perceptive he can catch glimpses of the future. He's like Laplace's demon with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Perhaps it's unfair to judge The Twelve so harshly having read only half of it thus far. After all, upon awakening, Master Mind Excello found the modern world too loud to focus but you know he's going to find some way to get around that and do something crazy. Maybe it'll be enough to make the series worthwhile.
Realistically, I doubt I'll enjoy the second half very much. I feel like The Twelve bit off way more than it could chew because by issue six, the series is starting to choke on it. So far it's just a collection of watered-down versions of the displaced hero story I mentioned before. It seems each issue is going to focus on one or two of the characters while simultaneously moving the whole thing forward. What we have is a series of anecdotes which are neither particularly interesting or new. The only good thing is that we have the assurance (through a flash-forward) that the most insufferable one of the lot gets to eat a murder sandwich sometime before it ends.
I can't imagine a satisfactory way for this series to continue that doesn't involve the immediate deaths of half of these schmucks. It's too much for a twelve part series, and to be honest, I don't like most of the characters enough to recommend extending it to fix this problem.
I've always held up Babylon 5 as an example of successful pacing in serialized fiction. Stories end. However, there is financial incentive to keep serials like comics or television shows going indefinitely. Babylon 5 didn't suffer from this because it was exactly as long as it was intended to be. I admire the attempt to tell a succinct tale in the Marvel universe, but I don't have much faith in The Twelve to deliver before the deadline.
Before I go, I have a special message for Joe Quesada. If he survives The Twelve, I am available to write the continuing adventures of Master Mind Excello.
Just saying.
Sorry, I'm getting off-topic.
In the midst of my often arduous, only occasionally rewarding quest to catch up on the major events of the Marvel universe since the House of M (because I'm a sucker for alternate timelines), a little series called The Twelve was brought to my attention. It's the currently ongoing twelve-issue story of twelve (12) golden age heroes and vigilantes cryogenically frozen by Nazi scientists in the final days of the war in Germany, lost in the shuffle and thawed in the present day. It sounded pretty safe, but then I found out it's penned by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. Not only am I a fan of his work, but I wanted to review a comic series and I was completely unprepared to write the Marvel universe retrospective I'm planning.
After all, I thought, there is no way it can be worse than World War Hulk.
I have to say I'm glad to be reviewing just the first volume, issues one through six, because I can refuse to finish it and pretend that the second half is an opus which completely subverts my expectations and the series rises like a phoenix from the stale, derivative ashes the first half crumbled into after I read it. I can pretend that I don't have to go back and re-watch Babylon 5 just to make sure I really did enjoy myself the first time.
It's the Captain America story. Although technically resurrected in the sixties, taking Marvel's rolling timeline into account, he could have been revived in the mid nineties, putting his inconsistent time-influenced culture shock somewhere between "What, no jetpacks?" and "What is this... iPod?" However, Marvel was happy to milk Steve Rogers' quaint, simpler time background throughout the relatively recent Civil War, and in The Ultimates, Mark Millar saw fit to cover the postmodern, information age reawakening story (albeit with his usual ham-fisted macho tough-guy characterization). The point is, I think it's safe to say that it's been done before, I dare say to death.
The Twelve begins by flashing back to 1945 Berlin. If you're not familiar with the history of Marvel comics, this means a whole load of ridiculous heroes and guys in masks and what-have-you are ending World War II by punching Nazis and firing guns at something outside the panel. The premise is that many of the failed and one-shot comic heroes from Marvel's early incarnations fought in the war. Twelve of them who were assumed killed in action or fallen off the planet or whatever were actually trapped and frozen by Nazi scientists who wanted to study their powers later. The scientists never returned to the bunker, however, and the twelve remained hidden until unearthed by a construction project in 2008.
How compelling. It's the story of gifted individuals trying to find their way in a world they do not belong to. The problem is that it's the premise for most comic books since the golden age--no, scratch that, it's a staple of a a large portion of fantastic or magical or not-exactly-realistic storytelling of any kind. Only this time, it's cluttered and has terrible pacing.
The recovered heroes represent most of the different types of characters found in Marvel's sprawling continuity. Five of them are just vigilantes without powers (most of whom dress like The Spirit) and tend to be moody detectives. One is a remote-controlled robot, but since the guy who piloted it died in the 40's, it has yet to do anything. I imagine it became self-aware or something to that effect. The only woman in the group has mysterious, dark magic powers and is obviously delighted to discover the goth/industrial scene (I wish I was joking). The tank is an outsider who claims to hail from a hidden underground society Namor-style. You have your scientist who accidentally gives himself powers and uses them to fight crime, your scientist who is accidentally given powers by another scientist (who is evil) and uses them to fight crime, and the artificial "perfect man" created by a scientist who goes off to fight crime after his creator dies. The only character I found interesting was the final lost hero, Master Mind Excello. He is exceptionally strong, but his primary powers are his excellent senses. This guy is so perceptive he can catch glimpses of the future. He's like Laplace's demon with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Perhaps it's unfair to judge The Twelve so harshly having read only half of it thus far. After all, upon awakening, Master Mind Excello found the modern world too loud to focus but you know he's going to find some way to get around that and do something crazy. Maybe it'll be enough to make the series worthwhile.
Realistically, I doubt I'll enjoy the second half very much. I feel like The Twelve bit off way more than it could chew because by issue six, the series is starting to choke on it. So far it's just a collection of watered-down versions of the displaced hero story I mentioned before. It seems each issue is going to focus on one or two of the characters while simultaneously moving the whole thing forward. What we have is a series of anecdotes which are neither particularly interesting or new. The only good thing is that we have the assurance (through a flash-forward) that the most insufferable one of the lot gets to eat a murder sandwich sometime before it ends.
I can't imagine a satisfactory way for this series to continue that doesn't involve the immediate deaths of half of these schmucks. It's too much for a twelve part series, and to be honest, I don't like most of the characters enough to recommend extending it to fix this problem.
I've always held up Babylon 5 as an example of successful pacing in serialized fiction. Stories end. However, there is financial incentive to keep serials like comics or television shows going indefinitely. Babylon 5 didn't suffer from this because it was exactly as long as it was intended to be. I admire the attempt to tell a succinct tale in the Marvel universe, but I don't have much faith in The Twelve to deliver before the deadline.
Before I go, I have a special message for Joe Quesada. If he survives The Twelve, I am available to write the continuing adventures of Master Mind Excello.
Just saying.
Fallout 3
The first time I played Morrowind, I picked up everything that wasn't nailed down. I completed the character creation interview and immediately started pilfering flatware. I was halfway through the grain sacks in the basement of the first house in the game when I was informed that my stealthy thief character was overburdened and unable to move.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
Star Wars
I grew up in a cultural vacuum. My family's home was situated among acres of corn fields outside one of those little towns that only exist because they lie at the intersection of a couple of highways and thus Wal-Mart can justify the construction of a superstore. I don't hold a grudge against my family for this, I just want to make it clear that during my formative years, I was exposed to very little media aside from pop country music and popcorn action movies.
Great way to kick off what is ostensibly a review blog.
So I missed out on a lot of cultural material that was available to other kids. This resulted in some hilarious misunderstandings later on. For example, I didn't know that extending only one's middle finger was considered a vulgar act until another student discovered this fact and took advantage of it. My first grade teacher was not amused.
I can't recall how old I was, which is good because I'm sure it's embarrassing, but I was eventually coaxed out of my tiny sphere of appreciation by a family friend two years my senior. He introduced me to Star Wars and The Ramones. This was good not only because I personally feel that science fiction and punk rock are better than the entertainment I had been exposed to previously, but also because it made me realize that there was even more out there, and not just media. Although now that I think about it I'm pretty sure the existence of Toby Keith makes pop country bad in an empirical sense. In any case, I think it's wise to openly discuss one's bias on a topic.
I was born the same month Return of the Jedi was released, but I know the story of Star Wars. Once upon a time (1977), an up-and-coming filmmaker named George Lucas managed to film and distribute a science fiction space opera inspired by Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa's samurai films even though it seemed silly and most people in the industry thought there was something wrong with him. As it turns out, there is something wrong with him, but that wasn't it, and I'm getting ahead of myself.
So began the most profitable franchise in movie history, especially when you consider everything that spun out of it. When I popped my cherry, I watched all three of them in order, getting up only to pee. I cried at the end of Jedi. There is nothing like the first time you watch Star Wars.
I can only imagine what it was like to watch it back then. When I was growing up, Star Wars was something of a bridge to geekdom. It was the nerdiest thing that was still socially acceptable. I like to think of it as gateway sci-fi. That's how it happened to me, and I'm sure I'm not alone. If it wasn't for Star Wars, I doubt I'd have ever discovered the various other forms of science fiction, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy that I love now. What did nerds have before that? Dungeons & Dragons? They certainly didn't have anything with the charisma and staying power of Star Wars. I don't know that he meant to, but George Lucas gerrymandered the border between dorky and mainstream.
If you buy into that sort of thing, Joseph Campbell would say that Star Wars' success has a lot to do with the fact that it is a superbly packaged edition of the primal hero's journey story. It's designed to tug at certain strings you never knew you had in your subconscious. I think many were enamored with the series' empowering message. A handful of people in the right place at the right time changed not just one world, but had a positive influence on a mind-bogglingly vast number of beings across an entire galaxy. Escapism it may be, but it was not afraid to do it to the hilt.
I can only assume there are people who genuinely enjoy the prequels. Otherwise, capitalism has failed in a big way (Har har! Helpful hint: People of the future, search "2008 financial crisis" if you're not too busy fighting robots or whatever).
There is little to say about the special editions and the prequels that hasn't already been said. It's as if everyone knew what made Star Wars great except for George Lucas. He said he was just "completing his vision" with the special editions, that the technology in the seventies was inadequate and he felt he never quite got it right. What he failed to grasp was that his creation came to mean something more to the rest of us in the intervening years and we might just take umbrage at his silly changes. I don't think it ever occurred to him that the fact that he made Star Wars within the considerable limitations of its time was part of what made it so charming.
I do genuinely enjoy some of the spin-offs, The Knights of the Old Republic video games and Genndy Tartakovsky's original Clone Wars shorts, for example. However, the franchise has been spread a bit thin for some time now. As I write this, a Star Wars television series is in the works, supposedly created by Lucas himself. I honestly don't know how to feel about that. When I first heard about it, I was suddenly the kid who read all those awful books just to keep the story going, who stood in line for hours to see the first special edition film the night it was released, who pretended to like The Phantom Menace for about five minutes. But then the older, jaded Star Wars fan takes over and reminds me that George Lucas isn't capable of creating three decent films anymore, much less a television series they rather optimistically plan to keep going for years.
Television is where good ideas go to die these days. While there are exceptions, science fiction and the other members of its weird family are particularly vulnerable. I don't think I can handle a situation in which a program that bears the Star Wars name has to jockey for market share with Dancing with the Stars.
I don't hate George Lucas that much, and I'm not necessarily saying Star Wars needs to be taken out behind the shed. No one can be innovative every second of every day, and I would definitely play Knights of the Old Republic 3 if Bioware isn't too busy with Mass Effect 2: Now With More Alien Buttocks. I think that's the point. Star Trek, for all its many faults, recognized the need to change over time. The series and films try to present different themes and perspectives that make fans feel like they really know the setting. You can really climb inside and live there. Star Wars gave me what I needed way back when I was a kid, but it never took that anywhere. It turned into a parody of itself to sell some toys. I shudder to think that there may be children out there who were first exposed to the prequels, but I have to face reality.
We had some good times, but in the end we had to go our separate ways.
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